After composing some surging poetry, Vyasa faithfully comes back to the line of thought he was developing earlier. Hosts of men and things of the world reach the Mouth to perish therein. The hungry Mouth is never tired, for, the principle of destruction has a never-ending appetite, and after “SWALLOWING ALL THE WORLD ALL AROUND, YOU ARE LICKING YOUR LIPS,” exclaims Arjuna.
In fact, the stanza clearly brings forth the implication underlying the concept of the Trinity. The Creator, the Sustainer, and the Destroyer are three distinct entities in concept, but in their actual workings, they constitute a simultaneous process. Creation is continued in a chain of destruction, and the process of destruction is not a total annihilation but only a change from one form to another thereby ending in a new Creation. “Constructive destruction” is the secret philosophy behind the continuity of existence observed everywhere.
In a cinema show, the various poses on the film are made to run on in front of the arc-light, and each picture that has passed away from the arc-light may be considered as dead, and those reaching the arc-light as those that are born. The continuity in these two series of happenings of births and deaths, or constructions and destructions, gives us the hallucination of a logical sequence in the theme revealed on the screen. Conditioned by ‘place and time,’ things and beings, happenings and circumstances, come and go in the plane of our experiences and their continuity is what we experience as “existence.”The above idea can be repeated in the language of our traditional belief in the Trinity. Brahmaji, the Creator, cannot create unless Shiva, the Destroyer, is functioning simultaneously on the same anvil. And Vishnu, the Sustainer, will never come to play unless the Creator and the Destroyer work feverishly and consistently. The whole world of multiplicity is thus an expression of Vishnu, the Sustainer, which is nothing other than the product of the game played by both the Creator and the Destroyer!
When, with such depth of understanding, Arjuna looks at the mighty resplendence of the Totality-Form, he feels almost blindfolded by “THE FIERY RADIANCE OF ITS FIERCE RAYS.”YOU ARE FEARSOME; THEREFORE:
