An Experience of Awe
As I mentioned before, Chapter 11 of The Bhagavad Gita is one of my favorites. I remember reading it for the first time so many decades ago and the sense of awe and amazement that describes Arjuna’s experience of the Cosmic Form has stayed with me. For me it was one of the best descriptions of “The Divine” or “God” that I had ever read. It is a valiant attempt to refer to the totality of the Universe and tackles the impossible task of confining God or the Divine to any description written in any format.
I see no limits to Your Cosmic God form, no boundaries or demarcation points to Your spectrum of existence. I see countless eyes and arms, mouths, and bellies, but find no end or beginning to it all. It simply is, without any restrictions of space or time or thought.
The Bhagavad Gita – 11.16-17
The chapter is made up of Arjuna’s accounts of what he is experiencing and seeing when given “Divine vision” by Krishna. Krishna’s cosmic form engulfs the entire Universe and all of time: past, present, and future all at once, along with all the creation and destruction throughout. Arjuna is able to see the battle that lies before him. He is frightened and speechless at all that he sees. Awestruck to me is even too small of a word.
It is indeed appropriate, O Divinity, that the world reveres You, that the celestials bow to You and the demons flee from You. How could they not be in awe of You? You are the Cause of the Cause, The Eternal that existed even before Brahma the Creator. You transcend time itself, space itself, and even causation! You are the Supreme Divinity of all deities, the Lord of all gods. You are That within which the universe dwells. You are the Everlasting. You are That which is and That which is not, and even beyond both That and Not-That; You are rightly called the Supreme Absolute Reality.
The Bhagavad Gita – 11.36-37
Once Arjuna sees what he sees and cannot take it any longer, Krishna reverts back to his earthly form and continues his teaching through “The Path of Love” (Bhakti Yoga) in Chapter 12. This chapter closes out Part 2 of the “Walkthrough for Westerners” by Jack Hawley and in my opinion tries to explain the different ways that humans have found to worship or acknowledge or come to know the Divine. And, in the end, there seems to be no wrong path if and when it is focused toward the Divine with purity of mind and purity of heart.
The most interesting part for me of Chapter 12 is in the differentiation of a “visible God with form” and an “invisible, formless God” (BG 12.1) and how one is easier to love and worship than the other for humans. For me it explains the universality of spiritual teaching: though each culture, community, or time period may worship a different form of “God”, it is not the form that matters, but the essence of the Divine itself.
It is extremely difficult for a person in a physical form to really understand the formless. Ordinary people identify themselves with their own physical body and cannot help but conceptualize God as also being in some sort of body. To deeply love the formless God one must be free from one’s own body consciousness, and this state is not attainable by many. BG 12.5
However, Krishna does remind Arjuna that full liberation and union with the internal Atma is the ultimate goal and so we must practice and focus, continue to let go of the fruits of our actions and attachments. “Why? Because peace immediately follows the giving up of expectations.” BG 12.12
Until then, action, knowledge, devotion and love are all paths toward equanimity. Krishna enumerates certain qualities again of those that are close to the Divine. I know that the phrasing can get tricky here as there seems to be “preference” given to some over others when clearly in previous chapters there has been no preference given from Krishna to “special people” as the Cosmic God. The way I read the last parts of chapter 12 lies in our ability as an individual to be drawn closer to the Divine center, not in preference given from God to individuals who sing his praises without any action. “Love” is the experience felt when certain actions are taken by us as individuals, not something given or taken away by some outside force for praise or punishment. We must practice being so many of the following things and more in order to find our true inner peace:
- one who returns love for hatred, who is friendly and compassionate to all
- one who is beyond “I” and “mine”, unperturbed by pain and not elated by pleasure
- one who is neither a source of agitation in the world nor agitated by the world
- those who expect absolutely nothing
- those free of fear, envy, and other annoyances that the world brings
- those of great faith and deep devotion
The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali mirror all of the above teachings, telling us to focus on the “twin pillars” of yoga – practice (Abhyasa) and detachment (Vairagya) – to ultimately still our consciousness (YS I.12). These twin pillars and “the profound meditation on God” (YS I.23) remove the obstacles to knowing our true Self and culminate in a similar list to The Bhagavad Gita in Yoga Sutra I.33: “Through the cultivation of friendliness, compassion, joy, and indifference to pleasure and pain, virtue and vice respectively, the consciousness becomes favorably disposed, serene and benevolent.” (Light on the Yoga Sutras by BKS Iyengar)
Keep up your practice and keep up your reading! What a great time in the world to be striving toward a more peaceful and united end!
