4. Kunda-danta rejoined:—But how do you attribute the quality of variety or multiplicity, to the purely simple and immutable nature of the Supreme soul, as you see them appertaining to the intrinsic character of everything else in nature. (Or as Pope says:—That changed through all, yet in all the same; great in the earth, as in the etherial frame).
5. The kadamba devotee replied:—The sphere of the intellectual vacuum, is all quiet and serene, and there is nothing as any variety or multiformity in it; the changes that are apparent in its face, are no more, than the waves and eddies, whirling on the surface of the changeless main.
6. It is in the immensity of intellectual vacuity, that infinite creations seem to be continually purling about, as the rising waves are seen to be whirling in the sea; and it is in its fathomless depth that they appear to sink, like the waters subsiding in the hollow of the deep.
7. The substantial forms of things, that rise in the unsubstantial essence of the intellect, are as the various forms of substances, seen in the dreaming state of the soul, and all which are utterly forgotten in its state of sound sleep—susupti.
8. As a Hill seen in dream is no hill at all, and as things appearing to be in motion in dreaming, are found afterwards to be perfectly motionless; so are all things in nature but mere unrealities, and though as real from the real nature of soul itself. (i.e. It is the intellect that fashions everything in its own manner, and its imagination gives a form to an airy nothing).
9. The intellect is an immaterial substance, and neither creates nor perceives any thing material by itself; but conceives everything as it is manifested to it in its idea in the beginning. (i.e. The ideas of things are inborn in the mind).
10. As the intellect sees a great variety of objects in <its> dream, which it takes for realities for the time; so its belief in the reality of its ideas, causes it to conceive them as real entities.
11. The vacuous intellect, which glitters of itself in its own state of transparence; comes to find the world shinning in the same light within itself. (i.e. The world is subjective with the intellect, and not a part from our intellectual light of the same).
12. As we have the consciousness of heat in the fire, even when it is seen in a dream; so we are conscious of the presence of everything in our minds, even in the absence of the thing itself from us. (It was thus that the Bráhman brothers were conscious of their lordship, even in their want of the realms themselves).
13. And as we have the idea of the solidity of a pillar, from our dream of it in sleep; so have we the idea of the great variety of things in existence; although there is no diversity or difference in the nature of the One unvaried unity that pervades the whole. (And that shows its unchangeable self, as many and changed through all—Aham-bahusyam).