45. As in a city seen in dream, its houses and their apartments, come to appear gradually to sight; so the dream becomes enlarged and expanded and divided by degrees to our vision.
46. All this creation is but the empty void of the intellect, (or as pictures drawn in empty air); there is no duality or variety in it, but is one even plane of the intellect, like the open sky, without any spot or place attached to it.
47. The moon-light of the Intellect, diffuses its coolness on all sides, and gladdens the souls of all beings; it scatters the beams of intellection all around, and casts its reflexions in the image of the world.
48. The world as it is now visible to us, lies for ever in the mind of God in the same vacuous state, as it was before its creation; and as it is to be reduced to nothing upon its final destruction. It is the twinkling, or the opening and closing of the intellectual eye, that this empty shadow of the world, appears and disappears amidst the universal vacuum of the Divine Mind.
49. Whoever views this world in any light, it appears to him in the same manner (as some thinking it a solid plenum, and others as an empty vacuum). And as it depends upon the Intellect alone, it is exhibited in various forms according to the caprice of its observers.
50. The minds of the intelligent, are as pure as the clear sphere of the summer sky; and the pure hearted and holy people, think themselves as nothing else, beside their intellects or as intellectual beings only.
51. These pious and holy people, are free from ignorance and the faults of society; they share the gifts of fortune, as it falls to them by the common lot of mankind; and they continue in the conduct of their worldly affairs, like some working machine (acting externally and without taking any thing to mind).
CHAPTER CI.
A sermon on Spirituality.
Argument:—That self-consciousness is same with the pure soul, whose presence is preventive of the causes of all human woes and fears. (Here consciousness is synonymous with conscientiousness).
Vasishtha continued:—Thus it is the Intellect only which is the soul of the body also, and which is situated every where in the manner as said before; and there is nothing which is so self-evident as the Intellect (or self-consciousness).