Opening remarks
Aswapati has now entered the penultimate experience of Adwaita, the experience of the sole Reality that is beyond all constructions, definitions, forms and conceptions we can build out of it.
Silence and Peace
A Vastness brooded free from sense of Space,
An Everlastingness cut off from Time;
A strange sublime inalterable Peace
Silent rejected from it world and soul.
A vastness free from sense of Space, an Everlastingness beyond time is what Aswapati seems to be experiencing here, though it defies any description. It is a Silence beyond silence, a Peace beyond peace. It is an unalterable Peace, a Silence rejecting from it world and soul was there.
Stark Companionless Reality
A stark companionless Reality
Answered at last to his soul’s passionate search:
Passionless, wordless, absorbed in its fathomless hush,
Keeping the mystery none would ever pierce,
It brooded inscrutable and intangible
Facing him with its dumb tremendous calm.
It was a stark companionless Reality that was found as the last answer to his soul’s seeking and passionate search. It was passionless, wordless, absorbed in its fathomless hush, guarding the mystery that none can pierce. It brooded inscrutable and intangible facing him with its dumb tremendous calm. It is in this utter Silence where Aswapati has entered. There is no stir here, not even the first stir of creation.
No sanction or act
It had no kinship with the universe:
There was no act, no movement in its Vast:
Life’s question met by its silence died on her lips,
The world’s effort ceased convicted of ignorance
Finding no sanction of supernal Light:
There was no mind there with its need to know,
There was no heart there with its need to love.
It had nothing to do with creation as there was no movement no act in its Vast. Life’s question died upon its lips with silence as the answer. There seemed no sanction of Light to the world’s labour as if convicted of ignorance. There was no mind there with its need to know. There was no heart there with its need to love. All his seeking and striving seemed to have entered into a luminous Silence where both question and answer are absorbed and dissolved as if convicted of Ignorance.
Namelessness
All person perished in its namelessness.
All person and personality perished in That which has no Name.
No second
There was no second, it had no partner or peer;
Only itself was real to itself.
There was no second. It was alone without any partner or peer. Only itself was real to itself. It is the One without a Second, ekamevadwitiyam, of the Upanishads.
Closing Remarks
This is the much-celebrated Vedantic experience of Ekamevadwitiyam, the One without a second which is being described in the above passage.
