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SECTION SIX:
THE POEMS AS MANTRAS

When a poet, such as Sri Chinmoy, elects to use language for a sacred purpose, he immediately places it in a condition of special use. The words that he chooses to fulfil his purpose must be lifted from the flow of our common speech and used in a manner in keeping with divine utterance. This appropriation of profane words to a spiritual purpose has been undertaken throughout the ages by poets of both East and West. Each poet searches for the unique word or phrase that is absolutely proper to his vision and that will carry the reality of this vision directly to the consciousness of the reader. Seer-poets of the East have tended, in addition, to look for those words which have a mysterious inner resonance. According to their perception, certain words are invested with an autonomous power or soul-force. It is impossible to articulate them without invoking a portion of the quality they describe. These words and phrases are called mantras.

“A mantra is a syllable divinely surcharged with power,” Sri Chinmoy has written. It may be the power of wisdom or peace or truth or any one of a host of spiritual qualities. Let us examine the power of the English word “delight” as a specific example. Ordinarily, it is not a word to which we would ascribe vast spiritual overtones. However, Sri Chinmoy abstracts this word from any personal or historical context and places it in a key position in his poem:

DELIGHT IS AN UNLIMITED CAPACITY

Delight is an unlimited capacity
Which our heart has
And our soul eternally is.

(3621)

Suddenly the poet compels us to examine delight in a new context – as the highest manifestation of the soul. In effect, by transferring the entire burden of the poem’s meaning to this single word, the poet wakens its secret inner potency. The deeper our level of penetration, the more the word itself begins to reverberate with a new and enlarged meaningfulness. The poem as a whole becomes a powerful spiritual current.

It is interesting to compare this poem with the following mantric verse from the Vedas:

From Delight we came into existence.
In Delight we grow.
At the end of our journey’s close, into Delight we retire.

Not only does the same enduring wisdom pervade both poems, but there are strong stylistic parallels. Each poem articulates a general truth in a voice that is spontaneous and authentic. The poems resist all attempts at paraphrase. They are, in a sense, indivisible wholes, unveiled intuitions of truth.

Mantras belong to what we may call the literature of wisdom. The greatest repository of mantras in the Indian tradition are the Vedas which are held to be the revealed word of God. Consequently, the Indian seekers from earliest times unto the present have exhibited a scrupulous respect for the exact wording of the Vedic slokas: no syllable was lost and none interpolated, even though over two thousand years passed before they were secured in a written form. How to account for such perfect transmission? The Vedic mantras were recited over and over until they echoed and re-echoed in the depths of men’s hearts.

Steeped in Vedic lore and language, Sri Chinmoy has continued this tradition by transforming English into a vehicle capable of expressing powerful, mantric thought. In so doing, he implicitly asserts that the latent power of words to release a divine energy is not peculiar to the ancient Sanskrit language. This power resides within the words of any language when such words are used to convey the highest truths:

FRUITFUL ECHOES

Speak soulful words.
Immediately you are bound to hear
Fruitful echoes. (4239)

 

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