Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
Fragment ID: 20315
One dealt with her who meets the burdened great.1
Love? It is not Love who meets the burdened great and governs the fate of men! Nor is it Pain. Time also does not do these things – it only provides the field and movement of events. If I had wanted to give a name, I would have done it, but it has purposely to be left nameless because it is indefinable. He may use Love or Pain or Time or any of these powers but is not any of them. You can call him the Master of the Evolution, if you like.
1936
1 The context of the line on p.17 is
One dealt with her who meets the burdened great.
Assigner of the ordeal and the path
Who chooses in this holocaust of the soul
Death, fall and sorrow as the spirit’s goads,
The dubious godhead with his torch of pain
Lit up the chasm of the unfinished world
And called her to fill with her vast self the abyss.
The question was: “Who is ‘One’ here? Is it Love, the godhead mentioned before? If not, does this ‘dubious godhead with his torch of pain’ correspond to ‘the image white and high of god-like Pain’ spoken of a little earlier? Or is it Time whose ‘snare’ occurs in the last line of the preceding passage?”