Savitri – Eine Legende und ein Symbol. Sri Aurobindo

explore.

      At last he hears a chanting on the heights

      And the far speaks and the unknown grows near:

      He crosses the boundaries of the unseen

      And passes over the edge of mortal sight

      To a new vision of himself and things.

      He is a spirit in an unfinished world

      That knows him not and cannot know itself:

      The surface symbol of his goalless quest

      Takes deeper meanings to his inner view;

      His is a search of darkness for the light,

      Of mortal life for immortality.

      In the vessel of an earthly embodiment

      Over the narrow rails of limiting sense

      He looks out on the magic waves of Time

      Where mind like a moon illumines the world’s dark.

      There is limned ever retreating from the eyes,

      As if in a tenuous misty dream-light drawn,

      The outline of a dim mysterious shore.

      A sailor on the Inconscient’s fathomless sea,

      He voyages through a starry world of thought

      On Matter’s deck to a spiritual sun.

      Across the noise and multitudinous cry,

      Across the rapt unknowable silences,

      Through a strange mid-world under supernal skies,

      Beyond earth’s longitudes and latitudes,

      His goal is fixed outside all present maps.

      But none learns whither through the unknown he sails

      Or what secret mission the great Mother gave.

      In the hidden strength of her omnipotent Will,

      Driven by her breath across life’s tossing deep,

      Through the thunder’s roar and through the windless hush,

      Through fog and mist where nothing more is seen,

      He carries her sealed orders in his breast.

      Late will he know, opening the mystic script,

      Whether to a blank port in the Unseen

      He goes or, armed with her fiat, to discover

      A new mind and body in the city of God

      And enshrine the Immortal in his glory’s house

      And make the finite one with Infinity.

      Across the salt waste of the endless years

      Her ocean winds impel his errant boat,

      The cosmic waters plashing as he goes,

      A rumour around him and danger and a call.

      Always he follows in her force’s wake.

      He sails through life and death and other life,

      He travels on through waking and through sleep.

      A power is on him from her occult force

      That ties him to his own creation’s fate,

      And never can the mighty Traveller rest

      And never can the mystic voyage cease

      Till the nescient dusk is lifted from man’s soul

      And the morns of God have overtaken his night.

      As long as Nature lasts, he too is there,

      For this is sure that he and she are one;

      Even when he sleeps, he keeps her on his breast:

      Whoever leaves her, he will not depart

      To repose without her in the Unknowable.

      There is a truth to know, a work to do;

      Her play is real; a Mystery he fulfils:

      There is a plan in the Mother’s deep world-whim,

      A purpose in her vast and random game.

      This ever she meant since the first dawn of life,

      This constant will she covered with her sport,

      To evoke a Person in the impersonal Void,

      With the Truth-Light strike earth’s massive roots of trance,

      Wake a dumb self in the inconscient depths

      And raise a lost Power from its python sleep

      That the eyes of the Timeless might look out from Time

      And the world manifest the unveiled Divine.

      For this he left his white infinity

      And laid on the spirit the burden of the flesh,

      That Godhead’s seed might flower in mindless Space.

      End of Canto Four

      Canto Five

      The Yoga of the King:

       The Yoga of the Spirit’s Freedom and Greatness

      This knowledge first he had of time-born men.

      Admitted through a curtain of bright mind

      That hangs between our thoughts and absolute sight,

      He found the occult cave, the mystic door

      Near to the well of vision in the soul,

      And entered where the Wings of Glory brood

      In the silent space where all is for ever known.

      Indifferent to doubt and to belief,

      Avid of the naked real’s single shock

      He shore the cord of mind that ties the earth-heart

      And cast away the yoke of Matter’s law.

      The body’s rules bound not the spirit’s powers:

      When life had stopped its beats, death broke not in;

      He dared to live when breath and thought were still.

      Thus could he step into that magic place

      Which few can even glimpse with hurried glance

      Lifted for a moment from mind’s laboured works

      And the poverty of Nature’s earthly sight.

      All that the Gods have learned is there self-known.

      There in a hidden chamber closed and mute

      Are kept the record graphs of the cosmic scribe,

      And there the tables of the sacred Law,

      There is the Book of Being’s index page;

      The text and glossary of the Vedic truth

      Are there; the rhythms and metres of the stars

      Significant of the movements of our fate:

      The symbol powers of number and of form,

      And the secret code of the history of the world

      And Nature’s correspondence with the soul

      Are written in the mystic heart of Life.

      In the glow of the spirit’s room of memories

      He could recover the luminous marginal notes

      Dotting with light the crabbed ambiguous scroll,