Book-2-Study-Canto-10

Book Two: Canto X

The Kingdom and Godheads of the Little Mind

Summary
Above the paradise of Life are the realms of Mind, tranquil, still.

First, Aswapathy finds a silver-grey expanse parting the flow of Life from the poise of Thought, a meeting ground of Knowledge and Ignorance. At the lower end there is a dim, small-range mind ever turned outward—the material mind. This mind sees everything in terms of Matter and lives from moment to moment in its search for Knowledge.

Above this belt he steps into the realm of an early Sun out of whose rays the mind has come to be formed. Here an Intelligence is at work mediating between the Supermind above and the Nescience below, linking up gross Matter and its forms with the Consciousness looming from above. It enables Matter to think. Its field is still Ignorance; Knowledge is not yet in its grasp. This reasoning Intelligence with its instrument of logic cuts up Truth into bits and erects a wholly artificial pattern of the universe. However, invasion of Light from above in the form of intuitions, inspirations, myths, effect a breakthrough and living Knowledge begins to take shape and lead the earth onward.

Here are the first forward movements of the mind, searching for Knowledge, looking for fresh discoveries. Her first task is to teach Ignorance to awake to the Knowledge within. But mind itself must first learn to recognise the truth beyond the many transient truths glimpsed by it. The mind has indeed worked, though cautiously, for the growth of the Light of Knowledge and has cut a passage from the Night of Inconscience towards the Light of Omniscience.

There are three gradations of this Mind-Power: the physical mind, the life or desire-mind, the reasoning mind. Of these the first is the mechanical mind ever exposed to its habitual grooves of movement, inert, unchanging, repetitive, limited to physical forms and senses. This has its role in creation: to fix things in type. All movement, all new influx, is arrested and reduced by this power to its own established pattern.

Next comes the desire-mind, ever on the move, claiming everything as food for its hunger. Imaginative, adventurous, impulsive, it is never satisfied, never content with what is gained. It darts forth in force and often catches what calm intelligence would miss. Instinct and intuition play a good part in its action.

The last and the greatest of these powers is Reason. She looks upon the universe as an object to be studied and analysed piece by piece and seeks to impose a logical order and system on everything. She finds out the process of Nature and tries to remove Ignorance and harmonise all by thought.

Much that is not on the surface escapes Reason. She conceptualises what she sees and weaves webs of abstract thought in her attempt to explain things. Indeed she releases herself from the trap of the senses but she cannot break out of the walls of the limited mind. Her constructed knowledge is shadowed by doubt and at some time or other is questioned and breaks down. There is no finality to her knowledge, she cannot perceive the whole Truth at the same time.

Her labours are inconclusive. She can support with care and with equal care demolish the same. Her first reading of the material universe is that it is the working of a huge self-operating machinery, unconscious and mechanical. Life and Consciousness—such as they are—are products of this action; spirit, mystic feelings, etc. are all fancies; Matter is the sole reality.

But this Thought breaks down at the first touch of the Unseen. Flashes from the Unknown startle this mind and open her eyes to glimpses of other realities. The ground beneath her is pulled out. All reveals itself to be the movement of a Force, a clash and strife, a dance of Kali. Reason wonders if Force is the final certitude and she seeks to grasp this Power and organise all life into an order, to cut out all things into a standardised perfection. But the elaborate constructions of Reason are upset by fresh heavings of Knowledge from within and new prospects open up of linking up Earth and Heaven, Life and Spirit, the finite and the Infinite.

Awakened Reason is aware of the greater reality behind the surfaces of things, beyond her stretchings of conceptual logic. She is aware that her best is only a half-knowledge.

Reason is not the creator, nor is Reason capable of seeing the whole Truth. What Reason is occupied with is only the outer robe, form, not the real body of Truth. She cuts up the Indivisible. Her knowings are only the husks of the grains of Knowledge that wait within. Announcers of the greater Truth, agents of the completer Knowledge arrive time and again—inspirations and intuitions that are the harbingers of the vaster Gnosis.

Above these three spheres stand two more Powers of the Mind: the Life-Thought which breaks down the little walls built by the three smaller powers and soars wide and far mapping vistas beyond the normal ranges of the labouring mind and the pure Thought-Mind, luminous in its transcendent status, impassively surveying the cosmic act.

Journeying cannot Cease

This too must now be overpassed and left,
As all must be until the Highest is gained
In whom the world and self grow true and one:
Till that is reached our journeying cannot cease.

Many are the stations reached by man in the course of his evolutionary journey. Each station is but a halting place and however attractive and satisfying it may be, the traveller cannot tarry there for long; he is obliged to move on to the next and thence to the further next, till he arrives at the terminal, the highest where the full truth of all is gained, where the unity of oneself, the world and God is realised. The journey cannot cease at any intermediate stage which can give only a partial truth.

Aswapath7 has been in the satisfying paradise of the Life-Gods. But he cannot stay there for ever. He sees that that too is a stage which he has to leave behind and move further on in his journey upward till he reaches the supreme Plane of the highest all-reconciling Truth.

A Nameless Goal Beckons Beyond

Always a nameless goal beckons beyond,
Always ascends the zigzag of the gods
And upward points the spirit’s climbing Fire.

The path does not stop at any of the points on the route to the Destination, which remains unknown to the traveller still in the belt of Ignorance. Each station points to the next and however tortuous the way laid by the gods presiding over the course of the evolution, it always ascends from plane to plane. So too burns upwards the flame of Godward aspiration in the heart of every created being.

Lifted to Zenith Bliss

This breath of hundred-hued felicity
And its pure heightened figure of Time’s joy,
Tossed upon waves of flawless happiness,
Hammered into single beats of ecstasy,
This fraction of the spirit’s integer
Caught into a passionate greatness of extremes,
This limited being lifted to zenith bliss,
Happy to enjoy one touch of things supreme,
Packed into its sealed small infinity,
Its endless time-made world outfacing Time,
A little output of God’s vast delight.

The being is indeed delighted beyond limits while in this world of uninterrupted joy and felicity. However small it may be compared to the infinity of the Supreme, it is permitted to taste the concentrated bliss of the Eternal and the boundless Vast. AR this, however, is only a fraction of the immensity of God’s Delight.

Ceased Half-Way to Heaven

The moments stretched towards the eternal Now,
The hours discovered immortality,
But, satisfied with their sublime contents,
On peaks they ceased whose tops half-way to heaven
Pointed to an apex they could never mount,
To a grandeur in whose air they could not live.

Time appears to stand still and immortality is unveiled. However, Life reaches its zenith half-way to the divine heavens and climbs no further. It is content with its glory. The peaks attained point to still higher altitudes but life cannot climb to them and yet live.

Heights Decline Greater Adventure

Inviting to their high and exquisite sphere,
To their secure and fine extremities
This creature who hugs his limits to feel safe,
These heights declined a greater adventure’s call.

These heights of the life-world attract with their endless joys and intensities and beckon the being who is loth to come out of his narrow confines of the physical and smaller life-limits in which alone he feels secure. But they themselves are reluctant to respond to the call of still greater heights. They refuse to move out of their own grooves.

Golden Posts of Bliss

A glory and sweetness of satisfied desire
Tied up the spirit to golden posts of bliss.

It could not house the wideness of a soul
Which needed all infinity for its home.

The splendour and happiness of satisfaction that prevail in this great life-world keep the spirit chained to the posts of bliss which, however glittering and attractive they may be, are still agents of confinement. The soul that is infinite in its intrinsic nature cannot get here the necessary scope and freedom to live in its native wideness. It is a golden cage.

Lucent Realms of Mind

A memory soft as grass and faint as sleep,
The beauty and call receding sank behind
Like a sweet song heard fading far away
Upon the long high road to Timelessness.

Above was an ardent white tranquillity.

A musing spirit looked out on the worlds
And like a brilliant clambering of skies
Passing through clarity to an unseen Light
Large lucent realms of Mind from stillness shone.

However, the spell and pull of this paradisal world recede as a sweet memory sinking past like the notes of an enchanting music fading away from the ears of one on the way to where Time is not. Above presses a pure tranquillity. A brooding spirit looks out on all creation. The air is one of utter clarity with a lustrous glow on the heights. Wide and bright realms of Mind set in profound stillness come into view.

First a Silver-Grey Expanse

But first he met a silver-grey expanse
Where Day and Night had wedded and were one:
It was a tract of dim and shifting rays
Parting Life’s sentient flow from Thought’s self-poise.

The first tracts of this new realm are somewhat dimly lighted and grey. Here meet and commingle light and darkness. Here also is the demarcation between the ceaseless flow of restless life and the sustained firm poise of the Thought-mind which stands above and aloof from the eddies and currents of the sea of life.

Knowledge and Ignorance
A coalition of uncertaintiesThere exercised uneasy governmentOn a ground reserved for doubt and reasoned guess, A rendezvous of Knowledge with Ignorance.

Here nothing is certain and definite. All is an accommodation of uncertainties; doubts and logic-led guesses, characteristic of the lower belts of Mind, hold full sway. It is the meeting-ground between Knowledge flowing from the heights and Ignorance reigning below.

A Mind close to Earthly Nature

At its low extremity held difficult sway
A mind that hardly saw and slowly found;
Its nature to our earthly nature close
And kin to our precarious mortal thought
That looks from soil to sky and sky to soil
But knows not the below nor the beyond,
It only sensed itself and outward things.

At the lower end of this region is a mind that somehow manages to exist, but can hardly see or find what it seeks. It is a physical mind partaking the character of physical nature. It is of the same kind as the limited human thought which is confined to the ranges of its physical senses and hence unable to grasp what is outside them—either above or below. It is aware only of itself and of what is external to it.

First Means of Slow Ascent

This was the first means of our slow ascent
From the half-conscience of the animal soul
Living in a crowded press of shape-events
In a realm it cannot understand nor change:
Only it sees and acts in a given scene
And feels and joys and sorrows for a while.

This mind has been the first step of the ladder of ascent for the evolving soul from the stage of half-consciousness of the animal living amidst a rush of movements and forms in a domain that it can neither understand nor alter to its advantage. It can only see and react to things as they present themselves, feel their impact and experience joy or sorrow as long as they last, but nothing more.

Ideas that Drive the Spirit

The ideas that drive the obscure embodied spirit
Along the roads of suffering and desire
In a world that struggles to discover Truth,
Found here their power to be and Nature-Force.

The earth-world is in the throes of the quest for Truth. The emerging spirit encased in a living body is the focal centre of this movement and the ideas that impel and goad that spirit on the tortuous ways of Ignorance towards Knowledge derive their strength and force from this realm of mind.

Birth of Material Mind

Here are devised the forms of an ignorant life
That sees the empiric fact as settled law,
Labours for the hour and not for eternity
And trades its gains to meet the moment’s call:
The slow process of a material mind
Which serves the body it should rule and use
And needs to lean upon an erring sense,
Was born in that luminous obscurity.

Here originate the movements and forms of life in ignorance which mistakes phenomenal experience for the established truth of things, concentrates upon the immediate moment losing sight of the eternity that stretches beyond. Here also, in this glittering obscurity, begins the movement of the physical mind which follows and serves the body it is intended to lead and use, the mind that depends upon the misleading senses for its data.

Material Mind

Advancing tardily from a limping start,
Crutching hypothesis upon argument,
Throning its theories as certitudes,
It reasons from the half-known to the unknown,
Ever constructing its frail house of thought,
Ever undoing the web that it has spun.

This mind is unsure of its starting point and moves hesitantly. Nevertheless, using the support of argued hypothesis, it erects its own theories and asserts them as absolute truth. It proceeds, not from confirmed full Knowledge but from its half-knowledge, to grasp what is not yet known. It goes on weaving filmy webs of thought only to discard them in favour of further constructions equally shaky.

A Twilight Sage

A twilight sage whose shadow seems to him Self,
Moving from minute to brief minute lives;
A king dependent on his satellites
Signs the decrees of ignorant ministers,
A judge in half-possession of his proofs,
A voice clamant of uncertainty’s postulates,
An architect of knowledge, not its source.

This half-lit mind mistakes its own penumbra for reality and in its limited vision it hops from moment to moment. Utterly dependent upon the workings of the sense-faculties, it acts upon their misleading reports. It judges on insufficient data, argues from unsure premises. It is not in possession of knowledge but attempts to confront it.

Bondslave

This powerful bondslave of his instruments
Thinks his low station Nature’s highest top,
Oblivious of his share in all things made
And haughtily humble in his own conceit
Believes himself a spawn of Matter’s mud
And takes his own creations for his cause.

This material mind subjects itself to the rule of the senses which ought to serve it as its instruments. It imagines its status, which is in fact the lowest in the ranges of the Mind, to be the highest possible for Nature to attain. It is not aware of the part it has played in Nature’s evolution and thinks itself to be a creature of physical Matter, whereas in truth, it is it that moulds and rules Matter in the measure of its force. But it sticks to this ignorant conception of itself in aggressive humility.

Our Climb to Eternal Light

To eternal light and knowledge meant to rise,
Up from man’s bare beginning is our climb;
Out of earth’s heavy smallness we must break,
We must search our nature with spiritual fire:
An insect crawl preludes our glorious flight;
Our human state cradles the future god,
Our mortal frailty an immortal force.

Man is not the summit of Nature’s evolution. His is but a bare beginning of an ascent which is to lead to the peaks of eternal Light and Knowledge. We must not stay content with our small lot. We have to break out of our small earthly confines, explore our nature with the torch of the soul. The precarious pace of the crawling insect is only the beginning of a movement that leads to a soaring flight; man is the embryo of a god to be delivered; even the weakness of mortal man holds in potential a force that is immortal.

Half-Risen Sun

At the glow-worm top of these pale glimmer-realms
Where dawn-sheen gambolled with the native dusk
And helped the Day to grow and Night to fail,
Escaping over a wide and shimmering bridge,
He came into a realm of early Light
And the regency of a half-risen sun.

Out of its rays our mind’s full orb was born.

Aswapathy pushes across these regions of twilight, traverses their summits where light begins to gain over obscurity and emerges into a realm of a half-risen sun. From the rays of this incomplete sun is fashioned the full figure of the Mind.

Thought and Doubt

Appointed by the Spirit of the Worlds
To mediate with the unknowing depths,
A prototypal deft Intelligence
Half-poised on equal wings of thought and doubt
Toiled ceaselessly twixt being’s hidden ends.

Here at work is the original skilful Intelligence missioned by the Creative Spirit to act as a mediator between the summits of superconscience above and the depths of inconscience below. This Mind functions through an equal operation of thought and doubt, its constituent elements vying with each other.

Mind’s Tent Pitched

A Secrecy breathed in life’s moving act;
A covert nurse of Nature’s miracles,
It shaped life’s wonders out of Matter’s mud:
It cut the pattern of the shapes of things,
It pitched mind’s tent in the vague ignorant Vast.

There is an air of secrecy over this realm where the patterns of life-creation out of obscure Matter are planned and cut out by the Intelligence at work behind the veil. It creates room for the Mind to enter and function—however tentatively in the immense territories of Ignorance.

Master Magician

A master Magician of measure and device
Has made an eternity from recurring forms
And to the wandering spectator thought
Assigned a seat on the inconscient stage.

This Power of Intelligence has shown extraordinary skill in weaving a pattern of eternity from the forms that appear and reappear in the flow of life. And to thought, ever on the go, it has provided a place to station itself on the grounds of inconscience from where to witness the spectacle of life.

Will of Intelligence

On earth by the will of this Arch-Intelligence
A bodiless energy put on Matter’s robe;
Proton and photon served the imager Eye
To change things subtle into a physical world
And the invisible appeared as shape
And the impalpable was felt as mass:

It is by the impelling Will of this original creative Intelligence that formless energy is driven to gather itself in the form of Matter. The minutest elements constituting the subtle energies combine under the directing gaze to produce the physical world and thus what was unseen comes to be seen, what was unfelt comes to be palpable, felt.

Name and Form

Magic of percept joined with concept’s art
And lent to each object an interpreting name:
Idea was disguised in a body’s artistry,
And by a strange atomic law’s mystique
A frame was made in which the sense would put
Its symbol picture of the universe.

Perception of the, ensouling truth and conception of its formulation together make it possible to name each form according to the power it embodies. The originating idea is concealed in the attractive form of its result—body. An apparatus is erected in which the senses pour in a representational report of the universe.

Link up with the Ray

Even a greater miracle was done.

The mediating light linked body’s power,
The sleep and dreaming of the tree and plant,
The animal’s vibrant sense, the thought in man,
To the effulgence of a Ray above.

And there is something more, equally or still more miraculous. The intervening light of the dynamic Intelligence links up the force in the material body, the movements of the dormant and partial awareness in the plant, the sensational consciousness in the animal and the thinking activity of the mind in man with the Splendour of the creative Spirit above.

Matter’s Right to Think

Its skill endorsing Matter’s right to think
Cut sentient passages for the mind of flesh
And found a means for Nescience to know.

Offering its little squares and cubes of word
As figured substitutes for reality,
A mummified mnemonic alphabet,
It helped the unseeing force to read her works.

A buried consciousness arose in her
And now she dreams herself human and awake.

Matter too is enabled to think. The physical mind is provided with the doors of the senses for its functioning. Even Nescience is given a way of knowing. With the help of representation by words and aid of set letters the toiling force is taught to see and follow her workings_ A consciousness that was latent hitherto emerges and a kind of dreamy awareness ensues.

Knowledge could not Come

But all was still a mobile Ignorance;
Still Knowledge could not come and firmly grasp
This huge invention seen as a universe.

With all this, however, true knowledge is not yet. There is no definite grasp in knowledge of the huge universe that has appeared. The reality of things is not known, only its representations are played with.

Rigid Artifice of Logic

A specialist of logic’s hard machine
Imposed its rigid artifice on the soul;
An aide of the inventor intellect,
It cut Truth into manageable bits
That each might have his ration of thought-food,
Then new-built Truth’s slain body by its art:
A robot exact and serviceable and false
Displaced the spirit’s finer view of things:
A polished engine did the work of a god.

intellect which is ever active fashioning patterns on its own plane and it fragments the integral Truth into so many little bits and erects each as a self-existent truth. It then proceeds to build the picture of the Whole by bringing together these several parts in some kind of unifying design. Thus is the true living vision of the spirit displaced by the utilitarian but false, artificial and mechanical construction of the reason. A glittering mental mechanism takes the place of the divine artisan.

True Knowledge not Found

None the true body found, its soul seemed dead:
None had the inner look which sees Truth’s whole;
All glorified the glittering substitute.

Naturally none finds the true knowledge this way. The soul of knowledge appears to have died. The natural inner vision which sees truth in its totality is absent; what acts its part is a construction of the mind simulating a whole view.

Chaos of Rebel Light

Then from the secret heights a wave swept down,
A brilliant chaos of rebel light arose;
It looked above and saw the dazzling peaks,
It looked within and woke the sleeping god.

At this stage when the reasoning mind has erected its own picture of truth and true knowledge is displaced by an artificial put-together of the logical intellect, a wave of consciousness pours down and a rebel light that refuses to be schooled by the teacher intellect breaks out. It casts its eyes upwards and sees luminous heights; it turns its flash inwards and wakes up the God that is dormant within.

Imagination and Inspiration

Imagination called her shining squads
That venture into undiscovered scenes
Where all the marvels lurk none yet has known:
Lifting her beautiful and miraculous head,
She conspired with inspiration’s sister brood
To fill thought’s skies with glimmering nebulae.

Imagination has entered the scene with her bright hosts who run in all directions and discover marvels that are lying unknown to the mind of reason. She moves into action and along with her companion hosts of Inspiration, disturbs the placid skies of settled thought and fills them with new, bright impressions of light.

Imagination widens the field and creates openings for the entry of Inspiration.

From Dim to Radiant Breasts

A bright Error fringed the mystery-altar’s frieze;
Darkness grew nurse to wisdom’s occult sun,
Myth suckled knowledge with her lustrous milk;
The infant passed from dim to radiant breasts.

The prevailing Ignorance is slowly yielding ground. Error is lighted up and pushed away to the fringe; out of darkness the light of wisdom is slowly emerging. Imagination draws inspiration from a radiant knowledge and grows from obscurity to light.

Nourishment of Soul’s Childhood

Thus worked the Power upon the growing world;
Its subtle craft withheld the full-orbed blaze,
Cherished the soul’s childhood and on fictions fed
Far richer in their sweet and nectarous sap
Nourishing its immature divinity
Than the staple or dry straw of Reason’s tilth,
Its heaped fodder of innumerable facts,
Plebian fare on which today we thrive.

This is the way the Wisdom-Power works. The full knowledge is not yet. The soul grows from stage to stage in its transition from ignorance to Knowledge. Imagination and its allied faculties help it with rich fare—not all of which is fact but nonetheless more entertaining and in the long run more productive than the dry matter-of-fact data supplied by reason.

Gold-Horned Herds

Thus streamed down from the realm of early Light,
Ethereal thinkings into Matter’s world;
Its gold-horned herds trooped into earth’s cave-heart.

This is the way in which movements of thought pour down from the first beginnings of the realms of Light into the material world. This is how thoughts not originated in the material base come to form in this world. The Vedic herds of the Sun troop into the hidden obscurities of the Earth.

The Golden Child began to Think

Its morning rays illume our twilight’s eyes,
Its young formations move the mind of earth
To labour and to dream and new-create,
To feel beauty’s touch and know the world and self:
The Golden Child began to think and see.

By means of these emanations from the realms of Light the mind of earth is slowly lit up and induced to think, to dream and to create anew. It is cultured to respond to beauty and helped to grasp the inner and the outer world in its understanding. The soul is enabled to perceive and to conceive.

Mind’s First Forward Steps

In those bright realms are Mind’s first forward steps.

Ignorant of all but eager to know all,
Its curious slow enquiry there begins;
Ever searching it grasps at shapes around,
Ever it hopes to find out greater things.

These are the regions where the mind begins to step out of its native ignorance and emerge into the first belt of the light of Knowledge. Slowly it presses forward with its steps of enquiry, catches hold of the forms it comes across, scrutinises, and moves further in quest of greater discoveries.

On an Infant’s Scale

Ardent and golden gleamed with sunrise fires,
Alert it lives upon invention’s verge.

Yet all it does is on an infant’s scale,
As if the cosmos were a nursery game,
Mind, life the playthings of a Titan’s babe.

Lit by the glow of this early dawn, the mind is constantly on the move and is alert on the watch for new possible openings around. With all that, however, what it succeeds in doing is something trifling, little. It is as if the whole universe were a nursery game for a Titan’s infant with life and mind for its toys.

Fort of Sand

As one it works who builds a mimic fort
Miraculously stable for a while,
Made of the sands upon a bank of Time
Mid an occult eternity’s shoreless sea.

The constructions of this mind are as fragile as little sand-forts erected in play on the shores of the sea. They last somehow for a while but fire washed away by the first wave that slashes across. The edifices of the limited reason are destroyed in the same way by the first touch of a larger Knowledge.

Small Keen Instrument

A small keen instrument the great Puissance chose,
An arduous pastime passionately pursues;
To teach the Ignorance is her difficult charge,
Her thought starts from an original nescient Void
And what she teaches she herself must learn
Arousing knowledge from its sleepy lair.

The mind is, after all, a small though a sharp instrument fashioned by the creative Spirit for a definite purpose in evolution. It is meant to act upon the Ignorance that settles thick over this lower creation. The thought faculty of the mind grows from the soil of nescience at its roots; slowly awareness develops into thought and as this faculty gets organised by mind-culture, the Knowledge that is latent in the being is awakened.

Daemon Within

For knowledge comes not to us as a guest
Called into our chamber from the outer world;
A friend and inmate of our secret self,
It hid behind our minds and fell asleep
And slowly wakes beneath the glows of life;
The mighty daemon lies unshaped within,
To evoke, to give it form is Nature’s task.

Knowledge arises from within. It does not come from outside. It is there latent in the depths of the being, lying untapped behind the veil of the mind’s activity. As life grows and evolves in consciousness, this knowledge wakes up. To awake this slumbering deity and to set it into movement is the task of Nature.

Chaos of the True and False

All was a chaos of the true and false,
Mind sought amid deep mists of Nescience;
It looked within itself but saw not God.

When the mind began to enquire for truth, for knowledge of the truth of things, everything was mixed up. It was a medley of the true and the false. The searching mind was stumbling in the obscurites of the basal Nescience. When it looked into itself it was unable to discover there the truth of God. Neither within nor without could it come upon this truth.

Truth and Transient Truths

A material interim diplomacy
Denied the truth that transient truths might live
And hid the deity in creed and guess
That the World-Ignorance might grow slowly wise.

Indeed the mind concocted truths galore, but the real truth was not found. The creative Intelligence permitted this reign of short-lived truths and the denial of the lasting truth with a purpose. It let the deity of true knowledge be covered with outgrowths of mind-made creeds and conjectures so that the prevailing Ignorance might of itself slowly learn its error and grow towards Knowledge.

Knowledge imposed from outside lacks roots and does not last. What is realised from within and naturally becomes part of the Consciousness is effective and permanent.

Slow Advance

This was the imbroglio made by sovereign Mind
Looking from a gleam-ridge into the Night
In its first tamperings with Inconscience:
Its alien dusk baffles her luminous eyes;
Her rapid hands must learn a cautious zeal;
Only a slow advance the earth can bear.

It was perhaps inevitable that the mind should land in such a confusion in its first and tentative dealings with the obscurities of Inconscience. Her quick movements had to be sustained and tempered with caution.In this world emerging from Inconscience and pervaded by Ignorance, progress has necessarily to be slow; a too rapid advance ends in failure and setback; each forward step needs to be integrated with the rest before the next can be safely ventured.

Handles Makeshift Instruments

Yet was her strength unlike the unseeing earth’s
Compelled to handle makeshift instruments
Invented by the life-force and the flesh.

Earth all perceives through doubtful images,
All she conceives in hazardous jets of sight,
Small lights kindled by touches of groping thought.

The mind, however, was not allowed by the governing Intelligence to follow the blind and mechanical motion of the earth. She was obliged to use the provisional instruments fashioned by the Life-force acting in the body and play an active role. Unlike her the earth is passive in her perception of the uncertain images and unsure conceptions that flash across in sporadic gleams of light thrown by the groping mind.

Expelling Unity

Incapable of the soul’s direct inlook
She sees by spasms and solders knowledge-scrap,
Makes Truth the slave-girl of her indigence,
Expelling Nature’s mystic unity
Cuts into quantum and mass the moving All;
She takes for measuring-rod her ignorance.

and what she gathers is only fragments of Knowledge. Truth has to submit to the poverty of the mind and shape herself accordingly. The mind rules out the spiritual oneness in Nature, fragments everything and studies and evaluates all in terms of her own ignorance.

Pontiff in her Domain

In her own domain a pontiff and a seer,
That greater Power with her half-risen sun
Wrought within limits but possessed her field;
She knew by a privilege of thinking force
And claimed an infant sovereignty of sight.

Though endowed with only a half-light, this Mind-Power—greater than earth and life-power—was supreme in her own mental domain, worked masterfully within the boundaries of her field. Her special faculty of thought was her means to know and she claimed the beginnings of authority to see aright.

Towards the Sun

In her eyes however darkly fringed was lit
The Archangel’s gaze who knows inspired his acts
And shapes a world in its far-seeing flame.

In her own realm she stumbles not nor fails,
But moves in boundaries of subtle power
Across which mind can step towards the sun.

The mind was ringed with limitations in its functionings but acting through the mind was a greater Power with a dynamic vision and will. Beyond mind is an unfailing Power. That is why the mind, in spite of all handicaps, does not fail in her own field. She forges step by step the way towards the plenary Sun of Knowledge across the belts of subtle existence.

Search for Omniscience

A candidate for a higher suzerainty,
A passage she cut through from Night to Light,
And searched for an ungrasped Omniscience.

The mind aspired for a greater supremacy than her own and worked her passage from the darkness of Inconscience and Ignorance into the domain of Light. And there she searched for the All-Knowledge which was beyond grasp.

Physical Mind (I)

A dwarf three-bodied trinity was her serf.

First, smallest of the three, but strong of limb,
A low-brow with a square and heavy jowl,
A pigmy Thought needing to live in bounds
For ever stooped to hammer fact and form.

The instrumentation of this mind-power has three tiers: the physical mind, the vital or desire-mind, the thought or reasoning mind.

The physical mind is the smallest and the most limited of the three, but it is solid in its physical mould, firmly rooted in the physical base. It is small in stature and clings to its safety in the bounds of physical form and fact. It dwells within these confines and goes on repeating its rounds in them.

Physical Mind (II)

Absorbed and cabined in external sight,
It takes its stand on Nature’s solid base.

A technician admirable, a thinker crude,
A riveter of Life to habit’s grooves,
Obedient to gross Matter’s tyranny,
A prisoner of the moulds in which it works,
It binds itself by what itself creates.

It always looks outward and loses itself in the external vision. It works only upon the solid data of physical Nature and its thought-movements are correspondingly primitive. It arrests the free movements of life and presses them to flow in the grooves of physical habit, subject to the laws of Matter. It forms moulds for its working but they become its prison-bars; it gets caught within its own constructions.

Physical Mind (III)

A slave of a fixed mass of absolute rules,
It sees as Law the habits of the world,
It sees as Truth the habits of the mind.

In its realm of concrete images and events
Turning in a worn circle of ideas
And ever repeating old familiar acts,
It lives content with the common and the known.

This physical mind is a slave of fixed habits which assume for it the absoluteness of laws. Habitual movements of thought are to it the sole Truth. It lives and functions in its petty circle of physical forms and movements, mechanically repeating its activities, turning round in the same thought-grooves. It is satisfied to live in the common rut of the obvious and the familiar.

Physical Mind (IV)

It loves the old ground that was its dwelling-place:
Abhorring change as an audacious sin,
Distrustful of each new discovery
Only it advances step by careful step
And fears as if a deadly abyss the unknown.

This mind sticks to its position and is averse to any change. It does not easily move forward. Even when it has to accept a new position and move, it is extremely reluctant to do so and advances very warily. It does not welcome adventure into the unknown; it regards it as a fearful source of danger.

Physical Mind (V)

A prudent treasurer of its ignorance,
It shrinks from adventure, blinks at glorious hope,
Preferring a safe foothold upon things
To the dangerous joy of wideness and of height.

It guards its fund of ignorance very zealously; it shrinks from every possibility of fresh Knowledge, gets dazed by every new light. It cherishes its own narrow and low ground, preferring its accustomed safety to the dangerous thrill of expansion, outward and upward.

Physical Mind (VI)

The world’s slow impressions on its labouring mind,
Tardy imprints almost indelible,
Increase their value by their poverty;
The old sure memories are its capital stock:

The slow but steady impacts of the world make a strong impression on this mind and acquire a firm lodgement in its layers. Their very pettiness forms an asset. They build themselves into an unfailing stock of memories for the mind to draw upon.

Physical Mind (VII)

Only what sense can grasp seems absolute:
External fact it figures as sole truth,
Wisdom identifies with the earthward look,
And things long known and actions always done
Are to its clinging hold a balustrade
Of safety on the perilous stair of Time.

To this mind the only reality is what can be grasped by the senses; what is an objective fact, physically seizable, that alone is true. To it wisdom is to be found in an earth-bound vision; what transcends the earth is of doubtful value. In its journey through uncertain Time, things that are familiar and movements that are ever repeated are its sole support. It does not venture beyond them.

Physical Mind (VIII)

Heaven’s trust to it are the established ancient ways,
Immutable laws man has no right to change,
A sacred legacy from the great dead past
Or the one road that God has made for life,
A firm shape of Nature never to be changed,
Part of the huge routine of the universe.

Old ways to which it is accustomed acquire a sanctity to this mind. It does not permit them to be altered; it clings to them as a precious heritage that shall not be interfered with. It invests them with the inviolable sanction of God, and regards them as moulds for ever fixed for the activities of Nature. It is a necessary and unchangeable part of the machinery of the universe.

Physical Mind (IX)

A smile from the Preserver of the Worlds
Sent down of old this guardian Mind to earth
That all might stand in their fixed changeless type
And from their secular posture never move.

This mind is a force for conservation of form, posture and movement in their changeless type, charged with its task as it were by Lord Vishnu the Preserver. It resists change and seeks to maintain all things in their status quo.

Physical Mind (X)

One sees it circling faithful to its task,
Tireless in an assigned tradition’s round;
In decayed and crumbling offices of Time
It keeps close guard in front of custom’s wall,

This mind always moves round and round but never a step forward; it revolves ceaselessly within the circle of the known tradition. It sticks to custom and does not allow it to be transgressed, however old and worn out it might be in the passage of time.

Physical Mind (XI)

Or in an ancient Night’s dim environs
It dozes on a little courtyard’s stones
And barks at every unfamiliar light
As at a foe who would break up its home,
A watch-dog of the spirit’s sense-railed house
Against intruders from the Invisible,
Nourished on scraps of life and Matter’s bones
In its kennel of objective certitude.

The range of this mind is very close to the obscurity of the basal Nescience. It has fenced its territory with the posts of the senses and it is obstinate in its refusal to admit fresh knowledge from beyond its domain. It confines itself to material data and to such bits of life-experience as are within its assimilative capacity. Ideas and perceptions from outside this scope are taboo.

Physical Mind (XII)

And yet behind it stands a cosmic might:
A measured Greatness keeps its vaster plan,
A fathomless sameness rhythms the tread of life;
The stars’ changeless orbits furrow inert Space,
A million species follow one mute Law.

With all its obvious limitations, however, this physical mind serves a purpose in the Great Plan of the creative Spirit. It is supported by the Greater Will in its movements of repetitive sameness which gives a kind of necessary rhythm to the steps of the life-force and imposes one dumb Law of changeless stability on the innumerable species that people this creation.

Physical Mind (XIII)

A huge inertness is the world’s defence,
Even in change is treasured changelessness;
Into inertia revolution sinks,
In a new dress the old resumes its role;
The Energy acts, the stable is its seal:
On Shiva’s breast is stayed the enormous dance.

This strong element of inertia, of resistance to change, is a deliberate protective construction of Nature against the imperious surge of life which seeks to sweep off everything before it. As a result even when things appear to change and move, they turn round and settle back into their old state.

The energy may be always in motion, but the stability on which it bases itself is the guarantee of its continuity. The Cosmic Dance of the Creative Puissance, Shakti, is supported on the stable breast of the Immutable Shiva.

Desire-Mind (I)

A fiery spirit came, next of the three.

A hunchback rider of the red Wild-Ass,
A rash Intelligence leaped down lion-maned
From the great mystic Flame that rings the worlds
And with its dire edge eats at being’s heart.

Thence sprang the burning vision of Desire.

Next in the gradation, higher than the physical mind is the vital mind or the mind of desire. This power draws from the flaming Force of Will that is active everywhere in this Creation, expressed in different forms on different levels of existence. In this mind a stunted intelligence is yoked to the all-consuming force of life; it is fired with a restless desire. This mind is shot through and through with desire. All its movements are coloured with the desire to possess everything it sees.

Desire-Mind (II)

A thousand shapes it wore, took numberless names:
A need of multitude and uncertainty
Pricks it for ever to pursue the One
On countless roads across the vasts of Time
Through circuits of unending difference.

This mind of desire moves in endless forms, is never content, never sure of itself, darting in every direction. That is how it pursues the One Reality, running across innumerable roads, round and round in varied circles.

Desire-Mind (III)

It burns all breasts with an ambiguous fire.

A radiance gleaming on a murky stream,
It flamed towards heaven, then sank, engulfed towards hell;
It climbed to drag down Truth into the mire
And used for muddy ends its brilliant Force.

This glowing mind of desire is astir in all, burning upward and outward, opening the way, high and low, but it cannot shoot high enough, it fails and falls. The truth it is able to touch, it contaminates and perverts. It infects everything with its desire.

Desire-Mind (IV)

A huge chameleon gold and blue and red
Turning to black and grey and lurid brown,
Hungry it stared from a mottled bough of life
To snap up insect joys, its favourite food,
The dingy sustenance of a sumptuous frame
Nursing the splendid passion of its hues.

This mind rapidly changes from joy to grief, from love to hate and fear. It is filled with the insatiable hunger of life and snatches whatever petty pleasures and joys it can spot. It sustains itself on the grosser enjoyments of material life and thrives upon them.

Desire-Mind (V)

A snake of flame with a dark cloud for tail,
Followed by a dream-brood of glittering thoughts,
A lifted head with many-tinged flickering crests,
It licked at knowledge with a smoky tongue.

This mental power is bright at one end but full of obscurity at the other. Its thinkings have the character of the vital movements—dreamy and glowing. It shoots in many directions at the same time and its activities are colourful. In the end, however, it does not attain to Knowledge; it only touches Knowledge from the outside, here and there, briefly, with a touch which is both bright and obscure.

Desire-Mind (VI)

A whirlpool sucking in an empty air,
It based on vacancy stupendous claims,
In Nothingness born to Nothingness returned,
Yet all the time unwittingly it drove
Towards the hidden Something that is All.

It claims high but its very basis is a void, without any substance of reality. What its restless movements result in is an emptiness with no knowledge gained. But with all its apparent futility of activity, it is found to have moved in the long run—albeit without knowing it towards the concealed Reality that is All.

Desire-Mind (VII)

Ardent to find, incapable to retain,
A brilliant instability was its mark,
To err its inborn trend, its native cue.

This mind is passionate in its quest, but it can hardly retain what it finds or stumbles upon. It is scintillating but unstable. It has a natural tendency to make mistakes; both in its start and in its action it inclines to error.

Desire-Mind (VIII)

At once to an unreflecting credence prone,
It thought all true that flattered its own hopes;
It cherished golden nothings born of wish,
It snatched at the unreal for provender.

It is always ready to believe without reflection and welcomes all that supports its own hopes as the truth. It indulges with relish in wishful thinkings that ultimately come to little. It feeds itself on imagination which has little to do with reality.

Desire-Mind (IX)

In darkness it discovered luminous shapes;
Peering into a shadow-hung half-light
It saw hued images scrawled on Fancy’s cave;
Or it swept in circles through conjecture’s night
And caught in imagination’s camera
Bright scenes of promise held by transient flares,
Fixed in life’s air the feet of hurrying dreams,
Kept prints of passing Forms and hooded Powers
And flash-images of half-seen verities.

This mind is very active with its faculties of fancy, conjecture and dream and erects quite a world of images, scenes and movements but, however, it catches at times some glimpses of subtler Forms and Powers at work in the universe and some reflections of half-veiled truths.

Desire-Mind (X)

An eager spring to seize and to possess
Unguided by reason or the seeing soul
Was its first natural motion and its last,
It squandered life’s force to achieve the impossible:
It scorned the straight road and ran on wandering curves
And left what it had won for untried things;
It saw unrealised aims as instant fate
And chose the precipice for its leap to heaven.

It is ever eager to jump at things and possess them; it does not allow itself to be guided by reason or by the perceiving soul within, but rushes on, on impulse. It wastes a good deal of the life-force at its disposal in trying to attain what is not at all possible for it. In its flair for adventure it leaves the direct road and runs around courses that appear more interesting. It leaves its present gains for the uncertainties of the future; what is not achieved yet has for it a compelling imperative and danger fascinates and draws out its highest capabilities.

Desire-Mind (XI)

Adventure its system in the gamble of life,
It took fortuitous gains as safe results;
Error discouraged not its confident view
Ignorant of the deep law of being’s ways
And failure could not slow its fiery clutch;
One chance made true warranted all the rest.

It is ignorant of the truth of the being and the workings of that truth; and yet it is ever confident in its stride and mistakes do not hamper its confidence. Failures do not loosen its passionate hold on things. Even one chance success emboldens it to expect success all along.

Desire-Mind (XII)

Attempt, not victory, was the charm of life.

An uncertain winner of uncertain stakes,
Instinct its dam and the life-mind its sire,
It ran its race and came in first or last.

For this power effort itself is the savour of life, not necessarily success. It may or may not win high stakes. Instinct is at the root of its existence and desire is its impulsion to movement. It is satisfied with its efforts, no matter the results.

Desire-Mind (XIII)

Yet were its works nor small and vain nor null;
It nursed a portion of infinity’s strength
And could create the high things its fancy willed;
Its passion caught what calm intelligence missed.

However, its activities are not all a waste or without value. It takes in something of the manifesting strength of the Infinite Reality, receives a formative nourishment at its hands and with this it is able at times to create, to give concrete shape to some of its high fancies. What the intelligence in the calmer altitudes of the mind misses is seized by the passionate rushes of this vital-mind.

Desire-Mind (XIV)

Insight of impulse laid its leaping grasp
On heavens high Thought had hidden in dazzling mist,
Caught glimmers that revealed a lurking sun:
It probed the void and found a treasure there.

A half-intuition purpled in its sense;
It threw the lightning’s fork and hit the unseen.

It saw in the dark and vaguely blinked in the light,
Ignorance was its field, the unknown its prize.

It has sudden impulsive insights which seize some rays of light that are hidden behind the intense activity of Thought. It probes into what appears to thought to be a void and discovers there a treasure. A semi-intuitive power glistens in its workings and it touches the occult in flashes. Sometimes, strangely, in darkness, it perceives; in light, it sees dimly. Though its field of action is Ignorance, it aims at winning the unknown in its grasp.

Reason (I)

Of all these Powers the greatest was the last.

Arriving late from a far plane of thought
Into a packed irrational world of Chance
Where all was grossly felt and blindly done,
Yet the haphazard seemed the inevitable,
Came Reason, the squat godhead artisan,
To her narrow house upon a ridge in Time.

Next is the thinking reasoning mind, the greatest of the three. It comes from a distant plane of Thought and is set into action in a field where reason is not yet the ruler, where all appears to be a play of Chance, gross feeling and blind action. This Reason is a puny, slow builder and her narrow station in the journey in Time is upon a precarious ridge.

Reason (II)

Adept of clear contrivance and design,
A pensive face and close and peering eyes,
She took her firm and irremovable seat,
The strongest, wisest of the troll-like Three.

She has perfected her little instruments of testing and judging things and is ever watchful leaving nothing to escape her scrutinising gaze. She is supremely confident of herself and the rightness of her workings and refuses to change her position.

Of the three little mind-powers,—physical mind, desire-mind, reason—this thinking or reasoning mind is the strongest and the most enlightened.

Reason (III)

Armed with her lens and measuring-rod and probe,
She looked upon an object universe
And the multitudes that in it live and die
And the body of Space and the fleeing soul of Time,
And took the earth and stars into her hands
To try what she could make of these strange things.

This mind of reason looks upon the universe, the living beings in it and upon Time and Space in Which the world-movement is set as objects of its scrutiny. With her narrow meant and standards it tries to judge and evaluate the earth and distant stars.

Reason (IV)

In her strong purposeful laborious mind,
Inventing her scheme-lines of reality
And the geometric curves of her time-plan,
She multiplied her slow half-cuts at Truth:

This mind is not given to imaginative exercises like the vital mind, nor does it let itself go without check or control. It is purposeful, self-willed and labours assiduously to achieve its goal. It forms its own moulds of understanding, patterns into which it seeks to grasp the world-movement and goes on gathering its segments of Truth which are only so many half-views of the Reality.

Reason (V)

Impatient of enigma and the unknown,
Intolerant of the lawless and unique,
Imposing reflection on the march of Force,
Imposing clarity on the unfathomable,
She strove to reduce to rules the mystic world.

It cannot let pass a riddle or a thing that is not known; it must exert itself to solve the riddle, to know the unknown. It cannot tolerate disorder nor anything out of the way that does not fall into a system. It imposes its own deliberative order on the mechanical movement of Force. It tries to force some clarity on what cannot be plumbed by thought and strives to capture and formulate the contents even of the mystic world in terms of its own method and rule of logic.

Reason (VI)

Nothing she knew but all things hoped to know.

In dark inconscient realms once void of thought,
Missioned by a supreme Intelligence
To throw its ray upon the obscure Vast,
An imperfect light leading an erring mass
By the power of sense and the idea and word,
She ferrets out Nature’s process, substance, cause.

Though this mind of reason knows nothing, it has the ambition to know all. It is really an intermediate agent of the higher Intelligence missioned to cast its ray of light on the obscure lower realms of the inconscient bereft of thought. It is an imperfect, half-light leading the mass of ignorance towards the fuller Light of Knowledge through its instruments of sense, word and idea. By its incessant probe, analysis and study it succeeds, to a certain extent, in unveiling the secret process, the basic material and the motivating cause in Nature.

Reason (VII)

All life to harmonise by thought’s control
She with the huge imbroglio struggles still;
Ignorant of all but her own seeking mind
To save the world from Ignorance she came.

The mission of Reason is to impose the direction of thought, to coordinate and to bring some harmony into the pellmell of life in the universe; to that end she strives and strives. She is, indeed, ignorant of everything except her own mind; yet her work is to save the world from the domination of the prevailing Ignorance.

Reason (VIII)

A sovereign worker through the centuries,
Observing and re-moulding all that is,
Confident she took up her stupendous charge.

There the low bent and mighty figure sits
Bowed under the arc-lamps of her factory-home
Amid the clatter and ringing of her tools.

Reason has been at work holding her full sway for centuries, observing things, applying herself to reshaping them according to her own lights. Hers has been a tremendous task. She is industrious, ever-engaged in her labours with the aid of her instrumental faculties.

Reason (IX)

A rigorous stare in her creative eyes
Coercing the plastic stuff of cosmic Mind,
She sets the hard inventions of her brain
In a pattern of eternal fixity:
Indifferent to the cosmic dumb demand,
Unconscious of too close realities,
Of the unspoken thought, the voiceless heart,
She leans to forge her credos and iron codes
And metal structures to imprison life
And mechanic models of all things that are.

Reason observes everything, spans the supple and flexible vistas of the mind before her and formulates her own lines of systematisation into firm moulds for all movement to flow into. She cares not for the demand for free variation in the Cosmic Nature; she is not aware either of other realities besides herself e.g. unexpressed thought, mute emotion, which are so near herself. She proceeds to erect creeds and laws and dry frames in which she hopes to contain and fix the free flow of life and imposes a mechanical order on all things.

Reason (X)

For the world seen she weaves a world conceived:
She spins in stiff but unsubstantial lines
Her gossamer word-webs of abstract thought,
Her segment systems of the Infinite,
Her theodicies and cosmogonic charts
And myths by which she explains the inexplicable.

The world conceived by her is more true to this Reason than the world that actually is. She weaves endless webs of speculation and abstract thought, builds systems out of section-views of the Infinite Reality, presents philosophies of God and creation and tries to explain what is inexplicable by her canons of logic, by her means of myths.

Reason (XI)

At will she spaces in thin air of mind
Like maps in the school-house of intellect hung,
Forcing wide Truth into a narrow scheme,
Her numberless warring strict philosophies;

Even without any basis in fact she erects theories and schemes, trying to capture the vast Truth into narrow conceptual moulds; each of her systems of philosophy is a segment-view and hence they do not agree with each other, they clash. She observes the phenomenon of Nature and draws rigid lines and curves with her thought and logic along which she expects the world-movement to flow. She claims infallibility for her sciences thus formulated.

Reason (XII)

Out of Nature’s body of phenomenon
She carves with Thought’s keen edge in rigid lines
Like rails for the World-Magician’s power to run,
Her sciences precise and absolute.

Working upon the vast, varying phenomena of Nature, Reason lays out fast and rigid lines of movement and development for the World-Power in action according to her own reading and analysis. This study of the outer processes of Nature is developed by her into fine and absolute sciences.

Reason (XIII)

On the huge bare walls of human nescience
Written round Nature’s deep dumb hieroglyphs
She pens in clear demotic characters
The vast encyclopaedia of her thoughts;
An algebra of her mathematics’ signs,
Her numbers and unerring formulas
She builds to clinch her summary of things.

Reason studies the intricate and baffling movements of Nature and tries to interpret them in terms of her own understanding; she erects laws, casts maps and charts and builds systems purporting to explain and determine the world-movement.

Art and Artifice of Reason

On all sides runs as if in a cosmic mosque
Tracing the scriptural verses of her laws
The daedal of her patterned arabesques,
Art of her wisdom, artifice of her lore.

This art, this artifice are her only stock.

She embroiders her laboured systems of superficial knowledge with attractive, skilfully woven designs and makes them interesting though they are not sound in themselves. This art of presentation is her only forte.

Doubt

In her high works of pure intelligence,
In her withdrawal from the senses’ trap,
There comes no breaking of the walls of mind,
There leaps no rending flash of absolute power,
There dawns no light of heavenly certitude.

A million faces wears her knowledge here
And every face is turbaned with a doubt.

Indeed, Reason disengages herself from the misleading reports of the senses and tries to function from the altitudes of the higher, purer intelligence. Still, however, she is unable to break across the limitations of the mind; her power is bounded by the deficiencies of her instruments. She is never absolutely certain of the verity of the knowledge she builds up. Her knowledge is changeful and every step is shadowed by a doubt.

Absolute Knowledge is high above the domain of Reason.

All Questioned

All now is questioned, all reduced to nought.

Once monumental in their massive craft
Her old great mythic writings disappear
And into their place start strict ephemeral signs;
This constant change spells progress to her eyes:
Her thought is an endless march without a goal.

There is no summit on which she can stand
And see in a single glance the Infinite’s whole.

Every affirmation of Reason is followed by a questioning and a negation. Imposing edifices constructed by her are demolished in no time; new fabrications take the place of the old and this constant change is deemed progress. There is no finis to her thought-labours, no certain goal where she can stop and say she has arrived at last. There is no summit in her range from where she can get an all-embracing view of the Reality that is infinite.

Inconclusive Play

An inconclusive play is Reason’s toil.

Each strong idea can use her as its tool;
Accepting every brief she pleads her case.

Open to every thought, she cannot know.

The eternal Advocate seated as judge
Armours in logic’s invulnerable mail
A thousand combatants for Truth’s veiled throne
And sets on a high horseback of argument
To tilt for ever with a wordy lance
In a mock tournament where none can win.

There is no finality to the labours of Reason. She can champion with equal vehemence quite different ideas one after the other. Any powerful idea can use Reason. Running with every thought that comes before her, Reason cannot arrive at true, definitive Knowledge. She is a partisan who pretends to judge. But her logic and argument can serve equally every claimant to the prize of Truth; there is no final victory for any one in the field of Reason.

Reason’s Verdicts Cancelled

Assaying thought’s values with her rigid tests
Balanced she sits on wide and empty air,
Aloof and pure in her impartial poise.

Absolute her judgments seem but none is sure;
Time cancels all her verdicts in appeal.

Reason functions in an artificial vacuum of her own, weighing the soundness of every thought with the set measures devised by herself, without involving herself, without allowing any predisposition to sway her operations. Her judgments seem, to be absolute and final; but in reality not one of them is certain of its truth; none lasts the test of time.

Glittering Robe on Ignorance

Although like sunbeams to our glow-worm mind
Her knowledge feigns to fall from a clear heaven,
Its rays are a lantern’s lustres in the Night;
She throws a glittering robe on Ignorance.

It may appear to the flickering mind as if the knowledge gained by the Reason is a gift from the higher summits of Light. But in truth it is nothing of the kind; it is little more than the feeble rays of a lantern in a surrounding darkness. All that she does is to cover Ignorance with a bright glow.

Sovereign Claim Lost

But now is lost her ancient sovereign claim
To rule mind’s high realm in her absolute right,
Bind thought with logic’s forged infallible chain
Or see truth nude in a bright abstract haze.

Reason claimed at one time to be the undisputed ruler of the whole domain of mind; she sought to force thought to live and function within the absolute confines of her logic; she claimed to arrive atTruth in the dazzle of her abstract speculations. But now she no more stakes that claim.

Yoked to Proven Fact

A master and slave of stark phenomenon,
She travels on the roads of erring sight
Or looks upon a set mechanical world
Constructed for her by her instruments.

A bullock yoked in the cart of proven fact,
She drags huge knowledge-bales through Matter’s dust
To reach utility’s immense bazaar.

Reason reigns on the scene of Nature’s phenomenon but at the same time her range is bounded by the extent of the actual phenomenon. Her journey is along the routes chalked out by the misreporting senses, her vision is confined to the mechanical patterns constructed by the faculties of the sense, and the physical mind; she engages herself only with materially proved facts—not with verities of feeling or other types that do not admit of physical proof that can be demonstrated. Consequently her laboured knowledge is of the most material kind, and the goal of her labours is utility. The value of her knowledge is measured in terms of its practical utility and not in its intrinsic worth.

She keeps the Husks

Apprentice she has grown to her old drudge;
An aided sense is her seeking’s arbiter.

This now she uses as the assayer’s stone.

As if she knew not facts are husks of truth,
The husks she keeps, the kernel throws aside.

The sense ought to be the servant of Reason, but this natural relation is as if reversed. Reason has come to give the decisive role to the sense in coming to conclusions. Unless the sense certifies and confirms, Reason does not accept.

Facts by which Reason swears are really the external coverings of truth. Reason, however, treasures these husks and throws away the precious grain within.

Seeks Mechanic Nature’s Keys

An ancient wisdom fades into the past,
The ages’ faith becomes an idle tale,
God passes out of the awakened thought,
An old discarded dream needed no more:
Only she seeks mechanic nature’s keys.

With the advent and supremacy of Reason, wisdom garnered by other means fades away. Instinctive faith that had ruled all along is dismissed as a baseless construction. God does not stand the test of reasoned thought and is dismissed as an unsubstantial relic of an ignorant past. Reason tries to find the key to everything in the operations of mechanical nature.

Digs into Maim Er’s Soil

Interpreting stone-laws inevitable
She digs into Matter’s hard concealing soil,
To unearth the processes of all things done.

Reason studies the phenomenon in Nature, deduces certain laws from her observation and lends to them an inviolable fixity. She probes and bores through the deceptive surfaces of Material Nature in order to discover therein the origin of all life-movements, their precise processes.

Intricate Enginery Appears

A loaded huge self-worked machine appears
To her eye’s eager and admiring stare,
An intricate and meaningless enginery
Of ordered fateful and unfailing chance:
Ingenious and meticulous and minute,
Its brute unconscious accurate device
Unrolls an unerring march, maps a sure road;
It plans without thinking, acts without a will,
A million purposes serves with purpose none
And builds a rational world without a mind.

Reason comes face to face, in this venture of hers, with what appears to be a huge self-charged, self-worked, mechanical machinery in Nature which operates in a fixed and determined pattern. Even chance is a part of this machinery which, though apparently bereft of consciousness, is marvellously accurate in its results and forges the right path for the universal movement to advance along. This machine in effect plans without thinking it out, acts without exercising a will thereto; it does not seem to have any set purpose before it in its workings, but all the same it serves a diversity of purposes. It has no rationalising mind and yet the world it builds is rational to the core.

Matter Admirable Reality (I)

It has no mover, no maker, no idea:
Its vast self-action toils without a cause;
A lifeless Energy irresistibly driven,
Death’s head on the body of Necessity,
Engenders life and fathers consciousness,
Then wonders why all was and whence it came.

This machine has none to set it into movement; who at all has made it! There is no idea that impels it. It acts without any cause. It is an unconscious Energy unrolling itself inexorably. It appears to be a combination of Necessity and Death and they both together produce the phenomenon of life and consciousness. And yet why all is there and from where all is derived is a wonder in itself.

Mai I Fr Admirable Reality (II)

Our thoughts are parts of the immense machine,
Our ponderings but a freak of Matter’s law,
The mystic’s lore was a fancy or a blind;
Of soul or spirit we have now no need:
Matter is the admirable Reality,
The patent unescapable miracle,
The hard truth of things, simple, eternal, sole.

It would appear that even our thoughts are products of this huge, mechanical machinery. Our deep deliberations look to be chance off-shoots of the processes of Matter. In this setting all the wisdom of the mystic appears to be a fancy or a deception, soul or spirit dispensable things. Only Matter is the obvious, sole, eternal Reality, all-pervading, all-determining.

End of Mighty Toil

A suicidal rash expenditure
Creating the world by a mystery of self-loss
Has poured its scattered works on empty space;
Late shall the self-disintegrating Force
Contract the immense expansion it has made:
Then ends this mighty and unmeaning toil,
The Void is left bare, vacant as before.

It seems as if all creation is a result of a reckless out-throw of an Energy filling up an empty Space. The next and inevitable phase of this movement—the first being one of expansion—is of contraction following a disintegration of the Force that builds. This ends the whole movement of creation, all fades away leaving the original Void vacant as before.

World Explained

Thus vindicated, crowned, the grand new Thought
Explained the world and mastered all its laws,
Touched the dumb roots, woke veiled tremendous powers;
It bound to service the unconscious djinns
That sleep unused in Matter’s ignorant trance.

All was precise, rigid, indubitable.

This is the victorious conclusion of materialistic Thought: there is nothing else than Matter; all is built by the mighty material Enemy and when that Enemy withdraws all disappears.

This Thought has indeed done valuable service in its probing into and study of the material surfaces of the universe. It has touched the mute origins of creation in the physical bases, awakened unused powers into activity and put them in service. It has erected a system, unambiguous, exact, rigid in its frame.

But all Staggers Back

But when on Matter’s rock of ages based
A whole stood up firm and clear-cut and safe,
All staggered back into a sea of doubt;
This solid scheme melted in endless flux:
She had met the formless Power inventor of forms;
Suddenly she stumbled upon things unseen:
A lightning from the undiscovered Truth
Startled her eyes with its perplexing glare
And dug a gulf between the Real and Known
Till all her knowledge seemed an ignorance.

However, when this Thought is satisfied that it has erected a sound system of a material universe, a doubt creeps in following fresh discoveries revealing the much that is still unknown. What appeared to be solid crumbles into a flux; Reason is confronted with the presence of a formless creative Power in place of the phenomena of forms with which she was preoccupied. She is compelled to see the gulf between what she knows and the Reality that she is still to know. In comparison with the extent of the Reality to be known, what she knows can only be described as ignorance.

Source Lost in the Ineffable

Once more the world was made a wonder-web,
A magic’s process in a magical space,
An unintelligible miracle’s depths
Whose source is lost in the Ineffable.

What once appeared to be a reasoned system of the universe melts again into a product of wondrous magic. Reason is unable to trace the source of this miracle that is the universe. That origin is beyond its range to comprehend or formulate.

Facing the Unknowable

Once more we face the blank Unknowable.

In a crash of values, in a huge doom-crack,
In the sputter and scatter of her breaking work
She lost her clear conserved constructed world.

Thus one stands once again in the presence of a great Unknowable; all that appeared to be known is broken up. All the constructions of Reason flounder.

Blind Force

A quantum dance remained, a sprawl of chance
In Energy’s stupendous tripping whirl:
A ceaseless motion in the unbounded Void
Invented forms without a thought or aim:
Necessity and Cause were shapeless ghosts;
Matter was an incident in being’s flow,
Law but a clock-work habit of blind force.

What remains after the crash of the construction is the whirling movement of a mighty Energy in a limitless Void, producing innumerable forms without any definite purpose. Necessity and Cause which played a dominant role in the scheme of Reason are nonexistent; Matter which was the sole reality then is now hardly more than a petty result in the great flow of the life-being; Law which was the fixed frame of the material scheme is now no more than a mechanical habit of a blind force in movement.

Chaos and Strife

Ideals, ethics, systems had no base
And soon collapsed or without sanction lived;
All grew a chaos, a heave and clash and strife.

cal and other kinds of systems have no solid base to stand upon. Inevitably they collapse leaving everywhere chaos, friction and strife.

Kali’s Dance

Ideas warring and fierce leaped upon life;
A hard compression held down anarchy
And liberty was only a phantom’s name:
Creation and destruction waltzed inarmed
On the bosom of a torn and quaking earth;
All reeled into a world of Kali’s dance.

The order imposed by mental reason is gone and ideas clash and battle with one another. Liberty for orderly growth as determined by the mind is no more and complete anarchy is prevented only by the compulsion of Nature. Creation and destruction race together. The whole creation appears to be a frenzied dance of Kali—the Cosmic Power of destruction.

Clutching for Proofs

Thus tumbled, sinking, sprawling in the Void,
Clutching for props, a soil on which to stand,
She only saw a thin atomic Vast,
The rare-point sparse substratum Universe
On which floats a solid world’s phenomenal face.

Reason finds the ground snatched from under her feet; she is unable to hold to anything solid. She perceives a filmy vast melting into a Void. This is the impalpable background on which moves the world-force creating phenomena.

Omnipotent Force

Alone a process of events was there
And Nature’s plastic and protean change
And, strong by death to slay, or to create
The riven invisible atom’s omnipotent force.

What remains is only the process of things for Reason to perceive and analyse. There is a constant, subtle change at every moment. A mighty Force is seen released from the microscopic atom, a Force that can create or destroy irresistibly.

Reason’s Hope to Grasp Original Force

One chance remained that here might be a power
To liberate man from the old inadequate means
And leave him sovereign of the earthly scene.

For Reason then might grasp the original Force
To drive her car upon the roads of Time.

Could it be that here is a Power at work which can free man from his limitations of instrument and establish him as the ruler of the earth? In that case Reason can hope to get hold of the original omnipotent Force and use it to extend her empire.

Standardised Perfection

All then might serve the need of the thinking race,
An absolute State found order’s absolute,
To a standardised perfection cut all things,
In society build a just exact machine.

If that were to be, the whole world-movement could be made to serve Man the thinker, an ordered System without exceptions established, all things standardised at some level of perfection, the entire society turned into a precise and mechanical pattern of functioning.

Symmetric Fabric of Life

Then science and reason careless of the soul
Could iron out a tranquil uniform world,
Aeonic seekings glut with outward truths
And a single patterned thinking force on mind,
Inflicting Matter’s logic on Spirit’s dreams
A reasonable animal make of man
And a symmetrical fabric of his life.

Then Science and the logical intellect could organise the world on a set basis of uniformity. Knowledge would grow in its contents though the latter would pertain mostly to the external surfaces of Nature and the mind conditioned to think in one determined groove. The severe logic that governs the formulations of Matter would be imposed on the expressions of the Spirit thereby limiting its manifestation. Man would be little more than a trained animal capable of reasoning and his life would be an existence of an artificial symmetry.

Nature’s Peak?

This would be Nature’s peak on an obscure globe,
The grand result of the long ages’ toil,
Earth’s evolution crowned, her mission done.

Such obscurity would be accepted to be the summit of the edifice of Nature in this universe, the finale of her aeonic labour, the crown of the evolutionary progress of the earth.

Only if the Spirit Fell Asleep

So might it be if the spirit fell asleep;
Man then might rest content and live in peace,
Master of Nature who wants her bondslave worked,
The world’s disorder hardening into Law,—
If Life’s dire heart arose not in revolt,
If God within could find no greater plan.

But that cannot be. For the Spirit in the heart of the evolutionary Nature is not asleep. It is astir and will not allow man to rest in any intermediate station of his long journey, betraying the trust of Nature; it will not permit the temporary phenomena of disorder and confusion to turn into a permanent law of the world. The strong heart at the core of life rises in revolt against this prolongation of Matter’s rule of limitation and death. The awakened godhead in the bosom of earth has a greater plan that emerges slowly upsetting the little patterns of the material intellect.

Many-Visaged Cosmic Soul

But many-visaged is the cosmic Soul;
A touch can alter the fixed front of Fate.

The Soul that is at work in the universe is not limited to one single form, one single expression. It is multifaceted and has diverse ways of working that defy the strict rules laid down by the logical intellect. Things may appear to be fixed, determined, for all time; the operations of fate apparently rigid, inescapable, but in truth they are not so. A touch of Grace, a breath of the Spirit can change the whole set-up. Fate can be altered by the intervention of something that is beyond the level of its formations.

Key of Perfect Change

A sudden turn can come, a road appear,
A greater Mind may see a greater Truth,
Or we may find when all the rest has failed
Hid in ourselves the key of perfect change.

Suddenly a new road may come into sight and open quite a new direction, changing the given set of circumstances or some higher faculty than the logical mind may glimpse a Truth greater than the one held to before and the perspective and goal undergo a complete change. Or when all the outer means for effecting a breakthrough have failed, man may discover the key to the problem within himself. For in man lie, hidden behind the veil of external nature, endless possibilities. If only he looks within himself, deep enough, he will find the resolution of his difficulties, the solution for the riddles of his life.

Ascent

Ascending from the soil where creep our days,
Earth’s consciousness may marry with the Sun,
Our mortal life ride on the spirit’s wing,
Our finite thoughts commune with the Infinite.

The consciousness of the earth need not for ever stay confined to the lowly plains of material life. It can—and surely will—rise above these first grounds and join with the Light on the summits. Mortal life can take on the wings of the Spirit and soar high towards the immortal altitudes of Existence. The bounded mind of man can put itself in tune with the unbounded Infinite and be in communion with it.

Birth into Power of Light

In the bright kingdoms of the rising Sun
All is a birth into a power of light:
All here deformed guards there its happy shape,
Here all is mixed and marred, there pure and whole;
Yet each is a passing step, a moment’s phase.

Ascent into the higher realms of increasing Light brings about a rebirth into the power of that Radiance; whatever is deformed here on earth finds its right, felicitous form there above; everything here is mixed and segmented, there all is pure and entire. All the same each condition on earth is a phase, a step leading to another step. Nothing is permanent, all is in transition.

Awake to a Greater Truth

Awake to a greater Truth beyond her acts,
The mediatrix sat and saw her works
And felt the marvel in them and the force
But knew the power behind the face of Time:

Reason begins to awake to a larger and greater Truth than her own. This intermediary between the ignorance below and Knowledge above surveys her workings, feels what is admirable in them and their effective dynamism and becomes conscious of the greater Power that is acting from behind the veil of phenomena.

Yearning towards Great Ideal

She did the task, obeyed the knowledge given,
Her deep heart yearned towards great ideal things
And from the light looked out to wider light:
A brilliant hedge drawn round her narrowed her power;
Faithful to her limited sphere she toiled, but knew
Its highest, widest seeing was a half-search,
Its mightiest acts a passage or a stage.

Awakened Reason recognises the higher Truth and conforms to the Knowledge that comes from above. While discharging her normal functions, she seeks, in her deeper movements, for Ideals beyond herself and searches for a Light greater than her own. But her effective power is circumscribed by her constitutional limitations. Within her range she works faithfully, but all the while she is aware that her utmost accomplishments are but half-findings, only a stage which has to be left behind for the inevitable next.

Not by Reason can Truth be Seen

For not by Reason was creation made
And not by Reason can the Truth be seen
Which through the veils of thought, the screens of sense
Hardly the spirit’s vision can descry
Dimmed by the imperfection of its means:

And that is so because Reason is not the creator of the universe; she is only an intermediate Power. She can grasp only a part of truth, not the whole truth which stands veiled by mental thinking or by the movement of the senses. The eye of the perceiving spirit is handicapped by the defects of the instrumental faculties and its vision blurs.

Little Mind

The little Mind is tied to little things:
Its sense is but the spirit’s outward touch
Half-waked in a world of dark Inconscience;
It feels out for its beings and its forms
Like one left fumbling in the ignorant Night.

The petty sense-mind is always occupied with petty things. Its sense depends upon the first inadequate touches of the emerging spirit. Semi-awake in a world of dark Inconscience, it gropes to create its innumerable forms and beings. Its movements are tentative, unsure.

Reason Toys’ Artificer

In this small mould of infant mind and sense
Desire is a child-heart’s cry crying for bliss,
Our reason only a toys’ artificer,
A rule-maker in a strange stumbling game.

In this small, forming mind and its sense, desire shoots forth. This desire is really the cry of the infant soul for the Bliss that is its rightful share in the Creation.

Reason is little more than a craftsman of toys, a framer of rules for this little game played in the court of the small mind of sense.

Interim Report

But she her dwarf aids knew whose confident sight
A bounded prospect took for the far goal.

The world she has made is an interim report
Of a traveller towards the half-found truth in things
Moving twixt nescience and nescience.

Enlightened Reason is aware of the limited sight and range of her aides, the senses, and of the fact that they mistake the immediate and limited view to be the ultimate truth. Her account of the world based upon the reports of these instruments can only be provisional, her findings only half-truths. Reason moves from the nescience below towards the superconscience above—in either case her own awareness lapses at both ends.

Truth not Known

For nothing is known while aught remains concealed;
The Truth is known only when all is seen.

Reason grasps only a partial truth of things, some aspect fronting it; the rest is outside its grasp. And as long as any part remains unknown, the Knowledge gained is never complete; it is no knowledge at all. To know the Truth one must see and know it entire.

She Yearns for Higher Light

Attracted by the All that is the One,
She yearns towards a higher light than hers;
Hid by her cults and creeds she has glimpsed God’s face:
She knows she has but found a form, a robe,
But ever she hopes to see him in her heart
And feel the body of his reality.

Reason is attracted by the multiplicity that is in truth the One Reality. To get at this Reality she seeks for a light higher than her own which is feeble. The Reality is hidden behind all the cults and creeds she has erected; what she has discovered is only a Form, not the body of the Reality. Awakened Reason knows this and always strives and hopes to see and feel the very Reality in herself.

Glimmering Mask

As yet a mask is there and not a brow,
Although sometimes two hidden eyes appear:
Reason cannot tear off that glimmering mask,
Her efforts only make it glimmer more;

What Reason has found is only the mask covering the face of the Reality, a mask that shines. Something of the true visage unveils itself occasionally but as a rule the mask intervenes. The efforts of Reason to remove that shining mask result only in making it shine all the more.

She Breaks up Knowledge

In packets she ties up the Indivisible;
Finding her hands too small to hold vast Truth
She breaks up knowledge into alien parts
Or peers through cloud-rack for a vanished sun:
She sees, not understanding what she has seen,
Through the locked visages of finite things
The myriad aspects of infinity.

The Reality is indivisible, but Reason attempts to grasp and present it in divided bits. She finds the Truth too vast for her hands and hence breaks it up into unnatural parts for understanding it. Her crude attempts to perceive the Truth only result in the formation of clouds of speculation veiling the rays of the Truth-Sun. She sees so many finite bounded forms but does not know that through them she is face to face with the countless aspects of the Infinite Reality.

Ignorance Wisdom’s Chrysalis

One day the Face must burn out through the mask.

Our ignorance is Wisdom’s chrysalis,
Our error weds new knowledge on its way,
Its darkness is a blackened knot of light;
Thought dances hand in hand with Nescience
On the grey road that winds towards the Sun.

However, a day must come when the Reality has to emerge out of the mask; the ignorance of the mind is only the outer crust of the Wisdom that presses forward. All human error is a step towards the attainment of Knowledge; error is continually met and corrected by fresh bursts of Knowledge on the path. Its darkness is only a thick shadow of the involved light of Knowledge. But on this dim-lit road towards the Sun of Knowledge thought has perforce to walk arm in arm with the basic nescience out of which it has risen and hence it is constantly frustrated in its activity.

Flashes of Fire

Even while her fingers fumble at the knots
Which bind them to their strange companionship,
Into the moments of their married strife
Sometimes break flashes of the enlightening Fire.

Thought, indeed, attempts to release itself from these clamps of nescience and its development proceeds in the measure in which this is successfully done. In this process of friction and disentanglement, there are at times outbreaks of a revealing Knowledge.

Great Thoughts that Walk Alone

Even now great thoughts are here that walk alone:
Armed they have come with the infallible word
In an investiture of intuitive light
That is a sanction from the eyes of God;
Announcers of a distant Truth they flame
Arriving from the rim of eternity.

Even when things are in this confused and mixed up state, there are in the atmosphere great solitary Thoughts at work. They are not products of laboured thinking but Truth-Ideas that have come down as intuitive flashes with the imprimatur of the presiding Godhead. Coming from the borders of eternity, they are the harbingers of the Truth that is far off.

A Greater Gnosis shall Regard

A fire shall come out of the infinitudes,
A greater Gnosis shall regard the world
Crossing out of some far omniscience
On lustrous seas from the still rapt Alone
To illumine the deep heart of self and things.

A timeless knowledge it shall bring to Mind,
Its aim to life, to Ignorance its close.

These are only flashes of the Great Fire of the Spirit, the brilliant Knowledge-Will of the Supreme that shall one day manifest in this world. From the still Transcendent One shall flow over the earth, the Light and the Consciousness that will flood the Mind with Knowledge infallible, give Iife its fulfilment and terminate Ignorance once for all.

Aspiration to Beyond

Above in a high breathless stratosphere,
Overshadowing the dwarfish trinity,
Lived, aspirants to a limitless Beyond,
Captives of Space, walled by the limiting heavens,
In the unceasing circuit of the hours,
Yearning for the straight paths of eternity,
And from their high station looked down on this world
Two sun-gaze Daemons witnessing all that is.

Above the domain of the three little minds—physical mind, desire-mind and reasoning mind Aswapathy sees other powers, greater in stature aspiring still higher. Confined within the boundaries of the Mind, these powers however high some of them may be—aspire for the altitudes of the Infinite beyond; from the perpetual rounds of time in which they are involved they yearn for release into the free and straight courses of the Eternal.

Aswapathy sees also two bright-eyed Deities gazing down on this world from a high station above, witnessing all.

Life-Thought (I)

A power to uplift the laggard world,
Imperious rode a huge high-winged Life-Thought
Unwont to tread the firm unchanging soil:
Accustomed to a blue infinity,
It planed in sunlit sky and starlit air;
It saw afar the unreached Immortal’s home
And heard afar the voices of the gods.

Of these one is Thought fully charged with Life-power, Thought supported by an intense concentration of Life-force. It has the power to uplift the world from its inertia. It is reluctant to work in the sticky and inert ground of Matter but is in its elements in the unbounded, free and bright expanses of the higher regions of Life. It shoots its glance far into the realm of the Immortal and its ear is open to the distant voices of the gods.

Life-Thought (II)

Iconoclast and shatterer of Time’s forts,
Overleaping limit and exceeding norm,
It lit the thoughts that glow through the centuries
And moved to acts of superhuman force.

This Life-Thought never stays contained in the limits chalked out by the reasoning and logical mind. It breaks out of them and upsets conventional ideas and systems based upon them. It releases new thoughts that shine across the centuries and fathers movements of extraordinary force.

Life-Thought (III)

As far as its self-winged airplanes could fly,
Visiting the future in great brilliant raids
It reconnoitred vistas of dream-fate.

Apt to conceive, unable to attain,
It drew its concept-maps and vision-plans
Too large for the architecture of mortal Space.

It soars to its utmost range and catches glimpses of the future that is ready on the subtler planes. But though it conceives largely it is not able to realise and achieve to the full its own conceptual and visioned patterns, which are too ambitious for the earth-world as it is.

Thought-Mind

Beyond in wideness where no footing is,
An imagist of bodiless Ideas,
Impassive to the cry of life and sense,
A pure Thought-Mind surveyed the cosmic act.

Archangel of a white transcending realm,
It saw the world from solitary heights
Luminous in a remote and empty air.

Higher than the realms of the Life-mind, Aswapathy sees in the vastnesses that are ever at flux, a Mind of pure Thought, above and aloof from the touch of life and the senses, occupied with Ideas that are yet to take form. It is a great Power in the pure realms transcending the domains below and, from its distant station in vacancy, this bright Thought-Mind looks at the world and surveys it.