Savitri – Eine Legende und ein Symbol. Sri Aurobindo

peak immutable above mind’s air,

      A Power within her answered the still Voice:

      “I am thy portion here charged with thy work,

      As thou myself seated for ever above,

      Speak to my depths, O great and deathless Voice,

      Command, for I am here to do thy will.”

      The Voice replied: “Remember why thou cam’st:

      Find out thy soul, recover thy hid self,

      In silence seek God’s meaning in thy depths,

      Then mortal nature change to the divine.

      Open God’s door, enter into his trance.

      Cast Thought from thee, that nimble ape of Light:

      In his tremendous hush stilling thy brain

      His vast Truth wake within and know and see.

      Cast from thee sense that veils thy spirit’s sight:

      In the enormous emptiness of thy mind

      Thou shalt see the Eternal’s body in the world,

      Know him in every voice heard by thy soul,

      In the world’s contacts meet his single touch;

      All things shall fold thee into his embrace.

      Conquer thy heart’s throbs, let thy heart beat in God:

      Thy nature shall be the engine of his works,

      Thy voice shall house the mightiness of his Word:

      Then shalt thou harbour my force and conquer Death.”

      Then Savitri by her doomed husband sat,

      Still rigid in her golden motionless pose,

      A statue of the fire of the inner sun.

      In the black night the wrath of storm swept by,

      The thunder crashed above her, the rain hissed,

      Its million footsteps pattered on the roof.

      Impassive mid the movement and the cry,

      Witness of the thoughts of mind, the moods of life,

      She looked into herself and sought for her soul.

      A dream disclosed to her the cosmic past,

      The crypt-seed and the mystic origins,

      The shadowy beginnings of world-fate:

      A lamp of symbol lighting hidden truth

      Imaged to her the world’s significance.

      In the indeterminate formlessness of Self

      Creation took its first mysterious steps,

      It made the body’s shape a house of soul

      And Matter learned to think and person grew;

      She saw Space peopled with the seeds of life

      And saw the human creature born in Time.

      At first appeared a dim half-neutral tide

      Of being emerging out of infinite Nought:

      A consciousness looked at the inconscient Vast

      And pleasure and pain stirred in the insensible Void.

      All was the deed of a blind World-Energy:

      Unconscious of her own exploits she worked,

      Shaping a universe out of the Inane.

      In fragmentary beings she grew aware:

      A chaos of little sensibilities

      Gathered round a small ego’s pin-point head;

      In it a sentient creature found its poise,

      It moved and lived a breathing, thinking whole.

      On a dim ocean of subconscient life

      A formless surface consciousness awoke:

      A stream of thoughts and feelings came and went,

      A foam of memories hardened and became

      A bright crust of habitual sense and thought,

      A seat of living personality

      And recurrent habits mimicked permanence.

      Mind nascent laboured out a mutable form,

      It built a mobile house on shifting sands,

      A floating isle upon a bottomless sea.

      A conscious being was by this labour made;

      It looked around it on its difficult field

      In the green wonderful and perilous earth;

      It hoped in a brief body to survive,

      Relying on Matter’s false eternity.

      It felt a godhead in its fragile house;

      It saw blue heavens, dreamed immortality.

      A conscious soul in the Inconscient’s world,

      Hidden behind our thoughts and hopes and dreams,

      An indifferent Master signing Nature’s acts

      Leaves the vicegerent mind a seeming king.

      In his floating house upon the sea of Time

      The regent sits at work and never rests:

      He is a puppet of the dance of Time;

      He is driven by the hours, the moment’s call

      Compels him with the thronging of life’s need

      And the babel of the voices of the world.

      This mind no silence knows nor dreamless sleep,

      In the incessant circling of its steps

      Thoughts tread for ever through the listening brain;

      It toils like a machine and cannot stop.

      Into the body’s many-storeyed rooms

      Endless crowd down the dream-god’s messages.

      All is a hundred-toned murmur and babble and stir,

      There is a tireless running to and fro,

      A haste of movement and a ceaseless cry.

      The hurried servant senses answer apace

      To every knock upon the outer doors,

      Bring in time’s visitors, report each call,

      Admit the thousand queries and the calls

      And the messages of communicating minds

      And the heavy business of unnumbered lives

      And all the thousandfold commerce of the world.

      Even in the tracts of sleep is scant repose;

      He mocks life’s steps in strange subconscient dreams,

      He strays in a subtle realm of symbol scenes,

      His night with thin-air visions and dim forms

      He packs or peoples with slight drifting shapes

      And only a moment spends in silent Self.

      Adventuring into infinite mind-space

      He unfolds his wings of thought in inner air,

      Or travelling in imagination’s car

      Crosses the globe, journeys beneath the stars,

      To subtle worlds takes his ethereal course,

      Visits