23. When the mind comes to understand itself, after it is roused from its dormancy of self-forgetfulness (by being addicted to the thoughts of external objects); it gains what is known to be the best of gains, and the purest and the holiest state of life.
24. If with the vacillation of your vital breaths, and the fluctuation of your wishes, you do not disturb the even tenor of your consciousness, like the giddy part of mankind, then you are likened to the great Brahmá himself (who lives and does what he likes, without any disturbance of his inward intuition).
25. The mind without its self-consciousness or conscience, is a barren waste; and the life of man with its knowledge of truth, is as a mazy path, beset with traps and snares of errors and dangers.
26. The meditative Yogi is practised to the suppression of his breath for the peace of his mind, and conducts his pránáyáma or restraint of respiration, and his dhyána or intense meditation, according to the directions of his spiritual guide and the precepts of the sástras.
27. Restraint of breath is accompanied by the peace of mind, causing the evenness of its temperament; and it is attended with health and prosperity and capacity of cogitation to its practiser.
28. Learn Ráma, another cause of the activity of the mind, which is considered by the wise as the source of its perpetual restlessness; and this is its restless and insatiable concupiscence.
29. Now this concupiscence is defined as the fixed desire of the mind, for the possession of something, without consideration of its prior and ultimate conditions. (i.e. Whether it is worth having or not, and whether its gain will be productive of the desired object in view).
30. It is the intensity of one’s thought of getting something that produces it before him; in utter disregard of the other objects of its remembrance. (The gloss gives a mystic sense of this passage; that reminiscence which is the cause of the reproduction of prior impressions, is upset by the intensity of the present thought in the mind).
31. The man being infatuated by his present desire, believes himself as it depicts him to be; and takes his present form for real, by his forgetfulness of the past and absent reality. (The present unreal appears as real, and the past reality passes away as an unreality, as in the case of prince Lava’s believing himself a chandála during his dream, and so it is with us to take ourselves as we think us to be).
32. It is the current of our desire, that carries us away from the reality; as the drunkard sees everything whirling about him in his intoxication.