Opening Remarks
Aswapati has now completed his descent into the Abyss. It is from this dense darkness and unconsciousness that there emerges horror and fear and afflicts human lives.
Nameless fear
There crawled through every tense and aching nerve
Leaving behind its poignant quaking trail
A nameless and unutterable fear.
Even as Aswapati enters this domain he experiences the onslaught of a nameless fear rushing through leaving the nerves tense and painful.
Inhuman pain
As a sea nears a victim bound and still,
The approach alarmed his mind for ever dumb
Of an implacable eternity
Of pain inhuman and intolerable.
This onrush alarmed Aswapati’s mind as a strong wave rushes from the sea to swallow its victim tied on the shores. As a consequence he experiences an inhuman and intolerable pain.
An anguished nothingness
This he must bear, his hope of heaven estranged;
He must ever exist without extinction’s peace
In a slow suffering Time and tortured Space,
An anguished nothingness his endless state.
This he must go through and endure if he is to find the radical remedy to human suffering and pain. He must experience the extinction of hope for any higher state and labour endlessly in this dark dungeon without exit or escape. He must suffer the agonies of Time inflicted in a distorted and tortured Space. It is a state of complete self-loss with an endless anguish of this tremendous leap into the dark Nothingness.
Lifeless vacancy
A lifeless vacancy was now his breast,
And in the place where once was luminous thought,
Only remained like a pale motionless ghost
An incapacity for faith and hope
And the dread conviction of a vanquished soul
Immortal still but with its godhead lost,
Self lost and God and touch of happier worlds.
His heart, under the influence of this dark state, grew now an empty space, lifeless and ghostlike, pale and dull without any capacity for faith and hope. It was as if his soul, though immortal had been vanquished, without its godhead, without the sense of Self and God or the touch of happier things.
Smothering coils
But he endured, stilled the vain terror, bore
The smothering coils of agony and affright;
Then peace returned and the soul’s sovereign gaze.
This he endured stilling the vain terror, bearing the smothering coils of agony and fear. Then the darkness gave way before his endurance and peace and his soul’s mastering gaze returned.
Blank horror
To the blank horror a calm Light replied:
Immutable, undying and unborn,
Mighty and mute the Godhead in him woke
And faced the pain and danger of the world.
The Peace and his soul’s Light responded to the horror. The Godhead within him woke taking charge once again to face the pain and danger of the world.
Naked Hell
He mastered the tides of Nature with a look:
He met with his bare spirit naked Hell.
His soul’s gaze mastered this dark and fallen nature and its unruly high insurgent waves. Shorn of all covers, his bare spirit now faced the challenge of naked Hell.
Closing Remarks
Thus Aswapati entered the pit of Inconscient, digging deep into the filth and mire of a distorted and perverse nature to prepare a field for sowing there too the seeds of light and faith and hope.
END OF CANTO SEVEN
