Sri Vasista

1. O Rāma, best of people who know what is to be known, having reached this level (of discussion), let me say that this pure and great consciousness-ether is beyond all comprehensions and confabulations.

2.  If (in such a consciousness-ether) world is to exist like a sprout, what are the causes, effective and cooperating?

3. If there are no cooperative causes for the existence of a sprout, then that sprout is like a child of 2 banen woman, whom none has ever seen.

4. In the absence of effective and cooperative causes, whatever exists should be part of its (consciousness-ether’s) nature.  That native should alone be the root cause of such being.

5. Right from the beginning of creation, Brahman alone holds himself within himself the creations in a formless condition.  Then where is the routine or sequence of births and process of birth?

6. If it is said that earth and such others (which are elements of world) exist even at the beginning, it will attract the logical error of accepting the existence of cooperating causes at the beginning itself.

7. If it is said that world is hidden in Brahman and that is the cooperating cause (for the world to emerge), even that is a foolish play of childish mind.  It cannot be a wise mind.

8. And so O Rāma, this world was never, nor is, nor will be.  It is the sparkling of that consciousness-ether within itself.

9. When thus, O Rāma, the total nonexistence (or absence or lack of it) of world is understood, this world is Brahman alone and nothing else.

10. Whatever has disappeared from visible sight by mutually destroying each other, may not (or will not) disappear from the mind of senses.

11. Only when something is totally absent, then only feeling about is disappears.  How can that disappear from sight if it has not disappeared from mind?

12. For total absence of something, the only way is to disregard and discard perceptions and sights of/about the world.  There is no other way of overcoming the calamity (of perception of world) vision of the world.

13. The knowledge about Consciousness-ether is: ‘The world is Brahman’ and ‘I am that and not this world which is like a story-in-pictures’.

14. - 16. Mountains, earth, time, with its elements like instants and aeons, birth and death, all have the cause-effect relationship as in a picture-story.  Similarly the enclosing universe and its measures of life are all accepted (in the cause-effect sequence).

17. – 18. These temporal and spatial object-manifestations are that Infinite, unbounded great Consciousness-ether alone.  These remain ever as the tiny atoms, which sparkle in the great Consciousness, the way they were at the beginning of creation.

19. Consciousness brings out the luminous creation which is a surprise turbulence in itself.  This creation exists formless and not like a wall breaking out of this Consciousness.

20. These universes are like stone streaks in a great mountain.  They are neither born, nor dead nor acquired.

21. These pure creations sparkle in the self by itself.  They are like parts of sky in a sky without form and shape.

22. The world is in the Supreme like fluidity in water, vibration in air and vortices in ocean.

23. The world which is with birth, death, initiatives and beginnings abodes in that splendorous One which is majestic with Truth, which is all-peace, which is inifinite.

24. It is foolish prattling to say that this world arises by itself from Void due to of cooperative causes.

25. With all distortions and deformations of desires and purposes thrown aside and with long sleep (of asidya) taking flight, become one bedecked with courage, awakening and knowledge.