More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
November 25, 2024 - August 31, 2025
He sails through life and death and other life, He travels on through waking and through sleep.
A power is on him from her occult force That ties him to his own creation’s fate, And never can the mighty traveller rest And never can the mystic voyage cease, Till the nescient dusk is lifted from man’s soul And the morns of God have overtaken his night.
As long as Nature lasts, he too is there; For this is sure that he and she are one.
Even when he sleeps, he keeps her on his breast: Whoever leaves her, he will not depart To repose without her in the Unknowable.
There is a truth to know, a work to do; Her play is real; a Mystery he fulfils: There is a plan in the Mother’s deep world-whim, A purpose in her vast and random game.
This ever she meant since the first dawn of life, This constant will she covered with her sport, To evoke a person in the impersonal Void, With the Truth-Light strike earth’s massive roots of trance, Wake a dumb self in the inconscient depths And raise a lost power from its python sleep That the eyes of the Timeless might look out from Time And the world manifest the unveiled Divine.
For this he left his white infinity And laid on the Spirit the burden of the flesh, That Godhead’s seed might flower in mindless Space.
The Ideal must be Nature’s common truth, The body illumined with the indwelling God, The heart and mind feel one with all that is, A conscious soul live in a conscious world.
An inconsequence dogs every effort made, And chaos waits on every cosmos formed: In each success a seed of failure lurks. ||19.16||
He saw the doubtfulness of all things here, The incertitude of man’s proud confident thought, The transience of the achievements of his force.
His soul retired from all that he had done.
Hushed was the futile din of human toil, Forsaken wheeled the circle of the days; In distance sank the crowded tramp of life.
The Silence was his sole companion left.
Impassive he lived immune from earthly hopes, A figure in the ineffable Witness’ shrine Pacing the vast cathedral of his thoughts Under its arches dim with infinity And heavenward brooding of invisible wings.
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 being now exceeded thinkable Space, 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; He felt the invasion and the nameless joy.
One-pointed to the immaculate Delight, Questing for God as for a splendid prey, He mounted burning like a cone of fire.
To a few is given that godlike rare release. ||20.12||
One among many thousands never touched, Engrossed in the external world’s design, Is chosen by a secret witness Eye And driven by a pointing hand of Light Across his soul’s unmapped immensitudes.
A pilgrim of the everlasting Truth, Our measures cannot hold his measureless mind; He has turned from the voices of the narrow realm And left the little lane of human Time.
Far from compulsion of created things Thought and its shadowy idols disappear, The moulds of form and person are undone.
A nameless Marvel fills the motionless hours.
In a moment shorter than Death, longer than Time,
Mind is a mediator divinity: Its powers can undo all Nature’s work: Mind can suspend or change earth’s concrete law.
This giant Ignorance, this dwarfish Life
In our body arouse the demon or the god, Call in the Omniscient and Omnipotent, Awake a forgotten Almightiness within.
She surrendered to the service of the soul And the control of a spiritual will. ||22.23|| A greater despot tamed her despotism.
Assailed, surprised in the fortress of her self, Conquered by her own unexpected King, Fulfilled and ransomed by her servitude, She yielded in a vanquished ecstasy, Her sealed hieratic wisdom forced from her, Fragments of the mystery of omnipotence.
There was no quarrel more of truth with truth; The endless chapter of their differences Retold in light by an omniscient Scribe, Travelled through difference towards unity, Mind’s winding search lost every tinge of doubt
All came at once into his single view; Nothing escaped his vast intuitive sight, Nothing drew near he could not feel as kin: He was one spirit with that immensity.
All thought can know or widest sight perceive And all that thought and sight can never know, All things occult and rare, remote and strange Were near to heart’s contact, felt by spirit-sense.
Only was missing the sole timeless Word That carries eternity in its lonely sound, The Idea self-luminous key to all ideas, The integer of the Spirit’s perfect sum That equates the unequal All to the equal One, The single sign interpreting every sign, The absolute index to the Absolute.
It is within, below, without, above.
At first was laid a strange anomalous base, A void, a cipher of some secret Whole, Where zero held infinity in its sum And All and Nothing were a single term, An eternal negative, a matrix Nought:
All ocean lived within a wandering drop, A time-made body housed the Illimitable.
A Seer within who knows the ordered plan Concealed behind our momentary steps, Inspires our ascent to viewless heights As once the abysmal leap to birth and life.
Apart in an unfathomed loneliness, He travelled in his mute and single strength Bearing the burden of the world’s desire.
All here is driven by an insentient will.
On every plane the hieratic Power, Initiate of the unspoken verities, Dreams to transcribe and make a part of life In its own native style and living tongue Some trait of the perfection of the Unborn, Some vision seen in the omniscient Light, Some far tune of the immortal rhapsodist Voice, Some rapture of the all-creating Bliss, Some form and plan of the Beauty unutterable.
A communion of spiritual entities, A genius of creative Immanence, Makes all creation deeply intimate: A fourth dimension of aesthetic sense Where all is in ourselves, ourselves in all, To the cosmic wideness re-aligns our souls.
There all feel satisfied in themselves and whole, A rich completeness is by limit made, Marvel in an utter littleness abounds, An intricate rapture riots in a small space: Each rhythm is kin to its environment, Each line is perfect and inevitable, Each object faultlessly built for charm and use. ||31.3||
All is enamoured of its own delight.
Intact it lives of its perfection sure In a heaven-pleased self-glad immunity; Content to be, it has need of nothing more.
On a spiritual and mysterious peak Only a miracle’s high transfiguring line Divided life from the formless Infinite And sheltered Time against eternity. ||34.5||
Heaven’s joys might have been earth’s if earth were pure. ||35.3||
Life’s contraries were lovers or natural friends
Ascending slowly with unconscious steps, A foundling of the gods she wanders here Like a child-soul left near the gates of Hell Fumbling through fog in search of Paradise.
His sight, spiritual in embodying orbs, Could pierce through the grey phosphorescent haze And scan the secrets of the shifting flux That animates these mute and solid cells And leads the thought and longing of the flesh And the keen lust and hunger of its will.
An animal in the instinctive herd Pushed by life impulses, forced by common needs, Each in his own kind saw his ego’s glass; All served the aim and action of the pack.
Those like himself, by blood or custom kin, To him were parts of his life, his adjunct selves, His personal nebula’s constituent stars, Satellite companions of his solar I. ||41.23||

