18. The delightsome is equally delectable to all, and the God Indra as well as a worm, are alike inclined towards what is pleasurable to them; and this tendency to pleasure proceeds from their own option of choice. This freedom of choice is not denied to any but is irresistible in all, and he who knows his free will (or self agency), is altogether free and liberated. (The text uses two words viz., Vikshepa or projection of the soul (or inclination), as actuated by Vikalpa or one’s free choice of anything. This passage establishes the doctrine of free choice and self agency of all living beings, against the common belief in an imperious fatality).
19. The pleasure and pain, arising from the passions and feelings, and from enjoyments in life; and torments of diseases and death, are alike to all living beings.
20. Except the knowledge of things, and that of past and future events, as also of the arts of life; all the various kinds of animals, are possest of all other animal faculties and propensities like those of mankind.
21. The drowsy vegetable kingdom, and the dormant mountain and other insensible natures; are fully sensible in themselves, of a vacuous intellectual power whereon they subsist. (They are as the inactive but meditative yogis, who with their external insensibility, are internally conscious of the Divine spirit).
22. But there are some that deny the sensibility of an intellectual spirit, in the dormant and fixed bodies of arbours and mountains; and allow the consciousness of the vacuous intellect, but in a very slight degree, in moving animals and in the majority of living and ignorant part of mankind.
23. The solid state of mountains and the sleepy nature of the vegetable creation, being devoid of the knowledge of a dualism (other than their own natures) have no sense of the existence of the world, except that of a non-entity or mere vacuity.
24. The knowledge of the entity of the world, is accompanied with utter ignorance of its nature or agnosticism; for when we know not ourselves or the subjective, how is it possible for us to know the objective world.
25. The world is situated as ever, in its state of dumb torpidity, like a dull block of wood or stone; it is without its beginning and end, and without an aperture in it, and is as the dreaming wakefulness of a sleeping man.
26. The world exists in the same state, as it did before its creation; and it will continue to go on for ever even as now; because eternity is always the same both before and after.
27. It is neither the subjective nor objective, nor the plenum nor vacuum; nor is it a mute substance nor any thing whatever.