VII: 23

Chapter 7, Verse 23

"Those of small minds,
Only pray for that
Which is transient and perishable.
Those who love the gods
go to the gods,
But those who love me
Come unto me."

Sri Aurobindo:

Krishna is saying in so many words, "Those who resort to me as their refuge, divine light and deliverer, who turn to me with their spiritual aspiration towards release from death, from the mortal being with its limitations, attain to me.  No longer bound by mortal existence, they reach the very highest status of the Divine.

To him who is the Source of all that we are, we give all that we are.  The passion of love in our self-giving carries us up to him, opening the mystery of his deepest heart of Being.  Love completes the worship.  In this vision is revealed a glimpse of the principle of self-fulfillment in the divine nature.

When we are one with him in Spirit, we do not lose ourselves but rather recover our true selves in him, poised in the supremacy of the Infinite.

There develops an integral self-giving through love and devotion of our whole being to this All and to this Supreme, the Master of our works, the Inhabitant of our hearts.

Sri Eknath Easwaran:

In the deepest levels of our consciousness, all of us are praying, and when prayer becomes intense enough and consistent enough, we will live out our lives in such a way that the prayers are answered.  The variations lie in what we pray for.  When we worship the gods and goddesses of the sense-world...wealth, power, pleasure and status...we will get more and more caught up in the world of change.  When we try to give all our love to the Lord of Love, Krishna reminds us, we will gradually become unaffected by any change, even the great change called death.

The key to this is Shraddha, which supports our whole outlook and world-view.  As conditioned human beings, we share the deep conviction that we are separate, that we are the body and that our nature and behavior are conditioned by our genes.  In this verse, Krishna is saying that the more we identify with the world of Prakriti and its accessories, the physical world of change, the more will we be subject to the ravages of time and eventually death.  However, by placing our Shraddha in the Lord, who is our real Self, we gradually come to remember our real nature, and the passage of time affects us less and less.  Finally, when our faith in God becomes unshakeable, we become united with him completely.  Then, when the time comes to shed the body, there is no rupture in consciousness, any more than there is when we pass from one room to another.

This is Krishna's promise.  Faith in this promise is of the highest sort.  It is not blind faith.  It is trust in spiritual values, and it is confidence in their applicability, both of which bloom as our experience deepens and matures.  Shraddha grows over time, as we endeavor to experiment with these timeless truths in our own lives.  In the beginning, all that is asked is that we give them a try.

A friend:

"When we are one with him in Spirit, we do not lose ourselves but rather recover our true selves in him."

[This is the sentence that just jumped out at me as well.  When we live, "not my will but Thy Will be done," we lose our petty egos but gain the spontaneous expression of our God-given personality packages in all their glorified uniqueness.]