Childlike Mirth and Joy, pp. 126-127

Opening Remarks
We can see how Sri Aurobindo is taking us step by step towards higher and higher divine worlds and describing the life there. The union of Knowledge and Power is the characteristic of Supramental life. Beyond it are the worlds of Ananda, where Bliss is the spontaneous way of life.

Happiness great and grave
Worlds were there of a happiness great and grave
And action tinged with dream, laughter with thought,
And passion there could wait for its desire
Until it heard the near approach of God.

It is the world where one feels the intimate contact with the Divine filling one with joy and laughter. The happiness experienced in these sunlit worlds is deep and surging from the ground of Divine intimacy and not the superficial joy that imitates true happiness.

Divine gambols of love and beauty and bliss
Worlds were there of a childlike mirth and joy;
A carefree youthfulness of mind and heart
Found in the body a heavenly instrument;
It lit an aureate halo round desire
And freed the deified animal in the limbs
To divine gambols of love and beauty and bliss.

Those familiar with Indian mythology may see in it some reflection of Krishna worlds. Here the consciousness of beings is like a child, carefree and youthful and innocent, full of trust in the Divine. Here even the body’s substance exudes light and bliss and desire takes a sublime divine expression. It is a world where the animality of nature is sublimated and divinized, becoming part of the divine play of love and beauty and bliss.

Tears of happiness
On a radiant soil that gazed at heaven’s smile
A swift life-impulse stinted not nor stopped:
It knew not how to tire; happy were its tears.

It is a luminous world where life energy flows in abundance and untiringly. Even its tears were sweet tears of joy.

Work and play
There work was play and play the only work,
The tasks of heaven a game of godlike might:
A celestial bacchanal for ever pure,
Unstayed by faintness as in mortal frames
Life was an eternity of rapture’s moods:
Age never came, care never lined the face.

In this world one consciously participated in the Divine Play and therefore the work itself became part of the Divine play. All movements and all moods and states of being stemmed from Delight. Living for ever in delight, drinking the divine soma, the ambrosia of delight they remained forever young in body and spirit.

The nude god-children
Imposing on the safety of the stars
A race and laughter of immortal strengths,
The nude god-children in their play-fields ran
Smiting the winds with splendour and with speed;
Of storm and sun they made companions,
Sported with the white mane of tossing seas,
Slew distance trampled to death under their wheels
And wrestled in the arenas of their force.

These children of immortality and bliss, forever dwelling in delight and in a state of sinless purity, sported with the stars and seas, wrestling and gamboling with mighty forces as if it were a child’s play. Radiant with the divine Splendour, they knew not death or fear.

Radiant limbs and glorious bodies
Imperious in their radiance like the suns
They kindled heaven with the glory of their limbs
Flung like a divine largess to the world.

The glory and radiance of their limbs spread over to the Heavens as a gift to the gods.

The spell of delight
A spell to force the heart to stark delight,
They carried the pride and mastery of their charm
As if Life’s banner on the roads of Space.

It is a world filled with the charm of natural mastery casting a spell of delight upon the heart and will.

Ideas and thoughts as luminous comrades of the soul
Ideas were luminous comrades of the soul;
Mind played with speech, cast javelins of thought,
But needed not these instruments’ toil to know;
Knowledge was Nature’s pastime like the rest.

Idea and thought, speech and knowledge all sprang directly from the soul, effortlessly and intuitively bypassing even the need to know. Indeed Knowledge became a pastime and a play, like everything else, in these worlds of delight.

First creation’s bliss
Investitured with the fresh heart’s bright ray,
An early God-instinct’s child inheritors,
Tenants of the perpetuity of Time
Still thrilling with the first creation’s bliss,
They steeped existence in their youth of soul.

They lived as if in the first stir of creation whence delight was the moving impulsion. It was a world of the Light and Delight that sprang from the heart of God.

Streams of happiness
An exquisite and vehement tyranny,
The strong compulsion of their will to joy
Poured smiling streams of happiness through the world.

The will-to-joy poured streams of happiness all around in these worlds.

Closing Remarks
These are worlds of bliss where life has its origin. It is the original Delight that has gone into creation. Here it is felt as mixed and tainted with darkness and egoism, there it lives in its original power and purity and light.