A SAINT'S DIARY ... 1

I feel a great austerity dawning on my soul as I drift into the river of God. I feel a wonderful freedom --- freedom from the cares of the world, freedom from the shackles of life, freedom from the bondage of the body. There is a repose in me far from the hustle of life where no one raises the dust of desire besetting me. I feel a tranquillity that soothes, a transcendence that seems an altered reality and an unearthly peace that settles the warring forces within me to relocate me in the innocence of infancy, of a variant hue, of a higher order. Boundless am I, perfect am I, infinitude is my status among the finities of the world.

This life is a passing dream, a career of inconsequence, a plaything for the soul. Who knows what awaits, who cares to know? Life lingers on awaiting deliverance from the forces that forge it. In the fullness of the season of bloom shall efflorescence be and then the fruition of love for the withering of this world like a tale told in a void that never was. This paradox predominates the plurality of suppositions and must wither away when knowledge dawns of the essence of things. Then the vision clears and the Self is seen as the immutable being, eternal, solitary, the One without a possible second, lonesome beyond repair, the imperishable reality, the ground of all existence, Existence itself.

On the verge of such a shore am I standing while the billows keep lashing against the rocks that guard the citadels of consciousness, the frothy edges of the waves keep kissing the sands of time. I wonder what it is to be free after all this terrestrial dream, this horrible nightmare of a ghoulish existence when every impulse tends towards captivity within the confines of this finite form and lends immeasurable suffering to the soul. What will be the release like, whither am I bound when boundless I am?

The mood of the moment encompasses all of time as I behold the panoramic existence of colour and light through the mist of Maya but yet discern that all this is unreal in eventual terms. I stand gazing on the infinite stretch of the beyond from the interface of life with a drifting appreciation of all that has been and all that may yet perchance for the future is unknown even to the discerning soul till final freedom squashes it all to a point of gravitating end when Maya disappears in a final act of self-delusion and the Self is revealed in all its majesty or perhaps not.

Right now the ripples surface and dissolve in an unceasing stream of quasi-consciousness where truth and untruth play about in the haze of inwardness tending to illumination that waits in the wings of the theatre that life is. I hang on with it, for that which is mine may not be denied me and liberation is the life to be even as bondage drops off forever. Om!