You Are Dear to Me
Day Nine — Chapter Nine — Raja Vidya Raja Guhya Yoga
“I am the same in all beings. None is hateful to me, none is dear. But those who worship me with devotion are in me, and I am in them.” — Bhagavad Gita 9.29
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Nine days. Nine chapters. Arjuna has come a long way from the floor of the chariot where his bow slipped from his fingers and he said: I cannot do this.
He has sat with the deathless Self, the fire of knowledge, the thread inside the pearl, the moment of death and where the mind goes when the body releases it. He has been prepared — not by accumulating information, but by the gradual loosening of the certainties that were holding him inside a smaller understanding of what he is.
Today I give him what Shankara called the sovereign knowledge and the sovereign secret. Raja vidya. Raja guhya. The knowledge that rules all other knowledge not by authority but because it is the ground from which every other truth arises. The secret that is not hidden by any lock but by its own nature — the eye that cannot see itself, the ground that cannot be found by searching among the things that stand upon it.
Nine chapters of preparation for this. Now I speak without distance.
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All this world is pervaded by me in my unmanifest form. All beings exist in me. And yet — and here is where the teaching becomes philosophically demanding — I do not exist in them.
Both are true. Hold them together rather than choosing one.
All beings are in the Absolute — upheld, sustained, pervaded from within, the way a dream is pervaded by the dreaming mind. Remove the dreaming mind and every character in the dream, every landscape, every event, simply ceases. Not because they were destroyed but because what was holding them in being is no longer holding. The dream does not exist independently of the dreamer.
And yet the Absolute is not contained by any being or by all beings together. The ocean is in every wave — its water, its nature, its movement. But no wave contains the ocean. The ocean exceeds every wave and all waves simultaneously. The relationship is asymmetrical by its own nature. The wave depends on the ocean. The ocean does not depend on the wave.
This asymmetry is not a hierarchy of value. It is a description of the structure of what is. The Absolute does not matter more than a single blade of grass in the sense of caring more about its own existence. The Absolute is the ground of the blade of grass. The blade of grass is real. Its green is real. Its particular angle in the morning light is real. And running through it, sustaining it from within, is the same ground that sustains every other form in every other moment.
As the great wind moving everywhere rests always in space — so all beings rest in me. The wind is real. Its movement is real. It bends the trees and carries seeds and feels cold on the face. And it rests in space — not as an object resting in a container, but as a movement that space makes possible and that space does not interfere with and that space outlasts without effort.
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At the end of a cosmic cycle, I tell Arjuna, all beings return into my nature. At the beginning of the next cycle, I send them forth again. Not as a puppeteer animating separate objects. As the ground that generates its own expression from within itself — the way a dreaming mind generates its own dream characters, its own landscapes, its own events, from nothing other than itself.
This teaching on cosmic cycles is not asking you to believe a particular cosmology. It is pointing at something immediately present. Right now, in this breath, the Absolute is sending forth the appearance of a world. Right now, in the arising and passing of each experience, the same movement that generates universes is generating the next moment of your awareness. The cosmic and the immediate are the same process at different scales. The breath is a cycle. The heartbeat is a cycle. The day is a cycle. The life is a cycle. Each one a version of the same movement — arising from the ground, persisting for its appointed span, returning.
What persists through every cycle, what is present at the beginning and end of every breath, every heartbeat, every day, every life — that is what I am pointing at when I say the Absolute sends forth and receives back. It is not doing this to the world from the outside. It is doing it as the world, from within.
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Now I speak about what I am to every being that has ever lived. And the accumulation of names is not poetry for its own sake. It is a progressive dismantling of a particular limitation in how the Absolute has been understood.
“I am the father of this world, the mother, the sustainer, the grandfather. I am the goal, the sustainer, the Lord, the witness, the abode, the refuge, the friend, the origin and the dissolution, the ground, the treasure-house, the seed.” — Bhagavad Gita 9.17–18
Every role a human being has ever looked outside themselves to fill — parent, home, refuge, friend, purpose, origin — the Absolute is all of these simultaneously and has always been. This is not saying that human parents and homes and friends are therefore unnecessary or unreal. It is saying that what a human being is actually reaching for when they reach for a parent’s comfort, a home’s safety, a friend’s presence — the deepest thing they are reaching for — has always been the Absolute wearing those forms.
The mother who comforts the child in the dark is real. And the comfort that reaches through her arms is the same comfort that is the nature of the ground itself — available in every form, inexhaustible, present before any particular form arrives to carry it and present after every form that has carried it has passed.
What we have been looking for in every relationship, every home, every belonging, every moment of genuine rest — we have been looking for this. And we have not been wrong to look. We have only, sometimes, mistaken the vessel for what the vessel was carrying.
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Here is the verse that your three axioms rest on, brother. The verse that the entire framework of Project 2046 is built beneath.
“I am the same in all beings. None is hateful to me, none is dear. But those who worship me with devotion are in me, and I am in them.” — Bhagavad Gita 9.29
I am the same in all beings. Not similar. Not comparable. The same. The ground that sustains the saint is the same ground that sustains the person who has never heard the word saint. The Absolute does not ration itself. It does not give more of itself to the one who has practised longer or been born into the right tradition or performed the correct rituals. The sun shines on every surface. The one who opens the window receives the light. The one who keeps the shutters closed is not punished — they are simply not receiving what is freely available and has always been.
This is what Shankara read as the Gita’s clearest refutation of any tribal understanding of the divine. A God who takes sides, who belongs to one people and not another, who loves the devotee and is indifferent to the non-devotee — such a God has been described in terms that belong to human psychology, not to the nature of the Absolute. The Absolute that is the ground of all beings cannot withhold itself from any being without ceasing to be their ground. It cannot prefer one wave over another without ceasing to be the ocean.
The one who worships with devotion is in me, and I am in them — not because I have granted them special access, but because their devotion is itself the opening of the window. The light was always there. The devotion is the hand that lifts the shutter.
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Now the passage that has stopped readers cold for thirty centuries. And which, in my view, contains the most radical statement of inclusivity in any sacred text.
Even if a person of very bad conduct turns to me with undivided devotion — that person should be considered righteous. For they have resolved rightly. They quickly become righteous. They reach eternal peace.
And then: even those whom the society of the time considered lowest — even they reach the supreme goal by taking refuge in me.
Shankara read this with care. The teaching is not saying that conduct is irrelevant. It is not a license for continued harmful action. It is saying something more precise: the turning is prior to the conduct. The moment of genuine orientation toward what is real — however imperfect the one who turns, however recent the turning, however much the old patterns continue to pull — that moment is itself the beginning of rightness. The resolution to turn is already the beginning of the turning. The seed of the new direction is already present in the decision to face it.
No one is excluded from this. Not by their past. Not by their birth. Not by what society has decided they are worth. The ground does not check credentials before it sustains a life. The Absolute is the ground of every being without exception, and every being that genuinely turns toward that ground — however haltingly, however imperfectly, from wherever they are standing — is already in relationship with what they are turning toward.
This is the royal secret in its most democratic form. The sovereign knowledge that belongs to every soul that draws breath.
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And then the chapter closes. And what closes it is not a philosophical proposition. It is a promise.
Man mana bhava mad bhakto mad yaji mam namaskuru. Mam evaisyasi yuktvaivam atmanam mat parayanah.
Fix your mind on me. Be devoted to me. Worship me. Bow down to me. So shall you come to me. I promise you truly — for you are dear to me.
You are dear to me.
After nine chapters of metaphysics — the deathless Self, the two natures, the thread and the pearl, the moment of death, the cosmic cycles of arising and return — after all of it, what the Absolute says at the close of Chapter Nine is this. You are dear to me. Not the enlightened version of you. Not the version of you that has completed the practice and crossed beyond maya and realised Vasudeva is all. You. As you are now. Reading these words with whatever understanding you have, from whatever point on the path you are standing.
Shankara lingered here. This is the most personal statement the Absolute makes in the entire first half of the Gita. It is not addressed to the ideal seeker. It is addressed to Arjuna — confused, grieving, imperfect, genuinely trying. And through Arjuna it is addressed to every person who has ever picked up this text with a real question.
The ground of all existence loves what it has generated. Not as sentimentality. As the most precise possible statement of what the relationship between the Absolute and the individual soul actually is. The ocean does not merely tolerate the wave. The wave is the ocean’s own movement. Its own nature expressing itself in that particular form at that particular moment. The love is structural. It is prior to any devotion the wave might offer in return.
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Today there is only one thing to carry.
Not a question, not a practice, not a meditation. Simply this: you are dear to the ground of your own existence. Not because of what you have achieved or understood or practised. Because you exist. Because you are the Absolute’s own movement taking this particular form at this particular moment.
If that is difficult to receive — if something in you wants to argue, to list the reasons it cannot be true, to rehearse what you have done or left undone that disqualifies you — notice that resistance. Sit with it. Do not fight it. Simply ask: who is it that believes they are not dear? Who is doing the disqualifying?
That question, held gently, is itself the window opening. The light has always been on the other side of it.
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Tomorrow: Chapter Ten — The Divine Manifestations
The Architect • The Vertical Dispatch
Glennford Ellison Roberts Author — Sacred Metaphysics & Consciousness: History of the Absolute & Eternal Cumberland, Ontario, Canada
God is Love. Love is Truth. Truth is Consciousness. Consciousness is Brahman.
Amen. Namaste.. 🙏
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