Mystery before and Mystery behind,
A nothing Now, a tremble and a fall—
God of the future, Devil of the past,
Man of the meaningless moment—here I stand.
Great thought is all; life is a shell by the sea.
When the great thought knows Him who moves in the deep,
Joining the Self to the Self across the Self,
Come, Gone and Now are the Flame that licks up Time.

What is Mystery? What will it be after? This now is but nothing so full of tremble and fall. What is it to brood over? God of the future, Devil of the past and Man of the meaningless moment are the things which we cannot let it go. Great thought is all that we seek to know and barring it there is nothing. Life is a shell by the sea. Man can know Him through great thoughts and ideas which but can lead unto him otherwise He is inaccessible and unreachable, beyond the reach of human thought and idea, mortal notions of life and death.

Our journey is a spiritual journey. Our craving is a spiritual craving and we are but seekers after truth. Mystical Light, Metaphysical Transformation is the thing. Self to Self, our progression is from Self to Self through Self. Come, Gone and Now are the Flame that licks up time. Fractions and fissions will continue rake up and will never come to a stop as because these are elemental processes of making and unmaking. What it is present will turn into past, what it is yet to come will also lose luster. If the mind is small, one may not know Him, if the heart is so. To know is to be of a larger dimension and spectrum.

Our journey needs to be from the Mind to the Greater Mind, the Heart to the Greater Heart. To know Him is to dive deep, delve deeper and delve into the Mysteries and to feel the Miracles. If the swan dips it not, can it find the pearls? If you do it not the lotus-seated meditation, can you be endowed with Divine Bliss? Mystery is for to delve deep and Miracle is to look back in astonishment. Let us be entwined with the Greater self.

Time has been excerpted from K.D. Sethna’s book The Adventure of the Apocalypse which appeared in 1949 from Sri Aurobindo Circle, Bombay. Sethna who comes from an affluent family of Bombay was well-read before he came to join the Pondicherry Ashram to be a disciple of Sri Aurobindo and Mira Alfassa and an ashramite. A seeker after truth and a sadhaka, better known as Amal Kiran had been Director of Sri Aurobindo Archives and Research Library, Pondicherry. A journalist, an editor, a critic, a poet, a sadhaka, an ashramite, he was a Parsi man, the great disciple of Maharshi Aurobindo, like teacher like disciple. His literary letters and correspondences are a look on the literature of the time. He was a great critic of Aurobindo shedding light on Aurobindo Studies.

Poetry is cathartic and purgatory as has written earlier poetry while recuperating or recovering from serious illness. The poem entitled Time is a brooding over time, what it is time, how does it go sliding and gliding. What is that lasts it? What is it substantial? What is the essence of life, the sum total?