[For attaining the supreme result that you just mentioned, what is the easiest process?] Krishna said: This most confidential knowledge, in both its intellectual and experiential dimensions, I shall impart to you, Arjuna, because you are non-envious; understanding this knowledge, you will be delivered from inauspiciousness (1).

[Why is this knowledge so special?] It is the king of knowledge, the king of all secrets, the supreme purifier; it is directly realizable through personal experience, righteous, joyfully practicable and imperishable (2). 

[For receiving this knowledge, why is non-enviousness important?] Because the envious are faithless — and those who refuse to have faith in this knowledge can’t attain me; they are reborn in this world, which is the path of repeated death and transmigration (3).

[What is this knowledge that you will be imparting?] It is the knowledge about my mysterious relationship with the world — this whole universe is pervaded by me in my unmanifest form; all beings abide in me, yet I do not abide in them (4).

[What is mysterious about this relationship?] Because simultaneously all beings don’t abide in me [though they rest in me, they don’t burden me] — behold my mystic opulence: although all beings are sustained by me and are contained within me, I am not contained in them; I exist beyond them, as their source (5).

[Can you explain this complex relationship with an example?] Contemplate this: as the mighty wind, while going everywhere, still abides within the sky, so do all beings [while moving by their free will] abide within me (6).

[When living beings act according to their free will, how do they abide within you?] They are constrained within the boundaries of time — at the end of a kalpa [cosmic age], all living beings, Arjuna, go to my nature; and at the start of a new kalpa, I again send them forth (7).

[Aren’t such cycles of unmanifestation and manifestation just the workings of nature?] Nature belongs to me; acting through my material nature, it is I who sends forth the entire multitude of beings, again and again — while going through these cyclic manifest and unmanifest states, all living beings are powerless, being under the power of material nature (8). 

[If you send living beings into this world of suffering, aren’t you implicated by karma?] These actions never bind me, Arjuna, because I am seated as if neutral — I am unattached to these actions [I don’t cause the suffering of living beings; it is the result of their own past karma] (9).

[If you are neutral, what is your role in the working of material nature?] I am its overseer: under my supervision, material nature gives rise to all beings, moving and nonmoving — within its rules, Arjuna, the universe revolves [living beings function within the boundaries of material nature and are held accountable by its laws such as the law of karma] (10).