Krishna speaks7.15

न मां दुष्कृतिनो मूढाः प्रपद्यन्ते नराधमाः।माययापहृतज्ञाना आसुरं भावमाश्रिताः॥

na māṃ duṣkṛtino mūḍhāḥ prapadyante narādhamāḥmāyayāpahṛta-jñānā āsuraṃ bhāvam āśritāḥ

Word by word
na — notmām — unto meduṣkṛtinaḥ — the evil doersmūḍhāḥ — the ignorantprapadyante — surrendernara-adhamāḥ — one who lazily follows one’s lower naturemāyayā — by God’s material energyapahṛta jñānāḥ — those with deluded intellectāsuram — demoniacbhāvam — natureāśritāḥ — surrender

The verse says

They do not come to me: those who do harm, those lost in confusion, the lowest of people, whose understanding has been carried off, who have taken the cruel side.

In plain words

The hardest sentence in a warm chapter.

Krishna has just said the door is open. Now he names who does not walk through it.

Read it slowly, because every item describes a stance rather than a kind of person.

Where you've felt this · in community

Your neighbour two doors down has decided that everyone on the street is against him. When somebody clears the drain outside his gate, it was done to show him up. When food comes over at a festival, they want something. Every kind act gets fitted into the story before it lands. Nothing is keeping him out except the way he reads whatever comes in.

Going deeper

Narādhama — lowest of people — is about as harsh as this book gets, and softening it would be dishonest.

What can be done is to look at what the harshness attaches to. Every term is a posture, not a birth: those who do harm, those carried off by confusion, those who have taken the cruel side. Not one of them names a family, a caste or a people. Each names something a person is doing at present.

That is not a convenience invented by later readers. Two chapters on, Krishna says that even someone of very bad conduct who turns toward him is to be counted among the good — which only makes sense if the door was never bolted from his side.

What that leaves you with is uncomfortable and usable. This is not a list of people to avoid. It is a description of what being unreachable feels like from inside, and most of us have spent an afternoon there.