More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
November 25, 2024 - August 31, 2025
Her spirit opened to the Spirit in all, Her nature felt all Nature as its own.
Apart, living within, all lives she bore; Aloof, she carried in herself the world:
only the unborn spirit’s timeless power Can lift the yoke imposed by birth in time.
An episode in an unremembered tale, Its beginning lost, its motive and plot concealed, A once living story has prepared and made Our present fate, child of past energies.
the lonely eyes of immortal Death
Ardent was her self-poised unstumbling will; Her mind, a sea of white sincerity, Passionate in flow, had not one turbid wave.
An image fluttering on the screen of fate Half-animated for a passing show, Or a castaway on the ocean of Desire Flung to the eddies in a ruthless sport And tossed along the gulfs of Circumstance, A creature born to bend beneath the yoke, A chattel and a plaything of Time’s lords, Or one more pawn who comes destined to be pushed One slow move forward on a measureless board In the chess-play of the earth-soul with Doom,— Such is the human figure drawn by Time. ||4.17||
A grey tribunal of the Ignorance, An Inquisition of the priests of Night In judgment sit on the adventurer soul, And the dual tables and the Karmic norm Restrain the Titan in us and the God: Pain with its lash, joy with its silver bribe Guard the Wheel’s circling immobility, A bond is put on the high climbing mind, A seal on the too large wide-open heart; Death stays the journeying discoverer, Life.
This bodily appearance is not all; The form deceives, the person is a mask; Hid deep in man celestial powers can dwell.
Passenger from life to life, from scale to scale, Changing his imaged self from form to form, He regards the icon growing by his gaze And in the worm foresees the coming god. ||5.18||
At last the traveller in the paths of Time Arrives on the frontiers of eternity.
A beam of the Eternal smites his heart, His thought stretches into infinitude: All in him turns to spirit vastnesses. ||5.21||
A long dim preparation is man’s life, A circle of toil and hope and war and peace Tracked out by Life on Matter’s obscure ground In his climb to a peak no feet have ever trod, He seeks through a penumbra shot with flame A veiled reality half-known, ever missed, A search for something or someone never found, Cult of an ideal never made real here, An endless spiral of ascent and fall Until at last is reached the giant point Through which his Glory shines for whom we were made And we break into the infinity of God.
Original and supernal Immanence Of which all Nature’s process is the art, The cosmic Worker set his secret hand To turn this frail mud-engine to heaven-use.
A fearless will for knowledge dared to erase The lines of safety reason draws that bar Mind’s soar, soul’s dive into the Infinite.
In hands sustained by a transfiguring Might He caught up lightly like a giant’s bow Left slumbering in a sealed and secret cave The powers that sleep unused in man within.
Deceived no more by form he saw the soul.
The Supreme’s gaze looked out through human eyes And saw all things and creatures as itself And knew all thought and word as its own voice.
Indifferent to the sorrow and delight, Untempted by the marvel and the call, Immobile it beheld the flux of things, Calm and apart supported all that is: His spirit’s stillness helped the toiling world.
Inspired by silence and the closed eyes’ sight His force could work with a new luminous art On the crude material from which all is made And the refusal of Inertia’s mass And the grey front of the world’s Ignorance And nescient Matter and the huge error of life.
A deathbound littleness is not all we are: Immortal our forgotten vastnesses Await discovery in our summit selves; Unmeasured breadths and depths of being are ours. ||10.6||
Then the small bodily ego thins and falls; No more insisting on its separate self, Losing the punctilio of its separate birth, It leaves us one with Nature and with God.
Undriven by a brief life’s will to act, Unharassed by the spur of pity and fear, He makes no haste to untie the cosmic knot Or the world’s torn jarring heart to reconcile.
He is the Maker and the world he made, He is the vision and he is the seer; He is himself the actor and the act, He is himself the knower and the known, He is himself the dreamer and the dream.
The universe is an endless masquerade: For nothing here is utterly what it seems, It is a dream-fact vision of a truth Which but for the dream would not be wholly true, A phenomenon stands out significant Against dim backgrounds of eternity; We accept its face and pass by all it means; A part is seen, we take it for the whole.
At last he wakes to a memory of Self: He sees within the face of deity, The Godhead breaks out through the human mould: Her highest heights she unmasks and is his mate. ||14.18||
Till then he is a plaything in her game; Her seeming regent, yet her fancy’s toy, A living robot moved by her energy’s springs, He acts as in the movements of a dream, An automaton stepping in the grooves of Fate, He stumbles on driven by her whip of Force: His thought labours, a bullock in Time’s fields; His will he thinks his own, is shaped in her forge.
The master of existence lurks in us And plays at hide and seek with his own Force; In Nature’s instrument loiters secret God.
In his world-adventure’s crude initial start Behold him ignorant of his godhead’s force, Timid initiate of its vast design.
An expert captain of a fragile craft, A trafficker in small impermanent wares, At first he hugs the shore and shuns the breadths, Dares not to affront the far-off perilous main.
He in a petty coastal traffic plies, His pay doled out from port to neighbour port, Content with his safe round’s unchanging course, He hazards not the new and the unseen.
But now he hears the sound of larger seas.
A widening world calls him to distant scenes And journeyings in a larger vision’s arc And peoples unknown and still unvisited shores.
On a commissioned keel his merchant hull Serves the world’s commerce in the riches of Time Severing the foam of a great land-locked sea To reach unknown harbour lights in distant climes And open markets for life’s opulent arts, Rich bales, carved statuettes, hued canvases, And jewelled toys brought for an infant’s play And perishable products of hard toil And transient splendours won and lost by the days.
Or passing through a gate of pillar-rocks, Venturing not yet to cross oceans unnamed And journey into a dream of distances He travels close to unfamiliar coasts And finds new haven in storm-troubled isles, Or, guided by a sure compass in his thought, He plunges through a bright haze that hides the stars, Steering on the trade-routes of Ignorance.
His prow pushes towards undiscovered shores, He chances on unimagined continents: A seeker of the islands of the Blest, He leaves the last lands, crosses the ultimate seas, He turns to eternal things his symbol quest; Life changes for him its time-constructed scenes, Its images veiling infinity.
Earth’s borders recede and the terrestrial air Hangs round him no longer its translucent veil.
He has crossed the limit of mortal thought and hope, He has reached the world’s end and stares beyond; The eyes of mortal body plunge their gaze Into Eyes that look upon eternity.
A greater world Time’s traveller must explore.
At last he hears a chanting on the heights And the far speaks and the unknown grows near: He crosses the boundaries of the unseen And passes over the edge of mortal sight To a new vision of himself and things.
He is a spirit in an unfinished world That knows him not and cannot know itself: The surface symbol of his goalless quest Takes deeper meanings to his inner view; His is a search of darkness for the light, Of mortal life for immortality.
In the vessel of an earthly embodiment Over the narrow rails of limiting sense He looks out on the magic waves of Time Where mind like a moon illumines the world’s dark.
There is limned ever retreating from the eyes, As if in a tenuous misty dream-light drawn, The outline of a dim mysterious shore.
A sailor on the Inconscient’s fathomless sea, He voyages through a starry world of thought On Matter’s deck to a spiritual sun.
Across the noise and multitudinous cry, Across the rapt unknowable silences, Through a strange mid-world under supernal skies, Beyond earth’s longitudes and latitudes, His goal is fixed outside all present maps.
But none learns whither through the unknown he sails Or what secret mission the great Mother gave.
In the hidden strength of her omnipotent Will, Driven by her breath across life’s tossing deep, Through the thunder’s roar and through the windless hush, Through fog and mist where nothing more is seen, He carries her sealed orders in his breast.
Late will he know, opening the mystic script, Whether to a blank port in the Unseen He goes, or armed with her fiat, to discover A new mind and body in the city of God And enshrine the Immortal in his glory’s house And make the finite one with Infinity.
Across the salt waste of the endless years Her ocean winds impel his errant boat, The cosmic waters plashing as he goes, A rumour around him and danger and a call.
Always he follows in her force’s wake.
