This world now sustains itself only as intention

This statement radicalizes the epistemology of the Yoga Vāsiṣṭha: the world is not unconscious matter, vibrant energy, nor an insubstantial illusion. It is saṅkalpa-mātra —mere saṅkalpa, pure intention. This is not to say the world is “thought” in a mentalistic sense: it is intentionality without an intender, purpose without purpose. The mountain is not thought by someone: it is the intentionality of reality itself crystallized as mountain. This is the Buddhist doctrine of vijñāna-vāda reinterpreted not as subjectivism but as a phenomenological description: everything that appears, appears for a consciousness, but consciousness is not a subject—it is the field of appearance. The jagat—the world—as such a field is sustained (tiṣṭhati) not by external physical laws nor by a creator deity, but by the saṅkalpa—the inclination, the tendency—of reality itself to manifest. Vasiṣṭha does not invert the subject-object priority: he dissolves both into pure intentionality. When the mind grows still, it is not that the world disappears: it is revealed as what it always was—saṅkalpa-mātra—without the filter of a subject that appropriates or rejects it. The prapañca—the proliferation—ceases not because forms vanish, but because they no longer proliferate meaning for anyone.