JOIN USIn a critical section of the Bhagavad Gita, Arjuna requests Sri Krishna to show him His cosmic form in which all animate and inanimate beings reside in Him.
The Lord grants Arjuna the facility of divine vision that enables him to witness the vision displayed by the Lord.
Arjuna is beset with two dominant feelings when witnessing the spectacle: he is beset with feelings of terror and horror. This mighty warrior who had no parallel in the world was engulfed by fear. His hairs stand, he is astonished and paralysed. The world of duality opens before him: pain and pleasure, good and evil, the sacred and the profane. He sees the Lord is His beatific aspect as well as in His destructive aspect and he is bewildered. He sees the past, present and future collapse. He views the future unfold before his very eyes. He begins to understand the awesome power of the vision he beheld.
Arjuna is unable to understand that the cosmic form of the Supreme Being is nothing but the daivic (godly) and asuric (demonic) taken together, that the Lord exists in both and that there is no place where He is not. He is overcome by the experience. The fact that he had related to Sri Krishna merely as a friend and was unaware of his real identity makes his afraid and he seeks forgiveness for any lapses that he might have committed.He pleads with Sri Krishna to come back to his gentle form, the one he has been familiar all along. The Lord tells him that what he has witnessed has not been witnessed by any other living being. Neither the Gods or the demons have seen this form and He asks Arjuna to cast off his fear resumes his form as Sri Krishna. As Swami Rama observes: “Sri Krishna says that the profound vision of the cosmic Lord that was seen by Arjuna is extremely difficult to attain. Those who tread the path of divinity aspire to have the same vision but that vision cannot be received by studying the Vedas, by practicing austerities or self-mortification or by giving gifts or by performing sacrificial rites. It can be experienced only when one has one-pointed devotion.”
Arjuna is initially beset with fear and terror because he had a limited conception of the Lord's cosmic form. Exposure to that form clears his doubts and his confusion. The Lord is omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent. Good cannot exist without evil, right without wrong and righteousness without unrighteousness. Self-realization comes from selfless service. Such state is attained only when “one stops identifying with the objects of the world and establishes himself in his true nature.”