Ten Thousand Flower-Flames is not a medley of heterogenous elements. Ultimately, like the Rig Veda, its general character is homogenous: the many blend into the one and we see before us a vast visionary universe wherein all the stages of the soul are faithfully enacted.
This concordance of spiritual truths is guaranteed a sure place in our literature by virtue of the fact that it is consonant with man’s deepest and most enduring beliefs. The era has passed when it was popular to disclaim the value of general truth and to hold personal or psychological truth as our only valid touchstone. Now, once more, we are beginning to perceive the essential harmony of all great religions and systems of thought We have had our private epiphanies, our separate experiences, but as mankind as a whole progressively returns to the idea of the soul, so its universal aspirations are unveiled:
HAPPINESS WILL FOLLOW YOU
Happiness will follow you
If you follow the footsteps
Of the purity-sages
Who sing sleeplessly
For your heart’s illumination
And your life’s perfection.
Where do they sing?
They sing inside the silence-haunted heart
Of your unconscious universality.
(5362)
The individual is still paramount, for it is he alone who must seek out the divinity within himself, but the road along which he is travelling accommodates many other such pilgrims.
Precious to us is the poet who, with a simplicity of heart, may stand among us as representative and express through the medium of language all that he beholds; who may relate to us his own questing in the context of the universal and bring nearer our comprehension all the mysteries of being. For in him, as in the Vedic poets of another age, resides that great power which has the capacity to shape a civilisation and impart to it a sacred dignity and grandeur that it might not otherwise have known.
Despite its strong philosophical content Ten Thousand Flower-Flames is not a text book of a new philosophy. Having arisen from the same intuitive well-spring as the Vedas, it inclines to subordinate intellect to intuition. It is not ratiocinative, as in Western philosophical systems, but is rather the expression of deep spiritual yearnings.
Thousands of years ago the Vedic seers tackled the ultimate questions of the soul and God. These questions remain still and will remain for all time the foremost concerns of man. From the answers that the Vedic seers saw with their intuitive vision there radiated sufficient divine energy to sustain the Indian culture for thousands of years. And yet, powerful as they once were, the Vedas are now almost wholly the province of scholars. A fresh cycle has begun and a new collection of spiritual truths has emerged as its primary document. Ten Thousand Flower-Flames is an efflorescence of Vedic knowledge ripened by a mature poet into a major literary work of the modern age. Where the Vedas embody the vigour and freshness of the morning of mankind, Ten Thousand Flower-Flames is incandescent with the light of mankind’s meridian.