Chapter XXIII - The aerial journey of spiritual bodies

Vasishtha said:—

1. [Sanskrit available]
After this conference between the goddess and that excellent lady on that night, they found the inmates of the family fast asleep in the inner apartment.

2. [Sanskrit available]
They entered the charnel-house which was closely shut on all sides by latches fastened to the doors and windows, and which was perfumed with the fragrance of heaps of flowers.

3. [Sanskrit available]
They sat beside the corpse decorated with fresh flowers and garments, with their faces shining like the fair full-moon; and brightening the place.

4. [Sanskrit available]
They then went to the cemetery and stood motionless on the spot, as if they were sculptures engraven on marble columns, or as pictures drawn upon the wall.

5. [Sanskrit available]
They shook off all their thoughts and cares, and became as contracted as the faded blossoms of the lotus at the decline of the day, when their fragrance has fled from them.

6. [Sanskrit available]
They remained still, calm and quiet and without any motion of their limbs, like a sheet of clouds hanging on the mountain top in the calm of autumn.

7. [Sanskrit available]
They continued in fixed attention without any external sensation, like some lonely creepers shrivelled for want of the moisture of the season.

8. [Sanskrit available]
They were fully impressed with the disbelief of their own existence, and that of all other things in the world, and were altogether absorbed in the thought of an absolute privation of every thing at large.

9. [Sanskrit available]
They lost the remembrance of the phantom of the phenomenal world, which is as unreal as the horn of a hare.

10. [Sanskrit available]
What was a non ens at first, is even so a not-being at present, and what appears as existent, is as inexistent as the water in a mirage.

11. [Sanskrit available]
The two ladies then became as quiet as inert nature herself, and as still as firmament before the luminous bodies rolled about in its ample sphere.

12. [Sanskrit available]
They then began to move with their own bodies, the goddess of wisdom in her form of intelligence, and the queen in her intellectual and meditative mood.

13. [Sanskrit available]
With their new bodies they rose as high as one span above the ground, then taking the forms of the empty intellect, they began to mount in the sky.

14. [Sanskrit available]
The two ladies then with their playful open eyes, ascended to the higher region of the sky, by their nature of intellectual knowledge.

15. [Sanskrit available]
Then they flew higher and higher by force of their intellect, and arrived at a region stretching millions of leagues in length.

16. [Sanskrit available]
Here the pair in their etherial forms, looked about according to their nature in search of some visible objects; but finding no other figure except their own, they became much more attached to each other by their mutual affection.