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November 25, 2024 - August 31, 2025
In absolute silence sleeps an absolute Power. ||80.20|| Awaking, it can wake the trance-bound soul And in the ray reveal the parent sun: It can make the world a vessel of Spirit’s force,
This Light comes not by struggle or by thought; In the mind’s silence the Transcendent acts And the hushed heart hears the unuttered Word.
There was no cleavage between soul and soul, There was no barrier between world and God.
The last movement died and all at once grew still.
And its omniscient and omnipotent peace.
Existence found its truth on Oneness’ breast And each became the self and space of all.
For worlds were many, but the Self was one.
None was apart, none lived for himself alone, Each lived for God in him and God in all, Each soleness inexpressibly held the whole.
There was no sob of suffering anywhere; Experience ran from point to point of joy: Bliss was the pure undying truth of things.
Self and eternity alone were true.
It looked up to the heights it could not see; It yearned from the longing depths it could not leave.
What thou hast won is thine, but ask no more. ||89.13||
A riddle of opposites is made his field: Freedom he asks but needs to live in bonds, He has need of darkness to perceive some light And need of grief to feel a little bliss; He has need of death to find a greater life. ||89.33||
All sides he sees and turns to every call; He has no certain light by which to walk; His life is a blind-man’s-buff, a hide and seek; He seeks himself and from himself he runs; Meeting himself, he thinks it other than he. ||89.34||
Always he builds, but finds no constant ground, Always he journeys, but nowhere arrives; He would guide the world, himself he cannot guide; He woul...
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And how shall the end be vain when God is guide?
Fate shall be changed by an unchanging will.” ||91.9||
Aware of forms to which our eyes are closed, Conscious of nearnesses we cannot feel,
Proud, swift and joyful ran the wave of life Within her like a stream in Paradise.
The knowledge of the thinker and the seer Saw the unseen and thought the unthinkable, Opened the enormous doors of the unknown, Rent Man’s horizons into infinity.
The earth you tread is a border screened from heaven, The life you lead conceals the light you are.
The shadowy keepers of our deathless past Have made our fate the child of our own acts, And from the furrows laboured by our will We reap the fruit of our forgotten deeds. ||99.11||
But since unseen the tree that bore this fruit And we live in a present born from an unknown past, They seem but parts of a mechanic Force, To a mechanic mind tied by earth’s laws; Yet are they instruments of a Will supreme, Watched by a still all-seeing Eye above.
A prescient architect of Fate and Chance Who builds our lives on a foreseen design The meaning knows and consequence of each step And watches the inferior stumbling powers.
Primeval peace was there and in its bosom Held undisturbed the strife of bird and beast.
Like the thought-screened infinities that lie Behind the rapt smile of the Almighty’s dance. ||101.17||
These bodies summed the drift of numberless births And the spirit to the spirit was the same. ||102.59||
As when being cries to being from its depths Behind the screen of the external sense And strives to find the heart-disclosing word, The passionate speech revealing the soul’s need, But the mind’s ignorance veils the inner sight, Only a little breaks through our earth-made bounds,
I glimpsed the presence of the One in all.
Something that life is not and yet must
I looked upon the world and missed the Self, And when I found the Self, I lost the world,
And as he sang the demons wept with joy Foreseeing the end of their long dreadful task And the defeat for which they hoped in vain, And glad release from their self-chosen doom And return into the One from whom they came.
Death is our road to immortality.
“What help is in prevision to the driven?
A future knowledge is an added pain, A torturing burden and a fruitless light On the enormous scene that Fate has built.
For nothing have we learned, but still repeat Our stark misuse of self and others’ selves,
We are not as the gods who know not grief And look impassive on a suffering world, Calm they gaze down on the little human scene And the short-lived passion crossing mortal hearts. ||106.120||
For man, below the god, above the brute, Is given the calm reason as his guide; He is not driven by an unthinking will As are the actions of the bird and beast; He is not moved by stark Necessity Like the senseless motion of inconscient things.
To choose his steps by reason’s vigilant light, To choose his path among the many paths Is given him, for each his difficult goal Hewn out of infinite possibility.
Leave not thy goal to follow a beautiful face.
Only when thou hast climbed above thy mind And livst in the calm vastness of the One Can love be eternal in the eternal bliss And Love divine replace the human tie.
I have looked at him from my immortal Self, I have seen God smile at me in Satyavan; I have seen the Eternal in a human face.”
A growing register of calamities Is the past’s account, the future’s book of Fate: The centuries pile man’s follies and man’s crimes Upon the countless crowd of Nature’s ills; As if the world’s stone load was not enough, A crop of miseries obstinately is sown By his own hand in the furrows of the gods, The vast increasing tragic harvest reaped From old misdeeds buried by oblivious Time.
He walks by his own choice into hell’s trap; This mortal creature is his own worst foe.
His science is an artificer of doom; He ransacks earth for means to harm his kind; He slays his happiness and others’ good.
Nothing has he learnt from time and its history;
Battle and rapine, ruin and massacre Are still the fierce pastimes of man’s warring tribes;
An idiot hour destroys what centuries made, His wanton rage or frenzied hate lays low
Who laid on it the ceaseless will to live
Where Ignorance is, there suffering too must come;