Only You Have Seen🔗

This Form

No one before you has seen this unlimited, brilliant Form.

11.48 O best among Kuru warriors, no one has ever before seen this Universal Form of Mine, for neither by studying the Vedas nor by performing sacrifices or charities, can this Form be seen.

Only you have seen this Form.

11.49 Do not be disturbed any longer by seeing this terrible Form of Mine.

Dear devotee, be free from all disturbances. With a peaceful mind, you can now see the Form you wish to see.

Krishna consoles Arjuna in these verses. He is again His compassionate Self to His disturbed disciple.

He tells Arjuna that no one, but no one, has had this great privilege of seeing His Cosmic Form that He had just displayed to Arjuna. No penances, no rituals, no amount of scriptural reading and no other charities would gain this vision for any one. However, you are terrified. That is ok. See Me now in My normal form that you are used to worshipping.

Krishna is clear on this point. It is He who decides how He reveals Himself to His devotees and disciples. It is a gift from the Master, from the Divine. It is not earned through effort. Of course, effort prepares one for the receipt of this great gift, but it is not the only necessary condition for the gift to be showered.

Let me share another experience with you.

During my parivrajaka, when I wandered the length and breath of India, many thousand kilometers, I stayed for several months in Haridwar. This was sometime in 1998 or 1999. I stayed under a bridge, sleeping on a concrete bench. There was a small Shiva idol under this bridge, which was on the banks of the Ganga. Not many people came to this location.

I took ill and had high fever as well as severe dysentery. I could not even move. A young man suddenly appeared on the scene and started talking to me. He was very handsome and had tremendous grace. What I remembered in particular was a diamond-studded pen that he had in his shirt pocket. I found it incongruous since this man was otherwise very simply dressed.

This man brought me medicines and food for three days while I lay too ill to move. He would sit down and talk to me. I asked him his name and where he lived. He said he was called Shankar Maharaj and that he lived in a nearby ashram, which I vaguely knew.

Once it looked that I was getting better, this man stopped coming. After a few days when I was well enough to move freely, I decided to go to his ashram and thank him. I found the ashram without much trouble. It had three or four rooms on the banks of the Ganga and there was an old sanyasi sitting there. I asked him for Shankar Maharaj and he said that there was no one of that name living there.

The old man was not too keen to talk. I persisted. He then said only three other old sanyasi stayed there and no young man who lived there. When I still persisted he blurted out with irritation: 'The only Shankar Maharaj here sits there.' I went over to where he pointed. There was a small Shiva temple, where inside was a white marble statue of Shiva sitting. As I went nearer I was amazed to see the same pen that the young man wore, tucked into a cloth that they had put on Shiva's shoulder.

I could not believe what I saw. I went back to the old man and asked him why there was a pen on Shiva's statue. He simply said that some devotee had brought that pen and he had placed it on Shiva.

The Shankar Maharaj who came to feed me and give me medicines when I was too ill to even move was wearing the same pen that this statue wore. You can draw your own conclusions. This is the honest truth.

Years later, when I went with a group of devotees to Himalayas in 2005, I told them about this incident. I wanted to locate this temple but we were hard-pressed for time. Again when we went with another group in 2006, I decided we should look for it. After an early morning bath in the Ganga, we walked and after some searching found the bridge and the small Shiva idol in the place where I lay ill.

From there I had some general idea of where this ashram was, as I remembered it seven or eight years earlier. I knew it was near Gita Mandir. We walked another few miles and enquired at the Gita Mandir about this ashram. All I knew was that this ashram had a small Shiva temple and it was on the banks of the Ganga. The person at the Gita Mandir told us to go out through their rear gate and look nearby.

Whenever we asked about a Shiva temple, every passerby would point to the next house, because there was a temple in almost every house. Finally we came to a place, a large ashram that I thought looked familiar. Two of the disciples went inside and started looking. They talked to a number of people. They found one temple, which was not what I remembered. They started looking again. The rest of us, a party of about ten people, followed. Suddenly they came back running and said that there was a Shiva statue inside a small enclosure on the banks of the Ganga.

When we reached this place it was exactly as I remembered. The old ashram with its four rooms was still there. The temple with the white marble Shiva idol was still there. When some of our group offered some money, the priest tucked the money under a cloth that he had wrapped on Shiva’s shoulder. This was where I had seen the diamond-studded pen!

We asked the poojari (priest) if he remembered the incident when I had come looking for Shankar Maharaj. He was quite old, and even if he was the same old man who had met me, he did not remember anything. But the Shiva was still called Shankar Maharaj!

There is nothing to believe or not believe in this incident when Shiva took care of me. It happened, that is all. It did not happen as a result of any prayer or any penance. I have no idea why it happened. That is how things happen in Existence. You have to take it as it comes.

Of course, in this chapter Arjuna seeks Krishna’s vision and it happens. It could have also happened without his seeking. The favor is for the Divine to give, not because we ask.

It does not matter to Krishna that Arjuna seemingly spurns this gift and would like to see Him as He normally does. What Krishna offered was an unconditional gift that required neither acceptance nor appreciation.

A mother's love for a child does not happen as a result of any effort on the child's part. The presence of the child spontaneously evokes the deep unconditional love of the mother for the child.

It is ultimately the surrender of the devotee to the Master, like the surrender of the infant to the mother, that evokes this unconditional love. In the case of an infant, it is a reflex action. The nature of an infant is to be defenseless and in absolute surrender to the caregiver. In the case of a devotee, the studied patterns of mental behavior need to be given up. This is far more difficult.

The devotee has to return to his original and natural state of surrender to experience unconditional love. To achieve this he has to drop his mind. He has to give up all the studied behavior patterns, both conscious and unconscious. When the mind is wiped clean of its templates of comparison, it makes no difference if the Divine appears to be loving or terrifying. In both aspects one accepts Divinity.

Krishna leads His disciple in stages through this path of Self-Realization, which is no different from the realization of the Divine.

Q: Vishnu and Lakshmi are almost always worshipped in gentle and beautiful forms. Shiva and Kali, however, are in austere and fearful forms. Does this mean that Shiva and Kali are in a higher form?

First of all, you need to understand that in whatever form you worship a deity, in stone, metal, wood or whatever else, you are not worshipping that idol or picture. You are, in fact, worshipping the energy behind and beyond that idol or picture through that idol or picture. This is one of the most misunderstood aspects of our culture, leading people to say that we worship idols and that we are pagans.

No one can, however much they may like to believe so, understand the formless and worship the formless until and unless they have progressed from the identification with the form. You will find that even those who profess to be praying to the formless turn to a particular direction or visualize something in form. Why? Simply because it is practically impossible to go straight to the formless stage without a foundation involving some form.

After all what is your perception of God and Divinity based on? These are idle concepts.

A disciple of Ramakrishna complained to Vivekananda, a fellow disciple, and asked him why he called Ramakrishna 'God' in public. Vivekananda asked this man to explain what he understood by 'God'. This man replied that God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent.

Vivekananda retorted: ‘You fool! The omnipresent God is forever present in Ramakrishna. To you, God is just a concept. To Ramakrishna, God is a living reality. He lives with God all the time.’

It may sound fashionable and cool to denigrate idol worship without knowing what it is all about. The entire art of building temples is not a mere art, it is a science; temple architecture is a highly developed science. Every single facet of it, from the size of the idols and the size of the rooms and courtyards, the directions in which each has to be situated, to the process of installing the idol in the garba griha (the sanctum), all these are laid down in detail in manuals that were developed thousands of years ago.

In the temple of Brihadishwara in Tanjore, one of the largest temples in India, at any time the shadow of the main tower falls within itself. In many temples the sun shines through openings and falls on the main idol at specific days of the year at specific times. Many temples are built with thousand-pillared halls, in which the stone pillars, when struck, sound the exact notes of music. Modern day architecture does not have the methodology to recreate these feats.

Temples are energy bodies, as are idols. They receive, store and radiate energy. They are mass meditation centers to help all those who cannot or will not practice meditation by themselves. They initiate you into an awareness of Cosmic Consciousness through the form. To move beyond, you need to drop the form.

In our Nithya system of meditation, all meditations are formless. There are no mantras, no visualization of forms. But this requires some understanding, some awareness before practice.

When one chooses a form, invariably one chooses a form for a quality that one lacks and is in need of. It may also be based on one’s samskara, vasana and unfulfilled desires. A person who chooses Vishnu and Lakshmi, chooses so seeking wealth, as they both represent material pleasure and wealth. One seeks Kali when one needs courage. One chooses Shiva when one seeks the path of gnana or wisdom. The choice is a reflection of one’s needs and not one’s state.

Traditionally in Bengal, Kali has been worshipped as the Mother Goddess. They relate to her compassion and relate to her without any fear. Even in Vishnu worship, there are temples dedicated to Vishnu as Narasimha, his incarnation as half-lion, half-man.

In general, it is true that it is easier to relate to a form that exudes happiness and love. That is why Krishna and Ganesha are the most popular amongst the deities. But whichever form you worship, be aware that the energy behind all forms is the same and ultimately it is the formless energy that you are worshipping.

The energy of all deities and idols is one. There is absolutely no difference. In fact, the energy of all Masters is the same. There is no difference between the energy of a Krishna, a Buddha, a Mahavira and a Christ. It is we who perceive these differently, feel them differently and express them differently.

The energy as well as the message of all these great Masters is one of love and compassion. One cannot be a Master or a Divine being without being full of love and compassion. No Master and no Divine being can advocate violence and harm to one another. Terrorism is not a word in the dictionary of any spiritual being, let alone a great Master, and therefore cannot be part of the teaching of any great Master. All those who indulge in violence in the name of religion or the words of their Masters are misinterpreting, distorting and violating the truths that their Masters propounded.

Krishna's universal form was displayed not to frighten Arjuna, though it did frighten him. It was displayed to demonstrate to Arjuna the Supreme Truth of the Universe, of Existence. Krishna merely displayed the neutrality of Existence, by showing that destruction follows creation, and creation follows destruction. Such is Nature.

The fearful form of Kali is the outer expression of the experience of destroying one's ego, which is the body she dances on. A Master too is ruthless in destroying the ego of a disciple who comes to him. That is the nature of the Master. Those who are afraid need to stay away.

It is easy to intellectually accept these truths. It is easy to say, I surrender to the Master and he can do whatever he wants. It is easy to say that you are not uncomfortable with the process. But the surrender and the acceptance last only as long as it does not cause discomfort to you. When the Master calls, you will have a hundred other things to do. As long as the Master is a weekend Master, and preferably an alternate-weekend Master, synchronized with your other plans, he is acceptable to you. Otherwise he is a nuisance.

Do not worry about who is a higher form: Shiva or Vishnu, Lakshmi or Kali. They are all the same form and the same energy. They wear different makeup to suit your personality and the occasion, that is all. Go beyond the form; grasp the formless energy and surrender. You will be in bliss.