The body changes; the self witnesses.

Krishna offers here an analogy of stunning simplicity and power. Every person has direct experience of the soul persisting through radical bodily transformation: the infant, the teenager, the adult, and the elder are wildly different physical forms, yet we say 'I' through all of them.

There is a continuous witness — the 'dehinaḥ,' the one who inhabits the body — who remains present through all these changes without being any of them. Death, Krishna argues, is simply a further step in that same process.

This analogical argument is accessible to direct experience. When you look at a photograph of yourself as a child, not a single molecule of your current body was present then, yet you say 'that is me.' The identification persists not through physical continuity but through the continuity of awareness.

If that awareness has persisted through infancy, puberty, illness, aging — through all these smaller 'deaths' of one phase of life — why should the final physical transformation extinguish it?

The marker of wisdom here is 'dhīraḥ' — the steady one, the sober one. Wisdom is not primarily an intellectual achievement but a quality of inner stability. The 'dhīra' is not deluded ('na muhyati') by the apparent drama of physical death because they understand the soul's continuity.

In practical terms, this calls us to cultivate a steady inner witness — the part of awareness that can observe the changing theater of our lives without being swept away by it.