VBT – Meditation 92.4
Poetic Statements
To religion love is the highest knowledge. That is why religion is expressed more in poetic terms than in scientific ones. Scientific terms cannot be used, they belong to the realm of knowing. Poetry can be used. And those who have come to know reality through love, whatsoever they say becomes poetry. The Upanishads, the Vedas, the sayings of Jesus or Buddha or Krishna, they are all poetic statements.
It is not just a coincidence that all the old religious scriptures are written in poetry. It has a significance. It shows that there is some affinity between the world of a poet and the world of a mystic. The mystic is also using the language of the heart.
The poet is only a mystic in certain moments of flight, just as when you jump you can go away from the gravitation of the earth, but you again come back to it. A poet means a person who has been for some seconds on a flight into the world of the mystics. He has had some glimpses. A mystic is one who has gone beyond gravitation completely, who lives in the world of love, who lives through the heart. This has become his very abode. For the poetic person it is just a glimpse: sometimes he falls down from the head to the heart. But this is just for the time being – again he goes back to the head. So if you see a beautiful poem, don’t try to see the poet who has written it because you will not meet the same person. You will be disappointed because you will meet a very ordinary man.
He had a glimpse. For certain moments reality was revealed to him and he came down to the heart.
But he doesn’t know the passage. He is not the master of it. It has been happening and he cannot move to it by his own will.
When Coleridge died he left about forty thousand incomplete poems. He really completed only seven poems in his whole life. He became a great poet, one of the greatest in the world, but he was asked many times, “Why do you go on piling up incomplete poems, and when are you going to complete them?” He said, “I cannot do anything. Sometimes a few lines come to me and then they stop. So how can I complete them? I will wait. I will have to wait. If it happens again and the glimpse comes to me, and I again have the world revealed to me, the reality, then I will complete it. But on my own I can do nothing.” He must have been a very sincere poet. To find such sincere poets is difficult, because the tendency of the mind is to supply. If three lines have come then you will supply the fourth, and the fourth will kill all the three because it will come from a very lower state of mind – when you are back on the earth.
When you jumped, and you were freed for some moments from gravitation, you had a different dimension of being.
A poet moves on the earth but sometimes he jumps. In those jumps he has glimpses. A mystic lives in the heart. He doesn’t move on the earth, the heart has become his abode. So he doesn’t really create poetry but whatsoever he does becomes poetic, whatsoever he says becomes poetry.
Really, a mystic cannot use prose because his prose is also poetry – it is coming through the heart, it is coming through love.
PUT MINDSTUFF IN SUCH INEXPRESSIBLE FINENESS, ABOVE, BELOW AND IN YOUR HEART. The heart is your total being, and when you are total you can know the total – remember this. Only the similar can know the similar. When you are fragmentary you cannot know the total.
Tags: Poetic Statements
