The Witness Self and Mastery over Nature pp 32-34

Opening Remarks
As we shift beyond the earthly Mind, as the consciousness grows immobile and still, our soul is able to separate itself from the flow of Nature and become a witness to the play. Next it becomes the one who sanctions the forces that would move the instruments of nature, that is to say, our mind and body and life. Finally it becomes the master of Nature. That which was once Nature’s slave, becomes her master. In yoga these stages are called, Sakshi, Anumanta and Isa. This does not automatically lead to transformation but makes it easier for the Higher Consciousness to work out the intended divine change.

End of life’s debate
A vast unanimity ended life’s debate.

When the mind and vital parts become quiet and stilled by the pressure of the emergent Higher Consciousness, then we are ready to glimpse the Divine Self. The contrary forces pulling us in different directions lose their hold upon us as we grow from a state of division into a state of Unity and Oneness.

The Truth that lives in its own Light
The war of thoughts that fathers the universe,
The clash of forces struggling to prevail
In the tremendous shock that lights a star
As in the building of a grain of dust,
The grooves that turn their dumb ellipse in space    (p. 33 begins)
Ploughed by the seeking of the world’s desire,
The long regurgitations of Time’s flood,
The torment edging the dire force of lust
That wakes kinetic in earth’s dullard slime
And carves a personality out of mud,
The sorrow by which Nature’s hunger is fed,
The oestrus which creates with fire of pain,
The fate that punishes virtue with defeat,
The tragedy that destroys long happiness,
The weeping of Love, the quarrel of the Gods,
Ceased in a truth which lives in its own light.

An exceedingly beautiful passage describing how all  contradictions, confusions cease in the Divine. All is seen anew in that Truth-Light, all is experienced afresh leaving no room for the play of Ignorance that creates so much conflict and turmoil in life. As long as we live in the dividing Mind, we are bound to take sides and see only aspects and portions of One Reality rather than the Reality Itself. The One Truth seems fragmented in the medium of our Mind, and hence there appears a clash of one ‘truth’ against another. But when we ascend beyond the Mind and live in the rays of an Integral Truth, then we can see simultaneously these differences as different and complimentary aspects of the One.

Freedom of the soul
His soul stood free, a witness and a king.

When mind is stilled and life released from its restless agitation created by desire, when conflicts cease in a vast inner harmony created by obeying the law of Truth, then is our soul freed and reigns over nature as its master and lord. This is the first fundamental freedom needed.

Indivisible Time
Absorbed no more in the moment-ridden flux
Where mind incessantly drifts as on a raft
Hurried from phenomenon to phenomenon,
He abode at rest in indivisible Time.

Thus freed from the flow and flux of ever-changing phenomena, our soul is able to see the invisible links that join passing scenes and circumstances of present life. With the common underlying thread found, all is seen as a single chain and not separate disparate objects and incidents.

The singularity of Time
As if a story long written but acted now,
In his present he held his future and his past,
Felt in the seconds the uncounted years
And saw the hours like dots upon a page.

Just as we cut Space into manageable bits even though all Space is essentially a single extension, so too we cut Time into bits of past, present and future though all is a single movement. The vast impersonal consciousness sees not only boundlessness of Space but also the immensity of Time in a single sweep. It beholds the past and the future in the present moment. It is as if we came out of a river in whose currents we were caught, and are now able to see the entire river from a distant vantage point.

Meaning of the cosmic scene
An aspect of the unknown Reality
Altered the meaning of the cosmic scene.

All the scenes of our life to which we are glued and which seem to us in our state of Ignorance as ultimate, lose their all-important character. We see all things as part of a grand scheme of which  only bits are held before our sight. We can now see the larger picture held back behind surface events, and thus can understand the deeper sense of the mysterious play.

The Self hidden behind forms and appearances
This huge material universe became
A small result of a stupendous force:
Overtaking the moment the eternal Ray
Illumined That which never yet was made.

The light of the Self reveals the unborn Spirit, hidden behind several layers of our own and the world’s phenomenal existence.

The shoreless Infinite
Thought lay down in a mighty voicelessness;
The toiling Thinker widened and grew still,
Wisdom transcendent touched his quivering heart:
His soul could sail beyond thought’s luminous bar;
Mind screened no more the shoreless infinite.

When the finite mind grows still and thought sleeps in a mighty and luminous Silence, then a door opens into the Infinite and we see and receive the Infinite Wisdom hidden in the depths of creation and its mighty workings are bare before our inner sight.

The Unconceived and Alone
Across a void retreating sky he glimpsed
Through a last glimmer and drift of vanishing stars
The superconscient realms of motionless Peace
Where judgment ceases and the word is mute
And the Unconceived lies pathless and alone.       (p. 34 begins)

This is the One Reality whose praise we see sung in the Vedas. It is beyond all our mental and human conceptions, beyond all that we can think or imagine. It is beyond thought and speech. All the different paths can lead us to Its doorsteps but it is beyond all Paths. All paths cease here at the doorsteps of Eternity in a luminous and self-existent Peace. The seer and Yogi Aswapati stands now on the borders of this realm, as one stands on the highest peak of the manifested worlds, and is able to glimpse the Superconscient beyond where Space sinks and Time stands still.

Silence and the Absolute
There came not form or any mounting voice;
There only were Silence and the Absolute.

It is a state of Absolute ‘Nothingness’. The world of names and forms constructed by the mind vanish into this all-pervading Silence.

A mind new born arose
Out of that stillness mind new-born arose
And woke to truths once inexpressible,
And forms appeared, dumbly significant,
A seeing thought, a self-revealing voice.

The Light of a vast integral Truth begins to dawn upon his mind waking it to truths that cannot be tied into fixed formulas. All begins to assume a new significance when seen in this Light dawning from Above.

The vast union of Self and Nature
He knew the source from which his spirit came:
Movement was married to the immobile Vast;
He plunged his roots into the Infinite,
He based his life upon eternity.

Attuned to the eternal source from which all emerged and to which all returns, Aswapati has discovered the stable basis of all change, the Infinite behind all finite forms and names. Nature and Soul, World and God no more appear as irreconcilable opposites but two poles of a single Reality Infinite and Eternal.

Closing remarks
Thus no more tied to the surfaces of life, aware of the One Self that hides behind all names and forms, we discover the state of Peace and Joy that comes from this vast inner Freedom. A new and vast Knowledge begins to pour upon us from Above revealing all things a New Light.