WHEN I am in my room looking upon the walls I have painted I see there
reflections of the personal life, but when I look through the windows I
see a living nature and landscapes not painted by hands.
So,
too, when I meditate I feel in the images and thoughts which throng
about me the reflections of personality, but there are also windows in
the soul through which can be seen images created not by human but by
the divine imagination. I have tried according to my capacity to report
about the divine order and to discriminate between that which was
self-begotten fantasy and that which came from a higher sphere. These
retrospects and meditations are the efforts of an artist and poet to
relate his own vision to the vision of the seers and writers of the
sacred books, and to discover what element of truth lay in those
imaginations.
Excerpt:
BECAUSE I was a creature of many imaginings and of rapid alternations of mood out of all that there came to me assurance of a truth, of all truths
most inspiring to one in despair in the Iron Age and lost amid the
undergrowths of being.
I became aware of a swift echo or
response to my own moods in circumstance which had seemed hitherto
immutable in its indifference. I found every intense imagination, every
new adventure of the intellect endowed with magnetic power to attract to
it its own kin. Will and desire were as the enchanter's wand of fable,
and they drew to themselves their own affinities. Around a pure atom of
crystal all the atoms of the element in solution gather, and in like
manner one person after another emerged out of the mass, betraying their
close affinity to my moods as they were engendered. I met these people
seemingly by accident along is country roads, or I entered into
conversation with strangers and found they were intimates of the spirit.
I could prophesy from the uprising of new moods in myself that I,
without search, would soon meet people of a certain character, and so I
met them. Even inanimate things were under the sway of these affinities.
They yielded up to me what they had specially for my eyes. I
have glanced in passing at a book left open by some one in a library,
and the words first seen thrilled me, for they confirmed a knowledge
lately attained in vision. At another time a book taken down idly from a
shelf opened at a sentence quoted from a Upanishad, scriptures then to
me unknown, and this sent my heart flying eastwards because it was the
answer to a spiritual problem I had been brooding over an hour before.
It was hardly a week after my first awakening that I began to meet those
who were to be my lifelong comrades on the quest, and who were, like
myself, in a boyhood troubled by the spirit. I had just attempted to
write in verse when I met a boy whose voice was soon to be the most
beautiful voice in Irish literature. I sought none of these out because I
had heard of them and surmised a kinship.
The concurrence of
our personalities seemed mysterious and controlled by some law of
spiritual gravitation, like that which in the chemistry of nature makes
one molecule fly to another. I remember the exultation with which I
realised about life that, as Heraclitus has said, it was in a flux. and
that in all its flowings there was meaning and law; that I could not
lose what was my own; I need not seek, for what was my own would come to
me; if any passed it was because they were no longer mine. One buried
in a dungeon for many years could not have hailed sunshine, the
sweet-smelling earth, and the long hidden infinitude of the skies more
joyously than I the melting of that which had seemed immutable. It is
those who live and grow swiftly, and who continually compare what is
without with what is within, who have this certainty. Those who do not
change see no change and recognise no law. He who has followed even in
secrecy many lights of the spirit can see one by one the answering
torches gleam. When I was made certain about this I accepted what befell
with resignation.
I knew that all I met was part of myself and
that what I could not comprehend was related by affinity to some yet
unrealised forces in my being. We have within us the Lamp of the World;
and Nature, the genie, is Slave of the Lamp, and must fashion life about
us as we fashion it within ourselves. What we are alone has power. We
may give up the outward personal struggle and ambition, and if we leave
all to the Law all that is rightly ours will be paid. Man becomes truly
the Superman when he has this proud consciousness. No matter where he
may be, in what seeming obscurity, he is still the King, still master of
his fate, and circumstance reels about him or is still as he, in the
solitude of his spirit, is mighty or is humble.
We are indeed
most miserable when we dream we have no power over circumstance, and I
account it the highest wisdom to know this of the living universe that
there is no destiny in it other than that we make for ourselves. How the
spirit is kindled, how it feels its power, when, outwardly quiet, it
can see the coming and going of life, as it dilates within itself or is
still! Then do we move in miracle and wonder. Then does the universe
appear to us as it did to the Indian sage who said that to him who was
perfect in meditation all rivers were sacred as the Ganges and all
speech was holy.