Poem 78
How can He who eternally is be other than what He is?
If today He breaks his word, tomorrow He will fulfil His promise.
Because we straggle along like sheep in the summer heat (dreaming of clover)
He strings us on with: Just a little further and the journey will be over.
His ‘little furthers’ cannot be measured by light-years now;
He was little-furthering stardust when it asked the first when and how.
Whatever the Master says has a divine origin and reference;
It is our loss alone if we treat His word with indifference.
Do not seek to understand the subtleties of the Creation-romance
So long as you only possess a vocabulary of ignorance.
If your heart has not yet ripened to the extent that you wish to obey Him,
At least do not let intellect seize you by the throat and force you to gainsay Him.
Even if you deny Him, He will be with you until your last drop-bubble breaks
And you are finally and forever released from mind-confusions and heartaches.
How nice to hear the whole gradual process of our awakening being described as ‘He strings us on…’
If we had clear fore-knowledge of the trials, delays. and disasters ahead could we still persevere? Baba was notorious for His easy prognostications of end events and promised delivery. As we are shown in this poem, it is not for us to keep on asking “Are we there yet Dad?”
A good reminding in this poem that we are not dealing with a mechanical process here. It is a romance with all the elusiveness and freedom of a game. It is a heart opening and cleansing, and it is heart knowledge alone that can engage with what is happening and needed, and what this order of truth is.
A confronting opening grabs attention. We have a definition of God as always consistent to Himself, and the fact that He seems to break promises – not just Baba but Biblical ones of the coming of the kingdom of God and apocalypse. God has to be Self-consistent but to us may seem to have elements of spontaneous change or even chaos.
In verse 2 we like sheep need some encouraging dreams like green clover, a light touch deflating our expectations. All time-bound perspectives, ever since creation, have been a coaxing on as is needed for the sheep (verse 3).
The apparent difficulties and inconsistencies, a real problem for many minds, are now swept away in verse 4, counselling a total submission to the Master; for we are just not capable of thinking about reality, (the stance taken by most philosophers after Kant), having only a vocabulary of ignorance (verse 5). The message of religion in general and Baba in particular is that God and Truth cannot be known but only lived.
Intellect will hide the Master’s identity rather than reveal it, verse 6.
The poem is an assertion of confidence about what is real or unreal, hammering home the same truth. As so often, Baba as a celestial sun-being is slowly breaking one by one the bubbles of our illusions.