The Mahatmas KUTHUMI (This poem is purely a play of the imaginative, a poetic reconstruction of the central idea only of Mahatmahood.) The seven mountains and the seven seas Surround me. Over me the eightfold Sun Blazing with various colours – green and blue, Scarlet and rose, violet and gold and white, And the dark disk that rides in the mortal cave – Looks down on me in flame. Below spread wide The worlds of the immortals, tier on tier Like a great mountain climbing to the skies, And on their summit Shiva dwells. Of old My doings were familiar with the earth, The mortals over whom I hold control Were then my fe

Chitrangada In Manipur upon her orient hills Chitrangada beheld intending dawn Gaze coldly in. She understood the call. The silence and in perfect pallor passed Into her heart and in herself she grew Prescient of grey realities. Rising, She gazed afraid into the opening world. Then Urjoon, felt his mighty clasp a void Empty of her he loved and, through the grey Unwilling darkness that disclosed her face, Sought out Chitrangada. "Why dost thou stand In the grey light, like one from joy cast down? O thou whose bliss is sure. Leave that grey space, Come hither." So she came and leaning down, With that strange sorrow in her eyes, replied: “Great, dou

VI POEMS IN NEW METRES Ocean Oneness* Silence is round me, wideness ineffable; White birds on the ocean diving and wandering; A soundless sea on a voiceless heaven, Azure on azure, is mutely gazing. Identified with silence and boundlessness My spirit widens clasping the universe Till all that seemed becomes the Real, One in a mighty and single vastness. Someone broods there nameless and bodiless, Conscious and lonely; deathless and infinite, And, sole in a still eternal rapture, Gathers all things to his heart for ever. * Alcaics. Modulations are allowed, trochee or iamb in the first foot or a long monosyllable; an occasional anapae

CHAPTER XIV The Possibility of a First Step towards International Unity- Its Enormous Difficulties                                THE study of the growth of the nation-unit under the pressure indeed of a growing inner need and idea but by the agency of political, economic and social forces, forms and instruments shows us a progress that began from a loose formation in which various elements were gathered together for unification, proceeded through a period of strong concentration and coercion in which the conscious national ego was developed, fortified and provided with a centre and instruments of its organic life and

1919 THE year 1919 comes to us with the appearance of one of the most pregnant and historic dates of the modern world. It has ended the greatest war in history, begotten a new thing in the history of mankind, a League of Nations which claims to be the foundation-stone for the future united life of the human race, and cleared the stage for fresh and momentous other constructions or destructions, which will bring us into another structure of society and of the framework of human life than has yet been known in the recorded memory of the earth's peoples. This is record enough for a single year and it looks as if there were already sufficient to give this date an undisputed pree

CHAPTER VI Ancient and Modern Methods of Empire A CLEAR distinction must be made between ,two political aggregates which go equally in current language by name of empire. For there is the homogeneous national and there is the heterogeneous composite empire. In a sense, all empires are composites, at any rate, if we go back to their origins; but in practice there is a difference between the imperial aggregate in which the component elements are not divided from other by a strong sense of their separate existence in the ole and the imperial aggregate in which this psychological is of separation is still in vigour. Japan before the absorption ,Fo

CHAPTER XXVI The Need of Administrative Unity IN ALMOST all current ideas of the first step towards international organisation, it is taken for granted that the nations will continue to enjoy their separate existence and liberties and will only leave to international action the prevention of war, the regulation of dangerous disputes, the power of settling great international questions which they cannot settle by ordinary means. It is impossible that the development should stop there; this first step would necessarily lead to others which could travel only in one direction. Whatever authority were established, if it is to be a true authority in any degree a

CHAPTER X Aesthetic and Ethical Culture THE idea of culture begins to define itself for us a little more clearly, or at least it has put away from it in a clear contrast its natural opposites. The unmental, the purely physical life is very obviously its opposite, it is barbarism; the unintellectualised vital, the crude economic or the grossly domestic life which looks only to money-getting, the procreation of a family and its maintenance, are equally its opposites; they are another and even uglier barbarism. We agree to regard the individual who is dominated by them and has no thought of higher things as an uncultured and undeveloped human being, a prolon

CHAPTER XXIII Conditions for the Coming of a Spiritual Age                       A CHANGE of this kind, the change from the mental and vital to the spiritual order of life, must necessarily be accomplished in the individual and in a great number of individuals before it can lay any effective hold upon the community. The Spirit in humanity discovers, develops, builds into form in the individual man: it is through the progressive and formative individual that it offers the discovery and the chance of a new self-creation to the mind of the race. For the communal mind holds things subconsciently at first or, if consciously, then in a confus