Opening remarks
Changing in appearances, life continues to be a field of suffering. New hope awakens and then fades away. New systems of thought and practices and ways of living come and go while life continues to linger shackled by the chains of Ignorance tied to her feet.
New departures end up as the old
Yet every new departure seems the last,
Inspired evangel, theory’s ultimate peak,
Proclaiming a panacea for all Time’s ills
Or carrying thought in its ultimate zenith flight
And trumpeting supreme discovery;
Each brief idea, a structure perishable,
Publishes the immortality of its rule,
Its claim to be the perfect form of things,
Truth’s last epitome, Time’s golden best.
Old forms of life and its institutions perish giving way to new ones. Each new form brings with it the finality of hope. Yet this promise seems to fade away giving rise to yet new forms with a fresh lease of hope. Only for a brief hour in Time the idea and its force lasts though it claims to be the final and the perfect truth of things.
A fragment and not the whole
But nothing has been achieved of infinite worth:
A world made ever anew, never complete,
Piled always half-attempts on lost attempts
And saw a fragment as the eternal Whole.
These are but half attempts that capture the image or reflection of Truth from a partial angle. The whole is missed and hence the sense of incompleteness haunts us forever. A fragment is seen but mistaken for the whole. Therefore it must be broken down and fresh attempts made to recover the lost pages of the Divine script.
Unaccomplished force
In the aimless mounting total of things done
Existence seemed a vain necessity’s act,
A wrestle of eternal opposites
In a clasped antagonism’s close-locked embrace,
A play without denouement or idea,
A hunger march of lives without a goal,
Or, written on a bare blackboard of Space,
A futile and recurring sum of souls,
A hope that failed, a light that never shone,
The labour of an unaccomplished Force
Tied to its acts in a dim eternity.
Wandering in this plane it all seems a vain labour, an ever recurring act that leads us nowhere. It is as if a wrestle of eternal opposites was taking place in the playground of Space, or a hunger that is never fully appeased, or an ever incomprehensible writing that is being written by some cosmic scribe. It all seems a meaningless labour in unending Space and Time. A force of Nature works but without achieving anything of lasting value. It simply moves in endless rounds and cycles of nature.
There is no end
There is no end or none can yet be seen:
Although defeated, life must struggle on;
Always she sees a crown she cannot grasp;
Her eyes are fixed beyond her fallen state.
There is no finality, no end that can be seen. Thus life struggles on endlessly facing defeat after temporary and momentary victories. She is shown a crown that was never won which yet prompts and prods her to look beyond her fallen state.
Closing Remarks
This is the state of creation and the struggle of life so long as it has not found the Divine Truth that it contains within.
