The Epic of Consciousness

by Swami Krishnananda

Part Two

Vajas'ravas, the pious, sacrificed
For freedom's sake in joy of Indra's realm;
In bounty gave belongings all he owned,
Cattle and land and home and what was dear
That he may gain what mortals never taste –
Eternal youth and beauty, toilless frame
Which's free from sleep and free from decay's rot,
Where actions breed not wearied body's fruit
As age and ennui or destruction's shades,
Where mind and senses always virgins stand
For endless action, endless indulgence
In joy's communions, winkless enraptures
Of freedom's height, abandon's giddy reach,
Where none belongs or clings to other's frame
In social bond or ethic's legal chains,
Where body's form is delight embodied,
And every limb is beauty's total gaze,
Where days are waves of timeless happiness,
One is other's, yet none is other's e'r.
Of honeyed sweetness sights and contacts made,
Immortal faces seedless juice exude,
Whose touch does madden senses losing sense
By loss of self as self merges in bliss
Of fivefold senses' molten union
With what they sought and find in naked fill –
All light and glory, song and dance of life.

But, how can man possess such great treasure,
Unless he gives, for what he hopes to gain,
His earthly greed for greed of heaven's joy.
With tongue in cheek if gifts are offered feigned,
The gods do know the heart that heart has none,
And far depart from farthest arms of man.
Vajasravas, who gave his soul's dislike,
Tinsels and rusted tools and worn-out wealth,
And coins that died and houses crumbling stood,
Waterless tracts and dried up stony land,
But not himself nor dearest kin his son,
Could scarce expect those carnivals of gods
Who earth as clay and men as flies do deem,
Where sisters, brothers, husbands, wives and friends
Mean all the same, and so all property,
Since light is no one's wealth, and none is wealth
To light which's born to none, and its own law.

The golden age which Krita sages call
Had not the Vedas but engulfing OM,
The Pranava, the Cosmic Vibration;
No social class, no fourfold caste restrained,
The social man was Cosmic Man in work,
None married belonging nor slave became,
The law of Hamsa pure and simple ruled,
Which's law of no law, Dharma's omniform.
To love, obey and own was freedom's form
As Kama, Dharma, Artha, Moksha's ways.
Householder none and none renunciate,
Since none possessed, for all possessed the all.
The downward age is Krita's travesty:
When Treta came, Dvapara and Kali –
The rod of king, commerce and selfishness –
As Kshatra, Vaisya, Sudra named by men.
In Hamsa's reign, lo, each is everyone's;
In Kshatra king is owner as his law,
The State does own and all belong to State;
In Vaisya-Dvapara mutual consent
And legal mandate sanctions ownership
Of land and gold and wife and husband's role;
But down with crash does Kali grab in strife,
In theft, dacoity, rumpus and kidnap
Of all for oneself, Sudra come to worst,
Reverse of Hamsa, upside down beheld,
As things do mind produce to crass vision,
Or silence mute's is wisdom's reticence.

Since Hamsa's truth the rest do crack and fall,
Nor State, nor king, nor mandate's agreement,
Not what one owns in seeming possession,
Can live in time which ruthless sweeps to dust
Sceptre and crown and beloved family,
Babe and grown-up, or good and bad alike,
Which weedlike look to Time's rapacious grasp
That hurls to ground what turns against the Truth.
In Nature's purpose as evolution
Of lower forms to higher completions
What life intends is shedding false fossils
Of outgrown aims and contrived arrangements
As social laws or moral's makeshift schemes
Or governments of passing climes and times,
Which for a while as weakness' props survive,
But all are flung as drugs when illness' cured.

Nachiketas, Vajasravas' begot,
As conscience spoke though clouded in the din
Of rites which pined for angels' joy above,
To know the way he goes as charity,
For what is loved remains as object owned
And what is owned is gifted in the rite.
While body's self should also go as gift,
Since self of body's most beloved owned,
And what is seen as 'me' is also 'mine',
The 'me' is object to be sacrificed,
How come the lad, the son, is still retained
And not with objects counted in the deed
Which's Sarvavedas, gifts demanding all.

'To whom I go,' 'to whom you give me, dear,'
'For whom am I the gift of sacrifice?'
So thrice he quoth on sulken father's eyes
Which wrathful stared at dauntless innocence.
'To Death thou goest, give I thee to Hades,
To Mrityu, Yama, sacrificed thou art':
These words the parent spat on piety's face
Which looked as lotus blossomed in the morn.
To Yama, Death, the simple sapling rose,
Three days and nights he waited sans diet,
Sans respect, sans recognition he stood
At gate of lord's abode, the lord was not
To sight of guest who eager-eyed beheld
The mansion Master's, soul in hunger saw
The dazzle god's who reigned as death's overlord.

Does guest go fasting, come uninvited?
As fire he comes which burns the negligent
Who scarce attention on the guest bestows,
For unknown guest is God's messenger come;
To treat him well is hallowed worship done.
The three days' fast in body, mind and soul
Confer the boons of wealth and knowledge vast
And freedom transcendent, eternal life,
As waking is from sleep's nightmarish dream.
"Ask for a boon for every night's rigour
Which thou hast passed in austere self-control;
For here I am to grant what thou seekest
In all abundance, ask then, here it is."
"Lord, thou art kind and blessing embodied,
O Dread which people flee in awesome fear!
Death, where dost soul thou pluckest and dost take
To darkness deep where sunless abyss gapes.
When dost thou come and why dost thou grab all,
Or where thou draggest hapless souls from earth;
This none does know and what can worse be there
Than dungeon-dark is even wisdom here.
Sceptres and crowns, caparisoned gold rides,
The thumb of rule and thud authority's,
Kingdoms and wealth of distant empires,
Beauties of youth and fragrance of roses,
Get rent asunder, powdered sent to dust,
And vale of tears replaces Joys of life,
Beggars and kings shall live on common ground,
Lo, pride of blood, beware thy day is near.
Unrest and pain have ever ruled this world,
The drama life's is but a shifting scene.
As evening flower fades the bloom of youth,
And strength does vanish as a scattered cloud,
The ugly death paints rough the gayful face,
All things are branded with the rod of rule,
What is now seen is not the next moment,
Nothing's certain except that all shall die.
Centres of pleasure mock at human wit,
The dance of death is all this wondrous life.
Thou hast to me these boons in love bequeathed,
Deign, then, to grant that when I reach the world,
Let it receive me as its friend and self,
Not casting me as one among many,
As thing, content and individual."

"Lo, granted, thou hast all the senses held
In perfect order lined with facts of things,
Not contacting but fusing sensation
With all its needs, its wants and objectives.
So thou shalt go with prowess friends do wield,
People and things shall love thee as their own,
Nay, as themselves, for senses bar friendship
And cleave in two where one thing rules supreme.
Powers thou hast over matter's ranging fields
Since sense-forces which rose from matter's heart
Have gone in thee to sources whence they came.
Ask more and then with conferred boon be blessed."

"How great and gracious, Lord, thou art benign,
My request grant, this second of the boons.
I hear the gods do fear and age have none,
In heaven's abode hunger and thirst are not,
Thou Death art not there, hence no ageing fright.
Grant me the wisdom, Cosmic Fire's secret,
By which rejoicing I shall deem fulfilled."

"This mind's majestic cosmic sweep's domain,
Vaishvanara, the Fire Celestial,
Igniting which in concept's sacrifice
In contemplation's comprehensiveness
One gains the world, nay, worlds he does become,
This I shall teach, do learn it from me now,
The guarded knowledge gods zealously keep,
In having which creation's wealth one owns,
Of endless realms one emperor becomes,
Has access into fourteen worlds at once,
With omni-wisdom as the cosmic king,
He rules as all, over all he has the sway.
This science mortals know not till this day,
Which I relate in all its great details,
The Source of worlds, from where creation dawned,
The Fire Supreme of Cosmic Sacrifice,
Whose bricks of altar, framework and lay-out,
Are widespread objects mind does envisage,
The frame is perception's wide tangled field,
In consciousness where worlds are firmly held,
Where each is what it is by other's state,
So that to know any is knowing all,
And knowing all is being everyone,
For Cosmic Fabric is this Mighty Force,
Whose every thread is strung with all others,
Sutratman, great, this's Soul of all the threads,
Impossible for understandings frail,
The fruit of hard Tapas and mind's restraint,
Wherein installed as god of gods one hails.
This glory take as teaching from me, lad,
Good Nachiketas, be thou free of bonds."
So Yama spoke, instructed student come
In thunder's tone reverberating skies.

"But ask the third, the boon I promised, dear;
Virat thou knowest, what else dost thou seek."

"Lord let me know what irks my mind with doubt,
Some say there is a soul and some 'tis not;
What haps the soul when world it quits and goes,
Does it survive or does it cease to be;
When all it loses when it gains the all,
Where does it live, or exist not at all.
This wisdom grant, this is the third of boons,
This greatest blessing graciously bequeath."

"No, ask not thus, this question never raise,
Not all the gods can dare to answer this,
For none of gods is free from doubt, surprise,
Eluding marvel, sense of mystery,
And hopeless feeling in this quest of soul,
Which none has seen and none can ever see;
Subtle is law which concerns soul of man,
With hardship grasped, not easy path is this,
This principle, this way, this truth, which hides
Behind the mind and all the faculties
Which mankind wields by which one knowledge gains,
All which return when baffled by this light
Which darkness all the knowledge world can boast.
How, then, canst thou, whence gods in fright depart,
Persist in quest, whence all recoil despaired;
Ask, therefore, something other than this boon,
Embarrass not and press not this again,
Leave me here free and bind me not this way."

"Dost thou declare that even angels fail,
And are in doubt and know not secret soul's;
Then I am blest for here I am before
The master-teacher who does surely know.
Master, thou knowest, none better than thee
Can I find ever, teach me supplicant.
No other boon can stand compared with this,
Others I ask not, this alone I ask."

"Ask better things, more glorious, meaningful,
Children and friends and wealth and kine and kind,
Who live and last hundreds of years to come,
Royalty over all the widespread earth,
For ages long do rule as mighty king,
Have all the joys and pleasures gods covet,
I grant thee joys which angels not obtain,
Crown and servants and maids and elephant trains,
Army, power and fearless kingdom thine,
Nectar's dishes and nectared bathing streams,
And all the world shall bow in reverence,
Endless durations thou shalt reign the worlds
Of dazzling light, limitless glory thine,
Music and dance and fairest damsels take,
Enchanting maidens mortals ne'er can dream,
Chariots with horses windlike swift-moving,
Silver and gold, what men can hardly find,
Ask more of these, but ask not soul's beyond."

"What good are these that thou offerest, lord,
All things shall pass as transient wisp of breeze,
All joys and pleasures wear the senses' strength,
Senile becomes and dies who pleasures seeks,
All lustre leaves the face of indulgence,
And longest life is short when once it ends,
For end it must though longest it may seem.
Where is the charm in frames made out of clay
Though they be varnished with a daub of gold.
Vibrations' chord of sympathy deceive
The seeker pleasure's into false belief
That joys do stand as bricks are hard to touch,
While joys are phantoms, in fact exist not.
Take back the song and dance and maidens, thine,
Not all the worlds can please a single man,
If thee we see we all the wealth shall gain.
Knowing the worth of colour, taste and touch,
Of sound and smell which tantalise the mind,
Which person sensible would crave their grace
And land his life in sorrow and ruin.
Hence, greatest lord, do condescend to grant
That secret wisdom gods have not yet gained,
The thing of doubt, the destiny of soul,
Its whereabouts when hence it freed departs,
This do I ask, and none other at all."

"Purest of souls, thou seeker best, listen,
In thousand births may one acquire the means
To stand steadfast as thou hast firm behaved,
For even subtler than the subtlest things
Is what thou callest soul in human tongue.
The soul is not an object one can see,
It's not even what mind and reason gauge
With all their might, for reason's light flickers,
And mind is stunned in daring soul to know.
Of all the things is soul the foundation,
Of even mind and intellect's learnings;
Then who can know the soul which knower knows,
Where is the way to know such mystery,
Hence is reluctance in my answers here,
That while it seems the known is still unknown.
Who restrains self alone can know the self,
To plumb the self is abdicating self,
To cast the self is gaining self in full,
To conquer self is fixing one in self,
To all enigma is this pathless path,
Great Nachiketas, thou I fittest find,
For thou hast cast out joys of earth and heav'n,
Those rare delights which melt the hearts of men,
Celestial glory thou hast spurned as dirt.
Who injure not, nor falsify the truth,
Who grab not wealth in pillage or in theft,
Who simple live in barest means of life,
Whom world counts last as they in truth are first,
Who think the thought but not through thought do think.
Who know the frailty earthly glamours pose
And thus abandon tempting sensations,
Are stalwarts bold, who dive the sea of soul.
Thou seeker tested and hast hurdles crossed
Art now prepared and now wisdom receive."

The Lord then spoke the pleasant and the good,
The twain with ways that divergent proceed,
The one to bondage rushing far from self,
In outward pursuits,—outward self has none;
The other healthy growing inwardised
To selfhood blessed, freedom's excellence,
For self is what one is; so Self is all.
"There fools rush in where angels fear to tread,
The realm of soul whose meaning none beholds,
In learning's pride wiseacres feign and fail
To fathom depths of soul's eternal heart.
As blind do lead the blind with eyesight none,
So learned ones vainglorious parade.
None hears this glory, soul thou callest, boy,
Even though heard, its core no one does grasp,
Wonder is this, the teacher wondrous speaks,
The student is another wonder here.
No one that stands outside the self can speak
Of self, since self is all that ever is,
Children do run to objects' outward range
And enter death's menacing catching net.
The senses pouring forceful outwardly
Do carry mind and reason to their doom.

"There is no soul and no beyond this world,
This world is all, and no higher exists,"
So prates the fool who sees not back of mind.
Behind perceptions scaling not the truth,
And caught in snare of values objective,
He goes with objects, death is whose essence.
Mortality is stuff of sense-contents,
Transiency is the core of all things made,
The body forms indwell is constant change,
The heart of change do senses feel as things,—
Thus all the world which's mind's and sense's range
Is such substance as dreams are built upon.
Since consciousness in space is firm entwined,
The world and things appear external;
But heroes draw the self from space and time,
Lo, rare are they, in thousands one may rise.
The crowd of people mostly run around
And sink in objects as if they are soul,
Whose end-result is rampant destruction,
As moths do rush to flames which ashes make
The foolish enter opened jaws of death
Which's widely spread as passions objects rouse.”

Awakened student, Nachiketas spake,
"Lord, how does soul manage to lie hidden,
Which is the track that blinded eyes follow,
How things are born and how they die and why?
I see the world as lifeless matter first,
Then plants and trees with incipient life,
There, then, are beasts and birds and creatures wild,
Man stands above as sentience far advanced.
Thou sayest now that gods and angels dwell
Far lifted great beyond the human ken;
Which is the manner things and beings rise
How do behave created entities,
What tangled stages do they traverse, lord,
With grace explain the story that is man."

The lord of death, Yama, then highly pleased,
To Nachiketas, best disciple, speaks
The history of empirical modes
Of human science and logic's measurements
Of man's attempts with equipments of sense
And what is known by transcendental lights.

When sea is churned for deathless nectar's taste
By gods and ungods for their mutual calls,—
For good immortal or immortal hate,
Since deathlessness can either need adorn,—
The first-born sight is poison's fume and rage,
As light eternal's darkness time's destroys,
And so the wrath and roar of violent urge
To stifle effort for eternity.
And who can drink venom which longings pour
But lord of world-destruction, Rudra, fierce,
Who grasps the fierce by fierce Tapas,
The fire upsurged by control over self
To unleash force from All-embracing Self
Which's Siva named though evil's Rudra-flame.
When bitter, killing, threatening foes retreat,
The charm of sight and tasty forms emerge
In multitudes of gems and beauty-queens
That shatter reason, causing distraction,
And strengthen senses' wild marathon dance.
But late emerges from the ocean's depths
The nectar-bearer life's dispensing ills.

"Lo, hard to tread as razor's edge this path
Is seen with pain by service rendered pure
To great and blessed masters who do teach
This way to That which's spread out everywhere,
Whose hands and feet and eyes and ears are all,
Whose faces smile in every atom's core,
The reaching which is end and aim of life.
When thought does feel in prayer heart's release
It shoots up quick and fast succour bestows,
In timeless haste as parents love their child.
It sees with concern though with concern none,
It loves intensely with dispassion's care,
To love it is to draw the love of all,
Of man and beast and all that lives and breathes.
The great protector is this darling might,
The God of gods, immortal freedom's seat.
A single pace when honest seeker takes,
In hundred paces does it rush to save.
Uplifted bolt of thunder is this fear,
By whose fear do sun and moon and wind
And fire and rain do stately do their parts.
The dreaded death meal's condiment it makes
And Kshatra, Brahma,—power, knowledge,—food.

“Its incarnations come as Dharma's forms
As Rama's arrow or Krishna's discus,
As timely cure when world in distress sinks,
To found the law of unity and peace,
Destroy the craze for death and harm to life,
And plant on earth the grandeur divinity's.
It burns the foe that as its second vies,
It stands and glories unrivalled, alone.
As space in cups does not belong to cups,
Nor does it stand in relation to them,
So all-encompassing Soul by itself stands
As absolute and unrelated all.
The Soul is all and everything is Soul,
The Soul alone can understand the Soul,
The Soul is Self, the Universal Truth.
Who know the Self are saved from birth's torments
And rebirth's toil and sorrow's cyclic whirls.

"The Self is God, Creator, Sustainer,
And Destroyer of Time's material frames,
For God is Self, the Subjectness in things,
The Being, Root, the "I" in all that moves.
As wind it blows, as fire does it burn,
As earth supports, as rain it inundates,
All strength is its, all-power is this God
Who defies knowledge as the knowing Self,
Subtly pervading knowing's processes,
Not knower, knowledge, known or connection,
But ranging high above relation's realm,
None knows it, for it knows itself alone.

"As flood and ravage, pestilence and death,
Bereavement, pain and strife, battle and war,
As wrath of Nature can this Being work
When consciousness in objects gets immersed,
Defeating purpose Selfhood plants in things.
Or caress, love, culture, enlightenment
And happiness does God, the Self, does rain
When all goes well and consciousness is Self.
To raise the self by Self is Yoga's course,
For Self is friend to Self-like thoughts and deeds,
But Self is foe to not-Self's indulgence.
It is the food and eater food's it is,
As food it eats its eater disbalanced. 
The field, energy, mind and intellect
Are four degrees of out-turned soul's vision.
Since darkness is the cause of outwardness,
All learning that man boasts is night's parade.
Inverted gaze is mortal knowing's worth,
As shadow cast by three-dimensioned stuff
Is two-dimensioned feigning truth and light.

"In fourteen realms as Bhuh, Bhuvah, Svah,
Mahah, Jana, Tlapah and Satya high,
As also low as further deep's seven
Does range the glory of proximity
To this pervading all-inclusive Self,
And also distance from this Omni-Self.
Greater the light and wider Self's regime
The higher moves the seeking spirit lone.
But darker, gross and more self-centred, crude,
Is being's reach the downward more it falls.
In seven stages ignorance's grief
Does harass soul before it's born as man
By struggle up through eight million forms
Of species and four hundred thousand more
Before it steps on first of wisdom's rungs.
Then further rise is blessing all divine
Received with all-round self's immense restraint
To wider rise ascending Truth to reach,
Traversing regions light's empires seven.

"The higher worlds above the human range
Revel in light and joy's uprising waves.
The world of blessed, pious earth's above
Is peopled with serene, contented souls.
Beyond are masters fine art's excellence,
Gandharvas with their Apsaras consorts,
Whose music thrills and melts the hardest hearts,
Enthralls the wild and pleases trees and stones.
The angels, Devas, rise above these joys,
Dwellers of fire and lightning, Svarga called.
The Chief of gods and angels, Indra, reigns,
With greater puissance and rejoicing's peak,
The reigning ruler but he wields the rod,
His wisdom lagging pressed by mind's impulse.
Brihaspati, Preceptor even gods'
Rises beyond in wisdom's strength and bliss
Whose might and grandeur all the gods excels,
Then, further, what lies who can dare to speak,
Creator's realm is wonder wonder's great.

"Absolute's rays are thousand thousand volts
Of force released men incarnations call,
Who dauntless face the world's tremendous arms
And work miracles when'er crises surge.
These are the sages, heroes, redeemers
Who down descend to help ascent of man.
Godly is moral and ethic is theirs
Who rend the law to firm establish law.
For God ordains with all-measuring eye,
While human greed can cling to one alone.

"The severed mind from cosmic life-substance
Should get united with its parent whole
By deep communion in its vestures' clouds
In all relations outward and inward.
By harmless, kind, continent, truthful ways
Are snapped relations passions bind with ties.
Restraining pose in body's fixed seat
And thinking deep when breathing calm subsides
The senses loosen knots of object's love
And mind, then, broods on all-expanding space,
The Earth does melt and water dries by fire,
Fire expires in wind that engulfs space.
This is the first profound communion's stage
They call Samadhi, gross, subtle and cause.
Commune with earth, with water, fire and air,
And space which melts the contents called the world,
So that there is the space that draws the thought
Which thinks the space as if it is 'other'.
Thus space alone is, all is naught in space,
The thinker is the space, and space is thought.
Consciousness is the being which remains,
Being is thought, the Great Fullness abounds.
With people's clash, with inner layer's clash,
With Nature's clash, with God's designs the clash,
Are four-edged strifes which Yoga's system ends.

"While love is good, the worst is body's love;
The next is love of kith and kin and near.
Communal love though widened family
Is still restricted, wider Nation hails.
The love of country, culture, language, style,
Is love impassioned, soul is stronger here.
When Nation's pride collides with Nations' pride
The patriot roars and girds his loins to die.
Insight still wider grasps humanity
As single life, sheds vanity of clime.
This world, this earth, a speck in firmament
Is not the home that isolated stands.
The vaster fact, the universe is one,
And life is one,—god, man and beast and plant,
This widest range of perception and life
Towers beyond as perfection's finale.
So gradual rise is theme education's,
With larger, deeper, inclusiveness reached.

"When battlefield of life one enters brave,
The might of things is dim and faint noticed.
The world is large and rich enough to face
The simpleton who poses human pranks.
The clamp of craving human fondness strikes
Has logic, law, the world to justify.
The world of friends, men, women and children
Can scarce be countered in the war of life.
The vast arena, field of perception
Is dearest beauty valued more than self.
Parent, brother, and husband, wife and son,
Much more, teacher, are values immortal.
There is the country, clan and creed and cult,
The custom, rule, tradition, faith of group,
Which drive the soul to sell itself to forms
Which constant die with change of mental frames.
How does one know that neither eyes nor forms
Are facts, for fact is hidden in between.
Neither the lover nor the loved can see
What causes love or why the loves are dear.
The great magician who conjures up minds
Is neither mind nor what the mind believes.
Hence passions great which swear by religion,
Or justice, goodness or morality
Get strengthened by these justifications
And pounce on targets which their hates produce.

"The reason is the absence true insight's
Which bifurcates the world as seer, seen,
While neither seer nor the seen is world
Which stands by itself integratedly.
The oneness at the base of perceptions
Becomes their cause, or else a void and dark
Would fill experience deathlike, lifeless, nil.
The waves of sense collide in sea of life,
Contacting senses heave on their own source,
Which flares as force of objects and their want.
Between the thing and what beholds the thing
There is the third escaping grasp of both.
This third is all, including both the terms;
It sees and is the seen, yet neither is,
The immanent and transcendent at once.

"This third is Witness, God who rules the terms;
In disbalance when one on other hangs
Losing the scale that them equilibrates,
Then quick to action as incarnation
The third, the great, emerges into form
That strikes the balance in levels galore.
As birth of forces harmonising forms
And death of those that segregate the forms,
As history in Nature and in life
The work divine is active winklessly.
As wind and storm, as flood and drought and quake,
Destruction, strife, upsurging social norms,
Inventions, teachings, gospels, discoveries,
And changes massive as well as minute
The Cosmic Hand with parent's care does bless
Through silent moves and wondrous upheavals.

"The death of form is stride for newer birth
Through stages marking endless unions
By risings which herald integrations
Of mind and matter, seer and the seen,
Which widened realms of seeing consciousness
Are worlds of gods, Creator's Seat in end
Which stamps the seal of final attainment,
And beyond which nothing and none abides,
For matter melts in Purusha, All-One,
The God of all, the Absolute supreme.
Mutations in between the mind and world
Are causes endless births and death which bring.
Who loves outsideness of creation's forms
And passes out from one's subjective core
Is caught in net of births' and rebirths' griefs
Since outside Subject objects never breathe,—
The Subject Great which encompasses all.

"Of all the fangs the serpent fatal strikes
The greed of space and lust of time surpass,
The one devouring wealth of all the worlds
To large become as wide as sky's limit,
The other's burst as entrails disgorged drop
With pang of death outrushing out of self
To land in offspring future selfhood's claim,
Eternal longing breaking time's limits.
Power to thrall what lies outside the self
Is greed engendered Space external's need.
The call of future, immortal's shadow,
Goes wild berserk as passion androgyne
To break the gulf the sexes twain maintain
And reign as one and single perfection.
The Infinite and what is Eternal
Here dance as wealth and rumpus sexes make.
Lo, death glories as life's supernal aim,
Indeed, existence laughs as mystery.

"But mystery is also law precise,
Its dues, procedures and demands elude
Procrustean bed of sterile forms and norms,
For while the law rejects the bad as bad
It justice does to even what it casts.
Unless the moral, good or lawful forms
Do justly face and squarely deal in calm
What's dubbed as evil, immoral or bad
Or unlawful in highbrowed pride's pretense
The law that rules all known ordinances
Shall crack down hard on moral's legal clay
And reinforce the bondage of the soul.
The real should its real counterpart
As treatment meet providing dose of cure.
Hunger and thirst and heat and cold and sleep,
The claims of sex and ego's simple feed,
By counterparts their real objects hold
In fine proportions as medicines cure.
The blocks of rule that man perpetuates
With scarce regard to times and conditions
The world knows not, for lifeless life rejects.
The needs of time and circumstance decide
The good or bad, relative states not things.
Each passing moment new demand projects,
Eternal rule the world has none for all
Save integration subject's with objects,
Which marches forth as whole rising from whole,
The 'whole' of concord seer's with the seen
In all levels from insentience to God,
And not by subject's retreat from objects,
Since objects web-like in seer are fused.

"Caution, then, seeker, thou shalt well maintain;
In haste, emotion thou canst not renounce,
For what renounces in renounced does dwell
As member, partner higher family's.
In movements up the partners jointly rise,
The seer-seen is total fabric whole;
Hence none renounces save in form entire
Which both maintain, and both renounced emerge
As higher whole to rise to further wholes.
The world and soul a common harvest reap
From field-experience comrades immortal.
Else, unpaid debts to wholeness' healthy life
Shall come as tempting beauties and fears
That threats discharge, or mind's disordered dreams,
Complexes, crazes, crotchets, reveries,
Illusions, frenzies, violence and harm.

"Caution, other, yet stringent more remains,
For indulgence differs from healthy taste
Of poison's draught which kills or makes one live.
So all this world with multi-pronged dishes
That stand parallel with organs of sense
To feed for life or glut for death the soul
Which cased in body by its aid escapes,
As wiser foe the foolish friend excels.
As surgeons cut is not assassin's stroke,
Though both do what the eyes behold as same.
The world of contact ruins when gone wild
But is physician when contacts are sane.
Let not the healer rise in flood of wrath,
The healer then becomes destroyer's hand.
Penury's core or wealth's limitless mass
Can neither live, for both to death do point.

"As razor's edge no one can see easy,
The way middle is hard to comprehend.
Neither glutton nor abstinent is fit
For Yoga's path which subtle lies between.
It's not enough if Yoga one pursues,
May Yoga pursue its own seeker's grace.
Man runs to God in anguish devotion's,
But does God run to man eager with love,
For great is latter, height of spirit's goal.
A thousand mothers Yoga does surpass,
And that is God, and that is Reality.
The state of Yoga loves not, hates not things,
From thingness things' it rises knowing things,
Whose root is Truth but thingness exists not,
Since thingness is a name for outwardness.

"As tree inverted grows creation's frame
With root above and branches spread below,
Outward-directioned and disabled root to see;
What comes knows not from where it came or how,
Befooled by rush of force that urges sense
To speed for shadows cast by archetypes
Which range above as scintillating norms
Laying the rule of all-absorbing code
Of vision single Universal Soul's
That judges every tiny deed of man
And casts it in all-integrating moulds.
Thus, what is small is also great and all,
As what is all is smallest humble reed.
When intellect and senses and the mind
United stand as focussed jet of flame,
That state is Yoga raising soul to Self
Which indwells all and transcends creation.
Here caution high is watchword Yoga's rule,
Heedlessness brings the death of Yoga's aim.
Thou, blessed one, be standard paragon,
Attain the high, the all-encompassing."