Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 3

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,

Hath had elsewhere its setting,

And cometh from afar:

Not in entire forgetfulness,

And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come

From God, who is our home ¹: . . .

RARELY has a poet – a secular poet, I mean – given utterance to deep spiritual and occult truth with such clarity and felicity. It is, however, quite open to doubt whether Wordsworth himself was fully cognisant of the truth he expressed; the words that were put into his mouth carry a significance and a symbolism considerably beyond what his mind seemed to have received and understood. The passage may be taken as one more illustration of Matthew Arnold's characterisation of Wordsworth's genius at its best, it is then Nature herself that takes up the pen and writes for the poet.

The deep spiritual truth we are referring to is the Odyssey of the human soul. And it is also an occult phenomenon happening in the world of the inner reality. The Soul's own home is in God, is God; for it is part and parcel of the divine consciousness, it is essentially one in being and nature with the supreme Reality. It is a nucleus, a centre of individuation, a projection in a particular name and form of the infinite and eternal Being and Consciousness and Bliss on this side of mani­festation or evolutionary Nature. Being in and with the Divine, merged within it, the Soul has, at the same time, its own

¹ Wordsworth: Ode on the Intimations of Immortality

proper domain, exclusively its own, and its own inalienable identity. It is the domain where the Soul enjoys its swarajya, its absolute freedom, dwelling in its native light and happiness and glory. But the story changes, the curve of its destiny takes a sudden new direction when it comes down upon earth, when it inhabits a mortal body. Within the body, it no longer occupies its patent frontal position, but withdraws behind a veil, as it were: it takes its stand behind or within the depth of the heart, as spiritual practice experiences it. It hides there, as in a cavern, closed in now by the shades of the prison-house which its own body and life and mind build round it. Yet it is not wholly shut out or completely cut off; for from its secret home it exerts its influence which gradually, slowly, very slowly indeed, filters through – bathes, clarifies, illumines the encasement, makes it transparent and docile in the end. For that is the Soul's ultimate function and fulfilment.

In the meanwhile, however, "our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting." A physical incarnation clouds the soul-cons­ciousness and involves loss of memory, amnesia. The soul's travail therefore in a physical body is precisely to regain the memory of what has been forgotten. Spiritual discipline means at bottom this remembering, and all culture too means nothing more than that – that is also what Plato thought when he said that all knowledge, all true knowledge consists in reminiscence.

Man, in his terrestrial body, although fallen, because shrouded and diverted from his central being of light and fire, is yet not, as I have said, wholly forsaken and cut adrift. He always carries within him that radiant core through all the peregrinations of earthly sojourn. And though the frontal consciousness, the physical memory has no contact with it, there is a stream of inner consciousness that continues to maintain the link. That is the silver lining to the dark cloud that envelops and engulfs our normal life. And that is why at times – not unoften-there occurs a crack, a fissure in the crust of our earthly nature of ignorance and a tongue of flame leaps out – one or other perhaps of the seven sisters of which the Upanishad speaks. And then a mere man becomes a saint, a seer, a poet, a prophet, a hero. This is the flaming godhead whom we cherish within, Agni, the leader of our progressive life, the great Sacrifice, the child whom we

nourish, birth after birth, by all that we experience and do and achieve. To live normally and naturally in that fiery element – like the legendary Salamander – to mould one's consciousness and being, one's substance and constitution, even the entire cellular organisation into the radiant truth is the goal of man's highest aspiration, the ultimate end of Nature's evolutionary urge and the cycle of rebirth.

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