THIS LIFE AND THE LIFE BEYOND (UNFINISHED)

Death inexorably moves in on all. Dictators and devils die, gods and ghosts die, men and mortals die, all die inevitably with the passage of time that consumes it all. Even time eventually dies when its play is done as the universe winds up its network that had so long trapped us all. Phenomena, perishable and pernicious, holds us all in its thraldom as death dances over its domain. The cyclical pattern of things deludes us with the vision of a seeming permanence in this ephemeral dream of life, persistence of vision lends continuity to this diabolic design where disparateness assumes dissolving shapes and particulate motion masquerades as solidity of being. But despite this bewitching sensory drama that fascinates the mind of man and keeps him from tracing his roots, there remains ever an underlying current of consciousness whose feeble call man hearkens to at times and a whole vista opens up of limpid spaces, luminous, free, unbounded by death or decay, an unbroken mass of pure consciousness, the Self brooding on the Self. This, of course, is the Himalayan height of realisation, subtle and sublime, not accessible to all who dwell on commoner plains of mundane existence. But the principle is there. It lives on in the genius of extraordinary souls whose preoccupation is the pursuit of truth transcendental but which is a pointer to the fact, thereby, of the organic capacity of the human species at its evolved best to comprehend reality as it is and not merely as it seems to be. Uniformity is the rigorous law of Nature and from it follows the possibility, nay, the certainty that all will in due course apprehend this absolute truth of man and Nature and the Reality beyond. The panoramic world with its myriad enchantments then fails to hold the blossoming soul of man seeking perfection as it peers higher and higher into the heavens and the realm beyond, breaking free of the bonds that had held it so long. The Universal Enchantress then makes way for the chosen child that has rebelled against her dictates and releases him in the infinitude of freedom but not until he has had his cupful of cosmic experience in all its delights and despairs. He becomes now a living soul as he witnesses phenomena as the cover of consciousness and history as the surface scratching of toddlers on the page of experience. While the leonine soul emerges out of the meshes of Maya, the rest of humanity, faltering and failing, fumble about in the darkness of cosmic nescience, subject to death and decay, in the terrible transmigratory cycle that spares neither prince nor pauper but renders all equal in the sameness of death.

Such is the human predicament. Ignorance, primeval and uncaused, has sprung up whence to direct this dual drama of life and death, this cosmic spectacle of minor proportions, this wakeful dream of self-oblivion, man knows not. Prophets arise and sound their clarion call to break the dream but few ever respond in true intent to their earnest sentiments including their close associates and heirs for most, consciously or otherwise, fashion truth after their heart, truth which is comfortable or convenient and not which carries the purest imprint of the divine. Thus, the message is lost in the man as personality ruins principle and the movement, which had sprung in the Mother-heart of all that is serene and sublime, meanders off-course into the shallow waters of murky materialism whence there is no return to its pristine source despite pious protestations of followers to the contrary. Thus, all spiritual movements, after an inspired beginning, peter out gradually to more mundane organisational existence and the life of the Spirit which animated the Prophet and his Apostles is supplanted by a routine culture where daily discipline settles the soul into passive acquiescence of hierarchical authority that stifles so often individual genius and threatens thereby the very life of the Order. For all things must perish when they fail to refresh themselves from the eternal fountain of joy that abides in the depths of the soul and nourishes the creative faculty in man which is the sustenance of his being.

Thus, on the individual and the collective plane, in the routinised or the rambling way, difficulties galore spring up to oppress the soul of man which must yet triumph over material contamination to affirm the freedom of the Self, the supremacy of the Spirit over matter and lend light to the dark corridors of this terrestrial terrain, this theatre of fratricidal feud, this stage of sensory unreality. And through it all runs the torch of life, ever kindling, ever dimming, but never quite extinguished for good as the fire of fresh life keeps up the image of the Reality which underlies it all, nameless, formless, waveless, free. Life is transcended and so is death as the shadow of this cosmic spectacle pales into insignificance before the splendour of the Self. Thus is the victory sealed as the very face of Reality surfaces as the cosmic dance of death and every whirl reveals, in flash of light and love, the life within that is, pristine pure, pure delight. This very Earth is then heaven as bliss reveals all, this very Earth is hell itself as darkness shrouds the Self and this very Earth is Existence Absolute as separation vanishes before the integrated vision.

This admixture of good and evil is then an in-built structural element in the fabric of the man-universe that denies alteration, a perception problem for man seeking a rectification of vision as much as it is an evolutionary proposition that demands wholesale realignment of mental forces with the passage of time leading to higher insights into the core of Reality. The objective universe will remain the same but the subjective vision of man will, with evolution, slowly change and the balance of good and evil spiral upwards along a tapering mountainous detour till the road narrows to nothingness and the pilgrims reach the summit of realization where they are not nor anything is, the mount, the road, the men, the mode, all dissolving, coalescing into an integrated mass of consciousness, a void seeking itself in its nothingness, an infinitude brooding on itself in self-oblivion, in Self-awareness, a hollow wholeness in eternal solitude without a stir or motion, the ocean, waveless, tranquil, free of splash or bubble, spherical, unbounded, nor large nor small, dimensionless, limitless, nameless, formless, free.

This, then, is the other world, this, the life beyond in its absolute sense, the very world of everyday occurrence transforming from its manifoldness to its unitary status and the transcendence thereof, the panorama painting poetic dreams passing from partitioned phrases to its pristine wholeness, a ponderous point perishing into the prevision of phenomena, the Presence, pure and perfect, parallel, free. Yet, we have to contend with the dual syndrome of material life and struggle to combat the devil of delusion and death that stalks all of life. Shall we ever succeed in eliminating death and evil? No, for ignorance hallucinates hells and heavens which knowledge dispels and the flip side of good is forever evil, both assuming relative merit from our graded perception mode. Adjustments, advances, amendments are all subjective even though they seem external to our human apparatus. Through all these brushes of the paint, the artist reforms the substance of his dreams, reshapes the canvas of his mind till the fruit of his fancy is ready for deliverance. And then alone does he envisage at last that this life, after all, was a phenomenal dream, full of the dual throng of good and evil in the fabric of life and death, but that there is a higher reality too, a sublimity soaring past the highest heavens into the very kernel of existence lodged in the secret chambers of the human heart where a lamp shines ever leading to the sun of the Self, inward, deeper, gravitating to the essence of things. The Ancient Poem is there, come ye all and read into its meaning. The rest, who knows what destiny has in store for them? Death, decay and destruction await all but few apprehend the truth to escape the clutches of this ancient foe and emerge triumphant free, masters of life and death. For them is life a play and the world a vast stage where respective parts are being enacted by humans as per the divine director's bidding. But so few have access to the inner recesses of this reality about us that one cannot but wonder at the Divine Enchantress’ mesmeric spell that keeps us so befuddled as to so induce in us utter Self-oblivion.

Self-memory and Self-oblivion---these are the dual aspects then of this phenomenal universe and the transcendence thereof. The children of light remember their roots and are blissfully free but the children of the world forget their selves and suffer. Theirs is an eternal drudgery, the tyranny of the routine rigmarole, the tedious tending of the material self in the desert-sand of life. Effulgence illumining all on one side and darkness enveloping all on the other and in between is a glimmer of hope hinging on cross-linkages of the twain. It is a continuum all through, phases merely separated in time along an upward slide which nothing can thwart. Or, perhaps, one may prefer to term it the downward drift to the core of Reality, the gravitational focus, the essence of Being. Whatever the name, the destiny is divine for it is subtle and transcending the domain of physical phenomena, each movement along the ascending scale a quantum shift towards the finer, phenomenon tapering from grosser to subtler realms as it out-reaches itself to finally dissolve in an all-absorbing void, the vast unknown whence there is no return. The universe merges and so does the self in this abyss of nothingness and everything is blotted out in an all-encompassing cipher, beyond bounds, beyond cognition, the indecipherable end-point of things. As the universe zeroes in on itself, the material cover of things is rent apart and the spiritual shines in abiding effulgence from the source of stellar glow, the luminous core of transcendence. All that was dark and desolate is then lit up in a blaze of supernal light with bliss flowing in unceasing cascades and a self-existence that has been perennially there, undivided, whole, conscious and integrally so, without part or partition, self-brooding since eternity and incapable of replication or self-mirroring save in delusion which touches it not.

The 'this side' and the 'that side' of reality, the obverse and the reverse of the same coin tossed in play reveals but a single face of it, hiding the other. But it is all a threaded network across the face of reality that part reveals, part conceals that which is ever beyond the web, it is all a percolation that defies territorial bindings as it makes its way across defined domains, ever revealing slices of the truth beyond in the evolving process of phenomena, a reminder to the lost horizons of their ancestral roots in the centre whence they have sprung forth to ramble along expanding periphery. But the call is on and the flock must return to base camp before the vespers are done with and the nightfall beckons a fresh reckoning of things for a future foray into the unknown.

This then is the saga of existence, the this and that side of life ephemeral and life eternal. This is the cosmic dream, the clash of forces and the resolution thereof, this the sheer significance and the insignificance of terrestrial play. What a vast Cosmos and what a vaster Reality beyond! But how magical it is that the key to its centre lies in the deepest recesses of the human heart, that the core of consciousness is in the human soul, that the secret chambers of knowledge and bliss lie locked in the innermost cellars of this temporal temple where since antiquity is being matured the fermented fruit of realisation, the wine of love in the distillery of the Cosmic Mother-heart enthroned therein. The Self witnesses it all as the dance of the Divine holds the universe in its death throes and the life beyond. Shadows, they loom and shadows, they disappear when the hour cometh. Why, none call tell. They say it is a wrong question to ask. But the question remains and the questioner remains too and none knows why. Perhaps, they all get resolved in realisation when duality dissolves in the paradox of the infinite nothingness and the triune of the observed, the observer and observation all get unified in the unity that is the Void where causality and its queries are all absorbed in a comprehensive consciousness which knoweth it all but may not express. On this side, however, let us dwell on our dualistic deliberations of life and death and the entire spectrum betwixt the two.