Savitri – Eine Legende und ein Symbol. Sri Aurobindo

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      And mathematises her huge external world,

      To Reason bound within the circle of sense,

      Or in Thought’s broad impalpable Exchange

      A speculator in tenuous vast ideas,

      Abstractions in the void her currency

      We know not with what firm values for its base.

      Only religion in this bankruptcy

      Presents its dubious riches to our hearts

      Or signs unprovisioned cheques on the Beyond:

      Our poverty shall there have its revenge.

      Our spirits depart discarding a futile life

      Into the blank unknown or with them take

      Death’s passport into immortality.

      Yet was this only a provisional scheme,

      A false appearance sketched by limiting sense,

      Mind’s insufficient self-discovery,

      An early attempt, a first experiment.

      This was a toy to amuse the infant earth;

      But knowledge ends not in these surface powers

      That live upon a ledge in the Ignorance

      And dare not look into the dangerous depths

      Or to stare upward measuring the Unknown.

      There is a deeper seeing from within

      And, when we have left these small purlieus of mind,

      A greater vision meets us on the heights

      In the luminous wideness of the spirit’s gaze.

      At last there wakes in us a witness Soul

      That looks at truths unseen and scans the Unknown;

      Then all assumes a new and marvellous face:

      The world quivers with a God-light at its core,

      In Time’s deep heart high purposes move and live,

      Life’s borders crumble and join infinity.

      This broad, confused, yet rigid scheme becomes

      A magnificent imbroglio of the Gods,

      A game, a work ambiguously divine.

      Our seekings are short-lived experiments

      Made by a wordless and inscrutable Power

      Testing its issues from inconscient Night

      To meet its luminous self of Truth and Bliss.

      It peers at the Real through the apparent form;

      It labours in our mortal mind and sense;

      Amid the figures of the Ignorance,

      In the symbol pictures drawn by word and thought,

      It seeks the truth to which all figures point;

      It looks for the source of Light with vision’s lamp;

      It works to find the Doer of all works,

      The unfelt Self within who is the guide,

      The unknown Self above who is the goal.

      All is not here a blinded Nature’s task:

      A Word, a Wisdom watches us from on high,

      A Witness sanctioning her will and works,

      An Eye unseen in the unseeing vast;

      There is an Influence from a Light above,

      There are thoughts remote and sealed eternities;

      A mystic motive drives the stars and suns.

      In this passage from a deaf unknowing Force

      To struggling consciousness and transient breath

      A mighty Supernature waits on Time.

      The world is other than we now think and see,

      Our lives a deeper mystery than we have dreamed;

      Our minds are starters in the race to God,

      Our souls deputed selves of the Supreme.

      Across the cosmic field through narrow lanes

      Asking a scanty dole from Fortune’s hands

      And garbed in beggar’s robes there walks the One.

      Even in the theatre of these small lives

      Behind the act a secret sweetness breathes,

      An urge of miniature divinity.

      A mystic passion from the wells of God

      Flows through the guarded spaces of the soul;

      A force that helps supports the suffering earth,

      An unseen nearness and a hidden joy.

      There are muffled throbs of laughter’s undertones,

      The murmur of an occult happiness,

      An exultation in the depths of sleep,

      A heart of bliss within a world of pain.

      An Infant nursed on Nature’s covert breast,

      An Infant playing in the magic woods,

      Fluting to rapture by the spirit’s streams,

      Awaits the hour when we shall turn to his call.

      In this investiture of fleshly life

      A soul that is a spark of God survives

      And sometimes it breaks through the sordid screen

      And kindles a fire that makes us half-divine.

      In our body’s cells there sits a hidden Power

      That sees the unseen and plans eternity,

      Our smallest parts have room for deepest needs;

      There too the golden Messengers can come:

      A door is cut in the mud wall of self;

      Across the lowly threshold with bowed heads

      Angels of ecstasy and self-giving pass,

      And lodged in an inner sanctuary of dream

      The makers of the image of deity live.

      Pity is there and fire-winged sacrifice,

      And flashes of sympathy and tenderness

      Cast heaven-lights from the heart’s secluded shrine.

      A work is done in the deep silences;

      A glory and wonder of spiritual sense,

      A laughter in beauty’s everlasting space

      Transforming world-experience into joy,

      Inhabit the mystery of the untouched gulfs;

      Lulled by Time’s beats eternity sleeps in us.

      In the sealed hermetic heart, the happy core,

      Unmoved behind this outer shape of death

      The eternal Entity prepares within

      Its matter of divine felicity,

      Its reign of heavenly phenomenon.

      Even in our sceptic mind of ignorance

      A foresight comes of some immense release,

      Our will lifts towards it slow and shaping hands.

      Each part in us desires its absolute.