Verse 18

¹³You are known to me. You are the Person himself, beyond nature, whose own form is bliss and unmixed experience, the seer of every understanding. ¹⁴It was you who first brought this forth by your own nature, and it is made of the three strands; and afterwards you, who did not enter it, are thought of as having entered. ¹⁵As these unchanging principles, together with their changes, of different powers and standing separate, give birth to the vast body, ¹⁶so they come together, and bring it forth, and seem to have gone into it. But since they were there already beforehand, there is no coming to be of them here. ¹⁷So you, though you are present in the strands, which can be grasped and whose marks the understanding infers, are not caught by those strands. Nothing covers you, and there is no outside or inside to you, who are everything, the self of all, the one thing that is itself.

¹⁸The man who lays it down of his self that it is present in the strands that are seen, as though it were something other than himself, has no understanding. What he decides is a restatement and nothing more, since he takes up again what has rightly been given up.