The First Attempt to Live, p. 140

Opening Remarks
The emergence of life in matter was the first momentous step that sealed earth’s fate so to say. Unlike matter, life is a self-replicating open system and hence evolution is inevitable. And yet the first few steps of life seems to our surface view so meaningless. It is like a trail of vanishing flickering glows amidst the reign of utter darkness.

Early brief attempt
Here was its early brief attempt to be,
Its rapid end of momentary delight
Whose stamp of failure haunts all ignorant life.

The first attempt for life to establish itself in matter would look almost like a failure. There is hardly anything in it except a secret will-to-live that soon collapses seized by Death. Though evolution has carried us much farther, the state of consciousness that life experienced, the struggle to emerge and establish itself, still lurks in some subterranean region of our being and haunts our life.

Habit on the cells
Inflicting still its habit on the cells
The phantom of a dark and evil start
Ghostlike pursues all that we dream and do.

Since life has evolved under great resistance and struggle, the cells continue to carry its imprint as memory. They spontaneously believe that life and all growth must necessarily be painful and distrust Grace and the possibility of a swift and marvellous efflorescence. Their first response to evolutionary challenges is that it is not possible.

Roots of will
Although on earth are firm established lives,
A working of habit or a sense of law,
A steady repetition in the flux,
Yet are its roots of will ever the same;
These passions are the stuff of which we are made.

On the surfaces all appears a fixed law and process, a habitual movement; a reflex of sensation and action in the cells, other is the mystery that lurks in its roots. The first adventure of life upon earth, its first daring step, the danger and the charm, the passion and the struggle to emerge, the will-to-live and be in a world of denial and death continues to flow as sap in all living forms from the very roots of life. It still clamours for release; it still senses the danger and tends to slip into sleep.

The cry of life
This was the first cry of the awaking world.

The first steps of life and its immense struggle in a dark and dangerous world still exists within our cells.

Clings and clamps
It clings around us still and clamps the god.

It is this that tends to draw us back towards the primal state of living. It pulls our consciousness back from some godlike ascent towards the past stages of evolution.

The fount of life
Even when reason is born and soul takes form,
In beast and reptile and in thinking man
It lasts and is the fount of all their life.

This primitive early stage of life expressed in early forms continues to linger in the animal, bird and beast and man, clouding our reason and resisting our soul’s advance.

This too was needed
This too was needed that breath and living might be.

Yet this too has its usefulness and serves a purpose in the grand scheme of things.

Rescue for the prison
The spirit in a finite ignorant world
Must rescue so its prisoned consciousness
Forced out in little jets at quivering points
From the Inconscient’s sealed infinitude.

This lingering shadow of the past stages of evolution, on the one hand make evolution a slow process, yet on the other hand it ensures that nothing is left out and all possibilities that are involved in a seed state slowly emerge out of the Inconscient that holds them within dark infinity.

Clutch of nether force
Then slowly it gathers mass, looks up at Light.
This Nature lives tied to her origin,
A clutch of nether force is on her still;
Out of unconscious depths her instincts leap;
A neighbour is her life to insentient Nought.

The process is slow because the Inconscient continues to hold the deeper possibilities of life back into its dark folds of Night. It prevents and resists our advance at each step of the long and winding journey. In the process there is no abrupt rupture between one form and another, no sudden departures but a slow but completer transition.

The law of an ignorant world
Under this law an ignorant world was made.

Thus evolution and progress, growth and development remain a perpetual struggle against some secret resistance or an opposing will. This struggle and battle between forces of evolution and the forces of disintegration is the very law of this ignorant world.

Closing Remarks
Thus we are revealed the difficulty and the danger and yet the inevitability of evolution and the Wisdom that uses all, even our resistance, for a greater perfection.