Swami Gober's Bhagavad Gita Commentary: Introductory Essay - 30

Black Hole God

As moths hurriedly rush into a blazing fire for (their own) destruction, so also these creatures hurriedly rush into Thy mouths for (their own) destruction.

Thou lickest up, devouring all the worlds on every side with Thy flaming mouths. Thy fierce rays, filling the whole world with radiance, are burning, O Vishnu!

Bhagavad Gita, chap 11, ver 29,30

Generally, the word most commonly associated with the word ‘God’ is ‘creation’, as in God and his Creation. We think of God as this infinite creative force of the universe. In the Bhagavad Gita, it is just the other way round. This God is the God of destruction. He is the mighty all-devouring destructive force of the world, and he seems to be constantly hungry like a devil. And like the Devil himself, he seems to be especially fond of feasting upon human souls!

We would normally think of God as the eternal source of all beauty, goodness, harmony and light of the world we see around us. ‘Light’ again is a word that is closely associated with God. For example, in the Old Testament, God creates light at the very beginning of his Creation. In the Bhagavad Gita too, there is light all around the God. However, this is a light not associated with life and creation, but with death and destruction. As is the case with the dazzling radiance of a nuclear explosion! No wonder, the father of the atom bomb thought of the Bhagavad Gita verses when he first witnessed the bomb exploding. One would have expected that he would think of hell-fire, but no, he thought of the God of the Bhagavad Gita! Figures!

If the splendour of a thousand suns were to blaze out at once (simultaneously) in the sky, that would be the splendour of that mighty Being (great soul).

chap 11, ver 12

That is the main verse that reportedly passed through Robert Oppenheimer’s mind while he stood and gazed upon the world’s first atomic explosion. The brilliance of thousand suns could be an apt metaphor for a nuclear explosion, but to describe the glory of the Supreme Being, it would fall pathetically short. More than a billion nuclear bombs worth of explosions are going on inside the sun every second! Still, a thousand suns is the paltriest of phenomena, going by the standards of today’s astronomy. Arjuna could have at least said, a million suns or a billion suns — hundred crore suns — for a slightly more appropriate comparison. The Mahabharata normally uses numbers extremely liberally, but we see a strange niggardliness in some of the key verses of the Gita, in relation to God. For that matter, I could have easily gone for a trillion suns! Though that too is not really much, hardly a couple of galaxies put together.

To compare the light of any number of suns put together with the light of the Supreme Being is an utterly meaningless endeavor. Perhaps the indefinite adjective ‘countless’ would be more fitting. So picture these thousand or ten thousand or countless suns. It is not a static picture. Imagine hordes of these suns being ripped apart and sucked into a super massive black hole (SMB), as one generally found at the centre of a galaxy. There is intense luminosity all around, brilliantly-lit colossally violent activity, spread across light years. But at the center is of it all is the heart of darkness, the great dark abyss. The God of the Bhagavad Gita is like that fathomless nothingness; not in any mystical, philosophical sense, just in a sense to inspire raw horror, infinite horror!

Arjuna is naturally terrified senseless upon seeing the real form of his God, as he does here in the chapter 11 of the Bhagavad Gita.

The space between the earth and the heaven and all the quarters are filled by Thee alone; having seen this, Thy wonderful and terrible form, the three worlds are trembling with fear, O great-souled Being!

ver 20

Just visualize a huge black hole ominously drifting towards our solar system, already visible as a massive object in our skies. Time to tremble and remember God! But unfortunately, the three worlds did not get to see this terrible vision of God, therefore they couldn’t have trembled, as Arjuna says. He alone saw it because he was provided with the special vision needed for it, nonetheless he must have been trembling enough for all the three worlds put together. Imagine this warrior who never knew anything like fear his whole life, even when he was in the most frightful of situations. On one occasion he was fighting singlehandedly 30 million demons who were attacking him from all sides (what I was saying about the Mahabharata being liberal with numbers)! He handled the situation with the greatest aplomb and emerged a victor. He never experienced the minutest quiver of fear in his long career as the supreme warrior constantly facing fearsome enemies. But now, seeing the form of God, he is all of a sudden shaking like the earthquake at the end of the world, absolutely scared out of his wits. This vision he beheld in his mind’s eye is something for which he was not prepared at all.

Having beheld Thy immeasurable form with many mouths and eyes, O mighty-armed, with many arms, thighs and feet, with many stomachs, and fearful with many teeth, the worlds are terrified and so am I!

ver 23

Just a super massive black hole personified this Black Hole God is! Notice that the stomach and the teeth seem to be the more prominent parts, with the mouths, arms, eyes simply being in the service of the stomach! Grind and chomp and swallow, grind and chomp and swallow! But again Arjuna alone is affected by this terrifying cosmic spectacle, the world is simply going about its business as usual, though Arjuna seems to think the worlds are terrified along with himself. Apparently, he is barely cognizant of his circumstances. He is in a deep delirious state actually. Arjuna is so delirious that the thought never occurs to him that this could all be just an illusion, a hallucination. Perhaps he could have simply shaken it off, if he wanted, simply by intending it and moving about. When you alone are seeing something and the others around you are not, and also you are seeing very weird sorts of things, that is the time you should get the suspicion that this could all be just a hallucination. However, it is a catch-22 situation of course! If you had that much awareness to realize that this could all be just a hallucination, you wouldn’t be hallucinating in the first place. So we can’t blame Arjuna. He is simply stuck in a bad, bad dream, a horrendous nightmare. Alas, this greatest of warriors is now crouching and cowering in abject terror!

On seeing Thee (the Cosmic Form) touching the sky, shining in many colours, with mouths wide open, with large, fiery eyes, I am terrified at heart and find neither courage nor peace, O Vishnu!

Having seen Thy mouths, fearful with teeth, blazing like the fires of cosmic dissolution, I know not the four quarters, nor do I find peace. Have mercy, O Lord of the gods! O abode of the universe!

ver 24, 25

He is apparently going through a pure vision of hell! And he is thinking he is seeing God, to boot! If God is this hell, then where is any hope? Still, it could be a little comforting that as of now he is only viewing various kinds of beings and objects sucked helplessly into the countless mouths of God, standing aside. For how long, though? He too could get caught up in the fearful influx at any time.

All the sons of Dhritarashtra with the hosts of kings of the earth, Bhishma, Drona and Karna, with the chief among all our warriors, they hurriedly enter into Thy mouths with terrible teeth and fearful to behold. Some are found sticking in the gaps between the teeth, with their heads crushed to powder. Verily, just as many torrents of rivers flow towards the ocean, even so these heroes of the world of men enter Thy flaming mouths.

ver 26-28

It could be Arjuna’s turn any time! The terrifying thought must have been there all the time at the back of Arjuna’s mind, even as his being is being churned in the throes of a deathly delirium! These dangerous hallucinations could have simply ended up by stopping the heartbeat of the brave warrior, and killing him. That would have been a pity!

But it is Arjuna himself who brought this plight upon himself, out of totally unnecessary curiosity. How could he have known, though! At the outset he simply asks Krishna, perhaps thinking it would give him a nice break from Krishna’s monotonous chatter about this yoga and that yoga:

…I wish to see Thy Divine Form! If Thou, O Lord, thinkest it possible for me to see it, do Thou, then, O Lord of the Yogis, show me Thy imperishable Self!

ver 3,4

But is this the divine form or demoniac form that he gets to see? Arjuna, through sheer happenstance, evokes the ‘imperishable self’ of the Lord. He could have called for the glorious self or the awe-inspiring self or something like that, but just prompted by ill-begotten luck, he utters the word ‘imperishable self’. The Lord took it seriously, He must have thought for a moment, how to give the impression of being imperishable. ‘Glorious’, we can imagine, ‘awe-inspiring’ we can imagine, but ‘imperishable’ how? Because no matter how great and glorious something is, we can still imagine its destruction. Only death itself is indestructible, imperishable. That is the moment when Krishna must have struck upon this concept of Black Hole God, all-devouring, with death and destruction dancing the dance of doom all around, and himself causing it, himself absorbing it.

The Lord of the Yogis promptly bestows upon Arjuna the divine vision to behold his cosmic form, using his Yogic powers. But if he could grant the divine vision, he could surely induce all the hallucinations to go along with it. So that explains everything. And Arjuna gets trapped in this infernal vision of the Black Hole God, which nearly kills his very soul. He survives. But this man would never rebel again. Krishna’s purpose is served. All his argumentation with Arjuna perhaps did not seem to be doing much work, so Krishna ingeniously used the opportunity of displaying his cosmic form to utterly quash Arjuna’s being. Emerging from the experience, Arjuna wouldn’t be able to think even for a long time to come.

Black holes are dead stars. Though they are technically dead, they could be the most violent, destructive forces of the universe. Black holes are also the most imperishable objects in the universe. After a hundred billion years from now, when all the galaxies, stars and planets would have disintegrated, all matter annihilated, black holes would still be thriving, and they would reign supreme then, even though they would have nothing to feed upon. Our universe would have become a black hole universe. But it could be a black hole universe right now, albeit in quite a different sense.

The thing is, mathematically speaking, black holes are places where all laws of physics break down, where the chain of cause and effect itself is severed, where the fabric of space and time is crushed into a singularity. In a purely scientific sense, just about anything can happen inside a black hole! There is no law, no logic to things anymore. Black holes are called space-time singularities. And our universe itself took birth from a singularity event called Big Bang. Some scientists try to see a connection here and speculate that this whole universe we have around us could be a vast black hole. We could be actually living and moving inside a black hole, which perhaps formed in a regular fashion upon the death of a star in the parent universe. Of course this universe of ours is full of order and harmony, so it may be difficult for us to believe that we could be living inside a black hole, where theoretically everything just goes berserk. Still, our universe is a fantastically weird place, and black holes are fantastically weird places too. Though scientists tend to conceive of our universe in a framework of order, elegance and complexity, when we shift the focus and look at the world of human affairs, we see the dance of pure chaos. There seems to be no logic or reason to things anymore. It seems like anything at all could happen in this realm, and all sorts of surreal and bizarre things do happen too.

To me, the fact that a book like the Bhagavad Gita, with its Black Hole God and black hole metaphysics, could become the holiest scripture of an entire religion and a nation for thousands of years, is proof enough that we are living inside a black hole. An awfully awfully weird black hole universe!