Savitri – Eine Legende und ein Symbol. Sri Aurobindo

the discovery of a greater self

      And the far gleam of an eternal Light.

      This world is a beginning and a base

      Where Life and Mind erect their structured dreams;

      An unborn Power must build reality.

      A deathbound littleness is not all we are:

      Immortal our forgotten vastnesses

      Await discovery in our summit selves;

      Unmeasured breadths and depths of being are ours.

      Akin to the ineffable Secrecy,

      Mystic, eternal in unrealised Time,

      Neighbours of Heaven are Nature’s altitudes.

      To these high-peaked dominions sealed to our search,

      Too far from surface Nature’s postal routes,

      Too lofty for our mortal lives to breathe,

      Deep in us a forgotten kinship points

      And a faint voice of ecstasy and prayer

      Calls to those lucent lost immensities.

      Even when we fail to look into our souls

      Or lie embedded in earthly consciousness,

      Still have we parts that grow towards the light,

      Yet are there luminous tracts and heavens serene

      And Eldorados of splendour and ecstasy

      And temples to the godhead none can see.

      A shapeless memory lingers in us still

      And sometimes, when our sight is turned within,

      Earth’s ignorant veil is lifted from our eyes;

      There is a short miraculous escape.

      This narrow fringe of clamped experience

      We leave behind meted to us as life,

      Our little walks, our insufficient reach.

      Our souls can visit in great lonely hours

      Still regions of imperishable Light,

      All-seeing eagle-peaks of silent Power

      And moon-flame oceans of swift fathomless Bliss

      And calm immensities of spirit space.

      In the unfolding process of the Self

      Sometimes the inexpressible Mystery

      Elects a human vessel of descent.

      A breath comes down from a supernal air,

      A Presence is born, a guiding Light awakes,

      A stillness falls upon the instruments:

      Fixed, motionless like a marble monument,

      Stone-calm, the body is a pedestal

      Supporting a figure of eternal Peace.

      Or a revealing Force sweeps blazing in;

      Out of some vast superior continent

      Knowledge breaks through trailing its radiant seas,

      And Nature trembles with the power, the flame.

      A greater Personality sometimes

      Possesses us which yet we know is ours:

      Or we adore the Master of our souls.

      Then the small bodily ego thins and falls;

      No more insisting on its separate self,

      Losing the punctilio of its separate birth,

      It leaves us one with Nature and with God.

      In moments when the inner lamps are lit

      And the life’s cherished guests are left outside,

      Our spirit sits alone and speaks to its gulfs.

      A wider consciousness opens then its doors;

      Invading from spiritual silences

      A ray of the timeless Glory stoops awhile

      To commune with our seized illumined clay

      And leaves its huge white stamp upon our lives.

      In the oblivious field of mortal mind,

      Revealed to the closed prophet eyes of trance

      Or in some deep internal solitude

      Witnessed by a strange immaterial sense,

      The signals of eternity appear.

      The truth mind could not know unveils its face,

      We hear what mortal ears have never heard,

      We feel what earthly sense has never felt,

      We love what common hearts repel and dread;

      Our minds hush to a bright Omniscient;

      A Voice calls from the chambers of the soul;

      We meet the ecstasy of the Godhead’s touch

      In golden privacies of immortal fire.

      These signs are native to a larger self

      That lives within us by ourselves unseen;

      Only sometimes a holier influence comes,

      A tide of mightier surgings bears our lives

      And a diviner Presence moves the soul;

      Or through the earthly coverings something breaks,

      A grace and beauty of spiritual light,

      The murmuring tongue of a celestial fire.

      Ourself and a high stranger whom we feel,

      It is and acts unseen as if it were not;

      It follows the line of sempiternal birth,

      Yet seems to perish with its mortal frame.

      Assured of the Apocalypse to be,

      It reckons not the moments and the hours;

      Great, patient, calm it sees the centuries pass,

      Awaiting the slow miracle of our change

      In the sure deliberate process of world-force

      And the long march of all-revealing Time.

      It is the origin and the master-clue,

      A silence overhead, an inner voice,

      A living image seated in the heart,

      An unwalled wideness and a fathomless point,

      The truth of all these cryptic shows in Space,

      The Real towards which our strivings move,

      The secret grandiose meaning of our lives.

      A treasure of honey in the combs of God,

      A Splendour burning in a tenebrous cloak,

      It is our glory of the flame of God,

      Our golden fountain of the world’s delight,

      An immortality cowled in the cape of death,

      The shape of our unborn divinity.

      It guards for us our fate in depths within

      Where sleeps the eternal seed of transient things.

      Always we bear in us a magic key

      Concealed in life’s hermetic envelope.

      A burning Witness in the sanctuary

      Regards