Savitri – Eine Legende und ein Symbol. Sri Aurobindo

eclipsing shell of a darkened sun

      On its secret way to the Ineffable.

      Even now her splendid being might flame back

      Out of the silence and the nullity,

      A gleaming portion of the All-Wonderful,

      A power of some all-affirming Absolute,

      A shining mirror of the eternal Truth

      To show to the One-in-all its manifest face,

      To the souls of men their deep identity.

      Or she might wake into God’s quietude

      Beyond the cosmic day and cosmic night

      And rest appeased in his white eternity.

      But this was now unreal or remote

      Or covered in the mystic fathomless blank.

      In infinite Nothingness was the ultimate sign

      Or else the Real was the Unknowable.

      A lonely Absolute negated all:

      It effaced the ignorant world from its solitude

      And drowned the soul in its everlasting peace.

      End of Canto Six

      Canto Seven

      The Discovery of the Cosmic Spirit and the Cosmic Consciousness

      In the little hermitage in the forest’s heart,

      In the sunlight and the moonlight and the dark

      The daily human life went plodding on

      Even as before with its small unchanging works

      And its spare outward body of routine

      And happy quiet of ascetic peace.

      The old beauty smiled of the terrestrial scene;

      She too was her old gracious self to men.

      The Ancient Mother clutched her child to her breast

      Pressing her close in her environing arms,

      As if earth ever the same could for ever keep

      The living spirit and body in her clasp,

      As if death were not there nor end nor change.

      Accustomed only to read outward signs

      None saw aught new in her, none divined her state;

      They saw a person where was only God’s vast,

      A still being or a mighty nothingness.

      To all she was the same perfect Savitri:

      A greatness and a sweetness and a light

      Poured out from her upon her little world.

      Life showed to all the same familiar face,

      Her acts followed the old unaltered round,

      She spoke the words that she was wont to speak

      And did the things that she had always done.

      Her eyes looked out on earth’s unchanging face,

      Around her soul’s muteness all moved as of old;

      A vacant consciousness watched from within,

      Empty of all but bare Reality.

      There was no will behind the word and act,

      No thought formed in her brain to guide the speech:

      An impersonal emptiness walked and spoke in her,

      Something perhaps unfelt, unseen, unknown

      Guarded the body for its future work,

      Or Nature moved in her old stream of force.

      Perhaps she bore made conscious in her breast

      The miraculous Nihil, origin of our souls

      And source and sum of the vast world’s events,

      The womb and grave of thought, a cipher of God,

      A zero circle of being’s totality.

      It used her speech and acted in her acts,

      It was beauty in her limbs, life in her breath;

      The original Mystery wore her human face.

      Thus was she lost within to separate self;

      Her mortal ego perished in God’s night.

      Only a body was left, the ego’s shell

      Afloat mid drift and foam of the world-sea,

      A sea of dream watched by a motionless sense

      In a figure of unreal reality.

      An impersonal foresight could already see, –

      In the unthinking knowledge of the spirit

      Even now it seemed nigh done, inevitable, –

      The individual die, the cosmos pass;

      These gone, the transcendental grew a myth,

      The Holy Ghost without the Father and Son,

      Or, a substratum of what once had been,

      Being that never willed to bear a world

      Restored to its original loneliness,

      Impassive, sole, silent, intangible.

      Yet all was not extinct in this deep loss;

      The being travelled not towards nothingness.

      There was some high surpassing Secrecy,

      And when she sat alone with Satyavan,

      Her moveless mind with his that searched and strove,

      In the hush of the profound and intimate night

      She turned to the face of a veiled voiceless Truth

      Hid in the dumb recesses of the heart

      Or waiting beyond the last peak climbed by Thought, –

      Unseen itself it sees the struggling world

      And prompts our quest, but cares not to be found, –

      Out of that distant Vast came a reply.

      Something unknown, unreached, inscrutable

      Sent down the messages of its bodiless Light,

      Cast lightning flashes of a thought not ours

      Crossing the immobile silence of her mind:

      In its might of irresponsible sovereignty

      It seized on speech to give those flamings shape,

      Made beat the heart of wisdom in a word

      And spoke immortal things through mortal lips.

      Or, listening to the sages of the woods,

      In question and in answer broke from her

      High strange revealings impossible to men,

      Something or someone secret and remote

      Took hold of her body for his mystic use,

      Her mouth was seized to channel ineffable truths,

      Knowledge unthinkable found an utterance.

      Astonished by a new enlightenment,

      Invaded by a streak of the Absolute,

      They marvelled at her, for she seemed to know

      What they had only glimpsed at times afar.

      These