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How Emily Bronte found her Divine Self

No coward soul is mine,
No trembler in the world’s storm-troubled sphere:
I see Heaven’s glories shine,
And Faith shines equal, arming me from Fear.

O God within my breast,
Almighty, ever-present Deity!
Life, that in me has rest,
As I, undying Life, have power in Thee!

Vain are the thousand creeds
That move men’s hearts: unutterably vain;
Worthless as withered weeds,
Or idlest froth amid the boundless main,

To waken doubt in one
Holding so fast by Thy infinity,
So surely anchored on
The steadfast rock of Immortality.

With wide-embracing love
Thy Spirit animates eternal years,
Pervades and broods above,
Changes, sustains, dissolves, creates, and rears.

Though earth and moon were gone,
And suns and universes ceased to be,
And Thou wert left alone,
Every existence would exist in Thee.

There is not room for Death,
Nor atom that his might could render void:
Thou–thou art Being and Breath,
And what thou art may never be destroyed.

Emily Bronte wrote the foregoing only a matter of weeks before her death, revealing a profundity of spiritual realization that belied her confined nineteenth-century rural Yorkshire background. Upanishadic as the above stanzas may be, the insights expressed therein seem to have arisen totally from within her own divine spirit. Years before she penned these lines, she wrote a poem in which the experience of samadhi is described as well as it can be. (There is a very slight chance that during her brief period of education in Brussels she might have come across a French translation of the Upanishads. This would not, however, account for the Advaitic content of her poetry written before that time.

Emily Bronte has something in common with Arjuna: she was facing death. She was facing her own imminent death, and Arjuna was facing the surety of death for many he beheld on both sides assembled on the battlefield of Kurukshetra, as well as the likelihood of his own death. From the depths of her own immortal self (atma) the assurance of immortality arose in the mind and heart of Emily. From the front of his chariot, the voice of Krishna entered into the ears of Arjuna, awakening his innate understanding, enabling him to see, as did Emily Bronte, the truth of his own immortal being.

One thing that marks out the various world religions from the vision of the Vedic rishis is the fact that they all claim to have a “new” message for a “new” age, a heretofore unheard-of annunciation of truth. The rishis, quite to the contrary, knew–and said–that they were speaking eternal facts that were no more geared to the times or contemporary than are the principles of mathematics. Consequently, as Sri Ramakrishna stated: “The Hindu religion alone is the Sanatana Dharma. The various creeds you hear of nowadays have come into existence through the will of God and will disappear again through His will. They will not last forever.…The Hindu religion has always existed and will always exist.” (The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, p. 642) The religion of the Vedas, Upanishads, and Bhagavad Gita alone are the Eternal Religion (Sanatana Dharma), for it is oriented toward eternity, not toward time, and takes into consideration only the Unchanging in the midst of the ever-changing.

Just as it was the spirit, the true self, of Emily Bronte that was speaking in this poem, so it is our own true self that is speaking to us through the mouth of Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita. When I first read the Gita, I did not have a sense of reading some ancient document or primeval wisdom spoken through the lips of a long-departed sage or avatar. Rather I felt that my own soul was speaking to me directly, that I was being taught by my own self guiding me toward realization of my ultimate Self: God. I did not “accept” or “adopt” a religion–I awoke to the truth of myself and God. The Vedic sages did not have a religion in the commonly accepted sense: they had a Vision. And the Gita called me to that same vision, and pointed me toward meditation (yoga as the only means of gaining it. The Gita gave me a pretty good idea of yoga, and Patanjali filled in the rest. Although she had no such books to guide and inspire her, the Yogi of Haworth, Emily Bronte, nonetheless attained the Vision by turning within and letting her inmost consciousness lead her to the Divine Center.

• Read more about the Bhagavad Gita.
• Coming soon: A full commentary on the Bhagavad Gita as a free PDF download.

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