Canto XIII: In the Self of Mind

This experience is perhaps the precursor for a turn towards nirvana or moksha. Creation seen from this state seemed a futile waste without any sense or purpose arising somehow out of Nothingness and dancing upon this vague unstable base of the Inconscient Void. 

Creation seemed, from this state a vast ocean rolling aimlessly below an indifferent sky. An irreconcilable opposition is thus experienced between world and God, creation and the Creator.

This state which yogis may take for a final liberation is but a passage towards a yet greater Beyond. The sense and purpose of creation are missed out. The Force that built the worlds and the ecstasy of creation is not found there.

The world appears as a cinematic shadow without any substance. But how it came into being and what is its purpose remains concealed. This is what most yogis prize as nirvana. Yet it is more a reflection in the mind of a still higher state.

This is a stage through Aswapati is passing in trying to find the true remedy to transmute the world into something divine and beautiful. But what he experiences here is the world imprisoned by mental structures surrounded by a vast Nothingness.

The Self of the Mind, this vast impersonal, indifferent state in which the mind enters, is liberating in its effect. It frees us from all religious and sectarian belief-systems as well as ideological freezes and home for rigid dogmas and fixed opinions.

This is the celebrated witness state of the yogi, the base of the thinker, the seat of one withdrawn from the world and the images it builds with the help of some cosmic Mind. This is the release that comes by knowing the Self as revealed through the still mind free from the turbulence of desires.

Climbing the stairs of consciousness, passing through the range of mental worlds, Aswapati has arrived at a state of static indifferent witness. This is the state that precedes nirvana.

Aswapati has climbed the last peak of the triple world. But his quest has not ended. He seeks the door or path through which he can go beyond.