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Válmiki
Yoga-Vāsistha, Book 6: Nirvāna-Prakarana (On ultimate extinction) - part 2. Chapter 14 - Story of Indrānī; and Establishment of the Identity of the Acts of Creation and Imagination
Bhuśunda continued: There was one prince born of the race of that Indra; who had also become the lord of gods; He was endowed with prosperity and all good qualities, and devoted to divine knowledge.
This prince of Indra's race, received his divine knowledge from the oral instruction of Brhaspati 1.
He knowing the knowable-one, persisted in the course of knowledge as he was taught and being the sovereign lord of gods, he reigned over all the three worlds.
He fought against the demigods, and conquered all his foes; he made a hundred sacrifices, and got over the darkness of ignorance by his enlightened mind.
He remained long in meditation, having his mind fixed in his cerebral artery, resembling the thread of a tubular stalk of the lotus, and continued to reflect on hundreds of many others matters. 2
He had once the desire of knowing by the power of his understanding, how he could see the essence of Brahma in his meditation. 3
He sat in his solitary retirement, and saw in this silent meditation of his tranquil mind, the disappearance of the concatenation of causes all about and inside himself.
He beheld the omnipotent Brahma, as extended in and about all things; and presenting all times and places and existing as all in all, and pervading all things in all places.
His hands stretch to all sides, and his feet reach to the ends of the worlds; his face and eyes are on all sides and his head pierces the spheres; his ears are set in all places, and he endures by encompassing all things every where.
He is devoid of all the organs of sense, and yet possest of the powers of all senses in himself; he is the support of all, and being destitute of qualities, is the source and receptacle of all quality. 4
Unmoved and unmoving by himself, he is moving in and out of all things, as well as moves them all both internally and externally 5. He is unknowable owing to his minuteness, and appears to be at a distance, though he is so near us.
He is as the one sun and moon in the whole universe, and the same land in all the earth; He is the one universal ocean on the globe, and one Meru Mountain 6 all about.
He is the pith and gravity of all objects, and he is the one vacuum every where, he is the wide world and the great cosmos, that is common to all.
He is the liberated soul of all, and the primary intellect in every place; he is every object everywhere, and beside all things in all places.
He is in all pots and huts, in all trees and their coatings; he moves the carts and carriages, and enlivens alike all men and other animals likewise.
He is in all the various customs and manners of men, and in all the many modes of their thinking; he reside equally in the parts of an atom, as also in the stupendous frame of the triple world.
He resides as pungency in the heart of pepper, as vacuity in the sky, and in his intellectual soul the three worlds, whether they are real entities or mere unrealities.
Indra beheld the lord in this manner, and then being liberated from his animal state by the help of his pure understanding; he remained all along in the same state of his meditation as before.
The magnanimous god sees in his revery, all things united in his meditative mind; and beheld this creation in the same light as it appears to us 7.
He then wandered in his mind all over this creation, and believing himself as the lord of all he saw in it, became the very god Indra; and reigned over the three worlds and their manifold pageantries.
Know, O chief of the race of vidyādharas, that the same Indra who was descended of the family of Indras, has been still holding his reign as the lord of gods to this day.
He then perceived in his mind, by virtue of his former habit of thinking, the seed of his remembrance sprouting forth with the lotus stalk, wherein he thought to have lain before.
As I have related to you of the reign of the former Indra, in the bosom of an atom in the sun-beam; and of the residence of his last generation-the latter Indra, in the hollow fibre of the lotus stalk.
So have thousands of othėr Indras gone by, and are going on still in their fancied realm in the empty sky, in the same manner and mode as observed by their predecessors.
So runs the course of nature in ceaseless succession, like the current of a river running onward to the sea; and so do men whether acquainted or not with the divine knowledge, flow on as streams to the abyss of eternity: 8.
Such is lengthening delusion of the world appearing as true; but vanishing to nothing at the appearance of the light of truth 9.
From whatever cause, and in whatever place or time, and in whatever manner this delusion is seen to have sprung, it is made to disappear by knowledge of the same.
It is egoism alone, which produces the wonderful appearance of delusion; as the cloud in the sky causes the rain; it spreads itself as a mist, but disappears immediately at the sight of light.
He who has got rid of his belief of the looking and sight of the world, 10; and has attained the knowledge of self reflecting soul; and who has placed his belief in one vacuous form of empty air; which is devoid of all properties and beyond all categories, is freed from all option and settled in the only One.
Footnotes
1. the preceptor of the gods
2. On the imaginary world and its kingdom and conquests together with many other things
3. or how he could have a sight of the nature of god, manifest before him. Gloss
4. The qualities of finite bodies are of a finite nature, but the infinite are infinite, eternal and immutable
5. that is to say, He is the moving force of dull matter
6. of the sun's path
7. as a real entity
8. which is tatpada or state of the Deity
9. which is the sight of god in everything
10. Of both the subjective and objective, as well as of his action and passion
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