For those clinging to enjoyment and lordship, whose only love is for enjoyment and lordship, who have made these their very self, whose discerning insight is carried off, veiled, by that speech rich in particular rites: for them the resolute understanding, the understanding that bears on Sāṅkhya or on yoga, is not formed in absorption (samādhi). 'Samādhi' here is the inner instrument, the understanding, the place in which all things are gathered for the enjoyment of the person; in that their understanding is not set, does not arise. The fruit of those who lack the discerning understanding, those of the nature of desire, He now states.

For those men attached to enjoyment and lordship, whose knowledge of the self has been carried off by that speech bearing on enjoyment and lordship, the resolute understanding described is not set in the mind, does not arise. 'Concentration' (samadhi) is the mind, for in it knowledge of the self is concentrated. In their mind the understanding that has for its object the liberation-bound action preceded by the certain knowledge of the self's true nature never at all arises. Therefore the seeker of liberation should form no attachment to desire-prompted actions. If actions of such utterly slight fruit, which breed rebirth, are what the Vedas, set on sustaining us with a tenderness greater than that of a thousand mothers and fathers, prescribe, then why do they prescribe them, and how can what the Veda teaches be spoken of as to be given up? To this the Lord speaks.

For such people the buddhi whose nature is the determination of truth by sound reasoning is not laid down for samadhi, for the sake of meditative concentration. Only for those who have rightly settled the matter does the settling of the mind on the Lord come about rightly, and that is the means to liberation. This has been said elsewhere: 'not even the most excellent of words, taken directly, suffice for the grasping of His truth, for one whose mind has not of itself, by mere etymology, inferred the householder's pleasure seen in a dream to be a thing to be abandoned' (Bhagavata 5.11.3).