Opening Remarks
Human life as we experience now, in our ignorance, is not the final intended act of Nature. It is a stage, a transition, a rather long preparation, often through much struggle and suffering. Even as the animal life was a preparation for humanity, human life is a preparation for divinity, for the divine unfolding in and through man as an intermediary link.
A long dim preparation
A long dim preparation is man’s life,
A circle of toil and hope and war and peace
Tracked out by Life on Matter’s obscure ground.
Human life, and all the range of experiences it provides plough our mind and life and the soil of matter for the divine seed to take roots and blossom. This long journey starts with obscurity and unconsciousness but steadily moves towards a growing consciousness and light.
At last is reached the giant point
In his climb to a peak no feet have ever trod,
He seeks through a penumbra shot with flame
A veiled reality half-known, ever missed,
A search for something or someone never found,
Cult of an ideal never made real here,
An endless spiral of ascent and fall
Until at last is reached the giant point
Through which his Glory shines for whom we were made
And we break into the infinity of God.
The first phase of our journey is in Ignorance. Yet even here there are hints and glimpses of a greater Reality hidden behind appearances. The seeking for an Ideal, the search for Something or Someone vaguely felt, the need to Know what lies beyond, an aspiration for Truth and Beauty and Love are some of the forms that this glimpse takes. However a point comes when something in us, through the intensity of the flame of aspiration, breaks free from the ‘magic circle’ of ‘finiteness’ and ‘separateness’ and we experience the deep Unity of all things. We begin to breath infinity, to live eternity.
Living light
Across our nature’s border line we escape
Into Supernature’s arc of living light.
The burden of Ignorance is shed. The night and darkness is no more and we wake up to God’s Vastness and Light.
Closing remarks
This is the journey of man, beautifully summarized in the great Upanishad, – from Non-being to the true being, from Darkness to Light, from Death to Immortality.
