Recognition

Dhāraṇā 111 · Knower and known

Everything that exists is a revealer of knowing, and through everything it is the Self that reveals — contemplate knowledge and the known as one nature, and the last division closes.

One division outlasts all the others: the split between the knowing and the known — awareness here, world there. It survives purification, quiet, even bliss. The text's penultimate dhāraṇā is aimed at exactly this seam.

The verse's symmetry

The Sanskrit is built as a chiasm, and the practice follows its two arms. First arm: jñāna-prakāśakaṃ sarvam — everything is a revealer of knowledge. Each object, in the very act of appearing, displays not only itself but the knowing of it: the jar shows jar-awareness the way a lit window shows the lamp. You have never once encountered an object that arrived without its knowing — the known advertises the knower. Second arm: sarveṇātmā prakāśakaḥ — through everything, it is the Self that does the revealing. The light in each appearance is one light, yours, the Self's. Then the verse draws the conclusion as an identity of nature: eka-svabhāvatvāt — because the two have one nature, knowledge and the knowable are to be contemplated — vibhāvyate — as one.

The method

Take any present perception and run both arms on it. This page: see it as revealing the seeing — attend to the appearing itself rather than the appeared. Then reverse: recognise the light by which it appears as the Self, not a faculty the page switches on. Now hold both at once, and look for the line where knowing stops and known begins. Search honestly: is there a border in experience — a place where luminosity ends and dead object starts? None is ever found; the border exists only in the description, never in the fabric. Resting at that unfindability is the contemplation. It differs from the arguments of the previous verses in tone: nothing is voided here, nothing frightened off. The world is not subtracted from awareness but recognised as made of it — the affirmative, warm end of the same non-duality.