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Canto Five
The Yoga of the King: The Yoga of the Spirit’s Freedom and Greatness
THIS knowledge first he had of time-born men. Admitted through a curtain of bright mindThat hangs between our thoughts and absolute sight, He found the occult cave, the mystic doorNear to the well of vision in the soul, And entered where the Wings of Glory broodIn the silent space where all is for ever known. Indifferent to doubt and to belief,Avid of the naked real’s single shock He shore the cord of mind that ties the earth-heartAnd cast away the yoke of Matter’s law. The body’s rules bound not the spirit’s powers:When life had stopped its beats, death broke not in; He dared to live when breath and thought were still.Thus could he step into that magic place Which few can even glimpse with hurried glanceLifted for a moment from mind’s laboured works And the poverty of Nature’s earthly sight.All that the Gods have learned is there self-known. There in a hidden chamber closed and muteAre kept the record graphs of the cosmic scribe, And there the tables of the sacred Law,There is the Book of Being’s index page; The text and glossary of the Vedic truthAre there; the rhythms and metres of the stars Significant of the movements of our fate:The symbol powers of number and of form, And the secret code of the history of the worldAnd Nature’s correspondence with the soul Are written in the mystic heart of Life.
Page – 74 In the glow of the spirit’s room of memories He could recover the luminous marginal notes Dotting with light the crabbed ambiguous scroll,Rescue the preamble and the saving clause Of the dark Agreement by which all is ruledThat rises from material Nature’s sleep To clothe the Everlasting in new shapes.He could re-read now and interpret new Its strange symbol letters, scattered abstruse signs,Resolve its oracle and its paradox, Its riddling phrases and its blindfold terms,The deep oxymoron of its truth’s repliques, And recognise as a just necessityIts hard conditions for the mighty work, — Nature’s impossible Herculean toilOnly her warlock-wisecraft could enforce, Its law of the opposition of the gods,Its list of inseparable contraries. The dumb great Mother in her cosmic tranceExploiting for creation’s joy and pain Infinity’s sanction to the birth of form,Accepts indomitably to execute The will to know in an inconscient world,The will to live under a reign of death, The thirst for rapture in a heart of flesh,And works out through the appearance of a soul By a miraculous birth in plasm and gasThe mystery of God’s covenant with the Night. Once more was heard in the still cosmic MindThe Eternal’s promise to his labouring Force Inducing the world-passion to begin,The cry of birth into mortality And the opening verse of the tragedy of Time.Out of the depths the world’s buried secret rose; He read the original ukase kept backIn the locked archives of the spirit’s crypt,
Page – 75 And saw the signature and fiery seal Of Wisdom on the dim Power’s hooded work Who builds in Ignorance the steps of Light.A sleeping deity opened deathless eyes: He saw the unshaped thought in soulless forms,Knew Matter pregnant with spiritual sense, Mind dare the study of the Unknowable,Life its gestation of the Golden Child. In the light flooding thought’s blank vacancy,Interpreting the universe by soul signs He read from within the text of the without:The riddle grew plain and lost its catch obscure. A larger lustre lit the mighty page.A purpose mingled with the whims of Time, A meaning met the stumbling pace of ChanceAnd Fate revealed a chain of seeing Will; A conscious wideness filled the old dumb Space.In the Void he saw throned the Omniscience supreme. A Will, a hope immense now seized his heart, And to discern the superhuman’s form He raised his eyes to unseen spiritual heights,Aspiring to bring down a greater world. The glory he had glimpsed must be his home.A brighter heavenlier sun must soon illume This dusk room with its dark internal stair,The infant soul in its small nursery school Mid objects meant for a lesson hardly learnedOutgrow its early grammar of intellect And its imitation of Earth-Nature’s art,Its earthly dialect to God-language change, In living symbols study RealityAnd learn the logic of the Infinite. 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,
Page – 76 A conscious soul live in a conscious world. As through a mist a sovereign peak is seen, The greatness of the eternal Spirit appeared,Exiled in a fragmented universe Amid half-semblances of diviner things.These now could serve no more his regal turn; The Immortal’s pride refused the doom to liveA miser of the scanty bargain made Between our littleness and bounded hopesAnd the compassionate Infinitudes. His height repelled the lowness of earth’s state:A wideness discontented with its frame Resiled from poor assent to Nature’s terms,The harsh contract spurned and the diminished lease. Only beginnings are accomplished here;Our base’s Matter seems alone complete, An absolute machine without a soul.Or all seems a misfit of half ideas, Or we saddle with the vice of earthly formA hurried imperfect glimpse of heavenly things, Guesses and travesties of celestial types.Here chaos sorts itself into a world, A brief formation drifting in the void:Apings of knowledge, unfinished arcs of power, Flamings of beauty into earthly shapes,Love’s broken reflexes of unity Swim, fragment-mirrorings of a floating sun.A packed assemblage of crude tentative lives Are pieced into a tessellated whole.There is no perfect answer to our hopes; There are blind voiceless doors that have no key;Thought climbs in vain and brings a borrowed light, Cheated by counterfeits sold to us in life’s mart,Our hearts clutch at a forfeited heavenly bliss. There is provender for the mind’s satiety,There are thrills of the flesh, but not the soul’s desire.
Page – 77 Here even the highest rapture Time can give Is a mimicry of ungrasped beatitudes, A mutilated statue of ecstasy,A wounded happiness that cannot live, A brief felicity of mind or senseThrown by the World-Power to her body-slave, Or a simulacrum of enforced delightIn the seraglios of Ignorance. For all we have acquired soon loses worth,An old disvalued credit in Time’s bank, Imperfection’s cheque drawn on the Inconscient.An inconsequence dogs every effort made, And chaos waits on every cosmos formed:In each success a seed of failure lurks. He saw the doubtfulness of all things here,The incertitude of man’s proud confident thought, The transience of the achievements of his force.A thinking being in an unthinking world, An island in the sea of the Unknown,He is a smallness trying to be great, An animal with some instincts of a god,His life a story too common to be told, His deeds a number summing up to nought,His consciousness a torch lit to be quenched, His hope a star above a cradle and grave.And yet a greater destiny may be his, For the eternal Spirit is his truth.He can re-create himself and all around And fashion new the world in which he lives:He, ignorant, is the Knower beyond Time, He is the Self above Nature, above Fate.
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.
Page – 78 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 thoughtsUnder 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.Aware of his occult omnipotent Source, Allured by the omniscient Ecstasy,A living centre of the Illimitable Widened to equate with the world’s circumference,He turned to his immense spiritual fate. Abandoned on a canvas of torn air,A picture lost in far and fading streaks, The earth-nature’s summits sank below his feet:He climbed to meet the infinite more above. The Immobile’s ocean-silence saw him pass,An arrow leaping through eternity Suddenly shot from the tense bow of Time,A ray returning to its parent sun. Opponent of that glory of escape,The black Inconscient swung its dragon tail Lashing a slumbrous Infinite by its forceInto the deep obscurities of form: Death lay beneath him like a gate of sleep.One-pointed to the immaculate Delight, Questing for God as for a splendid prey,
Page – 79 He mounted burning like a cone of fire. To a few is given that godlike rare release. One among many thousands never touched,Engrossed in the external world’s design, Is chosen by a secret witness EyeAnd 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.In the hushed precincts of a vaster plan He treads the vestibules of the Unseen,Or listens following a bodiless Guide To a lonely cry in boundless vacancy.All the deep cosmic murmur falling still, He lives in the hush before the world was born,His soul left naked to the timeless One. Far from compulsion of created thingsThought and its shadowy idols disappear, The moulds of form and person are undone:The ineffable Wideness knows him for its own. A lone forerunner of the Godward earth,Among the symbols of yet unshaped things Watched by closed eyes, mute faces of the Unborn,He journeys to meet the Incommunicable, Hearing the echo of his single stepsIn the eternal courts of Solitude. A nameless Marvel fills the motionless hours.His spirit mingles with eternity’s heart And bears the silence of the Infinite.
In a divine retreat from mortal thought, In a prodigious gesture of soul-sight,His being towered into pathless heights, Naked of its vesture of humanity.
Page – 80 As thus it rose, to meet him bare and pure A strong Descent leaped down. A Might, a Flame, A Beauty half-visible with deathless eyes,A violent Ecstasy, a Sweetness dire, Enveloped him with its stupendous limbsAnd penetrated nerve and heart and brain That thrilled and fainted with the epiphany:His nature shuddered in the Unknown’s grasp. In a moment shorter than death, longer than Time,By a Power more ruthless than Love, happier than Heaven, Taken sovereignly into eternal arms,Haled and coerced by a stark absolute bliss, In a whirlwind circuit of delight and forceHurried into unimaginable depths, Upborne into immeasurable heights,It was torn out from its mortality And underwent a new and bourneless change.An Omniscient knowing without sight or thought, An indecipherable Omnipotence,A mystic Form that could contain the worlds, Yet make one human breast its passionate shrine,Drew him out of his seeking loneliness Into the magnitudes of God’s embrace.As when a timeless Eye annuls the hours Abolishing the agent and the act,So now his spirit shone out wide, blank, pure: His wakened mind became an empty slateOn which the Universal and Sole could write. All that represses our fallen consciousnessWas taken from him like a forgotten load: A fire that seemed the body of a godConsumed the limiting figures of the past And made large room for a new self to live.Eternity’s contact broke the moulds of sense. A greater Force than the earthly held his limbs,Huge workings bared his undiscovered sheaths,
Page – 81 Strange energies wrought and screened tremendous hands Unwound the triple cord of mind and freed The heavenly wideness of a Godhead’s gaze.As through a dress the wearer’s shape is seen, There reached through forms to the hidden absoluteA cosmic feeling and transcendent sight. Increased and heightened were the instruments.Illusion lost her aggrandising lens; As from her failing hand the measures fell,Atomic looked the things that loomed so large. The little ego’s ring could join no more;In the enormous spaces of the self The body now seemed only a wandering shell,His mind the many-frescoed outer court Of an imperishable Inhabitant:His spirit breathed a superhuman air. The imprisoned deity rent its magic fence.As with a sound of thunder and of seas, Vast barriers crashed around the huge escape.Immutably coeval with the world, Circle and end of every hope and toilInexorably drawn round thought and act, The fixed immovable peripheriesEffaced themselves beneath the Incarnate’s tread. The dire velamen and the bottomless cryptBetween which life and thought for ever move, Forbidden still to cross the dim dread bounds,The guardian darknesses mute and formidable, Empowered to circumscribe the wingless spiritIn the boundaries of Mind and Ignorance, Protecting no more a dual eternityVanished rescinding their enormous role: Once figure of creation’s vain ellipse,The expanding zero lost its giant curve. The old adamantine vetoes stood no more:Overpowered were earth and Nature’s obsolete rule;
Page – 82 The python coils of the restricting Law Could not restrain the swift arisen God: Abolished were the scripts of destiny.There was no small death-hunted creature more, No fragile form of being to preserveFrom an all-swallowing Immensity. The great hammer-beats of a pent-up world-heartBurst open the narrow dams that keep us safe Against the forces of the universe.The soul and cosmos faced as equal powers. A boundless being in a measureless TimeInvaded Nature with the infinite; He saw unpathed, unwalled, his titan scope.
All was uncovered to his sealless eye. A secret Nature stripped of her defence,Once in a dreaded half-light formidable, Overtaken in her mighty privacyLay bare to the burning splendour of his will. In shadowy chambers lit by a strange sunAnd opening hardly to hid mystic keys Her perilous arcanes and hooded PowersConfessed the advent of a mastering Mind And bore the compulsion of a time-born gaze.Incalculable in their wizard modes, Immediate and invincible in the act,Her secret strengths native to greater worlds Lifted above our needy limited scope,The occult privilege of demigods And the sure power-pattern of her cryptic signs,Her diagrams of geometric force, Her potencies of marvel-fraught designCourted employment by an earth-nursed might. A conscious Nature’s quick machineryArmed with a latent splendour of miracle The prophet-passion of a seeing Mind,
Page – 83 And the lightning bareness of a free soul-force. All once impossible deemed could now become A natural limb of possibility,A new domain of normalcy supreme. An almighty occultist erects in SpaceThis seeming outward world which tricks the sense; He weaves his hidden threads of consciousness,He builds bodies for his shapeless energy; Out of the unformed and vacant Vast he has madeHis sorcery of solid images, His magic of formative number and design,The fixed irrational links none can annul, This criss-cross tangle of invisible laws;His infallible rules, his covered processes, Achieve unerringly an inexplicableCreation where our error carves dead frames Of knowledge for a living ignorance.In her mystery’s moods divorced from the Maker’s laws She too as sovereignly creates her field,Her will shaping the undetermined vasts, Making a finite of infinity;She too can make an order of her caprice, As if her rash superb wagered to outvieThe veiled Creator’s cosmic secrecies. The rapid footsteps of her fantasy,Amid whose falls wonders like flowers rise, Are surer than reason, defter than deviceAnd swifter than Imagination’s wings. All she new-fashions by the thought and word,Compels all substance by her wand of Mind. Mind is a mediator divinity:Its powers can undo all Nature’s work: Mind can suspend or change earth’s concrete law.Affranchised from earth-habit’s drowsy seal The leaden grip of Matter it can break;Indifferent to the angry stare of Death,
Page – 84 It can immortalise a moment’s work: A simple fiat of its thinking force, The casual pressure of its slight assentCan liberate the Energy dumb and pent Within its chambers of mysterious trance:It makes the body’s sleep a puissant arm, Holds still the breath, the beatings of the heart,While the unseen is found, the impossible done, Communicates without means the unspoken thought;It moves events by its bare silent will, Acts at a distance without hands or feet.This giant Ignorance, this dwarfish Life It can illumine with a prophet sight,Invoke the bacchic rapture, the Fury’s goad, In our body arouse the demon or the god,Call in the Omniscient and Omnipotent, Awake a forgotten Almightiness within.In its own plane a shining emperor, Even in this rigid realm, Mind can be king:The logic of its demigod Idea In the leap of a transitional moment bringsSurprises of creation never achieved Even by Matter’s strange unconscious skill.All’s miracle here and can by miracle change. This is that secret Nature’s edge of might.On the margin of great immaterial planes, In kingdoms of an untrammelled glory of force,Where Mind is master of the life and form And soul fulfils its thoughts by its own power,She meditates upon mighty words and looks On the unseen links that join the parted spheres.Thence to the initiate who observes her laws She brings the light of her mysterious realms:Here where he stands, his feet on a prostrate world, His mind no more cast into Matter’s mould,Over their bounds in spurts of splendid strength
Page – 85 She carries their magician processes And the formulas of their stupendous speech, Till heaven and hell become purveyors to earthAnd the universe the slave of mortal will. A mediatrix with veiled and nameless godsWhose alien will touches our human life, Imitating the World-Magician’s waysShe invents for her self-bound free-will its grooves And feigns for magic’s freaks a binding cause.All worlds she makes the partners of her deeds, Accomplices of her mighty violence,Her daring leaps into the impossible: From every source she has taken her cunning means,She draws from the free-love marriage of the planes Elements for her creation’s tour-de-force:A wonder-weft of knowledge incalculable, A compendium of divine invention’s featsShe has combined to make the unreal true Or liberate suppressed reality:In her unhedged Circean wonderland Pell-mell she shepherds her occult mightinesses;Her mnemonics of the craft of the Infinite, Jets of the screened subliminal’s caprice,Tags of the gramarye of Inconscience, Freedom of a sovereign Truth without a law,Thoughts that were born in the immortals’ world, Oracles that break out from behind the shrine,Warnings from the daemonic inner voice And peeps and lightning-leaps of prophecyAnd intimations to the inner ear, Abrupt interventions stark and absoluteAnd the Superconscient’s unaccountable acts, Have woven her balanced web of miraclesAnd the weird technique of her tremendous art. This bizarre kingdom passed into his charge.As one resisting more the more she loves,
Page – 86 Her great possessions and her power and lore She gave, compelled, with a reluctant joy; Herself she gave for rapture and for use.Absolved from aberrations in deep ways, The ends she recovered for which she was made:She turned against the evil she had helped Her engined wrath, her invisible means to slay;Her dangerous moods and arbitrary force She surrendered to the service of the soulAnd the control of a spiritual will. 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 hermetic wisdom forced from her, Fragments of the mystery of omnipotence.
A border sovereign is the occult Force. A threshold guardian of the earth-scene’s Beyond,She has canalised the outbreaks of the Gods And cut through vistas of intuitive sightA long road of shimmering discoveries. The worlds of a marvellous Unknown were near,Behind her an ineffable Presence stood: Her reign received their mystic influences,Their lion-forces crouched beneath her feet; The future sleeps unknown behind their doors.Abysms infernal gaped round the soul’s steps And called to its mounting vision peaks divine:An endless climb and adventure of the Idea There tirelessly tempted the explorer mindAnd countless voices visited the charmed ear; A million figures passed and were seen no more.This was a forefront of God’s thousandfold house, Beginnings of the half-screened Invisible.
Page – 87 A magic porch of entry glimmering Quivered in a penumbra of screened Light, A court of the mystical traffic of the worlds,A balcony and miraculous facade. ¸Above her lightened high immensities; All the unknown looked out from boundlessness:It lodged upon an edge of hourless Time, Gazing out of some everlasting Now,Its shadows gleaming with the birth of gods, Its bodies signalling the Bodiless,Its foreheads glowing with the Oversoul, Its forms projected from the Unknowable,Its eyes dreaming of the Ineffable, Its faces staring into eternity.Life in him learned its huge subconscient rear; The little fronts unlocked to the unseen Vasts:Her gulfs stood nude, her far transcendences Flamed in transparencies of crowded light.
A giant order was discovered here Of which the tassel and extended fringeAre the scant stuff of our material lives. This overt universe whose figures hideThe secrets merged in superconscient light, Wrote clear the letters of its glowing code:A map of subtle signs surpassing thought Was hung upon a wall of inmost mind.Illumining the world’s concrete images Into significant symbols by its gloss,It offered to the intuitive exegete Its reflex of the eternal Mystery.Ascending and descending twixt life’s poles The seried kingdoms of the graded LawPlunged from the Everlasting into Time, Then glad of a glory of multitudinous mindAnd rich with life’s adventure and delight
Page – 88 And packed with the beauty of Matter’s shapes and hues Climbed back from Time into undying Self,Up a golden ladder carrying the soul, Tying with diamond threads the Spirit’s extremes.In this drop from consciousness to consciousness Each leaned on the occult Inconscient’s power,The fountain of its needed Ignorance, Archmason of the limits by which it lives.In this soar from consciousness to consciousness Each lifted tops to That from which it came,Origin of all that it had ever been And home of all that it could still become.An organ scale of the Eternal’s acts, Mounting to their climax in an endless Calm,Paces of the many-visaged Wonderful, Predestined stadia of the evolving Way,Measures of the stature of the growing soul, They interpreted existence to itselfAnd, mediating twixt the heights and deeps, United the veiled married oppositesAnd linked creation to the Ineffable. A last high world was seen where all worlds meet;In its summit gleam where Night is not nor Sleep, The light began of the Trinity supreme.All there discovered what it seeks for here. It freed the finite into boundlessnessAnd rose into its own eternities. The Inconscient found its heart of consciousness,The idea and feeling groping in Ignorance At last clutched passionately the body of Truth,The music born in Matter’s silences Plucked nude out of the Ineffable’s fathomlessnessThe meaning it had held but could not voice; The perfect rhythm now only sometimes dreamedAn answer brought to the torn earth’s hungry need Rending the night that had concealed the Unknown,
Page – 89 Giving to her her lost forgotten soul. A grand solution closed the long impasse In which the heights of mortal effort end.A reconciling Wisdom looked on life; It took the striving undertones of mindAnd took the confused refrain of human hopes And made of them a sweet and happy call;It lifted from an underground of pain The inarticulate murmur of our livesAnd found for it a sense illimitable. A mighty oneness its perpetual theme,It caught the soul’s faint scattered utterances, Read hardly twixt our lines of rigid thoughtOr mid this drowse and coma on Matter’s breast Heard like disjointed mutterings in sleep;It grouped the golden links that they had lost And showed to them their divine unity,Saving from the error of divided self The deep spiritual cry in all that is.All the great Words that toiled to express the One Were lifted into an absoluteness of light,An ever-burning Revelation’s fire And the immortality of the eternal Voice.There was no quarrel more of truth with truth; The endless chapter of their differencesRetold in light by an omniscient Scribe Travelled through difference towards unity,Mind’s winding search lost every tinge of doubt Led to its end by an all-seeing speechThat garbed the initial and original thought With the finality of an ultimate phrase:United were Time’s creative mood and tense To the style and syntax of Identity.A paean swelled from the lost musing deeps; An anthem pealed to the triune ecstasies,A cry of the moments to the Immortal’s bliss.
Page – 90 As if the strophes of a cosmic ode, A hierarchy of climbing harmonies Peopled with voices and with visagesAspired in a crescendo of the Gods From Matter’s abysses to the Spirit’s peaks.Above were the Immortal’s changeless seats, White chambers of dalliance with eternityAnd the stupendous gates of the Alone. Across the unfolding of the seas of selfAppeared the deathless countries of the One. A many-miracled Consciousness unrolledVast aim and process and unfettered norms, A larger Nature’s great familiar roads.Affranchised from the net of earthly sense Calm continents of potency were glimpsed;Homelands of beauty shut to human eyes, Half-seen at first through wonder’s gleaming lids,Surprised the vision with felicity; Sunbelts of knowledge, moonbelts of delightStretched out in an ecstasy of widenesses Beyond our indigent corporeal range.There he could enter, there awhile abide. A voyager upon uncharted routesFronting the viewless danger of the Unknown, Adventuring across enormous realms,He broke into another Space and Time. END OF CANTO FIVE END OF BOOK ONE
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