Читать книгу All Life Is Yoga: The Soul and How to Find It - Sri Aurobindo - Страница 34

Words of Sri Aurobindo

But since she knows the toil of mind and life

As a mother feels and shares her children‘s lives,

She puts forth a small portion of herself,

A being no bigger than the thumb of man

Into a hidden region of the heart

To face the pang and to forget the bliss,

To share the suffering and endure earth‘s wounds

And labour mid the labour of the stars.

This in us laughs and weeps, suffers the stroke,

Exults in victory, struggles for the crown;

Identified with the mind and body and life,

It takes on itself their anguish and defeat,

Bleeds with Fate‘s whips and hangs upon the cross,

Yet is the unwounded and immortal self

Supporting the actor in the human scene.

Through this she sends us her glory and her powers,

Pushes to wisdom‘s heights, through misery‘s gulfs;

She gives us strength to do our daily task

And sympathy that partakes of others‘ grief

And the little strength we have to help our race,

We who must fill the role of the universe

Acting itself out in a slight human shape

And on our shoulders carry the struggling world.

This is in us the godhead small and marred;

In this human portion of divinity

She seats the greatness of the Soul in Time

To uplift from light to light, from power to power,

Till on a heavenly peak it stands, a king.

In body weak, in its heart an invincible might,

It climbs stumbling, held up by an unseen hand,

A toiling spirit in a mortal shape.

*

This bodily appearance is not all;

The form deceives, the person is a mask;

Hid deep in man celestial powers can dwell.

His fragile ship conveys through the sea of years

An incognito of the Imperishable.

A spirit that is a flame of God abides,

A fiery portion of the Wonderful,

Artist of his own beauty and delight,

Immortal in our mortal poverty.

This sculptor of the forms of the Infinite,

This screened unrecognised Inhabitant,

Initiate of his own veiled mysteries,

Hides in a small dumb seed his cosmic thought.

In the mute strength of the occult Idea

Determining predestined shape and act,

Passenger from life to life, from scale to scale,

Changing his imaged self from form to form,

He regards the icon growing by his gaze

And in the worm foresees the coming god.

*

This seed-self sown in the Indeterminate

Forfeits its glory of divinity,

Concealing the omnipotence of its Force,

Concealing the omniscience of its Soul;

An agent of its own transcendent Will,

It merges knowledge in the inconscient deep;

Accepting error, sorrow, death and pain,

It pays the ransom of the ignorant Night,

Redeeming by its substance Nature‘s fall.

*

In this investiture of fleshly life

A soul that is a spark of God survives

And sometimes it breaks through the sordid screen

And kindles a fire that makes us half-divine.

*

Our soul from its mysterious chamber acts;

Its influence pressing on our heart and mind

Pushes them to exceed their mortal selves.

It seeks for Good and Beauty and for God;

We see beyond self‘s walls our limitless self,

We gaze through our world‘s glass at half-seen vasts,

We hunt for the Truth behind apparent things.

*

A Person persistent through the lapse of worlds,

Although the same for ever in many shapes

By the outward mind unrecognisable,

Assuming names unknown in unknown climes

Imprints through Time upon the earth‘s worn page

A growing figure of its secret self,

And learns by experience what the spirit knew,

Till it can see its truth alive and God.

*

Earth must transform herself and equal Heaven

Or Heaven descend into earth‘s mortal state.

But for such vast spiritual change to be,

Out of the mystic cavern in man‘s heart

The heavenly Psyche must put off her veil

And step into common nature‘s crowded rooms

And stand uncovered in that nature‘s front

And rule its thoughts and fill the body and life.

*

Although Death walks beside us on Life‘s road,

A dim bystander at the body‘s start

And a last judgment on man‘s futile works,

Other is the riddle of its ambiguous face:

Death is a stair, a door, a stumbling stride

The soul must take to cross from birth to birth,

A grey defeat pregnant with victory,

A whip to lash us towards our deathless state.

The inconscient world is the spirit‘s self-made room,

Eternal Night shadow of eternal Day.

Night is not our beginning nor our end;

She is the dark Mother in whose womb we have hid

Safe from too swift a waking to world-pain.

We came to her from a supernal Light,

By Light we live and to the Light we go.

*

All that is made and once again unmade,

The calm persistent vision of the One

Inevitably re-makes, it lives anew:

Forces and lives and beings and ideas

Are taken into the stillness for a while;

There they remould their purpose and their drift,

Recast their nature and re-form their shape.

Ever they change and changing ever grow,

And passing through a fruitful stage of death

And after long reconstituting sleep

Resume their place in the process of the Gods

Until their work in cosmic Time is done.

*

A conscious soul in the Inconscient‘s world,

Hidden behind our thoughts and hopes and dreams,

An indifferent Master signing Nature‘s acts

Leaves the vicegerent mind a seeming king.

In his floating house upon the sea of Time

The regent sits at work and never rests:

He is a puppet of the dance of Time;

He is driven by the hours, the moment‘s call

Compels him with the thronging of life‘s need

And the babel of the voices of the world.

***