There, the holy ladies, unseen by anyone, saw the tomb of the brahmin. The maid servants were dejected with sorrow, and the faces of the women were soiled with tears, faded like lotuses with their withered leaves.
Then Leela, with her gracefulness of divine knowledge, the elegance of her perfections, and her devotion for truth, thought within herself that the residents of the house might see her and the goddess in their ordinary forms as human beings. Then the people of the house saw the two ladies as Lakshmi and Gauri, brightening the house with the light of their being.
Wreaths of unfading flowers of various kinds adorned the two women from head to foot. They seemed like the personifications of spring season, perfuming the house with the fragrance of a flower garden. Their appearance seemed to sprinkle ambrosial dews all around and made the dry withered and brown branches of tamara trees sprout new tender leaflets.
On seeing them, the whole family with Jyeshtha Sarma, the eldest son of the deceased brahmin, cried aloud and said, “Hail to the woodland goddesses,” and threw handfuls of flowers on their feet.
The goddesses addressed him gently, “Tell us the cause of your sorrow which has made you all so sad.”
Then, one by one, Jyeshtha Sarma and others described their sorrows owing to the death of the brahmin couple.
They said, “Know, O goddess pair, there lived here a brahmin and his wife who had been the support of guests and a model for brahmins.
They were our parents who recently died. They have abandoned us, leaving all their friends and domestic animals here. They have departed to heaven and left us quite helpless in this world.”
“Our prosperity has fled from us, and we sit here in dumb despair of hope. Our houses have become dark and gloomy as a desert. Here the humble bees are humming in grief upon the scattered flowers in our garden that now sends forth a putrid smell instead of their former fragrance.”
“Therefore, O Devis! reduce our excessive grief, because the visit of the great never goes for nothing.”
Hearing these words, Leela gently touched the head of her son with her hand, as the lotus bed leans to touch its offshoot by the stalk. At her touch the boy was relieved of all his sorrow and misfortune, just like the summer heat of the mountain is reduced by the showers of rainy season. All others in the house were as highly gratified at the sight of the goddesses as when a pauper is relieved of his poverty, or the sick are healed by a draught of nectar.
Vasishta answered:— You forget, O Rama, and think that Leela had a material body or could assume one at pleasure. She was in an astral form, her form of pure intellect, and it was with her spiritual hand that she touched the inner spirit of the boy and not his material body.
Belief in materialism leads one to think that his unreal earthly frame is real, just like a boy’s belief in ghosts makes him take a shadow for a spirit. But this belief in one’s materiality is soon over upon conviction of one’s spirituality, just like the traces of our visions in a dream are removed on the knowledge of their unreality upon waking.
A dream presents the sights of cities, lands, air and water where there are no such things in actuality. A dream causes the movements of our limbs and bodies for no purpose.
As air appears as earth in dreaming, so the nonexistent world appears to exist in waking. It is thus that men see and talk of things unseen and unknown in their fits of delirium. Children see ghosts in the air and a dying man sees a forest in it. Others see elephants in clouds, and some see pearls in sunbeams.
In this manner, everyone is of the form of whatever he thinks himself to be. It is only habit that makes him to believe himself as such. He is not so in reality. But Leela, who had known the truth of the nonexistence of the world, was conscious of its nothingness and viewed all things as false conceptions of the mind.
The hand that Leela laid on the head of Jyeshtha Sarma, her eldest son, was not lain from her maternal affection for him, but for his edification in intellectual knowledge. Consciousness being awakened, there is all joy attendant upon it. It is more subtle than ether and far purer than vacuum, and leads the intellectual being above the region of air. All other things are like images in a dream.
Love.
