The eighth chapter opens with Arjuna asking for definitions of the great terms, Brahman, adhyatma, karma, adhibhuta, adhidaiva and adhiyajna. Krishna’s replies gather the metaphysical vocabulary needed for the next stage. Brahman is the supreme Imperishable; adhyatma is the soul-principle, the self-nature in the individual; karma is the creative movement that brings beings into manifestation; adhibhuta is the mutable becoming; adhidaiva is the cosmic Purusha; and adhiyajna is the Divine present in the body as the Lord of sacrifice (8·3, 8·4).
For Sri Aurobindo these definitions are not scholastic but reveal that all the planes of existence are bound together by the Divine. The mutable world, the cosmic deity, the individual soul, the sacrifice of works and the imperishable Brahman are not unrelated compartments but aspects of one integral reality. From this follows a practical demand: to remember the Divine at the hour of death and so pass to him (8·5). But such a remembrance cannot be improvised at the last moment, for what a man dwells on then is determined by what he has become through the whole of his life.
Krishna therefore gives one of the Gita’s central formulas: remember me at all times and fight (8·7). The command is not to choose between contemplation and action but to unite them. The warrior must act, yet keep his consciousness fixed on the Supreme; mind, heart and will must be so trained to return constantly to the Divine that action becomes the very expression of remembrance rather than a fall away from it.
The chapter also speaks of the departure of the soul, the sacred syllable OM, the gathering of the life-force between the brows, and the paths of return and of no return. Sri Aurobindo refuses to reduce all this to a mere technique of dying. The larger truth is that the Divine is the supreme goal beyond all the cycles of cosmic manifestation. All the worlds, even the highest, are subject to return within the movement of Time; only the supreme status beyond the mutable manifestation gives the final release.
The cosmic scale is then widened through the Day and Night of Brahma, the recurrent emergence and withdrawal of all beings, and the unmanifest that is yet beyond the unmanifest. The seeker is bidden to know that even the vastest temporal formations are not final. Yet the conclusion remains wholly practical: the soul that knows the Supreme and holds to him through a constant Yoga passes beyond the round of return. The eighth chapter thus binds metaphysics, remembrance, death, cosmic time and action into a single discipline; the battlefield remains, but the consciousness is turned wholly toward the Eternal.
