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Válmiki
Yoga-Vāsistha, Book 6: Nirvāna-Prakarana (On ultimate extinction). Chapter 3 - On the unity and universality of Brahmā
Vasistha continued- As the countless waves, which are continually rising and falling in the Sea, are no other than its water assuming temporary forms to view; so the intellect exhibits the forms of endless worlds heaving in itself; and know, O sinless Rāma! this intellect to be your very self or soul. 1
Say you that have the intellectual soul, what relation doth your immaterial soul bear to the material world, and being freed from your earthly cares, how can you entertain any earthly desire or affection in it. 2
It is the Intellect which manifests itself in the forms of living soul or jīva, mind and its desires, and the world and all things; say then what else can it be, to which all these properties are to be attributed; 3.
The intellect of the Supreme Spirit, is as a profound sea with its huge surges; and yet, O Rāma! it is as calm and cool as your soul, and as bright and clear, as the transparent firmament.
As the heat is not separate from fire, and the fragrance not apart from the flower; and as blackness is inseparable from colyrium, and whiteness from the ice; and as sweet is inborn in the sugar-cane, so is intellection inherent in, and unseparated from the intellect.
As the light is nothing distinct from the sun-beams, so is intellection no other than the intellect itself; and as the waves are no way distinct from the water; so the universe is in no wise different or disjoined from the nature of the intellect, which contains the universe. 4
The ideas are not apart from the intellect, nor is the ego distinct from the idea of it; the mid is not different from the ego, nor is the living soul any other than the mind.
The senses are not separate from the mind, and the body is not unconnected with the senses; the world is the same as the body, and there is nothing apart from the world. 5
Thus the great sphere of universe, is no other than the unbounded sphere of intellect; and they are nothing now done or made, or ever created before: 6.
Our knowledge of everything, is but our reminiscence of the same; and this is to continue for evermore, in the manner of all partial spaces, being contained in infinity, without distinction of their particular localities. 7
As all spaces are contained in the endless vacuity, so the vastness of Brahmā is contained in the immensity of Brahmā; and as truth resides in verity, so in this plenum contained, in the plenitude of Divine mind. 8
Seeing the forms of outward things, the intelligent man never takes them to his mind; it is the ignorant only, that set their minds to the worthless things of this world.
They are glad to long after what they approve of, for their trouble only in this world; but he who take these things as nothing, remains free from the pleasure and pain of having or not having them.
The apparent difference of the world and the soul of the world, is as false in reality, as the meaning of the words sky and skies, which thought taken in their singular and plural senses, still denote the same uniform vacuity. 9
He who remains with the internal purity of his vacant mind, although he observes the customary difference of external things, remains yet as unaffected by the feelings of pain and pleasure, as the insensible block of wood and stone; 10.
He who sees his blood-thirsty enemy in the light of a true friend is the person that sees rightly into the nature of things. 11
As the river uproots the big trees on both its sides, by its rapid currents and deluge; so doth the dispassionate man destroys the feelings of his joy and grief to their very roots.
The sage that knows not the nature of the passions and affections, and does not guard himself from their impulse and emotions, is unworthy of the veneration, which awaits upon the character of saints and sages.
He who has not the sense of his egoism, and whose mind is not attached to this world; saves his soul from death and confinement, after his departure from this world. 12
The belief in one's personality, is as false as one's faith in an unreality, which does not exist; and this wrong notion of its existence, is removed only by one's knowledge of the error, and his riddance from it.
He who has extinguished the ardent desire of his mind, like the flame of an oilless lamp; and who remains unshaken under all circumstances, stands as the image of a mighty conqueror of his enemies in painting or statue.
O Rāma! that man is said to be truly liberated, who is unmoved under all circums-tances, and has nothing to gain or lose in his prosperity or adversity, nor anything to elate or depress him in either state.
Footnotes
1. All personal souls are selfsame with the impersonal Self; because it is in the power of both the finite and infinite souls to produce and reduce the appearance of the worlds in them, which proves them beyond any doubt as the Cidātmā or the Intellectual soul
2. The spiritual soul has no concern with the material world
3. if not to the eternal intellect
4. The noumenon contains the phenomenon, and become manifest as the world
5. The body is the microcosm of the cosmos
6. for whatever there is or comes to pass, continues forever in the presence of the intellect
7. All spaces of place occupied by bodies, are contained in the infinite and unoccupied vacuity of Mind
8. Here Brahmā the great means by figure of metonymy, the Brahmānda or vastness of his creation
9. So the one soul is viewed as many in appearance only
10. with his stoical indifference in joy and grief
11. Because the killers of our lives, are the givers of our immortality
12. There is a similar text in the Bhāgavadgītā, and it is hard to say which is the original one and which is the copy
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