September 25, 2024
yavat saṁjāyate kiṁcit sattvaṁ sthāvarajaṅgamaṁ
kṣetrakṣetrajñasaṁyogāt tad viddhi bharatarṣabha (XIII-26)
XIII/26. Wherever a being is born, whether unmoving or moving,
know thou, O best of the Bharata, that it is from the union between
the field and its knower.
Swamiji's Commentary
Creation itself involves both the subject (knower) and the object (the field). Creation can be viewed from two standpoints. ‘I think; therefore, I am’ is true, though not in the Cartesian sense of a division, for awareness or consciousness is consciousness’s awareness of itself, which is the universe. ‘I am; therefore, I think’ is equally true. For, in order to be able to project a thought, the thinker should exist and the thought (as well as the thought-subject) must also exist. There is actually no conflict or contradiction between these two viewpoints; they are complementary to each other.
Here, again, it is obvious that the apparent contradiction springs from the fact that we regard matter and spirit as two eternally separate and distinct factors and, in accordance with our own bias, tend to exaggerate the importance of one over the other. In fact, God exists because God is you!
God and his nature, subject and object, matter and spirit, the field and its knower – are in truth one and indivisible. All beings that exist in the universe are the products of the perpetual union between the two (God and his nature). Creation is never ex nihilo; God’s nature has ever been his, and its manifestation has always been in a potential state – even when all beings return to the state of formless dissolution during the ‘night of the creator’. Once again, when consciousness (cit) actively engages itself in becoming aware of its own potentialities (śakti), the diverse beings are ‘created’. Hence the universe is but cit-śakti made manifest. He who knows this lives in cosmic consciousness, and he realizes that animate and inanimate objects pulsate with cosmic life and float in cosmic consciousness.