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If we study Sri Aurobindo's writings, a few questions emerge regarding time.
In “Symbol Dawn” in his book “Savitri”-a legend and symbol, he describes the moment in the following verse:
“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.”
The fathomless zero is inclusive of time, I presume, for if space is zero time cannot be far behind. In the same canto he continues in another stanza:
“A sacred yearning lingered in its trace,
The worship of a Presence and a Power
Too perfrect to be held by death-bound hearts,
The prescience of a marvellous birth to come.
Only a little the god-light can stay:
Spiritual beauty illumining human sight
Lines with its passion and mystery Matter's mask
And squanders eternity on a beat of Time.
As when a soul draws near the sill of birth,
Adjoining mortal time to Timelessness,…”
How can you squander eternity on a beat of Time unless it is very flexible to the extent that eternity levels to a beat? And also there is Timelessness adjacent to our mortal time. How this duality and why? Do we exist at the edge of timelessness meaning there is no time beyond the point of our death?
Now Sri Aurobind goes on to describe the reasons of immediate birth of Savitri, the alienated goddess, thrown to this world from the heavens to atone for her imagined fault:
“A narrow movement on Time's deep abysm,
Life's fragile littleness denied the power,
The proud and conscious wideness and the bliss
She had brought with her into the human form,
The calm delight that weds one soul to all,
The key to the flaming doors of ecstasy.”
Where is the deep abysm of Time located? Is our existence on the edge of that abysm?
And he describes Savitri's prospective torment on the day that Satyavan, her husband is destned to die in the following lines:
“Awake she endured the moments' serried march
And looked on this green smiling dangerous world,
And heard the ignorant cry of living things.
Amid the trivial sounds, the unchanging scene
Her soul arose confronting Time and Fate.
Immobile in herself, she gathered force.
This was the day when Satyavan must die.”
Is Time a foe that Savitri had to confront along with Fate? Enduring the serried march of the moments was another torture for her. Was she able to confront Time and Fate from the front and stop both? If yes, Time is an entity that can even be stopped in the eyes of the great philosopher Sri Aurobindo.
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