IX: 5

Chapter 9, Verse 5

"This is my divine mystery.
Try to understand its nature.
My Being sustains all creatures
And brings them to birth,
But has no physical contact with them."

Paramahansa Yogananda:

Even though a beam of light conveys and sustains the scenes of a movie, with all their variety and contrast, the beam itself undergoes no transformation.  Similarly, the motion pictures of creation do not disturb the Lord's originating beam.

A man looking at the sky and the mountains and the ocean does not detect in them the divine presence.  The subtle beam of the Creator is imperceptible to the human gaze.  Because he is everywhere, it is as if he is nowhere.

By his mysterious divine Yoga, the Lord's vibrationless, unmanifested, Cosmic Consciousness is the foundation of all vibratory beings, who cannot be observed to exist in him, nor do they affect him.

Swami Shivananda:

Although all actions are done with the help of the Sun's light-energy, yet the Sun cannot become the doer of actions.  Even so, the Lord is not the doer of actions, but rather presides as the Witness.  Nature does everything.

Sri Aurobindo:

All these becomings are always changing.  He is their Being.  In the unthinkable, timeless and spaceless Infinity of his existence, he has extended this minor phenomenon of a Universe.

The pantheist's identity of God and the Universe is a more limited view, a partial seeing, for he is at once one with all that is, and yet at the same time he exceeds it.  This is the mystery of his Being, that he is supra-cosmic and yet not in any sense extra-cosmic, for he pervades all and everything as its Self.

There is a luminous, uninvolved presence of God, which is in constant relation with the becomings and brings all existences into manifestation by his simple presence.  It is only through union with him in our spiritual consciousness that we can arrive at our real relation with his Being.

Father Bede Griffiths:

Krishna is careful to explain how all things come totally from the Supreme.  He is Source.  All things are pervaded by him and spun out from him the way a spider spins its web.  This is a crucial verse.  It shows that God is at once both totally immanent in creation and totally transcendent of creation.

[The web is simultaneously "of the spider" and "not of the spider."]