SEAS – Soul Encounters for the Auroville Soul

FULL TEXT

Text of the first part:

This bodily appearance is not all;
The form deceives, the person is a mask;
Hid deep in man celestial powers can dwell.
His fragile ship conveys through the sea of years
An incognito of the Imperishable.

Passenger from life to life, from scale to scale,
Changing his imaged self from form to form,
He regards the icon growing by his gaze
And in the worm foresees the coming god.

In him that high transition laid its base.

As so he grew into his larger self,
Humanity framed his movements less and less;
A greater being saw a greater world.
Deceived no more by form he saw the soul.

A magical accord quickened and attuned
To ethereal symphonies the old earthy strings;
It raised the servitors of mind and life
To be happy partners in the soul’s response,
Tissue and nerve were turned to sensitive chords,
Records of lustre and ecstasy; it made
The body’s means the spirit’s acolytes.
A heavenlier function with a finer mode
Lit with its grace man’s outward earthliness;
The soul’s experience of its deeper sheaths
No more slept drugged by Matter’s dominance.

The wide world-rhythms wove their stupendous chant
To which life strives to fit our rhyme-beats here,
Melting our limits in the illimitable,
Tuning the finite to infinity.

There unity is too close for search and clasp
And love is a yearning of the One for the One,
And beauty is a sweet difference of the Same
And oneness is the soul of multitude.

The ways that lead to endless happiness
Ran like dream-smiles through meditating vasts:
MUSIC FOR KALOU AND TEAM

Into a wonderful bodiless realm he came,
The home of a passion without name or voice…
The silent Soul of all the world was there…
All there was soul or made of sheer soul-stuff;
A sky of soul covered a deep soul-ground.

A sympathy of self with other selves,
The touch of consciousness on consciousness
And being’s look on being with inmost gaze
And heart laid bare to heart without walls of speech
And the unanimity of seeing minds
In myriad forms luminous with the one God…
The soul itself was its own deathless form
And met at once the touch of other souls
Close, blissful, concrete, wonderfully true.

Text of the second part:

MUSIC FOR SAM AND TEAM, COMBINED WITH THE FOLLOWING READINGS FROM THE BOOK OF LOVE

An alchemy worked, the transmutation came…
In the nameless light of two approaching eyes…

Lids known through many lives, large frames of love.
He met in her regard his future’s gaze,

The soul can recognise its answering soul…
There is a Power within that knows beyond
Our knowings; we are greater than our thoughts,
And sometimes earth unveils that vision here.
To live, to love are signs of infinite things,

Too far from the Divine, Love seeks his truth
And Life is blind and the instruments deceive
And Powers are there that labour to debase.
Still can the vision come, the joy arrive.

A soul made ready through a thousand years
Is the living mould of a supreme Descent.

“Arise, O soul, and vanquish Time and Death.”

“Why should I strive with earth’s unyielding laws
Or stave off death’s inevitable hour?”

And what shall thy soul say when it wakes and knows
The work was left undone for which it came?

Thou shalt see the Eternal’s body in the world,
Know him in every voice heard by thy soul,
In the world’s contacts meet his single touch;
All things shall fold thee into his embrace.

In the indeterminate formlessness of Self
Creation took its first mysterious steps,
It made the body’s shape a house of soul…
A conscious soul in the Inconscient’s world,

But all is there, even God’s opposites…

An awful insurgence overpowers man’s soul…
Death and his hunters stalk a victim earth;

MUSIC FOR MANISH AND TEAM

But there is a guardian power, there are Hands that save,
Calm eyes divine regard the human scene.

All the world’s possibilities in man
Are waiting as the tree waits in its seed…
His mind creates around him its universe.
All that has been renews in him its birth;
All that can be is figured in his soul.

Our soul from its mysterious chamber acts…
It seeks for Good and Beauty and for God;
We see beyond self’s walls our limitless self,
We gaze through our world’s glass at half-seen vasts,
We hunt for the Truth behind apparent things.

In the prone obscure beginnings of the race
The human grew in the bowed apelike man.
He stood erect, a godlike form and force,
And a soul’s thoughts looked out from earth-born eyes;

Man stood erect, he wore the thinker’s brow:
He looked at heaven and saw his comrade stars;
A vision came of beauty and greater birth…

Aspiring he transcends his earthly self;
He stands in the largeness of his soul new-born,
Redeemed from encirclement by mortal things
And moves in a pure free spiritual realm
As in the rare breath of a stratosphere;
A last end of far lines of divinity,
He mounts by a frail thread to his high source;
He reaches his fount of immortality,
He calls the Godhead into his mortal life.

Text of the 3rd part:

But for such vast spiritual change to be,
Out of the mystic cavern in man’s heart
The heavenly Psyche must put off her veil
And step into common nature’s crowded rooms
And stand uncovered in that nature’s front
And rule its thoughts and fill the body and life.

MUSIC FOR FIRE DANCE

But dim in human hearts the ascending fire,
The invisible Grandeur sits unworshipped there….
Thence rose the need of a dark intruding god,
The world’s dread teacher, the creator, pain.

“I rend man’s narrow and successful life
And force his sorrowful eyes to gaze at the sun
That he may die to earth and live in his soul.
I know the goal, I know the secret route;
I have studied the map of the invisible worlds;
I am the battle’s head, the journey’s star.”

Thou shalt see self and world as by him they are seen
Reflected in the bright pool of thy soul…
Then hate shall dwell no more in human hearts,
And fear and weakness shall desert men’s lives,
The cry of the ego shall be hushed within,
Its lion roar that claims the world as food,
All shall be might and bliss and happy force.”

MUSIC FOR RAINBOW SWAN GYMNASTICS STUDIO

“What profit have I of my human soul?
I toil like the animal, like the animal die.
I am man the rebel, man the helpless serf;
Fate and my fellows cheat me of my wage.
I loosen with my blood my servitude’s seal
And shake from my aching neck the oppressor’s knees
Only to seat new tyrants on my back:
My teachers lesson me in slavery,
I am shown God’s stamp and my own signature
Upon the sorry contract of my fate.”

Yet Light is there; it stands at Nature’s doors….

Text of the 4th part:

Yet Light is there; it stands at Nature’s doors….

In our defeated hearts God’s strength survives
And victory’s star still lights our desperate road;

“I am the Power that labours towards the best
And works for God and looks up towards the heights.
I make even sin and error stepping-stones
And all experience a long march towards Light…
Many are God’s forms by which he grows in man;
They stamp his thoughts and deeds with divinity,
Uplift the stature of the human clay
Or slowly transmute it into heaven’s gold.”

MUSIC FOR SMITI AND SHRISHTI AND TEAM

“Only when Eternity takes Time by the hand,
Only when infinity weds the finite’s thought,
Can man be free from himself and live with God.”

“A mystery is this mighty Nature’s birth;
A mystery is the elusive stream of mind,
A mystery the protean freak of life…
Perhaps the world is an error of our sight,
A trick repeated in each flash of sense,
An unreal mind hallucinates the soul
With a stress-vision of false reality,
Or a dance of Maya veils the void Unborn.”

“How can man grow immortal and divine
Transmuting the very stuff of which he is made?
This wizard gods may dream, not thinking men.”

As man disguised the cosmic Greatness works….

High priests of wisdom, sweetness, might and bliss,
Discoverers of beauty’s sunlit ways
And swimmers of Love’s laughing fiery floods
And dancers within rapture’s golden doors,
Their tread one day shall change the suffering earth
And justify the light on Nature’s face.
Although Fate lingers in the high Beyond
And the work seems vain on which our heart’s force was spent,
All shall be done for which our pain was borne.
Even as of old man came behind the beast
This high divine successor surely shall come
Behind man’s inefficient mortal pace….

On our life’s prow that breaks the waves of Time
No signal light of hope has gleamed in vain.

Text of the 5th part:

ONWARD she passed seeking the soul’s mystic cave…
In a simple purity of emptiness
Her mind knelt down before the unknowable.
All was abolished save her naked self
And the prostrate yearning of her surrendered heart:

In endless Time her soul reached a wide end,…

A marvellous brooding twilight met the eyes
And a holy stillness held that voiceless space.

Conscious in stone and living without breath,
Watching with fixed regard the soul of man,
Executive figures of the cosmic self,
World-symbols of immutable potency.
To the abiding and eternal is their climb,
To the pure existence everywhere the same,
To the sheer consciousness and the absolute force
And the unimaginable and formless bliss,
To the mirth in Time and the timeless mystery
Of the triune being who is all and one
And yet is no one but himself apart.
There was no step of breathing men, no sound,
Only the living nearness of the soul.

Then through a tunnel dug in the last rock
She came out where there shone a deathless sun.
A house was there all made of flame and light
And crossing a wall of doorless living fire
There suddenly she met her secret soul.

They looked upon each other, knew themselves,
The secret deity and its human part,
The calm immortal and the struggling soul.
Then with a magic transformation’s speed
They rushed into each other and grew one.

MUSIC FOR GATHERING OF ALL PARTICIPANTS WITH TATIANA AND ALAIN AND YOGA GROUP

On a brink held of senseless ecstasy
And guarding an eternal poise of thought
Sat sculptured souls dreaming by rivers of sound…
Souls of a luminous celestial joy,
Faces of stark beauty, limbs of the moulded Ray;
In cities cut like gems of conscious stone
And wonderful pastures and on gleaming coasts
Bright forms were seen, eternity’s luminous tribes.

But more there is concealed in God’s Beyond
That shall one day reveal its hidden face.

THE END