II
SHOWING THAT THE LIFE OF THE SELF COMES FROM FORMING IDEALS AND BRINGING THEM TO BIRTH.
| LIFE is preserved by purpose | |
| Because of the goal its caravan-bell tinkles. | |
| Life Is latent in seeking, | |
| Its origin is hidden in desire. | 270 |
| Keep desire alive in thy heart, | |
| Lest thy little dust become a tomb. | |
| Desire is the soul of this world of hue and scent, | |
| The nature of everything is a storehouse of desire. | |
| Desire sets the heart dancing in the breast. | 275 |
| And by its glow the breast is made bright as a mirror. | |
| It gives to earth the power of soaring. | |
| It is a Khizr to the Moses of perception.36 | |
| From the flame of desire the heart takes life, | |
| And when it takes life, all dies that is not true. | 280 |
| When it refrains from forming desires, | |
| Its opinion breaks and it cannot soar. | |
| Desire keeps the Self in perpetual uproar. | |
| It is a restless wave of the Self's sea. | |
| Desire is a noose for hunting ideals, | 285 |
| A binder of the book of deeds. | |
| Negation of desire is death to the living, | |
| Even as absence of heat extinguishes the flame. | |
| What is the source of our wakeful eye? | |
| Our delight in seeing hath taken visible shape. | 290 |
| The partridge's leg is derived from the elegance of its gait, | |
| The nightingale's beak from its endeavour to sing. | |
| Away from the seed-bed, the reed became happy: | |
| The music was released from its prison.37 | |
| What is the essence of the mind that strives after new discoveries and scales the heavens? | 295 |
| Knowest thou what works this miracle | |
| 'Tis desire that enriches Life, | |
| And the mind is a child of its womb. | |
| What are social organisation, customs and laws? | |
| What is the secret of the novelties of science? | 300 |
| A desire which realised itself by its own strength | |
| And burst forth from the heart and took shape. | |
| Nose, hand, brain, eye, and ear, | |
| Though, imagination, feeling, memory, and understanding | |
| All these are weapons devised by Life for self-preservation | 305 |
| In its ceasless struggle, | |
| The object of science and art is not knowledge, | |
| The object of the garden is not the bud and the flower | |
| Science is an instrument for the preservation of Life. | |
| Science is a means of invigorating the Self. | 310 |
| Science and art are servants of Life, | |
| Slaves born and bred in its house. | |
| Rise, O thou who art strange to Life 's mystery, | |
| Rise intoxicated with the wine of an ideal, | 315 |
| An ideal shining as the dawn, | |
| A blazing fire to all that is other than God, | |
| An ideal higher than Heaven— | |
| Winning, captivating, enchanting men's hearts | |
| A destroyer of ancient falsehood, | |
| Fraught with turmoil, and embodiment of the Last Day. | 320 |
| We live by forming ideals, | |
| We glow with the sunbeams of desire! |