First Stanza: “As a dream melts deep”
In the first stanza of “ The Little Eternity,” the speaker is addressing the Divine, as he likens the process of a sleeper’s consciousness progressing into the stillness of deep sleep to the act of unifying one’s soul with the Oversoul, or God, and he prays that that experience come to all devotees. The goal sought by the spiritual aspirant is exactly to “dissolve in the depth of [God’s] being.”
The speaker then describes precisely the human condition of having to reincarnate into a human body time after time before transcending that necessity, and he deems that repetition “useless, hazardous traveling”: “To fly from dream to dream, / Nightmare to nightmare; / And from birth to rebirth, / Death to repeated deaths.” Suffering dreams, nightmares, and the traumas of birth and death repeated endlessly becomes boring and tiresome to the perfect soul that yearns to recognize its true self.
The speaker then declares that the troublesome repetitions of reincarnations can be avoided if the devotee realizes that “behind the wings of Thy blessings, / My soul can be safe in Thy keeping.” If the devotee unites her soul with the Ultimate Reality, she regains the safety that that realization affords.
Second Stanza: “The universe, so big through the eyes”
In twelve glorious lines, the speaker demolishes the notion that “the universe” of material reality is anything other than “a tiny slimy egg of thought.” What seems “so big” to the tiny human brain as taken in through the eyes is only a fantasy that is “beaten with the egg-beater of fancy, / Frothed up into the fluffy cosmic dream.” The human mind is deluded by the ostensible reality of the material level of being, “With sextillion worlds glimmering, / With Milky Way bubbles shimmering.”
On the contrary, however, this huge mass is nothing more than “a single little thought.” What seems to be a “giant cosmic lot” simply “throbs and lives” in the mind of the beholder, even though this “vast cosmic dream” that is “squeezed into tiniest nothingness” can also “be eternally expanded, tier upon tier, / Into an ever-growing, endless sphere.” Even if the expanding universe doubles, triples, or quadruples its size, it is still the same delusion of the human mind.
Third Stanza: “My body with the universe-name”
The human body is part of the universe, being composed of the same elements of which the universe is composed; thus the universe and the “little, finite frame” of the individual human being “both recede or reside / In my thought’s ebb and tide.” Whether the speaker thinks about the whole universe or his own small body, his thought depends upon the illusion of their reality.
The important fact that the speaker is conveying to the devotee is that the soul of the devotee is the spark of the Divine, “the colossal cosmic God,” because God “lives in my little self’s sod.” The body itself may be perishable sod, but the human soul lives “in His palace of eternity.”
And “He lives in me.” Also, “He dreams in me.” And the Divine finally awakes in the devotee, who had been asleep to His presence. The Divine seems to be dead in the devotee who “sleep[s] in delusion.” But ultimately, though meditation, soulful study, and a cheerful attitude, the devotee realizes, “[God] is reborn in my wisdom-womb’s seclusion.” The soul is the “little eternity,” that abides in the devotee’s “measureless amity.”
Source
- Paramahansa Yogananda, “The Little Eternity,” Songs of the Soul, Self-Realization Fellowship, Los Angeles, 1983.
Linda Sue Grimes - As a writer, researcher, and SRF devotee, Linda Sue Grimes has studied poetry and practiced Kriya Yoga for over thirty years..
