Continued from Verse Four
5. The body is a form composed of the five-fold sheath; therefore, all the five sheaths are implied in the term, body. Apart from the body does the world exist? Has anyone seen the world without the body?
Commentary: The five-fold sheath is a Vedantic idea that understands the body-mind to be a complex which includes five layers, like an onion. Each layer in some sense is the product of the layers within it, and in some sense produces the layers outside it. The outer-most layer is the physical organs. Then comes the prana, or physiological energy. Then is said to be the seat of the emotions. Then, within that is our ability to reason and to decide. And finally within that is the ego, the sense that “I am.” Note that this sense, too, is actually just a layer, just as insentient as all the other layers. It claims to be conscious, claims to be deciding and feeling and all the other layers, but it can no more do those things than a piece of paper can actually think and feel. It is only when the light of consciousness hits that insentient “I am” thought that the reflected consciousness appears to experience the world.
The body, however, is a kind of instrument for seeing the world, much like a novel is an instrument for experiencing a fictional universe. When readers read a book, they project an imaginary landscape peopled by imaginary people. Both the reader and the book are required for this to happen.
So the body establishes boundaries and mental concepts which are the tools by which everything else seems to be experienced. The world as we know it is always the world as perceived and cognized by the body (where the body is understood to include all the mental and emotional instruments together).
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