Opening remarks
All that we experience on earth through the senses and the vital is marred due to the jarring notes of mind or are hampered by the body’s incapacity. Or else we are drawn to deeper and higher pursuits by the soul. Here however, in this plane, one discovers the purified and unrestrained joys of the senses and the vital.
Scale of sense
A scale of sense that climbed with fiery feet
To heights of unimagined happiness,
Recast his being’s aura in joy-glow,
His body glimmered like a skiey shell;
His gates to the world were swept with seas of light.
The senses of the vital world are constituted in such a way as to experience heightened intensity of contacts, a heightened happiness surrounding the vital body with a glow of vital joy. His body glimmered like a shining shell and each sense was a door to joy and channel of light.
Celestial competence
His earth, dowered with celestial competence,
Harboured a power that needed now no more
To cross the closed customs-line of mind and flesh
And smuggle godhead into humanity.
Freed from the double barrier of mind and body, the vital brought out its powers into fuller play. These powers could act freely through him bringing the god-touch in the human field.
Untired capacity for bliss
It shrank no more from the supreme demand
Of an untired capacity for bliss,
A might that could explore its own infinite
And beauty and passion and the depths’ reply
Nor feared the swoon of glad identity
Where spirit and flesh in inner ecstasy join
Annulling the quarrel between self and shape.
The vital naturally seeks for joy but gets tired due the bodily limitations. Now it was freed from this tyranny of the flesh and experienced a heightening of joy and might and beauty and passion that are restrained and tied within limits in human life. These powers began to pour into the bodily life healing the antagonism between Matter and Spirit.
The road of sense
It drew from sight and sound spiritual power,
Made sense a road to reach the intangible:
It thrilled with the supernal influences
That build the substance of life’s deeper soul.
The senses are normally regarded as obstacles and obstructions to spiritual quest. But released from the iron grip of earth they became roads for the inrush of powers and joys of the Spirit. Thus his deeper self of life was being built.
Earth-nature a comrade of heaven
Earth-nature stood reborn, comrade of heaven.
The movements of nature that we experience upon earth were found there in their purity and heavenly force.
Closing Remarks
Thus Aswapati discovers the vital heavens, the Paradise and grows into the likeness of the gods of these worlds.
