The World as a Shadow, p. 286

Opening Remarks
The world appears as a cinematic shadow without any substance. But how it came into being and what is its purpose remains concealed.

Convicting beam
Assailed by the edge of the convicting beam
The builder Reason lost her confidence
In the successful sleight and turn of thought
That makes the soul the prisoner of a phrase.

Our reason builds theories and the soul gets trapped as a prisoner into its web of words. Reason collapsed here with the collapse of the world and all that it regarded as real and tangible.

Brilliant guess
Its highest wisdom was a brilliant guess,
Its mighty structured science of the worlds
A passing light on being’s surfaces.

What reason took to be the ultimate truth was but a passing gleam falling upon the surfaces of life. Our very science on which we rely for revealing truth turned out to be a science of appearances that cannot sound the depths of creation nor behold the Wisdom working there.

Schema drawn by sense
There was nothing there but a schema drawn by sense,
A substitute for eternal mysteries,
A scrawl figure of reality, a plan
And elevation by the architect Word
Imposed upon the semblances of Time.

Reason trusts the senses for its first observation of reality. But senses do not reveal truth, they rather conceal it by spinning a web of sensations which we mistake for reality. What the senses do is to draw a schema, a figure, a pattern on which the word builds its theories about reality. But this building is not Reality but only a temporary and tentative plan on a drawing paper.

Cosmic Nothingness
Existence’ self was shadowed by a doubt;
Almost it seemed a lotus-leaf afloat
On a nude pool of cosmic Nothingness.

In that state even existence seems a doubtful shadow as if a lotus leaf were floating upon a cosmic Void.

The spectator and creator Mind
This great spectator and creator Mind
Was only some half-seeing’s delegate,
A veil that hung between the soul and Light,
An idol, not the living body of God.

The Mind lost its supremacy. Its creations and its seeing seemed merely some delegate power that came from elsewhere. What was hid from it was much more precious and real than what was seen by it. It could not see the soul and the Light except through a veil. It saw an idol of God and not His living Reality.

A void recoil
Even the still spirit that looks upon its works
Was some pale front of the Unknowable;
A shadow seemed the wide and witness Self,
Its liberation and immobile calm
A void recoil of being from Time-made things,
Not the self-vision of Eternity.

In that state even the witness spirit seemed only some pale front of what was beyond and Unknowable. The sense of all being a shadow, including the witness Self gave a sense of peace and calm of immobility and detachment from all things including one’s own self. Yet this was more of a recoil from time born things and not the true vision and seeing of Eternity.

Closing Remarks
This is what most yogis prize as nirvana. Yet it is more a reflection in the mind of a still higher state.