At the opening of the seventh chapter Krishna lifts the teaching to a higher plane. The first six chapters have given the practical foundation, equality, desireless works, sacrifice, self-mastery and the silent Self; now Krishna promises integral knowledge of himself, not merely the impersonal Self but the Divine in all his principles, known without remainder as origin, support, Lord, Self, Nature, soul and world. Sri Aurobindo marks this as a decisive enlargement of the whole horizon of the Yoga.
The first key is the distinction between the two natures. The lower nature is the divided field of mind, life, matter, reason, ego and the elemental conditions of existence, the nature in which the gunas labour and the ego imagines itself a separate thing. But beyond it is a higher nature, the supreme conscious-force of the Divine, which becomes the Jiva and sustains the world (7·5). This idea carries the Gita past the bare dualism of Purusha and Prakriti: Nature is not finally alien to Spirit, for the lower nature is itself a derivative and veiled action of a higher spiritual Nature.
Krishna then shows how the Divine is present as the very essence in all things: the taste in water, the light in sun and moon, the strength of the strong freed from desire, the intelligence of the intelligent, the life in all beings, the eternal seed of all that is (7·8). Sri Aurobindo reads these not as poetic decorations but as signs of the Divine’s power of becoming. The spiritual essence of each quality belongs to the Divine; its lower distortion arises from the play of the gunas and the ego. Strength, for example, is divine in its pure power and is degraded only when seized by desire and violence.
The world, however, is bewildered by the Maya of the three gunas, a Maya that is hard to overpass because it is a power of the Divine himself, though working in a lower and divided action. Men therefore turn to many aims, some to desire, some to the gods, some to a partial knowledge. Krishna recognises four kinds of devotees who seek him, the afflicted, the seeker of his own good, the seeker of knowledge and the knower (7·16); and the knower, who sees the Divine as all, is dearest, because his devotion rests upon the truth.
The seventh chapter therefore opens the Gita’s second movement by disclosing the object of works and devotion. The Divine is not outside life but its very substance and secret power, and yet he is in no way limited by the gunas or imprisoned in the partial forms through which men worship him. To cross beyond the Maya, the soul must turn to him as the supreme Reality behind both Nature and Self.
