Opening Remarks for the Canto 1

In Book Three Canto 1 ‘The Pursuit of the Unknowable’ we see Aswapati enter through the doors from where none returns. The Unknowable cannot be known by the mind and hence to enter this realm one has to discard all other sheaths, that physical, vital and mental that clothe and cover the soul. It is difficult to remain conscious in this realm, nay impossible. He is the formless, featureless Infinite in which nothing formed can stay or remain. All figures and forms melt and dissolve into That out of which they had emerged mysteriously so to say. In It all concreteness of creation seems simply an illusory construct of the mind and senses. All our feelings seem like a momentary wave that arise out of Time’s sea only to lapse back into It. All our will appears to strive meaninglessly before that infinite ocean of Light, a sheer mass of Superconscience that assumes or shadows forth a form Divine to pay with us and the world. He is the One without a Second, the indefinable and ineffable who can be known only by becoming one with it and even then remains beyond all description and definitions. All names and forms IT has assumed and yet Itself remains Nameless and Formless. All qualities and aspects emerge from HIM and yet He remains unqualified and infinite.

It is at His doors that Aswapati has reached hesitating to enter. He has to choose between a complete annulment of all that he has been and is and ever could be or else to be reborn and remade and return from the tremendous threshold of extinction with a new mind and new life. The mind cannot know or define it. In its effort to experience it may well be dissolved in it, or else be new found and transformed into the ‘Mind of God’.