27. All this is as false as the appearance of water in the mirage, while our reliance in the everlasting and all pervading One, is as firm, secure and certain (as our supportance on a solid rock). By reasoning rightly in yourself, you will discover your egoism to be nowhere; how and whence then do you beget this false phantom of your imagination.
CHAPTER XXXIII.
Sermon on the True Sense of Truth.
Argument:—Causes of erroneous conceptions and false Imagination, our hankering for the future world and its remedy.
Vasishtha continued:—Ráma, if a man will not gain his wisdom by his own exertion, by his own reasoning and by the development of his understanding in the company of good men, then there is no other way to it.
2. If one will try to remove his mis-apprehensions and the false creations of his imagination, by the prescribed remedies of the sástras, he will succeed to change and rectify them himself, as they remove or remedy one poison by means of a counter poison.
3. All fancies and desires are checked by unfancying them, and this unfancifulness or undesirousness is the cause of liberation, by relinquishment of worldly enjoyment, which is the first step to it. (So says the sruti:—Renunciation of enjoyments, is the leader to liberation).
4. First consider well the meanings of words, both in your mind and utterance of them; and all the habitual and growing misconceptions will slowly cease and subside of themselves.
5. There is no greater error or ignorance in one’s self, except the sense of his egoism; and this error having subsided by one’s disregard of its accepted sense, it is not far from him to arrive at his liberation.
6. If you have the least reliance in your body and egoism, you surely lose the infinite joy of your unbounded soul; but by forsaking the feeling of your egoism or personality, you are freed from the bondage of your fondness for anything of this world, and become perfected in divine knowledge and blissfulness.
7. It is from want of understanding, that all these unrealities appear as real to the ignorant; but we venerate and bow down to the sage, who remains unmoved as a stone at all this.