SECTION FIVE:
THE GOAL OF GOALS
Even as Sri Chinmoy’s synthetic vision incorporates both the inner and the outer nature, so it also has the effect of resolving all the many formulations of God. The realisation of God carries man far beyond any firm belief in a particular manifestation of the Divine. The God that was personal is also known as impersonal; the God that was far becomes near, He is both finite and infinite, transcendent and immanent. Ten Thousand Flower-Flames is an endless contemplation of God in all His myriad aspects. Scarcely a poem appears in which God is not invoked. He is the all-pervading Reality towards which the soul is constantly moving.
“The major poetic idea in the world is and always has been the idea of God,” writes Wallace Stevens. For Sri Chinmoy, the actual experience of God’s presence and the stages by which the soul ascends to that state are the highest concerns of literature. All other thoughts and movements are subsumed by this effort to attain the goal of goals.
The greatness of Sri Chinmoy as a poet is particularly evident in the way in which he handles this most difficult subject area. Poems that point to God or that depend in some degree on God’s participation revolve around the central paradox that we cannot give a conceptual explanation of God, for God transcends all our intellectual powers of understanding. To the mind, the idea of a God who is both personal and impersonal, knowable and unknowable, is totally incompatible. To the seer-poet, however, there is no contradiction. With his intuitive understanding he soars to a height where all opposites are merged into the One.
The language of intuition is poetry with its vast array of symbols and signs. Poetry is the expression of the Divine through the material of everyday life. This becomes clearer when we examine the appellations of God in Ten Thousand Flower-Flames.
Absolutes dominate the language of the impersonal God for He is apprehended as transcending all levels of reality:
UNLESS YOU BELIEVE
Unless you believe in the unknown,
How can you eventually
Successfully grow into the unknowable?
(3661)
What begins as an inner mystic faith, the poet asserts, eventually becomes an inner certitude of truth. It is a certitude that is based on direct revelation. Through “ardent submissiveness,” the poet suggests in another poem, one may arrive at the place where God is:
AN ARDENT SUBMISSIVENESS
To arrive at the core of everything
What you need is an ardent submissiveness
To Eternity’s infinite Source.
(3036)
MY IMMORTALITY’S REALITY-SHORE
My Lord Supreme,
I do not know where You are,
I do not know who You are,
But I know for certain
That I am Your Eternity’s Dream-Boat
And You are my Immortality’s Reality-Shore.
(2948)
What these absolute terms have in common is a reaching out beyond the finite. We come to know God through the sheer power of negatives: He is unknown, unnameable, unlimited. The experience of Him is one of supreme Nothingness, which harbours the greatest fulness;
DO DISSOLVE ME
O Lord Supreme,
Do dissolve me
Into Your Infinity’s ecstasy.
O Lord Supreme,
Do dissolve me
Into Your Eternity’s nothingness.
(292)
Although our understanding of these terms is necessarily imperfect, since we have not entered into the theopathetic life which they express, they are nonetheless deeply moving expressions of God’s utter transcendence. By appealing to the sweeping negatives and absolutes that extend far beyond the human mind, Sri Chinmoy’s images seem to draw on a power which no merely personal language could convey.This approach to God’s static aspects is balanced by an apprehension of Him as no longer remote and unchanging but near, loving and responsive to man’s yearnings. God is conceived as a living person fulfilling the many different roles that we encounter in our human relations. He is the Friend and Lover of the soul; He is its Lord and Master, its Guide and Boatman, its Father and King. Once again, as in the poet’s use of nature symbols, we find ourselves returned to the world of the immediately familiar and graspable:
GOD WILL ALWAYS COME FIRST
If God is what you want,
Then He can never come second.
He will always come first.
He will come
As your Confidant.
He will come
As your Advisor supreme.
He will come
As your only Friend.
(2427)