Verse 9.5

Verse 9.5: “And yet, the beings are not (in sooth) resting upon Me: observe this Yoga (power and skill) of Me the Overlord. Sustainer of the beings, and yet not contained within the beings, is the Self of Me who have brought the beings into being. (71)

Commentary called Jnaneshwari by Jnaneshwar:

Try to realise My absolute being beyond the compass of primal nature (Prakriti), leaving aside limitations of imagination and then, the language that all the living beings abide in Me, is also untrue, since I am all in all, there being nothing besides My Being. When in the dust of blind will, Fancy creates and sheds the faint twilight to obscure knowledge with ignorance on the Supreme Spirit, the power of knowledge gets dimmed, and at the eventide of ignorance through the illusiveness of the material world ), the entire mass of created beings appears distinct from the Supreme Brahman. But as the evening time closes the illusory plurality melts into the Sole Supreme Brahman in its unmutilated, undistorted, pure Essence of the Self, such as the misgiving of a floral wreath mistaken for a serpent in the dark is realized in its true being that puts an end to that suspicion itself.

Do sprouts of earthen vessels ever spring from earth? Are they not rather shaped out by the potter’s mind? And are there any quarries of waves on the bed of the sea? Is it not rather entirely the doing of the wind that moves freely? Does cotton hold any box of ready-made cloth? Is it not rather true that threads become cloth through the purpose of the weaver? Even though changed into an ornament outwardly, gold does not lose its real essence of gold; the external ornamental shape is through the imaginative vision of the wearer. Just tell me, if what is echoed, or what is reflected in the mirror, is our own sound or light, or was it originally there in itself? Even so, created beings—many and separate—appear as real to such a one who by imagination, works them up on My Pure Being in itself. When the action of this power of imagination is spent up, the illusion of created beings, which comes to naught is dissolved and there abides only My pure undistorted Self Essence.

To one who gets dizzy mountains and valleys are seen as spinning round and round, in that way it is the illusion that by imagination causes the created beings to appear in My undivided pure essence. Get rid of this imagination and it would be futile even to dream either that I am in created beings or that they are in Me. Therefore, all this talk that I am the sustainer of all beings, or that I dwell in them, is like the raving of an unsound state of mind caused by the delirium (vāta) induced through the power of fancy. Therefore, hear ye dearest soul, it is also the merest untruth to take Me as the soul of all created things or the inward supporter of unreal beings.

Just as there comes into being, unreal mirage on account of sun’s rays, in that way the entire beings are falsely ascribed to My pure being—not only that, but they make Me the real mover dwelling in them. I am thus held to be the creator of the beings: Yet I am the only real being in all that is, just as the splendour and the Sun are one and the same thing. Now have you known well this secret of innermost glory of great Power? And now say, if there is the least room for any distinction. Thus the beings are not other than Me that is the truth and so never hold Me distinct from the beings.