Opening Remarks
Life is everywhere, expressed or unexpressed. It creates different means for its manifestation. It is concealed within the dumb atom, even where there are no living forms waiting to emerge out of its stupor.
On every plane
On every plane, this Greatness must create.
On earth, in heaven, in hell she is the same;
Of every fate she takes her mighty part.
Life is not found on earth and the material universe alone. It is there on other planes of consciousness, in other dimensions of existence with its creative force expressing in ways and through means appropriate to each plane of consciousness.
The World-force
A guardian of the fire that lights the suns,
She triumphs in her glory and her might:
Opposed, oppressed she bears God’s urge to be born:
The spirit survives upon non-being’s ground,
World-force outlasts world-disillusion’s shock:
Dumb, she is still the Word, inert the Power.
Life, in its origin is essentially the force of consciousness. It is there behind all that moves, its breath is felt behind all the movements of the world. The sun and stars are expressions of her glory and might. She guards the Fire that builds the worlds and lights the suns. Even when her force is opposed and oppressed she only increases in her power through this restraint. It survives the death of body and disintegration of forms as indestructible energy. No illusion can hold it for long as it returns back with its creative powers. Even when apparently inert as in matter or dumb as in stones, she is still there waiting for an appropriate moment to emerge out of its trance.
Driven to aspire
Here fallen, a slave of death and ignorance,
To things deathless she is driven to aspire
And moved to know even the Unknowable.
Life is immortal, it is the form that disintegrates. Even though now caught up in a field of death, in our material universe, she still aspires for her deathless state and is moved towards things not yet achieved or known.
Her sleep creates
Even nescient, null, her sleep creates a world.
Even though caged in the prison of matter, even though seemingly void of any knowledge, still she creates by her pressure and force a variety of forms in the material universe.
Her creative passion
When most unseen, most mightily she works;
Housed in the atom, buried in the clod,
Her quick creative passion cannot cease.
Her force works unseen in the atom and the lump of clay to give birth to living forms. Nothing can bind her forever. She is meant to create and to expand whatever be the difficulty or the challenge.
Her bed of death
Inconscience is her long gigantic pause,
Her cosmic swoon is a stupendous phase:
Time-born, she hides her immortality;
In death, her bed, she waits the hour to rise.
Death is not the end of life but only a change of her field and mode of working. She is there even in the swoon oof Inconscience, unmarked, unfelt, temporary ceasing to create. Though immortal energy she has bound herself to transient forms that must die. She rests there awhile and then returns again rising out of the pyre and the grave.
Crucified God
Even with the Light denied that sent her forth
And the hope dead she needed for her task,
Even when her brightest stars are quenched in Night,
Nourished by hardship and calamity
And with pain for her body’s handmaid, masseuse, nurse,
Her tortured invisible spirit continues still
To toil though in darkness, to create though with pangs;
She carries crucified God upon her breast.
The Divine Consciousness tied to matter and material forms in a seeming helpless state is the symbol of crucifixion. And yet it returns the victor. Going through the pain and torture it still labours on to give birth to newer things. Though abandoned to a state where there can be no hope and doomed to die in the chill night, her creative impulsion still survives awakening in other hearts and minds.
The Wonder-worker’s skill
In chill insentient depths where joy is none,
Immured, oppressed by the resisting Void
Where nothing moves and nothing can become,
Still she remembers, still invokes the skill
The Wonder-worker gave her at her birth,
Imparts to drowsy formlessness a shape,
Reveals a world where nothing was before.
In states of utter darkness where love and joy are not, in spaces and domains where there is nothing but resistance to her creative urge, where nothing is ready to change or be born, Life still labours on. She is born from the Divine Force and carries something of that creative impulsion in her giving birth to worlds out of the dark inconscient void.
Closing Remarks
We see here the immortal nature of Life and its power to create everywhere. It builds the forms by its breath imparting force to things inert. It arouses forces from their sleep and urges them to endure and to create.
