Savitri-study-Book-2-Canto-8

Book Two: Canto VIII

The World of Falsehood, the Mother of Evil and the Sons of Darkness

Summary
Aswapathy beholds the hidden core of Night. It is a spiritless blank Infinity, a Nature denying Truth, wanting to abolish God. There is no Light, no divine Soul here; Evil and Pain are busy erecting their own world. Titans, Demons and the rest of the nether host comeinto their own and a veritable Hell appears to exist.

Aswapathy's gaze pierces through this heavy gloom and observes this realm of dark contraries—Non-Being, Inconscience. Here suffering is the daily food of Nature, torture yields delight, Good produces Evil. An illimitable and vague Something basing itself on an all-swallowing Death dominates everything. Time was when there was nothing else except a soulless Matter. Then came Life into that Void striving to create a way for the Spirit to be. But the response of the Night was different: a vast Non-Being, a Nescience came to life and occupied the Earth with its huge body of Doom. Death, Pain, Falsehood emerged vitiating and deforming the original design of creation. The Truth-Light was put behind and an antagonist Energy usurped the place of the eternal Mother.

This antagonist pushes backwards the human aspiration and will to advance and grow and tries to keep man ever at the animal level. All the same the divine Spirit grows in man though the Enemy is ever on the prowl wanting to smother the new-birth. She uses all means of fascination and joy for her nefarious purpose of turning man away from God and Light. She infects life, misguides the mind, uses doubt to slay faith and brings about the virtual banishment of God. Thus is brought the inner death by the expulsion of the divine element.

The creative Spirit allows these agencies full scope to play out their possibilities. Under the cover of Ignorance these Powers act against Light, Peace and Truth. They shut out the Divine Grace by their own formations. They interfere with the workings of God everywhere. And always these dark Adventurers seem to win. They have occupied all positions of vantage and claim to be the sole rulers of the minds and hearts of men. They are allowed their play because by their very resistance and opposition they serve the Cosmic Purpose. Their home is the Black Night from where they scheme and work out their inescapable dominion on earth.

Aswapathy decides to sound the depths of this Hell and enters into this dark and terrible realm, where evil and misery are the natural climate and bliss is unknown. Happiness is tabooed, torture a festival. Tranquillity is a bore; suffering adds spice to life. Pitiless Power is worshipped and Hate is the archangel of this Kingdom. Even inanimate objects exude these evil passions and afflict their users.

The anguish of this environment opens out in the breast of Aswapathy. His ears are filled with the clamours of pain. He traverses the passages of Doom across the many dangers of misguidance, treachery and death. He bears the tremendous assaults of Hell and drinks her poison to its dregs. All the while he keeps alive the flame of his spirit. Even when thought, sense, all fails, his soul sees and knows. Thus sounding the mystery of the Infinitesimal and the Inconscient, he arrives ultimately at the very heart of the Dark Gulfs from where the creation has emerged. Here he discovers by sheer identity, the presence of a Wisdom and Will that works behind all the veils of Nature. Here he sees the key to all change. In his luminous vision he sees an invisible Hand of the Spirit laid upon error and pain which turn into ecstasy at that touch. He sees clearly that Night is only a veil of the Eternal, death a process of Life, destruction a rapid step of Creation, hell a short cut to the gates of Heaven.

The Illusion of the Nether Absolute is dissipated. All on Earth reveals its divine significance. Life comes into its own pure action in the physical embodiment. Hell collapses. Division ceases to be, God is present. The soul lights up the conscious body and Matter and Spirit become one.

Hidden Heart of Night

Then could he see the hidden heart of Night:
The labour of its stark unconsciousness
Revealed the endless terrible Inane.

From his masterful position Aswapathy is able to see things as they are. His gaze plumbs into the core of that dark Night and he sees a sheer unconsciousness at work revealing a horrid, empty infinity.

A Nature that Denies Truth

A spiritless blank Infinity was there;
A Nature that denied the eternal Truth
In the vain braggart freedom of its thought
Hoped to abolish God and reign alone.

This is not the infinity of the Spirit full with its glories of Consciousness, Force and Bliss. It is completely devoid of Spirit, empty of all its contents. Here is a Nature that exults in its liberty to think what it chooses and denies the existence of the eternal Truth of the Spirit. In so doing it hopes to cancel God altogether so that it could be the sole monarch.

Creates its own Bleak World

There was no sovereign Guest, no witness Light;
Unhelped it would create its own bleak world.

Its large blind eyes looked out on demon acts,
Its deaf ears heard the untruth its dumb lips spoke;
Its huge misguided fancy took vast shapes,
Its mindless sentience quivered with fierce conceits;
Engendering a brute principle of life
Evil and pain begot a monstrous soul.

This Nature would create a dreary world on its own without the help of a presiding Spirit, without a guiding Light. Its eyes, large but blind, see only its demoniac acts; its ears hear only untruths uttered by lips dumb to all but untruth; its misguided ambition for aggrandisement expresses itself in vast schemes: unlit by mind, its feelings are astir with belligerent false notions. A brutal principle of life is brought into action and out of all this evil and pain a monstrous being is born.

The Anarch

The Anarchs of the formless depths arose,
Great titan beings and demoniac powers,
World-egos racked with lust and thought and will,
Vast minds and lives without a spirit within:
Impatient architects of error’s house,
Leaders of the cosmic ignorance and unrest
And sponsors of sorrow and mortality
Embodied the dark Ideas of the Abyss.

Titans and demons, rebels against the Divine order, appear on the scene with colossal egos dominated by lust and pervert will and thought; they have large capacities and ranges of power but with no soul. Restlessly they build the edifice of error, champion the hosts of world-Ignorance and disturbance and promote the spread of sorrow and death. They are veritable embodiments of the black Ideas from the nethermost regions of hell.

Adverse Space

A shadow substance into emptiness came,
Dim forms were born in the unthinking Void
And eddies met and made an adverse Space
In whose black folds Being imagined Hell.

Into this dark Void a kind of shadowy substance arises providing material for vague forms to take shape. Movements gather and create a hostile Space in that Void, an unholy Space whose dark regions the Being imagines as Hell.Actually there is no world of hell as such. It is only a state formed and maintained in imagination.

Triple-Plated Gloom

His eyes piercing the triple-plated gloom
Identified their sight with its blind stare:
Accustomed to the unnatural dark, they saw
Unreality made real and conscious Night.

Aswapathy's eyes penetrate through the thrice fortified gloom whose covering darkness has so fearful an influence on the physical, vital and mental layers of existence. Accustomed to the unnatural darkness, his eyes see directly the unreal fronting him as the real and the Night becoming conscious and alive.

Womb of Calamitous Dreams

A violent, fierce and formidable world,
An ancient womb of huge calamitous dreams,
Coiled like a larva in the obscurity
That keeps it from the spear-points of Heaven’s stars.

He sees a disturbing formidable world which has long been a veritable source of black and disastrous nightmares. It is convoluted in thick obscurity so that the rays of Light from the heavens of the Spirit may not touch and dissolve it.

False Infinite

It was the gate of a false Infinite,
An eternity of disastrous absolutes,
An immense negation of spiritual things.

This world turns out to be the entry into a pseudo-infinity, not an Infinite of Truth but an endless Vast of Falsehood. It is a termless realm of suicidal absolutes of negation, of an overwhelming denial of the verities of the Spirit.

All Turned into Dark Contraries

All once self-luminous in the spirit’s sphere
Turned now into their own dark contraries:
Being collapsed into a pointless void
That yet was a zero parent of the worlds;
Inconscience swallowing up the cosmic Mind
Produced a universe from its lethal sleep;

All the luminous Verities of the Spirit above, the Sat-Chit-Ananda, are precipitated here into their dark opposites. Being, Sat, has almost dissolved itself into non-being, an utter Void without even a point of existence. But it is not a barren emptiness. It is a fecund zero, a self-limitation to the point of apparent dissolution and yet from this micro-seed arises the Tree of the cosmic worlds. The Consciousness, Chit, loses itself in its contrary—Inconscience—by a self-concentration to the point of forgetting itself. But from this almost fatal nescience arises this Universe.

Bliss Falls into Coma

Bliss into black coma fallen, insensible,
Coiled back to itself and God’s eternal joy
Through a false poignant figure of grief and pain
Still dolorously nailed upon a cross
Fixed in the soil of a dumb insentient world
Where birth was a pang and death an agony,
Lest all too soon should change again to bliss.

Bliss, Ananda, falls into a swoon as it were and loses itself in stark insensibility. However, it struggles back into awareness and strives to regain its original status in the Divine Consciousness as ineffable Delight. But the way is long and tortuous and the forms through which it works its passage are those of grief and pain which, though without real basis in fact, are biting in their actuality. In a world based upon insentience, every effort, every upward movement is attended with pain and suffering; birth is preceded by intense pain and death accompanied by agony. The transmutation from insensibility to supreme bliss is deliberately slow and long.

Thought, a Priestess of Perversity

Thought sat, a priestess of Perversity,
On her black tripod of the triune Snake
Reading by opposite signs the eternal script,
A sorceress reversing Life’s God-frame.

Instead of being an instrument for giving the delivering Knowledge, Thought becomes an agent of deformation that twists the life-movements. It bases itself upon the threefold unpurified energies of the physical, vital and mental. Nature starts at the wrong end of things, misreads the directions and misguides the course of the Divine Creation.

Ritual of Mysteries

In darkling aisles with evil eyes for lamps
And fatal voices chanting from the apse,
In strange infernal dim basilicas
Intoning the magic of the unholy Word,
The ominous profound Initiate
Performed the ritual of her mysteries.

There are also symbolic rituals of the Mysteries of Evil performed by the ominous adept, chanting the Word productive of evil results, in the dark interior of the Church filled with the fell notes of a strange music.

Suffering is Nature's Food

There suffering was Nature’s daily food
Alluring to the anguished heart and flesh,
And torture was the formula of delight,
Pain mimicked the celestial ecstasy.

Contrary to the balance of things in the human world, here in this dark world of Evil, Nature thrives on suffering: the hungry heart and body take to suffering with avidity. Torture produces not pain but delight; actual pain affects to give the satisfaction and delectation of heavenly ecstasies.

Good, a Faithless Gardener

There Good, a faithless gardener of God,
Watered with virtue the world’s upas-tree
And, careful of the outward word and act,
Engrafted his hypocrite blooms on native ill.

Here even Good turns out to be a faithless gardener; it is not productive of the wholesome. It uses virtue to foster the growth of the tree of poison. Though scrupulously correct in its outer words and deeds, it multiplies in reality the spread of hypocrisy in this native land of evil.

Heaven's Face a Mask of Hell

All high things served their nether opposite:
The forms of Gods sustained a demon cult;
Heaven’s face became a mask and snare of Hell.

Everything, however high and truthful, is made to serve its contrary and thus defeat itself. Thus the forms of the Gods which normally serve as foci for the manifestations of Divinity are here deliberately used to mislead the world into subscribing to the rule of the demon-powers. The demon-powers masquerade as Gods and hold the loyalty of the faithful. The very face of heaven is a danger as it is used as a trap to cover the entrance of hell.The high is forced to serve the low.

Illimitable Shape Sitting on Death

There in the heart of vain phenomenon,
In an enormous action’s writhen core
He saw a shape illimitable and vague
Sitting on Death who swallows all things born.

A chill fixed face with dire and motionless eyes,
Her dreadful strident in her shadowy hand
Outstretched, she pierced all creatures with one fate.

At the core of all this monstrously pervert, involuted worthless phenomena, Aswapathy sees an immense vague Something seated on the throne of the devourer Death. With her fearful visage and pitiless gaze, she seeks to pitch her sway as far as possible, infecting with one fate all creatures within her domain.

When Matter was without Soul

When nothing was save Matter without soul
And a spiritless hollow was the heart of Time,
Then Life first touched the insensible Abyss;
Awaking the stark Void to hope and grief
Her pallid beam smote the unfathomed Night
In which God hid himself from his own view.

In the beginning of the material creation, there was only Matter. There was no life, no soul. It was all insensible. Then Life descended from its own plane above and touched this insentient Matter; the result was the stirring of a sensibility in what was a sheer Void so long, and the way was opened for the movements of hope and grief. This ray of Life, pale though it was in its transition into the material sphere, struck at the thick darkness of insentience and inconscience of Matter in which Consciousness was veiling itself self-forgotten.

Life Sought the Slumbering Truth

In all things she sought their slumbering mystic truth,
The unspoken Word that inspires unconscious forms;
She groped in his deeps for an invisible Law,
Fumbled in the dim subconscient for his mind
And strove to find a way for spirit to be.

Life searched for the ensouling truth in all things. She looked for the unexpressed concentration of conscious Power that moves formations that are apparently unconscious; she felt for the Truth-Law in the depths of God's creation, unseen but nevertheless active; she went probing unsteadily in the dim regions of the subconscient for the concealed Mind. By all these steps Life struggled to build the way for the spirit, the soul, to come into being.

Ignorance Prepared

But from the Night another answer came.

A seed was in that nether matrix cast,
A dumb unprobed husk of perverted truth,
A cell of an insentient infinite.

A monstrous birth prepared its cosmic form
In Nature’s titan embryo, Ignorance.

The answer from the dark depths, however, was quite different. A seed was thrown in the womb of Nescience, a mute fount of perversion in the body of the insentient Vast. An ugly formation on a universal scale began to gather itself in the giant embryo of that Nature. Ignorance was preparing to emerge.

The result of the action of Life on the Insentient is the birth of Ignorance.

Overshadowing Doom

Then in a fatal and stupendous hour
Something that sprang from the stark Inconscient’s sleep
Unwillingly begotten by the mute Void,
Lifted its ominous head against the stars;
Overshadowing earth with its huge body of Doom
It chilled the heavens with the menace of a face.

A nameless Power, a shadowy Will arose
Immense and alien to our universe.

Then, all on a sudden something shot up from the dormant depths of the Inconscient under the weight of the Void and enveloped the whole earth with a spread of Doom. It was a concrete form menacing the very heavens with its ominous approach. It was a Power that could not be defined, a Will that could not be determined. All that could be said about it was that it was immense and foreign to this universe.

Nescience Covers Eternity

In the inconceivable Purpose none can gauge
A vast Non-Being robed itself with shape,
The boundless Nescience of the unconscious depths
Covered eternity with Nothingness.

human mind. None knows precisely what it is. In such a scheme, the vast Non-Being came to assume a form; the endless Nescience from the depths of the Inconscient rose and covered up the eternal Existence with its Nothingness. Being was covered by Non-Being.

Mighty Opposition Conquered Space

A seeking Mind replaced the seeing Soul:
Life grew into a huge and hungry death,
The Spirit’s bliss was changed to cosmic pain.

Assuring God’s self-cowled neutrality
A mighty opposition conquered Space.

The result of this nether invasion was catastrophic. A lame mind struggling to know displaced the soul with its direct vision; Life assumed the character of an insatiable hunger that is Death; the natural bliss of the pervading Spirit was altered into universal pain. The creative Divinity allowed all possibilities, to take shape without immediate intervention; the opposing hosts occupied the field.

Sovereign Ruling Falsehood

A sovereign ruling falsehood, death and grief,
It pressed its fierce hegemony on earth;
Disharmonising the original style
Of the architecture of her fate’s design,
It falsified the primal cosmic Will
And bound to struggle and dread vicissitudes
The long slow process of the patient Power.

Falsehood, grief and death occupied the Earth and sought to establish their rule firmly. They broke into the original pattern of a harmonious evolution intended for the Earth, upset and deflected the workings of the creative Will that fathered the universe and subjected the labouring Power, effecting the slow evolution of the Earth, to incessant opposition, struggle and calamitous prospects.

Error Implanted

Implanting error in the stuff of things
It made an Ignorance of the all-wise Law;
It baffled the sure touch of life’s hid sense,
Kept dumb the intuitive guide in Matter’s sleep,
Deformed the insect’s instinct and the brute’s,
Disfigured man’s thought-born humanity.

Error was sown in the very substance of everything. As a result the All-Knowing Law changed its character into Ignorance; the sure touch of the hidden sense in life—beyond the five overt, active senses which are always tentative in their operations—got confused; the intuitive element that is active even in the sleep of Matter and guides the creative movement was muted; the instinct that guides and leads the animal and insect creations, which are not yet awakened to the mental faculties, was deformed and made unreliable; even the thinking faculty which sets apart man above all other species in Nature was infected and the human type fashioned by it was disfigured.

Shadow Obscured the Truth-Light

A shadow fell across the simple Ray:
Obscured was the Truth-light in the cavern heart
That burns unwitnessed in the altar crypt
Behind the still velamen’s secrecy
Companioning the Godhead of the shrine.

The shadow of this Nescience and Ignorance interfered with the natural play of the Light of the creative Spirit. It obscured the Divine Truth that shines as an inextinguishable flame of light in the inmost heart of every creature and every form, and burns behind all the veils of Nature, thick or thin, still or vibrant, ever inalienable from the inhabiting soul.

Antagonist Energy (I)

Thus was the dire antagonist Energy born
Who mimes the eternal Mother’s mighty shape
And mocks her luminous infinity
With a grey distorted silhouette in the Night.

This was how the hostile opposing Power in creation came to be. She is the relentless Antagonist who imitates the Divine Power labouring to manifest the glories of the Spirit on Earth. She sets herself up as the counterpart in shape and force of the original luminous Puissance and follows it as a dark shadow everywhere.

Antagonist Energy (II)

Arresting the passion of the climbing soul,
She forced on life a slow and faltering pace;
Her hand’s deflecting and retarding weight
Is laid on the mystic evolution’s curve:
The tortuous line of her deceiving mind
The Gods see not and man is impotent;
Oppressing the God-spark within the soul
She forces back to the beast the human fall.

The workings of this antagonist Energy are varied in their disastrous effect.The intensity of the aspiring soul is held down; the pace of life-movement is chequered and slowed; the course of the spiritual evolution in Progress is deflected and retarded; neither the Gods nor men are able to see through the mazes of the activities of her cunning mind; the Godward urge in man is suppressed and he is constantly pushed back to the animal level below.

Yet the one Grows

Yet in her formidable instinctive mind
She feels the One grow in the heart of Time
And sees the Immortal shine through the human mould.

However, in spite of all her opposition and negation, the antagonist is aware, instinctively, that the Divine is growing. He lives and grows amidst all the contraries she has set up. She sees the Immortal One radiate through the human frame as the Indweller.

Alarm and Prowl

Alarmed for her rule and full of fear and rage
She prowls around each light that gleams through the dark
Casting its ray from the Spirit’s lonely tent,
Hoping to enter with fierce stealthy tread
And in the cradle slay the divine Child.

This fact of the steady growth of the Divine Flame of Truth in spite of her attempts to smother it alarms the Adversary. Wherever there is a gleam of this light, from whichever habitation a ray of this Spirit beams forth, there this hostile power lurks waiting for the opportunity of an unguarded moment to pounce and kill the infant Krishna, the divine manifestation in embryo.

Her Ruse

Incalculable are her strength and ruse,
Her touch is a fascination and a death;
She kills her victim with his own delight;
Even Good she makes a hook to drag to Hell.

The might and cunning of this antagonist are immeasurable. She uses everything to gain her own ends, even things that are contrary to herself. Delight which nourishes life in its growth is utilised by her to destroy life by its excess. Even Good which leads upwards in the evolutionary ascent is converted by her into a dragnet of self-righteousness and made the means of a steep fall.

Pilgrim Falls Overpowered

For her the world runs to its agony.

Often the pilgrim on the Eternal’s road
Ill-lit from clouds by the pale moon of Mind,
Or in devious by-ways wandering alone,
Or lost in deserts where no path is seen,
Falls overpowered by her lion leap,
A conquered captive under her dreadful paws.

To this antagonist, the Creation exists not to outflower towards a growing Delight, but to hasten to agony. Pain is the end.

Many a seeker who dares to quest for the Spirit finds himself in unenviable conditions. His guide, the limited faculty of the mind, throws but scant light on the way; he misjudges his way and wanders in tortuous bypaths; he gets lost in barren tracts; and when the Adversary pounces upon him with fury, he falls, helpless, defeated.

Mortal Perishes to God and Light

Intoxicated by a burning breath
And amorous groan of a destroying mouth,
Once a companion of the sacred Fire,
The mortal perishes to God and Light,
An adversary governs heart and brain,
A Nature hostile to the Mother-force.

Man is overpowered by the lustful hold of the Adversary. He loses his balance and forsakes his cherished aspiration for the Truth, Light and God and surrenders his heart and mind to this nether Nature that is inimical to the true Mother of all.

Cowled Fifth-Columnist

The self of life yields up its instruments
To Titan and demoniac agencies
That aggrandise earth-nature and disframe:
A cowled fifth-columnist is now thought’s guide;
His subtle defeatist murmur slays the faith
And, lodged in the breast or whispering from outside,
A lying inspiration fell and dark
A new order substitutes for the divine.

The life-being surrenders its instruments of effectuation to his Enemy and her agents—soulless forces of Egoism and Greed who give a perverted twist to them. They over-blow material nature and take it out of its proper setting in the Cosmic scheme. Not truth or an emanation of Truth is now the guide of thought, but a veiled agent of Falsehood that usurps its place and subtly plants the poison-seed of doubt that undermines and kills the innate faith of the being. Whether by a feeling from within or a suggestion from without, this enemy is incessantly at work to misguide, mislead and in all ways to bring about an order of life totally alien to the divine Plan.

God Retires

A silence falls upon the spirit’s heights,
From the veiled sanctuary the God retires,
Empty and cold is the chamber of the Bride;
The golden Nimbus now is seen no more,
No longer burns the white spiritual ray
And hushed for ever is the secret Voice.

The Spirit from its higher altitudes falls silent; it no more communicates. From the chamber in the heart, behind the veil and outer nature, the Godhead withdraws leaving the soul alone. The halo of the Divine Presence is there no more, the pure Ray of the Spirit shines not; the inner voice that is infallible falls mute.

End of the Soul's Epic

Then by the Angel of the Vigil Tower
A name is struck from the recording book;
A flame that sang in Heaven sinks quenched and mute,
In ruin ends the epic of a soul.

Thus is brought about the fall of an aspiring soul by the Adversary closing in from all sides, on all levels. The call of the soul is heard no more in Heaven; it dies down in frustration and failure.

Inner Death

This is the tragedy of the inner death
When forfeited is the divine element
And only a mind and body live to die.

This is how death takes place within, even though there is not yet the outer physical death. When for any reason, the soul, the divine element in man, is rendered ineffective, displaced in action by the hostile agencies, what remains is only a soulless mind in body; the factor that gives meaning and purpose to existence is no more there. It is a living death.

Terrible Agencies Allowed

For terrible agencies the Spirit allows
And there are subtle and enormous Powers
That shield themselves with the covering Ignorance.

Offspring of the gulfs, agents of the shadowy Force,
Haters of light, intolerant of peace,
Aping to the thought the shining Friend and Guide,
Opposing in the heart the eternal Will,
They veil the occult, uplifting Harmonist.

The Divine Spirit permits all the dread agents of the Hostile to have full scope in order to play out their possibilities. Safe behind the veil of human ignorance many forces of this kind are active; they are subtle but all-pervading in their havoc. They issue from the dark depths of the nether creation. These enemies of light and haters of peace try to cheat the mind by posing themselves as the hosts of Light and Knowledge. They set up their own contrary will in the heart of man to oppose the Will of God; they cover up the existence and the action of the inner Being who harmonises the diverse activities of Nature into an uplifting and purposeful movement.

Grace Shut by Law

His wisdom’s oracles are made our bonds;
The doors of God they have locked with keys of creed
And shut out by the Law his tireless Grace.

Along all Nature’s lines they have set their posts
And intercept the caravans of Light;
Wherever the Gods act, they intervene.

These nefarious powers turn even the liberative Words of God into chains by promoting wrong understanding and application; revealed approaches to God are effectively closed by their credal dogmas. They erect walls of mind-made Laws against the entry of the saving Divine Grace from above which acts on its own, regardless of desert. Throughout the long paths of Nature by which man has to journey on his quest, they set up sentries to stop whatever help from on high may come to aid the pilgrim in his arduous effort. Wherever the divine Agents are and start to work, there these nether powers come and obstruct.

Yoke is Laid

A yoke is laid upon the world’s dim heart;
Masked are its beats from the supernal Bliss,
And the closed peripheries of brilliant Mind
Block the fine entries of celestial Fire.

The obscured heart of the universe is enslaved to the rule of Falsehood and Evil; it is prevented from throbbing to the Delight of the creative Spirit. So too is the mind shut up in its own brilliant cell; Truth-Light finds no entry for its rays in that closed circle.

Dark Adventurers Seem to Win

Always the dark Adventurers seem to win;
Nature they fill with evil’s institutes,
Turn into defeats the victories of Truth,
Proclaim as falsehoods the eternal laws,
And load the dice of Doom with wizard lies;
The world’s shrines they have occupied, usurped its thrones.

In scorn of the dwindling chances of the Gods
They claim creation as their conquered fief
And crown themselves the iron Lords of Time.

No doubt that in such conditions, the forces of darkness always appear to gain the upper hand. They spread evil all over by their machinations. They turn even the successes of Truth into her defeats. Truth-laws are decreed as falsehoods. Their cunning propaganda swells the chances of the gathering Doom. They have installed themselves in places of worship drawing the hearts of men, occupied seats of Power ruling over all. The hosts of Light seem, for the moment, to be the losing side and the powers of darkness ride roughshod over them. They claim the whole creation to be their domain as of right and proclaim themselves as the Masters of the Age—Kali, the Purusha of Evil.

Artificers of Fall and Pain

Adepts of the illusion and the mask,
The artificers of Nature’s fall and pain
Have built their altars of triumphant Night
In the clay temple of terrestrial life.

These powers are past masters in creating illusion, in covering up the true form of things with false formations of their own make. They are the authors of the deviations in the workings of Nature which result in fall and pain. They have established their own altars of victorious Darkness in the little temples of earth-life.

Their Mysteries

In the vacant precincts of the sacred Fire,
In front of the reredos in the mystic rite
Facing the dim velamen none can pierce,
Intones his solemn hymn the mitred priest
Invoking their dreadful presence in his breast:
Attributing to them the awful Name
He chants the syllables of the magic text
And summons the unseen communion’s act,
While twixt the incense and the muttered prayer
All the fierce bale with which the world is racked
Is mixed in the foaming chalice of man’s heart
And poured to them like sacramental wine.

The high priests of the cult of these Gods of Darkness conduct their own secret rituals and ceremonies before their altars. They intone hymns to invoke the nefarious presence of their Gods in their own person. They give fearful names to these Gods, recite their black formulae and effect a communion as a result of which the ingredients of woe and misery are stirred in the human breast and poured out as the wine sacramental.

They Serve by Enmity

Assuming names divine they guide and rule.

Opponents of the Highest they have come
Out of their world of soulless thought and power
To serve by enmity the cosmic scheme.

These impostors assume the names (and at times even the forms) of the Gods and pretend to guide; they wield dominion over the hearts and minds of men in the name of the Divinity whose antagonists they assuredly are. They have come out of their native world where there is no soul at all—and hence all its thought and power is bereft of the saving divine element—to oppose and destroy the creation of the Divine Spirit. But by their very obstruction and opposition they serve the cause of the cosmic evolution. They provide the testing and perfecting ground for the progression of the cosmic plan. Nothing is allowed to survive unless it has earned the right to live and grow by overcoming the opposition of the adversary.

The Supreme Diplomat uses even the Enemy for His own Purpose.

Night their Strategic Base

Night is their refuge and strategic base.

Against the sword of Flame, the luminous Eye,
Bastioned they live in massive forts of gloom,
Calm and secure in sunless privacy:
No wandering ray of Heaven can enter there.

The stronghold of these enemies of God and Light and Bliss is Darkness and whatever leads to the Dark. Gloom is an ideal climate for their living. No ray of light is allowed to come into their fortress. They fortify their defences so thoroughly that not even by chance can a speck of light enter. They operate from the safe base of Night.

Depression, gloom, melancholy provide them with footholds from where they can expand and fight against the hosts of Light and Happiness.

Sons of Darkness Plan

Armoured, protected by their lethal masks,
As in a studio of creative Death
The giant sons of Darkness sit and plan
The drama of the earth, their tragic stage.

Well-protected in strong armour and death-dealing masks, in their dark chambers where Death is developed into a fine art, those titans, the sons of Darkness, sit and plan unobserved, unobstructed, how to overrun the Earth-stage and enact the tragedy of their schemings.

Dangerous Arches of Power

All who would raise the fallen world must come
Under the dangerous arches of their power;
For even the radiant children of the gods
To darken their privilege is and dreadful right.

None can reach heaven who has not passed through hell.

All who strive and hope to uplift the world from its state of affliction have perforce to come under the close attention of these dark powers who, as of right, claim to oppose and obstruct all upward effort of the hosts of Light. They attack the redeemer with all their might and subject him to untold suffering. The way to the haven of peace and bliss lies through the rocks and manholes of danger and disaster.

Aswapathy Challenges

This too the traveller of the worlds must dare.

A warrior in the dateless duel’s strife,
He entered into dumb despairing Night
Challenging the darkness with his luminous soul.

Aswapathy feels obliged to face and meet this challenge of the antagonist. As a combatant in the ageless battle between the forces of Light and Darkness, he readily plunges into the deathlike Night spread before him, defying its darkness with his own luminous soul.

Dolorous Realm

Alarming with his steps the threshold gloom
He came into a fierce and dolorous realm
Peopled by souls who never had tasted bliss;
Ignorant like men born blind who know not light,
They could equate worst ill with highest good,
Virtue was to their eyes a face of sin
And evil and misery were their natural state.

At his approach there is quite an alarm in the gloom that pervades at the entrance of this realm, for the dark gloom is afraid of its own dissolution by the light of his soul. He steps into a land of dire suffering and misery inhabited by beings who have no experience or conception of bliss. Truth and light are unknown to them and for them the extremes of good and evil are but the same. Even virtue appears to them as simply another garb of vice. They live and thrive on evil and misery as to the manner born.

Torture a Daily Festival

A dire administration’s penal code
Making of grief and pain the common law,
Decreeing universal joylessness
Had changed life into a stoic sacrament
And torture into a daily festival.

The perversion of truth has gone so deep and extensive here that grief and pain are prescribed as the common law of the realm; joy is tabooed; suffering is borne with resignation as something sacred; torture is accepted as a regular celebration for enjoyment.

Happiness Chastised

An act was passed to chastise happiness;
Laughter and pleasure were banned as deadly sins:
A questionless mind was ranked as wise content,
A dull heart’s silent apathy as peace:
Sleep was not there, torpor was the sole rest,
Death came but neither respite gave nor end;
Always the soul lived on and suffered more.

And further: happiness is frowned upon; pleasure of mind and body are penalised. An inert, unquesting mind is honoured as replete with wisdom and a passive heart's indifference is looked upon as peace. Of restful sleep there is none, there is only a lapse into dull inertia. Death does not bring pause or cessation to the tired strife of life; it only enhances the helplessness of the soul which continues to live and suffer.

Wicked Joy in others' Calamity

Ever he deeper probed that kingdom of pain;
Around him grew the terror of a world
Of agony followed by worse agony,
And in the terror a great wicked joy
Glad of one’s own and others’ calamity.

Aswapathy advances further into this domain of pain; the terror of the place grows; agony leads to more agony. And amidst all this pain and terror, there runs an unmistakable, pervert, huge and wicked joy in one's own suffering and that of others.

Body a Field of Torment

There thought and life were a long punishment,
The breath a burden and all hope a scourge,
The body a field of torment, a massed unease;
Repose was a waiting between pang and pang.

In this unnatural order of things, even thinking and living are an intolerable imposition. To breathe is a burden and hope is a painful whip that drives one mad. The body is not a fortress of security that it is on earth, but a concentration of discomfort, a centre of torment. There is no real rest, no relaxation; what appears to be so is only an anticipatory interval between one pang and the next.

Spice of Pain and Salt of Tear

This was the law of things none dreamed to change:
A hard sombre heart, a harsh unsmiling mind
Rejected happiness like a cloying sweet;
Tranquillity was a tedium and ennui:
Only by suffering life grew colourful;
It needed the spice of pain, the salt of tears.

Such is the established order in this world and no one even feels the need to change it. The stony heart in gloom and the dry unpitying mind reject all happiness as a vitiating element. Peace and calm are a tiring boredom. Only suffering makes life more bright and enjoyable. Of this banquet of life, pain is the spice and tears, the salt.

Fierce Sensation gave some Zest

If one could cease to be, all would be well;
Else only fierce sensations gave some zest:
A fury of jealousy burning the gnawed heart,
The sting of murderous spite and hate and lust,
The whisper that lures to the pit and treachery’s stroke
Threw vivid spots on the dull aching hours.

Complete cessation of life is the most desired here. These creatures are so insensitive that only strong and piercing sensations arouse some interest. The dull and dragging days are enlivened only by angry jealousies, biting hates, consuming lusts, alluring deceits and sudden betrayals.

Enjoyment of Infelicity

To watch the drama of infelicity,
The writhing of creatures under the harrow of doom
And sorrow’s tragic gaze into the night
And horror and the hammering heart of fear
Were the ingredients in Time’s heavy cup
That pleased and helped to enjoy its bitter taste.

Enjoyment of the dregs of life here consists in gleefully watching the mounting drama of pain and suffering, the throes of creatures struggling under the heavy stamp of doom, the helpless, dumb pleas of sorrow, the rapid and painful beats of hearts oppressed by fear.

Life's Long Hell

Of such fierce stuff was made up life’s long hell:
These were the threads of the dark spider’s web
In which the soul was caught, quivering and wrapt;
This was religion, this was Nature’s rule.

Such is the nature of the interminable hell of the life-region. In these dark formations is the soul imprisoned and lost. All this is embraced as religion, all this is taken as natural.

Chapel of Iniquity

In a fell chapel of iniquity
To worship a black pitiless image of Power
Kneeling one must cross hard-hearted stony courts,
A pavement like a floor of evil fate.

A dark heartless Power is the idol that is worshipped here on the ruthless altar of injustice. One must crawl the hard paces of the courts of cruelty and evil before reaching that sanctum.

Their te Deums (I)

Each stone was a keen edge of ruthless force
And glued with the chilled blood from tortured breasts;
The dry gnarled trees stood up like dying men
Stiffened into a pose of agony,
And from each window peered an ominous priest
Chanting Te Deums for slaughter’s crowning grace,
Cities uprooted, blasted human homes,
Burned writhen bodies, the bombshell’s massacre.

The entire atmosphere and setting is of ruthlessness, tortured agony and dried-up life. High priests, in their temples of Doom, keep vigil and chant gratitude to their dark god for his enabling grace at the successful completion of the unholy work that is on—slaughter, devastation, burning and massacre.

Their te Deums (II)

“Our enemies are fallen, are fallen”, they sang,
“All who once stayed our will are smitten and dead;
How great we are, how merciful art Thou.”

Thus thought they to reach God’s impassive throne
And Him command whom all their acts opposed,
Magnifying their deeds to touch his skies,
And make him an accomplice of their crimes.

They perpetrate crimes in the ways of Evil but seek to make God their accomplice by rendering imposing thanksgiving services to Him. They congratulate themselves on their successes in brutally eliminating all the elements that opposed their Will, exaggerate their own deeds and seek to involve God in their misdoings by pretending to be recipients of His Grace.

A Darkened God

There no relenting pity could have place,
But ruthless strength and iron moods had sway,
A dateless sovereignty of terror and gloom:
This took the figure of a darkened God
Revered by the racked wretchedness he had made,
Who held in thrall a miserable world,
And helpless hearts nailed to unceasing woe
Adored the feet that trampled them into mire.

In this world there is no quarter for pity. An unpitying, unyielding, oppressive strength dominates. Terror and gloom rule as of ancient right. Theirs is a dark God who has created this world of misery, woe and cruelty and who is adored and worshipped by the very victims of his wickedness.

World of Sorrow and Hate

It was a world of sorrow and of hate,
Sorrow with hatred for its lonely joy,
Hatred with others’ sorrow as its feast;
A bitter rictus curled the suffering mouth;
A tragic cruelty saw its ominous chance.

It is a world where sorrow and hate are supreme, each feeling and vying with the other. Sorrow takes a peculiar joy in hating and hatred fattens on the sorrow of others. Sorrow hardens these wretched creatures and gives a bitter twist to their expressions. In their pain and suffering they grow cruel and cruelty gets an opportunity to flourish.

Hate the Black Archangel

Hate was the black archangel of that realm;
It glowed, a sombre jewel in the heart
Burning the soul with its malignant rays,
And wallowed in its fell abysm of might.

The highest Power of this world is black Hate. Hate is the most cherished and guarded of possessions.

Treasured in the heart of beings, it burns up the soul with its evil and glories in that horrid bottomless perversity of power.

Even Objects Exude Evil

These passions even objects seemed to exude,—
For mind overflowed into the inanimate
That answered with the wickedness it received,—
Against their users used malignant powers,
Hurt without hands and strangely, suddenly slew,
Appointed as instruments of an unseen doom.

It is not the beings alone of this world who indulge in these passions of hate, cruelty, evil and the like. Even inanimate objects emanate these evil radiations. The wickedness flows from the mind into the inanimate which then responds to every situation with like reactions. The objects harm their users with their evil powers and at unexpected moments, even slay them mysteriously. They act as agents of an overshadowing but invisible Doom.

Evil Environment Worsens Evil

Or they made themselves a fateful prison wall
Where men condemned wake through the creeping hours
Counted by the tollings of an ominous bell.

An evil environment worsened evil souls:
All things were conscious there and all perverse.

Or these objects hold the inhabitants of the prison world to obsession; they are helplessly enslaved with no prospect of relief, relentlessly moving to a consuming finale. The souls here are by nature evil; but the evil in the atmosphere makes them even worse. All things pulsate with a perverted consciousness that infects their users.

Plunge into Night

In this infernal realm he dared to press
Even into its deepest pit and darkest core,
Perturbed its tenebrous base, dared to contest
Its ancient privileged right and absolute force:
In Night he plunged to know her dreadful heart,
In Hell he sought the root and cause of Hell.

Aswapathy has the daring to plunge even into such a forbidding dark realm, into its very core, and question its right to exist and persist so powerfully. Because of his luminous presence the foundation of this dark world is agitated by the fear of being dissolved by the invading Light. He delves into the nether depths in order to perceive and know the real nature, root and cause of this Hell and its secrecies.

Anguished Gulfs Open in his Breast

Its anguished gulfs opened in his own breast;
He listened to clamours of its crowded pain,
The heart-beats of its fatal loneliness.

Above was a chill deaf eternity.

The flow of life in this Hell is not something outside himself for Aswapathy to analyse and study. It becomes one with his own life and he feels the anguish of its depths in his own being; the call of its mounting pain clamours in his ears and the throbs of its solitary suffering are heard by him. Eternity that looms above is aloof and silent; it does not seem to hear the wail of distress from below.

Passage of Doom

In vague tremendous passages of Doom
He heard the goblin voice that guides to slay,
And faced the enchantments of the demon Sign,
And traversed the ambush of the opponent Snake.

In his wary journey through vague but huge passages of this Doomland, Aswapathy hears mischievous voices that misguide to places of danger, sees attractive signs that hide diabolic designs and crosses treacherous traps laid by the vile Enemy.

Endures Assaults and Bears Wounds

In menacing tracts, in tortured solitudes
Companionless he roamed through desolate ways
Where the red Wolf waits by the fordless stream
And Death’s black eagles scream to the precipice,
And met the hounds of bale who hunt men’s hearts
Baying across the veldts of Destiny,
In footless battlefields of the Abyss
Fought shadowy combats in mute eyeless depths,
Assaults of Hell endured and Titan strokes
And bore the fierce inner wounds that are slow to heal.

Aswapathy walks through areas full of threatening danger; alone, he negotiates the deserted and exhausted barren tracts, passes the danger points where the nether agents of Destruction, Death and Evil, lie waiting for their prey. He gives fight to the slippery forces of this abysmal Kingdom in battlefields on which it is difficult to get even a footing. He suffers their assaults and bears the inner wounds inflicted by the powerful enemy—wounds that heal much slower than wounds external.

Poison Draughts

A prisoner of a hooded magic Force,
Captured and trailed in Falsehood’s lethal net
And often strangled in the noose of grief,
Or cast on the grim morass of swallowing doubt,
Or shut into pits of error and despair,
He drank her poison draughts till none was left.

Aswapathy experiences to the full every kind of attack that the hosts of Hell can launch—possession by the spell of illusion, entanglement in the fine spread of falsehood, suffocation under the hold of grief, exposure to endless doubt, envelopment by error and despair.He exhausts the poison of the Night.

Ordeal of Mali Er's Denial

In a world where neither hope nor joy could come
The ordeal he suffered of evil’s absolute reign,
Yet kept intact his spirit’s radiant truth.

Incapable of motion or of force,
In Matter’s blank denial gaoled and blind,
Pinned to the black inertia of our base
He treasured between his hands his flickering soul.

Aswapathy subjects himself to the ordeal of the supremacy of Evil in this world where neither hope nor joy is possible. But through all the struggle he keeps unsullied and unreduced the luminous power of his soul. Held a prisoner in the total inertia, obscurity and negation of Matter, it is extremely hard for him to guard his soul safe from threatened extinction.

Mindless Void

His being ventured into mindless Void,
Intolerant gulfs that knew not thought nor sense;
Thought ceased, sense failed, his soul still saw and knew.

Here in the nether Void that opens before him there is no entry for sense or thought; there is no mind at all. Both sense and thought fail to function. However, Aswapathy is able to perceive and know with his luminous soul. The soul does the work of both. Both sense and thought prove to be dispensable instruments of the soul.

Atomic Parcellings

In atomic parcellings of the Infinite
Near to the dumb beginnings of lost Self,
He felt the curious small futility
Of the creation of material things.

He probes deeper and deeper till he comes to the tiniest, microscopic formations of the Infinite Spirit almost at the point of extinction, which is also the starting point of creation. He begins to wonder, at this stage, very near dissolution, if there is any purpose at all in material creation.

He Sounds the Mystery

Or, stifled in the Inconscient’s hollow dusk,
He sounded the mystery dark and bottomless
Of the enormous and unmeaning deeps
Whence struggling life in a dead universe rose.

There in the stark identity lost by mind
He felt the sealed sense of the insensible world
And a mute wisdom in the unknowing Night.

He feels suffocated in the gaping depths of the Inconscient, but tries to find the truth of these dark, huge and blank gulfs from whose womb life has arisen in this lifeless universe and struggles to maintain itself. And there in that state of sheer identity that the mind cannot attain, he becomes aware that behind the apparent insensibility of things there is a sense albeit veiled; within the black Inconscience there broods a Consciousness unexpressed.

Into Abysmal Secrecy

Into the abysmal secrecy he came
Where darkness peers from her mattress, grey and nude
And stood on the last locked subconscient’s floor
Where Being slept unconscious of its thoughts
And built the world not knowing what it built.

Aswapathy arrives at the very own chamber of Darkness and looks in from the last threshold of the Subconscient. Here the Being that has to evolve in full consciousness and manifest the Spirit is in a dormant state, not yet awake to Thought; but its Power goes on to effectuate the underlying Will and build the universe even though it is not overtly conscious of what it is doing and why.

Secret Key of Nature's Change

There waiting its hour the future lay unknown,
There is the record of the vanished stars.

There in the slumber of the cosmic Will
He saw the secret key of Nature’s change.

A light was with him, an invisible hand
Was laid upon the error and the pain
Till it became a quivering ecstasy,
The shock of sweetness of an arm’s embrace.

In this secrecy lies the future that is yet to unveil itself; here also is the tablet-memory of the past that has disappeared from view. Here is the Cosmic Will in trance holding the secret of the changing movement of Nature. All that Nature does is really directed by this Will underlying the Creation. Aswapathy is able to perceive all this as there is a light guiding and helping him to see. Then he beholds a remarkable change in the scene. A veiled Hand is laid on the prevailing error and pain and under its sweet impact they soon turn into a throbbing ecstasy.

Night the Eternal's Veil

He saw in Night the Eternal’s shadowy veil,
Knew death for a cellar of the house of life,
In destruction felt creation’s hasty pace,
Knew loss as the price of a celestial gain
And hell as a short cut to heaven’s gates.

He sees not only the conversion of pain into ecstasy at the touch of the Spirit. But he begins to see the truth of many of the other negative opposites also. He perceives that dark Night is only a mask, a veil assumed by the Luminous Eternal for working more effectively, death only a process in the making of newer and newer forms by life, destruction a rapid step in the movement of construction, loss a condition for making a higher gain since unless a loss is sustained no fresh effect is called for to effect a gain which turns out to be larger than the past one, and even hell a near passage to the Kingdom of Heaven for the purificatory result of suffering expedites the transmutation into a higher existence.

Nature Expunges her Mechanical Code

Then in Illusion’s occult factory
And in the Inconscient’s magic printing house
Torn were the formats of the primal Night
And shattered the stereotypes of Ignorance.

Alive, breathing a deep spiritual breath,
Nature expunged her stiff mechanical code
And the articles of the bound soul’s contract,
Falsehood gave back to Truth her tortured shape.

The tricks of Illusion, the mechanical issues of the Dark Inconscient and the models erected by Ignorance, are all cast aside. Animated by the Spirit, Nature comes to life as it were, throws off her rigid mechanical pattern and disregards the conditions that hold the soul captive. Falsehood yields and only a suffering-worn form of Truth remains.

Transfiguration

Annulled were the tables of the law of pain,
And in their place grew luminous characters.

The skilful Penman’s unseen finger wrote
His swift intuitive calligraphy;
Earth’s forms were made his divine documents,
The wisdom embodied mind could not reveal,
Inconscience chased from the world’s voiceless breast;
Transfigured were the fixed schemes of reasoning Thought.

The rules of the law of pain are gradually displaced by those of light and joy. The Creator-Spirit ushers in a new dispensation in which things of the earth are converted into heaven's values, the wisdom that is beyond the scope of mind to hold is given form and made effective, inconscience is thrust out from the muted world-being and the rigid patterns of reason-based thinking are transformed into suppler movements of the higher mind.

Name Inscribed on the Dim Heart

Arousing consciousness in things inert,
He imposed upon dark atom and dumb mass
The diamond script of the Imperishable,
Inscribed on the dim heart of fallen things
A paean-song of the free Infinite
And the Name, foundation of eternity,

In things hitherto inert and asleep, a consciousness is awakened. On the tiniest formulation of the dark Inconscient, as on the mute extended formations, the message of the Eternal is stamped. The obscured heart of the fallen creation is given wings of aspiration to soar into the freedom of the Infinite Spirit and the power of the Name of the Eternal is planted in it.

The Name is a charge of the stress of the Spirit embodied in the Form to which it relates and hence it is a vibrant evocator of the truth it designates.

Lyric of Love Traced on the Cells

And traced on the awake exultant cells
In the ideographs of the Ineffable
The lyric of the love that waits through Time
And the mystic volume of the Book of Bliss
And the message of the superconscient Fire.

The awakened vibrant cells are charged with the embryonic stirrings of the Divine Love that is to manifest in the fullness of Time, of the Divine Bliss that is the origin and the goal of all, of the Luminous Spirit on the summits above that beckons the creation.

Hell Splits

Then Life beat pure in the corporeal frame;
The infernal Gleam died and could slay no more.

Hell split across its huge abrupt façade
As if a magic building were undone,
Night opened and vanished like a gulf of dream.

Then is life able to begin its true and pure movements in its physical embodiment. The interfering and deforming element from Darkness and Falsehood is no more in a position to vitiate and pull down. The imposing edifice of Hell cracks asunder. Night is no more; it has vanished like an evil dream.

Matter And Spirit Become One

Into being’s gap scooped out as empty Space
In which she has filled the place of absent God,
There poured a wide intimate and blissful Dawn,
Healed were all things that Time’s torn heart had made
And sorrow could live no more in Nature’s breast:
Division ceased to be, for God was there.

The soul lit the conscious body with its ray,
Matter and Spirit mingled and were one.

In the Being's space purged of Evil and Night there occurs a downpour of vast Bliss and Light. All the wounds are healed. Sorrow has no more place to live. The Oneness of God being manifest, there is no more room for division. The body becomes conscious and is illumined with the light of the indwelling soul. The gulf between Matter and Spirit is at last healed; both fuse together and become one.