IX: 9

Chapter 9, Verse 9

"These actions do not bind me, Arjuna.
For my spirit stands apart,
Watching over Maya,
The maker."

Sri Aurobindo:

If, in his power, he accompanies her and shapes all of her workings, he is outside of them, too, not bound by her workings, because he infinitely exceeds them and precedes them.  He is the same before, during, and after all of this procession in the cyclic march of time.

Still, since these workings are the actions of the divine nature, and since the divine nature can never be separated from everything she creates, God must be immanent in everything.  This is a relation which is not the whole truth of his being, but neither is it a truth that we can at all afford to ignore.

Swami Shivananda:

Krishna is saying to Arjuna in so many words...

I remain neutral.  I have no attachment to the fruits of action.  I have no egoistic feeling of agency such as "I do this."  I know that the Self, of which I am the manifestation in the world of name and form, is actionless.  Therefore, the actions involved in the creation and the dissolution do not bind me.

So also in the case of the wise, the absence of the egoistic feeling of agency and the absence of any attachment to the fruits of action are the causes of freedom from Dharma and Adharma, virtue and vice.

Paramahansa Yogananda:

Just as an attendant who operates a ferris wheel in an amusement park feels no identification with the emotional involvement of the passengers, even so, the Master of this ferris wheel of creation ever remains an onlooker.

So long as the passengers lose themselves in the ride on the wheel of cosmic entertainment, so long will they be bound to it, identifying with the pleasures and pains of existence.  Krishna expresses in this verse the secret by which he participates without involvement in creation: pure detachment.

When you realize that "all this is God, not I and mine," you, too, will become a detached spectator, free from selfish desire and inflammatory emotion.

Ram Dass:

The practice of witnessing can be a key spiritual practice, because it lets you move outside the drama of your life.  It reveals another plane from which to view your experience.  The witness isn't trying to change anything.  It's not trying to get you ahead.  It's just about witnessing, nothing more.  You need a little elbow room.  Create a spacious environment for yourself, one that makes it easier to step back and breathe.  On this level of the witness, you're still operating within a dualistic framework.  The witness is still witnessing something.

Later, there will emerge another kind of witnessing, a kind of pervasive perception, which is born of pure detachment.  This involves a deeper transformation.  You become the experiencer and the experience, the total package.  There is no part of it you are not.

That's the Self.  The practice has transcended itself.  It has taken you to a place where you are all of it.  You have merged.  It is the oneness which births the higher wisdom.  It is the "beyond the beyond."

Eckhart Tolle:

When your thoughts absorb your attention, you're identifying with the voice in your head.  This is the ego, the mind-made "me."  That mentally constructed self feels incomplete and precarious.  Fearing and wanting are its predominant emotions and motivating forces.

When you recognize that there is a voice in your head that is pretending to be you and never stops chattering, you start to awaken out of your unconscious identification with the stream of thoughts.  When you recognize that voice for what it is, you understand deeply that you are not this voice, but the one who is aware of it.  Knowing yourself as the awareness behind the voice is freedom.