The Lord Is at Once Near and Far
HE IS NEAR US nearer than our breath, nearer than our heart-beats, the subtlest of the subtle. Yet He seems farthest of the far, far beyond the last pinnacle of thought, far beyond the universe, ineffable, majestic alone. All that is needed to feel him, to know him, is to remove the veil of the ego, that substratum we call ourselves and we shall find that He was always there, near us and yet we knew him not.
A cave of darkness guards the eternal Light.
A silence settled on his striving heart;
Absolved from the voices of the world’s desire,
He turned to the Ineffable’s timeless call.
A Being intimate and unnameable,
A wide compelling ecstasy and peace
Felt in himself and all and yet ungrasped,
Approached and faded from his soul’s pursuit
As if for ever luring him beyond.
Near, it retreated; far, it called him still.
Nothing could satisfy but its delight:
Its absence left the greatest actions dull,
Its presence made the smallest seem divine.
When it was there, the heart’s abyss was filled;
But when the uplifting Deity withdrew,
Existence lost its aim in the Inane.
The order of the immemorial planes,
The godlike fullness of the instruments
Were turned to props for an impermanent scene.
But who that mightiness was he knew not yet.
Impalpable, yet filling all that is,
It made and blotted out a million worlds
And took and lost a thousand shapes and names.
It wore the guise of an indiscernible Vast,
Or was a subtle kernel in the soul:
A distant greatness left it huge and dim,
A mystic closeness shut it sweetly in: … [305-306]
When all our guards and props that support the framework of thought and sense and understanding and sense experience fall then we are ready to behold the Lord in his vacant nothingness that yet contains the all.
The Far-Seen Godhead
HE IS FORMLESS and yet He shadows forth a form for the play. This form can be beheld only when all the garbs of the ego are torn and slain. Or else one can behold him through his special Grace.
All glory of outline, sweetness of harmony,
Rejected like a grace of trivial notes,
Expunged from Being’s silence nude, austere,
Died into a fine and blissful Nothingness.
The Demiurges lost their names and forms,
The great schemed worlds that they had planned and wrought
Passed, taken and abolished one by one.
The universe removed its coloured veil,
And at the unimaginable end
Of the huge riddle of created things
Appeared the far-seen Godhead of the whole,
His feet firm-based on Life’s stupendous wings,
Omnipotent, a lonely seer of Time,
Inward, inscrutable, with diamond gaze.
Attracted by the unfathomable regard
The unsolved slow cycles to their fount returned
To rise again from that invisible sea.
All from his puissance born was now undone;
Nothing remained the cosmic Mind conceives.
Eternity prepared to fade and seemed
A hue and imposition on the Void,
Space was the fluttering of a dream that sank
Before its ending into Nothing’s deeps.
The spirit that dies not and the Godhead’s self
Seemed myths projected from the Unknowable;
From It all sprang, in It is called to cease.
But what That was, no thought nor sight could tell.
Only a formless Form of self was left,
A tenuous ghost of something that had been,
The last experience of a lapsing wave
Before it sinks into a bourneless sea,—
As if it kept even on the brink of Nought
Its bare feeling of the ocean whence it came.
A Vastness brooded free from sense of Space,
An Everlastingness cut off from Time;
A strange sublime inalterable Peace
Silent rejected from it world and soul. [307-308]
They who say that He is formless alone know him not. They who say He is a form know him not. He is at once formless and form, the essence of all forms and yet transcends them completely. The whole universe is a coloured veil that He has spun around himself. All emerges from him as a wave from the sea and returns back to him into his supreme Silence.
One and Infinite
HE IS THE ONE, the stark companionless Reality, One and Alone robed in his splendour of Light, a Calm on his face that nothing can perturb, a Peace that absorbs the shock of a million worlds without stir, an immobile Silence unfathomable and infinite.
A stark companionless Reality
Answered at last to his soul’s passionate search:
Passionless, wordless, absorbed in its fathomless hush,
Keeping the mystery none would ever pierce,
It brooded inscrutable and intangible
Facing him with its dumb tremendous calm.
It had no kinship with the universe:
There was no act, no movement in its Vast:
Life’s question met by its silence died on her lips,
The world’s effort ceased convicted of ignorance
Finding no sanction of supernal Light:
There was no mind there with its need to know,
There was no heart there with its need to love.
All person perished in its namelessness.
There was no second, it had no partner or peer;
Only itself was real to itself.
A pure existence safe from thought and mood,
A consciousness of unshared immortal bliss,
It dwelt aloof in its bare infinite,
One and unique, unutterably sole.
A Being formless, featureless and mute
That knew itself by its own timeless self,
Aware for ever in its motionless depths,
Uncreating, uncreated and unborn,
The One by whom all live, who lives by none,
An immeasurable luminous secrecy
Guarded by the veils of the Unmanifest,
Above the changing cosmic interlude
Abode supreme, immutably the same,
A silent Cause occult, impenetrable,—
Infinite, eternal, unthinkable, alone. [308-309]
This penultimate passage of this canto reveals to us the Glory of the One Infinite Purusha, the ekamevadwitiyam, the One without a second of the Veda, the ultimate Nihil, shoonyam, of the Buddha. This tremendous experience is liberating. It is by knowing the Purusha as thus that one arrives at the final moksha, mahanirvana, the gate through which the soul passes into the Beyond never to return.
Unity With the Transcendent Lord
THE LORD is oneness. He is perfect Unity. It is in union with the Lord that we shall find the key to brotherhood and harmony. It is in union with the Lord in his completeness that we shall discover the secret of making this earthly life the life divine, thereby fulfilling the aspiration of the ages for a perfect life upon earth, individually and collectively.
A last and mightiest transformation came.
His soul was all in front like a great sea
Flooding the mind and body with its waves;
His being, spread to embrace the universe,
United the within and the without
To make of life a cosmic harmony,
An empire of the immanent Divine.
In this tremendous universality
Not only his soul-nature and mind-sense
Included every soul and mind in his,
But even the life of flesh and nerve was changed
And grew one flesh and nerve with all that lives;
He felt the joy of others as his joy,
He bore the grief of others as his grief;
His universal sympathy upbore,
Immense like ocean, the creation’s load
As earth upbears all beings’ sacrifice,
Thrilled with the hidden Transcendent’s joy and peace.
There was no more division’s endless scroll;
One grew the Spirit’s secret unity,
All Nature felt again the single bliss.
There was no cleavage between soul and soul,
There was no barrier between world and God.
Overpowered were form and memory’s limiting line;
The covering mind was seized and torn apart;
It was dissolved and now no more could be,
The one Consciousness that made the world was seen;
All now was luminosity and force.
Abolished in its last thin fainting trace
The circle of the little self was gone;
The separate being could no more be felt;
It disappeared and knew itself no more,
Lost in the spirit’s wide identity.
His nature grew a movement of the All,
Exploring itself to find that all was He,
His soul was a delegation of the All
That turned from itself to join the one Supreme.
Transcended was the human formula;
Man’s heart that had obscured the Inviolable
Assumed the mighty beating of a god’s;
His seeking mind ceased in the Truth that knows;
His life was a flow of the universal life. [318-319]
This is a wonderful description of the transformation whereby man the mental being changes into a supramental being. All undergoes a mighty change and the within and the without become one. The individual reclaims not only the union of his individual soul with the Divine within but also with the universal and transcendent Divine.
Beyond the Beginning and End of Things
THERE ARE several levels at which one can have the experience and realisation of the Lord. The highest is the superconscient Light that is beyond all beginning and end. He is the base of everything from which all emerges and towards which it is helplessly drawn. There all is reconciled in a supreme harmony and unity. By his touch evil turns into its original good of which it was the distortion and good turns into its original divine Good of which it is the shadow. Here is the eternal Peace that men long after and never find.
Lost in deep tracts of superconscient Light,
Or voyaging in blank featureless Nothingness,
Sole in the trackless Incommensurable,
Or past not-self and self and selflessness,
Transgressing the dream-shores of conscious mind
He reached at last his sempiternal base.
On sorrowless heights no winging cry disturbs,
Pure and untouched above this mortal play
Is spread the spirit’s hushed immobile air.
There no beginning is and there no end;
There is the stable force of all that moves;
There the aeonic labourer is at rest.
There turns no keyed creation in the void,
No giant mechanism watched by a soul;
There creaks no fate-turned huge machinery;
The marriage of evil with good within one breast,
The clash of strife in the very clasp of love,
The dangerous pain of life’s experiment
In the values of Inconsequence and Chance,
The peril of mind’s gamble, throwing our lives
As stake in a wager of indifferent gods
And the shifting lights and shadows of the idea
Falling upon the surface consciousness,
And in the dream of a mute witness soul
Creating the error of a half-seen world
Where knowledge is a seeking ignorance,
Life’s steps a stumbling series without suit,
Its aspect of fortuitous design,
Its equal measure of the true and false
In that immobile and immutable realm
Find no access, no cause, no right to live:
There only reigns the spirit’s motionless power
Poised in itself through still eternity
And its omniscient and omnipotent peace.
…
There Nature on her dumb spiritual couch
Immutably transcendent knows her source
And to the stir of multitudinous worlds
Assents unmoved in a perpetual calm.
All-causing, all-sustaining and aloof,
The Witness looks from his unshaken poise,
An Eye immense regarding all things done.
Apart, at peace above creation’s stir,
Immersed in the eternal altitudes,
He abode defended in his shoreless self,
Companioned only by the all-seeing One. [320-322]
We have here a beautiful description of the immutable state wherein Nature withdraws into her Lord who is her origin and sole witness. All is Peace and Calm and Silence and Immobility.
Beyond Being and Non-Being
THE LORD is beyond being and the non-being. All becoming is nothing but a spark of his Glory. All objects and forms are merely ways through which He represents himself. He is at once the form and formless, the One endowed with infinite qualities as aspects of himself and also beyond all qualities, the Impersonal and the Personal. The material universe is his vast outer body while his essence is hid in each particle of creation.
The world is but a spark-burst from its light,
All moments flashes from its Timelessness,
All objects glimmerings of the Bodiless
That disappear from Mind when That is seen.
It held, as if a shield before its face,
A consciousness that saw without a seer,
The Truth where knowledge is not nor knower nor known,
The Love enamoured of its own delight
In which the Lover is not nor the Beloved
Bringing their personal passion into the Vast,
The Force omnipotent in quietude,
The Bliss that none can ever hope to taste.
It cancelled the convincing cheat of self;
A truth in nothingness was its mighty clue.
If all existence could renounce to be
And Being take refuge in Non-being’s arms
And Non-being could strike out its ciphered round,
Some lustre of that Reality might appear. [548]
All contraries were true in one huge spirit
Surpassing measure, change and circumstance.
An individual, one with cosmic self
In the heart of the Transcendent’s miracle
And the secret of World-personality
Was the creator and the lord of all.
Mind was a single innumerable look
Upon himself and all that he became.
Life was his drama and the Vast a stage,
The universe was his body, God its soul.
All was one single immense reality,
All its innumerable phenomenon.
Her spirit saw the world as living God;
It saw the One and knew that all was He.
She knew him as the Absolute’s self-space,
One with her self and ground of all things here
In which the world wanders seeking for the Truth
Guarded behind its face of ignorance:
She followed him through the march of endless Time. [556]
The Lord is both the being and the becoming, the creation and the Creator. There is nothing else but himself playing with himself in countless ways.