पुरुषः स परः पार्थ भक्त्या लभ्यस्त्वनन्यया ।यस्यान्तःस्थानि भूतानि येन सर्वमिदं ततम् ॥
puruṣaḥ sa paraḥ pārtha bhaktyā labhyastvananyayāyasyāntaḥsthāni bhūtāni yena sarvamidaṁ tatam
But that supreme Purusha has to be won by a bhakti which turns to him alone in whom all beings exist and by whom all this world has been extended in space.
Compiled rendering · Anilbaran Roy
Essays on the Gita
Whether we entertain or we dismiss this cosmological notion,—which depends on the value we are inclined to assign to the knowledge of “the knowers of day and night,”—the important thing is the turn the Gita gives to it. One might easily imagine that this eternally unmanifested Being whose status seems to have nothing to do with the manifestation or the non-manifestation, must be the ever undefined and indefinable Absolute, and the proper way to reach him is to get rid of all that we have become in the manifestation, not to carry up to it our whole inner consciousness in a combined concentration of the mind’s knowledge, the heart’s love, the Yogic will, the vital life-force. Especially, bhakti seems inapplicable to the Absolute who is void of every relation, avyavahārya. “But” insists the Gita,—although this condition is supracosmic and although it8·22 is eternally unmanifest,—still “that supreme Purusha has to be won by a bhakti which turns to him alone in whom all beings exist and by whom all this world has been extended in space.” In other words, the supreme Purusha is not an entirely relationless Absolute aloof from our illusions, but he is the Seer, Creator and Ruler of the worlds, kavim anuśāsitāram, dhātāram, and it is by knowing and by loving Him as the One and the All, vāsudevaḥ sarvam iti, that we ought by a union with him of our whole conscious being in all things, all energies, all actions to seek the supreme consummation, the perfect perfection, the absolute release.
