Continuing the strain of His arguments in the previous stanza here He says, “NOR DO THINGS EXIST IN ME,” although “I DWELL NOT IN THEM.” Now here he says that in the Infinite, never has the finite ever risen! Continuing our example of the post and the ghost this is equivalent to the post declaring that, “in me, the electric post, never has a ghost existed.” In Pure Awareness, in Its Infinite Nature of sheer Knowledge, there never was, never is and can never be any world of pluralistic embodiment, just as, for the waker, the pleasures of the dream world ARE NEVER AVAILABLE. In short, at the time of the direct subjective experience of the Self there is no cognition of the pluralistic world, which is born out of the forgetfulness of the Infinite.

The Self “BRINGS FORTH AND SUPPORTS ALL BEINGS” just as the ocean gives birth to, supports and nourishes all the waves in it. “AND YET,” says Krishna “I, MYSELF NEVER DWELL IN THEM.” Just in the same way the ocean can cry that “I am never the waves.” The mud is the womb of all pots, the sustainer of their shapes, the nourisher of their forms, and yet, none of the pots, nor all the pots put together, can ever define or give a total knowledge of the mud. Pure Consciousness, Divine and Eternal, is the Substratum that sustains and illumines the entire panorama of the everchanging plurality.

The objects of the world conveying their stimuli through the doors of the sense organs create mental waves which are illuminated by the Conscious Principle residing in all forms. If the Awareness is not there, the external world must necessarily fail in giving the mind-and-intellect the concept of its life as a series of unbroken experiences. Just as the cotton is in the cloth, or the gold in all ornaments, or the heat in the fire, so too, the Imperishable is in the perishable. The dreamer can function only in the waker; the waker pervades the dream-experiences, and at the same time, the waker is not in the dream nor in fact, when awakened fully, does the dream ever exist in the waker.

KRISHNA FEELS THAT THE LANGUAGE OF PARADOX IS PROVING TOO MUCH OF A RIDDLE TO THE GROSS INTELLECT OF THE AVERAGE MAN IN ARJUNA, AND THEREFORE, IN HIS DIVINE KINDNESS, THE LORD PROVIDES FOR HIS DISCIPLE AN EXAMPLE:

Na ca bhutani, nor do the beings, beginning from Brahma; matsthani, dwell in Me. Pasya, behold; me, My; aisvaram, divine; yogam, Yoga, action, performance, i.e. this real nature of Myself. The Upanisadic text, too, similarly shows the absence of association (of the Self) due to Its being free from contact: ‘…unattached, for It is never attached’ (Br. 3.9.26). Behold this other wonder: I am the bhuta-bhrt, sustainer of beings, though I am unattached. Ca, but; mama atma, My Self; na bhutasthah, is not contained in the bengs. As it has been explained according to the logic stated above, there is no possibility of Its remaining contained in beings. How, again, is it said, ‘It is My Self? Following human understanding, having separated the aggregate of body etc. (from the Self) and superimposing eoism of them, the Lord calls It ‘My Self’. But not that He has said so by ignorantly thinking like ordinary mortals that the Self is different from Himself. So also, I am the bhuta-bhavanah, originator of beings, one who gives birth to or nourishes the beings. By way of establishing with the help of an illustration the subject-matter [Subject-matter-that the Self, which has no contact with anything, is the substratum of creation, continuance and dissolution.] dealt with in the aforesaid two verses, the Lord says: