24. The learned explain liberation to consist in the meditation of God, without any desire of the heart or duplicity in the mind; and this they say is not possible to do, without the assistance of spiritual knowledge. But the world being full of error, it is requisite to derive this knowledge from spiritual works moksha sástras, or else it is very likely to be entrapped in the very many snares, which are for ever set all about this earth.
25. Knowing full well the unreality of the world, and the uncertainty of one’s self and body, and of his friends, family and wealth and possessions; whoso is distrustful of them and identifies himself with his intelligence and pure vacuity, verily finds his liberation in this, and in no other state whatsoever.
CHAPTER XXXI.
Sermon on the means of attaining the Nirvána
Extinction.
Argument:—Refutation on the falsity of imagination, and the ideal creation of the world; establishing the true God, who is all in all, and who remains ever the same.
Vasishtha said:—He who has devoted his whole soul to the contemplation of the Intellect, and feels the same stirring within himself, and knows in his mind the vanity and unreality of all worldly things, (is the person whose soul is said to be extinct in the deity).
2. By habituating himself to this sort of meditation, and seeing the outward objects in his perceptive soul, he views the external world, as an appearance presenting before him in his dream.
3. All this is verily the form of the Intellect, represented in a different garb. The intellect is rarer than the pure air, but collects and condenses itself as the solid world, and recognizes itself as such; wherefore the world is no other than the consolidated intellect, and there is nothing beside this anywhere.
4. It has no dissolution or decay, nor it has its birth or death; it is neither vacuity nor solidity, it is neither extension nor tenuity, but it is all and the Supreme one and nothing in particular.
5. Nothing is lost by the loss of egoism, and of this world also; the loss of an unreality is no loss at all, as the loss of anything in our dream, is attended with loss of nothing.
6. Nothing is lost at the loss of an imaginary city, which is altogether a falsity; so nothing is destroyed by the destruction of our egoism and this unreal world.