Cosmic Consciousness
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I have wrapped the wide world in my wider self And Time and Space my spirit’s seeing are. I am the god and demon, ghost and elf, I am the wind’s speed and the blazing star. All Nature is the nursling of my care, I am its struggle and the eternal rest; The world’s joy thrilling runs through me, I bear The sorrow of millions in my lonely breast. I have learned a close identity with all, Yet am by nothing bound that I become; Carrying in me the universe’s call I mount to my imperishable home. I pass beyond Time and life on measureless wings, Yet still am one with born and unborn things.
Thy golden Light came down into my brain And
the grey rooms of mind sun-touched became A
calm illumination and a flame. And
all my speech is now a tune divine, My
words are drunk with the Immortal’s wine. Smiting
my life with Thy eternity; And
all its passions point towards only Thee. My earth is now thy playfield and thy seat. Page-134 Life-Unity
I housed within my heart the life of things, All hearts athrob in the world I felt as mine; I shared the joy that in creation sings And
drank its sorrow like a poignant wine. All passions poured through my world-self their waves; One love I shared in a million bosoms expressed. I am the beast man slays, the beast he saves.
I spread life’s burning wings of rapture and pain; Black fire and gold fire strove towards one bliss: I rose by them towards a supernal plane Of power and love and deathless ecstasies.
A deep spiritual calm no touch can sway Upholds the mystery of this Passion-play.
All nature is taught in radiant ways to move, All beings are in myself embraced. O fiery boundless Heart of joy and love, How art thou beating in a mortal’s breast!
It is Thy rapture flaming through my nerves And all my cells and atoms thrill with Thee; My body Thy vessel is and only serves As a living wine-cup of Thy ecstasy.
I am a centre of Thy golden light I its vast and vague circumference, Thou art my soul great, luminous and white And Thine my mind and will and glowing sense.
Thy spirit’s infinite breath I feel in me; My life is a throb of Thy eternity. Page-135
I looked for Thee alone, but met my glance The iron dreadful Four who rule our breath, Masters of falsehood, Kings of ignorance, High sovereign Lords of suffering and death.
Whence came these formidable autarchies, From what inconscient blind Infinity, - Cold propagandists of a million lies, Dictators of a world of agony?
Or was it Thou who bor’st the fourfold mask? Enveloping Thy timeless heart in Time, Thou hast bound the spirit to its cosmic task, To find Thee veiled in this tremendous mime.
Thou, only Thou, canst raise the invincible siege, O Light, O deathless Joy, O rapturous Peace!
O worshipper of the formless Infinite, Reject not form, what lives in form is He.1 Each finite is that deep Infinity. Enshrining His veiled soul of pure delight. Form in its heart of silence recondite Hides the significance of His mystery, Form is the wonder-house of eternity, A cavern of the deathless Eremite.
There is a beauty in the depths of God, There is a miracle of the Marvellous That builds the universe for its abode. The One, in His glory multitudinous, Bursting into shape and colour like a rose, Compels the great world-petals to unclose.
1 what dwells in it is He. Page-136
On the waters of a nameless Infinite My skiff is launched; I have left the human shore. All fades behind me and I see before The unknown abyss and one pale pointing light. An unseen Hand controls my rudder. Night Walls up the sea in a black corridor, - An inconscient Hunger’s lion plaint and roar Or the ocean sleep of a dead Eremite.
I feel the greatness of the Power I seek Surround me; below me are its1 giant deeps. Beyond, the invisible height no sou1has trod. I shall be merged in the Lonely and Unique And wake into a sudden blaze of God, The marvel and rapture of the Apocalypse.
I am held no more by life’s alluring cry, Her joy and grief, her charm, her laughter’s lute. Hushed are the magic moments of the flute, And form and colour and brief ecstasy. I would hear, in my spirit’s wideness solitary The Voice that speaks when mortal lips are mute: I seek the wonder of things absolute Born from the silence of Eternity.
There is a need within the soul of man The splendours of the surface never sate; For life and mind and their glory and debate Are the slow prelude of a vaster theme, A sketch confused of a supernal plan, A preface to the epic of the Supreme.
1 the Page-137 There is a wisdom like a brooding Sun, A Bliss in the heart's crypt grown fiery white, The heart of a world in which all hearts are one, A Silence on the mountains of delight,
A Calm that cradles Fate upon its knees; A wide Compassion leans to embrace earth’s pain; A Witness dwells within our secrecies, The incarnate Godhead in the body of man.
Our mind is a glimmering curtain of that Ray, Our strength a parody of the Immortal’s power, Our joy a dreamer on the Eternal’s way Hunting the fugitive1 beauty of an hour.
Only on the heart’s veiled door the word of flame Is written, the secret and tremendous Name.
I sat behind the dance of Danger’s hooves In the shouting street that seemed a futurist’s whim, And suddenly felt, exceeding Nature’s grooves, In me, enveloping me the body of Him.
Above my head a mighty head was seen, A face with the calm of immortality And an omnipotent gaze that held the scene In the vast circle of its sovereignty.
His hair was mingled with the sun and breeze; The world was in His heart and He was I: I housed in me the Everlasting’s peace, The strength of One whose substance cannot die.
The moment passed and all was as before; Only that2 deathless memory I bore.
1 unseizable 2 its Page-138 The Stone Goddess
In a town of gods, housed in a little shrine, From sculptured limbs the Godhead looked at me, - A living Presence deathless and divine, A Form that harboured all infinity.
The great World-Mother and her mighty will Inhabited the earth’s abysmal sleep, Voiceless, omnipotent, inscrutable, Mute in the desert and the sky and deep.
Now veiled with mind she dwells and speaks no word, Voiceless, inscrutable, omniscient, Hiding until our soul has seen, has heard
The secret of her strange embodiment, A beauty and mystery flesh or stone can drape.
At last I find a meaning of soul’s birth Into this universe terrible and sweet, I who have felt the hungry heart of earth Aspiring beyond heaven to Krishna’s feet.
I have seen the beauty of immortal eyes, And heard the passion of the Lover’s flute, And known a deathless ecstasy’s surprise And sorrow in my heart for ever mute.
Nearer and nearer now the music draws, Life shudders with a strange felicity; All Nature is a wide enamoured pause Hoping her lord to touch, to clasp, to be.
For this one moment lived the ages past; The world now throbs fulfilled in me at last. Page-139 DANCE OF KRISHNA, DANCE OF KALI
Two measures are there of the cosmic dance. Always we hear the tread of Kali’s feet Measuring in rhythms of pain and grief and chance Life’s game of hazard terrible and sweet:
The ordeal of the veiled Initiate, The hero soul at play with Death’s embrace, Wrestler in the dread gymnasium of Fate And sacrifice a lonely path to Grace.
Man’s sorrows made a key to the Mysteries, Truth’s narrow road out of Time’s wastes of dream, The soul’s seven doors from Matter's tomb to rise, Are the common motives of her tragic theme.
But when shall Krishna’s dance through Nature move, His mask of sweetness, laughter, rapture, love?
Shiva
On the white summit of eternity A single Soul of bare infinities, Guarded he keeps by a fire-screen of peace His mystic loneliness of nude ecstasy. But, touched by an immense delight to be, He looks across unending depths and sees Musing amid the inconscient silences The Mighty Mother’s dumb felicity.
Half now awake she rises to his glance; Then, moved to circling by her heart-beats’ will, The rhythmic worlds describe that passion-dance. Life springs in her and Mind is born; her face She lifts to Him who is Herself, until The Spirit leaps into the Spirit’s embrace. Page-140 The Word of the Silence
A bare impersonal hush is now my mind, A world of sight clear and inimitable, A volume of silence by a Godhead signed, A greatness pure of thought, virgin of will.
Once on its pages Ignorance could write In a scribble of intellect the blind guess of Time And cast gleam-messages of ephemeral light, A food for souls that wander on Nature’s rim.
But now I listen to a greater Word Born from the mute unseen omniscient Ray: Voice that only Silence’ ear has heard Leaps missioned from an eternal glory of Day.
All turns from a wideness and unbroken peace To a tumult of joy in a sea of wide release. The Dual Being
There are two beings in my single self. A Godhead watches Nature from behind At play in front with a brilliant surface elf, A time-born creature with a human mind.
Tranquil and boundless like a sea or sky, The Godhead knows himself Eternity’s son, Radiant his mind and vast, his heart as free; His will is a sceptre of dominion.
The smaller self by Nature’s passions driven, Thoughtful and erring learns his human task; All must be known and to that Greatness given This mind and life, the mirror and the mask.
As with the figure of a symbol dance The screened Omniscient plays at Ignorance. Page-141
I have become what before Time I was. A secret touch has quieted thought and sense: All things by the agent Mind created pass Into a void and mute magnificence.
My life is a silence grasped by timeless hands; The world is drowned in an immortal gaze. Naked my spirit from its vestures stands; I am alone with my own self for space.
My heart is a centre of infinity, My body a dot in the soul’s vast expanse. All being’s huge abyss wakes under me, Once screened in a gigantic Ignorance.
A momentless immensity pure and bare, I stretch to an eternal everywhere.
In us is the thousandfold Spirit who is one, An eternal thinker calm and great and wise, A seer whose eye is an all-regarding sun, A poet of the cosmic mysteries.
A critic Witness pieces everything And binds the fragments in his brilliant sheaf; A World-adventurer borne on Destiny’s wing Gambles with death and triumph, joy and grief.
A king of greatness and a slave of love, Host of the stars and guest in Nature’s inn, A high spectator Spirit throned above, A pawn of passion in the game divine,
One who has made in sport the suns and seas Mirrors in our being his immense caprice. Page-142
O Thou of whom I am the instrument, O secret Spirit and Nature housed in me, Let all my mortal being now be blent In Thy still glory of divinity.
I have given my mind to be dug Thy channel mind, I have offered up my will to be Thy will: Let nothing of myself be left behind In our union mystic and unutterable.
My heart shall throb with the world-beats of Thy love, My body become Thy engine for earth-use; In my nerves and veins Thy rapture’s streams shall move; My thoughts shall be hounds of Light for Thy power to loose.
Keep1 only my soul to adore eternally And meet Thee in each form and soul of Thee.
I face earth’s happenings with an equal soul; In all are heard Thy steps: Thy unseen feet Tread Destiny’s pathways in my front. Life’s whole Tremendous theorem is Thou complete.
No danger can perturb my spirit’s calm: My acts are Thine; I do Thy works and pass; Failure is cradled on Thy deathless arm, Victory is Thy passage mirrored in Fortune’s glass.
In this rude combat with the fate of man Thy smile within my heart makes all my strength; Thy Force in me labours at its grandiose plan, Indifferent to the Time-snake’s crawling length.
No power can slay my soul; it lives in Thee. Thy presence is my immortality.
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