Bhagavad Gita 11.51

dṛṣṭvedaṁ mānuṣaṁ rūpaṁ

tava saumyaṁ janārdana

idānīm asmi saṁvṛttaḥ

sa-cetāḥ prakṛtiṁ gataḥ

 

Seeing now your gentle form,

Divine and human, soft and warm;

My mind is steady, fear gone,

I return to myself—calm reborn.

 

My dear Lord, by first revealing the ghastly universal form to Arjuna and then revealing your gentle personal form, you lead him on a journey from anxiety to serenity—a journey that mirrors the evolution my own consciousness must undergo.

O inconceivable Lord, life presents me with a perplexing puzzle: to grow, I need to be both tough and tender. Life’s many tasks and troubles require a certain hardness—one that protects me from collapsing internally and from being treated as weak externally. While such toughness may be necessary for my body’s survival, my heart’s flourishing requires the opposite: I need to be tender enough to open myself to the possibility of love in this lethal world.

O merciful Lord, help me become tough enough to see—without blinking or flinching—the harsh reality of life, where everything enjoyable is inexorably destructible. Only when I thus come out of denial will I feel the firm and forceful need to seek a reality beyond this world. And only then can I, by your mercy, discover you as both the world’s overseer and my heart’s gardener, acting to nourish my heart even through the world’s seeming senselessness.

O infallible Lord, please grant me these three blessings: may I realize your presence beneath this world’s coldness; may I reciprocate with your purpose acting through the world’s chaos; and may the resulting experience of divine love make my heart tender—timelessly, tenaciously, transcendentally tender.

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11.51 When Arjuna thus saw Kṛṣṇa in His original form, he said: O Janārdana, seeing this humanlike form, so very beautiful, I am now composed in mind, and I am restored to my original nature.