How can I see Krishna?

A dialogue in Vrindavan

During a visit to the holy town of Vrindavan, as I was wandering through one of the narrow alleys that are found everywhere, I entered a musical instruments store. The owner of the store, who I found out later is also a music teacher, was talking to me about his store, music classes, plans for future expansion etc. But soon enough, as it always happens in Vrindavan, the topic turned to Krishna. And he surprised me by suddenly asking very earnestly, “Please tell me one thing. I understand that Krishna is Supreme and He is our only true friend. But I have only one question. Why can’t I see Him? If I call a friend, I can see him. Why not with Krishna?!”. Such is the sublime beauty of Vrindavan that it’s not just saints and renunciates, but even ordinary residents — whether it be store owners, roadside vendors or housewives — have only Krishna on top of their mind.

I replied to some surprise on his part now, that in reality, there is not a moment we don’t see Krishna. How so, he quizzically looked. I then asked him, do you ever think about what happens to the food after we eat? How does it get assimilated so smoothly in the body? Do we have any control over the process by which the food nourishes the body? He responded, “Of course that’s true. It all happens automatically”. And I responded that what we consider to be an automatic process is in reality the presence of Krishna alone, as declared by Himself in the Gita:

ahaṁ vaiśhvānaro bhūtvā prāṇināṁ deham āśhritaḥ
prāṇāpāna-samāyuktaḥ pachāmy annaṁ chatur-vidham

Becoming the fire of digestion in the body of living entities, and along with the incoming and outgoing breaths, I digest the four kinds of foods.

So I told him that if we take Krishna to be Supreme and as our true friend, we have to take his word to be Supreme too. And here He himself declares that He is ever present within our own bodies. So we have to ‘see’ that He alone is the digestive fire (vaiśhvānara) or the breath (prāṇa) or every other biological process in the body and it all works perfectly only through His Intelligence.

[As a side note, normally we refer to the body as I but what we take as body is simply an aggregation of food. It is food alone that through assimilation makes a baby grow bigger till adulthood and then sustains the body through adulthood. So the body is simply food assimilated. And that very process of assimilation is His Intelligence, as declared by Krishna in the verse above. Also food comes from food, which is to say, the bodies of other living entities. Vegetables, fruits, dairy etc are all produced through food assimilated by their own biological processes in plants, cows etc. Therefore food and body are interchangeable. Today’s body becomes tomorrow’s food and today’s food becomes tomorrow’s body. That this entire process of food assimilation is the Divine Intelligence alone, is the import of the Vedic declaration “annam brahman” — Food is God.]

I continued with him, furthermore Krishna declares that not just inside the body, but everything and everyone outside is also an expression of Himself:

yo māṁ paśhyati sarvatra sarvaṁ cha mayi paśhyati
tasyāhaṁ na praṇaśhyāmi sa cha me na praṇaśhyati

For he who sees Me everywhere and sees everything in Me, I am never lost to him, nor is he ever lost to Me.

And I concluded by saying that Krishna has made it really easy to see Him by simply seeing the truth that within and without, everything and everyone is He alone!

He was happy to hear this but being a resident of Vrindavan, he said, “I can see that all this is true. He is indeed everywhere. But I want to see the beautiful form of Him playing the flute!”.

Of course, our body is the flute and He plays His music through this flute every moment. In any case, I asked him that if we truly consider Krishna to be Supreme, then how can we command that He reveal Himself only in that particular form? Especially when He has Himself declared that He is present as all the infinite forms around us each moment. That being said, if we truly yearn for the vision of the enchanting blue-hued boy playing his flute in the forests of Vrindavan, maybe He will bestow that vision too if He deems it appropriate.

So we agreed that we ought to just leave it to Him whether to reveal any particular form and always strive to simply see Him through all the forms around us each moment!

With that, we bid each other goodbye with a smile and he did so in the endearing way that is unique to Vrindavan: ‘Radhe, Radhe!’