Opening Remarks
This realm builds a dream splendour, which lasts only as long as a dream lasts. A time comes when the illusion is over and one discovers the fugitive nature of what one had hoped to have found.
Illusion’s ode
Unseen, a captive in a house of sound,
The spirit lost in the splendour of a dream
Listens to a thousand-voiced illusion’s ode.
A captive of its own voice, the spirit is trapped in a prison of self-praise, a world where the ego-self rules and listens to a thousand voices that give false hopes.
A delicate sorcery
A delicate weft of sorcery steals the heart
Or a fiery magic tints her tones and hues,
Yet they but wake a thrill of transient grace;
A vagrant march struck by the wanderer Time,
They call to a brief unsatisfied delight
Or wallow in ravishments of mind and sense,
But miss the luminous answer of the soul.
Our hearts are caught in a web of sorcery that builds a magical wonder-world around us. It is a charming world built around our heart’s ignorant desires rather than the deeper soul’s aspiration. It gives brief satisfaction, transient thrills and pleasure to the mind and senses but misses the touch of the soul that alone can fulfil.
Ecstasy of unfulfilled desires
A blind heart-throb that reaches joy through tears,
A yearning towards peaks for ever unreached,
An ecstasy of unfulfilled desire
Track the last heavenward climbings of her voice.
This realm of greater life gropes in blindness and ignorance and climbs with struggles and suffering towards the heights it cannot reach. It yearns for these glorious states and in this yearning finds its satisfaction and joy. This yearning is its greatest gift, a yearning that is fed by its non-fulfilment.
Transmuted sufferings
Transmuted are past suffering’s memories
Into an old sadness’s sweet escaping trail:
Turned are her tears to gems of diamond pain,
Her sorrow into a magic crown of song.
Its path of purification and ascension lies through suffering that though unable to achieve, yet transmutes her pain into a sweet sadness and luminous gems of wisdom, turning her sorrow into a crown of magical song.
Cherished suffering
Brief are her snatches of felicity
That touch the surface, then escape or die:
A lost remembrance echoes in her depths,
A deathless longing is hers, a veiled self’s call;
A prisoner in the mortal’s limiting world,
A spirit wounded by life sobs in her breast;
A cherished suffering is her deepest cry.
In the end this life cherishes its suffering which is her deepest cry. Few and fleeting moments of joy that soon pass away, a lost memory of sweetness that has gone by is its way to be. She longs for a love that would never die, a self that is he very soul of Beauty and Delight but falls short since imprisoned and bounded by Ignorance. Thus wounded, its spirit sobs within and cherishes her suffering.
A wanderer on despairing routes
A wanderer on forlorn despairing routes,
Along the roads of sound a frustrate voice
Forsaken cries to a forgotten bliss.
All its longings hopes turn into despair even as it cries for a lost felicity and a bliss that is never won.
Sweet and errant notes
Astray in the echo caverns of Desire,
It guards the phantoms of a soul’s dead hopes
And keeps alive the voice of perished things
Or lingers upon sweet and errant notes
Hunting for pleasure in the heart of pain.
Its song of sweetness is touched with notes of pain that jar. Wandering alone in ill-lit narrow caves of desires realms, it hopes and despairs but refuses to give up longing for the return of pleasant states in a world of ignorance where pain abounds. In this heart of pain she tries to pluck out pearls of happiness.
Troubled strain
A fateful hand has touched the cosmic chords
And the intrusion of a troubled strain
Covers the inner music’s hidden key
That guides unheard the surface cadences.
Its true music lies in its own depths covered with hands of fate and the troubled noises of our surface existence. The key is there to uplift and attune us to the song Divine but it is lost in the deep cavern of the heart.
Closing Remarks
This is a very beautiful description of our life as it stands at present. It has deep longings and yearns for happier states and beautiful things. Yet trapped in Ignorance it is unable to pierce the veil and commune with its own depths or ascend to a diviner world. Therefore all its efforts end in suffering and despair or memories of a sweetness lost and felicity that touched for but one brief hour.
