The timelessness cannot be the dismissal of all that is in time

Re: 12: A Downward Look by RY Deshpande on Wed 23 May 2007 04:06 AM PDT Profile Permanent Link In a thunder-flash of God

The gains of the world are, fortunately, not all that insignificant and we can derive a good deal of comfort from our daily occupations and activities, feel relief from the feeling of frustration that invades us quite often. But, perhaps, only the complaint is that these gains and gifts are too little to satisfy the spirit’s deeper thirst. It looks, it is that desirable uneasiness in us which prods us on the fulfilling quest, always urging us to make progress. We remain discontented till life’s meaning and purpose are discovered, till we live in what they bring to us. The quest is therefore happily there, inherently there, and we cannot just rest till the discovery is made. In its absence our greatest actions would remain dull, obtuse, uninteresting.

However, if this quest, and this discovery, were to lead us only to the pure Self, it would remain incomplete, compromised. In such a discovery name and form and attributes and qualities, and all the workings of the mind would cease to exist, with the appalling danger of giving the impression of this phenomenal world to be nothing but a bad dream, an illusion. When the self is won, more often than not the world is lost; vastness and space, time and eternity get cut off from each other—as if they are fundamentally incompatible with each other, antagonistic to each other.

The path, in that case, would be the Path of Escape; but “Escape brings not the victory and the crown!” The negative is asserted forcefully, but then it turns out that, in this creation, the possibility of the positive gets denied with equal vehemence. Aswapati is alert and swift in recognising the situation and arrives at the realisation that there is a greater and truer, the truest Truth “at the mystic fount of Life”, that the first entrance into the timelessness cannot, in fact need not be the dismissal of all that is in time. Aswapati’s pursuit of the Unknowable reveals to him the true mystery behind all this:

Across the silence of the ultimate Calm

The Presence he yearned for suddenly drew close.

In a “thunder-flash of God” he sees that that Presence must be brought down into the “darkness of the suffering world”, that it is she who would heal its wound and suffering, heal it with her love and truth and joy. That is the only way, and there is none other, nānyastha panthah. In it the riddle of the world got dissolved and a “Life from beyond grew conqueror here of Death.” The dichotomy between the hesitant ‘yes’ and the stubborn ‘no’ has at once vanished and the unity of knowledge embraced every aspect of the creation.

There was no cleavage between soul and soul

There was no barrier between world and God.

Not only that; Aswapati’s ascent is beyond the world awaiting the Descent the world to save. He even steps into regions “past not-self and self and selflessness”. There, in that supreme Nirvanic state, in that infinity, he awaits the ultimate voice of the utter Transcendence. And what does he hear, and see?

The great world-rhythms were heart-beats of one Soul,

To feel was a flame-discovery of God,

All mind was a single harp of many strings,

All life a song of many meeting lives;

For worlds were many, but the Self was one.

This knowledge was now made a cosmos' seed:

This seed was cased in the safety of the Light,

It needed not a sheath of Ignorance.

Then from the trance of that tremendous clasp

And from the throbbings of that single Heart

And from the naked Spirit's victory

A new and marvellous creation rose.

His knowledge of things and the unity of all the cosmic aspects now became the seed from which a new world could spring up. In fact it has become the seed, but cased in the safety of the Light.

This is the great things Aswapati has already done, the measureless siddhi achieved, achieved in the Transcendent, in the House of the Spirit, forming the seed but encased in the safety of the Light. That seed must now sprout in the dim earthly soil. Presently this is Aswapati’s one concern. RYD