Savitri: a Legend and a Symbol by Sri Aurobindo, Book I The Book of Beginnings, Canto 5 The Yoga of the King: the Yoga of the Spirit's Freedom and Greatness, pp. 76-78

0:01 A will, a hope immense now seized his heart, and to discern the superhuman's form he raised his eyes to unseen spiritual heights, aspiring to bring down a greater world. The glory he had glimpsed must be his home. A brighter, heavenlier sun must soon illume this dusk room with its dark internal stare. The infant's soul in its small nursery school, mid objects meant for a lesson hardly learned, outgrow its early grammar of intellect and its imitation of earth. Nature's art, its earthly dialect to God, language, change in living symbols, study reality and learn the logic of the infinite.

0:55 The ideal must be nature's common truth. The body illumined with the indwelling God. The heart and mind feel one with all that is a conscious soul. Live in a conscious world as through a mist a sovereign peak is seen. The greatness of the Eternal Spirit appeared. Exiled in a fragmented universe amid half semblances of Diviner things, these now could serve no more his regal turn, the Immortal's pride refused the doom to live. A miser of the scanty bargain made between our littleness and bounded hopes and the compassionate infinitudes. His height repelled the lowness of Earth's state. A wideness discontented with its frame resiled from poor assent to nature's terms.

1:56 The harsh contract spurned and the diminished lease Only beginnings are accomplished here. Our bases matter seems alone complete. An absolute machine without a soul or all. Seems a misfit of half ideas, where we saddle with the vice of earthly form, a hurried, imperfect glimpse of heavenly things, guesses and travesties of celestial types. Here chaos sorts itself into a world, a brief formation drifting in the void. Apings of knowledge, unfinished arcs of power, Flamings of beauty into earthly shapes.

2:42 Love's broken reflexes of unity, swim fragment. Mirrorings of a floating sun, A packed assemblage of crude, tentative lives are pieced into a tessellated hole. There is no perfect answer to our hopes. There are blind, voiceless doors that have no key Thought climbs in vain and brings a borrowed light. Cheated by counterfeits sold to us in life's Mart, our hearts clutch at a forfeited heavenly bliss. There is a provender for the mind's satiety. There are thrills of the flesh, but not the soul's desire.

3:27 Here even the highest rapture time can give is a mimicry of ungrasped beatitudes, a mutilated statue of ecstasy, a wounded happiness that cannot live, a brief Felicity of mind or sense thrown by the world power to her body slave, or a simulacrum of enforced delight in the Seragelios of ignorance. For all we have acquired soon loses worth an old disvalued credit. In times bank, imperfections checked, drawn on the inconscient, and in consequence dogs every effort made, and chaos waits on every cosmos formed. In each success a seed of failure lurks. He saw the doubtfulness of all things here, the in certitude of man's proud, confident thought, the transience of the achievements of his force, a thinking being in an unthinking world, an island in the sea of the unknown. He is a smallness, trying to be great, an animal with some instincts of a God, his life a story too common to be told, his deeds, a number summing up to naughty, his consciousness, a torch lit to be quenched, his

4:57 hope, a star above a cradle engrave. And yet a greater destiny may be his, for the eternal spirit is his truth. He can recreate himself and all around and fashion new the world in which he lives. He ignorant is the knower beyond time. He is the self above nature, above fate.