The Lord Disdains Nothing
THE LORD is the humblest of all, disdaining nothing, accepting everything. He is all-Love and all-Light. The Master of all yet He humbly assumes the role of the servant of all creatures.
“Who is this God imagined by thy night,
Contemptuously creating worlds disdained,
Who made for vanity the brilliant stars?
Not he who has reared his temple in my thoughts
And made his sacred floor my human heart.
My God is will and triumphs in his paths,
My God is love and sweetly suffers all.
To him I have offered hope for sacrifice
And gave my longings as a sacrament.
Who shall prohibit or hedge in his course,
The wonderful, the charioteer, the swift?
A traveller of the million roads of life,
His steps familiar with the lights of heaven
Tread without pain the sword-paved courts of hell;
There he descends to edge eternal joy.
Love’s golden wings have power to fan thy void:
The eyes of love gaze starlike through death’s night,
The feet of love tread naked hardest worlds.
He labours in the depths, exults on the heights;
He shall remake thy universe, O Death.” [591-592]
The Lord is not what we have made him out to be, a being in our image and satisfying our idea of a superior moral judge. He is one that judges not, condemns not, but simply loves all beings, and carries everything towards the upwards path on wings of love to where one can find supreme peace and harmony and bliss. It is to him and not a god erected by our fancies that we must offer our self and our life as sacrifice.
The Lord Has Become His Own Veils
HE IS not only hidden in the Night, rather Night is a blanket He has drawn over himself. Nothingness is nothing but himself withdrawn from all approach. He is the bodiless and yet inhabits every body.
A traveller new-discovering himself,
One made of Matter’s world his starting-point,
He made of Nothingness his living-room
And Night a process of the eternal light
And death a spur towards immortality.
God wrapped his head from sight in Matter’s cowl,
His consciousness dived into inconscient depths,
All-Knowledge seemed a huge dark Nescience;
Infinity wore a boundless zero’s form.
His abysms of bliss became insensible deeps,
Eternity a blank spiritual Vast.
Annulling an original nullity
The Timeless took its ground in emptiness
And drew the figure of a universe,
That the spirit might adventure into Time
And wrestle with adamant Necessity
And the soul pursue a cosmic pilgrimage.
A spirit moved in black immensities
And built a Thought in ancient Nothingness;
A soul was lit in God’s tremendous Void,
A secret labouring glow of nascent fire.
In Nihil’s gulf his mighty Puissance wrought;
She swung her formless motion into shapes,
Made Matter the body of the Bodiless.
Infant and dim the eternal Mights awoke. [621-622]
It is through an involution and self-loss that creation began. It is through self-finding that creation evolves. It is through a complete self-discovery that the forms built of matter will one day become God.
The World is God Concealed
THE LORD is here in bird and beast and stars and stone. He is here in the rivers and mountains and landscapes. He is here in every finite thing. All is his Work and his Art and his Glory and his Beauty and his Love.
In God concealed the world began to be,
Tardily it travels towards manifest God:
Our imperfection towards perfection toils,
The body is the chrysalis of a soul:
The infinite holds the finite in its arms,
Time travels towards revealed eternity.
A miracle structure of the eternal Mage,
Matter its mystery hides from its own eyes,
A scripture written out in cryptic signs,
An occult document of the All-Wonderful’s art.
All here bears witness to his secret might,
In all we feel his presence and his power.
A blaze of his sovereign glory is the sun,
A glory is the gold and glimmering moon,
A glory is his dream of purple sky.
A march of his greatness are the wheeling stars.
His laughter of beauty breaks out in green trees,
His moments of beauty triumph in a flower;
The blue sea’s chant, the rivulet’s wandering voice
Are murmurs falling from the Eternal’s harp.
This world is God fulfilled in outwardness. [623-624]
The world and creation are nothing but God objectivised. He hides within each element and manifests something of his Glory and Beauty through form. Matter is his document and creation the script that He writes.
The One Lord and the Dual Nature
His ways challenge our reason and our sense;
By blind brute movements of an ignorant Force,
By means we slight as small, obscure or base,
A greatness founded upon little things,
He has built a world in the unknowing Void.
His forms he has massed from infinitesimal dust;
His marvels are built from insignificant things.
If mind is crippled, life untaught and crude,
If brutal masks are there and evil acts,
They are incidents of his vast and varied plot,
His great and dangerous drama’s needed steps;
He makes with these and all his passion-play,
A play and yet no play but the deep scheme
Of a transcendent Wisdom finding ways
To meet her Lord in the shadow and the Night:
Above her is the vigil of the stars;
Watched by a solitary Infinitude
She embodies in dumb Matter the Divine,
In symbol minds and lives the Absolute. [624]
His knowledge he disguised as Ignorance,
His Good he sowed in Evil’s monstrous bed,
Made error a door by which Truth could enter in,
His plant of bliss watered with Sorrow’s tears.
A thousand aspects point back to the One;
A dual Nature covered the Unique. [625]
Knowledge and Ignorance, Day and Night are his self-concealment and his self-revealing. All is his mask and all is his Glory. All is his Play and all serves a purpose deep.
The Lord is Perfect Harmony
THERE IS nothing but the Lord. Even all that seems to be not He is only himself hiding behind a thick disguise. The two poles of Nature, bright and dark are his two sides and aspects united harmoniously and transformed in him.
All contraries are aspects of God’s face.
The Many are the innumerable One,
The One carries the multitude in his breast;
He is the Impersonal, inscrutable, sole,
He is the one infinite Person seeing his world;
The Silence bears the Eternal’s great dumb seal,
His light inspires the eternal Word;
He is the Immobile’s deep and deathless hush,
Its white and signless blank negating calm,
Yet stands the creator Self, the almighty Lord
And watches his will done by the forms of Gods
And the desire that goads half-conscious man
And the reluctant and unseeing Night.
These wide divine extremes, these inverse powers
Are the right and left side of the body of God;
Existence balanced twixt two mighty arms
Confronts the mind with unsolved abysms of Thought.
Darkness below, a fathomless Light above,
In Light are joined, but sundered by severing Mind
Stand face to face, opposite, inseparable,
Two contraries needed for his great World-task,
Two poles whose currents wake the immense World-Force.
In the stupendous secrecy of his Self,
Above the world brooding with equal wings,
He is both in one, beginningless, without end:
Transcending both, he enters the Absolute.
His being is a mystery beyond mind,
His ways bewilder mortal ignorance;
The finite in its little sections parked,
Amazed, credits not God’s audacity
Who dares to be the unimagined All
And see and act as might one Infinite.
Against human reason this is his offence,
Being known to be for ever unknowable,
To be all and yet transcend the mystic whole,
Absolute, to lodge in a relative world of Time,
Eternal and all-knowing, to suffer birth,
Omnipotent, to sport with Chance and Fate,
Spirit, yet to be Matter and the Void,
Illimitable, beyond form or name,
To dwell within a body, one and supreme
To be animal and human and divine:
A still deep sea, he laughs in rolling waves;
Universal, he is all,—transcendent, none.
To man’s righteousness this is his cosmic crime,
Almighty beyond good and evil to dwell
Leaving the good to their fate in a wicked world
And evil to reign in this enormous scene. [656-657]
With a wonderful divine irony Sri Aurobindo describes how what we call evil is nothing else but something that is out of place. It is either a good in the making or a good in the passing. They are joined in the One Lord as two extremes that He always carried with him as two poles of a single Consciousness.