Opening Remarks
As we draw more and more into the Self of Mind, we discover the futility of all the mental structures, all systems of thoughts, philosophies and ideologies and theologies that we have built around the soul. At one level these things help the soul to climb upwards providing a support structure. At another level, they become a trap and a prison when the soul must go further and is held back through its attachment to these systems of thought and belief.
A frail house in air
A frail house hanging in uncertain air,
The thin ingenious web round which it moves,
Put out awhile on the tree of the universe,
And gathered up into itself again,
Was only a trap to catch life’s insect food,
Winged thoughts that flutter fragile in brief light
But dead, once captured in fixed forms of mind,
Aims puny but looming large in man’s small scale,
Flickers of imagination’s brilliant gauze
And cobweb-wrapped beliefs alive no more.
All our mind made systems of thought are like frail houses built in thin air. Bereft of support, they vanish or collapse. They were built only to justify life’s desires or else are like the brief flutter of butterfly wings that can hardly carry our flight to higher domains. These ideas, even when born of some partial light soon become dead systems of thought that have lost their living truth which inspired them. They give to man’s life a brief meaning and small aims building a larger than life image around this smallness. Or else they are like flickers of imagination dying soon after their birth. Or else they are like cobwebs of confusion and belief-systems in which the human mind is caught and its soul stifled and trapped.
Built-up certitudes
The magic hut of built-up certitudes
Made out of glittering dust and bright moonshine
In which it shrines its image of the Real,
Collapsed into the Nescience whence it rose.
What we call as truth are very often premature certitudes. This hut built by opinions, views, systems of thoughts that we take for the ultimate Reality is in fact the glitter of dust as the moonbeam shines upon it. The image or the idea we worship there is not the Reality but its representation. All this collapsed now leaving a vast ‘Nothingness’, a Void out of which all seemed to emerge without cause or beginning and end.
Symbol facts
Only a gleam was there of symbol facts
That shroud the mystery lurking in their glow,
And falsehoods based on hidden realities
By which they live until they fall from Time.
Only some gleam of far off Truth was there or symbols that covered the mystery in their glow. Or there were falsehoods that yet derived their strength from some hidden realities by which they lived through a limited passage of Time until they fall off as dry leaves from the tree of creation.
The haunted house of mind
Our mind is a house haunted by the slain past,
Ideas soon mummified, ghosts of old truths,
God’s spontaneities tied with formal strings
And packed into drawers of reason’s trim bureau,
A grave of great lost opportunities,
Or an office for misuse of soul and life
And all the waste man makes of heaven’s gifts
And all his squanderings of Nature’s store,
A stage for the comedy of Ignorance.
Our minds are filled with ghosts of past truths that have lost their once-living reality. Each religion and philosophy and ideology has had its purpose in the great Play. But the soul of man always advances forward. The adherents of these systems of thought very often remain tied to the formulas of the past that have lost the living reality that once gave birth to it. All the gifts brought to man, the lights from Beyond have all been turned by man into dead carcasses upon whose tomb and grave he erects structures to feed his ambitions and lust for power. The great adventure of life and its joy turns into a poor comedy of ignorance.
All sterile grew
The world seemed a long aeonic failure’s scene:
All sterile grew, no base was left secure.
It is a state in which all appears meaningless and sterile without any power to change anything. The world and creation seemed a wasted effort, a perpetual failure.
Closing Remarks
This is a stage through Aswapati is passing in trying to find the true remedy to transmute the world into something divine and beautiful. But what he experiences here is the world imprisoned by mental structures surrounded by a vast Nothingness.
