There is sometimes a tendency to draw all kinds of conclusions about the life and works of the Master and the Mother based on what they have written. At other times one draws conclusions based on what one has seen or experienced in one’s personal life with or without physical contact with Them. One must, however, remember that however much one may have read, understood or known it is impossible to fathom the heart of the supreme Mystery that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother are. What They have revealed is surely not even a fraction of what they knew and what they have withheld. In a sense, it is true of any spiritual scripture such as the Gita, for instance. The Scripture is a guide but the Master is the incarnate Wisdom and even beyond. Since Wisdom is but one aspect of the Supreme, there are also many other, in fact, infinite aspects. There is most importantly Love whose single touch is far more powerful than hours of reading of scriptures and even reflections and deliberations.
Even if all the scriptures and all the truths that have been expressed so far about the Divine and will yet be spoken were to be kept together on one scale and the Divine Master, the embodied Divine, the scales would completely tilt on the side of the Master. It is perhaps this quality of the Master that he was called as a Guru, which means two things. One is that it indicates the one who takes us from darkness towards the Light. But the other meaning is equally significant, perhaps even more so. The word also means ‘heavy’. He is heavy with Wisdom, with Strength, with spiritual Power, with compassion, with Grace and Love. An ideal disciple or a seeker after Knowledge is therefore always eager to know not just what the word means but also what is hidden behind it and even more what has never been said or uttered by the Master. He receives not only the Word but also the Silence pregnant with infinity.
It is with this background that we shall now turn to some of the works of Sri Aurobindo knowing the inherent limitations of the human mind but also knowing the infinite Grace of the Divine Mother that can make the dumb speak and the deaf to hear and understand.
Let us close or rather begin with an invocation to Her:
“But thought nor word can seize eternal Truth:
The whole world lives in a lonely ray of her sun.
In our thinking’s close and narrow lamp-lit house
The vanity of our shut mortal mind
Dreams that the chains of thought have made her ours;
But only we play with our own brilliant bonds;
Tying her down, it is ourselves we tie.
In our hypnosis by one luminous point
We see not what small figure of her we hold;
We feel not her inspiring boundlessness,
We share not her immortal liberty.
Thus is it even with the seer and sage;
For still the human limits the divine:
Out of our thoughts we must leap up to sight,
Breathe her divine illimitable air,
Her simple vast supremacy confess,
Dare to surrender to her absolute.
Then the Unmanifest reflects his form
In the still mind as in a living glass;
The timeless Ray descends into our hearts
And we are rapt into eternity.
For Truth is wider, greater than her forms.
A thousand icons they have made of her
And find her in the idols they adore;
But she remains herself and infinite.”
[Savitri:276]
