The Abysmal Absolute, p. 216

Opening Remarks
It is the shadow of the Absolute hence it imitates the Light that it denies.

Stifling atmosphere
All were deceived or served their own deceit;
Truth in that stifling atmosphere could not live.

It was a land of deception where everyone lived by deceiving others. Quite naturally truth could not find a place there and felt stifled in that atmosphere of falsehood.

Wretchedness
There wretchedness believed in its own joy
And fear and weakness hugged their abject depths;
All that is low and sordid-thoughted, base,
All that is drab and poor and miserable,
Breathed in a lax content its natural air
And felt no yearning of divine release:
Arrogant, gibing at more luminous states
The people of the gulfs despised the sun.

Wretchedness is not about being poor or ill born. It is a state of consciousness where one enjoys lowness and lives in fear and suspicion as a coward and a weakling. It is a state where thought circles around low and sordid things and one feels at ease in misery and depravity and seeks not for something higher and truer or nobler and beautiful. Though low in their consciousness these beings were arrogant and mocked at luminous states.

Harsh autonomy
A barriered autarchy excluded light;
Fixed in its will to be its own grey self,
It vaunted its norm unique and splendid type:
It soothed its hunger with a plunderer’s dream;
Flaunting its cross of servitude like a crown,
It clung to its dismal harsh autonomy.

The beings of this world ruled as if they were an absolute sovereign. They had shut out possibilities of light so that they can preserve their greyness and believe it to be splendid and unique. They loved their darkness and dreamt of plundering other domains to satiate their lust and gigantic appetites. Service, for them, was merely a show and a sham, their real cult was a service to their own gigantic egos. A harsh and cruel dictatorship was their way to rule.

Braggart dogmas
A bull-throat bellowed with its brazen tongue;
Its hard and shameless clamour filling Space
And threatening all who dared to listen to truth
Claimed the monopoly of the battered ear;
A deafened acquiescence gave its vote,
And braggart dogmas shouted in the night
Kept for the fallen soul once deemed a god
The pride of its abysmal absolute.

Bragging and shouting about their achievements and success and they threatened and silenced all those who would listen to truth. The ears were deafened by constant shouting and sloganeering of their dogmas and bragging about themselves. The souls once a god found in this abysmal absolute the pride it had lost.

Closing Remarks
All that is found in the higher states is recreated here as its dark imitation, thereby trapping the fallen beings in a web of lies and propaganda, mixed with terror and fear and the perverted joy of a fallen state.