There was a lake at the foot of the Vindhya mountains that the villagers called Shantisagar — the Ocean of Peace. It was not an ocean, of course. It was a small, round lake, no wider than a cricket pitch, fed by underground springs and shaded on three sides by ancient banyan trees whose roots hung down into the water like the fingers of sleeping giants.

For most of the day, the wind blew across the lake's surface, and the water was restless — wrinkled, choppy, flashing with fragments of reflected sky and cloud and leaf. If you stood on the bank and looked down, you saw only a churning mosaic of broken light. You could not see the bottom. You could not even see your own face.

But every evening, as the sun dropped behind the Vindhyas and the air went still, something extraordinary happened. The wind died. Not gradually — it simply stopped, as though someone had closed a door. And the lake, which had been trembling and twitching all day, went absolutely flat.

In that stillness, the water became a mirror — not a bathroom mirror with its streaks and smudges, but a perfect mirror, so clear that the reflected sky was indistinguishable from the real one. Birds flying overhead appeared to be flying below, in a second sky beneath the water's skin. The banyan roots, the stones on the bottom, the slow gliding of a silver fish — everything became visible, all the way down.

The old grandmother who lived near the lake — people called her Shanti-ma, though no one knew if that was her real name — would sit on the bank every evening at this hour. When curious visitors asked what she was looking at, she always said the same thing: "I am watching the lake remember what it really is."

Krishna is describing this moment. When the mind becomes serene — truly serene, not just distracted from its agitation but genuinely settled — something happens that cannot happen any other way. The sorrows do not leave because someone pushed them out. They dissolve the way turbulence dissolves from water when the wind stops. They were never solid things. They were disturbances, patterns of movement, and when the movement ceases, they simply are not there anymore.

And in that clarity, the intellect becomes steady. Not clever — steady. Cleverness is a restless kind of knowing, always reaching for the next thought. Steadiness is knowing that settles into itself like water settling into a lake, clear and deep and reflecting everything without holding anything.

Arjuna listened, and for a moment the battlefield and the armies and the terrible decision before him seemed very far away, like a landscape seen through the wrong end of a telescope. There was just this: a still lake. A clear sky. The feeling that if he could only be still long enough, he might see all the way to the bottom of everything.