What has become of thy body, after it was rotten in a fortnight and evaporated in the air.
When they will behold thee coming here in thy same body, they must be astonished to think thee as returned from the next world of the dead. When thou shalt appear before them in this thy purer and spiritual form, they must look upon thee with astonishment. For thou hast not thy former form at present, but it is changed to a purer one, agreeably to the tenor and temperament of thy mind. (Lit. according to the desire in thy heart). For every body beholds every thing without him, according to his inward feelings; as for example the sight of shadowy ghosts is frequent to children, that have a fear of devils at heart. Thou art an adept in spiritualism, and hast a spiritual body on thee, and hast forgotten and forsaken thy former body, with all the desires connate with it. The view of material bodies, is lost to the sight of spiritualists; and the intelligent view them in the light of autumnal clouds, which are void of substance (i. e., The flimsy clouds which are without rain-water in them). On attainment of the spiritual state, the material body becomes as an empty cloud, and as a flower without its odor. When a man of pure desire, is conscious of his attaining the spiritual state; he loses the remembrance of his material body, as a youth forgets his embryonic state.
Thoughts are the seeds of action, and action is the soul of life. Past acts are productive of future consequence, but inaction is attended with no result. (Our lives are reckoned by our acts, and there is no vitality without activity). The living soul bears its vitality as the seed bears the germ in its bosom; and this sprouts forth in future acts, in the manner of the various forms of leaves, fruits and flowers of trees. The personal acts of people are the causes of their repeated births and deaths in this or other worlds; and they ascend higher or sink lower by virtue of their good or bad deeds, which proceed from their hearts and the nature of their souls. Our actions are the efforts of our minds, and shape our good or bad destinies according to the merit or demerit of the acts. The fates and chances of all in the existing world, are the fruits and flowers of their past acts, and even of those done in prior Kalpas; and this is called their destiny. (Sāstra: No act goes for naught even in a thousand Kalpas. Mā bhuktan kshiyate Karma, kalpa koti satai rapi).
The mind hangs in doubt between what is and what is not, and what is right and what is wrong. It forgets the past like the scent of a fleeting odor by its wilful negligence. (Unmindfulness is the cause of forgetfulness). What is true and real shines forth amidst all that is untrue and unreal; so does the subjective essence of the mind subsist amidst all its airy and fleeting dreams in sleep. And thus the world is both true and untrue as regards its subsistence in God and its external phenomena. (The substance is real but the appearance is false). The erroneous conception either of the reality or unreality of the outer world, does not spring in the mind, which is conscious of its operations only, and of no outward phenomena. This conception is like the deception of a magic show, and is concomitant with all sensuous minds. It is the long habit of thinking the unreal world as real, that makes it appear as such, to the unthinking, as a protracted sleep makes its visionary scenes appear as true to the dreaming soul.
Knowledge of the living state (personality), leads to that of Egoism which is the cause of intellection. This again introduces the sensations and finally the sensible body. (Ego is the subject of thoughts). This bondage of the soul in body, necessitates a heaven and hell for want of its liberation and then the acts of the body, become the seeds of our endless transmigrations in this world. As there is no difference between the soul, intellect and life, so there is no duality in the living soul and intellect, nor in the body and its acts, which are inseparable from each other. Acts are the causes of bodies, and the body is not the mind; the mind is one with egoism, and the ego is the living soul. The living soul is one with the Divine Intellect and this soul is all and the lord God of all.
By knowing one’s self as nothing as it was before its coming to being, and by considering the falsity of his notions (of his reality), no one can have any cause of grief (at its loss). (The Sruti:—The knower of the true-self, is above all grief and sorrow). Man is but a being of his own conception, and by getting rid of this concept, he is freed from his idea of the duality of the world (as a distinct existence). As the plantain tree has no pith except its manifold coats, so there is no substantiality of the world beside our false conceptions of it. Our births are followed by childhood, youth, old age and death one after the other, and then opens the prospect of a heaven or hell to our view, like passing phantoms before the flighty mind. As the clear eye sees bubbles of light in the empty sky, so the thoughtless mind views the firmament full of luminous bodies (which are but phantoms of the brain). When the intellect thinks of another thing (as matter) beside itself, it then falls into the error of dualism; but when it concentrates its thoughts in itself, it then loses the sense of the objective duality.
When the sound and consummate understanding, runs in one course towards its main reservoir of the supreme; it becomes divested of its knowledge of the knowables, and of its self-consciousness also in the presence of the one and no other. The perfected understanding finds the errors, to which it is exposed by its sensation of the sensibles; and comes to know, that birth and life and all the acts and sights of the living state, are as false as dreams. The mind being repressed from its natural flight, can have no thought of any thing; and is lost in itself; as the natural heat of fire and motion of the wind being extinct, they are annihilated of themselves. It is not difficult to repress the action of the mind and rouse our consciousness; in order to heal our souls of the malady of their mistaken notion of the world. If you can succeed to suppress the desires of your restless mind at any time, you are sure to obtain your liberation even at the very moment and without fail. If you will but turn to the side of your subjective consciousness only, you will get rid of the objective world, in the same manner as one is freed from his fear of snake in a rope, by his examination of the thing. If it is possible to get rid of the restless mind, which is the source of all our desires; it is no way impossible to attain to the chief end of liberation to any.
Remain unfettered by forsaking the desires of your greedy mind; for what is the good of getting sensible objects, which we are sure to lose (some time or other). It is the Spirit of God alone, that abides in everything in these phenomenal worlds, which rise to view like the waves of the waters of the great deluge. It is his knowledge that is attended with the summum bonum of liberation, and it is ignorance of that supreme Being, that binds the mind to the interminable bondage of the world.