Shrimad Bhagavad Gita: The Cosmic Form (Chapter 11)

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To enable Arjuna to have a direct experience of the Divine, the Lord bestows upon him a new intuitive power of insight. Therefore, the Lord reveals to him His cosmic form in which Arjuna finds, in an instant, all that exists-past, present and future-spread out, as it were, as part and parcel of an all-comprehending Whole, a divine Person whose mortifying majesty and stunning splendourare too much for him to bear. The Lord reveals that all beings are helplessly drawn and absorbed into His being by the stringent Time, identified with the Lord Himself.

There is only divine Will which encompasses the will of all beings who are mere instruments serving His biddings and accomplishing His plans. Arjuna finds both the armies arrayed in battle formations, along with their warriors and chiefs, have all been already destroyed by the Lord's will, he finding himself just an instrument of the Lord surrenders to Him in dauntless devotion.

In the general scheme of development of the theme, Lord Krsna had already explained His immanence in all the objects of the world (vibhuti). This expansion of Himself in all objects and beings, as a perceptible divine presence, is exhaustively explained in the previous chapter entitled Vibhuti-yoga, the divine glories.

Studying this chapter, keeping in view this scheme of development in the Gita, we detect here that a perfectly modern and scientific method of investigation is employed. An intellectual enquiry first of all seeks to gather enough data to support a theory, and thereafter, it demands an experimental demonstration of the same, without which, the theory cannot be established. If in the previous chapter, therefore, the Gita has supplied us with enough data to prove the thesis that the Self is the substratum for the multiple worlds, in this chapter the attempt is to supply Arjuna with a practical demonstration that everything does exist only in the Self.