सर्वद्वारेषु देहेऽस्मिन्प्रकाश उपजायते।ज्ञानं यदा तदा विद्याद्विवृद्धं सत्त्वमित्युत॥
sarva-dvāreṣu dehe ’smin prakāśa upajāyatejñānaṃ yadā tadā vidyād vivṛddhaṃ sattvam ity uta
Word by word
The verse says
When light appears at every gate of this body — when there is knowing — then you should understand that clarity has grown strong.
In plain words
A diagnostic, not a description.
Sarva-dvāreṣu — at all the gates. The senses, all of them, working cleanly at once.
And the instruction is vidyāt — one should know. He is teaching Arjuna to read his own condition.
Where you've felt this · in creative work
Some mornings the light in the kitchen is interesting. The radio is actually saying something. The thing you have been avoiding turns out to take eleven minutes. You have not become a better person overnight. Something lifted, and it is all coming through.
Going deeper
Being taught to diagnose your own state is a different project from being told how to be, and this is where the chapter turns to it.
The next three verses give the signs of each strand so that a person can tell which one has them. That is a practical skill and it is rarely taught. Most people experience whichever strand is dominant as simply how things are — the Monday clarity feels like insight, the Friday fog feels like truth about their life.
Chapter 7 said the same thing about delusion: the problem is not seeing what you are looking through.
The signs given here are deliberately external and checkable. Not how you feel about yourself, which is produced by the very state you are trying to assess, but whether things are coming in clearly. That is the kind of question you can answer even when the answer is no.