Canto Three

The Yoga of the King:

The Yoga of the Soul's Release

A WORLD'S desire compelled her mortal birth.

Protagonist of the mysterious play

And limits his eternity by the hours

A thinker and toiler in the ideal's air,

His was a spirit that stooped from larger spheres

A colonist from immortality.

His birth held up a symbol and a sign;

Covered the All-Wise who leads the unseeing world.

And paying here God's debt to earth and man

Although consenting to mortal ignorance,

A strength of the original Permanence

He kept the vision of the Vasts behind:

An archivist of the symbols of the Beyond,

He bore the stamp of mighty memories

His days were a long growth to the Supreme.

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Climbed through white rays to meet an unseen Sun.

His mind was like a fire assailing heaven,

An ocean impulse lifted every breath;

Each moment was a beat of puissant wings.

Touched by this tenant from the heights became

This bodily appearance is not all;

Hid deep in man celestial powers can dwell.

An incognito of the Imperishable.

A fiery portion of the Wonderful,

Immortal in our mortal poverty.

This screened unrecognised Inhabitant,

Hides in a small dumb seed his cosmic thought.

Determining predestined shape and act,

Changing his imaged self from form to form,

And in the worm foresees the coming god.

Arrives on the frontiers of eternity.

He feels his substance of undying self

A beam of the Eternal smites his heart,

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All in him turns to spirit vastnesses.

His life is oceaned by that superlife.

A topless Supernature fills his frame:

As the security of her changing world

Immortally she conceives herself in him,

Her face is seen through his face, her eyes through his eyes;

Then is revealed in man the overt Divine.

Descend in him, the integral Godhead's seals;

A long dim preparation is man's life,

Tracked out by Life on Matter's obscure ground.

He seeks through a penumbra shot with flame

A search for something or someone never found,

An endless spiral of ascent and fall

Through which his Glory shines for whom we were made

Across our nature's border line we escape

This now was witnessed in that son of Force;

Original and supernal Immanence

The cosmic Worker set his secret hand

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A Presence wrought behind the ambiguous screen:

Refining half-hewn blocks of natural strength

The Craftsman of the magic stuff of self

In the wide workshop of the wonderful world,

Then came the abrupt transcendent miracle:

At travail in the occult womb of life,

A crown of the architecture of the worlds,

Annexed divinity to the mortal scheme.

For him mind's limiting firmament ceased above.

A gap was rent in the all-concealing vault;

The landmarks of the little person fell,

Overpassed was this world of rigid limiting forms:

Abolished were conception's covenants

Annulled the soul's treaty with Nature's nescience.

And broken the intellect's hard and lustrous lid;

An empyrean vision saw and knew;

The finite self mated with infinity.

Out of apprenticeship to Ignorance

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And made him an archmason of the soul,

An aspirant to supernal Timelessness:

Above mind's twilight and life's star-led night

As so he grew into his larger self,

A greater being saw a greater world.

The lines of safety Reason draws that bar

Even his first steps broke our small earth-bounds

In hands sustained by a transfiguring Might

Left slumbering in a sealed and secret cave

He made of miracle a normal act

Magnificently natural at this height,

Pursued in a royalty of mighty ease

The gifts of the spirit crowding came to him;

A pure perception lent its lucent joy:

It enveloped all Nature in a single glance,

Deceived no more by form he saw the soul.

It seized the idea in mind, the wish in the heart;

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He felt the beating life in other men

Their love, their anger, their unspoken hopes

Into the immobile ocean of his calm.

Re-echoed in the vault of other minds;

His inner self grew near to others' selves

Yet stood untouched, king of itself, alone.

To ethereal symphonies the old earthy strings;

To be happy partners in the soul's response,

Records of lustre and ecstasy; it made

A heavenlier function with a finer mode

The soul's experience of its deeper sheaths

In the dead wall closing us from wider self,

The mystic tract beyond our waking thoughts,

Releasing things unseized by earthly sense:

Appeared in the silent spaces of the soul.

Into the luminous countries of the unborn

And all that the life longs for is drawn close.

Wearing the glory of a deathless form,

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Rapt in the heart-beats of God-ecstasy.

And will is nursed by an ethereal Power

Till it grows into the likeness of a god.

On hidden interiors, lurking passages

He owned the house of undivided Time.

He stood upon a threshold serpent-watched,

Silent and listening in the silent heart

He gazed across the empty stillnesses

In the far avenues of the Beyond.

And saw the secret face that is our own.

Strange powers and influences touched his life.

A consciousness of brighter fields and skies,

And subtler bodies than these passing frames,

Acts vibrant with a superhuman light

And joys that never flowed through mortal limbs,

A consciousness of beauty and of bliss,

Replaced the separated sense and heart

The mind leaned out to meet the hidden worlds:

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Air glowed and teemed with marvellous shapes and hues,

On the tongue lingered the honey of paradise.

Hearing was a stream of magic audience,

Out of a covert tract of slumber self

That flows beneath the cosmic surfaces,

Held by intuitive heart and secret sense.

It voiced the unfulfilled demand of earth

And all that hides in an omnipotent Sleep.

On its long listening flood that bears the world's

A laughter of sleepless pleasure foamed and spumed

A cry came of the world's delight to be,

Recall of the soul's adventure into space,

And being's labour in Matter's universe,

And joy of high spiritual response,

In all the sweetness of the gifts of life,

Its taste of pangs and tears and ecstasy,

The sob of its passion and unending pain.

Which crowd around our hearts but find no window

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And all that labours vainly to be born

And all the beauty that will never be.

The wide world-rhythms wove their stupendous chant

Melting our limits in the illimitable,

A low muttering rose from the subconscient caves,

Answer to that inarticulate questioning,

A radiant hymn to the Inexpressible

All was revealed there none can here express;

Or symbols more veridical than fact,

Immortal eyes approached and looked in his,

The ever-living whom we name as dead

To utter the wisdom which exceeds all phrase:

Appellants at the reason's judgment seat,

And all believed themselves spokesmen of God:

Battled for his soul as for a costly prize.

There rose a song of new discovery,

Each day was a spiritual romance,

Adventure leaped an unexpected friend,

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Each happening was a deep experience.

And counsels came couched in celestial speech,

To help the heart to yield to rapture's call,

And sudden ecstasies from a world of bliss.

All now his bright clairaudience could receive;

Awakened to new unearthly closenesses,

And with a silver cry of opening gates

Ever his consciousness and vision grew;

He passed the border marked for Matter's rule

Out of this world of signs suddenly he came

And looked beyond into a nameless vast.

All tokens dropped our sense can recognise;

There the eyes gazed no more on beauty's shape.

Into a signless region he could soar

Where world was into a single being rapt

And Spirit was its own self-evidence.

And saw all things and creatures as itself

There unity is too close for search and clasp

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And beauty is a sweet difference of the Same

There all the truths unite in a single Truth,

There knowing herself by her own termless self,

Sat uncompanioned in the eternal Calm,

There knowledge needs not words to embody Idea;

Weary of its homeless immortality,

Whose single window's clipped outlook on things

The boundless with the boundless there consorts;

While there, one is one's own infinity.

A power of seeing silence filled his limbs:

Into a vision that surpasses forms,

He neared the still consciousness sustaining all.

Became a silent knowledge in the soul;

Was lodged now in a mute omnipotent peace.

A pause in the joy and anguish of the search

A vast unanimity ended life's debate.

The clash of forces struggling to prevail

As in the building of a grain of dust,

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Ploughed by the seeking of the world's desire,

The torment edging the dire force of lust

And carves a personality out of mud,

The oestrus which creates with fire of pain,

The tragedy that destroys long happiness,

Ceased in a truth which lives in its own light.

Absorbed no more in the moment-ridden flux

Hurried from phenomenon to phenomenon,

As if a story long written but acted now,

Felt in the seconds the uncounted years

An aspect of the unknown Reality

This huge material universe became

Overtaking the moment the eternal Ray

Thought lay down in a mighty voicelessness;

Wisdom transcendent touched his quivering heart:

Mind screened no more the shoreless infinite.

Through a last glimmer and drift of vanishing stars

Where judgment ceases and the word is mute

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There came not form or any mounting voice;

Out of that stillness mind new-born arose

And forms appeared, dumbly significant,

He knew the source from which his spirit came:

He plunged his roots into the Infinite,

Only awhile at first these heavenlier states,

The high and luminous tension breaks too soon,

The breathless might and calm of silent mind;

The restless nether members tire of peace;

A need to call back small familiar selves,

The need to rest in a natural pose of fall,

Replace the titan will for ever to climb,

An old pull of subconscious cords renews;

Or a dull gravitation drags us down

This too the supreme Diplomat can use,

For into ignorant Nature's gusty field,

The formless Power, the Self of eternal light

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Chooses its home mid the tumults of the sense.

And, curtained by the darkness, does his work,

Till they too feel the need and will to change.

Our body's cells must hold the Immortal's flame.

Leaving a half-saved world to its dubious fate.

Our earth would ever spin unhelped in Space,

Till at last the frustrate universe sank undone.

His greater consciousness withdrew behind;

To feel again the old sublimities,

Call back to its dire need the divine Force.

Or slowly in his breast a presence grew;

Or soared above the peak from which it fell.

A dwelling on a higher spirit plane;

In this oscillation between earth and heaven,

There grew in him as grows a waxing moon

A union of the Real with the unique,

The presence of the Eternal in the hours

Bridging the gap between man's force and Fate

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At last was won a firm spiritual poise,

A safety in the Silence and the Ray,

His heights of being lived in the still Self;

And look down on the magic and the play

And the Everlasting puts on Time's disguise.

His equal spirit gave its vast assent:

A wide unshaken look on Time's unrest

Indifferent to the sorrow and delight,

Immobile it beheld the flux of things,

His spirit's stillness helped the toiling world.

His force could work with a new luminous art

And the refusal of Inertia's mass

And nescient Matter and the huge error of life.

He slowly chipped off the dark envelope,

The illusion and mystery of the Inconscient

That he may act unknown in cosmic Time.

A transfiguration in the mystic depths,

And fashion the world-shape in him anew,

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Already in him was seen that task of Power:

His soul, mind, heart became a single sun;

But there too, in the uncertain shadow of life,

The ambiguous cowled celestial puissance worked

Even on the struggling Nature left below

Lightnings of glory after glory burned,

Air rippled round the argosies of the Gods,

Splendours of insight filled the blank of thought,

Rivers poured down of bliss and luminous force,

Rained from the all-powerful Mystery above.

A dense veil was rent, a mighty whisper heard;

A wisdom-cry from rapt transcendences

The voices that an inner listening hears

And flame-wrapped outbursts of the immortal Word

Approached him from the unreachable Secrecy.

Whose seconds illumined more than reason's years:

As if a pointing accent upon Truth,

A swift intuitive discernment shone.

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Or raise its rapid torch-fire in the dark

Covered by the forged signatures of the gods,

Or scan the apparent face of thought and life.

A sudden messenger from the all-seeing tops,

Bringing her rhythmic sense of hidden things.

As if from a golden phial of the All-Bliss,

A rapture of the thrilled undying Word

A repetition of God's first delight

In a brief moment caught, a little space,

Lodged in the expectant stillness of his depths

A portion of the inexpressible Truth

The intense creatrix in his stillness wrought;

She looked upon the seen and the unforeseen,

All-vision gathered into a single ray,

Till through the intensity of one luminous spot

Enters into the kingdom of the seer.

It rent the gauze opaque of Nescience:

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Bared with a stab of flame the closed Beyond.

A mind plucking at the unimaginable,

The high black wall hiding superconscience,

And plundered the Unknowable's vast estate.

A sheaf-binder of infinite experience,

And her magic methods wrapped in a thousand veils;

In the dust and crannies of his mounting route

And buried remnants of forgotten space.

She joined the distant ends, the viewless deeps,

Pursuing all knowledge like a questing hound.

Her shining minutes of celestial speech,

Transmitting gave to prophet and to seer

A recorder of the inquiry of the gods,

She brought immortal words to mortal men.

Released like radiant air dimming a moon,

Or limit swam into his spirit's ken.

Calling to infinite discovery;

Stretched out surrounded by the eternal hush;

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Disclosed stood up in a gold moment's blaze

Along a naked curve in bourneless Self

Shadowed the indeterminable line

The magician order of the cosmic Mind

With the stark array of Nature's symbol facts

Transmuted chance recurrences into laws,

Out of the rich wonders and the intricate whorls

The balance of the world's design grew clear,

Managed in the deep perspectives of the soul,

Its logic of infinite intelligence,

A glimpse was caught of things for ever unknown:

In the immutable nameless Origin

The trail of the Ideas that made the world,

The seed of the Spirit's blind and huge desire

And spread its magic arms through a dream of space.

There looked out from the shadow of the Unknown

And tries to gain from the mortal's mind and soul

The immobile lips, the great surreal wings,

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The eyes with their closed lids that see all things,

The original Desire born in the Void

The feet that run behind a fleeting fate,

Hardly for a moment glimpsed viewless to Mind,

The radiant world of the everlasting Truth

Above the golden Overmind's shimmering ridge.

The smile of love that sanctions the long game,

Of Wisdom suckling the child-laughter of Chance,

The omniscient hush, womb of the immortal Word,

And the creative eye of Eternity.

Made there her study of divining thought

And sat upon the tripod seat of mind:

In darkness' core she dug out wells of light,

Lent a vibrant cry to the unuttered vasts,

Bore earthward fragments of revealing thought

A Voice in the heart uttered the unspoken Name,

Entered the invisible and forbidden house:

In the deep subconscient glowed her jewel-lamp;

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Where, by the miser traffickers of sense

In folds of velvet darkness draped they sleep

A darkness carrying morning in its breast

Waiting the advent of a larger ray

In a splendid extravagance of the waste of God

Left in the chantiers of the bottomless world

The golden shekels of the Eternal lie,

Locked in blind antres of the ignorant flood,

A vision lightened on the viewless heights,

A deeper interpretation greatened Truth,

All the world's values changed heightening life's aim;

Than what the slow labour of human mind can bring,

A Presence and a Greatness everywhere.

Borne round inert on an immense machine;

A mechanism no more or work of Chance,

A spirit hid in forces and in forms

The beauty and the ceaseless miracle

The formless Everlasting moved in it

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Life kept no more a dull and meaningless shape.

He saw the labour of a godhead's birth.

Fate covered with an unseen necessity

A glory and a rapture and a charm,

Earth's pains were the ransom of its prisoned delight.

The days were travellers on a destined road,

A heavenly impetus quickened all his breast;

The divine Dwarf towered to unconquered worlds,

Once only registering the heavy tread

Life now became a sure approach to God,

And cosmos the soul's opportunity.

Of Spirit in Matter into living forms,

That she might climb through him to eternal life.

And bathed in wells of pure spiritual light;

Lit by the rays of an everlasting sun.

Could raise the earthly parts towards higher things

Already it journeyed towards divinity:

Upheld to a Light it could not always hold,

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And lost life's incapacity for bliss.

Thus came his soul's release from Ignorance,

A wide God-knowledge poured down from above,

His daily thoughts looked up to the True and One,

Awakened to the lines that Nature hides,

He grew one with a covert universe.

He spoke with the unknown Guardians of the worlds,

His wide eyes bodied viewless entities,

And felt the occult impulse behind man's will.

The records of the future and the past

One and harmonious by the Maker's skill,

His acts betrayed not the interior flame.

A genius heightened in his body's cells

Akin to the march of unaccomplished Powers

Apart he lived in his mind's solitude,

One soul's ambition lifted up the race;

The universal strengths were linked with his;

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Immeasurable by the common look,

And cast his deeds like bronze to front the years.

Lonely his days and splendid like the sun's.

END OF CANTO THREE

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