Canto Fourteen

The World-Soul

A covert answer to his seeking came.

In a far shimmering background of Mind-Space

A glowing mouth was seen, a luminous shaft;

A recluse gate it seemed, musing on joy,

A veiled retreat and escape to mystery.

Away from the unsatisfied surface world

It fled into the bosom of the unknown,

A well, a tunnel of the depths of God.

It plunged as if a mystic groove of hope

Through many layers of formless voiceless self

To reach the last profound of the world’s heart,

And from that heart there surged a wordless call

Pleading with some still impenetrable Mind,

Voicing some passionate unseen desire.

As if a beckoning finger of secrecy

Outstretched into a crystal mood of air,

Pointing at him from some near hidden depth,

As if a message from the world’s deep soul,

An intimation of a lurking joy

That flowed out from a cup of brooding bliss,

There shimmered stealing out into the Mind

A mute and quivering ecstasy of light,

A passion and delicacy of roseate fire.

As one drawn to his lost spiritual home

Feels now the closeness of a waiting love,

Into a passage dim and tremulous

That clasped him in from day and night’s pursuit,

He travelled led by a mysterious sound.

A murmur multitudinous and lone,

All sounds it was in turn, yet still the same.

A hidden call to unforeseen delight

In the summoning voice of one long-known, well-loved,

But nameless to the unremembering mind,

It led to rapture back the truant heart.

The immortal cry ravished the captive ear.

Then, lowering its imperious mystery,

It sank to a whisper circling round the soul.

It seemed the yearning of a lonely flute

That roamed along the shores of memory

And filled the eyes with tears of longing joy.

A cricket’s rash and fiery single note,

It marked with shrill melody night’s moonless hush

And beat upon a nerve of mystic sleep

Its high insistent magical reveille.

A jingling silver laugh of anklet bells

Travelled the roads of a solitary heart;

Its dance solaced an eternal loneliness:

An old forgotten sweetness sobbing came.

Or from a far harmonious distance heard

The tinkling pace of a long caravan

It seemed at times, or a vast forest’s hymn,

The solemn reminder of a temple gong,

A bee-croon honey-drunk in summer isles

Ardent with ecstasy in a slumbrous noon,

Or the far anthem of a pilgrim sea.

An incense floated in the quivering air,

A mystic happiness trembled in the breast

As if the invisible Beloved had come

Assuming the sudden loveliness of a face

And close glad hands could seize his fugitive feet

And the world change with the beauty of a smile.

Into a wonderful bodiless realm he came,

The home of a passion without name or voice,

A depth he felt answering to every height,

A nook was found that could embrace all worlds,

A point that was the conscious knot of Space,

An hour eternal in the heart of Time.

The silent Soul of all the world was there:

A Being lived, a Presence and a Power,

A single Person who was himself and all

And cherished Nature’s sweet and dangerous throbs

Transfigured into beats divine and pure.

One who could love without return for love,

Meeting and turning to the best the worst,

It healed the bitter cruelties of earth,

Transforming all experience to delight;

Intervening in the sorrowful paths of birth

It rocked the cradle of the cosmic Child

And stilled all weeping with its hand of joy;

It led things evil towards their secret good,

It turned racked falsehood into happy truth;

Its power was to reveal divinity.

Infinite, coeval with the mind of God,

It bore within itself a seed, a flame,

A seed from which the Eternal is new-born,

A flame that cancels death in mortal things.

All grew to all kindred and self and near;

The intimacy of God was everywhere,

No veil was felt, no brute barrier inert,

Distance could not divide, Time could not change.

A fire of passion burned in spirit-depths,

A constant touch of sweetness linked all hearts,

The throb of one adoration’s single bliss

In a rapt ether of undying love.

An inner happiness abode in all,

A sense of universal harmonies,

A measureless secure eternity

Of truth and beauty and good and joy made one.

Here was the welling core of finite life;

A formless spirit became the soul of form.

All there was soul or made of sheer soul-stuff;

A sky of soul covered a deep soul-ground.

All here was known by a spiritual sense:

Thought was not there but a knowledge near and one

Seized on all things by a moved identity,

A sympathy of self with other selves,

The touch of consciousness on consciousness

And being’s look on being with inmost gaze

And heart laid bare to heart without walls of speech

And the unanimity of seeing minds

In myriad forms luminous with the one God.

Life was not there, but an impassioned force,

Finer than fineness, deeper than the deeps,

Felt as a subtle and spiritual power,

A quivering out from soul to answering soul,

A mystic movement, a close influence,

A free and happy and intense approach

Of being to being with no screen or check,

Without which life and love could never have been.

Body was not there, for bodies were needed not,

The soul itself was its own deathless form

And met at once the touch of other souls

Close, blissful, concrete, wonderfully true.

As when one walks in sleep through luminous dreams

And, conscious, knows the truth their figures mean,

Here where reality was its own dream,

He knew things by their soul and not their shape:

As those who have lived long made one in love

Need word nor sign for heart’s reply to heart,

He met and communed without bar of speech

With beings unveiled by a material frame.

There was a strange spiritual scenery,

A loveliness of lakes and streams and hills,

A flow, a fixity in a soul-space,

And plains and valleys, stretches of soul-joy,

And gardens that were flower-tracts of the spirit,

Its meditations of tinged reverie.

Air was the breath of a pure infinite.

A fragrance wandered in a coloured haze

As if the scent and hue of all sweet flowers

Had mingled to copy heaven’s atmosphere.

Appealing to the soul and not the eye

Beauty lived there at home in her own house,

There all was beautiful by its own right

And needed not the splendour of a robe.

All objects were like bodies of the Gods,

A spirit symbol environing a soul,

For world and self were one reality.

Immersed in voiceless internatal trance

The beings that once wore forms on earth sat there

In shining chambers of spiritual sleep.

Passed were the pillar-posts of birth and death,

Passed was their little scene of symbol deeds,

Passed were the heavens and hells of their long road;

They had returned into the world’s deep soul.

All now was gathered into pregnant rest:

Person and nature suffered a slumber change.

In trance they gathered back their bygone selves,

In a background memory’s foreseeing muse

Prophetic of new personality

Arranged the map of their coming destiny’s course:

Heirs of their past, their future’s discoverers,

Electors of their own self-chosen lot,

They waited for the adventure of new life.

A Person persistent through the lapse of worlds,

Although the same for ever in many shapes

By the outward mind unrecognisable,

Assuming names unknown in unknown climes

Imprints through Time upon the earth’s worn page

A growing figure of its secret self,

And learns by experience what the spirit knew,

Till it can see its truth alive and God.

Once more they must face the problem-game of birth,

The soul’s experiment of joy and grief

And thought and impulse lighting the blind act,

And venture on the roads of circumstance,

Through inner movements and external scenes

Travelling to self across the forms of things.

Into creation’s centre he had come.

The spirit wandering from state to state

Finds here the silence of its starting-point

In the formless force and the still fixity

And brooding passion of the world of Soul.

All that is made and once again unmade,

The calm persistent vision of the One

Inevitably re-makes, it lives anew:

Forces and lives and beings and ideas

Are taken into the stillness for a while;

There they remould their purpose and their drift,

Recast their nature and re-form their shape.

Ever they change and changing ever grow,

And passing through a fruitful stage of death

And after long reconstituting sleep

Resume their place in the process of the Gods

Until their work in cosmic Time is done.

Here was the fashioning chamber of the worlds.

An interval was left twixt act and act,

Twixt birth and birth, twixt dream and waking dream,

A pause that gave new strength to do and be.

Beyond were regions of delight and peace,

Mute birthplaces of light and hope and love,

And cradles of heavenly rapture and repose.

In a slumber of the voices of the world

He of the eternal moment grew aware;

His knowledge stripped bare of the garbs of sense

Knew by identity without thought or word;

His being saw itself without its veils,

Life’s line fell from the spirit’s infinity.

Along a road of pure interior light,

Alone between tremendous Presences,

Under the watching eyes of nameless Gods,

His soul passed on, a single conscious power,

Towards the end which ever begins again,

Approaching through a stillness dumb and calm

To the source of all things human and divine.

There he beheld in their mighty union’s poise

The figure of the deathless Two-in-One,

A single being in two bodies clasped,

A diarchy of two united souls,

Seated absorbed in deep creative joy;

Their trance of bliss sustained the mobile world.

Behind them in a morning dusk One stood

Who brought them forth from the Unknowable.

Ever disguised she awaits the seeking spirit;

Watcher on the supreme unreachable peaks,

Guide of the traveller of the unseen paths,

She guards the austere approach to the Alone.

At the beginning of each far-spread plane

Pervading with her power the cosmic suns

She reigns, inspirer of its multiple works

And thinker of the symbol of its scene.

Above them all she stands supporting all,

The sole omnipotent Goddess ever-veiled

Of whom the world is the inscrutable mask;

The ages are the footfalls of her tread,

Their happenings the figure of her thoughts,

And all creation is her endless act.

His spirit was made a vessel of her force;

Mute in the fathomless passion of his will

He outstretched to her his folded hands of prayer.

Then in a sovereign answer to his heart

A gesture came as of worlds thrown away,

And from her raiment’s lustrous mystery raised

One arm half-parted the eternal veil.

A light appeared still and imperishable.

Attracted to the large and luminous depths

Of the ravishing enigma of her eyes,

He saw the mystic outline of a face.

Overwhelmed by her implacable light and bliss,

An atom of her illimitable self

Mastered by the honey and lightning of her power,

Tossed towards the shores of her ocean-ecstasy,

Drunk with a deep golden spiritual wine,

He cast from the rent stillness of his soul

A cry of adoration and desire

And the surrender of his boundless mind

And the self-giving of his silent heart.

He fell down at her feet unconscious, prone.

End of Canto Fourteen

Canto Fifteen

The Kingdoms of the Greater Knowledge

After a measureless moment of the soul

Again returning to these surface fields

Out of the timeless depths where he had sunk,

He heard once more the slow tread of the hours.

All once perceived and lived was far away;

Himself was to himself his only scene.

Above the Witness and his universe

He stood in a realm of boundless silences

Awaiting the Voice that spoke and built the worlds.

A light was round him wide and absolute,

A diamond purity of eternal sight;

A consciousness lay still, devoid of forms,

Free, wordless, uncoerced by sign or rule,

For ever content with only being and bliss;

A sheer existence lived in its own peace

On the single spirit’s bare and infinite ground.

Out of the sphere of Mind he had arisen,

He had left the reign of Nature’s hues and shades;

He dwelt in his self’s colourless purity.

It was a plane of undetermined spirit

That could be a zero or round sum of things,

A state in which all ceased and all began.

All it became that figures the absolute,

A high vast peak whence Spirit could see the worlds,

Calm’s wide epiphany, wisdom’s mute home,

A lonely station of Omniscience,

A diving-board of the Eternal’s power,

A white floor in the house of All-Delight.

Here came the thought that passes beyond Thought,

Here the still Voice which our listening cannot hear,

The Knowledge by which the knower is the known,

The Love in which beloved and lover are one.

All stood in an original plenitude,

Hushed and fulfilled before they could create

The glorious dream of their universal acts;

Here was engendered the spiritual birth,

Here closed the finite’s crawl to the Infinite.

A thousand roads leaped into Eternity

Or singing ran to meet God’s veilless face.

The Known released him from its limiting chain;

He knocked at the doors of the Unknowable.

Thence gazing with an immeasurable outlook

One with self’s inlook into its own pure vasts,

He saw the splendour of the spirit’s realms,

The greatness and wonder of its boundless works,

The power and passion leaping from its calm,

The rapture of its movement and its rest,

And its fire-sweet miracle of transcendent life,

The million-pointing undivided grasp

Of its vision of one same stupendous All,

Its inexhaustible acts in a timeless Time,

A space that is its own infinity.

A glorious multiple of one radiant Self,

Answering to joy with joy, to love with love,

All there were moving mansions of God-bliss;

Eternal and unique they lived the One.

There forces are great outbursts of God’s truth

And objects are its pure spiritual shapes;

Spirit no more is hid from its own view,

All sentience is a sea of happiness

And all creation is an act of light.

Out of the neutral silence of his soul

He passed to its fields of puissance and of calm

And saw the Powers that stand above the world,

Traversed the realms of the supreme Idea

And sought the summit of created things

And the almighty source of cosmic change.

There Knowledge called him to her mystic peaks

Where thought is held in a vast internal sense

And feeling swims across a sea of peace

And vision climbs beyond the reach of Time.

An equal of the first creator seers,

Accompanied by an all-revealing light

He moved through regions of transcendent Truth

Inward, immense, innumerably one.

There distance was his own huge spirit’s extent;

Delivered from the fictions of the mind

Time’s triple dividing step baffled no more;

Its inevitable and continuous stream,

The long flow of its manifesting course,

Was held in spirit’s single wide regard.

A universal beauty showed its face:

The invisible deep-fraught significances,

Here sheltered behind form’s insensible screen,

Uncovered to him their deathless harmony

And the key to the wonder-book of common things.

In their uniting law stood up revealed

The multiple measures of the upbuilding force,

The lines of the World-Geometer’s technique,

The enchantments that uphold the cosmic web

And the magic underlying simple shapes.

On peaks where Silence listens with still heart

To the rhythmic metres of the rolling worlds,

He served the sessions of the triple Fire.

On the rim of two continents of slumber and trance

He heard the ever unspoken Reality’s voice

Awaken revelation’s mystic cry,

The birthplace found of the sudden infallible Word

And lived in the rays of an intuitive Sun.

Absolved from the ligaments of death and sleep

He rode the lightning seas of cosmic Mind

And crossed the ocean of original sound;

On the last step to the supernal birth

He trod along extinction’s narrow edge

Near the high verges of eternity,

And mounted the gold ridge of the world-dream

Between the slayer and the saviour fires;

The belt he reached of the unchanging Truth,

Met borders of the inexpressible Light

And thrilled with the presence of the Ineffable.

Above him he saw the flaming Hierarchies,

The wings that fold around created Space,

The sun-eyed Guardians and the golden Sphinx

And the tiered planes and the immutable Lords.

A wisdom waiting on Omniscience

Sat voiceless in a vast passivity;

It judged not, measured not, nor strove to know,

But listened for the veiled all-seeing Thought

And the burden of a calm transcendent Voice.

He had reached the top of all that can be known:

His sight surpassed creation’s head and base;

Ablaze the triple heavens revealed their suns,

The obscure Abyss exposed its monstrous rule.

All but the ultimate Mystery was his field,

Almost the Unknowable disclosed its rim.

His self’s infinities began to emerge,

The hidden universes cried to him;

Eternities called to eternities

Sending their speechless message still remote.

Arisen from the marvel of the depths

And burning from the superconscious heights

And sweeping in great horizontal gyres

A million energies joined and were the One.

All flowed immeasurably to one sea:

All living forms became its atom homes.

A Panergy that harmonised all life

Held now existence in its vast control;

A portion of that majesty he was made.

At will he lived in the unoblivious Ray.

In that high realm where no untruth can come,

Where all are different and all is one,

In the Impersonal’s ocean without shore

The Person in the World-Spirit anchored rode;

It thrilled with the mighty marchings of World-Force,

Its acts were the comrades of God’s infinite peace.

An adjunct glory and a symbol self,

The body was delivered to the soul, –

An immortal point of power, a block of poise

In a cosmicity’s wide formless surge,

A conscious edge of the Transcendent’s might

Carving perfection from a bright world-stuff,

It figured in it a universe’s sense.

There consciousness was a close and single weft;

The far and near were one in spirit-space,

The moments there were pregnant with all time.

The superconscient’s screen was ripped by thought,

Idea rotated symphonies of sight,

Sight was a flame-throw from identity;

Life was a marvellous journey of the spirit,

Feeling a wave from the universal Bliss.

In the kingdom of the Spirit’s power and light,

As if one who arrived out of infinity’s womb

He came new-born, infant and limitless

And grew in the wisdom of the timeless Child;

He was a vast that soon became a Sun.

A great luminous silence whispered to his heart;

His knowledge an inview caught unfathomable,

An outview by no brief horizons cut:

He thought and felt in all, his gaze had power.

He communed with the Incommunicable;

Beings of a wider consciousness were his friends,

Forms of a larger subtler make drew near;

The Gods conversed with him behind Life’s veil.

Neighbour his being grew to Nature’s crests.

The primal Energy took him in its arms;

His brain was wrapped in overwhelming light,

An all-embracing knowledge seized his heart:

Thoughts rose in him no earthly mind can hold,

Mights played that never coursed through mortal nerves:

He scanned the secrets of the Overmind,

He bore the rapture of the Oversoul.

A borderer of the empire of the Sun,

Attuned to the supernal harmonies,

He linked creation to the Eternal’s sphere.

His finite parts approached their absolutes,

His actions framed the movements of the Gods,

His will took up the reins of cosmic Force.

End of Canto Fifteen
End of Book Two

Canto One

The Pursuit of the Unknowable

All is too little that the world can give:

Its power and knowledge are the gifts of Time

And cannot fill the spirit’s sacred thirst.

Although of One these forms of greatness are

And by its breath of grace our lives abide,

Although more near to us than nearness’ self,

It is some utter truth of what we are;

Hidden by its own works, it seemed far-off,

Impenetrable, occult, voiceless, obscure.

The Presence was lost by which all things have charm,

The Glory lacked of which they are dim signs.

The world lived on made empty of its Cause,

Like love when the beloved’s face is gone.

The labour to know seemed a vain strife of Mind;

All knowledge ended in the Unknowable:

The effort to rule seemed a vain pride of Will;

A trivial achievement scorned by Time,

All power retired into the Omnipotent.

A cave of darkness guards the eternal Light.

A silence settled on his striving heart;

Absolved from the voices of the world’s desire,

He turned to the Ineffable’s timeless call.

A Being intimate and unnameable,

A wide compelling ecstasy and peace

Felt in himself and all and yet ungrasped,

Approached and faded from his soul’s pursuit

As if for ever luring him beyond.

Near, it retreated; far, it called him still.

Nothing could satisfy but its delight:

Its absence left the greatest actions dull,

Its presence made the smallest seem divine.

When it was there, the heart’s abyss was filled;

But when the uplifting Deity withdrew,

Existence lost its aim in the Inane.

The order of the immemorial planes,

The godlike fullness of the instruments

Were turned to props for an impermanent scene.

But who that mightiness was he knew not yet.

Impalpable, yet filling all that is,

It made and blotted out a million worlds

And took and lost a thousand shapes and names.

It wore the guise of an indiscernible Vast,

Or was a subtle kernel in the soul:

A distant greatness left it huge and dim,

A mystic closeness shut it sweetly in:

It seemed sometimes a figment or a robe

And seemed sometimes his own colossal shade.

A giant doubt overshadowed his advance.

Across a neutral all-supporting Void

Whose blankness nursed his lone immortal spirit,

Allured towards some recondite Supreme,

Aided, coerced by enigmatic Powers,

Aspiring and half-sinking and upborne,

Invincibly he ascended without pause.

Always a signless vague Immensity

Brooded, without approach, beyond response,

Condemning finite things to nothingness,

Fronting him with the incommensurable.

Then to the ascent there came a mighty term.

A height was reached where nothing made could live,

A line where every hope and search must cease

Neared some intolerant bare Reality,

A zero formed pregnant with boundless change.

On a dizzy verge where all disguises fail

And human mind must abdicate in Light

Or die like a moth in the naked blaze of Truth,

He stood compelled to a tremendous choice.

All he had been and all towards which he grew

Must now be left behind or else transform

Into a self of That which has no name.

Alone and fronting an intangible Force

Which offered nothing to the grasp of Thought,

His spirit faced the adventure of the Inane.

Abandoned by the worlds of Form he strove.

A fruitful world-wide Ignorance foundered here;

Thought’s long far-circling journey touched its close

And ineffective paused the actor Will.

The symbol modes of being helped no more,

The structures Nescience builds collapsing failed,

And even the spirit that holds the universe

Fainted in luminous insufficiency.

In an abysmal lapse of all things built

Transcending every perishable support

And joining at last its mighty origin,

The separate self must melt or be reborn

Into a Truth beyond the mind’s appeal.

All glory of outline, sweetness of harmony,

Rejected like a grace of trivial notes,

Expunged from Being’s silence nude, austere,

Died into a fine and blissful Nothingness.

The Demiurges lost their names and forms,

The great schemed worlds that they had planned and wrought

Passed, taken and abolished one by one.

The universe removed its coloured veil,

And at the unimaginable end

Of the huge riddle of created things

Appeared the far-seen Godhead of the whole,

His feet firm-based on Life’s stupendous wings,

Omnipotent, a lonely seer of Time,

Inward, inscrutable, with diamond gaze.

Attracted by the unfathomable regard

The unsolved slow cycles to their fount returned

To rise again from that invisible sea.

All from his puissance born was now undone;

Nothing remained the cosmic Mind conceives.

Eternity prepared to fade and seemed

A hue and imposition on the Void,

Space was the fluttering of a dream that sank

Before its ending into Nothing’s deeps.

The spirit that dies not and the Godhead’s self

Seemed myths projected from the Unknowable;

From It all sprang, in It is called to cease.

But what That was, no thought nor sight could tell.

Only a formless Form of self was left,

A tenuous ghost of something that had been,

The last experience of a lapsing wave

Before it sinks into a bourneless sea, –

As if it kept even on the brink of Nought

Its bare feeling of the ocean whence it came.

A Vastness brooded free from sense of Space,

An Everlastingness cut off from Time;

A strange sublime inalterable Peace

Silent rejected from it world and soul.

A stark companionless Reality

Answered at last to his soul’s passionate search:

Passionless, wordless, absorbed in its fathomless hush,

Keeping the mystery none would ever pierce,

It brooded inscrutable and intangible

Facing him with its dumb tremendous calm.

It had no kinship with the universe:

There was no act, no movement in its Vast:

Life’s question met by its silence died on her lips,

The world’s effort ceased convicted of ignorance

Finding no sanction of supernal Light:

There was no mind there with its need to know,

There was no heart there with its need to love.

All person perished in its namelessness.

There was no second, it had no partner or peer;

Only itself was real to itself.

A pure existence safe from thought and mood,

A consciousness of unshared immortal bliss,

It dwelt aloof in its bare infinite,

One and unique, unutterably sole.

A Being formless, featureless and mute

That knew itself by its own timeless self,

Aware for ever in its motionless depths,

Uncreating, uncreated and unborn,

The One by whom all live, who lives by none,

An immeasurable luminous secrecy

Guarded by the veils of the Unmanifest,

Above the changing cosmic interlude

Abode supreme, immutably the same,

A silent Cause occult, impenetrable, –

Infinite, eternal, unthinkable, alone.

End of Canto One