“What do you mean by this grandeur that transports us in this manner? Who is this Almighty and how could we have a realisation, an experience of this Divine Glory?” The great Teacher is standing there;—Krishna is before Arjuna; and the disciple implores the great Master, “Is it possible for a person like me to have a vision of this Glory, a direct experience of that which you have been describing up to this time as the be-all and end-all of all things? And surrendering himself wholly to the great Incarnation, the disciple speaks, “If you consider me fit enough to have a vision of this Glory, may I be endowed with this blessedness. Deign to shower this Grace upon me.” It is in the Eleventh Chapter that the poet of the Bhagavadgita bursts forth into expressions which try to convey in a highly enrapturing language the phenomenon which revealed Itself before the seeking soul, Arjuna. Words have to be employed as vehicles in the description of this Glory because we have no other instruments available in the world. All explanation is through words. So, even the highest poetic genius has to employ images which belong to the world of perceptions. We speak of God as Light, but we cannot imagine any light which is greater than the light of the Sun, for us that is the supreme light, and the inclusiveness which God is, the infinitude which is God’s being, has also to be explained in a similar manner by imagery and comparison. Imagine thousands of Suns rising. and splashing forth simultaneously in the sky, dazzling the eyes of the beholders; no one has seen in one’s life what it is to see thousands of Suns at one stroke. These, again, are words for us with no significance. We cannot even dream what it would be to see several thousands of Suns coming together and blazing in the eastern horizon. We can only console ourselves by thinking that we understand what it is. Even the great immortality that we are thinking of is a shadow, as it were, cast by the super-immortal being of God, says the Veda. Not merely is God this supernal Light which blinds the eyes of the soul, but God is infinitude, again something which we cannot understand. What is infinitude? Every blessed thing is there transformed into its originality, not in its crude, distorted, reflected form, as we see it here today. The originals of things get revealed in the Supreme Being of God. These are the archetypes of all things. Philosophers tell us that we are all shadows, here moving in the world of phenomena. Everyone of us has a reality beyond ourselves. Even our own realities are not here! We are above in a noumenal existence, while this phenomenal universe is a conglomeration of shadows and reflections of the true archetypes. God is not a totality of shadows, a bunch of finite particulars. God does not become complete by a bringing together of all the individuals conceivable in the world. You and I and everything imaginable put together do not make God, because these visibles are all shadows, unrealities in the end, and a multitude of unrealities do not go to constitute one reality. We are far below the level of understanding what all this can be. Our minds are not made in such a way as to be able to grasp what these originals could be like. Our souls are our originals, the body and mind are reflections. But when we think of ourselves, we think only of bodies and minds; our real soul is beyond our comprehension. The soul is in ourselves; the soul that we really are, is the original in us, and that is the representation of God. God is present in us as the soul in us, and not merely as a particular expression of name and form in space and time. That is why when the great vision is described in the Gita, we are told that perfection was seen everywhere in that Glory. One does not see ugliness and suffering, which are consequences of the finite vision which wrests one particular from another and does not read the meaning of anything with relevance to all other things. The vision of God is the vision that God Himself has in respect of the whole of creation. To see God is to see through the eyes of God. And that would be a veritable realisation of the Soul of the universe. Here the perceptive faculties and the cognitive processes cease to function. It is not the intellect that understands or the feeling that feels God’s presence, it is the bursting forth of the intuitional integrality by which what is intended is a totality of grasp of the whole of the cosmos at one stroke and in simultaneity, and not as a succession of phenomena. We do not count one thing after another thing as we do here in this world when we try to see a series of objects. We cannot see with our eyes all things at once. Even when it appears that we are seeing many things at one time, we are really seeing one thing after another thing in a series, in a time-process, as if they are extended in space. But, as we observed, God-vision is a timeless, spaceless experience. And, therefore, it is not a visualisation of many things one after another in a series, as in an arithmetical computation. It is a timeless grasp of the eternity of Being, where everything is a here-and-now and not afterwards or somewhere else. Everything is just here, and everything is just now. Here is the abolition of space and a transcendence of time. Our spatial and temporal body-mind-complex vanishes, melts away into the supernal menstruum of the Absolute. Such was the vision which the great Lord condescended to bestow upon the seeking Arjuna.

And what one feels at that time is, again, poetically portrayed in the great hymnology which fills the whole of the Eleventh Chapter. It does not actually mean that one will be speaking something there. The poet of the Gita has to express himself in language, and so he uses a poetic style to demonstrate the feeling of the soul at the time of this divine possession and experience, at which time it becomes giddy with God-Consciousness. The soul does not utter words in human language. It shudders from the roots and shakes at the very bottom and it does not think and feel but melts away gradually into the awe. This process of the evaporating of the soul-consciousness into the Consciousness of All-Being is the significance behind the exuberant description of the prayers which Arjuna seems to have offered when he was blessed with the Divine Vision. The functions of the individual cease automatically, and completely. Neither does one speak, nor see, nor hear; nor is there any particularised sensation. All the empirical faculties are brought together into a concentrated oneness and get gathered up in the soul within instead of operating separately as in ordinary perception. The whole being is centred in one indivisible splendour of the soul, and it is the soul that flies to the Supreme Soul. And even as the soul that beholds this vision does not express itself in any language but indescribably transforms itself into the All-in-All God, so, too, God does not speak in a language, in the words that we utter through our mouths. Yet, a response from this Mighty Being seems to come in answer to the prayer of the soul that beholds the vision, and the Almighty speaks in a transcendental language of the unity of everything with everything else.

The feeling or the notion in the individual that it does anything at all is a fallacy, and here in the context of the Mahabharata, where the Bhagavadgita occurs, Arjuna is told that the war has already taken place, it is already concluded, victory has already been won, there is nothing more to be done by anyone. The individuals are just instruments. “In a timeless comprehension, I have done everything that is to be done, in the firmament of infinity and eternity.” To Arjuna, to us, from the point of view of time, the Mahabharata might appear to be a future event that is yet to take place. But to the Omnipresent Absolute, which has neither time nor place, it has eternally taken place and its results are decided once and for all.

It is added that everyone cannot have this vision. It is not that merely for the asking it suddenly comes, unless the asking comes from the soul. Our little charities, a few good deeds and some studies that we make are inadequate for the purpose. God is not a cheap substance that one can purchase for a few dollars or pounds. Impossible is this vision; even the gods crave to have this blessing. Any amount of learning or scriptural lore is insufficient for this fulfilling attainment. All the austerities that we may perform, all the efforts that we can think of from our side cannot promise us this blessedness of God-vision. Then what is the solution? How do we get it? A whole-souled surrender of the self is the way. Unless the self melts away into the All-Self, this vision is not going to materialise itself. Any individualistic austerity, or, for the matter of that, any performance whatsoever which retains the individuality intact, even in the name of religion or spiritual practice, will go counter to the requirements of this great realisation. The condition is this: In our spiritual practices, do we long to maintain our individualities? Though it is true that we are spiritually engaged or religiously conscious, are we secretly hugging our own ego or personality? If this is to be there, the vision is far off. Whoever performs works for His sake, whoever regards Him as the Supreme Soul, and bears not enmity to anyone, looks upon all things with an equal vision, with no difference of high and low, or even better or worse, whoever whole-heartedly considers this wonder as the only goal of life, and everything else as merely an accessory or an antecedent to this great Realisation, one who is possessed with this spirit of aspiration which transfigures the whole of one’s being in the love of the One God, one who seeks God, and God alone, and nothing else, in the highest sense of the term,—to such a person God-Vision will be an immediate experience. Inasmuch as there is no isolation or individuality in God, to have His experience or Vision, one must also be free from the individuality of the self. It appears that God alone can behold God. God experiences; God realises God. It is not that man, as a man, maintains himself as man, and then reaches God. It is not you or I that can attain God, but God-vision bursting itself within itself, and God looking at Himself in God. It is a mystical enigma, a secret available only to sincere souls, and everyone is blessed with this beatitude of experience, when the heart is sincere.