Chapter 2 Verse 24

Chapter 2, Verse 24

"Innermost element,
Everywhere, always,
Being of beings,
Changeless, eternal,
For ever and ever,”

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi:

"It is necessary for Arjuna to be given a clear conception of reality in order to prepare him for enlightenment. He cannot be immediately given the direct vision, but needs to be taught the principles first and then be led to the realization step by step."

Father Bede Griffiths:

"It is not that we try to suppress our senses and feelings. We cannot expect to escape pleasure or pain, but we can cultivate the awareness of a center within which is not moved, a center which is not affected by pleasure or pain or anything that happens. "

Sri Eknath Easwaran:

“Meister Eckhart summarizes the truth of the Self beautifully when he points out that the seed of God is latent in all of us. Meister Eckhart uses the expression ‘the seed of God’. He says that just as apple seeds grow into apple trees and pear seeds into pear trees, God seeds grow into God trees. The seed has to be helped to germinate, weeds have to be removed regularly, and then the plant becomes a God tree. This is our purpose in life. Because the Self is beyond all the dualities of conceptual thinking, it can only be revealed when the turbulent factory of the mind has become completely still. Descartes, one of the grandfathers of modern civilization, is known for his statement, ‘I think, therefore I am.’ The Yogi says, ‘I have stopped thinking. Therefore I am.’”

Daniel Clark comments:

“In response to Easwaran: Yes, ‘I’ stops thinking. But a new thinkingstarts, where the ‘I’ is subsumed within the ‘Super-I’ and thinkssuper-thoughts. I saw this happen with my guru [Srila Prabhupada]. When the self stopsidentifying with matter and identifies with spirit, one becomes ‘largerthan life,’ or that is, a part of the larger life, which includes everything -thinking too. God is everything. Nothing is excluded."

[“What you refer to as the ‘I’ and the ‘Super-I,’ I sometimes think of as lower mind and higher mind. It's not that one's personality gets obliterated, but that what might be called spontaneous intuition kicks in and one becomes a pure vessel of the higher power, resting in choiceless awareness, once and for all. Someday...”]