nce and
gave them a comprehensive answer, saying: Be it heard! This universe
existed only in the first divine idea yet unexpanded, as if involved in
darkness, imperceptible, undefinable, undiscoverable by reason, and
undiscovered by revelation, as if it were wholly immersed in sleep; then
the sole, self-existing power, himself undiscovered, but making this world
discernible, with five elements and other principles of nature, appeared
with undiminished glory, expanding his idea or dispelling the gloom. He,
whom the mind alone can perceive, whose essence eludes the external
organs, who has not visible parts, who exists from eternity, even he, the
soul of all beings, whom no being can comprehend, shone forth in person.
He, having willed to produce various beings from his own divine substance,
first, with a thought, created the waters and placed in them a productive
seed; that seed became an egg bright as gold, blazing like the luminary
with a thousand beams; AND IN THAT EGG HE WAS BORN HIMSELF IN THE FORM OF
BRAHMA THE GREAT FOREFATHER OF ALL SPIRITS. The waters were called nara,
because they were the production of Nara, or the spirit of God; and, since
they were his first ayana, or place of motion, he thence is named
Nayrayana, or moving on the waters. From that which is, the first cause,
not the object of sense, existing everywhere in substance, not existing to
our perception, without beginning or end, was produced the divine male,
famed in all worlds under the appellation of Brahma. In that egg the great
power sat inactive a whole year of the Creator, at the close of which, by
his thought alone, he caused the egg to divide itself; and from its two
divisions he framed the heaven above and the earth beneath; in the midst
he placed the subtile ether, the eight regions, and the permanent
receptacle of waters.

"From the supreme soul he drew forth mind, existing substantially, though
unperceived by sense, immaterial; and before mind, or the reasoning power,
he produced consciousness, the internal monitor, the ruler; and before
them both he produced the great principle of the soul, or first expansion
of the divine idea; and all vital forms endued with the three qualities of
goodness, passion and darkness; and the five perceptions of sense, and the
five organs of sensation. Thus, having at once pervaded, with emanations
from the Supreme Spirit, the minutest portions of six principles immensely
operative, consciousness and the f