Opening Remarks
As Aswapati begins to search with a spiritual fire and intuitive beams, he discovers a world of fantasy and imagination drawing its substance from some hidden reality.
Subtle splendours
A thousand baffling faces of the Truth
Looked at him from her forms with unknown eyes
And wordless mouths unrecognisable,
Spoke from the figures of her masquerade,
Or peered from the recondite magnificence
And subtle splendour of her draperies.
Life revels in variety of forms through which she can express her movements. Each form is like a costume that expresses a state or mood, a motion of energy or a force. Beings of these greater Life-worlds began to reveal their secrets to Aswapati.
Time’s secret things
In sudden scintillations of the Unknown,
Inexpressive sounds became veridical,
Ideas that seemed unmeaning flashed out truth;
Voices that came from unseen waiting worlds
Uttered the syllables of the Unmanifest
To clothe the body of the mystic Word,
And wizard diagrams of the occult Law
Sealed some precise unreadable harmony,
Or used hue and figure to reconstitute
The herald blazon of Time’s secret things.
There are many secrets hidden in the heart of life and her varied movements and complex patterns and designs. There are occult laws that our minds do not yet know. There are ideas that express profound truths that take a symbol form. Sights and sounds and colours and hues conjure a hidden truth that artists and musicians and poets discover and express.
Songster hopes
In her green wildernesses and lurking depths,
In her thickets of joy where danger clasps delight,
He glimpsed the hidden wings of her songster hopes,
A glimmer of blue and gold and scarlet fire.
The forests and mountains and gulfs outside are symbolic of inner contours of life. Danger and delight are woven together in life’s clasp where different hues of energies of mind and bodily life and spirit meet with their song of hope.
Flowers of dream
In her covert lanes, bordering her chance field-paths
And by her singing rivulets and calm lakes
He found the glow of her golden fruits of bliss
And the beauty of her flowers of dream and muse.
In countless ways and through countless forms, through trees and flowers and rivulets and lakes and pathways made through clearings in the forest, life expressed her beauty and bliss.
A miracle of joy
As if a miracle of heart’s change by joy
He watched in the alchemist radiance of her suns
The crimson outburst of one secular flower
On the tree-of-sacrifice of spiritual love.
Aswapati experienced here a change in his heart as if miraculously changed by joy. He saw behind in life’s deeps the glow of spiritual love and a mystic radiance born out of self-giving and sacrifice.
Anklet-bells of fantasy
In the sleepy splendour of her noons he saw,
A perpetual repetition through the hours,
Thought’s dance of dragonflies on mystery’s stream
That skim but never test its murmurs’ race,
And heard the laughter of her rose desires
Running as if to escape from longed-for hands,
Jingling sweet anklet-bells of fantasy.
Thought danced in rhythms over life’s mysterious streams giving birth to poetic imagination. He heard the laughter of her sweet desires born of love that lives in its fantasy dream world. This fantasy world was like an escape gate from earthly realities and yet this escape would open the gates of a greater world of life that stands behind our own.
Closing Remarks
The kingdom of greater Life is a fantasy land where beauty and love and joy express themselves in secular ways through form and feeling. It is the world that painters and musicians and artists are in touch with as also some poets who draw their inspiration from this world of greater life.
