As if a childlike finger laid on a cheek
Reminded of the endless need in things
The heedless Mother of the universe,
An infant longing clutched the sombre Vast.
Insensibly somewhere a breach began:
A long lone line of hesitating hue
Like a vague smile tempting a desert heart
Troubled the far rim of life’s obscure sleep.
Waking up of consciousness that He compares to a “smile”. He says “hesitating hue” — that is the first beginning of consciousness, that is like a very pale light and He compares to “a smile tempting a desert heart”. It is like a very faint light at the border of the obscure sleep of life.
He says:
Arrived from the other side of boundlessness
An eye of deity pierced through the dumb deeps;
A scout in a reconnaissance from the sun,
It seemed amid a heavy cosmic rest,
The torpor of a sick and weary world,
To seek for a spirit sole and desolate
Too fallen to recollect forgotten bliss.
The first vision of Consciousness that He compares to the “An eye of deity” piercing “through the dumb deeps” and this look is like “A scout in a reconnaissance from the sun” — that is the symbol of Consciousness, in the “heavy cosmic rest, The torpor of a sick and weary world”. “Too fallen to recollect forgotten bliss” — that is, too unconscious to remember the Consciousness from which it came.
This talk is based on CWSA 28 which is the first of the four volumes of Letters on Yoga.
This talk given at Savitri Bhavan is part of the "Sanatana Dharma and Modern Issues" (SDM) series.
Summary of Book Two, Part Two, Chapters 15 to 17. A talk by Dr Alok Pandey at Sri Aurobindo Society, Jaipur, Rajasthan.