18. The elevation of the mind in worldly affairs, tends to its destruction, and its depression in these leads to its spiritual elevation. The wise always lower their minds (pride); but fools are for elevating them (to their ruin).
19. The mind makes the world its own, and ranges all about it; it raises the mountains and mounts over them; it is as the infinite vacuum, and comprehends all vacuity in itself; and it makes gods of friends and foes of others unto us.
20. The understanding being soiled by doubts, and forgetting the true nature of the intellect, takes upon it the name of the mind, when it is full of all its worldly desires.
21. And the intellect being perverted by its various desires, is called the living soul; the animal soul being distinct from the rational soul.
22. The understanding which forgets its intellectuality, and falls into the error of its own personality, is what we call the internal principle of the mind which is all hollow within.
23. The soul is not the man of the world (i.e. no worldly being), nor is it the body or its blood. All material bodies are but gross and dull matter; but the soul in the body is empty air and intangible.
24. The body being dissected into atoms, and analysed in all its particles, presents nothing but blood and entrails as the plantain tree, which when cut into pieces, presents naught but its folded rinds.
25. Know the mind and living soul as making a man, and assuming his mortal form; the mind takes its form by itself according to his own option.
26. Man stretches his own sphere of action by his own option only to entrap himself in it, as the silkworm weaves its cocoon for its own imprisonment.
27. The soul lays down its error of being the body, when it has to forsake the same at some time or other (i.e. sooner or later), and assume another form as the germ sprouts forth into leaves. (i.e. The body is not the soul, nor is the soul the same with the body, as the materialist would have it; because the soul has its transmigration, which the body has not).