1. While in the street, the Avadhuta moves covered only with a patched-up garment made of ragged pieces, with conduct unqualified with the considerations of merit and demerit; and the Avadhuta ever merged in the pure, spotless and universal essence of everything lives naked in a secluded house.
2. He is possessed of an aim devoid of purpose and non-purposiveness; his skill for doing things, is not characterised by propriety and impropriety. He is the truth in itself, spotless and pure. How can such an Avadhuta have settled or unsettled doctrine about the Supreme?”
3. He is free from bondage by the rope of desire, and with devotion, devoid of holiness and purity of conduct. Thus, those that have realised the pure and spotless truth exist devoid of ail attributes.
4. How can there be the discrimination of embodied and disembodied states? How can there be the discernment of attachment and non-attachment, while he himself is the supreme reality in its innate nature, which is pure and unruffled and is of the form of ethereal space?
5. In such a state how can there be perception of the real existence, how can there be form and formlessness? Where there is the Supreme Self in the form of ethereal space, how can there be perception of objects?
6. He is the Supreme Self in the form of ethereal space; he is the Supreme Self which is pure and spotless. How can there be distinction and non-distinction, or distinction from the changes of bondage and freedom?
7. When everything is solely filled with indivisible truth, how can there be the pride of union and separation. While everything is thus one undivided Supreme, how can there be the distinctions of essence and non-essence.
8. Everything is the pure and spotless reality which is perfect and all-pervading like ethereal space. With such an existence how can there be attachment and non-attachment, and how can there be truth with or without a field for manifestation?”
9. He is a Yogin devoid of union and separation; he is an enjoyer without enjoyment and non-enjoyment. Thus, he moves slowly with his mind absorbed in innate and natural bliss.
10. How can he who is always staid in consciousness and mindlessness, be freed from duality and non-duality? How can he who is a Yogin, pure, spotless and untouched by rajas, be in the enjoyment of the all-pervading essence?
11. He whose only disappointment is being without disappointment and whose only attachment is being without attachment and non-attachment – how can such a person who is the universal reality in the form of ethereal space be here both essence and non-essence?
12. He is always absorbed in meditation devoid of material things and is entirely free from the limitations of material substances. While being so, how can there be life and death and how can there be meditation and nonmeditation in organs of consciousness?
13. Everything in this universe is magic, like water, in a mirage. But Shiva who is of the nature of undivided consciousness, alone exists.
14. From religious karmas up to the attachment to freedom we have desire for none. How can the wise fabricate through attachment and non-attachment?
15. Wherever one perceives that nothing, nothing indeed exists, there the restrictions of metre do not exist. The supreme Avadhuta merged in the universal essence and purified by thought prattles the truth.
Thus ends the seventh chapter in the discourse between Dattatreya and Kartikeya, entitled the knowledge of the Self.