A Thousand Blazing Suns

11.9 Sanjaya said:

O King, having spoken thus, the great Lord of Yoga, Krishna, showed to Arjuna His supreme Cosmic Form,

11.10 Numerous mouths and eyes, with numerous wonderful sights, numerous divine ornaments, with numerous divine weapons uplifted,

11.11 Arjuna saw this Universal Form wearing divine garlands and clothing, anointed with celestial fragrances, wonderful, resplendent, endless, with faces on all sides.

11.12 If the splendor of a thousand suns were to blaze all together in the sky, it would be like the splendor of that mighty Being.

11.13 There, in the body of the God of Gods, the Pandava then saw the whole universe resting in One, with all its infinite parts.

11.14 Dhananjaya, filled with wonder, his hair standing on end, then bowed his head to the God and spoke with joined palms.

These verses show the unlimited, never-ending, wonderful, all-pervading nature of the Lord.

Ramakrishna says that when he experienced the Form, the Cosmic Consciousness, he could not pluck a single flower from a plant because he felt that all the plants were garlands offered to rajapurusha, God.

Anyone who has had this experience is reborn. At one level this experience is one of boundarilessness. The body expands to fill everything. The entire universe is part of the body. There is no separation of the individual and the whole. The whole is part and the part is whole. At another level the whole universe exists within you. You are everything that you see around you. The grass outside the hut, the dog in the distance, the tree beyond, every single entity, animate and inanimate, resonates within you, as a part of you.

When I tell my healers not to eat meat, it is not based on any theory that only animals have body, mind and spirit, and therefore it is a sin to kill and eat them. I say it because from my experience the energy of dead animals, meat, is not conducive to the energy of healing, that's all. There is no morality involved here. By such logic, are carnivorous animals sinners? Of course not!

There is life in everything around us, every single thing, be it a rock, be it earth, be it a tree or an insect or animal. We share the same energy with them, they with us. When one experiences Cosmic Consciousness, collective consciousness, one realizes that we are all interconnected. We are all one.

In that mood, plucking a flower hurts. A wild animal responds peacefully to your presence. There is no violence in Cosmic Consciousness. There is only acceptance and inclusion.

This is what Arjuna saw in the universal form, an unlimited number of mouths, eyes and wonderful visions. The form was decorated with many celestial ornaments and bore many divine upraised weapons. He wore celestial garlands and garments. Many divine scents were smeared all over His body. All was wondrous, brilliant, unlimited, all-expanding.

Here he sees unlimited number of mouths and eyes in Krishna. Now Arjuna sees 360 degrees in both horizontal and vertical dimensions. He sees the whole universe, all the people on the battlefield; all of them in Krishna, as the Universal Consciousness. He sees the Whole as his own Being.

There is no boundary to Krishna's Universal Form. The word Vishnu, which is his real form, means one who expands infinitely. The splendor that Sanjaya talks about is beyond anything the mind can comprehend, because it is the source of all splendor.

Notice, it is Sanjaya speaking these words, not Arjuna. Sanjaya is far from the battlefield and has been given the power to see what happens on the battlefield so that he can describe the events to his king Dhritarashtra. Now Sanjaya has the unbelievable fortune of witnessing the Divine Form of Krishna. Though Krishna says that this form is being shown only to Arjuna, by default Sanjaya has the great fortune to witness and participate in this vision.

Arjuna is awestruck and is in silence. He is yet to speak. What he has witnessed is beyond anything that he could have imagined or asked for. But the silence is a very active silence. It is a silence in which he experiences the Truth of Krishna. It is a silence in which he is actively participating in the process and is being immersed.

Those who wish to understand this logically, through their mind, are unfortunate. They just cannot. Even as the expression of an experience, this is beyond logic and rationale. In Tamil there is a proverb concerning such experiences. It says those who experience do not talk. Those who talk have not experienced.

In the vast majority of cases it is true; but this is one of the exceptions. What is experienced is being expressed for the benefit of humanity. It is being expressed to give hope to the rest of humanity that it too can experience what Arjuna experienced with the grace of God.

Such an experience need not be confined to one religion or another. Arjuna perceives Krishna's Divine Form up to this point in time in a way that is familiar to him. Krishna is taking him in steps to provide him some comfort. A person of another religion may experience the Divine Form of the formless energy in a different manner. The Ultimate Energy behind and beyond both will be the same.

Sanjaya then summarizes Arjuna's reaction to the Divine Form of Krishna in the last few verses. Arjuna is still silent and it is Sanjaya who describes what happens.

What Arjuna saw was beyond his understanding. Wherever he looked was Krishna; Krishna in many forms, many shapes, many non-forms and non-shapes. There are no words to describe what Arjuna saw. How does one describe what is beyond the mind, beyond logic, beyond words, beyond all comprehension?

In the body of the Supreme Lord, Arjuna saw the whole Universe divided in different ways and at the same time united in one form. The Universe is divided into many parts such as the sun, moon, earth, planets and other bodies in space. Here he sees all of them as one form. You need to understand this description, which is so beautiful. Later we shall enter into a meditation and pray to the Parabrahma Krishna to give us all a glimpse of what Arjuna received.

Arjuna is able to see the whole and at the same time all the parts. Even the word hologram that we now so commonly use to describe the totality of something preserved in a fragment does no justice to Arjuna's vision. In a hologram, one needs to make the effort to see the whole in the fragment. In this divine vision granted to Arjuna, the whole existed with the part, with no separation, no discontinuity. The whole was part and the part was whole.

Of all the people in the battlefield of Kurukshetra, only Arjuna had this great fortune to behold the Cosmic Vision of Krishna. Only he was granted the boon of divine vision to see the entire universe within Krishna. The vision that Arjuna beheld enveloped him completely. He was, in fact, part of that vision. He was the observer and yet part of what was being observed. In addition, he was the experience of that observation as well.

Arjuna and Krishna grew up together from childhood. Krishna's sister Subhadra was Arjuna's wife. They had a deep relationship as friends. In this one moment, that relationship was redefined.