Just as a mountain cannot stop the wind, neither can the Lord himself stabilize the wise mind when difficulty agitates it.

The metaphor of the mountain and the wind appears in multiple Indian texts, but here it receives a radical twist: even Īśvara, the personified divinity, is powerless before the mind shaken by kaṣṭa. This is not atheism, but something deeper: ultimate responsibility falls on individual practice. God does not stabilize the mind by delegation; stability is self-generated. The mountain symbolizes the apparent solidity of prajñā — accumulated wisdom — which turns out to be permeable to the vāyu of circumstance. Vāyu is also prāṇa, the vital force that moves the mind. In traditional haṭha, control of prāṇa is control of the mind; here Vasiṣṭha suggests that when prāṇa overflows in kaṣṭa, no external structure contains the storm. The seeker must become their own vāyu-stambha — the pillar of air, the contradiction that only practice resolves.