There is a moment, near the edge of a very great wonder, when wonder tips over into something harder to carry. Arjuna had reached that moment.

The mouths of the cosmic form were everywhere now, and they were not gentle. Their fangs gleamed. Their light was not the soft gold of a lamp but the white-hot blaze of kālānala — the fire of the end of time, the fire that the old stories said would one day fold the whole world back into itself. To look at it was to look at every ending all at once.

Arjuna tried to steady himself the way a warrior is taught. Find your bearings, his teachers had always said. Know where north is, where the sun sits, where your own chariot stands. A soldier who loses his directions is lost indeed.

But there were no directions anymore. The form filled north and south, above and below, behind him and before him, all the same blazing everywhere. He turned and turned and found no edge, no door, no quiet corner to rest his eyes. "Diśo na jāne," he said — I do not know the directions. "Na labhe ca śarma" — and I find no comfort.

A lesser person might have looked away, or shut his eyes, or simply broken. Arjuna did something better. He remembered who it was he was looking at.

This blazing, fanged, terrible immensity was not a monster that had come to swallow him. It was Krishna — his friend, his charioteer, the one who had laughed with him and counselled him only that morning. The same one. And so, instead of running, Arjuna folded his hands and asked for the one thing the vast can always give the small.

"Prasīda," he said. Be gracious. Be kind to me. "O Lord of all the gods, O home of all the worlds." When you cannot make yourself bigger, you can still ask the great one to be gentle. That is not giving up. That is trust.