The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Greater Mind

Sri Aurobindo
Savitri A Legend and a Symbol
PART ONE BOOK TWO The Book of the Traveller of the Worlds
Canto Eleven The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Greater Mind

• There ceased the limits of the labouring Power.
• But being and creation cease not there.
• For Thought transcends the circles of mortal mind,
• It is greater than its earthly instrument:
• The godhead crammed into mind's narrow space
• Escapes on every side into some vast
• That is a passage to infinity.
• It moves eternal in the spirit's field,
• A runner towards the far spiritual light,
• A child and servant of the spirit's force.
• But mind too falls back from a nameless peak.
• His being stretched beyond the sight of Thought.
• For the spirit is eternal and unmade
• And not by thinking was its greatness born,
• And not by thinking can its knowledge come.
• It knows itself and in itself it lives,
• It moves where no thought is nor any form.
• Its feet are steadied upon finite things,
• Its wings can dare to cross the Infinite.
• Arriving into his ken a wonder space
• Of great and marvellous meetings called his steps,
• Where Thought leaned on a Vision beyond thought
• And shaped a world from the Unthinkable.
• On peaks imagination cannot tread,
• In the horizons of a tireless sight,
• Under a blue veil of eternity
• The splendours of ideal Mind were seen
• Outstretched across the boundaries of things known.
• Origin of the little that we are,
• Instinct with the endless more that we must be,
• A prop of all that human strength enacts,
• Creator of hopes by earth unrealised,
• It spreads beyond the expanding universe;
• It wings beyond the boundaries of Dream,
• It overtops the ceiling of life's soar.
• Awake in a luminous sphere unbound by Thought,
• Exposed to omniscient immensities,
• It casts on our world its great crowned influences,
• Its speed that outstrips the ambling of the hours,
• Its force that strides invincibly through Time,
• Its mights that bridge the gulf twixt man and God,
• Its lights that combat Ignorance and Death.