Of Wisdom and Sin

Further and further back in time, my mind cannot rest on a moment, it is as if every epoch was a verse in a grand epic poem, which I’ve read too often, and into which my oneness has been dissolved. Who am I now — the traveler, the lover, the saint: who were they, were they not me? They have it wrong; one soul does not pass from body to body, from age to age… it emerges, it acts, it dissolves back into the infinite realm, where it comingles with other streams of its kind. We are an intermixed breed, not only in our blood, but also in the essential fluxes of our being. My ideas are those once conceived by George Eliot, by a mendicant in the wilderness of Palestine, a sage in the foothills of the Himalayas… all, nothing, part of nothing and all. A rabbit, a fox, a wolf.

The old trees in the deep forest, their roots are deep, they are the only ones with pure, untouched souls. No, says the owl of Minerva — is it my time to go? so soon? — my mistress died, she is that redwood which stands in Alaska. Every god, deva, gandharva… they were reborn in forest under which the rishis gained their wisdom, to build a new epoch without their celestial presence among mortals. Mortals! They were mortals too. Or, are we all immortals?

I must find a tree. Sit under a tree, and starve to death, waiting for an awakening that will never come — my streams of being are mingled with too many dark essences, I have sinned in every age.