18. The oppressed body then assumed its intellectual or spiritual form lingadeha; which was a living subtile body as air or light but without its acts of breathing the vital air. (The aerial spirit has vitality, without inhaling or exhaling the vital air).
19. This body growing by degrees to its rarefied form by its imagination, became of the form of the inner mind, which was felt to reside within the heart. (But the mind is seated in the brain, and not in the heart).
20. It thought in itself of having become a pure and living liberated seer or sage, in which state it seemed to pass a hundred years under the shade of a Kadamba tree, in the romantic grove of the Kailása mountain (a peak of the Himalayas).
21. It seemed of taking the form of a Vidyádhara for a century of years, in which state it was quite free from the diseases of humanity. It next thought of becoming the great Indra who is served by the celestials, and passing full five Yuga ages in that form.
22. Ráma said:—Let me ask you, Sir, how could the mind of the sage conceive itself as the Indra and Vidyádhara, whom it had never seen, and how could it have the ideas of the extensive Kailása and of the many ages in its small space of the cell, which is impossible in nature.
23. Vasishtha replied.—The Intellect is all comprehending and all pervading, and wherever it exerts its power in any form, it immediately assumes the same by its own nature. Thus the undivided intellect exhibits itself in various forms throughout the whole creation.
24. It is the nature of the intellect to exhibit itself in any form, as it represents itself in the understanding; and it is its nature to become whatever it pleases to be at any place or time. (It is the nature of the finite heart to be confined in the finite cell of the body, but the nature of the infinite intellect grasps all and every thing at once in itself, as it ranges through and comprehends the whole and every part of the universe within it).
25. So the impersonal sage saw himself in various forms and personalities in all the worlds, in the ample sphere of his consciousness within the narrow space of his heart. (The heart is said to be the seat of the soul. And so says Pope. “As full and perfect in a hair as heart”).
26. The man of perfect understanding, has transformed his desires to indifference; and the desires of men like seeds of trees, being singed by the fire of intelligence; are productive of no germ of acts.
27. He thought to be an attendant on the god (Siva), bearing the crescent of the moon on his forehead, and became acquainted with all sciences, and the knowledge of all things past, present and future.