Hindi poetry -- Translations into English; Indic poetry -- Translations into English
Brahma, then, is the Ineffable Fact compared with which "the
distinction of the Conditioned from the Unconditioned is but a
word": at once the utterly transcendent One of Absolutist
philosophy, and the personal Lover of the individual
soul--"common to all and special to each," as one Christian mystic
has it. The need felt by Kabîr for both these ways of describing
Reality is a proof of the richness and balance of his spiritual
experience; which neither cosmic nor anthropomorphic symbols,
taken alone, could express. More absolute than the Absolute,
more personal than the human mind, Brahma therefore exceeds
whilst He includes all the concepts of philosophy, all the
passionate intuitions of the heart. He is the Great Affirmation,
the font of energy, the source of life and love, the unique
satisfaction of desire. His creative word is the _Om_ or
"Everlasting Yea." The negative philosophy which strips from the
Divine Nature all Its attributes and defining Him only by that
which He is not--reduces Him to an "Emptiness," is abhorrent to
this most vital of poets.--Brahma, he says, "may never be found
in abstractions." He is the One Love who Pervades the world.,
discerned in His fullness only by the eyes of love; and those who
know Him thus share, though they may never tell, the joyous and
ineffable secret of the universe. [Footnote: Nos. VII, XXVI,
LXXVI, XC.]
Now Kabîr, achieving this synthesis between the personal and
cosmic aspects of the Divine Nature, eludes the three great
dangers which threaten mystical religion.
First, he escapes the excessive emotionalism, the tendency to
an exclusively anthropomorphic devotion, which results from an
unrestricted cult of Divine Personality, especially under an
incarnational form; seen in India in the exaggerations of
Krishna worship, in Europe in the sentimental extravagances of
certain Christian saints.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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