In Reality Transparency

Commentary on Poem 5 of Dawn

If I were to say of myself that I am a God

I would be lying knowingly.

But if I were to say of myself that I am God

The Truth of its Existence would be spoken

Transparent in the rhythm of speech.

In this poem, I follow an internal dialogue with two elements of the non-dual ontology that I accept as my own: one I owe to the Upanishad, the other to a luminous Sufi, Bistami.

"Asatoma, Sat gamaya" ("From the unreal, lead me to the Real") I say with the Upanishad. The "lie" is not just a moral falsehood that leads others to err in relation to states of things, but a game of reactive will and an expression, even in the shadow of ignorance and inertia, of the force of love. The first two verses, "If I were to say of myself that I am a God / I would be lying knowingly," connect directly with the yearning of the Rishi who chanted "Asatoma, Sat gamaya." It is a yearning for Reality that, while accepting the limitation and density of the mind of the small Magician—that game of mirages and masks—does not stop at its deficiencies and proceeds to desire the Light from the darkness. This alludes to the psychic being or Soul in its state of identification with human volition, emotion, and intellection. From this limited perspective, the assertion of being a God would be a falsehood, an arrogance of the ego that has not understood its own formation. It is the self that feels separate from the divine, and therefore, cannot proclaim itself as such without lying.

This lie to which we anchor ourselves, seeking an egoic identity that in its precariousness allows us to move forward in the confused dreamlike whirlwind of conditioned existence, is sustained by the illusion of separation, and is further deepened and entangled in the desire for that separation—a desire that the ego camouflages by proudly proclaiming the banner of finitude as the only one that fully represents the human. There is a "will of shadow" that exerts a reactive force to the Real, an act of the mind that, as it is distance and separation, deepens duality. This lie, in its sadness, is the reflection of a consciousness that has not yet transcended the limitation of form.

However, the poem shifts to a higher plane with the assertion: "But if I were to say of myself that I am God / The Truth of its Existence would be spoken." In these verses, the declaration of divinity no longer comes from the ego, but from the Being that has overcome the Asat and has aligned with the Sat, the Real. If from my being I were to speak the being of God, if I were to infer or reveal from my limitation the limitation of the unlimited that I feel and that resonates at the core of the egoic attempts to want to continue being, then that impulse would show what lies behind the ego's limiting appearance. Then, the ego's lies would be winks of loving complicity; its lies and its malevolence, its attempt to lead to error, would show the trick of the small Magician, and once the Magician's trick is seen, its function can only follow the path of laughter, the redemption of Ananda. A blessed form of a lie, all play and love, would find its full resonance here.

Finally, the poem's culmination in "Transparent in the rhythm of speech" refers to the expression of the Logos, of speech, Vaak in Sanskrit. The transparency of the Real in the Logos has deep resonances in the Christian tradition. Although the Vaak is the form in which the threads of the masks of any speech are woven, not all forms of Vaak facilitate transparency. The speech of the Rishi expresses a universal rhythm; his mantra is transparency in Reality, and that is the echo that resonates in the Upanishadic prayer. The existence of God becomes transparent as Logos, but its Being also becomes transparent in my being as a single stellar pulse, like the cycles of the Universe's breath in Speech.

Simultaneously, on this plane of meaning, there exists in my thinking-feeling and in my volition, the plane of Bistami, with which it forms a space of higher dimension. Here beats a long poem that I wrote elsewhere, inspired by Bistami's Ishq. In my aesthetic experience, the semantic space of poetry has a "subjacent space" of a very general type, a topological space in which the epistemological intuition of separate points is not applicable. It is like a non-Hausdorffian topological space, or even a very "fine" trivial topology that barely allows for identity distinctions. In that space, this poem, the verses of "Asatoma..." and the fragments of the poem that I write below form a matrix of dynamic meaning interwoven with liminal resonances.

“How can someone say of themselves

That they are God, in one body, alone,

How does anyone dare to proclaim

The Unconditioned, the Eternal, the Unlimited,

From a personality

That is a painful condition,

A sharp limit and death?

And how can anyone say of themselves

That they are not God?

What is not God?

How could anyone proclaim

How does a limited mind dare

To make a summary judgment about the scope,

About the radiant nature

Of what without limit drives everywhere

Until it becomes Consciousness?

How could I not be God,

How could I be something other

than Everything else, than this Love that lives and dies me?

(...)”