THE TRANSCENDENTAL CURE
Ignorance-mire is
The universal sickness of humanity.
When our heart starts singing
A new song,
The song of aspiration-cry,
Then the universal sickness
Will be transformed into
The transcendental cure.
(2795)
Here we witness the synthesis of the poet’s visionary powers and his great shaping powers. Like the Vedic poets of ancient India he has found that to study the perfection of man is to be always conscious of the highest ideals towards which man aspires. The seer-poet perceives clearly what is necessary to that perfection. It is not enough that he conveys this knowledge through his writings. We demand of the highest art that it shall change our lives by setting before us the path which we must follow in order to attain the goal:
EACH SERVICE-HEART
Each service-heart
Sculptures the perfection-beauty
Of tomorrow’s self-transcending
New world.
(1272)
The poet is the architect of this new world, establishing the pillars on which it shall be built, articulating its laws and codes. Men find in his works a solace and a refuge for their deepest beliefs and, above and beyond this inspiration, they discover a profound inspiration to strive for perfection in their own life. Mankind celebrates the advent of the seer-poet because of the promise that he bears, the promise of human fulfilment and divine satisfaction:
THE HARVEST OF SILENCE-DELIGHT
When the holy sages sing,
My heart’s mounting cry
Collects the harvest of silence-delight.
(4921)
These are poems which we must reach up to with an inner movement of our understanding and when we do so their wisdom becomes our own, we “harvest” the bounty of the poet’s spiritual plenitude. In an essay on “The Future Poetry”, Sri Aurobindo amplifies this wordless interpenetration of the poet’s nature with our own:
“Neither the intelligence, the imagination nor the ear are the true recipients of the poetic delight, even as they are not its true creators; they are only its channel and instruments: the true creator, the true hearer is the soul The more rapidly and transparently the rest do their work of transmission, the less they make of their separate claim to satisfaction, the more directly the word reaches and sinks deep into the soul, the greater the poetry.”
In such perfect identification of matter and form, the end is not distinct from the means. The beauty and grace inherent in the poetic expression are in absolute accordance with the wisdom they articulate. The perfection of diction and style come entirely as the spontaneous form of the poet’s soul-view. Sri Chinmoy affirms the nature and the form of his creative vision in the following aphorisms:
GOD-DISCOVERY
Art
Is God-discovery.
God-discovery
Is life-mastery.
(1857)
IMITATION IS NOT ART
Imitation
Is not art.
Newness in fulness
Is art.
(1858)
Sri Chinmoy’s vision of the progress of the soul is wholly original not because he is the first poet to deal with a spiritual theme but because it is shaped out of the force and fire of his own inner experience. Again and again as we read the poems we find ourselves in awe of this man who binds the universe together with his intuitive seeing. His epic vision is not a fixed and static formulation of truth nor is it a carefully structured philosophy. It is an endless growth and expansion, a self-transcending motion which continually takes into itself new ideas, new states of being, new feelings. Each poem takes its place between what came before and what shall come after and, as we find ourselves in the poems, we are filled with the sense of having been somehow formed by the same power which is manifesting itself through the words. The vision of the poet is akin to the original vision of the Creator – it dreams through us of mankind’s perfect Perfection.