The ideal of a mystic
is never to think of disagreeable things.
What one does not want to happen one should not
think about. A mystic erases from his mind all the disagreeable
things of the past. He collects and keeps his happy experiences, and
out of them, he makes a paradise. Are there not many unhappy
people who keep part of the past before them, causing
them pain in their heart? Past is past; it is gone.
There is eternity before us.
the nature and work of a mystic
Mountains,
a moment’s earth-waves
rising and hollowing; the earth
too’s an ephemerid; the stars— short-lived
as grass the stars quicken in the nebula and dry
in their summer, they spiral blind up space, scattered
black seeds of a future; nothing lives long, the whole sky’s
recurrences tick the seconds of the hours of the ages of the gulf
before birth, and the gulf after death is like dated: to labor eighty
years in a notch of eternity is nothing too tiresome, enormous repose
after, enormous repose before, the flash of activity. Surely you never
have dreamed the incredible depths were prologue and epilogue
merely to the surface play in the sun, the instant of life, what is
called life? I fancy that silence is the thing, this noise a found
word for it; interjection, a jump of the breath at that silence;
stars burn, grass grows, men breathe: as a man finding
treasure says ‘Ah!’ but the treasure’s the essence;
before the man spoke it was there, and
after he has spoken he gathers it,
inexhaustible treasure.