Savitri is trying to convey something from across the horizon of knowability

One Cosmos Under God Robert W. Godwin

Sri Aurobindo's epic poem of cosmic all-possibilty, Savitri, begins with the line, "It was the hour before the God's awake." It is the "huge foreboding mind of Night, alone," "opaque, impenetrable," "the abysm of the unbodied Infinite" "between the first and last Nothingness." Later comes the first "event" or act:

Then something in the inscrutable darkness stirred;

A nameless movement, an unthought Idea....

A thought was sown in the unsounded Void,

A sense was born within darkness' depths,

A memory quivered in the heart of Time

As if a soul long dead were moved to live....

Like Savitri, Genesis can only be understood lighterally, and therefore must be read slowly overhead and meditated upon, for it is trying to convey something from across the horizon of knowability -- something that cannot be known, only unknown. To unknow something is not equivalent to being ignorant about it. Rather, it is a special way of knowing what is beyond the brightly but ill-luminated area of consciousness -- it is to unvision the perfect night that precedes sight. In ether worlds, it is a way to try to get past the phenomena -- which we know can only be a shadow of the Real -- and to try to intuit the noumena, or the reality behind appearances.

As it so happyns, we undo this every naught when we enter the state of deep, dreamless sleep, or what is called in the Upanishads turiya. But how do we enter that state with eyes wide shut? Ah, that's the trick, isn't it, for this is to die before you die and to wake while you live. They say that enlightenment is to dance along the penumbra of this razoredgeon. Or so we have heard from the wise, from Petey, the mirthiful, the compassionate!

How does one awaken to the Dreamer who dreams the dream of our dream of the Dreamer? If you're asking me, I say you can try to gno it alone, but I think you'll get nowhere faster with the help of the Dreamer. But how to enlist his aid? It's an ether ore situation: to mine the ore from the ether, you must either pay your deus or be nilled to a blank. No body crosses the phoenix line lest it be repossessed and amortized -- yes, both amor- and amortized, love and death. posted by Gagdad Bob at 3/17/2007 07:55:00 AM