The Descent into Night, pp. 204-205

Opening Remarks
Aswapati begins his descent into the Night. At first he enters into a realm built by the waste and destruction of past forms that have served their utility and gone into oblivion. They survive only in their outer form even though the spirit has passed away.

Disillusion and decadence
A breath of disillusion and decadence
Corrupting watched for Life’s maturity
And made to rot the full grain of the soul:
Progress became a purveyor of Death.

Every field of human progress tends to reach a limit after which it enters into decadence like an overripe fruit. There is a season when it bears fruit. When things persist beyond their valid season they begin to decay and bring disillusion among people. Corruption sets in and the rot swells in the name of progress.

Law of a slain Light
A world that clung to the law of a slain Light
Cherished the putrid corpses of dead truths,
Hailed twisted forms as things free, new and true,
Beauty from ugliness and evil drank
Feeling themselves guests at a banquet of the gods
And tasted corruption like a high-spiced food.

His first few steps took him into places where truth had outlived its term and only a dead corpse was left as a decaying sheath. Yet the world cherished it and even revered it as something new and true. True beauty was nowhere to be found. It was replaced by something artificial concealing behind its beautiful mask all that is ugly and evil. The beings of that realm were deep into corruption yet believed themselves to be even as the gods.

Fear’s crooked eyes
A darkness settled on the heavy air;
It hunted the bright smile from Nature’s lips
And slew the native confidence in her heart
And put fear’s crooked look into her eyes.

Slowly darkness and fear began to settle in that place. Crookedness began to play into the eyes robbing the smile and confidence of nature.

An instrument of Hell
The lust that warps the spirit’s natural good
Replaced by a manufactured virtue and vice
The frank spontaneous impulse of the soul:
Afflicting Nature with the dual’s lie,
Their twin values whetted a forbidden zest,
Made evil a relief from spurious good,
The ego battened on righteousness and sin
And each became an instrument of Hell.

The force of lust warped the natural impulsion of the soul. Virtue and vice were merely a make-believe things. An arbitrary division between good and bad only increased a secret attraction towards all that was forbidden. The good was an equally artificial force without any element of truth within it. Thus the ego-self feeds on righteousness and sin and each feeds the other thereby gravitating towards the dark abyss. Righteousness tends to condemn and convict others thinking oneself as a superior being thereby opening the doors of hell for itself.

Wastelands of life
In rejected heaps by a monotonous road
The old simple delights were left to lie
On the wasteland of life’s descent to Night.

The road to Hell became slowly a dull monotonous path leading through wastelands where heaps of the once useful past lay in abundance.

Closing Remarks
Thus Aswapati begins his descent layer by layer through the pathways of the Night towards the very core of the Abyss.