The Divine Dream, p. 330

Opening remarks
Yet this material world is not a vanity or an illusion. It conceals within it a greater truth than what meets the surface eye. Embedded within it is a dream divine that slowly emerges through the aeons and the centuries.

Nobler destiny
This darkness hides our nobler destiny.

A nobler destiny is concealed within our world and the ignorance that surrounds it. A mighty plan that moves it through seemingly random chance events.

Chrysalis
A chrysalis of a great and glorious truth,
It stifles the winged marvel in its sheath
Lest from the prison of Matter it escape
And, wasting its beauty on the formless Vast,
Merged into the Unknowable’s mystery,
Leave unfulfilled the world’s miraculous fate.

The material world as we experience it is like the chrysalis and cocoon that conceals within it a beautiful butterfly that is seeking to emerge through the stifle and the struggle. It is a slow, deliberate process lest it emerges too quickly and escapes from matter’s sheath and wastes its beauty on vacant vasts where it is not needed. The soul thus struggling is not here to merge back into the Unknowable leaving the world unfulfilled. In this significant analogy the soul is the butterfly and the chrysalis is the sheath of ego and ignorance under which it is enclosed. A time comes when it begins to feel stifled because the soul within is now ready to emerge even while being rooted in matter.

High spirit’s dream
As yet thought only some high spirit’s dream
Or a vexed illusion in man’s toiling mind,
A new creation from the old shall rise,
A Knowledge inarticulate find speech,
Beauty suppressed burst into paradise bloom,
Pleasure and pain dive into absolute bliss.

As yet the high and noble ideals of a beautiful divine life may seem like a dream or illusion, yet, Sri Aurobindo assures us that a new creation filled with Divine Beauty and Bliss is bound to emerge out of the present old creation giving tongue and speech to a deeper knowledge and truth that is yet hardly felt or understood by men.

Dance of Time
A tongueless oracle shall speak at last,
The Superconscient conscious grow on earth,
The Eternal’s wonders join the dance of Time.

Indeed a day would come when the truth shall be revealed as the concealed Superconscient grow conscious in man and the dance of Time shall be tuned to rhythms of the Eternal.

Closing remarks
This is the future that gives us hope, the vision of a greater and diviner world that seeks emergence here out of our present ignorant state.