Savitri – Eine Legende und ein Symbol. Sri Aurobindo

pain he makes his means:

      On death and suffering he builds his throne.

      In the hurry and clangour of his acts of might,

      In a riot and excess of fame and shame,

      By his magnitudes of hate and violence,

      By the quaking of the world beneath his tread

      He matches himself against the Eternal’s calm

      And feels in himself the greatness of a god:

      Power is his image of celestial self.

      The Titan’s heart is a sea of fire and force;

      He exults in the death of things and ruin and fall,

      He feeds his strength with his own and others’ pain;

      In the world’s pathos and passion he takes delight,

      His pride, his might call for the struggle and pang.

      He glories in the sufferings of the flesh

      And covers the stigmata with the Stoic’s name.

      His eyes blinded and visionless stare at the sun,

      The seeker’s Sight receding from his heart

      Can find no more the light of eternity;

      He sees the beyond as an emptiness void of soul

      And takes his night for a dark infinite.

      His nature magnifies the unreal’s blank

      And sees in Nought the sole reality:

      He would stamp his single figure on the world,

      Obsess the world’s rumours with his single name.

      His moments centre the vast universe.

      He sees his little self as very God.

      His little 'I' has swallowed the whole world,

      His ego has stretched into infinity.

      His mind, a beat in original Nothingness,

      Ciphers his thought on a slate of hourless Time.

      He builds on a mighty vacancy of soul

      A huge philosophy of Nothingness.

      In him Nirvana lives and speaks and acts

      Impossibly creating a universe.

      An eternal zero is his formless self,

      His spirit the void impersonal absolute.

      Take not that stride, O growing soul of man;

      Cast not thy self into that night of God.

      The soul suffering is not eternity’s key,

      Or ransom by sorrow heaven’s demand on life.

      O mortal, bear, but ask not for the stroke,

      Too soon will grief and anguish find thee out.

      Too enormous is that venture for thy will;

      Only in limits can man’s strength be safe;

      Yet is infinity thy spirit’s goal;

      Its bliss is there behind the world’s face of tears.

      A power is in thee that thou knowest not;

      Thou art a vessel of the imprisoned spark.

      It seeks relief from Time’s envelopment,

      And while thou shutst it in, the seal is pain:

      Bliss is the Godhead’s crown, eternal, free,

      Unburdened by life’s blind mystery of pain:

      Pain is the signature of the Ignorance

      Attesting the secret god denied by life:

      Until life finds him pain can never end.

      Calm is self’s victory overcoming fate.

      Bear; thou shalt find at last thy road to bliss.

      Bliss is the secret stuff of all that lives,

      Even pain and grief are garbs of world-delight,

      It hides behind thy sorrow and thy cry.

      Because thy strength is a part and not God’s whole,

      Because afflicted by the little self

      Thy consciousness forgets to be divine

      As it walks in the vague penumbra of the flesh

      And cannot bear the world’s tremendous touch,

      Thou criest out and sayst that there is pain.

      Indifference, pain and joy, a triple disguise,

      Attire of the rapturous Dancer in the ways,

      Withhold from thee the body of God’s bliss.

      Thy spirit’s strength shall make thee one with God,

      Thy agony shall change to ecstasy,

      Indifference deepen into infinity’s calm

      And joy laugh nude on the peaks of the Absolute.

      “O mortal who complainst of death and fate,

      Accuse none of the harms thyself hast called;

      This troubled world thou hast chosen for thy home,

      Thou art thyself the author of thy pain.

      Once in the immortal boundlessness of Self,

      In a vast of Truth and Consciousness and Light

      The soul looked out from its felicity.

      It felt the Spirit’s interminable bliss,

      It knew itself deathless, timeless, spaceless, one,

      It saw the Eternal, lived in the Infinite.

      Then, curious of a shadow thrown by Truth,

      It strained towards some otherness of self,

      It was drawn to an unknown Face peering through night.

      It sensed a negative infinity,

      A void supernal whose immense excess

      Imitating God and everlasting Time

      Offered a ground for Nature’s adverse birth

      And Matter’s rigid hard unconsciousness

      Harbouring the brilliance of a transient soul

      That lights up birth and death and ignorant life.

      A Mind arose that stared at Nothingness

      Till figures formed of what could never be;

      It housed the contrary of all that is.

      A Nought appeared as Being’s huge sealed cause,

      Its dumb support in a blank infinite,

      In whose abysm spirit must disappear:

      A darkened Nature lived and held the seed

      Of Spirit hidden and feigning not to be.

      Eternal Consciousness became a freak

      Of an unsouled almighty Inconscient

      And, breathed no more as spirit’s native air,

      Bliss was an incident of a mortal hour,

      A stranger in the insentient universe.

      As one drawn by the grandeur of the Void

      The soul attracted leaned to the Abyss:

      It longed for the adventure of Ignorance

      And