Verse 8.25

Verse 8.25: “Smoke, Night, as also Dark (Fortnight), and the Six Months (that mark) the Southern Path: (departing along the Path marked) by these, the Yogin attains the Moon’s Light-realm, and has a return (thence). (226)

Commentary called Jnaneshwari by Jnaneshwar:

At the approach of death the phlegm and the wind over power the body and thereby in the mind is spread the darkness of stupor; the organs get stiff like wood, the memory is scuttled by delusion, and the mind is deranged while the life-wind is choked up. The body’s heat falls rapidly, smoke pervades all through, and animation in the body is suspended. Just as it gets dusky, and there remains neither darkness nor bright light when the Moon gets behind dense and watery clouds, in the same way, life gets stiffened and still, being neither dead nor alive but hovering on the borderline between life and death. The mind, reason, and senses being choked up by the smoke, all that is secured in the hard-worked life-time gets all lost and when what is already secured is thus threatened, what of making new acquisition? In short, such distressed condition prevails at the time of departure of life. This is what goes on inside the body.

Outside, there is first the dark half of the month (kṛṣṇapakṣa), next, the night time, and over and above that one of the six months when the Sun is in the Southern Hemisphere. When such inauspicious events concur and forebode the fated cycle of rebirths at the time of the departure of life of a Yogin, even the talk of the attainment of the Supreme Brahman is out of his hearing. One whose body drops down at such a juncture, reaches as far as the region of the Moon, that too because of his being a Yogin, and then he has after some time to dwindle down from there to this world of life and death. This is, know ye, O Pandava, the improper time I made mention of, and this is the smoky (dark) path-way that leads to the region of the rotations of births and deaths. The other one, is the bright path, populated, independent, self-same, and peaceful and it leads to absorption into the Supreme Brahman (nivṛtti).