PARTING
By Rabindranath Tagore
In God’s creation there is no end to anything. All that is true is continuous. In God’s garden the flower blooms and fades, but when it fades it does not really come to its end. It blooms again and again. The seasons come and go, but they return. In their succession there is truth. So all true relations, all true happiness, are continuous. They are not merely temporary. In their succession they do not really cease.
In man’s works there is this taint of death. Most of our activities are unmeaning. Our energies are employed in supplying ourselves with things and pleasures. They have no eternity in the background. Therefore we try to give things an appearance of permanence by adding to them. Man in his anxiety to prolong his pleasure tries simply to make additions, and we are afraid to stop, because we fear that it must some day come to an end.
But truth is not afraid to be small, to come to an end,—just as a poem, when it is finished, is not really dead. Not because a poem is composed of endless lines. If that were so we should know that the poem was not true. The true poem knows when to come to an end. It has attached itself to some permanent ideal of man, which belongs to all men and is the inner principle of all creation. If a poem has reached this ideal of perfection, then it knows that, by stopping, it does not die, but live.
So the true meeting can afford to stop, because it never comes to an end, but has its continuity in truth. Where we are true, we are immortal. When we are on the side of truth, we are on the side of immortality. But man scatters his life by giving it up for objects which are meaningless in themselves. We make these our ends and then it becomes a life of death.
In our everyday world we meet many men; but they pass like shadows over our life. But where we meet in truth, there all is different. Here, in this corner of the country, we have come together. You long for truth, as I do. We are all children crying in the dark for our eternal Mother, but we do not know that she is in the same bed with us all the time. We do not know this, and we think that we are separated. But when the lamp is lit we know that the Mother has been here all the while. Then we find that we are children of the same Mother, that amid differences of race, and climate, we are children of the same Mother, and the cry of India, “Lead us from the unreal to the real, from darkness to light, from death to immortality,” rises from our lips. When we listen to that prayer we know that these differences are the unreal, and that the Real is that we are one. Under these trees we have called Him in united voices our Father, and we have come to know that this is our true relationship; it can never be lost, but will continue deep in our souls.
Our personal relationship with this world was begun in love—Mother brought us into the world, Father’s love cherished and nourished us there. Gradually through the keynote of this love we could see that only this relationship was final. The objects of our passionate desires were either destructive or shadowy things. Life becomes unreal when filled up with them. But when we meet with each other in God, then our life is continuous in truth. It has not this element of falsehood in it. That is what we must remember. Here we have got the meaning of the words, “Lead us from the unreal to the Real.”
When we take food, that food is assimilated into our body, and it goes on with its work of creation. But if we eat dust or gravel, it is not creative, but destructive. So the true relationship with man is creative. Under these trees, this very meeting will be creative in our lives and become truer every day. It is true that, like God’s daylight, all its energies may be shrouded under night’s darkness for a time, but it lives again. So with all true relations. These will remain to the end of our lives and will not be lost. These will grow into some great life, which will have its fulfilment of purpose in the days to come. And I offer my prayer to God that He may lead us from all that is trivial, unmeaning, disconnected, and unrelated to the truth of love.
Lead us unto the Real, the Truth which is Eternal, from darkness which blinds us to the infinite truth, that Thou art our Father in truth. Deliver us from that darkness of desire; that smallness of heart. Bring us unto the light.
From death, lead us to the Deathless. From all that is perishable, lead us to truth that is eternal.
THE END
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