IX: 11

Chapter 9, Verse 11

"Fools pass blindly by the place of my dwelling
Here in human form.
Of my majesty they know nothing at all.
I am the Lord, the Eternal Soul."

Father Bede Griffiths:

There is the scene in the Gospels when Jesus returns to Nazareth, his home town, and the people say, "Is not this the carpenter's son?  Do we not know his brothers and sisters?"  They were unable to see behind that semblance of his human form.

Sri Aurobindo:

Mortal mind is bewildered by its ignorant reliance upon veils and appearances.  It catches no liberating glimpse of the divinity lodged in others.  It ignores the divinity within itself.  Even though the Divine manifests himself in humanity as Avatar, mortal mind ignores or even despises the veiled Lord.  It is blind to the vision by which everything in the world becomes clothed in the Divine and by which the soul awakens to its own inherent divinity and becomes godlike.

What it does see readily and to what it attaches itself with passion is only the life of the ego stalking finite things for the satisfaction of the earthly hunger of the intellect, body and senses.  Those who have given themselves up too entirely to this outward drive fall into the hands of the lower nature, cling to it and make it their foundation.  They are hurried ever onward in a fruitless cycle, never satisfied by the insatiable appetite for enjoyment.

To live persistently in this separative ego-consciousness and to make it the center of all activity is to miss altogether the true Self-awareness.  The charm that it throws upon all of its hopes, actions and knowledge are vain in the light of the eternal standard, for it excludes the liberating action and banishes the illuminating knowledge.  It sees the phenomenon but misses the essence within the phenomena, a blind hope that chases after the transient but misses the Eternal.

Paramahansa Yogananda:

Prakriti (Nature) has three Gunas, or manifesting qualities.  This verse refers to those with a predominance of Tamas, or dullness.  The next verse will refer to those with an over-abundance of Rajas, or activity with selfish interest.  Verse Thirteen will mention those with Sattva, or wisdom.

Swami Shivananda:

Krishna is saying in so many words, "I have taken this body to bless my students.  Others take me for an ordinary mortal.  I pervade the entire Universe.  There is not a place anywhere where I am not, and yet so many people do not recognize my presence.  This is their misfortune."

Eckhart Tolle:

You might like to experiment with this practice: as you walk through life, don't give one hundred percent of your attention to the external world and to your mind.  Keep some within.  Feel the stillness.  Feel it as a deep sense of peace somewhere in the background, a stillness that never leaves you, no matter what is happening out there.  Then you become a bridge between the unmanifested and the manifested, between God and the world.  This is the state of connectedness with Source.

A portal into the unmanifested is created through the cessation of thinking.  This can start with a simple thing, such as taking a conscious breath, or looking, in a state of intense alertness, at a flower, so that there is no mental commentary running at the same time.  There are many ways to create a gap in the incessant stream of thought.  This is the essence of meditation.

Thought belongs to the realm of manifestation.  Continuous mind activity keeps you imprisoned in the world of form and becomes an opaque screen that prevents you from becoming conscious of the unmanifested, the formless and timeless God-essence in yourself and in all things and creatures.