Songs of Kabir | Page 4

the
"natural" and "supernatural" worlds; everything is a part of the creative
Play of God, and therefore--even in its humblest details--capable of
revealing the Player's mind.
This willing acceptance of the here-and-now as a means of representing
supernal realities is a trait common to the greatest mystics. For them,
when they have achieved at last the true theopathetic state, all aspects
of the universe possess equal authority as sacramental declarations of
the Presence of God; and their fearless employment of homely and
physical symbols--often startling and even revolting to the
unaccustomed taste--is in direct proportion to the exaltation of their
spiritual life. The works of the great Sûfîs, and amongst the Christians
of Jacopone da Todì, Ruysbroeck, Boehme, abound in illustrations of

this law. Therefore we must not be surprised to find in Kabîr's
songs--his desperate attempts to communicate his ecstasy and persuade
other men to share it--a constant juxtaposition of concrete and
metaphysical language; swift alternations between the most intensely
anthropomorphic, the most subtly philosophical, ways of apprehending
man's communion with the Divine. The need for this alternation, and its
entire naturalness for the mind which employs it, is rooted in his
concept, or vision, of the Nature of God; and unless we make some
attempt to grasp this, we shall not go far in our understanding of his
poems.
Kabîr belongs to that small group of supreme mystics--amongst whom
St. Augustine, Ruysbroeck, and the Sûfî poet Jalâlu'ddîn Rûmî are
perhaps the chief--who have achieved that which we might call the
synthetic vision of God. These have resolved the perpetual opposition
between the personal and impersonal, the transcendent and immanent,
static and dynamic aspects of the Divine Nature; between the Absolute
of philosophy and the "sure true Friend" of devotional religion. They
have done this, not by taking these apparently incompatible concepts
one after the other; but by ascending to a height of spiritual intuition at
which they are, as Ruysbroeck said, "melted and merged in the Unity,"
and perceived as the completing opposites of a perfect Whole. This
proceeding entails for them--and both Kabîr and Ruysbroeck expressly
acknowledge it--a universe of three orders: Becoming, Being, and that
which is "More than Being," i.e., God. [Footnote: Nos. VII and XLIX.]
God is here felt to be not the final abstraction, but the one actuality. He
inspires, supports, indeed inhabits, both the durational, conditioned,
finite world of Becoming and the unconditioned, non-successional,
infinite world of Being; yet utterly transcends them both. He is the
omnipresent Reality, the "All-pervading" within Whom "the worlds are
being told like beads." In His personal aspect He is the "beloved Fakir,"
teaching and companioning each soul. Considered as Immanent Spirit,
He is "the Mind within the mind." But all these are at best partial
aspects of His nature, mutually corrective: as the Persons in the
Christian doctrine of the Trinity--to which this theological diagram
bears a striking resemblance--represent different and compensating
experiences of the Divine Unity within which they are resumed. As
Ruysbroeck discerned a plane of reality upon which "we can speak no

more of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but only of One Being, the very
substance of the Divine Persons"; so Kabîr says that "beyond both the
limited and the limitless is He, the Pure Being." [Footnote: No. VII.]
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,