4. He passed his time happily at that place, in the company with the attendants and different classes of the dependant divinities of Rudra.
5. This Rudra being then full of the best knowledge of divinity and spirituality; looked back in his understanding into the passed accounts of his prior lives, that were almost incalculable.
6. Being then gifted with clear sightedness and clairvoyance, he was astonished at the view of naked truths, that appeared to him as sights in a dream, which he recounted to him as follows.
7. O! how wonderful is this over spreading illusion, which is stretched all about us, and fascinates the world by its magic wand; it exhibits the palpable untruth as positive truth, as the dreary desert presents the appearance of limpid waters, in the sun beams spreading over its sterile sands.
8. I well remember my primary state of the pure intellect, and its conversion to the state of the mind; and how it was changed from its supremacy and omniscience, to the bondage of the limited body.
9. It was by its own desire that the living soul assumed to itself a material body, formed and fashioned agreeably to its fancy, like a picture drawn in a painting; and became a mendicant in my person in one of its prior births, when it was unattached to the objects exposed to view all around.
10. The same mendicant sat in his devotion, by controlling the actions of the members of his body, and began to reflect on outward objects, with great pleasure in his mind.
11. He buried all his former thoughts in oblivion, and thought only of the object that he was employed to reflect upon; and this thought so engrossed and worked upon his mind, that it prevented the rise of any other thought in it.
12. The phenomenon which appears in the mind, offers itself solely to the view also (by supplanting the traces of the past); as the brownness of fading autumn, supercedes the vernal verdure of leaves and plants, so the man coming to his maturity, forgets the helpless state of his boyhood, and is thoughtless of his approaching decay and decline.
13. Thus the mendicant became the Brahman Jivátá by his fallible and fickle desire, which laid him to wander from one body to another, as little ants enter into the holes of houses and things.