Spiritual awakening often looks different from worldly excitement.

This final verse in the sthitaprajna section is perhaps the most poetic and philosophically profound. It presents a complete reversal of the ordinary and the spiritual states of consciousness through an elegant paradox of night and day. The image is not merely figurative — it points to a fundamental ontological difference between the awareness of the liberated sage and that of ordinary beings.

For all beings, the realm of sensory experience — the waking world of objects, transactions, pleasures, and sorrows — is where consciousness is fully engaged and alert. But this very domain is 'night' for the sage, meaning it holds no special fascination, no compelling pull of reality.

It is not that the sage is unconscious or absent; rather, sensory phenomena do not constitute the primary field of their awareness. Conversely, what is 'night' for ordinary beings — the dimension of pure consciousness, the Self beyond the senses, the infinite ground of being — is where the sage is most vividly awake.

This verse has been interpreted across centuries as pointing to the difference between the empirical level of reality (vyāvahārika) and the absolute level (pāramārthika). The ordinary person is awake in the phenomenal realm and asleep to the transcendent; the muni (sage) is awake to the transcendent and, in a meaningful sense, unmoved by the merely phenomenal.

This is not a division but a completion: the sage sees both levels of reality clearly, while the ordinary person remains confined to one. It is a luminous final portrait of steady wisdom — fully present, fully aware, and fully free.