18. There grew in some places, many a tender sprout, of plants, shooting forth with joy as the green blades of grass; or as the erect hairs of horripilation rising on the bodies of saints, enrapt in their reveries and sitting with their closed eyelids.
19. I saw the resorts of flies and leeches and gnats in the dirt, and of bees and black bees on the petals of lotus flowers; and I saw big elephants destroying the lotus bushes, as the plough-share overturns the furrows of earth.
20. I saw the excess of cold, when all living beings were shrivelled and withered in their bodies; when the waters were congealed to stone, and the keen and cold blasts chilled the blood of men.
21. I have seen swarms of weak insects, to be crushed to death under the feet of men; and many diving and swimming and skimming in the waters below, and others to be born and growing therein.
22. I have seen how the water enters in the seeds, and moistens them in the rainy season; and these put forth their hairy shoots on the out side, which grow to plants in the open air.
23. I smile with the smiling lotuses, when they are slightly shaken in their beds by the gentle winds of heaven; and I parade with the gliding of rivers, to the ocean of eternity for final extinction. (i.e. As the river bearing all things is lost in the ocean; so doth the human body become extinct in the Deity, with the world that it contains within itself).
CHAPTER LXXXIX.
The Phenomenal as the Reproduction of
Reminiscence.
Argument:—The situation of the World in the womb of the Vacuous Intellect; and its outward appearance as the Imagination of the Mind.
Ráma said:—Tell me sir, whether in your curiosity to observe the mutations of earthly things and affairs, you beheld them in their earthly shapes with your corporeal body; or saw them in their ideal forms, in the imagination of your mind.
2. Vasishtha replied:—It was in my mind, that I thought myself to have become the great earth; and all what I saw as visible, being but simple conceptions of the mind, could not possibly have a material form.