Savitri Digital-friendly First Edition

by Sri Aurobindo

Nirvana and the Discovery of the All-Negating Absolute

Fear not to be nothing that thou mayst be all;

Consent to be nothing and none, dissolve Time’s work, Cast off thy mind, step back from form and name. ||128.49||

Annul thyself that only God may be.”

Then all grew still, nothing moved any more: Immobile, self-rapt, timeless, solitary A silent spirit pervaded silent Space.

blank pure consciousness had replaced the mind.

joy and grief could never rise again.

Vain was the provocation of events; Nothing within answered an outside touch, No nerve was stirred and no reaction rose.

Yet still her body saw and moved and spoke; It understood without the aid of thought, It said whatever needed to be said, It did whatever needed to be done.

There was no person there behind the act, No mind that chose or passed the fitting word: All wrought like an unerring apt machine.

The engine did the work for which it was made: Her consciousness looked on and took no part;

The Truth where knowledge is not nor knower nor known,

Immortality thou claimest for thy spirit, But immortality for imperfect man, A god who hurts himself at every step, Would be a cycle of eternal pain.

If thy mind seems to thee a radiant sun, If thy life runs a swift and glorious dream, This is the illusion of thy mortal heart Dazzled by a ray of happiness or light.

Or who can see a face and form divine In the naked two-legged worm thou callest man?

Where Matter is all, there Spirit is a dream: If all are the Spirit, Matter is a lie,

He who would turn to God must leave the world; He who would live in the Spirit, must give up life; He who has met the Self, renounces self.

The voyagers of the million routes of mind Who have travelled through Existence to its end, Sages exploring the world-ocean’s vasts, Have found extinction the sole harbour safe.

Two only are the doors of man’s escape, Death of his body Matter’s gate to peace, Death of his soul his last felicity.

Mind is the author, spectator, actor, stage: Mind only is and what it thinks is seen.

If Mind is all, renounce the hope of bliss; If Mind is all, renounce the hope of Truth.

For Mind can never touch the body of Truth And Mind can never see the soul of God; Only his shadow it grasps nor hears his laugh As it turns from him to the vain seeming of things.

Each thought is a gold coin with bright alloy And error and truth are its obverse and reverse: This is the imperial mintage of the brain And of this kind is all its currency. ||144.24||

Think not to plant on earth the living Truth Or make of Matter’s world the home of God; Truth comes not there but only the thought of Truth, God is not there but only the name of God.

If Self there is, it is bodiless and unborn; It is no one and it is possessed by none,

Dream not to change the world that God has planned, Strive not to alter his eternal law.

If thou art Spirit and Nature is thy robe, Cast off thy garb and be thy naked self Immutable in its undying truth, Alone for ever in the mute Alone. ||144.33||

Turn then to God, for him leave all behind; Forgetting Love, forgetting Satyavan, Annul thyself in his immobile peace.

For thou must die to thyself to reach God’s height: I, Death, am the gate of immortality.”

The soul is a figure of the Unmanifest, The mind labours to think the Unthinkable, The life to call the Immortal into birth, The body to enshrine the Illimitable.

I am not bound by thought or sense or shape; I live in the glory of the Infinite, I am near to the Nameless and Unknowable, The Ineffable is now my household mate.

Lo, how all shakes when the gods tread too near!

The Person is a bubble on Time’s sea.

But what is Truth and who can find her form Amid the specious images of sense, Amid the crowding guesses of the mind And the dark ambiguities of a world Peopled with the incertitudes of Thought?

All in this world is true, yet all is false:

man at once is animal and god, A disparate enigma of God’s mate Unable to free the Godhead’s form within, A being less than himself, yet something more, The aspiring animal, the frustrate god, Yet neither beast nor deity but man, But man tied to the kind earth’s labour strives to exceed, Climbing the stairs of God to higher Things.

All contraries are aspects of God’s face.

To eyes that see a part and miss the whole; The surface men scan, the depths refuse their search:

If our souls could see and love and clasp God’s Truth, Its infinite radiance would seize our hearts, Our being in God’s image be remade And earthly life become the life divine.”

For truth and knowledge are an idle gleam, If Knowledge brings not power to change the world, If Might comes not to give to Truth her right. ||146.80||

He is the Wisdom that comes not by thought, His wordless silence brings the immortal word.

Few are the silences in which Truth is heard,

Heaven’s call is rare, rarer the heart that heeds;

To bring God down to the world on earth we came, To change the earthly life to life divine. ||153.1||

If thou must indeed deliver man and earth On the spiritual heights, look down on life, Discover the truth of God and man and world; Then do thy task knowing and seeing all.

In the world of my knowledge and my ignorance Where God is unseen and only is heard a Name And knowledge is trapped in the boundaries of mind And life is hauled in the drag-net of desire And Matter hides the soul from its own sight,

There is a being beyond the being of mind, An Immeasurable cast into many forms, A miracle of the multitudinous One.

Nature shall live to manifest secret God, The Spirit shall take up the human play, This earthly life become the life divine.”