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But all of a sudden a sweet voice filled the place of this darkness. A mirage like an elf rose up from the host and ripped all at once the thick darkness, for hearts which sought a little light to breathe. ‘I am the immortal Soul of the world, because without soul no one would exist, the world would be void in meaning and connection. And Love is my own Soul which leads my passing in the worlds. I speak through all the beings when arrogance is absent from them. How have you dared, you fool, to imagine that only you have a soul in all this world? Did you hear it leading you - that you are a king over relics of bodies? What sort of king is he whose lot is a condemnation to live in a country truly empty of life? And since men, as you say, have themselves a soul, why do they kill one another and have filled their streets with death and violence and have shattered the warmth of life which rocked the future in its cradle? I am the Great Soul and the little souls belong to me. The destiny of the world was written before the beginning of the great time, with a fiery seal on the everywhere, undefeated by the world and the beings. How could the beings and the world ever defeat themselves? The performance is not life and never possesses victory. It is a mirroring of life, but you must read it well, otherwise you are lost in the black shadows of error which darkened the hearts and those died, choked by the dark. How is it possible for the Soul to dwell in a world so empty, next to beings which are truly soulless and non-existent? The Soul blows everywhere like the hope of life which leads the beings on an impulse to lightning flashes of glory beyond time where Love and the Aim, fiery waves of life which sweep the worlds, in an ecstasy of joy empty the performance of the meanings which were not its own.’ The beings of this earth wept on hearing the final hope, for a little while the black veils of darkness were opened and light was poured out like a vision everywhere, which like an undissolved memory would support the beings on the unbearable roads of affliction. The king falls to the ground as if wounded. The symbols of the mind and of power were scattered on the earth. Head and hands stripped of adornments, a poverty without inner meaning shining within it. And the Soul stretches out a hand to the man who lies before it, for him to receive in the depth of his heart that strange equality of the unknown purpose which governs the beings. But the king turned away his face with anger and great vehemence: ‘Go! Phantom of the dark! Man will conquer you.’ And so the hand of the Soul alone remained over the breath of the world. Empty it seemed and luckless for the rich shadows of the earth which hid desires and pleasures for the roads of men, and it wished to extinguish them in that emptiness of it which frightened men and they did not let go from their hands what they were holding, toils of generations and of endless years. And the king continued in a voice which weak sounded in the brilliance: ‘We have made so many good things in this wild world for protection, for life, for the delight of man - much knowledge has collected in the mind which we alone have fashioned in the blood of our heart, and you, wicked ghost, seek to scatter the things that we have to the wind for the sake of a nothing which is all our own?’ And the Soul replied: ‘For your own sake renounce what you have acquired throughout the years. For your soul these things are of no use, in the light they will appear non-existent! All this wisdom of yours has ended up an acquisition without life and died as it thought, stifled in the passions, that the whole world is a machine. But your soul aspires to be free from the earth’s symbols of power and you too seem like a machine to it as long as you see only machines. But love holds it by a golden chain, until you rise up from the mud you have wallowed in and as a pure spirit you rise again from your own waiting depth, or else your world will be reduced in rubble through and through and the ‘machines’ which your mind saw everywhere will take an involuntary revenge through their extinction. The passions have no limits, they spread constantly, to become absolute. Remember this: The first war of this grim world was that of the bodies, where the bodies wrote the history of the world. The second war was that of the mind, a heavy and treacherous weapon in the cold hands of man, which swept away the beings of the earth with images of death even before the violence of the bodies. But now the third great war is about to begin, of man against the Soul, because the Soul will not allow itself to be seen by the scheming thought of man as war against the world.’ The terrible words of the Soul resounded like a thunderbolt and man was seized with fright, but these did not touch him in the depths of his heart, he had an image of the Soul, but no sense of it. ******* The mirage faded and the fearful dark began to spread in the places of the earth. The king drags himself along and looks for his earthly symbols, his trembling hands fumble about in the earth and dust which covered them - the only honour they deserved in this magical world, where the spirit and the body met for one moment only. There is the sceptre and the crown, on the king’s head again, a head full of thought and knowledge, but grown old and humiliated by time, only with memories of small pleasures and fears which could not stand the gaze of joy illumining them, so they could sleep like a night’s dreams which passed and were lost in the morning’s radiance. Laments of the earth which dressed in silken veils to hide the utter loss which has no worldly honour. The king’s crown seemed frayed, its glamour faded, and the power of the sceptre a stale force, a shame hurriedly hidden so as not to meet the eternal gaze. But this picture of feeble power which seemed like a paper toy in the lightning flash of that meeting where man competed against the Soul will be forgotten, because the memory is too frail to endure this burden.
(Photograph by Yiannis Zisis) |
