Canto Thirteen

In the Self of Mind

AT LAST there came a bare indifferent sky

Where Silence listened to the cosmic Voice,

But answered nothing to a million calls;

The soul's endless question met with no response.

A deep cessation in a mighty calm,

And a margin and a blank of wordless peace.

He stood on a wide arc of summit Space

Which held all life in a corner of its vasts.

In the world which sprang from it, it took no part:

It was indifferent to its own defeats,

Impartial fell its gaze on evil and good,

An equal Cause of things, a lonely Seer

It acted not but bore all thoughts and deeds,

Consenting to the movements of her Force.

This witness hush is the Thinker's secret base:

From hidden silences the act is born

In secrecy wraps the seed the Eternal sows

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A seeing Self and potent Energy met;

Self-made from the dual power creation rose.

Its mute immemorable listening depths,

One being with it he grew wide, powerful, free.

As one who builds his own imagined scenes

Spectator of a drama self-conceived,

With the burden of luminous prophecy in their eyes,

Arisen from the dumbness in his soul.

Desire came not nor any gust of will,

Nothing was asked nor wanted any more.

His soul had peace, it knew the cosmic Whole.

On all things seen or touched or heard or felt

That must be reached from which all knowledge comes.

And smote at the very roots of thought and sense.

Aspiring towards a superconscient Sun,

They never can win however high their reach

A doubt corroded even the means to think,

All that it takes for reality's shining coin,

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Firm theory, assured significance,

Or assets valueless in Truth's treasury.

Travestied with a fortuitous sovereignty

And tinsel thought-forms brightly inadequate.

What it knew was an image in a broken glass,

All the ideas in its vast repertory

That spent itself in sound and left no trace.

The thin ingenious web round which it moves,

And gathered up into itself again,

Winged thoughts that flutter fragile in brief light

Aims puny but looming large in man's small scale,

And cobweb-wrapped beliefs alive no more.

Made out of glittering dust and bright moonshine

Collapsed into the Nescience whence it rose.

That shroud the mystery lurking in their glow,

By which they live until they fall from Time.

Ideas soon mummified, ghosts of old truths,

And packed into drawers of reason's trim bureau,

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Or an office for misuse of soul and life

And all his squanderings of Nature's store,

The world seemed a long aeonic failure's scene:

Assailed by the edge of the convicting beam

In the successful sleight and turn of thought

Its highest wisdom was a brilliant guess,

A passing light on being's surfaces.

A substitute for eternal mysteries,

And elevation by the architect Word

Existence' self was shadowed by a doubt;

On a nude pool of cosmic Nothingness.

Was only some half-seeing's delegate,

An idol, not the living body of God.

Was some pale front of the Unknowable;

Its liberation and immobile calm

Not the self-vision of Eternity.

Our sweet and mighty Mother was not there

Her clasp that takes the world into her arms

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The Bliss that is creation's splendid grain

That laughs in the blaze of the boundless heart of Love.

Must answer to the questioning of his soul.

High-climbing pathways ceased in the unknown;

In contrary patterns and conflicting hues;

He looked above, but all was blank and still:

Escaped into a formless Vacancy.

A noise was heard, between, of thought and prayer,

A vain and ignorant seeking raised its voice.

A foaming mass, a cry innumerable

Along the coasts of mortal Ignorance.

Beings and forces, forms, ideas like waves

And rose and sank and rose again in Time;

A Nothingness parent of the struggling worlds,

For ever sustaining the irrational cry,

Motionless, refusing question and response,

The dim Inconscient's dumb incertitude.

Opposed their limits to the spirit's walk;

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In a world of beings and momentary events

Immortal by renewed mortality,

Or ran around the cycles of its thought,

And knew no more than when it first began.

END OF CANTO THIRTEEN

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