23. Some are of enlightened understandings, and some are darkened in their minds. Some are preachers and lecturers of knowledge, and others in their ecstatic trance of Samádhi.
24. The living souls that are under the subjection of their desires, are so powerless of themselves, that they have forgotten their freedom, and are fast chained to the fetters of their wishes.
25. They rove about the world, now flying up and then falling down in their hopes and fears; and are incessantly tossed up and down, like playing balls flung on all sides, by the relentless hands of playful Death.
26. Entrapped in the hundred fold snare of desire, and converted to the various forms of their wishes, they pass from one body to another, as the birds fly from one tree to alight on another.
27. The endless desires of the living soul, bred and led by the false imaginations of the mind, have spread this enchanted snare of magic or máyá, which is known by the name of the great world.
28. So long are the stupefied souls doomed to rove about in the world, like the waters in a whirlpool; as they do not come to understand the true nature of their selves, as selfsame with the Supreme-Self.
29. Having known and seen the true Self, by forsaking their false knowledge of it, they come to their consciousness of themselves, as identic with the divine Self; and having attained this in process of time, they are released from their doom of revisiting this world of pain and sorrow.
30. There are however some insensible beings, who notwithstanding their attainment of this knowledge, are so perverted in their natures, that they have to return again to this earth, after passing into a hundred lives in it in various shapes (owing to their disbelief in the self).
31. Some there are who after having attained to higher states, fall down again by the lowness of their spirits, and appearing in the shapes of brute creatures, have to fall into hell at last.
32. There are some great minded souls, who having proceeded from the state of Brahma, have to pass here a single life, after which they are absorbed in the Supreme soul. (Such were the sage Janaka and the sagely Seneca).