There is a kind of bigness that still leaves room around it. A mountain is huge, but the sky stretches beyond it. The sea is vast, but the shore holds its edge. Arjuna had always known bigness like that — bigness with something outside it.

But the form before him was not big like that.

He looked at the wide blue space that arched between the earth beneath his feet and the heavens above his head, the great open expanse where clouds drifted and birds flew and the wind moved freely. It was the emptiest, roomiest space he knew.

It was not empty now. The form filled it. Every inch of the gulf between sky and ground was the Lord's own body, with no gap left anywhere, the way water fills a jar right up to the brim with nothing but water inside.

Then Arjuna turned to look in another direction — east, where the sun rose. The form was there. He turned west, north, south. The form was there too, in every direction at once. He looked up and down and to every side his eyes could reach, and everywhere, in every quarter of space, there was only this one immense being. There was no "outside" to step into. There was nowhere the Lord was not.

"You alone," Arjuna whispered, "fill the space between heaven and earth, and all the directions besides. By Yourself. Completely."

And then he became aware of something he could feel in his very bones: everything was trembling.

Not just himself. The earth seemed to shiver. The heavens seemed to quake. The whole universe — the world below, the world of men, the world above — all three worlds shuddered at the sight of this wondrous, fierce, overwhelming form, the way the whole forest shakes when a great storm rolls through.

"Seeing this awesome form of Yours, O Great Soul," Arjuna said, his own voice unsteady, "the three worlds are shaken to their depths." And he, standing in his small chariot in the middle of it all, was shaking with them.