This chapter turns to an elaboration on the nature of this transcendent person, bhagavān, whom Krishna identifies as himself. It is extremely rare for a human being to know this supreme being, but Krishna offers some ways one can appreciate his presence in the temporal world. First, he identifies all the physical and subtle “elements”—from earth to the sense of oneself being an independent doer (ahaṁkara)—as his “separate nature”. Krishna then identifies all living beings as constituting his “superior nature” (7.4-5). Indeed, he says, everything is “strung” on him, like so many pearls are strung on a thread (7.7). To comprehend this and to act in this understanding is the yoga of wisdom.

But speaking of elements, “separate nature,” and of “everything’s” dependence on bhagavān is very abstract. So Krishna then becomes more specific, identifying himself as the essence of various familiar features of the world: it is he, he says, who is the taste in water, the light of the sun and moon, the fragrance of the earth, the intelligence of intelligent persons, and the strength of the strong. We may note that Krishna does not say that he is like the taste in water, and so on, but that he is these things. Again speaking more abstractly, Krishna says that the three modalities of nature or phenomenal world—illumination, passion, and darkness (more about these modalities in later chapters)—are all coming from the supreme being. Furthermore, it is these same modalities that bewilder persons, preventing them from being aware of bhagavān’s presence as the “thread” behind everything. The key to becoming free from the grip of nature’s modalities is to take refuge in that supreme being (7.8-14).

To pursue the yoga of wisdom, it is helpful to recognize a spectrum of attitudes and understandings that fall short of the full comprehension of reality of which Krishna speaks. Full comprehension can take several lifetimes to achieve (as indicated in the previous chapter), at which time such a great soul (mahātmā) understands, “Vāsudeva (another name for bhagavān) is everything” (7.19). Along the way to such comprehension, Krishna identifies four general types of persons who tend to progress well along the path, including pious persons motivated by selfish wants and needs, and people with more serious motivations to comprehend ultimate reality.

But there are also others who strongly resist or reject the path of yoga, some of whom are just plain foolish, others who are very degraded in character, some whose powers of discriminative thought are usurped by temporal preoccupations, and others who are downright unyielding in their denial of spiritual reality (7.15-16; more about this last group in chapter 16). Krishna considers this last type to be “without intelligence,” foolish persons who think that spirit can be reduced to matter (7.24-25). Any denial of spirit and the process of realizing it (yoga) simply affirms one’s continued bondage within matter as a result of being thrown back and forth between desire and hatred (7.27). In such a thoroughly bewildered condition it is impossible to appreciate that spirit is that which is conscious of all beings, what to speak of acknowledging that spirit knows the past, present, and future of all beings (7.26).

The yoga of wisdom, Krishna concludes, can be successfully practiced as one becomes free from impious actions and habituated to pious actions; this engenders a disposition that is aloof from the misconceptions of duality, enabling one to attend to spirit with full determination (7.28). Truly wise persons, yogīs of wisdom, who seek freedom from aging and dying, find refuge in bhagavān, thereby comprehending brahman—spirit—entirely (7.29). Such wise persons, Krishna says, know him, brahman fully manifest as bhagavān, as the ultimate principle of the world, of divinity, and of cosmic regeneration (sacrifice).

The yoga of wisdom (vijñāna-yoga) is kindred with the yoga of discernment (buddhi-yoga) that we encountered in the second half of Chapter 2. However, the yoga of wisdom is discernment in full bloom. The vijñāna-yogī practices recognizing the presence of spirit in all things in a positive sense. In contrast, the emphasis in buddhi-yoga is on negative awareness that one’s own pleasure is not the purpose of one’s surrounding world. Buddhi-yoga cultivates the truth of the individual self, distinct from the body, whereas vijñāna-yoga connects the self to the supreme self by seeing the world in relation to the supreme self.