Travels in the Mogul Empire (Bernier) 6.9.4

6.9.4

The Creation then, say these visionary doctors, is nothing more than an extraction or extension of the individual substance of God, of those filaments which He draws from his own bowels ; and, in like manner, destruction is merely the recalling of that divine substance and filaments into Himself; so that the last day of the world, which they call maperle or pralea, and in which they believe every being will be annihilated, will be the general recalling of those filaments which God had before drawn forth from Himself. — There is, therefore, say they, nothing real or substantial in that which we think we see, hear or smell, taste or touch ; the whole of this world is, as it were, an illusory dream, inasmuch as all that variety which appears to our outward senses is but one only and the same thing, which is God Himself; in the same manner as all those different numbers, of ten, twenty, a hundred, a thousand, etc., are but the frequent repetition of the same unit — But ask them some reason for this idea ; beg them to explain how this extraction and reception of substance occurs, or to account for that apparent variety ; or how it is that God not being corporeal but biapek, as they allow, and incorruptible. He can be thus divided into so many portions of body and soul, they will answer you only with some fine similes : — That God is as an immense ocean in which many vessels of water are in continual motion ;