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Chapter 7

1. The pure and immaculate ascetic who is submerged ia the feeling of oneness, who pats on rags picked up in the street and who avoids the path of both virtue and vice, repairs to a deserted place and sits there all alone.

2. The ascetic baptised by the purity of the One Eternal Truth, is beyond both conceivable and inconceivable goals, and 'devoid of contact and separation alike. What has he to do with discussion or criticism?

3. Such ascetics are free from all bonds of hope, devoid of all acts of exterior purity and bereft of all. They are wedded to the pure and immaculate reality alone.

4. How comes in the idea of the body and the bodiless, the idea of the existence of passion, and dispassion when it (the Atma) is itself the pure immutable and naturally formless reality boundless as the space?

5. How can one gain any knowledge there; how can there be any form or formlessness? Where

it is only the Highest, boundless as the space, how can there be any sensual activity?

6. It is perpetually as boundless as the sky. It is the Truth, pure and undefiled. It is bereft of all bondage and freedom. How can there be in it any notion of difference or non-difference?

7. The One Eternal Reality exists everywhere. How can there be any notion pertaining to union or disunion? It is verily the Highest, existing eternally everywhere. How can there be any notion of gain and loss in it?

8. It is the One pure universal reality. It is eternally immaculate and boundless as the sky. How can contact and separation, color and variety be true in regard to it?

9. The ascetic who is devoid of both union and disunion and who is an enjoyer without enjoyments and non-enjoyments, gradually attains to the spontaneous felicity projected by the mind.

10. An ascetic who is attached to the know- ledge and ignorance of the duality or non-duality can not attain liberation. How can such an ascetic be naturally dispassionate and the enjoyer of the pure and undefiled sentiment of Oneness?

11. It (the Atma) is infinite and boundless as the sky, if it is devoid of all notions of divisibility and indivisibility, all notions of attachment and detachment, how can there be in regard to it any notion of truth or falsehood?

12. The seer is perpetually averse to all, and devoted (only to self-realization). He goes beyond all elemental truths and attains liberation where there is neither birth nor death, neither meditation nor its opposite.

13. All this (world) is just like a magical hallucination or mirage in a sandy desert. Only Bliss, universal unbroken and boundless as the space, exists.

14. The Self is altogether beyond all, beyond all activities beginning with religious observances and culminating in liberation. How do the learned, then, impose upon it such feelings as love and detachment?

15. The enlightened Ascetic who has been purged of all evil desires and who is submerged in the sentiment of Oneness throughout, declares the truth that one never succeeds in knowing it (the Brahm) which neither the Vedic verses nor logical definitions can ever describe.