JLI1& VVUJK..L».U-JLJL».L^U OJ.V-/1N .n.-LNJ-/ XJTLXL. .CVJ&JnL.fc-i UJL-.J-^JL- ^»^

Goddess, Saras vati, by whose favour we all meet again". The
king- arose and bowed at the feet of the Goddess, and prayed ;

"O Goddess t, give us wisdom and enlightenment." And
SarasvatI blessed them all and departed, saying: "Be ye
happy ^ And thereafter all was gladness and rejoicing"
throughout the kingdom, and people wondered and conversed
amongst themselves how the great love of the queen had
brought back the king and her own Jiva twofold from the
other worlds. And the king- and the two Lilas reigned wisely
and well, for eight myriads of years, and then all passed into
the peace of Vi<leha-muktL(1)

CHAPTER VII

Consciousness
Vasishtha said : "Thou must have gathered from the tale
of Lila, Prince !, that the feeling of solidity, which makes the
world around seem independent in its realness, is also but
mere Consciousness, as much as the feeling of tenuity or
liquidity. All this multifarious universe is nothing else than
the play of a Single Point of Consciousness, which encloses
and contains within itself all Self and all Not-Self and all
their mutual Interplay, in all-Time without limit, past, present,
and to come, in all-Space without periphery, here, there, and
everywhere. What the Consciousness imagines strenuously,
that it feels as real. If it will imagine to itself a solid body
standing before the impassable barrier of a wall of rock, to
that body the rock is truly an impassable barrier. If it will,
by equal stress, eliminate solidity from both, they will no
longer be a bar and a resistance to each other. If it will rush
through the whole experiences of a Kalpa in a single moment,

(1) Liberation, 'body-less deliverance', complete dissolution of all,
even the sabtlest, material sheathing, and perfect mergence into Param-
Atma, without any remnant of any separating body ; *pari-(or para")
nirvana, in Buddhist speech. See p« 45, suyra^