Arjuna chose his words carefully, the way you do when you ask someone you love for something very big.

"Everything is exactly as you say it is," he began. "Supreme Lord, I do not doubt you. When you tell me you are the source of all beings, the spring from which everything flows and the sea into which everything returns, I believe you. When you tell me your glory has no end, I believe that too. Not one word of yours seems false to me."

Krishna waited, the reins resting loose in his hands.

"But," Arjuna said, and then stopped, because the next part was hard to say. It felt like too much to ask. Yet his whole heart was leaning toward it.

"O Highest Person — I want to *see* it. Not just hear about your divine form. I want to behold it. With these eyes. The true, lordly shape that lies behind the friend who sits beside me holding my horses."

It was a strange thing to ask of someone you have known your whole life. Arjuna had eaten with Krishna, joked with him, ridden into a hundred adventures at his side. He thought he knew that face better than any face in the world. But the words of the last hours had shown him that this familiar friend was also something immense — the Supreme Lord himself, wearing the disguise of a charioteer.

"I have heard about a treasure all my life," Arjuna said. "Now I am standing in front of the chest. Will you open it? Will you let me look?"

He was not demanding. He was asking, the way a child asks a parent to lift them up so they can see over a wall too tall to climb. He believed there was something glorious on the other side. He simply wanted to be shown.

Krishna looked at his friend with the lotus eyes that had watched him grow from a boy into a warrior. He was deciding, perhaps, whether Arjuna was ready — whether a human heart could bear to look at the thing it longed for.