THIS knowledge first he had of time-born men.

Admitted through a curtain of bright mind

And entered where the Wings of Glory brood

In the sunlit space where all is for ever known.

The body's rules bound not the spirit's powers:

When life had stopped its beats, death broke not in;

He dared to live when breath and thought were still.

Thus could he step into that magic place

Which few can even glimpse with hurried glance

Lifted for a moment from mind's laboured works

And the poverty of Nature's earthly sight.

All that the Gods have learned is there self-known.

There in a hidden chamber closed and mute

Are kept the record graphs of the cosmic scribe,

And there the tables of the sacred Law,

There is the Book of Being's index page,

The text and glossary of the Vedic truth

Are there; the rhythms and metres of the stars

Significant of the movements of our fate:

The symbol powers of number and of form,

And the secret code of the history of the world

And Nature's correspondence with the soul

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Are written in the mystic heart of life.

Out of the depths the world's buried secret rose;

He read the original ukase kept back

In the locked archives of the spirit's crypt,

And saw the signature and fiery seal

Of Wisdom on the dim Power's hooded work

Who builds in Ignorance the steps of Light.

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A sleeping deity opened deathless eyes:

He saw the unshaped thought in soulless forms,

Knew Matter pregnant with spiritual sense,

Mind dare the study of the Unknowable,

Life its gestation of the Golden Child.

In the light flooding thought's blank vacancy,

Interpreting the universe by soul signs

He read from within the text of the without:

The riddle grew plain and lost its catch obscure.

And Fate revealed a chain of seeing will;

A conscious wideness filled the old dumb Space.

     A Will, a hope immense now seized his heart,

The heart and mind feel one with all that is,

A conscious soul live in a conscious world.

These now could serve no more his regal turn:

The Immortal's pride refused the doom to live

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A miser of the scanty bargain made

His height repelled the lowness of earth's state:

A wideness discontented with its frame

Resiled from poor assent to Nature's terms,

The harsh contract spumed and the diminished lease.

Only beginnings are accomplished here;

Our base's Matter seems alone complete,

An absolute machine without a soul.

Or all seems a misfit of half ideas,

Or we saddle with the vice of earthly form

A hurried imperfect glimpse of heavenly things,

Guesses and travesties of celestial types.

Here chaos sorts itself into a world,

A brief formation drifting in the void:

Apings of knowledge, unfinished arcs of power,

Flamings of beauty into earthly shapes,

Love's broken reflexes of unity

Swim, fragment mirrorings of a floating sun.

A packed assemblage of crude tentative lives

Are pieced into a tessellated whole.

There is no perfect answer to our hopes;

There are blind voiceless doors that have no key;

Thought climbs in vain and brings a borrowed light,

Cheated by counterfeits sold to us in life's mart,

Our hearts clutch at a forfeited heavenly bliss.

There is provender for the mind's satiety,

There are thrills of the flesh, but not the soul's desire.

Here even the highest rapture Time can give

Is a mimicry of ungrasped beatitudes,

A mutilated statue of ecstasy,

A wounded happiness that cannot live,

A brief felicity of mind or sense

Thrown by the World-Power to her body-slave,

Or a simulacrum of enforced delight

In the seraglios of Ignorance.

For all we have acquired soon loses worth,

An old disvalued credit in Time's bank,

Imperfection's cheque drawn on the Inconscient.

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An inconsequence dogs every effort made,

And chaos waits on every cosmos formed:

In each success a seed of failure lurks.

And yet a greater destiny may be his,

For the eternal Spirit is his truth.

And fashion new the world in which he lives:

He, ignorant, is the Knower beyond Time,

     His soul retired from all that he had done.

Forsaken wheeled the circle of the days;

In distance sank the crowded tramp of life.

A call was on him from intangible heights;

Indifferent to the little outpost Mind,

He dwelt in the wideness of the Eternal's reign.

His boundless thought was neighbour to cosmic sight:

A universal light was in his eyes,

A golden influx flowed through heart and brain;

A force came down into his mortal limbs,

A current from eternal seas of Bliss;

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He felt the invasion and the nameless joy.

Aware of his occult omnipotent Source,

Allured by the omniscient Ecstasy,

A living centre of the Illimitable

Widened to equate with the world's circumference.,

He turned to his immense spiritual fate.

Abandoned on a canvas of torn air,

A picture lost in far and fading streaks,

The earth-nature's summits sank below his feet:

He climbed to meet the infinite more above.

Into the deep obscurities of form:

Death lay beneath him like a gate of sleep.

Far from compulsion of created things

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Thought and its shadowy idols disappear,

     In a divine retreat from mortal thought,

In a prodigious gesture of soul-sight,

His being towered into pathless heights,

Naked of its vesture of humanity.

As thus it rose, to meet him bare and pure

A strong Descent leaped down. A Might, a Flame,

A Beauty half-visible with deathless eyes,

A violent Ecstasy, a Sweetness dire,

Enveloped him with its stupendous limbs

And penetrated nerve and heart and brain

That thrilled and fainted with the epiphany:

His nature shuddered in the Unknown's grasp.

In a moment shorter than Death, longer than Time,

By a power more ruthless than Love, happier than Heaven,

Taken sovereignly into eternal arms,

Haled and coerced by a stark absolute bliss,

In a whirlwind circuit of delight and force

Hurried into unimaginable depths,

Upborne into immeasurable heights,

It was torn out from its mortality

And underwent a new and bourneless change.

An Omniscient knowing without sight or thought,

An indecipherable Omnipotence,

A mystic Form that could contain the worlds,

Yet make one human breast its passionate shrine,

Drew him out of his seeking loneliness

Into the magnitudes of God's embrace.

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As when a timeless Eye annuls the hours

Abolishing the agent and the act,

So now his spirit shone out wide, blank, pure:

His wakened mind became an empty slate

Was taken from him like a forgotten load:

A fire that seemed the body of a god

Consumed the limiting figures of the past

And made large room for a new self to live.

Illusion lost her aggrandising lens;

As from her failing hand the measures fell,

The little ego's ring could join no more;

In the enormous spaces of the self

Of an imperishable Inhabitant:

His spirit breathed a superhuman air.

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The guardian darknesses mute and formidable,

Vanished rescinding their enormous role:

Once figure of creation's vain ellipse,

The old adamantine vetoes stood no more:

Overpowered were earth and Nature's obsolete rule;

The python coils of the restricting Law

Could not restrain the swift arisen God;

Abolished were the scripts of destiny.

Invaded Nature with the infinite;

He saw unpathed, unwalled his titan scope.

     All was uncovered to his sealless eye.

A secret Nature stripped of her defence,

Once in a dreaded half-light formidable,

Overtaken in her mighty privacy

Lay bare to the burning splendour of his will.

In shadowy chambers lit by a strange sun

And opening hardly to hid mystic keys

Her perilous arcanes and hooded Powers

Confessed the advent of a mastering Mind

And bore the compulsion of a time-born gaze.

Incalculable in their wizard modes,

Immediate and invincible in the act,

Her secret strengths native to greater worlds

Lifted above our needy limited scope,

The occult privilege of demigods

And the sure power-pattern of her cryptic signs,

Her diagrams of geometric force,

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Her potencies of marvel-fraught design

Courted employment by an earth-nursed might.

A conscious Nature's quick machinery

Armed with a latent splendour of miracle

The prophet-passion of a seeing Mind,

And the lightning bareness of a free soul-force.

All once impossible deemed could now become

A natural limb of possibility,

A new domain of normalcy supreme.

An almighty occultist erects in space

This seeming outward world which tricks the sense;

He weaves his hidden threads of consciousness,

He builds bodies for his shapeless energy;

Out of the unformed and vacant Vast he has made

This criss-cross tangle of invisible laws;

His infallible rules, his covered processes,

Making a finite of infinity;

She too can make an order of her caprice,

Compels all substance by her wand of Mind.

Mind is a mediator divinity:

Its powers can undo all Nature's work:

Mind can suspend or change earth's concrete law.

The leaden grip of Matter it can break;

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Indifferent to the angry stare of Death,

It can immortalise a moment's work:

A simple fiat of its thinking force,

Within its chambers of mysterious trance:

It makes the body's sleep a puissant arm,

Communicates without means the unspoken thought;

It moves events by its bare silent will,

Even in this rigid realm, Mind can be king:

The logic of its demigod Idea,

She brings the light other mysterious realms:

Here where he stands, his feet on a prostrate world,

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And the universe the slave of mortal will.

Her daring leaps into the impossible:

From every source she has taken her cunning means,

Elements for her creation's tour-de-force:

A wonder-weft of knowledge incalculable,

She has combined to make the unreal true

Or liberate suppressed reality:

In her unhedged Circean wonderland

Pell-mell she shepherds her occult mightinesses;

Her mnemonics of the craft of the Infinite,

She gave, compelled, with a reluctant joy;

Herself she gave for rapture and for use.

Absolved from aberrations in deep ways,

The ends she recovered for which she was made:

She turned against the evil she had helped

Her engined wrath, her invisible means to slay;

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Her dangerous moods and arbitrary force

     A border sovereign is the occult Force.

The worlds of a marvellous Unknown were near,

Behind her an ineffable Presence stood:

Her reign received their mystic influences,

Their lion-forces crouched beneath her feet;

The future sleeps unknown behind their doors.

And. called to its mounting vision peaks divine:

An endless climb and adventure of the Idea

Above her lightened high immensities;

All the unknown looked out from boundlessness:

It lodged upon an edge of hourless Time,

Gazing out of some everlasting Now,

Its shadows gleaming with the birth of gods,

Its bodies signalling the Bodiless,

Its foreheads glowing with the Oversoul,

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Its forms projected from the Unknowable,

Its eyes dreaming of the Ineffable,

Its faces staring into eternity.

Life in him learned its huge subconscient rear;

The little fronts unlocked to the unseen Vasts:

Her gulfs stood nude, her far transcendences

     A giant order was discovered here

Wrote clear the letters of its glowing code:

A map of subtle signs surpassing thought

Was hung upon a wall of inmost mind.

Paces of the many-visaged Wonderful,

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Predestined stadia of the evolving Way,

Measures of the stature of the growing soul,

They interpreted existence to itself

And, mediating twixt the heights and deeps,

United the veiled married opposites

And linked creation to the Ineffable.

A last high world was seen where all worlds meet,

In its summit gleam where Night is not nor Sleep,

The light began of the Trinity supreme.

All there discovered what it seeks for here.

It freed the finite into boundlessness

And rose into its own eternities.

The Inconscient found its heart of consciousness,

The idea and feeling groping in Ignorance

At last clutched passionately the body of Truth,

The music born in Matter's silences

Plucked nude out of the Ineffable's fathomlessness

The meaning it had held but could not voice;

The perfect rhythm now only sometimes dreamed

A reconciling Wisdom looked on life;

It took the striving undertones of mind

And made of them a sweet and happy call:

It lifted from an underground of pain

The inarticulate murmur of our lives

And found for it a sense illimitable.

A mighty oneness its perpetual theme,

It caught the soul's faint scattered utterances,

Read hardly twixt our lines of rigid thought

Or mid this drowse and coma on Matter's breast

Heard like disjointed mutterings in sleep;

It grouped the golden links that they had lost

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All the great Words that toiled to express the One

With the finality of an ultimate phrase:

United were Time's creative mood and tense

Above were the Immortal's changeless seats;

White chambers of dalliance with Eternity

Calm continents of potency were glimpsed;

Homelands of beauty shut to human eyes,

Surprised the vision with felicity;

Sunbelts of knowledge, moonbelts of delight

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Fronting the viewless danger of the Unknown

He broke into another Space and Time.

                                                    END OF CANTO FIVE

                                                                   END OP BOOK ONE

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