{"id":498,"date":"2013-07-13T01:28:23","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:28:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=498"},"modified":"2013-07-13T01:28:23","modified_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:28:23","slug":"16-book-2-canto-10-the-kingdoms-and-godheads-of-the-little-mind-vol-28-savitri-volume-28","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/01-works-of-sri-aurobindo\/01-sabcl\/28-savitri-volume-28\/16-book-2-canto-10-the-kingdoms-and-godheads-of-the-little-mind-vol-28-savitri-volume-28","title":{"rendered":"-16_Book 2 Canto 10 The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Little Mind.htm"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\n\n\n
 <\/td>\n\n
\n

\nCanto Ten<\/i> <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\nThe Kingdoms and
\nGodheads of the Little Mind<\/font><\/span> <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

This too must now be overpassed and left,<\/p>\n

As all must be until the Highest is gained<\/p>\n

In whom the world and self grow true and one:<\/p>\n

Till that is reached our journeying cannot cease.<\/p>\n

Always a nameless goal beckons beyond,<\/p>\n

Always ascends the zigzag of the gods<\/p>\n

And upward points the spirit’s climbing Fire.<\/p>\n

This breath of hundred-hued felicity<\/p>\n

And its pure heightened figure of Time’s joy,<\/p>\n

Tossed upon waves of flawless happiness,<\/p>\n

Hammered into single beats of ecstasy,<\/p>\n

This fraction of the spirit’s integer<\/p>\n

Caught into a passionate greatness of extremes,<\/p>\n

This limited being lifted to zenith bliss,<\/p>\n

Happy to enjoy one touch of things supreme,<\/p>\n

Packed into its sealed small infinity,<\/p>\n

Its endless time-made world outfacing Time,<\/p>\n

A little output of God’s vast delight.<\/p>\n

The moments stretched towards the eternal Now,<\/p>\n

The hours discovered immortality,<\/p>\n

But, satisfied with their sublime contents,<\/p>\n

On peaks they ceased whose tops half-way to
\nheaven<\/p>\n

Pointed to an apex they could never mount,<\/p>\n

To a grandeur in whose air they could not live.<\/p>\n

Inviting to their high and exquisite sphere,<\/p>\n

To their secure and fine extremities<\/p>\n

This creature who hugs his limits to feel safe,<\/p>\n

These heights declined a greater adventure’s call.<\/p>\n

A glory and sweetness of satisfied desire<\/p>\n

Tied up the spirit to golden posts of bliss.<\/p>\n

It could not house the wideness of a soul <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 238<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/div>\n

Which needed all infinity for its home.<\/p>\n

A memory soft as grass and faint as sleep,<\/p>\n

The beauty and call receding sank behind<\/p>\n

Like a sweet song heard fading far away<\/p>\n

Upon the long high road to Timelessness.<\/p>\n

Above was an ardent white tranquillity.<\/p>\n

A musing spirit looked out on the worlds<\/p>\n

And like a brilliant clambering of skies<\/p>\n

Passing through clarity to an unseen Light<\/p>\n

Large lucent realms of Mind from stillness shone.<\/p>\n

But first he met a silver-grey expanse<\/p>\n

Where Day and Night had wedded and were one:<\/p>\n

It was a tract of dim and shifting rays<\/p>\n

Parting Life’s sentient flow from Thought’s self-poise.<\/p>\n

A coalition of uncertainties<\/p>\n

There exercised uneasy government<\/p>\n

On a ground reserved for doubt and reasoned guess,<\/p>\n

A rendezvous of Knowledge with Ignorance.<\/p>\n

At its low extremity held difficult sway<\/p>\n

A mind that hardly saw and slowly found;<\/p>\n

Its nature to our earthly nature close<\/p>\n

And kin to our precarious mortal thought<\/p>\n

That looks from soil to sky and sky to soil<\/p>\n

But knows not the below nor the beyond,<\/p>\n

It only sensed itself and outward things.<\/p>\n

This was the first means of our slow ascent<\/p>\n

From the half-conscience of the animal soul<\/p>\n

Living in a crowded press of shape-events<\/p>\n

In a realm it cannot understand nor
\nchange:<\/p>\n

Only it sees and acts in a given scene<\/p>\n

And feels and joys and sorrows for a while.<\/p>\n

The ideas that drive the obscure embodied spirit<\/p>\n

Along the roads of suffering and desire<\/p>\n

In a world that struggles to discover Truth,<\/p>\n

Found here their power to be and Nature-Force.<\/p>\n

Here are devised the forms of an ignorant life <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 239<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/div>\n

That sees the empiric fact as settled law,<\/p>\n

Labours for the hour and not for eternity<\/p>\n

And trades its gains to meet the moment’s call:<\/p>\n

The slow process of a material mind<\/p>\n

Which serves the body it should rule and use<\/p>\n

And needs to lean upon an erring sense,<\/p>\n

Was born in that luminous obscurity.<\/p>\n

Advancing tardily from a limping start,<\/p>\n

Crutching hypothesis
\nupon argument,<\/p>\n

Throning its theories as certitudes,<\/p>\n

It reasons from the half-known to the unknown,<\/p>\n

Ever constructing its frail house of thought,<\/p>\n

Ever undoing the web that it has spun.<\/p>\n

A twilight sage whose shadow seems to him
\nSelf,<\/p>\n

Moving from minute to brief minute lives;<\/p>\n

A king dependent on his satellites<\/p>\n

Signs the decrees of ignorant ministers,<\/p>\n

A judge in half-possession of his proofs,<\/p>\n

A voice clamant of uncertainty’s
\npostulates<\/p>\n

An architect of knowledge, not its source.<\/p>\n

This powerful bondslave of his instruments<\/p>\n

Thinks his low station Nature’s highest top,<\/p>\n

Oblivious of his share in all things made<\/p>\n

And haughtily humble in his own conceit<\/p>\n

Believes himself a spawn of Matter’s mud<\/p>\n

And takes his own creations for his cause.<\/p>\n

To eternal light and knowledge meant to rise,<\/p>\n

Up from man’s bare beginning is our climb;<\/p>\n

Out of earth’s heavy smallness we must break,<\/p>\n

We must search our nature with spiritual fire:<\/p>\n

An insect crawl preludes our glorious flight;<\/p>\n

Our human state cradles the future god,<\/p>\n

Our mortal frailty an immortal force.<\/p>\n

At the glow-worm top of these pale glimmer-realms<\/p>\n

Where dawn-sheen gambolled with the native dusk<\/p>\n

And helped the Day to grow and Night to fail, <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 240<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/div>\n

Escaping over a wide and shimmering bridge,<\/p>\n

He came into a realm of early Light<\/p>\n

And the regency of a half-risen sun.<\/p>\n

Out of its rays our mind’s full orb was born.<\/p>\n

Appointed by the Spirit of the Worlds<\/p>\n

To mediate with the unknowing depths,<\/p>\n

A prototypal deft Intelligence<\/p>\n

Half-poised on equal wings of thought and doubt<\/p>\n

Toiled ceaselessly twixt being’s hidden ends.<\/p>\n

A Secrecy breathed in life’s moving act;<\/p>\n

A covert nurse of Nature’s miracles,<\/p>\n

It shaped life’s wonders out of Matter’s mud:<\/p>\n

It cut the pattern of the shapes of things,<\/p>\n

It pitched mind’s tent in the vague ignorant Vast.<\/p>\n

A master Magician of measure and device<\/p>\n

Has made an eternity from recurring forms<\/p>\n

And to the wandering spectator thought<\/p>\n

Assigned a seat on the inconscient stage.<\/p>\n

On earth by the will of this Arch-Intelligence<\/p>\n

A bodiless energy put on Matter’s robe;<\/p>\n

Proton and photon served the imager Eye<\/p>\n

To change things subtle into a physical world<\/p>\n

And the invisible appeared as shape<\/p>\n

And the impalpable was felt as mass:<\/p>\n

Magic of percept joined with concept’s art<\/p>\n

And lent to each object an interpreting name:<\/p>\n

Idea was disguised in a body’s artistry,<\/p>\n

And by a strange atomic law’s mystique<\/p>\n

A frame was made in which the sense
\nwould put<\/p>\n

Its symbol picture of the universe.<\/p>\n

Even a greater miracle was done.<\/p>\n

The mediating light linked body’s power,<\/p>\n

The sleep and dreaming of the tree and plant,<\/p>\n

The animal’s vibrant sense, the thought in man,<\/p>\n

To the effulgence of a Ray above.<\/p>\n

Its skill endorsing Matter’s right to think <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 241<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/div>\n

Cut sentient passages for the mind of flesh<\/p>\n

And found a means for Nescience to know.<\/p>\n

Offering its little squares and cubes of word<\/p>\n

As figured substitutes for reality,<\/p>\n

A mummified mnemonic alphabet,<\/p>\n

It helped the unseeing
\nforce to read her works.<\/p>\n

A buried consciousness arose in her<\/p>\n

And now she dreams herself human and awake.<\/p>\n

But all was still a mobile Ignorance;<\/p>\n

Still Knowledge could not come and firmly grasp<\/p>\n

This huge invention seen as a universe.<\/p>\n

A specialist of logic’s hard machine<\/p>\n

Imposed its rigid artifice on the soul;<\/p>\n

An aide of the inventor intellect,<\/p>\n

It cut Truth into manageable bits<\/p>\n

That each might have his ration of thought-food,<\/p>\n

Then new-built Truth’s slain body by its art:<\/p>\n

A robot exact and serviceable and false<\/p>\n

Displaced the spirit’s finer view of things:<\/p>\n

A polished engine did the work of a god.<\/p>\n

None the true body found, its soul seemed dead:<\/p>\n

None had the inner look which sees Truth’s whole;<\/p>\n

All glorified the glittering substitute.<\/p>\n

Then from the secret heights a wave swept down,<\/p>\n

A brilliant chaos of rebel light arose;<\/p>\n

It looked above and saw the dazzling peaks,<\/p>\n

It looked within and woke the sleeping god.<\/p>\n

Imagination called her shining squads<\/p>\n

That venture into undiscovered scenes<\/p>\n

Where all the marvels lurk none yet has known:<\/p>\n

Lifting her beautiful and miraculous head,<\/p>\n

She conspired with inspiration’s sister brood<\/p>\n

To fill thought’s skies with glimmering nebulae.<\/p>\n

A bright Error fringed the mystery-altar’s frieze;<\/p>\n

Darkness grew nurse to wisdom’s occult sun,<\/p>\n

Myth suckled knowledge with her lustrous milk; <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 242<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/div>\n

The infant passed from dim to radiant breasts.<\/p>\n

Thus worked the Power upon the growing world;<\/p>\n

Its subtle craft withheld the full-orbed blaze,<\/p>\n

Cherished the soul’s childhood and on fictions fed<\/p>\n

Far richer in their sweet and nectarous sap<\/p>\n

Nourishing its immature divinity<\/p>\n

Than the staple or dry straw of Reason’s tilth,<\/p>\n

Its heaped fodder of innumerable facts,<\/p>\n

Plebeian fare on which today we thrive.<\/p>\n

Thus streamed down from the realm of early Light,<\/p>\n

Ethereal thinkings into Matter’s world;<\/p>\n

Its gold-horned herds trooped into earth’s cave-heart.<\/p>\n

Its morning rays illume our twilight’s eyes,<\/p>\n

Its young formations move the mind of earth<\/p>\n

To labour and to dream and new-create,<\/p>\n

To feel beauty’s touch and know the world and self:<\/p>\n

The Golden Child began to think and see.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

In those bright realms are Mind’s first forward steps.<\/p>\n

Ignorant of all but eager to know all,<\/p>\n

Its curious slow enquiry there begins;<\/p>\n

Ever searching it grasps at shapes around,<\/p>\n

Ever it hopes to find out greater things.<\/p>\n

Ardent and golden-gleamed with sunrise fires,<\/p>\n

Alert it lives upon invention’s verge.<\/p>\n

Yet all it does is on an infant’s scale,<\/p>\n

As if the cosmos were a nursery game,<\/p>\n

Mind, life the playthings of a Titan’s babe.<\/p>\n

As one it works who builds a mimic fort<\/p>\n

Miraculously stable for a while,<\/p>\n

Made of the sands upon a bank of Time<\/p>\n

Mid an occult eternity’s shoreless sea.<\/p>\n

A small keen instrument the great Puissance chose,<\/p>\n

An arduous pastime passionately pursues;<\/p>\n

To teach the Ignorance is her difficult charge,<\/p>\n

Her thought starts from an original nescient Void <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 243<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/div>\n

And what she teaches she herself must learn<\/p>\n

Arousing knowledge from its sleepy lair.<\/p>\n

For knowledge comes not to us as a guest<\/p>\n

Called into our chamber from the outer world;<\/p>\n

A friend and inmate of our secret self,<\/p>\n

It hid behind our minds and fell asleep<\/p>\n

And slowly wakes beneath the blows of life;<\/p>\n

The mighty daemon lies unshaped within,<\/p>\n

To evoke, to give it form is Nature’s task.<\/p>\n

All was a chaos of the true and false,<\/p>\n

Mind sought amid deep mists of Nescience;<\/p>\n

It looked within itself but saw not God.<\/p>\n

A material interim diplomacy<\/p>\n

Denied the truth that transient truths might live<\/p>\n

And hid the deity in creed and guess<\/p>\n

That the World-Ignorance might grow slowly wise.<\/p>\n

This was the imbroglio made by sovereign Mind<\/p>\n

Looking from a gleam-ridge into the Night<\/p>\n

In its first tamperings with Inconscience:<\/p>\n

Its alien dusk baffles her luminous eyes;<\/p>\n

Her rapid hands must learn a cautious zeal;<\/p>\n

Only a slow advance the earth can bear.<\/p>\n

Yet was her strength unlike the unseeing earth’s<\/p>\n

Compelled to handle makeshift instruments<\/p>\n

Invented by the life-force and the flesh.<\/p>\n

Earth all perceives through doubtful images,<\/p>\n

All she conceives in hazardous jets of sight,<\/p>\n

Small lights kindled by touches of groping thought.<\/p>\n

Incapable of the soul’s direct inlook<\/p>\n

She sees by spasms and solders knowledge-scrap,<\/p>\n

Makes Truth the slave-girl of her indigence,<\/p>\n

Expelling Nature’s mystic unity<\/p>\n

Cuts into quantum and mass the moving All;<\/p>\n

She takes for measuring-rod her ignorance.<\/p>\n

In her own domain a pontiff and a seer,<\/p>\n

That greater Power with her half-risen sun <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 244<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/div>\n

Wrought within limits but possessed her field;<\/p>\n

She knew by a privilege of thinking force<\/p>\n

And claimed an infant sovereignty of sight.<\/p>\n

In her eyes however darkly fringed was lit<\/p>\n

The Archangel’s gaze who knows inspired his acts<\/p>\n

And shapes a world in its far-seeing flame.<\/p>\n

In her own realm she stumbles not nor fails,<\/p>\n

But moves in boundaries of subtle power<\/p>\n

Across which mind can step towards the sun.<\/p>\n

A candidate for a higher suzerainty,<\/p>\n

A passage she cut through from Night to Light,<\/p>\n

And searched for an ungrasped Omniscience.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

A dwarf three-bodied trinity was her serf.<\/p>\n

First, smallest of the three, but strong of limb,<\/p>\n

A low-brow with a square and heavy jowl,<\/p>\n

A pigmy Thought needing to live in bounds<\/p>\n

For ever stooped to hammer fact and form.<\/p>\n

Absorbed and cabined in external sight,<\/p>\n

It takes its stand on Nature’s solid base.<\/p>\n

A technician admirable, a thinker crude,<\/p>\n

A riveter of Life to habit’s grooves,<\/p>\n

Obedient to gross Matter’s tyranny,<\/p>\n

A prisoner of the moulds in which it works,<\/p>\n

It binds itself by what itself creates.<\/p>\n

A slave of a fixed mass of absolute rules,<\/p>\n

It sees as Law the habits of the world,<\/p>\n

It sees as Truth the habits of the mind.<\/p>\n

In its realm of concrete images and events<\/p>\n

Turning in a worn circle of ideas<\/p>\n

And ever repeating old familiar acts,<\/p>\n

It lives content with the common and the known.<\/p>\n

It loves the old ground that was its dwelling-place:<\/p>\n

Abhorring change as an audacious sin,<\/p>\n

Distrustful of each new discovery<\/p>\n

Only it advances step by careful step <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 245<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/div>\n

And fears as if a deadly abyss the unknown.<\/p>\n

A prudent treasurer of its ignorance,<\/p>\n

It shrinks from adventure, blinks at glorious hope,<\/p>\n

Preferring a safe foothold upon things<\/p>\n

To the dangerous joy of wideness and of height.<\/p>\n

The world’s slow impressions on its labouring mind,<\/p>\n

Tardy imprints almost indelible,<\/p>\n

Increase their value by their poverty;<\/p>\n

The old sure memories are its capital stock:<\/p>\n

Only what sense can grasp seems absolute:<\/p>\n

External fact it figures as sole truth,<\/p>\n

Wisdom identifies with the earthward look,<\/p>\n

And things long known and actions always done<\/p>\n

Are to its clinging hold a balustrade<\/p>\n

Of safety on the perilous stair of Time.<\/p>\n

Heaven’s trust to it are the established ancient ways,<\/p>\n

Immutable laws man has no right to change,<\/p>\n

A sacred legacy from the great dead past<\/p>\n

Or the one road that God has made for life,<\/p>\n

A firm shape of Nature never to be changed,<\/p>\n

Part of the huge routine of the universe.<\/p>\n

A smile from the Preserver of the Worlds<\/p>\n

Sent down of old this guardian Mind to earth<\/p>\n

That all might stand in their fixed changeless type<\/p>\n

And from their secular posture never move.<\/p>\n

One sees it circling faithful to its task,<\/p>\n

Tireless in an assigned tradition’s round;<\/p>\n

In decayed and crumbling offices of Time<\/p>\n

It keeps close guard in front of custom’s wall,<\/p>\n

Or in an ancient Night’s dim environs<\/p>\n

It dozes on a little courtyard’s stones<\/p>\n

And barks at every unfamiliar light<\/p>\n

As at a foe who would break up its home,<\/p>\n

A watch-dog of the spirit’s sense-railed house<\/p>\n

Against intruders from the Invisible,<\/p>\n

Nourished on scraps of life and Matter’s bones <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 246<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/div>\n

In its kennel of objective certitude.<\/p>\n

And yet behind it stands a cosmic might:<\/p>\n

A measured Greatness keeps its vaster plan,<\/p>\n

A fathomless sameness rhythms the tread of life;<\/p>\n

The stars’ changeless orbits furrow inert Space,<\/p>\n

A million species follow one mute Law.<\/p>\n

A huge inertness is the world’s defence,<\/p>\n

Even in change is treasured changelessness;<\/p>\n

Into inertia revolution sinks,<\/p>\n

In a new dress the old resumes its role;<\/p>\n

The Energy acts, the stable is its seal:<\/p>\n

On Shiva’s breast is stayed the enormous dance.<\/p>\n

A fiery spirit came, next of the three.<\/p>\n

A hunchback rider of the red Wild-Ass,<\/p>\n

A rash Intelligence leaped down lion-maned<\/p>\n

From the great mystic Flame that rings the worlds<\/p>\n

And with its dire edge eats at being’s heart.<\/p>\n

Thence sprang the burning vision of Desire.<\/p>\n

A thousand shapes it wore, took numberless names:<\/p>\n

A need of multitude and uncertainty<\/p>\n

Pricks it for ever to pursue the One<\/p>\n

On countless roads across the vasts of Time<\/p>\n

Through circuits of unending difference.<\/p>\n

It burns all breasts with an ambiguous fire.<\/p>\n

A radiance gleaming on a murky stream,<\/p>\n

It flamed towards heaven, then
\nsank engulfed<\/font> towards hell;<\/p>\n

It climbed to drag down Truth into the mire<\/p>\n

And used for muddy ends its brilliant
\nForce,<\/p>\n

A huge chameleon gold and blue and red<\/p>\n

Turning to black and grey and lurid brown,<\/p>\n

Hungry it stared from a mottled bough of life<\/p>\n

To snap up insect joys, its favourite food,<\/p>\n

The dingy sustenance of a sumptuous frame<\/p>\n

Nursing the splendid passion of its hues.<\/p>\n

A snake of flame with
\na dark cloud for tail,<\/p>\n

Followed by a dream-brood of glittering thoughts, <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 247<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/div>\n

A lifted head with many-tinged flickering crests,<\/p>\n

It licked at knowledge with a smoky tongue.<\/p>\n

A whirlpool sucking in an empty air,<\/p>\n

It based on vacancy stupendous claims,<\/p>\n

In Nothingness born to Nothingness returned,<\/p>\n

Yet all the time unwittingly it drove<\/p>\n

Towards the hidden Something that is All.<\/p>\n

Ardent to find, incapable to retain,<\/p>\n

A brilliant instability was its mark,<\/p>\n

To err its inborn trend, its native cue.<\/p>\n

At once to an unreflecting credence prone,<\/p>\n

It thought all true that flattered its own hopes;<\/p>\n

It cherished golden nothings born of wish,<\/p>\n

It snatched at the unreal for provender.<\/p>\n

In darkness it discovered luminous shapes;<\/p>\n

Peering into a shadow-hung half-light<\/p>\n

It saw hued images scrawled on Fancy’s cave;<\/p>\n

Or it swept in circles through conjecture’s night<\/p>\n

And caught in imagination’s camera<\/p>\n

Bright scenes of promise held by transient flares,<\/p>\n

Fixed in life’s air the feet of hurrying dreams,<\/p>\n

Kept prints of passing Forms and hooded Powers<\/p>\n

And flash-images of half-seen verities.<\/p>\n

An eager spring to seize and to possess<\/p>\n

Unguided by reason or the seeing soul<\/p>\n

Was its first natural motion and its last,<\/p>\n

It squandered life’s force to achieve the impossible:<\/p>\n

It scorned the straight road and ran on wandering curves<\/p>\n

And left what it had won for untried things;<\/p>\n

It saw unrealised aims as instant fate<\/p>\n

And chose the precipice for its leap to heaven.<\/p>\n

Adventure its system in the gamble of life,<\/p>\n

It took fortuitous gains as safe results;<\/p>\n

Error discouraged not its confident view<\/p>\n

Ignorant of the deep law of being’s ways<\/p>\n

And failure could not slow its fiery clutch; <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 248<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/div>\n

One chance made true warranted all the rest.<\/p>\n

Attempt, not victory, was the charm of life.<\/p>\n

An uncertain winner of uncertain stakes,<\/p>\n

Instinct its dam and the life-mind its sire,<\/p>\n

It ran its race and came in first or last.<\/p>\n

Yet were its works nor small and vain nor null;<\/p>\n

It nursed a portion of infinity’s strength<\/p>\n

And could create the high things its fancy willed;<\/p>\n

Its passion caught what calm intelligence missed.<\/p>\n

Insight of impulse laid its leaping grasp<\/p>\n

On heavens high Thought had hidden in dazzling mist,<\/p>\n

Caught glimmers that revealed a lurking sun:<\/p>\n

It probed the void and found a treasure there.<\/p>\n

A half-intuition purpled in its sense;<\/p>\n

It threw the lightning’s fork and hit the unseen.<\/p>\n

It saw in the dark and vaguely blinked in the light,<\/p>\n

Ignorance was its field, the unknown its prize.<\/p>\n

Of all these Powers the greatest was the last.<\/p>\n

Arriving late from a far plane of thought<\/p>\n

Into a packed irrational world of Chance<\/p>\n

Where all was grossly felt and blindly done,<\/p>\n

Yet the haphazard seemed the inevitable,<\/p>\n

Came Reason, the squat godhead artisan,<\/p>\n

To her narrow house upon a ridge in Time.<\/p>\n

Adept of clear contrivance and design,<\/p>\n

A pensive face and close and peering eyes,<\/p>\n

She took her firm and irremovable seat,<\/p>\n

The strongest, wisest of the troll-like Three.<\/p>\n

Armed with her lens and measuring-rod and probe,<\/p>\n

She looked upon an object universe<\/p>\n

And the multitudes that in it live and die<\/p>\n

And the body of Space and the fleeing soul of Time,<\/p>\n

And took the earth and stars into her hands<\/p>\n

To try what she could make of these strange things.<\/p>\n

In her strong purposeful laborious mind,<\/p>\n

Inventing her scheme-lines of reality <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 249<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/div>\n

And the geometric curves of her time-plan,<\/p>\n

She multiplied her slow half-cuts at Truth:<\/p>\n

Impatient of enigma and the unknown,<\/p>\n

Intolerant of the lawless and the unique,<\/p>\n

Imposing reflection on the march of Force,<\/p>\n

Imposing clarity on the unfathomable,<\/p>\n

She strove to reduce to rules the mystic world.<\/p>\n

Nothing she knew but all things hoped to know.<\/p>\n

In dark inconscient realms once void of thought,<\/p>\n

Missioned by a supreme Intelligence<\/p>\n

To throw its ray upon the obscure Vast,<\/p>\n

An imperfect light leading an erring mass<\/p>\n

By the power of sense and the idea and word,<\/p>\n

She ferrets out Nature’s process, substance, cause.<\/p>\n

All life to harmonise by thought’s
\ncontrol<\/p>\n

She with the huge imbroglio struggles still;<\/p>\n

Ignorant of all but her own seeking mind<\/p>\n

To save the world from Ignorance she came.<\/p>\n

A sovereign worker through the centuries,<\/p>\n

Observing and re-moulding all that is,<\/p>\n

Confident she took up her stupendous charge.<\/p>\n

There the low bent and mighty figure sits<\/p>\n

Bowed under the arc-lamps of her factory-home<\/p>\n

Amid the clatter and ringing of her tools.<\/p>\n

A rigorous stare in her creative eyes<\/p>\n

Coercing the plastic stuff of cosmic Mind,<\/p>\n

She sets the hard inventions of her brain<\/p>\n

In a pattern of eternal fixity:<\/p>\n

Indifferent to the cosmic dumb demand,<\/p>\n

Unconscious of too close realities,<\/p>\n

Of the unspoken thought, the voiceless heart,<\/p>\n

She leans to forge her credos and iron codes<\/p>\n

And metal structures to imprison life<\/p>\n

And mechanic models of all things that are.<\/p>\n

For the world seen she weaves a world conceived:<\/p>\n

She spins in stiff but unsubstantial lines <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 250<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/div>\n

Her gossamer word-webs of abstract thought,<\/p>\n

Her segment systems of the Infinite,<\/p>\n

Her theodicies and cosmogonic charts<\/p>\n

And myths by which she explains the inexplicable.<\/p>\n

At will she spaces in thin air of mind<\/p>\n

Like maps in the school-house of intellect hung,<\/p>\n

Forcing wide Truth into a narrow scheme,<\/p>\n

Her numberless warring strict philosophies;<\/p>\n

Out of Nature’s body of phenomenon<\/p>\n

She carves with Thought’s keen edge in rigid
\nlines<\/p>\n

Like rails for the World-Magician’s power to run,<\/p>\n

Her sciences precise and absolute.<\/p>\n

On the huge bare walls of human nescience<\/p>\n

Written round Nature’s deep dumb hieroglyphs<\/p>\n

She pens in clear demotic characters<\/p>\n

The vast encyclopaedia of her thoughts;<\/p>\n

An algebra of her mathematics’ signs,<\/p>\n

Her numbers and unerring formulas<\/p>\n

She builds to clinch her summary of things.<\/p>\n

On all sides runs as if in a cosmic mosque<\/p>\n

Tracing the scriptural verses of her laws<\/p>\n

The daedal of her patterned arabesques,<\/p>\n

Art of her wisdom, artifice of her lore.<\/p>\n

This art, this artifice are her only stock.<\/p>\n

In her high works of pure intelligence,<\/p>\n

In her withdrawal from the senses’ trap,<\/p>\n

There comes no breaking of the walls of mind,<\/p>\n

There leaps no rending flash of absolute power,<\/p>\n

There dawns no light of heavenly certitude.<\/p>\n

A million faces wears her knowledge here<\/p>\n

And every face is turbaned with a doubt.<\/p>\n

All now is questioned, all reduced to nought.<\/p>\n

Once monumental in their massive craft<\/p>\n

Her old great mythic writings disappear<\/p>\n

And into their place start strict ephemeral signs;<\/p>\n

This constant change spells progress to her eyes: <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 251<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/div>\n

Her thought is an endless march without a goal.<\/p>\n

There is no summit on which she can stand<\/p>\n

And see in a single glance the Infinite’s whole.<\/p>\n

An inconclusive play is Reason’s toil.<\/p>\n

Each strong idea can use her as its tool;<\/p>\n

Accepting every brief she pleads her case.<\/p>\n

Open to every thought, she cannot know.<\/p>\n

The eternal Advocate seated as judge<\/p>\n

Armours in logic’s invulnerable mail<\/p>\n

A thousand combatants for Truth’s veiled throne<\/p>\n

And sets on a high horseback of argument<\/p>\n

To tilt for ever with a wordy lance<\/p>\n

In a mock tournament where none can win.<\/p>\n

Assaying thought’s values with her rigid tests<\/p>\n

Balanced she sits on wide and empty air,<\/p>\n

Aloof and pure in her impartial poise.<\/p>\n

Absolute her judgments seem but none is sure;<\/p>\n

Time cancels all her verdicts in appeal.<\/p>\n

Although like sunbeams to our glow-worm mind<\/p>\n

Her knowledge feigns to fall from a clear heaven,<\/p>\n

Its rays are a lantern’s lustres in the Night;<\/p>\n

She throws a glittering robe on Ignorance.<\/p>\n

But now is lost her ancient sovereign claim<\/p>\n

To rule mind’s high realm in her absolute right,<\/p>\n

Bind thought with logic’s forged infallible chain<\/p>\n

Or see truth nude in a bright abstract haze.<\/p>\n

A master and slave of stark phenomenon,<\/p>\n

She travels on the roads of erring sight<\/p>\n

Or looks upon a set mechanical world<\/p>\n

Constructed for her by her instruments.<\/p>\n

A bullock yoked in the cart of proven fact,<\/p>\n

She drags huge knowledge-bales through Matter’s dust<\/p>\n

To reach utility’s immense bazaar.<\/p>\n

Apprentice she has grown to her old drudge;<\/p>\n

An aided sense is her seeking’s arbiter.<\/p>\n

This now she uses as the assayer’s stone. <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 252<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/div>\n

As if she knew not facts are husks of truth,<\/p>\n

The husks she keeps, the kernel throws aside.<\/p>\n

An ancient wisdom fades into the past,<\/p>\n

The ages’ faith becomes an idle tale,<\/p>\n

God passes out of the awakened thought,<\/p>\n

An old discarded dream needed no more:<\/p>\n

Only she seeks mechanic
\nnature’s keys.<\/p>\n

Interpreting stone-laws inevitable<\/p>\n

She digs into Matter’s hard concealing soil,<\/p>\n

To unearth the processes of all things done.<\/p>\n

A loaded huge self-worked machine appears<\/p>\n

To her eye’s eager and admiring stare,<\/p>\n

An intricate and meaningless enginery<\/p>\n

Of ordered fateful and unfailing
\nchance:<\/p>\n

Ingenious and meticulous and minute,<\/p>\n

Its brute unconscious accurate device<\/p>\n

Unrolls an unerring march, maps a sure road;<\/p>\n

It plans without thinking, acts without a will,<\/p>\n

A million purposes serves with purpose none<\/p>\n

And builds a rational world without a mind.<\/p>\n

It has no mover, no maker, no idea:<\/p>\n

Its vast self-action toils without a cause;<\/p>\n

A lifeless Energy irresistibly driven,<\/p>\n

Death’s head on the body of Necessity,<\/p>\n

Engenders life and fathers consciousness,<\/p>\n

Then wonders why all was and whence it came.<\/p>\n

Our thoughts are parts of the immense machine,<\/p>\n

Our ponderings but a freak of Matter’s law,<\/p>\n

The mystic’s lore was a fancy or a blind;<\/p>\n

Of soul or spirit we have now no need:<\/p>\n

Matter is the admirable Reality,<\/p>\n

The patent unescapable miracle,<\/p>\n

The hard truth of things, simple, eternal, sole.<\/p>\n

A suicidal rash expenditure<\/p>\n

Creating the world by a mystery of self-loss<\/p>\n

Has poured its scattered works on empty
\nspace; <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 253<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/div>\n

Late shall the self-disintegrating Force<\/p>\n

Contract the immense expansion it has made:<\/p>\n

Then ends this mighty and unmeaning toil,<\/p>\n

The Void is left bare, vacant as before.<\/p>\n

Thus vindicated, crowned, the grand new Thought<\/p>\n

Explained the world and mastered all its laws,<\/p>\n

Touched the dumb roots, woke veiled tremendous powers;<\/p>\n

It bound to service the unconscious djinns<\/p>\n

That sleep unused in Matter’s ignorant trance.<\/p>\n

All was precise, rigid, indubitable.<\/p>\n

But when on Matter’s rock of ages based<\/p>\n

A whole stood up firm and clear-cut and safe,<\/p>\n

All staggered back into a sea of doubt;<\/p>\n

This solid scheme melted in endless flux:<\/p>\n

She had met the formless Power inventor of forms;<\/p>\n

Suddenly she stumbled upon things unseen:<\/p>\n

A lightning from the undiscovered Truth<\/p>\n

Startled her eyes with its perplexing glare<\/p>\n

And dug a gulf between the Real and Known<\/p>\n

Till all her knowledge seemed an ignorance.<\/p>\n

Once more the world was made a wonder-web,<\/p>\n

A magic’s process in a magical space,<\/p>\n

An unintelligible miracle’s depths<\/p>\n

Whose source is lost in the Ineffable.<\/p>\n

Once more we face the blank Unknowable.<\/p>\n

In a crash of values, in a huge doom-crack,<\/p>\n

In the sputter and scatter of her breaking work<\/p>\n

She lost her clear conserved constructed world.<\/p>\n

A quantum dance remained, a sprawl of chance<\/p>\n

In Energy’s stupendous tripping whirl:<\/p>\n

A ceaseless motion in the unbounded Void<\/p>\n

Invented forms without a thought or aim:<\/p>\n

Necessity and Cause were shapeless ghosts;<\/p>\n

Matter was an incident in being’s flow,<\/p>\n

Law but a clock-work habit of blind force.<\/p>\n

Ideals, ethics, systems had no base <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 254<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/div>\n

And soon collapsed or without sanction lived;<\/p>\n

All grew a chaos, a heave and clash and strife.<\/p>\n

Ideas warring and fierce leaped upon life;<\/p>\n

A hard compression held down anarchy<\/p>\n

And liberty was only a phantom’s name:<\/p>\n

Creation and destruction waltzed inarmed<\/p>\n

On the bosom of a torn and quaking earth;<\/p>\n

All reeled into a world of Kali’s dance.<\/p>\n

Thus tumbled, sinking, sprawling in the Void,<\/p>\n

Clutching for props, a soil on which to stand,<\/p>\n

She only saw a thin atomic Vast,<\/p>\n

The rare-point sparse substratum
\nUniverse<\/p>\n

On which floats a solid world’s phenomenal face.<\/p>\n

Alone a process of events was there<\/p>\n

And Nature’s plastic and protean change<\/p>\n

And, strong by death to slay or to create,<\/p>\n

The riven invisible atom’s omnipotent force.<\/p>\n

One chance remained that here might be a power<\/p>\n

To liberate man from the old inadequate means<\/p>\n

And leave him sovereign of the earthly scene.<\/p>\n

For Reason then might grasp the original Force<\/p>\n

To drive her car upon the roads of Time.<\/p>\n

All then might serve the need of the thinking race,<\/p>\n

An absolute State found order’s absolute,<\/p>\n

To a standardised perfection cut all things,<\/p>\n

In society build a just exact machine.<\/p>\n

Then science and reason careless of the soul<\/p>\n

Could iron out a tranquil uniform world,<\/p>\n

Aeonic seekings glut with outward truths<\/p>\n

And a single patterned thinking force on mind,<\/p>\n

Inflicting Matter’s logic on Spirit’s dreams<\/p>\n

A reasonable animal make of man<\/p>\n

And a symmetrical fabric of his life.<\/p>\n

This would be Nature’s peak on an obscure globe,<\/p>\n

The grand result of the long ages’ toil,<\/p>\n

Earth’s evolution crowned, her mission done. <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 255<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/div>\n

So might it be if the spirit fell asleep;<\/p>\n

Man then might rest content and live in peace,<\/p>\n

Master of Nature who
\nwants her bondslave worked,<\/p>\n

The world’s disorder hardening into Law,\u2014<\/p>\n

If Life’s dire heart arose not in revolt,<\/p>\n

If God within could find no greater plan.<\/p>\n

But many-visaged is the cosmic Soul;<\/p>\n

A touch can alter the fixed front of Fate.<\/p>\n

A sudden turn can
\ncome, a road appear,<\/p>\n

A greater Mind may see a greater Truth,<\/p>\n

Or we may find when all the rest has failed<\/p>\n

Hid in ourselves the key of perfect change.<\/p>\n

Ascending from the soil where creep our days,<\/p>\n

Earth’s consciousness may marry with the Sun,<\/p>\n

Our mortal life ride on the spirit’s wing,<\/p>\n

Our finite thoughts commune with the Infinite.<\/p>\n

In the bright kingdoms of the rising Sun<\/p>\n

All is a birth into a power of light:<\/p>\n

All here deformed guards there its happy shape,<\/p>\n

Here all is mixed and marred, there pure and whole;<\/p>\n

Yet each is a passing step, a moment’s phase.<\/p>\n

Awake to a greater Truth beyond her acts,<\/p>\n

The mediatrix sat and saw her works<\/p>\n

And felt the marvel in them and the force<\/p>\n

But knew the power behind the face of Time:<\/p>\n

She did the task, obeyed the knowledge given,<\/p>\n

Her deep heart yearned towards great ideal things<\/p>\n

And from the light looked out to wider light:<\/p>\n

A brilliant hedge drawn round her narrowed her power;<\/p>\n

Faithful to her limited sphere she toiled, but knew<\/p>\n

Its highest, widest seeing was a half-search,<\/p>\n

Its mightiest acts a passage or a stage.<\/p>\n

For not by Reason was creation made<\/p>\n

And not by Reason can the Truth be seen<\/p>\n

Which through the veils of thought, the screens of sense<\/p>\n

Hardly the spirit’s vision can descry <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 256<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/div>\n

Dimmed by the imperfection of its means:<\/p>\n

The little Mind is tied to little things:<\/p>\n

Its sense is but the
\nspirit’s outward touch<\/p>\n

Half-waked in a world of dark Inconscience;<\/p>\n

It feels out for its beings and its forms<\/p>\n

Like one left fumbling in the ignorant Night.<\/p>\n

In this small mould of infant mind and sense<\/p>\n

Desire is a child-heart’s cry crying for bliss,<\/p>\n

Our reason only a toys’ artificer,<\/p>\n

A rule-maker in a strange stumbling game.<\/p>\n

But she her dwarf aids knew whose confident sight<\/p>\n

A bounded prospect took for the far goal.<\/p>\n

The world she has made is an interim report<\/p>\n

Of a traveller towards the half-found truth in things<\/p>\n

Moving twixt nescience and nescience.<\/p>\n

For nothing is known while aught remains concealed;<\/p>\n

The Truth is known only when all is seen.<\/p>\n

Attracted by the All that is the One,<\/p>\n

She yearns towards a higher light than hers;<\/p>\n

Hid by her cults and creeds she has glimpsed God’s face:<\/p>\n

She knows she has but found a form, a robe,<\/p>\n

But ever she hopes to see him in her heart<\/p>\n

And feel the body of his reality.<\/p>\n

As yet a mask is there and not a brow,<\/p>\n

Although sometimes two hidden eyes appear:<\/p>\n

Reason cannot tear off that glimmering mask,<\/p>\n

Her efforts only make it glimmer more;<\/p>\n

In packets she ties up the Indivisible;<\/p>\n

Finding her hands too small to hold vast Truth<\/p>\n

She breaks up knowledge into alien parts<\/p>\n

Or peers through cloud-rack for a vanished sun:<\/p>\n

She sees, not understanding what she has seen,<\/p>\n

Through the locked visages of finite things<\/p>\n

The myriad aspects of infinity.<\/p>\n

One day the Face must burn out through the mask.<\/p>\n

Our ignorance is Wisdom’s chrysalis, <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 257<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/div>\n

Our error weds new knowledge on its way,<\/p>\n

Its darkness is a blackened knot of light;<\/p>\n

Thought dances hand in hand with Nescience<\/p>\n

On the grey road that winds towards the Sun.<\/p>\n

Even while her fingers fumble at the knots<\/p>\n

Which bind them to their strange companionship,<\/p>\n

Into the moments of their married strife<\/p>\n

Sometimes break flashes of the enlightening Fire.<\/p>\n

Even now great thoughts are here that walk alone:<\/p>\n

Armed they have come with the infallible word<\/p>\n

In an investiture of intuitive light<\/p>\n

That is a sanction from the eyes of God;<\/p>\n

Announcers of a distant Truth they flame<\/p>\n

Arriving from the rim of eternity.<\/p>\n

A fire shall come out of the infinitudes,<\/p>\n

A greater Gnosis shall regard the world<\/p>\n

Crossing out of some far omniscience<\/p>\n

On lustrous seas from the still rapt Alone<\/p>\n

To illumine the deep heart of self and things.<\/p>\n

A timeless knowledge it shall bring to Mind,<\/p>\n

Its aim to life, to Ignorance its close.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Above in a high breathless stratosphere,<\/p>\n

Overshadowing the dwarfish trinity,<\/p>\n

Lived, aspirants to a limitless Beyond,<\/p>\n

Captives of Space, walled by the limiting heavens,<\/p>\n

In the unceasing circuit of the hours<\/p>\n

Yearning for the straight paths of eternity,<\/p>\n

And from their high station looked down on this world<\/p>\n

Two sun-gaze Daemons witnessing all that is.<\/p>\n

A power to uplift the laggard world,<\/p>\n

Imperious rode a huge high-winged Life-Thought<\/p>\n

Unwont to tread the firm unchanging soil:<\/p>\n

Accustomed to a blue infinity,<\/p>\n

It planed in sunlit sky and starlit air;<\/p>\n

It saw afar the unreached Immortal’s home <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 258<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/div>\n

And heard afar the voices of the
\ngods.<\/p>\n

Iconoclast and shatterer of Time’s forts,<\/p>\n

Overleaping limit and exceeding norm,<\/p>\n

It lit the thoughts that glow through the centuries<\/p>\n

And moved to acts of superhuman force.<\/p>\n

As far as its self-winged airplanes could fly,<\/p>\n

Visiting the future in great brilliant raids<\/p>\n

It reconnoitred vistas of dream-fate.<\/p>\n

Apt to conceive, unable to attain,<\/p>\n

It drew its concept-maps and vision-plans<\/p>\n

Too large for the architecture of mortal Space.<\/p>\n

Beyond in wideness where no footing is,<\/p>\n

An imagist of bodiless Ideas,<\/p>\n

Impassive to the cry of life and sense,<\/p>\n

A pure Thought-Mind surveyed the cosmic act.<\/p>\n

Archangel of a white transcending realm,<\/p>\n

It saw the world from solitary heights<\/p>\n

Luminous in a remote and empty air. <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

End of Canto Ten <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 259<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/td>\n

 <\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  Canto Ten    The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Little Mind    This too must now be overpassed and left, As all must be…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-498","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-28-savitri-volume-28","wpcat-10-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/498","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=498"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/498\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=498"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=498"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=498"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}