“I have related your
past lives to you so that you may know the individual soul to be only air, and
that knowledge of its reality is an error. False knowledge casts its reflection
on consciousness and causes its error also. (Errors in the senses breed errors
in the mind.)
This
makes you doubtful of the truth and untruth of the two states (of the material
and intellectual worlds). Therefore the question, ‘Which is true and
which is untrue?’ has no better answer than that all creations are equally
false and unsubstantial.”
Vasishta
said:—
Hearing
these words of the goddess, Leela was confused in her mind, and with her eyes
staring with wonder, she addressed her softly.
Leela said, “How is it,
O goddess, that your words are so incoherent with truth. You make us the same
as the brahmin couple who are in their own house. We are sitting here in our
palace. How is it possible that the small space of the room in which my
husband’s body is lying could contain those spacious lands and hills and the
ten sides of the sky? It is as impossible as confining an elephant in a
mustard seed, or a gnat fighting with a body of lions in a nutshell.
It is as incredible as
to believe a lotus seed contains a hill, or to be devoured by a little bee, or
that peacocks are dancing hearing the roaring of clouds in a dream. O great
goddess of gods, it is equally improbably to say that this earth, with all its
mountains and other things, is contained within the small space of a sleeping
room. Therefore, O goddess, please explain this mystery clearly to me,
because it is by your favor only that the learned are cleared of their
questions.”
The
goddess Saraswati said:— Hear me, fair maiden! I did not tell you a lie.
After death you lost the
memories of your former lives, just like one loses memories of waking events
when in the dream state. All are like the appearance of the three worlds in
dream, or their formation in the imagination, or like the description of warfare
in an epic poem, or like water in the mirage of a sandy desert.
The hills and houses
seen in the empty space of the brahmin’s house were nothing but the capacity of
his own mind to form the images of its fancy and receive the external
impressions like a reflecting mirror. All these, though unreal, appear as
real substances on account of the reality of consciousness which is seated in
the cavity of the innermost sheath of the body and reflects the images.
But these images derived
from the memories of unreal objects of the world are as unreal as those objects
which cast their reflections upon consciousness. Waves rising in the river of a
mirage are as unreal as the mirage itself.
The spirit of the
brahmin resided in the emptiness of his house (the body), with the seas,
forests and the earth within itself, like a bee lives in the lotus. Thus the
habitable earth with everything it contains is situated in a small cell in one
corner of consciousness, like a spot of flimsy cloud in the sky.
The house of the holy
brahmin was situated in the same locality of consciousness which contains all
the worlds in one of its atomic particles. Every atom of the intelligent soul
contains unnumbered worlds within worlds, enough to remove your doubt of the
brahmin being able to see an entire kingdom within the space of his intellect.
Leela
asked, “How can we be the brahmin couple when they died only eight days before
and we have been reigning here for so many years?”
Continued....
Love
