7. I have now related to you fully the whole of this story, whereby you may know, O Ráma, the wonderful occurrences that betide us in this everchangeful world.
8. Ráma said:—Tell me sir, how and with what form of body, thou didst rove about the regions of the Siddhas, when thy mortal frame was reduced to dust.
9. Vasishtha replied:—Ah! I remember it, and will tell you the particulars, how I wandered throughout these worldly abodes, until I arrived at the city of the Loka-pála deities, and joined with the hosts of Siddhas, traversing in the regions of midway sky.
10. I travelled in the regions of Indra or open firmament, without being seen by any body there; because I was then passing in my spiritual body, eversince I had lost my material frame-work.
11. I had then become, O Ráma, of an aerial form, in which there was neither a receptacle nor recipient, beside the nature of vacuous and intellectual soul.
12. I was then neither the subject or object of perception of persons like yourself, who dwell on sensible objects alone; nor did I make any reckoning of the distance of space or succession of time. (The spiritual yogi has no cognizance of gross material things, nor of the divisions of space and time, which are objects of sensation only).
13. The soul is busy with the thinking principle of the mind, apart from all material objects composed of earth &c.; and is as the meditative mind or ideal man, that meddles with no material substance.
14. It is not pressed nor confined by material things, but is always busy with its cognitions; and it deals with beings in the same manner, as men in sleep do with the objects of their dream (and others with their air-built cities).
15. Know Ráma, this doctrine of intellection by the simile of dreaming, to be quite irrefutable, although it is confuted by others (i.e. the Nyáya philosophers who deny the mental conceptions without previous perceptions); but they are not to be regarded as right. (Since the Veda says, the spirit of God created all from his mind, and not from its past perceptions).
16. As the sleeping man thinks himself to be walking and acting in his dream, without such actions of his being perceived by others (in the same room); so methought I walked before and beheld the aerials without their seeing me.