From the Editor's Desk

The rainbow it not a material entity. It comes in a spectacular fashion spanning a corner of the skies and vanishes. It is a play of meteorological and optical factors that lead to the formation of this phenomena. Light rays pass through clear, crystal droplets of rain water, or mist, spray or airborne dew and are refracted. Refracted light is then reflected out and appears in the atmosphere as a spectrum of coloured light. Newton noted the seven colours on the rainbow to be red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. The rainbow falls 42° from the direction opposite the sun. Throughout time, the rainbow has never failed to appeal to man’s imagination. Its sheer beauty and lightness adorning the vast skies spell wonder and joy in the hearts of observers. It is no wonder that mythologies from all over the world, fables, literary prose and poetry have a special place for the rainbow. Here are some examples of how different civilisations ascribed a meaning to the rainbow. In the Genesis it is recorded that the rainbow was God’s promise that the earth would not be destroyed again by another Flood. Here is the rainbow as a symbol of promise and therefore of assurance. In Sanskrit, a rainbow is termed Indradhanush, or literally translated, Indira’s bow. Indra, the valiant lord of rain, thunder and lightning and of war uses the rainbow as his bow to fire arrows of lightning at an Asura, Vrta. In Chinese mythology, the rainbow was a patch of stones of five colours stacked on the sky by a goddess to hide a slit on the sky.

A prominent modernist literary writer of the 20^th century, Virgina Woolf ascribes impermanence and fragility to the rainbow which makes a spectacular but brief appearance across the sky. Sri Aurobindo, uses the rainbow as a symbol of a bridge, in the Graeco-Roman tradition. More than a bridge, he sees behind the physical light the spiritual light. The rainbow is used as a symbol in conveying to readers messages on his Integral Yoga. The phrase “rainbow bridge” occurs once in Sri Aurobindo’s epic poetry, Savitri in Book 2, Canto 6, Pg 182 as follows:

Across a luminous dream of spirit-space
She builds creation like a rainbow bridge
Between the original Silence and the Void.

Nature is personified as a builder of a bridge, the rainbow bridge between the high worlds of the gods and the lower world of existence here on earth. Nature builds creation such that it assumes the order of a bridge that connects this earth to higher worlds, bridging the gap between the world of the Void where the spirit sleeps forgotten and the high world from which it all originated, the World of the Silent Brahman. This rainbow bridge lies across the luminous dream of spirit-space...something intangible. Here he lends the rainbow its spiritual quality and the symbolic representative of a truth he envisaged.

The “rainbow bridge” features again in one of Sri Aurobindo’s collected poems, titled, “God’s Labour” written between 1935 and 1936. It was during the 1930s also that Sri Aurobindo worked on refining extensively Part 1 of Savitri in which Book 2 referred above appears.

I had hoped to build a rainbow bridge

Marrying the soil to the sky
And sow in this dancing planet midge
The moods of infinity.

Here again, Sri Aurobindo’s Yoga and his mission on earth are brought to light. The bridging of “soil to sky” or nature with spirit is his aim here, to make manifest in this soil the presence of divinity.