Preparing for the Miraculous

78 eleven talksthe glorious bright side. This aspect of his being too SriKrishna reveals to Arjuna, “this Godhead who embracesthe worlds with his numberless arms and destroys with hismillion hands, whose eyes are suns and moons, has a face ofblazing fire and is ever burning up the whole universe withthe flame of his energy ... The companies of the gods enter[that Being] ... It has enormous burning eyes; it has mouthsthat gape to devour, terrible with many tusks of destruction;it has faces like the fires of Death and Time. The kings andthe captains and the heroes on both sides of the world-battleare hastening into its tusked and terrible jaws, and someare seen with crushed and bleeding heads caught betweenits teeth of power; the nations are rushing to destructionwith helpless speed into its mouths of flame ... With thoseburning mouths the Form of Dread is licking all the regionsaround; the whole world is full of his burning energies andbaked in the fierceness of his lustres ...”Arjuna, the protagonist in the world-battle at that timein human history, receives the full initiation. “This is thefigure of the supreme and universal Being,” writes Sri Aurobindo,“the Ancient of Days who is for ever, sanatanampurusham puranam, this is he who for ever creates ... he whokeeps the world always in existence, for he is the guardianof the eternal laws, but who is always too destroying inorder that he may new-create, who is Time, who is Death,who is Rudra the Dancer of the calm and awful dance, whois Kali with her garland of skulls trampling naked in battleand flecked with the blood of the slaughtered Titans, whois the cyclone and the fire and the earthquake and pain andfamine and revolution and ruin and the swallowing ocean.”This aspect of the Divine “is an aspect from which the mindin men willingly turns away and ostrich-like hides its headso that perchance, not seeing, it may not be seen by the Terrible.The weakness of the human heart wants only fair and comfortingtruths or in their absence pleasant fables; it will not have