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I SHALL LISTEN

I shall listen to Your command, I shall.
In Your sky I shall fly, I shall fly.
Eternally You are mine, my very own.
You are my heart's wealth.
For You at night in tears I shall cry,
For You at dawn with light I shall smile
For You, for You, Beloved, only for You.[51]

The poems with which I have dealt to this point span a wide range of human experiences and relationships which the poet has taken as tokens of the "play" between man and God. At the opposite extreme from this area of symbolism is that set of transcendental terms which seeks to convey the more impersonal aspects of God. Evelyn Underhill writes that, in the context of the theory of "immanence,"

the quest of the Absolute is no long journey, but a realisation of something which is implicit in the self and in the universe: an opening of the eyes of the soul upon the Reality in which it is bathed.[52]

It is a discovery that one's own soul houses the Infinite and the Eternal. In essence, these two approaches to God are not as different as they might appear, for the final end of the seeker's journeying towards a personal God is also this kind of enlightenment. Nor does a personal approach to God exclude a worship of His impersonal attributes. In the case of Sri Chinmoy, he may be classed among that group of mystics whom Evelyn Underhill refers to as having achieved a "synthetic vision of God":[53]

These [Kabir, Ruysbroeck and the Sufi poet, Rumi] 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.