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from The Enchanted Garden

Another record replaced it - Carnatic music.  The first notes suddenly of unprecedented importance, sounded as if struck inside the ear itself.  Never in life had such music been heard so close by.  It gathered us up in its passage.  The inner force of India, more intensified still; it introduced distinction, urged grandeur, united with fervour, an impersonal fervour.

As water moves forward in the bed of a river, so the music moved forward in the bed of my being, conveying, maintaining spaciousness and a longing for spaciousness.

..........And the garden was there, quite differently there.  From the beginning a subtle depth had reached its limits.  Now we had someting quite different and even a quite different garden.  Without ever leaving, the music had united with it, in a union I could not understand, so intimate that I was forgetting it, a union particularly strong with the dominant tree over there which had a very leafy double crown, moving, ceaselessly moving, in uneven tumultuous movements, embraced by a breeze that had become 'passionate' - an unheard whole.

Crazy aspirations were speeding and it seemed feeding in hundreds of branches and leaves - longings made marvelously generous, natural overflowing, by the sounds of an invisible vina.  I had seen it as so unpromising, with no particular character or style when I had walked into it and by it and now this ordinary garden was suddenly changed had become a paradise garden....

So it was possible, and no apple, no serpent, no punishing God, only the unhoped for paradise....

A breeze had arisen, waking the sleeping branches and the languid leaves with their sovereign spaciousness, expressing bliss, the highest degree of bliss and desire - desire for more bliss...

The exalted world of the east was there, one, total, expresing the highest point of ecstasy in the name of everyone, of everyone on earth....

And now adding to this...... there came a dull strong beat but equally inner, like the hammering of  a heart, a musical heart, from the trees, a heart we didn't know they had, a heart they had hidden from us, born of a great vegetal heart that seemed almost planetary, a heart participating in everything, found at last, perceived at last, audible to those possessed by the sovereign emotion, the one that accompanies every thing that carries away the Universe