Canto Ten

The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Little Mind

THIS too must now be overpassed and left,

As all must be until the Highest is gained

Till That is reached our journeying cannot cease.

Always ascends the zigzag of the gods

This breath of hundred-hued felicity

Tossed upon waves of flawless happiness,

This fraction of the spirit's integer

This limited being lifted to zenith bliss,

Packed into its sealed small infinity,

A little output of God's vast delight.

The hours discovered immortality,

On peaks they ceased whose tops half-way to Heaven

To a grandeur in whose air they could not live.

To their secure and fine extremities

These heights declined a greater adventure's call.

Tied up the spirit to golden posts of bliss.

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Which needed all infinity for its home.

The beauty and call receding sank behind

Upon the long high road to Timelessness.

A musing spirit looked out on the worlds

Passing through clarity to an unseen Light

But first he met a silver-grey expanse

It was a tract of dim and shifting rays

A coalition of uncertainties

On a ground reserved for doubt and reasoned guess,

At its low extremity held difficult sway

Its nature to our earthly nature close

That looks from soil to sky and sky to soil

It only sensed itself and outward things.

From the half-conscience of the animal soul

In a realm it cannot understand nor change;

And feels and joys and sorrows for a while.

Along the roads of suffering and desire

Found here their power to be and Nature-force.

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Labours for the hour and not for eternity

The slow process of a material mind

And needs to lean upon an erring sense,

Advancing tardily from a limping start,

Throning its theories as certitudes,

Ever constructing its frail house of thought,

A twilight sage whose shadow seems to him self,

A king dependent on his satellites

A judge in half-possession of his proofs,

An architect of knowledge, not its source.

Thinks his low station Nature's highest top,

And haughtily humble in his own conceit

And takes his own creations for his cause.

Up from man's bare beginning is our climb;

We must search our nature with spiritual fire:

Our human state cradles the future god,

At the glow-worm top of these pale glimmer-realms

And helped the Day to grow and Night to fail,

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He came into a realm of early Light

Out of its rays our mind's full orb was born.

To mediate with the unknowing depths,

Half-poised on equal wings of thought and doubt

A Secrecy breathed in life's moving act;

It shaped life's wonders out of Matter's mud:

It pitched mind's tent in the vague ignorant Vast.

Has made an eternity from recurring forms

Assigned a seat on the inconscient stage.

A bodiless energy put on Matter's robe;

To change things subtle into a physical world

And the impalpable was felt as mass:

And lent to each object an interpreting name:

And by a strange atomic law's mystique

Its symbol picture of the universe.

The mediating light linked body's power,

The animal's vibrant sense, the thought in man,

Its skill endorsing Matter's right to think

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And found a means for Nescience to know.

As figured substitutes for reality,

It helped the unseeing Force to read her works.

And now she dreams herself human and awake.

Still Knowledge could not come and firmly grasp

A specialist of logic's hard machine

An aide of the inventor intellect,

That each might have his ration of thought-food,

A robot exact and serviceable and false

A polished engine did the work of a god.

None had the inner look which sees Truth's whole;

Then from the secret heights a wave swept down,

It looked above and saw the dazzling peaks,

Imagination called her shining squads

Where all the marvels lurk none yet has known:

She conspired with inspiration's sister brood

A bright Error fringed the mystery-altar's frieze;

Myth suckled knowledge with her lustrous milk;

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Thus worked the Power upon the growing world;

Cherished the soul's childhood and on fictions fed

Nourishing its immature divinity

Its heaped fodder of innumerable facts,

Thus streamed down from the realm of early Light

Its gold-horned herds trooped into earth's cave-heart.

Its young formations move the mind of earth

To feel beauty's touch and know the world and self:

In those bright realms are Mind's first forward steps.

Its curious slow enquiry there begins;

Ever it hopes to find out greater things.

Alert it lives upon invention's verge.

As if the cosmos were a nursery game,

As one it works who builds a mimic fort

Made of the sands upon a bank of Time

A small keen instrument the great Puissance chose,

To teach the Ignorance is her difficult charge,

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Arousing knowledge from its sleepy lair.

Called into our chamber from the outer world;

It hid behind our minds and fell asleep

The mighty daemon lies unshaped within,

All was a chaos of the true and false,

It looked within itself but saw not God.

Denied the Truth that transient truths might live

That the World-Ignorance might grow slowly wise.

Looking from a gleam-ridge into the Night

Its alien dusk baffles her luminous eyes;

Only a slow advance the earth can bear.

Compelled to handle makeshift instruments

Earth all perceives through doubtful images,

Small lights kindled by touches of groping thought.

She sees by spasms and solders knowledge-scrap,

Expelling Nature's mystic unity

She takes for measuring-rod her ignorance.

That greater Power with her half-risen sun

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She knew by a privilege of thinking force

In her eyes however darkly fringed was lit

And shapes a world in its far-seeing flame.

But moves in boundaries of subtle power

A candidate for a higher suzerainty,

And searched for an ungrasped Omniscience.

A dwarf three-bodied trinity was her serf.

First, smallest of the three, but strong of limb,

A pigmy Thought needing to live in bounds

Absorbed and cabined in external sight,

A technician admirable, a thinker crude,

Obedient to gross Matter's tyranny,

It binds itself by what itself creates.

It sees as Law the habits of the world,

In its realm of concrete images and events

And ever repeating old familiar acts,

It loves the old ground that was its dwelling-place:

Distrustful of each new discovery

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A prudent treasurer of its ignorance,

Preferring a safe foothold upon things

The world's slow impressions on its labouring mind,

Increase their value by their poverty;

Only what sense can grasp seems absolute:

Wisdom identifies with the earthward look,

Are to its clinging hold a balustrade

Heaven's trust to it are the established ancient ways,

A sacred legacy from the great dead past

A firm shape of Nature never to be changed,

A smile from the Preserver of the Worlds

That all might stand in their fixed changeless type

One sees it circling faithful to its task,

In decayed and crumbling offices of Time

Or in an ancient Night's dim environs

And barks at every unfamiliar light

A watch-dog of the spirit's sense-railed house

Nourished on scraps of life and Matter's bones

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And yet behind it stands a cosmic might:

A fathomless sameness rhythms the tread of life;

A million species follow one mute Law.

Even in change is treasured changelessness;

In a new dress the old resumes its role;

On Shiva's breast is stayed the enormous dance.

A fiery spirit came, next of the three.

A hunchback rider of the red Wild-Ass,

From the great mystic Flame that rings the worlds

Thence sprang the burning vision of Desire.

A need of multitude and uncertainty

On countless roads across the vasts of Time

It burns all breasts with an ambiguous fire.

It flamed towards heaven, then sank, engulfed, towards hell;

And used for muddy ends its brilliant Force;

Turning to black and grey and lurid brown,

To snap up insect joys, its favourite food,

Nursing the splendid passion of its hues.

Followed by a dream-brood of glittering thoughts,

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It licked at knowledge with a smoky tongue.

It based on vacancy stupendous claims,

Yet all the time unwittingly it drove

Ardent to find, incapable to retain,

To err its inborn trend, its native cue.

It thought all true that flattered its own hopes;

It snatched at the unreal for provender.

Peering into a shadow-hung half-light

Or it swept in circles through conjecture's night

Bright scenes of promise held by transient flares,

Kept prints of passing Forms and hooded Powers

An eager spring to seize and to possess

Was its first natural motion and its last,

It scorned the straight road and ran on wandering curves

It saw unrealised aims as instant fate

Adventure its system in the gamble of life,

Error discouraged not its confident view

And failure could not slow its fiery clutch;

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One chance made true warranted all the rest.

An uncertain winner of uncertain stakes,

It ran its race and came in first or last.

It nursed a portion of infinity's strength

Its passion caught what calm intelligence missed.

On heavens high Thought had hidden in dazzling mist,

It probed the void and found a treasure there.

It threw the lightning's fork and hit the unseen.

Ignorance was its field, the unknown its prize.

Of all these Powers the greatest was the last.

Arriving late from a far plane of thought

Where all was grossly felt and blindly done,

Came Reason, the squat godhead artisan,

Adept of clear contrivance and design,

She took her firm and irremovable seat,

Armed with her lens and measuring-rod and probe,

And the multitudes that in it live and die

And took the earth and stars into her hands

In her strong purposeful laborious mind,

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She multiplied her slow half-cuts at Truth:

Intolerant of the lawless and the unique,

Imposing clarity on the unfathomable,

Nothing she knew but all things hoped to know.

Missioned by a supreme Intelligence

An imperfect light leading an erring mass

She ferrets out Nature's process, substance, cause.

She with the huge imbroglio struggles still;

To save the world from Ignorance she came.

Observing and remoulding all that is,

There the low bent and mighty figure sits

Amid the clatter and ringing of her tools.

Coercing the plastic stuff of cosmic Mind,

In a pattern of eternal fixity:

Unconscious of too close realities,

She leans to forge her credos and iron codes

And mechanic models of all things that are.

She spins in stiff but unsubstantial lines

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Her segment systems of the Infinite,

And myths by which she explains the inexplicable.

Like maps in the school-house of intellect hung,

Her numberless warring strict philosophies;

She carves with Thought's keen edge in rigid lines,

Her sciences precise and absolute.

Written round Nature's deep dumb hieroglyphs

The vast encyclopaedia of her thoughts;

Her numbers and unerring formulas

On all sides runs as if in a cosmic mosque

The daedal of her patterned arabesques,

This art, this artifice are her only stock.

In her withdrawal from the senses' trap,

There leaps no rending flash of absolute power,

A million faces wears her knowledge here

All now is questioned, all reduced to nought.

Her old great mythic writings disappear

This constant change spells progress to her eyes:

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There is no summit on which she can stand

An inconclusive play is Reason's toil.

Accepting every brief she pleads her case.

The eternal Advocate seated as judge

A thousand combatants for Truth's veiled throne

To tilt for ever with a wordy lance

Assaying thought's values with her rigid tests

Aloof and pure in her impartial poise.

Time cancels all her verdicts in appeal.

Her knowledge feigns to fall from a clear heaven,

She throws a glittering robe on Ignorance.

To rule mind's high realm in her absolute right,

Or see truth nude in a bright abstract haze.

She travels on the roads of erring sight

Constructed for her by her instruments.

She drags huge knowledge-bales through Matter's dust

Apprentice she has grown to her old drudge;

This now she uses as the assayer's stone.

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The husks she keeps, the kernel throws aside.

The ages' faith becomes an idle tale,

An old discarded dream needed no more:

Interpreting stone-laws inevitable

To unearth the processes of all things done.

To her eye's eager and admiring stare,

Of ordered fateful and unfailing Chance:

Its brute unconscious accurate device

It plans without thinking, acts without a will,

And builds a rational world without a mind.

Its vast self-action toils without a cause;

Death's head on the body of Necessity,

Then wonders why all was and whence it came.

Our ponderings but a freak of Matter's law,

Of soul or spirit we have now no need:

The patent unescapable miracle,

A suicidal rash expenditure

Has poured its scattered works on empty Space;

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Contract the immense expansion it has made:

The Void is left bare, vacant as before.

Explained the world and mastered all its laws,

It bound to service the unconscious djinns

All was precise, rigid, indubitable.

A whole stood up firm and clear-cut and safe,

This solid scheme melted in endless flux:

Suddenly she stumbled upon things unseen:

Startled her eyes with its perplexing glare

Till all her knowledge seemed an ignorance.

A magic's process in a magical space,

Whose source is lost in the Ineffable.

In a crash of values, in a huge doom-crack,

She lost her clear conserved constructed world.

In Energy's stupendous tripping whirl:

Invented forms without a thought or aim:

Matter was an incident in being's flow,

Ideals, ethics, systems had no base

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All grew a chaos, a heave and clash and strife.

A hard compression held down anarchy

Creation and destruction waltzed inarmed

All reeled into a world of Kali's dance.

Clutching for props, a soil on which to stand,

The rare-point sparse substratum universe

Alone a process of events was there

And, strong by death to slay or to create,

One chance remained that here might be a power

And leave him sovereign of the earthly scene.

To drive her car upon the roads of Time.

An absolute State found order's absolute,

In society build a just exact machine.

Could iron out a tranquil uniform world,

And a single-patterned thinking force on mind,

A reasonable animal make of man

This would be Nature's peak on an obscure globe,

Earth's evolution crowned, her mission done.

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Man then might rest content and live in peace,

The world's disorder hardening into Law, —

If God within could find no greater plan.

A touch can alter the fixed front of Fate.

A greater Mind may see a greater Truth,

Hid in ourselves the key of perfect change.

Earth's consciousness may marry with the Sun,

Our finite thoughts commune with the Infinite.

In the bright kingdoms of the rising Sun

All is a birth into a power of light:

Here all is mixed and marred, there pure and whole;

Awake to a greater Truth beyond her acts,

And felt the marvel in them and the force

She did the task, obeyed the knowledge given,

And from the light looked out to wider light:

Faithful to her limited sphere she toiled, but knew

Its mightiest acts a passage or a stage.

And not by Reason can the Truth be seen

Hardly the spirit's vision can descry

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The little Mind is tied to little things:

Half-waked in a world of dark Inconscience;

Like one left fumbling in the ignorant Night.

Desire is a child-heart's cry crying for bliss,

A rule-maker in a strange stumbling game.

A bounded prospect took for the far goal.

Of a traveller towards the half-found truth in things

For nothing is known while aught remains concealed;

Attracted by the All that is the One,

Hid by her cults and creeds she has glimpsed God's face:

But ever she hopes to see him in her heart

As yet a mask is there and not a brow,

Reason cannot tear off that glimmering mask,

In packets she ties up the Indivisible;

She breaks up knowledge into alien parts

She sees, not understanding what she has seen,

The myriad aspects of infinity.

Our ignorance is Wisdom's chrysalis,

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Its darkness is a blackened knot of light;

On the grey road that winds towards the Sun.

Which bind them to their strange companionship,

Sometimes break flashes of the enlightening Fire.

Armed they have come with the infallible word

That is a sanction from the eyes of God;

Arriving from the rim of eternity.

A greater Gnosis shall regard the world

On lustrous seas from the still rapt Alone

A timeless knowledge it shall bring to Mind,

Above in a high breathless stratosphere,

Lived, aspirants to a limitless Beyond,

In the unceasing circuit of the hours

And from their high station looked down on this world

A power to uplift the laggard world,

Unwont to tread the firm unchanging soil:

It planed in sunlit sky and starlit air;

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And heard afar the voices of the Gods.

Overleaping limit and exceeding norm,

And moved to acts of superhuman force.

Visiting the future in great brilliant raids

Apt to conceive, unable to attain,

Too large for the architecture of mortal Space.

An imagist of bodiless Ideas,

A pure Thought-Mind surveyed the cosmic act.

It saw the world from solitary heights

END OF CANTO TEN

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