Reading section 74

13. Therefore O blameless lady! try your utmost to deaden your desires, and when you have gained sufficient strength in that practice, know yourself to be liberated in this life.

14. Until the moon of your intellectual knowledge, comes to shine forth fully with her cooling beams, so long you shall have to leave this body of yours here, in order to have a view of the other world.

15. This fleshy body of yours, can have no tangible connection with one which is without flesh; nor can the intellectual body (_lingadeha_), perform any action of the corporeal system.

16. I have told you all this according to my best knowledge, and the state of things as they are: and my sayings are known even to boys, to be as efficacious as the curse or blessing of a deity.

17. It is the habitual reliance of men in their gross bodies, and their fond attachment to them, that bind their souls down, and bring them back to the earth; while the weakening of earthly desires serve to clothe them with spiritual bodies.

18. No body believes in his having a spiritual body here even at his death bed; but every one thinks the dying man to be dead with his body for ever.

19. This body however, neither dies, nor is it alive at any time; for both life and death are mere resemblances of aerial dreams and desires in all respects.

20. The life and death of beings here below, are as false as the appearances and disappearance of persons in imagination, (or a man in the moon), or of dolls in play or puppet shows.

21. Lílá said:—The pure knowledge, O goddess! that thou hast imparted to me, serves on its being instilled into my ears, as a healing balm to the pain caused by the phenomenals.

SECTION II.

ON THE PRACTICE OF YOGA.

22. Now tell me the name and nature of the practice, that may be of use to Spiritualism, how it is to be perfected and what is the end of such perfection.

23. The goddess replied:—Whatever a man attempts to do here at any time, he can hardly ever effect its completion, without his painful practice of it to the utmost of his power.

24. Practice is said by the wise, to consist in the conference of the same thing with one another, in understanding it thoroughly, and in devoting one’s self solely to his object.

25. And those great souls become successful in this world, who are disgusted with the world, and are moderate in their enjoyments and desires, and do not think on the attainment of what they are in want of.

26. And those great minds are said to be best trained, which are graced with liberal views, and are delighted with the relish of unconcernedness with the world, and enraptured with the streams of heavenly felicity.

27. Again they are called the best practised in divine knowledge, who are employed in preaching the absolute negation of the knower and knowables in this world, by the light of reasoning and Sástras.

28. Also the knowledge, that there was nothing produced in the beginning, and that nothing which is visible, as this world or one’s self, is true at any time, is called to be practical knowledge by some.

29. The strong tendency of the soul towards the spirit of God, which results from a knowledge of the nihility of visibles, and subsidence of the passions, is said to be the effect of the practice of Yoga.

30. But mere knowledge of the inexistence of the world, without subduing the passions, is known as knowledge without practice, and is of no good to its possessor.

31. Consciousness of the inexistence of the visible world, constitutes the true knowledge of the knowable. This habitude of the mind is called the practice of Yoga, and leads one to his final extinction—_nirvána_.

32. The mind thus prepared by practice of Yoga, awakens the intelligence which lay dormant in the dark night of this world, and which now sheds its cooling showers of reason, like dew drops in the frosty night of autumn.

33. As the sage was sermonizing in this manner, the day departed as to its evening service, and led the assembled train to their evening ablutions. They met again with their mutual greetings at the rising beams of the sun after the darkness of night was dispelled.

CHAPTER XXIII.

THE AERIAL JOURNEY OF SPIRITUAL BODIES.

Vasishtha said:—

After this conference between the goddess and that excellent lady on that night, they found the inmates of the family fast asleep in the inner apartment.

2. They entered the charnel-house which was closely shut on all sides by latches fastened to the doors and windows, and which was perfumed with the fragrance of heaps of flowers.

3. They sat beside the corpse decorated with fresh flowers and garments, with their faces shining like the fair full-moon; and brightening the place.

4. They then went to the cemetery and stood motionless on the spot, as if they were sculptures engraven on marble columns, or as pictures drawn upon the wall.

5. They shook off all their thoughts and cares, and became as contracted as the faded blossoms of the lotus at the decline of the day, when their fragrance has fled from them.

6. They remained still, calm and quiet and without any motion of their limbs, like a sheet of clouds hanging on the mountain top in the calm of autumn.

7. They continued in fixed attention without any external sensation, like some lonely creepers shrivelled for want of the moisture of the season.

8. They were fully impressed with the disbelief of their own existence, and that of all other things in the world, and were altogether absorbed in the thought of an absolute privation of every thing at large.

9. They lost the remembrance of the phantom of the phenomenal world, which is as unreal as the horn of a hare.

10. What was a _non ens_ at first, is even so a not-being at present, and what appears as existent, is as inexistent as the water in a mirage.

11. The two ladies then became as quiet as inert nature herself, and as still as firmament before the luminous bodies rolled about in its ample sphere.

12. They then began to move with their own bodies, the goddess of wisdom in her form of intelligence, and the queen in her intellectual and meditative mood.

13. With their new bodies they rose as high as one span above the ground, then taking the forms of the empty intellect, they began to mount in the sky.

14. The two ladies then with their playful open eyes, ascended to the higher region of the sky, by their nature of intellectual knowledge.

15. Then they flew higher and higher by force of their intellect, and arrived at a region stretching millions of leagues in length.

16. Here the pair in their etherial forms, looked about according to their nature in search of some visible objects; but finding no other figure except their own, they became much more attached to each other by their mutual affection.

CHAPTER XXIV.

THE AERIAL JOURNEY.

Vasishtha continued:—

Thus ascending higher and higher and reaching by degrees the highest station, they went on viewing the heavens, with their hands clasped in each other’s.

2. They saw a vast expanse as that of the wide extended universal ocean, deep and translucent within; but soft with etherial mildness, and a cooling breeze infusing heavenly delight.

3. All delightsome and pleasant was the vast Ocean of vacuity, into which they dived, and which afforded them a delight far greater in its purity, than what is derived from the company of the virtuous.

4. They wandered about all sides of heaven, under the beams of the full moon shining above them; and now halted under the clear vault of the clouds, covering the mountain tops of _Meru_, as if under the dome of a huge white washed edifice.

5. And now they roved by the regions of Siddhas and Gandharvas, breathing the charming fragrance of _Mandára_ chaplets; and now passing the lunar sphere, they inhaled the sweet scent exhaled by the breeze from that nectarious orb (_Sudhákara_).

6. Now tired and perspiring profusely, they bathed in the lakes of showering clouds, fraught with the blushing lotuses of lurid lightnings flashing within them.

7. They promenaded at random of their free will on all sides, and now alighted like fluttering bees on the tops of high mountains, appearing as filaments of the lotus-like earth below.

8. They roved also under the vaults of some fragments of clouds, which were scattered by the winds, and raining like the cascade of Ganges, thinking them as shower-bath-houses in the air.

9. Then failing in their strength, they halted in many places, with their slow and slackened steps, and beheld the vacuum full of great and wondrous works.

SECTION II.

DESCRIPTION OF THE HEAVEN.

10. They saw what they had never seen before, the tremendous depth of vacuity, which was not filled up by the myriads of worlds which kept revolving in it.

11. Over and over and higher and higher, they saw the celestial spheres filled with luminous orbs adorned with their ornamental stars, roving one above and around the other.

12. Huge mountainous bodies as the _Meru_ moved about in the vacuous space, and emitted a rubicund glare, like a flame of fire from within their bowels on all sides.

13. There were beautiful table-lands, like those of the Himálayas, with their pearly peaks of snow; and also mountains of gold, spreading an aureate hue over the land.