Author: Beloo Mehra
Date published: November 7, 2024
As a Collaborating Center of SAIEN (Sri Aurobindo Integral Education Network), BhāratShakti regularly contributes to the SAIEN Blog. To Be Like the Ocean is our second blog published on SAIEN platform.
To Be Like the Ocean
The other day as I read the following lines from Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri, I felt such a deep relief. Or was it a release?
For though a dress of blind and devious chance
Is laid upon the work of all-wise Fate,
Our acts interpret an omniscient Force
That dwells in the compelling stuff of things,
And nothing happens in the cosmic play
But at its time and in its foreseen place.
(Book V, Canto I, p. 389)
Our acts interpret an omniscient Force… nothing happens in the cosmic play, but at its time and in its foreseen place.
To this day I find myself unable to express why that feeling came on so strongly after reading these lines. I had read these lines several times before. But this time the experience was different. Maybe the mind does not know the reason or maybe it does, but does it really matter? What matters is what was experienced, what was felt.
Even if such experiences of release are for a few moments, perhaps their value lies in the way they leave their imprint drop by drop on our mental-emotional selves, gradually preparing these parts for seeking greater calmness and equanimity.
Life – individual and collective – goes on in straight lines and curves and zig-zags, with its ups and downs and highs and lows, and with the good and the bad and the ugly often mixed up. In its ignorance the mind naturally attributes these things to mere Fate or Chance, not only failing to see the good in what appears as the bad — or vice versa, but also failing to recognize the working of an omniscient Force behind all this play of Life, this cosmic play.