Book-3-Study-Canto-1

Book Three: Canto I

The Pursuit of the Unknowable

Summary
All that the world can give is a trifle; it cannot satisfy the thirst of man in search of the Reality from which the whole creation derives. At the end of his search, Aswapathy finds that all his Knowledge ends in an Unknowable. A Silence settles on his striving heart. Freed from the pulls of the world’s desire, he turns to the Call of the Ineffable. An unnameable Being lures him on and on.

It is a mysterious mightiness which is at once an unfathomable vast around and a subtle kernel in the soul. A giant doubt overshadows his advance. However, he ascends without pause and reaches a height where no created form can live. He nears an intolerant bare Reality where the mind must either dissolve or change into Light. The whole world and its Ignorance founders here. All is expunged from the silent Being to lapse into Nothingness.

There is only a Vastness, an Eternity, a solid Peace.

At last he is face to face with a companionless Reality, immutable, inscrutable, alone,—the unborn One, above all change, occult, eternal.

All is too Little

All is too little that the world can give:
Its power and knowledge are the gifts of Time
And cannot fill the spirit’s sacred thirst.

Life in this world is a field of experience. The power and the knowledge gained during one’s life-term on earth are considerable, but in the final analysis they are found too inadequate to meet the demands of the evolving spirit. They are circumscribed by conditions of time and fail to satisfy the needs of the immortal soul. Much more than what the world can offer is needed if the spirit is to fulfil its objective of embodying itself on earth.

Presence Lost

Although of One these forms of greatness are
And by its breath of grace our lives abide,
Although more near to us than nearness’ self,
It is some utter truth of what we are;
Hidden by its own works it seemed far off,
Impenetrable, occult, voiceless, obscure.

The Presence was lost by which all things have charm,
The Glory lacked of which they are dim signs.

This Reality is closer to us than anything else, and yet it is far off, a transcendent truth of ourselves.

Aswapathy perceives this fact. The Divine Spirit is hidden by its own workings; it is lost to sight, to hearing, and cannot be reached in the obscure conditions of the world. The Divine Presence due to which there is a sweetness and beauty in things is lost to experience. The Divine Glory of which all are symbols, however faint, is lacking.

World is Empty of its Cause

The world lived on made empty of its Cause,
Like Love when the Beloved’s face is gone.

The labour to know seemed a vain strife of Mind;
All knowledge ended in the Unknowable:
The effort to rule seemed a vain pride of Will;
A trivial achievement scorned by Time,
All power retired into the Omnipotent.

He sees how the world goes on eking out its existence bereft of its inspiring Cause, like the dragging on of Love when the loved one is no longer there. In such a state of the world, the attempt to know seems to be a vain effort of the mind, for all knowledge so gained ends on the borders of the Unknowable. Mind has to confess it cannot know. Similarly the effort to control, to rule over the circumstances of life turns out to be a vanity of the will. All power acquired is a trifle and yields ultimately to the Omnipotent.

Darkness Guards the Light

A cave of darkness guards the eternal Light.

But darkness is not all; it is not the ultimate truth. Behind the thick veils of darkness there is Light. There is an eternal Light at the source of things and this Light is, as it were, guarded by a deep cave of thickening darkness. One has to persevere and push through the dark passage and then one is sure to arrive at the ever-burning Light at the end.

He Turns to Ineffable’s Call

A silence settled on his striving heart;
Absolved from the voices of the world’s desire,
He turned to the Ineffable’s timeless call.

A Being intimate and unnameable,
A wide compelling ecstasy and peace
Felt in himself and all and yet ungrasped,
Approached and faded from his soul’s pursuit
As if for ever luring him beyond.

Near, it retreated; far, it called him still.

An unnameable Being is close to him and he feels a wide pressing bliss and peace in himself and in all, but he cannot grasp it securely. It approaches and recedes as if drawing him further and further with its insistent call.

Uplifting Deity

Nothing could satisfy but its delight:
Its absence left the greatest actions dull,
Its presence made the smallest seem divine.

When it was there, the heart’s abyss was filled;
But when the uplifting Deity withdrew,
Existence lost its aim in the Inane.

Aswapathy finds that nothing except the delight of this Being can satisfy. Without the presence of this uplifting Deity, the greatest action loses its savour; in its presence even the smallest acquires a divine glow. The void of the heart is filled to the full when this Being is felt; when it withdraws, existence loses its aim and all becomes empty of meaning.

Impalpable Mightiness

The order of the immemorial planes,
The godlike fullness of the instruments
Were turned to props for an impermanent scene.

But who that mightiness was he knew not yet.

Impalpable, yet filling all that is,
It made and blotted out a million worlds
And took and lost a thousand shapes and names.

The entire structure of the serried Planes and the amplitude of the manufacturing instruments turn out to be mere props for a scene that is transitory, passing. Only the Being, the unknown Mightiness, fills all, creates all, destroys all, assuming and discarding a multitude of forms and names.

Indiscernible Vast

It wore the guise of an indiscernible Vast,
Or was a subtle kernel in the soul:
A distant greatness left it huge and dim,
A mystic closeness shut it sweetly in:
It seemed sometimes a figment or a robe
And seemed sometimes his own colossal shade.

This Mightiness appears to be a Vast that cannot be probed; and yet it is felt as a subtle core of the being within. It appears to be a far, unapproachable Greatness, huge and dim; and yet it is felt as sweetly enveloped in an intimate closeness. At times it seems to be a tiny figment or a covering; at times it seems to him to be his own huge shade.

Ascends without Pause

A giant doubt overshadowed his advance.

Across a neutral all-supporting Void
Whose blankness nursed his lone immortal spirit,
Allured towards some recondite Supreme,
Aided, coerced by enigmatic Powers,
Aspiring and half-sinking and upborne,
Invincibly he ascended without pause.

A huge uncertainty comes over his path. All the same, he ascends without a stop. Across a Void that is neutral and all-supporting, whose emptiness nourishes his lone spirit, he is drawn towards some mysterious Supreme, helped, in fact almost compelled, by undeterminable Powers. He aspires, finds himself going down but is borne upwards again. Thus he ascends unvanquished.

Signless Immensity

Always a signless vague Immensity
Brooded, without approach, beyond response,
Condemning finite things to nothingness,
Fronting him with the incommensurable.

He espies constantly a featureless huge Immensity ahead, brooding, unapproachable, incommunicable. In its presence all finite things lose their reality and he is face to face with the immeasurable, the Infinite.

Ascent Ceases

Then to the ascent there came a mighty term:
A height was reached where nothing made could live,
A line where every hope and search must cease
Neared some intolerant bare Reality,
A zero formed pregnant with boundless change.

Then he arrives at a peak where the ascent ceases. There nothing that is formed can live; all hope and seeking come to a stop. He nears a severe, lone Reality which permits nothing else to exist before it. There is a zero which is potent, holding in itself all possibility.

Tremendous Choice

On a dizzy verge where all disguises fail
And human mind must abdicate in Light
Or die like a moth in the naked blaze of Truth,
He stood compelled to a tremendous choice.

All he had been and all towards which he grew
Must now be left behind or else transform
Into a self of That which has no name.

Aswapathy finds himself on the edge of a peak where all forms fall off, where the human mind must either surrender itself to the Light of Truth or dissolve in its blaze. Here he is faced with a severe choice; he is compelled to choose either to abandon completely all that he has cherished so far or to let it be transformed into the stuff of a Reality that is beyond name and form.

Adventure of the Inane

Alone and fronting an intangible Force
Which offered nothing to the grasp of Thought,
His spirit faced the adventure of the Inane.

Abandoned by the worlds of form he strove.

Aswapathy stands alone before an intangible Force which refuses to be grasped by mental thought. He is on the threshold of a Void. The worlds of form fall off but he strives on.

All of the Universe Ceases

A fruitful world-wide Ignorance foundered there;
Thought’s long far-circling journey touched its close
And ineffective paused the actor Will.

The symbol modes of being helped no more,
The structures Nescience builds collapsing failed,
And even the spirit that holds the universe
Fainted in luminous insufficiency.

The world-pervading fertile Ignorance collapses here; the long range of Thought comes to an end; even the instrumental will stands ineffective. The significant ways of being cease to be meaningful; all that the Nescience erects breaks down; even the spirit that indwells and holds the universe realises its inadequacy and falls into a swoon.

Self must Melt or be Reborn

In an abysmal lapse of all things built
Transcending every perishable support
And joining at last its mighty origin,
The separate self must melt or be reborn
Into a Truth beyond the mind’s appeal.

In this condition where all created things lapse, the separate self, exceeding all mortal supports and joining its great origin at last, must either dissolve or be reborn into a Truth that is beyond the range of the mind.

Expunged from Being’s Silences

All glory of outline, sweetness of harmony,
Rejected like a grace of trivial notes,
Expunged from Being’s silence nude, austere,
Died into a fine and blissful Nothingness.

The Demiurges lost their names and forms,
The great schemed worlds that they had planned and wrought
Passed, taken and abolished one by one.

All beauty of form, harmony and sweetness is rejected as if it were but a decor with little consequence and shed from the silence of the bare Being; it fades away into a blissful Nothingness. The creators lose their personalities and the world created by them are wiped out one by one.

Godhead of the Whole

The universe removed its coloured veil,
And at the unimaginable end
Of the huge riddle of created things
Appeared the far-seen Godhead of the whole,
His feet firm-based on Life’s stupendous wings,
Omnipotent or lonely seer of Time,
Inward, inscrutable, with diamond gaze.

The tinted veil over the universe is cast off and at the far-off end of things appears the Godhead of All, his feet firmly planted on the great wings of Life, omnipotent, lone master of Time, turned inward, unfathomable, with a piercing irresistible gaze.

All Undone

Attracted by the unfathomable regard
The unsolved slow cycles to their fount returned
To rise again from that invisible sea.

All from his puissance born was now undone;
Nothing remained the cosmic Mind conceives.

Pulled by the mysterious gaze of the Godhead, all the unfulfilled movements in the universe return to this their origin to go forth again from their womb. All that had been born from his dynamic Power is now ended. Nothing remains of whatever was conceived by the cosmic Mind.

Imposition on the Void

Eternity prepared to fade and seemed
A hue and imposition on the Void,
Space was the fluttering of a dream that sank
Before its ending into Nothing’s deeps.

The very Eternal seems to be fading away leaving behind but a touch of colour and a forced impression on the Void; Space seems to be like the flicker of a dream before the sinking into the deep dreamless sleep of Nothing.

The Unknowable

The spirit that dies not and the Godhead’s self
Seemed myths projected from the Unknowable;
From It all sprang, in It is called to cease.

The immortal spirit and the self of the Godhead appear to be, after all, myths emanating from some Unknowable which alone is; from it all comes to be—or appears to do so—and into it all is withdrawn.

Last Experience

But what That was, no thought or sight could tell.

Only a formless Form of self was left,
A tenuous ghost of something that had been,
The last experience of a lapsing wave
Before it sinks into a bourneless sea,—
As if it kept even on the brink of Nought
Its bare feeling of the ocean whence it came.

Neither vision nor thought can grasp this Unknowable.

What is left now is only a vague, slender, outline of what existed before; it is an experience akin to the last movements of a wave about to drown into the bosom of the sea from which it came, retaining the bare memory of its origin.

Vastness, Peace

A Vastness brooded free from sense of Space,
An Everlastingness cut off from Time;
A strange sublime unalterable Peace
Silent rejected from it world and soul.

There is a musing Vastness free from the limiting sense of Space, an Eternity beyond the bounds of Time; there is a solid, profound, unchanging Peace from which world and soul stand rejected as foreign.

Stark Reality

A stark companionless Reality
Answered at last to his soul’s passionate search:
Passionless, wordless, absorbed in fathomless peace,
Keeping the mystery none would ever pierce,
It brooded inscrutable and intangible
Facing him with its dumb tremendous calm.

This is the final answer to Aswapathy’s intense seeking: facing him with its stupendous Calm stands a sheer, sole Reality, mysterious, unmoved, silent, self-absorbed, intangible, inscrutable.

No Kinship with the Universe

It had no kinship with the universe:
There was no act, no movement in its Vast:
Life’s question met by its silence died on her lips,
The world’s effort ceased convicted of ignorance
Finding no sanction of supernal Light:
There was no mind there with its need to know,
There was no heart there with its need to love.

This sole Reality does not show any relationship with the universe. There is in it neither action nor movement; it is static. The problem of life finds no solution here and the whole world-effort stands condemned in a movement of Ignorance with no sanction from the Truth-Light. Here there is neither the mind with its urge for knowledge, nor the heart with its urge for love.

One and Unique

All person perished in its namelessness.

There was no second, it had no partner or peer;
Only itself was real to itself.

A pure existence safe from thought and mood,
A consciousness of unshared immortal bliss,
It dwelt aloof in its bare infinite,
One and unique, unutterably sole.

Personality dissolves here into the Impersonal. This Reality is one and alone with none other beside it. It is its own subject and object. It is a pure existence, unchanging; a consciousness of undivided, undecaying bliss. It dwells aloof in its featureless infinity, peerless, ineffable, sole.

Alone

A Being formless, featureless and mute
That knew itself by its own timeless self,
Aware for ever in its motionless depths,
Uncreating, uncreated and unborn,
The One by whom all live, who lives by none,
An immeasurable luminous secrecy
Guarded by the veils of the Unmanifest,
Above the changing cosmic interlude
Abode supreme, immutably the same,
A silent Cause occult, impenetrable,—
Infinite, eternal, unthinkable, alone.

It is a formless, featureless and silent Being, self-existent, self-aware, without movement. It is the One by whom all creation is made possible and by whom all live, but who lives by none. It is an unfathomable Mystery behind the veils of the Unmanifest, above the changing scenes of the manifestation. It is supreme, immutable, impenetrable, the sole Cause, the infinite, the eternal, the alone.