The Stillness Experience By Aurobindo Analysis

The stillness experienced by Aurobindo which he describes as something which is “absolute, incommunicable” and where Eliot sees the dance. It is not a new phenomenon but is actually newly realised and its incomprehensibility shuts it from the ordinary world. To reach the point of stillness, one has to surrender his desires of the senses and has to give up the ideas upheld by his logical mind because man’s mind cannot grasp the realities higher than the world experienced by the senses.

A STILLNESS absolute, incommunicable,

Meets the sheer self-discovery of the soul;

A wall of stillness shuts it from the world,

A gulf of stillness swallows up the sense

And makes unreal all that mind has known,

All that the labouring senses still would weave

(Eliot 179) But Eliot learns a timeless value from his experience. The value is of humility. At the ordinary level mind is aware of his worldly existence but is not conscious of any higher realities. An individual may think that he is having consciousness, but actually he is conscious of nothing. It is:

… the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing-

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope

For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love

For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith

But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.

Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:

So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing. (Eliot 180)

The meaning of the stanza emerges through the series of negations that Eliot makes: wait without hope, love, faith and thought. It is through the rejection of these things that he eventually arrives at the point of stillness in dance. When an individual is free from expectations and emotions it becomes conscious. This progress takes place