The Ascetic’s Home, pp. 381-382

Opening Remarks
These remote inaccessible spots upon earth are often used by ascetics so as to escape the corrupting influence of human life.

Some deeper plunged
Some deeper plunged; from life’s external clasp
Beckoned into a fiery privacy
In the soul’s unprofaned star-white recess
They sojourned with an everliving Bliss;
A Voice profound in the ecstasy and the hush
They heard, beheld an all-revealing Light.

Some spiritual seekers ant to escape from the bounds of earthly life. They loosen the grip of the senses and plunge within into the inmost depths where a subtle fire is burning, the fire of their soul and its flaming aspiration. They withdraw from the outer world into God’s night within that is illumined by points of His guiding Light. These seekers lived in a state of ecstasy and bliss in the presence of the Divine Light and heard the Divine rhythms behind creation.

One self in all
All time-made difference they overcame;
The world was fibred with their own heart-strings;
Close drawn to the heart that beats in every breast,
They reached the one self in all through boundless love.

These tapaswins lived in a oneness in the net of love that links the world. They were one with the universal Divine and His Love that animates all creation. Thus they reached to the one self in all through boundless love.

Attuned to Silence
Attuned to Silence and to the world-rhyme,
They loosened the knot of the imprisoning mind;
Achieved was the wide untroubled witness gaze,
Unsealed was Nature’s great spiritual eye;
To the height of heights rose now their daily climb:
Truth leaned to them from her supernal realm;
Above them blazed eternity’s mystic suns.

These mystics were attuned to the Silence and the rhythms behind creation rather than to the noises of the world that drowns man. They had stepped out of the boundaries of the human mind and achieved a deep and wide equanimity. The spiritual eye had opened in them and their life was a constant ascension to the higher truths. Truth came towards them from Its Home as rays of Intuition while above them the Supramental sun blazed in its all-seeing Light.

Austere ascetics
Nameless the austere ascetics without home
Abandoning speech and motion and desire
Aloof from creatures sat absorbed, alone,
Immaculate in tranquil heights of self
On concentration’s luminous voiceless peaks,
World-naked hermits with their matted hair
Immobile as the passionless great hills
Around them grouped like thoughts of some vast mood
Awaiting the Infinite’s behest to end.

The austere ascetics abandoning name and speech and action and desire sat alone absorbed in tranquil heights of self and its purity. Fixed in concentration that ended towards luminous voiceless peaks of self. They had cast the world away from them. These naked hermits with matted hairs immobile as the hills dwelling in the vastness waited for the Infinite’s Will to take them out of creation and end their journey of life and death and rebirth.

Closing Remarks
This is one line of advance of consciousness towards the Infinite as we find in the ascetics who have completely withdrawn from the world.