{"id":513,"date":"2013-07-13T01:28:30","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:28:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=513"},"modified":"2013-07-13T01:28:30","modified_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:28:30","slug":"19-book-2-canto-13-in-the-self-of-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\/19-book-2-canto-13-in-the-self-of-mind-vol-28-savitri-volume-28","title":{"rendered":"-19_Book 2 Canto 13 In the Self of Mind.htm"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\n\n
 <\/td>\n\n
\n

\nCanto Thirteen<\/i><\/p>\n

  <\/p>\n

\nIn the Self of
\nMind<\/font><\/span> <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

At last there came a bare indifferent sky<\/p>\n

Where Silence listened to the cosmic Voice,<\/p>\n

But answered nothing to a million calls;<\/p>\n

The soul’s endless question met with no response.<\/p>\n

An abrupt conclusion ended eager hopes,<\/p>\n

A deep cessation in a mighty calm,<\/p>\n

A finis-line on the last page of thought<\/p>\n

And a margin and a blank of wordless peace.<\/p>\n

There paused the climbing hierarchy of worlds.<\/p>\n

He stood on a wide arc of summit Space<\/p>\n

Alone with an enormous Self of Mind<\/p>\n

Which held all life in a corner of its vasts.<\/p>\n

Omnipotent, immobile and aloof,<\/p>\n

In the world which sprang from it, it took no part<\/p>\n

It gave no heed to the paeans of victory,<\/p>\n

It was indifferent to its own defeats,<\/p>\n

It heard the cry of
\ngrief and made no sign,<\/p>\n

Impartial fell its gaze on evil and good,<\/p>\n

It saw destruction come and did not move.<\/p>\n

An equal Cause of things, a lonely Seer<\/p>\n

And Master of its multitude of forms,<\/p>\n

It acted not but bore all thoughts and deeds,<\/p>\n

The witness Lord of Nature’s myriad acts<\/p>\n

Consenting to the movements of her Force.<\/p>\n

His mind reflected this vast quietism.<\/p>\n

This witness hush is the Thinker’s secret base:<\/p>\n

Hidden in silent depths the word is formed,<\/p>\n

From hidden silences the act is born<\/p>\n

Into the voiceful mind, the labouring world;<\/p>\n

In secrecy wraps the seed the Eternal sows<\/p>\n

Silence, the mystic birthplace of the soul. <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 283<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

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

In God’s supreme withdrawn and timeless hush<\/p>\n

A seeing Self and potent Energy met;<\/p>\n

The Silence knew itself and thought took form:<\/p>\n

Self-made from the dual power creation rose.<\/p>\n

In the still self he lived and it in him;<\/p>\n

Its mute immemorable listening depths,<\/p>\n

Its vastness and its stillness were his own;<\/p>\n

One being with it he grew wide, powerful, free.<\/p>\n

As one who builds his own imagined scenes<\/p>\n

And loses not himself in what he sees,<\/p>\n

Spectator of a drama self-conceived,<\/p>\n

He looked on the world and watched its motive thoughts<\/p>\n

With the burden of luminous prophecy in their eyes,<\/p>\n

Its forces with their feet of wind and fire<\/p>\n

Arisen from the dumbness in his soul.<\/p>\n

All now he seemed to understand and know;<\/p>\n

Desire came not nor any gust of will,<\/p>\n

The great perturbed inquirer lost his task;<\/p>\n

Nothing was asked nor wanted any more.<\/p>\n

There he could stay, the Self, the Silence won:<\/p>\n

His soul had peace, it knew the cosmic Whole.<\/p>\n

Then suddenly a luminous finger fell<\/p>\n

On all things seen or touched or heard or felt<\/p>\n

And showed his mind that nothing could be known;<\/p>\n

That must be reached from which all knowledge comes.<\/p>\n

The sceptic Ray disrupted all that seems<\/p>\n

And smote at the very roots of thought and sense.<\/p>\n

In a universe of Nescience they have grown,<\/p>\n

Aspiring towards a superconscient Sun,<\/p>\n

Playing in shine and rain from heavenlier skies<\/p>\n

They never can win however high their reach<\/p>\n

Or overpass however keen their probe.<\/p>\n

A doubt corroded even the means to think,<\/p>\n

Distrust was thrown upon Mind’s instruments;<\/p>\n

All that it takes for reality’s shining coin,<\/p>\n

Proved fact, fixed inference, deduction clear, <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 284<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

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

Firm theory, assured significance,<\/p>\n

Appeared as frauds upon Time’s credit bank<\/p>\n

Or assets valueless in Truth’s treasury.<\/p>\n

An Ignorance on an uneasy throne<\/p>\n

Travestied with a fortuitous sovereignty<\/p>\n

A figure of knowledge garbed in dubious words<\/p>\n

And tinsel thought-forms brightly inadequate.<\/p>\n

A labourer in the dark dazzled by half-light,<\/p>\n

What it knew was an image in a broken glass,<\/p>\n

What it saw was real but its sight untrue.<\/p>\n

All the ideas in its vast repertory<\/p>\n

Were like the mutterings of a transient cloud<\/p>\n

That spent itself in sound and left no trace.<\/p>\n

A frail house hanging in uncertain air,<\/p>\n

The thin ingenious web round which it moves,<\/p>\n

Put out awhile on the tree of the universe,<\/p>\n

And gathered up into itself again,<\/p>\n

Was only a trap to catch life’s insect food,<\/p>\n

Winged thoughts that flutter fragile in brief light<\/p>\n

But dead, once captured in fixed forms of mind,<\/p>\n

Aims puny but looming large in man’s small scale,<\/p>\n

Flickers of imagination’s brilliant gauze<\/p>\n

And cobweb-wrapped beliefs alive no more.<\/p>\n

The magic hut of built-up certitudes<\/p>\n

Made out of glittering dust and bright moonshine<\/p>\n

In which it shrines its image of the Real,<\/p>\n

Collapsed into the Nescience whence it rose.<\/p>\n

Only a gleam was there of symbol facts<\/p>\n

That shroud the mystery lurking in their glow,<\/p>\n

And falsehoods based on hidden realities<\/p>\n

By which they live until they fall from Time.<\/p>\n

Our mind is a house haunted by the slain past,<\/p>\n

Ideas soon mummified, ghosts of old truths,<\/p>\n

God’s spontaneities tied with formal strings<\/p>\n

And packed into drawers of reason’s trim bureau,<\/p>\n

A grave of great lost opportunities, <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 285<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

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

Or an office for misuse of soul and life<\/p>\n

And all the waste man makes of heaven’s gifts<\/p>\n

And all his squanderings of Nature’s store,<\/p>\n

A stage for the comedy of Ignorance.<\/p>\n

The world seemed a long aeonic failure’s scene:<\/p>\n

All sterile grew, no base was left secure.<\/p>\n

Assailed by the edge of the convicting beam<\/p>\n

The builder Reason lost her confidence<\/p>\n

In the successful sleight and turn of thought<\/p>\n

That makes the soul the prisoner of a phrase.<\/p>\n

Its highest wisdom was a brilliant guess,<\/p>\n

Its mighty structured science of the worlds<\/p>\n

A passing light on being’s surfaces.<\/p>\n

There was nothing there but a schema drawn by sense,<\/p>\n

A substitute for eternal mysteries,<\/p>\n

A scrawl figure of reality, a plan<\/p>\n

And elevation by the architect Word<\/p>\n

Imposed upon the semblances of Time.<\/p>\n

Existence’ self was shadowed by a doubt;<\/p>\n

Almost it seemed a lotus-leaf afloat<\/p>\n

On a nude pool of cosmic Nothingness.<\/p>\n

This great spectator and creator Mind<\/p>\n

Was only some half-seeing’s delegate,<\/p>\n

A veil that hung between the soul and Light,<\/p>\n

An idol, not the living body of God.<\/p>\n

Even the still spirit that looks upon its works<\/p>\n

Was some pale front of the Unknowable;<\/p>\n

A shadow seemed the wide and witness Self,<\/p>\n

Its liberation and immobile calm<\/p>\n

A void recoil of being from Time-made things,<\/p>\n

Not the self-vision of Eternity.<\/p>\n

Deep peace was there, but not the nameless Force:<\/p>\n

Our sweet and mighty Mother was not there<\/p>\n

Who gathers to her bosom her children’s lives,<\/p>\n

Her clasp that takes the world into her arms<\/p>\n

In the fathomless rapture of the Infinite, <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 286<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

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

The Bliss that is creation’s splendid grain<\/p>\n

Or the white passion of God-ecstasy<\/p>\n

That laughs in the blaze of the boundless heart of Love.<\/p>\n

A greater Spirit than the Self of Mind<\/p>\n

Must answer to the questioning of his soul.<\/p>\n

For here was no firm clue and no sure road;<\/p>\n

High-climbing pathways
\nclosed in the unknown;<\/p>\n

An artist sight constructed the Beyond<\/p>\n

In contrary patterns and conflicting hues;<\/p>\n

A part-experience fragmented the Whole.<\/p>\n

He looked above, but
\nall was blank and still;<\/p>\n

A sapphire firmament of abstract Thought<\/p>\n

Escaped into a formless Vacancy.<\/p>\n

He looked below, but all was dark and mute.<\/p>\n

A noise was heard, between, of thought and prayer,<\/p>\n

A strife, a labour without end or pause;<\/p>\n

A vain and ignorant seeking raised its voice.<\/p>\n

A rumour and a movement and a call,<\/p>\n

A foaming mass, a cry innumerable<\/p>\n

Rolled ever upon the ocean surge of Life<\/p>\n

Along the coasts of mortal Ignorance.<\/p>\n

On its unstable and enormous breast<\/p>\n

Beings and forces, forms, ideas like waves<\/p>\n

Jostled for figure and supremacy,<\/p>\n

And rose and sank and
\nrose again in Time,<\/p>\n

And at the bottom of the sleepless stir,<\/p>\n

A Nothingness parent of the struggling worlds,<\/p>\n

A huge creator Death, a mystic Void,<\/p>\n

For ever sustaining the irrational cry,<\/p>\n

For ever excluding the supernal Word,<\/p>\n

Motionless, refusing question and response,<\/p>\n

Reposed beneath the voices and the march<\/p>\n

The dim Inconscient’s dumb incertitude.<\/p>\n

Two firmaments of darkness and of light<\/p>\n

Opposed their limits to the spirit’s walk;<\/p>\n

It moved veiled in from Self’s infinity <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 287<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

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

In a world of beings and momentary events<\/p>\n

Where all must die to live and live to die.<\/p>\n

Immortal by renewed mortality,<\/p>\n

It wandered in the spiral of its acts<\/p>\n

Or ran around the cycles of its thought,<\/p>\n

Yet was no more than its original self<\/p>\n

And knew no more than when it first began.<\/p>\n

To be was a prison, extinction the escape.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

End of Canto Thirteen <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 288<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/td>\n

 <\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  Canto Thirteen    In the Self of Mind    At last there came a bare indifferent sky Where Silence listened to the cosmic Voice,…<\/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-513","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\/513","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=513"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/513\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=513"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=513"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=513"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}