and merge them all in the knowledge.[972] Restraining speech and the senses one should practise Yoga during the hours after dusk, the hours before dawn, and at dawn of day, seated on a mountain summit, or at the foot of a goodly tree, or with a tree before him.[973] Restraining all the senses within the heart, one should, with faculties concentrated, think on the Eternal and Indestructible like a man of the world thinking of wealth and other valuable possessions.  One should never, while practising Yoga, withdraw one’s mind from it.  One should with devotion betake oneself to those means by which one may succeed in restraining the mind that is very restless.  One should never permit oneself to fall away from it.  With the senses and the mind withdrawn from everything else, the Yogin (for practice) should betake himself to empty caves of mountains, to temples consecrated to the deities, and to empty houses or apartments, for living there.  One should not associate with another in either speech, act, or thought.  Disregarding all things, and eating very abstemiously, the Yogin should look with an equal eye upon objects acquired or lost.  He should behave after the same manner towards one that praises and one that censures him.  He should not seek the good or the evil of one or the other.  He should not rejoice at an acquisition or suffer anxiety when he meets with failure or loss.  Of uniform behaviour towards all beings, he should imitate the wind.[974] Unto one whose mind is thus turned to itself, who leads a life of purity, and who casts an equal eye upon all things,—­indeed, unto one who is ever engaged in Yoga thus for even six months,—­Brahma as represented by sound appears very vividly.[975] Beholding all men afflicted with anxiety (on account of earning wealth and comfort), the Yogin should view a clod of earth, a piece of stone, and a lump of gold with an equal eye.  Indeed, he should withdraw himself from this path (of earning wealth), cherishing an aversion for it, and never suffer himself to be stupefied.  Even if a person happens to belong to the inferior order, even if one happens to be a woman, both of them, by following in the track indicated above, will surely attain to the highest end.[976] He that has subdued his mind beholds in his own self, by the aid of his own knowledge the Uncreate, Ancient, Undeteriorating, and Eternal Brahma,—­That, viz., which can not be attained to except by fixed senses,—­That which is subtiler than the most subtile, and grosser than the most gross, and which is Emancipation’s self.’[977]

“Bhishma continued, ’By ascertaining from the mouths of preceptors and by themselves reflecting with their minds upon these words of the great and high-souled Rishi spoken so properly, persons possessed of wisdom attain to that equality (about which the scriptures say) with Brahman himself, till, indeed, the time when the universal dissolution comes that swallows up all existent beings.’"[978]