Savitri – Eine Legende und ein Symbol. Sri Aurobindo

the official cap and mask

      Or pass as manufactures of the brain,

      Unknown their secret truth and hidden source.

      Only to the inner mind they speak direct,

      Put on a body and assume a voice,

      Their passage seen, their message heard and known,

      Their birthplace and their natal mark revealed,

      And stand confessed to an immortal’s sight,

      Our nature’s messengers to the witness soul.

      Impenetrable, withheld from mortal sense,

      The inner chambers of the spirit’s house

      Disclosed to her their happenings and their guests;

      Eyes looked through crevices in the invisible wall

      And through the secrecy of unseen doors

      There came into mind’s little frontal room

      Thoughts that enlarged our limited human range,

      Lifted the ideal’s half-quenched or sinking torch

      Or peered through the finite at the infinite.

      A sight opened upon the invisible

      And sensed the shapes that mortal eyes see not,

      The sounds that mortal listening cannot hear,

      The blissful sweetness of the intangible’s touch;

      The objects that to us are empty air,

      Are there the stuff of daily experience

      And the common pabulum of sense and thought.

      The beings of the subtle realms appeared

      And scenes concealed behind our earthly scene;

      She saw the life of remote continents

      And distance deafened not to voices far;

      She felt the movements crossing unknown minds;

      The past’s events occurred before her eyes.

      The great world’s thoughts were part of her own thought,

      The feelings dumb for ever and unshared,

      The ideas that never found an utterance.

      The dim subconscient’s incoherent hints

      Laid bare a meaning twisted, deep and strange,

      The bizarre secret of their fumbling speech,

      Their links with underlying reality.

      The unseen grew visible and audible:

      Thoughts leaped down from a superconscient field

      Like eagles swooping from a viewless peak,

      Thoughts gleamed up from the screened subliminal depths

      Like golden fishes from a hidden sea.

      This world is a vast unbroken totality,

      A deep solidarity joins its contrary powers;

      God’s summits look back on the mute Abyss.

      So man evolving to divinest heights

      Colloques still with the animal and the Djinn;

      The human godhead with star-gazer eyes

      Lives still in one house with the primal beast.

      The high meets the low, all is a single plan.

      So she beheld the many births of thought,

      If births can be of what eternal is;

      For the Eternal’s powers are like himself,

      Timeless in the Timeless, in Time ever born.

      This too she saw that all in outer mind

      Is made, not born, a product perishable,

      Forged in the body’s factory by earth-force.

      This mind is a dynamic small machine

      Producing ceaselessly, till it wears out,

      With raw material drawn from the outside world,

      The patterns sketched out by an artist God.

      Often our thoughts are finished cosmic wares

      Admitted by a silent office gate

      And passed through the subconscient’s galleries,

      Then issued in Time’s mart as private make.

      For now they bear the living person’s stamp;

      A trick, a special hue claims them his own.

      All else is Nature’s craft and this too hers.

      Our tasks are given, we are but instruments;

      Nothing is all our own that we create:

      The Power that acts in us is not our force.

      The genius too receives from some high fount

      Concealed in a supernal secrecy

      The work that gives him an immortal name.

      The word, the form, the charm, the glory and grace

      Are missioned sparks from a stupendous Fire;

      A sample from the laboratory of God

      Of which he holds the patent upon earth,

      Comes to him wrapped in golden coverings;

      He listens for Inspiration’s postman knock

      And takes delivery of the priceless gift

      A little spoilt by the receiver mind

      Or mixed with the manufacture of his brain;

      When least defaced, then is it most divine.

      Although his ego claims the world for its use,

      Man is a dynamo for the cosmic work;

      Nature does most in him, God the high rest:

      Only his soul’s acceptance is his own.

      This independent, once a power supreme,

      Self-born before the universe was made,

      Accepting cosmos, binds himself Nature’s serf

      Till he becomes her freedman – or God’s slave.

      This is the appearance in our mortal front;

      Our greater truth of being lies behind:

      Our consciousness is cosmic and immense,

      But only when we break through Matter’s wall

      In that spiritual vastness can we stand

      Where we can live the masters of our world

      And mind is only a means and body a tool.

      For above the birth of body and of thought

      Our spirit’s truth lives in the naked self

      And from that height, unbound, surveys the world.

      Out of the mind she rose to escape its law

      That it might sleep in some deep shadow of self

      Or fall silent in the silence of the Unseen.

      High she attained and stood from Nature free

      And saw creation’s life from far above,

      Thence upon all she laid her sovereign will

      To dedicate it to God’s timeless calm:

      Then