January 30, 2026
tad īṣat sphuritākāraṁ brahma brahmaiva tiṣṭhati
ahantādi jagattādi krameṇa bhramakāriṇā (54)
The LORD continues to instruct Arjuna:
The pure experience of taste that exists in all substances in the world is the self. The faculty of experiencing that exists in all creatures, that is the omnipresent self. It exists in all even as butter exists in milk.
Even as in a collection of a thousand pots there is space within and outside of all the pots, undivided and indivisible, even so the self exists pervading all beings in the three worlds. Even as in a necklace of pearls the connecting thread may remain invisible, even so this self connects all and keeps all together, itself remaining invisible. That truth or reality is known as the self which pervades all things right from Brahmā the creator to the blade of grass.
In that Brahman there is a little manifestation which is also Brahman: and that is known here as the I-am-ness and the world on account of ignorance and delusion. When all this is but the one self, O Arjuna, what is the meaning of expressions like “This is killed” and “He kills” as also “good”, “not good”, “unhappiness” etc.? He who knows that the self is the witness of all these changes and that the self is unchanged and unaffected by these changes, he knows the truth.
Though I use expressions suggestive of diversity, the reality is non-dual. All these comings and goings, creation and dissolution, are non-different from the self. The self is the very nature of the totality of existence, even as hardness is the characteristic of a rock and liquid the nature of waves.
He who sees the self in all and all in the self and he who sees that the self is non-doer (being non-dual), he sees the truth. Just as gold is the reality in all the ornaments made of gold, whatever be their shape and size; just as water is the reality in all the waves and ripples on the ocean, whatever be their shape or size, even so the supreme self or the infinite consciousness alone is the reality in what appears to be a world of diverse creatures.
Why then do you vainly grieve? What is there in all these changing phenomena that your heart should be devoted to? Thus questioning themselves, the liberated ones roam this world in total freedom and in perfect equilibrium. Their desires having turned back on themselves (desires), their delusion having been shed, unattached to anything but firmly established in self-knowledge, freed from all sense of duality known as happiness and unhappiness, the sages reach the supreme state.