Argument:—Description of liberation, as heedlessness of the past and future, ignorance of the knowables, and thoughtlessness about the thinkables.
Vasishtha continued:—Gaining the knowledge of knowables, is called our bondage in this world; but it is our release from the bonds of knowable objects, that is termed our liberation from it.
2. Ráma rejoined:—But how can it be possible, sir, to get our escape from the knowledge of the knowables, and how can our rooted knowledge of things, and our habitual sense of bounden to them, be removed from us.
3. Vasishtha replied:—It is the perfection of our knowledge, and feeling of it as such, that removes our misjudgment; and then we get our liberation from error, after disappearance of our inborn bias.
4. Ráma rejoined:—Tell me sir, what is that simply uniform feeling, and what is called that complete and perfect knowledge said to be, which releases the living soul entirely, from its fetters of error.
5. Vasishtha replied:—The soul is full with its subjective knowledge of intuition, and has no need of the objective knowledge of the knowables from without; and perfect knowledge is our inward sense of the same, and not expressible in words.
6. Ráma rejoined:—Tell me sir, whether the knowableness of knowledge, that is whether the internal knowledge of the knowing soul, is the same or separate from itself; and whether the word jnána or knowledge, is taken in its instrumental or abstract sense (i.e. whether it is used to mean the power by means of which we derive our knowledge, or the so derived knowledge itself).
7. Vasishtha replied:—All perception is knowledge, and this term is denotative of its causality also (as we say, my knowledge is my guide, i.e. the instrumentality of my guidance). Hence there is no difference between knowledge and the known or the knowable, as there is none between the air and its ventilation.
8. Ráma rejoined:—If it be so (that there is no difference between them); then tell me, whence arises the error of difference in our conception of them; the conception of the materiality of the perceptible or objective world, must be as erroneous as that of the horns of a hare, which had never been in esse, nor are likely to be at any time in future.
9. Vasishtha replied:—The error of the reality of external objects, gives rise to the error of the reality to our knowledge of them also; but there is no inward object of thought, nor of the outward senses, has ever any reality in it.