Commentary on Ramana's Forty Verses: Verse Four

Continued from Verse Three

4. If one has form oneself, the world and God also will appear to have form, but if one is formless, who is it that sees those forms, and how? Without the eye can any object be seen? The seeing Self is the Eye, and that Eye is the Eye of Infinity.

Commentary: A form is a boundary. If you have a form, it means that you have a boundary. Other things, like the world and God, are contrasted to that boundary. They are the not-you. It is by the creation of mental boundaries that we have experiences. Without a form, without those boundaries, there is no way to differentiate self and other. There is therefore no way to use concepts, no way to use language, no way to say “individual,” “world,” “God.”

The eye is the form of the instrument of knowing, and it differentiates things into forms with boundaries. This eye can be regarded both as physical or as metaphorical — i.e. as the egoic mind, the mind which says “I” and “not-I.”

But in reality what sees is no physical or even mental I. Rather, the Self sees, and that Self is infinite — meaning boundless, meaning formless. There is no actual space in it for I and not-I. For that Eye, the true Eye, its Seeing is no seeing. Ordinary seeing can be understood. But the Seeing of that Eye, when inquired into, leads straight into the silence of the incomprehensible. It stuns the mind into silence.

At any time, see all the forty verses posts that I have published so far here.