By Vijay Phanshikar :
    The Golden Light
Thy golden Light came down into my brain
    And the grey rooms of mind sun-touched became
A bright reply to Wisdom's occult plane,
    A calm illumination and a flame.
Thy golden Light came down into my throat,
    And all my speech is now a tune divine,
A paean song of Thee my single note;
    My words are drunk with the Immortal's wine.
Thy golden Light came down into my heart
    Smiting my life with Thy eternity;
Now has it grown a temple where Thou art
   And all its passions point towards only Thee.
Thy golden Light came down into my feet;
My earth is now Thy playfield and Thy seat.
- Maharshi Aurobindo 

 Prose 

THE profound spiritual experience which Maharshi Aurobindo had may also be enjoyed by most practitioners of the Yogic path -- who are fortunate enough to rise to the pinnacle of meditative sublimation. Everything changes the moment the person reaches that heightened state of being. The trinity of body-mind-and-soul goes through an unusually enhanced refinement of every grain. A splendrous golden light fills every corner of being, lights up every sense ... and takes the person to a spiritual elevation that he/she has never experienced earlier. The person’s internal process experiences a near-total transformation and his/her external appearance acquires an unimpeachable glow that is well beyond mere words to capture.

 

Maharshi Aurobindo’s sonnet ‘The Golden Light’ explains the process of the golden glow transforms his inner being -- expressed through the body and its inner parts -- the brain, the throat, the speech, the heart, and then the feet ... ! With that profound transformation, the sage-poet then finds that My earth is now Thy playfield and Thy seat ! What a sensation ! What an experience ! What an acquisition of complete unity with the Divine ! Maharshi Aurobindo’s literature is full of such fine expression in different modes and nodes. His epic poem ‘Savitri’ of nearly 24,000 lines, for record, may be the story of how the legend of Savitri got woven into India’s overall ancient story. But it is not just about a woman who fought the Yama Dharma and had her husband’s life restored. In ‘Savitri’, Maharshi Aurobindo creates a splendrous signature of the power of faith -- especially of a determined Stree-Shakti.

 

In the sonnet ‘The Golden Light’, Maharshi Aurobindo converses with the Divine -- thanks the Divine for His Golden Glow bathing his inner being and in the process burning the dividing membrane between mortality and immortality. ‘I have realised Your presence. I am basking in its golden glow. I am awash with Your light. There is no darkness now left in me’ -- he seems to say. The sonnet is a powerful expression of the process of how the golden glow spreads through the entire being -- and sublimates him to an elevation beyond definition, beyond norms and beyond words.