{"id":497,"date":"2013-07-13T01:28:23","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:28:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=497"},"modified":"2013-07-13T01:28:23","modified_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:28:23","slug":"05-book-1-canto-04-the-secret-knowledge-vol-28-savitri-volume-28","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/01-works-of-sri-aurobindo\/01-sabcl\/28-savitri-volume-28\/05-book-1-canto-04-the-secret-knowledge-vol-28-savitri-volume-28","title":{"rendered":"-05_Book 1 Canto 04 The Secret Knowledge.htm"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\n\n\n
\n

 <\/p>\n<\/td>\n

\n
\n

\nCanto Four<\/i><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\nThe Secret Knowledge<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

On a height he stood that looked towards greater heights.<\/p>\n

Our early approaches to the Infinite<\/p>\n

Are sunrise splendours on a marvellous verge<\/p>\n

While lingers yet unseen the glorious sun.<\/p>\n

What now we see is a shadow of what must come.<\/p>\n

The earth’s uplook to a remote
\nunknown<\/p>\n

Is a preface only of the epic climb<\/p>\n

Of human soul from its flat earthly state<\/p>\n

To the discovery of a greater self<\/p>\n

And the far gleam of an eternal Light.<\/p>\n

This world is a beginning and a base<\/p>\n

Where Life and Mind erect their structured dreams;<\/p>\n

An unborn Power must build reality.<\/p>\n

A deathbound littleness is not all we are:<\/p>\n

Immortal our forgotten vastnesses<\/p>\n

Await discovery in our summit selves;<\/p>\n

Unmeasured breadths and depths of being are ours.<\/p>\n

Akin to the ineffable
\nsecrecy,<\/p>\n

Mystic, eternal in unrealised Time,<\/p>\n

Neighbours of Heaven are Nature’s altitudes.<\/p>\n

To these high-peaked
\ndominions sealed to our search<\/p>\n

Too far from surface Nature’s postal routes,<\/p>\n

Too lofty for our mortal lives to breathe,<\/p>\n

Deep in us a forgotten kinship points<\/p>\n

And a faint voice of ecstasy and prayer<\/p>\n

Calls to those lucent lost immensities.<\/p>\n

Even when we fail to look into our souls<\/p>\n

Or lie embedded in earthly consciousness,<\/p>\n

Still have we parts that grow towards the
\nLight,<\/p>\n

Yet are there luminous tracts and heavens serene<\/p>\n

And Eldoradoes of splendour and ecstasy <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 46<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/div>\n

And temples to the Godhead none can see.<\/p>\n

A shapeless memory lingers in us still<\/p>\n

And sometimes, when our sight is turned within,<\/p>\n

Earth’s ignorant veil is lifted from our eyes;<\/p>\n

There is a short miraculous escape.<\/p>\n

This narrow fringe of clamped experience<\/p>\n

We leave behind meted to us as life,<\/p>\n

Our little walks, our insufficient reach.<\/p>\n

Our souls can visit in great lonely hours<\/p>\n

Still regions of imperishable Light,<\/p>\n

All-seeing eagle-peaks of silent Power<\/p>\n

And moon-flame oceans of swift fathomless Bliss<\/p>\n

And calm immensities of spirit
\nSpace.<\/p>\n

In the unfolding process of the Self<\/p>\n

Sometimes the inexpressible Mystery<\/p>\n

Elects a human vessel of descent.<\/p>\n

A breath comes down from a supernal air,<\/p>\n

A presence is borne, a guiding Light awakes,<\/p>\n

A stillness falls upon the instruments:<\/p>\n

Fixed sometimes like a marble monument,<\/p>\n

Stone-calm, the body is a pedestal<\/p>\n

Supporting a figure of eternal Peace.<\/p>\n

Or a revealing Force sweeps blazing in;<\/p>\n

Out of some vast superior continent<\/p>\n

Knowledge breaks through trailing its radiant seas,<\/p>\n

And Nature trembles with the power, the flame.<\/p>\n

A greater Personality sometimes<\/p>\n

Possesses us which yet we know is ours:<\/p>\n

Or we adore the Master of our souls.<\/p>\n

Then the small bodily ego thins and falls;<\/p>\n

No more insisting on its separate self,<\/p>\n

Losing the punctilio of its separate birth,<\/p>\n

It leaves us one with Nature and with God.<\/p>\n

In moments when the inner lamps are lit<\/p>\n

And the life’s cherished guests are left outside,<\/p>\n

Our spirit sits alone and speaks to its gulfs. <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 47<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/div>\n

A wider consciousness opens then its doors;<\/p>\n

Invading from spiritual silences<\/p>\n

A ray of the timeless Glory stoops awhile<\/p>\n

To commune with our seized illumined clay<\/p>\n

And leaves its huge white stamp upon our lives.<\/p>\n

In the oblivious field of mortal mind,<\/p>\n

Revealed to the closed prophet eyes of trance<\/p>\n

Or in some deep internal solitude<\/p>\n

Witnessed by a strange immaterial sense,<\/p>\n

The signals of eternity appear.<\/p>\n

The truth mind could not know unveils its face,<\/p>\n

We hear what mortal ears have never heard,<\/p>\n

We feel what earthly sense has never felt,<\/p>\n

We love what common hearts repel and dread;<\/p>\n

Our minds hush to a bright Omniscient;<\/p>\n

A Voice calls from the chambers of the soul;<\/p>\n

We meet the ecstasy of the Godhead’s touch<\/p>\n

In golden privacies of immortal fire.<\/p>\n

These signs are native to a larger self<\/p>\n

That lives within us by ourselves unseen;<\/p>\n

Only sometimes a holier influence comes,<\/p>\n

A tide of mightier surgings bears our lives<\/p>\n

And a diviner Presence moves the soul.<\/p>\n

Or through the earthly coverings something breaks,<\/p>\n

A grace and beauty of spiritual light,<\/p>\n

The murmuring tongue of a celestial fire.<\/p>\n

Ourself and a high stranger whom we feel,<\/p>\n

It is and acts unseen as if it were not;<\/p>\n

It follows the line of sempiternal birth,<\/p>\n

Yet seems to perish with its mortal frame.<\/p>\n

Assured of the Apocalypse to be,<\/p>\n

It reckons not the moments and the hours;<\/p>\n

Great, patient, calm it sees the centuries pass,<\/p>\n

Awaiting the slow miracle of our change<\/p>\n

In the sure deliberate process of world-force<\/p>\n

And the long march of all-revealing Time. <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 48<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/div>\n

It is the origin and the master-clue,<\/p>\n

A Silence overhead, an inner
\nVoice,<\/p>\n

A living image seated in the heart,<\/p>\n

An unwalled wideness and a fathomless point,<\/p>\n

The truth of all these cryptic shows in
\nspace,<\/p>\n

The Real towards which our strivings move,<\/p>\n

The secret grandiose meaning of our lives.<\/p>\n

A treasure of honey in the combs of God,<\/p>\n

A Splendour burning in a tenebrous cloak,<\/p>\n

It is our glory of the flame of God,<\/p>\n

Our golden fountain of the world’s delight,<\/p>\n

An immortality cowled in the cape of death,<\/p>\n

The shape of our unborn divinity.<\/p>\n

It guards for us our fate in depths within<\/p>\n

Where sleeps the eternal seed of transient things.<\/p>\n

Always we bear in us a magic key<\/p>\n

Concealed in life’s hermetic envelope.<\/p>\n

A burning witness in the sanctuary<\/p>\n

Regards through Time and the blind walls of Form;<\/p>\n

A timeless Light is in his hidden eyes;<\/p>\n

He sees the secret things no words can speak<\/p>\n

And knows the goal of the unconscious world<\/p>\n

And the heart of the mystery of the journeying years.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

But all is screened, subliminal, mystical;<\/p>\n

It needs the intuitive heart, the inward turn,<\/p>\n

It needs the power of a spiritual gaze.<\/p>\n

Else to our waking mind’s small moment look<\/p>\n

A goalless voyage seems our dubious course<\/p>\n

Some Chance has settled or hazarded some Will,<\/p>\n

Or a Necessity without aim or cause<\/p>\n

Unwillingly compelled to emerge and be.<\/p>\n

In this dense field where nothing is plain or sure,<\/p>\n

Our very being seems to us questionable,<\/p>\n

Our life a vague experiment, the soul<\/p>\n

A flickering light in a strange ignorant world, <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 49<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/div>\n

The earth a brute mechanic accident,<\/p>\n

A net of death in which by chance we live.<\/p>\n

All we have learned appears a doubtful guess,<\/p>\n

The achievement done a passage or a phase<\/p>\n

Whose further end is hidden from our sight,<\/p>\n

A chance happening or a fortuitous fate.<\/p>\n

Out of the unknown we move to the unknown.<\/p>\n

Ever surround our brief existence here<\/p>\n

Grey shadows of unanswered questionings;<\/p>\n

The dark Inconscient’s signless mysteries<\/p>\n

Stand up unsolved behind Fate’s starting line;<\/p>\n

An aspiration in the Night’s profound,<\/p>\n

Seed of a perishing body and half-lit mind,<\/p>\n

Uplifts its lonely tongue of conscious fire<\/p>\n

Towards an undying Light for ever lost.<\/p>\n

Only it hears, sole echo of its call,<\/p>\n

The dim reply in man’s unknowing heart<\/p>\n

And meets, not understanding why it came<\/p>\n

Or for what reason is the suffering here,<\/p>\n

God’s sanction to the paradox of life<\/p>\n

And the riddle of the Immortal’s birth in Time.<\/p>\n

Along a path of aeons serpentine<\/p>\n

In the coiled blackness of her nescient course<\/p>\n

The Earth-Goddess toils across the sands of Time.<\/p>\n

A Being is in her whom she hopes to know,<\/p>\n

A Word speaks to her heart she cannot hear,<\/p>\n

A Fate compels whose form she cannot see.<\/p>\n

In her unconscious orbit through the Void<\/p>\n

Out of her mindless depths she strives to rise,<\/p>\n

A perilous life her gain, a struggling joy;<\/p>\n

A Thought that can conceive but hardly knows<\/p>\n

Arises slowly in her and creates<\/p>\n

The idea, the speech that labels more than it lights;<\/p>\n

A trembling gladness that is less than bliss<\/p>\n

Invades from all this beauty that must die.<\/p>\n

Alarmed by the sorrow dragging at her feet <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 50<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/div>\n

And conscious of the high things not yet won,<\/p>\n

Ever she nurses in her sleepless breast<\/p>\n

An inward urge that takes from her rest and peace.<\/p>\n

Ignorant and weary
\nand invincible<\/p>\n

She seeks through the soul’s war and quivering pain<\/p>\n

The pure perfection her marred nature needs,<\/p>\n

A breath of Godhead on her stone and mire.<\/p>\n

A faith she craves that can survive defeat,<\/p>\n

The sureness of a love that knows not death,<\/p>\n

The radiance of a truth for ever sure.<\/p>\n

A light grows in her, she assumes a voice,<\/p>\n

Her state she learns to read and the act she has done,<\/p>\n

But the one needed truth eludes her grasp,<\/p>\n

Herself and all of which she is the sign.<\/p>\n

An inarticulate whisper drives her steps<\/p>\n

Of which she feels the force but not the sense;<\/p>\n

A few rare intimations come as guides,<\/p>\n

Immense divining flashes cleave her brain,<\/p>\n

And sometimes in her hours of dream and muse<\/p>\n

The truth that she has missed looks out on her<\/p>\n

As if far off and yet within her soul.<\/p>\n

A change comes near that flees from her surmise<\/p>\n

And, ever postponed, compels attempt and hope,<\/p>\n

Yet seems too great for mortal hope to dare.<\/p>\n

A vision meets her of supernal Powers<\/p>\n

That draw her as if mighty kinsmen lost<\/p>\n

Approaching with estranged great luminous gaze.<\/p>\n

Then is she moved to all that she is not<\/p>\n

And stretches arms to what was never hers.<\/p>\n

Outstretching arms to the unconscious Void,<\/p>\n

Passionate she prays to invisible forms of Gods<\/p>\n

Soliciting from dumb Fate and toiling Time<\/p>\n

What most she needs, what most exceeds her scope,<\/p>\n

A Mind unvisited by illusion’s gleams,<\/p>\n

A Will expressive of soul’s deity,<\/p>\n

A Strength not forced to stumble by its speed, <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 51<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/div>\n

A Joy that drags not sorrow as its shade.<\/p>\n

For these she yearns and feels them destined hers:<\/p>\n

Heaven’s privilege she claims as her own right.<\/p>\n

Just is her claim the all-witnessing Gods approve,<\/p>\n

Clear in a greater light than reason owns:<\/p>\n

Our intuitions are its title-deeds;<\/p>\n

Our souls accept what our blind thoughts refuse.<\/p>\n

Earth’s winged chimeras are Truth’s steeds in Heaven,<\/p>\n

The impossible God’s sign of things to be.<\/p>\n

But few can look beyond the present state<\/p>\n

Or overleap this matted hedge of sense.<\/p>\n

All that transpires on earth and all beyond<\/p>\n

Are parts of an illimitable plan<\/p>\n

The One keeps in his heart and knows alone.<\/p>\n

Our outward happenings have their seed within,<\/p>\n

And even this random Fate that imitates Chance,<\/p>\n

This mass of unintelligible results,<\/p>\n

Are the dumb graph of truths that work unseen:<\/p>\n

The laws of the Unknown create the known.<\/p>\n

The events that shape the appearance of our lives<\/p>\n

Are a cipher of subliminal quiverings<\/p>\n

Which rarely we surprise or vaguely feel,<\/p>\n

Are an outcome of suppressed realities<\/p>\n

That hardly rise into material day:<\/p>\n

They are born from the spirit’s sun of hidden powers<\/p>\n

Digging a tunnel through emergency.<\/p>\n

But who shall pierce into the cryptic gulf<\/p>\n

And learn what deep necessity of the soul<\/p>\n

Determined casual deed and consequence?<\/p>\n

Absorbed in a routine of daily acts,<\/p>\n

Our eyes are fixed on an external scene;<\/p>\n

We hear the crash of the wheels of Circumstance<\/p>\n

And wonder at the hidden cause of things.<\/p>\n

Yet a foreseeing Knowledge might be ours,<\/p>\n

If we could take our spirit’s stand within,<\/p>\n

If we could hear the muffled daemon voice. <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 52<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/div>\n

Too seldom is the shadow of what must come<\/p>\n

Cast in an instant on the secret sense<\/p>\n

Which feels the shock of the invisible,<\/p>\n

And seldom in the few who answer give<\/p>\n

The mighty process of the cosmic Will<\/p>\n

Communicates its image to our sight,<\/p>\n

Identifying the world’s mind with ours.<\/p>\n

Our range is fixed within the crowded arc<\/p>\n

Of what we observe and touch and thought can guess<\/p>\n

And rarely dawns the light of the Unknown<\/p>\n

Waking in us the prophet and the seer.<\/p>\n

The outward and the immediate are our field,<\/p>\n

The dead past is our background and support;<\/p>\n

Mind keeps the soul prisoner, we are slaves to our acts;<\/p>\n

We cannot free our gaze to reach wisdom’s sun.<\/p>\n

Inheritor of the brief animal mind,<\/p>\n

Man, still a child in Nature’s mighty hands,<\/p>\n

In the succession of the moments lives;<\/p>\n

To a changing present is his narrow right;<\/p>\n

His memory stares back at a phantom past,<\/p>\n

The future flees before him as he moves;<\/p>\n

He sees imagined garments, not a face.<\/p>\n

Armed with a limited precarious strength,<\/p>\n

He saves his fruits of work from adverse chance.<\/p>\n

A struggling ignorance is his wisdom’s mate.<\/p>\n

He waits to see the consequence of his acts,<\/p>\n

He waits to weigh the certitude of his thoughts,<\/p>\n

He knows not what he shall achieve or when;<\/p>\n

He knows not whether at last he shall survive,<\/p>\n

Or end like the mastodon and the sloth<\/p>\n

And perish from the earth where he was king.<\/p>\n

He is ignorant of the meaning of his life,<\/p>\n

He is ignorant of his high and splendid fate.<\/p>\n

Only the Immortals on their deathless heights<\/p>\n

Dwelling beyond the walls of Time and Space,<\/p>\n

Masters of living, free from the bonds of Thought, <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 53<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/div>\n

Who are overseers of Fate and Chance and Will<\/p>\n

And experts of the theorem of world-need,<\/p>\n

Can see the Idea, the Might that change Time’s course,<\/p>\n

Come maned with light from undiscovered worlds,<\/p>\n

Hear, while the world toils on with its deep blind heart,<\/p>\n

The galloping hooves of the unforeseen event,<\/p>\n

Bearing the superhuman
\nrider, near<\/p>\n

And, impassive to earth’s din and startled cry,<\/p>\n

Return to the silence of the hills of God;<\/p>\n

As lightning leaps, as thunder sweeps, they pass<\/p>\n

And leave their mark on the trampled breast of Life.<\/p>\n

Above the world the world-creators stand,<\/p>\n

In the phenomenon see its mystic source.<\/p>\n

These heed not the deceiving outward play,<\/p>\n

They turn not to the moment’s busy tramp,<\/p>\n

But listen with the still patience of the Unborn<\/p>\n

For the slow footsteps of far Destiny<\/p>\n

Approaching through huge distances of Time,<\/p>\n

Unmarked by the eye that sees effect and cause,<\/p>\n

Unheard mid the clamour of the human plane.<\/p>\n

Attentive to an unseen Truth they seize<\/p>\n

A sound as of invisible augur wings,<\/p>\n

Voices of an unplumbed significance,<\/p>\n

Mutterings that brood in the core of Matter’s sleep.<\/p>\n

In the heart’s profound audition they can catch<\/p>\n

The murmurs lost by life’s uncaring ear,<\/p>\n

A prophet-speech in thought’s omniscient trance.<\/p>\n

Above the illusion of the hopes that pass,<\/p>\n

Behind the appearance and the overt act,<\/p>\n

Behind the clock-work
\nchance and vague surmise,<\/p>\n

Amid the wrestle of force, the trampling feet,<\/p>\n

Across the triumph, fighting and despair,<\/p>\n

They watch the Bliss for which earth’s heart has cried,<\/p>\n

On the long road which cannot see its end<\/p>\n

Winding undetected through the sceptic days<\/p>\n

And to meet it guide the unheedful moving world. <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 54<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/div>\n

Thus will the masked Transcendent mount his throne.<\/p>\n

When darkness deepens strangling the earth’s breast<\/p>\n

And man’s corporeal mind is the only lamp,<\/p>\n

As a thief’s in the night shall be the covert tread<\/p>\n

Of one who steps unseen into his house.<\/p>\n

A Voice ill-heard shall speak, the soul obey,<\/p>\n

A power into mind’s inner chamber steal,<\/p>\n

A charm and sweetness open life’s closed doors<\/p>\n

And beauty conquer the resisting world,<\/p>\n

The truth-light capture Nature by surprise,<\/p>\n

A stealth of God compel the heart to bliss<\/p>\n

And earth grow unexpectedly divine.<\/p>\n

In Matter shall be lit the spirit’s glow,<\/p>\n

In body and body kindled the sacred birth;<\/p>\n

Night shall awake to the anthem of the stars,<\/p>\n

The days become a happy pilgrim march,<\/p>\n

Our will a force of the Eternal’s power,<\/p>\n

And thought the rays of a spiritual sun.<\/p>\n

A few shall see what none yet understands;<\/p>\n

God shall grow up while the wise men talk and sleep;<\/p>\n

For man shall not know the coming till its hour<\/p>\n

And belief shall be not till the work is done.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

A consciousness that knows not its own truth,<\/p>\n

A vagrant hunter of misleading dawns,<\/p>\n

Between the being’s dark and luminous ends<\/p>\n

Moves here in a half-light that seems the whole:<\/p>\n

An interregnum in Reality<\/p>\n

Cuts off the integral Thought, the total Power;<\/p>\n

It circles or stands in a vague interspace,<\/p>\n

Doubtful of its beginning and its close,<\/p>\n

Or runs upon a road that has no end;<\/p>\n

Far from the original Dusk, the final Flame<\/p>\n

In some huge void Inconscience it lives,<\/p>\n

Like a thought persisting in a wide emptiness.<\/p>\n

As if an unintelligible phrase <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 55<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/div>\n

Suggested a million renderings to the Mind,<\/p>\n

It lends a purport to
\nthe random world.<\/p>\n

A conjecture leaning upon doubtful proofs,<\/p>\n

A message misunderstood, a thought confused<\/p>\n

Missing its aim is all that it can speak<\/p>\n

Or a fragment of the universal word.<\/p>\n

It leaves two giant letters void of sense<\/p>\n

While without sanction turns the middle sign<\/p>\n

Carrying an enigmatic universe,<\/p>\n

As if a present without future or past<\/p>\n

Repeating the same revolution’s whirl<\/p>\n

Turned on its axis in its own Inane.<\/p>\n

Thus is the meaning of creation veiled;<\/p>\n

For without context reads the cosmic page:<\/p>\n

Its signs stare at us like an unknown script,<\/p>\n

As if appeared screened by a foreign tongue<\/p>\n

Or code of splendour signs without a key<\/p>\n

A portion of a parable sublime.<\/p>\n

It wears to the perishable creature’s eyes<\/p>\n

The grandeur of a useless miracle;<\/p>\n

Wasting itself that it may last awhile,<\/p>\n

A river that can never find its sea,<\/p>\n

It runs through life and death on an edge of Time;<\/p>\n

A fire in the Night is its mighty action’s blaze.<\/p>\n

This is our deepest need to join once more<\/p>\n

What now is parted, opposite and twain,<\/p>\n

Remote in sovereign spheres that never meet<\/p>\n

Or fronting like far poles of Night and Day.<\/p>\n

We must fill the immense lacuna we have made,<\/p>\n

Re-wed the closed finite’s lonely consonant<\/p>\n

With the open vowels of Infinity,<\/p>\n

A hyphen must connect Matter and Mind,<\/p>\n

The narrow isthmus of the ascending soul:<\/p>\n

We must renew the secret bond in things,<\/p>\n

Our hearts recall the lost divine Idea,<\/p>\n

Reconstitute the perfect word, unite <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 56<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/div>\n

The Alpha and the Omega in one sound;<\/p>\n

Then shall the Spirit and Nature be at one.<\/p>\n

Two are the ends of the mysterious plan.<\/p>\n

In the wide signless ether of the Self,<\/p>\n

In the unchanging Silence white and nude,<\/p>\n

Aloof, resplendent like gold dazzling suns<\/p>\n

Veiled by the Ray no mortal eye can bear,<\/p>\n

The Spirit’s free and absolute potencies<\/p>\n

Burn in the solitude of the thoughts of God.<\/p>\n

A rapture and a
\nradiance and a hush<\/p>\n

Delivered from the approach of wounded hearts,<\/p>\n

Denied to the Idea that looks at grief,<\/p>\n

Remote from the Force that cries out in its pain,<\/p>\n

In his inalienable bliss they live.<\/p>\n

Immaculate in self-knowledge and self-power,<\/p>\n

Calm they repose on the eternal Will.<\/p>\n

Only his law they count and him obey;<\/p>\n

They have no goal to reach, no aim to serve.<\/p>\n

Implacable in their timeless purity,<\/p>\n

All barter or bribe of worship they refuse;<\/p>\n

Unmoved by cry of revolt and ignorant prayer<\/p>\n

They reckon not our virtue and our sin,<\/p>\n

They bend not to the voices that implore,<\/p>\n

They hold no traffic
\nwith error and its reign:<\/p>\n

They are guardians of the silence of the Truth,<\/p>\n

They are keepers of the immutable decree.<\/p>\n

A deep surrender is their source of might,<\/p>\n

A still identity their way to know,<\/p>\n

Motionless is their action like a sleep.<\/p>\n

At peace, regarding the trouble beneath the stars,<\/p>\n

Deathless, watching the works of Death and Chance,<\/p>\n

Immobile, seeing the millenniums pass,<\/p>\n

Untouched while the long map of Fate unrolls,<\/p>\n

They look on our struggle with impartial eyes,<\/p>\n

And yet without them cosmos could not be.<\/p>\n

Impervious to desire and doom and hope, <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 57<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/div>\n

Their station of inviolable might<\/p>\n

Moveless upholds the world’s enormous task,<\/p>\n

Its ignorance is by their knowledge lit,<\/p>\n

Its yearning lasts by their indifference.<\/p>\n

As the height draws the low ever to climb,<\/p>\n

As the breadths draw the small to adventure vast,<\/p>\n

Their aloofness drives man to surpass himself.<\/p>\n

Our passion heaves to wed the
\neternal calm,<\/p>\n

Our dwarf-search mind to meet the Omniscient’s
\nforce.<\/p>\n

Acquiescing in the wisdom that made hell<\/p>\n

And the harsh utility of death and tears,<\/p>\n

Acquiescing in the gradual steps of Time,<\/p>\n

Careless they seem of the grief that stings the world’s
\nheart,<\/p>\n

Careless of the pain that rends its body and life;<\/p>\n

Above joy and sorrow is that grandeur’s walk:<\/p>\n

They have no portion in the good that dies,<\/p>\n

Mute, pure, they share not in the evil done;<\/p>\n

Else might their strength be marred and could not save.<\/p>\n

Alive to the truth that dwells in God’s extremes,<\/p>\n

Awake to a motion of all-seeing Force,<\/p>\n

The slow venture of the long ambiguous years<\/p>\n

And the unexpected good from woeful deeds,<\/p>\n

The immortal sees not as we vainly see.<\/p>\n

He looks on hidden aspects and screened powers,<\/p>\n

He knows the law and natural line of things.<\/p>\n

Undriven by a brief life’s will to act,<\/p>\n

Unharassed by the spur of pity and fear,<\/p>\n

He makes no haste to untie the cosmic knot<\/p>\n

Or the world’s torn jarring heart to reconcile.<\/p>\n

In Time he waits for the Eternal’s hour.<\/p>\n

Yet a spiritual secret aid is there;<\/p>\n

While a tardy Evolution’s coils wind on<\/p>\n

And Nature hews her way through adamant<\/p>\n

A divine intervention thrones above.<\/p>\n

Alive in a dead rotating universe<\/p>\n

We whirl not here upon a casual globe <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 58<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/div>\n

Abandoned to a task beyond our force;<\/p>\n

Even through the tangled anarchy called Fate<\/p>\n

And through the bitterness of death and fall<\/p>\n

An outstretched Hand is felt upon our lives.<\/p>\n

It is near us in unnumbered bodies and births;<\/p>\n

In its unshaken grasp it keeps for us safe<\/p>\n

The one inevitable supreme result<\/p>\n

No will can take away and no doom change,<\/p>\n

The crown of conscious Immortality,<\/p>\n

The godhead promised to our struggling souls<\/p>\n

When first man’s heart dared death and suffered life.<\/p>\n

One who has shaped this world is ever its lord:<\/p>\n

Our errors are his steps upon the way;<\/p>\n

He works through the fierce vicissitudes of our lives,<\/p>\n

He works through the hard breath of battle and toil,<\/p>\n

He works through our sins and sorrows and our tears,<\/p>\n

His knowledge overrules our nescience;<\/p>\n

Whatever the appearance we must bear,<\/p>\n

Whatever our strong ills and present fate,<\/p>\n

When nothing we can see but drift and bale,<\/p>\n

A mighty Guidance leads us still through all.<\/p>\n

After we have served this great divided world<\/p>\n

God’s bliss and oneness are our inborn right.<\/p>\n

A date is fixed in the calendar of the Unknown,<\/p>\n

An anniversary of the Birth sublime:<\/p>\n

Our soul shall justify its chequered walk,<\/p>\n

All will come near that now is naught or far.<\/p>\n

These calm and distant Mights shall act at last.<\/p>\n

Immovably ready for their destined task,<\/p>\n

The ever-wise compassionate Brilliances<\/p>\n

Await the sound of the Incarnate’s voice<\/p>\n

To leap and bridge the chasms of Ignorance<\/p>\n

And heal the hollow yearning gulfs of Life<\/p>\n

And fill the abyss that is the universe.<\/p>\n

Here meanwhile at the Spirit’s opposite pole<\/p>\n

In the mystery of the deeps that God has built <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 59<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/div>\n

For his abode below the Thinker’s sight,<\/p>\n

In this compromise of a stark absolute Truth<\/p>\n

With the Light that dwells near the dark end of things,<\/p>\n

In this tragi-comedy of divine disguise,<\/p>\n

This long far seeking for joy ever near,<\/p>\n

In the grandiose dream of which the world is made,<\/p>\n

In this gold dome on a black dragon base,<\/p>\n

The conscious Force that acts in Nature’s breast,<\/p>\n

A dark-robed labourer in the cosmic scheme<\/p>\n

Carrying clay images of unborn gods,<\/p>\n

Executrix of the inevitable Idea<\/p>\n

Hampered, enveloped by the hoops of Fate,<\/p>\n

Patient trustee of slow eternal Time,<\/p>\n

Absolves from hour to hour her secret charge.<\/p>\n

All she foresees in masked imperative depths;<\/p>\n

The dumb intention of the unconscious gulfs<\/p>\n

Answers to a will that sees upon the heights,<\/p>\n

And the evolving Word’s first syllable<\/p>\n

Ponderous, brute-sensed, contains its luminous close,<\/p>\n

Privy to a summit victory’s vast descent<\/p>\n

And the portent of the soul’s immense uprise.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

All here where each thing seems its lonely self<\/p>\n

Are figures of the sole transcendent One:<\/p>\n

Only by him they are, his breath is their life;<\/p>\n

An unseen Presence moulds the oblivious clay.<\/p>\n

A playmate in the mighty Mother’s game,<\/p>\n

One came upon the dubious whirling globe<\/p>\n

To hide from her pursuit in force and form.<\/p>\n

A secret spirit in the Inconscient’s sleep,<\/p>\n

A shapeless Energy, a voiceless Word,<\/p>\n

He was here before the elements could emerge,<\/p>\n

Before there was light of mind or life could breathe.<\/p>\n

Accomplice of her cosmic huge pretence,<\/p>\n

His semblances he turns to real shapes<\/p>\n

And makes the symbol equal with the truth: <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 60<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/div>\n

He gives to his timeless thoughts a form in Time.<\/p>\n

He is the substance, he the self of things;<\/p>\n

She has forged from him her works of skill and might:<\/p>\n

She wraps him in the magic of her moods<\/p>\n

And makes of his myriad truths her countless dreams.<\/p>\n

The Master of being
\nhas come close to her,<\/p>\n

An immortal child born in the fugitive years.<\/p>\n

In objects wrought, in the persons she conceives,<\/p>\n

Dreaming she chases her idea of him,<\/p>\n

And catches here a look and there a gest:<\/p>\n

Ever he repeats in them his ceaseless births.<\/p>\n

He is the Maker and the world he made,<\/p>\n

He is the vision and he is the
\nseer;<\/p>\n

He is himself the actor and the act,<\/p>\n

He is himself the knower and the known,<\/p>\n

He is himself the dreamer and the dream.<\/p>\n

There are Two who are One and play in many worlds;<\/p>\n

In Knowledge and Ignorance they have spoken and met<\/p>\n

And light and
\ndarkness are their eyes’ interchange.<\/p>\n

Our pleasure and pain are their wrestle and embrace,<\/p>\n

Our deeds, our hopes are intimate to their tale;<\/p>\n

They are married secretly in our thought and life.<\/p>\n

The universe is an endless masquerade:<\/p>\n

For nothing here is utterly what it seems,<\/p>\n

It is a dream-fact vision of a truth<\/p>\n

Which but for the dream would not be wholly true,<\/p>\n

A phenomenon stands out significant<\/p>\n

Against dim backgrounds of eternity;<\/p>\n

We accept its face and pass by all it means;<\/p>\n

A part is seen, we take it for the whole.<\/p>\n

Thus have they made their play with us for roles:<\/p>\n

Author and actor with himself as scene,<\/p>\n

He moves there as the Soul, as Nature she.<\/p>\n

Here on the earth where we must fill our parts,<\/p>\n

We know not how shall run the drama’s course;<\/p>\n

Our uttered sentences veil in their thought. <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 61<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/div>\n

Her mighty plan she holds back from our sight:<\/p>\n

She has concealed her glory and her bliss<\/p>\n

And disguised the
\nLove and Wisdom in her heart.<\/p>\n

Of all the marvel and
\nbeauty that are hers<\/p>\n

Only a darkened little we can feel.<\/p>\n

He too wears a diminished
\nGodhead here;<\/p>\n

He has forsaken his omnipotence,<\/p>\n

His calm he has foregone and infinity.<\/p>\n

He knows her only, he has forgotten himself;<\/p>\n

To her he abandons all to make her great.<\/p>\n

He hopes in her to find himself anew,<\/p>\n

Incarnate, wedding his infinity’s peace<\/p>\n

To her creative passion’s ecstasy.<\/p>\n

Although possessor of the earth and heavens,<\/p>\n

He leaves to her the cosmic management<\/p>\n

And watches all, the Witness of her scene.<\/p>\n

A supernumerary on her stage,<\/p>\n

He speaks no words or hides behind the wings.<\/p>\n

He takes birth in her world, waits on her will,<\/p>\n

Divines her enigmatic gesture’s sense,<\/p>\n

The fluctuating chance turns of her mood,<\/p>\n

Works out her meanings she seems not to know<\/p>\n

And serves her secret purpose in long Time.<\/p>\n

As one too great for him he worships her;<\/p>\n

He adores her as his regent of desire,<\/p>\n

He yields to her as the mover of his will,<\/p>\n

He burns the incense of his nights and days<\/p>\n

Offering his life, a splendour of sacrifice.<\/p>\n

A rapt solicitor for her love and grace,<\/p>\n

His bliss in her to him is his whole world:<\/p>\n

He grows through her in all his being’s powers;<\/p>\n

He reads by her God’s hidden aim in things.<\/p>\n

Or, a courtier in her countless retinue,<\/p>\n

Content to be with her and feel her near<\/p>\n

He makes the most of the little that she gives<\/p>\n

And all she does drapes with his own delight. <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 62<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/div>\n

A glance can make his whole day wonderful,<\/p>\n

A word from her lips with happiness wings the hours.<\/p>\n

He leans on her for all he does and is:<\/p>\n

He builds on her largesses his proud fortunate days<\/p>\n

And trails his peacock-plumaged joy of life<\/p>\n

And suns in the glory of her passing smile.<\/p>\n

In a thousand ways he serves her royal needs;<\/p>\n

He makes the hours pivot around her will,<\/p>\n

Makes all reflect her whims; all is their play:<\/p>\n

This whole wide world is only he and she.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

This is the knot that ties together the stars:<\/p>\n

The Two who are one are the secret of all power,<\/p>\n

The Two who are one are the might and right in things.<\/p>\n

His soul, silent, supports the world and her,<\/p>\n

His acts are her commandment’s registers.<\/p>\n

Happy, inert, he lies beneath her feet:<\/p>\n

His breast he offers for her cosmic dance<\/p>\n

Of which our lives are the quivering theatre,<\/p>\n

And none could bear but for his strength within,<\/p>\n

Yet none would leave because of his delight.<\/p>\n

His works, his thoughts have been devised by her,<\/p>\n

His being is a mirror vast of hers:<\/p>\n

Active, inspired by her he speaks and moves;<\/p>\n

His deeds obey her heart’s unspoken demands:<\/p>\n

Passive, he bears the impacts of the world<\/p>\n

As if her touches shaping his soul and life:<\/p>\n

His journey through the days is her sun-march;<\/p>\n

He runs upon her roads; hers is his course.<\/p>\n

A witness and student of her joy and dole,<\/p>\n

A partner in her evil and her good,<\/p>\n

He has consented to her passionate ways,<\/p>\n

He is driven by her sweet and dreadful force.<\/p>\n

His sanctioning name initials all her works;<\/p>\n

His silence is his signature to her deeds;<\/p>\n

In the execution of her drama’s scheme, <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 63<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/div>\n

In her fancies of the moment and its mood,<\/p>\n

In the march of this obvious ordinary world<\/p>\n

Where all is deep and strange to the eyes that see<\/p>\n

And Nature’s common forms are marvel-wefts,<\/p>\n

She through his witness sight and motion of might<\/p>\n

Unrolls the material of her cosmic Act,<\/p>\n

Her happenings that exalt and smite the soul,<\/p>\n

Her force that moves, her powers that save and slay,<\/p>\n

Her Word that in the silence speaks to our hearts,<\/p>\n

Her silence that transcends the summit Word,<\/p>\n

Her heights and depths to which our spirit moves,<\/p>\n

Her events that weave the texture of our lives<\/p>\n

And all by which we find or lose ourselves,<\/p>\n

Things sweet and bitter, magnificent and mean,<\/p>\n

Things terrible and beautiful and divine.<\/p>\n

Her empire in the cosmos she has built,<\/p>\n

He is governed by her subtle and mighty laws.<\/p>\n

His consciousness is a babe upon her knees,<\/p>\n

Her endless space is the playground of his thoughts,<\/p>\n

His being a field of her vast experiment;<\/p>\n

She binds to knowledge of the shapes of Time<\/p>\n

And the creative error of limiting mind<\/p>\n

And chance that wears the rigid face of fate<\/p>\n

And her sport of death and pain and Nescience,<\/p>\n

His changed and struggling immortality.<\/p>\n

His soul is a subtle atom in a mass,<\/p>\n

His substance a material for her works.<\/p>\n

His spirit survives amid the death of things,<\/p>\n

He climbs to eternity through being’s gaps,<\/p>\n

He is carried by her from Night to deathless Light.<\/p>\n

This grand surrender is his free-will’s gift,<\/p>\n

His pure transcendent force submits to hers.<\/p>\n

In the mystery of her cosmic ignorance,<\/p>\n

In the insoluble riddle of her play,<\/p>\n

A creature made of perishable stuff,<\/p>\n

In the pattern she has set for him he moves, <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 64<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/div>\n

He thinks with her thoughts, with her trouble his bosom
\nheaves;<\/p>\n

He seems the thing that she would have him seem,<\/p>\n

He is whatever her artist will can make.<\/p>\n

Although she drives him on her fancy’s roads,<\/p>\n

At play with him as with her child or slave,<\/p>\n

To freedom and the Eternal’s mastery<\/p>\n

And immortality’s stand above the world,<\/p>\n

She moves her seeming puppet of an hour.<\/p>\n

Even in his mortal session in body’s house<\/p>\n

An aimless traveller between birth and death,<\/p>\n

Ephemeral dreaming of immortality,<\/p>\n

To reign she spurs him. He takes up her powers;<\/p>\n

He has harnessed her to the yoke of her own law.<\/p>\n

His face of human thought puts on a crown.<\/p>\n

Held in her leash, bound to her veiled caprice,<\/p>\n

He studies her ways if so he may prevail<\/p>\n

Even for an hour and she work out his will;<\/p>\n

He makes of her his moment passion’s serf:<\/p>\n

To obey she feigns, she follows her creature’s lead:<\/p>\n

For him she was made, lives only for his use.<\/p>\n

But conquering her, then is he most her slave;<\/p>\n

He is her dependent, all his means are hers;<\/p>\n

Nothing without her he can, she rules him still.<\/p>\n

At last he wakes to a memory of Self:<\/p>\n

He sees within the face of deity,<\/p>\n

The Godhead breaks out through the human mould:<\/p>\n

Her highest heights she unmasks and is his mate.<\/p>\n

Till then he is a plaything in her game;<\/p>\n

Her seeming regent, yet her fancy’s toy,<\/p>\n

A living robot moved by her energy’s springs,<\/p>\n

He acts as in the movements of a dream,<\/p>\n

An automaton stepping in the grooves of Fate,<\/p>\n

He stumbles on driven by her whip of Force:<\/p>\n

His thought labours, a bullock in Time’s fields;<\/p>\n

His will he thinks his own, is shaped in her forge.<\/p>\n

Obedient to World-Nature’s dumb control, <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 65<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/div>\n

Driven by his own formidable Power,<\/p>\n

His chosen partner in
\na titan game<\/p>\n

Her will he has made the master of his fate,<\/p>\n

Her whim the dispenser of his pleasure and pain;<\/p>\n

He has sold himself into her regal power<\/p>\n

For any blow or boon that she may choose:<\/p>\n

Even in what is suffering to our sense,<\/p>\n

He feels the sweetness of her mastering touch,<\/p>\n

In all experience meets her blissful hands;<\/p>\n

On his heart he bears the happiness of her tread<\/p>\n

And the surprise of her arrival’s joy<\/p>\n

In each event and every moment’s chance.<\/p>\n

All she can do is marvellous in his sight:<\/p>\n

He revels in her, a swimmer in her sea,<\/p>\n

A tireless amateur of her world-delight,<\/p>\n

He rejoices in her every thought and act<\/p>\n

And gives consent to all that she can wish;<\/p>\n

Whatever she desires he wills to be:<\/p>\n

The Spirit, the
\ninnumerable One<\/p>\n

He has left behind his lone eternity,<\/p>\n

He is an endless birth in endless Time,<\/p>\n

Her finite’s multitude in an infinite
\nspace.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The master of existence lurks in us<\/p>\n

And plays at hide and seek with his own Force;<\/p>\n

In Nature’s instrument loiters secret God.<\/p>\n

The Immanent lives in man as in his house;<\/p>\n

He has made the universe his pastime’s field,<\/p>\n

A vast gymnasium of his works of might.<\/p>\n

All-knowing he accepts our darkened state,<\/p>\n

Divine, wears shapes of animal or man;<\/p>\n

Eternal, he assents to Fate and Time,<\/p>\n

Immortal, dallies with mortality.<\/p>\n

The All-Conscious ventured into Ignorance,<\/p>\n

The All-Blissful bore to be insensible.<\/p>\n

Incarnate in a world of strife and pain, <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 66<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/div>\n

He puts on joy and sorrow like a robe<\/p>\n

And drinks experience like a strengthening wine.<\/p>\n

He whose transcendence rules the pregnant Vasts,<\/p>\n

Prescient now dwells in our subliminal depths,<\/p>\n

A luminous individual Power, alone.<\/p>\n

    The Absolute, the Perfect, the Alone<\/p>\n

Has called out of the Silence his mute Force<\/p>\n

Where she lay in the featureless and formless hush<\/p>\n

Guarding from Time by her immobile sleep<\/p>\n

The ineffable puissance of his solitude.<\/p>\n

The Absolute, the Perfect, the Alone<\/p>\n

Has entered with his silence into space:<\/p>\n

He has fashioned these countless persons of one self;<\/p>\n

He lives in all, who lived in his Vast alone;<\/p>\n

Space is himself and Time is only he.<\/p>\n

The Absolute, the Perfect, the Immune,<\/p>\n

One who is in us as our secret self,<\/p>\n

Our mask of imperfection has assumed,<\/p>\n

He has made this tenement of flesh his own,<\/p>\n

His image in the human measure cast<\/p>\n

That to his divine measure we might rise;<\/p>\n

Then in a figure of divinity<\/p>\n

The Maker shall recast us and impose<\/p>\n

A plan of godhead on the mortal’s mould<\/p>\n

Lifting our finite minds to his infinite,<\/p>\n

Touching the moment with eternity.<\/p>\n

This transfiguration is earth’s due to heaven:<\/p>\n

A mutual debt binds man to the Supreme:<\/p>\n

His nature we must put on as he put ours;<\/p>\n

We are sons of God and must be even as he:<\/p>\n

His human portion, we must grow divine.<\/p>\n

Our life is a paradox with God for key.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

But meanwhile all is a shadow cast by a dream<\/p>\n

And to the musing and immobile
\nSpirit<\/p>\n

Life and himself don the aspect of a myth, <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 67<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/div>\n

The burden of a long unmeaning tale.<\/p>\n

For the key is hid and by the Inconscient kept;<\/p>\n

The secret God beneath the threshold dwells.<\/p>\n

In a body obscuring the immortal Spirit<\/p>\n

A nameless Resident vesting unseen powers,<\/p>\n

With Matter’s shapes and motives beyond thought<\/p>\n

And the hazard of an unguessed consequence,<\/p>\n

An omnipotent indiscernible Influence,<\/p>\n

He sits, unfelt by the form in which he lives<\/p>\n

And veils his knowledge by the groping mind.<\/p>\n

A wanderer in a world his thoughts have made,<\/p>\n

He turns in a chiaroscuro of error and truth<\/p>\n

To find a wisdom that on high is his.<\/p>\n

As one forgetting he searches for himself;<\/p>\n

As if he had lost an inner light he seeks:<\/p>\n

As a sojourner lingering amid alien scenes<\/p>\n

He journeys to a home he knows no more.<\/p>\n

His own self’s truth he seeks who is the Truth;<\/p>\n

He is the Player who became the play,<\/p>\n

He is the Thinker who became the thought;<\/p>\n

He is the many who was the silent One.<\/p>\n

In the symbol figures of the cosmic Force<\/p>\n

And in her living and inanimate signs<\/p>\n

And in her complex tracery of events<\/p>\n

He explores the ceaseless miracle of himself,<\/p>\n

Till the thousandfold enigma has been solved<\/p>\n

In the single light of an all-witnessing Soul.<\/p>\n

This was his compact with his mighty mate,<\/p>\n

For love of her and joined to her for ever<\/p>\n

To follow the course of Time’s eternity,<\/p>\n

Amid magic dramas of her sudden moods<\/p>\n

And the surprises of her masked Idea<\/p>\n

And the vicissitudes of her vast caprice.<\/p>\n

Two seem his goals, yet ever are they one<\/p>\n

And gaze at each other over bourneless Time;<\/p>\n

Spirit and Matter are their end and source. <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 68<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/div>\n

A seeker of hidden meanings in life’s forms,<\/p>\n

Of the great Mother’s wide uncharted will<\/p>\n

And the rude enigma of her terrestrial ways<\/p>\n

He is the explorer and the mariner<\/p>\n

On a secret inner ocean without bourne:<\/p>\n

He is the adventurer and cosmologist<\/p>\n

Of a magic earth’s obscure geography.<\/p>\n

In her material order’s fixed design<\/p>\n

Where all seems sure and, even when changed, the same,<\/p>\n

Even though the end is left for ever unknown<\/p>\n

And ever unstable is life’s shifting flow,<\/p>\n

His paths are found for him by silent fate;<\/p>\n

As stations in the age’s weltering flood<\/p>\n

Firm lands appear that tempt and stay awhile,<\/p>\n

Then new horizons lure the mind’s advance.<\/p>\n

There comes no close to the finite’s boundlessness,<\/p>\n

There is no last certitude in which thought can pause<\/p>\n

And no terminus of the soul’s experience.<\/p>\n

A limit, a farness never wholly reached,<\/p>\n

An unattained perfection calls to him<\/p>\n

From distant boundaries in the Unseen:<\/p>\n

A long beginning only has been made.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

This is the sailor on the flow of Time,<\/p>\n

This is World-Matter’s slow discoverer,<\/p>\n

Who, launched into this small corporeal birth,<\/p>\n

Has learnt his craft in tiny bays of self,<\/p>\n

But dares at last unplumbed infinitudes,<\/p>\n

A voyager upon eternity’s seas.<\/p>\n

In his world-adventure’s crude initial start<\/p>\n

Behold him ignorant of his godhead’s force,<\/p>\n

Timid initiate of its vast design.<\/p>\n

An expert captain of a fragile craft,<\/p>\n

A trafficker in small impermanent wares,<\/p>\n

At first he hugs the shore and shuns the breadths,<\/p>\n

Dares not to affront the far-off perilous main. <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 69<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/div>\n

He in a petty coastal traffic plies,<\/p>\n

His pay doled out from port to neighbour port,<\/p>\n

Content with his safe round’s unchanging course,<\/p>\n

He hazards not the new and the unseen.<\/p>\n

But now he hears the sound of larger seas.<\/p>\n

A widening world calls him to distant scenes<\/p>\n

And journeyings in a larger vision’s arc<\/p>\n

And peoples unknown and still unvisited shores.<\/p>\n

On a commissioned keel his merchant hull<\/p>\n

Serves the world’s commerce in the riches of Time<\/p>\n

Severing the foam of a great land-locked sea<\/p>\n

To reach unknown harbour lights in distant climes<\/p>\n

And open markets for life’s opulent arts,<\/p>\n

Rich bales, carved statuettes, hued canvases,<\/p>\n

And jewelled toys brought for an infant’s play<\/p>\n

And perishable products of hard toil<\/p>\n

And transient splendours won and lost by the days.<\/p>\n

Or passing through a gate of pillar-rocks,<\/p>\n

Venturing not yet to cross oceans unnamed<\/p>\n

And journey into a dream of distances<\/p>\n

He travels close to unfamiliar coasts<\/p>\n

And finds new haven in storm-troubled isles,<\/p>\n

Or, guided by a sure compass in his thought,<\/p>\n

He plunges through a bright haze that hides the stars,<\/p>\n

Steering on the trade-routes of Ignorance.<\/p>\n

His prow pushes towards undiscovered shores,<\/p>\n

He chances on unimagined continents:<\/p>\n

A seeker of the islands of the Blest,<\/p>\n

He leaves the last lands, crosses the ultimate seas,<\/p>\n

He turns to eternal things his symbol quest;<\/p>\n

Life changes for him its time-constructed scenes,<\/p>\n

Its images veiling infinity.<\/p>\n

Earth’s borders recede and the terrestrial air<\/p>\n

Hangs round him no longer its translucent veil.<\/p>\n

He has crossed the limit of mortal thought and hope,<\/p>\n

He has reached the world’s end and stares beyond; <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 70<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/div>\n

The eyes of mortal body plunge their gaze<\/p>\n

Into Eyes that look upon eternity.<\/p>\n

A greater world Time’s traveller must explore.<\/p>\n

At last he hears a chanting on the heights<\/p>\n

And the far speaks and the unknown grows near:<\/p>\n

He crosses the boundaries of the unseen<\/p>\n

And passes over the edge of mortal sight<\/p>\n

To a new vision of himself and things.<\/p>\n

He is a spirit in an unfinished world<\/p>\n

That knows him not and cannot know itself:<\/p>\n

The surface symbol of his goalless quest<\/p>\n

Takes deeper meanings to his inner view;<\/p>\n

His is a search of darkness for the light,<\/p>\n

Of mortal life for immortality.<\/p>\n

In the vessel of an earthly embodiment<\/p>\n

Over the narrow rails of limiting sense<\/p>\n

He looks out on the magic waves of Time<\/p>\n

Where mind like a moon illumines the world’s dark.<\/p>\n

There is limned ever retreating from the eyes,<\/p>\n

As if in a tenuous misty dream-light drawn,<\/p>\n

The outline of a dim mysterious shore.<\/p>\n

A sailor on the Inconscient’s fathomless sea,<\/p>\n

He voyages through a starry world of thought<\/p>\n

On Matter’s deck to a spiritual sun.<\/p>\n

Across the noise and multitudinous cry,<\/p>\n

Across the rapt unknowable silences,<\/p>\n

Through a strange mid-world under supernal skies,<\/p>\n

Beyond earth’s longitudes and latitudes,<\/p>\n

His goal is fixed outside all present maps.<\/p>\n

But none learns whither through the unknown he sails<\/p>\n

Or what secret mission the great Mother gave.<\/p>\n

In the hidden strength of her omnipotent Will,<\/p>\n

Driven by her breath across life’s tossing deep,<\/p>\n

Through the thunder’s roar and through the windless hush,<\/p>\n

Through fog and mist where nothing more is seen,<\/p>\n

He carries her sealed orders in his breast. <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 71<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/div>\n

Late will he know, opening the mystic script,<\/p>\n

Whether to a blank port in the Unseen<\/p>\n

He goes or, armed with her fiat, to discover<\/p>\n

A new mind and body in the city of God<\/p>\n

And enshrine the Immortal in his glory’s house<\/p>\n

And make the finite one with Infinity.<\/p>\n

Across the salt waste of the endless years<\/p>\n

Her ocean winds impel his errant boat,<\/p>\n

The cosmic waters plashing as he goes,<\/p>\n

A rumour around him and danger and a call.<\/p>\n

Always he follows in her force’s wake.<\/p>\n

He sails through life and death and other life,<\/p>\n

He travels on through waking and through sleep.<\/p>\n

A power is on him from her occult force<\/p>\n

That ties him to his own creation’s fate,<\/p>\n

And never can the mighty
\ntraveller rest<\/p>\n

And never can the mystic voyage cease,<\/p>\n

Till the nescient dusk is lifted from man’s soul<\/p>\n

And the morns of God have overtaken his night.<\/p>\n

As long as Nature
\nlasts, he too is there;<\/p>\n

For this is sure that
\nhe and she are one.<\/p>\n

Even when he sleeps, he keeps her on his breast:<\/p>\n

Whoever leaves her, he will not depart<\/p>\n

To repose without her in the Unknowable.<\/p>\n

There is a truth to know, a work to do;<\/p>\n

Her play is real; a Mystery he fulfils:<\/p>\n

There is a plan in the Mother’s deep world-whim,<\/p>\n

A purpose in her vast and random game.<\/p>\n

This ever she meant since the first dawn of life,<\/p>\n

This constant will she covered with her sport,<\/p>\n

To evoke a person in the impersonal Void,<\/p>\n

With the Truth-Light strike earth’s massive roots of trance,<\/p>\n

Wake a dumb self in the inconscient depths<\/p>\n

And raise a lost power from its python sleep<\/p>\n

That the eyes of the Timeless might look out from Time<\/p>\n

And the world manifest the unveiled Divine. <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 72<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/div>\n

For this he left his white infinity<\/p>\n

And laid on the Spirit the burden of the flesh,<\/p>\n

That Godhead’s seed might flower in mindless Space.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

End of Canto Four <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 73<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/td>\n

\n

 <\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  Canto Four   The Secret Knowledge   On a height he stood that looked towards greater heights. Our early approaches to the Infinite Are…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-497","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-28-savitri-volume-28","wpcat-10-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/497","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=497"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/497\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=497"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=497"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=497"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}