Keats’s sonnet On First Looking into Chapman's Homer (1817) is a high mark in Romantic poetry. It is a Petrarchan sonnet divided into an octave and a sestet. In the octave, the poet has travelled in the realms of gold, and one of them is the great property of Homer, a vast tract of living and vibrant land, the seer-poet holding the lordship in the company of the heroic gods and goddesses. Here is the gold of many and many-sided splendours, born from the womb of the celestial Muse herself. After the beautiful prolegomena, the sonnet undergoes a volta at the sestet, coming to the new wonder the poet has discovered. It looks as though, the poet is dumbfound at what he saw in Chapman and the best way to acknowledge it is, to use another extended metaphor—the metaphor of Cortez staring, with eagle-eyes, at the inconceivable Pacific. All that can be described, but it can be described only in the language of utter silence; intensest speech also would fail to rise to the occasion. The awe experienced by Keats has come out most powerfully in the last line, “Silent, upon a peak in Darien.” We might argue that Keats was mentioning in his immortal creation a wrong conquistador,—it was actually Balboa, not Cortez, whose soldiers were the first Europeans to look upon the Pacific Ocean from a mountain in Panama—but nothing can take away or mar the perfection that walks here in celestial elegance and majesty, beautifully truthful as much as truthfully beautiful:

Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold,

And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;

Round many western islands have I been

Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.

Oft of one wide expanse had I been told

That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne;

Yet never did I breathe its pure serene

Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold.

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies

When a new planet swims into his ken;

Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes

He star’d at the Pacific—and all his men

Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—

Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

But the important point for our purpose is, Cortez and his soldiers saw what already existed; it was not a new peak, an altogether new peak that came into sudden view in the manner of a new planet swimming past in the deep night sky.

The point is, we should see the Savitri-line—“A new and marvellous creation rose”—not as something unknown becoming known, but something that never existed and coming out, brought out of the utter Unknowable, an unexpressed possibility willed and made present in it, the sheer nonmanifest as if wheedled or persuaded to manifest it, something from the Unknowable becoming the Unknown which can be, and must be, the Known. Aswapati has it done by the intensification of a supreme will that alone can give definiteness and form to what is potential. The Upanishadic Veil of Unrevelation drawn over the Potential has by the yoga-tapasya of Aswapati got removed; nay, more than that. By the force of his yoga-tapasya it has been formed. His knowledge created the seed of light. Thus was the new world first born in the Transcendent. That is Aswapati’s Trailokya rather Saptalokya Siddhi, the Siddhi of not Three but the Seven Worlds of Consciousness, conquest of Seven Realms, sapta-dhāma. The Mother will later announce that, in the wake of the supramental descent on 29 February 1956, a new world was born, born, born in the earth’s subtle-physical. That is the announcement of the supramental manifestation upon earth.

The Unknowable is undoubtedly far richer and vaster than the Unknown, with all that is creatively patent in it, each will carrying its expressive richness. To reiterate: the Unknown can first become knowable and then the known, but it is not possible to know the Unknowable,—precisely for the reason that it holds in itself all the concealed possibilities, the possibilities that have not yet been thrown into manifestation, or possibilities that have not yet been seeded or willed at all. The Unknown is a part of the Manifest whereas the Unknowable is the Unmanifest or the Non-manifest with all creative urges, all potentialities and prospects, all positives from which can stream out countless manifestations. It is actually with this connotation that we should see Yogi Aswapati’s pursuing the Unknowable,—to bring out a new creation from the Unmanifest. He has first willed it in it and is now occupied to bring it out.

If it is an altogether new creation upon the earth which Aswapati is proposing then for that possibility to get established here, it should first be present in the Transcendent. His yogic effort is therefore first directed towards creating it there. He has done it. He had set for himself a great task no doubt; but then it was only by fulfilling that great task could the full meaning and scope of its getting realised be certain. In it alone is the chance of achieving the assuring success. Aswapati is standing at the entrance of the Sanctum Sanctorum and there is the Upanishadic Veil of Unrevelation drawn over the vision. Behind that Veil everything seems to collapse, not only the nescient worlds but also the higher teeming worlds,—and the Spirit too.

Aswapati was standing on the verge of the Unknowable, free from the bondage of ignorance as well as of knowledge. All that was there with him until this moment was left behind,—except the single yearning that had taken him to that edge of creation. In such total freedom he has gleaming intuition of the future, intuition of his daughter Savitri’s marriage with Satyavan and his death in the Shalwa woods at the noontime. In it is present the entire problem of mortality for which he had undertaken this long and difficult journey across all these occult and spiritual worlds.

It is then that he suddenly sees the meaning of the ignorant “No.” It has been the primordial “No”, the ur-No at the origin of things. In this world that “No” has been the cause of failure; it had been, again and again, rejecting the gifts and the happy graces showered by the plenteous heaven in heavenly richness and munificence, in their magnificences. There is a darkness surrounding the aspiring soul of humanity and in the lucre of sleep are trapped its dreams. The great Athenian always is concerned about great issues, and in the face of this tremendous “No” he has to make his last choice. Perhaps in it will be the victory of the blue-eyed Goddess of Wisdom, of the excellent Athena, the Divine Mother herself in the Transcendent.

The ignorant “No” may not be directly in Aswapati, nor would it be his “evil persona”, his shadow-being, but he ought to recognise its, of the universal shadow-being’s implacable or awesome presence in the world where he proposes the transforming Power to descend. Not only that. His long “apprenticeship to Ignorance” cannot terminate until and unless everything is done to the last detail, every nook and corner searched with the spirit’s fire, every contingency is properly taken care of. The great and thrustful Colonist from Immortality has willingly accepted the travail and he must suffer to the extremest degree of the arduous demand.

But, to reassert, it is not that Aswapati has newly discovered this creation. It is not because of his remarkable spiritual attainments that some pre-existent world which was already there that has presently come into view. It is not a distant peak upon Darien suddenly caught or spotted by a keen eye of the voyager. It is a creation in relation to the earth, a creation that itself has sprung up or arisen as a result of the intense tapasya of Aswapati, arisen because of his remarkable spiritual attainments, because of his will put into the process. The profound Unknowable has offered him this wonderful gift in recognition of his tireless selfless effort, effort put in the Divine Cause: his will had become one with the Will of the Unknowable. The Unknowable’s will took shape in his will. It looks as though the potent will of the Unknowable had to be activated by the will in the creation, activated in the Tapas World by performing the an intense Yoga-Yajna, by yogically invoking the Lord of Sacrifice. That indeed could be the true meaning of the Vedic spiritual approach which has presently been integrated in the possibility of a wider collectivity. That is also perhaps what is finally intended by the Gita's recommendation of works for the welfare of the people, lokasamgraha. Aswapati however makes it now realisable in the evolutionary context.

This new and marvellous creation breathing in topaz radiance has many worlds, the worlds of beauty, of love, joy, thought, will, knowledge, power, light, form, reality’s substance, all with the growing God-kind perfection everywhere. But their materialisation upon the earth must await the “veiled Transcendent’s ultimate decree”. In the House of the Spirit this new creation is ready, poised for precipitation if the conditions here do become appropriate and receptive. The veiled Transcendent’s decree comes in the form of a boon. That boon is the incarnation of the divine Savitri upon earth: “One shall descend and break the iron Law.” That shall be the precursor of the new creation manifesting in its deepening and widening glory.