The real question is what purpose, if any has placed the human soul here in this strange twi-natured earthly life? We know the link between the soul and God. We know the link between the self and world as nature. But is there truly a link between God and the World apart from an ‘apparently irresponsible’ Creator who built this universe in Time and Space? For His delight we are told, but a delight that leads to pain and suffering to its most evolved and special creature called man would be a strange antinomy. These and other questions that arise naturally out of the different positions that humanity has taken since man awoke to his unique privilege and the challenge of a seeker are so well voiced by Sri Aurobindo himself in Savitri in the words of the Queen, wife of the yogi Aswapati, a good and beautiful being yet ignorant and seeking for some ultimate answers.
‘Why is it all and wherefore are we here?
If to some being of eternal bliss
It is our spirit’s destiny to return
Or some still impersonal height of endless calm,
Since That we are and out of That we came,
Whence rose the strange and sterile interlude
Lasting in vain through interminable Time?
Who willed to form or feign a universe
In the cold and endless emptiness of Space?
Or if these beings must be and their brief lives,
What need had the soul of ignorance and tears?
Whence rose the call for sorrow and for pain?
Or all came helplessly without a cause?
What power forced the immortal spirit to birth?
The eternal witness once of eternity,
A deathless sojourner mid transient scenes,
He camps in life’s half-lit obscurity
Amid the debris of his thoughts and dreams.
Or who persuaded it to fall from bliss
And forfeit its immortal privilege?
Who laid on it the ceaseless will to live
A wanderer in this beautiful, sorrowful world,
And bear its load of joy and grief and love?
Or if no being watches the works of Time,
What hard impersonal Necessity
Compels the vain toil of brief living things?
A great Illusion then has built the stars.
But where then is the soul’s security,
Its poise in this circling of unreal suns?
Or else it is a wanderer from its home
Who strayed into a blind alley of Time and chance
And finds no issue from a meaningless world.
Or where begins and ends Illusion’s reign?
Perhaps the soul we feel is only a dream,
Eternal self a fiction sensed in trance.”
What follows is a long answer provided by the heavenly sage Narad. But the epic takes up these ultimate questions to their ultimate logical conclusion.
