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"In us is the thousandfold Spirit who is one, An eternal thinker calm and great and wise, A seer whose eye is an all-regarding sun, A poet of the cosmic mysteries."

There are two beings in my single self. A Godhead watches Nature from behind At play in front with a brilliant surface elf, A time-born creature with a human mind.

"I have become what before Time I was [...] A momentless immensity pure and bare, I stretch to an eternal everywhere."

"All turns from a wideness and unbroken peace To a tumult of joy in a sea of wide release."

"A deep enigma is the soul of man. [...] A demigod and a demon and a brute, The slave and the creator of his fate."

"Life springs in her and Mind is born; her face She lifts to Him who is Herself, until The Spirit leaps into the Spirit’s embrace."

"At last I find a meaning of soul’s birth Into this universe terrible and sweet, I who have felt the hungry heart of earth Aspiring beyond heaven to Krishna’s feet."

"Always we hear the tread of Kali’s feet Measuring in rhythms of pain and grief and chance Life’s game of hazard terrible and sweet."

The sonnet is reflecting Sri Aurobindo's own spiritual experience, elsewhere described as "... you stand before a temple of Kali beside a sacred river and see what? A sculpture, a gracious piece of architecture, but in a moment mysteriously, unexpectedly there is instead a Presence, a Power, a Face that looks into yours, an inner sight in you has regarded the World-Mother."