35. Thus these various states of the world and all worldly things, may appear gratis to the ignorant vulgar, but they afford no pleasure to the learned who knows their instability. (Hence longevity and stability depend on one's reliance in the eternal God, and not on the transient world).
[CHAPTER XXIV.]
Investigation of the Living Principle.
Argument.—Disquisition of the Arteries and organs of the body. The seat of life and its actions.
BHUSUNDA continued:—All things being thus unstable, unprofitable and unpleasant to man, there is one reality only in the view of the wise, which is beyond all error and imperishable, and which though present in all things and all places, transcends the knowledge of all.
2. This essence is the soul or self, and its meditation is the remover of all sorrow and affliction. It is also the destroyer of the erroneous vision of the world, which has passed every man, and biased his understanding by his long habit of thinking this phantom of his dream as a sober reality.
3. Spiritual contemplation dawns in the clear atmosphere of the unpolluted mind, and traverses amidst its whole area like the solar light, and it destroys the darkness of all sorrows and erroneous thought which over spreads it.