Works of Sri Aurobindo

open all | close all

Book-2-Study-Canto-6

Introduction   Notes   Book 1   Book II   Book III   Book IV    Book V   Book VI   Book VII   Book VIII    Book IX   Book X   Book XI   Book XII

Book Two. The Book of the Traveller of the Worlds

Canto I    Canto II    Canto III    Canto IV     Canto V     Canto VI    Canto VII    Canto VIII     Canto IX
    Canto X    Canto XI    Canto XII     Canto XIII    Canto XIV     Canto XV           


 

Book Two: Canto VI

The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Greater Life


Summary

Escaping from the anarchic world of lower life, Aswapathy enters the realms of greater life. The world he first steps into is an ineffectual one where there is but an intermittent will to live and no direction at all. He arrives at an indefinite tract where hope dares to be but is uncertain in its tenure. Life is in a strange state; she dreams and imagines but does not actually create yet. Beings are attracted to take birth into life but hold back on the verge. It is a world of enchantment but there is neither base nor goal.

A greater creation follows. The will to life is manifested in a more substantial way. The inner Spirit impresses itself on the innumerable forms of life, there is a rhythm and beauty, a light and joy which however incomplete—bespeak a greater glory beyond.

This realm exerts great influence upon the earth; the higher movements of life on earth are inspired from here. Here is the pattern to which human seeking points. An endless possibility is seen here climbing high on a ladder of dreams, from height to greater height. An energy is at work perpetually, though its results are transient, putting out forms, larger and larger. She tries by every means to regain the Bliss she has lost in the course of her devolution from her source in the supreme Spirit, but she fails to attain it. Though thus unable to achieve her ends, she strives on and on because she is impelled to do so by the Will of the Creator active in her. Her mission is to manifest the Unmanifest, to express the Eternal in terms of Time. All purposeful work is indeed done behind the veil. With her limited means she strives, fails, attempts again; the will to live persists and the myriad creation is projected.

The greater Life is in pursuit of the Unseen, the Light beyond; she feels the Silence and the touch of the Grace from above. She is close to the heavens of the Gods, but also to the worlds of the demons. She hungers for expansion, for elevation, for perfection, and goes on creating to that end. She almost achieves her aim but falls short ultimately.

Thus does Life exert herself and create on every plane of existence irrespective of the failures she may meet in the course of her toil. In whatever condition, she is productive in her labour. Even when she is apparently immobile, she works beneath the surface.

In the utmost obscurity of Matter, she is still active. There is an Intelligence in her that guides, a Will that goads through darkness, non-sentience and inertia to an irresistible creative movement. Gradually sense, mind, heart, soul come into formation and the world-procession upborne by her assumes a meaning and direction. Life means to recapture her lost eternity.

Life moves into action for the delectation of her Purusha. By a hundred means she seeks to hold his interest but he turns to his native state of immutable and formless peace. He is first asleep in her pro-founds; gradually she awakens him to consciousness. The world she builds is a net in which he is held.

She is moved by a Knowledge that works under the cloak of Ignorance; she has a might that does the incredible. On the lower levels her workings hide their purpose, on the higher altitudes they are undisguised in their operations. But still, her forms are only tokens; the Truth is not yet concretely built; what is constructed is only a copy, a figure.

This is the character of the world that opens before Aswapathy. It is lit by a Truth, but not the Truth manifest. There is a freer space and larger air; life is lived from a deeper level, not from the surface. Life is the leading power, with mind and body following her trail. The dimensions are cosmic and the self of each being embraces the universe. Each is growing larger and taller in consciousness, but there are also many who imprison themselves in the attained greatness.

This world lies on the border of our mortal state. It inspires all great movements in the world below on earth and sets the patterns for formations below. In this world of greater Life there is an open confrontation between the true and the false, the good and the evil, and one is forced to make a choice between the hosts. The balance of values is other than that of earth: the inner determines the outer. All derives from the truth within. Sense is no barrier. The Mind, emotion and feeling of one are not divided from those of others, but commune and fuse into each other. There is a live interchange. Still the ultimate oneness is not there. A soul, if it so wishes, can shut itself from others. There is no real identity. The miracle of Inconscience has been indeed over-passed, but the miracle of Superconscience is still a mystery looming overhead. This is a kind of midterm between the two mysteries—an ambiguous life in an uncertain world.

Aswapathy follows the trails of the greater Life. At first no aim is visible but only a wide source of all things, pointing to a still wider source. There is a stronger pull from the Unknown above, a mightier and vaster formation of the Life-Force. Yet much remains unrevealed. Aswapathy tries to scan the tangled design spread before him but loses himself repeatedly in the labyrinth of signs and patterns. A thousand faces of the Truth stare at him, voices speak to him, Ideas flash; he watches with amazement the appearance and disappearance of Life’s hopes and joys and passions. He takes his poise in the Silence on the heights and sees Life losing herself in Infinity. He identifies himself closely with her so that he might learn the secrets of her soul. He is overpowered by her splendour and display of skill. But he sees also her being within that is disappointed at her failure to seize the truth. The Divine Beloved is still beyond.

Aswapathy feels the presence of the Spirit in the forms built by Life, the Spirit from which she derives her strength. But he is unable to decipher the design in her vision, though he catches some hints at that high level of Life-existence. He follows her course towards some infinitude and reads her signs aright by intuitive flashes.

All is a play of Life and Spirit, a game of hide and seek, gain and loss. The Spirit hopes to possess Life, but loses himself in her manifold play. Hopes and disappointments, joys and griefs, punctuate her routes. With all the pain and tears, however, it is a joy to live; for there is a Will behind each life; God has created everything on purpose. This element at the core gives meaning to Life, though she has wandered far away from her governing truth in her plunge down from her spiritual home.

To manifest the Divine Reality was the mission with which Life was charged. But her performance has lagged behind her objective. She is not permitted to cease from her labours and she must endure, strive and move on. Life and the soul within her have no respite from the march. Each goal points to the next. Behind all effort, there is a memory of the lost glory and beyond all failures, there is a Splendour that beckons. Life is perpetually in toil to realise her dream. There is an abiding faith that a time must come when the Divine will respond to her Call and manifest His Verities of Truth, Beauty, Love and Bliss in Life’s creations and restore her to her true immortal state.

Till then her labours must continue, however vain, however fruitless they may seem and though her world appear a pointless mistake of the gods.


Escape from Dull Anarchy

As one who between dim receding walls
Towards the far gleam of a tunnel’s mouth,
Hoping for light, walks now with freer pace
And feels approach a breath of wider air,
So he escaped from that grey anarchy.

Aswapathy’s passage from the kingdoms of little life where everything is unsure, shifting, obscure and dull is like a journey through a dim tunnel. His pace quickens as he sights the distant gleam of the opening at the end and feels the breath of a fresh air. Thus he comes out of the dim, disorderly belt of the little life.


Ineffectual World

Into an ineffectual world he came,
A purposeless region of arrested birth
Where being from non-being fled and dared
To live but had no strength long to abide.

The world into which he emerges has an air of fruitlessness. Things are trying to come to birth but their attempts succeed only partially. There is a willed effort to be but there is not enough strength to survive long.


Crying for Direction

Above there gleamed a pondering brow of sky
Tormented, crossed by wings of doubtful haze
Adventuring with a voice of roaming winds
And crying for a direction in the void
Like blind souls looking for the selves they lost
And wandering through unfamiliar worlds;
Wings of vague questioning met the query of Space.

The air is thick with questionings. Nothing is yet certain. Life is on the move seeking a direction but not knowing where to turn, like souls who in the blindness of their ignorance have lost their identity and wander about looking for the truth of their existence in the strange worlds where they find themselves.


Dawn of Hope

After denial dawned a dubious hope,
A hope of self and form and leave to live
And the birth of that which never yet could be,
And joy of the mind’s hazard, the heart’s choice,
Grace of the unknown and hands of sudden surprise
And a touch of sure delight in unsure things:

From the ubiquitous denial of everything in the worlds of lower life, Aswapathy passes into a realmwhere there is hope however uncertain it be. Here in the kingdoms of higher life there are possibilities of existence for forms, of birth for things which could not come to be so far, of joy for the mind in its probings, of freedom for the heart to choose, of unfailing delight in things, however uncertain they be, of the action of the Grace of God, unexpected and surprising.


Uncertain Tract (I)

To a strange uncertain tract his journey came
Where consciousness played with unconscious self
And birth was an attempt or episode.

Things are still uncertain, though not denied the right to live. There is here a play of consciousness—what is unaware is acted upon to awake into awareness. But things take birth only to pass; they do not last, they can stay only briefly. However, even this birth into brief existence is a gain.


Uncertain Tract (II)

A charm drew near that could not keep its spell,
An eager Power that could not find its way,
A Chance that chose a strange arithmetic
But could not bind with it the forms it made,
A multitude that could not guard its sum
Which less than zero grew and more than one.

Here Beauty and Power from the higher regions attempt to enter and remain, but they are unable to do so as conditions are not ready for them to endure. It looks as if all moves by chance though there seems to be a mysterious order in that chance. Forms in their multitude come into endless being but they refuse to be determined. They are in their totality innumerable, but ultimately they amount to less than nothing.


Mythic Air

Arriving at a large and shadowy sense
That cared not to define its fleeting drift
Life laboured in a strange and mythic air
Denuded of her sweet magnificent suns.

Here all is vague. Life strives under a vast shadow of uncertainty not knowing where she is drifting. The atmosphere is unfamiliar. There is an air of unreality. The bright light that nourishes her other realms is not here.


No Achievement

In worlds imagined, never yet made true,
A lingering glimmer on creation’s verge,
One strayed and dreamed and never stopped to achieve:
To achieve would have destroyed that magic Space.

It is a domain where dreams and imaginations play riot and prepare the ground for some eventual creation. But nothing concrete is achieved. All is at the enchanting stage of pre-formation where anything seems possible; the hard realities of the actual do not disturb this world of enchantment.


Marvels of Wonderland

The marvels of a twilight wonderland,
Full of a beauty strangely, vainly made,
A surge of fanciful realities,
Dim tokens of a Splendour sealed above,
Awoke the passion of the eyes’ desire,
Compelled belief on the enamoured thought
And drew the heart but led it to no goal.

In this realm of wonder there is a surge of movements—movements of Beauty and of Glory trying to formulate something of the divine Splendour of the veiled heights above. These powerful movements that attract the eye impart a sense of certainty to the helplessly drawn mind and pull the will towards them, though ultimately they achieve nothing definite.


Fugitive Delicacy

A magic flowed as if of moving scenes
That kept awhile their fugitive delicacy
Of sparing lines limned by an abstract art
In a rare scanted light with faint dream-brush
On a silver background of incertitude.

Things here keep on changing their indefinite contours against a background that is itself uncertain. The light is dim adding to the enchantment of the scene.


Infant Glow of Heavens

An infant glow of heavens near to morn,
A fire intense conceived but never lit,
Caressed the air with ardent hints of day.

It is not yet broad daylight. There is but the glow of dawn in the skies, holding the promise of the outbreak of flaming light, filling the air with expectation.


Region of Promise

The perfect longing for imperfection’s charm,
The illumined caught by the snare of Ignorance,
Ethereal creatures drawn by body’s lure
To that region of promise, beating invisible wings,
Came hungry for the joy of finite life
But too divine to tread created soil
And share the fate of perishable things.

Here come the truths of the Divine Being attracted by the possibilities of adventure into their opposites. What is perfect wishes to experience the novelty of imperfection; Knowledge seeks to sport with Ignorance; subtle existences want to embody themselves in gross forms; the Infinite wants to play the finite. But they are reluctant to go the whole way and pay the price of death for participation in creation.


Children of Gleam

The Children of the unembodied Gleam
Arisen from a formless thought in the soul
And chased by an imperishable desire,
Traversed the field of the pursuing gaze.

All these are truths that have issued from the being of the Creative Soul in the wake of a perception, a certain possibility, and impelled by desire, kāma, to actualise that possibility. The Truth-vision creates the field for the Truth-perception to shape itself and the whole movement takes place in that developing field.


A Failing Will

A will that unpersisting failed, worked there:
Life was a search but finding never came.

Here on this plane of life the will to live is not strong enough to persist against the contrary pulls of nature. It fails. Life is in search of something but she does not succeed in her object. There is no continuity of will.


Pale Dreams

There nothing satisfied, but all allured,
Things seemed to be that never wholly are,
Images were seen that looked like living acts
And symbols hid the sense they claimed to show,
Pale dreams grew real to the dreamer’s eyes.

There is here no certainty, no satisfaction of fulfilment. All is compulsively attractive, seeming to be real but never actually so; images abound but they are only unsubstantial figures; symbols do not reveal but only veil what they stand for. It is a world of vague dreams that appears real to the dreamer.


Souls Strive Vainly

The souls came there that vainly strive for birth,
And spirits entrapped might wander through all time,
Yet never find the truth by which they live.

Souls that come for embodiment cannot hope to achieve their purpose here. Entities and forces which are attracted to this scheme of life may stay here under its spell and strive for all time but the truth which bases their existence and is the justification of their being will not be found here.


Nothing Solid

All ran like hopes that hunt a lurking chance;
Nothing was solid, nothing felt complete:
All was unsafe, miraculous and half-true.

It seemed a realm of lives that had no base.

All forces, all beings here are on the move hoping to catch some opportunity that may come by, as human hopes that persist, expecting chance favours, some time or other.

Nothing here is concrete, nothing fulfilled, nothing fully true. All is precarious, more untrue than true; existence itself is a miracle, Lives there are but they have no firm standing-ground.


Dawn of Broadened Sky

Then dawned a greater seeking, broadened sky,
A journey under wings of brooding Force.

First came the kingdom of the morning star:
A twilight beauty trembled under its spear
And the throb of promise of a wider Life.

As Aswapathy proceeds he enters, under the spell of a gathering Force, into another belt of larger vistas, higher impulsions. First comes a realm of trembling light, beauteous and astir with hints of a wider manifestation of Life.


Seeking for Deep Self

Then slowly rose a great and doubting sun
And in its light she made of self a world.

A spirit was there that sought for its own deep self,
Yet was content with fragments pushed in front
And parts of living that belied the Whole
But, pieced together, might one day be true.

Then there breaks a greater and fuller light, which, however, is somewhat unsure of itself. In this light Life seeks to find her own real self and organise a world around it. But all that she succeeds in doing is to throw up fragmentary constructions which are far from the figure of her self, though eventually they could, in their totality, answer to its truth.


Something Achieved

Yet something seemed to be achieved at last.

A growing volume of the will to be,
A text of living and a graph of force,
A script of acts, a song of conscious forms
Burdened with meanings fugitive from thought’s grasp
And crowded with undertones of life’s rhythmic cry,
Could write itself on the hearts of living things.

All the same there is here some definite advance towards achievement. There is a stronger impress of the will to exist, a bolder formulation of life and connected action. There is a greater expression of consciousness in forms—though its significances elude the grasp of thought—and an audibly pervading rhythm of the breath of Life.


Outbreak of the Might of the Spirit

In an outbreak of the might of secret Spirit,
In Life and Matter’s answer of delight,
Some face of deathless beauty could be caught
That gave immortality to a moment’s joy,

To the outburst of the Power of the indwelling Spirit, there is a joyous response from Matter and Life, creating thereby an opportunity for a revelation of some aspect of the Beauty of the Eternal. This revelation gives a touch of immortality to the joy of life however momentary it may be.

Beauty, Delight, Immortality follow in the wake of the plenary manifestation of the Divine Spirit in Life and Matter.


Word incarnating Highest Truth

Some word that could incarnate highest Truth
Leaped out from a chance tension of the soul,

There is also, in this dynamic situation, a finding of the exact expression in Word by the Truth seeking to manifest itself.

It is only when the being is withdrawn from all dispersion and ingathered in concentration that the perfect Word capable of embodying the highest truth—mantra—is prepared and takes shape in the consciousness.


Hue of the Absolute

Some hue of the Absolute could fall on life,
Some glory of knowledge and intuitive sight,
Some passion of the rapturous heart of Love.

Other verities of the Divine Reality also manifest. Some glowing aspect of the Absolute, as an illumination of knowledge, a vision of intuition, an intensity of the power of Love, play on Life, following an outbreak of the might of the secret Spirit.


The Will that Half Manifests

A hierophant of the bodiless Secrecy
Interned in an unseen spiritual sheath,
The Will that pushes sense beyond its scope
To feel the light and joy intangible,
Half found its way into the Ineffable’s peace,
Half captured a sealed sweetness of desire
That yearned from a bosom of mysterious Bliss,
Half manifested veiled Reality.

The active Will to manifest what is un-manifested begins to be more effective. It is this Will that forces the limited senses to extend their range beyond their habitual run of the gross and feel something of the subtler light and joy in existence. This unceasing Will finds here something of the peace of the ineffable Reality, something of the sweet longing welling from a. hidden Bliss at the root of things. It manifests partly the Reality behind the veil.


Glimpse of the True Sense

A soul not wrapped into its cloak of mind
Could glimpse the true sense of a world of forms;
Illumined by a vision in the thought,
Upbuoyed by the heart’s understanding flame,
It could hold in the conscious ether of the spirit
The divinity of a symbol universe.

It is possible for the soul here as it is not yet covered by the misleading and blinding mind—to perceive the real significance of this world of forms. A luminous vision informs its thought; a direct understanding in the heart rises up and it is able as a result, to grasp and hold in its spiritual poise the divine nature of this universe which is in fact a Figure of the Reality.


This Realm Inspires us

This realm inspires us with our vaster hopes;
Its forces have made landings on our globe,
Its signs have stamped their patterns on our lives:
It lends a sovereign movement to our fate,
Its errant waves motive our life’s high surge.

This realm of greater life has its action on our earth. The larger movements, higher aspirations and strivings in our human world are inspired from there. Things from there cast their moulds here on earth and forces from there communicate their achieving power here. The mighty upsurges of our lives particularly are, as it were, the overflow of the coursings of the Life-movements in that realm above.


All is Prefigured there

All that we seek for is prefigured there
And all we have not known nor even sought
Which yet one day must be born in human hearts
That the Timeless may fulfil itself in things.

All that we strive for here on earth is there, in that Life-realm, prepared and ready to be precipitated into the material world. There stands prefigured even what we are not aware of or have sought for, but which, nevertheless, has to be realised at some time or other for the fullness of the manifestation here of the Divine Reality.


A Mounting Endless Possibility

Incarnate in the mystery of the days,
Eternal in an unclosed Infinite,
A mounting endless possibility
Climbs high upon a topless ladder of dream
Forever in the Being’s conscious trance.

In the Eternal Being are endless possibilities. One of these possibilities which is sanctioned by theSupreme sets out on its career and this Creation is the result. It is a conscious movement of the Eternal pouring itself in Time, of the Infinite devolving into the finite. This devolution of the Higher into the lower term is one part of the movement; the evolution of the lower into the Higher, the ascent, is the other part of the possibility.

The finite ascends into the Infinite up the evolutionary ladder that has no end.


Pilgrimage to the Unknown

All on that ladder mounts to an unseen end.

An Energy of perpetual transience makes
The journey from which no return is sure,
The pilgrimage of Nature to the Unknown.

From the known all climbs to the Unknown. There is in action a mighty Life-Energy whose products may be of temporary duration but whose working is ceaseless in forging the path and effecting the ascent of evolutionary Nature to the summits of Existence that transcend the horizons of the mind. The journey is ever forward.


Ascent to the Lost Source

As if in her ascent to her lost source
She hoped to unroll all that could ever be,
Her high procession moves from stage to stage,
A progress leap from sight to greater sight,
A process march from form to ampler form,
A caravan of the inexhaustible
Formations of a boundless Thought and Force.

This is in fact the ascent of Life to her own Source above, the citśakti, from which she has got separated in the course of the devolution of the Spirit. The ascent is also an unrolling, a manifestation of all that seeks to manifest. This movement proceeds systematically, step by step; from a lower light it climbs to a higher, from a restricted sight to a greater. The process develops from small and simple forms to the building of larger and more intricate forms. The way is strewn with the countless formations of Force and Thought thus created.


Power Erects the Type of Lost Joys

Her timeless Power that lay once on the lap
Of a beginningless and endless Calm,
Now severed from the Spirit’s immortal bliss,
Erects the type of all the joys she has lost;

Before this movement of devolution and evolution begins, Life-Power lies at rest in the Being of the Eternal. Once she is released into action and in the course of the descent gets separated from her source in the Eternal’s Consciousness-Force that is blissful, she tries to recapture what is lost. She goes on to rebuild, in the conditions of her fall, the pattern of those joys that were once natural to her.


Hopes to Heal the Severance

Compelling transient substance into shape,
She hopes by the creative act’s release
To o’erleap sometimes the gulf she cannot fill,
To heal awhile the wound of severance,
Escape from the moment’s prison of littleness
And meet the Eternal’s wide sublimities
In the uncertain time-field portioned here.

This Power of Life forces substances to shape into forms and in the very momentum of her creative advance registers certain leaps, saltus, over gulfs that cannot be bridged in the normal way. She attempts in several ways of contact, meeting and union to unite what has been severed. She strives for release into the freer heights of the Spirit from the limitations that have formed around her and curb her actions while they last. She strives also to gain something of the assured freedom of the Eternal even in the uncertainty of the workings of Time in this realm.

Each plane of existence has its own Time with its own characteristic Time-action.


She Nears the Unattainable (I)

Almost she nears what never can be attained;
She shuts eternity into an hour
And fills a little soul with the Infinite;

Almost she achieves the impossible. She imprisons Eternity in the flow of Time and concentrates the Infinite in the tiny soul at the heart of all living forms. In her meet Eternity and Time, the Infinite and the Finite.


She Nears the Unattainable (II)

The Immobile leans to the magic of her call;
She stands on a shore in the Illimitable,
Perceives the formless Dweller in all forms
And feels around her infinity’s embrace.

Also meet in her and in her workings, the Immobile and the mobile; what is in movement is supported by the Moveless. Though she needs a boundary for the dynamis of her work, her field extends into the Boundless. She creates forms but is aware of the presence of the Formless Divinity in each form. With all her finite and finitising movements she feels palpably the Infinite upholding her.


Driven by a Nameless Will

Her task no ending knows, she serves no aim
But labours driven by a nameless Will
That came from some unknowable formless Vast.

There is no finale as such to the strivings of this labouring Power. She has no conscious, chosen aim before her. She is driven to labour by an undefined Will which is not her own but comes from another source, from a range of Being that breaks away from forms and cannot be known by the normal faculties.


Secret Task

This is her secret and impossible task
To catch the boundless in a net of birth,
To cast the spirit into physical form,
To lend speech and thought to the Ineffable;
She is pushed to reveal the ever Unmanifest.

And this is the well-nigh impossible task set by the Will, this is the object the Life-Power is driven to achieve: to bind with birth the Reality that is without bounds; to embody the formless Spirit in a form of Matter; to formulate and express the Truth that in its innate nature is beyond formulation by mind and speech—’That from which mind and speech fall back unattaining’ (Taittiriya Upanishad, 2.4.1.)

In a word, to manifest the Reality that is unmanifest.


Her Skill in Doing the Impossible

Yet by her skill the impossible has been done:
She follows her sublime irrational plan,
Invents devices of her magic art
To find new bodies for the Infinite
And images of the Unimaginable;
She has lured the Eternal into the arms of Time.

However impossible this task appears to be, it is being fulfilled by the Power at work. Her movements follow a profound plan which human reason cannot fathom or anticipate. She displays an endless skill in providing newer and newer forms to the Formless Infinite Reality that seeks to manifest, in revealing increasingly That which cannot be wholly imaged.

She has succinctly captured Eternity in the flow of Time, made the Timeless manifest in terms of Time.


Beneath a Baffling Mask

Even now herself she knows not what she has done.

For all is wrought beneath a baffling mask:

But the Life-Power is not overtly conscious of the significance of her achievement in the total scheme that is being worked out. What appears on the surface of life as a confused action is only a mask; behind that misleading exterior a meaningful work is being done by an Intelligence that directs from within.


Truth Hidden

A semblance other than its hidden truth
The aspect wears of an illusion’s trick,
A feigned time-driven unreality,
The unfinished creation of a changing soul
In a body changing with the inhabitant.

The appearance is that of an illusion; nothing seems to last, all is subject to the process and decay of time; an unreal masquerades as some real. There is ever a gap of incompleteness in this changing creation. But that is not the real truth. The truth of creation is yet hidden.


Timeless Mystery in Time

Insignificant her means, infinite her work;
On a great field of shapeless consciousness
In little finite strokes of mind and sense
An endless truth she endlessly unfolds;
A timeless mystery works out in Time.

The work before this Life-Power is vast and endless, but the means wherewith to execute it are paltry and limited in capacity. The ground on which she labours is an amorphous spread of consciousness and her puny instruments are the limited mind and the senses. The truth she is to manifest is endless and so is her work.

Through her workings some Truth that is eternal and transcendent reveals itself in the field of Time.


She Labours on

The greatness she has dreamed her acts have missed,
Her labour is a passion and a pain,
A rapture and pang, her glory and her curse;
And yet she cannot choose but labours on;
Her mighty heart forbids her to desist.

There is indeed a big gap between what she aims at and what is actually realised. And yet she is seized with a passion to achieve. The intensity of her drive is at once her joy and her pain. She has no choice but to go on striving. The Will in her goads her on.


Her Failure Lives

As long as the world lasts her failure lives
Astonishing and foiling Reason’s gaze,
A folly and a beauty unspeakable,
A superb madness of the will to live,
A daring, a delirium of delight.

She may have failed to achieve the greatness aimed at, but the failure does not peter away. Whatever is achieved lasts, bewildering the calculations of Reason, indescribable in its beauty, however purposeless it may seem,—an exciting essay of the will to be, a bold phantasy of the delight of Life.


Will to Lavish

This is her being’s law, its sole resource;
She sates, though satisfaction never comes,
Her hungry will to lavish everywhere
Her many-imaged fictions of the Self
And thousand fashions of one Reality.

This is the very nature of the Life-Power. She gives in reckless profusion but no contentment is there. She is ever at work to produce and throw up more and more varieties of forms, countless figures of the Reality that is One.

The fiction is the sense of separateness in the individual forms, the reality is their underlying oneness.


A World Touched by Truth’s Hem

A world she made touched by truth’s fleeing hem,
A world cast into a dream of what it seeks,
An icon of truth, a conscious mystery’s shape.

The world thus created by Life is not a world of truth but one of fantasy touched by something of the truth which could escape its fantasies. It is more of a dream than an actuality of what is sought for. It is some representation of truth, a form of a living mystery.


A Daring World

It lingered not like the earth-mind hemmed in
In solid barriers of apparent fact;
It dared to trust the dream-mind and the soul.

Unlike the realm of the physical mind which confines itself to the field and data of the senses that take cognisance only of the physically obvious phenomenon, this world has a larger flight. It extends itself on the wings of the mind that dreams and adventures at the call of the soul.


Hunter of Spiritual Verities

A hunter of spiritual verities
Still only thought or guessed or held by faith,
It seized in imagination and confined
A painted bird of paradise in a cage.

This Life-world is in search of the higher truths of the Spirit which its thought points to or some intuitive feeling assures. But it does not realise these truths, only imagines them; what it seizes and holds to is only a bright imitation of the living truth that eludes it.


Enamoured of the Unseen

This greater life is enamoured of the Unseen;
It calls to some highest Light beyond its reach,
It can feel the Silence that absolves the soul;
It feels a saviour touch, a ray divine:
Beauty and good and truth its godheads are.

This greater Life is attracted to what is beyond it. It always seeks for the Splendour that is above its range. It is capable of touching the Silence in which the striving soul finds its delivering release. It feels the touch of the Divine Grace, receives a ray of the Divine Glory. Its governing Ideals, the truths it seeks to realise, are the True, the Good, the Beautiful, satyam, sivam, sundaram.


Kinship with Demon and God

It is near to heavenlier heavens than earth’s eyes see,
A direr darkness than man’s life can bear.

It has kinship with the demon and the god.

If, however, this greater Life is closer to the heavens that are brighter than the heavens of the earth-order—each order of existence, physical, vital, mental, has its own heavens—it is also exposed to hells that are darker and worse than the hells of the earth-life. Greater Life has strong affinities to both good and evil, light and darkness, god and demon.


Hunger for Perfection

A strange enthusiasm has moved its heart;
It hungers for heights, it passions for the supreme.

It hunts for the perfect word, the perfect shape,
It leaps to the summit thought, the summit light.

For by the form the Formless is brought close
And all perfection fringes the Absolute.

The fervour that fills the movements of greater Life asks for constant increase, for larger and higher ranges; it desires intensely to reach the supreme Divinity. It strives to attain to the perfect expression, the perfect form, the highest thought, the highest light.

It seeks for form because the Reality that is formless can be made tangible only through form. It seeks for perfection because the Absolute that is Full and Perfect can be approached only through increasing perfection.


It can Touch but not Hold

A child of heaven who never saw his home,
Its impetus meets the eternal at a point:
It can only near and touch, it cannot hold;
It can only strain towards some bright extreme:
Its greatness is to seek and to create.

This greater Life though derived from the divine Consciousness-Force, cit-śakti, has not realised its true nature yet. By the force of its drive it comes close to and touches the Higher Existence, but it cannot hold it. It can only strive towards these brighter ends but not arrive. Its special excellence is its capacity to push towards greater things and to try to create them.


Creative Greatness

On every plane, this Greatness must create.

On earth, in heaven, in hell she is the same;
Of every fate she takes her mighty part.

The might of this greater Life is a force for effectuation on every plane of Existence. She participates in the creative action in all conditions of the manifestation that is in progress, whether of light and joy or darkness and suffering or of both mixed together as on earth. She is there in the building of each destiny.


Bears God’s Urge

A guardian of the fire that lights the suns,
She triumphs in her glory and her might:
Opposed, oppressed she bears God’s urge to be born:
The spirit survives upon non-being’s ground,
World-force outlasts world-disillusion’s shock:
Dumb, she is still the Word, inert the Power.

Life holds in her bosom the creative urge that fathers the universe; she carries a conquering fervour that breaks down obstructions; she has an irrepressible impulsion to be born and to live. Where there was nothing she affirms and establishes an existence of her force and spirit that withstands all shocks and survives. She may appear inarticulate, but she is always the potent expressive; she may hold herself immobile, but she is ever a dynamis.


Aspires to the Deathless

Here fallen, a slave of death and ignorance,
To things deathless she is driven to aspire
And moved to know even the Unknowable.

Here on earth Life is subject to death and ignorance; she is far removed from her native state. But deep in her is the memory of her origin and that goads her to strive to reach and regain her rightful immortality, to outgrow the ignorance and emerge into a full knowledge of the Reality that remains unknowable in the state of ignorance.


Her Sleep Creates a World

Even nescient, null, her sleep creates a world.

When most unseen, most mightily she works;
Housed in the atom, buried in the clod
Her quick creative passion cannot cease.

Even when this Life-energy is not overtly active, not outwardly perceivable, she works dynamically beneath the surface. Her workings there are more effective because they are less open to interference by contrary elements. She is there pulsating even in an infinitesimal formation like the atom, hidden even in such an inconscient form as the clod. She is ceaselessly vibrant in her creative beat.


She Hides Her Immortality

Inconscience is her long gigantic pause,
Her cosmic swoon is a stupendous phase:
Time-born, she hides her immortality;
In death, her bed, she waits the hour to rise.

What is called the inconscient is only a stage, a deliberate suspension of her movement, a productive in-gathering. Though immortal in her origin in the Eternal Being, Life has a different appearance in the field of time; her real nature is concealed, she accepts the setting and conditions of death and bides her time to assert her true self.


Crucified God on Her Breast

Even with the Light denied that sent her forth
And the hope dead she needed for her task,
Even when her brightest stars are quenched in Night,
Nourished by hardship and calamity
And with pain for her body’s handmaid, masseuse, nurse,
Her tortured invisible spirit continues still
To toil though in darkness, to create though with pangs;
She carries crucified God upon her breast.

Life is bereft of the Light of Consciousness from which she has originally issued; she is obliged to work in the darkness of Ignorance with its dim shadows pursuing her everywhere; her guiding lights—however bright they may be—are swallowed up in the dark; obstruction, disaster, pain dog her steps constantly; but she thrives on these very elements of opposition, grows in stature and creates through these pangs of birth. Her creation is born in the stress of suffering and exists in pain.


Remembers and Invokes the Skill of Creation

In chill insentient depths where joy is none,
Immured, oppressed by the resisting Void
Where nothing moves and nothing can become,
Still she remembers, still invokes the skill
The Wonder-Worker gave her at her birth,

She is at first confined in the deep gulfs of the Inconscient where there is no sensation, no joy, no movement. All is a black void and nothing can take shape. But Life carries in herself the memory of her origin; she remembers and invokes the skill of formation with which she was endowed by the Creative Spirit of this marvellous manifestation when he first set her forth on her appointed career.


Reveals a World

Imparts to drowsy formlessness a shape,
Reveals a world where nothing was before.

In realms confined to a prone circle of death,
To a dark eternity of Ignorance,
A quiver in an inert inconscient mass,

Where there is no form but only a sleepy existence, she creates form; where there is nothing but an empire of death she creates a living world perceivable even in the reigning darkness of Ignorance; where there is an inconscient mass without any movement, she sets up a throb.


She Reposes Motionless

Or imprisoned in immobilised whorls of Force,
By Matter’s blind compulsion deaf and mute
She reposes motionless in its dust of sleep.

Or she holds herself at rest, without motion, in the depths of Matter where her Force is still and inexpressive under the compelling spell of Matter’s rule.


Fashions Marvels Out of Mud (I)

Then, for her rebel waking’s punishment
Given only hard mechanic Circumstance
As the enginery of her magic craft,
She fashions godlike marvels out of mud;

As if in punishment for breaking up the material order of immobility and inconscience, Life is given the most rigid conditions for her working. And yet so great is her skill that even from such crude material as mud she fashions creations that are godlike.


Fashions Marvels Out of Mud (II)

In the plasm she sets her dumb immortal urge,
Helps the live tissue to think, the closed sense to feel,
Flashes through the frail nerves poignant messages,
In a heart of flesh miraculously loves,
To brute bodies gives a soul, a will, a voice.

And what are the godlike wonders that she creates? In the smallest physical cell of the body she plants, the life-urge; promotes the capacity to think in the tissues and to feel and react in the insentient senses; uses the nerve-channel for the communication of impacts of pleasure and pain and the like to the brain; manifests non-physical movements, like the emotion of love in the physical organ of the heart; endows the material body, an inert physical form, with a living soul, a directing will and a voice to express itself.


Journey of Life

Ever she summons as by a sorcerer’s wand
Beings and shapes and scenes innumerable,
Torch-bearers of her pomps through Time and Space.

This world is her long journey through the night,
The suns and planets lamps to light her road,
Our reason is the confidante of her thoughts,
Our senses are her vibrant witnesses.

This world-creation is indeed a procession of the caravan of Life through the darkness of Ignorance. Time and Space are her field. Luminaries like the suns and planets light up her pathway. Reason is her collaborator and the senses her active observers. Both reason and senses subserve Life.


Dreams Replace Lost Eternity

There drawing her signs from things half true, half false,
She labours to replace by realised dreams
The memory of her lost eternity.

However, the things she draws upon for her creation are neither fully true, nor fully false, with the result that what she is able to effect is of the nature of dreams seeming real enough while they last but proving their unreality when they pass away. This is all that she can create to replace the immortality of her origin of which she has but a haunting memory.


Endless Pilgrimage

These are her deeds in this huge world-ignorance:
Till the veil is lifted, till the night is dead,
In light or dark she keeps her tireless search;
Time is her road of endless pilgrimage.

Life keeps up her relentless striving to recreate the Eternal here in this world, and pushes her wayacross the dark or semi-dark passages in this empire of Ignorance. And she will go on doing so till the veil of darkness is cast aside; her path is as endless as Time in which her journey takes place.


Her Mighty Passion

One mighty passion motives all her works.

Her eternal Lover is her action’s cause;
For him she leaped forth from the unseen Vasts
To move here in a stark unconscious world.

Life is in her origin a Power of the creative Divine. She is a Power that has issued forth from His Being to fulfil His will and to manifest His Glory under conditions that are the very reverse of His innate and supreme Consciousness and Bliss. To create and recreate till this object is fulfilled is the passionate endeavour of Life.

The Shakti acts for her Lord.


Her Hidden Guest

Its acts are her commerce with her hidden Guest,
His moods she takes for her heart’s passionate moulds;
In beauty she treasures the sunlight of his smile.

Life flows according to the impulsions of this Will. Whatever is beautiful in her creation is a reflection of the joy of the Purusha within her.


She Cajoles and Woos Him

Ashamed of her rich cosmic poverty,
She cajoles with her small gifts his mightiness,
Holds with her scenes his look’s fidelity
And woos his large-eyed wandering thoughts to dwell
In figures of her million-impulsed Force.

All is her play for the delectation of her Lord. She is aware of the inadequacy of her cosmic manifestations but she tries to interest him with her paltry gifts. She strives to hold his attention by her varied picturesque scenes and woos him to sanction and indwell her manifold creations.


Keeps Him Close to Her Breast

Only to attract her veiled companion
And keep him close to her breast in her world-cloak
Lest from her arms he turn to his formless peace,
Is her heart’s business and her clinging care.

Her one care is to hold the attention of her Purusha in her world-playings and keep him from turning back to his original status of ineffable and formless Peace. She works to fulfil his Will but she also desires to have him as her partner, participating in her movements.


That Never They May Part

Yet when he is most near, she feels him far.

For contradiction is her nature’s law.

Although she is ever in him and he in her,
As if unaware of the eternal tie,
Her will is to shut God into her works
And keep him as her cherished prisoner
That never they may part again in Time.

Life works through contraries. The conditions in which she is set to work are the very opposite of her own nature. Immortal in her origin, she is given the domain of death as her field; boundless, she is given limited instruments through which to establish herself. At the core she is luminously conscious that her Purusha is always with her, supporting and guiding her movements from behind the veil. But she acts as if she were unaware of this eternal union and the only way in which she can hold him is to relate him to all her acts, confirm his presence in all her movements, and not to allow him to escape her in the field of time. She fears a repetition of the severance of the kind that took place at the origin of the creative movement when Power issued out of the Supreme Being and at some stage in devolution parted from it.


Chamber of Spirit’s Sleep

A sumptuous chamber of the Spirit’s sleep
At first she made, a deep interior room,
Where he slumbers as if a forgotten guest.

In Life’s first poise this Purusha, the Conscious Being, is asleep, as it were, in the spell of inconscience. He is hidden deep within folds after folds of the tranced Spirit. There is no evidence of his existence at all.


Awakes the Sleeper

But now she turns to break the oblivious spell,
Awakes the sleeper on the sculptured couch;
She finds again the Presence in the form
And in the light that wakes with him recovers
A meaning in the hurry and trudge of Time,
And through this mind that once obscured the soul
Passes a glint of unseen deity.

is felt. Life becomes aware of the purpose of her movements and catches through the mind which at one stage veiled the truth some revelation of the Godhead.


Creation, a Rainbow Bridge

Across a luminous dream of spirit-space
She builds creation like a rainbow bridge
Between the original Silence and the Void.

A net is made of the mobile universe;
She weaves a snare for the conscious Infinite.

This greater Life builds her Creation in the extension of the Spirit like a beautiful and picturesque bridge between the white Silences on the summit of Existence and the dark Void of Nescience below. And this moving universe sufficiently attracts the Conscious Being to dwell in it.


Her Knowledge and Might

A knowledge is with her that conceals its steps
And seems a mute omnipotent Ignorance.

A might is with her that makes wonders true;
The incredible is her stuff of common fact.

Life seems to act dumbly and ignorantly though irresistibly; but in fact she is instinct with a knowledge that is dynamic from behind the veil. She is also endowed with a strength and power that achieves impossibles; she goes on to make actual what is unbelievable.


Riddles of Her Workings

Her purposes, her workings riddles prove;
Examined, they grow other than they were,
Explained, they seem yet more inexplicable.

Life has her own ways of working her purposes. They baffle the human mind. Reason and logic cannot fathom her modes. When they try to probe into them, appearances prove to be misleading and attempts at solving her mysteries only deepen them.


Mystery in our World Too

Even in our world a mystery has reigned
Earth’s cunning screen of trivial plainness hides;
Her larger levels are of sorceries made.

Mystery belongs not to the Life-world alone. Even on our physical earth there is a mystery behind the deceptive veil of common phenomena. Inexplicable formations and movements take place in the physical universe too, especially on those levels of its existence that are not too bound by their physicality.


Enigma in its Splendid Prism

There the enigma shows its splendid prism,
There is no deep disguise of commonness;
Occult, profound comes all experience,
Marvel is ever new, miracle divine.

In the Life-world proper, however, the mystery is undisguised, it reigns in all its richness. The apparent alikeness in form and movement which misleads is not there. Everything is marvellous, ever new, superbly miraculous, holding back its truth!


Secrecy of Hidden Sense

There is a screened burden, a mysterious touch,
There is a secrecy of hidden sense.

Although no earthen mask weighs on her face,
Into herself she flees from her own sight.

There is indeed no material covering concealing the truth of things in that world, but still the inner sense is withheld. Life is weighed down by a mystery, overpowered by it.


Form, Token of Idea

All forms are tokens of some veiled idea
Whose covert purpose lurks from mind’s pursuit,
Yet is a womb of sovereign consequence.

A form is not just a shape that has somehow come to be. Each form is a self-figuration of the idea that seeks to express itself; the figure corresponds or attempts to correspond to the quality and the stress of the consciousness within that ensouls the idea. The truth of this idea is not easily grasped by the mind. The truth is veiled, but on that account it is not ineffective. It is the seed out of which issues the shaping of the form and its subsequent developments.


Thought and Feeling an Act

There every thought and feeling is an act,
And every act a symbol and a sign,
And every symbol hides a living power.

In that life-world even feeling and thinking are dynamic; they instantly produce results. They are not, as in our world here, preparatory to action but action itself. And each act there is a symbol of a veiled truth in movement. Behind the symbol-act pulsates the vibrant power of Life.


Only a Copy of Truth

A universe she builds from truths and myths,
But what she needed most she cannot build;
All shown is a figure or copy of the Truth,
But the Real veils from her its mystic face.

All else she finds, there lacks eternity;
All is sought out but missed the Infinite.

With all her dynamism, skill and ambition, all that this Life can succeed in building is a copy, an imitation of Truth, not the Truth itself which alone can make her work immortal. Her creations are manifold, but they do not last; they break down sooner or later; eternity eludes her. She succeeds in building forms but all the forms constitute only a finite; the infinite is beyond.


Only an Image

A consciousness lit by a Truth above
Was felt; it saw the light but not the Truth:
It caught the Idea and built from it a world;
It made an Image there and called it God.

Here in this realm of greater Life Aswapathy feels the presence of a consciousness lighted up by the rays of the Truth above. This consciousness is not face to face with that Truth though it is bathed in its radiance. It perceives something of that Truth as formulated in the Idea and proceeds to build a world upon that basis. But what it is able to so build is only an image of the Truth, though it may call it the Truth.


Something True Harbours Here

Yet something true and inward harboured there.

The beings of that world of greater life,
Tenants of a larger air and freer space,
Live not by the body or in outward things:
A deeper living was their seat of self.

All the same there is something here in the world of greater Life that is true, something that is turned inward. The atmosphere here is freer than that in the lower worlds, the field is larger. And the beings here do not live only on the surface of things, turned always to the external—as they do in the lower worlds. They live from within. Their base is deeper.


Domain of Intimacy

In that intense domain of intimacy
Objects dwell as companions of the soul;
The body’s actions are a minor script,
The surface rendering of a life within.

There is a strong commonalty, a deep oneness of life in this world. There is no separative demarcation between the inner and the outer; objects are not foreign to oneself, other than oneself, but are associates; the movements and activities of the body are not the main or sole features, they are only translations of a greater life that pulsates within.


All Forces are Life’s Retinue

All forces are Life’s retinue in that world
And thought and body as her handmaids move.

Life is the leading Power, the ruling truth of this world. All other forces that operate here are subsidiary to Life. The body and the mind which dominate over life in the material world, are here her understudies; they follow and serve Life who is the master.


Universal Wideness

The universal widenesses give her room:
All feel the cosmic movement in their acts
And are the instruments of her cosmic might.

Or their own self they make their universe.

Here the distinction between the individual movement and the universal is very slender. Each individual being feels the play of the cosmic force in its movements. Everywhere the sweep of Life is unbounded. All function as channels of her flow and instruments of her workings. Each one embraces the whole.


Image of a Crown

In all who have risen to a greater Life
A voice of unborn things whispers to the ear,
To their eyes visited by some high sunlight
Aspiration shows the image of a crown:
To work out a seed that she has thrown within,
To achieve her power in them her creatures live.

Whoever comes under the dominion of this greater Life awakes to greater inspirations and brighter illuminations. Creative urges communicate themselves; a living aspiration pulls high goals to reveal themselves. All live and strive to fulfil the purpose of this Life in them, to embody and manifest her glory.


Growing Greatness

Each is a greatness growing towards the heights
Or from his inner centre oceans out;
In circling ripples of concentric power
They swallow, glutted, their environment.

Each being is under pressure to expand, grow upwards to greater and still greater heights or to enlarge itself wider and still wider. This movement of self-enlargement spreads over larger and larger areas till it engulfs the entire environment. Each expansion proceeds in bigger and bigger circles but always from one truth-centre.


Small Greatness

Even of that largeness many a cabin make;
In narrower breadths and briefer vistas pent
They live content with some small greatness won.

Even here there are many who shut themselves in the expansion they have arrived at. They do not keep on progressing. They limit their field and stay contented with the comparative greatness they have achieved.

Unless one goes on progressing more and more, the progress achieved itself becomes a limitation, an impediment.


Rulers of Little Empires

To rule the little empire of themselves,
To be a figure in their private world
And make the milieu’s joys and griefs their own
And satisfy their life-motives and life-wants
Is charge enough and office for this strength,
A steward of the Person and his fate.

Such beings who limit themselves to their existing states are satisfied with their little kingdoms in which they can play the king. They identify themselves with the joys and griefs of their environments and exert to fulfil their life-needs. They function in the strength given to them as managers for the real Person for whose emergence the conditions are not yet ready.


Transition-Line into Heavenliness

This was transition-line and starting-point,
A first immigration into heavenliness,
For all who cross into that brilliant sphere:
These are the kinsmen of our earthly race;
This region borders on our mortal state.

This world of greater Life, above the borders of our mortal world, is the line of transition and the starting-point for entry into the brighter heavens beyond. Its denizens are not totally foreign to our race on earth; in some way they are our kinsmen.


Source of our Greater Movements

This wider world our greater movements gives,
Its strong formations build our growing selves;
Its creatures are our brighter replicas,
Complete the types we only initiate
And are securely what we strive to be.

From this wide world of greater Life flow the impulsions that motivate great movements on earth. Man’s growth on earth is shaped by formative actions from there. The originals of the things men seek to build in the material world are there in this Life-world, actual, living. What is begun in the physical world is there complete in the Life-world.


They Follow the Leader in the Heart

As if thought-out eternal characters,
Entire, not pulled as we by contrary tides,
They follow the unseen leader in the heart,
Their lives obey the inner nature’s law.

Beings here in the greater Life-world are not pulled about in contrary directions as humans are in their world below. They are not incomplete, not subject to alien controls. They are full, self-assured, pre-designed, as it were, and they follow their guide within, act according to the law of their inner nature, svabhava.


The True and False Join Battle

There is kept grandeur’s store, the hero’s mould;
The soul is the watchful builder of its fate;
None is a spirit indifferent and inert;
They choose their side, they see the god they adore.

A battle is joined between the true and false,
A pilgrimage sets out to the divine Light.

Those who are of this Life-world that is full of grandeur are cast in the mould of heroes. The soul within them is not a mere witness, unmoving and unmoved; it participates in the destiny that is being forged and determines the issue. Beings here are wide awake and choose their host—gods or titans. For here the battle is acutely fought between the gods who form the army of truth and the titans and their brood who oppose with their falsehood.

The whole procession of this Life-pageant is a journey to the Light Divine.


Even Ignorance Aspires to Know

For even Ignorance there aspires to know
And shines with the lustre of a distant star;
There is a knowledge in the heart of sleep
And Nature comes to them as a conscious force.

All here move upward. Even Ignorance is not content to remain what it is, but seeks to acquire Knowledge; its aspiration draws upon its visage a glow of the Knowledge-Light far above. Even in the swoon of sleep there is a waking Knowledge. Nature is not a mechanical energy but a conscious force.


An Ideal is Their Leader

An ideal is their leader and their king:
Aspiring to the monarchy of the sun
They call in Truth for their high government,
Hold her incarnate in their daily acts
And fill their thoughts with her inspired voice
And shape their lives into her breathing form,
Till in her sun-gold godhead they too share.

The beings here have their own ideals which they seek to realise. They aspire for Truth and strive to govern their lives in accordance with it; their actions embody the spirit of the Truth sought for, their thoughts are inspired by it, their lives are moulded in its figure. Thus they seek to grow into the divinity of Truth.


Warriors All

Or to the truth of Darkness they subscribe;
Whether for Heaven or Hell they must wage war:
Warriors of Good, they serve a shining cause
Or are Evil’s soldiers in the pay of Sin.

Not all of these vital beings, however, work for the Ideal of the Divine Truth, of Light. There are also those who choose the Ideal of Falsehood, of Darkness. Both kinds serve their respective Ideals with passion and intensity for that is their nature.

The vital being is a warrior by nature and whether it puts itself on the side of Good or of Evil, it is an ardent combatant.


Good and Evil

For evil and good an equal tenure keep
Wherever Knowledge is Ignorance’s twin.

Both the Good and its opposite the Evil exist here with equal dominion. Both thrive and fight with each other on equal terms.

Wherever Knowledge is not supreme and not the sole power but is accompanied by Ignorance to whatever degree, there is bound to be this dual phenomenon of good and evil. Evil proceeds from ignorance as good ensues from knowledge.


Each Power Builds its Temple

All powers of Life towards their godhead tend
In the wideness and the daring of that air,
Each builds its temple and expands its cult,
And Sin too there is a divinity.

In this Life-World, all powers have freedom to develop to their utmost, to speed to their absolutes. The field is vast and adventure is natural. Each power builds its own empire and expands its sway. Even Sin has her own rule and holds the allegiance of her adherents.


Sin (I)

Affirming the beauty and splendour of her law
She claims life as her natural domain,
Assumes the world’s throne or dons the papal robe:
Her worshippers proclaim her sacred right.

Sin claims the whole of the Life-realm as her rightful domain. She tries to establish her law—bright and beautiful as it appears to her and her host—all over the world. She assumes the role of the high-priest and her right to preach her gospel is blazoned by her retinue.


Sin (II)

A red-tiaraed falsehood they revere,
Worship the shadow of a crooked god,
Admit the black Idea that twists the brain
Or lie with the harlot Power that slays the Soul.

Her crown of regalia is Falsehood. Those who worship her pay homage to this Falsehood, cherish crookedness that is the shadow of sin, admit in their minds dark untruth in the form of the Idea which twists the brain by its crookedness, cherish and indulge in unholy power that corrupts and veils their soul.

Falsehood, crookedness, wrong thinking, wrong actions, all lead to destruction, step by step.


Titan Passion and Idol of Power

A mastering virtue statuesques the pose,
Or a titan passion goads to a proud unrest:
At Wisdom’s altar they are kings and priests
Or their life a sacrifice to an idol of Power.

Some stay put in a virtue that dominates their life; they do not move further. Some are seized with a powerful passion which always keeps them in a ferment of restlessness. Even in the precincts of wisdom some are too proud of their kingship or sacerdocy to benefit by her. Some pour out their lives in service of a feigned godhead of Power.


Beauty and Joy

Or Beauty shines on them like a wandering star;
Too far to reach, passionate they follow her light;
In Art and Life they catch the All-Beautiful’s ray
And make the world their radiant treasure house:
Even common figures are with marvel robed;
A charm and greatness locked in every hour
Awakes the joy which sleeps in all things made.

Some of these beings of greater Life are attracted by the Ideal of Beauty and they strive with passion to embody it in their lives. They grasp something of the Beauty aspect of the Supreme, sundaram, and express it in their world. Doing so they ennoble even common things and bring into existence a brilliant and wonderful creation. This presence and constant action of the truth of Beauty draws out the joy which is concealed in all forms and movements in Creation. For in all things there is a joy, a delight of creation, ānanda, originating them, sustaining them—whether it is manifest on the surface or lies hidden within waiting for conditions to be ready for its overt play.Beauty is the mould of Delight and where there is beauty there is the flow of delight.


Dual Energy

A mighty victory or a mighty fall,
A throne in heaven or a pit in hell,
The dual Energy they have justified
And marked their souls with her tremendous seal:
Whatever Fate may do to them they have earned;
Something they have done, something they have been, they live.

The vital beings in this plane of Life drive to the extreme either way, and either achieve great victories and win thrones of glory or suffer heavy defeats and fall into pits of darkness and suffering. In them is seen the glaring contrasts of the results of the twin-faced Energy at work which turns at one end upwards to Good and at the other downwards to Evil.

All that they enjoy or suffer is the result of their own doings. Fate is their own creation.


Contrary Balance

There Matter is soul’s result and not its cause.

In a contrary balance to earth’s truth of things
The gross weighs less, the subtle counts for more;
On inner values hangs the outer plan.

In this Life-world the balance of things is quite different from that which obtains on the physical plane. The soul is not the product of Matter as it appears to be in the physical world, but the cause which creates Matter. The soul is anterior. Similarly the subtle is of greater consequence here than the gross, whereas on the earth things have little value unless they have a gross expression palpable to the gross senses. All in this Life-world is determined by its inner significance. According to the inner intention and design, the outer pattern forms itself. The inner is the cause; the outer is the result.


Some Interior Might

As quivers with the thought the expressive word,
As yearns the act with the passion of the soul
This world’s apparent sensible design
Looks vibrant back to some interior might.

Just as the complete word—the word which fully expresses its content—is astir with the thought that is formulating itself in it and just as right action moves on the impulsion of the soul within, so the perceptible design of this Life-world strongly points to some great Power preparing within.


Impacts without Sense Channels

A Mind not limited by external sense
Gave figures to the spirit’s imponderables,
The world’s impacts without channels registered
And turned into the body’s concrete thrill
The vivid workings of a bodiless Force;

The physical mind is limited by the nature of its instruments, the gross senses, which take cognisance only of gross objects. But the mind in this vital world is not so limited; it cognises and gives shape to the subtler formulations of the spirit that are beyond the scope of the physical mind. The contacts of the world impinge directly upon the being without the need of sense-channels—and evoke responsive sensations of thrill. The workings from without of the subtle Force which is not embodied in any form are immediately converted into concrete bodily sensations.


Subliminal Powers Come Out

Powers here subliminal that act unseen
Or in ambush crouch waiting behind the wall
Came out in front uncovering their face.

The forces that act on earth are not all of them patent to the eye. Some of them are stationed in and always act from unseen regions like the subliminal. We know of them only from their results. At times they leap into action unexpectedly and take us by surprise. Such forces come out into the open in this vital world, and function in full view.


The Occult and the Obvious Meet

The occult grew there overt, the obvious kept
A covert turn and shouldered the unknown;
The unseen was felt and jostled visible shapes.

What is hidden and acts from behind the veil on earth stands revealed here in this vital world. And what is considered open and obvious on earth shows here a side that is still concealed and touches the Unknown. In between the seen and visible forms, one feels here the presence of the Unseen.The seen and the unseen meet in this vital world.


Communion of Minds and Hearts

In the communion of two meeting minds
Thought looked at thought and had no need of speech;
Emotion clasped emotion in two hearts,
They felt each other’s thrill in the flesh and nerves
Or melted each in each and grew immense
As when two houses burn and fire joins fire:

Unlike as in the physical world on earth, here in the vital world, there is no need of speech for the communication of thought; mind meets mind directly. So also with emotions. When two hearts come together, there is a spontaneous commingling of their emotions and both expand and merge into each other becoming one. There is no need of outer expression of their respective emotions to form a bridge between them.


Hate Grapples Hate

Hate grappled hate and love broke in on love,
Will wrestled with will on mind’s invisible ground;

In this free interchange on the subtler levels there is friction and combat too. Hatred from one meets the hatred of another and there is struggle. So also takes place the engulfing of love by love, the assertion of will against will.


Impact of Others’ Sensations Grief and Joy Invade

One felt another’s grief invade the breast,
Another’s joy exulting ran through the blood:
Hearts could draw close through distance, voices near
That spoke upon the shore of alien seas.

The grief of one is felt by another; one suffers with others. The joy of one thrills another; one delights with others. Distance is of no consequence. Hearts commune with each other and speech is heard irrespective of the distance in between.


A Living Interchange

There beat a throb of living interchange:
Being felt being even when afar
And consciousness replied to consciousness.

Thus there is a vibrant and constant interchange everywhere in this world of higher Life. Each one is not only aware of others, near or far, there is also a spontaneous response of the consciousness to other consciousnesses.


Oneness not Yet

And yet the ultimate oneness was not there.

There was a separateness of soul from soul:
An inner wall of silence could be built,
An armour of conscious might protect and shield;
The being could be closed in and solitary;
One could remain apart in self, alone.

Identity was not yet nor union’s peace.

But with all this living interchange, there is not yet oneness. Soul continues to be divided from soul. It is possible for the soul to erect an unseen wall of no response between itself and others and stay aloof, protecting itself from their impacts by a conscious will. One can live apart, alone in oneself. The natural identity of oneness or the peace of perfect union is not yet.


Still Imperfect

All was imperfect still, half-known, half-done:
The miracle of Inconscience overpassed,
The miracle of the Superconscient still
Unknown, self-wrapped, unfelt, unknowable,
Looked down on them, origin of all they were.

Things are still in the intermediate stage, the progress of evolving Nature is still incomplete; there is much to be known yet, much to be done. The mystery of Inconscience below has indeed been unravelled, but the mystery of the Superconscient above is still to be unveiled. It is yet to be known and experienced. It is there looming on those worlds of Life from above; it is in fact the real source of their existence.


Forms and Names

As forms they came of the formless Infinite,
As names lived of a nameless Eternity.

Above is the Infinite, the Eternal. It has no form, but out of that formless Being have issued all these forms; the Formless assumes forms. It has no mark, no name to determine and signify its character, but out of that nameless Being have appeared all these names; the Nameless emerges into names.

The Real in itself is formless and nameless. But forms and names are not on that account unreal; for they too are self-determinations of the Real.


A Middle Term

The beginning and the end were there occult;
A middle term worked unexplained, abrupt:
They were words that spoke to a vast wordless Truth,
They were figures crowding an unfinished sum.

This Life-world represents the middle stage of a long way whose beginning and end, start and finish, are not perceivable here. Looked at in itself it appears abrupt and leaves much to be explained. All here is in the nature of words trying to commune with a Truth that is beyond words, figures strewn about in the process of working out a sum. There is plenty but it is all unfinished.


None Truly Knows

None truly knew himself or knew the world
Or the Reality living there enshrined:
Only they knew what Mind could take and build
Out of the secret Supermind’s huge store.

None of the beings here knows the truth of himself or of the world of his habitation, much less of the Reality that is embedded in this Creation. His knowl’edge is incomplete, not deep and full enough to grasp the truth. It ranges only to that part which is formulated by the Mind from out of the rich store of the Supermind above which is still veiled.

The Mind is only a selective power of the Supermind.


Mystery and Riddle

By mysteries they explained a Mystery,
A riddling answer met the riddle of things.

Below, the denizens of this Life-world perceive an outspread darkness of Ignorance and Nescience. Above, they face a luminous Vast which they cannot fathom. In their own expanding and rising world nothing is certain. It is a Mystery on either side and all their attempts to solve it land them into more mysteries. Each riddle of life evokes a further riddle.


Aswapathy Sees all as Symbols

As he moved in this ether of ambiguous life,
Himself he grew a riddle to himself;
As symbols he saw all and sought their sense.

As Aswapathy moves in this Life-world of uncertainty, he finds that he has become a riddle to himself. HE too is overcome by the prevailing uncertainty and mystery. He regards all forms and movements herE as symbolic and seeks to read through them the truth they signify


Perilous Adventure

Across the leaping springs of death and birth
And over shifting borders of soul-change,
A hunter on the Spirit’s creative track,
He followed in life’s fine and mighty trails
Pursuing her sealed formidable delight
In a perilous adventure without close.

Eager to know the course of the creative Spirit, Aswapathy follows the great and subtle paths taken by Life across the phenomena of birth and death, through the changing fields of the Soul; he is led on by the concealed but unmistakable delight in the breath of Life and pursues his daring and endless venture.


Towards Marvel and Discovery

At first no aim appeared in these large steps:
Only the wide source he saw of all things here
Looking towards a wider source beyond.

For as she drew away from earthly lines,
A tenser drag was felt from the Unknown,
A higher context of delivering thought
Drove her towards marvel and discovery;

In the earlier stages Aswapathy does not espy any definite aim in Life’s course. He sees only a wide and high source of all things pointing upwards to a still higher source. As Life draws away from the lowly belts of material earth, the pull upwards from the regions that are yet unknown becomes more and more pronounced; a higher and liberative prospect of the Mind above spreads her course towards new vistas of wonder and surprise.


A Greater Scene

There came a high release from pettier cares,
A mightier image of desire and hope,
A vaster formula, a greater scene.

The petty round of little cares and anxieties that holds life captive on the lower levels of the vital is passed. Here opens the empire of mighty hopes and desires, larger perspectives and processes, a far greater field.

Small desires and petty cares are the natural movements of the lower vital; those of the higher vital have a far larger and higher range.


But Tied to the Immediate

Ever she circled towards some far-off Light:
Her signs still covered more than they revealed;
But tied to some immediate sight and will
They lost their purport in the joy of use,
Till stripped of their infinite meaning they became
A cipher gleaming with unreal sense.

This mighty movement of Life turns in circles and larger circles but at the same time it advances towards a distant Light that is glimpsed. Though the forms and movements of this Life reveal their purpose somewhat, much remains concealed still. They are all preoccupied in their immediate effort, lost in the enjoyment of the hour and their real significance recedes. Their value as indices of an infinity at work becomes practically nil and their appearance is illusive.


Invisible Target

Armed with a magical and haunted bow
She aimed at a target kept invisible
And ever deemed remote though always near.

Life here is possessed of a wonder-working Power and she is impelled to rush forward even when the prospect is not clear. In the very intensity of her effort she fails to see that the truth she seeks afar is all the while close by her.


He Scans her Tangled Designs

As one who spells illumined characters,
The key-book of a crabbed magician text,
He scanned her subtle tangled weird designs
And the screened difficult theorem of her clues,
Traced in the monstrous sands of desert Time
The thread beginnings of her titan works,

Aswapathy laboriously scans the intricate patterns of the movements of Life, follows the clues that he is able to catch and traces the beginnings of those that have developed into gigantic proportions.


He Watches her Action

Watched her charade of action for some hint,
Read the No-gestures of her silhouettes,
And strove to capture in their burdened drift
The dance-fantasia of her sequences
Escaping into rhythmic mystery,
A glimmer of fugitive feet on fleeing soil.

He watches closely her complicated movements to catch some hint, notes the symbolic gestures of the fleeting figures in her high drama of music and dance, as it were, strives to perceive the design in her fanciful sequences of developing rhythms and follows her disappearing trail on receding grounds.


He Loses its Signs

In the labyrinth pattern of her thoughts and hopes
And the byways of her intimate desires,
In the complex corners crowded with her dreams
And rounds crossed by an intrigue of irrelevant rounds,
A wanderer straying amid fugitive scenes
He lost its signs and chased each failing guess.

Ever he met key-words, ignorant of their key.

However, the movements of Life are so complex, so profusely crowded and intricately patterned what with her thoughts, hopes, secret desires, dreams—that Aswapathy is lost in bewilderment. He loses hold of the guiding clues and follows guessing, only to find that each guess fails to come true. He comes across solutions but they are in code and he does not have the key to decipher them.


Sun and Stars

A sun that dazzled its own eye of sight,
A luminous enigma’s brilliant hood
Lit the dense purple barrier of thought’s sky:
A dim large trance showed to the night her stars.

The upper limits of thought’s horizons are lit up by a dazzling and enigmatic lustre. Thought cannot cope with it. In the silent, dimly showing skies of the night, twinkle the stars.

The hberative and guiding Light is seen on the summits.


He Reads by Lightning-Flashes

As if sitting near an open window’s gap,
He read by lightning-flash on crowding flash
Chapters of her metaphysical romance
Of the soul’s search for lost Reality
And her fictions drawn from spirit’s authentic fact,
Her caprices and conceits and meanings locked,
Her rash unseizable freaks and mysteried turns.

Aswapathy is helped by flashes of illumination descending upon him to view and grasp the significance of all this mighty effort of Life. He sees in its strivings the attempt of the Soul to regain its identity with the Divine Reality. If the forms and names built by Life are transitory and therefore liable to be called fictitious, it is still a fiction based upon the Truth of the Spirit; even her unpredictable turns, her swift and abrupt movements, her mysteries are meaningful episodes in her enterprise.


He Sees Through the Masks

The magnificent wrappings of her secrecy
That fold her desirable body out of sight,
The strange significant forms woven on her robe,
Her meaningful outlines of the souls of things
He saw, her false transparencies of thought-hue,
Her rich brocades with imaged fancies sewn
And mutable masks and broideries of disguise.

Aswapathy is able to observe the various masks—picturesque and splendid—and the disguises behind which Life hides herself and her workings. He glimpses into the truth of things through their forms which are significant of their ensouling verities. He also perceives the misleading nature of appearances which the mind mistakes for realities.


Thousand Baffling Faces of Truth

A thousand baffling faces of the Truth
Looked at him from her forms with unknown eyes
And wordless mouths unrecognisable,
Spoke from the figures of her masquerade,
Or peered from the recondite magnificence
And subtle splendour of her draperies.

Aswapathy becomes suddenly aware of the innumerable forms around him turning into so many bewildering faces of the Reality and looking at him; he becomes conscious of the various symbols and masks coming alive with vivid expressions; he sees the gaze of the Truth through all her splendid and magnificent garbs.


Sudden Scintillation

In sudden scintillations of the unknown,
Inexpressive sounds became veridical,
Ideas that seemed unmeaning flashed out truth;
Under flashes of illumination the hitherto mute sounds turn into communications of truth; ideas that had looked blank and lacking in meaning reveal their truth-contents in rapid glimpses.


Herald of Voices and Figures

Voices that came from unseen waiting worlds
Uttered the syllables of the Unmanifest
To clothe the body of the mystic Word,
And wizard diagrams of the occult Law
Sealed some precise unreadable harmony,
Or used hue and figure to reconstitute
The herald blazon of Time’s secret things.

The creative Word, the Womb of the Cosmic rhythms, which carries the seed of manifestation from the vasts of the Unmanifest finds expression here. Lines and figures with occult significance secure firmly an exact underlying harmony; or they serve to re-form and proclaim the advent of new truths to manifest.


Wings of Her Songster Hopes

In her green wildernesses and lurking depths,
In her thickets of joy where danger clasps delight,
He glimpsed the hidden wings of her songster hopes,
A glimmer of blue and gold and scarlet fire.

The expanses of Life are lush and vast with unexpected depressions here and there. There are places where the joy of life is specially concentrated in its play with danger a circumstance that heightens the joy of adventure. In these Aswapathy glimpses the soaring flight of Life’s aspirations in all their variegated hues.


Glow of Her Fruits of Bliss

In her covert lanes, bordering her chance field-paths
And by her singing rivulets and calm lakes
He found the glow of her golden fruits of bliss
And the beauty of her flowers of dream and muse.

Not all the paths of her course are open and straight. There are hidden lanes and bylanes, unexpected short-cuts; there are regions that are vibrant with joyous movements; there are spots where things are quiet and restful. Everywhere Aswapathy finds the bright and rich yield of the bliss of Life, the beauty of her dreams and musings.


Crimson Burst of Secular Flower

As if a miracle of heart’s change by joy
He watched in the alchemist radiance of her suns
The crimson outburst of one secular flower
On the tree of sacrifice of spiritual love.

Even as an outburst of joy alters the whole set-up and mood of one’s heart, the radiances in the realm of greater Life effect such a miracle. Aswapathy watches the birth on the tree of Life of a passionate, deep red flower that has grown from the seed of the holocaust of the Spirit in its supreme Love.


Laughter of Rose Desires

In the sleepy splendour of her noons he saw,
A perpetual repetition through the hours,
Thought’s dance of dragon-flies on mystery’s stream
That skim but never test its murmurs’ race,
And heard the laughter of her rose desires
Running as if to escape from longed-for hands,
Jingling sweet anklet-bells of fantasy.

Aswapathy observes the repetitive movements of the Life-force which affirms herself and makes and remakes things till her object is achieved; he sees the complex and indefinite thought movements that touch only the surfaces of things and fail to probe into their depths which remain unknown; he hears the merry laughter of bright desires that shy away from their objects as they draw near—for they would cease to be in their fruition.


A Life more Concrete

Amidst live symbols of her occult power
He moved and felt them as close real forms:
In that life more concrete than the lives of men
Throbbed heart-beats of the hidden reality:
Embodied was there what we but think and feel,
Self-framed what here takes outward borrowed shapes.

In this realm of the workings of the Life-Power, symbols are not mere tokens or pointers. They vibrate with life and Aswapathy feels them to be real, vivid and animate forms. Though the concreteness of materiality is not here, life impinges more solidly than on earth. One feels here the living vibrations of the Reality within. What men on earth can only feel or think, finds ready and just embodiment here. Forms here are shaped by their ensouling truths unlike on earth where they are borrowed from the universal supply.


Comrade of Silence

A comrade of Silence on her austere heights
Accepted by her mighty loneliness,
He stood with her on meditating peaks
Where life and being are a sacrament
Offered to the Reality beyond,
And saw her loose into Infinity
Her hooded eagles of significance,
Messengers of Thought to the Unknowable.

Aswapathy attunes himself with the profound stillness of the silent summits of Life where all flows in self-giving to the Transcendent Reality. He sees her’ veiled and swift Knowledge-powers pass into the Unknowable, the Infinite.

Beyond the finite is the Infinite; beyond the realm of Knowledge is the Unknowable.


Identified to Learn the Secret

Identified in soul-vision and soul-sense,
Entering into her depths as into a house,
All he became that she was or longed to be,
He thought with her thoughts and journeyed with her steps,
Lived with her breath and scanned all with her eyes
That he might learn the secret of her soul.

Aswapathy desires to know the inmost truth that moves this greater Life. And for this purpose he identifies himself with her inner sense and vision, dives deep into her profounds and becomes one with her existence and her aspirations; in thinking and in action, in living and in seeing, he functions with the faculties natural to her.


Witness Overmastered

A witness overmastered by his scene,
He admired her splendid front of pomp and play
And the marvels of her rich and delicate craft,
And thrilled to the insistence of her cry;
Impassioned he bore the sorceries of her might,
Felt laid on him her abrupt mysterious will,
Her hands that knead fate in their violent grasp,
Her touch that moves, her powers that seize and drive.

He stays no more a witness that he was. He turns a captive-admirer of her dazzling splendour and wondrous play; he readily responds to her notes; he exults in and upbears the displays of her strength. He is held by her will the meaning of which he knows not; her hands that forge destiny close on him; her initiating touches and dynamic impulsions pour upon him.


Her Soul Weeps Within

But this too he saw, her soul that wept within,
Her seekings vain that clutch at fleeing truth,
Her hopes whose sombre gaze mates with despair,
The passion that possessed her longing limbs,
The trouble and rapture of her yearning breasts,
Her mind that toils unsatisfied with its fruits,
Her heart that captures not the one Beloved.

Aswapathy sees also the negative side of Life. He regards her soul within that is disappointed. Her seekings do not succeed in reaching the truth which is their objective; her hopes are shadowed by despair; the intensity that fills her restless being, the desire that agitates her are unceasing; her mind is never satisfied with the meagre results of its workings; her heart does not succeed in meeting and clasping the Divine Beloved it seeks.


An Exiled Goddess

Always he met a veiled and seeking Force,
An exiled goddess building mimic heavens,
A Sphinx whose eyes look up to a hidden Sun.

Wherever he turns, Aswapathy feels her Force that is constantly asearch though concealed. What she builds looks like an attempted imitation of a remembered heaven by a goddess who has been thrust out from it. She is a mystery whose gaze is fixed on a light that is not patent to the eye.


Spirit the Key

Ever he felt near a spirit in her forms:
Its passive presence was her nature’s strength;
This sole is real in apparent things,
Even upon earth the spirit is life’s key,
But her solid outsides nowhere bear its trace.

All the same, Aswapathy feels the presence of a spirit in the forms of Life. This spirit, though it is not active but present only as a passive witness, is the real strength of the Life-Power.

This is so not only on the Life-planes but even upon Earth, the field of Matter. Whatever the appearance, the truth lies within in the indwelling spirit; that explains all outer movements in life. The inner is the real and permanent, the outer is the result and impermanent. However, in the material world the gross form effectively veils the ensouling determinant.


Hint of Veiled Reality

Its stamp on her acts is undiscoverable.

A pathos of lost heights is its appeal.

Only sometimes is caught a shadowy line
That seems a hint of veiled reality.

The movements of life on earth hardly testify to the presence of this spirit within. But the persistence of aspiration for the heights of the Spirit points to the existence of this spark inside; it makes itself felt through this longing. Rarely does its presence reveal itself in outer life-activities; only occasionally is there a vague hint of the reality inside.


Confused Outlines

Life stared at him with vague confused outlines
Offering a picture the eyes could not keep,
A story that was yet not written there.

As in a fragmentary half-lost design
Life’s meanings fled from the pursuing eye.

Aswapathy is unable to get a clear picture of life. She is vague in form and her workings do not yet reveal a pattern. Things seem to be only partly done; their meaning escapes his sight.


Life’s Real Self Hidden

Life’s visage hides life’s real self from sight;
Life’s secret sense is written within, above.

The thought that gives it sense lives far beyond;
It is not seen in its half-finished design.

In vain we hope to read the baffling signs
Or find the word of the half-played charade.

The real meaning of life lies hidden by her changing appearances. That truth is concealed within and above her. The Idea that inspires Life lies beyond the Life-plane. It cannot be read in Life’s half-completed creations. Human attempts to catch the significance through the bewildering masks of her workings, to arrive at her truth through the clues afforded by the incomplete play prove futile.


Cryptic Thought in Greater Life

Only in that greater life a cryptic thought
Is found, is hinted some interpreting word
That makes the earth-myth a tale intelligible.

Some secret clue, some half-revealed idea, however, is found on the planes of the greater Life. In the light of that pregnant idea-form, the activity of life on earth takes on some meaning.


A Half-Blind Chained Divinity

Something was seen at last that looked like truth.

In a half-lit air of hazardous mystery
The eye that looks at the dark half of truth
Made out an image mid a vivid blur
And peering through a mist of subtle tints
He saw a half-blind chained divinity
Bewildered by the world in which he moved,
Yet conscious of some light prompting his soul.

Gazing at the scene which is only the dark half of the truth—Aswapathy alights upon a seeming truth. In that atmosphere, dim, dangerous and mysterious, confused but led by an inner light, he espies across the haze of melting colours, a half-blind divinity in chains. The divine Spirit that ensouls this world is only half-awake; its sight is not yet fully open; it is bound to the formula of Life.


He Seeks his Way Towards Infinitude

Attracted to strange far-off shimmerings,
Led by the fluting of a distant Player
He sought his way amid life’s laughter and call
And the index chaos of her myriad steps
Towards some total deep infinitude.

He hears divine notes calling him from afar; bright glows of light beckon to him. He makes his way forward through all the mirth and urge of Life, following her innumerable chaotic steps which, for all their confusing appearance, point to a significant goal,—towards some profound infinitude beyond.


Reads by Arrow-Leaps of Thought

Around crowded the forest of her signs:
At hazard he read by arrow-leaps of Thought
That hit the mark by guess or luminous chance,
Her changing coloured road-lights of idea
And her signals of uncertain swift event,
The hieroglyphs of her symbol pageantries
And her landmarks in the tangled paths of Time.

His passage is crowded with signs and pointers whose meaning is not clear. Reasoning and logic fail him. He lets his thought intuit and whether by guess or by some higher light appearing as chance, he is able to understand and follow the layout of this domain with all its play of leading ideas, tentative movements, significant shows and definitive demarcations in the medley of paths.


Play of Life and Spirit (I)

In her mazes of approach and of retreat
To every side she draws him and repels,
But drawn too near escapes from his embrace;
All ways she leads him but no way is sure.

Life plays, as it were, hide and seek with the Spirit. She appears to come near to the Spirit but escapes his hold. Life and Spirit are ever on the move, Life leading and the Spirit following.


Play of Life and Spirit (II)

Allured by the many-toned marvel of her chant,
Attracted by the witchcraft of her moods
And moved by her casual touch to joy and grief,
He loses himself in her but wins her not.

The Spirit is held captive by the rhythm of Life’s movements. He is fascinated by her rapidly changing moods. He reacts with joy or grief to her touches however casual. He is completely lost in her but cannot possess her.


Play of Life and Spirit (III)

A fugitive paradise smiles at him from her eyes:
He dreams of her beauty made for ever his,
He dreams of his mastery her limbs shall bear,
He dreams of the magic of her breasts of bliss.

He pursues enchanted the elusive promise of paradise in her eyes and dreams of mastering her and possessing her form of beauty. He is lost in the thought of the rapture that awaits him.


Play of Life and Spirit (IV)

In her illumined script, her fanciful
Translation of God’s pure original text,
He thinks to read the Scripture Wonderful,
Hieratic key to unknown beatitudes.

But the Word of Life is hidden in its script,
The chant of Life has lost its divine note.
The Spirit-mate of Life hopes to divine the supreme knowledge in the transcript made by Life of the original Intention and thereby find the key to the Bliss of the Infinite. But that script, however bright and attractive, is a product of her fancy. The real Word lies covered under her picturesque rendering. The divine sound-vibration, nāda, that marked the birth of Life is no more to be found in the ode sung by her.


Play of Life and Spirit (V)

Unseen, a captive in a house of sound,
The spirit lost in the splendour of a dream
Listens to a thousand-voiced illusion’s ode.

The Spirit is shut within the walls of sound, forgetting himself in the picturesque imagery of his dream. The notes that he listens to are those sounded by the multi-toned and illusive play of Life.


Soul is Missed

A delicate weft of sorcery steals the heart
Or a fiery magic tints her tones and hues,
Yet they but wake a thrill of transient grace;
A vagrant march struck by the wanderer Time
They call to a brief unsatisfied delight
Or wallow in ravishments of mind and sense,
But miss the luminous answer of the soul.

The play of Life is enchanting in the pattern she weaves, in the spell of her notes and the scintillations of her bright colours, but the delight it produces is temporary. It palls after a time or one is lost in the enjoyment of the senses and the sense-mind. In either case the response of the inner soul is not given. The pageant reveals itself as aimless.


Heavenward Climbings

A blind heart-throb that reaches joy through tears,
A yearning towards peaks for ever unreached,
An ecstasy of unfulfilled desire
Track the last heavenward climbings of her voice.

Her great soarings to the infinities above take place on the wings of an irresistible impulsion from within to win joy through whatever suffering it might entail. She is moved by a spirit of adventure to scale the unconquered peaks, by an anticipatory thrill that accompanies the effort to reach the object of her desire.


Past Sufferings Transmuted

Transmuted are past suffering’s memories
Into an old sadness’s sweet escaping trail:
Turned are her tears to gems of diamond pain,
Her sorrow into a magic crown of song.

In the procession of Life, sufferings are quickly forgotten; they pass into memories which when recalled strike only a momentary sad note, sweet and fleeting_ The tears that are shed in the struggle of Life are preserved in precious lessons of experience. Sorrows undergone become themes for inspiring ballads.


Snatches of Felicity too Brief

Brief are her snatches of felicity
That touch the surface, then escape or die:
A lost remembrance echoes in her depths,
A deathless longing is hers, a veiled self’s call;
A prisoner in the mortal’s limiting world,
A spirit wounded by life sobs in her breast;
A cherished suffering is her deepest cry.

There are brief intervals of happiness when some felicity from within wells up, but it soon passes or is smothered by the stresses and griefs of life. There is somewhere in the profounds of Life a memory of her original immortality and she longs for it, in some form or other, constantly. The divine entity within calls her to her innate status. This soul within—deathless and boundless by nature—is encased in her mortal, limited embodiment and subjected to the bitter experiences of Life. She is aware of this suffering of her soul and her deepest articulations are poignant with its pain. And, in a way, Life values this suffering in her breast for it keeps fresh the awareness of her ensouling truth.


Cry for Forgotten Bliss

A wanderer on forlorn despairing routes,
Along the roads of sound a frustrate voice
Forsaken cries to a forgotten bliss.

The Life-being has fallen from its original state of bliss and some memory of it drives it to regain that bliss. It strives for this in varied movements, but finds itself doomed to disappointment and cries out in despair.


Hunting for Pleasure

Astray in the echo caverns of Desire,
It guards the phantoms of a soul’s dead hopes
And keeps alive the voice of perished things
Or lingers upon sweet and errant notes
Hunting for pleasure in the heart of pain.

The Life-being is lost in the proliferating terrains of Desire; even when hopes are frustrated and dead, it keeps their memory alive. It follows enchanting and false calls in its search for joy and pleasure in the midst of prevailing grief and pain.

Desire eggs on the Life-being to a fruitless venture.


Inner Music Covered

A fateful hand has touched the cosmic chords
And the intrusion of a troubled strain
Covers the inner music’s hidden key
That guides unheard the surface cadences.

Some dire and decisive touch has set astir all this cosmic motion. This disturbance has brought in an element which effectively conceals the rhythm of things whose unheard beat gives meaning to the outer movements.


Joy to Live and to Create

Yet is it joy to live and to create
And joy to love and labour though all fails,
And joy to seek though all we find deceives
And all on which we lean betrays our trust;
Yet something in its depths was worth the pain,
A passionate memory haunts with ecstasy’s fire.

In spite of all the pains and shocks, there is a joy in living, in striving, in creating, in loving. Maybe all effort fails in the end, objects of desire disappoint when acquired at long last and trust is betrayed constantly; but truly all has not been in vain. There is some deeper purpose that justifies all the apparently useless effort and hardship. The strong memory of a lost glory goads Life into an intense and joyful effort to regain it.


Nothing is Truly Vain

Even grief has joy hidden beneath its roots:
For nothing is truly vain the One has made:
In our defeated hearts God’s strength survives
And victory’s star still lights our desperate road;
Our death is made a passage to new worlds.

This to Life’s music gives its anthem swell.

Grief does not kill; man survives the worst attacks of grief, for behind grief—which is a surface deformation—there is a joy of existence. All is created by the Divine and nothing created by Him is without purpose; that is why even in the hour of defeat there is a sustaining reserve of strength within. An ultimate victory beckons man to persist and traverse the paths however difficult. Even what appears to be a total cessation of life—death—is converted into a passage to greater and freer planes of existence.

This truth, the divine element in creation, is what gives fullness and irresistible power to Life.


She Lends the Glory of Her Voice

To all she lends the glory of her voice;
Heaven’s raptures whisper to her heart and pass,
Earth’s transient yearnings cry from her lips and fade.

It is Life that imparts dynamism and effectuation to all urges for expression whether from above or from below. The joys and ecstasies from the higher worlds come close to her and pass; the brief longings of material earth articulate themselves through her and fade away. To both Life lends herself and provides the means and the opportunity for manifestation.


God-Given Hymn Escapes

Alone the God-given hymn escapes her art
That came with her from her spiritual home
But stopped half-way and failed, a silent word
Awake in some deep pause of waiting worlds,
A murmur suspended in eternity’s hush:

Life articulates and gives form to many cravings but;; the truth with which she was charged when she issued out of the supreme creative Reality remains unexpressed. That Word of truth was lost in the devolutionary course and it still awaits in the profound ranges of the Unmanifest.


Evanescent Music

But no breath comes from the supernal peace:
A sumptuous interlude occupies the ear
And the heart listens and the soul consents;
An evanescent music it repeats
Wasting on transience Time’s eternity.

Life is cut off, as it were, from the Word she was ordained to voice. What she is occupied with, in the meanwhile, is some makeshift music attracting the heart and filling and satisfying the soul for the mo-’ ment. But it is a fleeting effort that ultimately arrives at nothing.


Screens the Intended ThemeA tremolo of the voices of the hours Oblivious screens the high intended themeThe self-embodying spirit came to play On the vast clavichord of Nature-Force.

And the loud strains of the music played by this Life shut out effectively the song that the manifesting Soul came to play on the multiple instrument of its Nature-Power.

The Spirit embodies itself in order to play its Harmonies, manifest its truths. Nature provides the needed instruments.


Mighty Murmur

Only a mighty murmur here and there
Of the eternal Word, the blissful Voice
Or Beauty’s touch transfiguring heart and sense,
A wandering splendour and a mystic cry,
Recalls the strength and sweetness heard no more.

The lost might and sweetness, however, are not completely forgotten. As if to remind Life of their existence somewhere—and the possibility of actualising them—there is an inarticulate hearing of the deathless Sound, nada, here and there. A soulful strain of Delight, a touch of Beauty captivating the eye and the heart, an errant Glory, a mystic note of Call, all these testify to a Splendour lost by Life but seeking to be born anew.


Deficit that Paupers

Here is the gap, here stops or sinks life’s force;
This deficit paupers the magician’s skill:
This want makes all the rest seem thin and bare.

It is this gulf between what sought to manifest and what actually Life has been able to build, that is responsible for the indigent character of this creation. Life, as it is, is unable to rise higher, evoke into manifestation the greater verities and support their pressure of formation.


God Lost in Nature’s Endless Lines

A half-sight draws the horizon of her acts:
Her depths remember what she came to do,
But the mind has forgotten or the heart mistakes:
In Nature’s endless lines is lost the God.

The vision of Life is clipped and naturally her action is correspondingly stunted. Though the knowledge of the mission with which she was charged is there at the core of her being, she has no active memory of it in her mind; her feelings are too mixed to read and be guided aright. Consequently the Soul that has come on the steed of Life is lost in the labyrinthine profusions of the paths and bypaths of Nature.


Her Heart’s Conceit

In knowledge to sum up omniscience,
In action to erect the Omnipotent,
To create her Creator here was her heart’s conceit,
To invade the cosmic scene with utter God.

The fond hope with which Life started her toil was this: to set the supreme omniscience of the Divine Consciousness working spontaneously in the faculty of knowledge here below, to reveal the omnipotence of the Divine Force in all action here below. In a word she desired to manifest in the cosmos the creative Godhead in all his Glory.


Toil to Bring the Glory Here

Toiling to transform the still far Absolute
Into an all-fulfilling epiphany,
Into an utterance of the Ineffable,
She would bring the glory here of the Absolute’s force,
Change poise into creation’s rhythmic swing,
Marry with a sky of calm a sea of bliss.

She has striven to give full expression to the far-off Absolute and Ineffable Reality here in this creation, to bring down the Supreme’s Force here in the cosmos. She has sought to induce the static state of the Supreme to move into a dynamic creative condition, to bring about a fruitful unification between his state of a still calm and his vast motion of creative Bliss.


To Reconcile the Eternal and the Abyss

A fire to call eternity into Time,
Make body’s joy as vivid as the soul’s,
Earth she would lift to neighbourhood with heaven,
Labours life to equate with the Supreme
And reconcile the Eternal and the Abyss.

Life is astir with an aspiration to invoke the Eternal to pour itself into Time, to bring the material consciousness in tune with the spiritual so that the joy that is natural to the soul could be equally native to the body. She would be the bridge between Earth and Heaven and uplift Earth to the heights and joys of Heaven. She works to heal the gulf between this world here and the Supreme on high, between the abyss of nescience below and the summit of the superconscience above.


Single Voice Lost

Her pragmatism of the transcendent Truth
Fills silence with the voices of the gods,
But in the cry the single Voice is lost.

Life would not leave the Truth that transcends all to remain in its soleness. She seeks to draw it, its Light and Power, into her creation. The Gods, the many aspects and personalities of the Supreme, come into being in answer to her call But amidst this multitude of Gods and their Powers, the One Reality is pushed behind the veil, the one Person is lost behind his various personalities.


Twixt Earth and Sky

For Nature’s vision climbs beyond her acts.

A life of gods in heaven she sees above,
A demi-god emerging from an ape
Is all she can in our mortal element.

Here the half-god, the half-titan are her peak:
This greater life wavers twixt earth and sky.

The actual is never the limit of Nature. She always looks beyond it, for greater possibles ever beckon her. Life sees the order of the gods above her own domain; below, she sees man who has just emerged from the animal stage of evolution, but she perceives that he has the makings of a god in him. In her own realm, the highest that this greater Life has been able to achieve in her search for perfection is the half-god and the half-titan in whom manifest both Light and Darkness, both Good and Evil.

Greater Life has moved away from the stage of mortal man but has not reached the state of godhead; she lingers indecisively in the middle.


Poignant Paradox

A poignant paradox pursues her dreams:
Her hooded energy moves an ignorant world
To look for a joy her own strong clasp puts off:
In her embrace it cannot turn to its source.

A tragic contradiction characterises the movements of this greater Life. What she seeks is in constant variance to what she does. By her hidden force she throws this ignorant world into a ferment in her frantic search for perennial joy, but that joy remains out of her reach because of her very frenzy, her eager clutchings of desire. The world moves helplessly in its never-ending round, unable to turn to the source of Joy within.


Significance Lost

Immense her power, endless her act’s vast drive,
Astray is its significance and lost.

Although she carries in her secret breast
The law and journeying curve of all things born
Her knowledge partial seems, her purpose small;
On a soil of yearning tread her sumptuous hours.

The power of this greater Life is immense and the range of her forceful actions vast; but the direction, the meaning of it all is not evident. It is well-nigh lost. Indeed the purpose, the governing truth and the direction are there in the depths of her being but she is not aware of them on her surface levels. Here her knowledge seems to be but partial and her purpose limited. Underneath there is the seeking, an intense want, but on the surface, Life seems to loll leisurely, abundantly.


Leaden Nescience

A leaden Nescience weighs the wings of Thought,
Her power oppresses the being with its garbs,
Her action prisons its immortal gaze.

The weight of Inconscience at the base of this material creation pulls downwards every formation, every movement. In its various forms of ignorance, obscurity, decay and the like, it arrests the free movement of the faculties, thought, sight etc. and limits their range of action.


Sense of Limit

A sense of limit haunts her masteries
And nowhere is assured content or peace:
For all the depth and beauty of her work
A wisdom lacks that sets the spirit free.

Life is admittedly masterful in her workings, but she is always hedged in by various limitations—limitations of the material on which she works, limitations of the instrument, limitations of the environment. Consequently there is no satisfaction of complete achievement; some inadequacy is always gnawing. There is profundity and there is beauty in her works but there is no real freedom for her spirit; the conscious intelligence that could effect the freedom is lacking.


He Asks for a Deeper Joy

An old and faded charm had now her face
And palled for him her quick and curious lore;
His wide soul asked a deeper joy than hers.

Out of her daedal lines he sought escape;
But neither gate of horn nor ivory
He found nor postern of spiritual sight.

There was no issue from that dreamlike space.

Aswapathy is no more held by the novel and picturesque creation of this greater Life. Things begin to pall. His large being looks for a deeper joy than what Life can give. He wants to break away from her intricate and complex hold, but finds no appointed doors of exit; neither does he find any opening of spiritual sight that could help him out. He sees that this enchanting scene leads nowhere.


Our Being Must Move Eternally

Our being must move eternally through Time;
Death helps us not, vain is the hope to cease;
A secret Will compels us to endure.

Our life’s repose is in the Infinite;
It cannot end, its end is Life supreme.

Cast in this field of Evolution we have to keep moving onward. What appears like cessation in death does not really put a full stop to things. There is no halt because there is a definite goal to be reached: a freedom in the Infinite and a perfect life in the Divine. All along there is a divine Will in the depths of our being compelling us to strive and endure, sustaining us in our labour till the purpose is fulfilled.


Death a Passage Not the Goal

Death is a passage, not the goal of our walk:
Some ancient deep impulsion labours on:
Our souls are dragged as with a hidden leash,
Carried from birth to birth, from world to world,
Our acts prolong after the body’s fall
The old perpetual journey without pause.

No silent peak is found where Time can rest.

Death is really not the end of our life. We do not have only one life to live, we have several lives across which the soul journeys, gathering experience, growing towards full embodied divinity Death is a passage from one life to another, from this physical world on earth to other worlds above where we repair for rest and assimilation before the next birth is undertaken. Our souls are charged with this mission of divinity at the very start of their career by the Supreme (of whom they are emanations) and this original impulsion goads them on. Besides the Karma done in each life does not end with death. It continues in its consequences and forges further lives to work itself out.

There is really no resting place in this journey of the soul.


Stream that Reached No Sea

This was a magic stream that reached no sea.

However far he went, wherever turned,
The wheel of works ran with him and outstripped;
Always a farther task was left to do.

Aswapathy finds that all here is a constant movement that has no issue. However far he goes, in whichever direction he turns, he finds that activity goes on and on. There is no completion. Each act leads to the next.


Unquiet World

A beat of action and a cry of search
For ever grew in that unquiet world;
A busy murmur filled the heart of Time.

All was contrivance and unceasing stir.

In this world of greater Life there is everywhere and always a ceaseless activity, a note of search, a pervading restlessness. Things are somehow managed, but there is no satisfaction of fulfilment.


A Thousand Ways

A hundred ways to live were tried in vain:
A sameness that assumed a thousand forms
Strove to escape from its long monotone
And made new things that soon were like the old.

A constant experiment goes on in this world of greater Life. There is an urge for variety, for novelty. Multiple movements take shape. But very soon the newness wears out and all sinks back into stale routine.


All Still the Same

A curious decoration lured the eye
And novel values furbished ancient themes
To cheat the mind with the idea of change.

A different picture that was still the same
Appeared upon the cosmic vague background.

There is an attractive ornamentation of things. Old movements are placed in new settings. In every way there is an attempt to impress with the appearance of change even though there is no real change. It looks as if a diferent pattern has been formed but in truth it is the same old one.


Another Labyrinthine House

Only another labyrinthine house
Of creatures and their doings and events,
A city of the traffic of bound souls,
A market of creation and her wares
Was offered to the labouring mind and heart.

This world turns out to be yet another crowded, hectic, criss-crossed realm where there is no worthwhile achievement, no freedom. All the labour of the creation and the questing spirit comes to little more than a hubbub of forms and movements.


Circuit Ending Where it Began

A circuit ending where it first began
Is dubbed the forward and eternal march
Of progress on perfection’s unknown road.

In this world of Ignorance most movements are in circles; they turn round and round. There is an appearance of forward movement, a constant progression, but very often things come back to where they started from.

(It is only meaningful movements that register an upward direction even when they move in circles; such movements are really spiral and not merely circular.)


Each Final Scheme Leads to a Sequel

Each final scheme leads to a sequel plan.

Yet every new departure seems the last,
Inspired evangel, theory’s ultimate peak,
Proclaiming a panacea for all Time’s ills
Or carrying thought in its ultimate zenith flight
And trumpeting supreme discovery;

Nothing really meets the situation in this world. Each plan seems to be the final, all-sufficient remedy, but as it is worked, its inadequacies reveal themselves and a subsequent plan becomes necessary.

And so it goes on. At the time each scheme is launched, it is taken as the all-time solution of all the ills that beset man, the very acme of planning, but ultimately it turns out to be only one more ineffective attempt that must inevitably be followed by another.


Each Brief Idea Claims Immortality

Each brief idea, a structure perishable,
Publishes the immortality of its rule,
Its claim to be the perfect form of things,
Truth’s last epitome, Time’s golden best.

Each idea that comes fathering such schemes, though it is only a temporary construction of the mind, claims to be an everlasting verity, and demands allegiance as the most perfect, the best formulation of the truth.


Nothing Achieved of Worth

But nothing has been achieved of infinite worth:
A world made ever anew, never complete,
Piled always half-attempts on lost attempts
And saw a fragment as the eternal Whole.

Aswapathy sees that in spite of all the hectic doings and goings on, nothing of lasting value has been achieved in this world of greater Life. Things are being constantly made and remade but never completed; failures are followed by reluctant attempts again and again; parts are mistaken for the whole.


Aimless Mounting Total

In the aimless mounting total of things done
Existence seemed a vain necessity’s act,
A wrestle of eternal opposites
In a clasped antagonism’s close-locked embrace,
A play without denouement or idea,
A hunger march of lives without a goal,

There is here a mounting activity, but it is aimless and the very existence of things seems to be a result of some purposeless necessity. There is a ceaseless combat of the opposites of Light and Darkness, Good and Evil. The whole scene strikes as a drama without any intelligent issue, a stampeded march of things into a nowhere.


Futile Labour

Or, written on a bare black board of Space,
A futile and recurring sum of souls,
A hope that failed, a light that never shone,
The labour of an unaccomplished Force
Tied to its acts in a dim eternity.

It is a picture of futility, repetition without issue, unfulfilled hope, failing light; there is only the ceaseless and helpless toil of a Force that never arrives at its objective.


Life Must Struggle On

There is no end or none can yet be seen:
Although defeated, life must struggle on;
Always she sees a crown she cannot grasp;
Her eyes are fixed beyond her fallen state.

Really there is no end to the labours of life, at any rate it is not yet perceivable. Whatever the failures, life is obliged to continue her struggle. She is constantly drawn by some prospect of glory that she glimpses but which always eludes her. Her vision looks beyond her present state of fall.


Call of Greatness

There quivers still within her breast and ours
A glory that was once and is no more,
Or there calls to us from some unfulfilled beyond
A greatness yet unreached by the halting world.

In the breast of man, in the bosom of life, there is still the remembrance of a glorious state that has been lost. There is also a call of some greatness from a realm beyond awaiting fulfilment, a greatness that is not yet attained by this world of chequered movements.


Dreams of Happier Air

In a memory behind our mortal sense
A dream persists of larger happier air
Breathing around free hearts of joy and love,
Forgotten by us, immortal in lost Time.

Behind the exterior awareness of man, there is a persistent sense of the certainty of a freer and happier existence in which joy and love are spontaneous. It is a kind of memory of a state that the soul has lost in its adventure, but which is there waiting to be recovered.


Haunting Memory

A ghost of bliss pursues her haunted depths;
For she remembers still though now so far
Her realm of golden ease and glad desire
And the beauty and strength and happiness that were hers
In the sweetness of her glowing paradise,
In her kingdom of immortal ecstasy
Half-way between God’s silence and the Abyss.

Life has a strong memory of her original state of will, power and bliss before she got completely separated from her source in the Truth-Consciousness in the course of her descent from the profound peaks of Superconscience to the depths of Nescience. This memory haunts her and she strives to regain that state of unfettered and unvitiated play.


Hidden Knowledge and Spur

This knowledge in our hidden parts we keep;
Awake to a vague mystery’s appeal,
We meet a deep unseen Reality
Far truer than the world’s face of present Truth:
We are chased by a self we cannot now recall
And moved by a Spirit we must still become.

Man has these memories stored in the deeper parts of his being which are behind the veil of the exterior. That is why he responds to the call of the Mysterious and somewhere his being comes into contact with a Reality that is not seen but is nevertheless more real, more full than the incomplete and fragmented truth of the present state of the universe. Man has forgotten his true self but that self drives him on the quest for self-recovery. He is impelled by the Spirit that seeks embodiment in him.


Past God-Phase

As one who has lost the kingdom of his soul,
We look back to some god-phase of our birth
Other than this imperfect creature here
And hope in this or a diviner world
To recover yet from Heaven’s patient guard
What by our mind’s forgetfulness we miss,

Man has some recollection somewhere in his being of a happier and more elevated godly state that he has enjoyed before he forfeited it and fell to his present state of imperfection. He misses it and hopes and strives to regain that forgotten condition either here while on earth or in diviner worlds after death.


Mortal Nature Yearns for Bliss

Our being’s natural felicity,
Our heart’s delight we have exchanged for grief,
The body’s thrill we bartered for mere pain,
The bliss for which our mortal nature yearns
As yearns an obscure moth to blazing Light.

clings to grief instead. The joyous thrill that was natural to the body has been displaced by pain. But his nature remembers its rightful bliss and longs for it even though in its present unpurified and untransformed condition it would not be able to bear it.


March to Victory Never Won

Our life is a march to a victory never won.

This wave of being longing for delight,
This eager turmoil of unsatisfied strengths,
These long far files of forward-striving hopes
Lift worshipping eyes to the blue Void called heaven
Looking for the golden Hand that never came,
The advent for which all creation waits,
The beautiful visage of Eternity
That shall appear upon the roads of Time.

Man strives for fulfilment but is not able to achieve it. His being seeks for delight, his powers of effectuation are ever striving but without success, his hopes are continual in their forward leap. He conceives of a Heaven that can give him what he wants and supplicates the gods of that paradise. He looks vainly for the delivering hand of Grace, awaits the advent of a new Dawn, the birth of the Immortal in this world of mortality.


Man’s Faith (I)

Yet still to ourselves we say rekindling faith,
“Oh, surely one day he shall come to our cry,
One day he shall create our life anew
And utter the magic formula of peace
And bring perfection to the scheme of things.

Though thus disappointed and frustrated, man repeatedly affirms to himself his inborn faith in the certainty of the divine response to his call. He affirms his confidence that the Divine will manifest one day and recreate his failing life, bring peace to the strife-torn world and recast the present pattern of imperfection into perfection.


Man’s Faith (II)

One day he shall descend to life and earth,
Leaving the secrecy of the eternal doors,
Into a world that cries to him for help,
And bring the truth that sets the spirit free,
The joy that is the baptism of the soul,
The strength that is the outstretched arm of Love.

Man has the confident faith that one day the Divine will come down from his transcendent spheres to this world that cries out to him for succour and uplift—for only then can the world be redeemed; that he will bring the truth that liberates—for only truth can free the soul imprisoned in ignorance; that he will come with the bliss that regenerates—for only the divine bliss can bathe and purify the being, giving it a new birth; that he will bring the strength of Love that is irresistible—for it is only the flawless power of divine Love that can shatter all obstacles and build a new creation.


Man’s Faith (III)

One day he shall lift his beauty’s dreadful veil,
Impose delight on the world’s beating heart
And bare his secret body of light and bliss.”

He has faith that one day the Divine will freely manifest himself in this world, reveal his Beauty rending the veil of ugliness that has covered it in this field of Ignorance, cast his Delight on the aching heart of life, and show his real form of Light and Bliss on this scene of darkness and suffering.


No End of Seeking and of Birth

But now we strain to reach an unknown goal:
There is no end of seeking and of birth,
There is no end of dying and return;
The life that wins its aim asks greater aims,
The life that fails and dies must live again;
Till it has found itself it cannot cease.

All must be done for which life and death were made.

That glorious manifestation, however, is still far-off. In the meanwhile man must go on striving towards a goal which is yet not clear. There is no respite allowed. He is born, he seeks, he dies only to return to the scene of his toils. If he succeeds in achieving his immediate aim, a greater aim arises before him; if he fails, he must try anew—in the present birth or the next. He cannot cease till he finds the truth of his being. Life is given to man and death imposed on purpose. They are the processes through which he is to work out his self-discovery and win the truth of his existence.


No Final Rest

But who shall say that even then is rest?

Or there repose and action are the same
In the deep breast of God’s supreme delight.

Even after man finds the truth that he seeks, is it certain that he will rest? In that state of being and consciousness, there is really no difference between action and repose. For all is upheld by the Being of Delight; and in that supreme Delight of Existence, activity and rest are but the forward and backward flowings of the same wave of Bliss. They are not two different and exclusive movements.


Where Ignorance is no More

In a high state where ignorance is no more,
Each movement is a wave of peace and bliss,
Repose God’s motionless creative force,
Action a ripple in the Infinite
And birth a gesture of Eternity.

In that high state of consciousness where the last shadows of Ignorance are overpassed, every movement is a wave of peace and bliss. Ignorance being no more, there is no strife, no pain. Rest is a state without motion of the creative force, but is fully potent all the same; action is a local stir in the waters of the Infinite hardly disturbing the ocean; appearance in Time is a willed movement of the Timeless, not something fortuitous and momentary.


Sun of Transfiguration

A sun of transfiguration still can shine
And Night can bare its core of mystic light;
The self-cancelling, self-afflicting paradox
Into a self-luminous mystery might change,
The imbroglio into a joyful miracle.

The glorious prospect is there, and is confidently awaited, when the supreme Light can radiate and change all and the Darkness dissolve revealing the light of the Spirit concealed in its bosom, when the apparently self-defeating paradox of life may show its profound character as a purposive formulation of consciousness and all hopeless confusion yield to a joyous order.


God Could be Visible

Then God could be visible here, here take a shape;
Disclosed would be the spirit’s identity;
Life would reveal her true immortal face.

Then can be the plenary manifestation of the Divine, the formless Spirit revealed in form. That the Divine Spirit is omnipresent and within all that is here will be openly seen. Life will put off her present mask of limitation and death and reveal her true visage as a Power of the Immortal.


But now a Termless Labour

But now a termless labour is her fate:
In its recurrent decimal of events
Birth, death appear as its vibrating points;
The old question-mark margins each finished page,
Each volume of her effort’s history.

Meanwhile, Life has to go on with her endless labour, repetitive, mechanical, incondusive, with birth and death as signal points on her interminable journey. Each task completed raises the question, has it been worthwhile?


All Seems in Vain

A limping Yes through the aeons journeys still
Accompanied by an eternal No.

All seems in vain, yet endless is the game.

Impassive turns the ever-circling Wheel,
Life has no issue, death brings no release.

Every affirmation of Life, however halting, brings a negation in its wake—birth is followed by death, success by failure and so on. And so the journey goes on and on, apparently in vain. The Wheel of Life turns on its course indifferent to what ensues from its movement. The relentless effort of Life achieves no result, and death brings no release either.


An Error has Made the World

A prisoner of itself the being lives
And keeps its futile immortality;
Extinction is denied, its sole escape.

An error of the gods has made the world.

Or indifferent the Eternal watches Time.

The soul is a prisoner shut up in its encasement. Its innate immortality is of little practical consequence in this mechanical round of life and death. It cannot end itself and thus escape. It looks as if the whole world were the result of some error of the creating Gods, or that the Eternal were indifferent to what takes place in Time.