Golden Bridge

He and She at play


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Savitri: Book 1 Canto 4 Section 4


All here where each thing seems its lonely self

Are figures of the sole transcendent One:

Only by him they are, his breath is their life;

An unseen Presence moulds the oblivious clay.

A playmate in the mighty Mother’s game,

One came upon the dubious whirling globe

To hide from her pursuit in force and form.

A secret spirit in the Inconscient’s sleep,

A shapeless Energy, a voiceless Word,

He was here before the elements could emerge,

Before there was light of mind or life could breathe.

Accomplice of her cosmic huge pretence,

His semblances he turns to real shapes

And makes the symbol equal with the truth:

He gives to his timeless thoughts a form in Time.

He is the substance, he the self of things;

She has forged from him her works of skill and might:

She wraps him in the magic of her moods

And makes of his myriad truths her countless dreams.

The Master of being has come down to her,

An immortal child born in the fugitive years.

In objects wrought, in the persons she conceives,

Dreaming she chases her idea of him,

And catches here a look and there a gest:

Ever he repeats in them his ceaseless births.

He is the Maker and the world he made,

He is the vision and he is the Seer;

He is himself the actor and the act,

He is himself the knower and the known,

He is himself the dreamer and the dream.

There are Two who are One and play in many worlds;

In Knowledge and Ignorance they have spoken and met

And light and darkness are their eyes’ interchange;

Our pleasure and pain are their wrestle and embrace,

Our deeds, our hopes are intimate to their tale;

They are married secretly in our thought and life.

The universe is an endless masquerade:

For nothing here is utterly what it seems;

It is a dream-fact vision of a truth

Which but for the dream would not be wholly true,

A phenomenon stands out significant

Against dim backgrounds of eternity;

We accept its face and pass by all it means;

A part is seen, we take it for the whole.

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Golden BridgeBy Sri Aurobindo Ashram Delhi Branch