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Our acceptance of his statements depends wholly on his power to evoke and sustain an integrated system of beliefs. It is no longer fashionable among contemporary poetic theorists to ask of a poem, "Can we believe this to be generally true?" A poet, according to many, is not concerned with thoughts but with feelings and any pronouncement he may make has only the value of a personal truth. It therefore becomes a pseudo-statement. However, what we observe in the aphorisms of Sri Chinmoy and in other poets such as WB.Yeats, Emily Dickinson and Wallace Stevens, who also employ this mode in their poetry, is that at the very outset they assume a community of belief. The very nature of aphorism, as opposed to lyric or confessional poetry, is to suppose an audience. It is poetry that is expansive, public and general. We have only to consider several famous lines by Yeats:

Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.[6]

Things thought too long can be no longer thought. [7]

Poems assertive of a theory cannot be wholly private for the reason that they place utmost importance on establishing conclusions that outreach the scope of a single life and bring the poem into relation with external reality.

Finally, it may be seen from "My Truth-Discoveries" that the very nature of aphorism is to bind, the word itself deriving from the Greek "horos", meaning boundary, from which we later gained the word "horizon." Aphorism holds within its finite limits the ineffable dimensions of life's deepest mysteries and questions. In housing the eternal, it fulfils the role outlined by Rilke:

We need eternity; for only eternity can provide space for our gestures. Yet we know that we live in narrow finiteness. Thus it is our task to create infinity within these boundaries ... [8]