कामात्मानः स्वर्गपरा जन्मकर्मफलप्रदाम्।क्रियाविशेषबहुलां भोगैश्वर्यगतिं प्रति॥
kāmātmānaḥ svarga-parājanma-karma-phala-pradāmkriyā-viśeṣa-bahulāṃbhogaiśvarya-gatiṃ prati
Word by word
The verse says
Their hearts are set on what they want. They aim at heaven. What they offer leads to good birth and good results, and it is all elaborate ritual pointed at pleasure and power.
In plain words
Krishna spells out what those people are actually after.
Heaven. Good rebirth. Enjoyment. Position.
Strip away the ceremony and it is an ordinary shopping list. The difference is that the shopping is being done in a temple.
Where you've felt this · in community
Every part of the celebration is correct and beautiful, and everyone present can tell it is about being seen to have held it. Nothing is wrong. Nothing is quite real either.
Going deeper
Kāmātmānaḥ — those whose very self is desire. It is a harsh phrase, and it is aimed at people doing everything right.
The Gita's objection is not that these people want the wrong things. Heaven and a good birth are perfectly respectable goods in its own framework; it does not deny they can be obtained this way.
The objection is structural. Any action done for a reward binds you to the reward, and rewards end. Heaven, in this cosmology, is not permanent — you exhaust the merit and return. So the entire enterprise is an enormous amount of effort to be moved somewhere pleasant for a while.
This is why verse 39's phrase mattered: release from the bondage of action. Ritual done for results is not the opposite of worldly striving. It is the same striving with a longer time horizon.
And there is a reason Krishna raises it here rather than anywhere else. He has just spent seven verses offering Arjuna heaven and honour as reasons to fight. He is now taking that scaffolding down.