Poetry Therapy

It is Poetry Therapy which saved me. During all these years of tension and strife, Poetry alone gave me solace.

When I fell upon the thorns of Life and bled, Poesis saved me. It gave me comfort.

It gave Bliss as Wordsworth described it

With Bliss infeffable

I felt the sentiment of Being spread around

Over all that moveth and all that lieth still

It opened the gates to Heaven. No wonder one great author called it " The Healing Touch of Poetry "!

Shaw, the master Satirist !

Shaw was influenced by Annie Besant and Henri Bergson. Bergson postulated the theory of L'Evolution Creatrice or Creative Evolution.

Everything is done by Creative Evolution and its errors are called the Problem of Evil.

"Shaw's seriousness and mock humour run into an incredible, inextricable melange ", remarked Aurobindo.

One of his best quotations

" This earth of ours is a place where the Fool flourishes, where the good and the wise are hated and persecuted, where men and women torment each other in the name of love; where children are enslaved in the name of parental duty and education, where the weak in body are poisoned and mutilated in the name of medical healing & where the weak in character are imprisoned in the name of justice. It is clear to me that this earth is hell and as the Indian revealed to me, we are here to expiate for crimes committed by us in a former existence.

Gems from the Poet-King, Bhartrihari

With Night and Day as alternating pieces of dice,
On the Chess board of the world, Time plays human beings as pawns !


Poets Self Actualised are the truly triumphant
As their Fame-bodies knoweth no fear of disease or death


Those devoid of learning, penance, charity
Wisdom, character, qualities, Ethics
They burden mighty Mother Earth
As animals disguised as men!

Bhartrihari, The Master Poet !

He was one of the greatest Sanskrit poets of all time. He was a philosopher-king turned renunciant ( (c. 450-510 CE?)

He dealt with Literature, Philosphy & the Arts.

Initially, it is Wealth that is recognised. Hence about Wealth he wrote

He who has wealth is deemed aristocratic
The scholar, the man who is indeed versatile
The philosopher, the leader and the guide
All qualities are based on Wealth !

A wealthy man without kids is not considered fortunate. Or Fortune is an invisible goddess which no wealth can court !

About Fortune he wrote

He who is fortunate is aristocratic
The scholar and the man versatile
The leader, guide and the tribal chief
For all qualities Fortune is the base !

Even then, it is not perfection. For we find that man's span is one hundred years, of which half is gone as night, half as boyhood and old age. The rest is accompanied by service, loss and pain.
Happiness, it seems, is elusive !

As he wrote

One hundred years: one half is stillness of the night,
and half again is gone in boyhood or old age.
In what is left, accompanied by illness, loss and pain,
pleasure is a water bubble, passing breath.

In other words, in contrast to the lives of miserable men, the immortalised poets are the most famous and victorious !

Victorius are the masters, the rasa-siddha poets
Whose body of fame has no fear of age or death.

The true Yogi, the Seer, the Psychic, the Sage is the most fortunate. We find parallel lines in another philosopher, Sankara.

He who recites the sacred syllable Om
He who visualises himsef as the Self Absolute
He who is happy with the Bliss of the Self
Fortune belongs to him; to none else, to none else

Vivekananda - The Cosmic Poet !

Vivekananda was a genius, in whom intellectuality and divinity found the perfect blend.

In his poem ' The Hymn of Cosmic Consciousness " , he proclaims the transcendental experience he had.

" In the void of Mind involute

The fleeting Universe rises and floats

And sinks back in the current "I" "

He declared that all men are infinite and our journey on earth is to manifest that infinity.

He declared that it is a sin to call man a sinner.

He declared that by Vedas no books are meant. Kant's greatest achivement was that he found that Space, Time and Causality are modes of thought, but Vedanta, the Science of Being, knew this long ago and called it Maya.

The Universe is thought and Vedas are the words expressing that Thought !

Osho, the Mystic

Osho was a genius, who was a philosophic rebel. The philosopher is a rebel, he is against the outworn fetishes of a purblind social system !

Osho said that both East and West are extremes. In the East sex is suppressed and in the West sex is free !

He advocated following none and in following one's own Conscience.

His excellent book " Be Still and Know " is an excellent treatise on Mysticism. He postulated a region called " No Mind ", the equivalent of Cosmic Consciousness of transcendental philosophy.

Robert Burns, Poet Laureate !

This was another Poet Laureate who graced our Planet Earth, Robert Burns !

A Bard's Epitaph1786

Is there a whim-inspired fool,

Owre fast for thought, owre hot for rule,

Owre blate to seek, owre proud to snool,

Let him draw near;

And owre this grassy heap sing dool,

And drap a tear.

Is there a bard of rustic song,

Who, noteless, steals the crowds among,

That weekly this area throng,

O, pass not by!

But, with a frater-feeling strong,

Here, heave a sigh.

Is there a man, whose judgment clear

Can others teach the course to steer,

Yet runs, himself, life's mad career,

Wild as the wave,

Here pause-and, thro' the starting tear,

Survey this grave.

The poor inhabitant below

Was quick to learn the wise to know,

And keenly felt the friendly glow,

And softer flame;

But thoughtless follies laid him low,

And stain'd his name!

Reader, attend! whether thy soul

Soars fancy's flights beyond the pole,

Or darkling grubs this earthly hole,

In low pursuit:

Know, prudent, cautious, self-control

Is wisdom's root.

Rabindranath Tagore

About Tagore, W B Yeats once said " There have been great poets, but none his equal "



Mind Without Fear
Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up
into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason
has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action---
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

Aurobindo Ghosh

" God descending into materiality is what we call humanity, with Matter as the lowest principle and Absolute Being as the highest " , wrote Aurobindo. He was also one of the greatest writers of all time. In his epic poem, " Savitri ", he depicts the victory of Mortality by Immortality or Self Actualisation.

Everything is done by the divine Conscious Force

A luminous heart of the Unknown is She
A power of Silence in the depths of God
She is the Force, the inevitable word,
The magnet of our difficult ascent,
The Sun from whom we kindle all our suns,
The Light that leans to us from the Unrealised vasts,
The Joy that beckons us from the impossible " ( Savitri)

It is said that at the time of samadhi, his body became golden !

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

It is said that Germany's greatest poet studied Sanskrit to understand that master Epic Poem ' The Shakuntala ' by India's Shakespeare, Kalidasa. In Shakuntala, he glimpsed the absoluteness of poetry.

He was a true Yogi. He died like a Yogi, exclaiming " Light, light, more light ".

Like Milton and Dante, Goethe is classified with one central achievement, the Faust, a dramatic poem, which depicted the Titanic Man or the Master scholar, like Augustus Caesar, Prometheus, Mohammed, Goetz von Berlingen. Goethe drew his inspiration from the great representatives of the Nature Philosophy of the Renaissance - Campanella, Paracelsus & Giordano Bruno.

Dante's Divina Comedia

One of the greatest writers of all time was Dante, who wrote the Divine Comedy. He recorded his psychologicl mystic experiences as journeys through the Inferno ( Hell ), Purgatorio ( purgatory ), & Final Beatitude ( Paradiso or Heaven ). The Divine Comedy is called Divine because of its superhuman beauty.

He was a scholar and astrologer. To Dante, Astrology was the noblest of all sciences.
. He drew a parallel between the seven revolving heavens and the seven liberal arts in his Convivio. He gave Grammar to Moon and Dialectic to Mercury. In Philosophy, he classified the seven reprehensible actions as the Seven Deadly Sins.

In his De Monarchia, he spoke about the One World Government. He declared that for World Peace to manifest, the best solution is the One Government. O happy race of men, heavenly peace on earth if all the hearts of men are ruled by the Love that rules Heaven !

Learning is the Mother of all Virtue !

"Learning is the mother of all virtue" said Montaigne, the Sceptic.

The Bible says " Righteous heart seeketh knowledge ". Islam also gives priority to Learning " The ink of the scholar is greater than the blood of the martyr. He who reads is handsome in the sight of God " !

To Indians, Wisdom and He are synonyms. The distinction between knowledge and Wisdom is made. Knowledge is of things; Wisdom is about the Absolule alone !

Thou art Wisdom
Thy Form the fourfold Veds
Thou art the End of Wisdom !

Vidya sthwam
Vedaroopasthwam
Vedaneeyasthwmevacha !

The Jewish Kabbalah is another treatise on Wisdom. Albert Pyke remarked about the Kabbalah " One is stunned while entering the sanctuary of the Kabbalah, at finding the doctrine so simple, so logical and at the same time so absolute "

Kabbalah, Yoga, Zen, Gnosticism, Sufism - all these mystic schools are the figurative representatives of the royal Solomon and personify Wisdom !