Canto Fifteen

The Kingdoms of the Greater Knowledge

AFTER a measureless moment of the soul

Again returning to these surface fields

He heard once more the slow tread of the hours.

Himself was to himself his only scene.

He stood in a realm of boundless silences

A light was round him wide and absolute,

A consciousness lay still, devoid of forms,

For ever content with only being and bliss;

On the single spirit's bare and infinite ground.

He had left the reign of Nature's hues and shades;

It was a plane of undetermined spirit

A state in which all ceased and all began.

A high vast peak whence Spirit could see the worlds,

A lonely station of Omniscience,

A white floor in the house of All-Delight.

Here the still Voice which our listening cannot hear,

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All stood in an original plenitude,

The glorious dream of their universal acts;

Here closed the finite's crawl to the Infinite.

Or singing ran to meet God's veilless face.

He knocked at the doors of the Unknowable.

One with self's inlook into its own pure vasts,

The greatness and wonder of its boundless works,

The rapture of its movement and its rest,

The million-pointing undivided grasp

Its inexhaustible acts in a timeless Time,

A glorious multiple of one radiant Self,

All there were moving mansions of God-bliss;

There forces are great outbursts of God's truth

Spirit no more is hid from its own view,

And all creation is an act of light.

He passed to its fields of puissance and of calm

Traversed the realms of the supreme Idea

And the almighty source of cosmic change.

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There Knowledge called him to her mystic peaks

And feeling swims across a sea of peace

An equal of the first creator seers,

He moved through regions of transcendent Truth

There distance was his own huge spirit's extent;

Time's triple dividing step baffled no more;

The long flow of its manifesting course,

A universal beauty showed its face:

Here sheltered behind form's insensible screen,

And the key to the wonder-book of common things.

The multiple measures of the upbuilding force,

The enchantments that uphold the cosmic web

On peaks where Silence listens with still heart

He served the sessions of the triple Fire.

He heard the ever unspoken Reality's voice

The birthplace found of the sudden infallible Word

Absolved from the ligaments of death and sleep

And crossed the ocean of original sound;

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Near the high verges of eternity,

Between the slayer and the saviour fires;

Met borders of the inexpressible Light

Above him he saw the flaming Hierarchies,

The sun-eyed Guardians and the golden Sphinx

A wisdom waiting on Omniscience

It judged not, measured not, nor strove to know,

And the burden of a calm transcendent Voice.

His sight surpassed creation's head and base;

The obscure Abyss exposed its monstrous rule.

Almost the Unknowable disclosed its rim.

The hidden universes cried to him;

Sending their speechless message still remote.

And burning from the superconscious heights

A million energies joined and were the One.

All living forms became its atom homes.

Held now existence in its vast control;

At will he lived in the unoblivious Ray.

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In that high realm where no untruth can come,

Where all are different and all is one,

The Person in the World-Spirit anchored rode;

Its acts were the comrades of God's infinite peace.

The body was delivered to the soul, —

In a cosmicity's wide formless surge,

Carving perfection from a bright world-stuff,

There consciousness was a close and single weft;

The moments there were pregnant with all time.

Idea rotated symphonies of sight,

Life was a marvellous journey of the spirit,

In the kingdom of the Spirit's power and light,

He came new-born, infant and limitless

He was a vast that soon became a Sun.

His knowledge an inview caught unfathomable,

He thought and felt in all, his gaze had power.

Beings of a wider consciousness were his friends,

The Gods conversed with him behind Life's veil.

The primal Energy took him in its arms;

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An all-embracing knowledge seized his heart:

Mights played that never coursed through mortal nerves:

He bore the rapture of the Oversoul.

Attuned to the supernal harmonies,

His finite parts approached their absolutes,

His will took up the reins of cosmic Force.

END OF CANTO FIFTEEN

END OF BOOK TWO

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