Wake up, don't sleep anymore!
Morning brings God's light to effortlessly end our sleep;
the deep slumber of an entire night is gone in a flash.
But who will end the evening torpor!
Thoughts and deeds of a long day have cast a net of thick fog;
how to pull the mind out of that, into clear, sublime peace?
The whole day has enmeshed us on all sides - just like a spider - weaving one cobweb after another;
it has completely veiled the Eternal, the Infinite;
how to destroy these cobwebs and rouse the Consciousness in that Infinite!
Oh, wake up! Don't sleep anymore!
When the day starts to bind us, on all four sides, one turn after another - with sundry activities, with sundry thoughts, with sundry intentions;
when it starts to build a partition between the world and my soul;
exactly in those moments, if we do not alert our senses from time to time -
'Wake up, don't sleep anymore' - if this awakening spell doesn't keep sounding every moment - from within our innermost depths - in the midst of the sundry affairs of the day;
then turns after turns, knots after knots, overpower us, ultimately making us numb;
then we don't even wish to pull ourselves out of the stupor,
we know the bindings on our four sides as the ultimate truth -
beyond that, the Truth that is forever free, forever open, forever pure - to that we lose all faith;
so much so, that we don't even try to feel doubt at Its existence.
Thus, when an entire day is filled with the hum of sundry affairs,
may the line 'Oh, wake up! Don't sleep anymore!' keep sounding from a chord in the depths of our mind.
Kolkata
17 Agrahāyaṇa 1315
(December 2, 1908)
Bengali original: http://tagoreweb.in/Render/ShowContent.aspx?ct=Essays&bi=72EE92F5-BE50-4057-6E6E-0F7410664DA3&ti=72EE92F5-BE50-4057-5E6E-0F7410664DA3&ch=c