The second stage of Equality is a heightening and widening of the first and passes quite naturally into the yoga of knowledge. This is the period when the passage of the personality into the Impersonal gets completed and sealed. There is here a complete cessation of the mechanism of attraction and repulsion, a complete cessation of identification with Prakriti and her movements in us and in the world, a complete withdrawal from all that externalises and a complete merging with the real Person within that supports and sanctions the play of Nature but is completely unmoved and untouched by it. To be stationed in the depths of the high seated soul is the result of this stage of equality. This is the station that transcends the play of Nature in oneself and in others and rests in the immutable reality of the soul.
The third stage of Equality and the one that is characteristic of the Integral Yoga, for not many have envisioned a descent back to earth after reaching the supreme heights, is the one that perfects and makes possible a divine life upon earth for the sake of the earth and hails the next future of Evolution, the Supramental future. If the first two stages were the hallmarks of the adolescent and the mature soul, the third is the sign of the perfected soul.
Having passed through the first two stages and having moved on the soul comes to the possibility of a total self-giving and through it to the joy and delight of the love of union. Now the soul is capable of a spiritual equality, passionate calm, delightful resignation, and a blissful self-giving. It can now be equal with power and passion, with total knowledge by identity with all, with a mighty sense of a universal and transcendent oneness.
This is when calm becomes the base for true action, peace the ground for infinite bliss and strength is replaced by a total mastery. It is totality and joy that characterize this phase, total understanding, total knowledge, total self-giving, total oneness accompanied by bliss. There is no sense of giving up or enduring or persisting anymore, there is only joy in every contact, love in every movement. There is a quiet gladness here in all that happens. This is also the culmination of the yoga of devotion where all is only a passionate play of the seeker and his Divine beloved, where there is no scope for anything other than Love and Ananda.
It can be concluded that Equality begins with the individual and his immediate action as an offering to the One, in the giving up of all selfish expectation and desire, then passes to a universal Understanding and impersonal Quiet of the One in all and finally culminates in a Joyful self-giving and union with the Divine in order to work out here His Supreme Will.
There arises in me a prayer, a deep conviction and yearning, “I shall meet Thee in all, I shall know Thee in all, I shall become Thee in all.”
Equanimity, Immutable peace and calm.
Iberis, Candytuft
