The Pursuit of the Unknowable 3, pp. 310-312 (SH 156)

Savitri Class in Hindi with Alok Pandey
Savitri Book Three: The Book of Divine Mother, Canto Two : The Adoration of the Divine Mother

It is true that the touch of the Supreme reality liberates us from all that nature or we ourselves have woven around our life. It liberates us not only from our desires and attachments but also from our concepts and ideas about self and life and world and truth. These things collapse finding no support in the Ultimate Reality. This is the experience that great sages have had and declared that the world is a meaningless illusion that has somehow come into being. Aswapati too stands on the borders of the Unknowable. He is face to face with the Supreme Reality, Formless, Featureless, Absolute, Alone, One without a second, Infinite, Eternal. He can, if such be the last will of his being dissolve in the infinity and be done with life and birth and death. Such is the choice that great yogis have made in the past. Such is the door of exit that they have shown to earth and men.

But then a question remains…. the question of questions or the last question, if we like.

If Nirvana or extinction in the Supreme Beyond be the end of our journey, then, why this creation and its many-sided, many hued play at all? Why the soul must pass through these shades of grey, play with dualities, dabble with suffering, fight against Fate if the end were the same as the beginning? Who then condemned us to this unreal bondage in an unreal world where the very self appears an illusion.

Such is the enigma that Aswapati confronts within his being even as he stands on the verge of extinction in the Formless, Nameless, Causeless Infinite.

A STILLNESS absolute, incommunicable,
Meets the sheer self-discovery of the soul;
A wall of stillness shuts it from the world,
A gulf of stillness swallows up the sense
And makes unreal all that mind has known,
All that the labouring senses still would weave
Prolonging an imaged unreality.
Self’s vast spiritual silence occupies Space;
Only the Inconceivable is left,
Only the Nameless without space and time:
Abolished is the burdening need of life:
Thought falls from us, we cease from joy and grief;
The ego is dead; we are freed from being and care,
We have done with birth and death and work and fate.

But something within his soul quests to go further, to seek further as if this wall of stillness and Peace, this hush of the Infinite, this Omnipotent, Omniscient Truth were hiding someone or something greater within its folds of shadowless Light. He had not travelled so far, undertaken this intense tapas only to end thus in a narrow escape. He had aspired for Victory, the victory of truth and Light upon earth.

O soul, it is too early to rejoice!
Thou hast reached the boundless silence of the Self,
Thou hast leaped into a glad divine abyss;
But where hast thou thrown Self’s mission and Self’s power?
On what dead bank on the Eternal’s road?
One was within thee who was self and world,
What hast thou done for his purpose in the stars?
Escape brings not the victory and the crown!
Something thou cam’st to do from the Unknown,
But nothing is finished and the world goes on
Because only half God’s cosmic work is done.

This is only half the work. Freedom he has gained, the freedom of the Supreme but where is the freedom to fulfill Himself? Where is the heart of love in this sphere of sorrow that gives us Hope and Faith, Nurtures our soul’s aspiration and Protects? Where is that savior Grace that takes form upon Earth to save creation from peril and disaster. Where is the two-way bridge between Heaven and Earth? What lies, if anything lies at all hidden behind the luminous mask of Truth.

Only the everlasting No has neared
And stared into thy eyes and killed thy heart:
But where is the Lover’s everlasting Yes,
And immortality in the secret heart,
The voice that chants to the creator Fire,
The symbolled OM, the great assenting Word,
The bridge between the rapture and the calm,
The passion and the beauty of the Bride,
The chamber where the glorious enemies kiss,
The smile that saves, the golden peak of things?
This too is Truth at the mystic fount of Life.
A black veil has been lifted; we have seen
The mighty shadow of the omniscient Lord;
But who has lifted up the veil of light
And who has seen the body of the King?
The mystery of God’s birth and acts remains
Leaving unbroken the last chapter’s seal,
Unsolved the riddle of the unfinished Play;
The cosmic Player laughs within his mask,
And still the last inviolate secret hides
Behind the human glory of a Form,
Behind the gold eidolon of a Name.
A large white line has figured as a goal,
But far beyond the ineffable suntracks blaze:

Here, at this juncture a door seems to open and admit the seer-king into the greatest Secret, the Mystery of mysteries. When all the masks of our inferior nature fall away then we discover a higher Supernature waiting for us on the peaks of the Absolute. She is the goal, the aim, the fulfillment of our long and tortuous journey, the grand work for which earth toils in Space and towards which creation slowly climbs through struggle and pain. Even as that door opens, Aswapati is admitted to the Secret of secrets.

What seemed the source and end was a wide gate,
A last bare step into eternity.
An eye has opened upon timelessness,
Infinity takes back the forms it gave,
And through God’s darkness or his naked light
His million rays return into the Sun.
There is a zero sign of the Supreme;
Nature left nude and still uncovers God.
But in her grandiose nothingness all is there:
When her strong garbs are torn away from us,
The soul’s ignorance is slain but not the soul:
The zero covers an immortal face.
A high and blank negation is not all,
A huge extinction is not God’s last word,
Life’s ultimate sense, the close of being’s course,
The meaning of this great mysterious world.
In absolute silence sleeps an absolute Power.
Awaking, it can wake the trance-bound soul
And in the ray reveal the parent sun:
It can make the world a vessel of Spirit’s force,
It can fashion in the clay God’s perfect shape.
To free the self is but one radiant pace;
Here to fulfil himself was God’s desire.

[Savitri: 310 – 312]