Opening remarks
Aswapati the seer-king is now voyaging across the worlds beyond our limited mind and its doubtful light. He meets luminous beings and powers that dwell on the mountain tops of Nature. His journey carries him right up to the borders that join the lower and the higher hemispheres of existence.
A call to infinite discovery
Oceans of being met his voyaging soul
Calling to infinite discovery;
Timeless domains of joy and absolute power
Stretched out surrounded by the eternal hush;
The ways that lead to endless happiness
Ran like dream-smiles through meditating vasts: (p 40 begins)
Disclosed stood up in a gold moment’s blaze
White sun-steppes in the pathless Infinite
Truth is limitless, and as we ascend towards Its Home, there is a greater and greater wideness and joy and calm that we experience. We grow into wideness and power. The adventurer soul is carried upwards, surrounded by these greater realities that call and welcome it towards the heights. He is supported in this ascension by domains and beings of absolute power that dwell in these realms of Light and Peace and Joy.
The points that run through the closed heart of things
Along a naked curve in bourneless Self
The points that run through the closed heart of things
Shadowed the indeterminable line
That carries the Everlasting through the years.
The hidden links that connect our lives in Space and Time begin to grow clear, as intuition develops its workings in us. The curves, through which the soul has journeyed so far and yet must complete, appear as luminous points indicating the route of our voyage in its cosmic adventure.
The magician order of the cosmic Mind
The magician order of the cosmic Mind
Coercing the freedom of infinity
With the stark array of Nature’s symbol facts
And life’s incessant signals of event,
Transmuted chance recurrences into laws,
A chaos of signs into a universe.
The cosmic Mind is the form-maker, the power that seems to limit the infinite Reality into limits and measures. It gives to the Infinite tangible forms and shapes. The patterns of movements that the Cosmic Energy makes become laws. The gesture of her stupendous dance becomes signs and symbols and the shape of things to come. All this is now being revealed to the seer Aswapati who is growing into the Cosmic Consciousness.
The logic of infinite intelligence
Out of the rich wonders and the intricate whorls
Of the spirit’s dance with Matter as its mask
The balance of the world’s design grew clear,
Its symmetry of self-arranged effects
Managed in the deep perspectives of the soul,
And the realism of its illusive art,
Its logic of infinite intelligence,
Its magic of a changing eternity.
It is this dance of the infinite Shakti that makes manifestation possible and real. Even though it appears random to the surface mind, it has within a deep and vast Wisdom working in the heart of Time. When we have identified with this Cosmic Consciousness, then only we can get some glimpse of the ways of the Divine. We see the One Infinity as cut into bits and parts, and thereby miss the logic behind events and circumstances. Our partial vision is the source of error, which is removed when we grow one with the Cosmos.
The tree of Cosmos
A glimpse was caught of things for ever unknown:
The letters stood out of the unmoving Word:
In the immutable nameless Origin
Was seen emerging as from fathomless seas
The trail of the Ideas that made the world,
And, sown in the black earth of Nature’s trance,
The seed of the Spirit’s blind and huge desire
From which the tree of cosmos was conceived
And spread its magic arms through a dream of space.
The tree of Cosmos has its roots Above in the boundless Truth, while its branches spread below here as creation. Ordinarily however we experience the emergence from below upwards. But to a truer and deeper vision we discover that it is the Divine Reality that has extended Itself as creation. It is the seed of the Divine that is sown in this vast extension of Space and Time. It is the Divine Will buried in the depths of creation that is working Itself out through the vast and complex play of forces.
The bodiless Namelessness
Immense realities took on a shape:
There looked out from the shadow of the Unknown
The bodiless Namelessness that saw God born
And tries to gain from the mortal’s mind and soul
A deathless body and a divine name.
The workings of this Immense Energy is to create forms suitable for the Lord who inhabits all things. The constant building of forms out of the formless and the pulling down of Forms back to their formless state is a process to create immortal perfection out of mortal elements. The original Formless Reality thus assumes various Names and Forms in an effort to manifest and express Its infinity.
The Architect who builds in trance
The immobile lips, the great surreal wings,
The visage masked by superconscient Sleep, (p 41 begins)
The eyes with their closed lids that see all things,
Appeared of the Architect who builds in trance.
It is this power of Intuition that leads us to the doors of the Superconscient. Sri Aurobindo speaks of the Superconscient not merely as an Existence and Consciousness, but also the Being who dwells in the blissful Silence and the trance of the Infinite. It is His Knowledge and Power that emerges from Him and goes forth into Creation.
The original Desire
The original Desire born in the Void
Peered out; he saw the hope that never sleeps,
The feet that run behind a fleeting fate,
The ineffable meaning of the endless dream.
Creation is a dream, but a real one, since it is taking place in the Consciousness of the One Being. This original dream is to manifest that which is hidden in the sleep of the Infinite. It is a dream of the Divine that is ever engaged in manifesting Itself through an ever ascending perfection of forms and life.
The golden Overmind’s shimmering edge
Hardly for a moment glimpsed viewless to Mind,
As if a torch held by a power of God,
The radiant world of the everlasting Truth
Glimmered like a faint star bordering the night
Above the golden Overmind’s shimmering ridge.
This intuition casting its Light upward pointed back to its Source, the Golden Sun from where it emerged. Far above creation, far beyond anything we can imagine or conceive, there is the radiant Home of Truth appearing as a distant star to the seer vision of Aswapti who has now reached the very borders of the Unknown. Here the hemispheres part, here is the shimmering golden vest that is woven around the Supramental Sun by Its own rays.
The smile of love that sanctions the game of creation
Even were caught as through a cunning veil
The smile of love that sanctions the long game,
The calm indulgence and maternal breasts
Of Wisdom suckling the child-laughter of Chance,
Silence, the nurse of the Almighty’s power,
The omniscient hush, womb of the immortal Word,
And of the Timeless the still brooding face,
And the creative eye of Eternity.
It is on the borders of the Overmind that one finds the creative Word, a glimpse of the Wisdom and Bliss that has gone forth into creation. Here the deeper meaning and sense of creation is discovered. Beyond are regions of infinite Beatitude and Light. Here are the original Gods, the great Form makers who give form to the Formless and turn the dreams of the Eternal into an ever unfolding play in succession of Time.
Closing Remarks
Thus we see the first part of Aswapati’s yoga coming to a close with his ascension out of the state of Ignorance into the wide luminous spaces. He crosses domains of growing Light and, ascending through the Rays of Intuition, stands at the borders of the Overmind. The changes that accompany this ascent are being described subsequently.
