English poets and Advaita Vedanta

Literature is itself is a philosophy, though some critics differ, there are innumerable literary examples of visionary poets revealing primeval truths. These poetic revelations are universal spiritual truths to which no one person, age or religion can lay exclusive claims.

Tennyson acknowledges that inteelect is not potent enough to realise ultimate reality- it only “stirs the surface- shadow “but never “hath dipt into…/ the abysm of all abysms”. Vedic scriptures declare the illusory dualistic veil or surface- shadow as ‘maya’. This is something we need to overcome.

Mystics perceive reality through self- realization and poets and thinkers perceive it through imagination. Once they experience out- of- body consciousness, poets reach the realm of pure consciousness and self esteems “to dissolve and fade away into boundless being; and this is not a confused state, but the clearest of the clearest… the loss of personality seeming not extinction but the only true life”. Tennyson here conveys the essence of Advaita Vedanta, the cardinal tenet which is the same. Brahmin alone is real. The universe is unreal, and the individual soul is none other than the universal soul.

On the death of Keats, Shelley knew; “He hath awakened from the dream of life”. Wordsworth feels the same state when the “breath of this corporeal frame” is “almost suspended” and then “we are laid asleep in body, become a living soul”. D. H Lawrence is over joyed at the prospect of discarding his flesh “Like luggage of some departed traveler”.

A parallel is found in the autobiography of Sri. Yogananda; “The flesh was as though dead, yet in m,y intense awareness I knew that never before had I been fully alive…The spirit of God, I realized, is exhaustless Bliss”.

Evidently this state is not confined to sages. Plato regarded this divine madnedd to be a divine blessing granted to man. Saint     Paul and Francis of Assissi are reported to have fallen in to the same ecstatic trance. The poet William Blake confidently said; “I am I n God’s prescence night and day”. In this mystical trance, which is seeming the the soul with bodily eyes closed, is when we receive the highest kind of intuitive knowledge.

In the Kathopanishad, Yama tells Nachiketa that the supreme person, the size of a tomb, dwells forever in the hearts of all being. Krishna assures us in the Gita that He is seated in the heart of all beins. Christ knew that the kingdom of Heaven is within us.

Poets are born, not made. Socretes says what poets compose they compose not by wisdom but because they are inspired. The purest creative moments of their inspiration have filled literature with pure magic. Entirely different from the tradition of mystics, their vision nevertheless contributes to our spiritual heritage.