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Transformation
My
breath runs in a subtle rhythmic stream;
It fills my members with a might divine:
I have drunk the Infinite like a giant’s wine.
Time
is my drama or my pageant dream.
Now
are my illumined cells joy’s flaming scheme
And changed my thrilled and branching nerves to fine
Channels of rapture opal and Hyaline
For
the influx of the Unknown and the Supreme.
I
am no more a vassal of the flesh,
A slave to Nature and her leaden rule;
I
am caught no more in the senses’ narrow mesh.
My
soul unhorizoned widens to measureless sight,
My body is God’s happy living tool,
My
spirit a vast sun of deathless light.
Nirvana
All
is abolished but the mute Alone.
The mind from thought released, the heart from grief
Grow inexistent now beyond belief;
There
is no I, no Nature, known-unknown.
The
city, a shadow picture without tone,
Floats, quivers unreal; forms without relief
Flow, a cinema’s vacant shapes; like a reef
Foundering
in shoreless gulfs the world is done.
Only
the illimitable Permanent
Is here. A Peace stupendous, featureless, still,
Replaces all, - what once was I, in It
A
silent unnamed emptiness content
Either .to fade in the Unknowable
Or thrill with the luminous seas of the Infinite.
Page-161
The
Other Earths
An
irised multitude of hills and seas,
And glint of brooks in the green wilderness,
And
trackless stars, and miracled symphonies
Of hues that float in ethers shadowless,
A
dance of fire-flies in the fretted gloom,
In a pale midnight the moon’s silver flare,
Fire-importunities
of scarlet bloom
And bright suddenness of wings in a golden air,
Strange
bird and animal forms like memories cast
On the rapt silence of unearthly woods,
Calm
faces of the gods on backgrounds vast
Bringing the marvel of the infinitudes,
Through
glimmering veils of wonder and delight
World
after world bursts on the awakened sight.
Contrasts
What
opposites are here! A trivial life
Specks the huge dream of Death called Matter; intense
In its struggle of weakness towards omnipotence,
A
thinking mind starts from the unthinking strife
In
the order of the electric elements.
Immortal life breathed in that monstrous death,
A mystery of Knowledge wore as sheath
Matter’s
mute nescience. Its enveloped sense
Or
dumb somnambulist will obscurely reigns.
Driving the atoms in their cosmic course
Whose huge unhearing movement serves perforce
The
works of a strange blind omniscience.
The
world’s deep contrasts are but figures spun
Draping
the unanimity of the One.
Page-162
A
trifling unit in a boundless plan
Amidst the enormous insignificance
Of the unpeopled cosmos’ fire-whirl dance,
Earth,
as by accident, engendered man:
A
creature of his own grey ignorance,
A mind half-shadow and half-gleam, a breath.
That wrestles, captive in a world of death,
To
live some lame brief years. Yet his advance,
Attempt
of a divinity within,
A consciousness in the inconscient Night,
To realise its own supernal Light
Confronts
the ruthless forces of the Unseen.
Aspiring
to godhead from insensible clay
He
travels slow-footed towards the eternal day.
The
dumb Inconscient drew life’s stumbling maze;
A night of all things, packed and infinite,
It
made our consciousness a torch that plays
Between the abyss1 and a
supernal Light;
It
framed2 our mind a lens
of segment sight,
Piecing out inch by inch the world’s huge mass,
And
reason a small hard theodolite
Measuring unreally the measureless ways.
Yet
is the dark Inconscient whence come all,
The self-same Power that shines on high unwon;
Our
night shall be a sky purpureal,
The torch transmute to a vast godhead’s sun.
Man is a narrow bridge, a call that grows,
His
soul the dim bud of God’s flaming rose.
1
its night 2
made
Page-163
Out
of a still Immensity all came!
These million universes were to it
The
Poor light-bubbles of a trivial game,
A fragile glimmer in the Infinite.
It
could not find its soul in all that vast:
It drew itself into, a little speck
Infinitesimal,
ignobly cast,
Out of earth’s mud
and slime strangely awake, -
A
tiny plasm on a little globe
In the small, system of a dwarflike sun,
A
little life wearing the flesh for robe,
A little mind winged through wide space to run!
It
lived, it knew, it saw its self sublime,
Deathless,
outmeasuring Space, outlasting Time.
All
is not finished in the Unseen’s decree!
A mind beyond our mind demands our ken;
A
life of unimagined harmony
Awaits, concealed, the grasp of unborn men.
The
crude beginnings of the lifeless earth
And mindless stirrings of the plant and tree
Prepared
our thought; thought for a godlike birth
Broadens the mould of our mortality.
A
might no human will or force could gain,
A knowledge seated in eternity,
A
joy1
beyond our struggle and our pain
Is this earth-hampered creature’s destiny.
O
Thou who climbedst to mind from the dull stone,
Turn
to the mirac1ed summits yet unwon.
1 bliss
Page-164
All
are deceived, do what the One Power dictates,
Yet each thinks his own will his nature moves;
The
hater knows not ’tis himself he hates,
The lover knows not 'tis himself he 1oves.
In
all is one being many bodies bear,
There Krishna flutes upon the forest mood,
There
Shiva sits ash-smeared, with matted hair.
But Shiva and Krishna are the single God.
In
us too Krishna seeks for love and joy,
In us too Shiva struggles with the world’s grief.
One
Self in all of us endures annoy,
Cries in his pain and asks his fate’s relief.
My
rival’s downfall is my own disgrace,
I
look on my enemy and see Krishna’s face.
Our
godhead calls us in unrealised things.
Asleep in the wide fields of destiny,
A
world guarded by Silence’ rustling wings
Sheltered their fine impossibility.
But
part, but quiver the cerulean gates,
Close splendours look into our dreaming eyes,
We
bear proud deities and magnificent fates;
Faces and hands come near from Paradise.
What
shone thus far above is here in us;
Bliss unattained our future’s birthright is;
Beauty
of our dim soul is amorous;
We are the heirs of infinite widenesses.
The
impossible is the hint of what shall be,
Mortal
the door to immortality.
Page-165
Only
by electric hordes your1 world is run?
But they are motes and spark-whirls of a Light,
A
Fire of which your nebula and your sun
Are glints and flame-drops scattered eremite.
Veiled2 by the
unseen Light act other Powers,
An Air of endless movement unbegun
Expanding
and contracting in Time-hours,
And the intangible ether of the One.
These
surface findings -
screen-phenomenon –3
Are Nature’s offered reasons but behind
Her
occult mysteries lurk safe unknown
To the crude handling of the empiric Mind.
All
yet4 discovered are
but mire and trace
Of
the eternal Energy in her race.
1
the 2
And veiled 3
These things, a front, a screen-phenomenon 4 Your
truths
Page-166
How
shall ascending nature near her goal? 1
Not through man’s stumbling tardy intellect
Patient all forms and powers 2
to dissect
But
by the surer vision of his soul.
An
algebra of mind, a scheme of sense,
A symbol language without depth or wings,
A power to handle deftly outward things
Are
our scant earnings3
of intelligence.
The
Truth 4 is greater and asks5 deeper ways.
A sense that gathers all in its own being,6
A close and luminous touch,7
an intimate seeing,
A
Thought flung free from the words' daedal maze,8
A
tranquil heart in sympathy with all,
A
will one-pointed, wide, imperial.
1 How
shall earth’s evolution find its goal? 2
Godheads
3 Is
our poor booty
4 Our
Spirit / The Soul. 5
has
6
into
our being, 7 A
luminous touch direct,
8 A Thought that
is a god’s all-seeing gaze,
Page-167
Discoveries of Science III
Our
science is an abstract cold and, brief
That cuts in formulas the living whole.
It has a brain and head but not a soul:
It
sees all things in outward carved relief.
But
how without its depths can the world be known?
The visible has its roots in the unseen
And each invisible hides what it can mean
In
a yet deeper invisible, unshown.
The
objects that you probe are not their form.
Each is a mass of forces thrown in shape.
The forces caught, their inner-lines escape
In
a fathomless consciousness beyond mind’s norm.
Probe it and you shall meet a Being1
still
Infinite, nameless, mute, unknowable.
1
abysses
Page-168
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