Grace, Love, Mercy—all the three-
Stand for one same reality—Life's Star.
"He who loves is he who really lives." Do learn
These syllables nine by heart in place of lettered charm.
Here the positive factors are brought closer to one another to indicate the one dominant human value intimately related to life itself. Doctrinal religion tends to reduce faith into dry liturgical formulae and creeds to be repeated mechanically for a promised salvation. The aspirant who seeks instruction in Brahman wisdom or knowledge of the Absolute often becomes a slave to its deadening, mechanically repetitive word-features, which is the word that kills and not the bread of life, though such word-features can be potent in their own way in a purely perceptual context.
It is not enough to understand love as a doctrine and say that one believes in it as an article of faith. This and other values have to enter into intimate union with the Self as part of a life that is lived. But even such a life where theory and practice meet, involves an intuitive apprehension of reality in the most intimate understanding of Self-realization. On the one hand one has to enter into the spirit of the words, and then on the other hand the manna of the Word has to be made effectively true again in the everyday living meaning of daily bread.
In the first formula the value which ought to dominate life is indicated as a star to guide the mariner on the sea of existence, and then it is related backwards as it were to real living in the here and now. Thus in both ways the unity of life and love is affirmed. The whole object here is to bring ethics, piety and knowledge unitively under one dominant conception of a human value, in accord with the fundamental method and theory of the Advaita Vedanta which affirms "That Thou Art" (Tat-Tvam-Asi).
Verse - IV
Without the gift of Grace, a mere, body
Of bone and skin and tissue foul is man
Like water lost in desert sand,
Like flower or fruit bereft of smell.
The frustrated Self buried in its own desert sands does not emerge into positive levels of goodness either to humanity or to its own true nature. When grace has gone and love has weakened, the body loses its beauty. A flower through its fragrance confers some benefit, and fruit too has its positive smell-taste virtue. These are the opposites of the inert bodily aspects. Flower and smell complement each other producing the total value of a good flower. Similarly the bird and bird-song can be equated, together resulting as joy for the poet. Water lost in sand cannot allay the traveler’s thirst or be of use to plants; and with the non-satisfaction of simple needs, more refined cravings for luxury are out of the question. At the personally hedonistic, the collectively utilitarian and the universal Platonic levels there are corresponding emergent factors which tend to complete the personality, bringing into existence an integrated central value compounded proportionately of both "positive" and "negative" factors. Contemplation stabilizes, harmonizes and equalizes these opposing factors, producing the good life at all levels in different forms, as indicated in the various ways discussed in this composition.
Verse –V
Those phases six that life do overtake
Invade not wisdom's pure domain;
Likewise the Mercy quality, when human form has gone,
As good reputation's form endures.
The perfume of a flower can leave its traces in its surroundings till breezes carry the scent across the fields. In a similar way when we come to human values which are subtler than the perfume of a flower, it is possible to imagine how the behavior of a good man in a certain locality can create around him associations and memory-factors which we generally call, vaguely, the "atmosphere" of a place. Sometimes this results from the contribution of many personalities who have lived a life of goodness.
In the case of a highly spiritual man of the status of a harmonized contemplative or sage, this ineffable influence affects the surroundings almost permanently. The reputation of a Christ or of a Buddha belongs to this category. It does not depend upon the passing away of the body. The body is the phenomenal aspect of reality which suffers change. Metabolic changes, and changes through the larger cycles of life and its extinction (such as the six phases usually mentioned in the terminology of Vedanta, viz., existence, birth, growth, transformation, decline and death) affect only one aspect of the personality. The subtler, purer or inner life tends to become independent of states and the last lingering traces of duality vanish in Self-realization, which is the innermost awareness of all, the Vijnana Maya Kosha (zone of pure consciousness), where Plotinus' "flight of the alone to the alone" takes place.
Even when this final consummation is unattained, at whatever intermediate level it may be that we consider the matter, the anti-nominal principle makes for a fundamental distinction between the bodily and other subtler, positive aspects, successively sublimating and approaching pure reason as contemplation gains ground. When human values enter into the conduct of a wise man, as it ought to in a normal way at every stage of his spiritual progress from the real to the ideal, the higher aspects of the personality leave various traces on his environment. Actually, all this good influence remains as a favorable appreciation on the part of humanity, which is often grateful for the good implied in a certain way of life. This reputation is the life after death recognized here. There is no confusion of false esoteric in a public or scientific sense.
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