Maharaj Kaul

There is something about today I do not know:
It is wildly quiescent, uneasily reposed;
The air is heavy and light laboriously languid.
My apparent malaise seems to have a deep
Wound supporting it – the placid mouth of
A turbulent volcano, gentle plumes of smoke
Fronting a caravan of gushing flames.

I have been traveling on this earth oven fifty years now
But the journey has never been smooth.
What is it, I often wonder, that is behind my melancholic vision,
Sorrowed immersion in life, asynchrony with its grand demands?
Why do I have to bleed often on the hallowed white sheen of life,
Pay twice with pain for every joy I have?

The doctor thought that I suffered from
A long childhood love deprivation,
That matured into the steel cage of
Gloom around me. Lying on the couch helplessly,
I thought that supposititious conclusion was emblematic of
Science’s continuing ignorance of the interiors of human mind.

I was not a loveless child, nor inclined to low spirits.
My sorrow is a long story of my developing awareness of the
World that I gained, as I journeyed gingerly through its labyrinthine alleys.
The world hidden by a million facades,
The world run by a million hypocrisies –
The paralyses of imagination, the corrosion of the human spirit.

Man is spinning the efficient wheels of technology –
Turning life into a cold clockwork.
But does that encourage the rapture of experience,
Enrich and expand consciousness?
Will the big business give us the big joy of living?
These things are for ease and not for soul.

The blazing goal of this civilization is to make money,
But people do not realize that materials do not
Connect well with the human spirit.
And without human spirit there is no meaningful life.
A temporary high can not a life make,
Nor can provisions against insecurity substitute happiness.

Sex is the big apple of the current culture,
Next to money the best thing man can have.
Nature did attach high pleasure with procreation,
But sensual pleasure can not be the driving force of life,
As it has a week mental coefficient,
Making it narrow, fixated, and unsustainable.

Like the galaxies in the deep space,
Everyone in today’s culture is running in a drunken frenzy.
They do not know what they are running away from,
But they know they are running to the next thing to do.
There is too much passion, without reflection,
Which boils over, creating emptiness, evolving into a void.

Come Love let us leave this world together,
For here we have endured a million pains,
Our spirits suffered a million insults.
Our past is a mosaic of our failures and fierce courage,
Our present a windblown string of fragile pendant hopes,
Future looks to be a concatenation of everyday lives.

Lord made human life capable of rewarding spiritual experience,
Studded with a high potential for creativity.
The short journey was meant to be
A celestial dance over the worldly abyss,
Broken now and then to help the unfortunate fellow humans,
And offer obeisance to nature.

But from Lord’s conception to man’s execution,
Many foreign and strange elements intervened,
Making a mockery of the original blueprints.
Looking at the potential of human life
And the actual work accomplished,
The mind recoils and the heart feels stabbed.

The material greed of man is limitless.
When and how it contaminated human life is obscure,
But once having found its root, it has been
Virtually impossible to get rid of.
Instead of stemming its wildly poisonous growth,
Modern man has lavishly built on it.

Today’s man celebrates his freedom endlessly,
Thinking he has created a new spirituality.
His illusions are deep, his salvation will take ages.
The present reign of darkness will stay long,
Till one day an avatar will be born to
Free him from the shimmering bondages and give him real freedom.

Why should we live wounded and withered,
Why should we stain the chalice of nectar we came with?
(Sin has no size – the little sin is equal to the large sin)
Why should we sleepwalk at noon,
And be in continual stupor?
Come Love let us leave this world together.

I can not be compressed any more with my worldly woes,
So I have to find relief in the seascape of Montessory.
Here I see the pulsating froth of the sea waves –
Timeless sentinels of freedom that we came with but lost to the world.
Montessory vacuums out my poisons and lofts me in the direction of the horizon.
I feel unburdened at the moment and free to move in any direction.

The mirth and frolics at the beach, the skinny freedom, the beckoning horizon,
Conspire to change the stage of life. Away from the Wall Street cannibalism,
Distant from the political shenanigans, cut off from the insane man-made stresses,
The buffeting beach breeze buoys the trammeled spirits to live,
Frees the long repressed desire to be an element of nature.
The mercy of Montessory Beach is immense.