मन्मना भव मद्भक्तो मद्याजी मां नमस्कुरु।मामेवैष्यसि सत्यं ते प्रतिजाने प्रियोऽसि मे॥
man-manā bhava mad-bhakto mad-yājī māṃ namaskurumām evaiṣyasi satyaṃ te pratijāne priyo ‘si me
Word by word
The verse says
Keep your mind on me, love me, offer to me, bow to me. You will come to me. I promise you truly, because you are dear to me.
In plain words
Four short instructions and then something rare: a promise.
Think of me. Love me. Offer to me. Bow to me. Each one is two words in the Sanskrit.
And then satyaṁ te pratijāne - I promise you truly. In seven hundred verses this is one of the only places he gives his word.
Where you've felt this · in relationships
At the end of a long and complicated conversation about what somebody should do with their life, the only thing that actually helps is the short sentence at the end: whatever happens, call me. Everything before it was useful. That is the part they remember in six months.
Going deeper
Four instructions, each small enough to begin today, is the shape of the final teaching, and the smallness is deliberate.
Compare them with what has gone before: three kinds of everything, five causes of action, the whole analysis of knowledge and doer and understanding. That was real and it was long. What is left at the end is four verbs that a person with no training could do this afternoon.
This is also the same instruction given word for word in 9.34, which is the middle of the book. It arrives unchanged at the end, which means the intervening nine chapters did not refine it or qualify it. It was already the whole thing.
And the promise is the unusual part. Arguments do not need promises; they stand or fall on their own. A promise is what one person gives another, and it is given here on the stated ground of affection rather than of merit.