Āvirāvīrmayēdhi
Thou, who art the spirit of manifestation, manifest thyself in me.
This longing for the perfect expression of his self, is more deeply inherent in man than his hunger and thirst for bodily sustenance, than his lust for wealth and distinction. This prayer is not merely one born individually of him; it is in depth of all things, it is the ceaseless urging in him of the Āvih, of the spirit of eternal manifestation. The revealment of the infinite in the finite, which is the motive of all creation, is not seen in its perfection in the starry heavens, in the beauty of flowers. It is in the soul of man. For there will seeks its manifestation in will, and freedom turns to win its final prize in the freedom of surrender.
Therefore, it is the self of man which the great King of the universe has not shadowed with his throne – he has left it free. In his physical and mental organism, where man is related with nature, he has to acknowledge the rule of his King, but in his self he is free to disown him. There our God must win his entrance. There he comes as a guest, not as a king, and therefore he has to wait till he is invited. It is the man’s self from which God has withdrawn his commands, for there he comes to court our love. His armed force, the laws of nature, stand outside its gate, and only beauty, the messenger of his love, finds admission within its precincts.
It is only in this region of will that anarchy is permitted; only in man’s self that the discord of untruth and unrighteousness hold its reign; and things can come to such a pass that we may cry out in our anguish, “Such utter lawlessness could never prevail if there were a God!” Indeed, God has stood aside from our self, where his watchful patience knows no bounds, and where he never forces open the doors if shut against him. For this self of ours has to attain its ultimate meaning, which is the soul, not through the compulsion of God’s power, but through love, and thus become united with God in freedom.
He whose spirit has been made one with God, stands before man as the supreme flower of humanity. There, man finds in truth what he is; for there the Āvih is revealed to him in the soul of man as the most perfect revelation for him of God; for there we see the union of the supreme will with our will, our love with the love everlasting.
In our country [India] he who truly loves God receives such homage from men, as would be considered almost sacrilegious in the west. We see in him God’s wish fulfilled, the most difficult of all obstacles to his revealment removed, and God’s own perfect joy fully blossoming in humanity. Through him we find the whole world of man overspread with a divine homeliness. His life, burning with God’s love, makes all our earthly love resplendent. All the intimate associations of our life, all its experience of pleasure and pain, group themselves around this display of the divine love, and from the drama that we witness in him. The touch of an infinite mystery passes over the trivial and the familiar, making it break out into ineffable music. The trees and the stars and the blue hills appear to us as symbols aching with a meaning which can never be uttered in words. We seem to watch the Master in the very act of creation of a new world, when a man’s soul draws her heavy curtain of self aside, when her veil is lifted and she is face to face with her eternal lover.
But what is this state? It is like a morning of spring, varied in its life and beauty, yet one and entire. When a man’s life rescued from distractions finds its unity in the soul, then the consciousness of the infinite becomes at once direct and natural to it as the light is to the flame. All the conflicts and contradictions of life are reconciled; knowledge, love and action harmonized; pleasure and pain become one in beauty, enjoyment and renunciation equal in goodness; the breach between the finite and the infinite fills with love and overflows; every moment carries its message of the eternal; the formless appears to us in the form of the flower, of the fruit; the boundless takes us up in his arms as a father and walks by our side as a friend. It is only the soul, the One in man which by its very nature can overcome all limits, and finds its affinity with the Supreme One. While yet we have not attained the internal harmony, and the wholeness of our being, our life remains a life of habits. The world still appears to us as a machine, to be mastered where it is useful, to be guarded against where it is dangerous, and never to be known in its full fellowship with us, alike in its physical nature and in its spiritual life and beauty.
From Rabindranath Tagore’s Sadhana – The Realisation of Life, pp. 30-32.
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