Opening Remarks
Darkness has no reality of its own. It is a shadow that claims our attention as if it were a self-existent reality. So too falsehood has no reality of its own. It is a twisting of the body of truth. Suffering has no reality of its own. It is an entanglement of delight into finite and transient forms. The Inconscient too is a shadow of the Infinite and hence appears as endless and infinite.
Unreality made real
His eyes piercing the triple-plated gloom
Identified their sight with its blind stare:
Accustomed to the unnatural dark, they saw
Unreality made real and conscious Night.
Aswapati is a yogi and hence no longer deceived by appearances. His eyes penetrate the gloom wrapping the world in unconsciousness, suffering and falsehood. Thereby he learns how the darkness is born and how it conjures an unreal reality
Huge calamitous dreams
A violent, fierce and formidable world,
An ancient womb of huge calamitous dreams,
Coiled like a larva in the obscurity
That keeps it from the spear-points of Heaven’s stars.
It was a world where weakness and violence, fierce cruelty reigned wearing a formidable appearance. It was as if this Night was full of calamitous dreams that rushed out from its dark womb for their realisation. Hidden like a coiled larva it was kept safe from the luminous eye of Heaven’s Light.
An immense negation
It was the gate of a false Infinite,
An eternity of disastrous absolutes,
An immense negation of spiritual things.
This dark shadow imitated the eternal and the infinite and gave an absolute sense or appearance to the disastrous dreams of the Night. This world and its forces denied and negated all that is high and true and noble and divine.
The great fall
All once self-luminous in the spirit’s sphere
Turned now into their own dark contraries:
Being collapsed into a pointless void
That yet was a zero parent of the worlds;
Inconscience swallowing up the cosmic Mind
Produced a universe from its lethal sleep;
Bliss into black coma fallen, insensible,
Coiled back to itself and God’s eternal joy
Through a false poignant figure of grief and pain
Still dolorously nailed upon a cross
Fixed in the soil of a dumb insentient world
Where birth was a pang and death an agony,
Lest all too soon should change again to bliss.
The creation of this world was the result of a tremendous fall of the luminous powers that emerged from the One supreme. The Being lapsed into a sleep of Nothingness, Bliss turned into grief and pain, truth into falsehood grew. Thus the Inconscient bore the seeds of pain. There birth itself was a pang and death an agony. All this turned evolution into a slow and often painful process.
Closing Remarks
It is this lapse of the divine powers from their state of unity that this world of darkness was formed out of which pain and falsehood were born.
