Beyond Knowing and Not-Knowing

Dnyaneshwar opens this abhanga by pulling the ground out from under you. In God, he says, there is no knowing and no not-knowing. The two things you spend your entire spiritual life chasing and fleeing, clarity and confusion, both dissolve in the divine. And then, in the same breath, he puts the Name on your tongue: in the utterance of Hari, look, liberation is always present. Not coming. Not earned. Always.

This verse is for the one who is exhausted from trying to get the spiritual life right. You have been reaching for understanding, measuring your progress, sorting your experiences into clarity and confusion. Dnyaneshwar says: both of those categories dissolve where you are headed. You do not need to achieve a state of perfect knowing. You do not need to escape your confusion. You need only to say the Name. The Name carries you past the place where the mind's sorting is useful, into a territory where liberation was never absent.

Dnyaneshwar names the one thing that can shelter you when the times are against you: the utterance of Narayana Hari. Where the Name is spoken, the dark age has no entry. Not fought off, not endured, not survived. It simply cannot get in. The Name is the wall. The sound itself is the fortress. And what presses against that wall, the scattering, the distraction, the heaviness of an age that works against depth, has no power there.

This verse is for the one who feels that something in the world itself resists the spiritual life. You are not imagining it. The noise is real. The pull outward is constant. Dnyaneshwar does not pretend otherwise. He says: the Name is stronger. You do not need to retreat from the world or wait for better times. You need to open your mouth. The Name you speak creates a space that the storm cannot enter, and it starts with a single utterance.

Dnyaneshwar says something staggering in this verse: even the Vedas do not know the measure of the place the Name opens. The highest scripture, the self-luminous word of divine origin, reaches toward what is there and cannot contain it. And if the Vedas cannot measure it, how would any living creature understand? The instruments of knowing, all of them, from the most exalted to the most ordinary, are not the right tools for this territory.

This verse is for the one who believes that understanding is the goal. You have been reading, studying, collecting insights, waiting for the moment when everything clicks into place. Dnyaneshwar says: the Vedas themselves have not achieved that click. Your not-understanding is not a failure. It is the correct response. It is the only honest response to something that exceeds every instrument designed to measure it. The Name does not ask you to understand. It asks you to speak. And the speaking carries you past the boundary of everything the mind can map.

Dnyaneshwar closes this abhanga by opening his hand and showing you what the Name has placed there. The fruit of the Narayana recitation, he says, is this: Vaikuntha has been made everywhere. The supreme abode of God, the place devotees spend lifetimes trying to reach, is not a distant heaven. It is here. The kitchen, the street, the hospital room, the cracked pavement under your ordinary feet. The Name does not take you somewhere else. It shows you where you have always been.

This verse is for the one who is looking for God in the wrong direction. You have been reaching upward, outward, toward some extraordinary experience that will confirm you have arrived. Dnyaneshwar says: the arriving has already happened. Vaikuntha is not the destination. It is the ground you are standing on. The Name did not build it. The Name uncovered it. And now the only thing left is to walk as someone who knows that every step falls on sacred ground.