37. The sage replied:—The words piety and impiety, our desires and acts, are words of the same import, and significant of their causality in framing the living soul according to their own stamp; but these are mere suppositions, and neither true causes of the schesis of our souls, nor of the modes of our lives.
38. It is the mind which is situated in the vacuous intellect, and is possest of the power of intellection that imagines in itself the various states of things (and the happiness and miseries of life), and gives names to them accordingly. (So says the sruti:—The sapient seeing the different form and states of things, coin words to designate them and their various modes also).
39. The conscious soul comes to know by means of its intellection, its own body in its vacuous self; and after death it sees the same to exist as in its dream or imagination (i.e. in its ideal form).
40. The knowledge of the dead in regard to the next world, is likewise in the manner of a dream; and though this dreaming state of the soul continues for a long duration, it bears no truth in its nature.
41. If a new body is framed by another person (such as parents or the creator himself), for the re-entrance of deceased spirit into it, then can the new born body have any remembrance of the past, and how can this body be what the dead person had before, and as for his intellect, it is a mere vacuity, and cannot pass from one body into another.
42. Therefore no one that is dead is born again, or is to be reborn afterwards at any time; it is only an idea of the mind, that I was so and am reborn as such; and a vain wish in its vacuity, to be born again <in>some form or other.
43. It is by nature and habitual mode of thinking, that men are impressed with belief of his regeneration, both by popular persuasion and scriptural evidence of a state of future retribution, which is altogether false and fanciful.
44. The soul is an aerial and vacuous substance, giving rise to the phantoms of visibles, in the forms of shadowy dreams in its spacious vacuity; and always views its births and deaths in endless repetitions in this world.
45. It views every particular object, in the illusive net work, which is spread in its ample sphere; and seems to see and act and enjoy everything, without being in the actual enjoyment of any thing.
46. In this manner millions and millions of worlds, are constantly rising before its sight; which appear to be so many visible phenomena in its ignorance; but which when viewed in their proper light, prove to be the display of One all pervading Brahma only.