The Witness Spirit

by Sri Aurobindo

The Inner Fields

There is a brighter ether than this blue

Pretence of an enveloping heavenly vault,

Royaler investiture than this massed assault

Of emerald rapture pearled with tears of dew.

Immortal spaces of cerulean hue

Are in our reach and fields without this fault

Of drab brown earth and streams that never halt

In their deep murmur which white flowers strew

Floating like stars upon a strip of sky.

This world behind is made of truer stuff

Than the manufactured tissue of earth's grace.

There we can walk and see the gods go by

And sip from Hebe's cup nectar enough

To make for us heavenly limbs and deathless face. 

The Witness Spirit 

I dwell in the spirit's calm nothing can move

And watch the actions of Thy vast world-force,

Its mighty wings that through infinity move

And the Time-gallopings of the deathless Horse.

This mute stupendous Energy that whirls

The stars and nebulae in its long train,

Like a huge Serpent through my being curls

With its diamond hood of joy and fangs of pain.

It rises from the dim inconscient deep

Upcoiling through the minds and hearts of men,

Then touches on some height of luminous sleep

The bliss and splendour of the eternal plane.

All this I bear in me, untouched and still

Assenting to Thy all-wise inscrutable will. 

The Unseen Infinite 

Arisen to voiceless unattainable peaks

I meet no end, for all is boundless He,

An absolute Joy the wide-winged spirit seeks,

A Might, a Presence, an Eternity.

In the inconscient dreadful dumb Abyss

Are heard the heart-beats of the Infinite.

The insensible midnight veils His trance of bliss,

A fathomless sealed astonishment of Light.

In His ray that dazzles our vision everywhere,

Our half-closed eyes seek fragments of the One:

Only the eyes of Immortality dare

To look unblinded on that living Sun.

Yet are our souls the Immortal's selves within,

Comrades and powers and children of the Unseen. 

The Universal Incarnation 

There is a Wisdom like a brooding Sun,

A Bliss in the heart's crypt grown fiery white,

The heart of a world in which all hearts are one,

A Silence on the mountains of delight.

A Calm that cradles Fate upon its knees;

A wide Compassion leans to embrace earth's pain;

A Witness dwells within our secrecies,

The incarnate Godhead in the body of man.

Our mind is a glimmering curtain of that Ray,

Our strength a parody of the Immortal's power,

Our joy a dreamer on the Eternal's way

Hunting the fugitive beauty of an hour.

Only on the heart's veiled door the word of flame

Is written, the secret and tremendous Name.