Opening Remarks
Climbing the stairs of consciousness, passing through the range of mental worlds, Aswapati has arrived at a state of static indifferent witness. It is a state whence one experiences a strong and powerful indifference towards the world and all that it contains. This indifference is not born out of weakness or disappointment or inability to meet the challenges of the world but out of strength of tapasya through which one has climbed the stairway of consciousness.
Bare Indifferent Sky
At last there came a bare indifferent sky
Where Silence listened to the cosmic Voice,
But answered nothing to a million calls;
The soul’s endless question met with no response.
When we approach the Divine through the mind then we arrive at a bare indifferent state, a vast universal impersonality that seems to be the end of all things. In this state one witnesses the creation and its endless rolling without any engagement or response to the cosmic movement and stir. All voices seem to end in a vast Silence.
A deep cessation
An abrupt conclusion ended eager hopes,
A deep cessation in a mighty calm,
A finis-line on the last page of thought
And a margin and a blank of wordless peace.
Here one experiences a deep calm in which all ceases. Here hopes and questionings end as if the last possibility of thought had been reached. Here one finds the wordless peace. Here creation seems to end abruptly.
A tremendous Pause
There paused the climbing hierarchy of worlds.
The stairway of the world mounting from matter’s plinth and base seemed to end suddenly in that bare sky as if it were the last point in the soul’s ascension.
Summit Space
He stood on a wide arc of summit Space
Alone with an enormous Self of Mind
Which held all life in a corner of its vasts.
It was a summit Space where Aswapati now stood alone in an enormous Self of Mind which held all life in a little corner.
Omnipotent, immobile and aloof
Omnipotent, immobile and aloof,
In the world which sprang from it, it took no part:
It gave no heed to the paeans of victory,
It was indifferent to its own defeats,
It heard the cry of grief and made no sign;
Impartial fell its gaze on evil and good,
It saw destruction come and did not move.
Though this space or state seemed to be the omnipotent Source out of which the world somehow emerged, Itself had no part in it. It remained aloof and immobile from its multitudinous cries, its joys of victory and the sorrow of defeat. Grief or happiness could not move It. Impartial and indifferent It remained to evil and good, to destruction or to creation.
An equal Cause
An equal Cause of things, a lonely Seer
And Master of its multitude of forms,
It acted not but bore all thoughts and deeds,
The witness Lord of Nature’s myriad acts
Consenting to the movements of her Force.
Its seer gaze sanctioned all things indifferently. Though the omnipotent Master of multitudinous forms it remained a mere witness of Nature’s acts and movements of her force giving sanction to all her deeds equally without intervening in the rolling out of creation.
Closing Remarks
This is the state that precedes nirvana, an indifferent witness state watching all things equally and with indifference.
