Preparing for the Miraculous

sri aurobindo and the big bang 195way. As Sri Aurobindo wrote for the future, this cannot buthave been intentionally. It is the aim of this talk to examineone such statement:A Mystery’s process is the universe.At first was laid a strange and anomalous base,A void, a cipher of some secret Whole,Where zero held infinity in its sumAnd All and Nothing were a single term,An eternal negative, a matrix Nought:Into its forms the Child is ever bornWho lives for ever in the vasts of God.A slow reversal’s movement then took place:A gas belched out from some invisible Fire,Of its dense rings were formed these million stars ... 5In these lines Sri Aurobindo describes the origin of theuniverse, with in the last two his evocation of what is nowcommonly called the “Big Bang.” It should be kept in mindthat this was written before 1950.All peoples known in history – and most probably allothers also – have wondered about how the world in whichthey lived originated. There were the seasons which regulatedtheir lives, the unknown beyond the horizon whichencircled their lives, the immense cupola of the sky alongwhich the sun and moon travelled and where the starsshone bright at night, and the miracles of birth, life anddeath. Each people has its own story about the beginnings,told from generation to generation, with gods, giants andprimeval beings doing amazing deeds. However, there areno known stories in which the cosmos began at one time,at one point – humanity, yes, successive humanities, yes,but never the existence of the world. The inexplicable wasmostly explained by imagining cycles of immense duration,5 Sri Aurobindo: Savitri, pp. 100-01.