Verse 12

¹²Bhagavan said: So long as the self is held close to body, senses and breaths, the round of birth bears fruit for one who does not tell them apart, though it comes to nothing. ¹³Though the object is not there at all, the round of rebirth does not turn back for a man who broods on objects, as harm comes to a man in a dream. ¹⁴As sleep carries much harm for one who is not awake, that same sleep, for one who is awake, does not serve to bewilder him. ¹⁵Sorrow, gladness, fear, anger, greed, delusion, longing and the rest, and birth and death, are seen to belong to I-making, and not to the self. ¹⁶The living being, the self within, which takes itself for body, senses, breaths and mind, whose form is the strands and works, sung of in many ways as the thread and as the great principle, runs on as the round of birth, bound to time.

¹⁷This thing without a root, given many shapes, the work of mind and speech and breath and body: the sage cuts it with the sword of knowledge, whetted by tending it, and walks the earth with no thirst left. ¹⁸Knowledge, discernment, the sacred word, austerity, what is before the eyes, what has been handed down, and inference: whatever alone stands at the beginning and the end of this, that same is the time and the cause of it in the middle. ¹⁹As gold, unworked, is there before and after everything golden, and is that same gold in the middle, dealt with under many names, so am I to this world.