Preparing for the Miraculous

sri aurobindo and the big bang 199Immortal in men and things.” It is the central Fire of Heraclitus,Pythagoras and the Stoics, “the heart of Zeus.” “In thePythagorean cosmology the centre of the world is occupiedby a fire (different from the Sun) around which orbit all theheavenly bodies (including the Sun), and that fire is connectedwith the godhead, Hestia, responsible for the movementof the world and for its organization. Here the fire occupiesa central position and an organizing function ...” (AndréPichot) 10 Sri Aurobindo, rediscoverer of the secret of theVeda, wrote: “It is a fact that Agni is the basis of forms, as theSankhya pointed out long ago, i.e. the fiery principle in thethree powers radiant, electric and gaseous (the Vedic trinityof Agni) is the agent in producing liquid and solid forms ofwhat is called Matter.” 11The quantum vacuumYet all this is a comment on the last two lines of ourquotation. The previous lines are as revealing: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 ...What Sri Aurobindo mentions here is “a strange andanomalous base” for the event that is to take place: the suddenappearance of a material universe. At the time he wrotethis it was thought that nothing could precede the primalexplosion. Russell Stannard, for instance, tries to explain:“The Big Bang did not take place at some well-defined pointwithin an already existing space – like a terrorist bomb10 André Pichot: Histoire de la notion de vie, p. 119.11 Sri Aurobindo: Letters on Yoga, p. 215.