कथं विद्यामहं योगिंस्त्वां सदा परिचिन्तयन्।केषु केषु च भावेषु चिन्त्योऽसि भगवन्मया॥
kathaṃ vidyām ahaṃ yogins tvāṃ sadā paricintayankeṣu keṣu ca bhāveṣu cintyo ’si bhagavan mayā
Word by word
The verse says
How shall I come to know you, Krishna, by thinking of you always? In which forms should I hold you in my mind?
In plain words
The practical question, finally asked outright.
He has accepted everything. He has praised at length. Now: what do I actually do with my mind.
Keṣu keṣu ca bhāveṣu — in which forms, in which states. He wants somewhere to rest his attention.
Where you've felt this · in health
You are told to relax before an unpleasant appointment and you have no idea what to do with the instruction. Relax where? Then somebody says: let your shoulders drop and breathe out slowly. That you can do. The first instruction was correct and useless, and the second was neither.
Going deeper
Attention needs an object, and Arjuna has noticed that he has not been given one.
Everything so far has been true and unusable in this specific way. Be joined at all times, remember me, let the mind rest on me — all of it assumes the mind knows what to rest on. An unlimited being is precisely the kind of thing a mind cannot hold, as Chapter 8 said directly when it called the form unthinkable.
So he asks for handles. Particular things, in the world, that he can actually look at.
That is a request worth making on your own behalf. Vague spiritual instructions fail for the same reason vague physical ones do — not because they are wrong, but because they do not reach the part of you that would have to act. The rest of this chapter is the answer, and it is made almost entirely of concrete nouns.