The Seeds of the Collective Yoga (LP17)

Sri Aurobindo’s Life through his Poems. Today’s talk touches upon the coming of disciples around Sri Aurobindo and the Mother.

MAN, THE DESPOT OF CONTRARIES
I am greater than the greatness of the seas,
A swift tornado of God-energy:
A helpless flower that quivers in the breeze,
I am weaker than the reed one breaks with ease.
I harbour all the wisdom of the wise
In my nature of stupendous Ignorance;
On a flame of righteousness I fix my eyes
While I wallow in sweet sin and join hell’s dance.
My mind is brilliant like a full-orbed moon,
Its darkness is the caverned troglodyte’s.
I gather long Time’s wealth and squander soon;
I am an epitome of opposites.
I with repeated life death’s sleep surprise;
I am a transience of the eternities.

MAN THE MEDIATOR
A dumb Inconscient drew life’s stumbling maze,
A night of all things, packed and infinite:
It made our consciousness a torch that plays
Between the Abyss and a supernal Light.
Our mind was framed a lens of segment sight
Piecing out inch by inch the world’s huge mass,
And reason a small hard theodolite
Measuring unreally the measureless ways.
Yet is the dark Inconscient whence came all
The self-same Power that shines on high unwon:
Our Night shall be a sky purpureal,
Our torch transmute to a vast godhead’s sun.
Rooted in mire heavenward man’s nature grows,—
His soul the dim bud of God’s flaming rose.

EVOLUTION – II
All is not finished in the unseen decree;
A Mind beyond our mind demands our ken,
A life of unimagined harmony
Awaits, concealed, the grasp of unborn men.
The crude beginnings of the lifeless earth,
The mindless stirrings of the plant and tree
Prepared our thought; thought for a godlike birth
Broadens the mould of our mortality.
A might no human will nor force can gain,
A knowledge seated in eternity,
A bliss beyond our struggle and our pain
Are the high pinnacles of our destiny.
O Thou who climb’dst to mind from the dull stone,
Face now the miracled summits still unwon.

THE CALL OF THE IMPOSSIBLE
A godhead moves us to unrealised things.
Asleep in the wide folds of destiny,
A world guarded by Silence’ rustling wings
Shelters their fine impossibility:
But parting quiver the caerulean gates;
Strange splendours look into our dreaming eyes;
We bear proud deities and magnificent fates;
Faces and hands come near from Paradise.
What shines above, waits darkling here in us:
Bliss unattained our future’s birthright is,
Beauty of our dim souls grows amorous,
We are the heirs of infinite widenesses.
The impossible is our mask of things to be,
Mortal the door to immortality.

MAN THE ENIGMA
A deep enigma is the soul of man.
His conscious life obeys the Inconscient’s rule,
His need of joy is learned in sorrow’s school,
His heart is a chaos and an empyrean.
His subtle Ignorance borrows Wisdom’s plan;
His mind is the Infinite’s sharp and narrow tool.
He wades through mud to reach the Wonderful,
And does what Matter must or Spirit can.
All powers in his living’s soil take root
And claim from him their place and struggling right:
His ignorant creature mind crawling towards light
Is Nature’s fool and Godhead’s candidate,
A demigod and a demon and a brute,
The slave and the creator of his fate.

THE GREATER PLAN
I am held no more by life’s alluring cry,
Her joy and grief, her charm, her laughter’s lute.
Hushed are the magic moments of the flute,
And form and colour and brief ecstasy.
I would hear, in my spirit’s wideness solitary,
The Voice that speaks when mortal lips are mute:
I seek the wonder of things absolute
Born from the silence of Eternity.
There is a need within the soul of man
The splendours of the surface never sate;
For life and mind and their glory and debate
Are the slow prelude of a vaster theme,
A sketch confused of a supernal plan,
A preface to the epic of the Supreme.