Canto Thirteen

      In the Self of Mind

      At last there came a bare indifferent sky

      Where Silence listened to the cosmic Voice,

      But answered nothing to a million calls;

      The soul’s endless question met with no response.

      An abrupt conclusion ended eager hopes,

      A deep cessation in a mighty calm,

      A finis-line on the last page of thought

      And a margin and a blank of wordless peace.

      There paused the climbing hierarchy of worlds.

      He stood on a wide arc of summit Space

      Alone with an enormous Self of Mind

      Which held all life in a corner of its vasts.

      Omnipotent, immobile and aloof,

      In the world which sprang from it, it took no part:

      It gave no heed to the paeans of victory,

      It was indifferent to its own defeats,

      It heard the cry of grief and made no sign;

      Impartial fell its gaze on evil and good,

      It saw destruction come and did not move.

      An equal Cause of things, a lonely Seer

      And Master of its multitude of forms,

      It acted not but bore all thoughts and deeds,

      The witness Lord of Nature’s myriad acts

      Consenting to the movements of her Force.

      His mind reflected this vast quietism.

      This witness hush is the Thinker’s secret base:

      Hidden in silent depths the word is formed,

      From hidden silences the act is born

      Into the voiceful mind, the labouring world;

      In secrecy wraps the seed the Eternal sows

      Silence, the mystic birthplace of the soul.

      In God’s supreme withdrawn and timeless hush

      A seeing Self and potent Energy met;

      The Silence knew itself and thought took form:

      Self-made from the dual power creation rose.

      In the still self he lived and it in him;

      Its mute immemorable listening depths,

      Its vastness and its stillness were his own;

      One being with it he grew wide, powerful, free.

      Apart, unbound, he looked on all things done.

      As one who builds his own imagined scenes

      And loses not himself in what he sees,

      Spectator of a drama self-conceived,

      He looked on the world and watched its motive thoughts

      With the burden of luminous prophecy in their eyes,

      Its forces with their feet of wind and fire

      Arisen from the dumbness in his soul.

      All now he seemed to understand and know;

      Desire came not nor any gust of will,

      The great perturbed inquirer lost his task;

      Nothing was asked nor wanted any more.

      There he could stay, the Self, the Silence won:

      His soul had peace, it knew the cosmic Whole.

      Then suddenly a luminous finger fell

      On all things seen or touched or heard or felt

      And showed his mind that nothing could be known;

      That must be reached from which all knowledge comes.

      The sceptic Ray disrupted all that seems

      And smote at the very roots of thought and sense.

      In a universe of Nescience they have grown,

      Aspiring towards a superconscient Sun,

      Playing in shine and rain from heavenlier skies

      They never can win however high their reach

      Or overpass however keen their probe.

      A doubt corroded even the means to think,

      Distrust was thrown upon Mind’s instruments;

      All that it takes for reality’s shining coin,

      Proved fact, fixed inference, deduction clear,

      Firm theory, assured significance,

      Appeared as frauds upon Time’s credit bank

      Or assets valueless in Truth’s treasury.

      An Ignorance on an uneasy throne

      Travestied with a fortuitous sovereignty

      A figure of knowledge garbed in dubious words

      And tinsel thought-forms brightly inadequate.

      A labourer in the dark dazzled by half-light,

      What it knew was an image in a broken glass,

      What it saw was real but its sight untrue.

      All the ideas in its vast repertory

      Were like the mutterings of a transient cloud

      That spent itself in sound and left no trace.

      A frail house hanging in uncertain air,

      The thin ingenious web round which it moves,

      Put out awhile on the tree of the universe,

      And gathered up into itself again,

      Was only a trap to catch life’s insect food,

      Winged thoughts that flutter fragile in brief light

      But dead, once captured in fixed forms of mind,

      Aims puny but looming large in man’s small scale,

      Flickers of imagination’s brilliant gauze

      And cobweb-wrapped beliefs alive no more.

      The magic hut of built-up certitudes

      Made out of glittering dust and bright moonshine

      In which it shrines its image of the Real,

      Collapsed