Canto Six   Nirvana and the Discovery of the All-Negating Absolute   A CALM slow sun looked down from tranquil heavens. A routed sullen rearguard of retreat, The last rains had fled murmuring across the woods Or failed, a sibilant whisper mid the leaves, And the great blue enchantment of the sky Recovered the deep rapture of its smile. Its mellow splendour unstressed by storm-licked heats Found room for a luxury of warm mild days, The night's gold treasure of autumnal moons Came floating shipped through ripples of faery air. And Savitri's life was glad, fulfilled like earth's; She had found herself, she knew her being'

  Canto Two   The Way of Fate and the Problem of Pain   A SILENCE sealed the irrevocable decree, The word of Fate that fell from heavenly lips Fixing a doom no power could ever reverse Unless heaven's will itself could change its course. Or so it seemed: yet from the silence rose One voice that questioned changeless destiny, A will that strove against the immutable Will. A mother's heart had heard the fateful speech That rang like a sanction to the call of death And came like a chill close to life and hope. Yet hope sank down like an extinguished fire. She felt the leaden inevitable hand Invade the secrecy of her gua

  Canto Six   The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Greater Life   AS ONE who between dim receding walls Towards the far gleam of a tunnel's mouth, Hoping for light, walks now with freer pace And feels approach a breath of wider air, So he escaped from that grey anarchy. Into an ineffectual world he came, A purposeless region of arrested birth Where being from non-being fled and dared To live but had no strength long to abide. Above there gleamed a pondering brow of sky Tormented, crossed by wings of doubtful haze Adventuring with a voice of roaming winds And crying for a direction in the void Like blind souls looking for the

  Canto Three   The Yoga of the King: The Yoga of the Soul's Release   A WORLD'S desire compelled her mortal birth. One in the front of the immemorial quest, Protagonist of the mysterious play In which the Unknown pursues himself through forms And limits his eternity by the hours And the blind Void struggles to live and see, A thinker and toiler in the ideal's air, Brought down to earth's dumb need her radiant power. His was a spirit that stooped from larger spheres Into our province of ephemeral sight, A colonist from immortality. A pointing beam on earth's uncertain roads, His birth held up a symbol and a s

'Savitri' by Sri Aurobindo - Page 1 of 10      Sri Aurobindo in 1950 1916 version of a passage in Book Nine, Canto One A page of a 1947 draft for Book Ten, Canto Four Author's Note   The tale of Satyavan and Savitri is recited in the Mahabharata as a story of conjugal love conquering death. But this legend is, as shown by many features of the human tale, one of the many symbolic myths of the Vedic cycle. Satyavan is the soul carrying the divine truth of being within itself but descended into the grip of death and ignoran

  Canto Three   The Entry into the Inner Countries   AT FIRST out of the busy hum of mind As if from a loud thronged market into a cave By an inward moment's magic she had come. A stark hushed emptiness became her self: Her mind unvisited by the voice of thought Stared at a void deep's dumb infinity. Her heights receded, her depths behind her closed; All fled away from her and left her blank. But when she came back to her self of thought, Once more she was a human thing on earth, A lump of Matter, a house of closed sight, A mind compelled to think out ignorance, A life-force pressed into a camp of works And the material world he

  Canto Three   The Glory and the Fall of Life   AN UNEVEN broad ascent now lured his feet. Answering a greater Nature's troubled call He crossed the limits of embodied Mind And entered wide obscure disputed fields Where all was doubt and change and nothing sure, A world of search and toil without repose. As one who meets the face of the Unknown, A questioner with none to give reply, Attracted to a problem never solved, Always uncertain of the ground he trod, Always drawn on to an inconstant goal He travelled through a land peopled by doubts In shifting confines on a quaking base. In front he saw a boundary ever un

'Kena and Other Upanishads' by Sri Aurobindo - Page 1 of 50 Note on the Texts     Note on the Texts   KENA AND OTHER UPANISHADS comprises Sri Aurobindo's translations of and commentaries on Upanishads other than the Isha Upanishad, as well as translations of later Vedantic texts, and writings on the Upanishads and Vedanta philosophy in general. Translations of and commentaries on the Isha Upanishad are published in Isha Upanishad, volume 17 of THE COMPLETE WORKS OF SRI AUROBINDO. Sri Aurobindo's work on the Upanishads occupied more than twenty years, from around 1900 until the early 1920s. (One translation was revised some twenty-five years a

The Mandoukya Upanishad   Before which one repeats the Mantra.     OM. May we hear what is auspicious with our ears, O ye Gods; may we see what is auspicious with our eyes, O ye of the sacrifice; giving praise with steady limbs, with motionless bodies, may we enter into that life which is founded in the Gods. Ordain weal unto us Indra of high-heaped glories; ordain weal unto us Pushan, the all-knowing Sun; ordain weal unto us Tarkshya Arishtanemi; Brihaspati ordain weal unto us. OM. Peace! peace! peace!     1. OM is this imperishable Word, OM is the Universe, and this is the exposition of OM.

The Great Aranyaka   A Commentary on the Brihad Aranyak Upanishad _____   Foreword   The Brihad Aranyak Upanishad, at once the most obscure and the profoundest of the Upanishads, offers peculiar difficulties to the modern mind. If its ideas are remote from us, its language is still more remote. Profound, subtle, extraordinarily rich in rare philosophical suggestions and delicate psychology, it has preferred to couch its ideas in a highly figurative and symbolical language, which to its contemporaries, accustomed to this suggestive dialect, must have seemed a noble frame for its riches, but meets