It was the hour before the Gods Awake

It was the hour before the Gods awake.
Across the path of the divine Event
The huge foreboding mind of Night,
alone In her unlit temple of eternity,
Lay stretched immobile upon Silence' marge.
Almost one felt, opaque, impenetrable,
In the sombre symbol of her eyeless muse
The abysm of the unbodied Infinite;
A fathomless zero occupied the world.
A power of fallen boundless self awake
Between the first and the last Nothingness,
Recalling the tenebrous womb from which it came,
Turned from the insoluble mystery of birth
And the tardy process of mortality
And longed to reach its end in vacant Nought.
As in a dark beginning of all things,
Repeating for ever the unconscious act,
Prolonging for ever the unseeing will,
Cradled the cosmic drowse of ignorant Force
Whose moved creative slumber kindles the suns
And carries our lives in its somnambulist whirl.
Athwart the vain enormous trance of Space,
Its formless stupor without mind or life,
A shadow spinning through a soulless Void
Thrown back once more into unthinking dreams,
Earth wheeled abandoned in the hollow gulfs
Forgetful of her spirit and her fate.
The impassive skies were neutral, empty, still.
Then something in the inscrutable darkness stirred;
A nameless movement, an unthought Idea

“Savitri” by Sri Aurobindo

These words from Savitri, written by Sri Aurobindo and given out in a sermon by Dr. Karan Singh, have always been a part of my sub- conscious since childhood. After spending a couple of years in the spiritual environment of the Aurobindo Ashram in New Delhi, it was natural for this to happen.

These words resonate now due to the total uncertainty of the present times. While the financial markets are in total turmoil, the question is where we are headed. I have listened to countless experts in the last 48 hours giving their opinions and ideas, and the only certainty is the lack of one. There is a sense of some fundamental change about to happen; but that change is so unpredictable that it is almost an “unthought idea”.