Verse 11.8
But you cannot see Me with your present eyes. Therefore I give to you divine eyes by which you can behold My mystic opulence.
By Chapter 11 of Bhagavad-gītā Kṛṣṇa and Arjuna have deepened their initial friendship to a relationship of devotional intimacy. Arjuna is moved in a life-changing way by what Kṛṣṇa has told him. Now, the new devotee asks of God the privilege to see his ‘universal form’, his viśvarup.
Kṛṣṇa agrees, but warns Arjuna that he will not be able to see his universal form with his present, material eyes. Rather he will need to have divine, spiritual eyes (divya cakṣuṣā).
In effect, it is not for Kṛṣṇa to show Arjuna his form. Arjuna must simply open his spiritual eyes and see it. He doesn’t need to take Arjuna to some secret place where his universal form can be seen. Nor does he need to conjure up the form in order to make it visible. Kṛṣṇa simply needs to give Arjuna the ability to see what is already directly in front of him, but which has up until now been invisible to him.
Kṛṣṇa doesn’t give Arjuna the universal form, he helps him to see what is already there. This is the nature of realisation.
Realisation is not a divine message that is mercifully delivered from afar. It is the birth of an understanding about what the world actually is, what reality actually is: real-isation. Realisation means having the ability to see reality, to have the power to see, the will to see, the desire to see, the energy to see, to see with spiritual eyes.
What does it mean to see with spiritual eyes ?
At the simplest level, seeing with spiritual eyes means having spiritual consciousness, understanding that we are spiritual beings.
By understanding ourselves as spiritual beings we then automatically understand others as spiritual beings. When we see the world from a consciousness of our souls, we see others beings as also soulful.
Our reality is one of soul-relations, of relations between souls. We experience ourselves as souls and we experience others as souls. By seeing ourselves as souls, and in a world of souls, we quickly come to see that the force that binds us, the energy that makes all things, lies in the relation between our souls.
On its most basic level, this is the energy of love. It is not the Hollywood-style love, of course, not surface love, linked to the pursuit of the material pleasures. This love is the realisation that what links us to others, to any others, is a double desire : to give happiness and to receive happiness, to love and to be loved. This is the hidden energy of human life, the energy that drives us to seek happiness and to wish to give it.
This energy is called hladini-śakti (pleasure giving potency). It is the energy of Rādhārānī that lives in us. If Kṛṣṇa’s creation is a miraculous reservoir of spiritual pleasure, then Rādhārānī’s hladini-śakti is what transforms this spiritual beauty into an endless experience of relation with others, of giving and receiving love.
To see with the soul is to find oneself fixed between the spiritual beauty of the world and the loving spiritual pleasure it produces in us and others. If Kṛṣṇa created the world, it is Rādhārānī who makes it pleasurable, who makes it an experience we are driven to share, a flow of spiritual sensations that only have meaning when they are shared.
If Kṛṣṇa is love, then Rādhārānī teaches us to be spiritual lovers.