Opening Remarks
These luminous gods though stationed high and privy to many secrets, yet they miss the one thing needful, the most important Truth. It is the Divine Mother’s plan hidden in Her vast unfathomable heart.
Infinity’s dream
The mighty Mother’s whims and lightning moods
Arisen from her all-wise unruled delight
In the freedom of her sweet and passionate breast,
Robbed of their wonder were chained to a cause and aim;
An idol of bronze replaced her mystic shape
That captures the movements of the cosmic vasts,
In the sketch precise of an ideal face
Forgotten was her eyelashes’ dream-print
Carrying on their curve infinity’s dreams,
Lost the alluring marvel of her eyes;
The surging wave-throbs of her vast sea-heart
They bound to a theorem of ordered beats:
Her deep designs which from herself she had veiled
Bowed self-revealed in their confessional.
The Divine Mother acts in perfect freedom and delight. None knows Her heart that is burdened with dreams of the Future. But man and even the gods try to fix Her free movements to a set of rules and attribute cause and effect based on our little or no understanding of Her ways. They saw the present and the past but not the future that was hidden in Her heart. Her infinity and plasticity was reduced to fixed forms and modes of action. Even the freest and the vastest Intelligence is incapable of following Her steps. The gods too know Her not or rather know only what She chooses to reveal. The rest is hidden in the dream-print within Her eyes.
The diameter of infinity
For the birth and death of the worlds they fixed a date,
The diameter of infinity was drawn,
Measured the distant arc of the unseen heights
And visualised the plumbless viewless depths,
Till all seemed known that in all time could be.
We may know all things born in time that also perish with time; we may even try to measure expanding Space and view the fathomless depths of creation. We may know all that exists within endless Time and boundless Space.
Coerced by number, name and form
All was coerced by number, name and form;
Nothing was left untold, incalculable.
We may define everything by number, name and form leaving no secrets unexplained.
Wisdom circled with a nought
Yet was their wisdom circled with a nought:
Truths they could find and hold but not the one Truth:
The Highest was to them unknowable.
Yet the Eternal will remain unknown to the probing mind. A state of ‘Nothingness’ that contains everything within it, this parent Nought will remain unknowable since even our highest mental consciousness falls short of the Heights that are hidden in the heart of the Unknowable. The single Truth parent of all other truths remains yet undiscovered.
Transcendent secrecy
By knowing too much they missed the whole to be known:
The fathomless heart of the world was left unguessed
And the Transcendent kept its secrecy.
Their knowledge built by joining the different parts and aspects of creation misses the whole. The world is a conscious and living unity. It has a soul and heart which all our mental straining cannot reach. It moves within the cosmic circle and fails to pierce the veil that guards the Transcendent.
Closing Remarks
With his characteristic humour Sri Aurobindo reveals to us how we may be misled into the illusion of absolute Knowledge as we climb up the stairways of the Spirit. A last step remains even at the highest reaches of the Mind.
