A World of Shifting Base, p. 116

Opening Remarks
Normally we experience life as it appears to our physical mind and as it is conditioned by physical matter and our earthly body. But when we leave our earthly mind and enter into direct contact with the domain of life or the vital world, then we get a truer and deeper understanding of the real nature of life in its own native / typal world.

An uneven ascent
An uneven broad ascent now lured his feet.

Aswapati now enters the vital worlds to explore their nature. It is no more a limited, small and narrow world as the subtle physical but one that is broad even though uneven, consistent with the nature of life.

A world of search and toil
Answering a greater Nature’s troubled call
He crossed the limits of embodied Mind
And entered wide obscure disputed fields
Where all was doubt and change and nothing sure,
A world of search and toil without repose.

The world of life is in constant movement and lacks stability that matter provides. It is ever drifting creating new patterns which will again be destroyed and renewed. It is as if someone were constantly in search for something that one knows not. And when one finds it then soon it is lost and the search begins again. There is constant labour in this world but nothing sure is found, nothing stable is built.

A land peopled with doubts
As one who meets the face of the Unknown,
A questioner with none to give reply,
Attracted to a problem never solved,
Always uncertain of the ground he trod,
Always drawn on to an inconstant goal
He travelled through a land peopled by doubts
In shifting confines on a quaking base.

It is a land where one could not find the certitude of Truth. It is as if the Unknown remains forever undisclosed. It is as if someone is drawn towards an unsolvable riddle. The very base changes often in the world of life leaving everything ever unsure and to imagination and guess.

A far retreating mirage
In front he saw a boundary ever unreached
And thought himself at each step nearer now,—
A far retreating horizon of mirage.

Due to its ever changing nature and constant drift and shift of positions and arrangement of relations, it gives the impression of a retreating mirage and boundaries that ever shift and grow wider as one moves.

A journey of countless paths
A vagrancy was there that brooked no home,
A journey of countless paths without a close.

Many paths were there but none reached a definite destination or a stable home.

A tireless wandering
Nothing he found to satisfy his heart;
A tireless wandering sought and could not cease.

In the realm of life there is a constant movement, a search and finding but nothing is definitive or final. What one felt as the final truth turns out very soon to be an illusion.

Closing Remarks
Thus we see a very figurative description of the landscape of the life-worlds. This is the domain where Aswapati has entered by his yogabala (the strength of yoga). Now he must fully explore this doubtful, uncertain world without which nothing else could live and breath.