Verse 7.25 said that Bhagavān’s higher nature is not evident to everyone because the jīva is veiled by yogamāyā. That immediately creates a question: if māyā can cover the jīva and māyā belongs to Bhagavān Himself, does māyā cover Bhagavān too?

Kṛṣṇa answers: no. The crucial distinction is not whether māyā is present. Māyā is associated with both Īśvara and the jīva. The distinction is who controls whom.

Īśvara is the master of māyā, whereas the ignorant jīva is controlled by māyā. A simple analogy helps. A criminal may be surrounded by police officers, and the head of a nation may also be surrounded by police officers. From a distance, both are surrounded by police, but the relationship is completely different. The criminal is under police control; the ruler is protected and served by them. Mere proximity does not tell us who is the controller and who is the controlled.

Similarly, māyā does not create ignorance in Bhagavān. Bhagavān is māyā-adhiṣṭhātā, the one who presides over and controls the māyā order. The jīva, until knowledge arises, is subject to māyā and therefore experiences ignorance and samsāra.

Kṛṣṇa therefore says, vedāham — “I know.” What does He know? samatītāni bhūtāni — all beings belonging to the past; vartamānāni bhūtāni — all beings belonging to the present; and bhaviṣyāṇi bhūtāni — all beings belonging to the future.

The word bhūtāni belongs with all three time references. Kṛṣṇa is not merely saying that He has an unusually good memory or that He can predict certain events. The point is much larger: the entire creation across the three periods of time is within Īśvara’s knowledge.

Why? Because Bhagavān is not limited by the ignorance produced by māyā.

The jīva’s knowledge, by contrast, is extremely restricted. I know only a tiny portion of my own past. Even within this lifetime, enormous portions of childhood have disappeared from memory. I know only a tiny part of what is happening in the present universe; much of what is happening even in the next room may be unknown to me. Regarding the future, my knowledge is more limited still.

Even what I call “my world” is mostly unknown to me. Yet the jīva easily forgets this limitation and makes judgments from very small amounts of information: “This should definitely happen.” “That person should behave this way.” “My future will certainly look like this.” “This event has no purpose.” Then life reveals factors we never knew existed.

The limitation is not merely intellectual. It belongs to the condition of being a jīva identified with a particular body-mind and therefore operating through limited sense organs, memory, inference, and experience. Īśvara does not have that limitation.

Kṛṣṇa then makes the contrast explicit: māṃ tu veda na kaścana — “but no one knows Me.”

This statement must be understood in the flow of the preceding verses. It does not mean literally that no spiritual seeker can ever know Bhagavān, because the chapter itself has already spoken of the rare jñānī who knows Bhagavān. The meaning here is that the māyā-covered jīva, as such, does not know Bhagavān’s true nature.

What is especially missed is Bhagavān’s parā prakṛti, the consciousness principle. The jīva readily notices aparā prakṛti—body, mind, objects, forms, names, events, relationships, and changing circumstances—but the very consciousness because of which all of these are known remains unrecognized.

Thus there is an extraordinary asymmetry: Bhagavān knows the jīva completely, while the ignorant jīva does not know Bhagavān completely.

This also helps us understand why spiritual knowledge requires humility. The ordinary human standpoint is not an all-seeing standpoint. We operate through fragments of information, yet often speak as if we possess the total picture. Recognizing Īśvara as the total order changes that attitude. It does not make us passive; it makes us less arrogant about the little we know.

We still think, choose, act, plan, and exercise free will. But we recognize that our knowledge operates within an immeasurably larger order whose totality is known only to Īśvara.

This distinction also prevents a misunderstanding of karma and divine omniscience. The fact that Īśvara knows past, present, and future does not mean that human effort is meaningless. Individual effort, choice, and responsibility remain valid. Knowledge of an event and coercion of an event are not the same thing.

The point of 7.26 is therefore not fatalism. It is the contrast between freedom from māyā-born ignorance on the side of Īśvara and limitation of knowledge on the side of the jīva.

This prepares directly for 7.27. Having established that Bhagavān is not deluded by māyā whereas the jīva is, Kṛṣṇa will next explain how the jīva becomes deluded through icchā and dveṣa, desire and aversion.

7.26 therefore establishes the fundamental difference between Īśvara and the ignorant jīva in relation to māyā: Bhagavān is the master of māyā and knows the entire creation across time, while the jīva is conditioned by māyā and fails especially to recognize Bhagavān’s parā prakṛti. Spiritual maturity begins with acknowledging the limitation of our individual standpoint and opening ourselves to the knowledge through which that ignorance can end.