Sat-darshana Bhashya (translation)

Verse 23.

आत्मानमीक्षेत परं प्रपश्ये-
दित्यागमोक्तेः सुलभो न भावः।
नात्मैव दृश्यो यदि का कथेशे
स्वयं तदनीभवनं तदीक्षा।

‘See thyself and see the Lord.’ That is the revealed word and hard is its sense indeed. For the seeing Self is not to be seen. How then is sight of the Lord ? To be food unto Him, that indeed is to see Him.

The sense of the authoritative utterance ’See the Self and see the Lord’ is difficult to grasp. For if the Self itself cannot be seen, how can the question of seeing the Lord arise? Here it is the nature of ’seeing’, perception or realisation of the Self that has got to be understood. With the object of revealing its true character, the seeing of the Lord is described by an illuminating phrase as being ’food unto Him’. The seeing soul is never seen; it is always the seer, the subject never an object to be apprehended by anything other than itself. If this soul, the ego-self, the Jeeva, the subjective being, attempts to know its Lord, its own deepest being, it automatically withdraws itself from its pre-occupations with divergent thoughts in the subjective or divergent forms in the objective existence, and finds itself drawn to something deeper than itself and once it experiences its original being, its source, the deep Self in this manner, it ceases to be cut off in consciousness from its Supreme source to which it thus becomes a food, as it were, an experience and an enjoyment.

And there is no dualism dvaita here, because of this relation between isvara and jiva, between God and Soul, as enjoyer and enjoyed. For this relation is one of identity realised in a conscious union of the soul with its Lord, of the ego with the Self in the one basic Consciousness. Even before the Self allows the ego to get merged in it, there is no dvaita in the sense that the ego-self has an absolutely separate existence apart from its real Self, as the ego is nothing but a temporary formation in the consciousness of the Self. It is the Self that is behind the ego and though the ego is not aware of it so long as it is in a state of ignorance or bondage, yet it becomes aware of it once it is free from its preoccupations and prepossessions. When it is thus aware, it feels drawn to the deeper being of which it is the surface or the apparent self.

Thus we see that this description of Atma-Darshan or Selfperception does not contradict that of sat-darsan or Truth-perception (vide verse 10) as both refer to the same exalted state of the Self, nistha which can also be viewed as sayujya, with reference to the real Self holding the ego-self jiva in conscious union.

In the next verse it is pointed out how perception of Self does not differ from God-perception.