Opening Remarks
This mind is quick to leap on impulse. It jumps from appearance to appearance sometimes hitting the mark and sometimes totally missing it.
Uncertain winner
An uncertain winner of uncertain stakes,
Instinct its dam and the life-mind its sire,
It ran its race and came in first or last.
Driven by impulse and instinct, it can stake everything for one chance, winning or losing it all.
A portion of infinity’s strength
Yet were its works nor small and vain nor null;
It nursed a portion of infinity’s strength
And could create the high things its fancy willed;
Its passion caught what calm intelligence missed.
Yet its leap of uncertainty is not to be considered useless or totally mistaken. Because of this the vital mind may catch something which the calm reason misses as it is busy analysing and weighing the options. Its fancies may be the first hint of the higher things and its passion can be moved at times by a divine impulsion.
Insight of impulse
Insight of impulse laid its leaping grasp
On heavens high Thought had hidden in dazzling mist,
Caught glimmers that revealed a lurking sun:
It probed the void and found a treasure there.
Its sudden seeing may be inspired by flashes of intuition descending from –he heights. In the void it find the treasures of the sun hiding because of its nature to conceive imaginatively.
Half-intuition
A half-intuition purpled in its sense;
It threw the lightning’s fork and hit the unseen.
Even when it does not grasp or understand the full import of its action, it may yet hit the mark while throwing its light blindly towards the unseen.
Blinked in the light
It saw in the dark and vaguely blinked in the light,
Ignorance was its field, the unknown its prize.
While unable to behold the light for long it can intuitively hit upon some truth by shooting in the dark and have it as its prized catch.
Closing Remarks
Thus Sri Aurobindo puts each power of nature in its right place showing us its usefulness as well as limitation in the total scheme of things.
