Verse 43

³⁷Ah, the bewilderment of these people, older in years and looking straight at the way of the world: that they should grieve for nothing over a man who has gone where he came from, when they will go the same way themselves. ³⁸Ah, how fortunate we are, that though our parents left us here we do not worry. We are weak, and the wolves and the rest do not eat us. He who guards a child in the womb guards it still. ³⁹He who is the Lord and sends this forth by his will, unspent, who guards it and who tears it away: all that moves and does not move is called his play, weak ones, and he is the master of holding back and taking in.

⁴⁰What is dropped on the road stays there if what is ordained keeps it, and what stands in the house is destroyed if that has struck at it. One with no protector lives in the forest if that looks on him, and one well guarded at home, if that has killed him, does not live. ⁴¹Beings come to be by the works of their own kind of birth, and in time they altogether cease to be. The self is not in that, though it stands in nature; being other than she, it is not bound by her strands. ⁴²This body of the Person is born of confusion, as a house is taken for a thing of elements apart from him. As a man of water and earth and fire, born in time, alters and is destroyed.

⁴³As fire in wood is taken as something separate, as the air within a body stands apart, as the sky, which goes everywhere, does not stick to anything: so is the Person, the ground of all the strands, beyond them.