Bhagavad Gita Chapter 7: The Yoga of Knowledge and Wisdom

With Chapter 7 the Gita turns from discipline to divinity: Krishna begins describing who he is. He promises Arjuna the knowledge after which nothing more remains to be known (7.2) — and admits how rarely it lands: among thousands, hardly one strives, and among those, hardly one knows him in truth (7.3). His nature is twofold — an eightfold material nature (earth, water, fire, air, ether, mind, intellect, ego) and a higher nature, the life-principle sustaining the universe (7.4–5). Everything is strung on him like pearls on a thread (7.7).

The chapter's most loved verses find the divine inside ordinary experience: the taste in water, the radiance of sun and moon, the Om in the Vedas, the ability in humans (7.8). Yet the world, deluded by the three gunas, misses what stands above them (7.13); this divine maya is hard to cross, and those who surrender to Krishna cross it (7.14). Four kinds of people turn to God — the distressed, the curious, the seeker of gain, and the wise — and the wise, Krishna says, are dearest, being his very Self (7.16–18). Rarest of all is the soul who at the end of many births sees that all this is the Divine (7.19).