PRISMA Audio Books

The Traveller of the Worlds sees the vital forces which move the small beings in the Kingdom of the Little Worlds to live only for themselves and their own small wants and needs, and which makes them hurt others and destroy others’ lives to get what they want for themselves. In this Canto Sri Aurobindo makes it clear that these forces are the same ones which drive our human hearts wherever love and light and largeness lack and in a small body self is all that counts. The Mother gave a talk in which she described and explained exactly the same forces and their devious and poisonous work in humans. We have Mother’s clear explanation in prose and then Sri Aurobindo’s moving and evocative poetic version of the same thing. The original French tape recording will play after the English translation.

The King is observing the third creation that rises in the stages of the evolution of Life as it is developing in early beings whose small existence and petty state resemble our human days, but are fixed to eternity as a changeless type. We see a third creation arise as the dim, obscure mind power is pressed by a seeing Power to fashion the primitive pattern of the thoughts of man. This small creature of the little life knows itself a creature of mud and it turns around around the same unchanging points of ego-interest and desire. Sri Aurobindo says this movement lasts through time, so it still functions today along with aspects of further evolution.

King Aswapathy now sees the rise of strange creations of a thinking sense as he follows Life’s rise from inconscient sleep in matter. A seeking Power found out its road to form. The force of creation, working by the light of Ignorance, began her animal experiment. Beings were there who wore a human form but identified only with the body and worked only for outward wants. They turned in grooves of animal desire. Instinct was formed. Only life could think and not the mind. Only sense could feel and not the soul. As yet, the individual soul was unheeded and unknown.

The Yogi-King Aswapathy can see the purpose of the works of time in the very beginning of life’s slow rise out of the inconscience of matter. He can see her ascension towards consciousness from the inconscient torpor of her sleep in matter because of his developed spiritual sight. Impure and degraded though life’s motions are here, a heaven-truth always broods in life’s deeps. The phantom of this dark and evil start still pursues all that we dream and do, but it was needed for the breath of life to be. This week there is an entry from Sri Aurobindo’s diary, the Record of Yoga where we can see that he is experiencing what he writes about in Canto IV.

King Aswapathy, the great yogi, is traveling through the worlds to learn about life’s fall. She came to bring her glory but her plunge was into matter’s inconscience and from there she has to rise. Her need to find her true self again is joined to the hunger of earth. “In the heart she kindled a fire of passion and need. The inert cell awoke with her yearning,” The king sees life in her most fallen and degraded state when she first crawled out of her cabin of inconscient mud. She is in a world of falsehood and death An inconscient Power groped towards consciousness.

The great Yogi King continues to have the vision of Life, complete, eternal, blissful and immortal. She is fulfilled in all she is and does. But even with all of his yogic attainments, King Aswapathy cannot enter into Life’s glory. His nature lives too near suffering worlds and he is still bound by his individual thoughts and the dimness of his vision. Then Sri Aurobindo describes Life’s fall when she is called to enter into matter at the time of the crude beginnings of this mortal world when earth was built in the unconscious Void. Here, interned in matter, Life is changed. She is now doomed to feed death with her works. In the next canto the king will have to go deeper into all the worlds of being by traveling deeper into his own inner being.

Sri Aurobindo gives us life’s full glory in worlds which are halfway to heaven, but tells us that heaven’s joys cannot be earth’s because earth is not pure and she has stabled her dreams in matter’s courts. King Aswapathy continues to live these high experiences in vision. “Only to be was a supreme delight, life was a happy laughter of the soul and Joy was king with Love for minister.”

Answering a greater Nature’s troubled call, King Aswapathy ascends out of the Kingdom of Subtle Matter into the next world on the World Stair. He crosses the limits of embodied mind and arrives in a place where Life is free to go everywhere, do everything and be everything. But Life is unsatisfied and unsure of its end here, and the king finds nothing to satisfy his heart. While he walks on uncertain ground, he sees the image of Life’s happier state. This dream takes the shape of reality and his vision makes it all its own.

King Aswapathy is moving through the Subtle Physical plane, the first step on the World Stair. His senses are ravished with delight and the king enjoys that fine material paradise, but its limitations can not hold him long. His destiny lay beyond this finer world, which is closest to our material existence. His spirit wants more than being’s surfaces. It turned to hidden powers and deeper states, and he looked beyond for greater light. We have some of Sri Aurobindo’s diary entries in The Record Of Yoga, showing some of his success in working with his own subtle body and keeping some of the finer substance of the subtle physical plane in his own physical body. The Record Of Yoga is full of references to the subtle physical, but it is not always obvious.

King Aswapathy is in the first inner world as he climbs the World Stair; The Kingdom Of Subtle Matter. Mother refers to this as ‘the subtle physical’. Our own subtle physical is right outside our skin and extends a long way beyond our physical body. Mother often speaks of her experiences in the subtle physical. In this part of the canto Sri Aurobindo speaks of how our material, physical plane of consciousness responds to things which come to us from the subtle physical world and also how we respond to higher things which pass through the subtle physical and are available to our consciousness.