Canto Three: The Yoga of the King: The Yoga of the Soul’s Release

Opening Remarks for the Canto

Thus far, in Cantos One and Two of Book One, we have been given a brief background of Savitri’s work. It is a cosmic work that she has undertaken, against which are arraigned powers of darkness that do not wish to see the advent and growth of Light upon the earth.

We have also been given a little glimpse into Savitri’s divine personality. Now with this new canto, the story runs for quite some time in a flashback, as it were, revealing to us the secret of Savitri’s birth. It gives us the background of Savitri’s coming. The secret behind her advent is the seer-king Aswapati, who embodies the aspiration of the earth and who eventually calls down the divine intervention in the form of an embodiment of divine Love and Power and Grace that Savitri is.

But before this can happen, the seer-king Aswapati undertakes a long and unprecedented journey of yoga that starts from his individual liberation from the law of Ignorance under which we labour and leads us to much suffering and pain. Ordinarily, this has been considered as the end of yogic endeavour, after which all that one has to do is exhaust the past karmas created by the past momentum of nature and then depart into the silence of Nirvana with the falling off of the bodily cloak. However, Aswapati does not stop at the frontiers of Nirvana. If anything, his journey begins there and enters into uncharted territories. Impelled by his aspiration to earth and humanity, it ends at the doors of the Divine Mother to secure a boon for earth and men. In this canto, we see the first beginnings of his tremendous journey, the freedom from bondage to Ignorance.

Ordinarily, the soul is subject to nature and conditioned so much by it that it does not know itself as the lord of nature. It is anisa (not lord) so to say. It must first regain its mastery over nature, become isa. Then only it can make the decisive choice of whether to merge itself forever into the stillness and silence of Nirvana or return to earth to participate in the possibility of terrestrial transformation.

Essentially this state of freedom comes by a progressive growth of consciousness, by its heightening, widening and deepening that result in a greater, deeper and truer awareness of all that remains hidden behind the veil of the limited, ego-bound waking consciousness of man. There is much more that awaits our exploration and discovery, states beyond states of peace, joy, beauty and bliss, powers that lie unused in nature’s sleep, and above all, the divine Presence hid within man. The seer and yogi Aswapati is experiencing these profound mysteries of existence not just as a freak occurrence but as a prototype of the human race. His experiences hold an example for others, carving a path through which nature must and will move one day carrying human evolution beyond itself. The freedom of one individual, the pioneer and forerunner, seer-king Aswapati, is the freedom that nature will eventually concede to many more who reach that point of evolution, where the human limits begin to open out into the limitless infinite.

What is not given to us here, however, is the nature of Aswapati’s yoga that he followed in this great ascension. There are hints and suggestions but the primary refrain is that he is a chosen vessel, a representative of God in humanity. He embodies the aspiration of the ages and thus, becomes a meeting point between the human, as he stands now, and the Divine manifestation that is yet to come. What path man should take towards that is revealed later, primarily in the Book of Yoga (Book Seven), the path opened and shown by the Divine Mother born as Savitri.

This is the description of the seer-king Aswapati as he ascends out of the zone of the Ignorance and settles into the Knowledge. The Knowledge has nothing to do with knowledge and ignorance as we understand it. Knowledge, in the spiritual sense, is the direct experience and realisation of the One behind the seemingly separate things and objects. It means to dwell in Oneness, know the one Wisdom, one Power, one Bliss, one Love that dwells and works within all things and forces of the universe. Three things are obvious in this canto. First, as we can see, these are clearly Sri Aurobindo’s own experiences written with detail and clarity. Secondly, we may find some of these profound experiences in traditional spiritual literature, whereas others are not generally found. Some paths and sects have built themselves upon one or two such experiences. Clearly, Sri Aurobindo went farther, much farther in search of the integral Truth. And finally, it is interesting that while traditional spiritual literature that speaks about bondage and liberation leans either upon knowledge (as in Vedanta) or upon power (as in Tantra), here we find a beautiful synthesis of both. Aswapati’s freedom from Ignorance is not just in terms of gaining the true Knowledge but also the true Power. In the end, as it is revealed in the next canto, these are in fact two sides of one integral Reality.

The Divine Representative upon Earth, pp. 22-23

Opening remarks

The Divine has always been upon earth since its inception, not only as an essence hidden behind the surfaces of life but also taking a body and assuming a form to take creation forward through the evolutionary march of mankind. What follows is a brief introduction of King Aswapati, who is one such involutionary being from the higher consciousness, the divine representative who has come to call down and establish the truth of Savitri upon earth. He has descended here to install the Divine Mother in the human heart. The seer-king Aswapati, the human father of Savitri, has performed a tapasya (yagna in the original story) for the birth of Savitri, a partial incarnation of the Divine Mother. Earth and humanity have aspired for her coming since long, but it is only now that the time has come. Aswapati is the forerunner, a divine representative in humanity and a being from the higher worlds, who has come to prepare earth and humanity for the advent of Savitri.

A World’s desire compelled her mortal birth.

A world’s desire

The very first line of this canto summarises the secret of Savitri’s birth. The divine advent is compelled by the aspiration of the ages that burns in the secret heart of the world.

One in the front of the immemorial quest,
Protagonist of the mysterious play
In which the Unknown pursues himself through forms
And limits his eternity by the hours
And the blind Void struggles to live and see,
A thinker and toiler in the ideal’s air,
Brought down to earth’s dumb need her radiant power.

One in the front

We are now being introduced to Aswapati, the seer-king whose tapasya has brought down to earth the Divine Mother’s radiant power, now born as his daughter Savitri. In the forefront of the human quest, Aswapati embodies man’s incessant seeking and will to climb towards Light, Truth, Peace, Bliss, Freedom and Immortality.

His was a spirit that stooped from larger spheres
Into our province of ephemeral sight,
A colonist from immortality.

A colonist from immortality

That is to say, Aswapati is an involutionary being who has descended from the higher immortal planes of existence.

A pointing beam on earth’s uncertain roads,
His birth held up a symbol and a sign;
His human self like a translucent cloak
Covered the All-Wise who leads the unseeing world.

The All-Wise who leads the unseeing world

There is a divine consciousness involved in matter that is slowly emerging from the Inconscient. It embodies itself from age to age in a human form to guide and lead the evolutionary march of mankind. The presence of beings like Aswapati is a promise of the future. Though human in appearance, his inner being is one with the Divine who seeks to manifest here upon earth in and through our humanity. Thus, he becomes a representative of our humanity aspiring for a diviner life.

Affiliated to cosmic Space and Time
And paying here God’s debt to earth and man
A greater sonship was his divine right.

Paying here God’s debt to earth and man

Beings of the higher domains belong to the entire creation. Though born in a certain environment, culture and country, no age or civilisation can claim them since they are identified with the Divine and are here simply to help humanity grow towards Light, Freedom and Immortality. Through them God pays his debt to humanity. Since he has created earth and man, he owes it to mankind to save and transmute it into his perfect image.

Although consenting to mortal ignorance,
His knowledge shared the Light ineffable.

Consenting to mortal ignorance

Though veiled in an earthly body and hence subject to the laws of earthly life, he was inwardly conscious of his divine origin and embodied the Wisdom that belongs to the realms beyond the mind.

A strength of the original Permanence
Entangled in the moment and its flow,
He kept the vision of the Vasts behind:
A power was in him from the Unknowable.

A strength of the original Permanence

It was a deliberate decision to plunge into the fields of Ignorance to bring there the Light. Though identified with our struggling humanity, sharing its suffering and pain, he was conscious of the Power that can help uplift the human race.

An archivist of the symbols of the Beyond,
A treasurer of superhuman dreams,
He bore the stamp of mighty memories
And shed their grandiose ray on human life.

The stamp of mighty memories

He brought with him the dream-truths of the future and planted them in the soil of earthly mind. Reconnecting with past lines of similar effort, his words and deeds helped the human race to receive a greater light than it had known so far.

His days were a long growth to the Supreme.

Growth to the Supreme

Though everything is slowly growing towards the Divine, there are a few chosen beings who come especially to hasten this growth.

A skyward being nourishing its roots
On sustenance from occult spiritual founts
Climbed through white rays to meet an unseen Sun.

A skyward being

Going beyond the mind through intuitive realms, the seer-king climbed towards the supramental summits, sustaining his aspiration amidst a world that hardly seeks for Truth and Light.

His soul lived as eternity’s delegate,
His mind was like a fire assailing heaven,
His will a hunter in the trails of light.

Eternity’s delegate

Such beings open the doors of a higher consciousness, of a greater and vaster truth for earth and men. They lead the way as forerunners of the future, creating pathways for others to follow.

An ocean impulse lifted every breath;
Each action left the footprints of a god,
Each moment was a beat of puissant wings.

Footprints of a god

Their speech and their silence, their will and thoughts and acts help nourish earth’s aspiration and its growth towards Light, Freedom and Truth. Their very presence is a help to earth and men.

The little plot of our mortality
Touched by this tenant from the heights became
A playground of the living Infinite.

Living Infinite

They marry the soil to the sky, matter to the spirit, earth to the heavens and allow the influx of the Infinite in our finite lives.

Closing remarks

Thus we are introduced to the seer-king Aswapati, a being from the higher consciousness, a representative of the Divine upon earth who has come to help humanity in its Godward climb, opening the doors to a glorious future.

The Flame of God or the Psychic Being, p. 23

Opening remarks

Aswapati is the representative of the Divine upon earth. He is the eternal Avatara in man who has come to carry the evolutionary march forward as its leader. He is the soul of humanity, raising the aspiration in man higher and higher. What the Avatara does for humanity, the psychic being does for the individual. It leads the individual from birth to birth, through the doors of death, in numberless names and forms, until he grows into a true image of God. Aswapati himself has traced this journey through many lives until he has become the centre of a divine descent.

This bodily appearance is not all;
The form deceives, the person is a mask;
Hid deep in man celestial powers can dwell.

This bodily appearance is not all

Man is not just a body alone, nor is he just the mental personality. Hidden deep within him is his true self, the soul, that holds within itself the knowledge and power of the Divine as a seed holds within itself a tree.

His fragile ship conveys through the sea of years
An incognito of the Imperishable.

An incognito of the Imperishable

Behind the outer personality, covered by the figure and form of the external man, there dwells the nameless divine essence that never perishes. The body is the fragile ship that the soul uses for its experience as it moves through spaces of Time.

A spirit that is a flame of God abides,
A fiery portion of the Wonderful,
Artist of his own beauty and delight,
Immortal in our mortal poverty.

A fiery portion of the Wonderful

Rich with divine qualities, the soul is the immortal, imperishable element in us. It is self-luminous, a creator, lover and seeker of Beauty and Truth and Delight.

This sculptor of the forms of the Infinite,
This screened unrecognised Inhabitant,
Initiate of his own veiled mysteries,
Hides in a small dumb seed his cosmic thought.

Sculptor of the forms of the Infinite

In our ignorance, we believe the soul to be a by-product of the body and brain. When wisdom dawns, we discover that it is the soul that puts forth its energies which the cosmic forces use to create a body and a living personality for the experience needed by the soul for its growth.

In the mute strength of the occult Idea
Determining predestined shape and act,
Passenger from life to life, from scale to scale,
Changing his imaged self from form to form,
He regards the icon growing by his gaze
And in the worm foresees the coming god.

Passenger from life to life

The soul carries within itself the script of its destiny. It bears the occult Truth that determines the future through pre-determined steps of nature. Moving from life to life, it gathers strength and grows into that aspect of the Divine it is meant to represent. Its initial worm-like crawl ends in a heavenward flight.

At last the traveller in the paths of Time
Arrives on the frontiers of eternity.

Traveller in the paths of Time

The soul is a portion of the Eternal and as it grows from life to life it reaches a point where it becomes conscious of the eternal Source from which it has emerged.

In the transient symbol of humanity draped,
He feels his substance of undying self
And loses his kinship to mortality.

Substance of undying self

The substance of the soul is not subject to decay or disintegration. When we discover our soul, we become conscious of our immortality and see our human body and personality as simply a changing robe for the deathless soul.

Closing remarks

This marks one phase of the soul’s development. We become conscious of our soul. Identified with our soul, we do not make the mistake of thinking of ourselves as a body or a momentary personality.

Growth into the Integral Godhead, pp. 23-24

Opening remarks

The evolutionary journey does not stop with the discovery and identification with the soul. It is rather the first fundamental step from where other possibilities of ascension open their doors.

A beam of the Eternal smites his heart,
His thought stretches into infinitude;
All in him turns to spirit vastnesses.

A beam of the Eternal

New possibilities of growth and progress open before us once we become conscious of our soul and know ourselves as the soul. There is an ascension to higher and vaster domains of the spirit. The limits imposed by the ego-self fall away from us; a ray from the timeless Glory descends, taking hold of the individual and making us a vessel of the Eternal.

His soul breaks out to join the Oversoul,
His life is oceaned by that superlife.

Oversoul

The individual psychic being discovers itself as the central being, the Jivatma, beyond Time and Space. Our little life bound and circumscribed by the boundaries of Ignorance, imposed by nature and the ego-self, breaks beyond the barriers into the cosmic consciousness.

He has drunk from the breasts of the Mother of the worlds;
A topless Supernature fills his frame:
She adopts his spirit’s everlasting ground
As the security of her changing world
And shapes the figure of her unborn mights.

A topless Supernature

Once our being breaks free from the limited ego-sense and enters the wideness of the spirit, knowledge begins to pour from transcendent regions of Light and Bliss. Born to an ignorant and limited nature, we are adopted by a divine Supernature, the divine Power, who then begins to shape and move our lives towards a diviner image. The individual becomes a vibhuti, as they say in India, a vessel through whom the Divine Shakti pours her light and might.

Immortally she conceives herself in him,
In the creature the unveiled Creatrix works:
Her face is seen through his face, her eyes through his eyes;
Her being is his through a vast identity.

Unveiling of the inner Divine

Thus through a progressive transformation, brought about by the action of the Divine Shakti in us, we grow into oneness and likeness with her. She adopts us as her vessel, her channel and her instrument. No more veiled by the lower prakriti, her Force can move us freely and work in us and through us without hindrance. The divine seed, the immortal soul, hidden in the depths of nature, arrives at the fullness of its divine possibilities. The individual soul becomes conscious of the Divine dwelling within him. He becomes a part and parcel, a conscious portion of the Divine.

Then is revealed in man the overt Divine.

The overt Divine

Thus we grow into the utter identity and unity with the Divine within, who then pours himself out through the human vessel.

A static Oneness and dynamic Power
Descend in him, the integral Godhead’s seals;
His soul and body take that splendid stamp.

A static Oneness and dynamic Power

The Divine is not just static Peace but also dynamic Power. As we grow into his likeness, not only our inner being but also our outer nature, even our body, are taken hold by the divine consciousness for a progressive transformation. The body too begins to share the Peace and Power and Light and Ananda of the integral Divine.

Closing remarks

In a summarised way, we are being shown the core process and the final result of the supramental transformation — the discovery of the psychic being and becoming a conscious instrument of the Divine, a progressive opening and surrender to the Divine Mother and a growing oneness with her. The result is a growing likeness to the divine consciousness, the moulding of our nature into the divine Supernature, a conscious and constant state of living in the Divine and by the Divine. This is the high goal envisioned for man in Savitri, a goal towards which the seer-king Aswapati is the pioneer and forerunner.

Human Life — a Preparation, p. 24

Opening remarks

Human life as we experience it now, in our ignorance, is not the final act of nature. It is a stage, a transition, a rather long preparation, often through much struggle and suffering. Even as the animal life was a preparation for humanity, human life is a preparation for divinity, for the divine unfolding in and through man as an intermediary link.

A long dim preparation is man’s life,
A circle of toil and hope and war and peace
Tracked out by Life on Matter’s obscure ground.

A long dim preparation

Human life and all the range of experiences it provides, plough our mind and life and the soil of matter for the divine seed to take roots and blossom. This long journey starts with obscurity and unconsciousness but steadily moves towards a growing consciousness and light.

In his climb to a peak no feet have ever trod,
He seeks through a penumbra shot with flame
A veiled reality half-known, ever missed,
A search for something or someone never found,
Cult of an ideal never made real here,
An endless spiral of ascent and fall
Until at last is reached the giant point
Through which his Glory shines for whom we were made
And we break into the infinity of God.

At last is reached the giant point

The first phase of our journey is in ignorance. Yet there are hints and glimpses of a greater reality hidden behind appearances. The seeking for an ideal, the search for something or someone vaguely felt, the need to know what lies beyond, an aspiration for Truth and Beauty and Love are some of the forms that this glimpse takes. However, a point comes when something in us, through the intensity of the flame of aspiration, breaks free from the ‘magic circle’ of ‘finiteness’ and ‘separateness’, and we experience the deep unity of all things. We begin to breathe infinity, to live eternity.

Across our nature’s border line we escape
Into Supernature’s arc of living light.

Living light

The burden of ignorance is shed. The night and darkness are no more and we wake up to God’s vastness and light.

Closing remarks

This is the journey of man, beautifully summarised in the great Upanishad — from non-being to the true being, from darkness to light, from death to immortality.

Birth of a Seer, pp. 24-25

Opening remarks

The very first stages of transformation, the transformation of the mind of ignorance into a mind of Light, are described in the following passages. This initial step leads us to a freedom from ignorance.

This now was witnessed in that son of Force;
In him that high transition laid its base.

Son of Force

Aswapati’s tapasya has led him to the point where he begins to witness the transition from a limited mental consciousness to a vaster and freer spiritual and supramental consciousness.

Original and supernal Immanence
Of which all Nature’s process is the art,
The cosmic Worker set his secret hand
To turn this frail mud-engine to heaven-use.

The cosmic Worker

Aswapati’s body and mind, his whole human nature, now becomes a conscious and willing instrument in the hands of the Divine. When the Divine takes up our mind and life and begins to mould them in a diviner image, they become conscious and willing servitors of the Divine.

A Presence wrought behind the ambiguous screen:
It beat his soil to bear a Titan’s weight,
Refining half-hewn blocks of natural strength
It built his soul into a statued god.

A statued god

One of the first effects of the transformation is that we become aware of the divine Presence in our depths, whose mighty hand begins to reshape us, releasing the godlike elements in our nature. This is the conversion of the asuric aspects of our nature. Our nature is like the raw material that is taken up and refined and purified to become stronger and suppler for the divine work.

The Craftsman of the magic stuff of self
Who labours at his high and difficult plan
In the wide workshop of the wonderful world,
Modelled in inward Time his rhythmic parts.

The divine Craftsman

This world is a workshop of the Divine where he tunes our nature to the rhythms of the Spirit.

Then came the abrupt transcendent miracle:
The masked immaculate Grandeur could outline,
At travail in the occult womb of life,
His dreamed magnificence of things to be.

The abrupt transcendent miracle

The greatest of all miracles is for the human in us to be shaped in the divine image. This is slowly being prepared in the inner being of man, even as a chick is prepared inside an egg. For a long time nothing much is visible on the surface, and then suddenly the moment comes when the chick comes out of the egg. Even so, the inner change precipitates itself in the outer being.

A crown of the architecture of the worlds,
A mystery of married Earth and Heaven
Annexed divinity to the mortal scheme.

Marriage of earth and heaven

Slowly the divine elements hidden within us awake and begin to exercise their influence and control over our earth nature, which has been under the spell of darkness and unconsciousness. This is the marriage of earth and heaven pictured in mystic stories and myths.

A Seer was born, a shining Guest of Time.

A shining Guest of Time

A seer is someone who can penetrate behind appearances and “see” the truth hidden in the play of time. When our mind is transformed by the higher Light, then it is able to see by an inner intuition and revelation what our mortal mind burdened with ignorance cannot see and know.

For him mind’s limiting firmament ceased above.

Mind’s limiting firmaments

The lid that separates the limited, finite mind in ignorance from the higher and vaster regions of Light and Truth is removed by the action of the higher consciousness.

Closing remarks

Thus, we see how the ignorant human mind gets transformed into the mind of a seer. It changes its way of functioning and methods of knowledge as a deeper, intuitive and revelatory vision begins to grow in the individual.

Vastness and Light, pp. 25-26

Opening remarks

The Vedic seers saw the Truth as a vast, luminous consciousness, a limitless Existence beyond the dualities of the mind and the ego. This is the next ascension that Aswapati undergoes.

In the griffin forefront of the Night and Day
A gap was rent in the all-concealing vault;
The conscious ends of being went rolling back:
The landmarks of the little person fell,
The island ego joined its continent.

A gap was rent

At first, there comes a little opening in the hard lid of the intellect. The mind begins to open to a greater light and the being widens into the cosmic consciousness. Our consciousness expands beyond the limited horizons of mortal awareness.

Overpassed was this world of rigid limiting forms:
Life’s barriers opened into the Unknown.

Life’s barriers opened

The self of life also widens, and we begin to become conscious of the play of forces that hide behind material forms. The essential oneness behind creation begins to reveal itself in marvellous ways.

Abolished were conception’s covenants
And, striking off subjection’s rigorous clause,
Annulled the soul’s treaty with Nature’s nescience.

Conception’s covenants

There is a whole reversal of consciousness, a revolutionary change, as our habitual understanding of life, our limited conceptions born of a limited experience, begin to be replaced by a truer and deeper vision of things. With this comes freedom, and the soul previously subject to the laws of nature begins to transcend beyond the limits imposed by nature and becomes her master.

All the grey inhibitions were torn off
And broken the intellect’s hard and lustrous lid;
Truth unpartitioned found immense sky-room;
An empyrean vision saw and knew;
The bounded mind became a boundless light,
The finite self mated with infinity.

Mating of the finite and the infinite

The divisive and partial view of things, the greyness and uncertainty in mental knowledge, begins to change into a total and luminous view. The doors of our finite mind open to infinity, all our partial one-sided and partisan views change into a total and synthetic knowledge. We begin to see the truth behind every experience, and each is put in its rightful place with regard to the whole.

His march now soared into an eagle’s flight.

Eagle’s flight

The bounded mind is freed from the boundaries of Ignorance. It soars higher; its vision grows deeper; it develops a wider and comprehensive look towards things.

Out of apprenticeship to Ignorance
Wisdom upraised him to her master craft
And made him an archmason of the soul,
A builder of the Immortal’s secret house,
An aspirant to supernal Timelessness:
Freedom and empire called to him from on high;
Above mind’s twilight and life’s star-led night
There gleamed the dawn of a spiritual day.

The dawn of a spiritual day

With this first change, the mind grows into freedom and vastness and light. Wisdom dawns, and the soul wakes up to higher and deeper truths and their workings. We begin to become conscious collaborators in fulfilling the divine scheme in creation.

Closing remarks

This is the first change, the first step towards building a deeper, higher and truer life within us.

Awakening of Latent Powers, pp. 26-27

Opening remarks

There are hidden powers and latent possibilities within each one of us. They begin to awake under the pressure of the Light growing within us. The transforming Power, the Divine Shakti, liberates what is imprisoned within us. The gifts of the higher consciousness come to us more and more as we grow into the fullness of our higher self.

As so he grew into his larger self,
Humanity framed his movements less and less;
A greater being saw a greater world.

A greater being saw a greater world

Though the world is the same, we see it with a different vision and a new set of eyes. Our perception and understanding change. We become conscious of a greater self and a greater world, hidden behind the surface appearances.

A fearless will for knowledge dared to erase
The lines of safety Reason draws that bar
Mind’s soar, soul’s dive into the Infinite.

A fearless will for knowledge

As the soul is freed from the clutches of ignorance, it begins to soar higher and dive deeper, bringing with it new possibilities and powers of the Spirit. The can-be and cannot-be of reason begin to fade before the growing omnipotence of the Spirit.

Even his first steps broke our small earth-bounds
And loitered in a vaster freer air.

A vaster freer air

Human life is surrounded by misery due to pettiness and smallness. Freedom from ignorance lifts our life into a vaster consciousness where we can breathe the delight of oneness and infinity.

In hands sustained by a transfiguring Might
He caught up lightly like a giant’s bow
Left slumbering in a sealed and secret cave
The powers that sleep unused in man within.

The powers that sleep

There are many hidden faculties, latent powers that begin to awaken as the Light and Force of the New Consciousness start working in our life. This is what is being described as the seer-king Aswapati experiences them in the early stages of his yoga.

He made of miracle a normal act
And turned to a common part of divine works,
Magnificently natural at this height,
Efforts that would shatter the strength of mortal hearts,
Pursued in a royalty of mighty ease
Aims too sublime for Nature’s daily will:
The gifts of the spirit crowding came to him;
They were his life’s pattern and his privilege.

Miracle a common act

What we call miracles are nothing but the interventions of a higher determinism that change the fixed course of things. Nothing is impossible to the universal Spirit that dwells in all things. When man too becomes vast and unites with the Spirit, then he too shall share its liberty and power. His deeds shall bear the seal of a superhumanity, now only dreamed or imagined or sometimes glimpsed by a few. Then, his daily life itself becomes a miracle filled with the gifts and glories of the Grace.

A pure perception lent its lucent joy:
Its intimate vision waited not to think;
It enveloped all Nature in a single glance,
It looked into the very self of things;
Deceived no more by form he saw the soul.

A pure perception

Our senses deceive us. Together with the mind, they construct an image of things rather than revealing the reality. They are limited in their action, restricted in their range and scope. But the transformation of the senses and the mind by the higher consciousness makes them pure channels of Truth and Light, showing the reality behind appearances.

In beings it knew what lurked to them unknown;
It seized the idea in mind, the wish in the heart;
It plucked out from grey folds of secrecy
The motives which from their own sight men hide.

The hidden motives

The higher consciousness transforms the mind into an intuitive mentality. This new working of the intuition goes deeper behind appearances and picks up hidden motives and forces that move our life.

He felt the beating life in other men
Invade him with their happiness and their grief;
Their love, their anger, their unspoken hopes
Entered in currents or in pouring waves
Into the immobile ocean of his calm.

Effacing the boundaries of Ignorance

The circle of ego in which we are trapped begins to widen and loosen its grip on every side, opening us to the states of consciousness in others. Our consciousness grows vast and immobile, thereby letting these waves flow into us without creating the least disturbance, even as rivers and streams pour into a sea. This is the true equanimity that can contain a whole world within itself without the least ripple or perturbation.

He heard the inspired sound of his own thoughts
Re-echoed in the vault of other minds;
The world’s thought-streams travelled into his ken;
His inner self grew near to others’ selves
And bore a kinship’s weight, a common tie,
Yet stood untouched, king of itself, alone.

King of itself

Such is the perpetual state of one whose life is transformed by the higher consciousness — a state of equanimity and self-mastery founded upon a vast and luminous peace and inner stillness. One begins to receive and share the life of all beings around oneself in a deeper and truer way. Though leaning with compassion to help and relieve the suffering of others, the soul remains untouched and above the play, like a king in possession of his kingdom.

Closing remarks

Thus, we see a progressive heightening and widening of the individual consciousness as it soars beyond the mind and grows towards freedom and oneness.

Contact with the Kingdom of the Gods, pp. 27-28

Opening remarks

The seer-king Aswapati now ascends to the higher planes. As he ascends, his sight and hearing acquire a new functioning. A heightening, greatening and deepening of these faculties take place. He leaves the limits and boundaries of terrestrial nature, and enters the domain of the gods, who preside over creation and its various aspects and functioning as powers of the One.

A magical accord quickened and attuned
To ethereal symphonies the old earthy strings;
It raised the servitors of mind and life
To be happy partners in the soul’s response,
Tissue and nerve were turned to sensitive chords,
Records of lustre and ecstasy; it made
The body’s means the spirit’s acolytes.

The spirit’s acolytes

Ordinarily, our senses blindly serve the mind and life. We are conditioned to hear and see what our mind believes and wants us to hear and see. But the action of the higher consciousness brings an upliftment and a new working in the sensory apparatus itself. Our senses are attuned to the truth and its rhythms, thereby becoming beautiful instruments of the soul. Our body, now a slave of the ego-self and desires, becomes a conscious instrument of the Spirit.

A heavenlier function with a finer mode
Lit with its grace man’s outward earthliness;
The soul’s experience of its deeper sheaths
No more slept drugged by Matter’s dominance.

A heavenlier function with a finer mode

Not only do our mind and life condition the senses, but this gross material sheath makes our senses blunted and dull. The higher consciousness, however, releases the senses from this subjection to matter and lifts them up to a higher mode of functioning.

In the dead wall closing us from wider self,
Into a secrecy of apparent sleep,
The mystic tract beyond our waking thoughts,
A door parted, built in by Matter’s force,
Releasing things unseized by earthly sense:
A world unseen, unknown by outward mind
Appeared in the silent spaces of the soul.

Release from the ego-self

As the soul wakes up to deeper and higher realities now concealed to our limited vision, a new and greater world begins to appear before us, a world missed by the gross senses and the earth-bound mind of man.

He sat in secret chambers looking out
Into the luminous countries of the unborn
Where all things dreamed by the mind are seen and true
And all that the life longs for is drawn close.

The luminous countries of the unborn

The seer-king Aswapati, released from subjection to the ego-sense and physical mind, now approaches the borderline between form and the formless, from where one can catch a glimpse of the Unmanifest awaiting its hour in future time.

He saw the Perfect in their starry homes
Wearing the glory of a deathless form,
Lain in the arms of the Eternal’s peace,
Rapt in the heart-beats of God-ecstasy.

The Perfect in their starry homes

In a few lines, this beautifully describes Aswapati’s contact with the world of the gods.

He lived in the mystic space where thought is born
And will is nursed by an ethereal Power
And fed on the white milk of the Eternal’s strengths
Till it grows into the likeness of a god.

Likeness of a god

The gods are many powers and aspects of the one Divine. Dwelling upon those rare heights, where knowledge is self-revealed, and will is moved by the divine Power, Aswapati himself grows into the likeness of a god.

In the Witness’s occult rooms with mind-built walls
On hidden interiors, lurking passages
Opened the windows of the inner sight.

Windows of the inner sight

Instead of looking at things from below and through the surface vision, the seer-king Aswapati can now see them from above and within. His inner sight is now released from the influences of the dividing mind.

He owned the house of undivided Time.

The house of undivided Time

The divisions that our mind creates between the past, present and future ceased to be. His newfound sight could now see the entire panorama as a single stream of Time.

Closing remarks

Thus Aswapati arrives on the higher planes, acquiring new powers and faculties and a more complete vision of things. He grows into the stature of the gods and becomes himself a demi-god among men.

The Higher Worlds, pp. 28-30

Opening remarks

As the consciousness begins to get liberated from the strong grip of matter, it opens to domains of reality hitherto hidden from our experience. Each ascension opens the doors to a new perception and a new understanding.

Lifting the heavy curtain of the flesh
He stood upon a threshold serpent-watched,
And peered into gleaming endless corridors,
Silent and listening in the silent heart
For the coming of the new and the unknown.

The new and the unknown

Aswapati stands on the threshold summits of the evolutionary manifestation. But there is much that is hidden and exists as a latent possibility, awaiting its hour to manifest. It is towards this which the seer-yogi Aswapati, the pioneer and high forerunner of the human race, now turns his gaze.

He gazed across the empty stillnesses
And heard the footsteps of the undreamed Idea
In the far avenues of the Beyond.

Far avenues of the Beyond

All is still, and in this enormous stillness he casts his vision and tunes his hearing for the new Idea that is yet to manifest upon earth.

He heard the secret Voice, the Word that knows,
And saw the secret face that is our own.

The secret Voice and the Word that knows

A new vision and hearing, known to the early seers as truth-vision and truth-audition, begin to awaken in him and reveal to him truths hidden behind appearances, the voice of Truth, the face of the Spirit hidden behind forms.

The inner planes uncovered their crystal doors;
Strange powers and influences touched his life.

The inner planes

A system of hierarchically arranged worlds, with corresponding beings, energies, powers and influences, lurks behind the wall of this material world. Aswapati now begins to enter into and experience these hidden worlds, their occult energies and the beings native to these realms, who yet influence our earth and humanity.

A vision came of higher realms than ours,
A consciousness of brighter fields and skies,
Of beings less circumscribed than brief-lived men
And subtler bodies than these passing frames,
Objects too fine for our material grasp,
Acts vibrant with a superhuman light
And movements pushed by a superconscient force,
And joys that never flowed through mortal limbs,
And lovelier scenes than earth’s and happier lives.

Higher realms and brighter fields

These are the various gods whose consciousness and field of action is wide, driven by a luminous force. Light, wideness, joy and peace are the native atmosphere of these higher realms.

A consciousness of beauty and of bliss,
A knowledge which became what it perceived,
Replaced the separated sense and heart
And drew all Nature into its embrace.

A consciousness of beauty and of bliss

There all is beauty and bliss. There, one has the joy of identity and oneness. A new and integral knowledge begins to awaken and operate in Aswapati’s mind.

The mind leaned out to meet the hidden worlds:
Air glowed and teemed with marvellous shapes and hues,
In the nostrils quivered celestial fragrances,
On the tongue lingered the honey of paradise.

The senses undergo a corresponding change

There are corresponding subtle senses equivalent to our gross ones. They awaken as the soul is freed and ascends to the higher worlds. Through these subtle senses, the spiritual mind connects and relates with the celestial beings and their energies. One tastes the rejuvenating nectar that invigorates the body and mind.

A channel of universal harmony,
Hearing was a stream of magic audience,
A bed for occult sounds earth cannot hear.

Occult sounds

There are secret rhythms and harmonies of truth that one cannot hear with our earthly ears. Only a limited range is our present capacity. The ascent of consciousness attunes us to these subtle sounds and rhythms that vibrate in the higher worlds.

Out of a covert tract of slumber self
The voice came of a truth submerged, unknown
That flows beneath the cosmic surfaces,
Only mid an omniscient silence heard,
Held by intuitive heart and secret sense.

The voice of a truth submerged

There is a silence behind life, a realm of superconscient Truth where the mind goes off to sleep. This Truth is hidden in our own depths behind the deeper heart and reveals itself to those who are attuned to it.

It caught the burden of secrecies sealed and dumb,
It voiced the unfulfilled demand of earth
And the song of promise of unrealised heavens
And all that hides in an omnipotent Sleep.

Revelation of the Vedas

This is how the hymns and mantras of the Vedas were composed. It is through an inner hearing that their truths were revealed, and their harmonic strains and supreme vibrations were given an appropriate body of word and sound.

In the unceasing drama carried by Time
On its long listening flood that bears the world’s
Insoluble doubt on a pilgrimage without goal,
A laughter of sleepless pleasure foamed and spumed
And murmurings of desire that cannot die:
A cry came of the world’s delight to be,
The grandeur and greatness of its will to live,
Recall of the soul’s adventure into space,
A traveller through the magic centuries
And being’s labour in Matter’s universe,
Its search for the mystic meaning of its birth
And joy of high spiritual response,
Its throb of satisfaction and content
In all the sweetness of the gifts of life,
Its large breath and pulse and thrill of hope and fear,
Its taste of pangs and tears and ecstasy,
Its rapture’s poignant beat of sudden bliss,
The sob of its passion and unending pain.

The delight that is the secret root of all

Behind the surface seeking for pleasure and the incessant cry of desire, there stands hidden in its depths the delight of existence and its will to be. It is this that prompted the soul to plunge into this adventure of Time and Space. It is delight and not desire which is the original cause of creation. Desire and pleasure are simply surface strains caught in the fields of ignorance of a secret delight and will to be. The drama of life staged on matter’s ground, though full of the passion of pleasure and pain, is inwardly an epic of the soul’s adventure. It is this that gives hope and meaning and the incessant will to live amidst and despite the danger and the pain.

The murmur and whisper of the unheard sounds
Which crowd around our hearts but find no window
To enter, swelled into a canticle
Of all that suffers to be still unknown
And all that labours vainly to be born
And all the sweetness none will ever taste
And all the beauty that will never be.

The murmur and whisper of the unheard sounds

The vibrations of truth, the harmonious rhythms of the higher worlds, began to grow in intensity and frequency, bringing with them the sweetness and delight of the Divine.

Inaudible to our deaf mortal ears
The wide world-rhythms wove their stupendous chant
To which life strives to fit our rhyme-beats here,
Melting our limits in the illimitable,
Tuning the finite to infinity.

Tuning the finite to infinity

The whole creation can be resolved into vibrations and rhythms that build, sustain and dissolve the countless worlds. Our own life itself is one note of this stupendous orchestra. Our limits are the limits of a note that blends with the grand music. Our seemingly finite life is a wave or even a drop in the ocean of infinity.

A low muttering rose from the subconscient caves,
The stammer of the primal ignorance;
Answer to that inarticulate questioning,
There stooped with lightning neck and thunder’s wings
A radiant hymn to the Inexpressible
And the anthem of the superconscient light.

The meeting of the subconscient and the superconscient

The harmonious vibrations and rhythms of Truth-Light meet the chaotic ill-formed notes of the subconscient realms and the subliminal being of man. It is here that the change first takes place before precipitating in the outermost fields.

Closing remarks

With the release of consciousness from the strong grip of matter, we discover new faculties and begin to experience the realms hidden behind the physical world.

Expansion of Consciousness, pp. 30-31

Opening remarks

What is being described now is a result of the expansion and growth of consciousness that is taking place in the seer-king Aswapati during the course of his yoga. His ascension is marked by new discoveries.

All was revealed there none can here express;
Vision and dream were fables spoken by truth
Or symbols more veridical than fact,
Or were truths enforced by supernatural seals.

Fables spoken by truth

This is how myths and fables were born. The seers with their occult vision discovered deeper and higher truths often revealed to them in visions and symbols. These symbols, often given to man in the form of myths, are more true than earthly physical facts, since they reveal a hidden side of reality unknown to the physical vision.

Immortal eyes approached and looked in his,
And beings of many kingdoms neared and spoke:
The ever-living whom we name as dead
Could leave their glory beyond death and birth
To utter the wisdom which exceeds all phrase:
The kings of evil and the kings of good,
Appellants at the reason’s judgment seat,
Proclaimed the gospel of their opposites,
And all believed themselves spokesmen of God:
The gods of light and titans of the dark
Battled for his soul as for a costly prize.

Beings of many kingdoms

As Aswapati’s depth and range of experiences increase, he begins to have close encounters with various beings of different worlds and inner kingdoms. The ever-living Masters whom we call “dead” draw near the soul in its heavenward climb. The wise gods and the mighty titans who work behind the earthly screen spoke to him, seeking to make him their instrument for extending their power and influence over earth. These beings, most of whom are much mightier than man as he stands today, are on the lookout for those who can embody and express them in material life. They seek to influence earth through such persons and thereby extend their reign.

In every hour loosed from the quiver of Time
There rose a song of new discovery,
A bow-twang’s hum of young experiment.

Song of new discovery

A life moved and governed by the breath of the Spirit refreshes and rejuvenates itself constantly. It follows the rhythms of universal becoming and remains young and joyful each moment, discovering the world anew.

Each day was a spiritual romance,
As if he was born into a bright new world;
Adventure leaped an unexpected friend,
And danger brought a keen sweet tang of joy;
Each happening was a deep experience.

Each day was a spiritual romance

All is the Divine and to one who is ‘inwardly awake,’ each moment and each event becomes a revelatory disclosure of the Divine. It is as if one were discovering the same Divine in countless ways bringing with it a deep felicity.

There were high encounters, epic colloquies,
And counsels came couched in celestial speech,
And honeyed pleadings breathed from occult lips
To help the heart to yield to rapture’s call,
And sweet temptations stole from beauty’s realms
And sudden ecstasies from a world of bliss.

High encounters and epic colloquies

The high and mighty beings of subtler realms, the gods and the heavenly damsels of sweetness and light (the apsaras and other such celestial beings that prepare the heart to the touch of beauty and bliss), drew near to him as a honey bee to a flower. The great gods spoke to his adventuring soul, and beauty made its passage into his wide heart. The breath of God’s bliss began to turn all experience into His rapture and delight.

It was a region of wonder and delight.

Region of wonder and delight

In these high realms, one feels nearness to the Divine and the touch of his bliss and oneness.

Closing remarks

Thus, the soul of Aswapati climbed through the higher realms facing the wonderful adventure of the new and the unknown.

The Great Ascension of the Soul, p. 31

Opening remarks

The soul of man grows out of its earthly state in steps and stages. There is a progressive change within as we climb each step of the journey.

All now his bright clairaudience could receive;
A contact thrilled of mighty unknown things.

Mighty unknown things

Aswapati is undergoing a progressive change even as he is developing new faculties and powers that are bringing him in contact with high realms that remain hidden and unknown to our human consciousness.

Awakened to new unearthly closenesses,
The touch replied to subtle infinities,
And with a silver cry of opening gates
Sight’s lightnings leaped into the invisible.

Unearthly closenesses

Beings of the higher worlds became his companions and aides. The opening of silver gates suggests that these experiences were taking place in the realms of the spiritual mind.

Ever his consciousness and vision grew;
They took an ampler sweep, a loftier flight;
He passed the border marked for Matter’s rule
And passed the zone where thought replaces life.

Beyond the zone where thoughts replace life

Aswapati passes beyond this world of material forms into the subtler worlds of life and mind. He moves beyond the realm of thoughts into the higher mind realms of symbols and signs.

Out of this world of signs suddenly he came
Into a silent self where world was not
And looked beyond into a nameless vast.

Beyond the world of signs

Seer-king Aswapati passes beyond thought and the world of signs towards a vast and luminous region of calm impersonality.

These symbol figures lost their right to live,
All tokens dropped our sense can recognise;
There the heart beat no more at body’s touch,
There the eyes gazed no more on beauty’s shape.

Symbol figures lost their right to live

It is the mind and the senses that create figure and form. Going beyond them liberates us from the restrictions imposed by form. Passing beyond appearances, we discover the impersonal and universal truths they represent. It is a world of pure idea-truths that have not yet embodied themselves. One is thus freed from the snare and attachment to external shapes and forms.

In rare and lucent intervals of hush
Into a signless region he could soar
Packed with the deep contents of formlessness
Where world was into a single being rapt
And all was known by the light of identity
And Spirit was its own self-evidence.

Light of identity

The Spirit is formless and cannot be known by normal human instruments. It is only by developing intuition that it can be known. Such a state is conferred as the result of Grace of the Divine. Aswapati draws nearer and nearer the rare summits where the Spirit abides. He now feels the light and breath of the Spirit which carries the whole universe in its embrace.

Closing remarks

Thus, we see the soul’s progress and freedom that comes through a progressive heightening and widening of consciousness as it draws near its origin and source.

The One and the Many, pp. 31-32

Opening remarks

How do our self-experience and world-experience change when we are identified with the cosmic Spirit? We are given a brief glimpse of this state in the lines that follow.

The Supreme’s gaze looked out through human eyes
And saw all things and creatures as itself
And knew all thought and word as its own voice.

The Supreme’s gaze

When man becomes conscious of the Divine, unites with the Divine, then he discovers the true basis of unity. For the Divine, there is no ‘other’. All is an aspect, portion, extension of himself, held within himself in a state of perfect harmony.

There unity is too close for search and clasp
And love is a yearning of the One for the One,
And beauty is a sweet difference of the Same
And oneness is the soul of multitude.

Love, unity and oneness

Only when we progressively unite with the divine consciousness can we discover the deep unity underlying all things. Only then can we love truly, understand truly through an inner oneness and identification with all.

There all the truths unite in a single Truth,
And all ideas rejoin Reality.

The one Truth source of all truths

Not only in the realm of love and beauty but also in the realm of ideas there is a secret unity. Each idea is the partial expression and a particular truth that is in harmony with all other truths in the consciousness of the One. In the play of multiplicity, they appear divided, often coming in clash with ‘other’ truths, but in the Divine they stand united as different and complementary aspects of the one Reality. To use an image, we may say that ideas are projections of aspects of Truth; like fingers of the hand, they reach out and appear separate but are inwardly always connected to their base. Different ideas are derived from a common source of knowledge and power.

There knowing herself by her own termless self,
Wisdom supernal, wordless, absolute
Sat uncompanioned in the eternal Calm,
All-seeing, motionless, sovereign and alone.

Wisdom supernal

One and alone, a single Being without a second has become this manifold creation. It is He who dwells in the heart of all things and yet He is beyond all, an eternal Presence not subject to mutation and change. To know this is to have wisdom, to live in this truth is to remain always calm and untouched under any circumstances.

There knowledge needs not words to embody Idea;
Idea, seeking a house in boundlessness,
Weary of its homeless immortality,
Asks not in thought’s carved brilliant cell to rest
Whose single window’s clipped outlook on things
Sees only a little arc of God’s vast sky.

Knowledge beyond thoughts and words

This is the normal progression. Knowledge is in a realm far beyond the mind. It slowly releases itself in ideas, which further use thought and word to express themselves. In the process, this higher knowledge suffers various degrees of limitation and distortion at each successive level. This is how knowledge turns into ignorance. Its vastness becomes limited and even distorted by fixed dogmas, belief systems, ideologies and all the rest.

The boundless with the boundless there consorts;
While there, one can be wider than the world;
While there, one is one’s own infinity.

Wider than the world

It is there, in that one Reality, the eternal source of all things, that we discover our own divine origin. We too as children of infinity share then the Divine’s boundlessness and liberty from all limiting frames.

Closing remarks

Thus, we have a glimpse of the vast and integral vision that is the privilege of those who are united with the Divine and thus ascend to the highest realms. For them, unity and oneness become the law of living. Division loses its hold, and the consciousness, freed from limited dogmas and beliefs, soars far above into infinity.

An Inner Shift, p. 32

Opening remarks

This ascension resulting from a growing union with the Divine leads to a shift of the station of consciousness, a reversal, a radical change in our self-regard and world-regard, in the way we see ourselves and the world.

His centre was no more in earthly mind;
A power of seeing silence filled his limbs:
Caught by a voiceless white epiphany
Into a vision that surpasses forms,
Into a living that surpasses life,
He neared the still consciousness sustaining all.

Beyond the earthly mind

Yogi and seer Aswapati ascends beyond the mind and makes the higher realms now his normal station. He dwells in the luminous silence that one encounters in the realms beyond mind. It is a life of vastness and luminous silence that looks upon hidden truths that he now experiences.

The voice that only by speech can move the mind
Became a silent knowledge in the soul;
The strength that only in action feels its truth
Was lodged now in a mute omnipotent peace.

A silent knowledge and calm strength

This silence of the higher realms is the matrix in which true knowledge can descend, and the omnipotence of the Divine plays freely in the human vessel. Ordinarily, we become aware of knowing only through thoughts and words or feel our strength only through action. But this is a higher knowing and a greater strength that is self-existent in the luminous silence and peace of the Divine.

A leisure in the labour of the worlds,
A pause in the joy and anguish of the search
Restored the stress of Nature to God’s calm.

God’s calm

To enter and dwell in these domains is to find true and luminous rest that restores and rejuvenates nature.

Closing remarks

The road to self-realisation undertaken by Aswapati is through a stilling of the mind leading to an ascension into a vast, luminous and powerful silence above.

The Witness Self and Mastery over Nature, pp. 32-34

Opening remarks

As we shift beyond the earthly mind, as the consciousness grows immobile and still, our soul is able to separate itself from the flow of nature and become a witness to its play. Next, it becomes the one who sanctions the forces that would move the instruments of nature, that is to say, our mind, body and life. Finally, it becomes the master of nature. That which was once nature’s slave becomes her master. In yoga these stages are called, Sakshi, Anumanta and Isa. This does not automatically lead to transformation, but makes it easier for the higher consciousness to work out the intended divine change.

A vast unanimity ended life’s debate.

End of life’s debate

When the mind and vital parts become quiet and stilled by the pressure of the emergent higher consciousness, then we are ready to glimpse the divine Self. The contrary forces pulling us in different directions lose their hold upon us as we grow from a state of division into a state of unity and oneness.

The war of thoughts that fathers the universe,
The clash of forces struggling to prevail
In the tremendous shock that lights a star
As in the building of a grain of dust,
The grooves that turn their dumb ellipse in space
Ploughed by the seeking of the world’s desire,
The long regurgitations of Time’s flood,
The torment edging the dire force of lust
That wakes kinetic in earth’s dullard slime
And carves a personality out of mud,
The sorrow by which Nature’s hunger is fed,
The oestrus which creates with fire of pain,
The fate that punishes virtue with defeat,
The tragedy that destroys long happiness,
The weeping of Love, the quarrel of the Gods,
Ceased in a truth which lives in its own light.

The truth that lives in its own light

An exceedingly beautiful passage describing how all contradictions and confusions cease in the Divine. All is seen anew in that Truth-Light, all is experienced afresh, leaving no room for the play of ignorance that creates so much conflict and turmoil in life. As long as we live in the dividing mind, we are bound to take sides and see only aspects and portions of one Reality, rather than the Reality itself. The one Truth seems fragmented in the medium of our mind, and hence there appears a clash of one ‘truth’ against another. But when we ascend beyond the mind and live in the rays of an integral Truth, then we can see differences as complementary aspects of the One.

His soul stood free, a witness and a king.

Freedom of the soul

When the mind is stilled and the life released from its restless agitation created by desire, when conflicts cease in a vast inner harmony created by obeying the law of Truth, only then is our soul freed and able to reign over its nature as its master and lord. This is the first fundamental freedom needed.

Absorbed no more in the moment-ridden flux
Where mind incessantly drifts as on a raft
Hurried from phenomenon to phenomenon,
He abode at rest in indivisible Time.

Indivisible Time

Thus freed from the flow and flux of ever-changing phenomena, our soul is able to see the invisible links that join the passing scenes and circumstances of our present life. With the common underlying thread found, all is seen as a single chain and not separate, disparate objects and incidents.

As if a story long written but acted now,
In his present he held his future and his past,
Felt in the seconds the uncounted years
And saw the hours like dots upon a page.

The singularity of Time

Just as we cut Space into manageable bits, even though all Space is essentially a single extension, so too we cut Time into bits of past, present and future though all is a single movement. The vast impersonal consciousness sees not only the boundlessness of Space, but also the immensity of Time in a single sweep. It beholds the past and the future in the present moment. It is as if we came out of a river in whose currents we were caught and are now able to see the entire river from a distant vantage point.

An aspect of the unknown Reality
Altered the meaning of the cosmic scene.

Meaning of the cosmic scene

All the scenes of our life to which we are glued and which seem to us in our state of ignorance as ultimate, lose their all-important character. We see all things as part of a grand scheme of which only bits are held before our sight. We can now see the larger picture held back behind surface events, and thus can understand the deeper sense of the mysterious play.

This huge material universe became
A small result of a stupendous force:
Overtaking the moment the eternal Ray
Illumined That which never yet was made.

The Self hidden behind forms and appearances

The light of the Self reveals the unborn Spirit hidden behind the several layers of our own and the world’s phenomenal existence.

Thought lay down in a mighty voicelessness;
The toiling Thinker widened and grew still,
Wisdom transcendent touched his quivering heart:
His soul could sail beyond thought’s luminous bar;
Mind screened no more the shoreless infinite.

The shoreless Infinite

When the finite mind grows still and thought sleeps in a mighty and luminous silence, then a door opens onto the Infinite and we see and receive the infinite Wisdom hidden in the depths of creation and its mighty workings lay bare before our inner sight.

Across a void retreating sky he glimpsed
Through a last glimmer and drift of vanishing stars
The superconscient realms of motionless Peace
Where judgment ceases and the word is mute
And the Unconceived lies pathless and alone.

The unconceived and alone

This is the one Reality whose praise is sung in the Vedas. It is beyond all our mental and human conceptions, beyond all that we can think or imagine. It is beyond thought and speech. Different paths can lead us to its doorsteps but it is beyond all paths. All paths cease at the doorstep of Eternity in a luminous and self-existent Peace. The seer and yogi Aswapati stands now on the borders of this realm, as one stands on the highest peak of the manifested worlds, and is able to glimpse the Superconscient beyond where Space sinks and Time stands still.

There came not form or any mounting voice;
There only were Silence and the Absolute.

Silence and the Absolute

This is a state of absolute ‘Nothingness’. The world of names and forms constructed by the mind vanish in this all-pervading Silence.

Out of that stillness mind new-born arose
And woke to truths once inexpressible,
And forms appeared, dumbly significant,
A seeing thought, a self-revealing voice.

A mind new born arose

The Light of a vast integral Truth begins to dawn upon his mind, waking it to truths that cannot be tied into fixed formulas. All begins to assume a new significance when seen in this Light dawning from above.

He knew the source from which his spirit came:
Movement was married to the immobile Vast;
He plunged his roots into the Infinite,
He based his life upon eternity.

The vast union of Self and Nature

Attuned to the eternal source from which all emerged and to which all returns, Aswapati has discovered the stable basis of all change, the Infinite behind all finite forms and names. Nature and soul, world and God, no more appear as irreconcilable opposites, but as poles of a single Reality infinite and eternal.

Closing remarks

No more tied to the surfaces of life, aware of the one Self that hides behind all names and forms, we discover the state of peace and joy that comes from this vast inner freedom. A new and vast knowledge begins to pour upon us from above, revealing to all things a new light.

The Course of Progress in Yoga: The Rise and the Fall, pp. 34-35

Opening remarks

The journey and process of yoga is not a straight line, but a wave-form with rise and fall and rise again. This wave-form movement is inevitable due to the complexity of our nature and the taking up of different parts and engaging them in the yoga. It is this which is being described now.

Only awhile at first these heavenlier states,
These large wide-poised upliftings could endure.

Only awhile at first these heavenlier states

The flight of the soul into vaster and luminous domains is not fully supported by our nature that is still bound to its lower movements. It resists the upward ascent and pull of the soul.

The high and luminous tension breaks too soon,
The body’s stone stillness and the life’s hushed trance,
The breathless might and calm of silent mind;
Or slowly they fail as sets a golden day.

The high and luminous tension breaks too soon

It is only some parts of the higher mind that are able to follow the movement of the soul to some extent. The rest of our nature is unable to keep pace and pulls the soul back to its earthly base. Or else the beautiful experience gently fades, receding into the background depths, while the surface nature struggles with ignorance.

The restless nether members tire of peace;
A nostalgia of old little works and joys,
A need to call back small familiar selves,
To tread the accustomed and inferior way,
The need to rest in a natural pose of fall,
As a child who learns to walk can walk not long,
Replace the titan will for ever to climb,
On the heart’s altar dim the sacred fire.

The restless nether members tire of peace

Our inferior nature, long accustomed to agitation and restlessness, is unable to rightly receive the higher states. It soon sinks back into tamas and is unable to respond to the call of the Spirit. The memory and conditioning of past habits draw it back to the old self. The fire of aspiration gets covered by old passions or sinks into inertia.

An old pull of subconscious cords renews;
It draws the unwilling spirit from the heights,
Or a dull gravitation drags us down
To the blind driven inertia of our base.

A dull gravitation drags us down

Thus far it has been like this. The subconscient refuses to yield. As long as the soul is tied to the material body, it is pulled back from the luminous heights to the dark fields of nature.

This too the supreme Diplomat can use,
He makes our fall a means for greater rise.

This too the supreme Diplomat can use

The Divine is everywhere and He can use everything for his divine purposes. He does not simply watch us sink, but rather plunges into the abyss with us. Nay He is there even in the densest darkness to receive us and once again push us back to even greater heights.

For into ignorant Nature’s gusty field,
Into the half-ordered chaos of mortal life
The formless Power, the Self of eternal light
Follow in the shadow of the spirit’s descent;
The twin duality for ever one
Chooses its home mid the tumults of the sense.

The formless Power, the Self of eternal light

The play of Purusha and Prakriti, the divine Self and his eternal Power, takes place on every plane. Even in the darkest states He is there, to help, to heal, to succour, to uplift. His Power, the Divine Shakti, though veiled by the darkness, works even there.

He comes unseen into our darker parts
And, curtained by the darkness, does his work,
A subtle and all-knowing guest and guide,
Till they too feel the need and will to change.

He comes unseen into our darker parts

The divine Wisdom works even in the heart of densest darkness, putting a silent pressure on all things to change. It may seem to be momentarily overpowered by the darkness, but in fact it is not so. Rather it waits for the darkness to yield to the Light, for thus alone can anything true and enduring be built. The divine compulsion behind all things is our source of hope and a promise that the transformation is going to be.

All here must learn to obey a higher law,
Our body’s cells must hold the Immortal’s flame.

All here must learn to obey a higher law

Nothing is to be left untouched by the Light and Power that engages with our nature in this yoga. It is a thorough-going Power, so to say, and nothing short of a perfect perfection is the divine aim. Indeed, all, even the smallest of movements, must be purified and uplifted to their divine possibilities.

Else would the spirit reach alone its source
Leaving a half-saved world to its dubious fate.

Else would the spirit reach alone its source

Liberation of the soul from the meshes of Ignorance is but one step, the first mandatory movement. It must be followed by the liberation, or rather, the transformation of Nature, for in its deepest sense they are one. To merely liberate the soul is a work half-done.

Nature would ever labour unredeemed;
Our earth would ever spin unhelped in Space,
And this immense creation’s purpose fail
Till at last the frustrate universe sank undone.

Nature would ever labour unredeemed

This is the purpose of creation. It is divine in origin and each element of it must recover its divinity. This is the reason the soul is tied to nature, not merely to escape, but to pull nature out of its fallen state. If this were not so, then indeed creation would be an absurdity, a miserable failure or a meaningless accident. For Sri Aurobindo, creation is a divine event, and its purpose is to fulfil itself in God through a progressive awakening to the Divine and the consequent divinisation of nature itself.

Closing remarks

This is the general course of the process of Integral Yoga. The soul ascends to a higher level and then returns with the light and power gained to lift up the nature as well.

Even the Great Must Rise and Fall, pp. 35-36

Opening remarks

The process is the same for all. Even the great and the strong must pass through the dark field of Nature. In fact, the greater the being, the greater is the burden it must bear. And yet there is a difference. Aswapati is the conscious representative of the Divine in humanity. He is the Avatara and hence he does not lose his greater consciousness when he returns to working on the dark and turbulent fields of nature.

Even his godlike strength to rise must fall:
His greater consciousness withdrew behind;
Dim and eclipsed, his human outside strove
To feel again the old sublimities,
Bring the high saving touch, the ethereal flame,
Call back to its dire need the divine Force.

Even his godlike strength to rise must fall

Aswapati is the very embodiment of tapasya. Yet it is not easy to keep this high poise as long as one is living in a mortal body. An untransformed body will not allow a free play of the divine Force all the time. It is bound to draw the soaring soul back to the grooves of bodily functions and old habits. This too serves a purpose. Here too the fire of yoga must be lit, even in these dark fields.

Always the power poured back like sudden rain,
Or slowly in his breast a presence grew;
It clambered back to some remembered height
Or soared above the peak from which it fell.

Always the power poured back like sudden rain

When the darkness is illuminated and the burden lightened, the soul soars yet higher. Thus, each backward pull only prepares for a greater ascension.

Each time he rose there was a larger poise,
A dwelling on a higher spirit plane;
The Light remained in him a longer space.

Each time he rose there was a larger poise

Each rise and fall is actually a clearing below: an increasing purification of the nature below that helps our further ascent.

In this oscillation between earth and heaven,
In this ineffable communion’s climb
There grew in him as grows a waxing moon
The glory of the integer of his soul.

The glory of the integer of his soul

This is the mystic marriage between earth and heaven envisaged by the Vedic seers, a progressive union and fulfilment of matter with the Spirit. It is this repeated touch and influence and a growing contact of the material base — represented by our physical body — and the spiritual planes above that will lead to the fullness of the soul and the possibility of a divine life upon earth.

A union of the Real with the unique,
A gaze of the Alone from every face,
The presence of the Eternal in the hours
Widening the mortal mind’s half-look on things,
Bridging the gap between man’s force and Fate
Made whole the fragment-being we are here.

Made whole the fragment-being we are here

Our present existence is a fragmented one. If we turn towards earth, we tend to lose sight of the Spirit, and if we turn towards the spiritual heights, we may lose our hold upon the earth. But yoga, in its fullest sense, means a union of these very seeming opposites and, through it, the divine conquest of earthly life. It means not only the union of our uniquely individual soul with the one and only Supreme Reality, the Supersoul, so to say, but also the bringing down and a conscious play of the Divine in our everyday mundane existence. Thus, we grow into wholeness and integration that comes by a conscious and constant union of our entire being with the Divine.

Closing remarks

The seer-king Aswapati leads us and shows the way out of our present limited and ignorant existence by transforming it into a conscious play of the Eternal and the Infinite.

A Settlement in the Immutable, pp. 36-37

Opening remarks

What is now described is the settling of repeated contacts and experiences into a realisation, when the experiences arrive at their fullness and get firmly established.

At last was won a firm spiritual poise,
A constant lodging in the Eternal’s realm,
A safety in the Silence and the Ray,
A settlement in the Immutable.

A firm spiritual poise

After a while the state of Peace and Knowledge one has acquired through effort and Grace abides permanently and it is no more possible to fall. The sadhaka becomes a siddha as the state of Peace is firmly established in him. He has found the safe ground of consciousness. He now dwells in the luminous silence of the Eternal.

His heights of being lived in the still Self;
His mind could rest on a supernal ground
And look down on the magic and the play
Where the God-child lies on the lap of Night and Dawn
And the Everlasting puts on Time’s disguise.

His heights of being lived in the still Self

With this higher and deeper shift there comes a true detachment that watches God’s play in the world. Then the play of dualities no more deludes us and both night and day, the seeming good and the apparent bad, both suckle the divine child.

To the still heights and to the troubled depths
His equal spirit gave its vast assent:
A poised serenity of tranquil strength,
A wide unshaken look on Time’s unrest
Faced all experience with unaltered peace.

A wide unshaken look on Time’s unrest

One result of this state is a wide equanimity that looks upon the world and its mystery with calm and tranquil eyes and meets the world-contacts that shake us with a luminous strength.

Indifferent to the sorrow and delight,
Untempted by the marvel and the call,
Immobile it beheld the flux of things,
Calm and apart supported all that is:
His spirit’s stillness helped the toiling world.

His spirit’s stillness helped the toiling world

This vast equanimity that comes from abiding in the Divine, this peace and stillness is a tremendous power. Such a person by the mere fact of his presence draws the forces of Light and Peace in his environment, giving to all the needed succour and strength to face life.

Inspired by silence and the closed eyes’ sight
His force could work with a new luminous art
On the crude material from which all is made
And the refusal of Inertia’s mass
And the grey front of the world’s Ignorance
And nescient Matter and the huge error of life.

His force could work with a new luminous art

The yogin works much more powerfully even as he sits still. He sees with clarity in a new-born Light the play of world-forces, pours the Light and Powers of a higher consciousness onto our troubled and error-prone material existence. He awakens earth and its creatures to a higher consciousness and a greater aspiration. Of all forms of help which can be rendered to man, this is the greatest.

As a sculptor chisels a deity out of stone
He slowly chipped off the dark envelope,
Line of defence of Nature’s ignorance,
The illusion and mystery of the Inconscient
In whose black pall the Eternal wraps his head
That he may act unknown in cosmic Time.

He slowly chipped off the dark envelope

This is a beautiful description of the transforming action of the higher consciousness on our nature that has hardened into habits under the influence of the Inconscient. The illusions of the night are torn away and in their place grow luminous letters that were hiding behind the mask of darkness. The Divine hidden behind the ambiguous play of lower nature now steps to the front. Thus, the yogin grows into a figure of God in a material physical form.

A splendour of self-creation from the peaks,
A transfiguration in the mystic depths,
A happier cosmic working could begin
And fashion the world-shape in him anew,
God found in Nature, Nature fulfilled in God.

God found in nature, nature fulfilled in God

The transformation spreads from within outwards and from above downwards. The changes at first start in the deeper and higher layers that are in contact with the soul and the higher consciousness. Slowly, they spread to the outermost fields of nature, thereby invading it with the God-touch and fulfilling it with God-consciousness.

Closing remarks

The discovery of the Divine within is indeed the pivotal point of sadhana, the first thing needed. But instead of making this discovery a means for escape from worldly life, the yogin on the path of Integral Yoga turns this into a greater and diviner living.

Workings of the Divine Shakti on the Fields of Human Nature, pp. 37-38

Opening remarks

It is the action of Divine Shakti that grants us freedom from Ignorance. But once the soul has attained its fundamental freedom from Ignorance, a new working starts on nature itself. The yoga begins to part from the traditional yoga where mukti, or liberation of the soul, is deemed sufficient. Or perhaps, we may say that it begins to include in its scope the yoga of the Vedic seers who were beginning to experience some of these changes as they went further in their search for Truth and Immortality.

Already in him was seen that task of Power:
Life made its home on the high tops of self;
His soul, mind, heart became a single sun;
Only life’s lower reaches remained dim.

A single sun

There is at first a glad uplifting of life, a shift to a new and higher level from which it begins to operate. The mind and the heart too are touched and uplifted by the workings of the New Consciousness. Our nature begins to share the glow and glory of the soul until all in us becomes organised and aligned with the Divine. Only life’s lower ranges continue to remain tied to their habitual movements.

But there too, in the uncertain shadow of life,
There was a labour and a fiery breath;
The ambiguous cowled celestial puissance worked
Watched by the inner Witness’s moveless peace.

The inner Witness’s moveless peace

Here too (in life’s lower reaches) the Light comes and starts its workings hidden under the cover of darkness. The witness soul in us begins to see a new working take place even in the nether parts. Yet, this intense working does not disturb its native peace that has now grown natural to it.

Even on the struggling Nature left below
Strong periods of illumination came:
Lightnings of glory after glory burned,
Experience was a tale of blaze and fire,
Air rippled round the argosies of the Gods,
Strange riches sailed to him from the Unseen;
Splendours of insight filled the blank of thought,
Knowledge spoke to the inconscient stillnesses,
Rivers poured down of bliss and luminous force,
Visits of beauty, storm-sweeps of delight
Rained from the all-powerful Mystery above.

Rain from the all-powerful Mystery above

The initial touches of the Divine are felt as a rain of Light, Peace and Bliss from above. There are periods of illuminations and experiences of bliss and force that come down to us as gifts of Grace. Our mind grows into revelatory sight; our heart is thrilled with the touch of a Love and Joy it has never known before.

Thence stooped the eagles of Omniscience.

The eagles of Omniscience

The eagles of omniscience are the messengers of Light; the powers of intuitive sight that begin to descend, awaken and enlighten us.

A dense veil was rent, a mighty whisper heard;
Repeated in the privacy of his soul,
A wisdom-cry from rapt transcendences
Sang on the mountains of an unseen world;
The voices that an inner listening hears
Conveyed to him their prophet utterances,
And flame-wrapped outbursts of the immortal Word
And flashes of an occult revealing Light
Approached him from the unreachable Secrecy.

A dense veil was rent

The hard lid of the intellect thins and vanishes as the mind grows still and the higher spiritual consciousness rains down its streams of peace and light from above. So too the veil behind the heart, that prevents us from listening to the soul, is torn under the pressure of the transforming force.

An inspired Knowledge sat enthroned within
Whose seconds illumined more than reason’s years:
An ictus of revealing lustre fell
As if a pointing accent upon Truth,
And like a sky-flare showing all the ground
A swift intuitive discernment shone.

Inspiration, revelation, intuition

These are the three characteristic modes of higher knowledge — inspiration, revelation and intuition. It is these that begin to operate in the sadhaka as a result of the proceeding transformation. Sri Aurobindo compares here the intuitive beam to a lightning from above that in one moment illumines the field over which it shines. In a moment is shown to us as in a flash what our reasoning mind tries to know by indirect means, groping in the darkness with much labour and struggle.

One glance could separate the true and false,
Or raise its rapid torch-fire in the dark
To check the claimants crowding through mind’s gates
Covered by the forged signatures of the gods,
Detect the magic bride in her disguise
Or scan the apparent face of thought and life.

One glance could separate the true and false

This intuitive light, once it becomes normal and natural in its working, is like a torch-light that illumines the field of Ignorance. With this light, it becomes easy to discern and detect the true from the false, the authentic soul-movement that can push us even through what may seem to the practical mind an error. At the same time, it cautions us against the dark intruders imitating as higher truths but leading us towards perdition and fall.

Closing remarks

Thus, we see here a beautiful description of the first stages of a psychic and spiritual transformation that take place in this yoga as a result of the workings of the divine Power.

The Divine Downpour, pp. 38-39

Opening remarks

Once the opening is created to the action of the Divine Shakti, there starts, in the fields of nature, the downpour of divine Peace, Light, Harmony, Beauty and Bliss.

Oft inspiration with her lightning feet,
A sudden messenger from the all-seeing tops,
Traversed the soundless corridors of his mind
Bringing her rhythmic sense of hidden things.

Rhythmic sense of hidden things

This is the birth of the mantra in the human consciousness. The flow of higher knowledge from above is facilitated when the mind is quiet. The labour of analytical reason scanning surface data is silenced and, in its place, there is born a new working of the mind that directly receives knowledge and turns it into sound symbols of rhythmic speech.

A music spoke transcending mortal speech.

A music spoke

The all-creative rhythmic Word is found and our speech begins to express it more and more. This speech is not just a string of words with a meaning, but also a creative power that builds the forms it beholds in the consciousness of those who hear it.

As if from a golden phial of the All-Bliss,
A joy of light, a joy of sudden sight,
A rapture of the thrilled undying Word
Poured into his heart as into an empty cup,
A repetition of God’s first delight
Creating in a young and virgin Time.

The undying Word

This is how the mantra is born in the depths of the heart now grown free of the clamour of desire, carrying with it the joy of sudden illumination. It carries within itself the burden of delight and the all-creative divine impulsion that moves the worlds from within.

In a brief moment caught, a little space,
All-Knowledge packed into great wordless thoughts
Lodged in the expectant stillness of his depths
A crystal of the ultimate Absolute,
A portion of the inexpressible Truth
Revealed by silence to the silent soul.

Revealed to the silent soul

Knowledge has its home in the luminous blissful silence of the eternal Truth. It descends from there, clothing itself in idea, thought and speech. In the human consciousness, it takes the form of a revelation, a soul-vision that carries its own conviction and certitude of Truth.

The intense creatrix in his stillness wrought;
Her power fallen speechless grew more intimate;
She looked upon the seen and the unforeseen,
Unguessed domains she made her native field.

The intense creatrix

The more we become inwardly quiet, the more does true knowledge dawn within us, bringing with it an intense and sublime creative power. Once awakened, its light illumines the hidden depths screened by appearances, lights up the future now concealed to our sight and reveals the fields of consciousness that lie beyond the reach of our mind and senses.

All-vision gathered into a single ray,
As when the eyes stare at an invisible point
Till through the intensity of one luminous spot
An apocalypse of a world of images
Enters into the kingdom of the seer.

Kingdom of the seer

Sri Aurobindo beautifully describes here the inner process that opens the doors to true knowledge. The first thing needed is an inner quietude, and the second is a power or ability for intense concentration. By concentrating on a particular point, we pass beyond and behind appearances and come in direct contact with the inner truths, which often are projected as images before the inner eye.

A great nude arm of splendour suddenly rose;
It rent the gauze opaque of Nescience:
Her lifted finger’s keen unthinkable tip
Bared with a stab of flame the closed Beyond.

The stab of flame

The dark veil of Ignorance is pierced and torn by the power of luminous concentration like an intense flame pierces and cleaves the darkness.

Closing remarks

Thus, we discover the divine vibration or rhythmic immortal Word that saves, and the seers become its recipients and upholders as well as instruments of its creative expression and manifestation.

Growth into Intuition, p. 39

Opening remarks

As the consciousness ascends beyond the limiting hedge of sense-mind, we begin to receive intuitive flashes from above. Slowly there is a progressive intuitivisation of our being. The light of intuition lights up not only what is of immediate concern to us, but also that which is hidden above in the Superconscient realms and that which hides below in the subconscient terrains.

An eye awake in voiceless heights of trance,
A mind plucking at the unimaginable,
Overleaping with a sole and perilous bound
The high black wall hiding superconscience,
She broke in with inspired speech for scythe
And plundered the Unknowable’s vast estate.

An eye awake in voiceless heights of trance

A new sight begins to develop in us, at first during moments when we are withdrawn into the inner fields of trance, and later it begins to operate even in the waking state. These flashes and glimpses take the form of inspired speech that climbs beyond the mind’s vision and shows us that which to the mind is unknowable.

A gleaner of infinitesimal grains of Truth,
A sheaf-binder of infinite experience,
She pierced the guarded mysteries of World-Force
And her magic methods wrapped in a thousand veils;
Or she gathered the lost secrets dropped by Time
In the dust and crannies of his mounting route
Mid old forsaken dreams of hastening Mind
And buried remnants of forgotten space.

She pierced the guarded mysteries of World-Force

The knowledge that the ray of intuition provides us is not merely some mystic knowledge, but also world-knowledge. The play of world forces that move events from behind the scenes becomes crystal clear. The past no more remains a guarded secret to be filled in with scant data and much guess and imagination. We become aware of history in a new way than our mind can know by a study of documents regarding surface events.

A traveller between summit and abyss,
She joined the distant ends, the viewless deeps,
Or streaked along the roads of Heaven and Hell
Pursuing all knowledge like a questing hound.

A questing hound

The Vedas indeed describe this power of intuition as a hound, the great goddess Sarama. She can know things from afar and can also penetrate into the hidden caves of the dasyus, the ‘robbers of the deep’, and unveil their workings to us.

A reporter and scribe of hidden wisdom talk,
Her shining minutes of celestial speech,
Passed through the masked office of the occult mind,
Transmitting gave to prophet and to seer
The inspired body of the mystic Truth.

A reporter and scribe of hidden wisdom talk

The power of intuition is burdened with wisdom that takes an appropriate body of words as it enters the inner mind and thence passes on to the external speech. It gives to speech the power to express the Truth that is beyond thought or word, thereby giving birth to the prophet and the seer.

A recorder of the inquiry of the gods,
Spokesman of the silent seeings of the Supreme,
She brought immortal words to mortal men.

She brought immortal words to mortal men

Privy to the truths that exist on higher planes, she brings knowledge of higher and deeper things kept as guarded secrets by the gods to our mortal and earth-bound humanity.

Above the reason’s brilliant slender curve,
Released like radiant air dimming a moon,
Broad spaces of a vision without line
Or limit swam into his spirit’s ken.

Above the reason’s brilliant slender curve

This knowledge that comes through intuition is infinite in its nature and scope. It can illumine any field, revealing hidden truths. Though its home is far beyond the realm of reason, it descends into the spiritual mind, granting a luminous touch to thought and speech.

Closing remarks

We see here a detailed description of the workings of intuition, its birth and path in the human consciousness and its action and role in the transformation of the mind.

Aswapati’s Ascension into the Wideness of the Truth-Light, pp. 39-41

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.

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:
Disclosed stood up in a gold moment’s blaze
White sun-steppes in the pathless Infinite.

A call to infinite discovery

Truth is limitless, and as we ascend towards its home there is greater and greater wideness, 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 us towards the heights. We are supported in this ascension by the domains and beings of absolute power that dwell in these realms of Light, Peace and Joy.

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 points that run through the closed heart of things

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
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 magician order of the cosmic Mind

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 gestures of her stupendous dance become signs, 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.

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.

The logic of infinite intelligence

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 can we see clearly the ways of the Divine. We normally 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.

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

The tree of cosmos has its roots above in the boundless Truth, while its branches spread below as creation. Ordinarily, however, we experience the emergence upwards from below. 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.

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 bodiless namelessness

This immense energy creates 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 immobile lips, the great surreal wings,
The visage masked by superconscient Sleep,
The eyes with their closed lids that see all things,
Appeared of the Architect who builds in trance.

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 as the Being who dwells in the blissful silence and the trance of the Infinite. It is his Knowledge and Power that emerges from him which goes forth into creation.

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.

The original desire

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.

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.

The golden Overmind’s shimmering edge

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 Aswapati, 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.

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.

The smile of love that sanctions the game of creation

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 the 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 described next.

The Gifts of Intuition, pp. 41-42

Opening remarks

As the seer awakens to the workings of intuition within him, he develops new ways of knowing and understanding life. A new relation begins to form between himself and the world, replacing the old, egocentric view and the laborious mental understanding that is subject to error and misjudgment.

The inspiring goddess entered a mortal’s breast,
Made there her study of divining thought
And sanctuary of prophetic speech
And sat upon the tripod seat of mind:
All was made wide above, all lit below.

The inspiring goddess

Sri Aurobindo here reveals to us that the powers of intuition and inspiration are not just faculties that open up within us, but standing behind them are powers or feminine energies that dwell on the heights of creation. As we open more and more to their workings, they enter into the heart. It is from the now sealed depths of the heart that this intuition arises, illumining the truth behind all things and lending to our human speech and mental understanding the prophetic vision and speech. As our consciousness expands, the horizons of our intuitive knowledge also expand. All is made wide above, all lit below, so to say.

In darkness’ core she dug out wells of light,
On the undiscovered depths imposed a form,
Lent a vibrant cry to the unuttered vasts,
And through great shoreless, voiceless, starless breadths
Bore earthward fragments of revealing thought
Hewn from the silence of the Ineffable.

Wells of light

Even in darkness a hidden wisdom works. It is this wisdom that is unsealed before our eyes with the working of intuition. Descending from the heights, it enters the mortal sphere of ignorance, granting to the human consciousness the joy of revelatory sight.

A Voice in the heart uttered the unspoken Name,
A dream of seeking Thought wandering through Space
Entered the invisible and forbidden house:
The treasure was found of a supernal Day.

A Voice in the heart and the seeing thought

The power of intuition awakens in us the Word that expresses That which is beyond thought and speech. She leads us to the doors of the Unmanifest, where the greater glories of the Spirit abide. We begin to receive the messages from the depths of our inmost heart; our thought illumined with clarity becomes a seeing thought.

In the deep subconscient glowed her jewel-lamp;
Lifted, it showed the riches of the Cave
Where, by the miser traffickers of sense
Unused, guarded beneath Night’s dragon paws,
In folds of velvet darkness draped they sleep
Whose priceless value could have saved the world.

The jewel lamps in the subconscient

A concealed intuition works even in our subconscient regions. The awakening of intuition reveals its occult workings in our subconscious depths. We discover how our senses have diverted the messages of Light and find the dormant and priceless energies that lie there waiting for our discovery. They are right now hoarded and distorted rather than turned to the divine Work and Purpose.

A darkness carrying morning in its breast
Looked for the eternal wide returning gleam,
Waiting the advent of a larger ray
And rescue of the lost herds of the Sun.

The lost herds of the sun

This is the Truth that lies asleep in the dark depths of the Inconscient. This Truth hiding in the darkness must be discovered for the fullness of life and yoga. As the rain of intuition increases and the Light goes deeper and deeper, the darkness is cleaved and opens itself to the transforming touch of the Light. The light of intuition reveals to us the divine Presence hidden in darkness. Then we see that darkness itself is a preparation for a New Dawn. This Dawn is the awaited birth of the New Consciousness that will save the ‘fallen angels’ and restore them to their original stature of the gods.

In a splendid extravagance of the waste of God
Dropped carelessly in creation’s spendthrift work,
Left in the chantiers of the bottomless world
And stolen by the robbers of the Deep,
The golden shekels of the Eternal lie,
Hoarded from touch and view and thought’s desire,
Locked in blind antres of the ignorant flood,
Lest men should find them and be even as Gods.

The golden shekels of the Eternal

There are powers and divinities and their energies that have strayed from their course and fallen under the sway and spell of the Inconscient. The light of intuition reaches there to rescue these powers now in the possession of the robbers of the deep, that is to say, the dark forces that now govern material existence. Once these tremendous forces worked upon Earth and moulded it under their mighty influence. Now these powers begin to yield their secrets to the awakening eye of intuition.

A vision lightened on the viewless heights,
A wisdom illumined from the voiceless depths:
A deeper interpretation greatened Truth,
A grand reversal of the Night and Day;
All the world’s values changed heightening life’s aim;
A wiser word, a larger thought came in
Than what the slow labour of human mind can bring,
A secret sense awoke that could perceive
A Presence and a Greatness everywhere.

A grand reversal

The awakening of intuition brings wisdom — the wisdom that can see the Truth hidden behind appearances. With this change a new understanding dawns upon the mind and the thought enlarges itself to reveal the total picture that was hitherto hidden. There is a reversal of consciousness, so to say, and with it the old values and measures of our mind undergo a transformative change. It is intuition that senses the divine Presence and its workings everywhere. It is a sense behind the senses that as it awakens shows us what our mortal senses in their ordinary operations miss.

The universe was not now this senseless whirl
Borne round inert on an immense machine;
It cast away its grandiose lifeless front,
A mechanism no more or work of Chance,
But a living movement of the body of God.

The body of God

A new meaning begins to emerge as we become conscious of the Divine working behind creation. When we behold the universe with the eye of intuition, it no more appears as a mechanical drifting of material forms driven by an inconscient energy, but the very outermost body of God moved by the breath of a secret consciousness.

Closing remarks

Thus, the mind and heart of man gets intuitivised and transformed into the mind and heart of the seer.

A New Vision and a First Change, pp. 42-44

Opening remarks

What is this reversal, this new vision acquired by the seer? How does he view the world? This is being described now.

A spirit hid in forces and in forms
Was the spectator of the mobile scene:
The beauty and the ceaseless miracle
Let in a glow of the Unmanifest:
The formless Everlasting moved in it
Seeking its own perfect form in souls and things.

The ceaseless miracle

As we awaken to the new Light and our being begins to grow in it, suddenly everything becomes alive. Inanimate objects become much more living, animated with a consciousness that is hidden in the forms, and watches over us as the eternal Witness. All grows beautiful and soulful and divine. Then all life becomes a ceaseless miracle of the Divine unfolding in creation.

Life kept no more a dull and meaningless shape.

The wonder called life

Then all becomes a wonder and joy, a constant discovery of the divine Presence behind life.

In the struggle and upheaval of the world
He saw the labour of a godhead’s birth.

The labour of a godhead’s birth

All creation labours to manifest the divine Reality hidden at its centre and core. But the work is incomplete, growing step by step through the various stages of evolution. Therefore, it gives us the sense of imperfection and assumes the aspect of struggle and pain.

A secret knowledge masked as Ignorance;
Fate covered with an unseen necessity
The game of chance of an omnipotent Will.

A secret knowledge masked as Ignorance

Sri Aurobindo reveals to us that behind the anomalies of life, there is a wisdom that uses everything to carry us forward on our evolutionary journey. Fate and chance are words we use in our ignorance. When knowledge comes, we see the tremendous workings of a conscious Force at play in creation. Fate and chance are words we use in our ignorance. When wisdom comes, we see it as the choice of the hidden Spirit in matter struggling to emerge under the circumstances of and on the basis of material existence.

A glory and a rapture and a charm,
The All-Blissful sat unknown within the heart;
Earth’s pains were the ransom of its prisoned delight.

Delight imprisoned in earth

Behind all things, even the most painful, there is the secret delight. All our suffering and pain is only a means to uncover this hidden bliss. If in the face of suffering, instead of being overwhelmed by it, we learn to dive deep into our heart, we shall discover there the wonderful Presence and even a momentary contact with it can dissolve all suffering and bring peace.

A glad communion tinged the passing hours;
The days were travellers on a destined road,
The nights companions of his musing spirit.

A glad communion

The more we become conscious of the Divine, the more we live in the Divine, the more our life becomes a wonderful journey, a pilgrimage of the soul. Such is the beautiful transmutation of life that takes place when we become conscious of the Divine hidden in our own depths and in the heart of creation as well.

A heavenly impetus quickened all his breast;
The trudge of Time changed to a splendid march;
The divine Dwarf towered to unconquered worlds,
Earth grew too narrow for his victory.

A splendid march

The divine Dwarf is the psychic being in man, an in-dweller in man’s house of clay. It now becomes a candidate to reign over the heavens of light and peace and bliss. He is no more limited by earthly joys and its dull terrestrial powers.

Once only registering the heavy tread
Of a blind Power on human littleness,
Life now became a sure approach to God,
Existence a divine experiment
And cosmos the soul’s opportunity.

Divine experiment

What appears to us now as blind fate and adverse destiny is then seen with the soul’s regard. In this new vision, life appears as a river or a stream ceaselessly flowing towards its divine origin, using everything, even the most adverse, for its Godward growth.

The world was a conception and a birth
Of Spirit in Matter into living forms,
And Nature bore the Immortal in her womb,
That she might climb through him to eternal life.

A conception and a birth

This is the true meaning and significance of our life. This is the real reason for the soul’s acceptance of bondage and death. Tied to nature, it shares in her struggles and suffering. But nature is enriched by the soul’s presence, which opens the doors to the divine touch. As the soul recovers its true stature, our nature too is uplifted and redeemed.

His being lay down in bright immobile peace
And bathed in wells of pure spiritual light;
It wandered in wide fields of wisdom-self
Lit by the rays of an everlasting sun.

Bright immobile peace

To find one’s soul and to live in and by it is to find and live in peace and light and wisdom and bliss.

Even his body’s subtle self within
Could raise the earthly parts towards higher things
And feel on it the breath of heavenlier air.

A breath of heavenlier air

Though the gross body is the last to feel the touch of the Divine, the bliss and peace extend right up to the subtle physical. Even the body begins to feel the touch Divine and is uplifted by the transforming Force.

Already it journeyed towards divinity:
Upbuoyed upon winged winds of rapid joy,
Upheld to a Light it could not always hold,
It left mind’s distance from the Truth supreme
And lost life’s incapacity for bliss.

Wings of joy and light

Then all becomes beautiful and blissful, even the body receives the touch of a higher light; it tastes the bliss that built the world. The trail of sorrow and suffering leaves our hearts and life becomes full of a glad communion and experiences a wide uplift upon wings of joy and light.

All now suppressed in us began to emerge.

All now suppressed began to emerge

The divinity held back within now began to grow and take charge of the fields of nature.

Closing remarks

The touch of the Divine, the discovery of the Divine within us begins to remould our perception and understanding; our life, senses and even our physical body share the Glory and Bliss.

The Soul’s Release from Ignorance, pp. 44-45

Opening remarks

Having given us a rather detailed description of the experiences that one has along the road to freedom from Ignorance, Sri Aurobindo now summarises it for us. The result of this freedom is that Aswapati, the king, is now a changed person. He has undergone a large and luminous change in his consciousness.

Thus came his soul’s release from Ignorance,
His mind and body’s first spiritual change.

First spiritual change

This is the first necessity, freedom from Ignorance, and it is accompanied by a fundamental change of consciousness. This change is not only a subjective change, but also translates itself into the mind and body. Much more will come, but this is the base that prepares for the others to come.

A wide God-knowledge poured down from above,
A new world-knowledge broadened from within:
His daily thoughts looked up to the True and One,
His commonest doings welled from an inner Light.

The True and One

There is a growth into Wideness, Knowledge, Light and Truth. This knowledge includes in its scope not just the Self but also the world, not just God but also the creation. There is a dwelling in the True and the One and all actions, however common they may seem, proceed on the basis of Truth and Oneness.

Awakened to the lines that Nature hides,
Attuned to her movements that exceed our ken,
He grew one with a covert universe.

Lines that nature hides

With this growth comes a knowledge of the hidden forces that work behind the visible front of nature. The seer-king Aswapati grows one with this occult universe.

His grasp surprised her mightiest energies’ springs;
He spoke with the unknown Guardians of the worlds,
Forms he descried our mortal eyes see not.

Unknown Guardians of the worlds

Seer-king Aswapati is now the king of nature. He communes with the guardians of the world and the beings who stand behind the movements of nature. His vision has opened up to subtle realities and beings who are masters and guardians of the world-powers.

His wide eyes bodied viewless entities,
He saw the cosmic forces at their work
And felt the occult impulse behind man’s will.

Viewless entities and cosmic forces

We believe that nature is mechanical and unconscious, yet all her processes are moved by conscious or half-conscious beings and their energies that work from behind. Even the so-called human will is pushed from behind by these hidden forces and subtle beings. Aswapati now begins to become aware of all this.

Time’s secrets were to him an oft-read book;
The records of the future and the past
Outlined their excerpts on the etheric page.

Time’s secrets

A subtle sight develops with the power of yoga and the past and future begin to appear as luminous letters written on the subtle substance that constitutes inner Space. This is how many of the Veda mantras were born. The workings of these subtle powers have now become common in Aswapati.

One and harmonious by the Maker’s skill,
The human in him paced with the divine;
His acts betrayed not the interior flame.

The interior flame

Thus, the seer-king Aswapati grows towards divinity in harmony with the divine Wisdom and Will that has gone forth into creation. His actions, his life, become a perfect rhythm impelled by the Eternal.

This forged the greatness of his front to earth.

Forged the greatness

Aswapati’s earth-nature too undergoes a change. His outer personality and surface movements also share something of the inner transformation that has taken place.

A genius heightened in his body’s cells
That knew the meaning of his fate-hedged works
Akin to the march of unaccomplished Powers
Beyond life’s arc in spirit’s immensities.

A genius heightened

Even the body cells begin to change under the pressure and impact of the higher regions of consciousness. The powers that dwell on the peaks of nature become for Aswapati’s liberated consciousness common in their workings.

Apart he lived in his mind’s solitude,
A demigod shaping the lives of men:
One soul’s ambition lifted up the race;
A Power worked, but none knew whence it came.

A demigod

The consciousness and deeds of Aswapati become one with the great cosmic powers, the gods. The radiance and fragrance of his inner being begins to spread far and wide, secretly influencing the earthly life and human race. Yet none could be fully aware of the source from which it came. Born a human, he grows into a godly being.

The universal strengths were linked with his;
Filling earth’s smallness with their boundless breadths
He drew the energies that transmute an age.

Energies that transmute an age

The mere presence of such a being upon earth is a great help. Even if he outwardly does nothing, he uplifts earth-nature by becoming a bridge that brings the earth and humanity in contact with the higher Powers.

Immeasurable by the common look,
He made great dreams a mould for coming things
And cast his deeds like bronze to front the years.

Immeasurable

The glory and greatness manifested in such individuals become a possibility for the earth. Whatever ideas and will he has implanted in the human mind and heart are bound to blossom in future Time. What he thought and felt, what he dreamed, become realities of the future. What he did becomes the mould for all that is yet to come.

His walk through Time outstripped the human stride.

Walk through Time

Thus, Aswapati passes beyond humanity and grows into the stature of a God.

Lonely his days and splendid like the sun’s.

Splendid like the sun

Like the sun that illumines and fosters all life upon earth yet shines alone in the sky, so too Aswapati has ascended to the high stature of a demi-god, a wonderful influence nourishing and nurturing earth’s heavenward climb. He has ascended too high beyond humanity to have any peer or comrade in his tremendous effort.

Closing Remarks for the Canto

This last passage summarises the kind of freedom that the seer and yogi Aswapati has arrived at in the course of his inner journey. He has become aware of higher states of consciousness; he has become aware of higher dimensions and levels of consciousness; he has become aware of the occult worlds, their beings and energies and forces that move us from behind; most of all, he has become aware of the divine Presence that is hidden behind all things, within and without, in every element of creation. This is a comprehensive and integral experience and realisation that none has had so far, though there have been hints and glimpses, often one-sided, here and there, but we have for the first time a summary of all these strands of spiritual experiences in one individual, the seer-king Aswapati. He is alone in this achievement and yet he refuses to stop here or merge into the Silence of Brahman. He seeks to go further beyond in search of a radical remedy for humanity at large.