16. Whatever comes to appearance without its cause, is all owing to the nature of our imagination of the same; which shows the objects of our desire in all their various forms to our view, as our fancy paints the fairy lands in our minds.
17. As a traveller passing from one country to another, finds his body (himself) to stand at the midspot (from his knowledge of the rotundity of the earth); so nothing departs from its nature, but turns about that centre like.
18. The understanding also shows many false and biggest objects, in its airy and minute receptacle; as for instance the many objects of desire, and the notion of mountains, which it presents to us in our waking and dreaming states.
19. Ráma rejoined:—We know well that the future banian tree, resides within the minute receptacle of its seed; why then don’t you say, that the creation was hidden in the same manner in the unevolved spirit of God?
20. Vasishtha replied:—The seed in its material form, contains the formless big tree in its undeveloped bosom; which developes afterwards to a gigantic size, by aid of the auxiliary causalities (of heat, rain &c.). (But God is formless spirit and cannot contain the material world in it, nor has it the need of other helping causes to produce the world).
21. The whole creation being dissolved in the end, tell me what remains there of it in the form of its seed; and what ancillary causes are there to be found, which cause the production of the world. (Nothing exists in nothing).
22. The pure and transparent spirit of God, has nothing of any possible shape or figure in it; and if it is impossible for even an atom to find a place therein, what possibility is there for a formal seed to exist or subsist in it.
23. So the reality of a causal (productive) seed, being altogether untrue; there is no possibility of the existence of a real (substantial) world, nor can you say how, whence, by whom and when it came into being.
24. It is improper to say that the world consisted in a minute particle in the divine spirit, and quite absurd to maintain that it remained in an eternal atom (according to the atomic theory); for how is it possible that a body as big as a mountain could be contained in a minim as small as a mustard seed? It is therefore a false theory of the ignorant.
25. Had there been a real seed from eternity, it is possible for the world to be produced from it, by causes inherent in the same; but how could a real and formal seed, be contained in the formless spirit of God; and by what process could the material proceed from the immaterial?