47. It is torn away as a limb from its place in the Spirit, and thrown in an incongenial spot; it is withering away like a lotus plant plucked from its root.
48. Being cast amidst the bustle of business, and among men who are inimical or as dumb pictures to him, every man is groveling in this earth amidst dangers and difficulties.
49. Man is exposed to the difficulties of this dark and dismal world, like a bird fallen in the waters of the sea; he is entangled in the snare of the world, like one snatched to the fairy land in the sky.
50. The mind is carried away by the current of business, like a man borne by the waves of the sea. Lift it, O brave Ráma! from this pit, as they do an elephant sinking in the mud.
51. Lift up thy mind by force, O Ráma! like a bullock from this delusive puddle (palvala) of the world, where it is shorn of its brightness and is weakened in its frame.
52. Ráma! the man whose mind is not troubled in this world, with successive joy and grief, and the vicissitudes of decrepitude, disease and death, is no human being: but resemble a monstrous Rákshasa, although he may have the figure of a man on him. (It is not humanity to <be> devoid of human feeling).
CHAPTER XLIII.
THE REPOSITORIES OF LIVING SOULS.
Argument. The Transmigrations of Souls by virtue of their Acts, and the way of their salvation.
Vasishtha continued:—Thus the living soul being derived from Brahma, assumes to itself the form of the mind, and is tossed about with the thoughts and cares of the world. It is then changed into thousands and millions of forms, as it figures to itself in its imagination.
2. It has undergone many prior births, and is in the course of migrating into many more; it will transmigrate into many more also, which are as multitudinous as the flitting particles of a water-fall (splitting to many atoms).