Opening Remarks
Though the universe and its powers are hierarchically arranged, yet a thread of continuity runs through its core. All is a single chain, part of a single plan.
A subtle link
A vast Unknown is round us and within;
All things are wrapped in the dynamic One:
A subtle link of union joins all life.
We are surrounded by the vastness of the Divine Consciousness. We are also interconnected through Her and joined and united in Her whose creative Power links all creation through subtle threads of Consciousness.
We are not left alone
Thus all creation is a single chain:
We are not left alone in a closed scheme
Between a driving of inconscient Force
And an incommunicable Absolute.
The tops of creation and its bases are joined together in a single Oneness. Nothing is separate or alone; each is joined to all and all is joined to the One.
Brighter earths and heavens
Our life is a spur in a sublime soul-range,
Our being looks beyond its walls of mind
And it communicates with greater worlds;
There are brighter earths and wider heavens than ours.
Our soul reaches out to the Beyond, crossing the limits of the embodied mind it comes into contact with higher and brighter worlds. Even our earth has its brighter counterparts in higher worlds just as we extend into other luminous fields.
Being broods in its own depths
There are realms where Being broods in its own depths;
It feels in its immense dynamic core
Its nameless, unformed, unborn potencies
Cry for expression in the unshaped Vast:
Ineffable beyond Ignorance and death,
The images of its everlasting Truth
Look out from a chamber of its self-rapt soul:
As if to its own inner witness gaze
The Spirit holds up its mirrored self and works,
The power and passion of its timeless heart,
The figures of its formless ecstasy,
The grandeurs of its multitudinous might.
All creation is essentially a manifestation of the Spirit. The Supreme dwells upon the Peaks where He broods within to bring out what is hidden in His own flaming core. By the power of tapas, He brings out the Energy and Power that is within and extends and objectivises it as creation. The world is in fact an objectivisation of the Lord Himself. His hidden potencies and ecstasy fill this creation even as His Power and Knowledge weave it together. Then He enters and sits within each element watching the works of Time and the constant unfolding.
Mystic substance of our souls
Thence comes the mystic substance of our souls
Into the prodigy of our nature’s birth,
There is the unfallen height of all we are
And dateless fount of all we hope to be.
Our soul itself directly emerges from Him and shares the same essential substance and energy as the Lord Himself. Though fallen into the limits of an ignorant nature, yet it has come from the heights where the Lord dwells and looks upwards towards the luminous future with hope and trust since it knows that the eternal is always with us.
The hieratic Power
On every plane the hieratic Power,
Initiate of unspoken verities,
Dreams to transcribe and make a part of life
In its own native style and living tongue
Some trait of the perfection of the Unborn,
Some vision seen in the omniscient Light,
Some far tone of the immortal rhapsodist Voice,
Some rapture of the all-creating Bliss,
Some form and plan of the Beauty unutterable.
The creatrix Power that has builds the worlds tries to create some semblance of the Beauty and Wisdom and Bliss and Perfection of the Divine that is Self-existent Above. At each plane It accommodates and adapts to the possibilities of that plane. Thus all is a symbol in countless ways of the One Reality.
Worlds nearer to absolute realms
Worlds are there nearer to those absolute realms,
Where the response to Truth is swift and sure
And spirit is not hampered by its frame
And hearts by sharp division seized and rent
And delight and beauty are inhabitants
And love and sweetness are the law of life.
There are greater worlds that dwell in the closeness of the Supreme. There one can discover the true plan, the original Idea that has gone into creation. There, in those worlds, the forms are plastic to the touch of the Spirit and the law of Beauty, Love and Oneness reigns.
The divinity earth dreams
A finer substance in a subtler mould
Embodies the divinity earth but dreams;
Its strength can overtake joy’s running feet;
Overleaping the fixed hurdles set by Time,
The rapid net of an intuitive clasp
Captures the fugitive happiness we desire.
It is this perfection, the perfection of intuitive knowledge, of strength and joy and all else that the earth dreams of and seeks to manifest here.
A larger Supernature
A Nature lifted by a larger breath,
Plastic and passive to the all-shaping Fire,
Answers the flaming Godhead’s casual touch:
Immune from our inertia of response
It hears the word to which our hearts are deaf,
Adopts the seeing of immortal eyes
And, traveller on the roads of line and hue,
Pursues the spirit of beauty to its home.
It is a higher Supernature that responds rapidly, flawlessly, intuitively to the Divine Consciousness and Force and adapts perfectly to the Divine Call. It has the vision of Truth and builds all forms there in perfect harmony with the spirit of Beauty.
Closing Remarks
As always Sri Aurobindo reminds us that there are greater and diviner possibilities concealed in the high peaks of Nature; a higher Nature beyond our limited lower Nature that the earth dreams to embody here. That is the original plan that the Divine Will intends upon earth and in man.
