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Neruda:
You are the daughter of the sea, oregano's first cousin.
Swimmer, your body is pure as the water;
cook, your blood is quick as the soil.
Everything you do is full of flowers, rich with the earth.
Your eyes go out toward the water, and the waves rise;
your hands go out to the earth and the seeds swell;
you know the deep essence of water and the earth,
conjoined in you like a formula for clay.
Naiad: cut your body into turquoise pieces,
they will bloom resurrected in the kitchen.
This is how you become everything that lives.
And so at last, you sleep, in the circle of my arms
that push back the shadows so that you can rest--
vegetables, seaweed, herbs: the foam of your dreams.
The World Soul:
There was a strange spiritual scenery,
A loveliness of lakes and streams and hills,
A flow, a fixity in a soul-space,
And plains and valleys, stretches of soul-joy,
And gardens that were flower-tracts of the spirit,
Its meditations of tinged reverie.
Air was the breath of a pure infinite.
A fragrance wandered in a coloured haze
As if the scent and hue of all sweet flowers
Had mingled to copy heaven's atmosphere.
Appealing to the soul and not the eye
Beauty lived there at home in her own house,
There all was beautiful by its own right
And needed not the splendour of a robe.
All objects were like bodies of the Gods,
A spirit symbol environing a soul,
For world and self were one reality.
Rimbaud :
J'ai tendu des cordes de clocher à clocher ; des guirlandes de fenêtre à fenêtre ; des chaînes d'or d'étoile à étoile, et je danse.
I have stretched ropes from steeple to steeple; garlands from window to window; golden chains from star to star, and I dance.
Rumi:
Come, come, whoever you are.
Wonderer, worshipper, lover -
It doesn't matter.
Ours is not a caravan of despair.
Come, even if you have broken your vow
A thousand times.
Come, yet again…
Look, these spiritual window-shoppers,
Who idly ask, 'How much is that?' Oh, I'm just looking…
They pick up a hundred items and put them down,
Shadows with no capital.
What is spent is love.
But these walk into a shop,
and their whole lives pass suddenly.
Where did you go? “Nowhere”
What did you have to eat? “Nothing much.”
Even if you don't know what you want,
Be part of the exchanging flow…
Start a huge foolish project,
Just like Noah…
It makes absolutely no difference
What people think of you…
Remember God so much that you are forgotten….
Lidia Bravo:
All fish carry seas in their mouths
and what is the sea if not just an open mouth,
and a night that wants to be made of water
so that day may be submerged in her
and all may be in the end
like it was in the beginning: a single voice.
Yes and no, you and I, everything and nothing,
light and shade.
* Todos los peces llevan mares en la boca
y qué es el mar sino una boca abierta
y una noche que quiere ser de agua
para que el día en ella se sumerja y todo sea al fin,
como fue en un principio, una voz sola.
Si y no, tú y yo, todo y nada, luz y sombra .
The World Soul:
Immersed in voiceless internatal trance
The beings that once wore forms on earth sat there
In shining chambers of spiritual sleep.
Passed were the pillar-posts of birth and death,
Passed was their little scene of symbol deeds,
Passed were the heavens and hells of their long road;
They had returned into the world's deep soul.
All now was gathered into pregnant rest:
Person and nature suffered a slumber change.
In trance they gathered back their bygone selves,
In a background memory's foreseeing muse
Prophetic of new personality
Arranged the map of their coming destiny's course:
Heirs of their past, their future's discoverers,
Electors of their own self-chosen lot,
They waited for the adventure of new life.
Whitman:
I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume
For every atom belonging to me, as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at ease observing a spear of summer grass.
My tongue, every atom of my blood, form'd from this soil, this air,
Born here of parents, born here of parents the same.
I, now thirty-seven years old, in perfect health, begin
Hoping to cease not till death.
Creeds and schools in abeyance,
Retiring back awhile, sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten,
I harbour for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,
Nature without check, with original energy.
The World Soul:
A Person persistent through the lapse of worlds,
Although the same for ever in many shapes
By the outward mind unrecognisable,
Assuming names unknown in unknown climes
Imprints through Time upon the earth's worn page
A growing figure of its secret self,
And learns by experience what the spirit knew,
Till it can see its truth alive and God.
Derek Walcott:
When sunset, a brass gong
vibrates through Couva
it is then I see my soul, swiftly unsheathed
like a white bird growing ever more small,
over the ocean of evening canes.
I sit quiet, waiting for it to return,
because for my spirit, India is too far away.
But at that evening gong,
clouds assemble and sacred robes
sacred even to Ramalochan,
singing Indian hit songs from his jute hammock
while evening strokes the quiet flames
and the silver horns of his maroon taxi.
Mosquitoes whine their evening mantras,
my friend Anopheles sits on the sitar
and fireflies make every dusk, Divali.
I knot my hair with a cloud
and my hands grow as brittle as these old pages
of Ramayana.
The World Soul:
Once more they must face the problem-game of birth,
The soul's experiment of joy and grief
And thought and impulse lighting the blind act,
And venture on the roads of circumstance,
Through inner movements and external scenes
Travelling to self across the forms of things.
Into creation's centre he had come.
The spirit wandering from state to state
Finds here the silence of its starting-point
In the formless force and the still fixity
And brooding passion of the world of Soul.
Homer:
Lay down the golden chain from Heaven
And pull at its links -
For who hearkens to the gods, the gods give ear…
And unextinguished laughter shakes the skies.
Milosz:
A day so happy.
Fog lifted early, I worked in the garden.
Hummingbirds were stopping over honeysuckle flowers.
There was no thing on earth I wanted to posses.
I knew no one worth my envying him.
Whatever evil I had suffered, I forgot.
To think I was once the same man did not embarrass me.
In my body I felt no pain.
When straightening up, I saw the blue sea and the sails.
The World Soul:
All that is made and once again unmade,
The calm persistent vision of the One
Inevitably re-makes, it lives anew:
Forces and lives and beings and ideas
Are taken into the stillness for a while;
There they remould their purpose and their drift,
Recast their nature and re-form their shape.
Ever they change and changing ever grow,
And passing through a fruitful stage of death
And after long reconstituting sleep
Resume their place in the process of the Gods
Until their work in cosmic Time is done.
Ovid:
There was a man here, Pythagoras, a Samian by birth, who fled Samos and its rulers, and, hating their tyranny, lived in voluntary exile.
Though the gods were far away, he visited their region of the sky, in his mind, and what nature denied to human vision he enjoyed with his inner eye.
When he had considered every subject, through concentrated thought, he communicated it widely, teaching the silent crowds, who listened in wonder about the origin of the vast universe, and of the causes of things: where the snows arise; the origin of lightning; by what laws the stars move; and whatever else is hidden.
‘Now, said Pythagoras , since a god moves my lips, I will follow, with due rite, and reveal my beloved Delphi and the heavens themselves, and unlock the oracles of that sublime mind.
Of things not fathomed earlier and things long hidden.
I delight in journeying among the distant stars, said Pythagoras , I delight in leaving earth and its dull spaces, to ride the clouds; to stand on the shoulders of mighty Atlas, looking down from far off on men. I say there is nothing in the whole universe that persists, said Pythagoras. Everything flows, and is formed as a fleeting image. Time itself, glides, in its continual motion, no differently than a river.
For neither the river, nor the swift hour can stop: but as wave impels wave to the shore, so time flees equally, and, equally follows, and is always new. For what was before is left behind: and what was not comes to be: and each moment is renewed.
The World Soul:
Here was the fashioning chamber of the worlds.
An interval was left twixt act and act,
Twixt birth and birth, twixt dream and waking dream,
A pause that gave new strength to do and be.
Basavanna:
The rich
will make temples for Shiva,
what shall I
a poor man do?
My legs are pillars
my body, the shrine
my head
a cupola of gold.
Listen, O lord of the meeting rivers,
things standing shall fall,
but things moving
ever shall stay…
Rilke:
The gods have no other substance
Than the one I have. I have like them,
The substance of all that has been lived.
And all that remains ever to be lived.
I am not only the present
But the streaming flight from end to end.
And what I see on one side or the other, roses,
the remains of wings, shadow and light,
belongs only to me…
The World Soul:
Beyond were regions of delight and peace,
Mute birthplaces of light and hope and love,
And cradles of heavenly rapture and repose.
In a slumber of the voices of the world
He of the eternal moment grew aware;
His knowledge stripped bare of the garbs of sense
Knew by identity without thought or word;
His being saw itself without its veils,
Life's line fell from the spirit's infinity.
Along a road of pure interior light,
Alone between tremendous Presences,
Under the watching eyes of nameless Gods,
His soul passed on, a single conscious power,
Towards the end which ever begins again,
Approaching through a stillness dumb and calm
To the source of all things human and divine.
There he beheld in their mighty union's poise
The figure of the deathless Two-in-One,
A single being in two bodies clasped,
A diarchy of two united souls,
Seated absorbed in deep creative joy;
Their trance of bliss sustained the mobile world.
Behind them in a morning dusk One stood
Who brought them forth from the Unknowable.
Ever disguised she awaits the seeking spirit;
Watcher on the supreme unreachable peaks,
Guide of the traveller of the unseen paths,
She guards the austere approach to the Alone.
Emily Dickinson:
Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all…
I've heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.
Rimbaud:
I embraced the summer dawn.
Nothing yet stirred on the face of palaces. The water was dead. The shadows still camped in the woodland road. I walked, waking quick, warm breaths. The gems looked on and wings rose without a sound.
The first embrace was in a path already filled with fresh, pale gleams, a flower who told me her name. I laughed at the blond waterfall that tousled through the pines: on the silver summit I recognized the goddess.
Then, one by one, I lifted up her veils. In the lane, waving my arms. Across the plain, where I notified the cock. In the city she fled along the steeples and domes; and running like a beggar on the marble quays, I chased her.
Above the wood near a laurel wood, I wrapped her up in her gathered veils, and I felt, little by little, her immense body.
The World Soul:
At the beginning of each far-spread plane
Pervading with her power the cosmic suns
She reigns, inspirer of its multiple works
And thinker of the symbol of its scene.
Above them all she stands supporting all,
The sole omnipotent Goddess ever-veiled
Of whom the world is the inscrutable mask;
The ages are the footfalls of her tread,
Their happenings the figure of her thoughts,
And all creation is her endless act.
Shakespeare:
- There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than dreamt of in your philosophy…
- Give me my robe, put on my crown;
I have immortal longings in me…
The World Soul:
His spirit was made a vessel of her force;
Mute in the fathomless passion of his will
He outstretched to her his folded hands of prayer.
Then in a sovereign answer to his heart
A gesture came as of worlds thrown away,
And from her raiment's lustrous mystery raised
One arm half-parted the eternal veil.
A light appeared still and imperishable.
Attracted to the large and luminous depths
Of the ravishing enigma of her eyes,
He saw the mystic outline of a face.
Overwhelmed by her implacable light and bliss,
An atom of her illimitable self,
Mastered by the honey and lightning of her power,
Tossed towards the shores of her ocean-ecstasy,
Drunk with a deep golden spiritual wine
He cast from the rent stillness of his soul
A cry of adoration and desire
And the surrender of his boundless mind
And the self-giving of his silent heart…
Wu-Men Hui-K'ai
The Great Way has no gates,
Thousands of paths enter it;
When you walk through this gateless gate,
You walk freely between earth and heaven.
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The central text was from Sri Aurobindo's Savitri: 