Opening Remarks
Aswapati now steps into this world of mind which is constituted very differently from the life worlds through which he has travelled so far. He must now discover its peaks and its laws, the beings and energies and their influence upon our earthly life.
The receding beauty and call
A memory soft as grass and faint as sleep,
The beauty and call receding sank behind
Like a sweet song heard fading far away
Upon the long high road to Timelessness.
The call and pull of Paradise now recedes behind as Aswapati moves onwards. It memory grew faint and faded as a sweet song heard at the distance. He took once again the long high road to Timelessness.
An ardent white tranquillity
Above was an ardent white tranquillity.
The skies changed into an ardent white tranquillity as he entered this new phase of his long journey.
A musing spirit
A musing spirit looked out on the worlds
And like a brilliant clambering of skies
Passing through clarity to an unseen Light
Large lucent realms of Mind from stillness shone.
The spirit there sat musing upon the world. Skies beyond brilliant skies appeared passing from shades of a growing clarity towards a high unseen Light emerging out of stillness.
Silver-grey expanse
But first he met a silver-grey expanse
Where Day and Night had wedded and were one:
It was a tract of dim and shifting rays
Parting Life’s sentient flow from Thought’s self-poise.
But this Light took at first the shade of silver-grey denoting a strong mixture of Ignorance. It was the dusk or the yet to come Dawn where darkness still dominated even though touches of light were also there. The rays of an unseen Sun were shifting and dim as if playing with the darkness around. Nevertheless they indicated that it was the beginning of thought’s self-reflecting poise rather than the flow of life that paused not to think or to understand itself.
A rendezvous of Knowledge with Ignorance
A coalition of uncertainties
There exercised uneasy government
On a ground reserved for doubt and reasoned guess,
A rendezvous of Knowledge with Ignorance.
There knowledge and ignorance met and embraced each other mingling intimately. A ground of uncertainty and doubt was created where a reasoned guess tried to find the way.
It only sensed itself and outward things
At its low extremity held difficult sway
A mind that hardly saw and slowly found;
Its nature to our earthly nature close
And kin to our precarious mortal thought
That looks from soil to sky and sky to soil
But knows not the below nor the beyond,
It only sensed itself and outward things.
We are familiar with this little mind which is kin to our thoughts. Turned outwards, its gaze occupied with the little ego-self it moved within a narrow strip of vision and sense. But the most important things that drive our nature, the subconscient below and the superconscient above remained to it hidden and unseen. It was engaged in a slow and laborious search that hardly yielded any firm result.
First means of our slow ascent
This was the first means of our slow ascent
From the half-conscience of the animal soul
Living in a crowded press of shape-events
In a realm it cannot understand nor change;
Only it sees and acts in a given scene
And feels and joys and sorrows for a while.
It was a first small step in the mind’s emergence out of the swoon and half-awareness of animal life. It lived surrounded by the impact of senses and outward events. Yet it understood not what it saw nor how to change things. It was given only a little practical knowledge to act within the range of a narrow scene and experience its little joys and sorrows for a while.
Closing Remarks
The little mind is a first infant step towards the Light. Though a low-lying hill in the grand panoramic scene, it provides a foothold to climb further and can provide us a brief and far off glimpse of the immensities beyond.
