All these movements, however, these vast roundelays of the world-systems, had for their centre a single object—the hundred-thousandfold Brahman throned in the midst of the universe; he whose immeasurable brightness permeated all the gods of the stars, and to whom they in turn flashed back that radiance, like so many mirrors of his splendour; he whose exhaustless strength, like a never-failing spring, imparted motion to all of them, and in whom, in turn, all their motion became centred.
And this was their being, filled with all the fullness of the Brahma, their community with the highest god, their blessedness, their prayerfulness, their bliss.
But if they had in Brahma the central point about which everything else was collected, yet this Brahma-world was also, though boundless, nevertheless, in a sense, limited. As the prescient eye of man, even in far-distant ages, discovered a "zodiac" in the dome of heaven, so the gods of the stars here saw untold zodiacs described in and about one another, weaving throughout the spheres pictures in which the most distant groups of stars resolved themselves into luminous figures. Now intertwined so that one star shone as an inherent part of several pictures, again flashing in lonely exclusiveness, objects appeared there, astral forms of all the beings that live and move on the worlds, or between these, abiding pictures of the original forms of all that, wrapping itself in the great elements, ceaselessly comes into being and passes away in the changeful river of life.
And this beholding of the original forms was their knowledge of the worlds.
But because, being all-seeing, they were able without having to look away from this in order to see that, and, without even the flutter of an eyelid, to behold at one glance the
