न त्वेवाहं जातु नासं न त्वं नेमे जनाधिपाः।न चैव न भविष्यामः सर्वे वयमतः परम्॥
na tvevāhaṃ jātu nāsaṃ na tvaṃ neme janādhipāḥna caiva na bhaviṣyāmaḥ sarve vayamataḥ param
Word by word
The verse says
There was never a time when I did not exist, nor you, nor these kings. And none of us will cease to be hereafter.
In plain words
Krishna makes it personal and specific. Not a general claim about souls — me, you, and these men in front of us.
All of us have always been. None of us will stop.
He includes the kings on both sides. The people Arjuna is about to kill are covered by the same sentence as Arjuna himself.
Where you've felt this · in community
Standing in a very old building, you get a brief sense of how many people have stood on that spot. It does not make your own afternoon less real. It puts it somewhere it fits.
Going deeper
This verse is one of the places where the great commentators genuinely disagree, and you are better off knowing that than being handed one reading as settled.
The question is the plural. Krishna says I, you, these kings — many selves, spoken of separately.
For the dualist schools this is the plain sense and a cornerstone: selves are eternally many and eternally distinct, individually real, never dissolving into one another. Ramanuja reads it this way.
For Advaita the plural is a concession to how Arjuna currently sees. Shankara reads the many as one consciousness appearing as many, with the distinctions belonging to the appearance rather than to what is ultimately there.
Both are serious readings of the same line. This edition does not pick between them, because the text genuinely does not force a choice here.
What both agree on is the part that matters for Arjuna. Whatever these men fundamentally are, it did not begin at birth, and the battle cannot end it.