Chapter fourteen takes a concept the Gita has used since chapter two and finally sets it out properly. Everything born of nature is woven from three strands, and the word itself means a strand of a rope, which is the image to hold. They are clarity, energy and inertia, and the chapter's subject is that each of the three binds the imperishable self to the body, including the one that looks like a virtue.
Clarity is described as luminous and free of disease, and it binds by attachment to happiness and by attachment to knowledge. That is the chapter's sharpest point. Being calm, well and clear headed is a form of bondage, because the person becomes attached to being that way. Energy, characterised as craving and thirst, binds by attachment to action. Inertia, born of ignorance, deludes all embodied beings and binds by heedlessness, indolence and sleep.
The three are not fixed types. The chapter is explicit that each rises by suppressing the other two, so a person is under a different strand at different hours, and gives the marks by which the current one can be recognised: when the light of knowledge appears in all the gates of the body, clarity is uppermost; greed, restlessness and the undertaking of works indicate energy; darkness, inactivity, negligence and delusion indicate inertia.
The destinations follow the same three way division, with those established in clarity going upward, those of energy remaining in the middle, and those of inertia going down. It is a scheme of psychology and cosmology at once, and the following chapters apply it to faith, food, giving, work and understanding in turn.