Opening Remarks
Aswapati, as the Avatara has to represent within himself both the divine and the human element. Now he has come to the gates Divine as a representative of the human race. Therefore he embodies the anguish and the aspiration of man.
Prophetic sight
A plan in the occult eternal Mind
Mapped out to backward and prophetic sight,
The aeons ever repeat their changeless round,
The cycles all rebuild and ever aspire.
Aswapati knows that the occult Mind of God has already foreseen all that must be and will be. Yet the aeons repeat the changeless rounds and the cycles of creation collapse into pralaya and restart their ascent again. The plan is destined to fulfil itself but the time taken is enormous.
Ever still to do
All we have done is ever still to do.
All our achievements collapse again and must be rebuilt again gaining from the previous experience, even improving upon itself, though with much labour and waste.
Breaks and renews
All breaks and all renews and is the same.
Civilisations rise and fall only to start afresh the effort to build and rebuild what has been broken.
The sad enigma
Huge revolutions of life’s fruitless gyre,
The new-born ages perish like the old,
As if the sad Enigma kept its right
Till all is done for which this scene was made.
Revolutions arise to change an age but after their force is spent, they too sink leaving the enigma of man unsolved. All this goes on and is to go on until the purpose of creation is fulfilled.
Too little
Too little the strength that now with us is born,
Too faint the light that steals through Nature’s lids,
Too scant the joy with which she buys our pain.
Something happens no doubt but it is too faint and scant. Too little is the strength with which we are born and with much pain we gain just a scant joy. Too faint the light that emerges out of Nature’s sleep.
Half-knowledge, half-creations
In a brute world that knows not its own sense,
Thought-racked upon the wheel of birth we live,
The instruments of an impulse not our own
Moved to achieve with our heart’s blood for price
Half-knowledge, half-creations that soon tire.
Aswapati now gives the report from below as to how brute this world has become where men have forgotten the very purpose of their life. They live burdened with thoughts and cares and are driven by impulses and pushed by forces beyond even their reckoning. Even when they achieve something paying with their blood for price it is not yet the full or the true thing and can hardly sustain the rub and change of Time.
Foiled immortal soul
A foiled immortal soul in perishing limbs,
Baffled and beaten back we labour still;
Annulled, frustrated, spent, we still survive.
Though we have an immortal soul hidden somewhere in the folds of nature, something that survives death and defeat, yet it dwells in a body that perishes. Baffled and beaten it must start again its journey in another body.
The labour and the anguish
In anguish we labour that from us may rise
A larger-seeing man with nobler heart,
A golden vessel of the incarnate Truth,
The executor of the divine attempt
Equipped to wear the earthly body of God,
Communicant and prophet and lover and king.
Human life is a field of effort, of endless effort and all this labour and anguish for progress and growth churns matter so that a yet greater being than man may arise out of our humanity. We do not know it yet nature uses man as a living and conscious laboratory of God so that our souls may discover and create a better vehicle for its earthly sojourn. We aspire and hope that a greater humanity, more noble and compassionate, wide-visioned humanity may arise with a body that is like a golden vessel for Truth to incarnate. Humanity is a bridge, a building ground for a diviner superhumanity that will be the fit instrument of the divine design. Equipped with a divinised body fit for the divine inhabitant who dwells within us, he will be naturally endowed with divine capacities to communicate the truth, a prophetic sight and a heart of boundless love. He shall reign a king of nature and not its slave as he now is.
Closing Remarks
Aswapati is carrying the human anguish to the very highest seat of Power beyond which there is none other. It is here that he can find the perfect solution to the enigma of earth and man.
