Oceanic Silence, Expansive Consciousness, and Relational Ontology: A Blue Humanities Reading of “Ocean Oneness” by Sri Aurobindo

Abstract

This paper explores the Blue Humanities approach to Sri Aurobindo's poem "Ocean Oneness" by articulating an oceanic epistemology of silence‚ boundlessness‚ and metaphysical oneness. By applying the theories of Blue Humanities, ecocriticism, and posthumanism, this study analyzes how this poem reconstructs subjectivity through immersion in oceanic vastness. It proceeds through four interrelated chapters: the ocean as epistemological silence; the ocean as an affective dissolution of the self; the ocean as an ontological matrix; and the ocean facing the ethics of non-anthropocentrism. A close reading of Aurobindo's poetry, with the theoretical embedding of each chapter, brings into light how precociously aware Aurobindo's poetry is of questions of relationality, interdependence, and ecological consciousness, which lie at the core of contemporary environmental humanities. The poem thus enacts a shift from the individual human to the cosmic‚ and acts as a literary model for thinking life through planetary systems.