Opening Remarks
Creation seemed, from this state a vast ocean rolling aimlessly below an indifferent sky.
Coasts of Ignorance
A rumour and a movement and a call,
A foaming mass, a cry innumerable
Rolled ever upon the ocean surge of Life
Along the coasts of mortal Ignorance.
Creation teeming with all kinds of life seemed from this vantage point nothing but a foaming mass and innumerable cry and the rumour of winds upon an ocean flanked by coasts of Ignorance.
Unstable and enormous breast
On its unstable and enormous breast
Beings and forces, forms, ideas like waves
Jostled for figure and supremacy,
And rose and sank and rose again in Time;
And at the bottom of the sleepless stir,
A Nothingness parent of the struggling worlds,
A huge creator Death, a mystic Void,
For ever sustaining the irrational cry,
For ever excluding the supernal Word,
Motionless, refusing question and response,
Reposed beneath the voices and the march
The dim Inconscient’s dumb incertitude.
As waves rise and fall so too in this ocean various forms, forces, beings, ideas rose and fell as if from a bed of ‘Nothingness’. Death seemed to create this world out of a mystic void. It sustained a world without purpose or cause. The fiat or breath of the Lord, the Word of Creation that sanctioned the game of life was not known here. A vast incertitude was the end where questions and answers both seemed as meaningless.
Two firmaments
Two firmaments of darkness and of light
Opposed their limits to the spirit’s walk;
It moved veiled in from Self’s infinity
In a world of beings and momentary events
Where all must die to live and live to die.
The Unity of Creation was lost and split into two halves. A realm of darkness and another of light opposed each other. All was a transient play of transient things where all must die and be reborn and die again.
Immortal by renewed mortality
Immortal by renewed mortality,
It wandered in the spiral of its acts
Or ran around the cycles of its thought,
Yet was no more than its original self
And knew no more than when it first began.
All moved in endless circles and spirals returning back to the same point giving an impression of immortality. There was no sense of progress felt in this meaningless cycle of birth and death.
Extinction the sole escape
To be was a prison, extinction the escape.
Creation was a prison and the only solution was to somehow escape from it through extinction, – extinction from the cycles of birth and death.
Closing Remarks
An irreconcilable opposition is thus experienced between world and God, creation and the Creator. The only way to ‘solve’ the cosmic riddle was to escape from it.
