Solar Flame
The poem has five stanzas. The first one traces the dual limits of the human emotion of joy.
There is a bliss that emotion cannot sustain
Overabundant, it escapes towards a heaven of purity
Passionate splendor that dwells indifferent
The temple of peace and the battlefield.
In this beginning of the poem, the insufficiency of conventional emotional experience to capture a higher form of bliss is posited. What is human life like beyond basic emotions, ardent seeking or desire, fear, anger, sex, caring for progeny, group emotion, or play? Can we understand something that goes beyond our instincts and passions? And on a social level, can we deal with someone who is not guided by these basic movements of the psyche without crucifying them?
In these first verses, we are told about the point at which human bliss reaches the state of Ananda. This joy-bliss is not a fleeting emotion, but a superior ontological state that emotion cannot harbor or contain, nor understand or accompany. Our well-being as living organisms reaches a point: there is a limit of physical ecstasy that we can tolerate, beyond which our egoic consciousness identity vanishes. However, there is a potential for subtle, new, and emergent symbolic bliss that rises beyond the affective plane of neurotransmitters toward a heaven of purity. This elevation feels like an “escape” from the point of view of the basic emotion in which we are trapped. We justify our emotional chains under a mask of fidelity to life, of commitment to human existence, an act done from the effort to remain in the mire of confrontation and density to help and do good. It is this attitude of the ego that speaks of “escapes” to justify its own chains. In doing so, it pays no attention to the overabundance of the movement that rises towards a heaven of purity, because that richness—in all its spontaneity—deeply wounds the ego by the mere fact of showing it the existence of something else, of another form of joy that is completely alien to it.
The "passionate splendor" is presented as a non-dual force that embraces both "peace" and "battle," without being polarized toward either, without accepting or rejecting any. Its indifference to peace and war is the result of detachment, not of apathy or lack of interest in the things of life: the echoes of the Bhagavad Gita resonate here. From the Eternal Dharma, Kurukshetra is both the battlefield and the temple of peace. Our Trikala thought already sees them as a single symbol. It is precisely the dual distinction of everyday life that perpetuates the cycles of wars and peaces. Human peaces are not moments of non-violence, but moments in which the victors legitimize their victorious violence and the vanquished, on the destructive wings of resentment and revenge, prepare a new cycle of war. In the same way, war is not exempt from anxious quietudes, nor are moments of harmony lacking on the thresholds of death that feed its insatiable beast's stomach. Joy-bliss, the beatitude of Ananda, indifferent to war and peace, looks at them from a hill that no longer belongs to the ego, and knows that none of these attitudes is exempt from attributes of its opposite.
The second stanza sings to the unique nature of this boundless joy:
There is a solar flame that is ignorant of sadness
Impetus that imbues visions of rapture
Secular parades of ascending joys
Flashes woven with nebulous gems.
The "solar flame" is the form of the Universal Soul united to the "I Am." It is not an exclusively human impulse, in the sense of the word "human" in our everyday language. It is the "living flame of love" of John of the Cross, full of tenderness, nourishing, but it is also our familiar Dawn. It is through this expression that the third poem of the book offers a new variation on the theme of the Dawn. The solar flame is Agni, your longing—dear reader of these lines—seeking distant echoes. That nostalgia is ignorant of sadness, although not as a desire to push it away, repress it, or feel superior to it. There is a solar flame—your most intimate and most external flame—that is ignorant of sadness because it does not know it, nor does it recognize it in the murky moments of the struggle of everyday life. It is an impulse of "Light that Sees," not of the light that we see and distinguish, and which serves us to walk among the shadows. The Light that Sees does not know darkness or its forms, because its flows and movements are raptures, samadhis that exclude concepts and names. As a subtle experience, from the Trikala, it is a reredos in which there is a still parade of million-hued color, a dancing river fixed in the depth of the cosmic night. And the fabrics that fiber the canvas are threads of nebulous gems that show us a more mysterious subspace supporting the Real.
In the third stanza, we have a counterpoint that shows the work of transformation that the "solar flame" produces in the experience of the ego:
There is a Light that is ignorant of the little Magician
And if it adopts him, it transforms him into something else
Outside of the affection that accepts or rejects
Far from tricks, stalkings, and traps
Hunting vacuums, praying darknesses
Muddied waters, barren riches.
These verses express a Will that is ignorant of sadness and impels visions of ecstasy and ascending joys, an unmoved motor of unconditional self-affirmation. In one of its modes, in one of the masks of the Light, this Will is ignorant of the little Magician, whom it cannot see, because for it he is nothing more than part of a grotesque and compact masquerade. The Light is indifferent to the "tricks, stalkings, and traps" of the survival mind, of the will to power that only distinguishes limited forms, tiny paths of inertial desires, confused whims that act as puppets in a shadow theater. And when the little Magician takes form in the Compassion of the Universe as part of a drama of another kind, that tiny Magician is not destroyed, but "integrated" into Consciousness—after all, once sadness (ignored in the same way that we ignore the ego, without engaging in negation) is no longer anything more than the note of a resonant perfume in the ancestral night. The ego then becomes an organ of Dharma, a tool for self-reflection, a sensory organ that is reused to identify the same chaos and incompleteness of meaning of the small worlds it once tried to control with its narratives. The old psychological processes are lovingly collected in a wider sphere.
There are hymns of plenitude that the mind cannot reach,
Matchless Consciousness that breathes the Eternal,
Lyres of Aeons craft such a foundation
Never-ending lucidity
Its brushstroke clear
Magma of Beauty.
The mind manas, the survival mind that binds us to matter, the thinking whose tools are only the physiological senses and the inferences that nourish the egoic narrative, cannot completely apprehend the "plenitude" of the Real. There is a form of Consciousness without equal, without a second, without "an other," whose only duality is that of its own breathing, that of its kalpas. The rhythm and melody of this consciousness are interpreted by the lyres of the Aeons. The Aeons intone from their immortal thrones music emanated from their divine lyres, melodies that come from a supreme Pleroma, from the ineffable and unknown Plenitude. From their harps comes the subtle substance of a bridge to the human, a bridge of arcane echoes, which like a Zoroastrian Chinvat, connect us with inextinguishable lucidity. Their sonic palette is a Magma of Beauty from which our most demiurgic being paints only inexhaustible Beauty and happy airs.
In the last stanza, the vision is recapitulated and concluded:
A Spirit that affirms is masked in Joy
Generously it pours it and with more Light it fills it.
From its nurturing vision it nourishes the Soul of Men
A summit Amalthea
That never stepped into the Valley.
In what we call joy, something of greater scope is masked, Ananda. Joy is masked because for our urgent thinking, joy is nothing more than a fleeting emotion that is opposed to sadness. Ananda pours its nectar into the cup of our Soul. Only by inundating it, only when our Soul is already completely immersed in Ananda does it become permeable to this nurturing Light, to this lamp of fire that fills our gaze with immemorial splendors, with a generous and unifying authority that nourishes without dominating. The Divine Nurse is now evoked in Amalthea, a superior vision that feeds the "Soul of Men," without ever descending to the valleys, because in its breadth of Reality there are no low basins: the summits sparkle imperturbably, covering the Universe.
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