“The Great Stage”

“Invisibly, the sun had now set. The sun makes the utter difference between an apparently living and a seemingly dead nature. As he plays on the water, a thousand transcendental thoughts pass through my mind. Each mirror glint on the sea reflects the Consciousness that put it there. As he reflects on the ephemerals of the skyscape, a million magic mysteries pique my curiosity. When he is gone, when the sun fades off the firmamental stage, there remains nothing but flimsy plywood sets and cheap, spray-painted props. Elegant actresses pull off their wigs and wipe the rouge from their faces, grumbling to no one in particular and worrying aloud about their cabs. Musical instruments that five minutes earlier had enskied the audience are now cleaned of spit and stowed in soiled and nicked cases. Lofty speeches have flown out the clerestory windows. Cranky stage hands push filthy brooms across the boards. Poetry and inspiration, glint and dazzle, iridescence and asterism, sky warriors and tropospheric Himalayas, snakes the size of great rivers, eyes divine and winking, boiling cauldrons and fleecy fields of felt and purple, all, all are gone. Nature’s house lights have come up. The audience gathers its handbags and coats, amidst throat clearing and idle insipid words. A great switch has been thrown and the show is over. So it is when the sun with a final flash and flourish takes leave of his great stage. And so is life when the greatest sun of all, the unending, never begun, and unchanging Being-Bliss, disappears from human view. When I see it, when we all see it, life is made great and endued with meaning and power, force, might, and truth. When, blinded by our own imagined smallness, we close our inner eye to this Oneness, it is as though the sun has set, and the sea of our lives returns to the gray-green boredom of the crepuscule, and the cyclorama of the cloudscape becomes drab and lifeless, losing all claim to our interest.”