(S 1)
“Till then must life carry its seed of death
And sorrow’s plaint be heard in the slow Night.
(S 2)
O mortal, bear this great world’s law of pain,
520 In thy hard passage through a suffering world
Lean for thy soul’s support on Heaven’s strength,
Turn towards high Truth, aspire to love and peace.
(S 3)
A little bliss is lent thee from above,
A touch divine upon thy human days.
(S 4)
525 Make of thy daily way a pilgrimage,
For through small joys and griefs thou mov’st towards God.
(S 5)
Haste not towards Godhead on a dangerous road,
Open not thy doorways to a nameless Power,
Climb not to Godhead by the Titan’s road.
(S 6)
530 Against the Law he pits his single will,
Across its way he throws his pride of might.
(S 7)
Heavenward he clambers on a stair of storms
Aspiring to live near the deathless sun.
(S 8)
He strives with a giant strength to wrest by force
535 From life and Nature the immortals’ right;
He takes by storm the world and fate and heaven.
(S 9)
He comes not to the high World-maker’s seat,
He waits not for the outstretched hand of God
To raise him out of his mortality.
(S 10)
540 All he would make his own, leave nothing free,
Stretching his small self to cope with the infinite.
(S 11)
Obstructing the gods’ open ways he makes
His own estate of the earth’s air and light;
A monopolist of the world-energy,
545 He dominates the life of common men.
(S 12)
His pain and others’ pain he makes his means:
On death and suffering he builds his throne.
(S 13)
In the hurry and clangour of his acts of might,
In a riot and excess of fame and shame,
550 By his magnitudes of hate and violence,
By the quaking of the world beneath his tread
He matches himself against the Eternal’s calm
And feels in himself the greatness of a god:
Power is his image of celestial self.
(S 14)
555 The Titan’s heart is a sea of fire and force;
He exults in the death of things and ruin and fall,
He feeds his strength with his own and others’ pain;
In the world’s pathos and passion he takes delight,
His pride, his might call for the struggle and pang.
(S 15)
560 He glories in the sufferings of the flesh
And covers the stigmata with the Stoic’s name.
(S 16)
His eyes blinded and visionless stare at the sun,
The seeker’s Sight receding from his heart
Can find no more the light of eternity;
565 He sees the beyond as an emptiness void of soul
And takes his night for a dark infinite.
(S 17)
His nature magnifies the unreal’s blank
And sees in Nought the sole reality:
He would stamp his single figure on the world,
570 Obsess the world’s rumours with his single name.
(S 18)
His moments centre the vast universe.
(S 19)
He sees his little self as very God.
(S 20)
His little ‘I’ has swallowed the whole world,
His ego has stretched into infinity.
(S 21)
575 His mind, a beat in original Nothingness,
Ciphers his thought on a slate of hourless Time.
(S 22)
He builds on a mighty vacancy of soul
A huge philosophy of Nothingness.
(S 23)
In him Nirvana lives and speaks and acts
580 Impossibly creating a universe.
(S 24)
An eternal zero is his formless self,
His spirit the void impersonal absolute.
(S 25)
Take not that stride, O growing soul of man;
Cast not thy self into that night of God.
(S 26)
585 The soul suffering is not eternity’s key,
Or ransom by sorrow heaven’s demand on life.
(S 27)
O mortal, bear, but ask not for the stroke,
Too soon will grief and anguish find thee out.
(S 28)
Too enormous is that venture for thy will;
590 Only in limits can man’s strength be safe;
Yet is infinity thy spirit’s goal;
Its bliss is there behind the world’s face of tears.
(S 29)
A power is in thee that thou knowest not;
Thou art a vessel of the imprisoned spark.
(S 30)
595 It seeks relief from Time’s envelopment,
And while thou shutst it in, the seal is pain:
Bliss is the Godhead’s crown, eternal, free,
Unburdened by life’s blind mystery of pain:
Pain is the signature of the Ignorance
600 Attesting the secret god denied by life:
Until life finds him pain can never end.
(S 31)
Calm is self’s victory overcoming fate.
(S 32)
Bear; thou shalt find at last thy road to bliss.
(S 33)
Bliss is the secret stuff of all that lives,
605 Even pain and grief are garbs of world-delight,
It hides behind thy sorrow and thy cry.
(S 34)
Because thy strength is a part and not God’s whole,
Because afflicted by the little self
Thy consciousness forgets to be divine
610 As it walks in the vague penumbra of the flesh
And cannot bear the world’s tremendous touch,
Thou criest out and sayst that there is pain.
(S 35)
Indifference, pain and joy, a triple disguise,
Attire of the rapturous Dancer in the ways,
615 Withhold from thee the body of God’s bliss.
(S 36)
Thy spirit’s strength shall make thee one with God,
Thy agony shall change to ecstasy,
Indifference deepen into infinity’s calm
And joy laugh nude on the peaks of the Absolute.