Two Interdependent Seeds

Sage Vasishtha

VASISHTHA continued:

When, obstinately clinging to a fancy, and therefore abandoning a thorough enquiry into the nature of truth, one apprehends an object with that fancy - such apprehension is described as conditioning or limitation. When such fancy is persistently and intensely indulged in, this world-appearance arises in consciousness. Caught up in his own conditioning, whatever the person sees he things that to be real and gets deluded. And on account of the intensity of the conditioning and the fancy, he discards his own nature and perceives only the world-illusion. All his happens only to the unwise person. That, whose perception is thus perverted, is known as mind. When this mind is confirmed in its perverted perception, it becomes the seed for repeated birth, old age and death.

When notions of the desirable and undesirable do not arise, then the mind does not arise and there is supreme peace. These alone constitute the form of the mind - conception, imagination, thought and memory. When these are absent, how does a mind exist? When one, established in non-becoming, contemplated that which has not changed into becoming and when one thus perceived what is as it is, the mind becomes no-mind. When the psychological conditioning or limitation is not dense, when it has become transparent, one becomes a liberated sage who apparently lives and functions by past momentum, but he ill not be born again. In his case, the seed has been fried, as it were, and will not germinate into world-illusion. When the body falls, he is absorbed into the infinite.

Of the two seeds for this world-illusion (viz., movement of prana and clinging to fancy), if one is got rid of, the other also goes away; for the two are interdependent. The mind creates the world-illusion and the mind is created by the movement of prana in one's own conditioning. Again, this movement of prana also takes place because of the mental conditioning or fancy. Thus this vicious circle of completed; one feeds the other, one spurs the other into action. Motion is natural to prana and when it moves in consciousness, mind arises; the the conditioning keeps the prana in motion.When  one is arrested, both fall.

The psychological conditioning or limitation alone is the source of untold pain and sorrow and it is the root of ignorance; but when it comes to an end, the mind falls with it instantly. Even so, by the restraint of the movement of prana the mind comes to a standstill, without perceiving the world that dwells within it.