The Lord of the Waking State
THE MATERIAL universe is the visible temple of the Lord with the stars as the garland woven around his unseen body. The sun and the moon are his eyes and ear rings, the earth is his feet. Let us worship him daily in this wonderful temple of the unseen Beloved and may all our adoration go to him who is everywhere and in all things.
All grace and glory and all divinity
Were here collected in a single form;
All worshipped eyes looked through his from one face;
He bore all godheads in his grandiose limbs.
An oceanic spirit dwelt within;
Intolerant and invincible in joy
A flood of freedom and transcendent bliss
Into immortal lines of beauty rose.
In him the fourfold Being bore its crown
That wears the mystery of a nameless Name,
The universe writing its tremendous sense
In the inexhaustible meaning of a word.
In him the architect of the visible world,
At once the art and artist of his works,
Spirit and seer and thinker of things seen,
Virat, who lights his camp-fires in the suns
And the star-entangled ether is his hold,
Expressed himself with Matter for his speech:
Objects are his letters, forces are his words,
Events are the crowded history of his life,
And sea and land are the pages for his tale.
Matter is his means and his spiritual sign;
He hangs the thought upon a lash’s lift,
In the current of the blood makes flow the soul.
His is the dumb will of atom and of clod;
A Will that without sense or motive acts,
An Intelligence needing not to think or plan,
The world creates itself invincibly;
For its body is the body of the Lord
And in its heart stands Virat, King of Kings. [680]
The fourfold description of the Lord is the Upanishadic description of the fourfold Brahman, from outside or the waking state to within. Virat is the outer material universe corresponding to our waking state. Hiranyagarbha is the inner or dream state. Prajna is the inmost or the Superconscient. And the fourth, Turiya, transcends them all. Here we have a description of the waking state in which we experience the material universe, Virat. Here too in dumb matter there is the same Will at work that has built the worlds.
The Lord of the Dream State
THE LORD is the eternal dreamer who plans and executes all the steps of creation as it emerges out of the darkness towards Light. Lord of the inner kingdoms, He knows the future that yet must be.
In him shadows his form the Golden Child
Who in the Sun-capped Vast cradles his birth:
Hiranyagarbha, author of thoughts and dreams,
Who sees the invisible and hears the sounds
That never visited a mortal ear,
Discoverer of unthought realities
Truer to Truth than all we have ever known,
He is the leader on the inner roads;
A seer, he has entered the forbidden realms;
A magician with the omnipotent wand of thought,
He builds the secret uncreated worlds.
Armed with the golden speech, the diamond eye,
His is the vision and the prophecy:
Imagist casting the formless into shape,
Traveller and hewer of the unseen paths,
He is the carrier of the hidden fire,
He is the voice of the Ineffable,
He is the invisible hunter of the light,
The Angel of mysterious ecstasies,
The conqueror of the kingdoms of the soul. [681]
There is another dream state behind the waking where there is a vast and complex play of subtle forces that weave our outer material circumstances and events and objects. He is Hiranyagarbha, the golden womb of all things and He holds the key to all that shall yet be.
The Superconscient Lord
HE IS the light ineffable, the Jyotirbrahman, who knows all this that are not and yet must be. His Wisdom is shut behind his lids and none knows but he whom the Lord chooses to reveal himself in his bare body of Light and Bliss. Yet is He the secret cause and seed of all things. Let all our adoration go to him who is the eternal Source, the Omniscient, the Omnipotent, the Absolute, the Alone.
A third spirit stood behind, their hidden cause,
A mass of superconscience closed in light,
Creator of things in his all-knowing sleep.
All from his stillness came as grows a tree;
He is our seed and core, our head and base.
All light is but a flash from his closed eyes:
An all-wise Truth is mystic in his heart,
The omniscient Ray is shut behind his lids:
He is the Wisdom that comes not by thought,
His wordless silence brings the immortal word.
He sleeps in the atom and the burning star,
He sleeps in man and god and beast and stone:
Because he is there the Inconscient does its work,
Because he is there the world forgets to die.
He is the centre of the circle of God,
He the circumference of Nature’s run.
His slumber is an Almightiness in things,
Awake, he is the Eternal and Supreme.
Above was the brooding bliss of the Infinite,
Its omniscient and omnipotent repose,
Its immobile silence absolute and alone. [681-682]
We have here the description of the third state, the transcendent Superconscient where the thinker sleeps in too much Light, the Susupti packed with the dense contents of Consciousness.
The Lord as Bliss
BEYOND EVEN the Silence ineffable and the Light imperishable there is He in his highest Glory as Beauty and Bliss, the formless universal Beauty that form tries to capture in patterns and line, the Bliss that has built the worlds and runs within it as its very sap.
All powers were woven in countless concords here.
The bliss that made the world in his body lived,
Love and delight were the head of the sweet form.
In the alluring meshes of their snare
Recaptured, the proud blissful members held
All joys outrunners of the panting heart
And fugitive from life’s outstripped desire.
Whatever vision has escaped the eye,
Whatever happiness comes in dream and trance,
The nectar spilled by love with trembling hands,
The joy the cup of Nature cannot hold,
Had crowded to the beauty of his face,
Were waiting in the honey of his laugh.
Things hidden by the silence of the hours,
The ideas that find no voice on living lips,
The soul’s pregnant meeting with infinity
Had come to birth in him and taken fire:
The secret whisper of the flower and star
Revealed its meaning in his fathomless look.
His lips curved eloquent like a rose of dawn;
His smile that played with the wonder of the mind
And stayed in the heart when it had left his mouth
Glimmered with the radiance of the morning star
Gemming the wide discovery of heaven.
His gaze was the regard of eternity;
The spirit of its sweet and calm intent
Was a wise home of gladness and divulged
The light of the ages in the mirth of the hours,
A sun of wisdom in a miracled grove.
In the orchestral largeness of his mind
All contrary seekings their close kinship knew,
Rich-hearted, wonderful to each other met
In the mutual marvelling of their myriad notes
And dwelt like brothers of one family
Who had found their common and mysterious home.
As from the harp of some ecstatic god
There springs a harmony of lyric bliss
Striving to leave no heavenly joy unsung,
Such was the life in that embodied Light.
He seemed the wideness of a boundless sky,
He seemed the passion of a sorrowless earth,
He seemed the burning of a world-wide sun.
Two looked upon each other, Soul saw Soul. [682-683]
This the Highest, divine Personality of the Infinite, the Purushottama, the Supreme. There is nothing and none other higher that That — Om Tat Sat, Om Tat Sat, Om Tat Sat.