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Book One Canto V: The Yoga of the King: The Yoga of the Spirit's
Freedom and Greatness |
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Armed
with secret Knowledge, Aswapati cuts off his moorings in material nature and enters
swiftly into the bright realm of the Spirit where all knowledge is
spontaneous, ready without the labouring processes of the mind; where the
laws of material life exercise no sway. Here he finds clues to all that is
mysterious in the material universe; here stands revealed the meaning of the
world-movement, the Plan according to which Spirit and Nature work out the
Divine Intention in the Cosmos. Admitted
to this secret of the riddle of existence, Aswapati casts his look upward to
heights unseen hitherto. He is no more satisfied with things that served him
ere now; he has seen that what obtains in terrestrial life is only a
caricature of the pattern in the domain of the Spirit and he seeks to win
that world for his home. He
withdraws his consciousness from the din of the old life-movements on earth
and dwells in a Silence that opens into the vasts beyond earthly Time and
Space. An immunity of Power, Knowledge and Bliss invades his being and sucks
him up into the infinitudes above. There, shorn of his humanity, he is bathed
in the waters of a divine Omniscience, Omnipotence and Ecstasy. His limits
are erased, his faculties undergo a transforming change, his soul widens to
cosmic dimensions. Nature
reveals herself to his veil-free sight as a conscious Power, with a force
that is omnipotent, executing a marvellous design of the Soul. She lays open
to his illumined Will her whole field of workings, from the rigidities of the
material base and form of her making to the sovereign plasticities of her
Mind and potencies of her Will which link the finite to the Infinite. On
the threshold of these occult worlds beyond the earth-scene Aswapati regards
a guarding Power behind whom stands an ineffable Divine Presence. Here
begin the domains of the Infinite, the Eternal, realms leading from Light to
greater Light. Here also comes to his sight the giant order that underlines
the system of worlds that constitute this Creation. He perceives the stair of
the descending and the ascending planes of consciousness formed in the course
of the evolution and the evolution of the Divine Spirit and up which the Soul
in the universe travels forging its growth to its full stature in the Divine
Glory. He
further sees the world of Light, the Mahas, the world of plenary
Truth-Consciousness, the Truth, the Right, the Vast, which in its lower
ranges is the source all the worlds below and in its upper reaches opens into
the infinities of Sat-Chit-Ananda. Here is the Wisdom that reconciles all the
warring truths in the domain of Ignorance and is the source of all
Revelation, Inspiration and Illumination; here is where the Eternal casts
itself into Time, where the One organises itself into the Many. Beyond is the
One in its infinitude. Into these Countries of the Unknown adventures
Aswapati. |