2. Pondering deeply, I saw the world was seated within my heart, and shooting forth therein; as the grains put out their sprouts in a granary, by help of the rain water dropping into it.
3. I beheld the formal world, with all its sentient as well as insensitive beings, rising out of the formless heart, resembling the shapeless embryo of the seed (i.e. the plastic nature from the amorphous spirit), by moisture of the ground.
4. As the beauty of the visibles appears to view, on one’s coming to sense after his sleep; so it is the intellect only which gives sensation to one, who is waking or just risen from his sleep: (and so it was the intellectual wakefulness of Vasishtha and other inspired men, which made them sensible of outward objects, even in the trance of their meditation). (Samádhi).
5. So there is conception of creation in the self-same soul, ere its formation or bringing into action; and the forms of creations are contained in the vacuum of the heart, and in no other separate vacuity whatever.
6. Ráma rejoined:—Sir, your assertion of the vacuum of the heart, made me take it in the sense of infinite space of vacuity, which contains the whole creation; but please to explain to me more clearly, what you mean by your intellectual vacuum, which you say, is the source of the world. (i.e. whether the heart or mind or infinite space, is the cause and container of the cosmos).
7. Vasishtha replied:—Hear Ráma, how I thought myself once in my meditation, as the self-born Swayambhu or the god who is born of himself, in whom subsisted the whole, and there was nothing born but by and from him; and how I believed the unreal as real in my revelry, or as an air-built-castle in my dreaming.
8. As I had been looking before, at that sight of the great kalpa-dissolution, with my aeriform spiritual body; I found and felt the other part of my person (i.e. my material frame), was likewise infused with the same sensibility and consciousness. (The body being the counter part or réchauffé of the mind).
9. As I looked at it for a while, with my spiritual part; I found it as purely aerial, and imbued with a slight consciousness of itself. (So says the Sruti:—In the beginning the spirit became or produced the air with its oscillation).
10. The vacuous Intellect found this elastic substance, to be of such a subtile and rarefied nature, as when you see the external objects in your dream, or remember the objects of your dream upon your waking.
11. This etherial air, having its primary powers of chit and samvid—intellect and conscience, becomes the intellection and consciousness also; then from its power of reflecting (on its existence in space and time), it takes the name of reflection (chittam). Next from its knowledge of itself as air, it becomes the airy egoism, and then it takes the name of buddhi or understanding, for its knowledge of itself as plastic nature, and forgetfulness of its former spirituality. At last it becomes the mind, from its minding many things that it wills or nils.