The Ones Who Are

Lesson 55 moved the sign from the building to the body. This lesson takes the step after that: the refusal of any sign at all. And the first thing to establish is that this argument was not invented in the fifteenth century. It is staged, explicitly, inside a text this course read in Month 1.

At Bhagavadgītā 12.1, Arjuna asks it directly: evaṃ satatayuktā ye bhaktās tvāṃ paryupāsate | ye cāpy akṣaram avyaktaṃ teṣāṃ ke yogavittamāḥ — those devotees who worship you constantly in this way, and those who worship the imperishable, the unmanifest — which of them know yoga better?

The answer comes in four verses and it is more careful than either side of the later argument.