With the release of the soul and
the freedom of the spirit, Aswapati is now set on the Yoga of the Universe,
Vishwa Yoga. If this is to be taken as an autobiographical description, Sri
Aurobindo represented by Aswapati, then we could understand how rapidly, on the
wings of an eagle, his yoga-tapasya was moving. At the beginning of the 1900s
when Sri Aurobindo was in
The Yogi-Poet presents the supreme
Incarnate’s Yoga of the Universe, Vishwa Yoga, as the Book of the Traveller of
the Worlds. In it is the exploration of the world above greater world rising in
the cosmic dimensions, typal worlds of fixed forms and given powers and
functions. It is like a world-pile founded on Matter and reaching the summits
of spiritual glory and greatness. There are also, plunging deep down below, the
worlds of darkness, of evil and crookedness and falsehood, founded on Ignorance
and Inconscience, exercising benign or else adverse influence over the powers
of the spirit that enter into the scheme of evolutionary things.
He saw a lone immense high-curved
world-pile
Erect like a mountain chariot of
the Gods
Motionless under an inscrutable
sky.
As if from Matter's plinth and
viewless base
To a top as viewless, a carved sea
of worlds
Climbing with foam-maned waves to
the Supreme
Ascended towards breadths
immeasurable;
It hoped to soar into the
Ineffable's reign:
A hundred levels raised it to the
Unknown.
So it towered up to heights
intangible
And disappeared in the hushed
conscious Vast
As climbs a storeyed temple-tower
to heaven
Built by the aspiring soul of man
to live
Near to his dream of the Invisible.
Infinity calls to it as it dreams
and climbs;
Its spire touches the apex of the
world;
Mounting into great voiceless
stillnesses
It marries the earth to screened
eternities.
Amid the many systems of the One
Made by an interpreting creative
joy
Alone it points us to our journey
back
Out of our long self-loss in
Nature's deeps;
Planted on earth it holds in it all
realms:
It is a brief compendium of the
Vast.
This was the single stair to
being's goal.
A summary of the stages of the
spirit,
Its copy of the cosmic hierarchies
Refashioned in our secret air of
self
A subtle pattern of the universe.
It is within, below, without,
above.
Acting upon this visible Nature's
scheme
It wakens our earth-matter's heavy
doze
To think and feel and to react to
joy;
It models in us our diviner parts,
Lifts mortal mind into a greater
air,
Makes yearn this life of flesh to
intangible aims,
Links the body's death with
immortality's call:
Out of the swoon of the Inconscience
It labours towards a superconscient
Light.
If earth were all and this were not
in her,
Thought could not be nor
life-delight's response:
Only material forms could then be
her guests
Driven by an inanimate world-force.
Earth by this golden superfluity
Bore thinking man and more than man
shall bear;
This higher scheme of being is our
cause
And holds the key to our ascending
fate;
It calls out of our dense mortality
The conscious spirit nursed in
Matter's house.
The living symbol of these
conscious planes,
Its influences and godheads of the
unseen,
Its unthought logic of Reality's
acts
Arisen from the unspoken truth in
things,
Have fixed our inner life's
slow-scaled degrees.
Its steps are paces of the soul's
return
From the deep adventure of material
birth,
A ladder of delivering ascent
And rungs that Nature climbs to
deity.
Once in the vigil of a deathless
gaze
These grades had marked her giant
downward plunge,
The wide and prone leap of a
godhead's fall.
Our life is a holocaust of the
Supreme.
The great World-Mother by her
sacrifice
Has made her soul the body of our
state;
Accepting sorrow and
unconsciousness
Divinity's lapse from its own
splendours wove
The many-patterned ground of all we
are.
An idol of self is our mortality.
Our earth is a fragment and a
residue;
Her power is packed with the stuff
of greater worlds
And steeped in their colour-lustres
dimmed by her drowse;
An atavism of higher births is
hers,
Her sleep is stirred by their
buried memories
Recalling the lost spheres from
which they fell.
(Savitri, pp. 98-100)
Aswapati sets himself to explore
these countless worlds, the purpose of their existence, their powers and
possibilities, as well as their shortcomings and even failures. If nothing in
this creation is superfluous, then the question to be understood is their need,
their functional role not only in its space-time measurements but also in its
prospects of the timeless-spaceless entering into it. There is the aspect of
their own further enrichment in the possibilities of the expressive spirit.
If we see from a certain point of
view the Book of the Traveller of the Worlds might look to be a mighty
travelogue, the traveller recording his detailed observations, swift but a
meticulous record. Marco Polo who embarked on an epic journey to Asia and far
to the east to Kubla Khan’s palace and who wrote for him his travel account,
here he is the spiritual explorer writing more for himself than for any Khan.
The Record is to consolidate his own yogic attainments by fixing them up in
writing in an occult way.
Yet there is something more than
that. It is no doubt the stepping in of the supreme Yogi as an Avatar, moving
through these countless worlds. Not that the transcendental supreme need to go
to these places to discover what they are. But when he comes here as an Avatar
and travels through these realms of various hues and sounds and perfumes he
leaves there behind him his luminous presence which is also the power. That is
the occult-spiritual purpose of the Avatar’s passage through these worlds which
can influence the earth-events. It is as though because of an occult imperative
that the Yogi undertakes this journey not in the manner of an expedition or a
quest, but to prepare the cosmic field for a definite spiritual action. His
presence left behind in these worlds is the foundation for the divine Shakti’s action
in the terrestrial process. He establishes his presence that her work be done. Aswapati
does it and it becomes the support, ādhāra,
for the resplendent dynamism of Savitri.