Divine Consciousness is poetic

The Deity Krishna once said that the Divine is a poet. And He also said that when we want to perceive the Divine, we can't do that with our usual vision, that we need a transformed vision or transformed sensibility, in order to experience the Divine who is the poet. This poetic aspect of consciousness or reality or nature is central to many ancient wisdom traditions across the world. The poet is the seer, the poet/seer/healer/dancer, you find these constellations in traditions across the world. And of course, many of the ritual traditions are in essence, they are poetic, and they are creative expressions, poetic dance or poetic chanting or poetic art, visual art, that is ritual and ceremonial and poetry.

Today, when we think of poetry, there are many, many kinds of poetry. But when we speak here of the poetic, there are some very particular qualities to the poetic in the realm of Consciousness or the realm of an archetypal tradition. Krishna gives us some clues when He says that if you can't perceive this, in Krishna as words, if you can't perceive Me, in this embodied form, because He has manifested Himself in the human form, and He says, If you can't perceive Me, if you can't perceive the divinity in this embodied form, then you are deluded. So the Divine is invested that divine poetic consciousness is immanent, in matter, it is expressed materially, through our body, through every dimension of Nature, it is not something that is separate from Nature, we don't find that poetic intelligence as separate to matter, but it is it is actually invested in body and in matter, and in every dimension of Nature around us.

This poetic quality has two elements to it. It has many elements, but I think these two elements are helpful. One is that it is of the nature of an outpouring. It's not something that is choreographed and strategically constructed and mastered and carefully brought stewarded out. But it is an outpouring it is something that is that just emerges from us. I'm thinking here of the poetic movement in English literature. One of most famous and my favorite poet, being William Wordsworth, where there were these group of poets who, who just sang or who wrote these poems, about the beauty of Nature, just around them. They all lived in the Lake District in England. And they wrote about the beauty of the Nature around them, and there are some incredibly beautiful and moving poems where you really sense the Divine because of this outpouring, this sensation of outpouring that, that infuses these poems.

The second, which is really important, is the quality of praising. Many of the ancient hymns were hymns of praise. And the reason why this is this is important is because we can be outpouring in many ways. We can have poems that are an outpouring of perhaps our own story, our personal situations, and there's nothing wrong with that. There's a whole movement called confessional poetry, where people are beautifully expressing what is going on in their lives, and there's nothing wrong with that. But here, the element of praise creates a different realm where we are not talking about our story or our experiences, but rather we are drawing our attention towards the beauty that is around us both within and without and kindling and praising that beauty.

Again, in the Indian tradition, there are these long hymns, which are very detailed invocations of a Deity. They go into exquisite detail about how the Deity is adorned, what clothes are they wearing, what are the colours and how do They smell, what are the shapes of their, their eyes, how do they smile. And the reason is because as we embody and the embodying part is really important, as we embody through dance, these praises or these invocations, it kindles those same sensations within us. And then there is no separation between the Deity and our own Consciousness because all of that beauty, all of that a poignancy, all of those adornments that we are praising is also part of us.

And that's what we do when we embody this poetry. We kindle those poetic qualities within us and this is that transformed vision, it doesn't happen by analytically changing of course, poetry is often considered the opposite of analysis. And that is true because we don't create this transformed vision by an analysis or by reading a text or by trying to reframe our ideology, but it is a complete outpouring, experience that kindles that beauty, and poignancy. It's not always about being happy, but that poignancy, which is about the beauty of sensation in everything, there is beauty. Even in those aspects of nature that are difficult, but there is something poignant about that and that is that unconditional beauty, which is the outpouring, which is the praise of the Deity, which then becomes the praise of the Deity within us.