SECTION FOUR:
THE ROLE OF NATURE
A spiritual man withdraws his senses from the world and turns them inward upon himself in order to comprehend the tastes, sounds and sights that rise from within. He ceases to be absorbed in the beauties that surround him and immerses himself in the splendour of the soul. And yet the same man invariably finds that nature has mysteriously entered into the very substance of his visions and dreams. Details of nature, lifted out of and above the immediately perceptible sensuous sphere, may precipitate a sudden inlet of spiritual understanding. The path between nature and the human soul is laid bare and every aspect of nature is seen to reflect a deeper spiritual significance.
The poems of Sri Chinmoy illustrate this clearing of the physical senses. To him, nothing is wonderful but the soul and so we never discover in him that entranced contemplation of nature for its own sake. What we do find, however, is a constant interpenetration of man and nature. The sun, the moon and the stars, light and darkness, the creatures, the birds and the plants, all these things not only reflect something of the divine Nature of God but also disclose features of the relationship between the soul and God.
The poems of Ten Thousand Flower-Flames assimilate certain aspects of nature into a wide spiritual vision. Nature provides the poet with a necessary locus against which to balance his inner experience and he is able to enlist her properties – such as light, space, stillness, permanence and motion — to suggest corresponding qualities of the contemplative life.
Undoubtedly, the most pervasive natural image in the poems is that of light and its antithesis, the absence of light. To the poet, the outer light and the inner light of consciousness are interchangeable. Light is evanescent – it dances over the surface of the world so that everything appears to be constantly on the point of dissolving into light. In this process, man returns ultimately to the effulgence of light which is God:
AT LAST MY LIFE IS READY
I have drunk deeply and greedily
The very depths of darkness-night.
At last my life is ready
For the beauty of mystic light.
(4386)
Darkness is used here as a metaphor for ignorance. It immediately suggests its own opposite, which is light or knowledge. The poem brings these two poles of experience into focus in order to enhance the radiant beauty of the inner light.
Even as the transformation of man’s nature is seen in the above poem as a movement from darkness to light, so his continued advance in spirituality is pictured as a growth or expansion from light to greater light:
MAY MY HEART’S PURITY RADIATE
May my mind’s sincerity
Spread like a silver dawn.
May my heart’s purity
Radiate like a golden morn.
(5200)
The morning has two distinct phases which glide into one another with magical effect. It is an event which we can verify from the field of our own outer experience. However, the poet is not concerned to record the minute variations in this outer play of light. On the contrary, he is seeing them under a timeless guise of perpetual becoming or unfolding: the silver dawn and golden morn are caught by the poet and fixed forever at the moment of their characteristic action.
It is evident that the poet’s aim is not imitation or exactitude but essence. He omits all but a few carefully selected details and imparts to these details a mysterious vibration or significance so that they dilate with meaning and expressiveness:
GOD’S MORNING BREATH
When my heart’s climbing cry
Ascended far beyond the realms of clouds,
God smilingly granted me
His own morning Breath to breathe.
(4905)
This poem, with its exquisite paysage interieur, achieves a delicate balance between perception and imagination. The “realms of clouds” and the morning sunlight confer a unique actualising power on the heart’s cry. We would seem to trace its flight beyond the mind and into God’s Infinity.
In the poem above, nature is used to portray a spiritual experience. However, when several details from nature are combined into an expressive pattern, they may be used to convey the idea of spiritual process. In the case of light, this pattern may revolve around the solar cycle – night/day; sunrise/sunset; morning/midday/afternoon and evening. In the following poem, for example, the changeover from night to day suggests to the poet the process whereby the mind is eventually subsumed by the spiritual heart:
MAY MY MIND BECOME THE PRECURSOR
As night is the precursor
Of a beautiful and fruitful dawn,
May my mind become the precursor
Of a prayerful and soulful heart.
(6235)