The Dumb Resistance, pp. 317-318

Opening Remarks
Since creation emerges from the Inconscience where it had plunged, there is the pull that the Inconscience exerts on the ascending soul. It pulls down the soul from its heights.

Stark resistance
In the texture of our bound humanity
He felt the stark resistance huge and dumb
Of our inconscient and unseeing base,
The stubborn mute rejection in life’s depths,
The ignorant No in the origin of things.

Aswapati now experiences the stark resistance embedded in human nature due to the Inconscient’s downward gravitational pull. He experiences the rejection of higher possibilities and higher states in life’s depths. He experiences the refusal of the Night that prevents the soul from advancing beyond its permitted fence of ignorance.

Veiled collaboration with the Night
A veiled collaboration with the Night
Even in himself survived and hid from his view:
Still something in his earthly being kept
Its kinship with the Inconscient whence it came.

There is within us a veiled collaboration with the powers of darkness and Night that is difficult to detect. Even in a yogi of the stature of Aswapati, there is hidden something of an affinity of earth nature with the Inconscient.

Shadowy unity
A shadowy unity with a vanished past
Treasured in an old-world frame was lurking there,
Secret, unnoted by the illumined mind,
And in subconscious whispers and in dream
Still murmured at the mind’s and spirit’s choice.

Even when the conscious mind is freed from the strong hold of past tendencies, the subconscious parts continue to harbour them as a treasure. It remains still under the influence of the shadow from the past and shows up in dreams and suggestions that enter the mind and try to divert and deflect the soul and the higher mind from the upward ascension. These subterfuges lurk unnoticed even by the illumined mind of man.

Sweet weaknesses
Its treacherous elements spread like slippery grains
Hoping the incoming Truth might stumble and fall,
And old ideal voices wandering moaned
And pleaded for a heavenly leniency
To the gracious imperfections of our earth
And the sweet weaknesses of our mortal state.

These shadowy elements are like slippery grains treacherously laid on the road for the incoming Truth to stumble and fall. The voices from the past, the old ideals seek admittance and entry. The old ways of life seek to persist pleading for heaven’s leniency against the sweet weaknesses and gracious imperfections of our earthly state. There are hidden aspects of our vast complex nature that not only do not support the manifestation of Truth but in fact actively resist it. They remain hidden under the cover of unconsciousness or the play of falsehood that gives specious justifications calling it natural. But these very elements of nature come in the way when we begin to aspire and climb beyond the limits of our present nature to the supernatural possibilities latent within us.

Discover and exile
This now he willed to discover and exile,
The element in him betraying God.

It is these shadowy elements hidden from the waking mind that Aswapati now turned to discover and exile. It is these that betray our divine elements that aspire for the upward climb and delay, distort and divert the voices of Truth.

Closing Remarks
The tackling of these subconscious elements is important at some stage in the yoga. Without this complete offering, the last step remains shaky and incomplete.