In our Friday Upanishad study class, a participant asked a question. It was something like, ‘ Why do we search for Brahman when it is unknown and beyond our reach’? This question has been asked and answered in many different ways. Not only religion but science, philosophy, literature, and other life sciences do their search and give their own answers. My answer to the participant's question based on my understanding of our religion was that the curiosity for it is something built in us from time eternal. However, how far we go in finding answers is different for all. Sometimes our search provides some answers that we are looking for, and some time we are completely dissatisfied. Our Vedic religion tells us that though God is unknown, still it can be reached and felt in our innermost being. Since our Atman is essentially That.
Yesterday I picked up Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri. As I read the Canto four of book ll ‘The Kingdom of the little life’, I was pleasantly surprised to read Sri Aurobindo’s thoughts and poetic elaboration of this very ancient and ever new question in that canto. What I gathered from it is, that it is a question not only for the world but also an important one in the evolution of life. I copied a few sentences related to this topic. I enjoyed reading them anyway and decided to share it with you all. You are welcome to express your thoughts on it if you wish.
I have added the lines from book ll canto lll
The Glory and fall of Life.
These opening lines of Canto lll on page 116 seem to create a background for this search...
Our Search For the Unknown
( The topic added by me just for the post)
Savita Tyagi
Excerpts From Sri Aurobindo's Book Savitri
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 unreached
And thought himself at each step nearer now,-
A far retreating horizon of mirage.
Book ll Canto lll page 116
The Glory and fall of Life.
********************
There was a writhing of half-conscious force
Hardly awakened from the Inconscient’s sleep,
Tied to an instinct-driven Ignorance,
To find itself and find its hold on things.
………
Between earth-pain and the bliss from which life fell
A world that ever seeks for something missed,
Hunts for the joy that earth has failed to keep.
………..
An Influence entered mortal night and day,
A shadow overcast the time-born race;
…………..
Dividing matter’s sleep from conscious mind,
There strayed a call that knew not why it came.
A power beyond earth’s scope has touched the earth;
The repose that might have been can be no more;
A formless yearning passions in man’s heart,
A cry is in his blood for happier things:
……………
Man’s natural joy of life is overcast
And sorrow is his nurse of destiny.
…………….
He has risen to greatness and to discontent,
He is awake to the Invisible.
Insatiate seeker, he has all to learn:
He has exhausted now life’s surface acts,
His being’s hidden realms remain to explore.
He becomes a mind, he becomes a spirit and self;
In his fragile tenement he grows Nature’s lord.
*******************
In the heart she kindled a fire of passion and need,
**************************
A groping consciousness in a voiceless world,
A guide-less sense was given her for her road;
Thought was withheld and nothing now she knew,
But all the unknown was hers to feel and clasp.
Book ll canto four page 132-33
The Kingdom’s of the Little life
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