Verse 1

¹Bhagavan said: Though he stands within nature, the Person is not smeared by the strands of nature, because he does not change, does not act, and is beyond the strands, like the sun reflected in water. ²But when that same one grows attached to the strands of nature, his self bewildered by I-making, he thinks: I am the doer. ³By that he comes helplessly and without rest upon the road of the round of birth, through the faults of action that attachment brings, into wombs mixed of good and bad. ⁴Though the object is not there at all, the round of birth does not stop for one who broods upon objects of sense, just as harm comes to a man in a dream.