Like gods disfigured by the pangs of birth,
Seized the great words which now are frail sounds caught
By difficult rapture on a mortal tongue. (pg.677)
What does the line ‘Like gods disfigured by the pangs of birth’ mean? Does it allude to anything symbolic or is it simply a spiritual truth that when divine beings come on earth, they suffer too?
It is the actual experience of a god each time he or she takes a human birth. The consciousness of a true, great god is high and vast and pure. But the human consciousness and the human instruments of speech and action, let alone the world conditions do not support this vastness that suffers a diminution in the passage from the higher realms to the lower. The diminution also means certain limitations imposed by the human state just as the purest water from the Ganga would get mixed with various pollutants as it courses down or is squeezed into a small vessel that has human and animal elements inevitably sticking to it since such is the human vessel designed by Nature so far. Even when intuitive rains enter the human mind and brain it suffers a diminution of its original impulsion and even distortions due to the imperfections of the human instrument. That is why great poets often had to labour again and again to perfect the poem as they knew that the expression is not as perfect as the original intuition. Receiving a revelation on inner heights during meditation or as sudden illumination is one thing and expressing it through human speech is quite another. That requires a double perfection, – higher and lower. The higher perfection puts us in contact with the higher realms of vast, luminous forces, vibrations and states of consciousness. But these cannot be expressed until there is some degree of lower perfection, the perfection of the natural instruments that have evolved so far only to express the animal modified by the human and not yet the consciousness of a god.
Affectionately,
Alok Da
