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

However, if this quest and this discovery are to lead us only to the pure Self, they would remain incomplete, linger compromised. In such a discovery name and form and all the thousand attributes and qualities, and all the workings of the mind would cease to exist. In that would be the appalling danger of turning this phenomenal world into a bad dream, an unhappy illusion. More often than not, the world is lost when the self is won; vastness and space, time and eternity get cut off from each other—as if they are fundamentally incompatible with each other, even antagonistic to each other.

In that case the way out or the path would be the Path of Escape; but “Escape brings not the victory and the crown!” In this formulation the negative gets asserted forcefully, and everything finishes up with denial. In such a creation as it is at present the possibility of the positive gets rebuffed, it gets rejected with a strong deep-seated vehemence. Aswapati is alert, and also swift, in recognising the situation and arrives at the realisation that there is a greater and truer Truth, the truest Truth “at the mystic fount of Life”, in this world of ours. He realises that the first entrance into the timelessness cannot be the dismissal of all that is in time; in fact, it need not be so. Aswapati’s pursuit of the Unknowable reveals to him the true mystery behind all this:

Across the silence of the ultimate Calm

The Presence he yearned for suddenly drew close.

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

There was no cleavage between soul and soul

There was no barrier between world and God.

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

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

To feel was a flame-discovery of God,

All mind was a single harp of many strings,

All life a song of many meeting lives;

For worlds were many, but the Self was one.

This knowledge was now made a cosmos' seed:

This seed was cased in the safety of the Light,

It needed not a sheath of Ignorance.

Then from the trance of that tremendous clasp

And from the throbbings of that single Heart

And from the naked Spirit's victory

A new and marvellous creation rose.

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

This is the great thing Aswapati has already accomplished, the measureless siddhi achieved, achieved in the Transcendent, in the House of the Spirit, forming the seed but a seed encased in the safety of the Light. That seed must now sprout in the dim and weak earthly soil. At present this is Aswapat’s one single concern.