Put the world outside, still the gaze, even the breath: the mind's real work begins.

Read as a purifying discipline set within a longer road to knowledge.

Meditation is placed here within a sequence: action first purifies the inner organ, renunciation of action follows, and truth-knowledge, for one ready through hearing and reflection, is the actual means of liberation further on. Putting the contacts outside is explained as the power of supreme dispassion: an object that entered only through attachment can be expelled again by dispassion, while something inherently inner could never be removed by any means at all. This verse, with the two that follow, is read as a seed-aphorism the sixth chapter will unfold in full.

Read as the ease already built into karma-yoga.

This is simply karma-yoga's own ease made visible: a path whose duty is the obligatory and occasional acts and whose crown is meditation. The decisive point is that the senses, mind, and intellect are rendered unfit for any task except beholding the Self. The muni named here is one who has made a settled habit of exactly that beholding, free both while walking the path and once the goal is reached.

Read close to the plain mechanics of the practice.

What survives here stays close to instruction: put the outer contacts outside, rein in the senses by yoga, hold the eye between the brows or at the tip of the nose, and make the breath even through retention. It is a compact, largely descriptive account of the technique, not an extended argument about what the verse's closing promise of freedom finally secures for a self whose very capacity to act is not its own.

Read as inward symbols beneath the bodily instructions.

Hear the bodily directions as signs of an inner act. The space between the brows is the point free of the leftward and rightward glances made of anger and passion. The breaths to be evened are dharma and adharma; the nose itself names the mind's own operation, called this because it moves crookedly and unevenly under the sway of anger and the rest. To even the breath within that operation is to steady the mind beyond the pull of opposites, though the plain, outward reading is affirmed to hold equally well.

Read as a gentle steadying, never a forceful stopping.

The posture must be understood as a steadying, not a stopping: eyes half-lowered, breath made even, the senses no longer fetching their objects. The evened breath may mean retention, or, in a gentler reading offered alongside it, simply letting the in-breath and out-breath move quietly within the very middle of the nose. Either way, nothing here is forced; the whole discipline rests on ceasing to reach outward, not on straining against the body.

Read as dispassion first, technique second.

Set within the wider structure this verse opens, dispassion does the primary work of removing the object as motive; the bodily practice of gaze and breath then refines whatever agitation of mind remains, sleep pulling from one side, scattering from the other. The technique is real and necessary, but it serves an inward movement that must already be underway for it to mean anything at all.