64-66

Active flux
Supporting this
Is this not also piercing through?

Resistant matter; sounds of creaking;
Then burning; boring through.

The following is a love poem to God by His devotee, Mirabai, who shunned her family, and her arranged marriage, for God in the form of Krishna. Krishna is her Muse. Mirabai was one of the great ascetics of sixteenth century India:

Just let me go to the mountain.
As night falls I set out to find him,
The One who lives in everyone's heart.
I do not return until dawn.
It is my daily journey; how I live,
Wearing the clothes He gives me and
Eating the food he brings.
I want to please Him.
I am rooted in the ancient path of love.
Mirabai's house is in the energy of the Mountains.1

67-69

Opposing words (a thousand words)
Entering the bones.

An archetype must be involved when one truly loves whether it be for mortal or a god. Love for the archetype cannot be seen as merely love, "a part of oneself." The archetype has an identity all its own and is separate from the ego. Although one may, like Narcissus, be loving something in someone that reflects what one possesses inside oneself, one usually perceives the beloved as the other. Sometimes it seems more like Aristophanes' version of the two halves of a person uniting in Plato's Symposium.2

God is the perfect lover, for s/he is the perfect completion of the human soul. Thomas Merton says, "The highest perfection of our nature is loving God: loving Him not simply because He is our highest good, but more especially and formally because He is infinitely good in Himself. It is this pure and perfect love that is the glory God asks of us, and it is our highest reward, the ultimate in all happiness possible to man."3 As I said before, many ascetics unite with God as a lover and imply in their writing that they do not miss human love:

The colors of the Dark One have penetrated Mira's body; all the other colors washed out.
Making love with the Dark One and eating little, those are my pearls and carnelians.
Meditation beads and the forehead streak, those are my scarves and my rings.
That's enough feminine wiles for me. My teacher taught me this.
Approve me or disapprove me: I praise the Mountain Energy night and day.
I take the path that ecstatic human beings have taken for centuries.
I don't steal money, I don't (hurt) anyone. What will you charge me with?
I have felt the swaying of the elephant's shoulders; and now you want me to climb on a jackass? Try to be serious.

Mirabai Versions, by Robert Bly

Mirabai; Krishna Dressed as a Dancer; translated by Kathy Ward.
Plato. Symposium; n.d.; rpt. 1948; Macmillan Pub.Co.
Merton, Thomas. A Thomas Merton Reader; Image Books; 1974.

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