Continued from Verse Six
7. Although the world and knowledge thereof rise and set together, it is by knowledge alone that the world is made apparent. That Perfection wherein the world and knowledge thereof rise and set, and which shines without rising and setting, is alone the Reality.
Commentary: So we have this twin idea of the world and the knowledge of the world. This knowledge comes through the mind. The mind is what we use to perceive the world; there is no other access to the world.
Where there is a world, there is a mind which says that is the case. And where there is a mind, there has to be a world, since what it means to be a mind is to have knowledge of something. That something is simply what we call the world. Even someone hallucinating sees the world — it may be a distorted vision of the world from someone else’s perspective, but it is the world for the hallucinator. In a dream it’s a dream world.
The idea of a mind requires the experience of thought. Thought is always of things, and things have boundaries: this is an apple because it is not an orange or a giraffe or anything else. Its limits make it what it is.
Without a something ‘out there’ there could be no perception of a something ‘in here,’ and vice-versa. That something ‘in here’ is the ego. So the mind is rooted in egoic identification, which is the sense that “I am a thinking, doing, experiencing entity.” Without that sense, you couldn’t have a world. Without the world, however, you couldn’t have that sense either.
Ego & world are like the two ends of a pole. When one comes, they both must come. They imply and require each other. The egoic mind is what seems to know the world.
Both the egoic mind and the world are established in something superior to them both, which does not come and go. The mind and the world are both just objects. Neither are really aware. They are, rather, in truth known by something else. They are both merely modifications of or forms of that something else. That something else in which they are both rooted, and by which they are both known, and which unlike them does not come and go, is deemed Perfection, the Self, Truth, Awareness, or Reality. It has many names.
At any time, see all the forty verses posts that I have published so far here.