Savitri Digital-friendly First Edition

by Sri Aurobindo

This limited being lifted to zenith bliss, Happy to enjoy one touch of things supreme, Packed into its sealed small infinity, Its endless time-made world outfacing Time, A little output of God’s vast delight.

Here are devised the forms of an ignorant life That sees the empiric fact as settled law, Labours for the hour and not for eternity And trades its gains to meet the moment’s call: The slow process of a material mind Which serves the body it should rule and use And needs to lean upon an erring sense, Was born in that luminous obscurity.

This powerful bondslave of his instruments Thinks his low station Nature’s highest top, Oblivious of his share in all things made And haughtily humble in his own conceit Believes himself a spawn of Matter’s mud And takes his own creations for his cause.

To eternal light and knowledge meant to rise, Up from man’s bare beginning is our climb; Out of earth’s heavy smallness we must break, We must search our nature with spiritual fire: An insect crawl preludes our glorious flight; Our human state cradles the future god, Our mortal frailty an immortal force. ||66.20||

Ignorant of all but eager to know all, Its curious slow enquiry there begins; Ever searching it grasps at shapes around, Ever it hopes to find out greater things.

And things long known and actions always done Are to its clinging hold a balustrade Of safety on the perilous stair of Time.

In Nothingness born to Nothingness returned, Yet all the time unwittingly it drove Towards the hidden Something that is All.

A bullock yoked in the cart of proven fact, She drags huge knowledge-bales through Matter’s dust To reach utility’s immense bazaar.

As if she knew not facts are husks of truth, The husks she keeps, the kernel throws aside.

It has no mover, no maker, no idea: Its vast self-action toils without a cause;

She had met the formless Power inventor of forms; Suddenly she stumbled upon things unseen: A lightning from the undiscovered Truth Startled her eyes with its perplexing glare And dug a gulf between the Real and Known Till all her knowledge seemed an ignorance.

For not by Reason was creation made And not by Reason can the Truth be seen

Our ignorance is Wisdom’s chrysalis,

It knows itself and in itself it lives, It moves where no thought is nor any form.

But our dwarf will and cold pragmatic sense Admit not the celestial visitants: Awaiting us on the Ideal’s peaks Or guarded in our secret self unseen Yet flashed sometimes across the awakened soul, Hide from our lives their greatness, beauty, power.

His privilege regained of shadowless sight The Thinker entered the immortals’ air And drank again his pure and mighty source.

A happiness it brings of whispered truth; There runs in its flow honeying the bosom of Space A laughter from the immortal heart of Bliss, And the unfathomed Joy of timelessness, The sound of Wisdom’s murmur in the Unknown And the breath of an unseen Infinity.

On meditation’s mounting edge of trance Great stairs of thought climbed up to unborn heights Where Time’s last ridges touch eternity’s skies And Nature speaks to the spirit’s absolute.

The All-containing was contained in form, Oneness was carved into units measurable, The limitless built into a cosmic sum: Unending Space was beaten into a curve, Indivisible Time into small minutes cut, The infinitesimal massed to keep secure The mystery of the Formless cast into form.

Yet was their wisdom circled with a nought: Truths they could find and hold but not the one Truth: The Highest was to them unknowable. ||71.40||

By knowing too much they missed the Whole to be known: The fathomless heart of the world was left unguessed And the Transcendent kept its secrecy.

A great all-ruling consciousness is there And Mind unwitting serves a higher Power; It is a channel, not the source of all.

The cosmos is no accident in Time; There is a meaning in each play of Chance, There is a freedom in each face of Fate.

On peaks beyond our ken the All-Wisdom sits:

The unseizable forces of the cosmic whirl Bear in their bacchant limbs the fixity Of an original foresight that is Fate. ||71.49||

Even Nature’s ignorance is Truth’s instrument; Our struggling ego cannot change her course: Yet is it a conscious power that moves in us And destiny the unrecognised child of Will.

Here the mind’s wisdom stopped; it felt complete; For nothing more was left to think or know; In a spiritual zero it sat throned And took its vast silence for the Ineffable. ||71.63||

Then the Unmanifest reflects his form In the still mind as in a living glass; The timeless Ray descends into our hearts And we are rapt into eternity.

For Truth is wider, greater than her forms.

A thousand icons they have made of her And find her in the idols they adore; But she remains herself and infinite.

A bliss is felt that never can wholly cease, A sudden mystery of secret Grace

Omnipotent, immobile and aloof, In the world which sprang from it, it took no part: It gave no heed to the paeans of victory, It was indifferent to its own defeats, It heard the cry of grief and made no sign, Impartial fell its gaze on evil and good, It saw destruction come and did not move.

Silence, the mystic birthplace of the soul.

In a world of beings and momentary events Where all must die to live and live to die. ||74.40||

To be was a prison, extinction the escape.

One who could love without return for love,

For world and self were one reality.

Here came the thought that passes beyond Thought, Here the still Voice which our listening cannot hear, The Knowledge by which the Knower is the Known, The Love in which Beloved and Lover are one. ||78.8||

The known released him from its limiting chain, He knocked at the doors of the Unknowable. ||78.11||

Inward, immense, innumerably one.

The primal Energy took him in its arms; His brain was wrapped in overwhelming Light, An all-embracing knowledge seized his heart: Thoughts rose in him no earthly mind can hold, Mights played that never coursed through mortal nerves: He scanned the secrets of the Overmind, He bore the rapture of the Oversoul.

A cave of darkness guards the eternal Light.

Near, it retreated; far, it called him still.

In an abysmal lapse of all things built Transcending every perishable support And joining at last its mighty origin, The separate self must melt or be reborn Into a Truth beyond the mind’s appeal.

There was no second, it had no partner or peer; Only itself was real to itself.

A pure existence safe from thought and mood, A consciousness of unshared immortal bliss, It dwelt aloof in its bare infinite, One and unique, unutterably sole.

A Being formless, featureless and mute That knew itself by its own timeless self, Aware for ever in its motionless depths, Uncreating, uncreated and unborn, The One by whom all live, who lives by none, An immeasurable luminous secrecy Guarded by the veils of the Unmanifest, Above the changing cosmic interlude Abode supreme, immutably the same, A silent Cause occult, impenetrable,— Infinite, eternal, unthinkable, alone.

And makes unreal all that mind has known,

All that the labouring senses still would weave Prolonging an imaged unreality.

Self’s vast spiritual silence occupies space; Only the Inconceivable is left, Only the Nameless without space and time: Abolished is the burdening need of life: Thought falls from us, we cease from joy and grief; The ego is dead; we are free from being and care, We have done with birth and death and work and fate.