Opening Remarks
This world lacks the power to build forms that could embody and realise its dreams. Its light is like a glimmer that faints before it touches the earth and illumines it. It gives dreams but not the power and the knowledge to realise.
Fugitive delicacy
A magic flowed as if of moving scenes
That kept awhile their fugitive delicacy
Of sparing lines limned by an abstract art
In a rare scanted light with faint dream-brush
On a silver background of incertitude.
The scenes of this realm of charming imaginations flew past as if magically created and vanishing without a trail. Art forms sprung up to capture it on canvas and film. Yet it lacked substance and reality and there was the air of incertitude.
An infant glow
An infant glow of heavens near to morn,
A fire intense conceived but never lit,
Caressed the air with ardent hints of day.
Its dreams were like the first glimmer of dawn but on waking up there was still night and darkness. There were hints and suggestions of what could be or should be but never what is and will be.
Imperfection’s charm
The perfect longing for imperfection’s charm,
The illumined caught by the snare of Ignorance,
Ethereal creatures drawn by body’s lure
To that region of promise, beating invisible wings,
Came hungry for the joy of finite life
But too divine to tread created soil
And share the fate of perishable things.
This dream world carries its own charm since one can fantasise perfection here without the need to realise it. It wants things to change according to the heart’s imperfect ideas and simply longs for the world to be moulded according to our wishes and desires. In other words it seeks to prolong our present imperfect state except that it somehow dreams that if all our dreams and wishes were fulfilled and our desires satisfied then we shall be forever happy. That is its idea of perfect life. It hopes to create perfection even while man remains ignorant and labours under the stress of ego and desires thereby creating false utopias. And yet it knows that these dreams will not hold the test of harsh earthly realities. Thus it hangs midway between the impracticality of its dreams and the inability to ascend further to a land where one can find the power and knowledge to realise.
Imperishable desire
The Children of the unembodied Gleam
Arisen from a formless thought in the soul
And chased by an imperishable desire,
Traversed the field of the pursuing gaze.
It deflects the aspiration for perfection into the fields of desires where there is no end of wanting and momentary satiations. It creates for man the false surface soul of desires that he constantly confuses with his true self and runs after and chases fugitive dreams that can collapse in a moment.
Pale dreams that seemed real
A Will that unpersisting failed, worked there:
Life was a search but finding never came.
There nothing satisfied, but all allured,
Things seemed to be that never wholly are,
Images were seen that looked like living acts
And symbols hid the sense they claimed to show,
Pale dreams grew real to the dreamer’s eyes.
In this dream world of the vital realms, fantasy wore a dress of reality and captured the dreamer in its alluring fields. Yet there was no will to persist, no patience and perseverance to realise. There was a search but never the satisfaction of finding, symbol images but not the inner sense.
Spirit’s entrapped
The souls came there that vainly strive for birth,
And spirits entrapped might wander through all time,
Yet never find the truth by which they live.
Trapped in this fantasy world it is very difficult to come out. One can remain in this domain forever dreaming heavenly dreams and wander through long passage of time without even knowing that none of this is real.
Miraculous and half-true
All ran like hopes that hunt a lurking chance;
Nothing was solid, nothing felt complete:
All was unsafe, miraculous and half-true.
It seemed a realm of lives that had no base.
Nothing was sure there even though it took miraculous proportions. There was no base for this constructed reality and yet one persisted with an eye on chance which may see its dreams realised sometime.
Closing Remarks
This dream world is where some half-baked aspirants get trapped, especially those who are secretly ambition and desire. Unable to put the required effort for purification or face the battle within and without, they create a fantasy land of ‘half-truths, half lies’ and live like one deluded who knows not his own deceit.
About Savitri | B1C3-11 Towards Unity with God (pp.31-33)