Yogananda's Breathe in Me
Searching for Divine Love
From Paramahansa Yogananda's Songs of the Soul, “Breathe in Me” consists of two unrimed verse paragraphs, the first featuring twelve lines, and the second nine. Also in the second verse paragraph, a six-line refrain emphasizes an important contingent regarding the speaker’s supplication to the Divine.
First Verse Paragraph: “Breathe in me the way to love You”
In the first verse paragraph, the speaker asks the Divine Beloved to make him realize the Divine as his own breathe. The Blessed Creator, Who fashioned his children out of the same essence as Himself, does actually “breathe,” circulate blood, work, and play in the bodies of His children.
When the speaker beseeches his Creator, he is asking for the ability to remember his already close relationship with the Lord. The speaker wants to re-establish his awareness of that close relationship so that he may “faultlessly love [the Divine Creator.]” The speaker wishes to “learn” to love his Maker without any taint of forgetfulness or selfishness that existence in the flesh has engendered in him.
The speaker then employs the metaphor of intoxication: “Pour me the wisdom-wine / By which I become intoxicated with You.” Being “drunk” with thoughts of the Divine brings a euphoric state that is without the negative side effects of imbibing liquid intoxicants. Metaphorically imbibing the spiritual liquor brings the perfect bliss that all humans seek.
Next, the speaker asks the Beloved Divine to “[w]hisper in my ears of silence,” imploring that those whispers be guidance for his “wandering senses.” He asks that his scattered thoughts and feelings be brought back to the Divine, to “[The Maker’s] sanctuary within.”
The speaker then implores the Creator to “call the marauding mind and counsel it”; he asks again to be guided back “to [his Maker’s] home.” The speaker knows he has been in that home before, because he asks to learn “how to retrace” his steps back to the heavenly abode.
Finally, the speaker requests, “With Your silent eyes, just look at me,” because he understands that once he catches a glimpse of the Beloved, he will intuitively know “where to find [Him].”
Second Verse Paragraph: “You may hide behind the ocean”
The second verse paragraph grows into a chant: “You may hide behind the ocean, / You may hide behind delusion, / You may hide behind life.” The speaker demonstrates in his refrain the nature of Maya delusion that hides the Blessed One from the speaker’s sense awareness. It seems that the Divine is hiding everywhere, behind every form from the gemstones to the bodies of all humans.
The speaker is seeking to locate the Divine in the many forms that hide His reality, as he continues his retrain: “You may hide behind dualities, / You may hide behind theological conundrums, / You may hide behind unanswered prayers.” Divinity even hides behind ideas such as the pairs of dual opposites, the enigmas of religious study, and for mankind the most frustrating of all is that the Creator hides behind seemingly “unanswered prayers.”
The speaker then reveals the key to his own prayer’s being answered and that is that the Lord “cannot hide behind [the devotee’s] love.” The speaker will find the Blessed One “in the mirroring light of [his] love” for the Divine; in that love “[the Creator] is revealed.”
Paramahansa Yogananda
|
More in Reading & Literature
Latest Articles