“That the sun illumines not, nor the moon, nor fire — that is My supreme abode (tad dhāma paramaṃ mama), reaching which none return.” This is a near-quotation of the Kaṭha and Śvetāśvatara verse (“na tatra sūryo bhāti…”). The meaning is precise: the supreme Reality is not lit by any external light, because it is itself the light by which all lights shine (as 15.12 will say). The sun cannot illumine it, for the sun borrows its radiance from That. To reach that self-luminous abode is to reach the end of return — the Akṣara of 8.21 named again.

A fair-minded doubt, and worth answering squarely. It can look, to a modern reader, as though K repeatedly hijacks every description of the Absolute — “that supreme light… is Mine”; “that abode… is Mine”; “the Vedas seek Me” — as if from vanity or insecurity. But this misreads the grammar of the whole Song. When K says “Me”, he speaks (as the Introduction laboured to establish) from the highest pedestal, as the impersonal Self voicing itself in the first person — the only way a dialogue can convey non-dual identity. He is not a small ego grabbing credit; he is the one Self saying, in effect, “the light you seek is not elsewhere — it is your own deepest reality, here called ‘Me’.” The repetition is pedagogical insistence, not psychological insecurity: the student keeps re-externalising the Absolute (making it a far-off God), and the teacher keeps pulling it back to the intimate “I”. Far from arrogance, it is the most generous claim possible — you are That.