Attaining the INFINITE within the FINITE

The following extracts from Tagore’s ‘MY REMINISCENCES’ helped me to understand my life here in the ashram now taking care of my mother.  Particularly Tagore’s words, ‘the Sanyasi BUSY casting away his all, and himself, into the self-evolved infinite of his IMAGINATION,’ caught my attention.  When I read this I reflected about my present life which almost tells the same story.  There is no need for me to write further comments as Tagore’s words themselves speak about the ‘joy of attaining the infinite within the finite’.  There are so many verses from Hindu Scriptures and other Scriptures endorse this view.  As most of you are familiar with them I am not going to quote them leaving you to contemplate in this eternal truth of merging the ‘infinite within the finite’.  Though I am busy in taking care of my mother, I find time to write poems but no mood to translate them in English and read lots of books and enjoying my time alone with God and nature.  So I thought of sharing this extract with you so that you too can find some lesson to learn from Tagore’s words.

DB

31-10-2022, Gurukulam.

Rabindranath Tagore, My Reminiscences, London, Macmillan, Reprint, October, 1917 [Note the year of publication–db]:

              Here in Karwar [in then Bombay Presidency now I think in Gujarat] I wrote the Prakritir Pratishodha (Nature’s Revenge), a dramatic poem. The hero was a Sanyasi (hermit) who had been striving to gain a victory over Nature by cutting (p.236) away the bonds of all desires and affections and thus to arrive at a true and profound knowledge of self. A little girl, however, brought him back from his communion with the infinite to the world and into the bondage of human affection.  On so coming back the Sanyasi realised that the great is to be found in the small, the infinite within the bounds of form, and the eternal freedom of the soul in love. It is only in the light of love that all limits are merged in the limitless.

              The sea beach of Karwar is certainly a fit place in which to realise that the beauty of Nature is not a mirage of the imagination, but reflects the joy of the Infinite and thus draws us to lose ourselves in it. Where the universe is expressing itself in the magic of its laws it may not be strange if we miss its infinitude; but where the heart gets into immediate touch with immensity in the beauty of the meanest of things, is any room left for argument?

              Nature took the Sanyasi to the presence of the Infinite, by the pathway of the heart. In the Nature’s Revenge there were shown on the one side the wayfarers and the villagers, content with their home-made triviality and unconscious of anything beyond; (p.237) and on the other the Sanyasi busy casting away his all, and himself, into the self-evolved infinite of his imagination.  When love bridged the gulf between the two, and the hermit and the householder met, the seeming triviality of the finite and the seeming emptiness of the infinite alike disappeared.

              This was to put in a slightly different form the story of my own experience, of the entrancing ray of light which found its way into the depths of the cave into which I had retired away from all touch with the outer world, and made me more fully one with Nature again. This Nature’s Revenge may be looked upon as an introduction the whole of my future literary work; or, rather this has been the subject on which all my writings have dwelt—the joy of attaining the Infinite within the finite.—pp.236-238

…Emptiness is a thing man cannot bring himself to believe in; that which is not, is untrue; that which is untrue, is not. So our efforts to find something, where we see nothing, are unceasing.—p. 258

              So having escorted them to the door of the inner sanctuary I take leave of my readers.—p. 272