VI: 47

Chapter 6, Verse 47

"Give me your whole heart, Arjuna.
Greatest of all the Yogis
Are those who with all their soul
Have faith,
And who with all their soul
Love me."

Father Bede Griffiths:

Here the highest Yoga is described as the Yoga of faith and love.  It integrates the whole person, culminating in faith and love.  The aim of all great wisdom traditions is to help you reach this inner center of your being and to discover this inner peace and abiding joy.

If you only have a philosophical understanding, a very deep experience may be attained, but it will not be the same as if you have faith and become integrated in the love of God.  Different experiences lead to different ways in which the experience is described.  The Buddhist, the Hindu, the Muslim and the Christian are all experiencing the ultimate reality, but in different ways through their own faith and love by way of their own traditions of wisdom. There are obviously various degrees as well.

There is sometimes a tendency to say that when you reach the supreme state, everything is the same and there are no differences any more, but I do not think that this is true.  In a sense, the ultimate truth is different for each person, since each of us is a unique image of God, a unique reflection of the one eternal light and love.

The whole gist of this chapter culminates in this emphasis on faith and love as the ultimate means of realization.  Everything depends upon whether or not you are motivated by faith and love.  With some Yogis, there is a deeply concentrated state beyond pleasure and pain, but there may be very little love in their nature.  Those who are whole have both integrated the personality in its inner center, in the Self, and in that center of their being opened themselves to the action of divine grace, allowing themselves to be transformed by love.

Sri Aurobindo:

Seeing in others the play of dualities which they themselves have surmounted, the liberated ones shall see all as themselves and, moved by them to help and to heal, they will work for the progress of the world Godwards, living the divine life, so long as days upon Earth are their portion.  The God-lovers who can do this, sweet and great and luminous in the strength of the divine nature, may well be declared to be the supreme Yogis.

Even among Yogis, the God-lovers, the Bhaktas, are the greatest. Krishna brings in here Bhakti, or devotion, as the climax of the Yoga, which may almost be said to sum up the whole and final result of the Gita's teaching.  Those who love God in all, however they live and act, live and act in God.  To emphasize it still more, after an intervention of Arjuna and a reply to his doubt as to how so difficult a Yoga can be at all possible for the restless mind, the divine teacher returns to this idea and makes it his culminating utterance.  It is this that is the closing word of the first six chapters and contains in itself the seed of the rest, the highest spiritual mystery and the divine secret.