Opening remarks
A complex play of forces hidden to our sight supports this visible universe from behind. It is this that Aswapati beholds now.
A giant order
A giant order was discovered here
Of which the tassel and extended fringe
Are the scant stuff of our material lives.
What we experience through our senses and outer mind is merely a small fraction, a surface result, the froth and foam while the vast depths remain hidden and concealed to our sight.
The secrets merged in superconscient light
This overt universe whose figures hide
The secrets merged in superconscient light,
Wrote clear the letters of its glowing code:
A map of subtle signs surpassing thought
Was hung upon a wall of inmost mind.
The material universe and the objects it holds are an immense facade, a symbol of the Real. But the Real remains hidden in the Superconscient Light while throwing a subtle hint here and a hint there in the inner mind-space. It is like a symbol script whose origin and meaning is to be found and can be read and discovered only in the Superconscient Light beyond the Mind.
The intuitive exegete
Illumining the world’s concrete images
Into significant symbols by its gloss,
It offered to the intuitive exegete
Its reflex of the eternal Mystery.
It is only when the intuitive light awakens that one can see and read the deeper sense behind the symbol; at least its secret sense begins to reflect in the intuitive mind.
The seried kingdoms of the graded Law
Ascending and descending twixt life’s poles
The seried kingdoms of the graded Law
Plunged from the Everlasting into Time,
Then glad of a glory of multitudinous mind
And rich with life’s adventure and delight
And packed with the beauty of Matter’s shapes and hues
Climbed back from Time into undying Self,
Up a golden ladder carrying the soul,
Tying with diamond threads the Spirit’s extremes
This is the ladder of Consciousness, each level with its own law that is nevertheless connected with other levels and the whole. . They lapse from the Superconscious state to the Inconscience. But the lapse is not without its purpose. It gives birth to a many-hued, rainbow creation climbing through evolutionary degrees. All these layers and kingdoms and their laws are held together in the Supramental Consciousness and its delegate, the Overmind. Supermind is the diamond thread that ties creation together and holds the golden ladder that carries the soul upwards in its ascent and adventure of consciousness through birth in Time and Space.
Archmason of the limits
In this drop from consciousness to consciousness
Each leaned on the occult Inconscient’s power,
The fountain of its needed Ignorance,
Archmason of the limits by which it lives.
It is the Spirit that has plunged into the Inconscient and become this obscure material field. It is by the power of the Spirit concealed in the Inconscient that the evolution takes place progressively from a state of utter Nescience to Ignorance and thence towards the Light of Truth. Each step of the descent also becomes a step in the ascension. But this release and ascent is by slow degrees since the Inconscient lays down the limits to the soul’s expansion.
Soar from consciousness to consciousness
In this soar from consciousness to consciousness
Each lifted tops to That from which it came,
Origin of all that it had ever been
And home of all that it could still become.
All is the divine, in its essence, and therefore each element of this creation aspires to reach out and become, in the manifestation, what it already is in the depths. It is there that it finds the key to its past becomings as well as to its future.
The evolving Way
An organ scale of the Eternal’s acts,
Mounting to their climax in an endless Calm,
Paces of the many-visaged Wonderful,
Predestined stadia of the evolving Way,
Measures of the stature of the growing soul,
They interpreted existence to itself
And, mediating twixt the heights and deeps,
United the veiled married opposites
And linked creation to the Ineffable.
This ladder supports the soul’s ascension towards its Home. At each level and rung of the ladder, the Divine is there and manifests in keeping with the soul’s evolutionary necessity at each stage. These are the steps and stages of our ascent that have been already marked out by the Divine Will. This ladder of consciousness unites the two poles of existence and serves as a mediating link for the soul to evolve through the different stages. Yet all is part of a simple plan and the whole is held together in a wonderful and harmonious totality in the consciousness of the Divine.
Closing remarks
This complex play of forces is arranged hierarchically as a ladder. Each rung of this ladder has come into being as the One Consciousness involved Itself degree by degree. This ladder will be described in detail in Book Two.
