English prose version of SAVITRI by binod bihari das

SRI AUROBINDO’S SAVITRI

English Prose Version of SAVITRI

By

Binod Bihari Das

SRI AUROBINDO’S SAVITRI

THE SYMBOL

THE LEGEND

Author’s Note

The tale of Satyavan and Savitri is recited in Mahabharata as a story of conjugal love conquering death. But this legend is, as shown by many features of human tale, one of the meaning symbolic myths of the Vedic cycle. Satyavan is the soul carrying the Devine truth of being within itself but descended into the grip of death and ignorance; Savitri is The Divine Word daughter of the Sun Goddess of the supreme Truth who comes down and is born to save; Aswapati, the Lord of the Horse, here human father, is the Lord of Tapasya, the concentrated energy of spiritual endeavourer that helps us to rise from the mortal true the immortal planes; The Dyumatsena, Lord of Shining Host, father of Satyavan, is the Divine mind here fallen blind, losing its celestial kingdom of vision, and through that loss its kingdom of glory. Still this is not a mere allegory, the characters are not personified qualities, but incarnations of emanations of living and conscious Forces with whom we can enter into concrete touch and the take human bodies in order to help man and so him the way from his moral state to a divine consciousness and immortal life.

SRI AUROBINDO

Preface It is not possible to write any commentary with regard to the epic Savitri because it is beyond Human language and idea. This prose version could only be possible by the unfathomable grace of the Divine Mother and hence I offer my bowed forehead’s prayer, and adoration and consecration and gratitude at the Lotus feet of The Divine Mother.

Savitri itself is a mantra of transformation.

Sri Aurobindo started the compilation of the epic Savitri in 1916 and it was completed in 1950 before his soul had left terrestrial tenement for it celestial abode. In the mean while Savitri was published in many parts having undergone correction in various occasion and held its present shape. Having been descended from higher level (stages) of consciousness even from higher mind, illumined, intuitive mind and between 1934 and 36 to the queries of one question, now he replied that it had the effects of over mind stage. Even from the beginning to the end the lines of Savitri as it was and he has arranged lines as it was. Hence Savitri underwent various revisions. The Subject Matter of the epic was based on the story of Mahabharata on the descriptions of the book of the Forest with regard to Satyavan and Savitri’s life history. The story was described in seven small cantos comprising of 700 lines in Mahabharata. The king of Madran Aswapati was blessed with all earthly blessings but he was issueless (without any children). For that he followed a course of austere ascetism for 18 years and consequently the daughter of Sun Goddess Savitri appeared before him and blessed him the boon of begetting a daughter. This incident was narrated in Mahabharata in 10 lines but in Sri Aurobindo’s Mantric Savitri it was described in 23 cantos nearly in 10,000 lines as yoga of Aswapati. There the quest of Aswapati and its fulfillment (accomplishment) with detailed descriptions and the journey of consciousness from stage to various higher stages.

In the first book of the epic Savitri the description of Aswapati’s personal achievement, in the second book the Cosmic achievement and meeting with the Cosmic Soul. In the third book is mentioned the achievements of the words beyond and meeting with the Supreme Divine Mother. In the other 27 cantos of the epic narrated the story of Savitri’s birth, then growth, then quest, selection of her life partner and marriage, the heavenly sage Narada’s prediction with regard to the death of Satyavan after one year of her marriage. Savitri living her father’s place at Madra proceeding to her husband Ashramic hermitage in the forest of Shalwa kingdom and keeping her sorrow within her heart secretly suppressed from the inmates of the hermitage, blind Father-in-law and mother-in-law and her husband Satyavan and went on executing her daily routine as a servant does, spending the whole year in austerity with sleepless night by the side of her husband’s bed and achieving all, wining over death and all the heavenly assurances for the establishment of Life Divine on earth, caring the soul of Satyavan who was dead and recovered it having become successful from all the opposing forces return to earth and at Dawn returned to the capital of Shalwa. The epic was started at Dawn and ended at Dawn. This epic consists of 23,837 lines and Sri Aurobindo turned a legend into an epic.

The cause of greatness of this epic Savitri was that Aswapati was not a sorrowful king and he did austerity for 18 years as he was childless. He was one of the Ascetics, Seer and Wild representative of human society and guide. His quest and Divine seeking was for complete eradication of humanities hopelessness, dissatisfaction, sin and depth, but for till today all Saints, Sages, great wisdoms, reformers, spiritual revolutionaries and even Incarnations have side tracked the tremendous and mostly coveted problem. He felt in his deepest depth which till today Science, efficient craft, religion, culture, and art could not so path to men for liberation from the snare of the Death, Ignorance, Sufferings and tribulations. From ages after ages men had inspired for God, Life, Liberation and Immortality could men’s aspirations can sometimes be realize? This was the quest and seeking of Aswapati.

In this epic we do find three significant characters, Aswapati, Savitri and Satyavan. Aswapati was the symbol of human aspiration and human body holder Savitri was the answer to that aspiration and symbol of the Divine grace and Satyavan was the symbol of the human soul. Aswapati was fore runner of the cosmic life’s sacrificial fire. “He was the One in front of the immemorial quest “his aim of seeking was achievement of victory on Matter and establishment of the empire of soul on matter. He vowed to execute the greatest work and engaged himself in this hard austere & ascetism.

Sri Aurobindo’s compilation of the Mantrik epic was his unprecedented boon to the humanity. Indicator of the history of the man and his would be spiritual gain and his Divine destiny, the longest and largest spiritual epic, Unique and incommensurable. Sri Aurobindo writing the epic Savitri in English converted it into a Divine Language. Every word and Para of this epic is Mantrik. It is not only an epic but a Divine Revolution. Savitri is the Divine mother’s reply to the universal questionnaires. What is cosmos, creation, constitutional world and the aim of its creation, why there exist sufferings, moan, pain, distress and birth and death for what useful purpose we human beings are engaged? To this primeval issue the answer was the mantras of Savitri. The seekers who are in quest of complete Divine Savitri are Real Vedic Mother. The book eleven of this epic contains the history of the whole universe and it’s Divine Destiny. This is an

epic of Love and Death and Divine Love triumphed over Death. For liberation from Ignorance and Death the Mantrik effect of Savitri should be the quest and seeking in life. This epic contains the victory over Death because Ignorance is the root cause Death and Danger, if the human being is fully blessed with the Divine Knowledge then he can be liberated from the Death. Now at this moment of changing age it is to be exclusively concentration on Savitri which is worthwhile. The epic Savitri is the path finder of world’s liberation. In the series and pages of development of consciousness it is like strong hold and history of evolution. The detailed story of Life’s psychological point of view except Sri Aurobindo’s grand epic Savitri no other spiritual psychology could place before human society. Apparent life is not real one, the call of Life, man can accomplish immortality and earthly life can be transformed into Divine Life.

Earth shall be converted or transformed into heaven and from heaven Divine mankind shall take birth and all these are significantly written in Savitri. The attention of humanity is drawn in various places of Savitri again and again. In this connection some extracts of lines are mentioned here under.

This bodily appearance is not all To Hid deep in man celestial powers can dwell.

(Book I, Canto III, Page 23) The apparent body is not all, the form it holds is deceptive and the individual human being is like a disguise, heavenly powers can dwell hiding deep within man.

A long dim preparation is man’s life.

(Book I, Canto III, Page 24) A man’s life is a long process of indistinct preparation (for his evolution towards Divine).

A death bound Littleness is not all we are Immortal our forgotten vastness Await discovery in our summit selves; (Book I, Canto IV, Page 46) Boundness Death is not all our existence here, our vastnesses though forgotten by us are immortal and awaits discovery in our top most selves.

Deep in us a forgotten kinship points To Calls to those lucent lost immensities.

(Book I, Canto IV, Page 46).

In our inner depths a forgotten relationship with those vastnesses are conscious towards that and a slow voice of ecstasy and prayer calls to those luminous lost immensities.

Whatever appearance we must bare To An anniversary of the Birth sublime.

(Book I, Canto IV, Page 59).

Whatever the appearance we must bear, whatever is our strong ills and the present fate are, when nothing, we see except push towards disaster, still always a mighty Guidance leads us through all. After our services to the great and divided world is completed the Divine bliss and oneness shall become our in born right. A date is fixed for an anniversary of the Supreme birth.

The universe is an endless masquerade For nothing here is utterly what it seems.

(Book I, Canto IV, Page 61).

The universe is only an endless disguise because nothing here is utterly what it seems outwardly.

The master of existence lurks in us To The immanent lives in man as in his house.

(Book I, Canto IV, Page 66).

God the creator hides in us and plays a hide & seek game with his own Force; in Nature’s Instrument the secret God waits. The inherent all pervading God lives in man as in his own house.

The Maker shall recast us and impose To Our life is a paradox with God for key.

(Book I, Canto IV, Page 67).

Then alone the creator lifting our finite mental beings to his infinite and touching the moments with his eternity shall recast our mortal shapes in his Divine shapes. This transformation is earth’s view to heaven: A mutual debt binds man to the supreme: We must put on his natures as he puts our nature here; we are sons of God and must become even as He: We are his human forces here and must grow Divine. Our life is a riddle and the only key to this is God.

Knew matter pregnant with spiritual sense To Life is gestation of the golden child.

(Book I, Canto V, Page 76).

Aswapati in his yoga could gain the knowledge that the matter from its inside is filled with spiritual sense and mind dares to study the Unknowable and the life is pregnant with the Divine golden child that would take birth in course of time.

As pains were the ransom of its present delight and as pains were proof before him as a reading of the imprisoned delight.

Existence is a Divine experiment To Of Spirit in Matter into living forms.

(Book I, Canto III, Page 43).

Existence on earth became a Divine experiment and the cosmos became an opportunity for the growth of the soul. The world is a conception and birth of the spirit in matter in living forms. .

An immortality cowled in the cape of death The shape of our unborn Divinity.

(Book I, Canto IV, Page 49).

An immortality covered in the cape of depth is a pre-indication of the shape of our unborn future Divinity.

A voice ill-heard shall speak, To And Earth grow unexpectedly divine.

(Book I, Canto V, Page 55).

A voice heard with difficulty shall speak and soul obeys. A Divine Power stealthily enters into mind’s inner chamber, and a magic spell and sweetness open life’s doors that were closed and beauty shall conquer this resisting world, the Truth-light shall capture the universal nature surprisingly; and God shall come unseen into human heart and compel to feel the Divine bliss and it shall grow unexpectedly Divine.

Our life is a holocaust of the Supreme To The many patterned ground of all we are.

(Book II, Canto I, Page 99).

Our life on earth is a sacrifice of the Supreme. The great World-Mother by her own sacrifice has forged soul as the body of our present state of being, accepting sorrow and unconsciousness the divinity having been separated from its own heavenly splendours’ created her many shapes of all we are.

An attempt, a drawing half-done is the world’s life.

(Book II, Canto I, Page 100).

Our present worldly life is only an attempt and drawing half-done.

This faint and fluid sketch of soul called man To A Mystery’s process is the universe.

(Book II, Canto I, Page 100).

The dim and fluid escape of soul that is called as man shall turned out on the back ground of This long time as a shining moving idol of eternity, a little point would reveal the infinitudes. This universe is a mysterious process.

A miracle of the Absolute was born; To To Live this mystery out our souls came here.

(Book II, Canto I, Page 101).

From the absolute a marvel was born on earth, Infinity bore the shape of a finite soul as if all Ocean lived within a wondering drop, a time made body was made the dwelling of the Illimitable as if all ocean lived within a wondering drop. In order to live in this Divine Mystery out our souls were descended here upon earth.

There are muffled throbs of laughter’s undertones To Awaits the hour when we shall turn to his call.

(Book II, Canto V, Page 169).

Within the world of pain a vibration of laughter’s subdued tone, the low continuous sound of a concealed happiness, a triumphant and rapturous rejoicing in the depth of sleep, and in the heart of bliss remains covered the world of pain. An Infant God nursed and suckled from Nature’s covered breast playing in the illusive forest, rapturously fluting beside the spirit’s streams awaits the moment that we shall hear to his call.

A work is done in the deep silences; To Our very senses blindly seek for bliss.

(Book II, Canto V, Page 170).

A work is accomplished in the deep silences, a glory of wonder of spiritual senses, a laughter in beauty’s everlasting space transforming the world experience into joy, inhabit the mysterious untouched depths; the eternity sleep in us lulled by Times sweet rhythms. In the happy inner depths of our fully sealed heart, behind the outer shape of death, not effected by emotion the eternal Entity prepares within us its matter of Divine felicity and its vision of manifestation of heavenly empire. Even in our doubtful ignorant mind a foresight appears of some great liberation from the earthly bondages and our aspiration lift its slow and shaping hands towards it. Each part of our bodily limbs yearns for its supreme being. Our thoughts eagerly aspires to posses the everlasting Light, our strength springs from an omnipotent Force and from the veiled God-joy. The words were created, even here where all is made out of the being’s dust and in those since eternal Beauty asked for forms to express, so our hearts are captured by enchanting shapes and as desired by them our physical senses blindly seek for the Divine bliss.

Our human state cradles the future God To Our mortal frailty an immortal force.

(Book II, Canto X, Page 240).

Our present human state is like cradling the future God and nursing it, our present mortal transience is like an immortal force.

A fire shall come out of the infinitudes To Its aim to life, to Ignorance its close.

(Book II, Canto X, Page 258).

A fire shall come descending down from the finitudes; a greater being having special mystical Knowledge from beyond shall regard the world crossing out for some omniscience on the lustrous seas from the still absorbed Alone to illumine the deep heart of self and things. It shall bring to Mind a timeless knowledge and aim to life, it shall make an end of the ignorance of the world.

A new creation from the old shall rise To The Eternal’s wonders join the dance of Time.

(Book III, Canto III, Page 330).

A new creation that was yet only thought as some high spirit’s dream or as a problematic illusive mirage in man’s mind shall rise from the old, A Divine knowledge tongue lighted shall find its speech of Divine Truth, The beauty that was suppressed on earth shall burst open like the blossoming of the flower of paradise, pleasure and pain immerse into supreme bliss. At last a day shall come when the voice raising prophetic Divine voice shall speak. The Super conscientious consciousness shall grow on earth; the Eternal’s marvelous things join the dance of Time.

And Immortality and spirit-room And pure perfection and a shadow less bliss Are this afflicted creature’s mighty fate.

(Book III, Canto III, Page 340).

Immortality, habitations in heaven, pure perfection and enjoying shadow-less bliss are the mighty fate of this distressed creature.

Even as of old man came behind the beast To Earth’s seeing widen into the infinite.

(Book III, Canto IV, Page 344).

Even as of olden days (ages) man was born after the animal creation so also man’s Divine inheritor behind man’s insufficient mortal steps, his futile labour, sweat , blood and tears shall surely come.. even as the mortal mind what could not think of to know he shall gain that knowledge, what mortal heart could not get there to do he would be able to accomplish that and would be the successor of the human time. He shall be able to take on him the burden of the Gods. The earth’s thoughts shall be touched by all heavenly light, the earthly hearts shall be strengthened, earth’s deed shall touch the super human height, earth’s seeing shall be widened into infinite.

The seed shall be shown in Death’s tremendous hour, To Fate shall be change by an unchanging will.

(Book III, Canto IV, Page 346).

In Death’s tremendous moments a heavenly seed shall be sown, a branch of heaven shall be transplanted on human soil. Nature shall cross over its mortal step and fate shall be changed by an unchanging Divine will.

But not her changeless littleness were you meant towards, To Yours life a changeful mould for growing gods.

(Book IV, Canto III, Page 370).

King Aswapati heard the repressed voice from behind the luminous bars of Time that his being did not come for swift reviling steps and repetition of his life and it shall hold changeful shape for growing gods.

Although as unknown beings we seem to meet, To Wearing a mortal body for the delight.

(Book V, Canto II, Page 397).

Satyavan when met Savitri in the forest of Shallawa kingdom told her that although they both appeared to have met on this earth as unknown beings their lives were not unknown to each other nor joined as foreigners and attracted to each other by causeless force. Across this dividing course of Time their souls meet each other’s answering soul on Life’s roads like engrossed travellers recognizing familiar splendour in an unknown face by the beaconing finger of swift love it gains and thrills to an immortal joy wearing the mortal body for joy.

The earth is full of anguish of the gods To Shape the life divine in mortal forms.

(Book VI, Canto II, Page 444).

The earth is full of unbearable pain of the gods, ever they suffer the pains of child birth driven by the goad of Time and try to work out the eternal Will and shape the life divine in forms that are subject to death.

Pain is the signature of the Ignorance Attesting the secrete God denied by life, Until life finds him pain can never end.

(Book VI, Canto II, Page 453).

Pain is a sign and stamp of Ignorance and is the proof of the existence of secrete God in man desired by life.. until life finds out him pain can never end.

Thy spirits strength shall make thee one with God. Thy agony shall change to ecstasy Indifference deepen into infity’s calm And joy laugh nude on the peaks of the Absolute.

(Book VI, Canto II, Page 454).

Your spirit’s strength shall make you one with God and your human pain shall be transformed into great divine ecstasy, your lack of interest or attention converted into infinite calm and joy shall openly spreads its light and laugh on the summits of the Absolute.

O man, the events that meets thee in thy road To Thy goal, the road though chooses or thy fate.

(Book VI, Canto II, Page 458).

Narada the heavenly Seer replying to Aswapati with regard to his questionings that the occurrences although they strike his body and soul with joy and grief are not his fate, though since shall pass away touching him for a while, even death cannot cut short his spirits walk which were his goal, the road he chooses are his fate.

Death is the spirits opportunity.

(Book VI, Canto II, Page 459).

Narada the heavenly Seer replied to Aswapati that the body that holds the soul, born and dies in several occasion till such moments it has accomplished all that it has to do and at last it returns to its heavenly source and hence Death is of the opportunity of the Soul.

Earth shall be made a home of Heaven’s light To The body’s self test immortality.

(Book VI, Canto II, Page 451).

Earth shall become the dwelling of heavenly light, a heaven born seer shall dwell in human breast, the super conscient beam of light shall touch men’s eyes and the truth-conscious world shall descant down on earth and possess Matter with the Sprit’s ray, the earth’s silence shall be awakened to immortal thought, and the dumb heart shall awake with the touch of the heavenly word. This mortal life shall become the dwelling of Eternity’s bliss and the body self test immortality.

All the world’s possibilities in man To The unborn god’s hide in his house of life.

(Book VII, Canto II, Page 482).

As the tree waits in its seed to grow up the entire world’s possibilities are waiting in man, his past lives in him that drives his future’s steps, his present acts fashion his future’s fate. In his Life like house the unborn gods does hide there.

This is not all we are or all our world To It shall descend and make earth’s life divine.

(Book VII, Canto II, Page 484).

After Savitri came to know from the prediction of the heavenly seer Narada that Satyavan her husband must die after one year. Thus she kept this in her mind without expressing before her in-law’s in the thatched hermitage of the Forest went on through austerity sitting in sleepless nights by her husband bed had the realization that her present suffering do not represent what we are and our world. Our greater being of knowledge waits for us and it is a supreme life of that Vast truth consciousness: It looks from the peaks beyond our thinking mind and moves in a greater heaven that transcends life. A day may come when it shall descend on earth and make its life divine.

Since in humanity waits his hour the God To Transcending grief and pain and fate and death.

(Book X, Canto III, Page 634).

Savitri while making counter arguments with the king of Death who was carrying the soul of Satyavan her husband, she replied to the king of Death that “ Since the hour of God is awaiting in humanity she shall crush him down to reach the immortal heights surpassing grief pain, fate and death.”

To bring God down to the world on earth we came To change the earthly life to life divine.

(Book XI, Page 692).

Savitri while replying to the changed God of Death to all his lures to remain in heaven leaving earth said that in order to rise to God in deathless life, to bring God down to the world on earth and to change the earthly life to life divine they came.

To be is not a senseless paradox; To What hides within her breast she must reveal.

(Book XI, Page 693).

Then the worldly existence is not a riddle, since God has created the earth, hence earth must make in her God to take birth and the things hidden in earth’s breast she must reveal.

And bring down God into the lives of man To the body of earth a tabernacle of God.

(Book XI, Page 699).

Then the Supreme Lord blessed Savitri (the daughter of sun) that she should raise the earth-soul to the Divine Light and bring down God into the lives of man: So earth shall be her workshop and residence i.e. it would become heaven and her Garden of life to plant a divine seed. When all her works in human time is finished then the mind of earth shall become a home of light, the life of earth shall become a tree growing towards heaven and the earth shall become the temple of God. The superman shall claim the world for Light To And Found Light’s reign on her unshaking base.

(Book XI, Page 707).

The superman shall possess the whole world to express its light in it and thrill the absorbed heart with the love of God and place The Divine Light’s crown on Nature’s lifted head and establish the Divine Light’s rule on its unshaken base.

The Spirit’s eyes shall look through Nature’s eye To Creation’s process shall change its antique front (Book XI, Page 707).

The eyes of the nature shall be filled with the Sprit’s look and the Spirit force shall occupy nature’s force. This world shall become God’s visible garden-house and the earth shall be a field and camp of God, man shall forget consenting to his mortality and his embodied mortal impermanence, this universe to uncover its mystic sense the ancient process of the creation shall be change.

Even their shall come as a high crown of all The end of death, the depth of ignorance.

(Book XI, Page 708).

After establishment of the Supramental force even as the higher crown of all there shall be the end of the death and the end of worldly ignorance.

Thus shall the earth open to divinity To This earthly life become the life divine.

(Book XI, Page 710).

Thus the earth shall open towards divinity, and common human nature shall feel the wide uplift, common acts shall be illumined with the spirit’s ray and meet God in common things. Nature shall live to manifest the secret God and its spirit shall take up the human play, the earthly life shall become the life divine.

Readings of Savitri For The Mother had said regarding Savitri is produced her below. Although we the followers of the integral yoga could know more or less from various publications of Sri Aurobindo’s Ashram, yet aspiration awakens for its reproduction because it was so beautiful at there is no end of satisfaction as it is it appears to be always new.

Do you read Savitri?

Yes, Mother.

You have read the whole of it?

Yes, Mother, I have read it twice.

Have you understood all that you have read?

No, not much, but I like poetry, that is why I read it.

It does not matter if you do not understand Savitri, read it always. You will see that every time you read it, something new will be revealed to you. Each time you will get a new glimpse, each time a new experience; thing which were not there, things you need not understand arise and suddenly it will be clear. Always an unexpected vision comes up through the words and the lines. Every time you try to read and understand you will see that something is added, something will be hidden behind is revealed clearly and vividly. I tell you, the very verses you have read once before will appear to you in a different light each time you re-read them. This is what happens invariably. Always you are experience is enriched; it is a revelation of each step.

But you must not read it as you read other books or news papers. You must read with an empty head, a blank and vacant mind, without there being any other thought; you must concentrated much, remain empty, calm and open ; then words, the rhythms, the vibration will penetrate directly through this white page, we put the stamp upon the brain, which will explain themselves without your making an effort.

Savitri alone is sufficient to make you climb to the highest peaks. If truly one knows how to mediate on Savitri, one will receive all the help one needs. For one who wishes to follow this path, it is a visible help as though the Lord himself were taking you by the hand and make you reach to the destined goal. And then every question, however personal it may be, had its answer here. Every difficulty finds here its solution, indeed there is everything that is necessary for doing the Yoga. *He has crammed the whole universe in a single book. * It is a marvellous work, magnificent and of in comparable perfection.

You know, before writing Savitri Sri Aurobindo said to me * “I am impelled to be launched on a new adventure; I was hesitant in the beginning, But now I have decided. Still I do not know how far I will succeed. I pray for help.”* And you know what it was? It was – before beginning I warn you in advance, - it was his way of speaking, so full of humility and divine modesty. He never … * asserted himself.* And the day he actually began it, he told me..* I have launched myself in a rudderless boat upon the vastness of the Infinite.* *And once having started, he wrote page after page without intermission, as though it were a thing already complete up there and he had only to transcribe into ink down here on these pages.

In truth, the entire form of Savitri has descended “enmasse” from the highest region and Sri Aurobindo with his genius only arranges the lines- in a superb and magnificent style. Sometimes entire lines were revealed and he has left them intact; he worked hard untiringly so that the inspiration could come from the highest possible summit. And what a work he has created! Yes it is a true creation in itself. It is an unequalled work. Everything is there, and it is put in such a simple, such a clear form; verses perfectly harmonious, limpid and eternally true. My child, I have read so many things, but I have never come across anything which could be compared with Savitri. I have studied the best works-in Geek, Latin, English and of course in French literature, also in German and all the great creations of West and East, including the great epics; but I repeat it, I have not found any where anything like Savitri. All these literary works seem to me empty, flat, hollow, without any deep reality – a part from a few rear acceptances and these too represent only a small fraction of what Savitri is. What grandeur, what amplitude, what reality.. It is something immortal and eternal he has created. I tell you once again, there is nothing like it in the whole world. Even if one puts a sight the vision of the reality, that is, the essential substance which is the heart of the inspiration, and considers only the lines in themselves, one will find them unique, of the classical coin. What he has created is something man cannot imagine. For, everything is there everything.

It may then be said that The Savitri is a revelation, it is mediation; it is a quest of the infinite, of the Eternal. If it is read with this aspiration for Immortality, the reading itself will serve as a guide towards Immortality, the reading itself will serve as a guide towards Immortality. To read Savitri is indeed to practice Yoga, spiritual concentration; one can find there all that is needed to realize The Divine. Each step of the Yoga is noted here, including the secret of all other Yoga. Surely, if one follows sincerely what is reveled here in each verse one will finally reach the transformation of the Supramental Yoga. It is truly the infallible guide who never abandons you; its support is always there for him who wants the follow the path. Each verse of Savitri is like a reveled mantra which surprise all that man possess by way of

knowledge, and I repeat this , the words were expressed and arranged in such a manner that the sonnet of the rhythm leads you to the origin of sound which is OM. My child, yes, everything is there.. mysticism, occultism, philosophy, history of evolution, history of man, of the Gods, of creation, of Nature; how the universe was created, why, for what purpose, what destiny- all is there. You can find there all the answers to all your questions. Everything is explained, even the future of man and of the evolution, all that nobody yet knows.

He has expressed them in beautiful and clear words so that spiritual adventurous wish to solve the mysteries of the world may understand it more easily. But the mystery is well hidden behind the lives and rise to the required level of true consciousness to discover it. All the prophesies all that is going to happen is presented with a precise and wonderful clarity. Sri Aurobindo gives you clear the key to find the Truth, to discover the Consciousness, to solve the problem of what the universe is. He has also indicated how he has opened the door of the Inconscience so that the light may penetrate there to transform it. He has shown the path, how to liberate oneself from the Ignorance to climb up to the super conscience; each stage, each plane of conscience how one can scale them, how one can cross the very barrier of death and attempt Immortality. You will find the entire root in detail, and as you go forward, you can discover things altogether unknown to man. That is what Savitri is, and yet much more. It is truly an experience – reading Savitri. All the secretes that man possess , he has reveled them, as well as all that awaits him in the future; all these found in the depth of Savitri; but one must have the knowledge to discover them,- the experience of the planes of conscious , the experience of the Super mind, even the experience of the conquest of Death. He has noted all the stages marked each steps needed in order to advance in an integral way in the integral Yoga.

All this is his own experience, and what most is surprising is that it is also mine own experience. It is my sadhana which here described. Each object , each event, each realization all the description, even the coluors are exactly what I saw and the words, the phrases are all so exactly what I had. And all this before having read the book. I read Savitri many times afterwards, but earlier, when he was writing he used to read it to me. Every morning I used to hear him read Savitri at night she would arrived and in the morning read it to me. And I observed something strange, that –day after day, the experiences he read out to me in the morning where those I had had the previous night word for word.

Yes, all the descriptions, the colours, the pictures I had seen, the word I heard all, all I heard, put by him into poetry, into miraculous poetry. Yet Yes, they were exactly my experience of the previous night which he read out to me the following morning. And it was not just one day, but for days & days together. And every time I use to compare what he said with my previous experiences and always the same. I repeat, it was not that I have told him my experience at that he had noted them down afterwards, No, he knew already what I had seen. It is my experiences he has represented all along. And they were also his experiences. It is moreover the picture of our adventure together into the unknown or rather into Super mind.

These are experiences lived by him, realities, supracosmic truths. He experienced all these as one experiences joy and sorrow in a physical manner. He has worked in the darkness of inconscience, even in the neighborhood of death, endured the sufferings of perdition, and he has emerged from the mud, the world-misery, to breathe the sovereign plenitude and enter the supreme Ananda. He has a traversed them all, these realms, borne the consequences, suffered and endure physically what one cannot imagine. Nobody till today has suffered like him. He has accepted suffering to transform suffering into the joy of union with the supreme. It is something unique and incomparable in the history of the world. It is something that has never happened; he is the first to have traced to path in the Unknown so that we may be able to walk with certitude towards the Super mind. He has made the work easy for us. Savitri is his whole yoga of transformation and this yoga it is for the first time that we see. It appears in the earth consciousness.

And I think that man is not yet ready to receive it. It is too high and too vast for him. He cannot understand and grasp it, it is not by the mind that one can understand Savitri. One needs spiritual experience in order to understand and assimilate it. The more one advances on the path of yoga, the more one assimilates and better. No, it is something which will be appreciated only in the future, it is the poetry of tomorrow of which he has spoken in The Future Poetry. It is true subtle, to refine, - it is not the mind or by the mind, it is in meditation the Savitri is revealed.

And men have the audacity to compare it and find it inferior in inspiration to that of a Virgil or a Homer. They do not understand, they cannot understand. What do they know? Nothing at all. And it is useless to try to make them understand. It will be known what it is, but in a distant future. It is only the new race with new conscious which will be able to understand. I assure you there is nothing under the blue sky to compare with Savitri. It is mystery of mysteries. *It is a super hyper epic*, It is super - literature, super- poetry, then super-vision, it is a super-work even if one conceders the number of lines he has written. No, this human word are not adequate to describe Savitri. Yes, one needs superlatives hyperboles to describe Savitri. It is a hyper epic. No, words express nothing of what Savitri is.

There are no proper adjectives to describe what Savitri is; at least I do not find them. It is of immense value – spiritual

value and all other values; it is eternal in its subject, and infinite in its appeal, miraculous in its mode and power of execution; it is a unique thing, the more you come in contact with it, the higher will you be lifted up. Ah, truly it is something! It is the most beautiful thing he has left for man, the highest possible. What is it? When will men know it?

When is he going to lead a life of truth? When is he going to accept it in his life? This yet remains to be known.

My child, everyday you are going to read Savitri; read properly with the right attitude, concentrating a little before opening the pages and trying to keep the mind as empty as possible, absolutely without a thought. The direct road is through that- the heart. I tell you if you try to really concentrate with this aspiration you can light the flame, the psychic flame, the flame of purification in a very short time, perhaps in a few days. What you cannot do normally, you will do it with the help of Savitri. Try and you will see how very different it is, how new, if you read with this attitude, with this something at the back of your consciousness; as though it were an offering to Sri Aurobindo. You know it is charge, fully charge with consciousness; as though Savitri were a being, a real Guide I tell you, whoever wants to practice Yoga, if he tries sincerely and feels his necessity, he will be able to climb with the help of Savitri to the highest rung up the ladder of Yoga, will be able to find the secrete that Savitri represents. And this without help of a Guru. And he will be able to practice it anywhere. Savitri by itself will be his guide, for all that he will find in Savitri. If he remain absolutely quiet when his face in difficulty, or when he does not know where to turn. In order to go forward and how to overcome the obstacles, for all these hesitations and this incertitude which over helm us at every moment, he will have the necessary indications, and the necessary concrete help. If he remains absolutely calm, open if he aspires sincerely, always will be as if led by the hand. If he has faith, the will to give himself and the essential sincerity, he will reach the final goal.

Indeed, Savitri is something concrete, living it is all replete, packed with consciousness, it is the supreme Knowledge above all human philosophies, all human religions. It is a spiritual path; it is Yoga, Tapasya, and Sadhana, everything in its single body. Savitri has an extraordinary power, it sends out vibration for him who can receive them, the true vibrations of each stage of consciousness. It is incomparable; it is truth in its plenitude, the truth Sri Aurobindo brought down on the earth. My child, one must try to find the secret of Savitri represents, the prophetic message Sri Aurobindo that revels there for us. This is the work before you, it is hard but it is worth the troubles.

(After having heard the full test, The Mother said:) It is good. Only, I do not remember what I had said. I never remember what I speak. When I speak, it comes down like this (gesture). I speak of things which come down, for the moment, like inspirations and then it is over. When I have spoken once I do not remember at all or disappears from my mind. It is so strange that I do not remember the thing that I have spoken just a moment ago. It is like this, my child. When I speak, I say many things which come at that moment, and the next minute – it is gone. That is why I do not remember what I had told you. Well, I do not know. I do not know what I had said. I do not remember anything at all.

But, Mother, how do You find this?

I find it very good. It is alright. Is it you who have written it?

Yes, Mother, I have noted down what You had told me.

Is it your Friend?

What you had told me, that I have written and then Nalinida has corrected a bit.

It is good. As an appreciation of Savitri, it is correct. This is Savitri. But I do not remember what I had said. That is why, I can say nothing. But all that he said here seems to me correct. It is true. It is good, my child.

Mother do you have something to comment?

To comment? No, my child, the substance of what you have written seems to be correct as it should be, but some personal things‌ Some personal things that I have been written ‌ about that, I can say nothing because I do not remember anything at all.

Mother, all that You had told me I had noted down a bit at that time and then I wrote from my memory what You had told me. I have tried to be faithful to what You had told me.

It is all right, my child.

Perhaps, I do not know whether you have added something of your invention?

I do not think so, Mother.

You do not think so?

Perhaps there is something missing, something which I have not written. I do not know. But I have tried my utmost to keep exactly to what you had told me. Naturally, it is seven years written that I have written it as it is long, Mother. I do not know. But I don’t think, Mother, ….

No, it is alright. It is good. ( Mother writes “ Blessings “ on the last page of the type script ).

You want to write something more, Mother?

No, it is alright, I have given my Blessings. It is alright, like this. What is date, today?

It is 5th November, Mother. Mother (Adds the date on the type script).

No, it’s alright, the appreciation is good. It can go.

Do I keep it here? If You want to correct afterwards?

No, my child, take it, it is alright. What shall I correct? I do not remember anything at all.

Where do you want to give it? Don’t know, Mother.

We can…

Mother Nalinida wanted to read this to his class. Yes, it is alright. He can very well read it. All right, Good.

5.11.1967 A letter of a disciple:

04.12.1967 Mother, I heard that you have recently written a long letter about Savitri. I am extremely eager to read it immediately. Can you send me a copy; let me know from whom I can have it?

Kishore The Mother’s reply..

I have written no letter on Savitri lately. I have spoken at length about it to Mona Sarker and he has noted in French what I have said. Sometime back I have seen what he has written and found it correct on the whole. It may be that you heard of.

Nalini may have a copy.

The Mother The Extra Ordinary Power Of Savitri Some days when I went to The Mother, If she found that something was not alright with me or something was tormenting me, She would ask me the reason for it. Often I could not reply. Then she would say.. “Let us see if we can find out what is disturbing you.” She would take up Savitri, concentrate for a while, open with a paper cutter and pin point a passage. Invariably lines contained the answer to my problem and I would feel relieved. She told me for trying it out for myself.

On one occasion The Mother spoke to me about the extraordinary power of Savitri.

Later I noted down what she had said, and took it to the Mother.

Then what is it again?

It is a small thing on Savitri that you had told me. Do you want to hear it Mother?

Yes, read it. (I read to her what I had noted down.)

Savitri “The Truth of Tomorrow�

If you are depressed, if you feel miserable, if you do not succeed in what you do or else if what happens is always the contrary of what you expect, however much you try – if it has come to such a pass that you lose your temper, life becomes disgusting and you are unhappy, then immediately take Savitri and, after a moments concentration open it at any page and read. You will see that all your misery disappears like smoke. And you will have the strength to overcome a worst sorrow; you will no longer feel that which was tormenting you. Instead, you will feel a strange happiness, a reversal of consciousness along with energy and force to conquer everything, as though there was nothing impossible and you will feel a strange happiness, a reversal of consciousness along with the energy and force to conquer everything, as though there was nothing impossible. And you will feel this in exhaustible joy that purifies everything. Read just a few lines and that is enough to establish the contact which were in most being. Such is the extraordinary power of Savitri.

Or else, after having read if you concentrate very deeply then too you can find the solution through what is tormenting you. You have only to open Savitri at random and without thinking as you have the answer to your problems.

Do it with faith and simplicity, the result is certain.

Expression of Gratitude I am deeply indebted to Mrs. Nalini Prabha Patnaik for having offered her Laptop for the initial typing DTP of English Prose version of the Epic Savitri. I find no words to express my thanks to my daughter Sanjukta Shroff and my granddaughter Shilpi Shroff for having done maximum DTP of Savitri and my younger son Padarbinda Das & Daughter Susama Das for having extended their help in this connection. I owe a load of debt to my elder son Sundhansu Sekhar Senapati, my tenant Damayanti Behera & Mr. Jay Krishna Mitra from Kolkata for having completed the maximum portion final typing of Savitri. I am grateful and too much thankful to my Son-in-law Balaji Shroff for having offered his laptop for this work. I pray to The Divine Mother to bestow her blessings on all those who have rendered their valuable assistance in this regard.

Binod Behari Das.

CONTENTS PART ONE BOOK ONE THE BOOK BEGINNING CANTO I The Symbol of Dawn CANTO II The Issue CANTO III The Yoga of the King; the Yoga of the Soul’s Release CANTO IV The Secret Knowledge CANTO V The Yoga of the King; the Yoga of the Spirit’s Freedom and greatness BOOK TWO The BOOK OF THE TRAVELLER OF THE WORLD CANTO I The World- Stair CANTO II The Kingdom of Subtle Matter CANTO III The Glory and the Fall of Life CANTO IV The Kingdom’s of The Little Life CANTO V The God Heads of the Little Life CANTO VI The kingdoms And God Heads of The Greater Life CANTO VII The Decent Into Night CANTO VIII The World of Falsehood, the Mother of Evil & The Sons of Darkness CANTO IX The Paradise of the Life-Gods CANTO X The Kingdoms and God Heads of the Little Mind CANTO XI The Kingdoms of the God Heads of the Greater Mind CANTO XII The Heavens of the Ideal CANTO XIII In The Self of Mind CANTO XIV The World-Soul CANTO XV The Kingdoms of the Greater Knowledge

1 – 27

2–4 5–7 8 – 14 15 – 22 23 – 27 28 – 91

29 – 31 32 – 35 36 – 40 41 – 46 47 – 53 54 – 61 62 – 66 67 – 70 71 – 72 73 – 78 79 – 83 84 – 85 86 – 87 88 – 89 90 – 91

BOOK THREE The Book of Divine Mother CANTO I The Pursuit of the Unknowable CANTO II The Adoration of the Divine Mother CANTO III The House of the Spirit and the New Creation CANTO IV The Vision and the Boon

92 –106

93 – 94 95 – 96 97 – 101 102 – 106 PART TWO

BOOK FOUR The Book of Birth and Quest CANTO I The Birth and Childhood of The Flame CANTO II The Growth of the Flame CANTO III The Call to the Quest CANTO IV The Quest

107 – 119

108 – 110 111 – 113 114 –116 117 –119

BOOK FIVE The Book of Love CANTO I The Destined Meeting Place CANTO II Satyavan CANTO III Satyavan and Savitri

120 - 128

BOOK SIX The Book of Fate CANTO I The Word of Fate CANTO II The Way of Fate and Problem Of Pain

129 – 142

121 – 121 122 – 124 125 – 128

130 – 135 136 – 142

BOOK SEVEN The Book of Yoga CANTO I The Joy of Union; The Ordeal of The Foreknowledge of Death and Heart’s Grief and Pain CANTO II The Parable of the Search for the Soul CANTO III The Entry into the Inner Countries CANTO IV The Triple Soul-Forces CANTO V The Finding of the Soul CANTO VI The Nirvana and the Discovery of the All-Negative Absolute CANTO VII The Discovery of the Cosmic Spirit and Cosmic Consciousness BOOK EIGHT The Book of Death CANTO III The Death in the Forest

143 –170

144 – 146 147 – 150 151 – 154 155 – 160 161 – 163 164 – 168 169 – 170 171 – 173

172 – 173

PART THREE BOOK NINE The Book of Eternal Night CANTO I Towards The Black Void CANTO II The Journey in Eternal Night and the Voice of the Darkness

174 – 182

BOOK TEN The Book of the Double Twilight CANTO I The Dream Twilight of the Ideal CANTO II The Gospel of Death and Vanity of the Ideal CANTO III The Debate of Love and Death CANTO IV The Dream Twilight of the Earthly Real

183– 203

BOOK ELEVEN The Book of Everlasting Day CANTO I The Eternal Day: Soul’s Choice and The Supreme Consummation BOOK TWELVE Epilogue The Return to Earth

204 – 216

176 – 178 179 – 182

184 – 185 186 – 189 190 – 195 196 – 203

205 –216 217 – 220 218– 220

1

BOOK ONE

THE BOOK OF BEGINNINGS

2

Canto 1 The Symbol Dawn

(1) The time was before the Gods were awake. Across the path of the divine Event i.e. the awakening of the Gods the huge threatening mind of Night contemplating that same thing terrible is going to happen i.e. the advent of the Dawn and its existence would end, alone in her darkened temple of eternity, lay stretched immobile upon the edge of the Silence. In the darkened symbol of her eyeless contemplation one almost felt a shadowed thing neither reflecting nor emitting light and thus impenetrable to sight the bottomless gulf of the unbodied Infinite and an unfathomable Zero occupied the world. A power of the unbounded self of the universe lay awake between two Nothingness i.e. Inconscient around and the Superconscient above, remembering the dark womb from which it emerged, wished to turn away from the mystery of birth following death the process of which is slow to happen and wished to reach its end in vacant Nothingness (Nirvana). As in a dark beginning of the creation of the universe a mute featureless (formless) superficial appearance of the Unknown for ever repeating its unconscious act, and prolonging its unseeing will for ever, cradled the cosmic sleep of the ignorant Force, and its creative sleep lights all the Suns and carries our lives in its unconscious whirl. Its mindless or lifeless formless diminished sensibility‟s shadowy figure spinning through a soulless Void, once more thrown back into thoughtless dreams, and the Earth forgetful of her spirit and fate abandoned in the bottomless gulfs. Then the skies were serene, empty, and neutral and still. Thereafter in the impenetrable darkness there stirred something; it was a nameless movement, an Idea never thought of i.e. it was self existent, it was aimless, it was insistent (repeating itself) and there (2) was dissatisfaction in it, and that wished to become something but knew not how to become, this movement tickled the Inconscient to wake Ignorance. A violent pain as of a child birth came and left a vibrating trace, it gave room for an old tired want that was not fulfilled and lied at peace in its subconscient darkened cave to raise its head and search for absent light exerting pressure on its closed eyes of lost memory, searched like one who searches for his past self and only finds the corpse (the dead body) of desire. It was as though even in the Nothingness‟ deepest depth and in this centre of last dissolution there lied hidden an entity forgetful of the past, it was the survivor of a dead and buried past sentenced punishment to start its effort again and undergo consequent pain of living, bringing back its existence in another discontented world. A formless consciousness desired light in that darkness and an empty foreknowledge longed towards a change that is very far away.

That desire eager for change for the coming of light is like a child, laying its finger on its mother‟s cheek it reminded of the endless need in things to the inattentive Mother of the universe, an infant longing held the Vast darkness. Unknowingly somewhere an opening began: like a vague smile tempting a dry heart a long line of reluctant light disturbed the far edge of life‟s deepest sleep (the deep sleep of the whole Nature). An eye of deity (the divine) i.e. the light of the goddess Dawn arrived from the other side of the boundlessness i.e. from beyond the universe and looked intently through the dumb deeps (the heavy cosmic rest), it was a scout (the first observing envoy) from the sun to survey, it seemed to have come to search for a spirit that was alone and without support and too fallen to remember its past forgotten bliss amid a heavy cosmic rest and the insensibility of a sick and tired world. The eye of the deity intervening in a mindless universe, its message spread through the disinclined silence (the silence of the sleeping world) persuading it for the adventure of Consciousness and joy and for conquering (3) the Universal Nature‟s unpleasant and baffling heart and compelled her to renew its consent to see and feel. In the unfathomable Void a seed of thought was sown, a sense was born within the depths of darkness that was insensible, in the heart of Time a memory stirred, it was as if a soul long dead there moved to live again: but the forgetfulness that took shape after the fall of the soul on the material universe, had wiped off the crowded inscription of the past, all that of the past was destroyed or dissolved must be rebuilt and an old experience must be built up once more. All is possible to be worked out if god-touch is there (if there is the will and Grace of God). In the darkest Night‟s lost and abandoned attention not withstanding the state of hopelessness a hope that hardly adventured to exist slowly entered the scene. As if invited in an unknown world an wandering marvel (the light of the coming Dawn) with no place to live because orphaned and driven out to seek a home with its apprehensive and risky inborn loveliness came into a far corner of heaven there appeared a slow appealing miraculous expressive movement. The continuing thrill for long time without stop of a transforming touch of the ray of light induced the black quietude of the sky (a state of stillness and silence) to respond that was resisting and unresponsive and consequently beauty and wonder heaved the fields of God. A moving hand made up of pale charmed light that glowed along a fading moment‟s edge partially opened a gate of dreams on the mysterious verge fixed with golden plates and hinge made up of various gems. A fully lighted corner showing the hidden things forced the world‟s immense blindness to sight. Consequently like a falling covering from the lying body of god the darkness of the darkest Night failed. Then through a pale crack that at first seemed hardly enough for a thin stream of ray from the suns to enter, poured out the full light of the flame of the Dawn. The short lived daily occurring sign of the light of the Dawn repeated again and again above. An alluring beauty from the unattainable beyond everything we know or can know and the whole creation shining with the glory of the Unseen (beyond the forms of the manifestation), (4) it came to express something from the unknown immortal Light shined upon the creation‟s quivering edge i.e. when the manifest and Unmanifest transcendent existence beyond are very close together, the goddess Dawn built up her beautiful atmosphere of glorious colours and buried the seed of greatness in the worldly Time. An instant‟s (a moment‟s) visitor the goddess Dawn was seen. The Vision (the divine form) stood for a while on life‟s thin border and remained bending for a while over earth‟s thought burdened forehead curve. Interpreting an incomprehensible beauty and bliss in colour‟s clear symbol representing a significance of words or ideas hidden from view of mysterious sense, it wrote the lines of a significant myth (a

3 legend) explaining the greatness of spiritual dawns, and inscribed on the sky as a page in a brilliant code (secret letters). On that day the advent of divine Light was almost revealed of which our thoughts and hopes are signal lights expressing that the presence of the Divine Dawn is there; a lonely splendour coming from an invisible goal almost projected on the darkened Void (empty Space). Once more the footsteps of the Goddess Dawn disturbed those Vast vacant Spaces; it seemed to be the very centre of Infinity, the face of the Dawn was delightfully Calm, it opened its eternal eyelids and thus by its opening the heaven was open; its Form from far regions of divine blissfulness seemed near to earth. The Omniscient (possessor of all knowledge) Goddess Dawn was an Ambassadress between eternity and the world of change (our living earth) inclined across the broad spaces that covered the fateful journeying of the stars and saw that the spaces are ready for her feet (for her movement). Once she half looked behind for her concealed scene (the sun had not yet arisen that would rise in succession of it the symbol of the divine presence) then in a meditative mood began her immortal work (the manifestation of divine consciousness). Consequently Earth felt the passage of the Goddess Dawn become nearer: the Universal Nature‟s waking ear could hear her steps, and the infinite wideness turned its limitless sight towards her and scattered it on the sealed depths and her luminous smile kindled its fire in the silence of the worlds. All universal things became a sacred offering and a ritual of worship. Air became a lively link between earth and heaven; the wide-winged hymn (the song of prayer) of a great priestly wind inviting the Dawn arose and failed upon the altar like hills; the prayer of the branches of the trees touching the wide sky rose beyond. (5) Here on the wordless bosom of our uncertain earth of duality the bottomless depths of which is surrounded with half-lighted ignorance where one does not know even the step in front because everything is unsure and Truth is seated on the shadowy back of doubt and as such it becomes difficult to know what is Truth and its opposite, on this sorrow and painful uncertain field of labour that is spread out beneath some large impassive look of the heaven beyond that impartially witnesses our pleasure and Pain, the awakening ray of the symbol Dawn flung upon this Vast earth born by our soil that is lying flat beneath the heaven. Here on our earth too that divine vision and the faint light the Predictor of future events lighted the common meaningless shapes into extraordinary supernatural events; thereafter the divine inspiration having not been wanted by the mortal world became dull, exhausted and withdrew. It left a sacred longing in its trace and worship of a Presence and Power that is too perfect to be held by the death-bound hearts and a foreknowledge of a marvelous birth that would take place. The god-light can stay for a little time: spiritual beauty illumining human sight draws its lines of passion and mystery below Matter‟s disguise and pours down eternity lavishly and extravagantly on a beat of Time i.e. in a second. As when a soul draws near the gate of birth that joins time to Timelessness, a spark of deity i.e. the light it carried lost in Matter‟s bottomless depths and its brilliance is lost in the Inconscient planes, so also now that short-lived illumination of the magic fire (the light of the Dawn) that stayed for a short while dissolved in the accustomed sky of the day. The message the work is ceased and the messenger disappeared. The single Call and the uncompanioned of the Divine Dawn to us to rise to higher worlds and greater destiny that came to work alone and the marvellous beauty of the supernatural light she had brought she withdrew into some far-off secret world and she looked no more towards our death-bound plane. The excess splendour of beauty that was natural to god-kind could not maintain its extreme influences on time-born (mortal) eyes; her body of glory that was too real beyond our senses for its stay in space was expunged from heaven: the rare splendour and wonder of the Goddess Dawn lived no more. (6) Now there prevailed the common light of earthly day. Released from the rest of tiredness the rumour of the speed of Life once more followed the cycles of her blinded search. All sprang to their stereotyped daily acts. Thousands of beings residents of soil and tree obeyed the urge of the moment that could not be anticipated before, and man who is the leader of all beings with his uncertain mind, alone looking at the future‟s covered face went on carrying the burden of his fate.

Savitri too awoke among the people who hastened to join the brilliant Divine Priest‟s (the Sun‟s) chant and attracted by the beauty of apparent ways claimed their portion of transitory joy. Savitri following the Truth of eternity from where she came upon the world, did not take part in this little transitory happiness of these transient things; the embodied Guest i.e. her Soul within a mighty stranger in the human field made no response to all that. The call that wakes the passion of the human mind, its eventful passionate motion of seeking and its multi-coloured winged illusion of desire felt in her heart like a pleasant hearing of a foreign song normally unacceptable. Time‟s message of short lived light was not worthy of her, her inner Pain was the pain of the gods, the immortal imprisoned in our transitory human form, conquered by the death of things. The vaster Nature‟s vast joy that was once hers could not keep for long its gold heavenly colour or could not survive for longer in this fragile earthly vessel. The great Power and glory and the proud and conscious wideness and the bliss she had brought with her into the human form and the Calm joy that links one soul to all and the key to the brilliant doors of divine ecstasy, all those were denied by a narrow movement on Time‟s deep depths and life‟s frail littleness. (7) Earth‟s seed that needs the juice of pleasure and tears for its growth rejected the offer of the immortal delight‟s boon but in return offered to the daughter of the heaven her love‟s thorny flowers and grim destiny. Now the great sacrifice she made seemed in vain. A reckless distributor of her illimitable rich divinity she gave to men her self and all she was, hoping to implant her greater being and adjust their body‟s lives to such conditions that heaven might grow native on mortal soil. It is too hard to induce earth-nature‟s change; because transcience could not bear the eternal‟s touch: it is afraid and intolerant to the attack of pure divine air and fire of the upper regions; it complains of its sorrowless happiness and almost with hate drives back the light it brings, it trembles at the sight of the bare power of Truth and the might and sweetness of its supreme Voice. The mortality of Earth imposing its law of the deepest gulf on heavenly heights tarnishes the heaven‟s messenger with its mud: the thorns of its fallen nature are its defense and uses them against

4 the savior hands of divine Grace; it presents with death and pain to the sons of Immortality. Like a glory of lightning many a gods and goddesses travelling for a while on the earth-scene, their sun like brilliant thoughts are faded having been darkened by ignorant earthly minds, here on Earth their work is betrayed, and the good they have done turned to evil, as against the crown they had brought they are crucified here, they only leave behind them a great Name. A fire has come and touched men‟s hearts and retired; by that a few have held the flame and risen to greater life. The world to which she came to help and save is too different from the world she came, her greatness burdened heavily upon the ignorant breast of the world and from its darkest depths a portion of its sorrow, struggle and fall sprang as a cruel return to her gifts. To live with grief, to face death on her way the mortal‟s lot became the share of the Immortal.

(8) Accordingly in the net of earthly destinies, waiting for her predestined moment of hard test in fire, exiled from her inborn great happiness, accepting life‟s darkened earthly covering, even hiding herself from those she loved, the godhead became greater than a human fate. A dire foreknowledge separated her from all of whom she was the star of their eyes and the shelter; the danger and the pain within her was too great and as such she could not disclose before others, and she had to keep within, the heart rending grief of her that would take place in future. As one who carefully watching over men left behind takes up the load of an unconscious race, she had to give shelter to an enemy whom she must feed with her breast, her act was unknown and unknown was the grim destiny she faced; without the help of the others she had to look over the future and in the turmoil of fear and danger she had to be courageous to face the challenge. The long-foreknown and lethal morning appeared before her when she woke up in the fateful morning as forecasted by the heavenly seer Narad and it brought with it a noon that was similar to that of the other noon. Because Nature has mighty movements and in the course of its movements disregarding sometimes when she breaks a soul or ends someone‟s life; leaving her slain behind she travels on: the same is only marked by man and God‟s all-seeing eyes. Even in this moment of her soul‟s complete loss of hope and crisis and its ghastly confrontation with death and fear she did not cry nor desired the help of others and did not disclose the secret of her affliction to anyone: her face was calm and courage kept her silent. Yet her outward self only suffered and attempted hard; even her humanity was half divine: her Soul was opened to the world Soul, her nature felt the whole universal Nature as its own. Alone and living within she bore the burden of the lives of all; remaining away she carried in herself the world: her great fear was identified with the great universal fear, her strength was founded on the universal strengths, the Universal Mother‟s love was one with hers. She stood against the evil that exists at life‟s dire suffering roots, and its occult sign (9) appeared as her own disaster, in order to root it out and cut the knot she made her sharp pain into a mystic penetrating sword. With her solitary mind and world-wide heart she rose to the lone Immortal‟s unique work. At first in her burdened breast the deep sorrow of life had not entered, on the lap of earth‟s original sleep lying like taking rest still and calm like stone and star, unconsciously on mind‟s border, inactive on the bed of self forgetfulness. In a deep depth of silence between two kingdoms she, lay away from grief, not affected by the worry and anxiety, not remembering earth‟s sorrow and suffering. Thereafter a shadowlike dim remembrance moved slowly and Savitri taking a long deep audible breath and laid her hand upon her breast and could know that the immediate related, deep, quiet, old and slow to depart pain was there in its natural place, but she did not know as to why it was there nor from where it came. Mind‟s enlightening Power was still lying behind, like workers without wages of delight life‟s servitor limbs were still dull and reluctant to be active, and resentful, and the torch of her sense refused to burn, her helpless mind could not find its past. Only a vague earth-nature held her bodily frame. But now there was a heaving in her, and her life-being shared the load of the universal work. At the command of her body‟s dumb call her strong far-winging spirit travelled back to the labour of ignorance and fate returned back to the labour and stress of mortal life, lighting a pathway through strange symbol dreams crossing the declining movement of tide of the seas of sleep. Now in her Nature like house an invisible oscillation was felt, life‟s nook and corners that were darkened now were illumined swiftly, on the bosom of time opened were the windows of memory and the tired feet of thought approached her doors. Earth and Love and Death came back to her, the ancient disputants encircled her like gigantic figures (10) wrestling in the night: the godheads born in the dim Inconscient planes came awoke for struggle and divine agony, in the shadow of her flaming heart and in the dark centre of dreadful contest, a guardian of the uncomfortable bottomless depth inheriting the long suffering of the globe, a stone like still figure of high and godlike pain looked into Space with eyes nothing in particular and saw grief‟s eternal depths but not the goal of life. This deity of pain distressed by his stark divinity, bound to his seat, waited unsatisfied for the daily offering of Savitri‟s unwept tears. Once again the violent question of man‟s life arose before Savitri. Earth‟s offering of suffering and desire to the immortal Ecstasy beneath the eternal Hand began again through the medium of Savitri. Savitri awake in the morning bore the closed together march of moments‟ (like a group of army) and looked on the green smiling world i.e. the green forest that surrounded the thatched hermitage of Dyumatsena and heard the ignorant cry of living things. Amid the sounds concerned with unimportant things of the forest and the unchanging scene her soul arose facing Time and Fate. Remaining immobile within she gathered strength because this was the day when Satyavan must die as foretold by Narad.

-End of Canto One

5

Canto Two The Issue

Now for a while Savitri‟s mind withdrew into the secret fields of thought (11) and moved in a many-picturesque past of her life that relived and found the approach of its end: although the past was dying, yet it lived in Savitri without diminution; it was fleeting and vanishing from brief-living eyes, it was invisible, a fateful ghost of self, and bore the future on its spectral breast. Along the swiftly moving event‟s far-backward line the stream of the hours that force attention went flowing on backwards and on the bank of the mysterious flood that once filled with Savitri‟s well-loved forms and the subtle images of things were now seen no more and her witness spirit stood observing Time. That entire she once had hoped and dreamed and been, flew past her like winged eagles through her memory‟s skies. Like the light of the many-coloured flaming inner dawn, her life‟s broad highways and its sweet byways from the bright country of her childhood days, the blue mountains of her growing youth and the paradise orchards and the peacock wings of Love that clutched to joy under the silent shadow of grim fate have reached the last turn where heaven raced with hell, now all these lay mapped to her sun-clear recording view. Twelve passionate months as forecasted by the heavenly seer Narad had passed and led to a day of fate. When man draws near to God sometimes an absolute supernatural darkness falls on him; a moment comes when all Nature‟s means fail; then man the God ward traveller compelled to come out from the earthly protecting Ignorance and forced back within to know his bare original need; he at last must leave off his surface soul and must become the unveiled (12) entity within, now that moment had fallen on Savitri: She had reached a point of crisis where life must be in vain or she must awake in her unborn element by her will power must cancel the destiny of her body. Because the unborn spirit‟s timeless power can only lift the burden imposed on Time-born beings. The Supreme Self the builder of the figure of self can only wipe off the fixed unending line that joins these changing names and numberless lives, and these new forgetful personalities and the sign of old (past) forgotten thoughts and deeds that still lives hiding in our conscious acts, repudiate the inheritance of our buried selves, the burdensome heirship to our vanished forms accepted blindly by the body and soul. Our present life is an episode in an unremembered tale, the beginning of which is lost, its motive and plot is concealed, a once living story has prepared and made our present fate as an offspring of our past cultures and energies. So Savitri must have to break the stability of the cosmic sequences that are tied with hidden inevitable links, her past that is the barrier on her Immortal‟s road, remove it by her soul‟s fire and demolish it to the ground and shape her fate again newly. Upon the borders of the unknown meeting with the original Gods in a dialogue, Savitri must fight out in a debate between her soul and the embodied Nothingness on a dim and dangerous background: her being must confront the formless Cause of the Nothingness and weigh her single self against the laws of the universe. On the nude peak where the Supreme self stands alone with Nothingness and where life has no meaning at all and love has no place to stand, Savitri must plead her case upon the verge of dissolution, uphold life‟s helpless claim in the world‟s death cave and justify the right of existence of life and privilege of love. She must alter the Nature‟s stark laws; (13) the past has forged a bond and she must be freed from her past bond and completely exhaust and eradicate the old account of suffering and strike out from Time‟s scroll the soul‟s long compound debt i.e. the soul goes on collecting Karma in life and working out one Karma it produces further Karma so it gets compounded and root out the heavy unbearable slavery of the Karmic Gods, and bring an end to the unforgiving Law of the universe, the deep need of the universal pain and the hard self sacrifice and it‟s tremendous sorrowful consequence i.e. death and she has to eliminate all these in the process of negating death. She must break and come out of the eternal barrier, and penetrate with her inner thoughts into the Void‟s giant silence and look into the lonely eyes of eternal Death that is reigning continuously and with the strength of her naked spirit measure the Infinite‟s night. Now that great and painful moment approached near. Like an armoured battalion marching to its ruin the last long days passed away with heavy footsteps, although the days are long but appeared to have passed soon and the end was too near i.e. she neared her grim destiny. Her armoured spirit remaining alone amid many loved faces, among ignorant happy hearts it only knew what would happen and kept watch upon the moments in the intense beauty of the inhuman Forest listening for a foreseen tremendous step. A warrior in dire silent battle fields, unknown by the world for which she stood: there was none to help her except her inner Strength; there was no witness of earthly eyes; the Gods above and the Nature below were only the spectators of that mighty struggle. Around her there were high hills pointing towards the sky like figures of hermits and the green murmurous broad deep-thoughted huge Forest incessantly uttered slowly their veiled fascinating tone. In the bright green splendour of the leaves a dense self-covered magnificent life and the sun beams that were playing on them in varieties of postures and the beautiful blossoming of flowers kept secret Savitri‟s destiny‟s severely separated scene. There Savitri had grown to the highest summit of her soul during the last one year she lived in the hermitage: the influence of the vast silences of the woods merging her soul in its wide loneliness (14) had shown to her the bare reality of her soul and identified her with her environment. With the background of the eternal and unique the solitude of the woods had greatened her human hours where she had performed and completed her yogic sadhana. In that dense forest a force of bare minimum direct human necessity had reduced the heavy workload of man‟s daily routine and his overloading bulk of outwards needs to a first thin strip of simple animal wants, the mighty solitude of the primitive earth and the praying multitude of patient trees and the meditative blue relaxation of the sky and the calm weight of slowly-passing months had left in Savitri a deep room for thought and God. There lived in the forest land her life‟s drama‟s radiant role i.e. the preparatory stage for the crisis to come. A secluded place in the huge forest filled with the prayer of hermitages and guarded by the aspiration of the peaks made ready for the eternal‟s footsteps appeared through the golden windows of

6 Time, where the silent ears could hear the unuttered word and the movements of time and hours forgot to pass towards grief and transience. Like that of the suddenness in which the divine advents take place, here Love came to Savitri repeating the marvel of the first decent and changing the tedious earthly movements into delight, hiding within the shadow like Death. That he could find in her his sacred Temple. Since the beginning of earth-being‟s heavenward growth through all the long stark test of the human race never a rarer creature could bear the fiery shaft of Love, and the burning test of the godhead in our limbs and a lightening from the heights on our life‟s bottomless depths. All in her pointed to a nobler personality of sublime kind. Nearer to the earth‟s wideness, and intimate with heaven her glorious and swift young far sighted spirit voyaging through the worlds of splendour and calm flung over Mind‟s ranges to unborn things. Her self-poised unhindered will was intense; (15) her mind was like a sea of pure sincerity to lift up life-movements to the level of the highest Consciousness, its flow was passionate and did not contain any muddy wave. As in a dynamic dance to obtain union with the transcendent she was a priestess of pure ecstasies inspired and ruled from revealing heights of Supreme Truth and she moves in some prophet caves of the gods, she was a heart of silence in the hands of joy (her action was always joyous) and was the habitation of opulent creative beats, her body was like a parable of dawn (an allegory of dawn)that seemed like a niche for an unseen divinity or a golden temple-door to enter into the things beyond. In her time-born steps immortal rhythms were oscillated; her look and her smile awoke divine sense even in the stuff of earthly things, and their intense delight poured its heavenly beauty on men‟s lives. A wide self-giving was her instinctive act; she was noble and generous like a vast sea and sky and whatever comes to her she enveloped with her greatness and gave a sense of a greatened world: her kindly care was like a sweet and mild sun, the lofty passion of her love was beautified like the calm equanimity of a blue heaven. Like a soul might as a hunted bird escapes with tired wings from a world of storms, and reaches in a quiet place of her mother‟s remembered breast as a refuge of safety and a place for grand peaceful tender rest, so also one could recover life back and drink streams of honey-fire from her lap and his lost habit of happiness feel the influence of her bright nature‟s glorious environment and enjoy the pleasure of her warmth and colour‟s ecstasy in her limbs. She was an unfathomable sea of pity and her presence was like a silent holy place, her inward help opened a gate in heaven; Love in her became wider than the universe, the whole world could take shelter in her single heart. The great unsatisfied godhead of Love could dwell in Savitri‟s single heart: her mind was freed from the atmosphere of the tiny ego self could be able to hold the sublime and spiritual breath of the godhead of Love (16) and its spiritual grace can be able to transform all things into divinity. Even her deepest depths were secret habitation of divine light. At once she was the transcendent silence and the word arising out of it, she became a continent of selfwidening peace and an ocean of unflattering immaculate divine fire, the strength and silence of the gods were her own. The godhead of Love found in her a vastness like his own, his high warm subtle environment he refound and moved in her as in his natural home. He met his own infinity in her.

Till then no line of terrestrial grief could obstruct this ray. On the weak breast of this uncertain earth when her spiritual range of sight in its breath-fastened mortal house opened in sympathy with happier stars, and where life‟s course did not at all know the consequences of sorrow, and remembered the heavenly beauty that death-bound eyelids never saw and surprised by seeing this world of brittle forms that are floating like painted pictures on strips of canvas on this partial lighted Time-field, Savitri like unborn Mighty Powers was exempted from punishment as consequence of act i.e. the law of Karma. Although she leaned down on the earth to bear the suffering human load, yet the rhythm of her footsteps on earth still kept the postures of the gods. Earth‟s filthy breath could not stain that brilliant glass (i.e. the touch of earth could not soil her strength and purity): even now unstained by the dust of our mortal atmosphere it still reflected heaven‟s spiritual joy. Those who lived within Savitri‟s light could almost see her playmates of the highest heavens descended from the unattainable spheres in her attracting luminous presence, and saw that the white-fire dragon-bird of endless bliss flying with burning wings above her life as a sentinel, heaven‟s quiet protection guarded the missioned child. A glowing orbit of stars was her childhood‟s circuits of movements; her years were passed like flying golden dress of gods while they pass; her youth passed in quite calmness and delightfully. But joy cannot survive until the end in this terrestrial environment: (17) because there remains darkness in earthly things that cannot endure for longer the accents of too gladness. On her too this unavoidable Hand‟s blow came too near: the armed Immortal was caught in the trap of Time (i.e. the consequences of coming within the range of Time). That God who meets the burdened great came and stood before her. He is the allotter of the stark test of walk on fire and the path of truth to follow, and chooses in this sacrifice of our soul death, fall, and sorrow as goads to our spirit‟s goal, the suspicious godhead with his torch of pain lights up the deepest depths of this unfinished world and called Savitri to fill the unfathomable abyss with her vast self.

That majestic rude, and pitiless calm eyed godhead heightening the Eternal‟s dreadful plan of action of the art of war, measuring the difficulty in proportion to the might of human beings dug more deep the deep hollow of the unfinished world that all must cross.

Attacking on her divinest limbs he made her heart kin with the struggling human heart and forced her strength to its appointed (predestined) road. For this only Savitri had accepted her present mortal life; to wrestle with the Shadow Death and to confront the mystery of man‟s birth and life‟s brief struggle in dumb Matter‟s night. Either to accept Ignorance and Death or make the clear paths to Immortality; and to win or lose here upon earth the godlike game for man was her soul‟s issue thrown with Destiny‟s dice. But she had not taken birth here on earth either to suffer or bow down; her glorious work upon earth is to lead and to liberate humanity from worldly ties. She had not come here upon earth as a fabric of earthly substance made fit for a day‟s use by busy careless Powers who are dominating over earth. Like a human figure drawn by Time she was not a transient image flapping wings on the screen of Fate, a half-

7 living being for a passing show only, or a voyager surviving a shipwreck on the ocean of Desire flung to the eddies of whirling waves in a ruthless sport and tossed along the gulf of Circumstance, a creature born here upon earth to bend beneath the worldly yoke, (18) a helpless toy in the hands of Time‟s lords, or as one more pawn who comes destined to be pushed in one slow move forward of the worldly measureless chess-board in the chess-play between the earth-soul and Grim Destiny. But she was a conscious bodily frame and a self-born Force came here on earth. In this earthly riddle of the dusk of God, in this slow and strange uneasy compromise of limiting Nature and the limitless Soul where all must move between an ordered Chance and uncaring blind Necessity, there the spiritual fire does not dare to burn. If once this spiritual fire meets the intense original divine Flame then its answering touch might break into pieces the entire human measures and earth sink down with the weight of the Infinite. This immense material world is a prison house: across each of its roads there stands an armed stark stone-eyed Law, at every gate there walks huge vague sentinels. In the grey tribunal of Ignorance an inquiring group of priests of Night sit in judgment and punish the adventurer soul, and the dual formulas of the Karmic norm restrain the adventurous work of the Titan and God in us: pain with its violent whip and joy with its silver bribe guard the inflexibility of circling of the ages‟ Wheel. A bond is put on the high-ascending mind, a seal is put on the too large wide-open heart and death puts a stop to the journeying Life from further discovery. Thus the throne of the Inconscient remains safe upon earth as long as the ages pass coiling on slowly and the Animal force goes on searching its food within the compound fence of the temple and the gold Hawk a bird of the paradise cannot cross the skies no more. But one (Savitri) stood up against all these earthly hindrances of the reign of the Inconscient to kindle the divine limitless flame. Declared guilty by the dark Power that hates all bliss in the tremendous ruthless court where life must pay for joy sentenced by a mechanic justicer (19) to the hardest penalty of man‟s hopes, Savitri did not surrender to the rigid decree bowing down her head and did not keep open her helpless heart against destiny‟s stroke. The mind-born will in man has to bow like this and becomes obedient to the old and unchangeable laws and admits the gods of lower status without any opposition. But in Savitri the superhuman had cast its seed. Her spirit was not accustomed to fold its mighty wings of dream and life‟s precious meanings robbed off and mixed in the dust and struck off from the list of stars, or quenched the God-given light with dark despair even then her soul refused to cling to the common earthly soil. Her being accustomed to the eternal and the true and conscious of its divine founts asked not relief from pain nor accepted her failure by bargain or compromise from mortal transcience. She had come upon earth to do a meaningful work and speak a Divine word: she never accepted to close the luminous page writing the unfinished story of her soul and express through it in thoughts and actions and print in Nature‟s book, and cancel her dealings with the eternity and close or put her signature of her weak admission to the dry balance of the world‟s exchange account. Since the creation of the earth her inner force laboured in accomplishing the great world-plan in her life and pursuing immortal aims after death, expressed her strong aversion to accept the dry role of discontentment and give up the meaning of her birth in Time; rejected to obey the government of the accidental circumstance or surrender her high destiny upto Chance that is a passing one. In her own self she found her greatest riches; she challenged the iron law of the world with her sovereign right; her single will stood opposed against the cosmic rule. This great force rose to stay the wheels of Death and Destruction of the world. At the Unseen‟s knock upon her hidden gates her strength became greater by the lightning‟s touch (20) and awoke from sleep from the depth of her heart. Her strength could bear the stroke of That that kills and saves. Across the terrifying path that is beyond the sight of any eyes and beyond the power of change of any will power, Savitri obstructing its terrible route confronted the engines of the universe; she was the only heart that stood in the way of the driving wheels of the universe: its giant workings was stopped in front of a mind, and its rigid customary practice confronted the flame of a Soul. At times a magic leverage is suddenly caught to that moves the veiled Ineffable timeless will; a prayer, a hero‟s act and a divine idea can link the strength of man to a transcendent Force. Then miracle is made the common rule, a hero‟s mighty deed can change the course of things; and a lonely thought becomes almighty. But all now in this world seems as heaps of Nature‟s machinery, and an endless slavery to material rule and a long cause and effect‟s rigid chain, her firm and changeless habits of imitating Law and her empire of unconscious skillful device cancels the claim of free human will. Man too is a machine amid machines of the Nature; his brain is like a piston of that engine which pumps out the shape of thought, a beating heart cuts out emotion‟s modes, an insensible energy builds a soul. Or the figure of the world reveals the signs of tied Chance repeating her old steps in circles around Matter‟s binding-posts. A scattered sequence of meaningless events to which our reason gives illusive meanings or those were our sense dependent Life‟s instinctive search, or a vast ignorant mind‟s great work. But in spite of all these short comings heavenly wisdoms comes upon earth, and vision grows within; then man the Nature‟s instrument crowns himself as her king, he then feels his witness soul and the conscious power; his soul steps back from its earthly state and meets the Supreme Light. (21) Godhead stands always, behind the brute machine. This truth now revealed before Savitri like a victory of fire; a victory was won for God in man and the deity revealed its hidden face. Now the great World-Mother arose in Savitri; a living choice reversed fate‟s lifeless turn and the spirit‟s footstep was affirmed on Circumstance, and it pressed back the senseless dire revolving wheel of Time and stopped the mute march of Necessity.

Savitri a flaming warrior from the eternal peaks empowered to force upon the divine door that was hither to denied and closed for earthly beings and broke the absolute dumbness from Death‟s countenance and broke the limits of consciousness and Time.

-End of Canto Two

8

Canto Three The Yoga of the King, the Yoga of the Soul’s Release

(22) An aspiration of a world compelled Savitri‟s mortal birth. Among those who were in the quest of the Divine from time immemorial Aswapati was the one in the front, a principal character of the mysterious play in which the supreme Unknown pursues himself through various worldly forms and limits his eternity by the moments of worldly Time, and in the blind Void struggles to live and see, he was a thinker and seeker in the divine atmosphere brought down Savitri‟s radiant power upon earth to meet earth‟s inarticulate need. His spirit had descended here into the kingdoms of our transient sight from larger heavenly spheres as a colonist from immortality. His birth was a guiding light on earth‟s uncertain road and held a symbol and a sign; his human self like a transparent robe covered the All-Wise who leads this blind world. Attached to this cosmic Space and Time and paying here God‟s debt (i.e. he himself suffers the worldly miseries and Pain and sends his incarnate to make it free from that) to earth and man and a greater son ship was his divine right. Although he has accepted mortal ignorance, his knowledge became a part of the inexpressible divine Light. He was strength of the beginning less heavenly Permanence and caught in the confused state here in the earthly moment and its flow, he kept the vision of the heavenly Vast behind secretly: he was in possession of a power that came from the Unknowable. He was a preserver of the symbols of the Transcendent, and a treasurer of the superhuman dreams, bore the stamp of powerful memories of his mighty past and cast their greatest light on human life. His whole life upon earth is a long growth towards the Supreme. His being grew towards heaven like a tree the roots of which are sustained (23) from the food of occult spiritual founts from Beyond and climbed through clear bright light to meet the unseen divine Sun of the transcendent Truth. His soul lived here as god‟s delegate, his mind was like a fire invading heaven, his will like a hunter moved in the paths of light. An ocean like impetus lifted each and every breath of his action left the footprints of a god and each earthly moment was like a beating of powerful wings. The little plot of our mortality i.e. earthtouched by this tenant coming from heavenly heights became a playground of the living Infinite. This apparent body is not all; the form it holds deceives and the person is a disguise; celestial powers can dwell hiding deep within man. His human body is like a fragile ship sailing through the sea of earthly Time carries the concealed identity of the Imperishable i.e. the Soul. He is a spirit that is a flame of God and dwells within us and a fiery portion of the Wonderful, the artist of his own beauty and delight, and immortal in our mortal indigence. This artist of the Infinite forms, this veiled unrecognised Inhabitant, initiate of his own veiled mysteries, conceals his cosmic plan in a small mute seed. In the mute strength of the unseen Divine idea determining the predestined shape and act of its future evolution, and travelling from life to life, from level to level changing his bodily self from form to form in the process of evolution, he sees by the power of his sight the growing symbolic image in concrete form of his own and foresees the coming god in the worm. At last this traveller in the roads of Time arrives on the borders of the everlasting. Even though covered in the transient symbol of humanity, he feels the substance of his immortal self and loses his relationship to mortality. A beam of an eternal Light fallen in his heart, (24) his thought stretches into infinitude; all in him changes into the vastness of the spirit. His soul breaks out all the barriers and advanced to join the Cosmic soul and his life like an ocean becomes the super life. Thus he is nourished by the Mother of the worlds; the limitless Super nature fills his bodily frame: the World Mother adopts his spirit‟s everlasting field as a security of her transient world and shapes the figures of her powers that are yet unborn. The world Mother immortally falls herself as an embryo in man, this unveiled Creatrix works in the creature, her face is seen through his face and her eyes are seen through his eyes, through a vast identity the creature‟s being becomes the world Mother‟s being. Only then God in his unconcealed state revealed in man. A passive Oneness and active Power, the integral Godhead‟s seals descend in man, then his soul and body receives the stamp of that greatness. Man‟s life is a long process of obscure preparation, a circle of toil, hope and war and peace drawn out by Life on Matter‟s darkened ground. In his climb to a summit path where no other feet had ever touched, through a partial shadowy circle of burning a flame of light he seeks for a veiled reality that is half-known, and ever missed, he seeks for something or someone whom he never at all found, seeks the cult of an ideal that was never made real on our earth, his journey in an endless spiral of ascent and fall until he reaches a gigantic point through which the great divine Glory shines for whom we were made and continue breaking through all barriers until we reach God‟s infinity.

Once we escape breaking across the borderlines of earthly natures into the luminous arc of Super nature of living light then we are free from the obscurity of terrestrial nature. Now the realisation of all this was witnessed in Aswapati, the son of Force; and that high transition of yogic state became firm in him. The whole process of Nature is the art of the Original supreme Immanence and the cosmic Worker used his secret hand (25) to change Aswapati‟s fragile earthly body for the use of the divine. A divine Presence worked behind the uncertain mask of bodily appearance and hammered his bodily soil i.e. made up of matter to withstand a Titan‟s weight, and refining his half-made blocks of natural strength built his soul into a statue god. The Artist of the magic substance of soul, works out his high and difficult plan in the vast workshop of the wonderful world, and shaped his rhythmic parts in the inward worldly Time. Thereafter the transcendent miracle appeared all of a sudden: the disguised faultless Grandeur worked out his dreamed marvellous things that would take shape in future suffering the labour pain in the occult womb of life. A supreme eminence of the architecture of the worlds and a mystery of union with Earth and Heaven joined divinity to the mortal scheme. As a consequence a Seer and a luminous Guest was born in Time. For him the limitations of the higher mind‟s sky above did not exist. In the griffin (a fabulous creature with a body of lion and the head and wings of an eagle that causes arrest to capture light) like forefront of Fatal Night and Wisdom‟s Day‟s stern guardian a chunk was created in the all-concealing arched covering above; the conscious ends of being retreated rolling back, the

9 limitations of the little personality was obliterated, the egoistic separate personal self joined with the world Self. Thus the world of these rigid limiting forms was overcast and all the barricades of life opened into the Unknown. All the norms and rules of concept were abrogated and all the hard clauses and condition of slavery to the actions of universal Nature were deleted and the soul‟s treaty with ignorant Nature was abolished. All the darkened restraints of law were done away with and intellect‟s hard and lustrous lids were shattered; Indivisible Truth found the vast sky like room for its expression; a heavenly vision rose from within and saw and knew everything; the limited mind became an unlimited light, the finite self wedded with the infinity. Aswapati‟s march now sprang up like the flight of an eagle. (26) The divine Wisdom lifted him to her highest craft out of the apprenticeship of ignorance and made him the architect of his soul, a builder of the Immortal‟s secret house and an aspirant to Supreme Timelessness: as a result divine freedom and heavenly expanse invited him from beyond; there shone the dawn of the spiritual day above his mind‟s twilight and life‟s night that was led by the light of the stars.

Thus he grew into his larger self, and the human traits in him were diminished to less and less, his greater being could behold a greater world. A fearless will Power for acquisition of knowledge dared to scratch out the lines of safety drawn by our Reason that prohibit our mind‟s ascension and soul‟s dive into the Infinite. Even his first steps broke our earthly confines and could wander in the vaster freer space. In hands strengthened by a transfiguring Might he could catch up like a giant‟s bow that lay latent in a sealed and secret cave the powers that sleep unused in man within. He turned into a miracle a normal act and turned the common acts into divine works, and efforts that are superbly natural at this height of consciousness he had reached, that would shatter the strength of the mortal heart and aims too high for Nature‟s daily determination were pursued in royal like stupendous ease: the gifts of spirit came crowding down to him; they were his life‟s features and privilege. A power of pure understanding lent to him its radiant joy: its inner vision did not wait to think anything; it enveloped all Nature in a single look, and could look into the very self of the universal things; and no more deceived by the form he could see the soul. It could know what is hidden in all beings unknown to them; it was able to know the impression of the idea in mind and the wish in the heart; from the active element of the brain it could know (27) the motives that men hide from their own sight. He could feel the throb of life in other men that invade him with their happiness and grief; their love, anger and unexpressed hopes either entered in currents or in pouring waves into his calm which was like an immobile ocean. He heard the inspired sound of his own thoughts re-echoed in the top of other minds, the stream of the world's thought travelled into the field of his understanding; his inner self widened and became close to other beings and bore the relationship‟s weight as a common tie, yet it stood untouched as a king of itself and alone. A magical harmony of cadences was quickened and tuned his old earthly harp‟s strings to heavenly tones; it uplifted the servitor senses of mind and life to become happy partners in opening themselves towards the soul, his tissue and nerve became sensitive chords of the soul‟s harp and also records of light and ecstasy; it made the body‟s members the spirit‟s followers. As an aftermath a divine function with a finer method kindled with the light of its grace man‟s outward earthliness; the deeper cells in the experience of the soul no more dominated by Matter to sleep as its slave. In the dead wall that bars us from entering into our wider being, into a secrecy of our apparent sleep, and in the mystic path that lies beyond our waking thoughts there opened a door built by Matter‟s force and thereby released things imperceptible and unknown by our earthly sense: apart from that a world unseen and unknown by our outward mind appeared in the silent domain of the soul. Aswapati sat in the secret chambers of his inner being looking out into the bright countries of the unborn where all things dreamed by the mind are seen and known as true and all that life yearns drew near. He saw the Perfect in its astral homes in its glorious immortal form, (28) lain in the lap of the Eternal‟s peace, and absorbed in the heart-beats of Divine-ecstasy. He lived in the mysterious region where thought is born and will is nursed by a heavenly Power and sustained on the white milk of the Eternal‟s strengths till it grows into the likeness of a god. In the Witness invisible rooms with mind built walls and secret inner chambers and unknown passages the windows of his inner sight were opened. The house of Timelessness became his own. Lifting the heavy curtain of his bodily flesh he stood upon a gateway guarded by a serpent and gazed into the unending luminous corridors, silently lending his ears listening in his quiet heart for the coming of the new and the unknown.

He stared across the empty stillness and heard the footsteps of the undreamed divine Idea, in the far wide pathways of the Beyond. He could hear the secret divine Voice and the omniscient Word and saw the secret face of God that was once our own. The inner planes opened their crystal doors before him and through that strange divine powers and influences touched his life. He was bestowed with a vision of higher planes than ours, a consciousness of brighter planes and heights of beings less bounded than our brief-lived men and subtler bodies than our mortal frames; a vision of objects too fine for the grasp of our material sense, acts lively with the superhuman light and movements driven by superconscient force, the stream of joys that never flowed through mortal limbs, and beautiful scenes and happier lives than earth‟s came and appeared before him. A consciousness of beauty and bliss, a knowledge that became identified with the things known now replaced his separated sense and heart and drew all Nature into its clasp. Now his mind stooped to look into the hidden worlds: (29) the sky and air glittered and filled with marvellous shapes and colours, celestial fragrances thrilled in his nostrils, heavenly sweetness settled on his tongue. His ears became a channel of universal harmony and a stream of magical songs and field for occult sounds that cannot be heard by earth. The voice of a truth that was submerged and hither to unknown, flowing beneath the cosmic surfaces and heard only amidst the omniscient silence and held by intuitive heart and the secret inner sense came out of a secret path of the slumberous soul. The voice of the truth took the burden of secrecies that were sealed and dumb, it articulated the unfulfilled demand of earth and the song of promise of unrealised heavens and all that is concealed in an

10 omnipotent Sleep of Matter. In the stream of Time that carries unending in its long listening flood the drama of life that bears the world‟s unsolved uncertainties on an aimless pilgrimage, on that a laughter of a sleepless happiness and murmurings of an everlasting desire rose foamed and bubbled: a cry came of the world‟s future delight and the grandeur of a greatness of its will to survive was heard by Aswapati, a memory of soul‟s adventure into space, he who is a traveller through the magic centuries and being‟s labour in Matter‟s universe, its search for the mysterious meaning of its birth on earth and the experience of its response to high spiritual joy, its vibration of satisfaction and happiness in all the sweetness of the gift of life, its large breath and pulse and thrill of hope and fear and its taste of pain and tears of ecstasy, its sudden joy‟s intense stirrings, the weeping of its passion and unending pain awoke in him. The murmur and whisper of the unheard sounds that crowd around our heart but found no way to enter into it, (30) all things that suffers to exist still unknown and all that fruitlessly labours to take birth here and all the sweetness that can never be tasted by anybody, all the beauty that never can be established on earth were now bulged like a hymn in Aswapati‟s heart. The wide world-rhythms that were unheard by our deaf mortal ears wove their stupendous music to which our life strives to attune here its rhyme-beats by dissolving our limits in the illimitable, and bringing the finite in consonance with the infinity. There rose a whisper of the vague utterance of the primal ignorance from the subconscient caves, and as an answer to that inarticulate questioning there came down with lightening neck and thunder‟s wings a radiant hymn to the inexpressible Divine and the song of victory of the superconscient light. All that revealed at that level of consciousness that Aswapati was in, none here on earth can express; there the subtle vision and dream were stories narrated by truth or symbols truer than the truth or truths carrying the assent of the supernatural seals. Deathless eyes neared Aswapati and looked into his eyes, and beings of many kingdoms came near and spoke to him: the ever-living whom we call as dead left their glory beyond the kingdoms of death and birth to pronounce the wisdom that exceeds all words: the appellants at the seat of judgment of his reason the kings of evil and that of good proclaimed their opposite view points as absolute truth, all believed themselves to be the spokesmen of God: the gods of light and titans of the darkness fought each other for his soul as a costly prize. In every hour as if an arrow unleashed from the carry bag of Time and pushed through the bow in every moment there rose a song of new discovery like a bow-twang‟s sound of immediate experiment before him. As if he was born into a new illumined world his each day became a story of spiritual love, as an unexpected friend adventure suddenly leaped before him, and danger brought an intense sweet penetrating sense of joy; and each event became a profound experience. (31) There he met with the higher beings and epic was deliberated in the daily conversation, advices came to him in heavenly speech; to help his heart to respond to the call of joy many sweet inspirations began coming in from invisible lips, from the kingdoms of beauty sweet temptations started coming in secretly and from the world of bliss sudden divine ecstasies came. It was a marvellous and delightful kingdom. Now his mystic listening could receive all that came to it and he was thrilled with the contact of mighty unknown things. Awakened to new unearthly presences, his sense of touch could be able to respond to subtle infinities, hearing the silver loud sound of the heavenly doors his sight‟s lightning‟s flashes sprang into the invisible. Always his consciousness and inner vision grew; and they avail wider field and wander in higher sphere; consequently he passed the border of Matter‟s rule and passed the zone where thought takes place of life. Out of this world of signs he suddenly came into a place where there was only silent self and no world existed, and looked beyond into a nameless vast. There these symbol figures lost their right to live, there all signs familiar to sense were dropped, there was no necessity of body for the heart beat, there was no need for the eyes to see beautiful shapes because everything was beautiful there. In a rare and luminous interval of silence he climbed into regions that are sign less and filled with formlessness and the world was absorbed into a single being and things are known by virtue of the light of identity, the Spirit was its own evidence there. The Supreme eyes looked out through human eyes and saw all things and creatures as it and knew all word and thought as its own voice. There unity is so close that was not necessary search and clasp (32) and love is a yearning of the Supreme One for the Unique, beauty is a sweet variation of the One and the Same and oneness is the soul of the multitude. There all the truths unite in a single Truth, and all ideas once again join the Supreme Reality. There the Supreme Wisdom wordless, absolute, all-seeing, immobile, sovereign and alone knowing herself by her own eternal self, sat alone in the eternal Calm.

There knowledge needed no medium of words to give shape to Idea; Supreme Idea tired of its homeless immortality seeks house in the illimitable, did not want carved brilliant chamber of thought to rest because in mind‟s single window‟s limited outlook of things only a little bit of God‟s vast sky is seen. There the boundless keeps company with the boundless; one can be wider than the world and become boundless while he is there; while there one is one‟s own infinity. He was no more centered within the limits by his earthly mind; a power of all-seeing silence filled in his limbs: encircled by a voiceless white epiphany through a divine vision that surpasses all forms, and into a living that surpasses life, he came closer to the still eternal consciousness that sustains all. The voice that make the mind active only by speech turned into a silent knowledge of his soul; the strength that could only feel its truth in action now got established in a silent omnipotent peace. A spare time in the labour of the worlds and an interval of joy and pain of the worldly search of things now restored God‟s calm in place of Nature‟s stress. A vast Oneness of opinion now ended all arguments and counter arguments of life in him. The world creator warring thoughts, the clash of opposing forces struggling to exist in the tremendous shock while creating a star as in the making of a grain of dust, (33) the dumb elliptical spiral cuts ploughed by the seeking of the world‟s desire in space, the prolonged rise and fall of Time‟s flood, the agony stimulating the acute force of sexual lust that awakens the dynamic energies in earth‟s dull mud and builds a personality out of it, the sorrow of man caused by vagaries of Nature and thereby feeding its hunger, the sexual desire created with the fire of pain, the fate that punishes virtue by defeat, the tragedy that kills the long

11 lived happiness, the humiliated Love shedding its tears, the clash of the Gods of light and God‟s of darkness in us have now been ceased to exist in a Truth that lives in their own light. Now his soul stood free as a witness and a sovereign. His mind no more engrossed in the time-driven flood floating unendingly as on a boat swiftly from one phenomenon to another, he took rest in indivisible Time. As if a story written long back but acted now, Aswapati in his present held his future and past felt in the seconds the things of the millenniums and saw the hours like dots upon a page and time was not a bar for him. An aspect of the Unknown Truth changed the meaning of the cosmic scheme before him. Now for Aswapati the creation of this huge material universe seemed as a microscopic act of a stupendous force: the eternal Ray surpassing the earthly moments illumined that which was never yet manifested on earth. His thoughts settled down in a mighty silence and the concentrating Thinker became widened and grew more and more still, the transcendent wisdom touched his beating heart: and his soul rose beyond thought‟s luminous barriers; and his mind could no longer screen the boundless infinite. Across a void retreating bare sky he had a brief look through the sparkles of vanishing stars the superconscient kingdoms of stable Peace where mind‟s judgment fails and speech becomes tight lipped, (34) and the unimaginable/unimagined Supreme lies pathless and alone. There any forms were seen or any upward voice was not heard; there existed only the Supreme Silence and the Supreme Absolute. Out of that silence his mind arose born anew and became conscious of the truths that were even once inexpressible, and there appeared before him unspeakable noteworthy forms, and an all-seeing thought and a self-revealing voice reached him. He could know the source from which his soul had come: and he could realise that the movements of the world was united with the immobile Vast; he plunged his roots into the Infinite and eternity became the base of his life.

At first these heavenlier states and large wide-poised elevations last only for awhile. The body‟s stone-like stillness and life‟s silent trance, the breathless might and calm of silent mind‟s high and luminous tension breaks too soon; or slowly fails as the setting of a day coloured with golden light. The restless lower limbs of his body get tired of peace; a sentimental passionate yearning for old little works and joys, a need to invite back the very negligible and familiar beings, the attraction to walk on the accustomed and inferior path, and the need to rest in a natural pose of fall crops up, as a child who learns to walk but cannot walk long and cannot replace the titanic will to climb beyond forever and further more the sacred fire that was burning in the heart‟s altar becomes indistinct. An old attraction of the subconscient cords starts again; it draws back the unwilling spirit from rising up to the heights, or a dull gravitation force drags us down to the blind-driven inactiveness of our earthly base. This too the supreme Intelligence can use who makes our fall as a means for our greater rise. Because into our ignorant Nature‟s troubled field, into the half-ordered confusion of our mortal life the Supreme formless Power, the conscious Being the holder of the eternal light walks following the shadow of our spirit‟s descent; (35) the twin duality which is ever one chooses its dwelling place amidst the disordering commotion of the sense. He comes into the darker parts of our body unseen by us and works there screened by the darkness, he is a subtle and all-knowing guest and guide, and works there till our darker parts feel the need and will to change. All here on earth must follow a higher law and our body‟s cells must hold the Immortal‟s flame. Else our spirit would reach alone its divine fount leaving here a half-saved world to its uncertain fate. In such an eventuality our universal Nature would ever labour without release, our earth would ever whirl helplessly in Space and the purpose of this great creation would fail till at last the frustrate Universe reach its extinction. There is s greater possibility of even his spirit‟s godlike strength to rise must fall: his greater consciousness shall withdraw behind; his human outside striving to feel again the old higher states becomes dim and eclipsed, and also his attempt to bring the saviour‟s touch and the divine flame, and invitation of the divine Force to meet its acute needs gets dim and eclipsed. Always the power from beyond poured back on him (Aswapati) like a sudden rain, or in his breast a presence grew slowly; and that climbed back to some remembered height or rose above the peak from which it fell. Each time he ascended to a larger poise, a dwelling on a higher plane of the soul and the divine Light lingered in him for longer time. In his ascension and descent between earth and heaven, in this inexpressible communion‟s climb there grew in him as grows an expanding moon the glory of the oneness of his soul. A union of the Supreme Real with his unique soul, a sight of the One and Alone from every face, the presence of the Timelessness in time widening the mortal mind‟s partial-look on things, bridging the gulf between man‟s force and Fate (36) made whole the divide-being we are here. At last a firm spiritual poise and a constant living in the Eternal‟s kingdom, a safety achieved in the Divine Silence and the Ray and a settlement in the Unchangeable was won. The heights of his being lived in the tranquility of the Supreme Self, his mind could rest on a divine field and looked down on the earth‟s magic and the play where the Godchild lies on the lap of Night and Dawn and the Everlasting wears the disguise of Time. His equipoise soul gave its vast assent to the peaceful heights above and the troubled depths below: a balanced unperturbed tranquil strength and a wide fixed look of his soul on Time‟s unrest faced all experience with unaltered peace. Attaching no importance to the worldly sorrow and delight and not attracted by the marvellous things and the call, his immobile spirit looked on the constant flow and change of the worldly things, calm and impassive supported all that exists: his tranquil soul helped this toiling world. Inspired by the silence and closed inner sight his creative force could work with a new luminous skill on the crude material from which all is made and the refusal of the world‟s mass of Matter (Inertia) for change and the sullied front of the world‟s Ignorance and the Inconscient Matter and huge errors of life. As an artist sculptor chisels a deity out of stone he slowly rent the adverse elements covering the body and the borderline of defense of Nature‟s ignorance, and the illusion and the mystery of the Inconscient in whose black cover the Eternal veils his head so that he may work unknown in the cosmic Time. A glory of self-creation from the divine peaks and an act of transformation from the depths beyond the reach of our senses came

12 and began a happier cosmic working in him and fashioned the world-shape anew in him, (37) thus he could find God in the world Nature and Nature fulfilled in God. In Aswapati the working of the universal Power was seen: his life now could dwell on the heights of the spirit; his soul, mind, heart turned into a unique sun, except lives lowest parts that were dim. But there too in the uncertain shadow of life force there was a labour and fiery breath; watched by the inner Witness‟s immobile peace an indeterminable veiled divine power worked. Even on the struggling Nature left below strong period of divine illumination came descending down: lightning‟s of the divine glory one after another were flashed on him, for him experience became a tale of bright flame and fire, air waved around aiding the buoyancy of Gods cargo ships that came sailing from the Unseen carrying the strange divine riches; magnificence of insight filled the blank space of his thought, into the Inconscient still nesses knowledge spoke, rivers of divine bliss and luminous force poured down, and revelations of beauty and stormy flow of delight showered upon him from the all-powerful Mysterious kingdoms above. From there Omniscience descended like the eagles. As a result a thick veil was ripped open and a mighty whisper was heard from beyond; a song of wisdom from the blissful transcendences sung on the mountains of an unseen world was heard repeatedly in the privacy of his soul; the voices heard by the inner ear conveyed to him their prophetic utterances, fiery expressions of the immortal Word and flashes of a mysterious revealing divine Light approached him from the inaccessible Secrecies beyond. An inspired Knowledge sat enthroned within him whose second‟s illumination is more than the light of the reason‟s years: a stroke of revealing luster like a pointing stress of accent fell upon the Truth, a swift intuitive insight opened like a sky-light showing all the ground. (38) Now a single glance of him could discern true and false, or raise its intense intuitive torch-light on his darkened parts to check the intruding claimants crowding at the gate of his mind to enter with the forged passports signed by the gods and to detect the sorceress bride coming in disguise to enter into him, or examine keenly the outer appearance of thought and life.

Like a sudden messenger from the all-seeing heights frequent inspiration with lightening speed came and wandered in the silent paths of his mind bringing the rhythmic sense of hidden things. He could hear a music that transcends our mortal speech. As if from a golden pot of the Supreme-Bliss a joy of divine light, a joy of sudden sight, a joy of the thrilling immortal Word poured into his heart as into an empty cup, there occurred in him a repetition of God‟s first delight created in the primal and immaculate Time. In a brief moment and short interval All-Knowledge that was packed into great wordless thoughts lodged in the expectant stillness of his depths placed a crystal jewel of the ultimate Absolute, and as a result a portion of the Truth that is yet inexpressible now revealed to his silent soul. The zealous creatrix goddess of intuition began working in the inner tranquility of Aswapati‟s heart and her fallen speechless power grew more closer to his soul; she looked upon things seen and unforeseen and made her native field in the unimagined domains of Aswapati‟s body. As when the eyes sight is fixed at an invisible point till through the intensity of one luminous spot an advent of a world of divine images enters into the kingdom of the seer all-divine vision remained centered into a single ray. A great uncovered arm of divine grandeur suddenly rose and tore apart the veiled mist of Ignorance; lifted her finger‟s sharp unimaginable tip clearly (39) opened the closed Beyond with a stroke of flame. In the silent heights of trance an eye awake, a mind stretched plucking the unimaginable, the goddess of Intuition overleaping the high black wall that hides the super conscience, with a unique dangerous leap entered in using the inspired speech of wisdom as a cutting tool and plundered the vast Empire of the unknowable. The creatrix goddess of Intuitive a gatherer of infinitesimal grains of Truth and the gatherer of infinite experience broke through the guarded mysteries of World-Force and entered there and opened her magic methods covered in a thousand veils; or she gathered the lost secrets dropped by Time in the dust and pits in its mounting route mid old forsaken dreams of hastening Mind and the buried small remaining portions of forgotten space. The goddess of intuition, a traveller between the highest heights and deepest depths joined together the distant ends and the viewless depths or wandered along the roads of Heaven and Hell pursuing knowledge like a dog in quest of its prey. She is a reporter and recorder of hidden wisdom‟s talk and her shining details of divine speech pass through the covered passage of the invisible mind and she transmits to the prophet and the seer the inspired image of the mystic Truth. She is the recorder of the inquiry of the god‟s and a spokesman of the silent seeing of the Supreme, brought immortal voices to mortal men. Like a bright sky that dims the moon above the reason‟s brilliant subtle curved covering the Creatrix intuitive goddess released and driven into Aswapati‟s soul‟s range broad spaces of a vision without boarder or limit. Teeming multitude of beings like oceans met his voyaging soul and invited him for infinite discovery; timeless kingdoms of joy and absolute power surrounded by the eternal silence stretched out before him; and the ways that lead to endless happiness (40) ran like smiles in dream through vast brooding expanses: in the pathless Infinite white sun bathed planes stood disclosed before him in the splendour of a golden moment. Along a wide open path in infinite Self the points that run through the centre of everything now shadowed the indeterminable line that carries the Everlasting through the aeons. The magician order of the cosmic Mind pressurizing the freedom of infinity with a naked plot of Nature‟s symbol facts and unending signals of events of life transformed all the accidental recurrence of things into the laws and (a chaos) signs of formless matter supposed to have existed before its creation into a universe. Out of the dance of the spirit with Matter as disguise and the rich wonders and complex whirling of the world, the harmony of the creation grew clear before Aswapati, and the symmetry of its self-arranged effects, its realism of illusive art, the logic of its infinite intelligence, the magic that lies behind the changing eternity, were settled in the deep relative importance of the soul. Aswapati had a sudden glimpse of things that were forever unknown: the letters of the immobile supernal Word became clear to him: in the imperishable nameless Origin the trace of the world creating Ideas was seen emerging as from fathomless seas, in the black earth of Nature‟s trance the seed of the Spirit‟s blind and huge desire was sown from

13 which the tree of cosmos grew and spread its magical branches over a dream of space. Consequently immense realities took shape looked out from the shadow of the Unknown the bodiless Nameless saw that God was born and trying to have from the mortal mind and soul a deathless body and a divine name. (41) There appeared before Aswapati the Architect‟s perfect immobile lips, the great super real wings, the face covered by the superconscient Sleep, and the closed eyes that could see all who builds in trance. The original God of Desire (Adi Kamadev) born in the Void looked out and saw the ever awake hope and the feet that run behind a passing fate and knew the inexplicable meaning of the unending dream. Scarcely seen for a moment and beyond Mind‟s prospect of sight as if a torch held by a power of God, the radiant world of the everlasting Truth in a sudden flash of light shined like a faint star on the border of night‟s sky above the Golden Over mind‟s faintly shined peak. Even were seen as through subtle screen the smile of the love that sanctions the long game of this worldly creation, the lovely sight of calm attachment and the maternal breasts of divine Wisdom feeding the child-like laughter of Chance, the greatest Silence that nurse of the Almighty‟s power, the all-knowing silence that is the womb of the immortal Word, the peaceful meditating face of the Timeless and the creative eye of Eternity was seen by Aswapati. The inspiring goddess entered a mortal‟s breast, and studied there the inner vision thought, constructed the temple of prophetic speech and sat upon the tripod seat of mind: consequently all in the beyond became widened and all that was below was illumined. She dug out wells of light in the darkest depths, on the undiscovered depths imposed a form, in the dumb vast she woke a stir of living word, through great shore less, dumb, darkened expanses carried the earthward fragments of revealing thought cut and brought from the silence of the Ineffable. His heart uttered the inexpressible great Name; and his dream of searching Thought wandering through Space entered the invisible and forbidden house: thus he could find the treasure of an eternal Day. In the depth of the subconscient burned jewel-lamp of the goddess Wisdom, (42) the lamp in question lifted up revealed the riches of the Cave where the miser traders of sense left unused the same and guarded beneath the paws of Night‟s dragon that breathed fire, whose priceless value could have saved the world and those were lying asleep swathed in the layers of dense darkness. The jewel-lamp revealed a darkness carrying morning in its breast and looking for the reappearance of the wide eternal Sunlight and waiting for the arrival of the larger ray to rescue the rays of the Sun. The golden coins of the Eternal that were dropped impassively in a great extravagance of the waste of God in creation‟s spendthrift work, left in the deepest depth of the bottomless world and were stolen by the robbers of the Hell and concealed from touch, view and even from the reach of thought‟s desire and were locked in the blind depth lest men should find them and became even as Gods and this was revealed before Aswapati with the help of that jewel-lamp. A divine vision lightened on the invisible heights, a wisdom rose from the mute depths and illumined: a deeper interpretation widened the grandeur of Truth and a grand reversal of the Night and Day took place; as an outcome all the values of the world were changed heightening the aim of life; a word of greater wisdom and a thought came that was larger than the slow labour of the human mind can bring, and there awoke a secret sense in him that could perceive a divine Presence and a Greatness everywhere. Before him the universe was now seen not as a senseless whirl borne round like a mass of matter on a great machine, it cast away its great lifeless scene and became no more a mechanism or work of Chance, but a living movement of the body of God. He could realise that the spirit hid in the forces and forms of the world was the spectator of the mobile scene: the beauty and the unending miracle of things turned into a light of the Unmanifest: the formless Everlasting moved in the universe (43) searching for its own perfect form in souls and things. Aswapati‟s life did not keep its dull and meaningless shape any more. In the struggle and turbulence of the world, he saw the labour pain of godhead‟s birth. He could observe that a secret knowledge disguised as Ignorance, a Fate draped with an unseen necessity and an omnipotent Will absorbed in the game of chance. A glory, a rapture and a charm and the All-Blissful sat unknown within his heart; Earth‟s pains were proved before him as a ransom of its imprisoned delight. A glad sharing of thoughts made beautiful the passing hours, the ways of whole life became travellers on a destined road, and the nights became companions of his meditating spirit. A heavenly inspiration quickened all within his heart; the slow and stumbling movement of Time changed into a splendours march; the divine Dwarf within him i.e. his soul becoming mighty in triple spheres ascended upto to unconquered worlds, Earth grew too small for his victory. The life that was once a process of carrying the heavy foot-step of a blind Power on human littleness now became a sure path to God, and existence of life on earth became a divine experiment and the cosmos became an opportunity for the growth of the soul. The world was a conception and birth of the Spirit in Matter in living forms and the universal Nature bore the Immortal God in her womb, that she might climb through the immortal to eternal life. Aswapati being now could lay down in bright divine immobile peace and bathed in the fountains of pure spiritual light; and wandered in wide fields of wisdom‟s self illumination lit by the rays of an everlasting sun. Even his body‟s subtle being within could raise its earthly parts towards higher things and felt on it the breath of the divine atmosphere. His soul journeyed towards the divinity uplifted upon the winged winds of rapid joy, it was held up to a divine Light that it could not always hold (44) and did away with the mind‟s distance from the Truth supreme and lost life‟s incapacity for bliss. Now all that remained suppressed within us began to emerge.

Accordingly his soul‟s release occurred from the bondage of Ignorance, and the first spiritual change of his mind and body. A wide God-knowledge poured down from beyond, a new world-knowledge broadened from within: his daily thoughts turned above towards the divine Truth and the One and Alone, his most common actions sprang from an inner Light. He now awakened to the lines and forms the universal Nature hides, attuned to the universal Nature‟s movements that exceed our scope; he was identified with a secret universe. By his power of understanding surprised the mightiest energies‟ founts of the universal Nature and he could talk to the

14 unknown Guardians of the worlds, he saw the forms that our mortal eyes have never seen. His far seeing eyes could see the embodied shapes of invisible entities, saw the cosmic forces at work and felt the secret impulse behind man‟s will. Now the secrets of Time became for him an often read book; the records of the future and the past outlined their excerpts on the sky as a page. Identified and harmonised by the Creator‟s skill the human in him attuned with the divine; his acts could never mislead his inner flame. This well founded his forward greatness in the universe. An extraordinary genius now heightened in the cells of his body that knew the meaning of his fate ringed works, in the immensities of the spirit and beyond life‟s limits he became kith and kin with the march of unattainable Powers. Apart he lived in solitude in his mind‟s tranquility, and became a demigod shaping the lives of men: his single soul‟s aspiration lifted up the human race; a Power worked, but none could know from where it had come. Now the universal strengths were linked with his strength, filling earth‟s smallness with their boundless breadth he drew the energies that transform an age. He made great dreams a mould for coming things and cast his deeds like bronze to front the years immeasurable by the common look. His walk through Time overtook the entire human progress. His whole life was lonely and passed on gloriously like the sun.

-End of Canto Three

15

Canto Four The Secret Knowledge

(46) Aswapati stood on a height of consciousness that looked towards greater heights. Our early attempts towards of the Infinite are only like splendours of sunrise on a mystic verge while the glorious sun still lingers unseen without rising. What we see now is a shadow of what must take shape in the future. Our earth‟s upward seeing towards far Unknown is only a introduction of the grand climb of human soul from its flat earthly state to the discovery of a greater self and the far faint ray of an eternal Light. This world is a beginning and a base where the universal Life and the universal Mind build their framed dreams; an unborn Power must descend and build reality here. Death bound littleness is not all our existence here: our forgotten vastnesses are immortal and await discovery in our topmost selves; the breadths and depths of our being are immeasurable. The summits of the universal Nature are related to the inexpressible Secrecy, mystic, and eternal in unrealised Time and neighbours of Heaven. These highest dominions are yet sealed to our search and is too far from surface Nature‟s access and too high for our mortal lives to live, in our inner depths a forgotten relationship with those vastnesses points us towards that and a slow voice of ecstasy and prayer calls to those luminous lost immensities. Even when we fail to look into our souls or lie sleeping preoccupied in earthly consciousness even then also we have such parts that grow towards the light, yet there are luminous paths and sacred heavens and Eldorados (cities of fantastic fabulous wealth of Light and ecstasy) and (47) temples for consecration to the godhead that none can see. Still a vague memory of the same lingers in us and sometimes when our sight turns inward then the ignorant earthly veil that covers our eyes is lifted; consequently there is a short miraculous liberation from our earthly bounds. Then we leave behind these narrow limits of bounded experience that was given to us as life along with our little walks and our insufficient realisations. Our souls in their great solitary hours visit still kingdoms of indestructible Light, all-seeing highest heights of silent Power and moon-lighted oceans of intense fathomless Bliss and calm immensities of spirit space. Sometimes in the process of evolution of the Self the divine inexpressible Mystery elects a human vessel for its descent. A breath comes down from the heavenly atmosphere, a divine Presence is felt, the divine Light the only guiding principle awakes in us, a peace falls upon our bodily instruments; then the body becomes motionless like a stone monument, as calm as a stone pedestal for holding the eternal Peace. Or a revealing divine Force sweeps into us like a blaze of fire; divine knowledge breaks through making a line in its radiant seas out of some vast superior continent and Nature stirs with the power and the flame.

Sometimes a greater Personality other than our human one possesses us that yet we think to be our own or we begin to adore the Master of our souls. Then in such eventuality the small bodily ego becomes weak and falls; no more insisting on its separate self, losing its petty honour of separate birth, and makes us one with Nature and with God. In such moments when our inner lights are burnt and our life‟s dear guests i.e. desire, anger, greed, jealousy etc. are left outside, then our soul sits alone and speaks to its depths. (48) Then a wider consciousness becomes wide open; a ray of the timeless Glory descends for a while from the spiritual silences to commune with our bodily seized illumined clay and leaves upon our lives a huge white stamp. The signals of eternity appear in our forgetful field of mortal mind and revealed to our closed foreseeing eyes of trance or witnessed by a strange immaterial sense in some deep inner solitude. Consequently the truth unknown to mind is revealed, we hear what is never heard by mortal ears, we feel what earthly sense has never felt, we love what common hearts reject and are afraid of; our minds are silenced before a bright Omniscient; and a Voice calls us from the inner chambers of the soul; we feel the ecstasy of Divine touch in the golden chamber of privacies of the immortal fire. These signs are native to a greater self that lives in us unseen, only sometimes a holier influence comes and a tide of mightier waves carries our lives and our soul is absorbed by a diviner Presence; or through the earthly Coverings i.e. our body something breaks, a grace and beauty of spiritual light and the murmuring tongue of a heavenly fire bursts out. Our inner self i.e. soul whom we feel as a high stranger, actually exits and acts unseen by us as if it were not; it follows a line of everlasting birth, yet it seems to perish with its mortal frame. Assured of the truth of the future divine advent it doesn‟t count the moments and hours, remaining Eminent, patient, calm it sees the centuries pass and awaiting the slow mystery of our transformation in the sure deliberate process of world-force and the long march of the all-revealing Time. (49) It is our original source and the key of our perfect knowledge, and the silence that exists above our head, an inner voice, a living image seated in the heart, an unbarred expanse and a bottomless point, the truth of all these mysterious shows shining in the Space, it is the Reality towards which we strive, the secret greatest meaning of our existence. It is like a store of honey in the combs of God, a Light burning in a dark cloak, it is our glory of the flame of God, the golden fountain of our world‟s delight, an immortality covered in a point of land running into death and is the shape of our unborn divinity. In our depths it guards for us our fate where sleeps the eternal seed of mortal things. We always carry with us a magic key that is concealed in life‟s airtight covering. It is a burning Witness in our heart‟s temple and looks through Time and the thick and blind walls of Form; an eternal Light burns in his hidden eyes; he sees the secret inexpressible universal things and knows the goal of this unconscious world and the mystery that lies in the inmost depth of the journeying years.

But all the above divine Realities are screened, and are at a height beyond our sight‟s range and at a level of consciousness exceeding our human senses; to realise the same it needs the intuitive heart, the inward intelligence and the Power of a spiritual sight.

Otherwise to our waking mind‟s small moment‟s look our life‟s uncertain course seems as an uncertain and aimless journey determined by some Chance or endangered by some Will Power, or a Necessity without aim or cause unwillingly compelled to take birth and exist.

16 In this complex earthly field where nothing is plain or sure, our very being seems to us questionable, our life as an uncertain experiment, the soul as a light burning unsteadily that can quench at any moment in this strange ignorant world, (50) the earth we live seems as a brute mechanical incident and a net of death in which we live by chance. All we have learned here appears as a doubtful guess and our accomplishment as a step or a phase whose farther end is hidden from our sight or appears like a chance or an accidental happening of fate. We keep on moving out of the unknown to the unknown. Our transient life here on earth is ever surrounded by vague shadows of unanswered questionings; the dark Inconscient‟s sign less mystery always standup unsolved behind our Fate‟s starting line. Only in this world‟s profound darkest Night an aspiration and a seed of a perishing body and half-lighted mind uplifts its lonely prayer of conscious fire towards an Immortal Light that is for ever lost; but in return only it hears, the echo of its call, and gets the dim reply in man‟s ignorant heart but could not understand as to why it came upon earth and the reason of suffering here on earth, and God‟s approval to the riddle of life and the mystery of the Timeless soul‟s birth in Time. Along the serpentine path of the aeons the Earth-Goddess in the circled darkness of her ignorant way goes on labouring across the sands of Time. A Being is within her whom she hopes to know, a Word speaks to her heart that she cannot hear, and she always was compelled by a Fate the form of which she cannot see. In her unconscious coiled like passage in the Void she attempts to rise out of her mindless depths, and as a result she gains an insecure life and a struggling joy; a Thought that can only conceive but could not know arises slowly in her and creates the idea and the speech more familiar than its lights; a thrilling delight that is less than bliss invades her from all this worldly perishable beauty. Frightened by the sorrow that ever follows dragging at her feet, (51) and conscious of the high things that have not yet been possessed by her; she ever nurses in her sleepless breast an inward forcible drive that broke her rest and peace. She ignorant, tired and unconquerable seeks through her soul‟s struggle and trembling pain the pure perfection of her deformed nature needs, and the Godhead‟s breathe on her nature of stone and mud. She earnestly desires a faith that can survive even after defeat, the sweetness of an immortal love and the radiance of an eternal truth forever sure. A light grows in her, she assumes a voice within and learns with regard to her state and the act she has done, but with regard to herself and all of which she is the symbol is the only needed truth escapes her grasp. An indistinct murmur drives her steps of which she feels the force but cannot understand the meaning of it; a few rare intimations come near as guides in between, immense predicting flashes of lightning pierce into her brain, and sometimes in her moments of dream and meditation the truth she has missed though was within her soul but looks out on her as if it was far off. A new shape comes near which was beyond her speculation and as much as it is postponed so much so it compels her attempts and hope, yet appeared to be too great for mortal hope to dare. A vision of the Powers beyond the worlds she could see attracting her as if her lost mighty relations of the past and approached her with an alienated great luminous sight. Then she is moved towards all that she is not and stretched her arms to them who were never hers. She outstretching her arms to the unconscious Void, passionately prays to the invisible forms of Gods asking earnestly from dumb Fate and labouring Time what she most needs and what is most beyond her scope, begs for a Mind that has never been touched by illusion‟s light, a Will that expresses soul‟s deity, a Strength not forced to trip by its speed, (52) and a joy that does not drag sorrow as its shade. For these she yearns and feels them as destined for her: she claims heaven‟s privilege as her own right. The all-witnessing Gods approve her claim as fair, and is clear in a greater light: that cannot be known by the reasoning mind: our intuitions are its just claim to possess them; what our blind thoughts refuse our souls accept as they have the deeper knowledge. What is earth taken as a wild and fanciful conceptions, are in the Heaven Truth‟s winged horses whatever is impossible here on earth there in the Heaven it is divine indication of things that would take place in future. But few only can look at things beyond their present state or can cross the complex fence of sense. Whatever happens on earth and all beyond are parts of an illimitable plan and the Supreme keeps the same in his heart and knows alone. Our outward happening have carried their seed within and even our haphazard Fate that imitates Chance, and this mass of unintelligible results are like a mute graph of the truths that works unseen: the laws of the Unknown creates the known things. The incidents that shape the appearance of our lives are secret signs of quivering of a larger consciousness that rarely surprises us or vaguely felt by us, and are a result of the suppressed realities that hardly is seen in day light, they are born from the spirit‟s sun of hidden powers digging a tunnel through a sudden state of danger requiring immediate attention. But who can pierce into the secret gulf of things and learn what deep necessity of the soul determined accidental deed and consequence? Because sank in a routine of our daily acts our eyes are fixed on an external scene; we only hear the crashing sound of the wheels of Circumstance and wonder at the hidden cause of things. If we could know our spirits state within, and if we could hear the covered deity‟s voice from within yet a foreseeing Knowledge might become ours. (53) It is too rare that the secret sense that feels the shock of the invisible that the shadow of things that would take place in future falls on it in an instant, and rare is the response of the few aspirants to the mighty process of work of the cosmic Will that communicates its image to our sight, identifying the world‟s mind with ours. Whatever we see and touch and can guess through our thought remains fixed within the crowded curve of our range of sight and rarely falls on that the light of the Unknown waking in us prophet and the seer. The outward and the immediate i.e. the present are our field, and though the past is dead it is our support and background, our mind keeps the soul imprisoned and we become slaves to our acts: hence we cannot free our sight to reach the sun of the wisdom. Man is an inheritor of a brief animal mind and still a child in Nature‟s mighty hands, and lives in the sequence of the moments; he has only a little right on the changing present; his memory looks back to the shadows of a ghostly past and as he moves forward the future flees from him further; he sees only imagined garments but not the face. Armed with his limited and uncertain strength he could somehow save

17 the fruits of his work from the cruelty of the adverse chance. A struggling ignorance is his wisdom‟s companion: he waits to see the fruit of his works and to weigh the certitude of his thoughts, and knows not as to what he shall accomplish or when; he knows not whether at last he shall survive, or end like the giant animals such as mastodon and sloth the species of which no longer exists on earth and perish from the earth where he was king. He is unaware of the significance of his life and his high and splendid fate. Only the Immortals dwelling beyond the boundaries of Time and Space on their deathless heights are the masters of their lives and freed from the ties of Thoughts, (54) they are the overseers of Fate, Chance and Will and the experts of the theorems of world-need, can see the divine Idea, and the divine Might that change Time‟s course and come surrounded with the divine light from undiscovered planes, and while the world labours on with its deep blind heart, they hear the galloping hooves of the unforeseen future event that comes bearing the Superhuman Rider near, but unemotional to earth‟s clamour and frightened cry, return to the silence of the hills of God; they pass away as the lightning leaps and thunder sweeps, leaving their footprints on the wounded breast of Life. The world-creators stand above the world; and could see the world‟s mysterious source in the apparent. They do not pay their attention to the deceiving outward play, and turn not towards the moment‟s busy movements, but listen with the calm patience of the Unborn for the slow footsteps of the far Destiny coming near through the huge distances of Time, not being seen by the eyes that only sees effect and cause of things; and unheard amidst the loud and slow voice of the human plane. Paying their attention to an unseen Truth they hear a sound as of invisible prophetic wings and the voice of an unfathomable significance and mutterings that spread over the deepest depths of Matter‟s sleep.

They can hear in the heart‟s deepest hearing the murmurs lost by Life‟s uncaring ear and the prophet-speech rising in Mind‟s omniscient trance. Above the illusive mirages created by our transient hopes, behind the apparent and the outward act, behind the machine-driven Chance and uncertain and vague guesses, amid wrestle of force, the footsteps that crush, across the cries of pain and joy, victory, fight and hopelessness, on the long road that cannot see its end and moving on spiraling undetected through doubtful days they watch the Bliss for which earth‟s heart has yearned (55) and to meet that they guide the inattentive moving world. Thus the veiled Transcendent will one day mount his throne. When darkness deepness and squeezes earth‟s breast, and man‟s mortal mind is the only light in the night one shall step unseen and enter into his house with stealthy and unheard footsteps. Then a Voice ill-heard shall speak and the soul obey, a divine Power shall stealthily enter into mind‟s inner chamber, and a magic spell and sweetness open life‟s doors that were closed and beauty shall conquer this resisting world, the Truth-Light shall capture the universal Nature surprisingly; and God shall come unseen into human heart and compel it to feel the divine bliss, and the earth shall grow unexpectedly divine. In Matter the spirit‟s light shall burn, each body shall be kindled by the sacred birth, the darkest Night shall awake to the Victorious songs of the stars and the worldly life shall become a happy pilgrim march, and our will shall become a force of the Eternal‟s power, thought shall become the rays of the spiritual sun. When these changes take place only a few shall see while none others yet understand the same, while wise men talk and sleep God shall grow up; because man shall not know the coming of God till arrival of its hour and belief shall not awake till the work is done.

A consciousness ignorant of its own truth and moves here like a roving seeker of aimless lights and meets only deceptive dawns and moves here between the being‟s dark and luminous ends in a half-light that seems to be the whole: it is an intermediate state of the Supreme Reality that breaks off the wholeness of Thought and the total Power; and doubtful of its beginning and its end it either circles or stands in a vague interior space i.e. the dark and luminous end or runs upon a road that has no end; like a thought existing in a wide emptiness far from the original Dusk and the final divine Flame in some huge vacant Inconscience it lives. (56) This consciousness is as if an ill understood sentence portrays million pictures of its meaning to the Mind, lends an aim to an aimless world.

It is a guess dependant upon doubtful proofs, a message misunderstood, a thought confused and missing its aim is all that it can speak or express a split of the universal word. Leaving two giant letters of a phrase without sense i.e. leaving the first and last letter of a word i.e. Nescience and Super conscience and turns without sanction the middle letter that carries a riddled universe as if a present without future or past and repeating the same revolution‟s whirl turned on it axis in its own senseless Void. As such the meaning of the creation remains secret from us because severed from the context the history of the cosmos is read: a portion of an unearthly story, its signs look at us like an unknown script written as if screened in a foreign language or code of signs without key. It appears to this transient creature‟s eyes as a greatness of a meaningless miracle that is wasting itself so that it may last a while, it is like a river that can never find its sea of confluence and runs through all changes of life and death on an edge of Time; as a fire burning in the deepest darkness of the Night is its mighty action‟s blaze. This is our deepest need to join once more what now is disjoined, opposite and dual and remote in sovereign spheres that can never meet or remain fronting like far poles of Night and Day i.e. Matter and Spirit, Light and Shade, Pleasure and Pain, etc. We must fill the great gap we have made i.e. between God and ourselves, Spirit and Matter etc., rejoin the closed finite‟s lonely consonant with the open vowels of Infinity and connect Matter and Mind with a hyphen that is the narrow passage of our ascending soul: we must renew the secret bond that ties all the universal things and our heart should remember the Divine Idea (57) that it has lost and reconstitute the Perfect word, unite the Alpha and the Omega (beginning and the end letter of the phrase) in one sound, then shall the Spirit and Nature become one. The divine mysterious plan has two ends. The Spirit‟s uncovered and absolute potencies burn in the solitude of the thoughts of God in the white and featureless sky of the Supreme Self and in the unchanging Silence shining like gold dazzling suns veiled by the Ray that is unbearable to mortal sight, and the Spirit‟s bare and absolute potencies burn in the solitude of the thoughts of God. Those potencies burn in a rapture and a radiance and a hush that is

18 beyond the approach of the wounded hearts and denied to the Idea that looks at grief and away from the Force that cries out in its worldly pain live in the indivisible bliss of the Supreme self. Those potencies of the Spirit immaculate in self-knowledge and self-power calmly repose on the eternal Will. They only count the law of the eternal and obey him, they have no goal to reach nor any aim to fulfill.

Stubborn in their timeless purity they refuse all exchange or bribe of worship; unstirred by the cry of revolt and ignorant prayer they do not count our virtue or sin and do not lean to the voices that beg earnestly; they have no communion with error and its rule; they are the guardians of the silence of the Truth; they are the keepers of unalterable divine decree. Their source of might is a deep surrender to the Supreme, a calm identity with the Spirit is their way to know, their action is motionless like a sleep. Remaining in divine peace they regard the troubles and turbulences beneath the stars, although they are immortal yet they watch the works of Death and Chance, they are immobile and see the millenniums pass, while the long map of Fate unrolls without touching it, impartially they look on our struggle and yet without them the cosmic existence is impossible. (58) Not affected by desire, grim fate and hope they remain unperturbed in their station of imperishable might and uphold the world‟s enormous task immovably, the world‟s ignorance is enlightened by their knowledge and the world‟s yearning lasts by their lack of interest. As the heights draw our earthly lowness to climb ever upwards, as the breadths draw the smallness to adventure for the vast, their distance drives man to transcend himself. Our passion rises to meet the Eternal‟s calm, our dwarf-seeking mind yearns for the Omniscient‟s light, and our helpless hearts desires to place in a temple within the Omnipotent‟s force for worship. Consenting in the wisdom that created hell and the harsh usefulness of the death and tears, and the gradual steps of Time, they seem to have been impassive to the grief that stings the world‟s heart and the pain that tears world‟s body and life; above the worldly joy and sorrow is the walk (movement) of that greatness: they do not share the virtue that dies, being silent and pure they do not share in the evil committed by us; otherwise their strength might be marred and could no more be of saviours. Awake to the truth that dwells in God‟s extremes, and to a motion of the all-seeing Force, and the slow effect of the long uncertain years and the unexpected good from the mournful deeds, the immortal do not see as is vainly seen by us. The Supreme looks on hidden aspect of things and veiled powers, and is the knower of the law and natural limit of things. Unmoved by a transient life‟s will to act, un-irritated by the motivation of pity and fear, he makes no haste to loosen the cosmic knot and to reconcile the world‟s wounded and discordant heart. In Time he waits patiently for the advent of the hour of God. Yet a secret spiritual aid is there; while the slow Evolution‟s process goes on its spiraling circuits and Nature prepares her way through stone-like hard possibilities, a divine intervention waits sitting above. (59) In a dead rotating universe for execution of a task beyond our force we are not living here forsaken to whirl upon an accidental globe; even through the confused anarchy called Fate and through the bitterness of death and fall of our worldly lives the touch of a graceful outstretched divine Hand is felt upon our lives. That gracious hand is near us in our unnumbered bodies and births; in its strong grasp it keeps for us safe the one inevitable supreme result i.e. the crown of conscious Immortality, the godhead promised to our struggling souls when first man‟s heart dared to face death and suffered the earthly life that no will can take away nor any misfortune can change however strong it might be. The One and the Alone creator of this world is ever its lord: our errors are his steps upon the way; he works through the horrible changes of our lives, and through our hard breath of battle and labour, and our sins, sorrows and tears, his knowledge annuls our ignorance; whatever the appearance we must bear, whatever is our strong ills and present fate, when nothing we see except push and disaster, still always a mighty Guidance leads us through all.

After our service to this great and divided world is completed then the Divine bliss and oneness shall become our inborn right. For the anniversary of the Birth of the Supreme a date is fixed in the calendar of the Unknown: then our soul shall justify its zigzag birth from to life to life, shape to shape, all will come near that is now negative or far. These calm and distant Mights shall act at last. The ever-wise compassionate Brilliances immovably ready for their destined task await for the direction of the Incarnate divine voice to leap and bridge the deepest depths of Ignorance and heal the hollow yearning gulfs of Life and fill the bottomless abyss that is the universe. (60) Here in the meanwhile at the Spirit‟s opposite pole in the mystery of the deeps that God has built for his dwelling below the shadow of the Thinker‟s sight, in this compromise of stark absolute Truth with the Light that dwells near the dark end of the universal things, in the drama of pleasure and pain of the Divine Being who works here in disguise, in this long far-seeking of joy that is ever near, in the great dream of which the world is made, the gold cupola on the base of a black dragon, the conscious Force that acts in Nature‟s breast, a dark-dressed labourer in this cosmic Scheme the carrier of clay images of unborn gods, executrix of the inevitable Divine Idea hindered and enveloped by the rings of Fate, a patient trustee of slow eternal Time, discharges from hour to hour the secret charge allotted to her. The Nature‟s Force could foresee all in the impassable concealed depths the dumb intention of the unconscious gulfs and answers to a will that sees from the heights above, and the first syllable of the evolving Word beyond the conception of mind and carries a gross sense and contains the luminous infinity, and the secret knowledge of the highest victory of the vast descent of the Spirit from Beyond and the preindication of the soul‟s immense ascension in the process of evolution.

All here upon earth where each thing seems to be its lonely existence are in its reality the various figures of the sole transcendent One: they only exit under the shelter of the Supreme and his respiration is their life; an unseen Presence is the creator of this unconscious clay. The Supreme Purusha is a playmate in the mighty World Mother‟s game; he came upon this doubtful rotating globe to hide himself from her pursuit in force and form. In the Inconscient‟s sleep he is a secret consciousness; a shapeless Energy and a voiceless Word, he was here before the emergence of the five worldly elements, before there was light of mind or breathing life.

He is a companion of world Mother‟s huge cosmic illusion, (61) he turns his disguised shapes into real ones and makes the symbol

19 equal with the truth: in Time he gives a form to his timeless thoughts. He is the main substance, and the soul of things; the Mother Nature moulded her works of skill and might from his being. She keeps him covered in the magic of her mind‟s moods and from the myriad truths of the Supreme Purusha she fulfills her countless dreams. He is the Master of being and came down to her, the immortal child born in transient Time. In all things created by her and the persons‟ forms she conceives in her womb, in those forms she pursues the meditative shapes of Him in her dream; somewhere she catches his momentary sight and somewhere a gesture: the Supreme Purusha ever repeats his infinite births in them. He is the Maker of the world and the world he made, he is the divine vision and the Seer, he is himself the actor and the act, the knower and the known and the dreamer and the dream. The Supreme Purusha and the Mother Nature are Two who are One and play in many worlds; they have spoken and met in Knowledge and Ignorance and the light and darkness are their eyes‟ interchange; and our pleasure and pain are their wrestle and clasp, our deeds and hopes are intimate to their tale, they have joined secretly in our life and thought. The universe is an endless disguise because nothing here is utterly what it seems outwardly, it is a vision of Truth in dream, that is not wholly true except the dream; against the dim background of eternity an apparent object stands out significant; we only see an apparent face of it and pass without understanding its inner meaning, seeing only a part of the entire creation we take it as a whole. In this way they have made their play in this world and allotted us the role of actors. The supreme self is himself the author and actor and the scene of the drama: he moves there in the drama as the Soul (Purusha) and she as Nature. Here on earth where we have to fulfill our roles (62) without knowing where the drama‟s course shall run; our spoken sentences veil their secret meaning in their thought. The Mother Nature holds back her mighty plan from our sight: She has concealed her glory and bliss in her heart and disguised the Love and Wisdom; we can only feel a little darkened part of all her marvel and beauty. The supreme too wears here the shape of a diminished Godhead; he has forsaken his divine omnipotence on earth and foregone his calm and infinity. The Supreme Purusha has forgotten himself by knowing the Mother Nature only; to make the Mother Nature great he abandons all to her. The Lord hopes to find himself a new in her; he is the incarnate and joins his infinity‟s peace to Mother Nature‟s creative passion‟s ecstasy. The supreme lord although the possessor of earth and heavens, he leaves to the Mother Nature the management of the cosmos and watches all, and becomes Witness of her drama. In the Mother Nature‟s stage he is a supernumerary actor and as such he speaks no words or hides behind the side wings of the drama pendal. The supreme takes birth in her world and waits to act on her will, knows by guess her doubtful gesture‟s sense and the ever changing turns of her caprices, works out her meanings that she seems not to know and serve her secret purpose in the course of long Time. The Supreme Purusha worships the Mother Nature as one who is too great for him; adores her as his sovereign of desire, he surrenders to the Mother Nature as the mover of his will, as a splendour of sacrifice he consecrates his life before the Mother Nature by burning the incense of his nights and days. He is an enchanted solicitor for her love and beauty, his own bliss in her is to him his whole world; he grows through her in all his own beings Powers, and he reads by her the God‟s hidden aim in things or is a companion in her countless attendants, to be content with her and feel her near (63) takes as the most of the little she gives and all she does he adorns with his delight. A glance of the Mother Nature makes his whole day wonderful, a word from her lips with happiness passes away his time. He depends on her for all she does and for all she is: he builds his proud fortunate days on her generous gifts and like a peacock spreading it feathers towards the sun and bathes the sun light, he walks in the glory of her passing smile. He serves in a thousand ways the Mother Nature‟s royal needs, he makes all his time like a pivot around her will, he makes all things reflecting the Mother Nature‟s whims of gladness, all is their play this whole world is only he and she.

This is the winding that ties together the stars: the Two who are one are the secret of all power, and the might and right in things. The silent soul of the Supreme Purusha supports the world and Nature; his acts are Nature‟s commandment‟s registers. He happily and inertly lies beneath the feet of the Mother Nature: he spreads his breast for her cosmic dance as Shiva spreads his breast for the dance of Kali of which our lives are the quivering theatre, in this world none could bear anything except the existence of the strength of the Supreme Self, within yet none would leave the world because there exits the delight of the Supreme Self. The works and thoughts of the Supreme Purusha have been framed carefully by Nature, his being is a vast mirror of her being: inspired by her he becomes active and dynamic and speaks; his deeds obey her heart‟s unspoken demands; as if her touches shaped his soul and life, he bears the shock of the universe passively: his journey through the days is the Nature‟s sun-march; he runs upon Nature‟s roads; and her movement is the way of his movements. The supreme is a witness and observer of Nature‟s joy and sorrow and a partner in her evil and good, he has consented to her passionate means and driven by her sweet and dreadful force. (64) He sanctions all her works putting his signature; his silence is an approval to her deeds; in the execution of her drama‟s scheme, in her imagination and mood of the moment, in the march of this apparent ordinary world where all is deep and strange to the eyes that look at Nature‟s common forms as marvellous, there she through his witness sight and motion of might makes open the material of her cosmic Play, her happenings that exalt and strike the soul, her force that drives the universal things, her savior and slaying powers, her Words that speak to our hearts in her silence, that transcends the summit Word, her heights and depths to which our spirit moves, her events that weave the substance of our lives and all by which we find or lose ourselves, things sweet and bitter, magnificent and mean, and terrible and beautiful and divine. The Nature built her empire in the cosmos and the Supreme Purusha is governed by her subtle and mighty laws. His consciousness lay like a baby upon her lap, his being a field of her vast experiment, her endless space is the playground of his thoughts; she binds the shapes of Time to knowledge, the creative error of the limiting mind and the chance that wore the rigid

20 shape of fate, her sport of death, pain and Ignorance she binds to his changed and struggling immortality. His soul is a subtle atom in a universal mass of things; his being is a material for her works. Amid the death of things his spirit survives, he climbs to eternity through being‟s gaps and Nature carries him from the darkest Night to the immortal divine Light. This grand surrender of the Supreme is his gift of free-will, his pure transcendent force leans to hers. In the mystery of Nature‟s cosmic ignorance, in the unsolved enigma of her play, (65) the Supreme Purusha creature made up of perishable stuff, moves in the pattern she has moulded him, he thinks with her thoughts and with her troubles there is rise and fall in his bosom; the forms which Nature expects from him he bears, that he becomes whatever her artist will can make. Although she drives him on her fancy‟s roads, and plays with him as with her child or slave; she moves her moment‟s seeming puppet of time to freedom and Eternal‟s mastery and the immortality that stand above the world. Even in his mortal living in a body‟s house, the Supreme Purusha is an aimless traveller between birth and death, and a transient being dreams immortality here, to rule him she goads him. He takes her powers and tied her to the yoke of her own law. His head that holds human thought puts on a victory‟s crown. Tied in Nature‟s rope and bound to her unseen caprice, he studies her ways to know whether he can win over her even for an hour and she fulfills his will; he makes her his passionate moment‟s slave: as if she obeys she pretends, she follows her creature‟s lead: she was only made for him and lives only for his use. Although he conquers her even then he mostly is her slave; he is her dependent and all his means are hers; without her he is solely impotent, and still she rules him. At last he wakes to a memory of his original Self: he sees within the face of deity and saw the Godhead coming out through human mould; Mother Nature unveils her highest heights and becomes his mate. Till then he is a plaything in her game, her seeming ruler, yet the toy of her caprice, a living robot moved by her energy‟s springs, he acts as in the movement in a dream like an automaton walking in the routine ways of Fate, while driven by her whip of Force he stumbles on: his thought labours like a bullock in Time‟s fields; (66) his will which he thinks as his own is shaped in her workshop. The Supreme Self obedient to World-Nature‟s dumb control driven by his own overwhelming Power, she is the chosen partner of the Supreme in a titan-game and yet he has made her will the master of his fate, her whim and fancy are the controller of his pleasure and pain; he surrendered himself into the royal power of Nature for any blow or boon that she may choose: even what seems as suffering to our sense he feels the sweetness of her mastering touch, in all experience he feels the touch of her blissful hands; on his heart he feels the joy of her footsteps in each event and in the chance of every moment he feels the sudden joy of her arrival. Whatever Nature does looks marvellous in his sight: he takes keen delight in her, and as a swimmer in her sea, he is a tireless enjoyer of her world delight, he rejoices in her every thought and act and consents to all that she wishes; he wills to be in whatever form the Mother Nature wants him to become: the Spirit the innumerable One and Alone has left behind his lonely eternity and takes endless birth in endless Time and becomes her finite‟s multitudes in an infinite Space.

The master of existence hides in us and plays a hide-and-seek game with his own Force; in Nature‟s instruments the secret God waits. The all pervading God lives in man as in his own house and made this universe his field of play and for his works of might made it a vast gymnasium. Although he is Omniscient he accepts our darkened state, though Divine wears shapes of animal or man in this world, he is Eternal assents to this worldly Fate and Time, immortal riots with mortality. He is the Supreme All-Conscious came daringly to face danger into the Ignorance, (67) he is the All-Blissful, bore the burden of the insensible. Incarnated in a world of struggle and pain he puts on joy and sorrow like a dress and took all worldly experience as a strengthening wine. His transcendent power rules the all-sustaining Vasts, and he is the fore-knower now dwells in our subliminal depths, and he alone is a luminous individual Power.

He is the Absolute, the Perfect, and the Alone has called out of the Silence of his mute Force that was lying asleep in a formless and shapeless silence, guarding from Time by her immobile sleep the inexpressible power of his solitude. He is the Supreme Self, perfect and the Alone and entered with his silence into space and fashioned these countless persons of one self; built a million figures of his power; lives in all who lived in his Vast alone; he himself only is the Space and Time. The Unique the Perfect, the Imperishable is the One who is in us as our secret self, has assumed the disguise of our human imperfections and made this body of flesh his own house, cast his own image in our human measure that we may possibly rise to his divine measure; then alone the Creator shall recast us in a figure of divinity and impose a plan of godhead on mortal‟s mould lifting our finite minds to his infinite, and touching the moment with eternity. This transformation is earths due to heaven: a mutual debt binds man to the Supreme: we must put on his nature as he puts on our nature here; we are sons of God and must become even as he: we are his human portion here and must grow divine. Our earthly life is a paradox and the only key to this is God. (68) But in the meanwhile all here on earth is a shadow thrown by a dream and to the meditating immobile spirit within us life and he himself bears an aspect of a mythical story and the burden of a long meaningless tale. Because the key is kept hidden by the Inconscient; the Unmanifest God dwells covered beneath the threshold beyond the conception of human consciousness. A nameless Resident vesting unseen powers in Matter‟s shapes and motives beyond thought and in the risk of an unguessed consequence kept our immortal Spirit in a body covered by darkness, he is an omnipotent Influence who is unseen by the form which holds it, he sits there unfelt by it and veils his knowledge by an uncertain mind. He is a wanderer in a world created by his thoughts; he turns the light and darkness of error and truth to find a wisdom which is his own and in the high beyond. He searches for himself as if one forgets himself; seeks for an inner life as if he had lost it: as a foreign traveller loitering amid unknown scenes he journeys to a home that he

21 knows no more. He seeks for his own self‟s truth who himself is the Truth; he is the Player who became the play, he is the Thinker who became the Thought; he is the many who was the silent One. In the symbol figures of the cosmic Force and in her lively and lifeless signs and in all her complex networks of the line of events he goes on discovering the ceaseless miracle of himself till the thousand fold world‟s puzzling things are solved in the single light of his all-witnessing Soul.

This was his treaty with his mighty mate for love of her and joined to her forever to follow her in the course of Time‟s eternity amid the magic dramas of her sudden moods and her unexpected veiled Idea and the changing form of her vast caprice (69). The goal of the supreme seems to be two yet they are ever one and in this endless Time they look at each other, the Spirit and Matter are their aim and source. The Supreme Purusha is the seeker of hidden meanings in life‟s various forms, he is the discoverer and the mariner on an unlimited secret inner ocean of the great Mother‟s wide uncertain will and rude mystery of her worldly ways: he is the adventurer and the knower of the theory of the universe of this magic earth‟s vague geography. In the fixed design of the Mother Nature‟s material order where all seems to be sure and remains the same even when changed, even though the last result is left for ever unknown and life‟s shifting flow remains ever unstable, his paths are found for him by the silent fate; in the ages‟ waves of all-swallowing flood firm lands appear as stations which tempt and only remain for a while, then new horizons attract the mind‟s advance. In his voyage there comes no end to the finite‟s boundlessness, there is no last certitude in which thought can rest and there is no end of the journey for the soul‟s experience. A limit, a farness that could never wholly be reached and an unaccomplished perfection calls to him from the distant boundaries in the Unseen: it is a long beginning only.

On the flow of the stream of Time this is the sailor, the World-Matter‟s slow discoverer, who launched himself into this small gross mortal bodily birth, has learned sailing in the little seas of self, but at last dares to sail into the unfathomable seas of infinitudes, becomes a voyager upon eternity‟s seas. In his world-adventurer‟s imperfect initial start he was seen to be ignorant of his godhead‟s force and was a timid initiate of the vast design of the divine force. He is an expert captain of a fragile ship, (70) he was a trader of small and impermanent goods bought and sold, in the beginning he always sails slowly near the shore only and does not dare to face the far-off dangerous main harbours. He sails through petty costal routes and while so sailing his earnings are sent out from one port to another neighboring port (i.e. the being‟s past results of work are carried forward from life to life), being satisfied with his safe journey‟s unchanging course he never dares to sail to new and unseen ports till he gains further experience. But now he hears the sound of larger seas indicating him to sail forward. He heard the call of a widening world and of distant scenes for voyaging into a larger vision‟s horizon and to unknown peoples and shores that were not visited still. He voyaged on a merchant ship that is not his own but brought from others on payment of commission that serves the world‟s commerce in the riches of Time and he sails across the foam of a great land-locked sea to reach unknown harbour lights in distant countries and open markets for the trading of life‟s rich arts, rich bales of statuettes made by chiseling out of stones and coloured canvases and jewelled toys meant for children and perishable products of hard labour and transient decorations that are won and lost by the days. Or passing through a gate of pillar like rocks encountered on his way daring into unnamed oceans that were not yet crossed and in a journey into a dream of distances he travels to nearer unfamiliar coasts and finds a new harbour in storm-affected islands, or guided by the sure compass of his mind he plunges through a bright mist that hide the stars, steering his ship on the trade-routes of Ignorance. His ship pushes towards undiscovered shores and reaches by chance in continents that were never imagined by him: he was the seeker of the islands of the Holy souls, leaving the last lands he crosses the last seas and turns towards eternal things that was his symbol quest; there life‟s time-constructed scenes changes and the figures of life which always veils the infinity of changes. The borders of Earth recede and (71) no longer the earthly sky could circumscribe its transparent veil. Now he has crossed the limit of mortal thought and hope and thus reached the world‟s end and looks beyond; his mortal sight plunged into the Eyes that could see the eternity. Now the Time‟s traveller must discover a greater world. At last he hears a chanting of hymns from the heights and hears the far speak to him and feels the unknown grows near to him: then he crosses the boundaries of the unseen and passes over the edge of mortal sight to a new vision of himself and things. He is a spirit in an imperfect world that knows him not nor can know itself; the surface symbol of his goalless search gives deeper meanings to his inner view; his present seeking or sadhana is a seeking of darkness for light and of mortal life for immortality. In the vessel of an earthly body and crossing the narrow limit of his senses, he looks out on the magic waves of Time where mind illumines the worlds‟ darkness like a moon. There as if a dream-light covered by a subtle mist a shadow of a mysterious shore was even seen receding from far to further farness. He is a sailor on the Inconscient‟s fathomless sea, voyages through a starry world of mind on Matter‟s ship to a spiritual sun. His goal is fixed across the noise and the multitudinous cry of the world, across the enchantment of the unknowable silences, through an unknown mid-world under heavenly skies, outside all the present worldly maps beyond earth‟s longitudes and latitudes. But none knows to where he sails through unknown or on what secret message given by the great Mother he travels on. By the hidden strength of the great Mother‟s omnipotent Will, driven by her breath across life‟s struggling depth of water, (72) through the roar of the thunder or through the windless silence, or through fog and mist where nothing more is seen, he carries the sealed orders of the great Mother in his breast and he is unaware with regards to its contents. Afterwards one day opening the mysterious order of the great Mother he shall know whether he goes to a vacant port in the Unseen or he goes armed with her order to discover a new mind and body in the city of God and enshrine the immortal in his glorious house and make the finite equal with Infinity. Across the salt-waste

22 waters of the seas the oceanic stormy winds pushes his daring voyager ship to move forward and the cosmic waters dashes against him as he voyages and he hears a clamour around him and a danger and a call. In spite of that he follows in his voyage with the strength of the World Mother‟s force. He always sails through life, death and other life in these worldly oceanic waters and travels on through waking and sleep. A power is on him from her occult force that ties him to his own creation‟s fate, and the mighty Traveller can never rest and his mystic voyage can never end till the ignorant dusk is lifted from man‟s soul and the mornings of God have overtaken his night. As long as Nature lasts he too is there for it is sure that he and she are one i.e. Spirit and Nature. The Spirit keeps the Nature on his breast even when he sleeps: whoever may leave Nature but leaving her the Spirit will not depart to take rest in the Unknowable.

There is a truth to know and a work to be done; Nature‟s play is real and the Spirit always fulfils a Mystery: in the Mother‟s deep worldfancy there is a plan behind it and there is a purpose in her vast and random universal game. This she meant since the very outset of life, this constant will she covered with her game to evoke a Person in the impersonal Void, to strike earth‟s greatest roots of trance with Truth-Light, to wake a dumb self in the Inconscient depths (73) and raise a last cosmic Power from its coiled sleep which was like a snake, so that the divine eyes might look out from the earthly Time and the world manifest the Divine who is here as yet unveiled. For this the Supreme Self has left his white infinity and in this world laid a burden of flesh on the spirit so that the seed of Godhead might grow fruitful in mindless Space.

-End of Canto Four

23

Canto Five The Yoga of the King; the Yoga of the Spirit’s Freedom and Greatness

Amongst the time-born men this secret knowledge was gained first by Aswapati. Across a curtain of bright mind that hangs between our thoughts and the absolute sight, he could find near to the well like vision of the soul the hidden cave of the soul and the mysterious door and entered where the Wings of Glory was spread in the silent space of the Soul where all is forever known. Attaching no importance to his own doubt and belief, and intently eager for the single clasp of the immaculate reality he tore away the cord of mind that binds the earth-heart and threw away the burden of the yoke of Matter‟s law. Now his body‟s rules could no more bind his spirit‟s powers: when the life‟s beat had stopped and death had not entered into him; then also he dared to live even though his breath and thought were still. Thus he could enter into that magic place that only a few can even glance quickly in a flash with a hurried look lifted for a moment from the mind‟s labourious works and the poverty of Nature‟s earthly sight. There all is self-known that the Gods have learned. There in a silent and closed secret chamber the record graphs of the cosmic recorder i.e., Chitragupta, and the lists of sacred Law, and the Book of Being‟s index page and the text and summary of the Vedic truth are kept, the rhythms and meters of the stars that signify the movements of our fate: the symbol powers of number and form, the secret code of the history of the world and the Nature‟s exchange of ideas with the soul were written in the secret depths of the Life that cannot be known from the surface. (75) In the spirit‟s chamber of memories with the help of a light he could recover the luminous marginal notes dotted with light the unintelligible and hardly decipherable ambiguous scroll and rescue the introductory part and the saving clause of the dark Agreement by which all are ruled that rises from the material Nature‟s sleep to clothe the Everlasting in new shapes. Aswapati now could re-read the agreement and interpret anew its unusual symbol letters and all secret meaning of the signs, analysed its oracle (declaration of the goddess with regard to the things that would happen) and its seemingly absurd or self contradictory and puzzling phrases the terms of which are mysterious and impenetrable, the deep contraries of its truth‟s answers; and recognise as a just necessity of the hard conditions of the agreement for the mighty work of the Nature and its impossible difficult task, its law of opposition of the gods, its warring inseparable contraries that her magical skill of wisdom could only solve. Aswapati could realise that the dumb great worldMother absorbed in her cosmic trance exploiting Infinity‟s sanction to the birth of form for creation‟s joy and pain, accepts unconquerably to execute the will to know in an Inconscient world, the will to live under the reign of death, to create the thirst for rapture in the heart of flesh, and works out through the appearance of a soul by a miraculous birth in plasma and gas the mystery of God‟s agreement with the darkest Night. Once more was heard in the silent cosmic Mind the Eternal‟s promise to his labouring force persuading the worldly passion to start, and in the world of mortality the cry of birth‟s labour pain, and the opening song of the sad ending play in world Time. Out of the unreachable depths the world‟s the mysterious secrets that remain suppressed rose; Aswapati read the original books of the ruling of the world that were kept back from the world‟s view locked in the place of collection of records of historical importance of the Spirit‟s cave; (76) and saw the sanction and fiery seal of Wisdom on the dim Power‟s covered work who built in ignorance the steps of Light. In Aswapati a sleeping deity opened her immortal eyes: consequently he could see the unshaped thought in soulless forms, and knew that Matter was filled with spiritual sense in its womb, Mind could dare the study of the Unknowable and also realised that the earthly Life is a process of carrying the involved Golden Child as in a mother‟s womb. In the mind‟s blank vacancy flooding the light, and interpreting the universe anew by soul signs he could study by his inner sight the external state of the world: as a result the riddle of the world grew clear and lost its complexities. A larger gloss lighted the mighty page of the history of the creation. From that he could know that in the whims of the worldly Time a purpose is inherent; the meaning of the stumbling steps of Chance grew clear to him and Fate revealed to him a chain of all-seeing divine Will; the old dumb Space was filled with conscious wideness. He could see that the All-Knowing Supreme seated on his throne in the Void.

An immense Will and hope now possessed his heart and aspiring to bring down a greater world and to see the super human‟s form he raised his eyes to unseen spiritual heights. He could realise that the glory that flashed before his eyes has to be made his own dwelling place. That a brighter heavenlier sun soon must illuminate this body like dusky room along with its dark internal stair, the human soul that is in its infancy must crossover its early grammar of intellect and its imitation of Earth-Nature‟s art in its small nursery school mid objects meant for a lesson hardly learned, its earthly language changed to God-language, and in living symbols study Reality and must have to learn the logic of the Infinite. The great Ideal must be changed into Nature‟s common truth, the body must be illumined by the God within, the heart and mind should feel identified with the universe, (77) a conscious soul must live in a conscious world. As through a mist the highest peak is seen, the greatness of the eternal Spirit appeared, that was exiled from heaven in a divided universe amid half appearances of diviner things. These things could no more fulfill the needs of Aswapati‟s royal state anymore; the Immortal‟s glory he had achieved and denied to live like a miser of a scanty bargain made between the worldly littleness and bounded hopes in one hand and the compassionate Infinitude in the other did not accept to yield to the worldly grim destiny. The heights of consciousness that he had reached refused the lowness of our earthly state: wideness within him now discontented with his human frame, did not accept to give its poor assent to the universal Nature‟s rule and refused the harsh contract and brief-lived lease of life. In this world some beginnings are only made, and to us our Matter‟s base seems alone to be complete, that is nothing but an absolute machine without a soul. Or in this world all seems as half ideas which are quite unfit or a hurried imperfect glance of heavenly

24 things, or we smear with the evils of the earthly forms and make many guesses and perverted imitations of those heavenly types. Here in this world the disorder sorts itself into a world, a transient formation driven along a current in the void: an imitation of knowledge, an unfinished arc of a circle of power i.e. illusion, flaming of beauty into earthly shapes and the broken shadows of love‟s unity swim on the earthly waters like a broken reflection of a floating sun. A collection of unrefined savage experimental lives are joined into a perfect garland. There exists no perfect solution to our hopes; there are only blind shut doors the key of which we do not have; our thoughts always climb vainly upwards and bring an unreal Light, we are always cheated by counterfeits sold to us in life‟s market and our hearts clutch at a relinquished heavenly bliss. In this world there exists food to satisfy the hunger of the mind, there are also thrillings of our flesh but our soul‟s fire of aspiration does not burn and thus the soul‟s desire is not fulfilled. (78) Here in this world even the highest joy Time can give is only an imitation of unattained divine Bliss, and like a broken statue of divine ecstasy, a wounded happiness that can not survive and it is like a brief pleasure of mind and sense thrown by the World-Power to her body-slave or the same is as an immovable puppet of a hard earned delight in the inmost palace of Ignorance. Because all we have earned in this world soon loses its value and is like an old disvalued credit in Time‟s bank and an imperfect cheque drawn on the treasury of Inconscient. All our worldly efforts are followed by fruitlessness; dissolution waits on every creation of the cosmos: a seed of failure hides in the heart of every successful thing. Aswapati could see here the uncertainty of all the worldly things, the incertitude in man‟s confident thought and the brief living of the accomplishments of man‟s force. He could realise that man is a thinking being in an unthinking world, he is like an island in the Sea of the Unknown, a smallness trying to be great, an animal with some inborn trends of a god, his life is a story that is too unworthy of narration, his deeds in this world is a number the sum total of which is nil, his consciousness is like a torch that burns to be extinguished, his hope is like a star above his birth and death. And yet he may be a possessor of a great destiny because the eternal Spirit is his truth of life. If he wants he can re-create himself and all around him in this world and mould the world anew in which he lives: although he is ignorant yet in his original source he is the Timeless Knower and he is the Self above Nature and Fate.

His soul was freed from all that he had done. The vain clamour of his human labour was ceased, the circular wheeling of his life was abandoned; the crowded footstep of life sank in distance. (79) Now the Silence was his only companion left. Unemotionally he lived free from earthly hopes, in the inexpressible Witness Self‟s sacred place under the infinitely dim arches of the vast cathedral of his thoughts and under the heavenward spreading of invisible wings like a wandering figure he lived. He was invited from unattainable heights, disinterested to the guidance of his little sentinel Mind he dwelt in the wideness of the Eternals reign. His being now exceeded the limits of the realms of the sky of thought, his boundless mind became a neighbour to cosmic sight: now a universal Light flashed in his eyes, a golden flood flowed through his heart and brain; like a current flows from the eternal seas of Bliss, a divine Force descended down into his mortal limbs; he felt the divine invasion and the nameless joy. Attracted by the Ecstasy of the omniscient Source, he became aware of his secret omnipotent source he became a living centre of the Illimitable and widened to equate with the world‟s circumference, and by this he turned to his immense spiritual fate. Like a picture lost in a far and fading rays, abandoned in the summit on a canvas of fragmented sky the earth-nature‟s summit ranges sank below his feet: he thus climbed to meet the infinite more and more above. In the course of his ascension towards the beyond, like an arrow leaped through eternity being suddenly shot from the tense bow of Time, and as if a sun‟s ray returning to its parent sun the Immobile‟s ocean like silence witnessed his ascension. An opponent of that glory of his escape the black Inconscient swung its dragon like tail striking violently the very sleepy Infinite by its force and dragged it deep into the darkness of form: death lay beneath him like a gate of sleep. Becoming one-pointed to the perfectly pure immortal Delight, he sought for God as for a marvellous prey, (80) and mounted burning like a cone of fire. That godlike rare release is given to a few seekers only. One among many thousands who are completely engrossed in the external affairs of the world have never touched such a divine thing chosen by a secret witness Eye and driven by a pointed hand of Light across the soul‟s unmapped immensities. He is a pilgrim of the everlasting Truth, and our worldly measures cannot measure his measureless mind; he has turned from the voices of this world‟s narrow region and left the little lane of human Time. He walks in the paths of the Unseen in the silent environs of a Vaster plan, or following a bodiless Guide listens to a lonely cry in the boundless vacancy. In that higher realm the deep murmur of the cosmos falling still, he lived in the silence that existed before the world was born; his soul remained open before the timeless One. Far from the compulsion of the created things his thought and its shadowy images were disappeared from his mind, the moulds of form and person are smashed: the inexpressible Infinite took him as its own. Among the symbols of things yet to be shaped watched by the divine closed eyes and silent faces of the Unborn, Aswapati the lone forerunner of the God ward earth, journeys to meet the Incommunicable, by hearing the echo of his single steps in the eternal courts of Solitude. A nameless Marvel filled the motionless hours. His soul mingled with eternity‟s heart and bore the silence of the Infinite.

His being in a marvellous expressive movement of soul-sight, naked of its covering of humanity in a divine withdrawal from mortal thought ascended towards pathless heights beyond. (81) As in this manner his being rose beyond to meet the Supreme bare and pure a strong divine Descent sprang forcefully down on him. A Might, a Flame, a Beauty that is half-visible with immortal eyes, a intense Ecstasy, an extreme Sweetness embraced him with its stupendous limbs and entered into his nerve, heart and brain and in consequence that were thrilled and fainted with the sudden advent: his human nature was thrilled in the grasp of the Unknown. He was taken into the arms of the Eternal sovereignly pulled forcibly and coerced by a stark absolute bliss, in a moment shorter than death,

25 longer than Time, by a Power more intense than Love and happier than Heaven, in a whirlwind circuit of delight and force dragged his nature hurriedly into unimaginable depths and upborne into immeasurable heights, and thus it was torn out from its mortality and underwent a new and limitless transformation. An Omniscient knowledge without sight or thought, an inconceivable Omnipotence, a mystic Form that could contain the worlds, yet make one human breast its passionate temple, and drew him out of his lone spiritual quest into the greatness of the God‟s embrace. As abolishing the actor and the act the timeless Eye cancels the worldly time, so now his spirit glowed widened, blank and pure: his wakened mind became an empty slate to be fit for the writing of the Universal self and the Alone. All that quell here our fallen consciousness was removed from Aswapati like a forgotten load: a fire that seemed like the body of a god burned into ashes his limiting figures of the past and made a larger chamber for a new Self to live. The touch of the Eternity broke the moulds of his human sense. Now a greater Force than the earth‟s possessed his limbs, huge workings made nude his undiscovered inner cells, (82) strange energies worked in him and unseen tremendous hands have cut the triple cord of mind i.e. tamas, rajas, satwic qualities and freed the unbarred heavenly wideness of a Godhead‟s look in him. As through a dress the wearer‟s shape is seen a cosmic feeling and transcendent sight reached through forms to the hidden absolute. As an outcome his human parts were developed and heightened. Illusion lost its pride and glory and as from its failing hand measures fell the things that appeared so large looked like an atom. Now the little circle of the ego could not be completed anymore in the enormous spaces of his soul, his body now seemed to him as a shell floating on water, his mind seemed to him as a painting of many-coloured outer court of the eternal Inhabitant: his Spirit now breathed in a superhuman atmosphere. The imprisoned deity his immanent soul now broken off its magic circular fence around him. Like the sound of thunder and seas the vast barriers around his soul have now been collapsed around the huge escape Unchangeably contemporary from the beginning of the creation the circle and end of hope and toil ever drawn relentlessly around thought and act like an insurmountable wall and the fixed immovable boundaries in which we live in this world were effaced themselves beneath the steps of the Incarnate Divine. The dreadful heavenly screen above and the bottomless depth between which life and thought move forever and still forbidden to cross the dim and dread boundaries, the mute guardian darkness that is very difficult to pass empowered our wingless soul to surround the boundaries of Mind and Ignorance, protecting no more their ever duality vanished abandoning their enormous role. Gradually increasing circle of zero, which was once the embodied shape of a vain egg like circle of the creation lost its giant curve. The old thunder like stark right of rejection i.e. veto power restricting in us for doing things stood no more: the rule of the earth and Nature that were no longer used were defeated; (83) the python like coiled restricting Law could not impede the swift arisen God i.e. soul: the writings of destiny were abolished. There he was no more a small death-bound creature; no more became an easily broken form of being to be preserved from the all-devouring Immensity. The great hammer-beats of the shut up world-heart, broke-open the narrow dam that keeps us safe against the universal forces as it was not necessary. Now his soul and the universe faced as equal powers. His soul became a boundless being in an immeasurable Time and invaded Nature with its infinity; he saw his unbounded, pathless giant field.

Now all things were opened to his ever seeing eyes. The secret Nature now made open her armour like covering to him that was once under the shelter of a dreadful and over powerful half-light and was possessed in her great depths and laid bare to the burning glory of his will. The Nature‟s dangerous mysterious and secret Powers lying in its shadowy chambers that could only be opened with great difficulty by secret mystic keys having been lighted by a strange sun now confessed the arrival of a mastering Mind and bore the compulsion of the time-born sight of Aswapati. The secret strength of the Nature native to greater worlds that remains lifted above our poverty-stricken limited field of sight whose magical modes are incalculable, and whose act was immediate and fruitful and unhindered, and the invisible privilege of the partial-gods, the sure power-pattern of Nature‟s secret signs her diagrams of geometric force, the potencies of her designs filled with marvels served an earth-nursed power i.e. of Aswapati. The universal Nature‟s conscious quick machinery equipped the prophetic-passion of a seeing Mind with a concealed splendour of miracle (84) and the lightning like bareness of a free soul-force. Consequently all that once appeared as impossible could now become a natural arm of possibility and a new kingdom of supreme normalcy. An almighty occultist erects in Space an outward world of Names and Forms that baffles the sense; he weaves his hidden threads of consciousness, builds bodies of his shapeless energy, he has formed the illusive concrete images of the world out of the formless vacant Vast, the magic of formative number and design, the fixed irrational links which none can nullify, this complex knots of invisible laws; his infallible rules, his covered processes achieve unerringly an inexplicable creation where our error creates dead frames of knowledge in place of living ignorance. The mighty Nature in her mystery‟s moods separated from the Maker‟s laws creates too her field with the same majesty, her will power shaping the undetermined Vasts making a finite of infinity; she too can establish an order of her caprice, as if her insisting Excellency challenged to overtake the veiled Creator‟s cosmic secrecies. In the rapid footsteps of her caprice, amid the fall of her footsteps wonders like blossoming of flowers rise, that are surer than reason and more skillful than skill and swifter than the wings of Imagination. She by her thought and word gives new shapes to all and by the magic wand of her Mind attracts all things towards her. Mind is a mediator divinity and its powers can destroy all Nature‟s work: it can suspend or change earth‟s concrete law. It can make free from the earth‟s habit of sleepy state and can break the heavy clutch of Matter; impassive to the angry look of Death (85) it can immortalise a moment‟s work: a simple direction of mind‟s thinking force and the casual pressure of its little consent can liberate the world‟s Energy that remains mute and suppressed within the chambers of its mysterious trance: it makes the body‟s sleep as a powerful weapon, it holds still the breath and the heart beat, and

26 when the unseen is found and the impossible is done, it communicates without means the unspoken thought, it can move events by its naked silent will, it works at a distance although it does not have hands or feet. It can illumine this giant Ignorance and this dwarfish Life with a prophet-sight, inviting by prayer the boundless joy and the sting of the violent Goddess, it can arouse the demon or the god in our body, and calling the Omniscient and Omnipotent into the body, it can awake a forgotten Almightiness within. In its own empire Mind is a shining emperor, even in this rigid kingdom of our bodily Matter it can become a king. In the rising of a transitional moment by the logic of its demigod Idea and even by Matter‟s strange unconscious skill brings surprises of creation never achieved. In this world all is miracle and can be changed by miracle. Mind is the secret of Nature‟s sharp edge of might. On the margin of great subtle planes, in the kingdoms of an unhampered glory of force where Mind is the master of life and body and soul fulfills its thoughts by its own power, there also the Mother-Nature meditates with her mighty words and sight on the unseen links that joins the separated spheres.

From there she brings the Light of her mysterious kingdoms to the initiate who observes her laws: here where Aswapati stands the whole universal creation lay prone under his feet, his mind no more moulded in Matter‟s frame, over the boundary of mind and life Nature by the sudden burst of her splendid strength (86) carries the magician processes of mind and life and the formulas of their stupendous speech, till heaven and hell becomes servers to earth and the universe become the slave of mortal will. The Nature is a mediatrix with veiled and nameless gods whose unfamiliar will touches our human life; she imitating the World-Magician‟s ways works out her self-bound free-will its grooves i.e. its paths, and for the magic‟s caprices pretends a binding effect and cause. The Nature makes use of all worlds as partners of her deeds; collaborators of her mighty violence and her adventurous jump into the impossible: from every source she has gathered her cunning means, she draws elements for her impossible process of creation from the free cordial relations between the worlds; to make the unreal true or liberate secret reality she has combined a wonder weaving of an incalculable knowledge and a summary of divine invention‟s strange deeds: in her unbarred Illusive wonder land she spreads here and there her occult mightiness, in the process of working out of the Eternal technique she takes all the systems that aids her memory, the capricious sudden gushing out of the veiled inner consciousness, the rhythms of the magic of the Inconscience, the lawless freedoms of sovereign Truth, thoughts that were born in the immortal‟s world, invisible divine revelations coming out from behind the temple, warnings from the voice of skillful inner spirit, brief glances and forceful lightening like jump of force in the direction of future events, intimations and indications heard in the inner ear, the sudden strong and supreme mediation and the Superconscient causeless acts have created her balanced stable uncanny net of miracles and the queer technique of her tremendous art. This strange kingdom of Nature came into his possession. As the beloved resisting more and more to her lover, loves him more (87) so she gave her great possessions and her power and her hierarchies, compelled by her unwilling joy; she gave herself to the seer for his joy and use. The Nature freed from her lapses in deep ways recovered her aim for which she was created: she turned against the evil that she had supported, she surrendered to the service of the soul of Aswapati and the control of spiritual will her engine like tremendous anger, and her invisible means to slay; her dangerous moods and capricious force. A greater absolute ruler mastered her caprices. The Nature attacked and surprised in the fortress of her self, conquered by her own unexpected king, fulfilled in her service and relieved from the slavery she surrendered in an absolute joy of defeat, her secret wisdom and the fragments of the mystery of her omnipotence was taken away from her by force.

On the border between heaven and earth the invisible Force is the supreme monarch. She is the guardian at the gate of the earth-scene beyond; she has made paths for the epiphany of the Gods and through the paths of intuitive sight cut a long road of shining discoveries. Thus the worlds of a marvellous Unknown became nearer to Aswapati, behind her there stood an inexpressible Presence: the kingdoms of the invisible force received the mystic influences of the higher worlds of the unknown; the lion-forces of those worlds lied leaning beneath her feet, the future sleeps unknown behind the doors of those higher worlds. As he advances around his soul‟s steps hell‟s bottomless depths remained wide open and the divine peaks above invited his ascending vision: an endless climb and adventure of the divine Idea above tirelessly attracted the discoverer mind of Aswapati to rise above and countless voices entered in his enchanted ear; he found that million figures have passed him and were seen no more. This kingdom was a forefront of God‟s thousand fold house and beginning of the half-veiled Invisible. (88) It was a magical glimmering entrance quivering in a partial shadow of screened divine Light, a court yard of the mysterious traffic between the worlds and a balcony and a miraculous forefront.

Above the invisible force the great vastitudes were spreading their lights and through that all the unknown beyond looked out from its infinity: those dwelling upon an edge of hourless Time, looked out of some eternal Present and its shadows were shining with the light that was existent at the time of birth of gods, and their bodies were indicating the signs of the Bodiless, and there foreheads were glowing with the splendour of the Cosmic Soul, their forms were projected from the Unknowable and their eyes were dreaming of the Indescribable, and their faces staring into eternity. The inner life of Aswapati now could learn as to what lies behind the huge subconscient; and his life‟s little fronts now opened to the unseen Vasts beyond: life‟s depths stood now bare and its far transcendences were flamed in the transparencies of crowded divine light.

A giant world of orders was discovered here by Aswapati and the outer edge of that is a very small stuff of our material lives.

The figures of our apparent universe hides the secrets merged in the superconscient light, the letters of its glowing signs were written there in clear terms: a map of subtle signs surpassing thought was hung upon the wall of Aswapati‟s inmost mind. By its luminosity

27 illumining the world‟s concrete images into meaningful symbols, it reflected to his intuitive explanatory Mind the reflection of the eternal Mystery. The serial kingdoms of the graded Law ascending and descending between life‟s extremes plunged from the Eternal into Time, then glad of the glory of multitudinous mind and rich with life‟s adventure and delight (89) and filled with the beauty of Matter‟s shapes and colours climbed back from Time into immortal Self up a golden ladder carrying the soul fastening the Spirit‟s extremes with diamond threads. In this drop from consciousness to consciousness each depended on the invisible Inconscient‟s power, the source of its needed Ignorance and builder of the limits by which it lives. In this rising from consciousness to consciousness each lifted to their peaks to that from which it came, he the origin of all that eternally exists and the home of all that it could still become. There in an endless Calm a gradually ascending tone of a musical instrument i.e. the flute of Eternal‟s acts mounting to their peak, signs of the footsteps of the many shaped Wonderful (God), the predestined field of evolving Way, measures of the state of the growing soul, all these interpreted their mystery of existence before Aswapati‟s intuitive Mind and mediating between the highest heights and deepest depths like a bridge united the veiled married opposites i.e. earth and heaven linked creation to the Inexpressible. A last high world was seen by Aswapati where all worlds meet; in its lighted peak where neither Night nor Sleep exists, from there the Light of the supreme Trinity (Truth, Consciousness and Bliss) is born. All that our soul seeks here on earth are there self-discovered. There the finite is freed into Infinite and rose to its own eternities. There the Inconscient found its fount of consciousness, the idea and feeling that fumbles here in the worldly Ignorance could at last clutch passionately the body of the Truth, the music born in Matter‟s silences and could not reveal its meaning without being expressed by Matter‟s tongue here has had its clear meaning out of the Indescribable fathomlessness; the perfect rhythm that now only sometimes dreamed on earth pierced into the night that had concealed the Unknown and brought an answer to the torn earth‟s hungry need (90) and it gave back to earth her lost forgotten soul. Now a supreme solution ended the long deadlock where the height of mortal effort becomes vain. A harmonising Wisdom looked on life; it took the attemptive tripping tones of mind and the confused recurrence of the music of human hopes made of them a sweet and happy call; it lifted from the inner most core of pain the unuttered murmur of our lives and discovered for it an illimitable meaning. A mighty oneness is its everlasting dominating melody, caught the soul‟s faint scattered utterances that can never be understood by our rigid thoughts or heard like disconnected mutterings in sleep mid this semi-sleep and unconscious material Nature‟s breast; it joined the golden links that the mind and life had lost and showed to them their divine unity and the deep spiritual cry that exists in all the universal things protecting it from the error of divided self. All the great words that laboured to express the One and the Alone were lifted the mighty striving Words into an imperishable light and an ever-burning Revelation‟s fire and the immortality of eternal Voice. There was no more any conflict between one truth and the other; the endless chapter of their differences were narrated again in the light by an omniscient Recorder and thus they crossed through difference towards unity, mind‟s winding search lost every shade of doubt and were led to its end by an all-seeing speech that covered the first and original thought with the finality of a last phrase: the Time‟s creative mood and tense were united now to the style and arrangement of Identity. There rose from the lost musing depths of earth a hymn and a song of victory to the triune ecstasies, and a cry of the earthly moments inviting to the Immortal‟s bliss. (91) As if the stanzas of a cosmic song, a series of ascending sweet melodious sound filled with voices and faces, aspired for the God‟s light from Matter‟s depths rose up to the Spirit‟s peaks. Beyond there existed the Immortal‟s eternally stable seats, white chambers flirting and playing with Eternity and the great gates of the Alone. The deathless countries of the One appeared across the opening seas of the self. A many-miracled Consciousness now revealed the vast aim and process and unrestricted standards and a larger Nature‟s great familiar roads. Now freed from the net of earthly sense Aswapati could glimpse calm continents of powers; homelands of beauty that were ever shut to human eyes, at first halfseen through his wonderfully lighted lids that surprised his vision with joy, the aura of the sun and the ecstatic aura of the moon were stretched out before him that existed beyond our sight‟s poor mortal range. Aswapati could enter there now and stayed for a while.

Aswapati a voyager upon charted routes and confronting the viewless danger of the Unknown and adventuring across enormous realms entered into another Space and Time.

-End of Canto Five -End of Book One

28

BOOK TWO The Book of the Traveller of the Worlds

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Canto One The World-Stair (95) Aswapati travelled alone on the world-stairs on his path of spiritual seeking watched and encircled by the protection of the infinity and the grace of the Unknowable above. There all could be seen that is beyond this sphere of the mortal sight range, all could be known that the human mind could never understand; all could be done there that no mortal will can dare to do here. There a limitless movement was filled in a limitless peace. Where the inter galactic boundless expanse (Space) is a vast experiment of the soul, in an immaterial substance linked to our world in a deep oneness of the universal things in a profound existence beyond the earth, parent or related to our dreams, there arose substance linked to our world in a deep oneness of the Universal things. There arose an unending and pause less self-creation revealed the grandeurs of its Infinite: it disclosed in its venture of play a million temporary states of mind, and innumerable energies, the world-shapes that are imaginations of its Truth and the formulas of its freedom of Force. The unknown universe poured down into the Eternal‟s flood of creation a riotous delight and mirthful Ideas, and a passion and motion of everlastingness. There into the Immutable wave rose the unborn thoughts dwelt in their deathless consequence, words though now fallen voiceless but lasts immortally, acts that brought out its dumb sense from the great Silence and all the Phrases that expresses the inexpressible. The calmness of the Eternal saw in its immovable joy which its universal Power at work displayed in the stories of pain and dramas of delight the wonder and beauty of her will to exist. Here all, even pain, was the soul‟s pleasure; (96) and all experience was a single scheme and the thousand fold expression of the One and Alone. Here all came at once floating into undivided view of Aswapati; nothing could escape from his intuitive sight, and all that came near him were felt as his friends & relatives: thus he was identified with the spirit of that immensity. Superconscient images embodying in the principles of the immortal Unborn, the universal Self in its well composed divine visions alive with the touch of being‟s eternity looked at Aswapati like form-bound spiritual thoughts shaping the movements of the Inexpressible. Various form of being wearing the out-lines and shapes of the world; forms that could open the moving doors on things divine, became familiar vision of Aswapati‟s transient human sight; the real Spiritual Truth‟s symbols and the living bodies of the Bodiless became nearer to him and his daily companions. The imperishable seeing of the wide awake Mind, the scripts with which the Mind keeps contact with the invisible, gathered around him with their countless significant signs; the voices of the innumerable kingdoms of Life sent her stupendous messages to him. The heavenly hints that possess our earthly lives, the evil dreadful (ominous) imaginations dreamed by Hell that if enacted and experienced here in this world the dim capacity of our consciousness would soon cease to feel, or our mortal fragility could not bear the same for long, were settled there in their highest proportion. Those having been established there in the environment of their self-born atmosphere resumed their limitless particular tone and native power, their extreme purity and passion, their unique unavoidable single voice. The supreme sweetness and intense poetry of their beautiful or terrible delight (97) They poured deep into the ground of consciousness and filled deep into the soul with their strengthening pressure. All that could be known by thought or perceived by widest sight and all that could never be attained by thought and sight, all things that are mystic and rare, unknown and alien were now near to his heart‟s contact and felt by his spiritual sense. His self-discovery‟s radiant witnesses offering their marvel and their multitude to him crowded the widened spaces of his mind seeking entry at his nature‟s gate. These now became new portions of his personality, the images of his inner consciousness‟s greater life, the moving scenery of his large movement in time or the ornamental tissue of his sense: replaced his intimate human things and moved as close comrades of his thoughts or became his soul‟s natural surroundings. The tireless daring enterprise of the heart for delight, the endless kingdoms of this Spirit‟s bliss, like unnumbered music tones struck from one harp‟s strings; each brought to its far reaching universal state, its deepest deep feeling of the All in one, rhythmic tone of perfection that were yet unseen, its lone retreat into Truth‟s secrecies and its happy sidelight on the Infinite. All that the One and the Alone has imagined and created were filled with unending extreme delight and surprise could be had there by Aswapati; and an abundance of beauty of all difference that creates passion and the repetition of the rhythm that creates the auspicious moment for the expression of God in worldly Time was seen by Aswapati there. There the sole timeless Word that carries eternity in its lonely sound, the divine Idea that is the self-luminous key to all ideas, the integer of the Spirit‟s perfect sum that equates the unequal All to the equal One, the single sign that interprets every sign, and the perfect sign of the Supreme was only missing there.(98) There Aswapati could see a solitary immense high-circled group of worlds laid on one another that stood upright like a mountain chariot of the Gods under an impenetrable sky and separated from each other by walls of its own innerness surrounded by mystical inner walls of vigorous light. These world groups rising as if from Matter‟s support and an unseen foundation to a top so unseen, like a created sea of worlds that climbed with foaming waves like a mane (hair) on the lions neck to the Supreme ascended up towards immeasurable wideness and hoped to rise into the kingdom of the inexplicable: a hundred levels raised it to the Unknown. As climbs a many storied temple-tower built by the aspiring soul of man towards heaven to live near his dream of the Invisible, so it rose to reach the unreachable heights and disappeared in the silent Vast consciousness. As those worlds climb in the passion of its dream towards the sky bye the Call of the infinity comes to it, and its tops touches the peak of the world; mounting into great voiceless, still nesses that joins earth to invisible eternities. Amid the many systems created by the One and the Alone by his interpreting creative joy, this alone points us to our journey back to our original source out of our long self-loss in this universal Nature‟s depths; founded on earth intimately it holds in it all the kingdoms of the universe, it is a brief essence of the Vast

30 Universe. This was the only single stair for our being to reach its goal. This is a summary of the various gradual stages of ascension of our spirit in this earthly plane, its copy of the universal hierarchies refashioned in our soul‟s secret atmosphere a subtle pattern of the universe. These worlds are within, below, without and above us. Those worlds acting upon this apparent universal Nature‟s scheme awakens our earthly matter‟s heavy sleep and inspires us to think, feel, and to respond to joy; it shapes in us our diviner parts, (99) It lifts mortal mind into a greater wideness, it creates a longing of this life of flesh to unattainable aims, and unites the body‟s mortality with immortality‟s call: the function of these worlds is to take our consciousness out of our faintness of earthly Inconscience, towards a superconscient Light. If our earth were all and these worlds were not in her then there would not have been the existence of mind and life would not have delight at all: then only material forms guided by a lifeless world-force would have been the guests of the world. By the grace of this golden abundance Earth could give birth to thinking man and shall give birth to something more than man shall bear in future; this sublime scheme of our being is the cause of our birth on this earth and holds the key to our ascending fate; it calls back our conscious spirit out of our intense earthly mortality nourished in Matter‟s house (the body like a material frame). The living symbol of these conscious worlds, its screened influences and the godheads, its unthought reasonableness of Truth‟s acts arisen from the unspoken truth of the universe, have fixed our inner life‟s slow-hierarchies of movements. The steps of this world-stair are the footsteps of our soul‟s return to its native heaven from the deep adventure of our material birth and it is a ladder of rising up towards the supreme liberation and serves as steps of the ladder for Nature‟s climb to the Supreme Self. These stairs were once in the ever awakening of our sight had marked the joint downward plunge of Nature and the wide and earthward leap of godhead‟s descent. Our life on earth is a sacrifice of the Supreme. The great World-Mother by her own sacrifice has forged her soul as the body of our present state of being; accepting sorrow and unconsciousness the divinity having been separated from its own heavenly Splendours created the many-shapes of all we are. Our mortality is an idol of our soul. Our earth is a portion and only a left-over of higher worlds and her power is filled with the substance of greater worlds (100) and the immersed in the colour‟s brilliances of those worlds although became dimmed by the drowse of earth; the reappearance of its remote ancestral characteristic of higher births still continues in her, the memories of those worlds buried deep into its recollection of the lost spheres from which they fell affected her sleep. In earth‟s deep within unsatisfied forces do move; they are the partners of her greater gradually growing fate and her return towards immortality; they expressed their willingness to share its grim destiny of birth and death; they flash partial lights of the All in all God and inspire earth‟s blind laborious spirit to make a meager portray of the mighty Whole (God). Becoming her tranquil and shining friend within, accepts and sanctions her works and ever guides the earth‟s blind Power. The Purusha (Soul) in order to achieve his vast design gives his assent for meager start. Our present worldly life is only an attempt and a drawing half-done, its lines of the drawing doubt themselves of the inherent significance, and the arcs of the circle of the worlds do not join their high and intended end. Notwithstanding of that some first image of divine greatness quivers on earth and when the misleading crowded parts of earth have met the multi-aimed unity to which they are moving, then the divine Artist‟s joy shall mock at our human reason‟s rules: then here on earth the divine intention shall be seen suddenly blossoming and its last result justify the intuition‟s certain technique. A graph (a mathematically linear diagram) of many meeting worlds, a solid and union-crystal of the gods shall be witnessed on earth, then a Mind shall think behind Nature‟s mindless covering, and fill the old dumb brute Space with a Vast consciousness. Then this dim and fluid sketch of soul that is called as man shall stand out on the background of this long Time as a luminous moving idol of eternity, a little point would reveal the infinitudes. This universe is a Mysterious process. At first it‟s strange inconsistent base was laid, a void and a cipher of some secret Whole where the zero held infinity in its sum and All and Nothing were a single term without any difference and (101) an eternal negative, a mother Nought: there into its form of Nature the God-child is ever born who lives forever in the Vasts of God. Thereafter a slow opposite movement took place: a gas emitted out from some invisible hearth of Fire, these million stars were created out of its dense circles; on earth‟s new-born soil God‟s footsteps was heard. Then across the thick smoke of this earthly ignorance a Mind began to see and look at forms and fumbled for knowledge in the ignorant Night: A blind force caught in a blind stone like grip worked out its plan and created in its sleep this huge mechanical world, her aim was that the Matter might grow conscious of its soul and like a busy mid-wife the lifepower would help at the labour of the universe that carries into its womb the All. Since the eyes of the eternal turned on the earthly gulfs, its radiating clearness of a pure sight saw a shadow of he Unknowable reflected in the Inconscient‟s boundless sleep, then after creation‟s search for self it was then set in motion. In the rude primeval cosmic whirl, the spirit dreamed that the mind unknowingly flowed in the vigour of life and Matter‟s breasts fed the divine Idea. From the Absolute a marvel was born on earth, Infinity bore the shape of a finite soul and as if all oceans lived within a wandering drop, a time-made body was made the dwelling of the Illimitable. In order to live in this divine Mystery out our souls descended here upon earth.

A Seer who lives within us knows the well arranged plan concealed behind our momentary steps, he inspires our ascent to heights beyond our sight as once he had inspired us to leap into the depths of blind Inconscient earth and life. His call has now reached Aswapati the Traveller in Time. Alone in a loneliness which is unimaginable Aswapati travelled in his silent and single strength (102) bearing the burden of the world‟s desire. A formless Stillness and a nameless Light invited him. Above him in this journey there existed the white immobile Ray, the Silences of the Eternal surrounded him. For his attempt of ascension no time limit was fixed; world after world disclosed their guarded powers to him, heaven after heaven disclosed its deep ecstasies, but still the invisible Magnet drew

31 his soul to reach its end. Aswapati was a figure alone on Natureâ€&#x;s giant stair, mounted towards an end that was always unseen on the bare summit of the universe.

-End of Canto One

32

Canto Two The Kingdom of Subtle Matter (103) Aswapati while travelling on the worldly stairs came to a place separated from our vision by earth‟s solid material covering of this little outer being‟s vast support, from the mentally ungraspable field of the secret soul, came into a magical crystal clear atmosphere and found a life not subsisted by the flesh and into a Light that made visible the things that are not of material make.

Stationed in a wonder‟s hierarchy of excellent-grade, the kingdom of the subtle Matter‟s beautiful artistry arising out of a magnificenttrance and shadowy mist, mapped out in a sky of strong bright colours the magic revelation of its outward show. That world of beautiful forms and lies near to our earth, where, not perverted by our earth‟s deforming sight, all shapes are beautiful and all things exist in their true shape. In that mysteriously clear shining environment the eyes were like doors indicating a heavenlier sense, and hearing was like music and the touch a spell, and the heart drew a deeper breath of power. There our earth-nature‟s brighter sources are established: the perfect plan on which nature shapes her works, the distant results of her force that efforts painfully lay rested there in a frame work of settled fate, On earth whatever attempted vainly by Nature now or failed to achieve the intended result were there already mapped and predetermined with regard to the time and figures of her future topmost creations drawn by a will power in very richly lines. The supreme result of our earthly mind‟s plots of complex and intricate network, the riches that were not yet found or still not yet captured by our lives, do stay in that pure atmosphere without being disfigured by the stigma of our mortal thought. Whatever work began here on earth indefinitely there it has started in its perfect shape prior to it.(104) all our middle states here on earth are sketched out there in foreknown lines, and the results of our last deeds are fore-stalled there. It is like a brilliant canopy of our soul‟s descending plane, seizing the free boon of heavenlier atmosphere there, it only admits small jets of a mighty breath to our earthly atmosphere or passes a partial circuit of the same screened through golden nets; although this kingdom of subtle matter covered like a armour the ceiling of our earthly mind from immortal suns and the following in of God‟s rain, yet makes a way for passing a strange heavenly rainbow‟s splendour and the fall of bright dew that that falls by the Immortal‟s sky. It is a passage for the divine Powers that is the cause of motion of our earthly life, it is mysterious behind this grosser Nature‟s walls, it is a place made up of a delicate substance for linking Mind with Matter hidden behind the screen of dreams; all the heavenly significances comes down through it secretly as through a screen, and its inner sight upholds our outer scene. It has a finer consciousness with happier ways, it has a skill which cannot be achieved by our touch, we never feel here on earth its purity of sense; its mediation with eternal Light inspires our transient earthly attempts for achieving heavenly beauty and the perfect shape of things. In the chambers of the young divinity of power and the early play of the eternal Child the forms of Aswapati‟s mental being‟s highly flying winged thoughts bathed in a bright everlasting wonder‟s colours and soothed by the whispers of that clear atmosphere take dream-hued rest like birds on timeless trees before they dive to float on earthtime‟s seas. Whatever is apparently seen here on earth have already their lovelier shape there. On this earth whatever our hearts conceive and our brains create have come here losing their some high original beauty, and were exiled from there consenting to an earthly colour. Whatever here on earth looks charming and beautiful finds there its faultless and immortal resemblance; all that is beautiful here on earth is there divine. (105) there exists such figures that have never even been seen in dream by mortal mind: bodies are there that have no earthly semblance here, and cross the inner eye‟s illumined trance and enraptured the heart with their heavenly footstep heaven to inhabit that wonder world. All the marvels that would take place on earth in future do wander in the gulfs of that kingdom; things old and new are fashioned in those depths: in the heights of the magic kingdom of ideal sight filled with a festival of beauty. Like lovers meet in a lonely secret place in its beautiful small side rooms of great privacy Matter and soul meet in a conscious union: away from the misfortune that has not yet occurred they clasp in a deep passion and join their strength and sweetness and delight and mixing make the high and low worlds one. The spirit (the soul) a trespasser from the formless Infinite while daring to descend on earth breaking into the Inconscient‟s reign, that leaps from the world soul beyond towards the body touches the ground here. Then the soul (spirit) not yet worn earthly shapes, still wears its dress to overcome birth and death convincing the hell by its heavenly form, conscious with regard to the dignity of the covering of its immortality, descended here fit to endure here on earth the difficult stroke of Change and Time. A tissue mixed of soul‟s radiant light and Matter‟s substance of sign-holding Force and vainly imagined in our mind‟s slender sky as a mind made imaginary shadowy figure, but it gains such experiences that is impossible for our earthly bodies to feel and is more real than this gross physical frame. After the death of our body the earthly body like cloak falls and the soul‟s weight is lightened to ascend towards higher regions; refined by the touch of the finer environments of the kingdom of subtle matter it drops all the old patterned coverings of its bodily denser stuff and cancels the grip of earth‟s descending pull and bears the soul from world to higher world, (106) till it reaches the bare higher regions of the heaven of the peaks and the spirit‟s simplicity alone is left and the eternal being‟s first transparent robe becomes clear. But when the soul comes descending down to take its mortal heavy load and the hard of earthly outfit, then its return again to earth resumes that heavier earthly covering. Because long before earth‟s solid covering was made by the technique of the atomic void, a luminous envelope of self-disguise was woven round the secret spirit in the universal things. All the subtle worlds are made from those bright sheaths. This wonder world of subtle Matter with all its glowing boons of subtle vision and happiness that were safe from harm, only cares for expression and perfect form; this kingdom is fair on its peaks and its underneath planes are dangerous, its light is attracted towards the boarders of earth Nature‟s lapse, it lends beauty to

33 the terror of the gulfs, and charming eyes to the terrific Gods, and adorns with beauty the demon and the snake. Its trance imposes inconscience on earth, though it is immortal but weaves for us death‟s darkened robe and it assents for our mortality. This kingdom serves as greater Consciousness and is a vessel of its secret mastery, it is a subtle foundation of Matter‟s worlds, amid the alterable forms of the material world it is unalterable, in the various layers of its creative memory it guards the immortal type of all things that suffers death or ruin: its lowered potencies are the base of our fallen strengths; its thought is the inventor of our ignorance that concludes by logical argument, its sense gives birth to our bodies uncontrollable reactions. This is the secret breath of our inexperienced mightier force, it is the concealed sun of our brief inner sight, its excellent suggestions are a secret sources of our colourful rich imaginations that colour to common earthly things with transforming colours (107) till even earth‟s mud grows and filled with the skies‟ richness and warmth and a heavenly splendour from the sources decline after reaching the peak. The knowledge of this kingdom is the starting point of our error; its beauty bears the perverted covering of our mud-covered ugliness, from its artist good the tale of our world‟s evil starts. Above it there exists a heaven of creative truths, in the middle there exists a cosmos of harmonious dreams and below it is a great disorder of dissolving forms, plunging in our Inconscient base it lost itself. Out of its downfall on earth our denser Matter has been formed.

In this way God has plunged into the Night. Inhabited by hidden divinity this fallen world became a nurse of souls. A Being woke and lived in this meaningless void, a world-wide great Ignorance tried hard towards life and thought, a Consciousness broke forth from mindless sleep. All in this world is driven by a will that has no perception. Likewise earth became fallen, Inconscient, ineffective, compacted and inactive like Matter has sunk into lifeless and dormant sleep, lay asleep in a heavy labour of sleep forced to create by subconscient logging memory left from a happiness dead before she was born and created an unknown wonderful thing on her senseless breast. This earthly mud must grow beautiful flowers like orchid and rose, and from her blind unwilling substance must grow a beauty that belongs to happier worlds. As if a slain god left a golden trust as if a slain god left a trust of deposits of gold to a blind force and an imprisoned soul, this is the destiny left as a legacy to earth. Earth must reconstitute from her lost fraction‟s an immortal godhead‟s transient parts, from a document that is complete elsewhere rewrite in a new alphabet her doubtful title of the right to her divine Name. Her sole inheritance is only on things leftover, she carries all things in her shapeless dust. (108) Earth‟s largest energy is tied to petty forms, in the slow experimental motion of her power with only weak instruments for use that she had accepted as her nature‟s need and given to man as his stupendous workload a labour that is impossible to the gods. Here a life living hardly in the field of death is its portion that claims of immortality; his brute like half-conscious body is his means of support, his mind that is now held in the stone clutch of world‟s inconscience must have to recover a knowledge lost, a bounded spirit still wearing these countless knots of Law must now stand up as Nature‟s king.

A mighty relationship with the world is the cause of the soul‟s daringness of descent. In this imperfect world all our attempts only looks forward or looks back beyond Time‟s lustre towards the arriving future and the past to an absolute creation‟s flawless skill to its pure idea and firm imperishable shape. To seize the supreme in shapes that are transient, to establish the eternal‟s touch on things made in the worldly time is the law of all perfection here. Here on earth only a fraction of heaven‟s mode is caught in all things or else we would never have hoped for a greater life and the divine glory and ecstasy could not be had. Even in the littleness of our mortal condition, and in this prison house like our bodily form, a glittering way is bored through our gross walls of nerve and brain for the perfect Divine Flame and through it a divine Splendour presses into our self or a divine Power breaks through it, then earth‟s great dull obstruction is removed for a while, and the covering of Inconscient is lifted from our eyes and we grow as vessels of a creative might.

As an outcome the enthusiasm of divine surprise spread through our life, a stir beyond the grasp of our senses is felt within us and an overjoyed mental agony throbs in our limbs, a dream of beauty dances through the heart, (109) a thought from the eternal Mental Being comes near to us, awaking from the Infinity‟s sleep divine intimations cast from the Invisible come down to us, and symbols of That which was never yet created on earth descends down. But soon our inactive flesh made up of matter responds to that no more, then the sacred rituals of delight becomes quieted on earth, we are deprived of the inner blaze and the surge of the power are taken away from us, although a glowing form and the imagined supreme stays here astonishing the earth, yet too little of the divine epiphany meant for earth could only leave its trace. The eyes of earth can see only a half and her forces can create half of the things; earth‟s rarest works are only copies of heaven‟s art. The forms of earth hide the luminosity of a heavenly golden ingenuity, and a masterpiece of divine inspired device and rule, the forms of earth hide their natural dwelling place; and they only exhibit gestures of the un-seized marvel of self-born shapes that live forever in the Eternal‟s view. Here in this difficult and half-finished world the unconscious Powers are only labouring slowly, here exists man‟s ignorant inferring mind, and his genius born from an Inconscient soil. To imitate earth‟s copies is man‟s art. Because when man attempts hard for things that is beyond the earth, then he sees that his workman‟s tools were too rough and useless, the substance or the stuff on which he works is too raw and this with great difficulty by spending his heart‟s blood he could only construct a transient house to accommodate the divine Idea, and make the plan of a Time-made resting place for the Unborn. Our being throbs with emotion of high far memories and intends to bring down their timeless meanings here, but finds that the same is too divine that the earthly Nature‟s scheme cannot cope up, and also the eternal marvels blaze much beyond our human reach. The eternal marvels dwell in the Spirit‟s immortal atmosphere in perfect, unborn, immutable and immaculate in the spirit‟s

34 immortal shape in a world of motionless Time and without any change in the meditation of deep self-space. Only when we have climbed above our egoistic selves, (110) a linking line of the Transcendent unites us on our way to the timeless and the true; it brings to us the beginning less inevitable word, and the godlike act and the immortal thoughts. Consequently a surge of light and glory envelops our brain and the figures of eternity arrive descending down into the earthly moment‟s vanishing route. Those figures arrive as the mind‟s visitors and heart‟s guest and they adopt our mortal short-lived life for awhile or rarely seen in some liberating brief view by our vision‟s delicate conjecture. Although these are beginnings only and first attempts, yet these little radiances point out to us the secret of our birth and the concealed miracle of our destiny. What we are there beyond earth and what we shall be here on earth in future are shaped in an identity and a call. As yet the earth‟s imperfection is our range of living, our nature‟s mirror does not reflect our real self and yet the greatness still dwells in us hiding within from our view. Earth‟s doubtful future conceals our inheritance: the divine Light that is now distant from us shall one day be born here naturally on earth, the divine Strength that would visit us as our guest shall be our comrade power; the Inexpressible shall become expressible by a secret voice in us, the Imperishable shall come dazzling through our Matter‟s covering and make our mortal body as godhead‟s covering. The Supreme Self‟s greatness is our timeless source and it shall be our topmost crown of last victory in endless Time. A vast Unknown exists around and within us; in the dynamic One and alone all things of the universe are enveloped: a subtle link of union joins all life here upon earth. To this extent all creation is a single chain: here on earth we are not left alone in a closed scheme between a driving Inconscient Force and an inexplicable Absolute. Our life is a prick as in pulse in a lofty soul-range, our being looks beyond its walls of mind, (111) and communicates with greater worlds; there exists brighter earths and wider heavens than ours. There are kingdoms where the Supreme Being meditates in its own depths; it feels in its immense active inmost depth its nameless, formless, unborn mights cry for expression from the shapeless Vast: he is inexpressible and dwells beyond Ignorance and death, the portraits of its everlasting Truth looks out from a chamber of its selfabsorbed soul: as if to its inner witness gaze the Supreme Spirit holds up its reflected self and works out the power and passion of its timeless heart, the figures of its formless ecstasy, and the greatnesses of its countless might. From there comes the substance of our souls that are beyond the grasp of our senses into the marvels of our nature‟s birth, there exists the un-fallen height of all we are and the timeless fount of all we hope to become. On every plane the priestly divine Power, the initiate of inexpressible Truths dreams to reproduce and make life a part in its own native style and living language in some special quality of the perfection of the Unborn, some occult inner vision seen in the omniscient Light, some far tone of the immortal singer‟s Voice who sings the stanzas of epic poetry, some delight of all-creating Bliss and some form and plan of some inexplicable divine Beauty. There exits worlds nearer to those absolute kingdoms where the response to divine Truth is quick and sure and spirit is not hindered by its embodiment and hearts are not possessed by sharp division and torn, delight and beauty are inhabitants and love and sweetness are the law of life. There in a subtler frame a finer substance embodies the divinity of which the earth cannot but dream; its strength can overtake joy‟s running feet; (112) over passing the firm obstacles set by Time, the swift net of an intuitive embrace captures our coveted transient happiness. A Nature lifted by a larger breath yielding and submissive to the all-shaping Fire, responds to the flaming Godhead‟s casual touch: freed from our earthly inactiveness of response hears the word to which our human hearts are deaf, adopting the sight of immortal eyes, a traveller follows the spirit on the roads of form and colour of eternal beauty to its home. In this way following his joy in things as sign and guide we are drawn to the All-Wonderful beauty is his footprint showing us where he has passed, love is his heartbeats‟ rhythm in mortal breasts and happiness is the smile on his adorable face. A union of spiritual entities and an extraordinary intelligence of creative inherent God pervading all creation makes all deeply intimate: where all is in us and ourselves in all, a fourth dimension or spiritual sense of beauty reunites our souls to the wide open cosmos. An inflaming extreme delight joins the seer and the seen; the artist and the art becoming only one accomplish perfection by the magic throb and passion of their close identity. Here on earth all that we slowly join from the gathered parts or evolve by tripping long labour is there in that kingdom of subtle Matter is self-born by its eternal right.

Here on earth in us too the intuitive Fire can burn; it is an agent of Light, it remains coiled in our shut hearts, the heavenly circles is its place: descending here upon earth it can bring those heavens here. But that divine flame of intuition burns rarely here or does not burn for long, the joy it invites from those diviner heights brings only brief magnificent remembrances (113) and high lustrous visions filled with the meaning of the interpreting thoughts, but it cannot bring the absolute divine vision and delight. A screen is hung and something is still concealed to our earthly experience, else our souls being prisoner of beauty and joy here on earth forget to aspire for the Highest ascension.

In that pretty kingdom of subtle matter, situated just behind our world where the form is all, and physical gods are kings. The inspiring Light spreads in fine boundaries there; by Nature‟s grace a faultless beauty from heaven comes there and liberty is perfection‟s certainty: although the Perfect Image of the One and Alone, the word incarnate “Om”, the unalloyed spiritual ecstasy lacks there: there all is attracting supernaturalism of harmonising beauty, and activity of imaginary things of perfect line and rule. There all feel satisfied and complete in themselves, there within a limit a rich completeness is only accomplished, even in a absolute littleness wonderful things are in great quantities filled in a small space there is a lavish display of an intricate extreme delight: each rhythm is in relation to its environment, each line is perfect and sure, each object is built faultlessly only for beauty and use. There all are enchanted in their own delight. That world survives unimpaired and sure of its perfection in a heaven-pleased self-glad security; satisfied in its existence it has no need for anything more. Here does not exist the vain effort‟s broken heart, is immune from the stark test of fire and

35 free from opposition and pain, there in that world neither fear nor grief is felt. There no kindness is shown for either error or defeat, there is no place for fault, there exists no power that causes failure. Out of some blissful being this world draws atonce its formdiscoveries of the mute divine Idea and the miracle of its rhythmic thoughts and acts, its clear technique of concrete and complete lives, (114) and filled with its beautiful lifeless shapes and glory of breathing bodies like ours. Very greatly surprised by all these Aswapati‟s senses were filled with delight, he moved in a divine, yet a world of kith and kin and admired the marvellous forms of that kingdom that is so near to ours and yet they are perfect like the playthings of a god, though they bear the appearance of mortality yet they are deathless. There confined in their narrow and sole perfectness the limited ranked highest authorities stay throned; they never dreamt of what else they might have been; only in boundaries the life of this unique world is possible. In a supreme accomplishment bounded to its own plan where all was finished and no more greatness was left to be accomplished, no space was left for casting the shadow of the immeasurable, no place for the incalculable surprise, in that place becoming a prisoner of its own beauty and ecstasy, the enchanted Might went on working in a magic circle. There the spirit eclipsed itself stood behind its frame. There the blue horizon enchanted by the bright completeness of the lines of that world limited the soul; thought moved there in the easily available lights, the gross idea‟s trivial depths is its swimming range: life lives satisfied in its boundaries with the trivial happiness of the body‟s acts. Given to it as Force a bound corner of mind, and tied to the safe scantiness of her living space life did her little works, played, slept and never thought of a greater work still not done. She forgetful of her tough vast desires and the heights to which she rose her movements are fixed within a bright spiral furrow. The beautiful body of her soul is at rest, and like one who laughs in sweet and sunlit gardens filled with the trees of fruits and flowers and it swung like a child in her gold cradle of joy. The call of the regions beyond does not reach her enamoured dwelling place, she had no wings for wide and dangerous flight, (115) she had never confronted any danger either from the sky above or the gulfs below, she is unaware of any far wider scenes and never had any mighty dreams, she never yearned for the infinitudes lost by her. It is a, this beautiful work of art a perfect picture in a perfect fame could not seize the traveller Aswapati‟s will: it could only give a moment‟s fine release to him and a careless hour of his was spent in experiencing this slight bliss. Our spirit tired of the surface scene that covers our being, transcending the luminosity of the outer form; turns towards hidden powers and deeper states.

So now Aswapati looked beyond for greater light. Leaving in its rear the brilliant courtyard of the House of Days (kingdom of subtle Matter), in his soul‟s climb he left that fine material Paradise. His destiny lay beyond in a larger Space.

-End of Canto Two

36

Canto Three The Glory and the fall of Life

(116) Now after passing over the kingdom of Subtle Matter Aswapati had to travel by ascending the world-stair and an unleveled broad ascent attracted his feet to climb. In response to a greater Nature‟s worried call he crossed now the limits of his bodily (physical) Mind and entered into wide darkened disputed fields where everything was doubtful, and ever changing and uncertain, and a world of restless seeking and labour. As one who meets the Unknown, he was a questioner to whom there was none to give reply, he was always attracted to a problem that could never be solved, ever walked on an uncertain ground, and drawn on to an ever changing goal travelled through a land filled with doubts, boundaries of which were always shifting and the base was quaking. He fronted an ever unreached boundary and at each step thought that he was nearer to his destination, but it was nothing but a far retreating horizon of mirage. There the journey was such roving of countless unending paths that could not make him reach at any place of dwelling. There except a tireless and unending journey he could not find anything satisfying his heart. There life‟s manifestation was Incalculable and was like a movement of unquiet seas and like an adventurous long and daring spring of the spirit into Space, and a disquieted disturbance in the eternal Calm and an impetus and passion of the Infinite. There the life force assuming form, according to her caprice and freed from the restraint of settled forms, she has left the safety of the thing familiar and experimented. Without being horrified by the fear that roams through Time, unafraid by the pursuance of Fate and the Chance that rises suddenly, the life force always accepts disaster as a common risk;(117) impassive of suffering and disregardful of sin and fall, she wrestles with danger to discover the undiscovered expanses of the Soul. To her existence is only as a long experiment and like an uncertain step of a seeking ignorant Force that tries all truths and finds none as absolute and thus moves on unsatisfied and unsure of its goal. As the inner mind saw in the subtle vision with regard to life‟s shape it takes shape accordingly: she passed from thought to thought and form phase to phase, tortured by the coercion of her own powers or being proud she thought herself as fortunate, sometimes she thinks as a master of herself and sometimes as a toy and sometimes as a slave. A huge irrelevance was her action‟s law, and she acts as if all possibility must be exhausted, and envisages pain and bliss as equal pastimes of the heart. In ever changing thunder-hooved gallop she crosses through the race-fields of Circumstance or, swinging unsteadily, she was thrown between her heights and deeps, sometimes either uplifted or crashed on Time‟s inconstant wheel. Amid the tiresome serpentine move of barren desires sometimes she rolled about as a worm mid worms in Nature‟s mud, sometimes with Titan eminence takes the whole earth as its food, longed to convert the seven seas as robe and the stars as crown and shouting she stepped from peak to giant peak and demanding to conquer and rule all the worlds.

Then capriciously inspired with the love of Sorrow‟s face, she plunged into the pains of the depths and rolling about in the mud and in an intense embrace caught to her own misery. Then in a sorrowful conversation with her wasteful self she wrote the account of all that she had lost, or sat with grief as with an old friend. Soon a playfulness of her intense joys was lost, or she loitered tied to an inadequate joy missing the turns of fate, and life‟s goal. A field for all her numberless moods was planned where each play could be the way and the law of life but none of those could offer her a pure joy; (118) or only they left behind a indecisive comic or an intense passionate desire that brings an extreme tiredness like death. Amid her rapid moving untold diversity something remained dissatisfied, and forever the same and in the new only a picture could be seen, because every hour repeated all the past and every new shape prolonged the same unease. She is an inmost being and uncertain of its aim, she gets tired soon of too much joy and happiness, she needs the prick or a stimulation of pleasure and pain and native taste of suffering and unrest; she labours for an outcome end that she can never achieve. A distorted taste always frequents in her thirsting lips: she weeps for the grief that she invites by her own choice, she yearns for the pleasure that injured by straining in her breasts with wounds; aspiring for heaven she turns her steps towards hell. She has chosen opportunity and misfortune and risk as her playmates; she takes fate‟s dreadful swinging she has taken for her cradle and seat.

Despite her weaknesses a purity and brightness from the Timeless was her birth, a world-rapture though she had lost, yet it lingers in her eyes, her various moods are the faces of the Infinite: beauty and happiness are her native right, endless Bliss is her eternal home.

Now this Life world revealed its primeval face of joy before Aswapati, its sudden disclosure tempted the heart of grief to endure, to wish and to hope. Even during Aswapati‟s journey in the changing worlds deprived of peace, and under a sky filled with fear and sorrow and while walking on a dangerous soil, he could see the picture of a happier state of the life-force. In the sacred Space a tower constructed by an architect circling and mounting towards creation‟s tops, a height of blue sky that was not too high for easy communion between body and soul and as far as heaven, and as near as thought and hope, (119) shone faintly the kingdom of a sorrowless life. Above Aswapati in a new heavenly height other than the heavens seen by mortal eyes, it was like a canopy decorated by the carving of the gods, and a group of island of laughter and fire appeared before him like stars swam apart in a waving like sea of sky. Towered spirals, charming circles of brilliant colours and shining orbs of on accustomed joy seen floated through distance like a symbol world. Great visioned planes blissful forever in their timeless right that could not share our sorrow and suffering and labour here on earth, and could not render help on the unhappiness of our earthly life, indifferent to life‟s suffering, struggle and grief, unstained by the worlds anger, feeling of sadness and depression and hate, unperturbed and untouched looked down on us from above. Engrossed in their own beauty and satisfied of their immortal gladness they live in the certainty of their right. Plunged exclusively in their self-glory they float far apart framing in a vague bright mist, an everlasting refuge of the dream-light, and a cloud of dust of the splendours of the

37 gods, created from the meditation of the eternity. They hardly seemed to be the stuff of earthly things almost unbelievable by human faith. As through a magic television‟s glass pictured to some magnifying inner eye, they looked like pictures thrown from a far scene end were so high and cheerful that are beyond the grasp of mortal eyelids. But those hidden kingdoms of bliss are near and real to the yearning heart and near and real to the body‟s passionate thought and sense. In some to unreachable kingdom that yet we can feel, freed from the cruel tight seize of Death and Time, relieved from the search of sorrow and desire those worlds indulged in bliss forever in bright enchanted safe boundary limits they lie. (120) Before our eyes crossing a subtle vision‟s inner field as in a dream, trance and meditation as the wide rapturous landscapes were fleeting from the sight, so the figures of the perfect kingdom of life pass and left behind them a shining memory‟s trace. Imagined scenes or great eternal worlds, either seen in dream or felt by our senses, they do touch our hearts with their depths; although they seem unreal yet more real than life, happier than happiness, truer than things true, if actually these were dreams or images caught in dream the truth of these dreams proves as false our earthly vain realities. Calm heavens of immortal Light, luminous continents of extreme peace, oceans and rivers of the joy of God and griefless countries under purple suns free from grief in fixed eternal movements live there or recalled forever comes back to the yarning eyes.

This life that was once a star of this physical mind‟s far bright idea or the imagination‟s comet trail seen in dream, now took an intimate shape of reality. Consequently the gap between the truth seen in a dream and the fact witnessed on earth has been crossed, now the wonder-worlds of life were no more dreams; Aswapati‟s inner vision captured all as its own that were disclosed before him: their scenes and happenings touched his heart and eyes and engrossed with their pure beauty and bliss. A breathless summit realm whose boundaries have touched into a sky of Self and emerged towards a strange ethereal base attracted his sight. There shined the pure essence of Life‟s supreme delight. On a spiritual and occult peak only a miracle‟s high transfiguring line divided life from the formless Infinite and given shelter to Time in the eternity. Out of that formless stuff Time forges its shapes; and the Eternal‟s peace holds the cosmic act: (121) from a deep ocean of active peace the various-changing images of the World-Force have drawn the strength to exist, and its will to last. The life-force inverting the spirit‟s summit towards the life below, uses the easy freedom of the One and the Alone to cast in her every act the dreams of her fanciful change of mind, the Divine wisdom‟s inspiration steadies the careless feet of the life-force, the Eternal supports the swiftness of the life-force upon a fixed rigid base, that his timeless silent immutability can normalise the miracle of the creations of the life-force. Out of the Void‟s blind energies the eternal creating the scene of a Physical universe, with the help of his thought the life-force fixed the movements of the world and in world‟s blind acts she sees by flashes of allknowing Light of the Spirit. The unintelligible Supermind leans down at the will of the life-force to guide her force that she only feels but cannot understand, the breath of the power of the Supermind controls the restless seas of the life-force and life obeys its governing divine Idea. At the will of the life-force the adventurous experimenting Mind led by a phosphorescent all pervading god pushes its way through unknown possibilities mid chance formations of an ignorant world. Our human ignorance gradually moves towards the Truth, that the Ignorant may become all-knowing, the inborn impulses especially of animals transformed and shaped into divine thoughts, and unerring immortal sight can be housed within the thoughts and Nature can climb beyond towards God‟s identity. All reborn lords of them who will fully made himself the slave of the life Nature who is the executor of her whims: the Nature has dug canals for streaming the seas of the all powerful; and has limited the illimitable by her laws. Thus the Immortal bound himself to do the works of the lifeforce; hidden behind the veil of our earthly mortality he labour‟s at the works that the Ignorance of life-force sets for him in the worlds.

The life Nature‟s goddess like fancy has created the worlds and forms have lost their origin on heights that are unseen beyond: (122) even estranged and isolating from their timeless source disfigured, darkened, cursed and fallen, and since the fall has an unnatural joy, the life Nature doesn‟t leave anything out that serves her delight, because these fallen things too can revert to the heights beyond or here cut out the punishment of the spirit‟s fall from beyond upon earth by their own efforts and recover their lost divinity. Aswapati captured at once in an eternal vision‟s stronghold could see the pride and splendour of life force‟s high-born zones and the kingdoms that were lying in the lowest deeps. Above him there existed the dominating kingdom of the unfallen self and beneath there was the dark trance of the deepest depth, those too are opposite poles or diametrically shadowy opposites. Before darkness emerged and pain and grief were born there existed vast wideness‟s of glory of life‟s complete power and authority; all laughed in a safe immortality as an eternal childhood of the soul, where all could dare to be themselves and alone and Wisdom played in sinless purity especially as of a child with bare Freedom in Truth‟s happy sun. There existed the worlds filled with her ridiculed laugh and her dire irony, there were fields providing materials for her experience of severe labour, struggle and tears; her head was lain on the breast of Death the lover though Death was the killer of life and awhile her sleep imitated the peace of extinction. In order to test an appalling quality taste of exclusive opposites the life-force separated the God‟s light from God‟s darkness. Here on earth mixing in man‟s heart the tones and colours of the exclusive opposites have woven his being‟s changeable design and to make man‟s life like a forward wave of the stream in Time and his nature like a constant fixed mobility and his soul as a moving picture‟s changeful film and the creation and destruction like of personality. The grand creatrix with her secret touch has turned being‟s self-dream into pity and power and made a passiondrama of its mystery that is too deep to imagine.

(123) But here on earth the worlds of the life-force were lifted half-way to heaven. There exists only a Veil but not the Shadowy Wall; in forms that is not much beyond human grasp some passion of imperishable purity and a ray of the original Bliss

38 entered there breaking through the veil. If earth were pure then heaven‟s joy might have been possessed by earth. Then there could have reached in our earth‟s divinised sense and heart some natural joy‟s extreme brightness and some thrill of Super nature‟s perfection; all heavenly strengths could laugh and sport on firm roads of the earth and it would never have felt the nature‟s cruel sharp edge of pain, perfect love could have played on earth and Nature‟s would not have been tented. But the earth Nature‟s dreams were confined in Matter‟s courts and still her doors are shut to supreme things. These life-worlds could feel God‟s breath touching their tops; there some light of the Transcendent‟s border exits. Immortal figures of embodied joy were seen crossing the white aeonic silences across the wide spaces near to eternity‟s sleep. In the silence of perfect bliss pure voices that are secret and exceeding that of the mundane universe entreated Love‟s ever immaculate sweetness‟s, and inviting Love‟s honeyed touch that it might thrill the whole universe, and Love‟s blissful hands to seize on Nature‟s limbs, that its sweet violent might of union to take all beings into the clasp of saviour arms, and that by the force of his pity draw the rebel and the helpless to force on them to accept the happiness they refuse. In those worlds a chant of hymns rising to the unseen Divine, a flaming absorbing emotional piece of music of white desire attracted into the heart an immortal music and woke the sleeping ear of ecstasy. There existed a purer and fierier sense, and a burning passion that could not be held by earthly limbs; there one can draw a large unburdened spacious breath and the heart beat runs in speed from one to another rapturous beat. The voice of Time sang the Immortal‟s joy;(124) With an inspiration and emotional cry the moments came flapping the wings of joy; freed from the boundaries of the vast wideness of dream unimaginable beauty moved there in the bare sky; the song of Marvellous Birds invited from beyond to the deathless people dwelling in the borders of divine Light. There creation leaped straight from the hands of God; wonderful things and joy wandered in the ways. Existence was only a supreme delight, life was a happy laughter of the soul and the Supreme Joy was king and Supreme Love was a minister with her. The spirit‟s luminosity remains embodied there. Their life‟s opposites were either lovers or natural friends and her life-force‟s extreme ends are keen edges of harmony: the goddess of that grants privilege came there with a soft hearted purity and fed the god on her maternal breast: there none was weak and thus falsehood could not exist; ignorance was a thin shade that covers the light, imagination is the free-will of Truth, pleasure a candidate for heaven‟s fire; the intellect was Beauty‟s worshipper, strength was the slave of calm spiritual law, and power laid its head upon the breasts of Bliss. There exists inconceivable peaks of glory, self-governments of Wisdom‟s peaceful self-rule and kingdoms dependent on her ever rising sun, illumined divine kingdoms of the seeing soul there throned in the royal power of the Transcendent‟s ray. There in the kingdoms illumined by sun a vision of greatnesses, a dream of largeness‟s moved with royal pose: assemblies, and crowded senates of the gods, and the life‟s powers and forces ruled on seats of strong and solid will, high sovereignties and absolute ruling and strengths honoured and adorned with garlands of victory and irresistible armed might‟s ruled there: there all objects were great and beautiful, all beings bore a royal sign of power. (125) There sat the government of handful rulers of natural Law, proud and fears chiefs served an unique calm monarch‟s view: all the soul‟s postures bore the figure of divinity. There mastery‟s joy and the joy of servitude joined in intense mutual intimacies, the burden of Love imposed on Love‟s heart that obeys, and Love‟s body bore the burden of bliss. There everything was game of meeting of kingliness with kingliness. Because by the grace of worship the worshipper‟s bowed strength lifted nearer to the god‟s pride and bliss that his soul adores: there the ruler is one with all he rules; who serves to him with a free and equal heart, obedience is his princely training‟s school, his (coronate) crown of aristocracy and privilege, his immutable faith is his nature‟s expression of specialty, his service is a spiritual self dominance. There exits such kingdoms where Knowledge joined creative Power in her high home and made all is own: that supreme luminous Knowledge has captured all the light emitting limbs of life-force and filled with the passion of his ray till her body becomes a lucid house of it and all her soul becomes a complement of his soul. The life-force was elevated and transformed into divinity by the wisdom‟s touch, her days became a luminous sacrificial fire; like an immortal moth burns in a happy and endless fire, the life-force burned in wisdom‟s sweet violent plane of fire. Life a prisoner wedded her conqueror god. In the Wisdom‟s wide sky the life-force built her world anew; Life Nature gave to mind‟s calm movement the motor‟s speed and to thought an inspiration to live according to the soul‟s vision, and to life she gave a passion of knowledge and sight. The glory of knowledge possessed by the life-force and her ascetic might clung to the soul within it; thus the lifeforce crowned the Idea as a king in purple robes and her magical serpent scepter (ruling rod) given in the hands of Thought, made forms of the Wisdom‟s inward vision‟s rhythmic shapes and her acts the living body of his will. (126) The Wisdom‟s light of victory like a fall thunder burning with flame like a creator flash, drove on Life‟s deathless Force: a centaur‟s (half man and half horse) running in a mighty gallop bore the god of Wisdom. There the life-force sat on a throne with mind in a double majesty (royal dignity). There existed worlds of great and solemn happiness and action confirms with that of the dream, and laughter is a slightly admixture of the feeling of thought, the passions of thought waits there till it hears the near footsteps of God for the satisfaction of its desire. Worlds were there of a childlike merriment and joy; a secure youthfulness of mind and heart found a heavenly instrument in the body; kindled a golden orb of light around desire and liberated the divinised animal lying in its limbs to enjoy the dance of beauty and bliss of divine play of Love. On a luminous soil the intense life-impulse without any diminution or pause looked beyond for the divine smile, it did not know any tiresomeness and her tears were happy. There work was play and play was the only work, all heavenly work was like a game of godlike might: there life-force was a reveler of heavenly bliss and forever pure, like human bodies that ceased by faintness here on earth there life does not cease and was eternally in joyful moods: there old age has never entered and faces never bore any reflection of thought and care. There the nude god-children in their play-fields imposing a tide and laughter of immortal strength on the safety of the stars

39 ran striking the winds with their brilliance and speed in their play fields; becoming companion of storm and sun they played with the white waves of the surging seas and under their wheels crushed distance to death and demolish it, and in the battlefields of their force they wrestled. Like the suns they in their all victorious luminosity kindled heaven with the glory of their limbs and cast the same like a generous divine gift to the world. To fill an utter delight in the heart they are a fascination, as if flying the flag of Life on the roads of Space (127) they carried the pride and mastery of their attraction. Their ideas were brilliant companions of the soul; mind played with speech and cast the spears of thought and never needed the labour of human instruments of thought to know things; like other pastimes knowledge was Nature‟s recreation. They were the early innate impulse of gods child inheritors bathed with the unfolded heart‟s bright ray and inhabitants of Time forever, thrilling still with the first creation‟s bliss, pervaded all existence in their youth of soul.

Their lovely and extreme cruel and arbitrary authority and the strong compulsion of their will for joy poured smiling streams of happiness through the whole world. There flowed a breath of high secured satisfaction, in a peaceful atmosphere the days passed in a happy pose; there flowed a flood of universal love and peace. Like a song of luxury on the lips of Time there lived a supreme rule of tireless sweetness. A great and automatic regulation made the will independent there, a sunlight-bathed soul flew to bliss, there an unbounded act had its wide nesses and greatness, and the swift flaming of heart had its golden liberty. There exists no falsehood that separates soul from soul, to plunder creation from its inborn truth there comes no crookedness of thought or word; there exists everywhere sincerity and natural force. Their independence was the only rule and the highest law. These worlds either climbed are plunged in a great happiness following each other: in the kingdoms of marvellous beauty and surprise and in the fields of glory and titan power life played at ease with her immense desires. She could build there a thousand heavens unceasingly; no limit was fixed to her greatness and to her beauty and heavenly variety. The Life-force awakes with a cry and stir of numberless souls, and arisen from the breast of some deep Infinite, (128) like a new-born child expresses her feeling by smiling love and hope, sheltering the Immortal‟s power in her nature, bearing the eternal Will in her bosom, she moves without needing any other guide except her luminous heart: no fall degraded the godhead‟s steps, and no unknown Night had ever come to blind her eyes. Her each act was a perfection and a joy and there was no need for her to be encompassed by the fence everything. Given up to her rapid moods of him and the rich coloured lavished enjoyment of her mind, the starter on the way and experiencing of mighty dreams the magician builder of countless forms discovering the measures of the rhythms of God, she at her will always creates the magic of the wonder-dance of her caprice, a Dionysian (sensually wild) goddess of delight, and a Worshipper of creative ecstasy.

Aswapati saw this world of bliss and felt its call, but could not find way to enter into its environments of joy; because there was no bridge to cross over the conscious gulf. A darker atmosphere yet surrounded his soul and was tied it to an image of unquiet life.

Nevertheless of his yearning mind and intense craving sense on account of a vague experience a sad Thought, an inner vision dimmed by anxiety and sorrow and sleep was formed in him and all these seemed to him as a bright desirable dream conceived in a long distance by the heart of one who walks in the shadow of earth-pain. Even though he had once felt the clasp of the Eternal, his nature lived too near to the suffering worlds and where he stood were the entrances of darkest Night. Too closely surrounded by the world‟s worries and anxieties the dense mould in which we have been made is unable to return pure joy to joy and pure light to light. Because its severely distressed will to think and live at first woke in a mixed pain and pleasure, (129) and still it keeps intact the habit of its birth: and a extreme duality is our way of living. In the raw beginnings of this fatal world there existed neither life mind‟s play nor heart‟s desire. When earth was created in the unconscious Void there was nothing except a material scene, her young gods identified with the sea, sky and stone hankered for the release of the souls that were asleep in the universal things in a vague and lifeless state. In that uninhabited grandness, in that nude beauty, in the unheard silence mid the unheard sounds, heavy was the uncommunicated load of the Godhead in a world that had no needs, because there was none to feel or to receive. This solid coherent body of matter of the created earth that had no pulsation of sense that could not contain the vast creative passion of the Godheads: the World-Soul no more immersed in Matter‟s harmony lost its footing of peace. The Spirit in its inattentive trance searched blindly for sight, and passionate for the movements of a conscious heart, curious for speech and thought and joy and love, in the dumb insensitive circling of day and night, hungered for the yearning and meeting. With a touch breaking the trance poised inconscience, and trembling the intuitive Silence with the burden of a name, they invited the Godhead of Life-force to invade the senseless mould and to awake divinity in brute forms. A voice was heard on the mute rolling globe, and there floated an unhappy murmur in the unheard Void. Where once there was none there a being seemed to breathe: as if something shut up in the lifeless depths and denied conscious existence and deprived of joy, now turned as if asleep since endless time. Now aware of its own concealed reality, remembering its forgotten self and privilege it hankered to know, to aspire, to enjoy and to live. (130) Life force heard its call and left her inborn light to come down. On the hard curve and the flattened state of our mortal Space, here on earth too the merciful great-winged Angel over flooding from her bright magnificent plane poured down her splendour, sweetness and bliss hoping to fill a fair new world with joy. Like a goddess descending on a mortal‟s breast and fills its life with her heavenly clasp, the life-goddess bent down to make her home in transient shapes; in Matter‟s womb she threw the Immortal‟s fire, woke thought and hope in the insensible Vast, with her grace and beauty enraptured the flesh and nerve and forced delight on earth‟s lifeless frame. Earth‟s great brown body alive and appareled with trees, herbs and flowers looked smiling towards the skies and the blue responded to the blue in the sea‟s laugh; new sensible creatures filled the unseen depths, life‟s glory and swiftness ran in the beauty of the beasts, and man dared and thought and confronted the world with his soul.

40 But while this life‟s magic breath was on its way to work on earth before its gifts could reach our prisoned hearts a dark confusing Presence questioned all. The secret Will Power that covers itself with the darkness of the Night offers on the Spirit the fiery test of the flesh imposed mysterious disguise of death and pain on life. Now bound in the slow and suffering time on earth the winged and wonderful traveller inhabited here can no more remember her previous happier state, but here she had to obey the inert Inconscient‟s law that is the foundation of the insensible world where blind limits are laid on beauty, and sorrow and joy live as struggling comrades.

A dim and dreadful dumbness fell on life: and her subtle mighty spirit was abolished, her boon of child-god happiness was slain and all her glory was turned into littleness and all her (131) sweetness turned into a mutilated desire. To feed death with her works has become here life‟s grim destiny. Thus her immortality seemed to have been exclusively veiled here, the attempt of imposing consciousness on unconscious things, became an incident in an eternal death, and her being‟s existence seemed to be an imagined tale that must for ever cease. This is the evil mystery of the change of the life-force here on earth.

-End of Canto Three

41

Canto Four The Kingdoms of the Little Life (132) In the emptiness where the feet of the life-force had fallen there appeared an uncertain world trembling with fear born from that painful meeting and eclipse (obscuration of light from one heavenly body by another) and a rapid darkness and seeking stir was seen. There was a coiling of a half conscious force not yet awakened from the Inconscient‟s sleep it does not know and wanted to know regarding its privilege on things, and tied to an Ignorance driven by its inborn impulse. That half-conscious force was an inheritor of poverty and loss, troubled by memories that fled when seized, worried by the forgotten uplifting hope, it attempted with a blindness as of searching hands to fill the painful and ruinous gap in one way between earth-pain and in the other the bliss from which Life fell. It was such a world that seeks constantly for something missed, runs seeking for the joy that earth has failed to keep. Solely near to our gates in this inactive material globe for its inability to live in peace, it had its unsatisfied disturbance, it had joined its hunger to the hunger of the earth, and has given the law of longings to our lives, and made our spirit‟s need a bottomless gulf. As an outcome there entered an Influence in our mortal night and day and a shadow solely covered the time-born race; in the rapid stream where springs a blind pulse of the heart and wakes nerve-beat of the feeling in a sense that divides Matter‟s sleep from conscious Mind, there arose a call that knew not why it came. A power beyond the scope of earth has touched the earth; and as a result the peaceful state of rest that was possible on earth became impossible; in man‟s heart a formless great desire and a cry in his blood hankered for happier things rose up: (133) else he could have wandered at will on a free sunlit soil with the childlike pain-forgetting mind of beasts or could live happily and move less like flowers and trees. The Mighty power that came upon earth is suffer and aspire. Thus the laugh of the infant life that was resonant through time is now silenced: Man‟s natural joy of life is thus clouded with darkness and now sorrow became his nurse of destiny. Man left behind the animal‟s unthinking happiness, the burden of anxiety and care fell on his daily routine: he has risen to greatness but a discontentment pursued him and now he is awake to the Invisible. He is an unsatisfied seeker and has now to learn everything: now his life‟s surface acts he has exhausted and his being‟s hidden kingdoms remain yet to be discovered. He becomes a mental being, and a conscious being; in his brittle bodily house he began to grow as Nature‟s lord. In him Matter wakes up from its long darkened trance and through the earth feels the Godhead drawing near to it. Life is a blind Power that knows no more its aim, it is a hungry energy of Will, constantly in motion, life sowed her seed in the human body‟s idle frame; it woke a blind Force from happy drowse compelling it to have walk with the feeling of sense and seek and feel. In the enormous labour pain of the Void the Lifeforce with her dreams waking the vast routine and the dead like coil of a sleeping universe, the mighty prisoner of the world strove hard for release. The life-force inspired by her intense desire woke the inactive cells; she kindled in the heart a fire of passion and hunger, amid the deep calm of insensible things her great voice of labour, prayer and struggle arose. In a mute world she was given a blind consciousness and a guideless sense as her path; estranged from thought she could no nothing but the entire unknown was left for her to feel and clasp. (134) in obedience to the inspiration of the unborn things towards birth she broke forth out of the covering of her insensible life: in her substance of thoughtless and wordless soul-strength that cannot express her inner thoughts there awoke a blind necessity to gain the capacity to know. The chain with which she was tied she made it her instrument; her native impulse is the embryo of Truth and effort, and growth and the ignorance that tries hard. Awakening desire and hope on the body, and imposing consciousness on inconscience she brought into the bodily Matter‟s dull retentiveness her painful claim to her lost all powerful right, her tireless search, her distressed uneasy heart and her wandering unsure steps and her anxiety for change. She is a worshiper of a nameless joy; offers her secret rites to the dim dwarf gods in her darkened temple of delight. But her unending sacrifice was vain, because the priest was an ignorant magician who only could make meaningless changes in the plan of the altar and casts blind hopes into a powerless sacrificial fire. A burden of momentary gains weighs down her steps and she can scarcely advance further under that load; but at the call of the moments to her she travels on passing from one thought to another and from one desire to another; and a deepened need is her greater progress. Dissatisfied in Matter she turns to Mind; conquers earth her field, then claims joy of the heavens. Ruthlessly the hindering ages breaking her works pass her labour, but yet no greater transforming divine light came down to her and no revealing joy touched her fall. Only at times a vague light justifying the twofold beneficent care of God breaks mind‟s sky that makes of darkness a path to unknown dawns or gives a vague indication of some diviner state. (135) In a complete lack of knowledge her great task began, in that state of Ignorance she pursues her unfinished work, though she searches for knowledge but could not see Wisdom‟s face. Ascending slowly to the beyond with unconscious steps the life force like an abandoned child of the Gods wanders here on earth like a child-soul left near the gates of Hell seeking blindly through fog in search of Paradise.

Aswapati realised that he must have to follow the steps of life-force in this slow ascension even form her faint and dim subconscious start: so only the earth‟s last liberation can be achieved. Because so only he could know the mysterious cause of all that holds us back from our journey beyond and bewilders God in the way of release of the imprisoned soul. So now along the swift paths of fall through dangerous gates Aswapati came by chance into a grey darkness filled with inborn impulses from mindless gulfs that were thrust forward to wear a form and possess a place. There life was intimate with Death and Night and ate Death‟s food that she might live awhile; thus she becomes their inmate and adopted orphan and helpless child. Accepting subconscious as a temporary inhabitant

42 in the dumb darkness‟ kingdom she was the Life-force hoped no more. There far away from Truth and shining mind Aswapati saw the original seat and the separate birth of the deposed, disfigured and suffering life Power. There he saw an unfortunate face of falsity exists only as a Truth, that was disaffirmation of our divine birth, with impassive beauty and light, there the life force without the help of disguise went on parading and displaying her brute like naked disgrace; she was a recognised and accepted authentic image of her outcast force exiled from heaven and hope, even though she was fallen, yet she always felt glory in the state of her baseness though once her strength was half-divine laid down in a show up humility or fear, the unlovely condition of misery and foulness of her beast desires (136)and her vain face of ignorance and the naked body of her poverty was there. At first life-force came here upon earth moving with body on hand and knees out of her cabin of mud where she was lain Inconscient, inactive and voiceless: its narrowness and numbness kept her mute still, a darkness surrounded her still that has not been effaced by divine Light. There no liberating touch from beyond has yet come near: the upward look was unknown to her sight, the godhead‟s fearless movement was forgotten; her glory and felicity was vanished, her adventurous journey in the dangerous fields of Time has been left aside, in order to live and bear she plunged in the mire and lived the life with great difficulty.

In a wide mist of seeking Space and a ray in fewer regions that appeared to be nameless, bodiless and homeless swallowed in vague mists, a covered blind and formless mind prayed for a body for the manifestation of its soul. But as a result of its prayer resulted and in a denied and it sought blindly after thought. But as yet it did not have any power of thinking, it was difficult for it to live, and thus it manifested in a queer and a world of dwarfish beings where this unhappy magic power had its source. On dim borders at the place of meeting of Life and Matter Aswapati wandered amide things half-seen and half-guessed pursued by beginnings that was never tackled and results that ever lost. The life was born there but died before it could survive. There was no solid ground to stay and no constant movement; there existed only some flame of mindless Will that had power. As if in a struggle of the Void to exist, there Aswapati remained dim to himself, half-felt, unnoticed. There in strange spheres where living by sense was all but there existed no domineering thought nor cause nor rule, rule existed only in an immature child-heart cried for toys of bliss, there mind‟s light was like a flickering and disordered infant light only existed, and haphazard shapeless energies drove for form and took each fire-fly as a guiding sun. (137) This exclusive blind force could put no steps using thought; though yearning it followed the way of the darkness. It was an Inconscient Power searched blindly for consciousness, Matter stricken by Matter grown to a sensual light, blind contacts, and slow reaction‟s stir beat out sparks of impulses natural to them from a covered subliminal bed, there crowded sensations were the dumb alternate for thought, by Nature‟s wakening blows sense‟s understanding answered but there remain still a mechanical response, and a sudden pull & push, a start in Nature‟s dream, and rude unrefined impulses ran struggling without caring for any movement except their own, and darkness clashed with other darker darkness‟s than themselves, all were free in a world of permanent lawlessness. There the need to exist and the inborn impulse to survive possessed the intense uncertain moment‟s will and a blind desire needed its fulfillment.

There to live in the storms of Nature was the only law, there force wrestled with force but without any result: the only gain was an ignorant blow of the clutch and push, and feelings and inborn impulses that knew not their source, sense-pleasures and sense-pains were soon caught, and soon lost, and the brute motion of unthinking lives were seen. It was a vain unnecessary world whose will for existence bring poor and sad results and meaningless suffering and forgotten uneasiness. There the labour to become did not seem to be worthwhile.

But Aswapati‟s soul‟s wakened eye did not judge like this. As a solitary witness star shines and burns apart as Light‟s lonely sentry, in the slow and full and abounding in a mindless Night, Aswapati a single thinker in an aimless world waiting for the advent of some tremendous dawn of God could see the purpose in the works of Time. Even in that aimlessness filled with (138) a magic will and in its womb and divine transformation work was accomplished. There the first coiling movement of the cosmic Serpent Force (the universal Kundalini Power) uncoiled itself from the mystic ring of Matter‟s trance, raised its head in the warm atmosphere of life. Till now it could not renounce the Night‟s stark sleep or hold mind‟s wonder particle and its fancies, could not hold its jeweled hood on the crown of soul or stand erect in the light of spirit‟s sun. Till now there were only seen an viciousness and force, through the lust‟s fertile mud and a fate sense the secret crawl of consciousness towards light, and beneath the body‟s physical covering of thickened self a slow passion working in the dark, a muddy yeast of Nature‟s curious change, a ferment (a changing substance) of the soul‟s creation out of mud. A heavenly process wore this grey disguise, a fallen ignorance in its darkest night laboured to achieve its dumb rude work, a disguise of the Inconscient‟s need toiled to release the glory of God in Nature‟s mud. Aswapati‟s orbs of sight embodied by spiritual forms could penetrate through the grey luminous mist of that region; and discover the secret of its siftings flow of flood that could make alive the mute and solid cells and lead the thought and longing of the flesh and the keen desire and hunger of its will. This too Aswapati pursued along the flow of its hidden stream and traced its acts and reached its miraculous source. In this sweet and bitter riddle of that life he could observe that the creator of this game of light and darkness an inscrutable and incoercible mysterious Presence asking from the body the soul‟s intimacies and by the intense vibration of a nerve that links the life‟s mechanic throbs to light and love. The Mystic presence summons the soul‟s sleeping memories that were lying beneath Time‟s foam from the subconscient depths;

43 (139) those sleeping memories forgetting of their flame of happy truth, arriving with heavy eyes that could see the great difficulties, they come disguised as feelings and desires like weeds floated on the sea of the surface consciousness awhile and rise and sink. Though the motions of life force were impure and fallen, a heaven-truth always deeply contemplates in life‟s deeps; in her darkened obscurest parts burns the fire of heaven‟s truth. Still now a touch of God‟s extreme delight in creations acts a lost remembrance of felicity remains hiding in the dumb roots of death and birth, and the world‟s senseless beauty reflects God‟s delight. The smiles of that extreme delight of God is secret everywhere; it flows in the wind‟s breath and in the spreading of tree‟s sap and its coloured brilliance blooms in leaves and flowers. When first life manifested through the medium of plant in its half-sleep, then it felt and suffered but could not move or cry, thereafter in beast and in winged bird and a thinking man‟s life turned the heart‟s rhythm its music‟s beat; it forced the unconscious tissues to awake and yearn for happiness and earn the sudden sharp pain, and thrill with pleasure and laughter of brief delight, and trembled with pain and desire for the over whelming feeling of joy. The claim of life was dogmatic, voiceless was its throat, was misunderstood by all, too far from the light, too near to the depths of our inner being, it took birth strangely in the stream of Time from the eternal Bliss, it presses heavyweight on the depths of the heart and on the vibrating nerve; its sharp self-seeking tears out our consciousness; and its sting is the cause of our pain and pleasure; but its natural impulse and blindness for its real joy and the soul‟s desire leaps out towards transient things. Life Nature‟s all yearning push that comes like waves through the blood and the quickened sense is irresistible and an infinite ecstasy is her chief cause. This infiniteness in us turn into the shape of finite loves and passionate desire, and creates in us the will to conquer and possess, to seize and keep, (140) to enlarge life‟s limits and its scope and its pleasure‟s range, to fight in war and overcome and make one‟s own, the hope to mix one‟s joy with others‟ joy, a yearning to possess and be possessed, to enjoy and be enjoyed and to feel and to live. Here on earth to exist is its primitive brief attempt to survive and the rapid end of its momentary delight whose mark of failure was always seen in all ignorant life. Still inflicting its habits on the cells its shadowy and inauspicious evil start pursues Ghostlike all that we dream and do. Though on earth we do have firm and established lives, a working of habit or a sense of law, and a steady recurring flow of life‟s force exists yet the roots of its will are ever the same; these passions of life are the stuff of which we are made. This was the first sound of expression of the awaking world. These passions of the life –force still cling around us and tie the god firmly. Even when reason is born and soul takes form it lasts, in beast and reptile and in thinking man, and is the source of all their life. This too was needed for breathing and life‟s epiphany. Thus the spirit in a limited ignorant world must rescue its prisoned consciousness by forcing out in little holes in quivering points from the Inconscient‟s shut infinitude. Then slowly the consciousness grows and looks at the Light beyond. This life Nature lives tied to its origin, a clutch of lower force is on her still, the life‟s innate impulses leap out of unconscious depths; here life is a neighbour to lifeless Naught. Under this law an ignorant world was created.

In the riddle of the darkened Vasts, in the passion and self-loss of the Infinite when the whole universe was plunged in the Void that denied the existence, the Non-Being‟s night could never have been saved (141) if then Being had not plunged into the dark crucified with its triple mystic cross. Inviting by Prayer the timeless truth into the world-time Divine Bliss changed into sorrow, Knowledge changed into ignorance, and on earth God‟s force falling into a state of child‟s helplessness can only bring down heaven on earth by their sacrifice. A state of opposition has established as a base of life: the eternal, the divine Reality encountered themselves with their own opposition; having became the Void and Conscious-Force became Ignorance and a walk of blind Energy and Divine Ecstasy bore the of world-pain. In a mysterious Supreme divine law of management the Mother Wisdom who prepares its far-off motives and she planned to start her slow aeonic game. A half-manifested Nature and hidden Soul‟s search with bandaged eyes and wrestle and uncertain clasp, a game of hide-and-seek in faint-lighted rooms, a play of love, hate, fear and hope and the hard and heavy mad dance of these self-born twins continues always in mind‟s nursery school. At end the struggling Nature Force can be able to come out and meet its voiceless Being in wider fields; then they can see, speak and clasp breast to breast, now seeing nearer the playmate‟s face in a larger consciousness and a purer light; these Two shall embrace and strive to know each other. Even in these formless coiling of forces Aswapati could feel Matter‟s response to the soul‟s infant stir. He could see the mighty Spirit concealed in the universal Nature, saw the weak birth of a tremendous Force, followed behind the mystery of the Godhead‟s indefinite footsteps and heard the faint tones of a great unborn Mahasaraswati.

Thereafter a waking Life‟s fierier breath that arose from the dim depths of creation (142) strange creations of a thinking sense, and existences that are half-real and half-dream appeared. There exists a life force that had no hope of survival: these beings were born and perished without any trace, there events were a formless drama‟s parts and actions driven by the will of a blind creature.

A seeking Power found out a way to take form, various patterns of love, joy and pain, symbol figures were made for the moods of Life.

A desire in the pleasure of life of the insect flapped wings in trying to fly and move with the body or crawled close to the ground or hands and knees, and Nature‟s surface forms bathed in the warmth of sunlight and thrilled, an extreme delight of reptiles, pain stricken python (large tropical snake) crawled in the low-lying watery ground and mud licked the sunlight. Huge armoured strengths shook a weak and shaking ground, giant mighty creatures with dwarfish brain and dwarf tribes imposed their little life‟s flow on earth. In a dwarf figured humanity Nature now begin the extreme application and the motive point of her design‟s caprice, and the luminous result of her half-conscious climb on the ladder‟s rungs between her loftiness and absurdity from the very small towards the large heavy shapes, a

44 fine and delicate shapes to a subtle poise of body and soul that is hard to describe are notice and to a tidiness. Around Aswapati in the moment‟s beat of Time brainy littleness the kingdoms of animal life arose where deed is all and mind is still half-born and the heart obeys a dumb unseen control. The Force that works by the light of Ignorance filling the conscious creatures crowding in her worldscheme; but they were living only an external life without any inner consciousness, they were only respondent to touches and surfaces and were alive to the sting of necessity that drove their lives. There lived a way of body that did not know its own soul within, and yearned and had become a slave of wrath, joy and grief; (143) as if a stranger or enemy present at its door there was a mind that met the physical world: its thoughts were pressed squeezed by the shocks of sense; it could not capture the spirit immanent in the form, and could not enter into the heart of things seen; could not see the power that existed behind the act, it could not study the hidden motive of universal things, nor attempted to discover the meaning of all. There were beings with human form; they live plunged in the passion of the outward scene, but could not know who they were and why they lived: they remained satisfied in respiring, feeling, sensing and acting, life for them had no aim except Nature‟s joy and the urge and delight of outer things; identified with the spirit‟s outward shell (the body) they worked only for satisfaction of body‟s wants and no more longed for anything. From their inner depths the hidden witness soul could not fix his inward sight upon himself nor turned from within to find the author of the plot of the drama of life, and only saw the drama and the stage. There was no contemplative stress of deeper meaning and no heavy burden of thought had come: mind looked on Nature with eyes that were unaware and liked very much for the boons of life force and was afraid of her Natures strokes as that of a titan. Mind never was in deep thought of the magic of Nature‟s laws and never thirsted for the secret founts of Truth, but made a register of facts that are too numerous and sewn experiences of the senses on a bright thread: searched for food and returns moving here and there and breathed only the winds or like an inert Matter lies in the sunshine and soft air in indolence: it sought the monopolising contacts of the world but that was only to feed its surface sense with bliss. These creatures could only feel life‟s shiver from the outward touch of things, but could not feel the touch of soul that lies behind. Only to guard their bodily self from Nature‟s harm, and to enjoy and to survive was all their care. (144) The narrow horizon of their lives was filled with such things and creatures that only could help and hinder: the world‟s values depended on their little egoistic self. Remaining alone and shut up in the vast unknown, to save their small lives from surrounding Death they made a very small circle of defense against the surrounding and blockading of the huge universe: they made the world their prey and became its prey, but never dreamed of victory and freedom. By obeying World-Power‟s hints and strong prohibitions they could only draw a very little part from her rich store; there existed no conscious code of living and strong life plan: the ways of thinking of a trivial group made firm their behaviour‟s law that was transmitted from generation and generation. They except knowing about a phantom shadow within were ignorant of their soul, tied to a mechanism of unchanging lives and to a usual dull sense and feeling‟s stir they turn round in the spiral furrows of animal desire. Around them within the worlds of stone fencing they worked and battled, with the shelter of an organized group of ego self they did a small good or commit a terrible wrong and cause a dire pain on conscious being‟s lives and thought that they did no harm. By plundering and destroying the happy peaceful residents‟ homes they remained zealous, are satisfied with slaughter, plunder, rape and fire committed by them, and by that they make the human selves their helpless prey and drove them as a line of prisoners who were led to lifelong misery, or they made torture a grand show and merrymaking, they laughed ironically or thrilled by the painful emotion of their wounded victims, admiring themselves as titans and gods, they sang proudly of their high and glorious deeds and praised their victory and their invulnerable great force. Each pushed by their life impulses and forced by common needs like an animal in the herd prompted by the inborn impulse each in his own group sees his ego‟s mirror; all served the aim and action of the group. Those who are like himself by blood or of similar custom were to him his (145) comrades of life and the means of his personality, and his personal distant galaxy‟s constituent stars, and the satellite companion of his solar ego. They were to him as a master of his life‟s environment, a leader of a gathered human mass who were grouped by her for safety on a dangerous earth, he gathered them around him as if minor Powers to make a common front against the seize of the world, or thinking himself as weak and lone on an indifferent earth he makes them either as a fortress for his undefended heart or else to alleviate his body‟s loneliness. In others than his own category he felt them as foe, and as a foreign unlike force he keeps away and gets afraid of them, and takes them as stranger and enemy and hates them and slays them. Or he lived as lives the wild solitary brute and battles with all bearing his single fate. Absorbed in their present act and the swiftly moving days, none there thought to look beyond the immediate gains or ever dreamed to make this earth a fairer world or never felt some divine touch that surprises his heart. The gladness that the transient moment gave, the fulfilled desires, the bliss and the experience gained, the intense speed of constant movement and strength were enough joy for him and also the accomplishment bodily intense sensual with others and quarrel and play of give and take, and tears and laughter and the need called love, etc. are a riot and revel for him. In war and embrace of love these life-wants joined the Universal-Life, engaged in a wrestling of a divided unity they inflicting grief and happiness mutually and in the state of ignorance of the Self they become one forever. A half-awakened Ignorance equipping its creatures with the weapon like delight and hope they strove hard for the outside of things. Thereafter an animal‟s natural impulse took shape of the way of this life, the past lived as in a bottomless sea in the memory‟s crowded sleep: reversing the quickened sense into half-thought the life force sought around it for the truth with groping hands, and (146) however little she could reach and possess she clutched and put the same concealed in her subconscient cave. In this way at last this dim life being (life force) must have to grow in light and force and look beyond to God and look round at the universe, and rise to his higher, and learn by failure

45 and progress by fall and battle with environment and grim destiny, discover his deep soul by suffering and by gradual possession grow to his own vastnesses. But while so doing the life force stopped in the half-way and could find her course of action no more. Except to begin still nothing has been attained by her, yet the circle of her force seemed to have been finished. Only she had left out sparks of ignorance by her hit repeatedly: life could only think but not the mind, the sense could only feel and not the soul. Only in the flame of Life burned some heat, she had only some joy of existence and some glad waves of the feeling of sense. All was an impulse of halfconscious Force; a spirit drowned sprawling position in dense life like foam, and a vague self-grasping of the outward shape of things.

Behind this scene all were in search of vessels to hold the first raw wine of the grapes of God, that as pillage of the supernal Bliss can be thrown on earth‟s mud, the erroneous soul and mind are kept intoxicated with dark and unrefined exciting wine of rapture, that yet remains dim and not yet cast into spiritual form, and now the life force a shadowy inhabitant of the world‟s blind deepest depth and as an unborn godhead‟s own and a mute Desire.

Now in this gradual series a third creation revealed its face in front of Aswapati. A shape of body‟s primeval gross mind was formed. A spark of light blazed the darkest World-Force; it endowed a briskly pushed world with the Idea that no medium of intelligence and equipped the act with thought‟s force sharp edge: a small thinking being watched the works of Time. From below a difficult process of evolution (147) invited a disguised power‟s intervention from above; otherwise this great, blind Inconscient universe could never have disclosed its hidden mind, or even the Intelligence that planned the cosmic scheme could never have worked in beast and man with its bandaged eyes. At first Aswapati saw a dim and darkened mind-power moving hidden by Matter and dumb life. A thin current streamed in life‟s vast flow floating under a sky carried by the movement of wind rose sometimes amid the brightened waves and the trembling wash, sometimes released in the scattering of the sense and feeling‟s waves. Amidst the deepest depths of lifeless world its crowded waves and foam of consciousness ran pressing and whirling through narrow strait, carrying experience in its crowded movement. That mind emerging into upper light flowed from the deep pool of its lowest level of birth to reach some high existence that was still unknown. There was no thinking being and no aim: there existed only an unorganised passion and vague search. There to a surface that was likely to change suddenly only physically feelings of joy, pushes of knife like sharp edges of desire and forceful jump of strong feelings and brief emotion‟s cries, an occasional communion of flesh with flesh, subdued experience of feeling one heart to the other yearning sudden flash of light of knowledge with shapeless thought and a sudden partial broken stream of subconscious will or pull of hunger rose above. All seemed as a dim sparkling on a foaming top: On an Inconscient flood of Force in Time it whirled around a floating shadowy self. Thereafter a seeing Power‟s pressure came circling around a single luminous point, and attracted all into a dancing muddy dance aggregation of objects, those were the centre of reference in a conscious field and the figure of an image of undivided Light within. It awoke (made alive) the flow of the half-awakened flood, (148) as if a sea could do the work as of a strong soil, it brought an illusion‟s fixed state. That strange witness Power imposed its sight. It forced on the unceasing flood a limit and a sense of shape and gave to its stream a lower narrow bank, and to put the formless spirit in a net it drew boundary lines around it. It gave a shape to the vital-mind of bird and beast and created natural response of the reptile and the fish and created the primitive model of the thoughts of man. The infinite‟s finite movement came flowing on its way through a wide sky of Time; within Ignorance knowledge marched forward and it guarded the separate soul which is under the shelter of form. It reserved its privilege of immortality, but built a wall of defense against the capture of death and to hold eternity threw a hook. As a result a thinking entity appeared in Space. A little methodical world appeared before sight where living being had a prison-room a (limited field) for act and sight, a floor to walk which was clear but was of a narrow range. An instrument like personality was born and a bounded and shut intelligence consented to confine its seeking within narrow bounds; it tied the thought to visible things and prohibited the adventure into the Unseen and the soul‟s travel through unknown infinities. A reflected reason was Nature‟s habitual seeing mirrors illumined life to know and fix its field of work, and accept a dangerous brief-lived ignorance and the inconclusive purpose of its walk, and profit by the moment‟s unexpected chance remaining in the assigned boundaries of its fate. This little life being tied like a knot and hung on the edge of its environment satisfied with a little joy and knowledge and like a curve cut off in a measureless Space, (149) a little span of life remained in all vast Time. There existed a planning thought force, a striving will power but served only small aims within a narrow scope and wasting unlimited labour on transient things. It knew itself as a creature of the mud; and as such was not interested for any larger law or any exalted and noble aim; it had no inward look and no upward sight. Taught and initiated in a particular belief by the mistaken sense a backward scholar of logic sat on a weak seat of the class, took the outside appearance of things as the face of God, considers occasional lights as the marching of the suns, took and considers a starlit fraction of doubtful sky as heaven; took every simulated aspect of being to be the shape of the indivisible whole (Divine). There was a voice of busy exchange with each other like a clamour of a market-place of petty thoughts and acts: there the life was brief-lived, and mind is the body‟s slave and those seemed to be the brilliant crown of the Nature‟s work, and took the little egos for the satisfaction of the transient desires and dwarf lusts and for a while took the world as their means of shelter, in death-bound passage saw life‟s start and end as if there was the sign of creation‟s is a blind work, and as if for this the soul had desired eagerly to take birth in this wonderland of self-creating world and the opportunities of the cosmic Space. This creature bound by shackles to small thoughts with no wide range and attracted the body‟s needs, and pains and joys, passionate only to survive, this fire growing by its fuel‟s (body‟s) unending death, increased by what it possessed and made its own: it gathered and grew and gave itself to none heartily. It only hoped its greatness within its wild life like lair and for its pleasure,

46 and victory in small fields of authority and winning of its life-long dwelling place for self and its kith and kin. Almost like an animal and tide within the limitation of its grazing ground. It knew not the Immortal soul that dwells in its bodily house and it had no greater and deeper reason to live. (150) It was powerful only within a limited field; it was shrewd to capture truth for outward use only, its knowledge was its body‟s instrument; engrossed in the net of little works of its prison-house it turned around the same unchanging point of horizon in the same circle of self interest and desire, but thought as the master of its jail. Although it was created for work and not for wisdom; yet its thought was its highest point or its drain‟s outer edge: it only sees the gross image of an external world and its own surface self and knew no more except that. Out of a slow confused state of disordered self-search mind grew to a precise clarity yet it was like a light shut in all sides in a stone like ignorance. In this limited thinking‟s narrow leadership tied to the soil, by the inspiration of general things of daily routine attached to a confined familiar world, amid the innumerable net of her purposeful tales and her changing actors and her million disguises life was a play always in the same lacking vibration. There were no great correctly regarded relative importance of the spirit, no sudden invasions of unknown joy, and opened no golden horizons of its wide liberation. This small scale kingdom of little life is similar to our human life but was eternally fixed to changeless type; it was a moment‟s movement, the grim destiny of which was to live through eternal Time. The beings existence is spanned like a bridge on the Inconscient gulfs, and is like a half-lighted building covered in a mist, it arose to sight from a void of supremely formed sky of Self. Life is a little light born in a great darkness, it knew not where it went and nor from where it came. Still around the life‟s scenes there floated the mist of ignorance.

- End of Canto Four

47

Canto Five The Godheads of the Little Life

(151) In an unhappy corner in eternity Aswapati could see a settled and limited-power with inflexible forms the empire of the little life. It lived upon the margin of mental Idea protected by Ignorance as an insect in a shell. Thereafter, hoping to learn the secret mystery of this world he looked across the scanty margin of appearance, that he can clearly distinguish from its almost clear darkness the Life-Force that moved it and the Idea that made it by imposing smallness on the Infinite and the spirit that rules its littleness, and the divine law that gave it right to exist and its claim on Nature and its need in Time. Aswapati completely immersed his sight into the blockading mist that held this ill-lighted narrow continent (land mass) encircled with the skies and seas of ignorance and kept it safe from Supreme Truth, Supreme Self and Divine Light. As when a searchlight enters into Night‟s blind depth as if revealed to an eye in Nothingness dwellings, trees and figures of men appear; there hidden all things having been opened out of their surface coverings and were seen in Aswapati‟s vision‟s sun-white brightness. A thickly inhabited busy, restless and awkward common people, in thousands and thousands gathered in their dusty shapes were present there. There covering the world-scene in a mist of secrecy the little deities of Time‟s mean and ignoble act who work far away from Heaven‟s controlling eye, outlined (created) small conspiracies of this petty kingdom against the creatures whom they guide without their knowledge and the deities felt amused, with the trivial skills, short-lived hopes, childlike eager steps and tiny ways (152) of the reptile like rolling about in the darkness and dust and the disgrace and fall of the creeping life there. A multi-coloured multitude of living beings trembling with fear, a group of strange disordered magic artisans, were seen there moulding by casting into a frame from the supple clay of life dwarfish creatures with the magical power and of primal Nature‟s type. Astonished by the unaccustomed shine of intense heat that there were never god too, of that realm as if inherent in the shadows of that realm there rose up imps (little ghosts) with unnatural limbs and hewed out beast faces, spirit-prompters (phantom advisors), dry dwarf diabolic forms, or small faeries imaginary beings with strange magical powers and soulless and indigent and fairer titans, fallen beings who lost their heavenly portions, and bewildered divinities imprisoned in the dust of Time. Their will power was ignorant and dangerous, but they are armed with power, their shape and mood was half-animal and half-god. Out of the greyness of an indistinct background of that region their whispers came and a voiceless force, rising awake in mind an echoing thought or word, and by their impulsive sting they attract heart‟s assent, in that little Nature they do their work and fill Nature‟s power and creatures with discomfort and restlessness. They curse the life Nature‟s seed of joy with sorrow‟s fruit, with their breath of error extinguish nature‟s scanty lights and turn its surface truths to serve the aims of falsehood, they prick with spur Natures small emotions and drive its passions into the bottomless depth or else push them through the spongy earth and mud: or else they prick with a goad of hard dry sensual desires, while our life‟s cart finding no escape out of ignorance moves it‟s on way-lost paths that leads to nowhere. To play with good and evil is their law; attracting with greed of vain and meaningless success, they degreed all style of structure and cheat by all measures, they make knowledge a poison and virtue into a sterile ideal (vice) and lead endless cycles of desire of life nature through the apparent shadows of sad or happy chance to an inevitable death. (153) All is done in that kingdom by their influence. Their empire or role is not only limited to that realm but these wherever soulless minds and guideless lives exists and where in a small body ego is all in all, and wherever there is lack of Love, Light and Largeness these crocked fashioned take up their work in hand. They extend domination of their evil rule into all half-conscious worlds. Here on earth too these lowest types of gods drive our human hearts and nature‟s twilight is their ambush (place of hiding): Here on earth too the darkened primitive human hearts obey the evil suggestions of a hidden Mind that guides our knowledge with misleading light and stands as a barrier between us and the saviour Truth. It speaks to us with the evil voices of the Darkness: and consequently our darkened lives are lead towards greater darkness: and our seeking listens to voices of hopes that are disastrous. Thus an edifice of blind-thought is built in us and our reason is used by an illogical Force.

This earth is not alone our teacher and nurse; the Powers of all the worlds have unbarred entrance here. Those Powers follow the wheel of law in their own fields and esteem the safety of a settled type: when they were thrown on earth out of their unchanged orbit then their law is only kept but they lost their fixed form of things. They are thrown into a creative lawlessness where all want order but driven by Chance only; they are foreigners to our earth nature and hence they have to learn the ways of the earth; since they are aliens or contraries for earth they must have to unite here: they work and battle and bear the earthly pain: they join and part and again having parted join anew, but till all of them have found their divine harmony we can never know truly or live. Our life‟s uncertain way winds circling on in its routine, our mind‟s unquiet search seeks for light till they have learnt their secret in their source, in the light of the Timeless and its spaceless home (154) in the joy of the Eternal one and alone. But now the supreme Light is far away from us: our conscious life obeys the Inconscient‟s laws; our hearts are moved by an uncertain force towards ignorant purposes and blind desires; even our mind‟s conquests wear a broken crown. A slowly changing new order binds our will. Until our souls are free from the clutch of adverse forces this is our grim fate. Thereafter only when our souls free a mighty Hand from beyond shall roll back our mind‟s tops and the infinity shall take up our finite acts and the Universal Nature shall step into the eternal Light. Then only there shall end the tormenting dream of the little life of lower level.

If From the beginning this riddle world is seen which at once seem as a brute machine and slow revelation of Spirit immanent in things and as God remains unknown to himself and unseen by us in a mysterious Inconscient miracle, and in this

48 revolving chamber without walls seen everywhere yet all his action and will. In this whirl and irregular state through infinite vacancy the Supreme Spirit became Matter and lay in the whirl, and became a body sleeping without sense or soul. An assembly of directly observed visible shapes appeared in the eternal Consciousness supported by the silence of the Void and seemed as an outward and unconscious world. There was none to see and feel; only the supernatural Inconscient and the subtle skilled sorceress were at its work.

Inventing ways for enchanting results, managing creation‟s astonishing scheme skillfully, marking mechanically the dumb wisdom‟s signs, only using the Idea that was inevitable and not thought of accomplishing the works of God‟s intelligence (155) or worked out the will of some supreme Unknown. Yet consciousness was hidden in Nature‟s womb, and that divine Bliss whose rapture dreamed the strange hierarchies of the worlds was not felt there. Here Being was a matter like an inert substance driven by the cosmic Force. At first there existed only an upper region of Space: specifically pertaining to the element of the (subtle sky) its huge vibrations circled round and round holding some unimagined inspiration in its heart: supported by a supreme original Breath by its expansion and contraction‟s occult act created touch and clash in the void, and brought clash and clasp into shapeless nothingness: it was the parent of an expanding universe, even though spending in a womb of a crumbling force yet was conserving an endless sum. On the floor of fire place of Space it burned a viewless creative Fire that created worlds like scattering of seeds, and whirled the luminous order of the stars reveled here. An ocean of electric Energy formed its strange wave particles from formlessness and by the passion of the waveparticles constructed this solid scheme, its mightiness was shut in the atom and took rest; all things and all visible shapes were shaped or all were shut in there disguised, light by flaming of its spark of swift light-particle revealed in the minuteness of it flash the image of the cosmos of apparent things. Thus this real impossible world was created which was a clear miracle of that electric Energy or a undoubted show of apparent things. Or so it seemed to man‟s daring mind who enthroned his thought as a judge of truth and his personal vision as an impersonal truth, made his erring sense as a witness of an objective world and his surface instruments‟ skilled craft. Therefore man has to work out to solve the riddle of the life in the worldly doubtful light and by the help of error that possess the Truth, slowly remove the disguise and the veil. Otherwise losing his faith in mind and sense (156) his knowledge shall become here a bright body of ignorance and would see in all things strangely created here an unpleasant joke of a deceiving Force and could see an imaginary story of Maya as the magnificence of her might made here. This vast everlasting motion caught and held in an unchanging change of the inflexible these mobile rounds that drives the stereotype flow that is called as a time and its ever renewing recurring beat these static objects of the cosmic dance that are nothing except Energy‟s self-repeating whirls prolonged by the spirit of the meditating Void awaited life, sense and waking Mind. Now the Dreamer Matter has changed its pose of stone a little. But when Inconscient‟s scrupulous work is completed and Chance was subdued by fixed laws, there a field for Nature‟s conscious play was created. Then there occurred churning in the Spirit‟s (souls) mute immobile sleep; the concealed Force dumbly emerged out silently and slowly. In Matter‟s heart a dream of life woke, in the Inconscient‟s dust a will to live stirred, in the caprice of life the vacant Time was surprised, there woke the transient-life in the blank eternity, in a dead Infinite there woke infinitesimal particles. A subtler breath made living the dead Matter‟s forms; the world‟s immobile rhythm changed to a conscious tone; a serpent (Kundalini) Power joined with the Unconscious Force. In the lifeless Space the dots of living islands were marked and living germs were formed in the formless atmosphere. Thereafter that followed Matter‟s law Life was born, it was ignorant of the purposes of its steps, Though ever changing remained forever the same, repeated the inconsistence that gave it birth: its restless and changeable formless repeated unendingly in the flow of Time and purposeful movements in the mindless forms (157) expressed the repeated rise and fall like wave of an imprisoned Will. Waking and sleep lay mutually embraced in their arms; trembling with the first faint thrill of World-Soul pleasure and pain came helplessly and indistinctly. A life force that could not speak or move yet broke out beautifully with an indication of deep joy: an ability of voiceless deep feeling of life force, quivering of the heart of an ignorant world, ran through its state of drowse and numberless life force there a vague uncertain thrill and a wandering stir, like dim opening as of secret eyes was felt there. An infant self-feeling grew and took birth. Godhead woke but lay there with its dreaming limbs; but the life-Nature declined to open its sealed doors for the godhead‟s entry. Insensible to our eyes that could only see the form and act but not the imprisoned God (soul), before it life force hidden in her pulse a consciousness with dumb and suffocated beats of sense, a suppressed mind that was not familiar with thought, and an inactive spirit that could only exist. At first the life force could not inarticulate and did not dare to move: filled with the world-power, with the inborn force of its living she only could cling with the help of her roots to the safe earth, thrilled mutely to the shocks of the ray of sun and the force of the wind gave signs stretching out her fingers of soft, new-born like leaves; her strength that was eagerly longing for sun and light could not feel the embrace of her breathing and living; absorbed in the satisfaction of beauty and colour she dreamed. At last the enchanted greatness (the life-force) looked around: she quivered, trembled and hungering, searches about as in the dark for mind; then slowly her sense quivered and became active, her thought could look out at outward things; she forced the her unwilling mould (body) to become conscious. This life force was craved as a conscious form; its motionless vibrations now rhythmed a quick response, a brain and nerve‟s luminous stirring quickened, the spirit‟s identity awoke in Matter (158) and in a body kindled the miracle of the heart‟s love and the soul‟s witness sight. Urged by an unseen Will power there broke out some fragments of vast inborn passion to become and to take form, and the Secret Self‟s clear glimpses was seen, and seeds of uncertain possibilities, and force of shapes that would take shape in future awoke from the Inconscient faintness of the universal things.

Thereafter an animal creation of birds and beast crept and ran here and there, and flew and their voice rang between earth and sky,

49 although they were pursued by death but they still hoped to live and breathe gladly, if only for a while. Thereafter man was created from the primal brute. To lift the feelings and behaviors of life a thinking mind was born, it is a sharp-edged tool of a mixed and vague Nature and it was an intellect of half-vigilance and half-machine. The apparent mind that was the driver of life‟s wheel of works was engaged to induce it for action and record the life-nature movements and fix its law on her variable Powers, this master of life like a delicate enginery aspired to enlighten its user life and refine it and lift the engrossed mechanic‟s unrefined initiative to a vision of the indwelling Power, he raised his eyes to beyond; and saw that the Heaven‟s light reflected a divine Face. The life-force amazed now at the works done in her mysterious sleep, and looked upon the world she had created: field with great surprise by seeing the world she seized the great self moving machine (mind); she absorbed to understand herself and her aim, and thinking deeply she learned the skill of acting by a conscious rule and a distinguished measure guided her rhythmic steps; thought surrounded her natural tendencies with the frame of a will and kindled with an idea‟s light her blinded passion. On her mass of passions, her natural acts and on the Inconscient‟s pushed or guided movements and the mystery of unthinking accurate steps she stuck an apparently right but not real image of the soul, and a living idol of a pervaded soul; (159) on Matter‟s acts she imposed a reasoned control; made a thinking body from the chemic cells and made a being out of a force compelled to move by others. To become what she was not she burned her light of hope: she turned her dream towards some Unknown beyond and at the bottom she felt the breath of the supreme One. A higher growing sight looked up to the worlds above and coloured shadows of transient figures of immortal things were portrayed on the mortal ground: sometimes a quick heavenlier flash of light began to descend: the soul‟s illumined ray fell on her heart and flesh and touched with the gleam of ideal light from the stuff of which our earthly dreams are made. To lift an easily broken human love that could not last for longer, and the winged angel of the highest order, ego‟s insect like wings as of a butterfly appeared, a surface-light of a short-lived day extinguished by a scanty breath of Time; and a joy that forgot mortality for a while came as a rare visitor who left before due time, and made all things seem beautiful for a moment, hopes that soon end like faded realities and passions that shatter to ashes while they burn, lighted the common earth with their brief light. Man a small and an insignificant creature was seen to have visited uplifted by an unknown Power and laboured on his little patch of earth for means to last, to enjoy, to suffer and to die. A spirit that is not perishable with body‟s breath was there in man like a shadow of the Unmanifest and stood behind the little personal form but not yet claimed its right on this earthly embodiment. The mighty Witness (spirit) consenting to Nature‟s long, slow-moving labour and watching the works of his own Ignorance, lives unknown and unfelt and did not show here anything of its Glory that exit here. An all pervading wisdom governing the mysterious world, (160) and a Silence that listens to the cry of Life world, it remains seeing the hurrying crowd of moment‟s stream passing towards the tranquil greatness of a distant moment.

This huge world in the shadow of a self-absorbed Inconscience turns in a way ungraspable by our intelligence; it hides the key to our inner meanings that we have missed, and shuts within our hearts a voice that we cannot hear. This subtle and great harmoniously arranged life is a riddling labour of the spirit, a faultless machine of which none knows the use, a senseless art and cleverness of invention, forever goes on singing her purposeless tones of long pieces of music as an orchestra. Here the mind learns and achieves and gets averse to truth; it studies surface laws by surface thought, examines life-steps and sees the universal Nature‟s process, but could not understand the purpose of Nature‟s acts or why we live; only observes the tireless care of the Nature‟s skills and her patient complexity of fine detail, in her great vain mass of endless works observes the shrewd spirit‟s brave inventive plan and adds purposeful figures to her purposeless sum; on its triangular piles of chambers, and its climbing roofs on the close constructed foundations she has laid imagined force in imagine sky or climbs a stair to a mystic moon: its transient creations point towards sky and hit it: on the obscure floor of mind‟s incertitude draws the plan of a world made out of guess or painfully builds the whole by joining the pieces. Inscrutable by our mind the vast plan of Nature‟s creation is an obscure mystery of which we are a part; its concords or noticed as discords by our sight since we do not know the great purpose they do serve. The work of the cosmic gods is unintelligible by us. We only see a border of their wide swell as of waves; (161) our bodily limbs are devoid of that greater light, our will cannot keep harmony with the eternal Will and our inner sight is too blind and passionate. Our ability to understand and is incapable to take part in Nature‟s skill and unskillful to feel the pulse and heart of things, and as such cannot reach beneath the life‟s mighty sea and only could be able to count its waves and see its foam; it does not know where these motions comes from and touch and pass, could not see to where life‟s hurrying flood passes away quickly: only attempts hard to canalise its powers and hopes to turn its course of the flow towards fulfillment of human aims: but all the means and methods of mind come from the Inconscient‟s store. Here on earth dim huge indistinct world-energies act unseen and only its drops of flow and currents are our share. Our mind lives far off from the genuine divine Light and could only catch little fragments of the Truth in a little corner of infinity; our lives are like narrow streams entering into an ocean‟s force. Our conscious movements have their secret founts concealed from our eyes and we do not have any communion with those shadowy thrones; our comrade bodily limbs are not tied with strings of unanimity with those; our acts emerge from a depth which our minds are ignorant. Our inner depths are ignorant of themselves; even our body is a mystery‟s store; as our earth‟s roots hide veiled below our earth so our roots of mind and life lie unseen. Our founts are hid secretly too near beneath and within; our souls are moved by the powers covered behind the bodily wall. In the lowest depths of our soul there acts a great Power but reckless of the significance of its works; it works with the help of thoughtless advisors and recorders, it is the cause of what we think and feel. The dwellers in the darkened depths of the subconscious Mind, and those ill-trained slow faltering interpreters are only aware of the routine of their small

50 task and busy recording the same in our cells (162) a darkened occult machinery concealed in the secrecies below the lower level of consciousness‟ capture the mysterious code letters whose rhythmed cadence transmits the messages of the cosmic Force. In life‟s inner ear a whisper is heard, and it echoes from the dull subconscient caves were heard, speech comes out, thought quivers, the heart vibrates, the will answers and tissue and nerve of the body obey the call. Our lives express these subtle intimacies; all is the process of give and take of a secret Power.

The mind of life is a thinking dole: it chooses the work of the basic strengths of the Nature that know not their own birth and death and cause and could not have a brief view of the immense purpose they serve. Although this uninteresting lowest life of man is still filled with painfully small and base substances, this conscious Doll is pushed a hundred ways and feels the push but could not feel the hands that drive it. Because none can see the disguised mocking groups in whose hands our embodied selves are only doles worked by strings, our deeds bound in their clutches move unconsciously and our all passionate inner struggle is a scene of entertainment for them. Ignorant of the origin of their own strength they play their role in the great stage of the vast universe. They are representatives of darkness imitating light, these are the darkened spirits and driving dark things; they serve a mightier Power inspite of their unwillingness. They are the engines of the goddess Necessity implementing the process of cosmic existences and human life organising Chance and they are the perverse medium of a communion of a great Will, tools of the Unknown and use us as their own tools, in Nature‟s lowest state they are powerful, they bring the catastrophes of Fate into actions that the mortals think their own, or turn Time‟s dangerous caprice into a ruin and in an irrelevant and crooked game toss the lives of men from hand to hand like a ball. (163) Their being revels against all higher truths, their will is only subdued to a Titan force. Their hold on human hearts is unrestrained; they intervene in all of our nature‟s movement. They are trivial architects and builders of our subliminal lives and creators of our selfishness and desire, out of our gross unrefined earthiness and turbid passionate stimulus and coarse reactions of our material nerve they build the piled structures of our despotism and the ill-lighted palace of our thought or they surround the beautiful temple of the soul (our human body) with ego‟s factories and markets. They were the minute artists of the detailed and precise colours of our littleness and set the diverse colours of our amusing incident or compose the trivial sorrowful pitiable stories of our lives, arrange our deeds, unite for a common purpose the circumstances and the strange imagination of the various colours of the dress of a particular occasion of temporary state of mind. These foolish inspirers of man‟s ignorant heart and the tutors of his tripping speech and will, inducers of his trivial extreme anger and strong sexual desire and hates and disordered thoughts and parent of superficial emotions, these masked inconsiderable creators of illusion and mirage, the painters of the decoration of a dull-coloured human stage and the quick scene shifters of our human play are always busy with this ill-lighted stage of drama of human life. We ourselves who are incapable to build our own fate only speak as actors and fulfill our role until the piece of the drama is completed and we pass off into a brighter Time and subtler Space than this earthly stage. Thus they inflict their little pigmy law on us and always put restraint on the mounting slow uprise of man and then they close by means this too scanty walk of life with death.

This is the daily life of this transitory creature. As long as the human being with animal qualities is lord and an impenetrable lower nature covers the soul, (164) and as long as the human intellect‟s range of surface sight serves the human selfishness and desire and creature‟s joy and littleness pursues his life. Ever since consciousness was awakened on earth the ways of life is the same in insect, ape and man, and its substance remains unchanged and the way life on earth is restricted to common path only. Even if new patterns and more adequate details grow and thought and more complex responsibilities of work is added and little by little it wears a brighter face, still the story of man‟s life remains mean and indigent. A satisfaction of external things prolongs his fallen state and his small successes are turned into failure of the soul, his little enjoyments puts a little stop to his frequent grief‟s: for establishing his right to live he pays as heavy price of hardship and severe labour and his last prize is death. An inactiveness as of matter sunk into the inconscience and a sleep that imitates death is only his rest. A trivial glory of creative force is only his inspiration or goad to fragile human works which yet survive their brief creator‟s living. Sometimes man dreams of the riotous celebration of the gods and sees the widely sensual posture of life pass him, if through his failing limbs and fainting heart the sweet and joyful mighty madness swept, a lion like great strength would tear out his soul: the energy given to him to grow and to exist is stimulated and wasted by trivial amusements.

In doing little things his little life is spent. A brief friendship amidst many quarrels, a little love and jealousy and hate and a touch of friendship amidst indifferent crowds draw his heart‟s plan on his life‟s little map. If sometimes a greater awakening arises in him then his strength is too weak to respond to it and to reveal the highest tension of his joy and his thought is too weak to eternise its transient uprising, he only enjoys art‟s brilliance by seeing it and a pastime for his eyes but he could not become an artist (165) the enchantment of music creates a thrill in his nerves. Amidst the torture of his labour and the severe stroke of the turmoil of the cares and anxieties, pressed by the labours of his crowding thoughts, he sometimes draws around his painful brow Nature‟s calm mighty hands to relieve his pain of life. By Nature‟s silence he is saved from self-torture; in Nature‟s tranquil beauty lays her purest bliss. He looks out from the wide paths of consciousness an advent of new life, and the Spirit‟s breathe moves him but soon it retires back; because his strength was not made to hold that powerful guest. Thereafter all in him becomes fallen and dim according to traditions and regular way of doing things or a fierce feeling of emotions brings him some bright joys: on account of struggle‟s highly excitement the hot magnificence of strong passionate desire and by the red stain of life passion‟s his days are coloured; battle and murder are his tribal

51 game. He has no time to turn his sight inwards to find his lost self and dead soul. His wheels of movement rotates on a too short axis and hence he cannot soar but creep on his long road or if he is impatient of heavy and weary movement of Time, he would make a great haste on Fate‟s slow road, consequently his hastening heart soon becomes breathless, tired and sunk; or he walks on forever and could not reach his goal. A few can rise to greater life with great difficulty. All turned and tied with the low scale of their state and consciousness of their nether life. Ignorance is the source of his knowledge; his force could not even reach once the Omnipotent, in his sights‟ range the heavenly ecstasy is rare. The bliss that sleeps in the universal things and tries to wake breaks out in him in a small joy of life: the shelter of the little grace is his persistent base; it lightens the burden of his many ills and sorrows and keeps him satisfied in his little world. He remains satisfied with his common average kith and kin; with the hopes of tomorrow and his old wheeling of thoughts, his old familiar selfishness and desires (166) he has made a thick narrow fence to keep out of danger his small life from the Invisible; his being‟s relationship with infinity he kept imprisoned in his innermost cave of self and wall himself off the grandeur of the hidden God. His being was created to play a very little role in the little drama of life on a trivial stage, beneath the widened view of the vast galaxy of the stars in a very narrow plot of land he has pitched his tents of life. All that he had achieved, he is the crown: is the labour of the creation justified by this; is this the result of the world and Nature‟s last state? If this were all and nothing more remained to be done, and if what now seems were the whole of what must be (the really deemed creation) and if this were not a place of shelter through which we pass on our road from Matter to eternal Self, to the Light which created the worlds and the Cause of the universal things then the interpretation of our mind‟s limited view that the creation is an accident in Time, an illusion, phenomenon or a play of caprice, the paradox of creative Thought that moves between two unreal opposites, a lifeless Force that struggles to feel and know, matter that takes the chance to know by the help of Mind, and an inconscience that monstrously gave birth to a soul would have been reasonable. At times everything appears to be unreal far distant in time or place; we seem to live in a world created by the imagination of our thoughts brought and joined together from sense narrated fanciful traveler‟s tale, or inscribed on the film of the recording brain caught a shadowy picture of imagination or circumstance of the cosmic sleep. The mind‟s thought regarding the creation would have been like a man suddenly waking up from sleep and walking under the moon unconsciously and an image of an ego, walking through an ignorant dream by counting the moments of a phantom Time. In a false perspective of effect and cause, trusting an illusive prospect of world-space, (167) without knowing where the creation goes or to what marvellous border of a country as narrated in the tell-tales and floating unendingly from scene to scene then the mind‟s interpretation would have been justified. All here is created by dream or exists doubtfully, but who the dreamer is or from where he sees is still unknown or only it is a shadowy guess, or the world is real but we ourselves are too small, not commensurate for the mightiness of our stage in which we are to fulfill our roles. As if a subtle life-curve crosses a titan whirl of the orbit of a soulless universe and in the womb of a scattered rolling mass a mind looks out from a small casual globe and wonders what itself and the universe are. And yet some inmost inner sight saw that in Matter‟s blind stuff is a sum of atom like point of little self, strangely took shape of a world-being‟s conscious base. Such is the scene of our earthly life which exists in the half-light below on earth. This is the sign of the Matter‟s infinite and the illusive purpose of the picture shown to the giantess physical Science the measurer of her field, in Matter when she looks deep on the record of her close observation and mathematics her huge external world, and to Reason which is bound within the circle of sense a speculator on the subtle or vacant form of vast ideas, in the Thought‟s broad unintelligible Exchange market imaginary conceptions in the void we do not know in what firm value for its base her currency stands. Only religion in this state of bankruptcy presents its fluctuating riches to our hearts but cannot guide us on the real path to the Beyond: thus in those regions our poverty of proper knowledge shall have its revenge. Our spirits passes away into the blank unknown discarding a futile life on earth or take with them death‟s passport into immortality because they have to come back again on to earth to fulfill their mission of earthly being‟s transformation.

Yet this present state of earthly life is only a tentative scheme, a false appearance sketched out by our limiting sense, (168) an early attempt and a first experiment of mind‟s insufficient self-discovery. This present scheme of life was a toy to amuse the infant earth but our knowledge does not end in these surface powers which live on the edge of Ignorance and incapable of looking into the dangerous inner depths or look upward to grasp the Unknown. There exists a deeper seeing within us, and when we have left these small outlying boarders where mind habitually frequents, in the luminous vastness of the spirit‟s sight we meet a greater vision than this on the heights. At last there wakes in us a witness Soul that looks at unseen truths and sees the Unknown; then all things appear assuming a new and marvellous face: than the whole world trembles with a God-light at its deepest depths, in Time‟s inner depths high purposes move and live, and life‟s borders break and join infinity. Great disordered and yet an inflexible scheme of life then takes shape of a magnificent confused situation of the Gods, a field of game and work gods of equivocal (double) meaning. Our earthly spiritual seekings are short-lived experiments made by a voiceless and unintelligible Power testing its escapes from the Inconscient Night to meet its luminous self of Truth and Bliss. It looks at the Real through the apparent form; labours in our mortal mind and sense; it seeks the truth the aim of all aims amid the figures of Ignorance, in the symbol pictures drawn by our word and thought, looks for the source of divine Light with the help of the Light of our inner vision; it works to find out the Doer of all works and the unfelt Self within who is our guide and the unknown Self above who is our goal. In this world all are not of a blinded Nature‟s work: a Word, a Wisdom watches us from Beyond, a Witness Self sanctions Nature‟s will and works, (169) in the unknown vast and unseen divine witnessing Eye is watching for us; an Influence from a divine Light above descended here, thoughts from far distant Beyond exist here, and all

52 eternities that are occult and a mysterious purpose whirls the stars and the suns in their orbit. In this path of our journey from a deaf ignorant Force to a struggling consciousness and towards a transient breath, a mighty Supernatural waits us on our paths in the course of Time. This universe is other than what we now see and think, what we have dreamed with regard to our lives are filled with deeper mystery than that; our minds are only starters in the race to God, our souls are deputed representatives of the Supreme. Crossing through the cosmos like field wearing a beggar‟s disguise walks the One and Alone in narrow lanes asking trifle handful of alms from the hands of the Goddess Fortune. Even in the theatre of these trivial lives behind the act a secret sweetness oozes out, and there exists an impulse to achieve a small scale and a small picture of the divinity. From the founts of God a passion that is beyond the perception of our senses flows through the secret spaces guarding the soul; a helping force supports and give shelter to this suffering earth and an unseen nearness and a hidden joy is always present. Within this world pain a vibration of laughter‟s subdued tones, the low continuous sound of a concealed happiness and an triumphant and rapturous rejoicing in the depths of sleep, a heart of bliss remains covered within the world of pain. An Infant God nursed and suckled on Nature‟s covered breast, playing in the illusive forests rapturously fluting besides the spirit‟s streams awaits for the moment when we shall hear to his call. In this bodily covering of our fleshly life a soul which is the spark of God survives and sometimes it breaks through this bodily ignoble screen of flesh and kindles a fire which makes us half-divine. In the cells of our body there thrones a hidden Power that sees the unseen and plans eternal things, and the smallest parts of our body have place for accommodation of the deepest needs; (170) there too the golden divine Messengers can come: in the mud wall of our self-personality a door was curved; across the lonely threshold of the said door the angels of ecstasy and self-giving enter with bowed heads and the makers of the image of God lodged in our inner retreat of dream. There dwells compassion of the flame of sacrificial fire and flashes of sympathy and kindness cast heaven-lights from the heart‟s screened temple. A work is accomplished in the deep silences; a glory and wonder of spiritual sense, laughter in beauty‟s everlasting space transforming the world-experience into joy, inhabit in the mysterious untouched depths; the eternity sleeps in us lulled by Time‟s sweet rhythm. In the happy inner depths of our fully sealed heart behind the outer shape of death not affected by emotion the eternal Entity prepares within us its matter of divine felicity and its vision of the manifestation of heavenly empire. Even in our doubtful ignorant mind a foresight appears of some great liberation from the earthly bondages and our aspiration lifts its slow and shaping hands towards it. Each of our bodily limbs yearns for its supreme being. Our thoughts eagerly aspires to possess the everlasting Light, our strength springs from an omnipotent Force, and since from a veiled God-joy the worlds were created, even here where all is made out of being‟s dust and in those since the eternal Beauty asks for form to express, so our hearts are captured by enchanting shapes absorbed by them and our physical senses blindly seek for the divine bliss. Our worldly error forces the supreme Truth to take birth in a divine body here upon earth crucifying the Reality, compelling it to incarnate in a human form and breathing in limbs that one can touch and clasp it, and its knowledge would rescue the ancient worldly Ignorance, (171) and its savior light would save the Inconscient universe. When that greater supreme Self comes down like a sea to fill this bodily image of our brief lived life, then all shall be filled with delight and transformed: our minds shall roll in waves of rapture beyond our dream, life and sense, laugh in a light other than this hard limited human life, the tissues of the body thrill elevated to divine status, the cells of the body shall sustain a luminous transformation. This Time born little being, this shadowy soul, and this living dwarf-figurehead of darkened spirit shall rise out of its traffic in petty dreams of pleasure. Its personal shape and its ego-face shall strip off its mortal disguise, like a lump of clay kneaded into a god new-made in the image of the eternal Guest, and shall be caught to the breast of white Force and flaming with a paradise touch in a rose-fire of spiritual grace, in the intense passion of its infinite change quiver with ecstasy. As if a reversal of deformation‟s magical effects released from the black of the Night, renouncing its servitude to the dim Abyss, it shall at last know with regard to the spark of God who lived within him unseen, and seized with a marvel in his adoring heart kneel down consciously at the feet of the enthroned Child-Godhead thrilling with his beauty, delight and love. But first out of the depths from which our nature rose we must achieve our spirit‟s ascent. The soul must climb sovereignty above the form and climbing to heights beyond mind‟s half-sleep; we must fill our hearts with heavenly strength and surprise the animalism in us by revealing the secret god. Then burning the golden luminous splendour of fire of sacrifice and inviting the powers of a bright hemisphere, (172) we shall be able to throw away the present disgrace of our mortal state and convert hell into a road for Heaven‟s decent, and can get our inner depths bathed with the supernal Ray and break through the darkness with the help of the divine fire that is beyond the perception of the senses.

Aswapati once more adventuring into the birth place of mist crossing the dangerous fog, the significant emotion, through the disorder of the subtle supra physical fields of existence mid grey faces of its demon gods, encountered with the questioning whispers of its unquiet ghosts and besieged by the witchcraft‟s net of unhindered hewed away and proceeded further. As one who walks without any guide through unfamiliar and unknown fields he passed without knowing where to go or with what hope, he walked on a soil that failed beneath his feet and yet journeyed with a stone strength to a goal that flees away from him. Like a faint light points a vague immensity there remained a trace like behind him a mark of the completely disappearing line; in the wounded darkness; a bodiless murmur travelled besides him in complaining against the light. There a motionless heart was creating a great hindrance on his way, as he moved further a witnessing blind sight multiplied its opposed mass of its dead like staring eyes; like a dying torch (burning at some moments) the darkness shined intermittently. Around him extinguished out ghostly light filled with shadowy and misleading shapes and

53 the indistinct Inconscient‟s dark and measureless cave. In his journey forward his spirit‟s flame was the only sunlight showing on his way.

- END OF CANTO FIVE

54

Canto Six The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Greater Life (173) As one who hoping for light walks with freer speed proceeding amidst dim retreating walls towards the far little light of a tunnel‟s mouth and feels the approach of a breath of a wider atmosphere, so Aswapati escaped from the dismal disorder of that region.

He reached a world that was ineffective and aimless and of birth less where being fled from non-being and dared to live but had no strength of long permanency. Like blind souls searching for their own lost selves and wandering in unfamiliar worlds; above that world there shone a faint light of a thoughtful brow of distressed sky covered by the wings of doubtful mist proclaiming and adventuring with a voice of roaming winds and eagerly crying for direction in the void; the wings of indistinct questioning confronted the question of the Space. After all these are forbidden, a doubtful hope emerged in him, that was a hope for self and form and survival and a birth of that which has not yet taken place; a hope of sudden joy of the mind, the heart‟s choice, a grace of the unknown and a hope of the company of hands of God‟s mercy rising in a sudden surprise and a touch of sure delight in unsure things: he on his path of journey reached a strange uncertain path where consciousness played with unconscious self and birth was an attempt or seemed as an event as a part of a sequence. A magic spell came near that could not keep its enchantment, and an eager Power came that could not find out its way, a Chance (an uncertain movement) came that chose a strange arithmetic but could not bind the forms with the formulas it made, a multitude came that could not guard its sum total which was less than zero and more than one. (174) The life-force arriving at a large and shadowy realisation that could not think to interpret its quick flow and severed from her sweet magnificent suns started work in a strange imaginary atmosphere. In those imaginary worlds that were not yet made real, in the brief light that gives an intermittent light on creation‟s verge, one may become way lost and could enjoy dream and never thought to achieve his dreams: because achievement would have resulted in the destruction of that Place of inexplicable influence. In that peculiarly and ineffectually beautiful kingdom with the marvels of a twilight fairyland and swell of unrealistic realities and indistinct signs of Resplendence shut beyond, awoke the passion of Aswapati sight‟s desire compelled reliance on his enchanted thought and attracted his heart but could not make it reach at any object of effort. As if of moving scenes that kept a while their brief delicacy or silver canvas of incertitude of a restricted line by an imaginary art drawn in a scanty light with a faint dream brush there flowed a stream of magic. At the approach of the morning an infant light of the heavens that glowed in the skies, an intense fire that was in its womb and not yet burned touched the sky with intense hints of arrival of the day. Though perfect but longing for imperfection‟s spell, illumined by knowledge yet caught by the noose of the worldly Ignorance, airy creatures attracted by the body‟s entice came to that region of promise by beating invisible wings, in a hungry for the joy of finite life but they were too divine and hence could not walk on the created soil and share the fate of things that were subjected to decay. The Children of the unbodied sparkle arisen from the formless thought in the soul and driven by an indestructible desire passed the field of the pursued sight. There a failed and perturbed Will was at work: there life was only a search but without any achievement. (175) Though all there are attractive but nothing could give satisfaction, things seemed to be complete but never wholly so, statues were seen that looked like living acts and symbols hid their meaning that they claimed to show, and to the dreamer‟s eyes faint dreams seemed to be real. Such souls came there that vainly attempted to take birth, and beings caught as in a trap ever wander in the paths through all time, but could never find the truth by which they live. There all ran like hopes that pursue behind hidden opportunities, there nothing was firm, nothing is felt complete: all was dangerous, supernatural and half-true. It seemed to Aswapati as a kingdom of lives that had no established and stable base.

Thereafter his journey began under a greater trial for searching, and wider sky under the wings of a meditating Force. At first came the kingdom of morning star: a twilight beauty and a vibration of a promise of wider Life trembling under its spear. Then slowly raised a great and a doubting sun and with the help of that light the life-force created a world with the soul as background. Then an inner being awoke and sought for its own deep soul; yet was satisfied with the fragments and the parts of living pushed in front that gave a false impression of the whole but began joining the fragments together because one day it might be true. Yet at last something seemed to be achieved. A gradual increase and its bulk of the will to exist, lessons of living and a linear diagram of force, a manuscript of acts, a song of conscious forms burdened with meanings unintelligible to thought and filled with vague tones of life‟s rhythmic voice were inscribed themselves on the hearts of universal living things. In a sudden outburst of the secret Spirit‟s might, in Life and Matter‟s response of delight, some face of immortal beauty that gave immortality to a moment‟s joy was revealed, some word that could embody highest Truth (176) sprang from the soul‟s sudden passions, some splendour of the Absolute, some glory of knowledge and intuitive sight, some passion of the joyful heart of Love fell on life. The Will of a revealing sacred bodiless Mystery merged under an unseen spiritual close fitting cover, pushes sense beyond its scope to feel the light and the imperceptible joy, half found its way into the Unutterable peace, half captured the sealed sweetness‟ of aspiration that yearned from an innermost depth of mystic Bliss and half expressed a concealed Reality. A soul that was not enveloped into its covering mind could find the true sense of a world of forms, illumined by a vision of the thought and upraised by the heart understands flame; it held the divinity of the symbol Universe in the conscious subtle sky of the spirit.

55 This kingdom inspires us with our vaster hopes; its forces have descended upon our globe, and the forms of its signs have been traced in our lives: it bestows an unconquerable movement to our fate, its roving waves induces our life‟s high ascent. All that we seek for here on earth, all that we have not yet known nor ever sought that yet one day must be born in human hearts by which the Timeless may fully be realised itself in the universal things is preindicated there. In the mystery of the daily routine of life the eternal timelessness shall descend embodied in a concrete form in its naked Infinite, and there exists a mounting incessant possibility that he shall climbs high on an immeasurable ladder of dream forever into Being‟s (of Truth, consciousness and bliss) conscious trance. All on that ladder mounts to an unseen end. An Energy of everlasting transience on its way of journey inspiring the pilgrimage of the life Nature to the Unknown from which there is no surety of return.(177) As if in Life-Nature‟s ascent to her lost source she hoped all to reveal that could ever be possible, her high gradual ascension moves from one phase to another, her progress rises from sight to a greater sight, her process of work grows from one form to another greater form, she moves leading a group of travellers of the inexhaustible formation of boundless Thought and Force. The life natures‟ timeless Power that once lay on the lap of a beginning less and endless divine Calm and was taking rest now separated from the Spirit‟s immortal bliss, upholds the type of all her lost joy, compelling the quick passing away substance to take shape, she hopes sometimes to overcome the gulf that she cannot fill by the release of her creative act‟s, to render remedy awhile to the pain inflicted on its feeling of separation from spirits immortal bliss and hoping to escape from the moment‟s prison of littleness and meet the Eternal‟s highest heights in the divided uncertain time-field here.

All that ever unreached by the life Nature she almost nears the same, she shuts Eternity in the moments of Time and fills a little soul with the Infinite; the Immutable self leans to the sorcery of the life nature‟s call; the Life Nature stands on the border of the illimitable, comprehends the formless Dweller in all forms and feels the clasp of the infinity around her. She knows not that her work ever ends; she fulfills no aim but labours driven by a nameless Will that came from some unknowable formless Vast. To catch the boundless in a net of birth, to cast the spirit into physical form, to give speech and thought to the unspeakable, is her secret impossible work; she is driven to reveal the ever Unmanifest. Yet by her skill the impossible has been made possible: she follows her highest illogical plan and invents all sorts of devices of her magical art (178) to find new bodies for the Infinite and images of the Unimaginable supreme; she has enticed the Eternal into the arms of Time. Even now what work she has accomplished she does not know. Because that entire she had done beneath a bewildering disguise: whatever she had become is a shadowy appearance other than its hidden truth that wore the character of an illusion‟s deception, a pretended time-driven unreality, those were an unfinished creation of a changing soul in a body changing with the inhabitant. The means adopted by her are trivial and her work is limitless; on a great field of shapeless consciousness with the finite strokes of mind and sense she endlessly expresses an endless Truth and in Time expresses a timeless mystery. The greatness dreamt by the life force are missed by her acts, her labour is an emotion and pain, a joy and torture, is the cause of her glory and curse; and yet she has no capability to choose at will the right thing to be done but labours on, because her mighty heart bars her to cease doing so. As long as the creation lasts her failure lives astonishing and baffling Reason‟s view, an indescribable foolishness and beauty, a unprecedented madness of the will to live, a daringness and an excited mental state of delight lasts. This is the life being‟s law and its only means; she satisfies her hunger all though her hungry will to pour down abundantly everywhere the many-shaped imaginations of the self and thousand fashions of the one Reality yet her hunger is not satisfied. She created a world touched by truth‟s fleeting border of cloth, and the world she seeks an idol of truth and a conscious mystery‟s shape she creates in dream. This life world is not surrounded in solid barriers of apparent fact like earth-mind and daringly trusts the dreammind and the soul. (179) A seeker of spiritual truths now only guided by thought or guess or by faith, now seized in imagination a painted bird of paradise and confined it in a cage. This greater life is rapt in the love of the Unseen; and invites to some highest Light beyond its reach, it feels the Silence that liberate the soul; it feels the touch of deliverer from harm & danger and the touch of a divine ray: its adorable godheads are Beauty, good and truth (Satya, Shiva, and Sundar). It lives near to heavenlier heavens beyond the scope of earthly sight, and lives in a middle reason near to a direr darkness than the life of man can bear: the demon and the god are her kins. A strange zeal has driven its heart; it hankers for heights and passions to achieve the Supreme summit. It only seeks for the total word and total shape, it moves with a very rapid progress to the highest thought and summit light. For under the shelter of form the Formless is brought nearer and all perfection floats on the lap of the Absolute. It is a child of heaven who never saw his home, its unending impulse meets the eternal at a point: it can only go near to it and touch but cannot hold it; it can only make an eager and intense effort towards a bright extreme: to create and seek is her own greatness.

On every world to create is the work of this great glorified Life Force. Her work on earth, in heaven and in hell is the same; on every fate (either tender or bitter) she takes her mighty part. She is a custodian of the fire that lights the suns, she is victorious in her glory and might: even though she is opposed and oppressed she obeys God‟s inspiration to take birth: she is the spirit that survives upon non-being‟s ground, she is a world-force and free from the shock of the worlds: pleasant but mistaken believe, when she is dumb then she is still the great Word, when she is inactive even then she is a great Power. Even though here fallen and became a slave of death and ignorance, yet aspires for deathless things and zealous and hankered to know the Unknowable. Even though her sleep is ignorant and void she creates a world. (180) When she is most unseen she works most mightily, though it is put in the atom and buried in the lump of earth yet her quick creative passion cannot cease. Inconscience is her long gigantic interval and her cosmic faintness is a great phase: as she is Time-born she hides her immortality, she waits for her moment to rise from her death-like bed. Even though

56 she is deprived of the Light that gave her birth and the hope she needed for doing her work is dead, even when her brightest stars are extinguished in the darkest Night, nourished by hardship and misfortune and even pain is her body‟s slave, nurse and massager, her tortured invisible spirit continues to work still even in the darkness she continues to create though with Pains; she carries the crucified God upon her breast. In the unpleasant ice-cold lifeless and joyless depths, where everything is inactive and non- becoming even there encompassed and oppressed by the resisting Void, still she remembers and invokes the skill that the Wonder-worker gave her at the time of her birth, she gives a shape to formlessness that is almost asleep and displayed a world where no world exists before. In kingdoms circumscribed by a downward circle of death, ever tied to a dark eternity of Ignorance, and quivering in an inactive Inconscient mass or imprisoned in a motionless whirling‟s of Force, and even by Matter‟s blind pressure becoming deaf and dumb she still disinclines to sleep motionlessly in the dust for taking rest. For her rebellious waking punishment given to her only the hard mechanic Circumstance as the sharp skill of her magic art, she shapes marvellous godlike images out of mud; in the plasm (original life force) she feels her dumb immortal inspiration, helps the live tissue to think, and bounded senses to feel, like lightning flashes she drives penetrating messages through weak nerves and in a heart of flesh thrashes loves miraculously (181) and to brute bodies she gives a soul, a will and a voice. She always call upon innumerable beings, shapes and scenes that are the torch-bearers of her magnificence through Time and Space as with a spell of magician‟s magic stick. This world is her long journey through the night‟s darkness, and the suns and planets provide lights on her path, our reason is the trustee of her thoughts and our senses are her living witness. There from things half true and half false she makes the drawing of her signs and exerts to replace by realised dreams the memory of her lost eternity.

In this huge world-ignorance these are her works: till the covering of ignorance is lifted and night is dead she keeps continuing her tireless search in light or dark; this world Time is her road of endless pilgrimage. A mighty passion gives incentive to all her works. The eternal Lover is the cause of all her actions, for whose sake she jumped forth from the unseen Vasts to move here in a hard unconscious world. All her acts here are her exchange with her hidden Guest, she takes the feelings of the mind of her hidden Guests for her heart‟s passionate base; and in beauty she stores the sunlight of his smile as precious things. Ashamed of her poverty of cosmic riches she coaxes his mightiness with her insignificant gifts; she in her created scenes reflects his sight‟s loyalty and seeks favor of his large-eyed wandering thoughts to dwell in the figures of her million-passionate Force. Only to attract her veiled companion and keep her hidden Guest clasped to her breast in her world-wrap else from her arms he would turn away to his formless peace, this is her heart‟s earnest work and her most sincere concern. Yet when he is most near the Life Nature feels him far. As disharmony is her nature‟s law. Even though she is ever in him and he is in her, she as if unaware of the eternal tie between them, willed to shut God into her works (182) and keep him as her loved prisoner that in the course of Time there is no severance at all between them. She at first constructed a lavish chamber of the spirit‟s sleep, and a deep interior room where he sleeps as if a forgotten guest. But now LifeNature desired to break the forgetfulness of her fascination, awake the sleeper from the bed carved out of stone and finds again the Presence of the inner being in the form and in the light that wakes with him recovers the meaning of the hurry and weary movement of Time, and through this mind that once screened the soul passes a sparkle of an unseen deity. Crossing the luminous dream of spirit‟s sky between the original Silence and the Void she built worlds like a rainbow bridge. She made this mobile universe as a net; and weaves a noose to catch the conscious Infinite. She possessed a knowledge that conceals her steps and that seems like a dumb omnipotent Ignorance. She had a might that turns wonders into truth, and disbelief is her daily routine of events. Her purposes and workings were proved as enigmas and on examination they were found other than they were, and even if explained it becomes more inexplicable. Even in our world a mystery has reigned that our earth‟s subtle screen of trivial simplicity hides and the earth‟s larger levels are made of a magical charm. There the riddle shows its bright primal stuff, there is no deep mask of commonness; and all experiences comes in a profound and secret way, the ever new marvel is divine super natural event. There exists a screened burden of veiled truth and a mysterious touch, and secrecy of sense‟s hidden significance. Although no earthen disguise covered her face, yet she flees back into herself from her own sight. There all forms are symbols of some veiled idea (183) whose cancelled purpose is hidden from mind‟s pursuit, yet is a organ of conception of Supreme consequence. There every thought and feeling is a reality, and every act is a symbol and a sign, and every symbol hides in it a living power. Life force builds a universe from truths and imaginations, but she was not capable to build what she mostly needed; whatever was shown there are a figure or copy of the Truth, but the Real veils from her its mystic face. All else she finds there but not the eternity; sought out all but the Infinite.

A consciousness lighted by a Truth beyond was felt there, it could see the light but not the Truth; it caught the Idea of the Truth and built from it a world and made an idol there and called it God. Yet something true and inwardness sheltered there. The beings of the world of greater life are tenants of a larger atmosphere and freer space, they do not live by the body or in outward things, a deeper way of living was the seat of their soul. In that kingdom of intense intimacy all objects dwell as comrades of the soul; and body‟s works are a minor script and the surface appearance of an inner life. In that world all forces are Life‟s accompanying attendance and the thought and body move with her as her female servants. The wideness of the universe made room for her; and all feel in their works the movement of the cosmos and are the instruments of the life forces‟ Cosmic might. Or they make their universe from their own self. In all those creatures who have risen to a greater Life, a voice of the unborn things whispers to their ear, before their eyes

57 some high sunlight reflects and the figure of their aspiration‟s crown: to fructify the seed she has sown within (184) and to achieve her power within them her creatures live. There each is a greatness growing towards the heights or from his inner centre they lived with great effort like oceans, in circling waves of the concentric power they swallow and devour their environment and gets satisfied. Even in that broad expense they make many small cabins, and shut in narrower breadths and briefer scenes they remain satisfied by gaining small greatnesses. To rule the little empire of them, to be a famous figure in their private world and to make the social surrounding‟s joys and griefs their own and to satisfy their inspiration of life, and the short fall and inconveniences of life is enough responsibility of this life-force, and they are the caretaker of the person and his fate. This was the line of its change of state and starting point, and the first foreign settlement into heavenliness, because all those who pass into that brilliant sphere are kith and kin of our earthly race, and this region is on the border of our mortal state.

This greater Life world is the assigner of our great movements, and its strong formations build our growing selves; its creatures are our brighter likenesses(copies), and they complete the types of the ideal way that we only start and what we try hard here to become are there very securely made ready. They were as if well-thoughted eternal characters, and complete and were not pulled by contrary tides as we do here, they follow the unseen leader in the heart, and their lives obey the inner nature‟s law. There the store of greatness and the hero‟s vessel were kept secured there, the soul is the ever alert builder of its fate; there the consciousness of none is impassive or inactive; they choose their own side, they see the god they worship. There continues a battle between falsehood and truth, from there starts a pilgrimage towards the divine Light. Because even there Ignorance aspires to acquire knowledge and shines itself with the brilliance of a distant star, (185) there exists a knowledge that dwells in the heart of sleep and Nature visits them as a conscious force. There the ideal is their leader and king: aspiring for the system of rule of the sun as of a monarch they invite Truth for their high government, in their daily acts they embody the figure Truth and fill their thoughts with her inspired voice and shape their lives into Truth‟s living form till they too could share the sun-bathed golden divinity. Or they give their assent for the truth of Darkness, whether for Heaven or Hell they had to involve in war: being warriors of Good, they serve a shining cause or as a paid member of Sin they become Evil‟s soldiers. Whenever Knowledge is the twin of Ignorance either for evil or for good they keep the equal form of right of both. Amidst wideness and the fearlessness of that atmosphere all powers of Life incline towards their godhead, each builds its temple and expands its religious sect, and Sin too there is treated as a divinity. There Sin declaring her laws of beauty and brilliance claims life as her natural kingdom; it occupies the world‟s throne or bear the chief priest‟s robe: there the worshippers of sin proclaim her sacred right. Their show reverence to Falsehood wearing a red crown, and worship the shadow of a crooked God, they welcome the black idea that perverts their brain or they lie with the sinner most Power that slays the Soul. A domineering virtue wars the pose like a statue of stone, or a Titan‟s passion urges with a goad towards a highest unrest: they are kings and priests at the Wisdom‟s altar or they make their life a sacrifice at the feet of an image of deity of Power. Or divine Beauty shines on them like a wandering star; although its light is too far for them to reach they follow her light passionately; in Art and Life they adorned the AllBeautiful ray and make the world their radiant treasure house: there even common figures are dressed marvelously; (186) a fascination and greatness that remains locked in every moment awakes the joy that sleeps in all the created things. Either in a powerful victory or in a great fall, and for a throne in heaven or a pit in hell they justified the significance of the dual Energy and they marked their souls with the tremendous seal of victory: whatever their Fate could do for them they have already experienced it; they have done something, they have become something and they live. There Matter is soul‟s result but not its cause. There for earth‟s truth of things in a contrary weighing balance the gross weighs less and weight of the subtle show more; the inner value holds the outer index of works. Like a meaningful word quivers with its thought, and with the passion of the soul the act hankers for expression of this world‟s outward sensible design looks back thrillingly to some interior might. There not limited by the external sense Mind gives shape to the inestimable (ethereal) value of the substance of the soul; there the world‟s effects without any medium of communication are registered, there and the lively act of a bodiless Force is turned into embodied thrill; here interiorised powers work unseen or hide waiting behind a wall in a hiding place and came out in front uncovering the veil from their face. There the secret becomes manifest and (manifest easily seen or recognised) kept a secret turn and carries the unknown; there the unseen was felt and struggled roughly with the apparent visible shapes. In the union of two meeting minds thought feels thought of another mind and needed not words for communication; in two hearts their emotions clasped each other, they felt each other‟s thrill in their flesh and nerves or melting each in each grew immense like fire joins fire when two houses burn: there hate wrestled with hate and love leans on love, will wrestled with will on mind‟s invisible ground, the sensations of others (187) passing through like waves make the subtle body‟s frame thrill; their anger rushed galloping like a horse in an intense brutal attack and by crushing heavy charge of their hooves on the shaken soil; one felt another‟s grief enter the heart, one felt another‟s joy rejoicing greatly ran through the blood: their hearts could draw close through distances and the voices that spoke from far off unknown shores of seas are felt nearer. There by a living interchange the heart beats: being felt being even when afar and a consciousness respond to other. Even then the supreme oneness did not exit there. Though there was a separateness of soul from soul but an inner wall of silence could be built, conscious might can protect and shield like a defensive dress, there the life-being can be kept blocked and in seclusion, and one could remain separately in self and alone. There neither identity nor union‟s peace is yet established. There everything was still imperfect, half-done and half-known: there the miracle of Inconscience is over passed but the wonder work of Superconscient is still unknown, self-covered, unfelt and unknowable, the origin of

58 all those looked down on them from above. They came as forms from the formless Infinite and lived bearing the names of the nameless Eternity. The beginning and the end of that kingdom were secret, a suddenly arrived middle-term than cannot be explained worked there: they were the words that spoke to a vast wordless Truth, they were such gathered figures added to an incomplete sum.

There none could really know himself or knew the world or the Reality (Tat) living in the inner temple: they could only know what Mind could bring from the secret Super mind‟s huge store and build. In darkness is under them and a bright Void above, they lived in a great climbing Sky without any certainty; they explained a Mystery by great mysteries, the puzzle of things gets puzzling answer there. (188) As Aswapati moved in the wide sky of that doubtful life he soon became a enigma to himself; he saw everything there as symbols and sought for their meaning.

Aswapati passing over the forceful fountain of death and birth and over the new borders of soul‟s change from form to form, a seeker on the spiritual creative path, followed life‟s fine and mighty footprints and aiming at her unintelligible delight that is difficult to overcome in an endless and dangerous daring enterprise. At first in those larger steps of the world stair no goal appeared and looking towards a wider source beyond he could only see the wider source of all things existed here. Because as far as the Life-force drew away from the earthly atmosphere, she felt a deeper attraction from the Unknown, a higher context (background) of liberating thought drove Life-force towards marvel and discovery, gradually a high release came from the cares of pettier things, and a mightier image of desire and hope is formed there, a vaster formula of things to be done came to hand and a vision of a greater scene appeared. The Life-force ever circled round and round towards some far-off divine Light: and its introducing signs that were actually revealed but still covered more than that, but as long as their infinite meaning is turn off and become a cipher luminous with unreal sense till than these were tied to some immediate sight and will and lost their purpose in the joy of use. Equipped with a magical bow as a weapon frequented by ghosts she aimed at an invisible target and ever deemed it to be too far though it was always near. As one who reads in bright letters by spelling them and the key-book of her complex magician text, Aswapati could see her subtle and complex illusive designs and the curtained and difficult theorem of her clues, and knew the thread beginning of her titan works that were drawn like diagrams on the monstrous i.e. fearful sands of desert like Time, to get some hint of the same he watched the riddle of her action, (189) read the Forbidden signs of her shadowy outlines, attempted to capture in their burdened heavy stream the caprice of her dance song based on familiar tunes in the order of its succession that were escaping into the mystery of regularisation and fall of accent of sound and inkling of departing feet on the soil that passes quickly. In the bewildering pattern of her thoughts and hopes and the bypaths of her closely acquainted desires, in the several parts of the complex corners filled with her dreams and her circular paths crossing of secretly planned impertinent rounds, Aswapati a wanderer baffled and way lost amid quickly passing scenes lost all its indications and always followed each vain guess. Even though he found the words of clue but was ignorant of their meaning. Like a sun that dazzled its own eye sight, a luminous enigma‟s brilliant covering lighted the deep red screen of his mind‟s sky: a faintly luminous large trance showed to the night her stars. As if sitting near an open window‟s empty space he read by the help of lighteningflash that were crowding there the chapters of the philosophical scripture of romance of the soul‟s search for the lost Reality and all her imaginary stories collected and formulated from spirit‟s real fact, and her caprices and her self-vanity and the concealed meanings, her reckless unintelligible abnormalities and mysterious ways. He saw the magnificent secret covering that covered her beautiful body from sight, the strange significant forms that were knitted on her robe, her meaningful pictures of the inner beings of things, the clear falsehood of her thought‟s lights, her rich woven patterns that were sewn fancifully, and her changeable faces and ornamental embroidery, and her skill of disguise. A thousand-bewildering faces of the Truth looked at him from the forms of the life force with unknown eyes and unrecognisable wordless mouths spoke from her disguised figures or the incomprehensible magnificent faces looked on him hidden by the subtle brightness of her dresses. (190) In the sudden sparks of the Unknown sounds that were in expressible became real, the ideas that seemed to be most meaningless flashed out the splendour of its truth; voices that came from unseen waiting worlds uttered the syllables of the Unmanifest to clothe the body of the mystic Word OM, and magical diagrams of the mysterious-Law covered some precise ineffable harmony or used some colour and figure to reconstitute the genealogical tables of things secret in Time. In Life natures planes of great green lands and her hidden depths, in her tangle of trees or shrubs of joy where danger clasps delight, there Aswapati could see the hidden wings of the hope of her arts of song flashed in blue, gold and bright red fire. In her secret lanes that were on the borders of her fields of roaming at will and by the side of little rivers that were flowing with bubbling sounds like songs and her calm lakes where he found the intense signs of her golden fruits of bliss and the beauty of her flowers of dream and meditation. As if a remarkable occurrence of heart‟s transformation by joy he watched in the transforming radiance of her suns the blossoming of a red coloured worldly flower on the tree-of-sacrifice of spiritual love. In the sleepy magnificence of the noon‟s of the Life-Force he saw through the time‟s moments a perpetual repetition of the thought‟s dance like long-bodied insects with two pairs of transparent wings on mystery‟s streams that only floats on the top and never able to test its murmurous‟ race and heard the laughter of her luxurious desires and the sweet ringing of the anklet-bells of imagination running as if to escape from longed-for hands. He moved amidst the living symbols of the canceled power and felt them as nearer and real forms: In that life the heart-beats of the hidden reality throbbed more concrete than the lives of men: whatever here on earth we think and feel was already embodied there, what here takes only an outward and brief living shape are there self-made. Welcomed by her mighty loneliness as a comrade of Silence on her ascetic heights (191) Aswapati he stood with her on meditating peaks where life and being are offered as a

59 sacrificial offering to the Reality beyond, and saw that the Life-Nature let loose into infinity her blind-fold eagles of significance, as messengers of Thought to the Unknowable. Identified in soul-sight and the soul-sense and entering into her depths as into one‟s own house he became one with all that the Life-Force was or that she wished to become, he thought with her thoughts and journeyed with her steps, lived with her breath and saw everything with her eyes, that he might learn the mysteries of her soul (inner consciousness).

As a witness seer over controlled by the things he saw around him Aswapati admired her great magnificence of splendourous front and play and the marvels of her rich and delicate craft, and thrilled by the strong demand of her eager cry, in a deep passion he bore the magic‟s of her might, and felt laid her sudden mysterious will on his breast, and felt her hands that press and squeeze fate in their rude clutch, her touch that gives all movements, and her powers that possess and drive. But he also saw that the soul of Life-Force wept within; her vain seeking that clutches a ever passing truth, her hopes whose sullen sight meets with hopelessness, her passion that possessed her desirous limbs, the unease and rapture of her eager breasts, her mind that labours unsatisfied with its fruits, her heart that cannot capture the one Beloved. Aswapati always met there a veiled and seeking Force and an exiled goddess building imitated superficial heavens for the purpose of ridicule, and like a (Sphinx) figure with a lion‟s body and a man‟s or animal heads whose eyes looking up to hidden Sun. Aswapati ever felt a closeness of spirit in all the forms of the greater Life-Nature: and the spirit‟s irresistible presence was her nature‟s strength; this alone was real and seen in outward visible things, even on earth the spirit is life‟s chef solution of problems, (192) but on earth‟s solid outside nowhere exist the spirit‟s sign. The spirit‟s trace is undiscoverable on the earthly acts. A pity for the lost heights is its only appeal. Only sometimes a shadowy line is caught that seemed as a hint of its veiled reality. The life force looked at Aswapati with its vague and confused shapes displaying such a picture that was beyond the grasp of sight and revealed a story not yet written there. Like a partial half lost design life‟s meanings fled from his pursuing sight. Life‟s apparent view hides its real being from sight: its secret mystery is written within and above. The mood that expresses its meaning lives far beyond; and it is not seen in its halffinished picture. Our hope is in vain to grasp the hindering scripts or to find the word of the half expressed absurd pretence in which a word is to be guessed from the enigmatic description. Only in that greater life world a mysterious thought is found that gives some clue of an interpreting word that makes our earth‟s mysterious tale understandable. At last something was seen that looked like truth. The eye that could look in an uncertain mysterious half lighted atmosphere at half of the truth in darkness only could see an image amidst a bright indistinctness and puzzled by the world in which Aswapati moved could see a half-blind chained divinity looking through a mist of subtle sign, yet he was conscious of some light that inspired his soul. Aswapati attracted by a strange far-off sparkling of light and led by the fluting of a distant flutist he tried to find out his way amid life‟s laughter and call and the complex signs of her myriad steps towards some deep infinitude. The forest-like thick Life‟s signs crowded around him and inspite of all obstacles and difficulties he could know by the arrow like springing of his Thought that could mark only by guess or luminous chance, life‟s new coloured road-lights of idea and (193) her uncertain signs of swift event, the words or ideas of her symbolic spectacular display of her figures that are difficult to penetrate an d her boundary signs in the complex paths of Time. In the confusing networks of passage of her approach and retreat she attracted and repelled him to every side, but when drawn too near she escapes from his embrace; though the life led him always but no way was sure. Tempted by the many toned astonished songs and attracted by the magical tact of her thoughts and absorbed by her occasional touches of joy and grief, Aswapati loses himself in her but could not win her. From the eyes of the Life-Force a fleeing away paradise smiles at him: he dreams to make her beauty forever his own, and dreams that the Life-Force‟s limbs bear his domination, and dreams of the magic of her breasts of bliss. Aswapati thinks to read the Wonderful Scripture written in her spiritually lighted lettering, her fanciful translation of God‟s pure original text of the sacred hymn that was the key to the sacred unknown supreme ultimate bliss. But sees that the Word of Life is hidden in its scripts, the song of Life lost its divine tone. The spirit as an unseen prisoner in a house of sound, lost itself in the bright light of a dream listens to a thousand-voiced deception‟s song. There a skillfully made witchcraft enchants the heart or a fiery magic made colourful her tones and colours, yet they only awake nothing but a thrill of brieflived beauty; the wanderer Time descends there in its nomadic march, but they call to a brief unsatisfied delight or to indulge in enrapturing of mind and sense but it misses the luminous tone of the soul. A blind heart-beat that derives joy through tears, an eagerness mounting towards ever unreached heights, and an ecstasy of unfulfilled desire pursues the last heavenward climbing‟s of the voice of life-force. The memories of life-forces past sufferings were transformed into an old sadness‟ sweet vanishing footprints: her tears are transformed (194) into gems of diamond pain, and her sorrow turned into a of magic crown of song. Her moments of great happiness was brief that only touches the surface and then escapes or vanishes: only in her depths a lost remembrance of that echoes, she had a longing for immortality and gets a screened soul‟s call; she is a prisoner in the mortal‟s limiting world, a spirit wounded by life‟s weeping in her breast; to keep her pangs nursed is her deepest call. She is a wanderer on abandoned hopeless routes, along the road of sound is a frustrate voice that being renounced cries to a forgotten bliss. Moving here and there in the echoing dark caves of Desire it guards the ghosts of soul‟s dead hopes alive the voice of transient things or seeking for pleasure in the depths of pain or stay about on sweet and wandering songs. A hand of lord of Fate has touched the strings of the musical instrument of the universe: the sudden intervention of a troubled tone covers the inner music‟s hidden key though unheard yet it guides the outer rhythm of the sweet songs. Yet there is joy to live and to create and joy to love and labour though everything fails and a joy to seek though all we found deceives and all on that we lean goes back on disloyalty of our trust; yet there exists something in its depths that

60 justify the pain; she searches in a passionate memory with ecstasy‟s fire. There even grief has joy hidden beneath its roots: because nothing is truly useless that has been created by the One and Alone: God‟s strength survives in our defeated hearts and victory‟s star still lights our road of hopelessness; our death is made a passage to new worlds. This gives Life‟s music a heaving rhythm of the song of praise. The Life-Force pours down the glory of her voice everywhere, heaven‟s raptures whisper to her heart and pass, (195) earth‟s brief yearning‟s cry comes out from her lips and fades away. Only the God-given hymn escapes her art‟s skill that came with her from her spiritual home but stopped half-way and failed, a silent word awake from the deep interlude of the waiting worlds, in eternity‟s hush a murmur was swung: but no breath comes to her from the supreme peace: a luxurious song of interval occupies her ear and her heart listens to that and soul consents; she repeats a quickly fading music wasting Time‟s eternity in the service of transient things. The self embodying spirit came to play on the vast string of the harp of Nature-Force the wave sound of the voices of the moments of Time forgetting that the Life-Nature screens the high topic of the same. Only a mighty murmur of the eternal Word was heard here and there, the blissful Voice or Beauty‟s touch that transfigures heart and sense, and a wandering splendour and a mystic cry, awakes a memory of that strength and the sweetness heard no more.

Here is the empty space, the life-force stops here and sinks, this shortage makes the magician life-force‟s skill very poor and this want makes all the rest seem very meager and empty. A half-sight draws the line of limit of her acts: her inner depths remember what she had come to do but the mind has forgotten or the heart commits errors: thus in Life-Nature‟s endless lines she loses God. The life-force‟s heart‟s excessive vanity is to conceive the all-knowing in knowledge and in her acts to erect the All-Mighty, to create her Creator here, and to possess the cosmic scene with the help of the absolute God. She goes on working to transform the still far indeterminable into an all achieving manifestation, and the Inexplicable into an utterance, to bring down the glory of the Absolute‟s force, (196) change the existence into a rhythmic tone of creation, and join a sky of calm with a sea of bliss. She is like a fire who labours to invite eternity into Time, to make body‟s joy as living soul‟s joy, to lift Earth to make it neighborhood with heaven, and to equate life with the Supreme and reconcile the eternal and the Hell. Her practical standpoint with regard to the Truth that is beyond all limitation of Earth fill silence with the voices of the gods but in this the unique Voice of the One and alone is lost, because Nature‟s vision climbs beyond her acts. She sees above in heaven the way of the life of gods but in our mortal element she can at best become a demigod emerging from an ape and this is her limit of achievement. Here upon earth the highest height of her climb is to half-god and the half-titan; this greater life swings between earth and sky. A deeply moving feeling‟s duality pursues her dreams: her screened energy drives her to an ignorant world to recover a joy that her own strong clasp has lost, in the embrace of the ignorant world the life force cannot turn to its source. Her power is immense and her act‟s vast forward urge is endless, but its significance of work led into error and is lost. Even though she carries in her secret breast the law of the journeying groove of all things born on earth, yet her knowledge in this regard seems to be partial and her purpose small; on a soil of intense longing her magnificent moments pass. A heavy burden of Ignorance weighs on her wings of Thought and hence it cannot rise above; her power oppresses the inner being with its cloaks, and her actions confine the immortal sight of the inner soul. A sense of limit regularly causes problem on her supremacies and nowhere there is assurance of satisfaction or peace: because in all the depth and beauty of her work the spirits liberating wisdom lacks. Now an old and vanishing grace is seen on her face and her quick and curious hierarchy became sterile for Aswapati; because his wide soul longed for a deeper joy than the joy of life-force. (197) Aswapati sought to escape out of the Life-Force‟s confused network of path but he could not find a gate of horn or ivory nor a secret gate of spiritual sight, from that dreamlike space there was no way of escape. Our being must move eternally through the course of Time, death cannot afford any help to us, and the hope to cease is vain; a secret Will compels us to live forever. Our life‟s rest is destined to be in the arms of the Infinite; it cannot end, its end lies in the Life divine (Life-Supreme). Death is only a passage but not the goal of the walk of our life, some ancient deep push labours on: our souls are dragged as with a hidden rope carried from birth to birth from world to world, even after our body‟s fall and our acts prolong the old journey that continuous without stop. Time is a continual movement and no silent peak for its rest is found, this life is like a magic stream that never reached its sea of confluence. However far Aswapati travelled, wherever he turned, the wheel of works ran with him and overtook him: always there a farther task left to be done. In that unquiet Life world there ever grew drum beats of action and cry for search and a busy murmur filled the heart of Time. In that world everything was a mechanical device and a plan and an unending stir. There to live the life a hundred ways were tried for same which is ultimately proved to be vain: a sameness that assumed thousand forms attempted to escape from its long monotone and make new things that soon turned out to be like the old. A strange mysterious decoration attracted the sight and to cheat the mind with the idea of change the old things were renovated with new values; it was a different picture that remained still the same appeared upon the cosmic vague background. It was only another tangled and intricate house of creatures and their doing and events, and a city of the movement of bound souls (198) and a market of creation and wares (articles) of the creatrix was given to the labouring mind and heart of the Life-Force for sale. There the place where it first began its journey was given a specified name as a circuit of ending of its forward and eternal march of progress on perfection‟s unknown road. There each final scheme ever leads to a plan that follows as its next event of the scheme. Yet every new deviation seems to be the last, an inspired things regarded as absolutely true, the scripture‟s ultimate peak proclaiming a universal remedy for all Time‟s evils or carrying thought in its ultimate highest flight and trumpeting as of a supreme discovery; each brief idea is a structure subjected to be destroyed rapidity that publishes the immortality of its rule, and its claim to be the perfect form of things and Truths highest quality and

61 Time‟s golden result. But consequently till now no achievement has been made of infinite value: a world is created ever anew, but never complete and always heaped half-attempts on vain attempts and saw a fraction as eternal Whole. In the aimless higher rising total of things done existence appeared as an act of vain necessity, a wrestle (fighting with hand) of eternal opposites in a clasped hostility‟s close-locked embrace, a drama without any final scene of the play or idea, a hunger march of lives without a goal, or a meaningless recurring sum total of soul‟s written on a bare blackboard of Space, a hope that failed, a light that never burns, and seemed as the labour of an unaccomplished Force to its acts in a dim eternity. There is no end of that and none yet could be seen there: although the life is ever defeated; yet it must struggle on, always she sees a crown that she cannot possess; her eyes are fixed beyond her fallen state. The glory that was once hers and is no more existent still thrills within her breast and ours (199) or there calls to us from some unutterable beyond that could not yet be reached by this crippled. In a memory behind our mortal sense though forgotten by us and immortal in lost Time a dream of larger happier atmosphere persistently awakes around free hearts of joy and love.

A ghost of bliss pursues the life-force‟s inner depths frequently, because she still remembers between half-way of God‟s silence and the bottomless Hell of her kingdom of golden ease and glad desire and the beauty and strength and happiness that were hers in the sweetness of her luminous paradise, and in her kingdom of immortal ecstasy though the same is now so far. This knowledge we keep in our hidden parts; awake to a call from a indistinct mystery we meet a deep unseen Reality that was far truer than the world‟s face of present truth: a self that we cannot remember now remains behind and drives us and we are moved by a Spirit that we must still become some day or other. As one who has lost the kingdom of his soul, turning our face we look back to some divine state of our birth other than this imperfect creature here upon earth and hope in this or diviner world to recover yet from Heaven‟s patient guard what we had missed by our mind‟s forgetfulness, and hope to get back our being‟s natural felicity, and our heart‟s delight that we have exchanged for grief, and the body‟s thrill that we have bartered for mere pain, like a dark moth longs for blazing light so also our mortal nature longs for supreme bliss. Our present life is only a march towards a victory never owned by us. This wave of our life being‟s curious desire for delight, this ardent disorderly commotion of unsatisfied strengths excitement, and this long and far lines of forward attempting hopes that lift their worshipping eyes to the blue Void called as heaven and looking for the golden Hand that never stretched towards us, (200) the advent for which the whole creation waits, and for the beautiful face of Eternity that shall one day appear upon the roads of Time towards which our life‟s march proceeds on. Yet still to ourselves we say by realising our faith “yes, surely one day he shall come by hearing our call and create our life newly and utter the magic formula of peace and bring perfection to the whole universe. One day he shall descend to life and earth leaving behind the secrecy of the eternal doors into a world that cries for help and bring the truth that sets free the spirit, the joy that is the initiator of truth of our soul, and the strength that is the outstretched hand of divine Love. One day he shall lift his beauty‟s terrible covering, make bare open his secret body of light and bliss and pour delight on the world‟s beating heart”. But now we are struggling to reach a goal that is unknown to us: there is no end to our seeking and birth and no end of death and rebirth; the life that wins its aim must aspire for greater aims, the life that fails and dies must live again; this cycle of birth and death cannot cease till it discovers its own soul. All must be done for which life and death were created. But who shall say that even then there is rest for life? Or in the depths of the God‟s supreme delight rest and action might be the same. In an elevated state of our life where ignorance does not exist each movement is a signal of peace and bliss, rest is God‟s motionless creative force, action is a bubble in the Infinite and birth is an expressive movement of Eternity. A sun of transformation still can shine and the darkest darkness of Night might open its depth of mystic divine light; this earthly self-loss and self-torturing duality might change into a selfluminous mystery, (201) the meaningless disorder might change into a supernatural joy. Then only God could be visible here upon earth and take a shape; our soul‟s spiritual identity would then be disclosed: life would reveal her true immortality. But now her fate is of an unending labour, birth and death in its recurring decimal of events shall be seen as unending repetition‟s points; the old questionmark shall continue to be marked in the margin of each finished page of each volume of her effort‟s history. But still after crossing the centuries and millenniums of journey of life a limping yes continues accompanied by an eternal No. The whole creation appears to be fruitless, yet the game is unending. The Wheel of creation turns impassively ever and there is no escape of life out of this, and death brings no release. The being lives as a prisoner of it and keeps its futile immortality; it has been denied complete destruction which is its sole escape from this entrapment. Perhaps an error of the gods has created this world. Or the Eternal keeps watch on the movements of Time impassively.

- END OF CANTO SIX

62

Canto Seven The Descent into Night

(202) Now Aswapati‟s Mind freed from the influence of life, made calm to acquire knowledge, his heart took a different turn from blindness and pain, and the pressure of tears and the bond of ignorance, to find out the cause of the failure of the wide world. He looked far away from the universal Nature‟s visible form and saw into the Vast that was beyond the range of sight, and the overpowering unknown Infinity, asleep behind the endless winding of the universal things that carries the universe in its timeless breadths whose being‟s waves are our lives. These worlds were created by the unconscious Breath of the unknown Infinite, and Matter and Mind are its forms or powers, and our waking thoughts are product of its dreams. Now the veil that covers the Nature‟s depths were torn apart: Aswapati could see the source of the world‟s continuing pain and the depth of the mouth of the black pit of Ignorance; the sin that remained guarded at the roots of life raised up its head and looked into Aswapati‟s eyes. On a dim shore of sea where the inner Space vanishes, and from a lonely peak from where everything could be seen, from there a darkened Ignorance awakened and looked with its wide blank blind eyes astonishing at Time and Form and looked at the original source of the living Void and the Bottomless depths from where our creation began. Behind that there appeared a grey formed disguise of Night observing the birth of all created things. There appeared a canceled Power conscious of its force and a indistinct hidden Presence everywhere, an advance Grim Destiny that threatens all the created things, and a Death that blossoms itself as the dark seed of life, seemed to be generating and slaying the world. (203) Thereafter from the darkest mystery of the depths of the Night and from the hollow centre bosom of the Mask the outer covering something moved stealthily that appeared as a shapeless Thought. An Influence causing death spread over the creatures and its deadly touch pursued the immortal spirit, the hunting finger of Death was laid on life and the soul‟s natural will for truth, joy and light was covered with error, grief and pain. A covered perversion claimed to become the being‟s very movement and Nature‟s true drive. A inimical and deliberately unreasonable Mind at every corner the conscious life keep settled and degraded Truth with her own formulas and was an obstructer of the souls listening, tainting knowledge of mystical gods with the colour of doubt possessed the divine revelation, wiped off the signposts fixed on the path of the Life‟s pilgrimage, and cancelled the firm divine messages graved by Time on rocks, and on the foundations of the cosmic Law raised huge monumental gate of bronze tower of its misrule. By the influence of that disguised danger‟s illusive sorcery even divine Light and Love abandoning the brilliant nature of the gods turned to take refuge under the fallen angels and misleading suns, and thus they themselves became a danger and a magic spell, and a contrary sweetness and heaven-born curse: its power could disfigure the divinest things. A sorrowful power of breathing breathed upon the world; there all thought was besieged by falsehood, all acts exhibit stamp of defect or a sign of hopelessness, all high attempts carried the sign of failure or vain success, but there none could know the cause of his fall. There the grey Disguise whispered, though no sound was heard, yet in the ignorant heart a seed was sown that bore deadly fruit of suffering, death and destruction. Out of the unpleasantly cold universal invisible tireless greasy plain of a sterile Darkness (204) the shadowy cover with the Night‟s grey clock arrived, they are the dreadful messengers, invaders from a dangerous world of power, diplomats of absolute sin. In the silence of that Night The unheard voices spoke, the Hands that none had seen sowed the deadly seed and though their form was not seen a dreadful was done, there an iron like hard decree written in criminal scripts imposed a law of sin and harmful fate. There Life Power looked at Aswapati with changed and depressingly gloomy eyes: he saw her beauty and the hearts of terrible desire in things that could be satisfied with little happiness, responding to a trivial ray of truth or love; he saw life‟s gold sunlight and her far blue sky, the green magnificence of the leaves and the colour and fragrance of the flowers, the attractiveness of children and love of friends and the beauty of women and kindly hearts of men, but also saw the dreadful Powers that drove the moods of life and the pain she has scattered upon her ways, was waiting on the unseen steps of men their fate and her sin and sorrow and last gift of death. A damaging breath of disappointment and deterioration watched for Life‟s perfection and made to decay the full grain of the soul: as an outcome progress became a supplier of food for Death. That world attached to the law of the slain divine Light held the decomposed and foul corpses of dead truths, lovingly welcomed enthusiastically perverted forms as things free, new and true, enjoys beauty from the sap of ugliness and sin and feeling themselves as guests at the feasts of the gods and tasted decomposed things like a highly tasty food.

Darkness had covered the dense atmosphere; it captured and killed the bright smile from Life Nature‟s lips and slew the inborn confidence in her heart and filled fear‟s criminal looks into her eyes. The thirst for sex that perverts the spirit‟s natural good replaced by an artificial virtue and sin (205) the frank spontaneous impulse of the soul: distressing Life Nature with dual‟s lie and on their twin values sharpened a forbidden gusto of passion, made sin a means of relief from fake good, the ego nourished on righteousness and sin and each become an instrument of Hell. The old simple delights were left to lie in rejected heaps by the side of the uninteresting roads on the wasteland of life‟s descent to Night. There all glory of life was dimmed and stained with doubt; all beauty wearing an aging face gets vanished; all power wore the title of tyranny and there Truth was an imagination according to the need of the mind; pursue of joy was now turned into a tired hunt; and all knowledge was turned into a questioning Ignorance.

Now Aswapati saw as if hidden behind the fair outside of life the body and face of dark Unseen as if rising from a dark womb.

Its dangerous fellowship with us is the cause of our suffering. Its breath is a subtle poison that remains in men‟s hearts; and all sin oozes out from that duality face. Now a serious and immediate danger infested the common atmosphere; and that world grew full of

63 threatening Energies and as in field and house, street, camp and market wherever he turned his eyes for help or hope, he met the footsteps and the stealthy movements of armed Influences with shapes that cause distress. A march of dark and bare goddess figures threatened the atmosphere with great unease; their frightful footsteps invisibly drew near, horrifying shapes invaded the dream-light, and terrible beings whose sight was a great catastrophe passed him on the road: faces with sudden and over powering sweetness and faces with rinsing attracting lips and eyes (206) approached him armed with beauty like a net spread by a hunter, but they hid a meaning that causes death in each shape and could dangerously change in a moment. But Aswapati alone could mark the hidden attack. There a veil is laid upon the inner vision, there was a force that hid its terrible steps; there all was falsehood, yet thought itself to be true, there all were besieged (beset) but could not know of their siege: because none could see the creator of their fall.

Aswapati conscious of some dark wisdom that was still unknown and authorisation that was the real seal and guarantee of this darken strength, followed the route of the dim tremendous steps of the darken strength returning to the night which was the place from where they came. He reached an area that was not built yet properly and owned by none: there all could enter but none could stay there for long. It was a land filled with sinful atmosphere and owned by none; it was a crowded neighbourhood but without a single residence of household, and a borderland between the world and hell. There unreality was Nature‟s lord: it was a place where no truth exist, because nothing was what it had claimed to be a deceptive void was covered by high outward show of forms. Yet there nothing would confess its own deception even to itself in its dual heart: there a vast fraudulence is the custom of things; and they lived only by that act of deceiving. All the forms of this Life Nature took that guaranteed by a reality which made them seem to exist and live for a while. A fake magic drew all falsehood from the Void, they took such a shape and stuff that was not theirs and showed a colour that they could not keep and those were the mirrors of imaginary reality (reflections of a real mirage). There the glitter of each rainbow was a great lie; an unreal beauty charmed an enchanting face. There nothing had the reliability of its lasting: (207) joy nourished tears and good proved to be an evil, but none can ever derive good out of evil: there love turned early into hate and delight is killed with pain, became falsehood and life is ruled by death. There existed a Power that laughed at the harms of the world, and a mockery that joined the world‟s contraries and flung them into each other‟s arms for struggle and drew a cruel line of jest on the face of God. Although the Power remains away, yet its influence entered everywhere and left a demon‟s footprint that causes evil on the breast of the world; a crooked heart and a strange boring smile mocked at the life‟s wicked amusing incident. Announcing the arrival of a sense of humor from a dangerous threatening form and softens its dreadful footfall none might understand or be on guard; none could hear the sound of the coming of a dreadful clutch until it came near. Or else all could see a favorable revelation of divine approach, and feel an atmosphere of prophecy and a heavenly hope, listened to things regarded as a scripture and waited watching for a new star. There a Wicked or cruel person could be seen but with a robe in light appeared to have come as a helping angel from the heavens: equipped like weapons the Scripture and the Law in the hands of falsehood; he duped with wisdom and slew the soul with the help of virtue and led to an infinite torture of Hell by the heavenward path. He poured down a sense of abundance of power and joy, and when there arose a warning from within against its cruel actions, then reassured solacing the ear with its sweet sounding soothing tones or kept the mind prisoned in its own net; his severe logic turned untruth to seem as true. Stupefying the chosen wise with the holy spiritually excellent knowledge spoke with the very voice of God. There the atmosphere was filled with violation of trust and a misleading trick; and in that place to speak truth was only a tactics; a trick hidden in a smile, and danger is hidden under the cover of safety, and firm belief in reliability is its entry‟s gate: Falsehood came there laughing with the eyes of truth; (208) there each friend becomes an enemy or a spy(secret agent), the hand one clasped hides in its armed covering a stabbing sharpened dagger and a friendly clasp turns into an iron cage of Evil fate. Pain and danger pursued stealthily their trembling prey involuntarily and always spoke softly as to a easily frightened friend: there suddenly an intense and unseen attack sprang at every turn fear sprang forcefully upon the heart and cried out with severe mental suffering‟s painful voice; there none came near to save though called for. There all walked with full alertness, because death was ever near; yet there carefulness seemed a vain waste, because all those hidden in smile were there as protectors proved to be a snare of death, and when at last after long anticipation liberation came and brought a powerless strength of glad relief, then it served as a favorable bright path to worse fate. It was a world of battle and surprise where there was no pact and a safe place for rest, and hence one does not dare to sleep or put off one‟s arms. All who were there lived for themselves alone; all battled with all, but with a common hate turned against the mind that sought some higher good; there Truth was banished or else she should dare to speak and hurt the heart of darkness with her light or bring her pride of knowledge to defame the settled disorder of the established things.

Thereafter the scene was changed, but in its inner depths there remained the state of same dreadfulness: although Life altered its form but remained the same as before. It was like a capital without any kingdom: there was no ruler, only struggling groups were there. Aswapati saw a city of ancient Ignorance founded upon a soil that never knew Light. There each walked alone in his own darkness: they were only unanimous to walk in different ways of Evil or to live in their own way for their own self interest or to enforce a common lie and wrong; (209) there Ego was the lord and seated upon his peacock throne and Falsehood sat beside him as his friend and queen: as Heaven turned towards Truth and God the world turned to them. There injustice by its strong and firm decrees was justified as universal weights of the Error‟s legalised trade, but all the weights were false and none were the same; there Error always

64 watched with her weighing balance and a sword, else any unsacred word would expose her holy laws‟ real shape of old misrule. There self will covered in high religious beliefs walked extending over the whole, and disregard of laws and customs walked in a haughty manner talking of foolishly trumpeting with regards to orderliness and right of justice: there was no altar raised for worshipping Liberty; there true freedom was rejected and slain like a prey; nowhere harmony and tolerance could be seen; there each group proclaimed its drastic and irrefutable Law. There a moral pattern was declared loudly as the scripture‟s whole law or a theory believed and praised passionately as a formula that seemed as high Heaven‟s gospel of sacred law. Protected by an armed iron shield a stereotyped custom gave to an uncultured and pitiless warrior kind a proud severe poise of harsh nobility and a firm and over powering civic posture drawing primitive womb of the earth. But all their personal acts proved their posture as falsehood: force and usefulness were for them is Truth and correct, there an eagle like greed cut to pieces their desired virtue, and its sharpened beak and pointed nails tore all their weaker prey. In their secret inner palace of pleasant sins they obeyed the Life Nature but not to any moralist God. They were the Inconscient traders of all contrary things; they commit what in others they would punish, when they looked upon their fellow being‟s sinful acts then the scornful anger a virtuous severe fury flamed in them; There forgetting their own deep hidden offences they throw stones like disorderly crowed at their neighbour caught in sin. From within them a non idealist judge announced all false decrees and (210) gets seated the worst injustices on the base of justice, proved by reason all ill-actions as just and sanctions the merchant ego‟s scale of selfishness and desire. In this manner a balance was kept there by which the world could survive. A fanatic ardour pushed forward their dire institutions (ruthless cults), there all devoted belief of religion that are contrary to their own were whipped and bled as opinion that is contrary to accepted religious belief; they questioned, imprisoned, tortured, burned or hit and forced the soul to give up truth or die. There amid the groups of her conflicting religious beliefs and warring religious denominations, religion sat upon a bloodstained throne. A hundred cruel and arbitrary uses of authorities there oppressed and slew and unity is founded upon criminal deception and despotism. There what is apparent was only prized as real: the ideal was an object of mockery of the pessimist (cynic): there spiritual seeking scorned by the crowd and jeered by the enlightened wise wandered expelled and outcaste and unsheltered, it seemed like a dreamer‟s self-deceiving net of thought or judged as a wild and fanciful imagination or a false magic of a pretender or its passionate instinctive thoughts passed through mind‟s obscurity and gets lost in the circuits of the Ignorance. There a lie was truth and truth is treated as a lie. Since Hell‟s adventurous kingdoms‟ winds through the heavenly route, here must the traveller of the heavenward Way either stop or pass slowly through that dangerous space, always with a prayer upon his lips and recitation of a great Name. If his insight‟s sharp spear of conscience does not closely examined vigilantly, then he might trip into falsity‟s endless net. He must often look back over his shoulder like one who feels an enemy‟s breathe riding on his neck; or else a traitorous blow striking stealthily behind him might make him lie with his face on the ground and make mix in the unholy soil, the Evil‟s sharpened violent spear might pierce through his back. Thus the traveller might fall on the Eternal‟s road forfeiting the spirit‟s lonely chance in Time (upward ascension) and no news of him would reach the gods waiting for his arrival, and his name marked as “missing” in the register of souls (211) and his name becomes a pointer of a failing hope and assume the position of a dead remembered star. Only were safe who kept God in their hearts: courage their armour, faith as their sword, their hands ready to give blows and eyes alert to observe keenly casting a spear-point like sight in front and must be heroes and soldiers of the army of divine Light. Even in spite of that passing through that fatal danger, released into a calmer and purer air and at last dare to breathe and smile once more on the upward heavenly route is very rare. Once more to move beneath a real sun is also tough. Though the reign of Hell was continued there, Aswapati‟s inner spirit could overcome it. He could pass this no-man‟s-land without any controversy because the heights beyond have sent him and the Abyss desired him and hence none could stand across his way and no voice of hell could prohibit him from proceeding further. As the downward path is swift and easy so now he turned his face towards the Night.

A denser darkness and a regenerated kingdom waited for him on his way, because what exists in sins extreme is still worst; yet compared to the covered an uncovered is naked worst. God and Truth and the supreme Light had never been there, or else if at all they did exist they had no power more. As when one slips over mind‟s border into another world in a deep moment‟s trance, So Aswapati crossed a boundary whose secret trace eyes could not see but only soul feels it. He came into an a defensively protected extreme frightened kingdom, and found himself wandering like a lost soul amid Night‟s dreadful walls and primitive areas in a very bad living condition. Around him crowded grey and filthy huts and near to it existed proud palaces of immoral Power, and inhuman residences and houses of evil spirits like imps. There a proud sinful work held firmly in its arms its fallen miserable state; an agony assailing great brightness kept pressed those fallen darkened outskirts of the cities of dream-life. (212) There Life disclosed to the witness soul the shadow depths of her strange marvel. As an empress who behaves as a prostitute within the high walls of a brothel, naked and unashamed, and rejoicing so also a strong and hopeless fallen goddess darkened and deformed by the enchantment of some dire Sin, as of a feminine figure whose look turns mortal beholders into stone, upraised her evil face of dangerous beauty and charm and drawing to the panic of its shuddering kiss in between the magnificence of her fatal breasts and allured the spirit‟s fall into their bottomless depth. Across the range of Aswapati‟s sight that fallen goddess multiplied as on a scenic film or a moving gramophone plate the dire brightness of the grand display of her terrifying unpleasant dreams. On the dark background (stage) of a soulless world that fallen goddess staged between an intense light and shade her dramas of the sorrow of the depths that were written on the painful nerves of the living things: there the epics of horror and dreadful sublimity, deformed statues struck and stiffened in life‟s mud, a

65 congestion of very ugly forms and deeds clipped pity in the hardened breast. There in temporary huts of sin and the places of crime or vice of nasty deeds of immoral conduct of the night engraved in the flesh of the body and the styled notorious evil sex desires of the body and hateful imaginations that tempt the flesh and turn the sexual lure into a decorative art: the pervert skill of that goddess misusing the gifts of Nature immortalised the sown seeds of living death, poured the heavenly nectar into a pot of mud and gave the reigning rod of god into the hands of a perverted half-man and half animal. Impure, cruel sadistic forms, in a lust of rape with distorted faces biting their teeth, horrible and grim grey foul figures appeared there from the gulfs of Night as if seen in a television. The goddess‟s clever inventing skill of invention of monstrous shapes impatient of all natural shape and poise, made an irony of a stark reality to nude exaggerated lines (213) of a face by opening of the mouth, the beauty of arts queer distorted forms and the disguised faces of unhealthy (unnatural) sexiness that are offensively indecent and terrible always excited the torn sense by mental distressed position. The fallen goddess was a worshipper of a stark sin, made great all meanness and elevated extremely dirty things; a fierce power as of reptile like creeping energies and strange arrivals of mean Force and serpent grandeurs sleeping in the mud carry the things of adoration to a flame burning on a mud. There all Nature pulled out from its frame and base was deformed into an unnatural posture: there disguised inspires the sleepy inactive desire; suffering were turned into a red-spiced tasty food for bliss, hatred was confidently engaged with the strong sexual desire and torture (infliction of severe pain) took the form of an embrace; suffering and pain was dedicated to death as a ritual, worship was offered to the Evil force. A new sense of beauty of the art of Hell trained the mind to love what the soul hates, and the art of Hell imposed a loyalty on the quivering nerves and forced the unwilling body to be delighted by that. In this kingdom that defined the being‟s depths (roots) it is extremely difficult to inspire it to activity in a manner sweetly and harmoniously, here beauty was banned exiled keeping the feelings of the heart dulled to sleep and in their place the sensation‟s thrills were held dearly; to the heart of the world was closely examined for the spurt of the sense apple, they piercing into it a pointed spear.

Here the passionless intellect was the judge and needed sensual prick, and push and torture that its hard dryness and its dead nerves might feel some passion and power and feel its sharp point of life. There a new philosophy justified the rights of the sin, felt pride in its shaking putrefied decline standard or gave to a titanic serpent Force a charming speech and made strong the primeval brute with knowledge like a weapon. Only Leaning on Life and material world spreads its influences, changed mind into the image of a violent beast; (214) it crawled into the pit to dig & seek out the truth and searched with the help of subconscient light. Because from there rose like bubbles impurity and the decaying secrets of the bottomless depths, polluting the atmosphere: this is announced as sure fact and real life. Now composed with these things the atmosphere was filled with foul smell. From that secret Night a passionate wild-beast moved stealthily to watch its prey with charming eyes: around Aswapati stretching out its tongue like a flame of fire there moved and laughed with mockery of beast like ecstasy; the sky was packed with brutal and fierce desires; crowding and stinging in monstrous groups pressed into some thoughts consisting of vague sounds that could poison the Nature‟s heavenliest breath pressed into his mind and forced his reluctant eyelid‟s sight to acts that revealed the mystery of Hell. All that existed in that region was made of this pattern.

In those regions there inhabited a race possessed by evil forces (like ghosts and phantoms). A devilish force hiding in man‟s deeper depths heaves to surface suppressed by the heart‟s human law, stupefied by the calm and majestic eyes of Thought (Reasoning Mind), arising in a fire and earthquake of the soul, and inviting its native night, overthrow the reasoning mind and occupy the life and stamp its hoof marks on Nature‟s shaking ground: for those races this was a flaming depth of their being. A mighty strength, a deformed god hard to the strong, and dreadful to the weak, looked continuously with the stony eyelids of its fixed idea at the harsh unpitying world it has created. Its heart was drunkenly riotous with a monstrous hunger‟s wine, it felt a thrilled delight in others‟ suffering and heard the great music of death and ruin. Here, to have power, and to be a master of everything, was alone the virtue and good for them: to make the whole world as Sin‟s living room (215) and its party‟s (group‟s) dreadful arbitrary rule to be the cruel destiny of living things was its claim. There all was shaped and patterned on one plan under a dark domineering reign‟s breathless heavy weight.

Aswapati met beings that looked like living men in streets, houses, councils and courts whose speech climbed high with winged thought but they harboured within them less than human, morally base and lower than the lowest reptile‟s creeping on the ground. The reason meant for rising up to the nearness of gods and uplift to heavenly scale by the touch of mind only enhanced the ray of their inborn nature‟s distorted crookedness as monsters. Frequently a familiar face studying joyfully met Aswapati unexpectedly at some dangerous turn, Aswapati‟s inner vision hoping to recognise a look of light warned by the spirit‟s inward eye his vision suddenly discovered Hell‟s footprints there, or cautioned by his unerring inner sense could see the resemblance of a beautiful masculine energetic form of the titan, demon and phantom. There an arrogance that was of a mighty cold stone-hearted strength, carried out orders that were approved by the Titan‟s law, driven by the huge laughter of a giant cruelty and fierce glad deeds of man-eater monster‟s violence ruled there. In that wide cave of pessimistic thinking beasts, to look for a trace of compassion or love is vain for one, there existed nowhere the touch of sweetness, but only there exists a brutal Force and its follower greed and hate: there was no help for suffering none to save, there none could dare to resist or to speak a noble word. There the power of Darkness took up arms of sponsorship of cruel and unfair Power, signing the decree of her dreadful rule, and using blood and severe pain as an authorisation proclaimed her motto to the world. There a slavish deceiving silence then quieted the mind, (216) or only it repeated the lessons already possessed by Mind , while the Falsehood wearing a turban on his head and holding the reigning rod enthroned on dreaded and fallen hearts and ruled there and with the help of cults and creeds that organise living death, and slay the soul on the altar of a lie as

66 sacrifice. There all were deceived or served their own deception misleading trick; there in that suffocative atmosphere truth could not live. There meanness had reliability in its own joy and fear and weakness always clasped their mean (base) depths; all that is low and filled with scornful thought and base, dull, poor and miserable in their ruinous satisfaction breathed in its natural air without yearning for any divine liberation: there the people of the infernal gulfs are haughty with their jeering ridiculed at more luminous states, and hated the sun. There a fenced system of government with unrestricted Power prevented light; stable in its will to keep the state of its darkened self, proclaimed the pride its norm as unique and of magnificent type: with the dream of a plunderer it quieted down its hunger; displaying in pride its cross of servitude like a crown, it clung to its darkest dire freedom. There a bull-throat cried with its harsh tongue; and its shameless shout filling the Space and threatening all who ever dared to listen to the truth and claimed the exclusive monopoly of the dreadful ear; it gave its affirmation to a deafened assent, in the night‟s darkness, shouted trumpeting, boastful dogmas of the scripture and the fallen soul whom once it deemed as a god for him pronounces the pride of its hell‟s absolute.

Aswapati an only discoverer in these threatening realms guarded like cities of white ants from the sun, treated cruelly amid the crowd and stampede and noise and instable light, passing from darkness to deeper and dangerous darkness he wrestled with the powers that stole from mind its light and fully defeated the evil influences that clung to him. (217) Soon he rose into a dim wall-less space. As he left now behind the populated paths; he walked between the wide banks of light and darkness of the gradual ending evening. Around him there grew a grim spiritual blank, a threatening dryness, and an evil loneliness that left his mind bare to an unseen attack and made it like an empty page on which all the forces of that realm could write the hard nude atrocious messages without any bar at will. In the dark evening‟s like a travelling dot Aswapati moved downward roads mid unfertile fields, store houses of grains and huts scattered here and there and through few crooked ghostly trees, and faced a sense of death and conscious void. But still an unseen inimical Life was present there whose death-like state resisting light and truth and made living a ghostly empty space in the void. He heard the horrifying voices that repudiate and assaulted by thoughts that thronged like hordes of ghosts he became a prey of the phantoms that were moving around looking in the darkness and the terror approaching him with its mouth that causes death, a strange will power drove him from down to ever down, the sky above him became the announcer of Evil Destiny, he attempted hard to protect his spirit from the clutches of hopelessness, but felt the horror of the growing darkest Night and the Hell that rose to claim his soul. Thereafter the homes of the creatures and their forms were vanished and solitude kept him covered in its silent layers. Thereafter the existence of everything vanished suddenly; his soul became an empty gulf of listening freed from the dead illusion of the world: there nothing was left and not even an evil face. Thus he was alone in that grey great python like Night. A dense nameless mute conscious naught existed there, that seemed alive but without body or mind, it passionately desired to destroy all beings completely that it may forever exist there barely and alone. As in a shapeless beast‟s untouchable jaws (218) clutched, stifled by that sensuous appetite gluey mass his being was driven to some black and giant‟s mouth and swallowing throat and a huge belly of ruin, it disappeared from its own vision and drawn towards depths that hungered for its beings fall. There Aswapati‟s struggling brain was oppressed by a formless void, a dreadful and cold darkness benumbed his flesh, a murmured dismal suggestion depressed his heart; forcefully pulled by a serpent like coiled force from its warm home and dragged to extinction in the blank vacancy his life clung to its seat with the support of its exhausted breath; a darkened tongue licked his body. Yet the stifled Life-being made painful effort to survive; in his empty soul his hope suffocated and perished belief and memory and all that helps the spirit in its course were abolished and died. A nameless and inexpressible fear crept through all his tired and aching nerve leaving behind its pitiable trembling line. As a sea nears its prey that is bound by it and silent and so also the approach of a dire constantly oppressive inhuman and intolerable pain frightened his ever silent mind. Constantly Aswapati severed from his hope of reaching heaven and had to bear this; he must have to ever exist without the peace of nirvana in a slow suffering Time and painful Space, and a painful nothingness was his endless state.

Now his breast became a lifeless vacancy and in the place where once existed a luminous thought there remained only like a pale motionless ghost with incapacity for faith and hope, and the terrible firm belief of a defeated soul; though with its godhead lost was still immortal, forgetting self and forgetting God and the touch of happier worlds. But he could endure all these attacks and the vain terror was stilled and he bore the suffocating pain and fear; (219) thereafter peace and the soul‟s all-conquering sight returned to him. Calm Light replied to that blank horror: the immutable, immortal and unborn, mighty and mute Godhead in him woke and faced the pain and danger of that world. Thus Aswapati mastered the tides of Life Nature with a look: and met with his bare spirit the naked Hell.

-END OF CANTO SEVEN

67

CANTO EIGHT The World of Falsehood, the Mother of Evil and the Sons of Darkness (220) Thereafter Aswapati could see the hidden heart of the Darkest Night: the labour of its utter unconsciousness revealed the unending terrible Void before him. There existed a spiritless vacant Infinity; and a Nature that denied the eternal Truth and by the strength of its vain boastful freedom of thought hoped to abolish God and to rule alone. There was no paramount Supreme Power who came as Guest, and no witness supreme Light; the Life-Nature wanted to create its own cheerless world without any help. Its large blind eyes were ever fixed on demon acts, its deaf ears heard the lie that its dumb lips uttered; its huge ill-judicious whim took vast shapes, its mindless consciousness quivered with its violent self-pride; there sowing a seed of brute principle of life and sin and pain gave birth to a soul like a monster. The leaders of revolt against all laws, great Titan beings and devilish powers, and world-egos distressed with sinful sensuous appetite and thought and will, and vast minds and lives without a consciousness within arose from the formless depths: the eager builders of blunder‟s house, leaders of the cosmic ignorance and unrest and patrons of sorrow and mortality held in their bodies the dark Ideas of the Hell. A shadow substance revealed in the emptiness, dim forms were born in the unthinking Void and whirl met with whirl made a hostile Space in whose black folds (layers) Supreme Being imagined Hell. Aswapati‟s eyes pierced through the triple plated darkness and identified their sight with the blind sight of the darkness: his eyes accustomed to the unnatural dark of that place saw (221) that the unreality was made real and Night was conscious. There a violent, ferocious and frightful world and an ancient womb of huge disastrous dreams coiled like a larva in the darkness that kept it safe from the spear-points of the light of Heaven‟s stars. It was a gate of Boundless falsehood, an endless utter extinction, and an immense negation of spiritual things. All that once were existing in the self-luminous spirit‟s kingdom now turned into the new shapes of their own dark opposites: the Being of Truth collapsed into a pointless void and yet was a parent of nothingness of the worlds; inconscience swallowing up the cosmic Mind produced a universe from its deadly sleep; Bliss fallen into black prolonged deep unconsciousness and became insensible, through a false penetrating figure of grief and pain coiled back to itself and God‟s eternal joy still very painfully nailed upon a cross and fixed in a soil of a dumb lifeless world where birth was a pain, and death was a misery, else all too soon should change again to bliss. There thought as a priestess of perversity sat on her black triple Snake legged tripod seat reading by opposite letters the eternal script, it was a wizards who reverses Life‟s God-shape. There in a darkened path at the side of the nave of a church the ill ominous profound initiate with her sinful eyes like lamps chanting fatal voices from the half-spherical room of the church, in strange Hellish dim rooms reciting in a chanting voice the magic of the unholy Word, performed her occult and imperceptible rituals. There tempting the miserable heart and body to suffer was Nature‟s daily food, there the key delight is torture and pain imitated the heavenly ecstasy to ridicule it. There Good, was a faithless gardener of God, (222) who watered with virtue the world‟s poisonous tree and was careful in the outward talk and act, and grafted his deception‟s flowers on its soil of natural sin. There all high qualities served their lowest opposite qualities: the forms of Gods always uphold the validity of religious system of a demon; there the face of Heaven turns into a disguise and a noose of Hell. There in the inner depth of heart of the vain futile illusive acts, and in an enormous action‟s twisting Painful core he saw an illimitable and vague Shape sitting on Death and swallows all things born. There a woman with a chill and fixed face and dire motionless eyes, with a trident in her dreadful shadowy hand outstretched, and pierced all creatures with the same type of fate.

When there existed nothing except Matter without soul and a spiritless emptiness was filled in the heart of Time, then Life‟s stir first touched the insensible Bottomless depth; awaking the rigid Void to hope and grief her pale beams of light penetrated into the unfathomable Night where God remained hiding himself from his own view. In all things Life force sought for their mystic truth that were lying asleep, and the unexpressed Word that inspires unconscious forms; she searched as in a dark in God‟s depths for an invisible Law; searched blindly in the dim subconscient for God‟s mind and attempted to find a way for the existence of the spirit. But there came another answer from the depth of the Darkest Night. A seed was sown in that lowest womb that was a dumb untested husk of unnatural truth, and lay astray from the right belief and a cell of an insensible infinite. In the Ignorance of Nature‟s titan embryo a demoniac birth prepared its cosmic form. Thereafter then in a deadly and stupendous moment from the naked Inconscient‟s sleep that unwillingly was born by the mute Void, lifted its threatening head against the stars above; overshadowing earth with its huge body of all destroying fate, (223) it chilled the heavens with the threat of a face. Immense and unfamiliar to our universe a nameless Power and a shadowy Will arose. In the unimaginable Aim that none can observe a vast Non-Being bore a shape, the boundless Ignorance of the unconscious depths covered eternity with nothingness. A seeking Mind took place of the seeing Soul; life turned into a huge and hungry death, and the Spirit‟s bliss was changed into universal pain. Ensuring God‟s self-covered impartiality a mighty opposition conquered the cosmic Space. A supreme ruler of falsehood, death and grief spread its ferocious predominant influence on the earth; creating discord the original style of the art and science in designing of earth‟s fate, falsified the primal universal Will and bound to struggle and terrible changes the creative Power that worked patiently in its long slow process. Establishing error in the stuff of universal things it turned the all-wise Law as into an Ignorance; it hindered the definite touch of life‟s hidden meaning, and in Matter‟s sleep kept dumb the intuitive guide, deformed the innate impulse of insect and brute, and disfigured man‟s mind-born humanity. A

68 shadow had fallen across the path of the simple Ray: it darkened the Truth-Light that burns in the depths of the heart‟s unseen in the raised platform for worship in the underground chamber behind the still secret screen as a companion of the Godhead in the temple.

Accordingly the dreadful opponent Energy was born who always acts with ridiculing gestures with regard to eternal Mother‟s mighty shape and jeers her luminous infinity with the grey shadowy disfigure in the Night. That evil goddess by arresting the passion of the ascending soul forced on life a slow and stumbling speed; (224) she laid on the mystic evolution‟s curved line the deviating and deterring weight of her hand: the devious line of her deceitful mind could not be noticed by the Gods and man and man remains in capable before her; crushing the soul‟s inner God-spark she forces the human fall to the level of beast behind him. Yet in her inborn mind which is difficult to overcome she felt that the One and Alone grew in the heart of Time and sees the Immortal shine through the human form. Frightened by her own authority and filled with fear and anger she goes about wandering here and there like searching for a prey around each light that burns through the dark throwing its ray from the soul‟s lonely tent (body) hoping to enter with a dangerous stealthy tread in god‟s house and slay the divine Child in the cradle. Her strength and trick or stratagem are beyond calculation, her touch is a spell and a death; she kills her prey with his own joy, in order to drag to Hell she even makes Good as a hook in her hand.

Due to her existence the world runs towards the dire pain. Often the pilgrim on the Eternal‟s path passing by the pale moonlight of his Mind covered by the clouds, or wanders alone in the winding frightening zigzag sideways or way lost in deserts where no path could be seen, falls subdued by the attack of the lion like spring of her force and becomes a conquered prisoner under her dreadful paws. The mortal human creature once a companion of the sacred fire intoxicated by her burning breath and grown romantic of a destroying voice of its mouth dies or gets ruined from God and Light, an Opponent rules his heart and brain and Nature becomes hostile to the MotherForce (Supernatural Force). The being of life surrenders its instruments to the Titanic and devilish agencies who magnifies the earthnature and disfigure it: now a disguised crooked (friend the fifth-columnist) became thought‟s guide; his clever defeatist whisper slays the faith (225) and a cruel dark false inspiration lodged in the human breast or whispering from outside substitutes a new order against divine order. Upon the spirit‟s heights a silence falls, God retires from the screened temple and thus the chamber of the Bride (Goddess) gets empty and ice-cold; the golden Circle of light could no longer be seen and the white spiritual ray burns no longer and forever the secret divine Voice is silenced. Thereafter from the heavens list of name of the soul his name is struck from the record book maintained by the Angel of the Vigil Tower; and a flame( a soul) that sang in Heaven sinks quenched and mute, and the great epic of soul ends in ruin. When the inner divine element is forfeited from the body and only the body and mind lived to die, this is the pitiable tale of inner death.

Because the Supreme Self allows terrible agencies to work and thus there are subtle and enormous Powers hiding themselves behind the covering of Ignorance. They were the children of the hell, perpetrators of the shadowy Force, haters of light intolerant of peace, thought‟s imitators and wise shining Friend and Guide, opposing the eternal Will in the heart, they covered the occult elevating influences of the Flutist. Thus that his wisdom‟s prophecies becomes our bonds; they locked the doors of God with the keys of religious creed and shut out by their Law the entry of God‟s Grace that he pours down tirelessly. Along all Nature‟s paths they have posted their sentinels at the gate of entry of the travellers of Divine and stop their entry: they create hindrance on each act of the God‟s. They have laid a yoke of the heavy weight upon the world‟s dim heart; the world‟s heart beats are barred from the supernal Bliss, and by the closed boundary lines of the brilliant Mind block the sharp entries of heavenly Fire. The dark Adventurers always seems to heve won in their tasks; (226) they fill the whole universal Nature with their sin‟s institutes, and turn the victories of truth into defeats, and proclaim the eternal laws as falsehoods, and load the dice of Grim fate created by time with sorcery‟s lies; occupying the world‟s temples seized wrongfully its thrones. Observing the waning like state of the Gods claim creation as their conquered feudal estate and turn themselves as the iron like strong Lords of Time. They are proficient of illusion and disguise, and the artists of Nature‟s fall and pain have built their raised platform for sacrifice of victorious Night in the clay temple of earthly life. In the vacant environs of the sacred Fire, and in front of the long screens in the mystic rite facing towards a dim veil where none can pierce, there the turbaned priest chanting solemn hymns invoking their dreadful presence in his breast: attributing to them with dreadful Name he chants its syllables of the magic text and invites the occult relation and in between intervals of burning incense sticks and chanting of prayers mixes in the foaming cups of man‟s heart the sap all the unbearable sufferings and pains that the world is in and poured to them like sacred wine as an offering. Adopting the divine names they guide and rule. They were the rivals of the Highest beings and have come out of their world of soulless thought and power to serve the scheme of the cosmos by hostility. The darkest Night is their shelter and the field for use as a large military objective. They live encircled by massive forts of darkness, against the sword like divine Flame and the luminous divine Eye in a calm and secure sunless inner most palace: there no wandering ray of Heaven can enter. The giant sons of Darkness armoured and protected by their deadly disguise sitting as in a work-chamber of creative Death and make their plan (227) the drama of the earth and their deplorable stage. All who would come forward to raise the fallen world must have to come under the dangerous gates of their power; because even to darken the privilege of the radiant children of the gods is their tremendous right. None can reach heaven who has not passed through hell.

This too the traveller of the worlds Aswapati had to dare and confront. Aswapati a warrior in the timeless dual‟s struggle with the help of his luminous soul challenging the darkness entered into the dumb hopeless Night. At the threshold of the gate of the

69 darkness creating a terror with his steps he came into a violent and sorrowful world field by souls dwelt there who never had tasted bliss; they were ignorant like men born blind who does not know light, they could equate the worst ill with highest good, to their vision virtue was seen as the disguise of sin and wickedness and extreme sorrow were their natural state. There a drastic administration‟s law of punishment making grief and pain as common law, pronouncing the sovereign joylessness changed life into an austerity of sacrifice of a lowest cult, and made of severe pain into a daily festival. An act was passed to punish happiness severely; there laughter and pleasure were prohibited as extreme sins; a question less mind was given a rank of wisdom, a stupid heart‟s indifference was ranked as peace: there was no sleep and inactiveness was the only rest, though death came but it could neither give rest nor made an end of birth; the soul there always lived and suffered more and more. Ever Aswapati went on seeking deeper and deeper in that kingdom of pain; around him grew the terror of a world of torment followed by worse torment, and in the terror existed a great malicious joy that felt glad of its own and other‟s extreme danger. There the way of life and mind were a long punishment, (228) the breath is a burden and all hope is a whip, the body was a field of severe pain and a pile of uneasiness; and rest was a waiting between sudden sharp pain to the other. This was the law of things there that none thought to change even in dream: an undying darkened heart, a stark unsmiling mind rejected happiness like an unbearable sweet; there peace was a mental boredom and weariness: life grew colourful only by suffering; it needed the piquant flavor of pain and the intense salty test of tears. If one could survive then all would be well for him; otherwise only intense sensations gave some stimulation: a wild anger of jealousy burning the painful wounded heart, and the prickle of a murder like malice, hate and sexual desire, the vague suggestion that attracts to the pit and the stroke of violation of trust mark living dots on the dull painful hours. To watch the drama of unhappiness, the twisting of creatures in acute pain under the great distressing evil fate and sorrow‟s deplorable look into the night‟s depth and the shock and the hammering heart of fear were the combinations of the stuff in Time‟s heavy cup that pleased and helped to enjoy its bitter taste. Life‟s long hell was made up of such violent stuff: these were like the threads of the dark spider‟s-web in which the soul was caught trembling and absorbed, this was the religion and the kingdom of the Life-Nature‟s ruled state. There in a savagely and inhumanly cruel temple of injustice to worship a black pitiless image of a Power (Kali) one must have to cross kneeling on hard-hearted stony courts which was like a floor of evil fate. There each stone was a sharp edge of a cruel force and are joined with the chilled blood from severe pain stricken breasts; there the dry and knotted trees stood up like dying men hardened into a pose of anguish, and from each window looked a priest of evil omen chanting there the songs of prayer for the crowning grace of the cruelly killed, and uprooted cities, blasted human houses and bodies that were burnt and thus shrunk, and the mass murder by the bombshell were seen there. They sang (229) that their enemies were fallen and those who once challenged their will were smitten and dead; that they were too great and implored God that he was too great and merciful. They thought to reach God‟s impassive throne in this manner and command Him whom all their acts have opposed, they thought of magnifying their deeds to touch God‟s skies and to make him a collaborator of their crimes. There is no place for compassionate hearts, but there rules pitiless strength and iron-like hard moods, and a timeless all-powerful extreme fear and darkness ruled there arbitrarily: this took a figure of a darkened God who was worshipped by the tortured wretchedness he had made, who held a miserable world in the bonds of slavery, and pinned down helpless hearts to perpetual suffering and adored the feet that crushed them into mud.

It was a world of sorrow and hate, sorrow was its only joy that remained combining with hatred, hatred enjoys other‟s sorrow as its feast; a bitter gapping of the mouth moved in a spiral form sacretes saliva from suffering mouth; a distressing cruelty gets a terrible chance to commit evil. Hate was the highest shadowy evil messenger of that kingdom; kindling a black and stained jewel in the heart burns the soul with the help of its harmful rays and sunk it in the deadly bottomless depth of his might. These mad passions and even material objects appeared to have oozed out from those things because mind overflowed in its flux into the inanimate and responded the atrocity received, they use harmful powers against their users and hurt them though they are without hands and strangely and suddenly kill. They were the appointed instruments of an unseen ruin. Or they made themselves a prison wall controlled by fate where men sentenced to death woke through the hours that pass and counted the ringing of an evil indicating bell waiting for the arrival of a slow moving moment of their end. There an evil environment makes evil souls more badly: all things there conscious and perverse. In this kingdom of hell Aswapati dared to walk even into its darkest depths and (230) stirred its darkened base and dared to fight with its ancient privileged right and absolute force: he plunged in the Night to recognise her terrible heart, and in Hell he sought to find out its root and cause of existence. Hell‟s painful depths were opened in his heart; he listened to the loud passionate voice of its crowded pain and the heart-beats of its lethal loneliness. Above Aswapati there existed a chill deafness of infinity. In the indistinct dreadful passages of disastrous Fate he heard the Voice of the mischievous ugly dwarfish devil that guides to slay and faced the enchantments of the coiled demon Sign and crossed the surprise attack from the hiding place of the opponent Time like Snake. In the dreadful expanses and in pain stricken lonely paths he wandered without any companion through uninhabited ways where the blood lusted Wolf that tears its prey and sucks the blood waits near the stream which is without possibility of crossing and Death‟s black eagles crying in a high pitched tone called to the precipice of the hill, he met the dogs of destruction who pursued and captured men‟s heart barking across the pastures of Destiny, in mute blind depths of the footprint less battlefields of the Hell he fought with the shadowy warriors, he endured the attacks of Hell and blows of the Titan and bore the dangerous inner wounds that are slow to heal. Imprisoned by a covered illusive Force, and captured and dragged into Falsehood‟s net causing death and often stifled in the loop of grief, or thrown in the dire mud and mire of swallowing doubt, or shut into the pits of error and hopelessness, he drunk the full pot of poison of the hellish power till nothing

70 was left. Into a world where hope and joy were prohibited to enter he suffered the hard test of evil‟s absolute rule, yet kept intact his spirit‟s radiant truth. He becoming incapable, motionless & powerless, imprisoned and blinded in Matter‟s blank denial and nailed to the black inactiveness of our earth, he kept safe his trembling fiery spirit between his hands from being quenched. His being wandered daringly into the mindless Void and into the intolerant gulfs where there was no touch of thought or sense; (231) though his thought was ceased and sense failed, yet his soul still saw and knew. He neared the dumb primal beginnings of the lost Self and saw the atomic division of the Infinite, or he felt the strange smallness and fruitlessness of the creation of material things. Or, suffocated in the Inconscient‟s hollow darkened twilight he descended into the mystery of the dark and bottomless enormous meaningless depths from where the struggling life rose in a death bound universe. Where the mind lost its exclusive identity there he felt the suppressed sense of the insensible world and mute wisdom of the ignorant Night. He reached the secrecy of the deepest depths of darkness where darkness looks from her grey and nude mattress, there on the last locked subconscient floor he stood where the Being slept unconscious of its thoughts and built a world without knowing what it built. There the future lay unknowingly waiting its moment, and there the histories of the vanished stars were recorded. There in the womb of sleep of the cosmic Will he could see the secret mystery of Nature‟s transformation. All along there was a light with him and an invisible hand was laid upon the error and pain till it turned into a quivering ecstasy, and the affect of sweetness of the embrace of an arm. He saw in the Night‟s darkness Eternal‟s shadowy screen, and realised death as an underground chamber of the of house of life, he felt creation‟s hasty movement in the destruction, knew loss as the price of heavenly gain and hell as a short cut way to heaven‟s gates. Thereafter in Illusion‟s occult factory and the Inconscient‟s magic printing-house he saw that all the pages of the primeval Night were torn and the frame of the stereotypes (the daily routines) of the Ignorance were shattered into pieces. There he saw that the Nature alive, and breathing a deep spiritual breath, abolished her stiff mechanical methods and the conditions of the agreement of the bounded soul‟s contract with it, (232) and Falsehood returned back to Truth its painful shape. All the rules of the Pain were fully nullified and in their place luminous characters were grown. The skillful Penman‟s (writer‟s) unseen finger wrote his swift intuitive handwritings and made all the earth‟s forms as his divine documents, the shapes that the wisdom took mind could not reveal, inconscience was driven far away from the world‟s voiceless breast; and all the fixed schemes of the reasoning Thought (Mind) were transformed. There arousing consciousness in the material things he imposed diamond script of the Imperishable upon dark atom and dumb mass, and inscribed on the dim heart of fallen things a song of victory (paean-song) of the free Infinite, and the great Name that is the primal foundation of eternity, and on the awakened exultant cells written in the inner alphabets of the Inexpressible, the song of love that waits through the worldly Time and the mystic volume of the Book of Bliss and the message of the superconscient Fire. Thereafter life pulsated purely in the brief lived bodily frame; the Light of hell was extinguished and could slay no more. Hell‟s huge sudden steep was shattered into pieces, as if a magic building was smashed, Night opened and vanished like a gulf of dream. Into being‟s gap that was dug as an empty place where the Night had filled with the absent God, there poured down a wide intimate and blissful Dawn, all things that were created by Time‟s wounded heart were remedied and sorrow could live no more in Nature‟s breast: there existed no division because God was present there. The soul lighted the conscious body with its ray and consequently there was no division between Spirit and Matter and they were joined and became one.

-End of Canto Eight

71

Canto Nine The Paradise of the Life-Gods

(233) Now around Aswapati there reflected a light of great well chosen Day. That Heaven of Life Gods in its dazzling brightness of golden laugh held a luminosity of some rapturous Infinite and a free region of the heart‟s happiness existed beyond self control with the wine of God and plunged in light and was ever divine. That region was much loved and closely acquainted by the Gods and was obeying the divine command for its joy; it was the monarch of its own delight and master of the kingdoms of its force. Selfconfident of the bliss for which all forms were created, not perturbed by fear and grief and the shocks of Fate and not frightened by the breath of passing Time and not caught in the snare of unfavorable circumstance, it lived breathing in a sweet stable unrestricted ease and free from our body‟s fragility that invites death and far away from our danger-zone of blundering Will. There was no need for it to control its passionate heart beats; thrilled by the clasp of the warm satisfied sense and the swift passion of wonder and flame and cry of the life impulses‟ intense elevated race, it lived in the jewel-rhythm of the laughter of God and always lay on the breast of universal love. There the unbounded Spirit of Delight unaffected by anything that happens grazed in this shining moons cattle herd their (ray‟s) by the side of griefless streams that were flowing in rhythmical speed in the fragrance of the unearthly immortal flower. A silence of joy was spread over the heavens, upon the heights a secured radiance spread its laugh upon the heights, and a murmur of an inexpressible delight trembled in the winds and touched the charmed soil; (234) a deep tone of rapture ever remaining in the arms of over whelming joy repeating its sweet spontaneous tone that flowed along the hours. As one who sees in the World-Magician‟s glass a marvellous reflection of soul pass Aswapati a traveller on plateau meditating like hill top advancing under a gate of peace and glory, crossed scenes of an immortal joy and fixed his sight into the unfathomable beauty and bliss. A light of conscious suns surrounded him and the gladness of great symbol things were spread over there; to meet him plains of brilliant calm, mountains and valleys luminous with magnificence of blue and red where the blessed souls inhabit, and deep narrow valleys of joy and waterfalls with humming sound and forests quivering in the intense solitude crowded around him, below him the dreaming cities of Gandharvas kings absorbed in joy like lustrous jeweled thoughts lay spreaded over there. A dim and sweet happy music was heard by him that was floating stealthily across the vibrant secrecies of the Space, the harp‟s rhythm of heavenly Gandharvas musicians played by unseen hands that came floating was heard by him in his heart‟s inner planes and in Heaven of the white-blue moon shine he heard the strange sweet voices chanted the glory of the eternal love. In all that marvellous Life world‟s topmost highest heights and intense depths there stood apart high Heavenly nameless hills raising their tops shining beautifully like setting sun absorbed in the trance of the evening. The base of those mountains and hills as if searching for some new undiscovered dense depths were plunged into a joyful stillness; their slopes through a hurry of laughter and voices, crossed by a number of singing rivers, adoring blue heaven with their happy chants sank down into the forest of shadowy secrecy: the peaks of the hills lifted into wide voiceless mystery climbed towards a greatness beyond life.

The shining beautiful gardens of delight and happiness of the vital gods (235) welcomed Aswapati to their deathless harmonies. The things that manifest here in earth‟s Time are there in their perfect shape; there beauty was creation‟s inborn make and Peace was a luxurious pure blissful living. There the golden optimistic dreams of Love was fulfilled and Strength was love‟s crowned and mighty hopes and yearnings; there desire climbed up swiftly like an all powerful flame, and Pleasure earned the eminence of the gods; there dream wandered along the highways of the stars; all lovely common things are transformed into miracles there: allured by the spirit‟s sudden charm, immersed in the divine passion‟s change, there pain‟s self by redressing the contrary between heaven and hell was transformed into a mighty joy. All the life‟s high visions took shape there, her ever moving hopes were fulfilled and her golden honeycombs were caught in the honey-eater‟s bee‟s lengthy tongue, her brilliant guesses were changed into truths that were overwhelmed with joy, her great lusts were stilled and deathless calm and her immense desires were liberated. In that paradise of perfect heart and sense no lower song could break the endless charm of her intense and pure sweetness; her movements were always glided on the path of the intuitive knowledge with all certainty. After the misery soul‟s long struggle at last were found calm and heavenly rest and lapped on of the magic flood of sorrowless hours, Aswapati‟s warrior nature‟s wounded limbs were set right in the encircling arms of Energies and there was no chance of any stain in them and no fear of acquiring their own bliss. In scenes that were prohibited to our dull sense amid miraculous scents and wonderful colours he met the forms that divinise the sight, heard such music that can immortalise the mind and make the heart as wide as infinity, he listened and captured the tones that are not loud enough to be heard (236) that awake the mystical ear: he heard those voices came out of the inexpressible silence trembling with the beauty of a wordless speech and are too great and deep to be expressed through words, and the thoughts descending down and the will power of which new-creates the universe. A graded step of the feeling of sense that climbed with fiery feet to heights of unimagined happiness remade his being‟s circle of light in the light of joy and his body shined like a sky‟s blue; the gates to enter into the various worlds were cleared off with the seas of lights for him. His earthliness filled with heavenly ability and magnificence, and harboured a power that needed now no more to cross the closed check-post of mind and flesh to convey down the godhead secretly into humanity. His body shrank no more from the supreme demand for a tireless capacity for bliss, an energy that could discover its own infinite and bear the beauty, passion and depth‟s reply or where soul and flesh join in inner ecstasy abolishing the quarrel between formlessness and form, there it was not afraid of the strong glad identity. His being drew spiritual power from sight and sound and made sense a path to reach the regions unattainable: thrilled with the supreme influences with which the substance of life‟s deeper soul was built. His earthly-nature

72 stood reborn as a comrade of heaven. Aswapati now became a fit companion of the timeless Kings and made himself equal with the godheads of living Suns, he became the radiant playmate of the Unborn beings and heard the whispers of the Player never seen and listened to his voice that steals the heart and draws it to make it reach the breast of Godâ€&#x;s desire, and felt its honey of felicity that flowed through his veins like the rivers of Paradise, and made his body a nectar-cup of the Absolute. In the sudden moments of the revealing divine flame (237) and in passionate half-uncovered responses he could reach the border of the unknown ecstasies; and in a hurry his heart was surprised by an unexpected supreme touch, the clasp of the Wonderful awakened in his memory and hints of the Pure Supreme bliss leaped down in him. Eternity disguised as Love drew nearer to him and laid its hand upon his Time made body. A little gift came descending down to him from the Immensities but its gain of joy to life was immeasurable; all the untold beyond were reflected there. A great drop of unknowable divine Bliss overwhelmed his limbs and became a fiery ocean of felicity around his soul; in that sweet and burning Vasts he was stuck and drowned: the dire delight that makes into pieces the mortal flesh and the rapture that the gods sustain he bore. Immortal pleasure cleansed him in its waves and turned his strength into immortal power. Immortality captured Time and carried Life.

-End of Canto Nine

73

Canto Ten The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Little Mind

(238) This kingdom and Godheads of the Little Mind too must now be transcended and left behind as all had to be crossed over until the Highest state is achieved where the world of Matter and self became true and one: till that point is reached the journeying of our terrestrial life cannot end. Always a nameless aim from beyond began summoning Aswapati and the zigzag paths of the gods and the spirit‟s climbing Fire soared always pointing upwards. This breath of multi coloured happiness and its pure lofty figure of Time‟s joy, floated upon waves of perfect happiness, was broken separately into beats of ecstasy, this individual soul that is a fraction of the spirit‟s whole was caught into a greatness of passionate extremes, this limited being was lifted to summit bliss becoming happy to enjoy one touch of things supreme, packed into its sealed small infinity this endless time-made world that is a little result of God‟s vast delight passed far away from Time before him. The moments of time were stretched towards the eternal Now, discovered immortality, but satisfied with their lofty reach they ceased on peaks whose tops were only half-way to Heaven and though pointed out to ascend to the highest height it is beyond their capability to rise to a greatness and glory, as it was impossible for those to live in that atmosphere.

This creature who shuts up itself within its limits to be safe, refused a greater adventure‟s call to rise up to high and exquisite spheres though invitation began coming in to rise to their secure and fine extremities. A glory and sweetness of satisfied desire tied up the spirit to golden sacrificial posts of bliss. But the wideness of the soul could not take refuge there (239) because it needed all infinity as its home. Like a sweet song heard fading far away a memory upon the long high road to Timelessness as soft as grass and faint as sleep, and the beauty and call receded and sank behind. Above Aswapati there spread an intense white tranquility. A meditating Spirit looked out on all the worlds and like a brilliant climbing of the skies over skies and passing through clarity to an unseen Light the large luminous kingdoms of Mind were seen shining from the heart of stillness. But first he saw a silver-grey expanse where Day and Night had joined and became one: it was a kingdom of dim and quick shifting rays that separates Life‟s living flow from Thought‟s selfbalance. There on a ground reserved for doubt and the reasoned guess and a field of an appointed meeting place of Knowledge with Ignorance an alliance of uncertainties exercised an uneasy government. A fresh born mind that could see with great difficulty and slowly begin and do; at its lowest edge of hand and feet held with difficulty and move unsteadily from side to side; its nature is similar to our earthly nature and related to our uncertain mortal thought that looks from soil to sky and sky to soil but could not know the worlds below nor the beyond, could know only itself and the outward things with the aid of its senses. This little mind was the first means of our slow ascent from the half-conscience of the animal soul living in a crowded stress of shaped events that were shaped in a realm where it cannot neither understand nor change: only it could see and act in a special stage and feel joys and sorrows for a while. In order to discover supreme Truth the ideas that drive the embodied spirit encircled by the darkness of ignorance along the roads of suffering and desire in a world that struggles, found here their power to exist and the Energy of Nature. Here are planned the forms of an ignorant life (240) that accepts the experienced fact as a settled law, labours for the present moment only and not for eternity and only to fulfill the moment‟s need trades for its gains: the slow process of a material mind that becomes the slave of the body instead of its ruler and guide and depends on a faulty sense, and was only born in that clear darkness. That physical mind starting namely advancing very slowly and not firm in taking support of an assumption proposed as a basis of reasoning and argument; giving sovereign seats to its theories (sets of ideas formulated by reasoning non facts), as certitudes, its reason proceeds from the half-known to the unknown and ever constructing its weak house of thought and ever tears the net that once it has spun. This mind is a possessor of half knowledge whose shadow seems to him as his soul and moving from minute to brief minute lives its life; it was like a king depending on his dependants, and assents to the decrees of ignorant ministers, a judge in half-possession of his proofs, a voice that pronounces uncertainty‟s fundamental principle assuming it to be true, a shaper of knowledge, but not its source. This a powerful slave secured by a bond of his instruments thinks his low station of living as Nature‟s highest top, forgetful of his share in all things created arrogantly becomes humble in his self-pride and believes himself as an egg in the Matter‟s mud and thinks himself as the cause of his own creations. Our higher ascension from man‟s very beginning is meant and determined for rising to eternal light and knowledge, thus we must break out of our earth‟s heavy smallness and seek for our nature with spiritual fire: the creeping of an insect is the preindication of our glorious flight beyond; our present human state cradles the future god and nurses it, our present mortal transience is an immortal force.

At the fire-fly like tops of these pale-lighted kingdoms the dawn played with its native darkness and helped the Day to grow and Night to fail (241) there Aswapati crossing over a wide and faintly lighted bridge reached a kingdom of primal Light and the kingdom of a half-risen sun. Our mind‟s full circle of Light was born out of its rays. An original and skillful Intelligence appointed by the Spirit of the Worlds to mediate with the ignorant depths worked unendingly somehow leaning on equal wings of thought and doubt between being‟s hidden ends. In life‟s moving acts a Secret mystery‟s breath was flowing on, a secret nurse of Nature‟s miracles shaped life‟s wonderful shapes out of Matter‟s mud: it moulded the patterns of the forms of universal things and pitched mind‟s tent in the indistinct ignorant Vast. A Supreme Magician of various measures and diverse designs created infinity from repeatedly changing forms and assigned a seat to the wandering spectator thought (mind) on the stage of the Inconscient. On earth by the will of this highest Intelligence a shapeless energy put on Matter‟s covering; to change subtle things into a physical world the matter particles and

74 the light particles served the creator divine Eye and as a result the invisible appeared as shape and the unfelt was felt as mass: the sorcery of sense joined with mind‟s artistic knowledge and lent to each object a meaningful name: idea was disguised in the body‟s beautiful art and by a strange atomic law‟s mysterious act a frame was built in which the bodily sense could put its symbol picture of the universe. There even a greater miracle was achieved. That mediating light linked the body‟s power, the sleep and dreaming of the tree and plant, the animal‟s living sense, and the thought of man to the mass of light of a Ray above. Its skill supporting Matter‟s right to think (242) made passages for the capability of perception and feeling of physical mind and discovered ways and means for the Ignorance to gain knowledge. This little mind placed its square and cube like words of the sentence for expression of the Truth as a substitute of reality like preservation of a corpse in a scented chemical substance, created alphabets that strengthens memory and made fit the blind Force to read her works. A consciousness that remained covered in a cave arose in her and now the little mind dreams her to be human and awake. But all was still a movable Ignorance and Knowledge could not come and firmly conceive (hold) this huge invention seen as a universe. It is a specialist of logic‟s hard machine and imposed its own rigid reasoning on the soul; it is a helper of the inventor intellect, divide Truth into acceptable bits that each might have his portion of thought as its food, and thereafter newly-build Truth‟s slain body by its art: it is an unerring and serviceable automatic mechanical device like a person of falsehood displaced the spirit‟s finer view of things: and also a refined engine did the work of a god. There none could see the true body of the Truth and its soul appeared to be dead: there none had the inner look that could see the indivisible Truth entirely; all sang the glory of the highly sparkling substitute of Truth only. Thereafter a wave from the secret height came rolling down and an unusual disorder of resisting light arose; it looked above and saw the dazzling peaks and looked within and woke the sleeping god. Imagination invited her shining troops and they dared to enter into undiscovered scenes where all the marvels were hidden that none has yet known: imagination lifting her beautiful and miraculous head conspired with inspiration‟s sisters to fill the skies of thought with the little light of the cloud, dust or gas (a dark or bright patch in the sky caused by a distant galaxy). A great Error was found around the edge of the mystery‟s altar; darkness became a nurse to wisdom‟s mystic sun, and imaginary stories fed knowledge from the breast with her brilliant milk;(243) thus an infant little mind passed from dim to radiant breasts. Thus worked the mind‟s Power upon the gradually evolving world; its subtle art held back the full-circled blaze, nursed the childhood soul with imaginary food that was far richer in their sweet nectarous juice for nourishing its immature divinity than the original dry straw yielded from Reason‟s cultivation and heaped fodder of innumerable facts by the common food on which we are surviving now. Likewise the heavenly thoughts flowed down like a stream from its kingdom of first Light into Matter‟s world; and its heavenly (golden) rays entered in groups in material earth‟s inner heart. Its morning rays illuminated our twilight like eyes, its young formations inspired the mind of earth to labour, and to dream and to create anew, and to feel the touch of beauty and know the world and self: now the Golden Child (the little mind) began to think and see.

In those bright kingdoms Mind‟s first forward steps began. Ignorant of all but eager to know all, its inquisitive slow enquiry for knowledge begins there; and always its search grasps clutched the shapes that came around, it ever hopes to find out greater things.

Passionate and golden lighted with the morning rays of the rising sun it lived vigilant upon the edge of new invention. Yet its entire outline was of an infant‟s measure, as if the whole universe were a nursery game and the Mind and life were toys of a Titan‟s baby. As one it works on the uneven sands of Time and builds an artificial fort that remains miraculously stable for a while mid an unseen eternity‟s shore less sea. The great Power had chosen this small acute instrument that pursues passionately a strenuous brief recreation for it; and to teach Ignorance is her heavy responsibility, her thought starts from a primal ignorant Void (244) arousing knowledge from her sleepy cave what she teaches she had to learn. Because Knowledge does not come to us as a guest invited into the chamber of our mind from the outer world; it is a friend and inmate of our secret soul, hidden behind our minds remained asleep and slowly wakes beneath the blows of life; the energetic devil (this little mind) lies unshaped within us the work of the universal Nature is to summon it and to give it a form. There everything was a disorder of the true and false, mind try to find out amid deep mists of Ignorance; though it looked within itself but couldn‟t see the God. Mind is a temporary intervening period of material tact and denied the Supreme Truth that the transient truths might live and keep hiding the inner Deity behind conviction (religious belief) and guess that the World-Ignorance might grow slowly wise. This was the complexity created by the all-powerful Mind in her first steps into the Inconscience looking from hilltops into the darker Night: its unfamiliar darkness perplexes her luminous eyes; hence her rapid hands must have to learn a cautious enthusiasm; this earth can bear only a slow advance. Yet the Minds strength is not like the blind earth that is compelled to handle temporary instruments invented by the life-force and the physical body. Earth becomes aware of all through uncertain images, and forms an idea in risky small openings of sight, and it kindles its small lights by touches of fumbling thought. The mind incapable of her soul‟s direct inner vision sees by small bits of brief sparkles and joins the scraps of knowledge and makes Truth the slave-girl of her poverty, and evacuating Nature‟s occult unity cuts into pieces the moving universal All into atomic particles and weight and mass; and uses her ignorance as a measuring-rod. In her own sphere of control the little mind is a seer and a religious head, that greater Power worked within the limits of light of its half-risen sun and (245) but possessed her field; she gained knowledge by the privilege of thinking force and claimed an infant sight‟s majesty. However darkly lighted the look of the divine Angel in her eyes, she is the knower of her inspired acts and shapes a world in its far-seeing flame. In her own kingdom she neither trips nor fails but moves in boundaries of subtle power across which mind can step towards the sun. She is a candidate for a higher sovereignty; she cuts a passage from Darkness to light and searches for all knowledge that is yet to be possessed.

75 A dwarf three-bodied three-in-one was the slave of this mind and nature. The first, is the smallest of the three whose limbs are strong, brows are low(small), cheeks square and heavy, it is a pigmy like thought and needs to live in limits, forever inclined to strike hammer on (two enter into) circumstance and form. Engrossed and confined in external sight, works depending on Nature‟s solid base. An estimable technician, immature thinker, sticks to habit‟s routine, Life‟s ways obedient to gross Matter‟s cruel arbitrary rule and becomes a prisoner of the frames in which it works, keeps attached itself by think created by it. It is a slave of changeless magnitude of absolute rules, the habits of the world it takes as Law, and thinks the habits of the mind as Truth. The mind in its kingdom of gross sight and events turning in old circles of ideas ever repeating old familiar acts, it lives satisfied with the general and the things known. It cherishes the old ground its past dwelling-place: hating change as an impudent sin, disbelieving on each new discovery it advances step by step carefully (246) and is afraid of the unknown as if a deadly hell. It is a wise and cautious preserver of its ignorance, shrinks from new adventure and opens and shuts her eyes quickly at glorious hope, it prefers a safe foothold upon things to the dangerous joy of wideness and of height. On its labouring mind the world‟s slow impressions and its slow imprints that are almost inerasable do increase their value by their poverty; the old sure memories are its capital stock: only things that could be grasped by sense seemed to be cocksure: it takes external events as the only truth, and it identifies wisdom with the earthly angle of vision, things known from long before and actions always done are to its stronghold as a step of safety while crossing over the dangerous stair of Time. A trust on heaven to it are the only established ancient ways and unchangeable laws that man has no right to change, and a sacred inheritance left from the great dead past or the only path that God has made for life, and as persistent shape of Nature that is never to be changed and is taken by it as a part of the huge daily work of the universe. This guardian Mind was sent down to earth from ancient times by smile from the protected Worlds that all might stand in their stable changeless type and never move from their worldly posture. It is seen moving in a circle faithful to its task, tirelessly in an ascribed convention‟s round meant for it; in a broken and dilapidated net of works of Time it keeps close watch like a vigilant sentry in front of custom‟s check post for prohibition of illegal entry or in ancient darkness‟ dim environment it remains half asleep on a little courtyard stone and barks at every unfamiliar light as an enemy who would break up its home, works as a watch-dog of the spirit‟s sense-fenced house against unauthorized intruders from the Invisible, and nourished itself on scraps of life and Matter‟s bones (247) in its dwelling place of certitude of external objects. Yet behind it there stands a cosmic power: it is a regulator of Greatness that kept intact its vaster plan, an unfathomable equality of those rhythms the steps of life; the stars‟ changeless circuit ploughs its inert Space, and there a million species do follow one mute Law. A huge numberless is the defence of that world, even in change there remains changelessness, all rotations sinks into torpor, in a new dress the old resumes its role; this Mind Energy acts and its fixed aim was stability: on Shiva‟s breast the enormous dance of Mahakali continues incessantly.

Thereafter to the next of the three a fiery spirit appeared before Aswapati. This adventurous intelligence vital mind a rider of the hunch back red Wild-Ass, leaning down like lion‟s mane from the great mystic Flame that encircles the worlds and with its sharpened tongue eats at the being‟s heart. From there only began the fire like burning vision of Desire. It wore thousand shapes and took numberless names; a need of great number of things and uncertainty ever sting into it painfully to pursue the One and the Unique on countless roads in the Vasts of Time through of unending unlike circuits. It burns all breasts with a doubtful fire. It is like a light that shines on a dark small river and burned flaming towards heaven and thereafter sank swallowed towards hell; it climbed beyond to drag down the Divine Truth into the earthly mud and used its brilliant Forces towards aims that are not clear like mud; it was like a gold, blue and red coloured huge chameleon and turning itself into black grey and smoky brown, in hunger it looked continuously with wide open eyes sitting on the multi coloured branch of the tree of life to snap insect joys, its favourite food, for the dull sustenance of its great frame and nursing the splendid passion of its colours. It is like a snake of flame, its tail was like a dull cloud, the shining thought‟s dream children followed it, (248) it lifted its head with many coloured wavering hoods and stretching its smoky tongue licked at knowledge. It was like a powerful circular eddy of waters sucking in an empty air established its stupendous claims on vacancy, that Intelligence born in Nothingness and returned to it, yet it ever drove unconsciously towards a hidden Supreme Unknown that is all. It was too eager to find out but was incapable to retain, a clear instability was its sign, and error is its inborn tendency and its nature‟s characteristic hint. It suddenly inclines to an indistinct faith, all that deceived its hopes, it thought them to be true; it loved the nothingness like gold born out of its wish, stretching it hands towards the unreal it snatched it as good food. In darkness it discovered shining shapes that can never be real; seeing into a shadowy half-light it saw coloured images mapped inscrutably on the cave of Imagination; or passed quickly in guessed circles whirling in the darkness and caught in imagination‟s photo camera by brief lights the snaps of bright scenes of promise of the future; in life‟s sky fixed its feet of hurrying dreams, and kept prints of passing Forms and the disguised Powers and flash images of half-seen truths. Without the guidance of reason and inner vision of soul to leap eagerly to seize and possess was its first and last natural motion, to achieve the impossible it lavishly wasted life‟s force: hating straight path ran on wandering zigzag paths and abandoned things that he had achieved first in order to seek for new things which were not tried; it saw unrealised aims as immediate fate and chose the vertical steep face of mountain for leaping to heaven. In the life gamble adventure is its means, it considers gains obtained abruptly as safe results; its confident view is never discouraged by its errors, though it is ignorant of the deep laws of the ways of the being yet failure could not slacken its thunder-like fiery clutch; (249) and one success by chance justifies the success for it for all the rest. Only attempt is its life‟s attraction but no victory. It is an uncertain winner of an uncertain bet,

76 natural ability is its mother and the vital-mind its father, it ran in the running race and sometimes became first and sometimes last. Yet its works were neither small nor vain nor nothing; it nursed a portion of infinity‟s strength and could create the high things according to the will of its fancy; what its calm intelligence missed its passion of life caught. To possess heaven‟s high thought that were hidden in dazzling mist its intuition leaped and caught only inklings of light that revealed the hidden sun: it examined closely in the void and found a treasure there. A half inner-sight became activated in its sense; it threw the lightning‟s fork and hit the unseen. It could see in the dark and in the light, its eyes were vaguely flashed on and off; ignorance was its field and unknown was its prize.

Of these entire three minds Powers the last was the greatest. Arriving at last from a far plane of thought into a packed unreasonable world of Chance where all was felt grossly and done blindly, yet there the accidental seemed to it as inevitable, that Reason, the short and stout godhead skillful artist came to her narrow house upon a mountain like peak in Time. It was a proficient artist of clear plan and design, its face was thoughtful, and its sight is sharp and intimate, she occupied her stable and irremovable seat here, it is the strongest and wisest amongst the dwarf-like Three. Equipped with her lens, measuring-rod and its testing device she looked upon a visible universe and large number of creatures that live in it and die and the body of Space and the ever swiftly moving soul of Time, and took earth and stars into her hands to try what she could make out of these unfamiliar things. In her strong undeviating laborious mind inventing her lines of systematic plan of reality (250) and the geometric outlines of her time-plan, she increased numerously its slow half moving steps towards the Truth: impatient of puzzling things and unknown, intolerant of the disregard of law and the unique, imposing the burden of its own thought on the march of the Force, and imposing clarity on the immeasurable she attempted hard to keep the mysterious world within the limits of rules. She knew nothing but hoped to know everything. Into the dark Inconscient kingdoms that were once void of thought assigned by a supreme Intelligence to scatter its ray upon the Vast darkness, to lead a mistaking multitude in an imperfect light by its power of sense, and the idea and word, she digs and searches out Nature‟s process, substance and cause. She struggles still with the huge confused situation to harmonise the universal life by its thought‟s control; except her seeking mind even though she is ignorant of all yet she came to save the world from Ignorance.

Through the centuries she is a dominant worker by observing and remaking all that existed, here she took up her great charge with self confidence. The low curved and mighty figure sits leaning under the intensely burning lamps of her (factory house) work chamber amid the roaring of her tools. A strict look in her creative eyes‟ meticulous look forcing into obedient the plastic stuff of cosmic Mind, she sets the hard inventions of her brain in a pattern of ever stable frame: impassive to the dumb demand of the cosmos, unconscious of too intimate realities and of the unspoken thought and the voiceless heart, to imprison life and mechanic methods of all universal things she leans down to work out her set of beliefs, iron-like laws and metal structures. She creates a world imagined by her in place of an apparent world: in stiff but unreal lines she weaves (251) her subtle word-webs (word net) of immaterial thought and the divided process of the Infinite and creates her own scripture‟s map and the theory of creation and also the imaginary stories by which she explains that cannot be explained. Like maps hung in the school-house of intellect she the (little minded) at her will spreads herself in the subtle sky of mind, she kept established the wide Truth and her innumerable rival strict philosophies into a narrow scheme; she by her definite and insurmountable material science in order to make run the power of the World-Magician makes like rails with Thought‟s sharp edge in inflexible lines out of Nature‟s events that can be directly observed. On the huge plain (open) walls of human ignorance around which the Nature‟s deep dumb pictures representing worlds she wrote in clear handwriting the vast encyclopedia of her thoughts; an algebra of her mathematics‟ signs, and her numbers and unmistakable formulas that she builds to keep secure her main point of things. As if in a cosmic mosque inscribing the scriptural (sacred) verses of her laws and wonderful varieties of her patterned Arabic artifices, and the art of her wisdom and skill of knowledge she runs all around. This art and this skill are her only riches that cannot be evaluated. In her high works of pure intelligence, in her escape from the net of senses, there comes no breaking of his walls of mind, and there springs no breaking flash of absolute power, and there dawns no light of heavenly certitude. Her knowledge here wears million faces and every face was filled with doubt. All her knowledge has now questioned became a problem for solution of her question and reduced to nothingness. Her old great mythic writings of imaginary tales that were once massive and permanent importance in their great skill now disappeared and in their place brief earthly firm signs substituted; this continuous change is viewed by her eyes as real progress: (252) her ways of thought became like an endless march. She could not find any summit on which she can stand and see in a single look the whole Infinite.

An indecisive play is the labour of Reason‟s understanding and drawing conclusion. She becomes a tool of any strong idea; taking every brief thing as her witness she pleads her case. She always kept herself open to every thought that she cannot understand.

She is a perpetual Advocate who occupied the seat of judge, in order to occupy the veiled throne of Truth making ready thousand warriors with defensive protections in logic‟s shield that is immune to effective attack and sets them on high horse-back of argument to fight forever in a battle of words in a mock tournament (imitating play) where none can win. Testing thought‟s values with her stark methods of tests sits firmly on wide and empty sky aloof and pure in her impartial state. Although her judgments seemed to her as positive but none is certain; in appeal Time cancels all her decrees. Although to our fire-fly like mind her knowledge like simulate like sunbeams to have fallen from a clear heaven, yet its rays are like lights of a lantern in the darkest Night; she throws brightly sparkling robe on Ignorance. But now to rule mind‟s high kingdom is her utter right and to bind mind‟s thought with logic‟s devised unerring chain

77 or see bare truth in a bright unsubstantial mist is lost her ancient overwhelming claim. She is a master and slave of a rigid apparent material scene; she travels on the roads of mistaken sight or looks upon a determined mechanical world constructed by her instruments. She is like a bullock yoked to a cart of demonstrated fact drags huge knowledge packages through Matter‟s dust to reach utility‟s immense market. Now she became a learner to her old inferior menial work; and a helper sense is her seekings umpire. Now this sense she uses as the tester‟s stone. (253) As if she does not know that the gross objects were only worthless outside part of the truth (false), she keeps those and throws aside the essential part. Consequently her long past wisdom vanishes into the past and her knowledge of aeons becomes an idle tale, in its awakened thought there was no place for God‟s dwelling, and hence he passes out and becomes as an old unwanted dream: she only seeks the mechanics like Nature‟s Keys. Interpreting stone like unavoidable hard laws as she digs into Matter‟s hard hidden soil to discover the process of creation of universal things. To her prompt and esteeming look a loaded huge self-worked machine of regulated destiny an infallible Opportunity appears as a complicated and meaningless mechanism: its clever and careful, exact detail and precise brute unconscious accurate trick opens before her as an unmistakable advancing path and outlines a sure road; it plans without thinking and acts without a will, it served million purposes without any special aim of her own and built a mindless world basing on reason. There was none to guide her, it has no maker and no inner idea: its vast self-action works without a cause; it is a lifeless Energy driven resistively, on the body of Necessity bore the head of death, she creates life and gives birth to a consciousness, then gets surprised as to why, how and from where all these had come. Our thoughts are parts of the great machine (Little Mind), our deep ideas are nothing but an unusual creation of Matter‟s law and for this mind the mystic‟s knowledge was only a fancy of mind or a blindness; only due to the presence of the mind we have no need now of soul or spirit: and now the Matter is our only praiseworthy Reality and an invention of unavoidable wonder and simple eternal and unique hard truth of things. It seemed as a suicidal reckless squandering creating the world by the mystery of self-loss and poured its scattered work on empty Space; (254) one day this self-breaking of Force shall contract the great expansion of the creation it has made: then only his mighty and meaningless labour would end, the Void would be left bare and vacant as before. In this manner the grand new Thought justified the truth, crowned and explained the world and mastered all its laws, touched its dumb roots and woke the tremendous powers that were veiled; the unconscious supernatural spirits that were slept unused in Matter‟s ignorant trance it closely associated those into service, consequently all went on exactly, rigidly and undoubtedly. But when on the base of Matter‟s rock of ages a clear-cut and safe whole figure stood firmly then all fell back moved unsteadily into a sea of doubt; the strong scheme slipped down in an endless flood: the grand new thought met the formless Power the creator of forms; suddenly she stuck upon things unseen: consequently a lightning from the undiscovered Truth suddenly surprised her eyes with its dazzling flash and created a deepest depth between the Real and Known till all her knowledge seemed as an ignorance. Once more the world was seen by Mind Force as a net of illusion, as a magic process in a magical sky and an imperceptible magnificence‟s depths whose source is lost in the Inexpressible. The blank Unknowable Once more stood before us. As a last result in the smash of values, and its huge destruction and the great sounds of her work of destruction she lost her clearly preserved built world. There only remained the dance of atoms and spreading out a chance in a longer area in the Energy‟s stupendous quick whirls of sudden radiance: in the unlimited Void a ceaseless motion created thoughtless and aimless forms: Unavoidability and Cause became were like shadows of ghosts; Matter remain only as an incident in world being‟s string, and the law became nothing but a mechanical habit of blind force. Ideals, morals, systems became baseless (255) and were either soon collapsed or lived without assent; all became a state of extinction of disorder that rose like tremendous waves and shock and struggle. All rival and ferocious ideas leaped upon life; a hard pressure held down the lawlessness and liberty remain like the name of specter (phantom): creation and destruction danced in armed on the torn and quaking breast of earth; and thus all revolved into a world of Mahakali‟s dance. Thus fell suddenly and sunk and reclined into the Void, and searching for support for shelter, and a soil on which to stand but saw only a Vast subtle atom, and a rare-point of the thinly distributed underlying substratum material universe on which there floats a solid world‟s external face. There only existed a process of events and Nature‟s plastic and the capability of ever assuming various changes of form at will and the torn invisible atom‟s almighty force strong by the power of death either to slay or to create. There remained only one opportunity that there might be a power to liberate man from his old inadequate means and leave him as the monarch of the earthly stage. If this is achieved then the Reason might be able to possess the original Force and drive her chariot upon the roads of Time. Then all might serve the need of the thinking race, a complete and total state shall come and establish an order of the autocratic, make all things in the standard of Universal perfection and in society build a fit and exact machine. Then the physical science and reason without caring for the soul within shall make a peaceful uniform world and feed the yearning of the ages with food of outward truths and fill a single patterned thinking force on mind, and inflicting Matter‟s logic on Spirit‟s dreams, create a reasonable animal make of man and a fabric of his life in a correct proportion. Then this would be Nature‟s summit on a shadowy globe and the grand result of the long ages‟ old labour, the evolution of earth shall be crowned and her mission fulfilled. (256) If the spirit within fell asleep it might happen like this; and man then might rest satisfied and live in peace, and become master of Nature who once worked as her confined slave and this might happen if the world‟s disorder get strengthened into a Law, if Life‟s dire heart doesn‟t rise in revolt and the Soul within (God) could find no other greater plan. But the cosmic Soul has many faces; its one sudden touch can transform the fixed front of Fate. A sudden turn on the way of the world can come and a brighter road may appear. A greater Mind may face a greater Truth, or when all other things failed we may find the key of perfect change hid in ourselves. The Earth‟s consciousness

78 ascending from below, where our life creep shall join with the Sun, our mortal life shall ascend to heaven riding on spirit‟s wings, our finite thoughts shall become the identified neighbour of the Infinite.

In the bright kingdoms of the rising Sun all takes birth by the power of light: all who were here on earth deformed guards their happy shape there, all that here on earth are mixed and spoilt are there pure and perfect; yet each is only a step that does not last long and a moment‟s phase (short lived). Awake to a greater Truth beyond her acts the mediatrix little mind sat and saw her works and felt the force and the unusualness in them except knowing the power behind the face of Time: she went on executing her works, and obeyed the knowledge given to her, her deep-heart eagerly longed for great ideal things and looked out from light to wider light: a brilliant fence surrounding her contracted her power; yet tied faithfully to her limited sphere she labored on, but knew that the highest and widest seeing of her was only its half-search and its mightiest works are momentary or a stage. Because the world was not created

by Reason and Truth cannot be seen through the veils of Reason and the screens of sense the spirit‟s vision can hardly be seen (257) because dimmed by the imperfection of its means: the little Mind is bound to little things: in a dark Inconscience world its halfawakened sense is nothing but the spirit‟s outward touch, as one left searching by stretching his hands in the ignorant Night it searches for its beings and forms. In this small frame of infant mind and sense desire is like a child-heart‟s crying for bliss, our reason is only the artist of its toys and a rule-maker in a strange tripping game. But she knew her dwarf associates whose confident sight see their own bounded fields and took it as their far goal. The world she has created is only like a provisional report of a traveller who travels towards the half-found truth in things moving in between ignorance and the other. Because nothing is known till anything remains hidden; and the real Truth is only known when the perfect all is seen. Attracted by the All pervading who is the One and the Alone she longs earnestly towards a higher light than hers; sunk in the net of her religious worship and religious belief she has seen a flashing sight of God‟s face: she knows that she has only found nothing except a form, and a robe but ever hopes to see him in her heart and feel the body of his reality. As yet there existed only a disguise and not a face of Truth, although two hidden eyes sometimes appear but reason cannot break off that fairly lighted-disguised, and the efforts made by her only make it more glimmer; she ties up the Indivisible making it into bits; finding that hands were too small that those cannot hold the vast Truth she breaks up knowledge into opposite fractions or through the gap of clouds looks for a vanished sun: she sees indefinitely great number of aspects of the infinity through the closed faces of finite things, but did not understand what she has seen. One day that Face of the infinity shall be flashed burning out through the disguise. Our ignorance is an intermediary stage (like a pupa of a butterfly or moth) of Wisdom, (258) our mistake joins with the new knowledge on its way, and its darkness is a blackened knot of light; the thought dances joining hand in hand with Ignorance on the grey road that proceeds in a spiral course towards the Sun. Even when her fingers held nervously at the knots that bind them to their strange companionship then also in their moments of the married attempts sometimes break the flashes of the enlightening Fire. Even now great thoughts exist here that walk alone: they come equipped with the unmistaken word wearing the royal dress of intuitive light which is a sanction from the eyes of God; they are the announcers of a distant divine Truth and the bright flame arrived from the border of the eternity. A fire shall come descending out of the infinitudes, a greater being having special mystical knowledge from Beyond shall regard the world crossing out of some far omniscience on the lustrous seas from the still absorbed Alone to illumine the deep heart of self and things. It shall bring to Mind a timeless knowledge and its aim to life, and make an end of the earthly Ignorance.

Above in a high breathless and windless sphere throwing over the shadows the dwarfish trinity like a canopy, the aspirant gods to a limitless Beyond lived, they are prisoners of Space, surrounded by the limiting heavens and in the constant circling of the hours they longed for the straight paths of eternity and from their high station two sun like eye holder Divine Forces looked down on this world witnessing the whole universe. To uplift this world that is moving in a very slow pace, a domineering power riding on a huge high-winged Vital-Mind came as it was never accustomed to walk on the soil which is firm and unchanging because it was only accustomed to a blue infinity, it flew in sunlit and starlit sky; it saw afar the unattainable Immortal‟s home (259) and heard from far away the voices of the Gods. The destroyer of divine Idols and demolisher of Time‟s forts by overleaping limit and exceeding all barriers and rules lit the thoughts that glowed through the centuries and did all works with the help of superhuman force. As far as its self-winged air-planes could fly it flew and visiting the future in great brilliant raids and surveyed the paths built by dream-fate. It was skilled to conceive but unable to possess the reality it drew the maps and plans of inner vision too large for the architecture of mortal Sky. Beyond in the wideness where no others foot prints are seen an artist of bodiless Ideas, Imperturbable to the cry of life and sense a pure Thought-Mind observed the cosmic act. That angle of a white transcending kingdom saw the world from solitary heights that were luminous in a far and empty sky.

-End of Canto Ten

79

Canto Eleven The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Greater Mind (260)There ended the limits of the labouring Power of the little Mind. But its conscious being and creation did not end there.

Because the Powers of Thought transcends the circles of mortal mind and is greater than its earthly instrument: the godhead that in the mind‟s narrow space escapes on every side into some vast which is a path towards infinity. It moves constantly in the spirit‟s field, and is a runner towards the far spiritual light, and a child and servant of the spirit‟s force. But this mind too falls back on earth from a nameless highest point. Aswapati stretched beyond the sight of Thought. Because the spiritual being is ever existent and unborn and its greatness was not born from thought and its knowledge cannot come by thinking. The spirit knows itself and lives in itself, moves where neither thought nor any form exits. Its feet remain steadily upon finite things and its wings can dare to cross the Infinite. A wonder space of great and marvellous meetings appeared before king Aswapati‟s range of sight and invited him to a place where Thought leaned on a Vision beyond thought and shaped the world under the shelter of the Unthinkable. On peaks beyond the reach of imagination, in the horizons which the sight can reach tirelessly, under a blue canopy of eternity the magnificence of ideal Mind was seen outstretched crossing the boundaries of known things. It was the fount of our littleness, it is an inborn natural ability of what we must endlessly become in future, it is a support of all that the human strength can do, (261) and the creator of hopes unrealised by earth, it spreads beyond the gradually expanding universe; crossing the boundaries of Dream its flies beyond it surpasses the summit of life‟s climb. Awake in a luminous orb and not confined to the set limits of Thought, opened towards the great boundlessness of all knowledge, it flings its great massed influences on our world, and its speed overtakes the hours that moves at easy pace, its force with unconquerable steps crosses the course of Time, and its mights that bridge the gulf between man and God, and it lights battles with Ignorance and Death. In this greater minds vast expanse of ideal Space where beauty and mightiness walk joining hand with hand, the Spirit‟s truths take form as living Gods and each can build a world in its own right. In an atmosphere where doubt or error cannot taint with the disgrace of their deformity, and it is in close relationship with the meditating inner seclusion of a truth that sees through an infallible light where the sight is not hindered nor thought is misled, freed from the extremeness of our worldly punishment of tears, there even in dream the luminous creation‟s sight is fixed on the divine Ideas where eternity dwells. Above in the intense blaze of sunlight of joy and established in the absolute power the Masters of the Ideal are throned in sessions of secure delight in the kingdoms of luminous certitude. Those domains are far away from our labour and longings and call, and those were the kingdom of perfection and sacred temple and are impassable to the uncertain thoughts of the human mind, and far away from the dull streams of mortal life.

But because they are the kith and kin of our secret souls, a breath of unattained divinity flows on the imperfect earth on which we are working labouriously; across a brighter heaven‟s gold hued laugh like a light that falls on our distressed unsatisfied lives, (262) even from the ideal minds‟ worlds a thought descends down even here on this earth and it inspires us to make new-models of some image of their greatness and attraction and marvel beyond our sphere of mortal hope. Amid the heavy burden of the sameness of the daily routine of our earthly lives and even opposed by the human law, a faith in things that do not exist now and must become some day or other in future shall live as comrade of this world‟s delight and pain, and on account of the secret love of the soul‟s forbidden desire with eternity its child shall be born here. Consequently our spirits shall be freed from their earthly environment; the future would bring its face of supernaturalism near, the future godhead shall look at us with its instant sight, then acts seemed impossible would grow natural; we would feel the immortality of the hero; the courage and the strength that death cannot touch shall awake in mortal limbs and failing hearts; when we shall move by the rapid stimulating force of a will that hates the slow and weary movement of mortal time.

These promptings does not come from an unknown sphere: we ourselves are the citizens of that mother State, we were adventurers and have colonised in Matter‟s night. But now our due rights are obstructed and our passports for the far Beyond became ineffective; we live here self-expelled from our heavenlier home. A wandering line of ray that came from the world of immortal Mind has accepted the earth‟s blindness and our human thought became slave of Ignorance. Now he is an exile from heavenly home, and became a labourer on this unsure globe and is captured and driven in Life‟s ignorant clutch, its ways of movement are hindered by our bodily darkened cell and deceiving nerve, it dreams of happier states and noble powers of heaven, and the natural privilege of the unfallen gods, it still remembers its old lost Domineering Powers. Amidst earth‟s mist, fogs, mud and stone it still remembers its lofty state and the high city of its lustrous birth. (263) Even now a memory from our lost heavens of Truth stealthily enters in, an unbarred liberation comes near, the call of a Glory comes, a might and a felicity from which we have been separated looks out at us. In the beautiful passages of half-covered light, this wanderer bright shadow of itself, and this quick uncertain leader of blind gods, hired by mind and body for earth‟s use this affectionate of small lamps and this attendant slave and nurse forgets its work mid the rude realities of earth; but it recovers its disowned royal right, it wears once more its thought‟s blue and red dress and knows itself as the Ideal‟s seer and king and the receiver and conveyer of message and predictor of the Unborn, inheritor of delight and immortality. All things that seemed as dreams here on earth do exist there in that kingdom of Ideal Mind in their own reality, in our unknown depths the reserved store of their truth is lying asleep; they reign in our unattainable heights and come to us in thought and meditation waving their robes of light. But our very small human will and dry practical reason bar admission to the heavenly visitants: hence they keep on waiting for us in the Ideal mind‟s peaks or remain guarded unseen by us in our secret soul yet spread heavenly light sometimes on our awakened soul, and hide

80 from our lives their greatness, beauty and power. Our present state sometimes feels their royal touch, our future attempts hard towards their luminous thrones: they keep looking at us out of their spiritual secrete caves; in the corridors of mind the sound of the footfalls of the immortal are heard: our souls can climb into those shining planes and the wideness from which they have come can become our home. The glorious Thinker Aswapati regained the privilege of shadow less sight and entered the immortal‟s atmosphere and drank again his pure and mighty source. Impassive in rhythmic calm and joy he saw limitless light overwhelmingly, the unfallen planes, and the thought-created worlds (264) where Knowledge is the leader of the act and Matter is made up of thinking substance, and feeling like a heaven-bird held supported on dreaming wings, as a child responding to the voice of parents answers the Truth‟s call and saw where from the all-shaping beam‟s luminous Form springs and Will is like a conscious chariot of the Gods and Life like a splendourstream of a meditating Force carries the voices of the ever mysterious Suns. It brings happiness of whispered truth; in the flow of the stream laughter from the immortal heart of Bliss, the immeasurable Joy of timelessness, the sound of Wisdom‟s murmur in the Unknown and the breath of an unseen Infinity runs flooding with honey the bosom of Sky in its flow. In the clear light of the blue sky the unbound omnipotent Spirit of Mind remained musing over the blue lotus of the Idea. A golden supreme sun of timeless Truth crossing through a silence quivering with the word of Light poured down the mystery of the eternal Ray on an endless ocean of discovery.

Aswapati saw far off the joining of two hemispheres. On meditation‟s mounting edge of trance he saw great stairs of thought climbed up to unborn heights where Time‟s last heights touch the eternity‟s skies and Nature speaks to the spirit‟s absolute.

First Aswapati saw a triple kingdom of ordered thought, it was a small beginning of a great ascent, above there existed bright subtle skies of mind as if packed in an endless ascent of sky pressed by sky secured as if within a strong hold of a fort of light supported against the Void; the highest sky of mind attempted to be a neighbour of eternity, and the largest sky widened into the infinite. But though the kingdoms were immortal, mighty and divine, their first realms were near and related to human mind; (265) their deities shape paths of our greater thinking, a fraction of their mightiness can be ours: these expanses were not too broad in range for the circuit of our souls and it is not vain for our human hope to ascend to these heights. A triple series of stairs led to this triple world.

Although it is very steep for our common strengths to ascend yet its upward slope inclines down on our earthly state: on a slope that is not too sharply sloping and however deep one descends can turn back to keep contact with the mortal‟s universe. The mighty protection of the ascending stair who keep communing with the world-creator supreme word, waited there for the heaven-bound pilgrim soul; holding the thousand keys of the Beyond they presented their Knowledge to the climbing mind and filled the life with Thought‟s boundlessness. They were the priests of prediction of events of the mystic Law, and the flame-bright inheritors of the divine Truth, and interpreters between man‟s mind and God‟s; they bring the immortal fire to mortal men. They were embodying the rainbow-like multicolour invisible; they were the guardians of the Eternal‟s bright act and stood in front of truth‟s Sun with their illumined troops. From afar they appeared like a symbol picture, they were the illumined originals of the shadowy script in which our sight draws the line of light of an ideal Mind‟s Ray, or make a mystic Truth an idol of God, but when they were nearer they become Gods and living Presences. In the lowest series of step of the stair the march of the stone figures are inscribed, those stone images were adorned extraordinary posture, and were small, contained the meaning of a world, they were infinitesimal symbols of its perfection‟s joy, there in the peculiar beasts the Nature‟s forces were alive and man awakened to the wonder of his role and grown as an image of an undefaced God, and there the objects were looked like the pure coin of Beauty‟s rule; (266) but their role was to serve the wide territories. In front of that ascending stair stood the World-Time‟s enjoyers, favourites of the World-Bliss, the Masters of actual things, lords of the short lived moments, playmates of the youthful Nature and child God, creators of Matter by the hidden pressure of Mind whose subtle thoughts support the unconscious Life and they guide the caprice of brute Matters events, and a race of young keen-visioned gods, Kingchildren born on Wisdom‟s primal land and taught in its school the world creation‟s transcendent play. They are the chief artists of the eternal Magician, makers and measurers of the fractioned Space, have made a known and unknown plan of a dwelling-house for the invisible Lord. Obeying the Eternal‟s great command in this material creation of world they have built this wide kindergarten of young souls where the infant spirit learns through mind and sense the letters of the cosmic alphabet and study with regard to the structure of the cosmic self and seek for the secret meaning of the entire God‟s and Goddess and the creation (whole). Whatever the Spirit conceives they make a frame of it, persuading Nature into apparent moods they lend a finite shape to infinite things. Each powers leaving the largeness of the Eternal‟s peace that sprang from the Unmanifest. They seized and held them by their unerring sight and made a dancing doll of the cosmic dance. They bound by the rhythms of the laws of free caprice and compelled to accept its posture and its line in the magic creation of an ordered universe. Thus the All-containing was bound in a form, the One was cut into measurable units and the limitless was build into a cosmic sum and they made the unending Space into an arc of a circle, (267) and the indivisible Time was divided into small minutes, to keep secure the mystery of the Formless cast into form and the infinitesimal atoms and molecules were massed. By their unfailing artist-skill invented the magic of the hierarchy of number and their sign‟s for use, design‟s miraculous potency was caught and filled with beauty and significance and by the firm direction of their gaze figure and quality equating joined in an indivisible identity (oneness). On each event they printed the methods of their law and its trust, and charge of burdened circumstance; those do not remain as a free and divine incident anymore and at each moment do not remain as a willed or an adventurous step of the soul, it lengthened a fate-bound mysterious chain, a foreseen line of an unalterable, plan added one more step in Necessity‟s long march. A limit was fixed for every eager Power to restrain its yearning to be the arbitrary power of the world and for

81 each force and act a spiral channel (furrow) as strong as bronze was prescribed and shown to each moment its appointed place which was fore willed unalterably in the spiral of the huge noose of Time fleeing from eternity. Their thoughts like inevitable links of Fate imposed on the jump and lightning rays of mind and on the weak sudden stream of life and on the liberty of atomic things imposed immutable cause and stubborn consequence. The Idea gave up its natural infinite plasticity to which it was born and instead of that it is seen to have been bound in a plot of small, separate steps of chain-work and that was once immortal now is tied to birth and death, severed from the nearness of unerring sight, knowledge was rebuilt from cells of imagination into a fixed body that is divisible and perishable; thus bound it began growing but could not last long and broke (268) and left its place for moulding a body of new thinking force. The Infinite‟s great-eyed divine Thoughts were closed in a cage for cross purposes of world-laws as obstructions and the rainbow like brilliant diverse lighted divine vision of the Inexpressible was fenced within a limited horizon‟s walls. A timeless Spirit was made the slave of time; the Illimitable was thrown into prison of birth to create a world that Mind could grasp and rule. To make the created being as the Nature‟s lord and to illumine the Matter‟s depths with the sight of the soul on earth that looked towards thousand suns, they tied the million-mysterious movement of One and Alone to definite moment and pattern and limited sphere.

The seekers of unseen in a lined grade of subtle race of divine angels with larger eyelids stood above. Across the depths of silence in their eyes a light of liberating Knowledge was shining; they lived in the mind and knew truth from within, in the inner concentration of sight they could enter behind the screen of Time‟s results and the stiff base and shape of visible things. All that escaped from the minds impression‟s narrow net their inner vision could discern and seized firmly and their seeing thought filled the blank places left by the seeking sense. They were the chief creators of possibility and skilled engineers converting the impossible into possibility, mathematicians of the infinite numbers and knower of the theory of unknowable truths, they formulate a chain of reasoned solution of all obscurely riddling incidents and join the unknown to the apparent worlds. They were the service man of the timeless Power and wait for her command, they were the investigators of the cycle of her works; crossing the hedge of the inexpressible confidential isolation of the timeless power their mind could penetrate her mystic mind and draw the diagram of her secret thoughts; they read all the symbols for secrecy and the secret writing that she had kept concealed, (269) they made copies of all her guarded plans and assigned a reason and an unchanging rule for every turn of her mysterious course. There the unseen could be seen by the student eyes, the interpretation of the immense Inconscient‟s scheme could be explained, upon the expending Void daring lines could be drawn and the Infinite was diminished to square and cube. Arranging the symbol and meaning and drawing the curved line of a transcendent Power, they framed the mystic doctrine of the cosmic Law, discovered the balancing line (the line of equilibrium) of Life‟s technique and constructed the structure of Life-force‟s magic and mystery. Imposing systematic plans of action of knowledge on the Supreme Vast they joined the deductive reasoning of finite thought to the unbounded logic of infinite Consciousness, they have bound in the formulas of grammar the hidden rhythms of Nature‟s dance, made a critical judgment of the plot of the drama of the worlds, and made figure and number a solution to all that is: traced the inner-analysis of the universal Self, and sought and captured its secrets and read the unknown deciding factor of the Unique. They have made just assessment of the system of likely hood, and the chance of fleeting possibilities, and to account for the Actual unaccountable sum, they have invented the logarithmic table of Necessity‟s (the system of arithmetic that shortens lengthy calculations) and to make difficult multiplication or division simpler and put into a stable scheme the triple act of the One and the Alone. They have unveiled the unexpected invisible multitude of forces whirling from the hands of Chance that seemed to have obeyed some vast command and worked out a unity from their complex motives. A knowledge that was unknown to their minds was read to them, and from their haphazardness and disorder a great Force was arranged and made into a formula, following the habit of their million paths, distinguishing each faintest line and stroke of a concealed unalterable design (270) and out of the disorder of the Invisible‟s moods the calculus of Destiny (the methods of mathematical calculation) based on symbolic notations was derived. The Mind‟s knowledge in its bright pride of having gained the universal knowledge exceeded the Omniscient‟s power: the Eternal‟s winged eagle like powers surprised in their pathless heaven inclined down from their circling spiral rotation above to obey the order of the Supreme Thought: there each mysterious God was forced to hold a revealing form, in the Nature‟s game settled movements were assigned to each, and across the many-coloured chess-board of cosmic Fate they move in a zigzag manner like a snake at the indication of chess-player‟s Will. In the wide order of succession of Necessity‟s steps every act and thought of God could be foreknown by them and its values could be determined by the accountant Mind, and checked by mind‟s mathematical omnipotence it thus lost its divine aspect of supernaturalism and only became a figure in the cosmic sum. In the mighty world Mother‟s freedom and sweet and passionate heart arisen from her all-wise unrestricted delight in the caprices and lightening moods estranged from their wonder was bound in a chain of cause and effect; an idol of bronze replaced her mystic shape and captured the movements of the cosmic Vasts, bound in the exact outline of her ideal face she had forgotten her eyelashes‟ dream print that carries on their curve the infinity‟s dreams and hence she lost the attracting superb wonder of her eyes; they have bound the ordered beats of her sea like vast heart‟s surging wave of throbs to a mathematical chain to a theorem of reasoning‟s: the Mother‟s deep designs that she had screened from herself opened self-revealed in their confessional. The Godheads of Mind world determined a date for the birth and death of the worlds, they had drawn the line of diameter of finite (made a finite shape of the Infinite) and measured the distant horizons of the unseen heights and went on measuring the unfathomable viewless depths till whatever possible in world Time seemed known. (271) All was forced by number, name and form and nothing was left untold and incalculable. Despite all

82 these their wisdom was circled with a cipher: they could discover many phenomenal truths but the one supreme Truth was unknowable to them. Thus by knowing too much they missed the whole perfect knowledge: they could not guess the fathomless heart of the world and the Transcendent was mysterious to them.

Towards the wide peak of the triple stairs in a higher and more daring ascension open steps climbed up like flaming rocks of gold illumining their way to a pure absolute sky. A few and majestic supreme ruling Kings of Thought made of Space their wide allseeing sight keenly observing the enormous work of Time: a wideness of the all-sustaining Consciousness held the Being in a still embrace. They were the mediators with the luminous Unseen and kept restrained in the long way to the world the commands of the creator Self that was obeyed by the ignorant earth and by conscious heaven; their thoughts are partners of the creator‟s vast control. A great all-controlling Consciousness exits there and the being of Mind out of ignorance serves a higher Power; Mind is only a channel but not the source of all. In the course of worldly Time the creation of the cosmos is no accident; a meaning is hidden behind each play of unplanned occurrence and there lies a freedom in each changed scene of Fate. A great Wisdom knows and guides this world which is full of mysteries; and a Truth-sight shapes the world‟s beings and events; a Divine Word is self-born upon creation‟s heights, it was the voice of the Eternal in the worlds of time and the predictor of the Absolute sight and sows the Idea‟s significance in the universal Form and from that seed the children of Time took birth. On summits beyond our sphere of sight the All-Wisdom sits: (272) from there a single and unfailing look comes down on our earth, a silent touch coming from the supreme sky awakes knowledge in the acts of the ignorant secret power that works in the Inconscient depths, compelling the blinded Godhead to rise up from its sleep, as she passes through the circuit of time down circling the paths of ages and vanishing from the pursuit of finite eyes determines the nude dance of Necessity. The inconceivable forces of the whirling cosmos bear in their unrestrained limbs the immobility of an original foresight that is called Fate. Even the universal Nature‟s ignorance is the instrument of Truth; our toiling ego cannot change the course of the Nature: yet the Nature is a conscious power that moves in us, a seed of an Idea is the parent of our acts and destiny is the unrecognised child of the Supreme Will. By the errorless directing eyes of the Truth all creatures here express their secret self and forced to become what they hide in themselves. Because He (That) who is here upon earth grows in the stream of time and manifests and the slow Godhead shut within our cells climbs from the living cell (plasm) to immortality. But the spirit‟s truth is hidden and beyond our mortal clutch, it is mysterious, inexpressible and untold, it could only be seen by the spirit‟s eye. When the mortal being is freed from the covering of ego and mind, then it could hear the heavenly Voice; it could look through light to ever greater light is and sees Eternity encircling LifeForce. This greater Truth is unfamiliar to our thoughts; where a free Wisdom is at work, there our thoughts seek for a rule or we only see a swift game of Chance or we can see a labour bound by the chained force of Nature‟s law and an absolute rule of dumb unthinking Power. These thought movements are arrogant in their sense of God-born strength, and dared to possess with their thought the absolute Truth; (273) by an ungodly sight‟s imaginary purity, and by a formless perception, intolerant of forms, they brought to Mind what it could never attain and hoped to conquer Truth‟s supreme base. A constructive and inevitable conceptual word‟s bare compulsion translated the unthinkable into thought: a naked subtle sense‟s silver-winged fire and an ear of mind withdrawn from the outward‟s rhythms could hear the original sounds of the eternal Word, and heard the world-creating rhythm and music and bodiless Will that exist in all things. They measured the Illimitable with the measuring rod of numbers and discovered the last formula of limited things, by unmistakable systems they embodied timeless truths and calculated the Timeless in terms of Time and valued the incomparable (invaluable) Supreme. To confine and hold the inconceivable infinitudes they have erected insurmountable walls of thought and speech and to hold the One and the Alone they made a vacuum. By the Power of their vision they rise towards an empty peak and a mighty sky of cold and sunlit sky. To unify their work they exclude a life that could not bear the nakedness of the Vast and made multitude the sum total of zero, and in negation found the meaning of the All existent and in non-existence they discovered positive Supreme Idea. Their single law compressing Nature into a formula simplified the cosmic theme; their titan labour made all knowledge into one and the Spirit‟s strange ways converted into mental algebra and made the living Divinity as an imaginary idol. Here in this land the mind‟s wisdom ended and it felt itself complete; because nothing else was left to think or know; it sat throned in a spiritual zero and took the vast silence as the supreme Inexpressible supreme.

(274) This was the play of the luminous gods of Thought. Attracting the timeless Light into time and imprisoning eternity in the moments, they have planned to trap the feet of Truth in a golden net of conception and word and keep her imprisoned for the thinker‟s joy in his little world of thought built of immortal dreams: that the Truth like great power dwell confined in the human mind, as an empress remains as prisoner in her subject‟s house, adored, pure and still on his heart‟s throne, become his great prized and loved property and live apart in the wall of silence of his secret meditation, this immaculate in snow-white like unstained purity remained same forever and one, as man‟s worshipped changeless Goddess through all time. Or else to keep her as a faithful companion of his mind assenting always to his nature and will, and sanctioning and inspiring his words and acts and through the listening years she would prolonged their echo, and be a companion and recorder of his march, while crossing a brilliant way of thought and life created through eternity of Time. Remain as a witness to his high victorious star, his greatest Idea‟s servitor godhead and one day he shall by her help dominate the prone world; she shall be a guarantee for man‟s deeds and beliefs, and to rule and lead she shall justify his divine right. Or as a lover clasps his one beloved she would be like that, she shall be the godhead of his life‟s worship and desire, his

83 heart‟s only adorable idol and she must live for him alone forever as she now is: the godhead would keep him possessed with her sudden bliss, and remain as unending marvel in his happy grasp and she would be his great attraction and a possessed enchanting supernaturalism is their planning. He now claims her after long and lone pursuit for the one and exclusive joy of his body and soul: (275) her divine attraction is inescapable, to possess her immense degree is an immortal quivering and an intoxication and an ecstasy: the passion of her self-revealing moods, and a heavenly glory and diversity makes ever new her body to his eyes, or else repeats the first charming touch, the luminous flash of divine joy of her mystic breasts and her beautiful lively limbs shall be a living field of an unending thrilling of new discovery for him. In her word and laugh a new beginning of everything blossom, a new attractiveness brings back the old extreme exclusive delight: the mental being is lost in her and she is his heaven here. The Goddess Truth smiled approving the lovely golden game. The great boundless Goddess of Truth had come leaned down out of her silent eternal spaces and pretended to have surrendered her sunlit sweetness of secrecies. In the clasp of the Thinker embodying down her concrete form of beauty she gives her immortal lips for a brief kiss and draws to her breast a glorified mortal head: she made earth her home and for her heaven was too small. In a human heart her secret presence lived; man from his own self made his own figure of Goddess of Truth: and the Goddess shaped her body that it can remain within a mind‟s embrace. She came into thought‟s narrow limits; consented for her glory and greatness to be pressed into the little chamber of the Idea and in the closed room of a lonely thinker‟s seize: she has lowered down her heights to the stature of our souls and dazzled our eyelids with her heavenly look. Thus each human being is satisfied with his high gain and thinks himself that he has passed beyond mortality and thinks as blessed and a king of truth upon his separate throne. In this field of Time a single splendour caught from her glory appears to her possessor as one true light and beauty‟s perfectly kindled figure. (276) But neither thought nor word can seize the eternal Truth: the whole world lives in a lonely ray of her sun. In our thought‟s close and small little lighted house and the vanity of the false ego of our shut mortal mind dreams that the chain of its thought tied the Goddess of Truth and made her as ours; but by so thinking we only play with our brilliant bonds; by tying her down it is ourselves we tie. In our illusion by one luminous point we do not know as to what small figure of her we hold; we do not feel her inspiring boundlessness and we cannot take share of her immortal liberty. Even this also happens with the seer and sage; because still the human limits the idea of divine: out of our thoughts we must leap up to the divine sight and breathe her divine illimitable air and confess her simple vast supremacy and dare to surrender to her absolute power. Then only the Unmanifest shall reflect his form in the still mind as in a living glass; the timeless Ray descends into our hearts and we shall remain enraptured into eternity because Truth is wider and greater than her forms. Men have made thousand idols of her and find her in the idols they adore; but she remains herself infinite and alone.

- END OF CANTO ELEVEN

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Canto Twelve The Heavens of the Ideal (277) From far beyond the Ideal Mind always invited Aswapati. Awakened by the touch of the Unseen and abandoning the boundary of things achieved, the strong discoverer with his aspired tireless Thought force went on revealing in each step a luminous world. It left known highest points and proceeded towards unknown highest point of achievement: with great passion it sought for the sole unrealised Truth, and hankered eagerly for the divine Light that knows not death and birth. Aswapati‟s soul in each stage of far ascent was like a constant heaven that always is felt here on earth. At each phase of his marvellous journey a new degree of wonder and of bliss was felt, a new step formed in Being‟s mighty ladder like stair, as if a dazzling spirit was quivering there holding up with his flame the immortal hope, and a radiant God sacrificed his soul that he might feel the pressure of footsteps of pilgrims climbing in haste to the Eternal‟s house, there a great wide step was trembling with jewelled fire. At either side of each brilliant stair the heavens of the ideal Mind were seen like pieces of a brilliant sky clinging to the moon in a blue splendour of dreaming Space. On one side of the stair the lovely kingdoms of the flower of paradise in a quivering rapture of the heart‟s insight and in a spontaneous bliss of beauty spread the glory of sunrise on the soul floating with colour over colour that looked luminous. Above the spirit encircled by mortal sense there stood embodied the super conscious domains of heavenly peace, below it there stood the Inconscient‟s dismal and dim bottomless depths, (278) in between and behind our life there stood the deathless Rose. Crossing the covered atmosphere the spirit breathes and unseen and unimagined by the blind suffering world a body formed by the cosmic beauty and joy, climbing from Nature‟s deep surrendered heart blossoms for ever at the feet of God, and nursed by life‟s mysterious sacrificial Fire. Here on our earth too its bud is born in human breasts; thereafter by a touch of a presence or a voice, the world is turned into a temple ground and all beings disclose the unknown Beloved. In the rushing out of heavenly joy and solace the stream of life surrenders to the divinity within and makes the rejoicing-offering of its all and thus the soul opens before the supreme happiness. Bliss is felt that can never cease totally; secret divine grace‟s sudden mystery blossoms with golden colour our earth‟s passionate desire. All the high gods who have concealed their faces from the stained passionate ritual of our hopes revealed their names and immortal powers. A flaming tranquility awakens the sleeping cells, a passion of the flesh becoming spirit and the miracle for which our life was created is at last fulfilled marvelously. In a white hushed tower a flame and the faces of immortal light is seen, the luminous limbs that know not birth and death, the breasts that fed the first-born of the Sun, the wings that crowd thought‟s intense silences and the eyes that look into spiritual Space is seen there. Like flowers that bloom towards heavenly atmosphere our hidden centers of celestial force were open, there the mind gets stuck quivered with the celestial Ray and even this quickly passing away body then can feel the ideal love and flawless happiness (279) and laughter of heart‟s sweetness and delight and the beauty and the rhythmic feet of the hours freed from the vigourously strong and pitiable possession of Time. This in higher region feels god‟s touch of the immortal things; what is here on earth in the shape of bud has blossomed there. There exists the secrecy of the House of Flame, and the brilliant display of God-like thought and precious bliss, the enraptured idealism of heavenly sense; there existed marvellous voices and brilliant laugh that is luminous like sunlight, in rivers of Divine joy with the gurgling sound of their whirling‟s and the mysteried groves of grape of the gold moon-wine and the fire and sweetness the brilliant shadow that hardly falls on mortal life are there. Although the joys of Time are seen there, yet the immortal‟s touch is felt as if pressed on the breast and the flutings of the Infinite is heard. Here upon earth there exists only early awakenings and moments that tremble in a divine atmosphere, time‟s sunflowers grown upon the yearning of earthly soil look at the golden Eternity: but there exists all imperishable bliss. A million lotuses were swaying in one stem only, world after coloured and ecstatic world climbs towards some far unseen advent.

On the other side of the eternal stairs the mighty kingdoms of the immortal Flame were climbing in an aspiration to reach the Being‟s completeness. Out of the sorrow and darkness of the world and out of the depths where life and thought are buried there immortal Flame ascends lonely towards heaven. In a veiled Nature‟s holy depth it burns for ever on the Mind‟s altar, its priests were souls of the dedicated gods and humanity is the hearth of its sacrificial fire. Once that flame burns it never extinguishes. A fire ascends along the mystic paths of earth (280) it rises through the mortal‟s hemisphere and carried by the runners of the Day and Dusk till it reaches in the mystic eternal Light and mounts whitening to the invisible Throne. Its worlds are serial steps of an ascending Force: like a dream of huge up and down lines, titan lines and shapes, homes of unfallen and illumined Might, ever pure and unborn heavens of unchanging Good, heights of the grandeur of truth‟s eternal ray began looking as if from a symbol sky and call our souls to rise into a vaster sky. Dreaming of a mysterious Beyond holding the ever burning Flame on their summits and transcendent of the paths of the Fate and Time above themselves they point out with the tips of their forefinger through the pale-blue heaven of god-mind towards some gold Infinite‟s full manifestation. Like a thunder rolling as waves mid the hills of God, with their tireless and extreme tremendous voice exceeding us calls us to exceed ourselves and command us to rise above incessantly. Those summits exist far away from our curious reach, and are too high for our mortal strength to climb, our spirits naked athlete will scarcely climb with a great intense ecstasy of labour. Those stern and pitiless summits demand from us efforts that require to long time that our mortal nerve cannot withstand and our hearts cannot pierce there nor flesh can support it; only the Eternal‟s strength that is within us can dare to attempt the immense

85 adventure of that climb and can sacrifice of all our lovely things here on earth. Our human knowledge is like a mere candle burnt on a dim altar of worship to a Truth as vast as Sun; the virtue of man is like a roughly woven ill-fitting dress and would only serve the dress of the wooden images of Good; (281) the human energy being passionate, blinded, bleeding and stained with mud while attempting towards a deathless Force trips on its way. An imperfection always pursues our highest strength and as such portions and little reflection of that strength is only our share. The worlds were happy that have not experienced the fall of our earthly life, where the Will is one with the Truth and Good with Power; they are not stricken by our earth-mind‟s poverty, and keep living with God‟s natural breath of mightiness, they become the bare spontaneous swift intensities of God, there reveals God‟s great transparent mirror of Self and there is God‟s all-powerful Arbitrary kingdom of bliss where immortal beings have lived in places worthy of them, they were the heirs and shareholders of divinity.

Aswapati moved at will through that Ideal‟s kingdom and accepted their beauty and bore their greatness, took share of the glories of their wonder fields, but passed without staying beneath their splendour‟s rule. There everything was intense and nothing but only a partial light exists. There in each kingdom a refined Idea arranged by a winged angel of high order united all Knowledge by one controller of thought, persuaded all action into a great meaningful sense, all powers were subordinated to a single power and made a world where it could rule alone in an absolute ideal‟s faultless home. They as a sign of their victory and their faith offered to the Traveller of the worlds at their gates a inextinguishable flame or an unfading flower as a symbol of a high kingdom‟s privilege. On the way to the heavens of ideals a glorious shining Angel presented to the seeking of the soul of the traveller of the world, the sweetness and the strength of an aspiration, there each seemed Truth‟s intimate source and summit force, and the inner meaning of the universe, key of perfection and passport to Paradise. Yet there were other kingdoms where the supreme powers met and joining hands created a circle of bliss; there a Light stood embraced by another light, fire joined with another fire, (282) but none would lose his body in other‟s body to find his soul in the world‟s single Soul and to possess a multiplied rapture of infinity. Aswapati passed onward to a diviner sphere: there light and bliss joined in a common greatness, all high and beautiful and desirable powers forgetting their difference and their separate kingdom becomes single multitudinous whole. Above the diverse facing of the roads of Time, above the Silence and its thousand fold Word, the radiant children of Eternity dwelt forever united and inseparable in the unchangeable and Truth that is not violated(sacred) on the height of wide spirit where all are one.

-End of Canto Twelve

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Canto Thirteen In the Self of Mind

(283) At last there appeared a bare serene sky before Aswapati where Silence listened to the cosmic Voice, but did not answer to its million calls; and there was no answer to the soul‟s endless question. A sudden determination ended curious hopes, a deep pause in a great calm, and a finishing line on the last page of thought and an interval and void of silent peace existed there.

There stopped the climbing series of worlds. Aswapati stood alone there on a wide curved portion of a circle of a summit Space with an enormous Mental Being that held all life in a corner of its Vasts. The all powerful, it had no communion with the immovable solitary world that sprang from the Self of Mind: it did not pay any attention to the songs of victory of that world, it was impassive to its own defeats, it heard the cry of grief but shown no reaction, its sight fell impartially on voice and virtue, and saw extinction came yet remained immobile. It was an equal Cause of all things created, a lonely Seer and the Lord of its multitude of forms, it did not act not but bore all thoughts and deeds, it was Nature‟s innumerable acts witness and Lord, consents to the movements of her Force. This vast quietism reflected in Aswapati‟s mind. This witness silence is the secret base of the Thinker: hidden in the silent depths the word is formed, the act rising from the hidden silences is born into the voiceful mind, and the labouring world; the great silence that is the mystic birthplace of the soul covers by secrecy the seed sown by the Eternal. (284) In God‟s supreme inwardness and timeless silence a seeing Self and a mighty Energy met; the Silence knew itself and thought took form: from the dual power a self-made creation rose.

Aswapati lived in the still self and the soul lived in him; its listening depths that were ancient and beyond memory, its vastness and stillness became his own; and he identified with that being become powerful, free and great. Aswapati looked on all things created their remaining apart and not bound with it. As one who builds his own imaginary scenes and does not loose himself in what he sees, like a spectator of a self-conceived drama he looked on the world and watched its inspiring thoughts that were rhythmed with luminous forecast in their eyes, he saw the forces of that world with their feet of wind and fire arisen from the voiceless depths in his soul.

Aswapati now here seemed to know and understand all; now there was neither desire nor any storm of will existed in him, the great bothered inquirer lost his mission; he did not desire for anything nor had any want. He could stay there and own the Supreme Self and the great Silence: his soul had peace and experience of the whole cosmos. Thereafter suddenly on all things seen, touched, heard or felt a luminous finger fell and showed to his mind that nothing is possible to know; and indicated to him that he must reach the source of all knowledge to know them. That doubtful Ray broke apart all the apparent things and stroke at the very roots of his thought and sense. Since his thought and sense were grown in a universe of Ignorance, though aspiring towards a superconscient Sun, playing in sunshine and rain falling from the heavenlier skies they never can reach that sky however high they climb or overpass and however penetrating their sight is. Even a doubt destroys gradually the means to think, disbelief falls upon Mind‟s instruments; whatever the mind accepts as reality‟s shining coin, (285) proved fact, fixed logical conjecture, clear conclusion, firm theory, assured significance proved as deceits upon Time‟s credit bank or as valueless assets in Truth‟s treasury. It is like Ignorance with a chance monarch‟s dress seated on an unstable throne and an idol of knowledge disguised with doubtful words and with trivial thought forms proved as brightly inadequate. Like a labourer dazzled by half-light in the dark, what mind knew was like an image in a broken glass and though what it saw was real but its sight was untrue. The mind‟s ideas in its vast storehouse were like the sound of a transient cloud that vanishes itself in sound and leaves no trace. Like a unstable house hanging in uncertain air, the subtle cleverly made net around which it moves, hanged for while on the tree like the universe, and like gathering up into itself again, it was only a tactful trap to catch its life‟s food like insect, and like short-lived thoughts that-flutter its wings in brief light for a while but dead, once captured in fixed forms of mind, it determines trivial aims that looked giant in man‟s small scale, those were the flickering of imagination‟s brilliant fine mesh and like beliefs that are covered with cobwebs alive no more. It is also like a magic hut of built-up certainties made out of shining dust and bright moonshine in which it thrones its images of the Real, but collapsed into Inconscience form where it rose. There only a ray of soft light of symbol facts survives that covers the mystery hidden in their glow, and they live by falsehood based on hidden realities until vanished from Time. Our mind is like a house frequented by phantom‟s of the dead past, and like ideas that becomes are a corpse of soon hardened stone, and ghosts of old truths, like God‟s spontaneities that are tied with strings custom and packed into the drawers of reason‟s office, (286) it is like a grave (pillar of memory in the burial ground) of great lost opportunities, or an office (workshop) for misuse of soul and life and all the waste made by man of heaven‟s gifts and all the misuse of Nature‟s store and like a stage for the humour of Ignorance. Like that the world seemed as a long aeonic failure‟s scene: all becomes fruitless and no secure base was left anywhere. Attacked by the condemning of the beam of light walking on its blade‟s edge, the builder Reason lost her confidence in the successful skill of deception and turn of thought that makes the soul the prisoner of a word. The Reasoning Mind‟s highest wisdom was only a magnificent guess and its mighty structured science of the worlds is only a brief light on being‟s surfaces. There exists nothing except a diagram drawn by sense, it is only a shadow substitute for eternal mysteries, a vague figure of reality, a plan and elevation by the builder and designer Word imposed upon the resemblance of Time. The Life-being was surrounded by a shadow of doubt; it almost seemed as a lotus-leaf floating on an empty pool of the cosmic Nought. This great spectator and creator Self of Mind was only some half-seeing‟s delegate, a screen hung between the soul and the Light, it is only an idol but not the living body of God. Even the tranquil witness spirit that looks upon mind‟s works was only some dim figure of the Unknowable; the wide and witness Self also seemed like a shadow, its liberation and immovable stillness is only an empty return of being from Time-made things, but it is not a self-vision of

87 Eternity. There existed deep peace, but the nameless Supreme Force was not there: our sweet and mighty Mother was not there who gathers her children‟s lives to her bosom, her clasp that takes the world into her arms (287) in the unfathomable rapture of the Infinite and the Bliss that is creation‟s magnificent grain or the white passion of God-ecstasy whose laugh bursts out in the hearth of blaze of the boundless heart of Love. Aswapati realised that a greater Spirit than the Self of Mind only must answer to the questionings of his soul. Since there existed no firm solution and sure way; hence the high-climbing paths were seized in the unknown; an artist Sight constructed the Beyond in patterns that are contrary and conflicting in colours; and a partial experience did split the Whole. Aswapati looked above, but saw that all was empty and still; the blue sky of theoretical Thought joined into a formless Vacancy. Aswapati looked below but saw everything was dark and mute. In between the high and low a noise was heard between thought and prayer, a struggle, and an unending pauseless labour; a vain and ignorant yearning raised its voice. Across the coasts of mortal Ignorance he could hear a rumour and a movement and a call, a mass of foam, an innumerable cry rolled ever upon the oceanic wave of Life. On its unstable and enormous breast beings and forces, forms, ideas like waves struggled for their form and supremacy, and rose and sank and rose again in Time; and at the bottom of the sleepless stir, a Nothingness that was the parent of the struggling worlds, a huge creator Death, a mystic Void ever supporting the irrational cry forever excluding the supernal Word, motionlessly refusing question and answer, Aswapati could see that dim Inconscient‟s dumb incertitude took rest beneath the voices and the march and could know the cause of the vague Inconscient‟s mute enigma. Two skies of darkness and light opposed with their limits to the spirit‟s walk; (288) the Spirit moved veiled from the Supreme Self in a world of beings and momentary events where all must die to live and live to die. By renewed mortality becoming immortal, it wandered in the spiral of its acts or ran around the cycles of its thought, yet it was no more than what it originally was and knew no more than when it first began. Its existence was an imprisonment and annihilation was only an escape.

-End of Canto Thirteen

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Canto Fourteen The World-Soul (289) Now Aswapati got a secret answer to his trial of finding out. In a far faintly lighted background of his Mind-Space a tunnel (long narrow space) shedding flameless light luminous with its shining mouth was seen, it appeared to be a gate of a solitary hermit, meditating in joy, and a veiled place of seclusion and released in to mystery. That looked like a well and a tunnel of the depths of God away from the unsatisfied surface world and fled into the bosom of the unknown. It plunged as if a mystic channel of hope through many layers of formless voiceless self to reach the last bottomless depth of the world‟s heart, and from that heart there did raise like a wave a wordless call voicing some passionate unseen desire pleading with some calm mysterious Mind. As if a secret finger summoning with gesture outstretched into a crystal-clear atmosphere signaling him from some near hidden depth and like a message from the world‟s deep soul and an intimation of hidden joy flowed out from a cup of self-absorbed bliss, a mute and quivering ecstasy of Light and a passion and beauty of hopeful fire diffusing faint appeared to have entered secretly into the Mind. As one drawn near to his lost spiritual home Aswapati feels now the nearness of a waiting love, he travelled led by a marvellous sound into a dim trembling passage that clasped him from the pursuit of the labour of day and night. Like a murmur of a multitudinous sound and though gradually became one sound in turn, yet remained the same. (290) It was long-known and well-loved summoning voice of a hidden call to an unforeseen delight, but the forgetful mind forgotten its name, that call led back to joy the habitually absent heart. That immortal cry enchanted the shut ear. Thereafter lowering its lordly mystery it sank into a whispering sound circling round his soul. It seemed to him as an intense yearning voice of a lonely flute wandering along the edge of memory and filled the eyes with tears of eager joy. It appeared as a grasshopper like chirping insect‟s constant and intense single cry that awakened with its high-pitched diapason tune the moments of silent moonless night and touched a nerve of mystic sleep with its high insistent charmed awakening call. It was like a ringing silver laugh of anklet bells that travelled the roads of a solitary heart; its dance consoled an eternal loneliness: an old forgotten sweetness came in silently shedding its tears. Or at times it seemed to be heard from far harmonious distance as a series of short slight ringing sound of bells of a long caravan, or a vast forest‟s hymn of saints and sages and the grim reminder of a temple bell or the hum of bees drinking honey in summer isles eager with ecstasy in a sleepy noon, or the far singing hymns of pilgrims sailing on sea. A scent of incense floated in the trembling wind, as if the invisible Beloved had come assuming a sudden sweetness of a face and intimate joyful hands could seize his fleeing feet and the world was transformed with a beauty of a smile and a mystic happiness trembled in Aswapati‟s breast. Aswapati now came into a wonderful bodiless kingdom, it was the home of passion that was nameless or voiceless, there he felt a depth that answers to every height, he found a corner that could embrace all worlds, he saw a point that was the conscious knot of Space, and he felt it as the existence of an eternal hour in the heart of Time.(291) There was the dwelling place of silent Soul of all the world: there lived a Being, a Presence and a Power, he saw a single Person and the unique who was himself and the universe and held Nature‟s sweet and violent heart with love and transformed it into a pure divine rhythm. It was the One and Alone who could love without expectation of return for love, he meets and turns the worst into the best, transforming all experience to delight remedied the intense cruelties of earth; intervening in the sorrowful paths life‟ of birth on earth swung the cradle of the cosmic Child and stilled its all weeping with the consolation of its hand of joy; it led evil things towards their secret good, it turned the unbearable painful falsehood to happy truth, to reveal divinity was its power. It was Infinite contemporary with the mind of God; bore within itself a seed and a flame, a seed from which the Eternal is new-born, a flame that annuls death in mortal things. There all grew related by blood to all self and near and dear; the Divine acquaintance was seen everywhere, no veil was felt and no paralised brute barrier was there; distance could not divide, Time could not bring any change. A fire of passion burned in the depths of the spirit, a constant touch of sweetness linked all hearts, and in a joyful sky of undying love a single bliss of prayer was thrilling. There in all an inner happiness dwelt, a sense of universal harmonies and truth, beauty, good and joy made one in a measureless safe eternity. Here was the intimate source of finite life: a formless spirit becomes the soul of form.

There all was soul or made up of pure soul-substance, a sky of soul covered a deep base of soul. (292) Here all could be known by a spiritual sense: there was no place for thought but there existed a knowledge that was intimate everywhere and one seized on all things by an active identity, a sympathy of self with other selves was present there, a consciousness feels the touch of other consciousness, and being‟s look on being with innermost sight and one heart opens to another without walls of speech and there all without exception of seeing minds in innumerable forms were in the luminosity of the one God. Life was not there, except an impassioned force subtler than subtleness, deeper than the deeps remaining in its place was felt as a subtle and spiritual power, thrilling of one soul to an answering soul, a movement that is beyond the grasp of sense, an intimate influence, a free and happy and intense approach of being to being without any partition or barrier existed there, without which Life and Love could never have existed here on earth. Body was not there because bodies were not necessary; there the soul itself was its own immortal form and instantaneously met the touch of other souls intimately, blissfully and concretely and true at once in an unimaginable reality. As when one walks in sleep through luminous dreams knows the truth the figures of dreams carry consciously, so also there where reality was its own dream state Aswapati could know things by their soul and not their shape: like those who have lived long made one in love

89 need neither word nor sign for heart‟s reply to heart, so also Aswapati could meet and communicate without speech with beings who were not veiled by a material frame. An extraordinary spiritual scenery was seen there, beautiful lakes and rivers and hills, a movement and an immobility in a soul-space, plains and valleys, lengthy extension of soul-joy, gardens that were flower fields of the spirit filled with coloured dreams of meditation. There the atmosphere was the breath of pure eternity. (293) As if a scent and colour of all sweet flowers of the universe had mixed to copy heaven‟s atmosphere there in a coloured mist a fragrance streamed on. Beauty lived there as if at home in her own house for attraction of the soul but not for the attraction of the eye, there all was beautiful by its own right and did not need the magnificence of a decoration. All objects there were like bodies of the Gods, a symbolic spirit encircled a soul because world and soul were one and an inseparable reality.

The beings that once bore forms on earth sat there in shining chambers of spiritual sleep immersed in mute trance between births. Now they were liberated from the repetition of birth and death from one place to another, their little scene of symbol deeds were passed, and their long road of heavens and hells were passed; they had returned into the shelter of the world‟s deep soul. All now was gathered into a meaningful rest: person and nature underwent magical change in sleep. In trance they gathered back the experiences of their past selves, in a background of memory‟s foreseeing meditation and predicting of their future new personality arranged the map of the course of their coming destiny: they were the heirs of their past and their future‟s discoverers, electors of their own self-chosen destiny and waited for the adventure of new Life. The same Personality was persistently remaining through one world to the other, though they are the same forever in many shapes yet were unrecognisable by the outward mind, holding unknown names in unknown countries passing through the flow of Time imprint upon the earth‟s worn page a growing figure of its secret self and learns by experience of the knowledge of the spirit till such time it can see its living truth and God. They once more must face the problem-bound game of birth, (294) the soul‟s experiment of joy and grief, the thought and the sudden urge that lights the blind act, and adventure on the roads of circumstance, travelling to self across the forms of things through inner movements and external scenes. Aswapati came into the centre of the creation. The spirit wandering from state to state finds here the silence of its starting point in the formless force and immovable state and the meditative passion of the world Soul. All that is created and once again dissolved, the calm persistent vision of the One and the Alone inevitably re-makes and it lives anew; forces, lives, and beings and ideas are gathered and taken into the depths of stillness for a while; there their purpose and their flow of movement they new make and recast their nature and re-form their shape. Ever they change and by changing ever grow, and passing through a fruitful stage of death and after long reconstituting sleep they resume their place in the process of the Gods until their work in cosmic Time is completed.

This was the creative chamber of the worlds. An interval was left between birth and birth, act and act, dream and waking dream, and there was an interval that provides new strength to do work and to exist. Beyond this were kingdoms of delight and peace existed, silent birth place of light and hope and love, and cradles of heavenly joy and rest. In a silence of the sleep of the voices of the world Aswapati grew conscious of the eternal moment; his knowledge was freed from the covering of sense, without the aid of thought and word he could know everything by identity; his being uncovered saw itself, the life that surrounded the spirit‟s infinity now fell down.

On the path of pure inner light, (295) remaining alone between tremendous Presences, under the continuous observation of nameless Gods, his soul passed on as a single conscious power towards the end where the journey ends and again ever begins, and it gradually passes through a voiceless and calm to the source of all things human and divine. There Aswapati could see in their mighty union‟s state the figure of the deathless Two-in-One, a single being in two bodies clasped, and a united action of two united souls, seated absorbed in deep creative joy; the trance of their bliss held up the mobile world. Behind the deathless Two-in-One in a morning light‟s shadow the One Supreme Goddess stood who brought them forth from the Unknowable and manifested here. The said Divine Power ever disguised awaits the seeking spirit; she is the ever sleepless sentinel on the supreme unattainable summits, she is the guide of the traveller of the unseen paths; she guards the seeker on the stark ascetic path of approach to the Alone. At the beginning of each far-extended plane penetrating the cosmic suns orbs with her might she rules there, she was the inspirer of its multiple works and she is the thinker of the symbol of its stage. Above the universe she stands supporting all, she is the sole omnipotent Goddess stands everveiled and this world is her unintelligible disguise; the aeons are the footfalls on her way, the happenings of the world are the figures of her thoughts and all creation is her endless act. Aswapati‟s soul was made as a vessel of her force; silent in the fathomless passion of his will he stretched out to her his folded hands of prayer. At that moment in an absolute answer to his heart a gesture was seen as of worlds thrown away and from the dresses‟ of the Goddess a mystery raised one arm that half opened the eternal screen. Consequently a light appeared that was tranquil and imperishable. (296) Attracted to the large and luminous depths of the enrapturing riddle of her eyes, Aswapati saw the mystic outline of a face. Overpowered by her unbearable light and bliss and mastered by the honey and lightning of her power he became an atom of her illimitable self and tossed like waves towards the shores of her ocean of ecstasy, drunk with the deep golden spiritual wine he cast from the piercing tranquility of his soul a cry of adoration and yearning arose towards her and the surrender of his boundless mind and the self-giving of his silent heart. He fell down at her feet unconscious and prone.

-End of Canto Fourteen

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Canto Fifteen The Kingdoms of the Greater Knowledge (297) After the immeasurable moment of the soul and returning again to the surface fields of life out of the timeless depths where he had sunk, Aswapati once more heard a slow footstep of the moments of Time. All that once he had experienced and achieved remained far away; now he himself became the only scene to himself. Above the Witness Self and his universe he stood waiting in a kingdom of boundless silences for the world creator‟s Supreme Voice. A wide and perfect light, and an eternal sight of diamond purity was around him; there lived resting in peace a free, wordless and formless consciousness liberated from the rule and indication of the worldly ways forever content with being and bliss only; on the single spirit‟s bare and infinite ground a pure existence (sat) lived in its own peace. He had arisen out of the world of Mind, and left the regions of Nature‟s aspects and shades: dwelt in his self‟s untainted purity. It was a plane of undecided spirit the meaning of which could be a zero or round sum of all things, it was in such a state in which all ended and all began. There everything reveals the consumed, it was a high vast summit from where the Spirit could see the worlds, it was the place of wide advent of calm, wisdom‟s own silent home, a solitary state of All-Knowledge, a diving board of Eternal‟s power, a purest pure courtyard in the house of All-Delight. Here existed the thought that surpasses beyond Thought, and can hear the still Voice that our listening cannot hear, and existed the Supreme Knowledge by which the knower becomes the known, (298) and the Love in which the beloved and the lover are one. All here stood in an fullness that is existing from the first before they could create the glorious dream of the universal acts they remained silenced and fulfilled; the spiritual birth was generated here, and here ended the finite‟s entry into Infinite. From here a thousand roads sprang into Eternity or they ran singing to meet God‟s uncovered face.

The Supreme Known released Aswapati from its limiting chain; and as a result he could knock at the doors of the Unknowable. From there Aswapati became one with his own inner sight looking with an immeasurable outlook into his soul‟s vast purity, could see the dazzling brightness of the kingdoms of the spirit, and the greatness and magnificence of its boundless works, the power and passion springing from its calm, the joy of its movements and its rest, and its fire-sweet marvellous of transcendent life, its unique stupendous all vision million pointing undivided firm hold of its vision of one and the same stupendous All, its acts in a timeless Time that are unending ways of work, and its own infinite widened space. There he could see the glorious multiple shapes of one radiant Self, there joy was answered with joy, and love with love, there all were the moving palaces of Divine-bliss; there all lived in the One eternal and the unique. There are the great forces rushing out of God‟s truth and objects are its pure spiritual shapes; and there the spirit is no more hid from its own view, all life‟s stir is a sea of happiness and all creation is a process of light. Aswapati passing out of the neutral silence of his soul entered into the field of might and calm and could see the Powers that stand above the world, crossing over the kingdoms of the supreme Idea he sought for the summit of created things and the divine source of the cosmic transformation. (299) There Knowledge invited him to her mysterious highest heights where thought is held in a vast inward perception and heart‟s feeling swims across a sea of peace and vision climbs beyond the reach of Time. Aswapati stationed there became an equal of the first creator seers, accompanied by an all-revealing light he wandered through the kingdoms of an inward, immense and infinitely unique transcendent Truth. There distance was his huge spirit‟s range of perception: as he was freed from the imaginations of mind and hence Time‟s triple dividing step could no more perplex him; Times inevitable and continuous stream, and the long flow of its manifesting course was held in his spirit‟s single great range of sight. A universal beauty revealed before him barely the invisible deep inherent implication that were sheltered here on earth behind form‟s material screen revealed before him their deathless harmony and the secret key (clue) to the wonder-book of the marvellous common things. In their harmonising law revealed clearly before him the multiple measures of the creator force, the Geometrical lines of skill World Creator, and the charms that holds up the cosmos as in a web and the inexplicable qualities that lies behind simple shapes. Aswapati reaching on those highest heights where Silence listens with still heart to the rhythmic tones of rolling globes, and served the sessions of triple sacrificial Fire (performed austerity). On the verge of the borders of two continents of sleep and trance ( in the lost two stages of yoga) he heard (OM) unuttered Reality‟s voice that awakens divine revelation‟s mysterious tone, and found the birth-place of the sudden unerring Word and lived in the rays of an intuitive Sun. Liberated from the tie of death and sleep he sailed on the lighted seas of comic Mind by the light of lighting and crossed the ocean of original sound; on the last step to the Transcendent‟s birth (300) he travelled along extinction‟s (Nirvana‟s) narrow edge near the high borders of eternity, mounted the golden top line of the world-dream that exists between the killer and saviour fires; he reached the shore of the eternal Truth, reaching the borders of the inexpressible Light he rejoiced in the presence of the Unutterable. Above him he could see the flaming series of the Divine messengers, the wings that were spread around the created zone of Sky, the Guardians whose all-seeing eyes were brightened like sun rays and the heavenly golden Sphinx (an animal with woman‟s head and a lion‟s body) and the layer after layers of the tiered planes of the Lords who are free from all perversions. There a wisdom servicing an Omniscience sat silently in a vast passivity; waiting for the command, it judged not, measured not, nor attempted to know but listened attentively for the veiled all-seeing Thought and heard the tone of a calm transcendent Voice. Aswapati now reached the top of all that can be known: his range of sight exceeded creation‟s top and bottom: the glittering triple heavens revealed their suns, the darkest Hell revealed its titanic rule. Except the supreme (topmost) Mystery all was possessed as his field, the Unknowable almost disclosed its borders. His self‟s infinities were gradually revealed, all the hidden worlds invited him; there eternities called to eternities by their speechless

91 message from still afar. The flame burning from the superconscient heights arisen from the marvel of the depths and sweeping in great horizontal whirls and joined with million energies and became One. All Energies flowed immeasurably to one sea, and all living forms became the atom homes of the One and the Unique. A universal Energy that harmonised all Life now held existence in its vast control; Aswapati became as a portion of that majesty. He could live willfully in the unforgettable Ray. (301) In that lofty kingdom where no falsehood can enter, where all are different yet all is one, in that shoreless Impersonals ocean the great glorious Person stayed established securely in the World-Spirit, it was delighted with the mighty marching‟s of the World-Force, its acts were the associates of God‟s infinite peace. The body like a coordinative glory and as the symbol of self, was surrendered to the soul, and in a state of the vast universe‟s formless wave it became an immortal point of power; a stable mass, and a conscious sharp edge of the Transcendent‟s might moulding perfection from a bright world-stuff expressed a figure in it carrying the sense of a universe. There consciousness was an intimate and single weave; in spirit-space the far and near remained one and indivisible, and there the moments carried all time in their womb. There the mental thought tore up the superconscient screen, idea repeatedly tuned and sang the music of sight, and sight was a flame-throw (like a fire-cracker) from identity: life was a marvellous journey of the spirit, and feeling of the heart became a wave from the universal Bliss. In the kingdom of Spirit‟s power and light as if one who was born from infinity‟s womb Aswapati became new-born, infant and limitless and grew in the wisdom of the timeless Child; he became a vast figure that soon became a Sun. A great luminous silence whispered something to his heart; his knowledge became an unbarred inner sight and entered into unfathomable depths, it turned into such an outview that no brief horizons could obstruct: he could think and feel in all, his sight became powerful. He could keep close touch with the One who is beyond close relation; Beings of wider consciousness became his friends, great and subtler forms drew near to him; the Gods those were there behind his Life‟s veil conversed with him. His being became borderer to Nature‟s peaks. The primal Energy took him into its arms; (302) an overpowering light was spread over his brain, an all-pervading Knowledge possessed his heart: thoughts that rose in him were beyond the grasp of earthly mind, mights that never flowed through mortal nerves began flowing into him: he discovered the secrets of the Over mind and bore the joy of the Oversoul. He became a borderer of the empire of the Sun, attuned to the supreme harmonies linked creation to the Eternal‟s sphere. His finite limbs were endowed with the supreme eminence, his actions became the movements of the Gods, and his will became the regulator of the cosmic Force.

-End of Canto Fifteen

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BOOK THREE The Book of the Divine Mother

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Canto One The Pursuit of the Unknowable (305) All the worlds Aswapati had travelled could give is very negligible: its power and knowledge are gifts of Time only and cannot fulfill the spirit‟s sacred requirement. Although the forms of greatnesses were emerged from the One and Alone and by its grace of breath we live our lives, and more near to us than the nearness‟ self, and is some absolute truth of our existence; because hidden by its own works it seemed far-off from us, and it is very difficult to get through (unreachable), mystical, silent and hidden. The Divine Presence by the grace of which all things have fascination was lost before Aswapati; the Divine Glory of which they are the dim signs was not there. Like love that becomes dry after loosing the beloved‟s face, the world lived on severed from the root Cause of creation.

Thus the labour to know appeared to be a vain struggle of Mind; and all his knowledge ended in the Unknowable: the effort to rule seemed to be a vain pride of Will; and as unworthy of achievement hated by Time, all his power retreated again into the Omnipotent. A cave of darkness barred the internal Light that is inextinguishable. A silence remained established on his seeking heart; and thus freed from the clamour of the voices of the world‟s desire, he turned his inner ear to the Inexpressible timeless call. An intimate and nameless Being, and a wide inevitable ecstasy and peace felt in him and all and as yet remained ununderstood, approached and vanished from his soul‟s follow up measures as if forever attracting him beyond. Immediately after it was near it retreated far away from him, and when it was far away it still called him. Nothing could satisfy Aswapati except its delight: its absence left his greatest actions tedious, and its presence made the smallest action seem divine. (306) When it was near to him, his heart‟s deepest depths was filled; but when the elevating influence of the Deity withdrew the creation lost its aim before him in the Nothingness. The series of the planes beyond memory, and the godlike fullness of his bodily instruments were turned into the bases of an impermanent scene. But Aswapati could not know as yet who that mightiness was. She was beyond the grasp of senses, yet filled in all the worlds: she had created and destroyed a million worlds and took and lost a thousand shapes and names. She assumed the disguise of an unseen Vast, or remained as a very subtle seed in the soul: when that greatness was far away it appeared huge and dim and when it was near then a mystic nearness shut her sweetly within: it seemed sometimes to him as an imagination (unreality) or as a robe and sometimes his own huge shade. Consequently a great doubt spread like a shadow on the way of his advance towards it. On the other side of an indeterminate all-supporting Void whose blankness nursed his lone immortal spirit, attracted him towards some incomprehensible Supreme beyond, aided and compelled by mysterious Powers, aspiring and half-sinking and rising up again he ascended indomitably without stop. On his way of advance towards the unknowable a singles indistinct Immensity perpetually spread before him, and was unapproachable and irresponsive, and crossing the finite things into the dust of nothingness, always it stood face to face to him with its being that cannot be measured are judged by the same standard as other. Thereafter on his way of ascension there came a mighty pause. He reached a height where no created things could survive, and a boundary line where every hope and search must end neared some dire bare Reality, and a zero carrying a boundless change in its womb took shape. On a precipice where one feels giddy and all disguises fail and human mind must surrender to the Divine Light or die like a moth in the naked blazing fire of Divine Truth, there Aswapati stood compelled to a tremendous choice. (307) The choice before him now is all that he had achieved and all that towards which he grew must now be left behind or else transformed into a nameless self of That. His sprit alone facing a Force beyond the grasp of the Mind, prepared for the adventure of the Void. Forsaken by the worlds of Form he attempted hard for his spiritual quest.

He found that a fruitful world-wide Ignorance is collapsed to the bottom here, thought‟s long far-circling journey ended and the doer‟s will stuck up ineffectively. There the symbol modes of knowledge of being was of no more help there, the great structures built by the world of Ignorance were collapsed and failed, and even the spirit that holds universe became feeble there due to insufficient shading of light. On account of the fall of all the created things into the bottomless depths the separate self must now have to transcend every perishable support and at last join its mighty origin and vanish or be reborn into a Truth beyond mind‟s reach. The glory of all lines of forms, all sweetness of harmony were rejected like trivial tones, erased severely from self-disciplined Being‟s bare silence and vanished into a pure and blissful Nothingness. The Gods engaged in the management of affairs and upkeep of the world lost their names and forms, the great systematically arranged worlds planned and made by the creator Brahma have passed and abolished one by one. Now the universe‟s colourful veil was removed, and at the unimaginable end of the huge duality of created things the far-seen Godhead of the whole world appeared, his feet remained firmly based on Life‟s great wings, he was omnipotent and a lonely seer of Time i.e. past, present and future and his sight was inward, and mysterious and impenetrable and were luminous with the splendour of diamond light. Attracted by the incomprehensible diamond gaze the unsolved slow worldly aeonic cycles returned to their fount to rise again in future from that invisible sea. (308) Whatever Aswapati could achieve by his austere force were now destroyed; the cosmic Mind were vanished. Eternity prepared as if to fade and as a colour and imposition on the Void, the space that seemed as a vibration of a dream sank before its end into Nothing‟s deeps. The deathless spirit and the Godhead‟s self appeared as an imaginary (myth) story projected from the Unknowable; all things that are born from that and are called to cease in It (That). But what that was neither thought nor could sight express. Only was left the formless Form of self like the last experience of a wave that lapses into a boundless sea before it sinks as if it kept even on the brink of Nought its bare feeling of the ocean from which it was born and whatever existed there before were felt by Aswapati like a shadow of a ghost. There remained only a meditative brooded Vast free from sense of Space, an

94 Eternal being severed from Time; a strange lofty imperishable Peace rejected from it the world and soul remained. At last a solitary and a perfect companionless Supreme Reality answered to Aswapati‟s soul‟s passionate seeking: it was passionless, wordless, assimilated in its immeasurable hush, bearing the impenetrable mystery of ages on its breast, it remained mused unintelligibly and intangibly and facing Aswapati with its dumb tremendous calm. That Reality had no relationship with the universe; there was no act nor movement in its Vast Being: the reply to life‟s question met by its silence died on her lips, the world‟s efforts found guilty of ignorance remained ceased unfruitful finding no favour of the Supreme Light; there exist no mind with its need of knowledge nor any heart with its desire of love. In its namelessness all personalities were perished. That Reality was alone there and there was no second to it, it had no partner nor companion; it was self-existent and real to itself. (309) There was a pure Being free from thought and mood, a consciousness of indivisible immortal bliss, it dwelt aloof in its bare infinite was our One and unique and unutterably alone. It was a formless, shapeless and mute, knew itself by its own timeless self, it was forever aware in its motionless depths, it was not creating nor created and unborn, it was the One by whom all live, who lives by none, it was an immeasurable luminous secrecy guarded by the veils of the Unmanifest, although he was a partner of ever changing cosmic intervals (the number of creations and dissolutions) and above it the supreme transcendent abides who is immutably the same, the silent, and the unseen Cause of everything, and is unattainable, infinite, eternal, unthinkable and alone.

-End of Canto One

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Canto Two The Adoration of the Divine Mother (310)When the soul discovers its own self purely it faces an inexpressible and an entire Silence, a wall of silence that shuts the soul from the world, the experience of the souls swallows the feeling of senses and makes unreal all that the mind has known, and all that the labouring senses still would create lengthening an imaginary unreality. Then the Self’s vast spiritual silence pervades the whole Space; At last only the Inconceivable and the Nameless without space and time is left: then the burdening need of life is abolished: we became thoughtless and we desist from joy and grief; the ego is dead and also we are freed from existence and all the worries and anxieties of life, and released from the ties of birth, death, work and fate. Then an inner voice was heard by Aswapati drawing the attention of his soul that the time for feeling great joy has not come yet. He had only reached the endless silence of the Supreme Self and sprang into the glad divine depth; but where and on what last end of Eternal’s road he had thrown his Self’s mission and its power? There existed one within him who was self and world, and what did he do to serve his purpose in the galaxy of the stars? Escape from the world to the beyond cannot bring the adorning victory and the crown? He came from the Unknown into this world to do something, but nothing is yet finished and the world goes on as it is, because only God’s half of cosmic work is done. Only the everlasting No has neared and looked into his eyes and killed his heart: but where is the Lover’s everlasting Affirmative promise, and the immortality that dwells in the secret heart, and the voice that chants to the creator Fire and the symbolic OM and the great assenting Word, (311) and where the bridge between the extreme delight and the calm, the passion and the beauty of the Divine Bride, the chamber where the glorious enemies embrace each other and the saviour smile and the golden summit of things? The realisation of extinction is a Truth in the mystic source of Life. Now a black veil has only been lifted; and we have seen the mighty shadow of the omniscient Lord; but who has lifted up the veil of light and who has seen the body of the Lord? The mystery of the God’s birth and acts still remains undisclosed and the seal of its last chapter is left unbroken, the enigma of the world’s unfinished Play remained unsolved; the cosmic Player laughs within his disguise, and as yet the last imperishable secret hides behind the human glory of a Form and behind the golden reflection of a great Name. A large white line only is formed as a goal, but far beyond the inexplicable sun’s lighted kingdom shines fiercely and yet have not been discovered: the thing that seemed as the source and an end was only a wide gate and a last bare step into eternity. Now an eye has opened upon the timelessness, infinity takes back the forms it gave, and through God’s darkness or his naked light his million rays returns into the Sun of the Supreme source. There exists a zero that indicates the sign of the Supreme; though Nature remains bare, yet it still reveals the God. But in Nature’s glorious nothingness everything remains: when Nature’s strong coverings are torn away from us then the ignorance of the soul is only slain but not the soul: here on earth a zero covers an immortal face. A great and blank negation is not all, a huge extinction is neither God’s last word nor life’s ultimate sense and not the end of being’s course, and is not the meaning of this great mysterious world. A supreme Power sleeps in supreme silence.

When it awakes it can wake the trance-bound soul (312) and in the ray of the physically seen sun can reveal the original sun: that Power can make the world a vessel of Spirit’s force and fashion God’s perfect shape in the clay. The liberation of the soul or its extinction is nothing but a radiant step; but here on earth to fulfill him was God’s desire.

Even while Aswapati stood on his being’s naked edge and all the passion and seeking of his soul faced their end in their formless Vast, the Divine Presence he eagerly longed for suddenly drew nearer to him. Crossing the silence of the supreme Calm, out of the deepest depths of a marvellous transcendence, a body of wonder and luminosity as if a sweet mysterious summary of the Divine Mother’s self escaping into original Bliss had come enlarged into a great form out of eternity, and felt as someone infinite and the only One came. She was a being of supreme wisdom, power and delight; even as a mother draws her child to her arms she drew to her breast Nature, world and soul. Abolishing the sign-less emptiness, and breaking the vacancy and the voiceless silence, forcing a way into the mysterious limitless Unknowable, a beautiful and most blissful splendourous Goddess descended secretly into the liberty of the motionless depths. Her Power, Light and Bliss is not expressible by words, the Goddess embodied itself in a surprising beam of Light built a golden passage into Aswapati’s heart and through the medium of his heart touched all the yearning conscient things. A moment’s sweetness of the All-Beautiful Divine Mother annulled the vanity of the cosmic whirl. In the unconscious universe a Nature with the vibration of the divine Heart was felt; and on account of that the breath of the world became a mysterious happiness. A love that bore the stab of pain with joy bestowed happiness through an internal influence of the spirit on the sorrow of the world (313) and she made happy the weight of long unending Time and the secret of the God’s felicity were possessed. Establishing in life an ecstasy that was hitherto hidden put the spirit to its miraculous path; vesting immortal values to the worldly time it justified the labour of the suns. For one was there supreme Divine Mother was behind the Supreme God there. A Mother’s Might pervaded upon the world above; a Supreme Conscious Force behind the whole universe and denying none revealed its miracle: Aswapati felt an imperishable blissful and un-tripping Force that was above our fallen heads. All that here created then destroyed, the outlasting Power of all that appeared there, she was the Mother of all godheads and all strengths who by her meditation binds earth to the Supreme. As a result the Riddle that rules our nature’s darkness was abolished and the covering Ignorance was removed and slain; the mind of error of all universal things was torn off and the darkened moods of its perverting will ended knowledge and Ignorance illumined by her all-seeing

96 identity that struggled no more; the adverse titan Forces and opposite poles of the world‟s misleading deception could no longer impose the illusion of their twofold screen throwing their screen like figures between us and the divine Mother. The Supreme Wisdom that wore the obscured universe as her robe under the disguise of its own works remained closer to Aswapati. On account of her Presence the worldly existence did no more seem as an aimless fall, Nirvana (the soul leaving the mind, life and body, and merging in the formless) became no more the only liberation from the worldly chaos. The hidden Word that expresses the Divine and the key of his long-seeking was found, the meaning of our spirit‟s birth that is condemned to an imperfect body and mind in the inconscience of the worldly material things and the poverty of mortal life now stood clearly revealed before Aswapati. In the bare and wide spaces the experience of a grandiose Heart was felt, (314) from white spiritual founts a Supreme Love having been kindled abolished the sorrow of the worldly ignorant depths; in her immortal smile suffering was lost Mother‟s a great force of Life descending from beyond conquered Death here upon earth; and thus to commit error was no more natural to mind; where all was light and love of the divine Mother there no evil could come. The Formless and the Formed Supreme were joined in her: a look of the divine Mother exceeded the Universal immensity, a Divine Face revealed the crowded Infinite. The boundless joy that the blind world-forces seek here incarnated inexpressibly in her limbs and as the sea heaves to a moon; the most beautiful body of the Divine Mother heaved in the seas of divine bliss. She stood above the top of birth, labour and fate, the aeonic cycles in their slow rounds turn only under her direction; her hands alone can change the dragon base of Time (Kundalini Force of Time). She was the mystery whom the Inconscient darkest Night keeps concealed; she is the energy of our spirit‟s transformation; she is the golden bridge that connects earth and heaven, and the wonderful fire. She is the luminous heart of the Unknown, and the Power of silence in the oceanic depths of God, she is the Supreme Force and the inevitable original Divine Word (OM), she is the magnet of our difficult ascent from our earthly base to the Beyond, she is the supreme Sun from which all our suns are kindled, she is the supreme Light came inclining down upon earth from the unattainable Vasts beyond, she is the Divine joy that invites us from the impossible vast beyond, and she is the Might of all that never yet came down upon the earth. The whole Nature dumbly calls to her alone to mend with the touch of her feet the throbbing painful worldly life, and break all the barriers that were laid on the dim soul of man and kindle her fire in the closed heart of all the universal things. One day the whole world shall be turned into her sweetness‟ home, all the contraries of the world shall achieve her harmony; towards her our thirst for knowledge climbs and our passion eagerly seeks for her, in her miraculous bliss we shall dwell, our worldly pain shall be transformed into ecstasy by her clasp. Through her presence upon earth our individual self shall become one self with all. (315) In her confirmed because transformed in her our life shall find in its fulfilled response beyond the boundless hushed delights and below on earth the wonder of the divine embrace. This was realised by Aswapati as in a lightening flash of God, and consequently the delight of eternal things filled in his limbs; his senses were enchanted due to the amazement fell upon it, his spirit was caught in the Divine Mothers intolerant flame. Having once seen the Divine Mother Aswapati‟s heart acknowledged her only. Nothing else other than a hunger of infinite divine bliss was left in him. All his aims were lost in the Divine Mother then again found in her; his earthly limbs were concentrated as a pointing structure to the summit beyond.

This achievement of Aswapati was a seed cast into endless Time. A divine Word is spoken and a Divine Light is seen, and the ages labour to express that he could see in a moment. In this way the worlds were sprung flashing out of the Timeless; and from an eternal moment the years were created. A field has only been prepared by his constant spiritual quest; his small beginnings claimed a mighty end: because all his achievements should now take a new-shape in him and the joy of the divine Mother to embody in him and the beauty and greatness of divine Mother to be established in his life like a temple. But now his being of spirit was too wide for his personal being; the demand of his heart had become immeasurable: his single liberation from the worldly contraries and troubles and tribulations, ignorance and death could not satisfy him and hence he prayed the Divine Mother‟s light and bliss for earth and men. But the human power and human love are vain to break the stamp of ignorance and death on it, now his own nature‟s might seemed to him as an infant‟s faculty of understanding; the heights of heaven seemed to be too high for outstretched hands to capture firmly. The Divine Light does not come by the human struggle or thought, the Transcendent acts in the mind‟s silence and the unuttered Word is heard in the silent heart. Now a vast surrender to the Divine Mother was the only strength in him. A Power that lives upon the heights beyond must act, (316) and bring into life‟s closed room the Immortal‟s breath and fill the finite with the Infinite. All in us that contradicts and denies the Divine must have to be torn out and slain and the worldly innumerable desires and longings must be crushed for whose sake we lose the One and the Alone and for whom our lives were created. Now the other claims hushed in Aswapati‟s heart have become silent: he only yearned to draw the presence and power of the Divine Mother into his heart, mind and body; he only yearned to call her forever to bring down upon earth her healing touch of love, truth and joy into the darkness of the suffering world. Now his soul was freed and surrendered to the Divine Mother alone.

-End of Canto Two

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Canto Three The House of the Spirit and the New Creation

(317) A Mightier work yet remained to be done than what Aswapati had achieved so far in his spiritual quest. He turned now to that which is the source all beings, to a sign that comes from the Supreme Secrecy which knows the Truth that remains unrealised behind our thoughts and guards the world with its all-seeing sight. In the inaccessible silences of his soul he sat like an embodied hope motionless on an altar of prayer, patiently and lonely concentrated and one-pointed, as in a monument. He prayed for a strength that was not yet descended down on earth, and a help from a Divine Power that was too great for any mortal will to aspire, the light of a Truth that is only seen now from afar, and a blessing from God‟s high all mighty Source. But no voice was heard from the frightful heights beyond to his prayer, the timeless eyes were closed and no opening came. Only an indifferent helpless void remained as a heavy weight over the earthly time. In our inherent naturally bound humanity he felt the huge and dumb rigid resistance of our Inconscient blind base, the inflexible mute rejection in life‟s depths, the ignorant Denial in the origin of all universal things. Even in himself a veiled collaboration with the darkest Darkness survived and hid from his view: and still something in his earthly being kept its relationship with the Inconscient which was its source. A shadowy unity with the vanished past treasured in the old-world frame was hidden there and was secret and unnoticed by the illumined mind, and the whispers from the subconscious and in dream it still disregarded at the choice of mind and soul. The deceptive elements of the abolished past were spread like lubricious grains (318) with a hope that the incoming Truth from heaven might trip and fall, and the old ideal voices wandering around would weep and plead to the incoming Divine Truth for a heavenly leniency to the attractive imperfection of our earth and the sweet weaknesses of our mortal state.

Now Aswapati willed to discover and banish from within himself the element in him that is going back against God. All the Nature‟s spaces that were hidden from view were torn and uncovered by him, and all the dim caves and corners where refugee inborn impulses and unshaped revolts could have taken shelter in the safety of darkness against the white purity of heaven‟s purifying fire searched with fire light. All the evil elements though seemed to have been perished, and yet he searched because some minutest revolting elements might escape his search and still a centre of the blind force might have been hidden there. Because the Inconscient too is infinitely wide; and more the deepest depths of it were checked, the more it stretches and stretches endlessly. Thereafter Aswapati uprooted desire from its bleeding roots and offered the vacant place as dedication to the gods; else a human cry should spoil the Truth.

So he could bear the touch of the immaculate Divine. Consequently a last and mightiest transformation took place in him. His soul came in front of him like a great sea flooding his mind and body with its waves; his being was spread to embrace the universe beyond, his within and without were united to transform life into an universal harmony and establish an empire of the all pervading inherent Divine. In this tremendous feeling of universality not only his soul-nature and mind-sense included every soul and mind with his own but even his life of flesh and nerve was changed and grew one flesh and nerve with all the living things of the universe; and as an outcome he felt the joy of others as his own joy and bore the grief of others as his own grief; (319) as earth endures all beings‟ sacrifice, Aswapati‟s universal pity upheld the creation‟s load that was like an immense ocean, and thrilled with the hidden Transcendent‟s joy and peace. The world‟s endless list of division could not exist anymore; identified with Spirit‟s secret unity he could grow, and all Nature felt again the single bliss. There was no split between soul and soul; there was no obstruction between world and God. The form and memory‟s limiting line was subdued; the mind that was screening the entry of divine element into the being was seized and torn away; was dissolved and could survive no more, the world creatrix one Consciousness was only seen: now all was filled with luminosity and force. The circumference circle of a little self abolished in its last thin mark of fainting; the separateness of his being could be felt no more, it disappeared and could not know itself any more, and it was lost in the spirit‟s wide identity. His nature now became one with the movement of the universal All; discovering itself he knew that all was He and his soul could know that it was a delegation of the All that turned from itself to join the unique Supreme. Now his human ways of living was surpassed; his human heart that had screened the Insurmountable now felt a god‟s mighty heartbeats; his seeking mind was vanished in the Truth that is enlightened by Knowledge, his life is turned into universal life. Aswapati stood fulfilled on the world‟s highest peak waiting for the ascent beyond the world and the Decent of the Divine into the world to save. A Divine Luminosity and Symbol spread over the earth, sacred tranquil advents looked down on the earth and holy Vasts surrounded the world and all, the infinite wisdom came nearer and all the bright far distances inclined down on earth and became related to it. In that tremendous luminosity the feeling of his sense occurred; (320) Aswapati could no more hear the transient voices through his ears and his Thought-force now became incapable and pale and like a tired god sank into the mysterious seas. The coverings of the mortal thoughts that clung to him like robes were cast down and uncovered his knowledge before the absolute divine sight; in his fate‟s driven Nature‟s sleepless prick were ceased: the hero-like heaving of his will was calmed down in the Almighty‟s immobile peace. Life in his limbs lay down widespread and mute; now becoming naked, unbarred, unterrified bore the immense regard of Immortality in itself. In last efforts and movement ended and all at once grew still. An unseen Transcendent‟s hand like a weight laid on his limbs the Spirit‟s measureless seal; infinity swallowed him into shore less trance.

As one below him the bottomless depths and unknown persuaded him to set his sails driven through huge oceans by the breath of God towards mysterious sources, Aswapati‟s soul left great sky filled with blind stars. His soul fled afar from this limited world

98 made up of all these substances, plunging into hidden eternities it withdrew back from mind‟s foaming surface to the Vasts that was voiceless within us in all knowing sleep. Above the imperfect reach of word and thought, beyond the sight that seeks support of form, his soul despaired in the deep fields of superconscient Light, or sailing in the blank formless Nothingness, alone in the pathless Immeasurable or passing the state like non-self, self and beyond self, and surpassing the dream shores of conscious mind he reached at last his original everlasting sources. On those sorrowless heights where no cry climbing from below could reach and disturb, above our mortal play field in that pure and untouched summit the spirit‟s silent immobile atmosphere is spread. There it was beginning less and endless; (321) there exists the stable force of all the forces that moves, there the aeonic labouring creator is at rest. There in the void no mechanical creation turns, there works no gigantic mechanism watched by a soul; there is no harsh grating noise heard of any giant machinery turned by the power of fate that predetermines events; the union of evil with good within one breast, the clash of struggle in the intimate clasp of love, the dangerous pain of life‟s experiment to know the values of Inconsequence and Chance, the danger of mind‟s throwing our lives as bet in the challenging gamble of indifferent gods and the pause less changing‟s of light and shadow of the idea falling upon the surface consciousness, where knowledge is a seeking ignorance there the mute witness soul in dream creating an error of a half-seen world; life‟s steps are its disordered tripping series, its aspect of haphazard design, its equal measure of the true and false have no access(no entry), no cause, no right to live in that immobile and immutable kingdom: there exist the exclusive spirit‟s motionless power stationed in itself through still eternity in its all knowing and almighty peace. There thought does not clash with thought and truth, with the philosophy of the other truth, there is no war of right among one religion with any rival religion; there are no halting and imperfect visioned lives passing from chance to an unexpected chance, there in the bodies made up of inactive Inconscient matter no heart is compelled to stir and suffer. There the protectors of Eternity‟s law equipped with the pure mysterious inextinguishable Fire, forever fixed upon Truth‟s giant base in her splendid and ever following timeless home. There Nature sleeping on her dumb spiritual couch knows that her source is unchangeably transcendent (322) and immobile in its everlasting peace assents to the stir of the movements of multitudinous worlds. There the root of all causes, the all sustaining and the unconcerned Witness self looks from his immobile state, with his world like immense Eye looking all things done in the world. Aswapati remaining alone at peace above the world‟s movement, plunged in the eternal heights, and only accompanied by the all-seeing One and Alone dwelt in peace defended in his limitless self. His mind became too mighty that could not be bound by Thought, he became a Life that was too boundless for the play in Cosmos, he became a boundless Soul that was not bounded by Time; and felt the end of the world‟s long pain, and he became the unborn and immortal Self and joined the sessions of Infinity. A primal loneliness fell on the murmur of the cosmos, and all his contacts formed with the time-born things were abolished, and Nature‟s wide community grew empty before him.

The entire universal things were returned back to their formless seed before him and for a cyclic moment the world was pervaded with silence. Though the worldly painful Nature left by him below maintained beneath him its broad numberless fields, yet her enormous acts receded and failed afar as if a soulless dream ceased at last. Thereafter no voice came down upon earth from the divine Silences beyond and none answered from her forlorn solitudes. A stillness of cessation and the wide eternal silence prevailed before the gods are born was only there in that level of consciousness; there awaited a mute universal Force for the final decree of the veiled Transcendent.

Thereafter suddenly there came a descending downward look. As if a sea discovering its own depths, a living supreme Oneness widened at its depths and made Aswapati to meet unnumbered beings. A Divine Bliss, a Light, a Power, a flame-white Love (323) caught the whole creation into its single immense embrace; creation found its truth on Divine Oneness‟ breast and each became the self and wideness of the whole universe before him. The great world-rhythms have become the active heart beats of one supreme Self, feeling became a flame for the discovery of God, the cosmic mind became a single harp of many strings, and the universal life has become the cadence of a song of many meeting lives; because the worlds were many but the Supreme Self was one. This knowledge now became a seed of the expression of the cosmos: and this seed was kept in the safety of Divine Light, and it needed not the covering of Ignorance. Thereafter from that state of remarkable impressive clasp of trance and from the stirrings of that single Heart and pure Sprit‟s joy of victory a new and marvellous creation rose. Then in that new world a flood of incalculable infinite beings laughing out in an immeasurable happiness lived in their innumerable unity; the worlds where the being is unbound and wide spread that unimaginably embodied the egoless Self in a form; the delight of ecstatic energies united Time to Timeless, as two poles of a single joy; there the white vastnesses were seen where all is plunged in all. There existed neither adversity nor severity, all were joined to all by spiritual links and bound to the One and Alone without any disintegration what-so-ever: each was unique there, but accepted the universal life as his own and following out these tones of Infinite, recognised the universe in himself. Each became a lustrous centre of infinity‟s whirl and pushed to its highest height that was its last expanse, felt the divinity of its own self-bliss repeated in its numberless other selves: as if a ceaseless arithmetic‟s (324) multiplication‟s sum prolonging the recurring decimal of eternity his soul took up tirelessly into its scope persons and figures of the Impersonal Brahman. There none was separate; none lived for himself alone, each lived for God in him and God in all, each being alone inexpressibly held the whole. There the supreme Oneness was not lacking in variety or variation; and showed a thousand aspects of it, in its calm unchanging stability remained on a changeless ground for ever safe, the immense world-forces in their perfect play in the ever changing immeasurable steps that seemed to be reckless dance‟s subtle plan compelled to be a spontaneous slavery. The outward form of the world looked back to its truth that is hidden in

99 itself and turned difference as oneness‟ smiling play; though it made all persons as fractions of the Unique, yet all were beings secret units. In the harmonised circle of sure embrace all struggle was turned to a sweet conflict of love. Identity‟s reuniting happiness gave a stable security to divergence. There on a meeting line of risky extremes a game of games was played to its last point, where through self-finding by divine self-loss there springs out unity‟s supreme delight whose blissful undivided sweetness feels a kinship of the Absolute (God family). There was no cry of suffering heard anywhere: the divine experience of joy was felt everywhere from the beginning to the end; there the divine bliss was the pure immortal essence of the truth of all things. There all Nature was felt as a conscious orb of the face of God: there a self-driven and self-sure wisdom worked in all, there shined an abundance of illimitable Divine Light, and there existed a genuinely intuitive Truth, and a fullness of glory and passion of creative Force. (325) There the moment‟s unerring thought leaping from the breast of eternity inspired every passing act. There a word and laughter, sprang from the depth of great Silence, in the expanse calm of a rhythm of Beauty rolled like a wave, a knowledge bursts out from the fathomless depth of Time.

There all unshrinking and un-reluctantly lived in the same mindedness without any reaction whatsoever: there in the throbbing heart of all that splendours life love was present as a close and delighted identity and an unbreakable single joy. An all uniting universal vision, a sympathy of nerve replying to nerve, a hearing that listens to thought‟s inner sound and follows the rhythmic meanings of the heart, a touch that does not need the medium of hands to feel and clasp were there as native means of consciousness and heightened the close familiarity of soul with soul. There a grand ensemble of spiritual powers, mutually tolerant interchange of soul‟s feeling between one and the other harmonised a deep and immeasurable Oneness. Aswapati thrust forward in these new worlds became a portion of the universal sight, a home of the all-inhabiting light and a wave on a single sea of peace. His mind responded to countless communicating minds, his words became syllables of the speech of the cosmos, and his life became a field of the vast cosmic stir. He felt the footsteps of a million wills that were moving in union to a single goal. He became like a stream that is full of whirling‟s throbbed with immortal sweetness, ever new-born and ever immortal and caught in its thousand fold current‟s enchanting flow; he bore the calm movements of interminable delight as they passed coiling through his limbs and the bliss of myriad myriads who are one.

In this enamors advent of perfection‟s law that imposes its changelessness on the ever-changing things (326) Aswapati could see a gradual series of luminous kingdoms climbing up one above the other that was given as a feudal right to this highest kingdom of God-state. There each uniting to the tone of one supreme Truth as their own legitimate right remained in a gladness of a bright degree, each were unique in its own beauty, perfect in their self-shake, each were an image of God cast from one deep supreme truth, and each in a happy variation joined to all in an inner relationship. Each utilised its power to help its neighbour, and by the gift they never feel any decrease in themselves and rather became profiteers of a mystic exchange between themselves, they flourished by what they took and what they gave, they accepted all others as their own counterparts and became one in the mighty joy of multitude. Even in a state where the Supreme Oneness remains separately to feel the joy of its separate selves, there too the Supreme Oneness in its solitude yearned towards the All and in the Many turned to meet at the One. To manifest divine Truths an all-revealing and all-creating Bliss seeking for forms in their significant mystery coordinated the lights of the symbols of the Inexpressible that were adorned like colours upon a colourless sky on the white purity of the Witness Soul. These colours were the very prism of the Supreme and the cause of the creation of beauty, might and joy. An immense Truth-Consciousness held these signs to pass them on to some divine child Heart that looked on them with laughter and delight and enraptured in these transcendent images that are living and real as the truths held in them. The Spirit‟s white neutral being became a playground of miracles and an appointed meeting place for the secret powers of a mystic Timelessness: the Spirit made of Space a wonderful residence of God, through Time its spilled like rain its works of timeless might, (327) and veil less the wonder and beauty of its Love and Force and saw those as an attractive delightful face. As a mother plays with her child the eternal Goddess moved in her cosmic house engaged in sport with God: to God the universe was the breast of love of the divine Mother and his toys were the immortal truths. All that were self-lost here on earth were established there in its divine place. The Powers that here on earth mislead and baffles our hearts and create error were there all paramount in truth and perfect in joy, masters in a flawless creation and the possessors of their own infinitude. There Mind is like a luminous sun of inner divine vision‟s rays, and shaped substance by the glory of its thoughts and moved amidst the magnificence of its dreams. There the imagination‟s great magical rod fascinating the unknown invited him and gave to it a home for its dwelling, there in the golden sky spreading out profusely truth‟s seven-coloured rainbow wings of unreal imagination or sang wonder‟s dream-songs that bring the Real nearer to the intuitive heart of joy. Its Power that could make the unknowable near and real, and established the One and the Alone in the temple of the ideal: it filled thought and mind and happy sense with bright aspects of the God‟s might and the living person of the one Supreme, and the word that expresses the inexpressible, and the ray that reveals the unseen Presences, the pure and immaculate forms through which the Formless shines and the great Word that expresses the divine experience and the Ideas that crowd the Infinite. There was no gap between thought and fact; ever they remain harmonised with one another like a bird replied to a calling bird; there the will was follower of the thought and the act obeyed the will. There web of harmony woven between soul and soul. There linked with eternity Time was divinised. There Life with joy in her heart and laughter in her lips (328) tirelessly pursued of her sport in the bright adventure of God‟s game of chance. Life in her caprice of clever passion and in her transfiguring joy mapped on Time her charming puzzle of events and at each turn of its flow was enticed to endless self-discovery of new transformations. Ever she created rigid bonds that her will would break it, where Truth repeatedly appeared with an unexpected face or else repeated familiar joy like a

100 return of a delightful poem brought there new creations for thought‟s surprise and passionate ventures for the heart to have the courage. Like hide-and-seek game on Mother-Wisdom‟s breast and an artist filled with her world-idea the Life-Force never could exhaust the numberless shapes made by her thought the vast adventure and trial and entice of new living‟s dreams were going on endlessly. She tireless of monotony and change endlessly went on unrolling her inspiring scene, a mysterious drama of divine delight, a living poem of the ecstasy of world, a coloured picture of meaningful forms, as of Japanese silk painting, a spiral expression of an art of drawing of pictures of developing scenes, a brilliant follow up of self-revealing shapes, an intense seeking of soul looking for soul and a seeking and finding as of gods. There Matter is the spirit‟s state of firm solidity; a work of art of self‟s glad firm destiny, where sense can build a world of pure eternal delight there it was a treasure-house of lasting images: in the house of everlasting happiness, it lodged the moments of time as in a pleasant inn (small hotel especially in the country). There the senses were the medium of soul‟s expression; even mind‟s youngest child-thought there made concrete forms of some touch of highest things. There substance was like a vibrating harp of soul, (329) a net to hold the Spirit‟s ever lightning flashes, a magnet power of an intense love whose stir of aspiration and adoration‟s cry of prayer drew God‟s sweet and wonderful arrival nearer. There the solid state of substance was a bulk of heavenly make and its stability of charm and its sweet permanence made a bright pedestal for delight. Its bodies woven by the tissue of divine sense prolonged the nearness of the clasp of one soul with the other; its sport of love of external sight and touch and its Mind‟s climbing brilliant thoughts and the spirit‟s bliss reflected the luminousness and quivering of heart‟s joy, life‟s delight kept forever its flame and tone. All that here on earth that are transient there lived immortal in the proud beauty and fine harmony of Matter plastic to spiritual light. Its regulated moments proclaimed the eternal Law; the inner Vision takes shelter in the safety of deathless forms; there time was like Eternity‟s transparent robe. There the architect Life cutting out soul‟s living rock built an apparent summer house for the supreme Truth on the beaches of the sea of Infinity.

Against this glory of spiritual states another dual state, though they are parallel yet opposite to each other, as if a doubt made substance wavering and faint, floated and eclipsed and appeared shadow like, two great negations were found that were quite opposite to one another. First a world that knew not its immanent Self and labours to find its cause and need of existence; the second a spirit ignorant of the world it made and covered by Matter and disguised by Life, struggles to manifest, to be free and to know and rule; though these negations were close-tied in one disharmony, and yet their opposite lines do not meet at all. Three Powers governed its unreasonable course, (330) in the beginning there existed an ignorant Force, in the middle an embodied striving soul, and in its end a silent spirit denying life. In the meanwhile a dry and unhappy intervening event appeared and compelled by the ignorant Power to play its role and record her incomplete tale, and the mystery of her Inconscient plan, the riddle of a being born from Night by wedding of Necessity with Chance and to expresses its doubtful truth to a questioning Mind. This darkness hides our loftier predetermined course of events (destiny). This is a future state of our great glorious truth, and it keeps suffocated the winged marvel (our soul) in its sheath, else it may escape from the prison of Matter and wasting its beauty on the formless immensity, merged into the Unknowable‟s mystery living unfulfilled world‟s miraculous fate. Notwithstanding this a new creation that was yet only thought as some high spirit‟s dream or as a problematic illusive mirage in man‟s labouring mind shall rise from the old, a divine Knowledge that is yet inarticulate shall find its speech of divine Truth, the Beauty that was suppressed on earth shall burst open like the blossoming of the flower of paradise, pleasure and pain immerse into supreme bliss. At last a day shall come when a voiceless prophetic divine voice shall speak, the Superconscient consciousness shall grow on earth, and the Eternal‟s marvellous things join the dance of Time. But now the entire thing seemed like a vainly aggrandizing enormousness vast to a self-absorbed and mute spectator careless of the meaning of the show he watched, and like one who waiting for an expected last result sees the fantastic procession pass before him as upheld by a misled Energy. Aswapati saw a world that took birth out of world that would take shape in future. There he had foreseen rather than actually seen and felt far off on the verge of consciousness, on this transient and frail little whirling globe and on it left (331) like a lost dream‟s vain mould and a fragile copy of the spirit‟s shell his body gathered into a mystic sleep seemed to him as a foreign shape and a shade of an imagined country.

Now that far and shadowy universe seemed as an unknown world to him, and his soul and eternity were alone felt as true.

Thereafter from the struggling planes below (from earth) a memory carrying a cry from once-loved dear things climbed to him, and to that cry as to its own last call a divine ray from the mysterious Supreme gave reply to that call. Because even there the boundless supreme Oneness dwells. That Supreme Oneness unrecognisable to its own sight lived still sunk in its own darkest seas upholding the world‟s Inconscient unity hidden in Matter‟s lifeless multitude. This seed-self sown in the indeterminate lost its glory of divinity, concealing the almightiness of its Force and the all knowingness of its Soul; becoming an agent of its own transcendent Will, it merges its knowledge in the Inconscient deep sea; accepting sorrow, error, death and pain which it pays the same as redemption value to the ignorant darkest Night, he by sacrificing his own self redeemed the Nature‟s fall. Now Aswapati by knowing himself knew as to why his soul had gone into the earth‟s passionate darkness to share the labour of an erroneous Power that by division hopes to find the One. Now Aswapati became two beings, one that was wide and free above and the other the intense struggling, bound, its portion here on earth. A tie between these two beings could still bridge the two worlds (the heaven above and the earth below); because there was a dim response and a breath is coming from far distance; and all had not been completely ceased in the illimitable silence to which he

101 had risen through his spiritual seeking. Now his heart lay somewhere conscious and alone far down below him i.e. on earth like a lamp in the night; (332) deserted it lay alone, indestructible, immobile with extreme passionate will, his sacrificed and surrendered living heart absorbed in a deep devoted adoration turned towards its far-off fount of light and love. Aswapati‟s heart in the luminous stillness of its mute appeal looked up to the heights that is beyond his sight‟s range and eagerly aspired from the ardently desired depths that it could not leave. In the centre of its vast and fateful trance, in the middle path between his free and fallen selves, stepping in between God‟s day and mortal‟s night, accepting worship as its single law, and bliss as the sole cause of things, refusing the ascetic‟s stark joy that none can share, refusing the calm that lives for calm alone, his heart turned towards the Mother‟s force who was its only force of determination for whom it willed to exist. Lit by a single and un-trembling ray on a consecrated silver floor where an invisible Presence kneels in prayer there Aswapati‟s heart in the passion of its solitary dream lay like a shut soundless place reserved for prayer. On some deep breast of that liberating peace all else of his being was satisfied with quietude, his being could know that the truth exists beyond it. Aswapati‟s all other parts of body were mute in the centre of sleep consenting to the slow willful Power that tolerates the world‟s error and grief and the cosmic long delay, those bodily parts were eternally waiting through the patient years for the coming of the Great Divine Mother for whose arrival the whole earth and men prayed for ever; this was the fiery point that prayed for the decent of the divine Mother now. That lonely fire of aspiration of Aswapati could not be quenched by extinction and its sight filled the blank of mind and will; his thought was dead but its changeless force lived and grew. Armed with the intuition of a bliss to which some inspiring peace was the key (333) it survived through life‟s huge emptiness amid the indifferent denials of the world. It sent its silent prayer to the Unknown; it listened for the footsteps of its hopes that were returning through the immense void and waited for the command of the Divine Word that comes through the still self from the Supreme.

-End of Canto Threee

102

Canto Four The Vision and the Boon (334) Thereafter suddenly in response to Aswapati‟s waiting for the command from the Supreme Work a sacred motion awoke there. Amid the lifeless silence of the Void and in solitude and an immensity a sound echoed in the listening skies of his soul that came throbbing as a loved footfall; his nerves and tissues were heaved with delight by its touch. Consequently an Influence had entered into the mortal range of Aswapati; a limitless Heart was near his aspiring heart, a mysterious Divine Form encircled his earthly shape. At the contact of the mysterious Divine Form all in Aswapati was broken from the seal of silence; linked in the possession of an inexpressible joy; his spirit and body were quivered by identification, the mind, life and limbs of his body were immersed in ecstasy. Overwhelmed as with nectarous rain Aswapati‟s nature‟s passionate stretches flowed towards the Divine Mother flashed with lightning and mad with heavenly luminous wine. Consequently all in Aswapati attracted towards the Divine Mother and became like a limitless sea that rose and fell with its waves towards the moon. A stream of divine possessed his veins, the cells of his body awoke to the sense of the spirit and each nerve became a burning thread of joy: his tissue and flesh took share of the divine bliss. Thrilled with the fore-knowledge of the Divine Mother‟s ever ardently desired footsteps and filled with trembling fire and praying tongues all the obscure and unfathomable subconscient caves in Aswapati were lit up. Even his material body lost in sleep, mute and Inconscient responded to the power of the Divine Mother. The One whom Aswapati adored was established within him now: pure like a flame, beautifully adorned with heavenly hairs, a Face of all strengths and powers appeared and from her lips sprang immortal words; her eyelids were like doors of the Wisdom inclined on her rapturous eyeballs, like a meditative marble monument her forehead was a shining luminosity (335) and her ocean like deep sight was looking towards Heaven, her two tranquil eyes of boundless thought looked into Aswapati‟s eyes and saw the god that would come down upon earth in future. A Divine Shape was seen on the gate of Aswapati‟s Mind and the supreme and wise Voice spoke to Aswapati in the chambers of his heart: “O Son of Strength who climbed the creation‟s peaks, no soul is your companion in the divine light; you alone stand at the eternal doors. What you have won is yours, but don‟t ask anymore. O Spirit aspiring in an ignorant human body, O Voice arisen from the Inconscient‟s world, how shall you speak for men whose hearts are dumb and make the partly blind earth the soul‟s seer-vision‟s home or lighten the burden of the senseless globe? I am the Mystery beyond the reach of human mind; I am the goal of the painful efforts of the suns rotating in their orbit; my fire and sweetness are the cause of the creation of life. But my danger and my joy is too immense. Hence awake not my immeasurable descent upon earth, do not utter my secret name before the aggressive Time; because man is too weak to bear the Infinite‟s weight. Truth born sooner than the right moment then the imperfect earth might be smashed. Leave the supreme Power to build its way: with the strength of your single immense achievement rule separately helping the world with your great lonely life. I ask you not to unite your heart of divine flame on the Immobile wide uncaring bliss beyond and turned from the fruitless motion of the years and forsaking the intense labour of the worlds, remaining aloof from the beings, and lost in the Alone. How shall your mighty soul shall tolerate taking rest while Death is still unconquered on the earth and Time is a field of suffering and pain? Your soul was born to take share of burden of divine Force and hence driven by guidance of your nature and fulfill the work as determined by your fate; accept the difficulty of the world and the godlike labour, (336) and live for the purpose of the following the law of the all-knowing that moves in a slow pace. The human mass is tied by the knot of a great Riddle. A lightning like luminous force from beyond thinks and plans and ploughs the sky of life without any trace, man is only awake in an unconscious world, and vainly aspires to change the cosmic dream. Man arrived on earth from some half-luminous Beyond like an unfamiliar being in the mindless expanses; amid the movements of many infinitudes he is a traveller like a nomad in his often changing home, in descent‟s great expanse he has pitched a tent of life. The still sight of the gods sees him from the heaven above, man in the house of Nature is a worrying guest, he is a voyager between the inconstant shores of the divine Thought, a seeker of unknown and beautiful Powers, in the seeking of the far mysterious Light he lives like the member of a tribe that roams from place to place, in the wide ways of the universe he is a little spark of God. Against his spirit all is in a drastic pitiless combination, and a Titanic influence puts a stop on his God ward seeing. A pitiless hungry Nothingness surrounds him, the eternal Darkness seeks to seize him with her hands, he is always driven and deceived by the Energies that were very hard to know, great unsatisfied deities oppose him. A Soul without inherent power of motion and a Force that walks getting up from sleep or dream have created a world that is deprived from life and thought; the Dragon (Kundalini force) born from the dark foundations keeps unalterable the prevalent law of accidental happening and Death; on his (man‟s) long way through Time and circumstances the grey coloured enigmatic darkened Sphinx of hell (a riddling mysterious creature with the head of woman and a lion‟s body, often winged) keeping her dreadful paws on the swallowing sands awaits him fully equipped with the soul-slaying question: across his path the army of the darkest Night waits for him spreading their dim camp. Man‟s life is a moment in eternal Time and he becomes a victim of the minutes and hours.

Attacked physically on earth and without any guaranty of his heaven this unhappy and great creature (337) descended here as a link between the half god and the beast, he does not know his own greatness nor his aim; he has forgotten why had he come to earth and from where. His spirit (soul) and his life, mind, body are in dispute; the height of his ascension remains too low that

103 makes him incapable to reach the heavens, most of his human mass is buried in the mud of animal. A strange conflict and contradiction is the way of his nature. A mystery of tremendous opposites are given to him as his field of life: he desires freedom but needs to live in bonds, in order to perceive some light he has the need of darkness without which he cannot distinguish the same, to feel a little bliss he has the need of grief; to find a greater life he has the need of death. On earth he looks to all sides and listen to every call; he has no certain guiding light by which he can ever walk; his life is blind fold and a play of hide-and-seek; thus he seeks for himself and runs away from himself; though he meets himself yet he thinks it as other than he. Always he goes on building but does not find any constant base for it, though he journeys always but arrives nowhere; he would guide the world but himself he cannot guide; he would save his soul but cannot save his life. The light that his soul had brought is lost by his mind; all that he has learned soon again turns into doubt; the sun seems to him as the shadow of his thoughts, then all becomes shadow again before him and nothing else remains as true: without knowing what he does or his motive he fabricates (makes a false picture) of the signs of the Supreme Reality out of his Ignorance. He through his mortal errors creates a barrier to Truth‟s star. Wisdom attracts him in her luminous disguise but looking behind he has never seen the face of wisdom: a giant Ignorance surrounds his sphere of Knowledge. He is entrusted to discover the cosmic mystery in the dumb figure of the material world, but to enter there his passport and personage are proved as false, consequently he is compelled to become what actually he is not; he obeys the Inconscience that he came to rule (338) and sinks in Matter for the fulfillment of his soul. The Earth-Mother awakened from the lower forms (beast, insects and moths) gave her forces to man‟s hands and he undergoing lot of pains guards the heavy confident expectation entrusted to him; on the roads of the Earth-Mother the mind of man losing its light becomes like a way-lost traveller. To make his thought and will as a magic door for his knowledge to enter the darkness of the world, and to establish the rule of love in a kingdom of hate and struggle, illumining his breath to think and life cells to feel he labours with his slow disbelieving brain with the help of reason‟s unstable light. His mind is not capable to reconcile heaven and earth and tied to Matter with thousand bonds, yet he lifts himself to become a conscious god. Even when a glory of wisdom touches the lotus between the brows of his forehead, when mind and spirit shed a greater ray on him to raise this human product of sperm and gene, this magician‟s (god‟s) magnificence made from living cells and gas, and this man who shared the animal‟s inborn impulses even though he lifts his thought-stature to the Immortal heights, his life still keeps the human middle way; he relinquishes his body to death and pain, forsaking the worldly Matter that is his too heavy responsibility. He is a magician who has doubts of miracles, guided by his unbelieving brain and believing heart, a spirit fruitless of its mystical power, leaves the world to end where it began: and though his work is unfinished yet he claims a heavenly prize. Thus he has missed the creation‟s supreme truth. On the halfway to the beyond he stops the star of his fate: the world‟s life is an immense and vain long-tried experiment, a high conception that serves in a ill-served manner and doubtfully done and the world‟s life trips before reaching his goal, it ever repeats its habitual walk on a zigzag path towards an unknown dangerous ground, it ever retreats after long marches (339) and like an indecisive game drawn endlessly it is a hardiest victory without sure result. This universal life is like an ill-fitting and great dress in which a radiant purpose still conceals its face, a mighty blindness is stuck hoping on and survives nursing its strength on gifts of luminous speculation. Because the human instrument has failed, the Godhead sleeps within its seed hopelessly and the spirit entrapped in the forms created by it. Whom God leads his failure is not a failure; through all these God‟s slow mysterious march goes on: an imperishable Power has created this alterable world; a self-fulfilling (self completing) transcendent consciousness walks on man‟s road; it is the driver of the soul upon its path and knows its each step, its way is sure and how shall the last result be vain when God is the guide? Man‟s mind however may get tired or his body of flesh and blood fails, a divine will prevails canceling man‟s conscious choice: though the goal recedes, yet a limitless vastness retreating into an immense Unknown keeps on inviting him; there is no end to the world‟s stupendous march and there is no rest for the soul that remains in a body. The soul must live on and travel on Time‟s all huge curved paths. From the shut heaven Beyond a stream of a huge flood presses forbidding him to rest and earthly comfort, till he has found his soul here he cannot stop. A divine Light is there that leads the soul and a Power aids it; unnoticed and unfelt by the soul, the power sees in him and acts: man out of his ignorance gives forms to the All-Conscient in his depths, although he is human, yet he looks up to superhuman heights: although he has not yet possessed the Supramental force (Super nature‟s gold) he still goes on making his road towards Immortality. The great gods always watches on man and guard him and choose the impossibilities of today as the base of his future success. His impermanence trembles with the touch of the Eternal and all his obstacles admit defeat beneath the footsteps of the Infinite; (340) the Immortal gods enters in his life; the deployments of the Unseen come drawing near to him. Love, the divine glory stained by mortal atmosphere passes back through his heart as a wandering guest. Beauty only surrounds man for a magic hour, he has many visits of a large revealing divine joy that often comes and touches him, brief wideness‟s come to him and liberates him from human self, hopes of immortal sweetness comes and tempting towards a goal that perpetually remains in front do attract him and leave. Strange discovering fires passed crossing his mind, rare intimations lift his frequently mistaking speech to a moment‟s relationship with the eternal Word; Wisdom in a disguise circles through his brain bothering him with half-divine glimpses. Sometimes he felt the touch of the Supreme Unknown by laying his hands sometimes speak intimately with the Eternity. His birth was a strange and a glorious symbol, and immortality, and dwelling in the kingdoms of spirit and pure perfection and a shadow less bliss is the mighty fate of this distressed

104 creature. The Earth-Mother sees in him the change that draws near that existed as a pre-semblance in her dumb and fiery depths and sees a godhead drawn out from her transformed limbs, and a Heavenly transformation on the universal Nature‟s base. The Divine Mother who enter into Aswapati‟s body addressed him as a perfect seeker of self-born unfailing hierarchy not leave the divine light to extinguish that was borne from ages, and advised him to still help humanity‟s blind and suffering life: to obey spirit‟s wide and all powerful inspiration. Your spirit is a witness of God‟s discourse with the darkest Night; it inclined down compassionately from the immortal calm and sheltered desire that is the troubled seed of all the universal things. Hence assent to your high self, create and endure. Do not cease from acquiring Knowledge and let his labour be vast. See that the earthly limits can no more suppress your force: make equal your work with the long unending Time‟s work. O, traveller upon the solitary eternal heights, (341) still walk on the difficult and timeless path that joins its cycles of ages with the rhythm of its austere curve prepared for man by initiate Gods. Her Light shall ever be flashing in you and my strength will be his force. Let not his heart be driven by the impatient Titan, do not aspire for any imperfect fruit and the partial prize. Advised him to only demand for one boon to greaten his spirit and desire for one joy to raise your humankind. Above this blind fate and the hostile powers there stands a high unchanging Will; leave the result of his works to the Almightiness. All things shall change in God‟s transforming hour”.

Thereafter the majestic and sweet Voice of the supreme divine Mother became quiet. Now there was no movement in the vast meditative space: in that listening world a silence and an immense mute Eternal Peace pervaded in the immensities of those silences. But like a cry of yearning Aswapati‟s heart replied to the supreme divine Mother: he said, “how shall I rest satisfied with the mortal life and the dull measures of earthly things, He who however have seen behind the cosmic disguise the glory and the beauty of her face? Oh with what hard grim destiny with which you have bound your sons? We who are the carriers of the deathless Force and builders of the godhead of the human race how long shall our spirits battle with the Night and bear defeat and bear the weight of the brute yoke of Death? Or if it is your work that I do below on earth amid the error and waste of human life in the vague Light of man‟s half-conscious mind why not some distant light of you enters in me? The centuries and millenniums ever pass but where is in the world‟s greyness is your coming‟s ray? Where is the grave sound of thunder of your victory‟s wings? We only hear the feet of passing gods. (342) In the eternal mystical Mind a plan has only been mapped out showing its picture of backward and futuristic sight, they aeons pass, ever repeat only their changeless round and the cycles of the ages in their wheeling only rebuilt the things that have existed already and ever moving aspiring for highest things. In this world whatever we have done already we still have ever to do. Though in this world all breaks and all renews, yet the outcome is the same. As if the sad Enigma (riddle) kept its right till all is achieved for which this worldly scene was created, Life‟s fruitless huge revolutions goes on whirling and the new-born ages perish like the old. Now the strength that is born with us is too little, the divine Light that comes upon the earth without being noticed through the covering of the universal Nature is too slight; the joy with which the mother Nature buys our pain is also too scanty (a little joy we had to undergo imperishable sorrow). In a brute world that knows not the significance of its creation and existence, we live strained by our thought and live rotating upon the wheel of birth and death, with the inspiration of instruments of impulse that is not our own we are prompted to achieve by giving our blood as a price of half-knowledge and half-creations that gets tired soon. With a frustrated immortal soul in our transient limbs and confounded and beaten and pushed back we still labour on, and though annihilated, disappointed and exhausted we still survive.

We labour in this world even with sorrow and pain so that possibly a larger-seeing man with nobler heart, might take birth from us, who would be a golden vessel of incarnate Truth, the executer of the divine attempt fully equipped to wear the earthly body of God, an imparter of heavenly message, a fore knowing seer, and a lover and king. I know that your creation cannot fail: because even through the mists of mortal thoughts your mysterious steps are unerring, and though Necessity comes under the guise of Chance and hidden in the blind changes of Fate, she keeps following the slow calm logic of Infinity‟s speed and sequence of its will that is not safe from violation. All life is established in an ascending series and the evolving Law is stubborn (343) and its last result is prepared in the beginning. Man the strange illogical product of the earthly mud and a creature of compromise between beast and God is not the top most creation of your miraculous world. I know that these Inconscient cells shall become conscious one day and become one with the universal Nature and achieve heavenly height, a spirit as vast a sky shall descend with joy here upon earth from the invisible heavenly founts, and a god come down from beyond and be greater by the fall. A Power arose out of his trance bound cell. She forsaking the slow limping movement of the hours and the changing momentary gleam of light of mortal sight, it reached there where the Thinker sleeps in the profundity of Light and alone holding the intolerant flames of the allwitnessing Eye, and hearing the word of Fate from the heart of Silence in the endless moment of Eternity, it saw from timelessness the works of Time. Consequently the lead like lifeless formulas of the Mind were over passed and all the obstacles of mortal Space were defeated: this revealing Divine image showed the things that would come in future. A giant (Tandava) dance of Shiva tore the past; a roar of the world destroying thunder was heard as of a world that fall, fire was spread over earth and the roar of Death demanding to slay a world his hunger had created. The harsh roar of the wings of great Extinction was heard all through: in his ears the Titan‟s war-cry echoed, fear and rumour shook the secured darkest Night. Thereafter he saw the Omnipotent‟s flaming pioneers over the verge of heaven that turns towards life came crowding down the amber stairs (sky step) of

105 birth; they were the forerunners of a divine multitude came out of the paths of the morning star into the little chamber of mortal life.

He saw them crossing the twilight (from the sky when sun was below the horizon in the evening) of an age, they were the suneyed children of a marvellous dawn, the great creators with wide calm brows, (344) they were the great destroyers of the worlds obstacles and wrestlers against the willful work of destiny in her battlefield, and were the labourers in the mines of the gods, the messengers of the Unattainable Supreme and the architects of immortality. They have descended into the fallen human world, their faces still wore the Immortal‟s glory, and their voices are still in close touch with the thoughts of God, their bodies are made beautiful by the light of the spirit, they came carrying the magic word, and the mystic fire, and the wildly sensual cup of wine of Divine delight, their eyes were resembling like that of a diviner man, from their lips a superb hymn of praise of the soul was coming out, that was still unknown and their feet were echoing in the roads of Time. They were the high priests of wisdom, sweetness, might and bliss, and the discoverers of beauty‟s sunlit paths and swimmers of Love‟s laughing fiery like luminous floods and dancers within the golden doors of extreme delight, one day their walk shall transform the suffering earth and their presence shall justify the divine Light on Nature‟s face. Although our Fate lingers in the high Beyond and delays the fulfillment of the mission of our life and the work seems on which we spend our heart‟s force seems vain, yet all shall be achieved for which we bore the worldly pain. Even as in the past man born as a successor of the beast, this high divine successor surely shall come behind the present man‟s inefficient mortal step, and his vain labour, sweat, blood and tears: he shall have the perfect knowledge of what mortal mind scarcely dare to think, that divine man shall achieve what the heart of the mortal could not dare. He shall be the inheritor of the labour of the human time, and shall take on him the burden of the gods; then all heavenly light shall illuminate the earthly thoughts, the heavenly might shall strengthen the earthly hearts; the earth‟s deeds shall touch the super human‟s height, and the sight of earth shall be widened into the infinite. The imperfect world is still burdened with its heavy unchanged weight; (345) the glorious youth of Time has passed and failed; heavy and long are the years where our labouriously life is the only outcome and still the seals upon man‟s soul are firm and the heart of the ancient Divine Mother is tired. Aswapati now prayed to the Supreme Divine Mother O goddess of Truth now defended in you the secret sun, and the voice of your mighty meditations in shut heavens on things withdrawn within your luminous depths, O magnificent-Wisdom, Mother of the universe, Creatrix, and the Eternal‟s artist Bride, as if Time does not dare to open its inner depth before God do not delay further more with your transforming hand, pressed vainly on one golden bar of Time. O luminous fountain of the world‟s delight dwelt free from the world in the unattainable beyond, O goddess of Bliss who ever dwelt deep within the heart of men while men search you outside and never find, Mystery and Muse (Mahasaraswati) with hieratic (Mantrik) tongue, kindly incarnate the white passion of your force on earth, mission to earth some of your living form. In the Time‟s moments fill with your eternity, let your infinity live in one body, and All-Knowledge envelop one mind in seas of light, and All-Love quiver only in one human heart. O Immortal Mother kindly walks on earth with mortal feet, and crowd all heaven‟s beauty in earthly limbs! O All powerful, kindly surround the movements and moments of mortal will with the power of God like a girdle, and pack one human hour with the eternal might, and with a single indication transform all future time. Prayed her to let a great word be chanted from the heights and a great act open the doors of Fate.

Aswapati‟s prayer to the Supreme Divine Mother as if too weak to ascend oppressed by the denial of the thousand forces sank down in the resisting Night. But from there arose a wide Voice of voluntary affirmation of the Supreme Divine Mother; (346) and in that sound of that voice the spirit of beauty was revealed: a Divine Light floated round her superb divine Vision‟s brow and on her lips the Immortal‟s joy sprang and said “O strong forerunner, I have heard your Call. One shall descend and smash the iron like hard Law, change universal Nature‟s grim destiny by her single spirit‟s power a limitless Mind that shall contain shall descend on earth, a sweet and violent heart of intense calms missioned by the passions of the gods shall descend. All mights and greatnesses shall join in her; the heavenly beauty shall pervade on the earth, like a net of clouds delight shall sleep in the crowd net of her hair, immortal Love shall beat her glorious wings in her body as the bird does on its homing tree. A music rising from griefless things shall spread her charming net; the harps of the Perfect shall attune with her voice, the streams of Heaven shall murmur in her laugh, her lips shall be the honeycombs of God, her limbs shall be the God‟s golden jars of supreme joy, her breasts shall be the rapture-flowers of Paradise (Parijat). Her voiceless heart shall become the mansion of supreme Wisdom, strength shall be with her like a conqueror‟s sword and from her eyes the Eternal‟s bliss shall look. A seed shall be sown in Death‟s tremendous hour, a branch of heaven shall be transplanted on human soil; Nature shall overleap her mortal step; Fate shall be changed by an immutable will.”

As a flame disappears in endless Light eternally extinguished in its source, the glorious Form was vanished and the word was silenced. The echo of the Divine delight that was once heard too near, its harmony passed towards some distant quietness, and as in the trance- bound ear the music failed, and its tone and a voice that stirred into tunes was withdrawn into some distant tones. (347) The Divine form of the Supreme Mother now retreated back from the aspiring earth renouncing its nearness to the desolate sense and ascended to her unattainable home. Now Aswapati‟s inner chamber of the body became secluded and filled with bright vacancy; all in him was vacant immeasurable spirit‟s space and impassive, waste and desert of bright peace.

106 Thereafter there moved a line in the far edge of calm: a quick and many-toned cry and laugh and a warm lipped living soft terrestrial waves came slowly in upon white feet of sound. The great glory of Supreme Silenceâ€&#x;s heart was opened; that supreme immobile peace surrendered to the breath of mortal atmosphere, and dissolving illimitably the heavenly trance state of Aswapati turned it into an ordinary state of waking mind. Behind the voiceless mystery of sleep and over its solitudes which was beyond knowledge Eternity cast down its incommunicable coverings. Consequently glorious rest and the wide release of Aswapati were vanished. His soul fled like a falling star crossing the light of far-receding planes compelled to fill its human house in Time now drew back into the speed and noise of the vast business of created things on earth. Like a broad-based chariot of the marvels of the heavens that were meant to bear the Gods on fiery wheels, Aswapati like a flame of fire descended through the spiritual gates swiftly. The stir of the mortal atmosphere received him in it. Now he once more moved amid the material scenes of this world that gets lifted by intimations from beyond and in the pauses of the building brain touched by the thought that stir the fathomless wave of Nature and returns back to its hidden shores. Aswapati the eternal seeker in the aeonic field bound by the intolerant press of earthly time again became strong for the swift-moving tasks. (348) Awake beneath the ignorant covering of the darkest Night he saw the unnumbered crowd of people below the stars and faced their unsatisfied flood of questionings and laboured with the form-maker measuring Mind. Succeeding over the fate of mortal things Aswapati a wanderer from the mystical invisible suns, a god in the figure of the arisen beast establishing the empire of soul on Matter and its bounded universe as on a solid rock in infinite seas, raised his head of conquest to the heavens. The Lord of Life Aswapati restarted his mighty circular motion of work in the little field of the uncertain globe.

-End of Canto Four, -End of Book Three, -End of Part One

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BOOK FOUR The Book of Birth and Quest

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Canto One The Birth and Childhood of the Flame (349) Earth a frenzied (maddened) of the cycles of desire hastening towards a far-off unknown goal followed the endless journey of the Sun around a divine Light that she must not dare to touch. On the bosom of Inconscience a mind that was half-awake in the oscillation of the void dreamed out life and bore this finite world bound by thought and deed across the immobile trance of the Infinite. An immense unchangeable silence ran with the circuit of the earth: earth a prisoner of speed of a jeweled wheel communed with the mystic heart in Space. She moved towards some undisclosed event amid the uncertain stillness of the stars and her rhythm tuned with the long whirl of Time. In Earth‟s unceasing motion around the purple (mixture red and blue) coloured cycle day after day passed speeding like coloured spokes of a wheel and through the attracting beauty of changing colours of the atmosphere the various seasons of the year caused to move one after another linked in a meaningful dance creating a symbol festival of the changing year.

Summer passed swiftly across the burning heat of the soil with its grand display of fiery noon‟s and stamped its intense warm light and the blue seal of a great brightened sky on Earth. Thereafter on the faint-like state of earth on account of the intense heat of the summer or through its thickened knot of the tide of rain poured down upon the torn wings of heat, the shock of lightning‟s awakened the unstable sleep of the atmosphere, rain water flowed on earth with life-giving streams on the faint-stricken soil, the unsteady shine and sound of rain and storm-winged dark covered the star-defended doors of heaven‟s dim sleep, or covered earth‟s brown face with packed cloud-veils from the gold eye of earth‟s lover sun. (350) Like armies of revolution the cloud‟s unending march crossed the timefield and surrounded the world, the sound of the violent storm spread over the sky and the sound of thunderbolt was like the announcement of the gods engaged in battle. The thick dark monsoon like a traveller from the neighbouring unquiet seas rode through earthly time with a cry like horses; now the messenger like clouds became thick: huge flashes of lightning‟s split the horizon‟s edge and like armies starting hurriedly from their contesting camps and attack their rivals joined steep, bare and blind edges of sky with the earth: a wave like heaving, a hiss and downpour of a wave like huge rain, the long straight pouring down of hailstones, sound of flowing storms, crowding movement of the winds from various fronts, rushing feet of wind swept hurriedly through the underlying wet plains of earth and from the sky falling of water in long lines and in drops flowed through the wet land. Then their movement became swift and a race of hissing sound of the rain or the sound of the strong storm and water fall from all around was heard. Then on the grey floor of day dimness was spread over and lengthening its darkened surrounding joined morning to evening, and indulging in greasy in mud and rain shower the day became black dark. As if wearing a dull dress day became half dark. Light saw through the tainted glass of dawn and found its face as exact counter part of half lighted night: heavy rainfall and fall of drops of rain water and falling of condensed water vapor blackening the wind screen moved unsteadily through the planes and converted the dry soil into mire and mud with pungent smell and earth was filled with muddy water and sky was seen as a mass of darkness. In these days of unpleasantly damp and cold and thoroughly wet none could see the obscured sun for weeks together. Like a sad smile shines veiled by returning tears, even when no trouble irritated the air‟s sleeping rest or a faint ray shined through the weeping clouds then also all promised brightness failed at once due to the influence of the rain in the sky at once denied or soon condemned or ended like a brief-lived hope. Thereafter a last massive pouring down of rains thrashed on the lifeless mud and a gradually less intense sound kept everything still or only there was a flow of muddy shrinking floods or was only heard the whisper and tossing of the green trees. (351) Now the mood of the earth was changed; she lay merged in a calm rest, the moments passed on with slow satisfied movement: a wide and tranquil atmosphere remembered peace and earth became the comrade of a happy sun. As of the approach of God a calmness neared earth, a light of a meditating trance kindled the soil and sky and an identity and ecstasy filled the solitary heart of meditation. A dream roamed about slowly in the dumb mind of Space, Time opened all its chambers of (mansion) joy and consequently a hope and rejoice entered earth: an inmost being awoke and looked up to a heavenlier height, an inner thought kindled a hidden flame and the inner sight adored an unseen sun. Observing one by one in detail the significant hours watching for a flame that was hidden in the luminous depths, and looking out consciously for some mighty birth to come in future three thoughtful seasons passed in a quicker speed. Autumn passed on with the glory of its moonlit nights and enjoying the splendour of its lotus pools and winter and Dew-time laid their calm cool hands on the universal Nature‟s bosom that was still in a half sleep and deepened with its colours of slack soothing comfort the tranquil beauty of the ending year. Thereafter spring (season), the intense lover of earth came springing through the new tender leaves and caught the earth-bride in his passionate clasp; his advent was like a fire expressing the splendour of seven colours of the rainbow and his arms created a circle of the arrival of joy on earth. The voice of spring was a call to the sphere that exist apart from the material Universe onto the earth and its secret touch upon our mortal lives keeps ever knew the world Creator‟s thrill, and remakes an ancient sweetness to new shapes and guards intact without change by death and Time our heart‟s response to Nature‟s charm and keeps forever new although the same remains unchanged, and the throb that ever keeps awake to the old delight (352) and beauty and delight and the joy to live. The arrival of the spring (king of season) brought the magic and the enchantment; by the grace of his touch life‟s tired heart became glad and young; he made joy a willing prisoner in earth‟s breast. His clasp upon earth‟s limbs was felt like that of a young god: changed by the passion of its divine advent he made the body of earth beautiful with his kiss. He came upon earth becoming eager for joy high fluting with coil‟s (singer bird‟s) happy voice and trailing his peacock turban on the trees; his breath was a fervent invitation to

109 delight, his look was like a sense pleasing dense blue sky. His arrival a tender celestial passion filled with an inborn God‟s sensuous joys amazed the blood, a rhythm disclosed in beauty spread everywhere and awoke in life the thrill of rapture recurring: immortal movements touched the brief-lived earthly moments. Even a dense and intense godlike feeling of sense brought in every breath a passionate pleasure; all sights and voices were woven in a single fascination. The life of the delighted earth became a storm of sweetness, light and song, and a festival of colour and ecstasy, the hymn of sunrays became series of prayers to God from a congregation: a tone of the crowded priestly music sang raising it sacred tone and the fragrance of the flowers swaying in the branch of trees swung like the containers of burning incense filled the moments as a sacrifice of perfume. The flower of the Asoka trees blossomed with its deep red colour of fire, the smell of the white jasmines spread in the enchanted atmosphere pure like a breath of unstained desire, tender mango-blossoms fed the liquid voice of the love-maddened singer bird coil, and the brown-bee muttered in the fragrance amid the flower buds containing honey. During spring the sunlight was like a great god‟s golden smile. The whole Nature was turned into a beauty‟s festival.

(353) In this high signalising moments of the gods a greatness from our other countries from beyond descended upon earth in response to earth‟s eager cry and aspiration for bliss. In the noise of earthly things a silence immutably revealed the secret Word, Om; a flowing in of a mightier power filled the forgetful clay: a sacred lamp was kindled and a sacred image was established. Bridging the gulf between man‟s mind and God‟s a mediating ray descending from heaven touched the earth; its brightness linked our short livingness to the Unknown. A being of spirit aware of its heavenly source transforming her heavenly shape into a human shape descended into earth‟s imperfect make and did not weep falling into the liability to death, but looked on all with large and peaceful sight.

She who had been fighting with our darkness and pain from the ancient times had returned from the transcendent spheres and again bore the load of this breath that is associated with death and started her divine unfinished task: she was a survivor of death and the aeonic years, she once more fronted earthly Time with her immeasurable heart. The ancient intimacy that was veiled by the vision of earth, and the secret contact broke off by Time, the invisible relationship of earth and heaven, between the human portion labouring here on earth and as yet unborn limitless heavenly Force was renewed again and revealed. Again the mystic deep attempt of daring challenge with bet the cosmic play began. Because from where upon this blind and whirling globe each living cell first quivered with the illumining mind and life invaded this material body and put pressure on the inconscience with a need to feel, and in Infinity‟s silence woke a word, then a Mother-wisdom works in the universal Nature‟s breast to pour delight on the heart of worldly labour and want (354) and to press and fill perfection on life‟s frequently mistaking powers, and impose heavenly perception on the darkest bottomless depths and make dumb Matter conscious of its God. Although our down trodden earthly minds forget to ascend towards diviner heights, and our human stuff opposes or breaks itself, the Mother-wisdom keeps her will intact that hopes to divinise the clay, no worldly failure can suppress her nor any defeat what so ever overthrow her from her attempt; Time cannot make her tired or the great Emptiness cannot restrain her, the ages have not made her passionless; she never admits the victory of Death or Fate. She always drives the soul to new attempts; and drives her magical infinitude forces the inactive brute elements within us to aspire; as one who has all infinity to waste; she scatters the seed of the Eternal‟s strength on a half-living and gradually collapsing mould, in the heart‟s passionate mud plants the delight of heaven, pours godhead‟s seekings like our body into a bare beast frame, and hides immortality in a disguise of death. Now once more that supreme Will put on an earthly shape. A Divine Mind empowered from Truth‟s unchangeable seat was framed here on earth for Truth vision and interpreting act and her earthly instruments were designed supremely here to express divinity in earthly signs.

By the pressure of this new descent a beautiful body was formed on earth than earth had ever known. The unseen wholes extremely beautiful shining curve that was as yet a future prediction and hint only came into the sky of mortal life shining like the gradually increasing golden moon came returning in a faint illumined eve. At first like an unshaped idea she shined in a little light and lay inactively sheltered in mute sleep, merged and drowned in Matter‟s great trance in the deep womb of the world creation as heart oscillated in a cradle of divine inconscience (355) she swung by the universal ecstasy of the suns. Some Power deputed by the Divine from beyond nursed a transcendent birth‟s dumb glorious seed in the half-wakened frame (human body) for which this living bodily house was made ready. But soon the link of the soul with the bodily shape became sure, the shadowy depth was flooded with slow conscient light, the seed grew into a tender marvellous bud, and the bud was blossomed into a great paradisiacal flower. At once the Grandeur seemed to have given birth to a mightier race on earth. Arrived upon this unknown and doubtful globe the new born child remembered within herself her far heavenly home and lived guarded in her spirit‟s luminous cell, alone amid men in her diviner state.

Even in her childish movements the nearness of a light that is still unattainable by earth could be felt and feelings that only eternity could share and thoughts that are natural and native to the gods could be felt. Like a alien bird with large rich-coloured breast that stays temporarily on a secret fruited bough of trees, and lost in the green glory of the Forest or flies above to divine unreachable heights her nature dwelt in a strong separate sky needing nothing except her own joyful flight. She harmoniously influenced deeply the earth towards heaven. Coordinated with the intense rhythm of pure joy her days went rolling on singing to themselves; her each minute was turned into a quivering of an inner beauty; her moments harmonised with the satisfied sweet tone and claiming for nothing else, took all that life gave sovereignly as her nature‟s right that is existent from her birth. Her spirit remained near to its parent Sun and her Breath within was intimate to the eternal joy. The first pretty life arisen from Nature‟s faintness mounts in a line of joy to the skies; it lives absorbed in its own happiness, although she was self sufficient, yet turned to all: (356) it has no free communion with the

110 apparent world around her and no open conversation with surrounding things. In her life there existed an oneness that was mystical and inborn and needed no medium of instruments and erects no forms; it grew in an inner union with the whole universe. It assumes all contacts and relations in its inner trance, immersed in laugh it consented to the wind‟s kiss and accepted the shocks of sun and breeze as transformation: an ecstatic eagerness makes merriments in its leaves with colours like a tree, a magic passion quivers in the blossoming of its the buds, its boughs aspired for the silent joy. A mystic godhead is the cause of this beauty, and the spirit and intimate guest of all the enchantment and the priestess of the sweetness and dream‟s meditation. Protected beyond our sensual perception the Wood-nymph (the Goddess of the Forest remained un-worshipped) lives bathed in a deeper ray and felt the storm and calm of another atmosphere and throbs inwardly in a mysterious rain. A heavenly higher Power remaining in her was revealed from within her. Even when she leaned down to meet the earth‟s intimacies her soul kept the eminence of the gods; though her soul inclined into the Matter but was not lost in its rule. Her illumined mind was a transformed world; a bright marvellous moon‟s crowding imaginary illumination kept nursed the ideal goddess fed with spiritual food of dreams in her house of gold. The having knowledge of forms that are beyond our sight, conscious of nearness unattainable to our senses, the Power within her shaped her shaping sense in deeper figures than our gross world figures. An invisible sunlight flowed within her veins and flooded them with the luminosity of heaven and woke a wider sight than earth could know. Shaped in the intimacy of the splendour of that ray, her springing child-like thoughts were turned intensely into the luminous patterns of her soul‟s deep truth, (357) and from her eyes she shed another look on all around her than man‟s ignorant sight. She felt all objects as living selves and in all outward awakening touch she could feel a message from her kith and kin. To her each object was a symbol power and in the circuit of half-known infinities felt as a living flash; nothing seemed to her as foreign or lifeless and meaningless or without a call. She was identified with a greater Nature. As the glory of branch and flower of a tree sprang from the soil, as from animal‟s life rose a thinking man a new advent appeared in her. A mind born from light, a life of rhythmic force, a body with natural ability of hidden divinity prepared an image of the coming god in her; and when the slow movement of the expanding years and the rich murmurous bee-like work of her life filled the moon-orb of her beauty and sense and limbs with honey, then also she remained self-guarded in the silence of her strength and her single glory was not lowered. As nearer the godhead in her exposed to the surface so much a sun replacing her childhood‟s bright or dark patch in the sky like a cloud of dust floated overwhelmingly in a blue and lonely sky. The sun rose upward to possess the outer worldly human scene: her strong immanent spirit turned to watch her own field. A pleasing light floated on her spirit brow and her meditating sight grew sweet and dignified; like a sacrificial fire burning in the altar of gods in a mysteried temple, the heavenly-human deep warm sparkles of slumberous fires woke in the long edges of the glory of her eyes. Out of the crystal clear windows like her eyelids there lighted a will that brought a large significance to life. Behind her student like sight‟s half circular eyebrows a nobler power pressing her forehead‟s open untainted space (358) of wisdom looked from light on earthly transient things. Like a scout of victory in a sentry tower to keep watch her aspiration brought down high destiny upon earth; and like a silent warrior moved in her city of strength remained guarding the divine Truth‟s diamond throne safely. Her passionate heart was like an orbed moon in a vessel of nectar loved all without word or sign, but kept in her heart‟s joyful secrecy like an intensely blissful charmed and voiceless world. Like a stream of Paradise (the river Mandakini) the wave of life ran brightly, joyfully and swiftly in her. Many high gods dwelt in her only like a beautiful home (in her body); yet her nature remained like a light of a perfect sun-orb and harmonious like a song of many tones and great and diverse like a universe. The beauty and grace of her body that held this greatness (Savitri) seemed almost like an image made of heaven‟s clear light. Her body‟s enchantment woke the memory of things seen in divine vision‟s moments, and she was looking like a golden bridge that spanned over a high flood and like a single moon touched palm-tree by the side of a lake as a companion of the wide and luminous peace, and as a murmur of the leaves in Paradise when the moving feet of the Immortals pass on them, she was like a luminous orb or light over sleeping hills and a strange and star adorned head alone in the Night.

-End of Canto One

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Canto Two The Growth of the Flame (359) A land beautified with its mountains and wide sun-shined plains and giant rivers that were flowing towards their Confluence of vast seas, and that was a field of new creation and spiritual calm and the clamouring acts of life were vanished into the depths of silence, and land of thought‟s climb towards the transcendent and leap towards heaven, it was a meditative world of dream and trance filled with the mightiest works of God and man where Nature seemed a dream of the Divine and dwelling place of beauty and grace and grandeur‟s was the refuge of the childhood of the incarnate Flame. Above her (Savitri) the sacred influences of the advent of the golden age that would take place watched her intensely and the deep godheads of a glorious past looked on her and saw the future‟s godheads come descending down upon earth as if this magnet drew their powers unseen by them. Earth‟s meditating wisdom spoke to Savitri‟s tranquil heart; the knowledge of the thinker and the seer ascending from their mind‟s last heights to meet with the gods, making earth‟s topmost thoughts as a springing-board to dive into the cosmic vastnesses, could see the unseen and think the unthinkable, and opened the huge doors of the unknown and broke the limited horizons of man to enter into infinity. Consequently the acts of the mortals became infinitely wide and art and beauty sprang from the inner human depths; there Nature and soul (Purusha and Prakriti) strove each other in their nobility. Humanity were inspired by moral principles to imitate heaven, the harmony of rich culture‟s tones refined the human sense and enlarged its range to hear the unheard and see the invisible and taught the soul to rise beyond things known and inspired life to greaten and break its limits, (360) and to aspire for the Immortal‟s unseen world. Those influences bore her above the fields of movement of the worldly thought leaving earth‟s limited sphere of Mind crossing mystic seas of the Beyond to live on heights near to the Sun as of an eagle. There the Supreme Wisdom sits on her eternal throne. All the turns of her life led her to symbol doors making reach the secret Powers that were her kith and kin; she had the proficiency of truth and was an initiate of bliss, a mystic attendant trained in Supreme Nature‟s school, aware of the marvel of created things laid the secrecies of her heart‟s deep meditation upon the altar of the Wonderful; her moments were a ritual in a timeless temple and her acts were expressive movement of sacrifice. Tuned with the rhythm of the spheres beyond she used the word as a mantra (hieratic means) for the release of the soul that was bound within human frame into communion with its comrade gods. Or it helped to some immemorial Souls in men and things that labour in the heart of life to manifest in expressive forms, she was the seeker of the Unknown and Unborn came carrying a light from the Inexpressible to tear out the veil of the last mysteries. In her childhood days intense philosophies pointed out to earth to rise to heaven or on foundations as broad as cosmic Space upraised the earth-mind to superhuman heights. The art of making figures by chiseling out of stone and the art of making pictures in colour‟s concentrated sense that hides the inner vision over passing lines that please the outward eyes, revealed a figure of the invisible, unveiled all Nature‟s meaning in a form or expressed the figure of Divine in a body. Then the Infinite architecture (361) discovered here on earth the inward-meditating shapes that were lying only in the wide breadths of the mounting stones: music brought down heavenly eagerness, song held the heart absorbed in the depths of joy linking the human cry with the universal one; the world-interpreting movements of the dance expressed the idea and the mood in a rhythmic movement and posture; the special skill of the minute handicrafts in subtle lines eternised a swift moment‟s memory in time or in the artist skills in the carving speed of a cup‟s design to express the flash of the underlying patterns of the unseen: great poems formed like the rhythm of the world and cadences rising up waves like roar of the ocean rendered by great poets and remained suppressed in Nature‟s heart but now, (but now during the period of growth of Savitri from her childhood) sung by the poets into a crowded greatness of speech with regards to its beauty and nobility of her forms, and the passion of her moments and moods lifted human word nearer to the word of the god‟s. Then man‟s eyes could look into the inner kingdoms; his scrutinising eyes discovered the law of the number and knew the various motions of the stars in the galaxy, and could take maps of the visible seen of the world, by the logical questioning could know the process of human thought and made a diagram of life and mind that evolve theories. These developments that existed during her growth gave Savitri a natural means of satisfaction but those alone could not satisfy her widest Soul‟s need: because a human seeking is limited by its gains seemed to her as great and primeval steps of a young discovering spirit that could not be able to see by its own soul‟s light with its difficult attempt, because human quest wanted to know the universe with testing knocks or stretched its mind‟s surmising rod to find the truth becomes futile: although the human mind always extends its vision to numberless sides but disturbed by various calls and thoughts, has not yet acquired the widest sight of the soul and not yet achieved the vast direct immediate touch, nor yet acquired the art and the wisdom of the Gods. (362) Savitri felt in her that a boundless knowledge greater than man‟s thought and a happiness that is too high to be achieved by heart and sense were locked in the world and longing for release and waiting as yet for expression through form, it sought for objects around which it can grow and natures that are strong to bear the pressure of the same without any reaction the splendour of her native royalty and greatness, sweetness, bliss, her might to possess and her vast power to love: then earth was made into a stepping-stone to conquer heaven, the soul could see beyond the limiting boundaries of heaven, met a great light from the Unknowable and dreamed of the field of action‟s of the transcendent. Savitri aware of the universal Soul in all turned to living hearts and human forms, and realised that those were her soul‟s reflections, things that make complete and counterparts, the nearest outlying portions of her being, though divided from her by the walls of body and mind, yet were bound to her spirit by divine ties. Surmounting the invisible walls and the disguised defence and the loneliness that separates soul from

112 soul, she wished to keep all in one immense embrace, that she might give shelter in it to all living things raising them into a luminous point of seeing divine light out of the present division‟s thick Inconscient depths and make them one with God and world and her. But only a few responded to her call: still fewer felt her screened divinity and attempted to match her soul with their own soul approaching with some relationship to her heights. They uplifted towards some luminous secrecy or conscious of some divine glory hidden above sprang to find her in a flash of the moment, witnessing a flash light in a heavenly vast, but incapable of keeping the divine vision and the power within themselves, they fell back to life‟s dull ordinary flow. (363) They felt near that a mind daring heavenly experiment, growing towards some largeness, even testing the limits of the unknown with passionate touch they still were bound by their human stuff: and could not keep pace with Savitri‟s tireless step; because their eagerness was too limited to follow Savitri‟s will‟s far-widened rhythm, their sight was too narrow to see with the unborn Infinite‟s sight and their human nature grew tired of things too great for them.

Because even the close partners of her thought who could have walked nearest to her ray could only remain satisfied in worshipping the power and light they felt in her but could not make equal their soul to the rhythm of her soul. Though she was friendly with them, yet she was too great to be known fully by them, though she walked in their front towards a greater light and was the leader and queen of their hearts and souls, and was very near to their hearts yet she was divine and far from them. Although they were attempting with a godlike rush and jump to heights that are too far apart for their human state to reach or with a slow great many-sided spiritual labour of seeking pushed towards aims that were inconceivable by them they observed her progress with admiration and amazement yet they were forced to be the satellites of her great sun and moved unable to forego her light, they clutched at her with their outstretched desiring hands or followed tripping in the path made by her. Or eagerly desiring with their vital and physical self they surrendered to her for the nourishment and support of their heart: the rest of her activities they could not see in the visible light; only they could vaguely bore her inner being‟s mightiness. Or bound by their senses and yearning heart and adoring her with their tainted human love they could not conceive the mighty spirit she was or change themselves by her nearness to become even as she. Some felt her with their souls and quivered in joy with her, felt a greatness near and yet that was beyond their mind‟s conception; by seeing her there awoke an inner urge in them to adore her only, (364) and her nearness always drew a high divine communion‟s force. In this way men worship a god who is too great to know, too high, too vast to wear a limiting shape; they only feel a Presence and obey a might, adore a love whose joy filled in their breasts, they adore in a divine zeal that intensifies their heart-beats and they follow a law that greatens their heart and life. A new diviner atmosphere was opened to their breath of their life‟s flow, and a freer and happier world opened to man: consequently high steps climbing to Supreme Self and Supreme Light were burst out before man‟s sight. Influenced by Savitri‟s divine qualities there awakened in men sincerity, love and loyalty of the soul and it could feel, see and know that she was the deity. On their nature‟s acts her will was powerfully spread over, Savitri‟s heart‟s imperishable sweetness attracted their hearts, she was loved by all but her being exceed the limit of their beings; though her measures were beyond their reach, but they could bear her touch, as a flower blossoms towards the sun by opening its petals, they surrendered themselves at her feet without any more expectations. She was greater than themselves and was too wide boundless to their sphere of sight, their minds could not understand her nor wholly realise, their lives were inspired by her words and absorbed towards her; they felt a godhead and lived obeying her call, responding to her lead they did her work in the world; as if the truth of their own larger selves put on an aspect of divinity to raise them to a level beyond their earthly state and their lives and their natures were driven compelled by her inspiration. In their own movement they felt the presence of a greater future meeting them; she held their hands and chose for them their paths: by her guidance and help they were moved towards great unknown things, they were attracted by a faith and joy to feel themselves as hers; they lived their life in her and saw the world with the help of her eyes. Some divided between wonder and revolt in themselves turned towards her against their nature‟s inclination; drawn by her grace and subdued by her will, possessed by her and trying hard to possess her, (365) some impatient dependants tied closely their yearning hearts against the bonds of which they most complained, they murmured at her splendid yoke of love and grace but they would have wept if that is lost: others pursued her with their life‟s blind desires claiming her as their own alone hastened to make their own her sweetness meant for all. As earth claims the light for its single separate need they were demanding her to hold her in their sole envious clasp, they desired her movements to be bounded like their own movements and longed for a like response from her to their smallness. Or they expressed their discontentment that she had surpassed their grip and hoped to bind her close with their ropes of desire. Or finding her touch desired by them to be too strong for them to bear they blamed her for an oppression they loved, they shrank from her into themselves as from a too bright sun, yet they hankered for the grandeur they had refused. Though on account of their earthly weakness that could not hold her sweet passionate ray they get angry, yet they were inspired by love for the same, they desired her touch but cried out when incapable to meet divinity too near and intolerant of a Force that they could not keep within. Some were drawn by her divine pull unwillingly and endured the same like a sweet but unknown enchantment; unable to mount to her levels too high for them they eagerly longed to draw her down to the level of their own earth.

They intended to keep their passionate lives around her as a center; they hoped to bind her glory and grace to their human needs that had made their souls as slave.

But in this world, these hearts that responded to her call, none could become her equal or her comrade. Her leaning down to earth to equal them to her heights became futile because the atmosphere in which she lived was too pure for those smalls souls to breathe. To raise these comrade selves to her own wide breadths her heart desired to fill with her own power (366) with the influence of

113 which a diviner Force might enter life and a divine life would greaten human time. Though she leaned down to their littleness protecting their lives with her strong passionate hands and knew by sympathy their needs and wants and plunged in the little wave-depths of their lives and met and shared their heart-beats of grief and joy and inclined to heal their sorrow and their pride squandering ungrudgingly the might that was hers on her lone heights beyond and lift to it their aspiration‟s cry, and drew their souls into her vast and surround with the silence of her deeps and held them as the great Mother holds her own children, only her earthly surface could bear their charge and mixed its fire with their mortality: yet her greater self lived alone and not claimed by any and within. Very often she could feel in dumb Nature‟s stir and peace a nearness that is marvellous and sacred one: the Divine Force in her drew attracting the earth‟s subhuman children of birds and beast; she used to join the intense-coloured splendid lives of animals, birds, flowers and trees to her spirit‟s large and free delight. They opened to her with the simple heart. In man somewhat obscure and unquiet lives: but preferring the dark ignorance of their fallen life though it knows the divine Light but turns away from it. Among the many who came attracted with devotion to her she could find nowhere her partner of her great works, and the comrade of her soul and her other self who was made with her one like God and Nature. Some though approached near her and touched her and caught the fire and then failed, because her demand was unavoidable and her force was too pure. Thus though lighting earth around her like a sun, yet she remained in her inmost sky aloof as a celestial planet, and those she was most close a distance estranged her. Her mighty soul remained apart in the immortal planes as the gods live.

(367) As yet she had no link with the broad visible human world, in a small circle of young eager hearts, her being‟s early school and limited field as an apprentice in the business of earth-life and trained her heavenly nature to bear the burden of universal pain and thus satisfied in her little garden of the gods (garden of paradise the Nadanakanan) as blossoms a flower in an unvisited place. Though earth is still ignorant with regard to the inhabiting flame nursed and nourished by it, yet something in the depth of the world stirred and vaguely knew about her; there was a movement and a passionate call, in her mind-like sky a dream of seven coloured rainbow‟s enchantment was blossoming and awakened a hope of golden transformation; there stirred some secret wing of expectation, a growing sense of something new, and rare and beautiful gloomed and stole across the heart of Time. Thereafter a faint murmur with regard to her existence touched the earthly soil and was spread over, like a hidden need is fulfilled the world soul breathed and could know her; she became known appearing before the great world and the wonder created with regard to her existence lifted high up in the voice of poets like a hymn. As a key to a divine Light still kept hidden in being‟s cave, and the sun-word of an ancient mystery„s sense her name ran murmuring on the lips of men, lifted and sweet like a poem full of inspiration and struck in the rumour‟s winds from the epic harp unceasingly or sung like a chanted thought by the Famous poet. But that system of religious worship remained like worship of a sacred symbol. Like a lightning flash in the evening sky and a glory unapproachably divine her beauty and flaming strength were seen and felt from afar; and though she was admired, yet remained away from their seeking and beyond their receptivity. No equal heart came nearer to join her heart, no short lived earthly love could enter into her and attacked her calm, no hero‟s passion with its own strength and might could be able to seize her and no earthly eyes could be able to demand her replaying eyes‟ response. Her inner Power could filled with wonder and eagerness in this imperfect body of flesh and blood; the self-protecting genius ( the inner god in our body ) made up of mass of clay could know the goddess had come upon earth in the shape of the woman (368) and drew back from a touch beyond their own kith and kin because the earth-nature was bound in sensual life‟s narrow frame. The hearts of men are fund of the clay of their earthly relations and the spirit‟s lone and high Fire like intimations brought from the immortal planes by the blest that are too vast for souls not born to be the companion of God becomes unbearable for them. The greater souls must live here alone. Even though adored here yet he walks here in the mighty loneliness and his labour to create Beings of his own kind proved to be vain, his only comrade here is his inner Strength. Thus it was for a while with Savitri. All worshipped her marvellingly, but none dared to claim her. Her sun like mind remained high pouring its golden light on earth, her heart was a crowded temple of delight. Until the arrival of the moment of her fate her soul lived amidst those encircling lives like a single lamp lit in perfection‟s house and a bright pure image of god in a priestless temple.

-End of Canto Two

114

Canto Three The Call to the Quest (369) Out of the changeless origin‟s soul (From the primal eternal source of the universe) of the Morn that appeared to be the advent of a new creation came filled with an extraordinary and heart engrossed beauty bringing a greater sunlight and happier skies, Consequently an ancient aspiration of the world again sprouted new roots: the air drank deep of its unsatisfied desire; like souls that quiver at the approach of joy the high trees trembled by the wandering wind, and a songster bird coil hidden in the green secret bosom of the trees sang like a harp among the leaves forever its one lovely song tirelessly. At that moment king Aswapati could listened through the morning ray to sounds ever unheard by the sensual ear that were turned away from the terrestrial murmur and quickly moving away calls and answers mixed with their flood with it. On a subtle inner sky that encircles our lives opened were the inner spirit‟s trans-closed doors and heard the tones that were unheard in Nature (supernatural tones); across the deep urgency of the worldly cares and anxieties and the cyclic movement of earthly eager lives, there arose from the silent heart of the cosmic Void Earth‟s wordless prayer to the Inexpressible; he could hear the suppressed voice of the unborn Powers that were murmuring behind the luminous barriers of earthly Time. The mighty yearnings of the Earth again raised its flame of aspiration praying for a perfect life on earth for men and certainty in the uncertain mind and unstained bliss for suffering human hearts and an embodied Truth in an ignorant world and an advent of a godhead divinising mortal forms. A word that sprang from some far sky of thought, (370) admitted by the screened receiving recorder mind and passed through the echoing passages of his brain and left its print on the recording cells. The voice said, “O earth-born race you who do live compelled by tyrannical Forces and driven by Fate, O petty adventurers in an infinite world and prisoners of dwarf humanity, you who cannot rise beyond human levels how long would you be moving around the circling path of mind and your little human selfishness and petty earthly things? But you are not born and meant for a changeless littleness that you are now in, not created for the vain repetition of birth and death; you were created out of Immortal substance; your actions can become swift revealing steps of the Divine Truth and your life can become a changeful vessel for growing gods. A Seer, a strong Creator is within you, the stainless divine Grandeur keeps watching your life concentratedly, and Almighty powers are shut in Nature‟s cells. A greater destiny keeps on waiting for you at your gate: these transcient being if he wills can tune his acts to the scheme of the transcendent. He who now stares at the world with ignorant eyes had never taken his birth from the Inconscient‟s night, now he could not see the Truth but looks at its images only; he can be able to fill his orbs of sight with an immortal‟s look. Notwithstanding the short comings in you, the godhead shall grow within your hearts, you shall awake into the spirit‟s atmosphere and feel the breaking walls of mortal mind and hear the message due to absence of which the stir of life‟s heart becomes dumb, and you shall look through Nature with sun-facing eyelids and blow your conch-shells at the Eternal‟s gate. You are the creators of the earth‟s high change, and you are meant to cross the dangerous spaces of the soul and touch the mighty Divine Mother fully awake and meet the Omnipotent in this house of flesh (the body) and transform your life into the million-bodied One. The earth in which you walk is a border veiled from heaven; and the life you lead now conceals the divine light you actually are. (371) The flaming immortal Powers come and go in front of your doors; to exceed the trumpeting sounds of your thought far off beyond you the god-chant of hymns sounds, that are heard by a few and a fewer people than that dare to aspire for the goddess of the ecstasy and the light. An epic of hope and failure breaks earth‟s heart; and the force and will of earth are greater than her form and fate. The earth goddess caught in a net of transience and selfbound in the pastures of death and she dreams of life, self-tortured with the pains of hell aspires for joy and builds the edifice of hope on the altars of hopelessness, she knew that one high step might set free the universe from all the worldly bondages and suffering herself she waits to look for the greatness in her sons. But in the human heart the ascending fire of aspiration is dim, and as such the invisible Grandeur (the soul) sits there un-worshipped; man sees only the Highest in a limiting form or looks upon a Person and hears a Name. Man yields to ignorant Powers for little gains only or kindles the lights of his altar to worship a demon face. He loves the Ignorance that is the creator of his pain. Illusive fascination laid on his glorious strength; he has lost the inner Voice that led his thoughts, and covering the tripod seat of the divine voice illusive Idol fills the marvellous temple. Because the great Goddess of Illusion covers man with its veils, the soul‟s deep intimations though comes to him becomes futile, and the unending line of seer on earth becomes fruitless and the sages meditate in unsubstantial light, the poets could give their voice only to outward dreams, and the voice of the prophets are inspired by a homeless fire. Heaven‟s flaming lights descend on earth but returns back for want of proper receptivity on earth, the luminous divine Eye approaches and withdraws unwanted on earth; although Eternity speaks none could understand its word, and Fate is unwilling for that and the Bottomless depth denies; the Inconscient‟s mindless waters barricades all progress achieved on earth. Till now only Mind‟s screen is lifted a little; (372) the Wise could only see and know the partial Truth, the strong could only climb with great difficulty to a lowest height, and the hearts that were yearning eagerly given only one hour (very short period). The secret Poet gets silenced by telling a half of his tale only; and the gods in mortal forms are still very few.” The Voice thereafter having expressed the above vanished into its hidden skies. But like a shining answer from the gods to the above voice, Savitri approached through the sun-bright spaces of her father‟s palace. She came advancing amid tall trees that were looking as if pillars rose to heaven, she dressed in her flickering coloured robes and seemed to be burning towards eternal kingdoms as a bright moving torch of incense and of flame held by pilgrim hands and lifted in the sky-roofed invisible temple from earth. The arrival of Savitri

115 at that moment was like a gift of a revealing hour and king Aswapati saw through his inner sight that could reinterpret all about Savitri‟s past, present and future, Aswapati‟s sight was not limited now by the dull eyes of his body and could find newly through a gate of clear discovery, and could reach a new realisation that she was an intimation of the world‟s delight, this wonderful creature made by the divine Artist built like a cup of nectar for the thirsty gods, this living Scripture of Eternal bliss and a net of Sweetness woven from the thread of a golden fire manifested here. The lovely face of the image transformed became the deeper Nature‟s self-revealing sign, she looked like a gold-leaf where all the details of her past sacred births were written and she was a solemn world-symbol made chiseling out of life. Her brow looked like a clear copy of unstained heavens and a seat of meditation and defense, the very room of a meditating smile of Space, and a thoughtful line of infinity‟s symbol curve. Amid her cloudy multitude of thick opened hairs, her long eyes as if were shadowed by wings of Night, and under that moon-gold forehead‟s dreaming breadth these were looking like seas of love and thought that held the world; astonished at life and earth her eyes saw far truths.(373) Her mortal limbs were filled with a deathless meaning; that seemed like a golden vase made up of an artistic skill carrying the rhythmic sob of bliss of earth‟s mute adoration towards heaven released from beauty‟s cry of living form towards the perfection of eternal things. Savitri‟s living earthly body became transparent and made naked to Aswapati‟s view as an expressive deity. The graceful harmony of her shapes of mortal limbs that was beyond the range of surface sight and mortal sense became a strange significant image of a Power which renewed its mysterious descent into a human figure for its works and stood out in life‟s bold and sudden relief on the soil of this evolving universe, and like a godhead chiseled on a wall of thought and seen as if reflected in a mirror of the passing hours and placed in a vague temple of Matter as in cave of a church. Consequently the flitting values of Aswapati‟s mind which was abolished, his bodily sense renounced its ways of earthly sight; and now Savitri and Aswapati looked each other with immortal eyes. Arisen from the intense enchantment from his daily use of senses that hides the soul‟s truth with the outward form‟s disguise, Aswapati saw through the familiar lovely limbs of Savitri that the great and unknown spirit was born as his child. A deeper inner sight like extempore thoughts that know not their own scope rose in him. Then Aswapati spoke in sentences from the unseen Heights to those large and meditating depths from where love saw him across the small straits of mind. An abrupt passing phrase can change our life because the hidden inspirers of our speech sometimes use the formulas of the mood of a moment to weigh unconscious lips with words from Fate: Aswapati told “O Spirit, the traveller of eternity, who came here on earth from the immortal planes (374) equipped to face the greatest danger of life and place your conquering foot on the worldly Chance and Time, and moon shut in her circle of light in the sky dreams always to become luminous and beautiful like you. A mighty Presence in you still keeps defending your body. Perhaps the heavens above guard you as a great soul, your fate and your work are kept somewhere afar. Your spirit did not descend here on earth as a lonely star. In you the love‟s sacred beauty has been inscribed lively, you are the golden virgin‟s luminous scripture, the message of heavenly strength and bliss that you have carried within you is written in you in the Eternal‟s sun-white lettering and to whom you have opened your heart‟s jeweled strings he shall discover and heightened his life with it. O, rubies (jewels of Lotus colour) of silence, from your lips there flows out low laughter and music of peace, your eyes are luminous like star remain awake in sweet large night and your limbs are moulded like finelinked poems made of gold and have been stanzaed to glimmering rhythms by the artist gods, please depart where love and destiny waits for your charm and beauty. To find your life-partner proceed daringly in search of him through the deep world. Because on the eager breast of earth somewhere your unknown lover shall be waiting for you unknowingly. Your soul has the strength and does not need any other guide for finding your life partner than the One who shines within your heart‟s powers. The second self for whom your nature seeks shall draw near the to meet your advancing steps a close-bound traveller walking step by step with you shall walk until your body‟s end, he shall be the eminent player of your soul‟s harp‟s most intimate chords, and he who shall give voice to what is now mute in you. Then you shall grow like equally tuned living harp and become one with the tunes of difference and delight of the harp, you too will be responsive in divine and equal strains and discover new songs of the eternal tone. The only One force shall be your mover and guide, the only one light shall be around you and within; (375) holding your hand with his strong hand face Heaven‟s question to life: challenge against the stark test of the universe like immense disguise. Ascend to divine heights from the universal Nature; meet the high gods crowned with felicity, thereafter you shall meet a greater god who shall be your Timeless self.” This word of Aswapati was like a seed of all things that would happen in the future: a hand of some divine Greatness opened her heart‟s locked doors and showed her the work for which her strength was born. As when a mantra sinks in the Yoga‟s ear its message enters stirring the blind brain and keeps its sound in the dim ignorant cells of the brain; the hearer understands an exterior form of words and to know, meditates on it through his indicating thought it holds, though he attempts hard to understand with his labouring mind but could not find the real truth embodied in it and only finds bright hints of the same: then keeping silent in himself to realise it he meets the deeper hearing of his soul: the Word repeats itself in rhythmic tones: his thought, vision, feeling, sense, the body‟s self absorbed inexpressibly by the same and he undergoes a divine joy and an immortal change; he feels a Wideness and becomes a Power, all knowledge rushes on him like a sea: transformed by the white spiritual ray he walks in open heavens of joy and calm and sees the face of God and hears speech of the transcendent: thus an equal greatness was sown in Savitri‟s life. Consequently all accustomed scenes have become now for her as a play of the past; moving in a state of meditation amid familiar powers, touched by new largeness and fiery signs, she turned her sight to greatnesses that were as yet not owned by her; attracted by unknown sweet nesses her heart was thrilled with joy; and the secrets of an unseen world came nearer to her. The morning ascended up into a smiling sky, the sun descended from its

116 sapphire peak of trance sank into the burning gold of the evening; (376) like a luminous orphan moves here and there, the moon floated through heaven and sank below the forgetful edge of dream; the night lit the watch-fires of eternity. Then all withdrew back into Savitri‟s mind‟s secret caves, a darkness leaning on this heaven-bird‟s wings and screened her senses from external sight and opened to her the deepest depths of sleep. When the pale dawn slipped through Night‟s shadowy guard, then the new-born light‟s desire to see Savitri‟s face proved futile; the palace where Savitri was living from her childhood became empty because the domineering enjoyer of its daily joys was far away on her quest; the lucent floors of the palace was not reflected with colours by her shining feet that were like moonbeams: the beauty and divinity had already left the palace. The delight fled out of the palace to search the great world for her life partner.

-End of Canto Three

117

Canto Four The Quest (377) Now for the quest of her life partner all the ways of the whole world were opened before Savitri. At first her mind was filled with the miracles of the new bright scenes kept her sight fixed on the same. But as she moved across the various diverse scenes of the earth on her way a deeper consciousness sprang up in her: she felt herself as if she was a citizen of many scenes and countries and each soil and country she had made its home and took all people and groups as her own till the whole destiny of mankind turned to be hers. These unknown territories that were seen on her way were known and neighbours to her inner sense, natural sceneries that were now seen by her frequently, were like lost forgotten fields of her past, many cities, rivers, plains seen by her were like slow and recurring memories in front of her, the stars in the night‟s sky were her past‟s brilliant friends, the passing winds murmured ancient things to her ears and she met nameless comrades who were once loved by her in the past. All was a part of her old forgotten selves: either seen indistinctly or with a lightning flash of sudden hints and her acts remembered a line of action of the power of her past lives, even the purpose of her movement was not new: she was a traveller to a predestined high goal, a memory awakened in her remembering witness soul that she was travelling to make again a journey often made in her past lives. A direction turned the dumb revolving wheels of her chariot and from the time of the birth of man as assigned to him unchangeably in their eager body of speed of the wheels the dim-disguised godheads rode her chariot towards human lives, they were the protectors of man‟s inner and outer law, and at once the representative of man‟s spirit‟s will and witness and regulators of his fate. (378) Unyieldingly trustworthy to their work they hold man‟s nature‟s order of succession in their control carrying the unbroken thread that man had spun in his past lives. They were the on looker on his destiny‟s regulated turn leading to the joys he has won and the pains he has invited, they even intervene in his accidental steps. Nothing is blank or insignificant of what we think and do; in every step a knot of energy loosed in every step and proceeds in its own way. The shadowy preservers of our immortal past have made our fate a fruit of our works and we reap the fruit of our forgotten deeds from the furrows made by the labour of our will. But since the tree that bore this fruit is unseen by us and we live in a present born from the unknown past, those fruits of work seem as nothing but parts of a mechanic Force to a mechanic mind tied by earth‟s laws; yet they are the instruments of a supreme Will and from above watched by a still all-seeing Eye. A foreseeing creator of Fate and Chance who builds our lives on a foreseen design and knows the meaning and consequence of each step and watches the inferior powers that cause obstacles on our movement. Savitri could know that upon her silent heights a calm Presence throned above her brows who saw the goal and chose each fateful turn of her life, used the body as its base; and her all-seeing eyes were the fires of its searchlight and the hands that held the body like a chariot was its living tools; all these are the working of an ancient plan and a way proposed by an unfailing Guide. Savitri on her way coming across wide noon and glowing afternoons and met with Nature and human forms and listened to the innumerable voices of the world; driven by her inner guidance she followed her long road of her quest and remained silent in the luminous depths of her heart, like a bright cloud through the shining day. (379) At first her chariot ran far through populated paths: thereafter admitted to the lion eye of many States and theatres of the noisy acts of man, her chariot made up of arts and images chiseled by nails with its various coloured wheels passed through noisy markets and sentry towers and through gates figured with many ancient images and high gates made up of cutting stone as if seen in dreams and gardens hung beneath the blue skies, watched by guards in their defensive dresses pillared assembly halls could be seen, small temples where one calm Image of god watched man‟s life and temples as if made by exiled gods to imitate their lost eternity. On her journey often from golden evening to bright dawn in palaces of kings in sleeping mood where jewel-lamps were burning on colourfully painted walls and the stone window was facing at moonlit branches of trees, Savitri in a half-conscious state of the slow listening night between banks of sleep and took rest there in a dim sleep. Savitri‟s fate-driven chariot passed through small and big villages, homes of life that were engaged in the soil that they cultivated for the sustenance of their short-lived lives and kept their old repeated course without change in the circle of sky that remains unaltered above our mortal labour. Now her chariot turned away from the thinking creature‟s burdened lives to free and griefless spaces that were not yet disturbed by human joys and fears. That country was of the childhood days of the primeval earth, and glad and still timeless thoughts were spread there, man have abstained as yet to fill the place with his own cares and anxieties, there existed fields of the empire that are eternally planted with trees and grass-lands that were bathed in sun-light flashing off and on and stirred by wind: or mid green forests and hills of rough precipice, in the groves murmurous humming wild bees or crossing the long lapsing voice of rivers with silver flood like a swift hope journeying among its dreams, the chariot of the golden bride rolled on in a hastening speed. (380) Out of the world‟s great inhuman past there came memories of those paths and ageless broken small remains came, domains of light given as feudal rights to ancient calm listened to the sound of the hooves of the horses of Savitri‟s chariot to which those were not accustomed and large imperishable complex silences absorbed Savitri into their green secrecy and slow and silent subtle magical nets of coloured flowers surrounded the wheels of her chariot. Along these lonely ways the strong persistent feet of Time became soft and forgotten its titanic speed and its dire and disastrous circuits. There the inner ear that listens to solitude leaning self-absorbed boundlessly could hear the rhythm of the intense wordless Thought that gathers in the silence behind life and the low sweet unuttered voice of earth in the great passion of her sun-kissed trance that ascended with its eager subdued (low tone).

There the all-seeking tranquil mind remaining far away from its blind outwardness of will, could feel the all-sustaining and tireless clasp

118 of the mute patient love of that place and could know that the soul is the mother of our forms. This spirit getting stuck often in the fields of sense, and this mortal creature crushed and wounded in the mortar of lives could find broad spaces of release in this territory. This world is not yet attacked by the worldly pain and suffering. In this place the Earth-Mother kept for us still reserved her severely selfdisciplined regions and meditating depths, her solitary and inspiring lonely impersonal planes and the mightiness of her joyful rendezvous. The Earth-Mother uttering the name of Mahasaraswati at the tip of her tongue nursed her symbol mysteries and guarded for her pure-eyed sacredness the valley-clefts between her breasts of joy and raised her mountain altars for the sacrificial fires of dawn and the sandy expanses of her ocean-beaches for the rapturous wanderings and (381) the huge chanting of hymns of her forests that were like prophets. There existed fields of her lonely joy, silent and happy plains bathed in the Light filled with the cry of birds and various colours of flowers and wonderful solitudes of beauty lit by the light of her moons, and the grey seer-evenings lighted with the stars and the shadowy movements in the night‟s infinitude there stood adorning the Earth. The majestic Earth-Mother feeling extreme joy in her Creator‟s eye, felt her nearness to her desired God in earth‟s breast, and still conversed with the Divine Light behind the veil, and still communed with the Eternity beyond. The Earth- Mother invited there a few and fit inhabitants to share the glad communion of her peace; and the breadth and summit of that place were their natural home. The hero king-sages freed from their labour of life and the warrior tension of their work came to the Earth-Mother‟s cheerful sessions in these forests, there the entire struggle in their life was ended and the interval of relief (calm) was present in their front. They lived in happiness with the wild birds, beasts and flowers and sunlight and the murmurous sound of the leaves caused by the passage of winds, and heard the wavering of the wild winds in the night, they meditated with the silent constant ranked stars in the sky, and living like in blue tents lodged in the mornings identified with the glorious noons. Some of them plunged deeper, called back from the life‟s external attachment into secret fire of privacy, and in the soul‟s sacred star-white inner chamber they lived with everlasting Bliss; they heard a profound Voice in the joy and silence and could witness an all-revealing Divine Light. There they surmount all differences created by time, with their own heart-strings the worldly like fiber was woven; they were closely attracted to the hearts that beats in every breast, they felt the Presence of one soul in all by the grace of the boundless Love. Attuned themselves to the great Silence and the world-rhyme loosened the knot of their imprisoning mind; (382) there they achieved the wide tranquil witness sight, the Nature‟s great spiritual eye (third eye) was opened before them; their daily yogic ascension rose to the height of heights: the Divine Truth leaned down to them from its transcendent kingdom; above them the mystic suns of eternity were ablaze. Some other nameless stark ascetics without home remaining silent and abandoning motion and desire sat absorbed there alone and aloof from creatures on concentration‟s luminous voiceless peaks pure in tranquil heights of self in trance, around them grouped like thoughts of some vast moods the hermits who had left the world with their matted hair sat immobile as passionless hills awaiting the command of the Infinite for their final liberation. Some other seers attuned to the Will of the universal soul, content with the Divine who smiles behind the earthly forms, lived in everlasting sorrowless life freed from the daily demands of life. In some other places like green trees stand encircling a hill young grave disciples gather around them and grew up by their touch, trained to the simple act and conscious word, and greatened within ascend to meet their heights. Somewhere farwandering seekers on the Eternal‟s path carrying the aspiration of their soul came to these peaceful hermitage spot and spent the treasure of a great silent hour and bathed in the gracious sight of saints and sages they became pure and that peace ruled them without any insistence and by the influence of that they discover the Paths of calm. Somewhere the Infants of the monarchy of the worlds, the heroic leaders of the future and the king-children were nurtured in that spacious atmosphere like lions playing under the sky and the sun, and received half-consciously the god like influence of the saints: formed by the high thought of the saints they sang higher literature and learned the wide magnificence of their moods that makes us comrades of the cosmic passion, thus they no longer were chained to their small separate selves, (383) becoming supple and solid beneath the eternal hand held Nature with a bold and friendly clasp and served in her the great Power that shapes her works. Like a large and wide continent where the warm sun shines in a great range equally to all fairly in joy, these sages became identified with all souls and freed from their narrowing bonds, lived enjoying God‟s joy in all things. They helping the slow arrival of the gods in the world, sowing immortal thoughts in young mind they lived, taught the great Truth to which man‟s race must rise or opened the gates of freedom to a few. Communicating the Divine Light to our struggling world they lived like spirits released from the dull yoke of Time, and comrades and vehicles of the cosmic Force using a natural magnificence like the suns: their speech and their silence was a help to earth. A magic happiness flowed from their touch; in the calmness of that forest Oneness was all-pervading, the wild beast joined there in friendship with its prey, the love that flows from the one Mother‟s breast persuading the hatred and strife to cease healed generously the hard and wounded world. Some others escaped from the limits of the kingdoms of human thought goes to that place where the being of Mind sleeps motionlessly awaiting for the birth of the divine Light and return back from there thrilled with a nameless Force, intoxicated with the honey of lightening in their cells; springing forcefully the intuitive knowledge into their speech they became possessed and quivered and luminous with the inspired word, and hearing the subtle voice that pervaded the heavens, carrying the splendour that has lit the suns they sang names of Infinity and immortal powers in rhythms that reflects the moving worlds, and sight‟s sound-waves that breaks the great depths of the soul and sprang like fountains. Some others lost their personal self and their way of thought in a motionless ocean of impersonal Power, receiving the vision of the Infinite‟s light they sat mighty, (384) or becoming comrades of the everlasting Will surveyed the plan of the past and future Time. Some others are flying like birds out of the cosmic sea and vanished (take Nirvana) into a bright formless

119 Supreme Vast: some others watched silently the universal dance of Nataraj or helped the world by their world-indifference. Some without watching any more merged in the Unique Supreme Self and absorbed in an extinction like trance from which no soul returns, some others closed for ever the mystical world-lines and cast away their chains of birth and person and unaccompanied reached the Inexpressible.

As the sunbeam floats across a shady place, the immaculate golden princess Savitri came in her carven chariot crossing among the seats of meditation of the sages and saints. Often in twilight (light from the sky when is sun is below the horizon in the evening) mid herds of cattle returning home thickening with their dust the shadowy evening and when the loud day had slipped below the horizon, arriving in a peaceful hermit grove took rest drawing round her like a robe the spirit of calm meditating consciousness and the strong effects of prayer of that place. Or somewhere near a river that flowed curling down like a lion‟s hair with its orange-brown coloured waters and the trees standing near its shore as if worshipping in prayer and the sacred atmosphere of the towers and temples existed there summoned by gestures the hurrying wheels of her chariot to stay their speed and she took rest there. Sometime at a place that seemed like solemnity, (ceremony‟s and gravity) where the mind remembers the primeval silence and to the heart the grandiose voices of the past called and the large liberty of the meditating saints and sages had left the long impress of the scene of their soul‟s age old knowledge, there the daughter of Flame inclined to the peaceful touch of that place awake in a clear dawn or moonlit night and received the silent splendour of that place without closing her tranquil eyelids and there felt the relationship of the eternal calm. But suddenly the morning broke reminding Savitri of her quest and she rose (385) from her state of sleep or rest from the gross bed or from the mats where she was resting and went compelled on her unfinished way following the destined orbit of her life, like a desire that questions silent gods and like a star that passes to some bright Beyond. From there Savitri arrived at great solitary plains where man was only a passer-by towards human scenes or strove to live alone in the vastness of Nature and overwhelmed by the immensity of this world and unaware of his own infinity called for help to the soul like invisible Powers. There the Mother Earth showed Savitri her multifarious scenes and called her with a far and nameless voice. There the mountains of the forests in their ascetic solitude, the forests with their multitudinous songs open to view to her the doors of the concealed divinity. Or somewhere on dreaming plains, wideness‟s that are averse to extension as if an age‟s end under the attracting beauty of a sunken sky of a dull enchanted eve, in an atmosphere like a death bed Savitri lay impassively, or sometimes her chariot passed an eager assembly of hills that lift their heads to hunt a sky looked like a cave of wild beasts, or it passed through an unknown and empty land where the solitary summits camped in a queer and strange heaven, and stood like silent sentries beneath a floating moon, or her chariot wandered in some lonely tremendous forest where the crickets‟ (grasshopper like insects‟) cry was ringing for ever or followed a long shining serpentine road through fields and pastures bathed in still light or it reached sometimes in a wild beauty of a desert space where neither it was ploughed nor any cattle had grazed there and Savitri slept upon the bare and thirsty sands amid the haunt of savage wild animal in the attraction of sleep in the night. But still her destined quest was unaccomplished and she didn‟t find the predestined face for which she sought amid the sons of men. A great silence covered that royal day when Savitri and Satyavan would meet: (386) the months had passed feeding the passion of the sun and now it‟s burning breath assailed the soil. The heat of the summer that was tremendous, like a tiger spread over through the fainting earth; and all was as if licked by a burning tongue. The winds of the spring season have now failed and the sky was set like bronze.

-End of Canto Four

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BOOK FIVE THE BOOK OF LOVE

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Canto One The Destined Meeting-Place (389) Now the place and time to determine the future of Savitri‟s meeting with her life partner were near; and she had neared her nameless goal unknowingly. Because though upon the work of the all-wise Fate a disguise of blind deceitful chance is laid, yet our acts interpret an omniscient Force that dwells inevitably in the stuff of universal things, and nothing happens in the cosmic play except at its time and in its fore destined place. Savitri came to a place where the wind was blowing softly and faintly that seemed as a place to be of sacred temple and of youth and joy, it was a world of highland of free and green delight where spring and summer lay together and carried on a conflict in an idle and friendly debate disputing unarmed with laughter as to who should rule. As if a soul had looked out from earth‟s face there expectation suddenly rose up beating its wings, all that in Savitri felt the approach of an immediate change and forgetting the joys of her daily life and common dreams, obedient to Time‟s call and to the spirit‟s fate, was lifted to a calm and pure beauty that lived under the eyes of Eternity. Like the armoured iron lined army‟s leaders pushing towards rival shoulders nearer heaven a crowd of sky high mountains raised their heads; and earth laid prostrate there beneath their burdened feet of stone. Below the mountains the emerald like green forest with their dreaming borders as in a solitarily sleep were laid inclined: there like faintly shining thread of pearl rivers ran with partially clear waters. Among the happy leaves of the forest‟s trees a long breath was wandering here and there; a cool pleasant smelling faint slow breeze with slow pleasure-burdened feet was blowing faltered the flowers. (390) Somewhere like a living still lightning flash the white crane stood, peacock and parrot beautified the soil and tree like jewels, somewhere the soft voice of the dove (pigeon like bird with small hard and thick body) enriched the enchanting atmosphere and firewinged wild-drakes swam there in pools containing silver like clear water. There earth lain like resting alone below her great lover Heaven uncovered to her lover‟s bluish white eyes. In her luxurious ecstasy of joy earth unreluctantly spent her love-music and wasted the passionate pattern of her flowers and the festival merriment of her scents and colours. Around the forest a cry and forceful springing jump and hurry of the stealthy footfalls of the four-footed animals pursuing their prey was heard, and there in that forest land the centaur‟s lustrous hairy bright green hairs like lion was wavering, and the gold and bright blue warmth and bright flame of that land was felt around. In that forest land a magician of her enchanted felicities, the joyful sensuous-perceptive hearted, impassive divine soul the universal Life‟s vibration flew there or hid in her delightful chambers in the forest; behind all these the universal Nature‟s grandiose calm was spread over. There the primeval peace was present and in its bosom held without any difficulty the struggle of the birds and beasts of the forest. There the skilled imaginary minded man has not entered to lay his hand to pull out of shape the happy Inconscient things of the forest, thought (a disturbing element of mind) was not there nor the measurer keen sighted labour, there life had not learned its disharmony with its aim. There the Mighty Mother Nature lay outstretched comfortably at her happy bed. There all was in a line attuning with the satisfied original plan of the Mother Nature, driven by the inspiration of the universal will of joy the trees were flowered and fruited in their green felicity and the children of wild birds and beasts were not depressed with the thought of their pain and joy. At the end a downward sloping path of the dense forest and grave questioning hills and peaks like a bare austerity of the soul armed, remote, solitary and grand like the thoughtless infinities that lie as if behind the enchanted smile of the Almighty Shiva‟s dance were seen. There the dense forest‟s head touched the heaven (391) as if the blue-throated ascetic, looked from the stony strong mountain cell at the brief gladness of life and his vast extended spirit was lain behind. As of a soul retiring from the world a mighty murmur of the retreating immerse retreat of the forest land and in its sad and limitless call crowded around Savitri‟s ears. This was the scene of the place that the ambiguous divine Mother had chosen for Savitri‟s brief joyful time; here in this lonely forest far away from the world Savitri began her part of the worldly joy and struggle. Here before Savitri the mystic courtyards and all the secret doors of beauty and surprise and the wings that murmur in the golden house of God, the temple of sweetness and its side luminous gates of entry were disclosed. Love in the image of Satyavan who is a stranger on the sorrowful roads of this worldly Time, immortal under the yoke of death and fate and a sacrificing of the worldly joys and pains met Savitri in this dense forest.

-End of Canto One

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Canto Two Satyavan (392) On this day of Destiny all awoke in Savitri‟s memory; her path of journey on her quest did not run into the risk of great grave forest depths filled with its great monotone, the morning like lustrous seer above, the passion of the mountain tops looking as if reaching the sky and the titanic murmur of the endless forest, but turned away to move towards human homes. As if surrounded with silent hint and magic sign a small gate to enter into the dwelling of joy were there, upon the margin of an unknown world a sloped curve of a sunlit secret place of dwelling was seen by Savitri, there the gardens of group of trees with strange flowers looked like eyes of nymphs (forest goddess) from their secrecies into open space, the branches of the high trees of the forest whispering to a constant sunlight sheltered there a dim and screened felicity and there on the partially inclined grasses adorned with green and gold colour slowly an inactive inconstant breeze was blowing like a fleeting long breath of happiness. Hidden in the depth of the forest‟s loneliness amid the leaves the intimate voices of the forest birds call was heard like enchanted and unseen desires answering to a low insistent cry of another bird. Behind that the remoteness of the dumb greenness of the forest was lain in a sleepy state, those were passionate Nature‟s veiled dwelling and denied to all except her own inner vision that was lost and blind. Earth in this beautiful place of shelter free from the worldly cares and anxieties whispered to the soul a song of strength and peace. There existed only one sign of human movements was seen: a single part ran thin and arrow like into the middle of the vast and secret hermit life, and pierced into its enormous dream of solitude. (393) Here first Savitri met on the uncertain earth the one for whom her heart had come so far. There on Nature‟s background created by the warm breadth of life like a picture drawn in the house of dream as might a soul stand out for a moment against the forest edge between the green and golden sunlight, Satyavan appeared. His figure was as if a weapon of living Light, in a upright posture and exalted like a spear of God expressed the dazzling brightness of the morn. Like broad and peaceful heavens his glorious and clear brow was seen as an early rising wisdom‟s inscription, his limbs were formed by freedom‟s absolute beauty, and the joy of life was dazzling on his open face. In his look all the morns of the gods were reflected, his head was lustrous with divine light like that of a youthful Rishi (Saint), his body was like a lover‟s and king‟s. His body was built like a moving statue of divine delight made luminous the border of the forest with the great sunrise of his force. Out of the ignorant and eager labour of the worldly time forsaking man‟s loud drama of life he came to the forest led by the wisdom of an adverse Fate to meet the ancient Mother in her forest gardens. He had grown in the forest in the divine communion of the ancient Mother as an adopted-child of beauty and solitude, and a heir to the lonely wisdom of the centuries, and a brother of sunshine and sky, a wanderer in deep communion with the dense depth and the boarders of the forest. Studying the mystic scriptures of the forms of Nature he became the Veda-knower of the unwritten book and learnt the deeper significances of the mysterious secrets of the scriptures, and learnt the great imagination of the field of Nature, taught by the inner greatness of the rivers and forests and the voices of the sun, and star and flame and the chant of magical singers sat on the boughs of the trees (394) and the dumb teachings of the four-footed wild animals. Helping the Nature‟s slow great hands with confident steps he leaned to her influence like flower to rain, and like the natural growth of flower and trees he grew, and widened by the touches of universal Nature‟s creative hours. The mastery free natured beings have become his own along with their assent to joy and their right to great calm was possessed by him, identified with the single Spirit that dwells in all, he laid his experience at the feet of the Godhead (the world Mother); his mind was open to the infinite mind; his acts were rhythmically attuned with the primal force of Nature; he has surrendered his mortal thoughts to the mother Nature. On that fateful day he had turned his feet from his daily accustomed paths; because the Supreme Fate knowing every moment‟s load of our feet can regulate all our studied or careless steps, that force had laid the charm of destiny on his feet and drawn him to the flowering boarder of the forest.

At first Savitri‟s sight was fixed on life‟s million shapes impartially to fill its treasure house along with the sky, flower, hill, and star and dwelt rather on the bright harmonious scene. It saw the green-gold sleepy grassland‟s grasses swaying with the movement of the slow wind and the branches of the trees frequented by the wild bird‟s call. Awake in the lap of Nature and as yet had an indefinite view of worldly life, the eager prisoner in a mortal form on earth that came from the Infinite, the immortal wrestler Savitri in its mortal house, with her pride, power, passion of a struggling God, saw this image of veiled deity Satyavan, this thinking master creature of the earth, and the last result under the beauty of the stars, but she could only see him like fair and common forms and to see him no artist spirit of her sight was needed and she puts aside the picture of the image in her memory‟s shadowy rooms. At times a look or a posture decides our Fate that is in an unbalanced state. Thus in such a moment that was most important for her, (395) and wandering not being guided by the slow surface mind, her inattentive searching eye lids admired a perfunctory beauty and did not care to wake her body‟s spirit to its king. Thus Savitri might have passed on ignorant roads of chance missing the call of Heaven, and losing life‟s aim but her inner god awoke her conscious soul in time. Now her inner sight settled and caught everything and all in her was changed.

At first Savitri‟s mind at first dwelt in ideal dreams, and those intimate transformers of earth‟s signs that make known things a hint of unseen worlds, and saw in that spot in Satyavan an incomparable figure of an exceptionally great creative god, he was a symbol figure standing mid earth‟s scenes, and a king of life drawn like a picture in a tender atmosphere. Yet this scene was nothing but a momentary day dream; because Savitri‟s heart suddenly looked out at Satyavan, and to that passionate seeing used any considered

123 thought cannot match, and she knew him as one nearer than her own nearest heart strings. All in a moment in Savitri was filled with surprise and possessed, all that were lain covered in the Inconscient ecstasy or under imagination‟s coloured eyelids were upheld in a large air of mirror of dream; suddenly exploded like flame of fire in her for the new creation of the world, and Savitri was born to new things in that flame. A mysterious clamour arose from her inner depths, like one who slept with happy dreams drawn and stricken erect, her life ran to look from every gate of her sense-organs: like moon-mist heavens glad and indistinct thoughts, feelings as when a universe takes birth passed through the heaving of her bosom‟s space like an invasion of a group of armies of golden gods: arising to a hymn of those wonder‟s priests her soul opened wide its doors to this new sun Satyavan. Consequently a magical change took place, and the transformation came; the face of Satyavan missioned from the heaven beyond worked out the great magical enchantment of God. In the nameless light of two approaching eyes (396) there appeared a swift and fateful turning of Savitri‟s life and stretched to splendour of unknown worlds. Then Savitri‟s heart trembling with mystic shock moved in her breast and replied like a bird who hears his comrade bird calling upon a nearby branch of trees. The hooves of the fast running horses of her chariot and its large wheels ceased moving from there and the chariot stood like an arrested wind. Then Satyavan looked out from his soul‟s doors and felt the enchantment of the pleasant tender voice of Savitri filled his youth‟s colourful environment and felt the charming miracle of her perfect face. Absorbed by the honey of Savitri‟s strange flower like mouth‟s lips and attracted by the soul-spaces that were opening round a brow, Satyavan turned to that vision like a sea that surges towards the moon and enjoyed a happy dream of beauty and of change, discovered a golden circle of light around her mortal head and adored a new divinity in the universal things. His self-bound nature as if fallen in fire merged in Savitri, his life was possessed by another‟s life. On seeing Savitri as at the touch of a new infinite the luminous lonely inner gods of his brain fell flat from their brightness to worship a godhead greater than their own. An unknown overpowering force drew Satyavan to Savitri. Satyavan filled with wonder came across the golden sun lighted grassland towards her: his sight met her sight and stuck close together to each other in an embrace. As if a span and arch of meditating light encircled by a circle of thoughts, and as through some secret cloudlike light was half seen; Savitri‟s inner vision still remembering knew that the forehead of Satyavan exhibit the crown of all her past and his two eyes were her constant and eternal stars, comrade of many lives and the supreme possessing eyes of Satyavan claimed her soul, the eyelids were known through many lives like large imperishable frames of love. Satyavan met in Savitri‟s eyesight his future‟s scene (397) a promise, a presence and a fire, an embodiment of a living figure of his dreams of ages, a mystery of the joy for which all in this world of short-lived life eagerly yearns now made his very own in material shape. By seeing her Satyavan could realise that the Golden figure that was possessed by him had in its breast the key of all his aims, and was a charm to bring the Immortal‟s bliss on earth, to bring the heaven‟s truth to our mortal thought and to lift the earth-hearts nearer to the Eternal‟s sun she had come. In these great spirits now incarnate here Love brought down power out of eternity to make the mortal life his new deathless base. His passion for Love surged like a wave from the fathomless depths; although it leaped to earth from the far forgotten heights, yet it kept its nature of infinity here on earth. Although as unknown beings we seem to meet on this mute breast of the forgetful globe but our lives are not foreigners nor do we join here to each other as unknowns moved by an influence of a causeless force. Here on earth across the stream of dividing Time the soul can recognise its answering soul, on life‟s roads this engrossed secret traveller turning his face recognises familiar magnificences in an unknown face and touched by the warning finger of a swift love it quivers again to an immortal joy wearing a mortal body for delight. There exist a Power within us that knows beyond the knowledge of our human minds; we are greater than our thoughts, and sometimes earth opens that vision here. To live and love are signs of infinite things of an invisible world and Love is a glory descended from the eternity‟s kingdoms. Though Love has been embarrassed, disfigured and mocked by despicable mights of earth that steal his name, shape and ecstasy, yet he still is the godhead by whose grace the whole universe can be transformed. A mystery of the presence of Love wakes in our worldly Inconscient stuff, (398) and a divine bliss is born that can new make our life. Here on earth Love dwells in us like a bud of the flower awaiting for its blossoming in a rapid moment of our soul or he wanders in his enchanted sleep mid thoughts and things; Love is a child-god at play in this world, he seeks for himself (his original source) in many hearts, minds and living forms: he waits for a sign by which he can know and when it comes blindly wakes up to a voice, a look, a touch and the meaning of a face. Love‟s instrument is the dim bodily mind of earth, that now grown forgetful of his heavenly insight, he holds on some sign of outward beauty to guide him mid the crowd of the universal Nature‟s hints, searches heavenly truths into his similar earthly shapes, and for the sake of godhead desires the image of god, and seeks the immortality of form and takes the body as a soul chiseled out of stone. Love‟s adoration like a mystic seer looks through Vision at the invisible and in the earthly alphabet discovers a godlike significance; but the mind only thinks, “Look, the one for whom my life has waited so long unfulfilled, suddenly the supreme ruler of life is present.” Heart feels for the stirring heart, limb calls for answering limb; all try hard to enforce the unity that exists in One and All. Remaining too far from the Divine, Love seeks his truth, but Life force is blind and the instruments deceive and Powers are there that always try to make it lower in nature. Still Love‟s true vision can come and joy can arrive. As rare is the vessel that can hold God‟s birth on earth, so rare is the cup to hold the divine love‟s nectar wine; and a soul that is made ready through a thousand years is the living mould to hold the Descent of the supreme. Although these spirits were unknown to each other‟s sight, though their life and mind had changed to hold a new significance (399) their bodies were the admixture up the flow of numberless births and the spirit to the spirit was the same. Surprised by a joy for which both had waited long, the lovers met upon their different paths, they were travellers across the limitless plains of Time, drawn together from their

124 journeying on the fate-led paths came to the self-closed solitude of their past human lives and to a swift joyful dream of future joy and the unexpected meeting of their four eyes. By the revealing grandeur of a look between them and smitten by form their spirit‟s memory woke in their sense. Consequently the mist that lain as a bar between these two lives was torn; Savitri‟s heart was opened and Satyavan‟s heart was also turned to find her heart, as a star is attracted by another star in the heaven, they surprised by seeing each other and rejoiced and wove the thread of unity in a silent look. A moment of the ray of eternity passed and began an hour in the world that would give birth to a new Age.

-End of Canto Two

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Canto Three Satyavan and Savitri (400) These spirits coming out of the dumb mystery of the past life and in a present moment unaware of forgotten bonds of the past Satyavan and Savitri met upon the roads of Time. Yet due to inner awakening of their secret conscious souls warned by the first call of a delightful voice and the first sight of a destined face they at once became aware of each other. As when a being calls to a being from its inner depths that lies behind the screen of external sense and tries hard to find the heart discovering word, and the passionate speech revealing the soul‟s need, but then the mind‟s ignorance veils the inner sight, only through our earthly coverings a little hole is made, so now Satyavan and Savitri met in that fateful hour and in their inner depths their soul awoke, but as their remembrance was lost in their mind the oneness felt and missed. Thus Satyavan first spoke to Savitri “O you who came to me across the Time‟s silences, yet your voice has wakened my heart to an unknown bliss, you might be mortal or immortal in your bodily frame, and since more than earth speaks to me from your soul and more than the earthly sight your sight surrounds me, hence please disclose in what name you are known amongst men? You who were shaped like a golden maid and splendour like Sun Light from where you have come arisen like a dawn filling the days of my spirit and reached into the lonely borders of my life, shining brighter than my summer and brighter than the flowers of my garden? I know that the mighty gods are friends of earth. Amid the magnificent and spectacular shows of day and night, I have travelled long with my pilgrim soul absorbed by the marvel of familiar things of the earth.

(401) Earth could not conceal her secret powers from me: even though wandering mid an earthly scene and the common surface of earthly things my inner vision was not hampered by the forms of earth; the Godhead looked at me from the familiar scenes of earth. I have witnessed the marriage of the pure unmarried daughters of dawn behind the luminous curtains of the sky or competing in joy with brighter steps of the morning I walked along the sleeping like indolent coasts of noon or and passing through great waste regions of light and fire and crossed the gold deserts of sunlight or met the moon floating through heaven in amazement in the uncertain wideness of the night or met the stars that marched along their sentry routes pointing out their spears through the infinite skies: the day and night reveled before me their hidden shapes; many figures from secret coasts have come to me and their happy faces looked on me from ray and flame. I have heard strange voices that cross the waves of the upper regions of the sky, the magical song of the Centaur (man cum horse) has throbbed my ears with emotion; I have had a brief look of the heaven‟s Apsaras bathing in the pools, I have seen the wood-goddesses looking through the opening between the leaves; the winds have shown me their dancing gods (like the dance of Kali), I have also seen the princes of the Sun dazzling in light in their thousand-pillared homes of light. Hence now there arises in my mind a dream and a doubt in my heart that leaving some wonderful couch beyond our sky risen in a wide morning of gods you have come driving your horses from the Thunderer‟s worlds (kingdom of Indra). Although your beauty and charm do relate to heaven yet much rather my thoughts would rejoice to know that mortal sweetness smiles in your sweet mortal lips and your heart can beat beneath a human sight and your golden breast can thrill with a look and its passion can answer to an earth-born voice. If you can feel our time-troubled affections and (402) earth‟s pleasantness and comfortability of simple things can satisfy you, and if your eye sight can live satisfied on seeing the earthly dust, and this summary of heavenly delight your golden body can idle away time playfully with earthly tiredness, and by the pressure of your feet on our earth you can pour down grace, and the meager, sweet and short-lived sweetness of our earthly food and its flow of leaping wine can delay your stay here on earth then please come down to us descending from your chariot. Let your journey be stopped here. My father‟s hermitage covered with wild creepers and surrounded by the long, tall trees that look like silent kings and sung to by the voices of many coloured birds whose music notes transcribed in passionate coloured letterings of the branches of the trees repeated their chants and fills the moments with their soft pleasing cry. Amid the welcome humming of the wild bees please conquer our honeyed kingdom of the great forest; if you permit me I shall lead you there into an abundant life. This sylvan (forest land‟s) hermit life is plain and simple; yet it is adorned with the jewellery of the earth. The frantic winds run like visitors amidst the oscillating tops of the trees, and the heaven‟s sentries of peace seated on a purple canopy of sky above looked down on a rich secrecy and hush below and through these calm lives there the forest waters flew chanting all auspicious hymn of marriage songs within, Great and ever whispering many-formed forest gods around held in their arms the human hour and take them as their guest in their centuried luxuries. The mornings come here adorned with gold and green colours, sunlight and shadow combined together paint the walls of our hermitage to make a resting chamber fit for your stay.” Savitri remained silent for a while without any answer as if hearing still Satyavan‟s voice and though unwilling to break the enchantment, then she answered in a meditative mood, “I am Savitri, princess of Madra. Who are you? What musical names on earth make you known to men? What trunk of a kingly tree watered by fortunate streams (403) has flowered at last upon one happy branch? Why do you live in this pathless forest far away from the task that your glorious youth demands, in a place frequented by ascetics and earth‟s wilder children wander (wild animals) and birds and where only with your witness soul you move in Nature‟s green inhuman loneliness, surrounded by great silences of the forest and the blind murmur of primeval calms?” Satyavan replied to Savitri: “In times when King Dyumatsena who had a clear eyesight once ruled in the kingdom of Shalwa, and his kingdom was spread through all the planes from behind the tops of these tall trees and passing its days of green delight in confident converse with the traveller winds and turns looking back towards the southern skies and leans its flank upon the solemn hills. But the impartial goddess of Fate removed her blessing hands from my

126 father‟s head. Consequently a persistent night covered the paths of the strong man, there reigns darkness only, the brilliant gods of heaven have withdrawn the gifts endowed by them indifferently, and took back their grand and helping ray from his blank eyes and led away from his side the uncertain goddess of Fate (Mahalakshmi who is fast in her movement). My father exiled from the empire of the outer light and lost the association of seeing men, now lives in two solitudes, one within him and the other in the grave rustle of the forest. I, Satyavan, son of that king have lived contented in my spirit‟s highly poised loneliness and this huge vital murmur of the woods that are my kith and kin, and nursed by the vastness of the Nature became a student of solitude, because I was not yet aware of you.

The great Mother Nature came to her recovered child; here I ruled in a kingdom of a nobler kind than men can build upon the dull Matter‟s soil; here I met the frankness of the primal earth and enjoyed the intimacy of infant God. In the great wonderfully designed chambers of Mother Nature‟s great kingdom, (404) I have dwelt freely in her boundless palace and was brought up by the care of the worm mother of all of us, and I was brought up by my natural brothers in her house. I lay in the wide open embrace of heaven, the sunlight‟s radiant rays of blessing touched my brow, and at night the moonbeam‟s silvery Light of ecstasy kissed my dim eyelids to sleep. All the mornings of the earth became mine; attracted by the slow murmurings of the green forest‟s moments I wandered and lost there, I was easily disposed to the sweet voice of winds and waters, I became a partner of the sun‟s joy, and a listener to the universal speech: my inner spirit knowing that God-like is our birth right remained satisfied, our life is luxurious whose intimate belonging are filled with the riches of the earth and skies. Before I was led by my Fate into this green world aroused by some indication of future event‟s touch within, there approached in my mind an early fore knowledge of the great dumb animal consciousness of earth and now that became my too intimate friend and I have left my old luxuries and came to live in the dim and vast grandiose murmur. I have already met her in my spirit‟s dream. As if entered into a deeper country of the soul through an inner seeing and a feeling of inner sense the clear imagery of earth changed and an awakening came. An enchantment of inner vision pursued me from my boyhood‟s days, the things seen by my eyes in coloured lines were seen in new shapes through my interpreting mind and in the form it sought to seize the formless soul. An early child-god came and led me holding my hands and guided by the seeking of his touch I was inspired, the bright forms and colours that fled across his sight were portrayed upon pages and stones and they opened their secrets in the hearts of men. My intimates were visitants of sublime beauty. Like the cry of the horse the pride of rapid life that wanders swaying with the wind through our grasslands for the grazing of animals, cast shapes of swiftness in my witnessing mood, groups of spotted deer running in the forests (405) under the evening sky became a song of the evening to my silent soul. Seeing the king-fisher bird that ran suddenly flashing the darkest pool I took it as an eternal sight; seeing the white swan slowly floating on the blue lake whitening the waters of the pool with its reflection I took it as a magic shape of whiteness that sailed through dream; seeing the leaves trembling with the passion of the wind and the many-coloured butterflies flying in the air were conceived by me as conscious flowers of air; and the birds flying in the infinite blue sky lived in my inner sight as an inscription; mountains and trees stood there in my inner sight as thoughts from God. The very bright-coloured birds with long-beaks and peacocks scattering on the breeze their moon-marked feathers painted in my memory like a painted wall. I have framed my inner vision from wood and stone; a supreme word echoed in my ears and I rhymed the rhythm-beats of infinity and listened through music for the eternal Voice. I felt a covered touch, and heard a call but as yet could not embrace the body of my God or hold between my hands the feet of the World-Mother. In men I met the strange portions of the Supreme Self that sought for fragments and lived in fragments: each man lived in himself for his self interest alone and with the rest they have only brief ties; each easily lived passionately in his surface joy and grief, and never saw the Eternal in his secret house. I entered into conversation with Nature and meditated with the changeless stars in their galaxies and saw God‟s inextinguishable watchfires burning in the ignorant Night, and also saw that a prophetic ray of the Eternal‟s sun fell on the mighty face of the universal Nature.

I sat with the sages of the forests in their meditative trance: I felt there poured down awakening streams of diamond light and saw the presence of the One and the Alone in all. But still there lacked the last transcendent power and Matter still slept empty of its Lord. (406) The Spirit (the Soul) was liberated and the body was lost and mute lived still in the house of Death and ancient Ignorance; the body‟s base was Inconscient and the Void was its fate. But as you have come now everything in me will surely change: I shall meet the WorldMother in your golden body and hear the words of wisdom in your sacred voice. Consequently the child of the emptiness shall be reborn in a Divine body and my Material body shall transcend its Inconscient state of trance. My body like my spirit shall be free and shall escape from Death and Ignorance.” Savitri still being absorbed in a state of meditation and replied to him: “O Satyavan, please speak more and more with regard to yourself and all that you are within; so that I would know you as if we had ever lived together in the chamber of our souls. Speak till a light shall come into my heart and my moving transient mind shall understand what the deathless being (my soul) in me feels. My spirit knows that you are he whom it has sought amidst the crowding faces and forms across the golden skies of my life.” And Satyavan like a replying harp to the constant calling of a flute answered her questionings making his heart in many-coloured waves of speech and made it to stream to her and said: “O golden princess, perfect Savitri, I would tell more than the failing words of my mouth can speak, and of all that you were meant to me unknowingly, and all that the lightning-flash of love reveals in one great hour of the unveiling gods. Even your brief nearness has reshaped my life. Because I know now that the entire life I lived till now moved towards this auspicious moment of my heart‟s rebirth; to know with regard to the meaning of myself I turned my sight within and could know that I am a soul made ready for you on the soil of this earth. Once I lived a life like other men: (407) that were confined to think and act, and to enjoy and breathe to live, and was the limit of mortal hope: yet there came to me flashes of a deeper

127 self that lives behind Life and makes her act its scene. A truth that was screened by my mind and a Greatness working towards a hidden aim was felt by me, and through the earthly forms something was seen vaguely that life has not yet become and must become what it ought to be. I sought for the Mystery with my Mind‟s way of light that was like a lamp. Its vague light showed with the help of an occult word a half-visible ground and travelling point to point through it could make an outline of a system of Supreme Self and God. I could not understand with my mind the truth it expressed. In the visible things I turned attempting to catch the shape of the truth, with a hope to fix a rule to catch it by mortal mind, I imposed a narrow framework of the world-law and a hard firm skeleton of outward Truth and a mental scheme of a mechanic Power upon the freedom of Infinite instead of showing the proper thing only showed me the unseen darknesses more and more; it made the original Secrecy more secret; it could not analyse its cosmic Veil or see the Wonderworker‟s hidden hand and trace out the pattern of his magic plans. Thereafter I plunged into my inner seeing Mind and knew the secret laws that made Matter as mind‟s perplexed slave: yet by that the mystery was not solved but deepened more. Then I tried hard to find its hints through Beauty and Art, but it only threw its symbols at our hearts and the Form could not reveal the indwelling Power. It only awakened a passionate idea of the Self, it could indicate a sign of all the grandiose that dwell hidden in the sense: I lived in the ray but could not see the sun. When I looked upon the world I missed the Supreme Self, and when I found the Supreme Self, I lost the world, (408) and I lost my other selves and the body of God, and lost the link of the finite with the Infinite and the connection between the appearance and the Truth, the mystic aim for which the world was created and the human sense of Immortality. But now your feet brought God‟s gold link to me and God‟s gold sun has shined on me from your face. Because now another kingdom draws near to me along with you and diviner voices fill in my ear, like a star approaching from unknown heavens an extraordinary and new world floats to me in your look; a joyful cry of the spheres and a song of the luminous gods comes near to me with you. Consequently I could draw a wealthier breath and move in a swifter march of moments. My mind has been transformed like a blissful seer. Travelling from the waves of the sea of bliss a passionate foam-leap came and transformed my heart and earth around: thus all was filled with your arrival.

The air, soil and stream of the forest wore marriage dresses to be worthy of you and because of the change within me by your look the sunlight grew as a shadow of your golden splendour. Please come down nearer to me from your chariot of light not regarding our soil with scorn on this green grass land. Because here are secret spaces made ready for you to keep you covered by their green caves since very long. Will you not make this brief-lived bliss your world? O blissful, descend here with your moon-gold feet and enrich earth‟s floors upon whose sleep we lie. O, my bright beauty‟s princess Savitri compelled by my joy and your joy enter my life, which is your chamber and temple. In this great tranquility where souls meet, and led by my silent desire come into my groves of the forest following me and let this dim sound of leaves blown by the wind of the arches of the branches of trees and creepers lean on you like a shadow; and live here identified with the breath of the eternal things and let your heart beat near to my heart till an auspicious moment comes (409) enchanted by the sweet fragrance of the flowers and all murmurs of the suffering world shall recall and every bird remember it in its cry.”

Enchanted by the influence of the passionate words of Satyavan her fathomless soul looked out at him filled rapture in her eyes and passing to her lips it spoke in soft voice. By uttering this word alone Savitri told: “O Satyavan I have heard all that you have said and I know that you and only you alone are he”. Thereafter Savitri descending down from her high sculptured chariot in a soft and hesitating haste; her many-coloured dress flashed in the light and floated for a moment over the grass stirred by wind, the colour of her dress mixed with the light of her body‟s ray looked like a lovely feather of a squatting bird. Savitri‟s shining feet falling upon the greengold grassland scattered a memory of wandering beams of light, her feet lightly pressed the unexpressed desire of earth held dear in her too brief passing by the soil. Then Savitri‟s hands moved lightly and rapidly wandering like pale-brilliant butterfly like insects plucked from the forest verge‟s sunlit boughs a load of their jewel-faces‟ (bunch of flowers) that were the companion of the spring-time and the breeze. She made a simple pure garland with the help of her rapid fingers teaching them a flower song and the stanza of a marriage hymn. Those flowers profound in fragrance and mixed their yearning‟s coloured signs and made their bloom of purity and passion one. As a flower-symbol of her offered life Savitri held the garland in her treasuring palms as a sacred thing of joy and went to Satyavan, then with raised hands that trembled a little now at the very closeness that her soul desired, the garland that is a bond of sweetness and their bright union‟s sign she laid on the bosom of Satyavan as was eagerly desired by her love. (410) As if inclined before some gracious god who has shined out of the mist of greatness to fill with beauty his adorer‟s hour, Savitri bowed down and touched the feet of Satyavan with worshipping hands; she made her life a world for Satyavan to walk and made her body the room of his delight, her beating heart she made a remembrance of bliss. Satyavan in his turn bent to her and took Savitri into his own arms and their married yearnings joined like the union of hopes; as if suddenly a whole rich world was possessed, Satyavan joined with all ties of wedding with whom he was related and became one with her, he made an unending joy his own, and in his deep embrace clasped Savitri. Around Savitri Satyavan‟s embrace became a sign of a locked closeness through slow intimate years, and a first sweet summary of delight to come and became one intense conciseness of expression of all long life. In a wide moment of two souls that meet she felt her being flew into Satyavan as in waves a river pours into a mighty sea. As when a soul merges into Supreme Self to live in Him forever and know His joy, Savitri‟s consciousness grew aware of Satyavan alone, and all her separate self was lost in his self. As a sky with its large constellation of stars encircles happy earth so Satyavan shut Savitri into himself in a circle of bliss and shut the world within him and her. A boundless seclusion now made them one; he was aware of Savitri enveloping him and let Savitri to

128 penetrate into his soul like a world by world‟s spirit filled and as the mortal wakes into Eternity and the finite opens to the Infinite.

Likewise they were in each other lost for a while and coming back from their long trance of ecstasy into a new self and a new world.

(411) Now each became a part of the other‟s unity, the world was nothing expect their twin self-finding‟s scene or their own married being‟s vaster frame. On the highlighted tower of the day fate tied the marriage knot with the morning‟s golden thread by the ministry of an auspice-hour heart-bound before the sun that was their marriage fire, the marriage of the eternal Lord and the eternal Goddess again took place on earth in human forms: in a new act of the drama of the world the united Two began a greater age. In the silence and the murmur of the green world and chanting of the priest-wind‟s hymn and with the common chanting of the leaves and creepers the twain of love had joined together and grew one. Now the natural miracle was achieved once more: in the changeless ideal world one human moment was made eternal.

Then Satyavan led Savitri down the narrow path where they had met and showed her future world and her love‟s refuge and corner of happy solitude. At the end of the path through the green opening in the trees Savitri saw a close grouped line of hermit-roofs and looked now first on her heart‟s future home, and the creeper thatch of the roof of the hermitage that protected the life of Satyavan.

The hermitage adorned with creepers and red climbing flowers seemed as a beauty of the forest in her dreams sleeping with brown body and tumbled hair in her chamber of unconquerable emerald peace. Around the hermitage the forest‟s ascetic moods stretched lost in the depths of its own solitude. Then fully absorbed in the deep joy Savitri could not speak anything more, only a little depth of its quivering happy tone said out to Satyavan: “When I am far my heart will stay here on the verge of this forest (412) and close to this thatched roof of the hermitage: now it has no need of wandering anymore. But I must return back early to my father‟s house that soon will lose one loved accustomed footsteps and listening for a once loved voice shall be vain. Because I shall return soon so that oneness can never separate its recovered bliss again or fate cannot sever our lives so long as we are alive.” Once more Savitri mounted on her carven chariot under the heat of the fiery noon that is less brighter than her thoughts and dreams she rode swiftly riding the horses of her chariot with her heart‟s swiftness, but she still could see in the clarity of her sight‟s inner world through the coolscented forest‟s luxurious gloom on shadowy paths between great rough trunks of trees that was in line towards the peaceful hermitage Satyavan walk towards a peaceful clearing. The circle of trees as a navel centre that enshrined the thatched hermit, the new deep refuge of her life‟s felicity and her soul‟s temple and home that was preferred to heaven was seen by her throughout. This now remained as a constant scene within her heart.

-End of Canto Three -End of Book Five

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BOOK SIX THE BOOK OF FATE

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Canto One The Word of Fate

(415) Narad the heavenly sage came from Paradise descending from the border of the mortal plane surrounded by silences crossing the wide expanse of brilliant peace came chanting through the large and shining sky. Attracted by the golden splendour of the summer-earth that lay beneath him like a burning bowl tilted upon the table of the Gods, as if moved round by some unseen hand turning to catch the warmth and blaze of a small sun, he passed from the immortal‟s happy paths to a world of toil, quest, grief and hope and to these rooms of see-saw games i.e. up and down play of death with life. Crossing the unattainable limit of soul-space he passed from Mind into material things amid the creation of the Inconscient Self and the workings of a blind Force that walks arising suddenly from sleep in an unconscious state. Below him thousands of suns glowing like fire were circling, he felt the waves of the upper regions of the air; a primal Air brought the first joy of touch, he saw a secret Spirit breathing a mighty breath contracting and expanding this huge world in its circuit through the Void that is difficult to overcome; the secret might of the creative Fire that displayed its triple power to build and form, its infinitely small wave-sparks‟ weaving dance and its units of indistinct stars creating shape and mass, the magic foundation and the pattern of the world and its radiance bursting into the light of stars; he felt the vital juice of life and death; plunging into the solid Matter‟s dense communion and its obscure oneness of forms, (416) he shared with the identity of a dumb Spirit. He saw the cosmic Spirit busy at his work, his eyes measured the spaces and it‟s the depths, his inner sight could see the process and working of the soul, he saw the eternal labour of the Gods, and looked upon the way of life of beasts and men. Now there occurred a change in the heavenly singer‟s mood, and his voice was moved by a joy and pity; he sang no more regarding the unquenchable Divine Light and the indivisible oneness and pure everlasting bliss, and the deathless heart of Love, now his song was confined to the hymn of Ignorance and Fate. He sang the name of Vishnu and the birth of the creation, and the joy and passion of the mysterious world, how the stars were made and life began and the mute regions thrilled with the throb of a Soul. He sang regarding the Inconscient and its secret self and its almighty power that knows not what it does, and does all works without will, thought or sense, its blind faultless secret mystery, and darkness eagerly longing towards the eternal Light, and Love meditating in the shadowy bottomless depth waiting for the response of the human heart and death that climbs seeking of immortality. He sang of the Truth that cries from the darkest Night‟s blind depths, and the Mother-Wisdom hid in Nature‟s breast and the Idea that works out through her dumbness and the miracle of her transforming hands, and of life that is asleep in stone and sun and the Mind that is below the lowest level of consciousness in mindless life and the Consciousness that wakes gradually in beasts and men. He sang of the glory and marvel that is still to be born, of the Godhead throwing off at last its screen and manifest, in bodies that shall be made divine and life made bliss, and immortal sweetness clasping immortal might, heart knowing other heart, one‟s thought meeting straight at other‟s thought (417) and the delight that would descend when every obstacle falls and the transformation and the divine ecstasy that would take place. As Narad sang the demons wept with joy seeing beforehand the end of their long dreadful work and the defeat of the worldly beings for which they hoped in vain, and the glad release from their self-chosen ruin and their return into the One from whom they came upon earth. So chanting Narad, the heavenly sage and the Man divine the conqueror of the Immortals‟ seats came descending down to men on earth.

While he came descending down on earth like a lightning flash falls on earth, a resplendent majesty fell nearing until the fully absorbed eyes of the heavenly seer neared looking out through the luminous clouds and his face that was brightly shining like a joy that exists from the first appearing in Light, descended where king Aswapati‟s sky-high palace in Madra was seen as flowers made up in a delicate stone. There Aswapati, the sage and thoughtful king welcomed him, and with him there stood by his side a beautiful, passionate, and wise creature who looked aspiring like a sacrificial flame towards the sky from its seat on earth, the queen with royal brow (forehead), the human mother of Savitri. There for an hour undisturbed by the siege of the earthly affairs Savitri‟s parents ceased from cares and anxieties of common life and sat inclined to the high and rhythmic voice of the heavenly seer while the heavenly seer Narad in his limits singing the song of the labour of men and what the gods try hard to do for earth, and the joy that thrills behind the marvel and mystery of the earthly pain. He sang to them with regard to the lotus-heart of love with all its thousand luminous buds of truth that sleeps quivering veiled by the visible things of the world. It trembles at each touch of the universal things and tries hard to wake and one day it shall hear a blissful voice and in the garden of the lover it shall blossom when she is seized by her discovered lord. Consequently on the singer‟s voice a mighty thrilling coil of ecstasy (418) crept through the deep heart of the universe. The universal Nature woke out of her Matter‟s sleep and mind‟s dreams and looked upon God‟s unveiled face.

Even while he sang a rapturous tone rose through earthly-time and touched the heavens and at that time Savitri came with the sound of the hooves of the horses of her chariot like the hastening of her swift heart; her radiant footfall shined across the floor.

Transformed by a ring of light of her love shown round her head she came; her eyes were filled with a mist of shining joy she came as one who comes from a heavenly embassy fulfilling the sublime mission of her heart and carrying the sanction of the gods to her love and its luminous eternity, she stood before her mighty father‟s throne eager for beauty on discovered earth transformed and made new in her heart‟s miracle light she saw as a rose of marvel worshipping the fire like bright sweetness of the son of Heaven. Narad then cast his vast immortal look on Savitri and the light of his inner sight surrounded her and holding back his knowledge in his immortal lips he asked in a loud voice “Who is this flame-born bride that came and round her illumined head the marriage light pouring on and flashes

131 as lightning sparks armed her? He questioned as to from what green light of the forest paths dazzling on the silent dew drops of the bushes or from what half-seen corner of waters betraying the moon she had brought the glory of such light in her enchanted eyes? On the bosom of the earth there are huge gold-coloured expanses and shadowy hills whose dreaming ghost like heads are covered in the night, and guarded in a joyful monastic seclusion of the huge forest, screened bank of the rivers of the forest seized by the circled incessant yearning hands and the ripple-passion of the on looking stream sink down in felicity: and rapt in their (419) cool-lipped murmurs of pure embrace lose themselves on the beds of trembling reeds. These are the mysterious Presences in which some spirit‟s immortal bliss is felt but they disappoint the earth-born heart to joy. Have you halted there for a while and did some marvellous form unknown to your eyes attracted your sight or whose voice you have heard that forced your life to fill its rapture through your listening soul? Or seeing through this flaring light if the trust awoke in my thought is correct then it would say that you have not drunk from an earthly cup, but stepping through the blue curtains of noon remained surrounded on a magic brink in brighter countries than man‟s eyes can bear. Encircled by the multitude voices of delight led down pursuing the footsteps of someone in the luminous slopes of the heavenly mountain Gandhamadan and watched where the Apsaras roam and seized amidst the sunlit alluring beauty of the boughs in the magical forest your limbs have shared the sports that none has seen, and in sacred places where gods roam your footsteps have fallen and your mortal breast thrilled with god-speech and your soul answered to an unknown Word. Approaching through the soft and delightful atmosphere by what sound of the footsteps of gods, what enchanting flutes of heaven have thrilled high tones around you from near and far that you seemed to hear till now with surprise? Those gods have fed your still self on some strange-ecstasies fruit and you have travelled wandering through the dim moon-peaks of bliss. Disclose, O bird of light, from where you came flying hastening casting bright-coloured splendor through the green earth and your body is rhythmic still with the spring-bird‟s call? Your empty lotus palms are filled only with your own beauty and the thrill of a remembered clasp, your firm deep honeyed heart shines like a heavenly jar filled with new sweet nectarous wine. You have never spoken with the gods of pain. (420) Still life‟s violent music like a far-melodies, rapid and grand Centaur‟s (divine singer‟s) song or as a soft sound of waters of river coming splashed mid hills or mighty like a great sound of many winds rings in your ears. You lived in your inner sky of bliss like an unstained light of moon. You came like a silver deer through the small forests of coral (red and pink coloured) flowers and buds of glowing dreams, or you came flying like a wind-goddess through the leaves, O ruby-eyed and snow-winged dove, you came by moving about lightly or rapidly through the forest of your pure desire in the imperishable beauty of your soul. For your earth these things are only metaphors and similes but their truest truths sleep in you. Because like this your soul is the sister of the gods and your earthly body is very beautiful to the eyes and you are related in joy to the sons of heaven. O you who have come to this great dreadful world where love and beauty can hardly live safely and now you are seeing the world through the splendour of your dreams, yourself a being dangerously great, a soul lived alone in a golden house of thought ever protected by the walls of safety of your dreams. On heights leaving doom asleep for ever who devours the unconscious lives of men invisibly, and like your high and happy waking if your heart live imprisoned in the of ideal‟s gold house, and if for all time doom could be left to sleep then what heavenly goodness might not have been prevailed here?”

Narad spoke this only and held back his knowledge behind his words. As a cloud plays with lightning‟s free and bright laugh but holds back the thunder in its heart so Narad only expressed bright images of his thoughts. Narad‟s speech like a vague music veiled his inner thoughts; like an alluring sound of wind in the bright summer sky Narad‟s speech was pitiful to mortals, and it spoke only to them of living beauty and present bliss: the rest of the things he has hidden in his all-knowing mind. (421) Those who have heard Narad‟s celestial voice, the veil heaven‟s pity throws on future pain seemed as God‟s sanction of an endless joy. But Aswapati answered to the divine seer that his listening mind had marked a doubtful consequence, and behind the words felt a threatening shadow, but calm like one whoever sits facing Fate here in the world amid the dangerous up and down of worldly life he answered covering thought with guarded speech: “O all knowing deathless sage, if I could know by the ray of my own wish through the carved shield of symbol images that you have drawn before your heavenly mind I have observed that in the world the steps of a young god like life with luminous eyes is beginning happily, she was born on the borders of two wonder-worlds between the Unknowable and the Unseen, and she scatters the flames of the symbols of the infinite and lives in a great light of inner suns. Because she has learned all the secret mysteries and broken the barriers of sorcery; she had drunk to the brim the Immortal seas of bliss and she had seen the things beyond the jewel barred gates of heaven, and entered into the Secretly burning the fire of aspiration without any obstruction, her sight is fixed beyond the earthly common things and she communes with the world creating Powers till through the shining gates and mystic streets of the city of bright beautiful golden coloured jewels and pearls the army of hero gods stepping forward in groups and march on to earth. Although earth keeps for man some short and perfect hours in certain intervals of human life and Time‟s inconstant movement can seem to be eternal in which the immortals live, yet that touch upon the mortal world is very rare: in the fierce difficult communion of the stars, hardly a soul and a body are born whose life can keep the rhythms of the heavenly tone, (422) and its rhythm repeat the many-toned sweet music tirelessly thrilling through the rapturous heaven and caught in the song that sways in the Apsaras limbs when she floats brightened like a cloud of light as a wave of joy in heaven‟s full moonlit floor. O seer, kindly see this image (Savitri) moulded out of light and love, made like a stanza of the god‟s eager songs perfectly rhymed and how it looks like a pillared ripple of gold! As if to hold earth‟s truth of hidden bliss her body is shaped in splendour of gold-coloured bronze like a vase filled with divine delight. Her eyes are like dream-made illumined mirrors and adorned subtly in a slumberous borderline of jet (deep glossy black)

132 and retain heaven‟s reflection in their depths. As her outer body is so is she pure within. Like drops of fire shining on a silver page, heaven‟s splendorous mornings gloriously recur in her young-like spirit not yet touched with tears. To her bright and unstained crystal soul all beautiful things seem eternal and new. The unchanging blue sky reveals its sky wide thought before her; in her marvellous beauty the moon floats crossing the skies filled with wonder; on account of her presence the flowers of earth blossoms and laugh at time and death; the bewitched changes of the magician life race before her like bright children crossing the smiling hours. If nothing except this joy could last longer and pain does not throw its heavy blow on it into her rhythmed life what wonderful thing it would not have been? O singer kindly look at her with your foresighted view and bless her that this fair child pour nectar of sorrowless life around her into this world from her pure heart of love and heal with her bliss the tired breast of earth and cast joy like a happy net throughout the world so that all may fall into it. As grows the great and golden generous tree with its full flowers on the bank of the river Ganges which flows with its murmurous waves where with joyful speed the waters run (423) with lisping and babbling sounds to the splendour of morn and cling with harp‟s laughter round the knees while the daughters of gods take bath sitting in the flowing waters and dripping like pearl-bright magic rain from their moon-gold limbs and cloudy hair, to bless her that her dawns of life are like jeweled doors of light and she flings delight on men. She was born as a flame of bright happiness and surely that flame will spread light on earth and grim destiny surely will let her pass on her way without any exchange of words of obstruction. But here on earth the careless world-Mother too often leaves her chosen lovely children in the envious hands of Fate: and often the harp of God becomes mute and its call to bliss fails discouraged mid earth‟s unhappy sounds; the strings of the signaling loud prolonging warning sound of the Divine Ecstasy does not ring here or if at all it sounds it gets silenced soon in the human heart. We have heard enough songs of sorrow on earth: he requested Narad to bless her once that her glad and sorrowless life brings down heaven here upon earth. Or must the great souls here on earth undergo the test of fire always? To bestow his blessing that Savitri a traveller to the Eternal‟s house fully secured with love, and faith and sacred joy, once let a mortal life to pass unwounded along the tunnel like mountain pathways of the Gods.” But Narad did not answer to this and he sat silent knowing that words are vain in a world where Fate is the lord. He looked into the unseen heavens with seeing eyes, then pretending with mortal‟s ignorance he questioned as if one who knows not: “On what high ambition Savitri‟s chariot went hastening? From where she had come with this glory in her heart and Paradise made visible in her eyes? What sudden God, and Supreme face has Savitri met?” Aswapati the king replied to him, “The red Asoka tree (griefless tree) watched her going away and now witnesses her return. Like a bright bird tired of her lonely branch arisen into a sky of flaming dawn to find her own lord, since he had not yet come to her on earth (424) this sweetness (Savitri) flew cutting her way beating her rapid wings. Guided by a distant call her vague swift flight passed through the summer morn and sun lighted lands. The rest of the happier news that had happened on her way are filled in her eyelids and her charmed guardian lips have held them still like a treasure. Then he questioned Savitri designating her as the purest pure that she who came perfected by joy to disclose the name her sudden heart-beats learned and whom has she chosen kingliest among men?” And Savitri answered with her still calm voice as one who speaks beneath the eyes of Fate: “Father and king, I have carried out your will. One whom I sought I found in distant lands; and I have obeyed my heart and heard its call. On the borders of a dreaming forest amid Shalwa Kingdom‟s giant hills covered by silent thick Forest, there lived King Dyumatsena in his thatched hermitage who was once a mighty king and is blind now, exiled and outcast. I have met on the wild forest‟s lonely verge Satyavan, the son of king Dyumatsena and chosen him and the work is done.” Hearing from Savitri all sat silent looking above for some time with astonishment. Then Aswapati looked within and saw a heavy shadow float above the name followed by a sudden and great light; he looked into his daughter‟s eyes and replied that: “You had done well and I approve your choice. If this is final, then all is surely well, and if there is anything more then all can still be well. Whether it seem good or evil to men‟s eyes but only for good the secret Divine Will can work. Our destiny is written in double terms: floating through Nature‟s contraries we draw nearer to God; out of the darkness we still grow towards light. Death is our road to immortality. Even if the desperate voice of the world cries with grief, (425) yet the eternal Good conquer at last.” Then the sage Narad would have spoken something, but king Aswapati interfered in haste and stayed the dangerous word and said: “O singer of ultimate ecstasy, do not lend dangerous vision to the blind because by your natural right you have seen clear. Do not impose on the mortal‟s frightening breast the tremendous test of fire that foreknowledge brings; do not demand now the act of Godhead in our acts. Here on earth happy peaks where the heaven-angles roam or the star lighted stairs of Coilas mountain or Vaicountha do not exist: the very steep and sharp edged rocky hills that only the mighty souls can climb are here, where a few can even hardly dare to think to climb; from the giddy rock far voices only call and the paths are chilly, slippery and precipitous. The gods are too hard with the man‟s mortal race; they dwelt in their large heavens exempted from the snare of Fate and forget the sorrows and sufferings of man who walks with wounded feet, and with the blows of earth his limbs faint with the stroke of grief, his heart that hears the footsteps of time and death. The road of the future is hid from the mortal sight: thus he moves towards a veiled and secret face. His entire hope is only to light one step in his front and he prays for only a little strength to meet the riddle of his concealed fate. He is always awaited by vague and half-seen force, and aware of the danger to his uncertain hours he guards his wavering longings and hopes from the breath of those uncertain moments, he does not feel when the dreadful fingers of the secret and unknown force would come close around him with their devouring clutch and none can save him from their thunder-like ties.

If you can loose her grip of fate then only speak. Perhaps there is escape from the iron trap: our human mind perhaps deceives us with its words and to our own choice it gives the name of doom; and perhaps the blindness of our will is Fate.” Aswapati said and Narad did

133 not give any answer to it. (426) But now Aswapati‟s queen raised her voice in panic and asked Narad: “O seer, your arrival here is in right time to this high auspicious moment of a happy life; then let the kind words of griefless heavens bless this happy conjunction of two stars and sanction perpetual joy with your heavenly voice. Here kindly do not drag us into the danger of our human thoughts and let not our human words create the ruin they fear. Here is no reason for fear, no chance of sorrow to raise her threatening head and look at divine love in a crooked view. Satyavan is a single spirit in a multitude mid earthly men whom Savitri had chosen as her mate and fortunate is the forest hermitage where my Savitri leaving her palace, riches and throne will dwell and bring down heaven. Then let your blessings put the immortals‟ seal on these lives‟ unstained joy pushing away the threatening Shadow from their lives. Because the Shadow of Time‟s ruin falls too heavily on man‟s heart and he dares not to be too happy upon earth. It fears greatly the blow that pushes too intense living joys, and an unseen violent stoke of whip from Fate‟s extended hand, the danger that hides in fortune‟s proud extremes, and a satire that exists in life‟s free gladness of smile, and trembles at the laughter of the gods. Or if an unseen death or ruin sleeps hiding like a panther, and if wings of Evil remains stretched above the life like house then also speak so that we may turn aside and rescue our lives from the dangers of wayside disaster and sudden tarp of an unknown fate”. Then Narad answered to the queen slowly: “What help can be rendered by fore-knowledge to men on earth who are driven by their fate? Though safe door‟s cry opening near, the ill fated blindly pass on. A future knowledge is an added pain and a torturing burden and a fruitless light (427) on this enormous earthly stage built by Fate. The eternal poet, universal Mind page marked each line of his royal act; the giant actors‟ movement is invisible and man lives like some secret actor‟s disguise. He not even knows what his lips shall speak. Because a mysterious Power drives his steps by compulsion and life is stronger than his trembling soul within. None can turn down what the violent Force demands: Savitri‟s eyes are fixed upon her mighty aim; and hence no cry or prayer can turn her from her path because she sprang an arrow from the bow of God.” The words of Narad the heavenly seer are only meant for them who never feel grief under compulsion and in calm mind can stay the moving wheels of life and do away with the long restlessness of brief living things and the trouble and passion of this unquiet world. On hearing Narad‟s words Savitri‟s mother as though her own heart were pierced saw that the ancient human curse‟s cruel spear strike her child and her loveliness that deserved another fate turned into tears in a larger measure. Though Aswapati‟s queen was calm and wise, and aspiring for the nature of the gods, and her mind was armoured and was mightily learned and risen to still heavens of knowledge, and a will entirely lain behind wisdom‟s shield, yet she was still human and opened her doors to grief; she accused the stark injustice of the stone-like godhead of the unchangeable Law; nor she did seek the strength that the extreme dangerous situation brings to lives that stand erect fronting the World-Power: her heart appealed against the impartial judge and imposed stubbornly unreasonability on the impersonal One. She did not invite the intervention of her tranquil soul for help but as a common man grows faint and expresses his pain in ignorant words beneath his load; so now she accused the world‟s impassive will and told: (428) “What stealthy grim destiny has crept across Savitri‟s path coming out from the dark forest‟s dismal heart and what evil thing stood smiling by the way wearing the Shalwa boy‟s beauty? Perhaps he came as her enemy of her past armed with the hidden force of ancient wrongs, himself unknowing seized her unknown. Here in this world love and hate dreadfully clasped and meet blind wanderers like us amid the dangerous paths of Time. Our days are links of a fatal chain and necessity takes revenge of our movements at will; old cruelties come back to us unrecognised and the gods also make use of the fruits of our past forgotten deeds.

Yet the bitter law of fate is vain. Our own mind‟s thoughts are the creators of our grim destiny. Because we have learned nothing in the world except repeating, still the severe misuse of our own soul and others‟ souls. There are dire changes of the human heart and Love the heavenly element fallen on earth gets darkened by the shadow of the inferior gods. Here upon earth the dreadful angel though always gets angry with human joys, yet cannot forego the woundingly painful sweet joy, the angel is pitiless to the soul that his sight has disarmed, he with his own pains and sufferings visits man who is his trembling prey and forcing us to remain enchanted to his clutches as if we are in love with our own pain. This is one of the intense miseries in the world and there are many others nooses of grief on our life. Here in this world our sympathies become our inflictors of severe pain. I have my own strength to bear the punishment knowing it as justifiable, but on this earth puzzled and stricken with the sorrow of the severely tormented and helpless things my strength often faints to meet other suffering eyes. We are not like gods who do not know sorrow at all and look indifferently on a suffering world; they calmly look down on the little human scene on earth (429) and the short-lived passion that crosses mortal hearts.

An ancient story of grief still can affect us with emotion, we carry the load of suffering hearts that could not breathe any more, we are trembled by the sight of human pain and share the miseries that others feel. Since our eyelids are not desireless and hence are bound to be aged. The heaven‟s indifference is too hard for us to bear, as if our own tragedies are not enough for us we make all the pains and sufferings of the world as our own; we weep looking towards greatness of the past and moved by the touch of tears in mortal things. Even a stranger‟s suffering tears forcefully my heart, O Narad, this is my well-loved child. Kindly do not hide the grim destiny from us if it is destined by us. It is worst to see the unknown face of Fate, a terror of evil omen that surrounds us mutely behind our seat by day and near our bed by night is felt more than it is seen, a fatal Fate hides in the shadow of our hearts and its unseen pain waits us to strike. Hence it is best to know the misery however unbearable, to know is best.” Then sage Narad told piercing Savitri‟s mother‟s heart and forcing the will of Savitri to become steel like strong, his voice set free the spring of cosmic Fate. The great Gods use the pain of human hearts as a sharp axe to cut and make their cosmic road: they waste unreluctantly men‟s blood and tears for the fulfillment of a moment‟s purpose in their fateful work. The weighing balance of the cosmic Nature is not in our hands and the mystic

134 measures of its need and use. A single word from the tongue of the great lets loose vast agencies and an accidental work determines the world‟s fate. So now Narad set free the destiny in that hour. “The truth you wanted to know, I give you the truth. Whom Savitri has chosen as her mate mid men in the world is a marvel of the meeting of earth and heavens, his embodied being was the forerunner of Nature‟s evolutionary march, (430) the creation of his single being is incomparable in the works of Time. Cutting from the sleep of heaven this sapphire was moulded, his soul is delightful, he is a ray came out of the rapturous Infinite, a silence waking to hear the hymn of joy. A divinity and kingliness encircles his brow; his eyes are filled with sacred memories from a world of bliss. He is as brilliant as a lonely moon in the heaven, and beautiful and lovely like a sweet bud of spring, he is pure like a stream that kisses the silent banks, his inner spirit and outer sense flashed with Light became comrade of bright surprise. He is a living knot of the golden Paradise, he is like an immense blue sky leaned to the yearning world, he is a joy of time borrowed out of eternity, and he is a star of splendour or a rose bliss. In him the twain Presence Soul and Nature joined mutually and created a wide harmony. Those who live ever Happily in the brighter heavens do not possess hearts more sweet and true than the heart of this mortal make Satyavan, that receives all joy as the world‟s native gift and gives joy to all as the world‟s natural right. His speech carries a light of inner truth and a persistent communion with the Power that exists in common things made his mind uncovered he is a seer of uncovered deity in all earth-shapes.

Like a tranquil windless and still breadth of sky his witness like unfathomable mind watching the world, he is like a luminous meditating silent sky before whom the dawn uncovers her veil to confront him with delight, he is like a green thickets of trees upon a happy hill made into a murmuring nest by southern winds, these are his images and parallels only and in depth they are relative in beauty and his equals in status and worth. He is an ever-rising will and to make delight ever living lifts it up, he is equal in height with heaven and companion of earth‟s beauty and grace, he is an aspiration to the immortals‟ atmosphere and (431) but now lain on the lap of mortal joy. His sweetness and joy attract all hearts to live with his own happy living; his strength is like a tower built to reach heaven, a godhead dug out from the stone pieces of life. As if the earth could not keep too long a unique treasure like Satyavan loaned by the gods, a being so rare of so divine make and if death enters into its elements of which his gracious bodily frame was made and shatter this vase before it breathes its sweets, then what loss it would not have been? In one brief year when this bright hour flies back and sits carelessly on a branch of Time, this overwhelming glory which heaven lent to earth ends and this splendour vanishes from the mortal‟s sky: heaven‟s greatness came, but was so great that it cannot stay. Twelve swift-winged months are given to Satyavan and Savitri and exactly when that day and that moment returns Satyavan must die.” Like a bright and nude lightening the sentence of Narad fell. But on hearing Narad‟s forecast the queen cried out and said: “Is then Heaven‟s grace Vain? Heaven jeers us with the brilliance of its gifts, because Death is a cupbearer of the wine of too brief joy held up to mortal lips by the careless gods for a passionate moment. But I reject the grace and mockery. Mounting your chariot go forward O Savitri, and travel once more through the populated lands. It is a pity that in the green gladness of the forest your heart has bent down by misleading calls. Chose once again and leave this fate-cursed being because Death is the gardener of this wonder-tree and love‟s sweetness sleeps in death‟s stone like strong grip. Because advancing in such a honeyed path is like travelling in a closed path only and a little joy would bring too bitter an end. Do not insist on your choice because death has made it vain. Your youth and radiance were not born to lie like (432) an empty box of jewellery dropped on a careless soil; and a choice less rare may bring in a happier fate.” But Savitri replied from her inflamed heart, and her voice was calm and her face was fixed like an image of iron, “once my heart had chosen chooses not again. The word I have once spoken can never be erased and is written in the record book of God. The truth once uttered by me, if erased from the earthly atmosphere and forgotten by mind but sounds immortally forever in the memory of Time. In the eternal moment of the gods the dice falls from the hand of Fate once only. My heart has determinately fixed for Satyavan only: its signature cannot be wiped off by any adverse Fate and its seal cannot be dissolved by Fate, Death or by Time. Those who have grown one wing within who shall part them? Death‟s firm hold can break our bodies but not our souls; if death takes Satyavan, I too know how to die. Let Fate do with me what she will or can; I am stronger than death and greater than my fate; my love shall survive even after the destruction of the world and grim destiny falls from me helpless against my immortality. Fate‟s law may change but not my unchangeable spirit‟s will.” Savitri‟s will power became hard like stone and her speech was tough like bronze. But listening to her words it rang in the mind of the queen like a self-chosen Doom denying every means of escape out of it. Desperately the mother answered as one who in her heavy heart labours amid the cries of her hopes to wake a tone of help from the strings of the harp of sorrow she cried: “O child, in the sublimity of your soul dwelling on the border of a greater world and dazzled by your superhuman thoughts you lent eternity to a mortal hope. Here on this ever-changing and ignorant earth (433) who is the lover and who is the friend? All here passes away and nothing remains as the same. In this transient globe none is for another. He whom you have loved now became a stranger and shall depart into a far strangeness: once his moment‟s role is done upon the stage of life‟s drama which was given to him for a time from within, he moves to other scenes and other players and laughs and weeps mid-new and unknown faces. The body you have loved is cast away amidst the world‟s brute unchanging stuff and mixed with the indifferent mighty Nature‟s five elements and becomes a molecule of crude matter for the joy of others‟ lives. But to bear our souls, those bodies come and go ever upon the revolving wheel of God, they are joined and separated in the magic round of the great Dancer in his boundless dance. Our human yearning and passions are nothing but high and ending tones of the harp of the wild music of the great Dancer changed compellingly by the passionate movement of a seeking Heart in the changing links of hour with hour. To call down heaven‟s distant answering song and an unattainable bliss is all we dare; once that tone is seized and once we lose

135 the sense of the heavenly music and the rhythmic cry, the song flees away too near or failed; in this world all sweetness‟s are misguiding symbols. Love dies before the lover in our heart: all our worldly joys are like perfumes in a broken vase. O to spread opening its sails upon Time‟s sea the life like boats to the stormy wind like desire and to call as a pilot the blind heart there then what damage to the boat it would not have been? O my child in a world where there is no Truth nor Light nor God how would you proclaim against the Law that is the eternal will and against the violent mood and despotism of the rash Titan to whom his own fierce will is one law? (434) What you speak now only the gods can speak. You who are human think not like a god. Because man is below the god and above the brute, he is given the calm reason as his guide: he is not driven by the force of unthinking will as of birds and beasts; he is not moved by the hard Necessity like the senseless motion of Inconscient things. The titan‟s and the giant‟s only march furiously climbing to possess the kingdom of the gods or they surround the demoniac greatness of Hell; in the senseless passion of their hearts they dash their lives against the eternal Law and consequently they fall and break by their own violent mass: hence the middle path is made for the thinking man. He is given to choose his steps by his reason‟s wakening light and choose his path among the many paths given to him because each is his difficult goal made out of infinite possibility. Hence leave not your goal to follow a beautiful face. Only when you have climbed above your mind and lived in the calm vastness of the one then love can be eternal in the eternal Bliss and divine love replace the human tie. There exists in heaven a concealed law and splendour power of severely self-disciplined force: it commands you to strengthen your immortal spirit; and offers its harsh kindnesses of work, and thought and measured grave delight as steps to climb God‟s secret heights. Then our life becomes a peaceful pilgrimage, each passing year becomes a mile of progress upon the heavenly Way and each dawn opens into a larger Light of the day. Then your works would become your helpers and all events would become signs, waking and sleep are opportunities which were given to you by an immortal Power. Hence you can raise your pure invulnerable soul beyond, (435) till it spreads in heaven in a wide evening calm, and greatens slowly spreading into timeless peace as an indifferent and gentle sky.” But Savitri replied to her mother with her calm eyes: “My will is a part of the eternal Will, my fate is that which my spirit‟s strength can make, and what my spirit‟s strength can bear; my strength is not of the Titan‟s but it belongs to God. I have discovered my glad reality beyond my body in another‟s being: I have found the deep unchanging soul of love. Then how shall I desire a lonely good, or aspiring to white vacant peace slay the endless hope that made my soul to spring forth out of its infinite solitude and sleep? My soul had glimpsed the glory for which it had come upon the world and seen the beating of one vast heart in the flame of the universal things, and my eternity clasped by the eternity of Satyavan tirelessly in the intense sweet occult cave of Time and always saw only the deep possibility of love. This and this is the only first and last joy compared to its throbbing the riches of thousand fortunate years are poverty. There is nothing for me like death, grief or ordinary and happy lives and what to me are of common souls of men or eyes and lips that are not of Satyavan? Hence I have no need to draw back from the arms of Satyavan and the discovered Paradise of his love and leaving them to go into still infinity. Only now for my soul to live with Satyavan I have treasured the rich occasion of my birth: for my soul to live with Satyavan: I shall walk with him in sunlight and the dream of the green forest‟s paths like gods in heaven. If it is for one year then that year is all my life. And yet I know that only to live and love awhile and die is not all my fate. (436) Because I know now why my spirit had come upon the earth and who am I and who he is to whom I love. I have looked at him from the sight of my soul and saw that god smiles at me in Satyavan and seen the Eternal in a human face.” Then none could answer to her words. Silently they sat and looked into the eyes of Fate.

-End of Canto One

136

Canto Two The Way of Fate and the Problem of Pain

(437) A great Silence kept covered the unalterable decree, and the word of Fate that fell from the lips of the heavenly sage Narad fixing a grim destiny that no power could ever change unless the supreme divine will itself could change its course. Or it seemed so: yet from that silence there raised one voice that questioned the changeless destiny, a will that carried on a conflict against the unalterable Will. Savitri‟s mother‟s heart had heard the fateful speech of Narad that rang like a sanction to the call of death and came like a dead end to life and hope. Yet her hope sank down like a quenched fire. She felt a depressingly heavy hand invaded the secrecy of her guarded soul and hit with sudden pain its still satisfied empire of her hard-won peace. Consequently awhile she fell to the level of human mind that was the field of mortal grief and Nature‟s law; she shared and bore the common lot of men and also felt what common hearts endure in the course Time. She now turned to the still immobile seer raising earth‟s question to the mysterious impenetrable power: attacked by all the dissatisfaction that existed in Nature‟s depths, and becoming a partner to the suffering of the worldly dumb driven things and all the misery and all the ignorant cry of the world, passionate in sorrow like questioning heaven she spoke. Lending her speech to the surface soul on earth she uttered with regard to the suffering in the world‟s dumb heart and man‟s revolt against his own ignorant fate. “O seer in the earth‟s strange double natured life by what pitiless harmful Necessity or what dire caprice of Creator‟s will (438) or by what haphazard occurrence or untoward Chance a rule was shaped out of accidental steps and destiny was created out of the compulsion of a moment‟s emotion and into the unintelligible mystery of Time came the more drastic mystery of grief and pain?

Is it your God who made this cruel law? Or some ruinous Power has hampered his work and he stands helpless to defend or save?

When evil and good was mixed on earthly soil then a deadly seed was sown in life‟s false start. At first appeared the ailment of mind and its pain of thought and its search for the aim of life. In the frank simplicity of the animal‟s acts it distorted into forms of good and evil; it left the straight path made by the body‟s gods and followed the zigzag path of the uncertain course of life that wandered seeking for its aims in the dim starlight fell from the skies of mind, it was guided by unsure idea and the unstable will. Thus the mind lost its inborn impulse‟s safe identity with the arrow-point of the being‟s inmost sight, and harmed the sure steps of Nature‟s simple walk and the truth and freedom in the growing soul. Out of some timeless innocence and peace and the own right of souls that were not yet misled to take birth on earth, thrown down from heaven to suffer on this hard dangerous earth and from that our life was born in pain and with a cry. Though earth-nature welcomes heaven‟s breath and inspires Matter with a will to live, yet a thousand evils attack man‟s longevity of life and diminishes the natural joy of life; our bodies are cunningly made like an engine but all its limbs are so cunningly planned and made skillfully with a demon skill with its appropriate inevitable heritage of mortal danger and its peculiar pain and (439) and its payment of tax of Time and Fate and its way to suffer and its way to die. This is the redeeming value (ransom) of our body like high estate and the sign and recognition of our humanity. A frightful group of sicknesses come as authorised lodgers into man‟s bodily house who is suppliers of food for death and inflictors of severe pain of life. They lie hidden in the harmful depths of the world and in the passage of subconscient caves waiting for a chance to jump and attack, surrounding dangerously the blockaded city of life: and admitted into the fort of life they impede his force and mutilate or suddenly kill him. We ourselves nurse within us forces that cause death; and make our enemies our guests: out of their holes like beasts they creep and tear the chords of the divine musician‟s harp till the music becomes thin and dies away or crashed with a last sad tone. All that we have become is like a fortified fort: and all that we try hard to become in future alters like a dream in the dull sleep of Matter‟s ignorance. Mind becomes crippled by the world‟s disharmony and in the ugliness of human things. Life is a treasure that is either misspent or cheaply, and fruitlessly sold in the market of a blind destiny, and a gift of priceless value from Time‟s gods is either lost or mislaid in an uncaring world, it is a marvel that is either missed or a beautiful art becomes distorted; it is a seeker in a dark and obscure place and an ill-armed warrior faces dreadful and dangerous odds, an imperfect worker entrusted with a perplexing work, an ignorant judge of problems made by Ignorance, its climb heavenward reach closed and keyless gates, and its glorious rushing outs fall out in mud and mire. On Nature‟s gifts to man a curse was laid: (440) here in this world all walks in armed in their own opposite paths, error is the comrade of our mortal thought and falsehood hides in the deep heart of truth, sin with its bright flowers of joy always pours down poison or leaves a burnt red mark across the soul; virtue is a grey bondage and a prison. A snare is laid at every step of ours. Our source of action springs from darkness and is contrary to our reason and spirit‟s light; our roots lie in ignorance and inconscience. Our past‟s account and the future‟s book of Fate is a growing register of disasters: upon the countless crowd of Nature‟s evils the centuries pile man‟s foolishnesses and crimes; as if the world‟s mountain like heavy load is not enough for us, a crop of miseries were sown unhesitatingly by man by his own hands in the ploughed lines of the gods; he suffers the vast increasing tragedy of his growing old misdeeds buried in the immemorial Time. He walks by his own choice into the trap of Hell; this mortal creature is his worst enemy. His science is an inventor of grim destiny; as a means to harm his own race he gives earth as an exchange value; he says his happiness and others‟ good. He has learned nothing from Time and its history; even as in unrefined state of Time in the primeval age when the Earth ran ignorantly on the highways of Fate, old forms of evil cling to the world‟s soul: so also war makes fruitless the sweet smiling calm of life, and battle, plunder, ruin and massacre are still the fierce pastimes of man‟s warring tribes; what centuries have made an idiot hour destroys, man‟s boundless fury or violent hate makes prostrate the beauty and greatness made by man‟s own genius and the mighty progress of nation‟s labour. All his achievements he drags to the lost edge of destruction. (441) All his greatness he makes into an epic of ruin and fall; satisfied with his littleness he crawls

137 through mud and mire, he invites heaven‟s curse on his head and roll about enjoying unrestrained pleasure in his self-made misery. He is a part creator of the sad-ending universal play and willfully conspires with death, time and fate. In this mysterious earth his brief appearance recurs but could not bring any high result to this traveller who travels in the rotating ages of God that shut his life in their vast longevity. Across a path of soon forgotten lives in his soul‟s wide search and ever returning hope he pursues the useless orbit of the course of the ages in a vain repetition of lost labours. All is an incident in a narrative meaningless tale of life. Why is it all and why do we live here on earth? If it is our spirit‟s destiny to return to some being of eternal bliss or to some still impersonal height of endless calm because we are That and came out of That, then from where this strange and fruitless interlude rose and lasting in vain through interminable Time? Who willed to form a universe and give it a disguised shape in the chilly and endless emptiness of Space? Or if these beings and their brief lives must be like that then what was the inevitable necessity of the soul to enter into ignorance and tears?

Where from the call for sorrow and pain arose? Or all came helplessly and causelessly? What power forced the immortal spirit to take birth in the mortal world? Who once was the eternal witness of eternity, and a deathless wanderer mid mortal scenes here on earth, and camps in life‟s half-lighted darkness amid the wreckages of his thoughts and dreams? Or who induced it to fall from heavenly bliss and forfeit his immortal privilege? Who laid on the wanderer in this beautiful and sorrowful world the endless will to live (442) and bear its load of joy, grief and love? Or if not being watches the works of Time, then what hard impersonal Necessity compels the vain labour of brief living things? Then a great Illusion has built the stars. But then where are the soul‟s security and its stand in this circling of unreal suns? Or else he is a way lost wanderer leaving his home and walks in a blind one-way lane of Time and chance from where he does not find the way of his escape from this meaningless world or from where begins and ends this worldly Illusion‟s rule? The soul we feel is perhaps only a dream and the eternal self is only an imagination that can only be sensed in a state of trance.”

Thereafter a silence Narad replied: he spoke in an earthly tone and now something of the deep sense of fate made the mortal words, fragile hints heavier. His forehead shined with heavenly vision and turned into a plate of supernal thoughts as if the characters of an unwritten voice had left the inscription of gods in its breadth. In that bare light the unseen works of Time were clearly seen, before Narad‟s world-wide sight were already mapped the broad-flung farseeing schemes that were left incomplete and the ascensions of aeons of Time; “Because there exists night is then the sun a dream? The Eternal lives hidden in the mortal‟s heart; he secretly lives in the chamber of your soul, there shines a Light and grief and pain can never enter there. Darkness stands between yourself and him; hence you cannot hear or feel the presence of the marvellous Guest and cannot see the blissful sun. O queen, your thought is a light of the Ignorance, and its brilliant curtain hides from you God‟s face. (443) This light of ignorance only illumines a world born from the Inconscience but hides the Immortal‟s meaning before the world. Your mind‟s light that hides from you the Eternal‟s thought, your heart‟s hopes hide from you the Eternal‟s will, the joys of earth keeps away from you the Immortal‟s bliss. On account of that there arose a necessity for a dark unwanted god who is the world‟s dread teacher and the creator of the load of pain. Wherever there exists Ignorance, suffering too must come there; your grief is an eager yearning of the darkness for the divine Light; pain was the first-born child of the Inconscience that was your body‟s original dumb base; there already slept pain‟s subconscient shape: it is like a shadow in a shadowy darkened womb, until life becomes dynamic it waits to wake and live. This dreadful Power was born with joy from one womb. It was born from life‟s inmost layer hiding its twin: but pain came first, then only joy‟s birth could be possible. Pain ploughed the first hard ground of the worldly drowse. By pain a spirit started its journey from the earthly mass, and by pain Life stirred in the subliminal deep. Inherent, submerged, hidden in the trance of Matter the dreamer, drowsy Mind awoke in its consciousness; out of its dreams it made a visible kingdom; from the depths of the subconscient it drew its shapes, and then turned to look upon the world it had made. By the shelter of pain and joy the bright and dark twins the lifeless material world perceived its ever living soul, or else the Inconscient world would never have changed. Pain is the hammer of the Gods to break a dead resistance in the mortal‟s heart and its slow inactiveness as of living stone. If the human heart were not forced to want and weep then his soul would have slept content at ease and would never have thought to exceed the human start and never learned to climb towards the Sun. This earth is full of labour and packed with pain; (444) the pain of an endless childbirth still keeps it forced into obedience; the centuries and millenniums have passed vainly yet the longed for Godhead in her is still not born. The ancient Mother faces all with equal joy; she invites the severe pain and the thrill of great joy because all creation started with pain and labour. This earth is full of unbearable pain of the gods; ever they suffer the pain of childbirth driven by the goad of Time and tried hard to work out the eternal Will and shape the life divine in mortal forms. Against the Evil that rises from the abyss, against the world‟s Ignorance and its rigid strength, against the obstacles of man‟s distorted will, against the deep error of the human mind, against the blind reluctance of the human heart the eternal will must be worked out in human breast. Till man is free from all these shortcomings and imperfections the human spirit is ill-fated to undergo pain.

From the worlds deep heart a violent sound of battle, and crush with heavy feet and movement: and a cry arises like an unquiet sea, under the blow of death a reckless laughter from despair is heard and there continues the work of an inescapable grim destiny of blood, sweat, labour and tears. Man dies so that he may live and one day God will be born in his place. A dreadful Silence watches the disastrous Time. Suffering is the hand of the Mother Nature like an architect that chisels out men to greatness: an inspired labour that cuts out with chisel with a heavenly cruelty an unwilling mould and makes it as an image of God. The demigods of the universe work in this world remaining stark in the passion of their will, and lifting the hammer of titanic energy; they with their demoniac strokes shape their own sons; their sons bear the mark of their great stamp of fire. Though the tremendous touch of the shaping god is an unbearable

138 severe pain to mortal nerves, yet the fiery spirit within man grows in strength, and feels a joy in every titanic pain. He who would save himself lives bare and calm; (445) he who would save the race must share its pain; this truth he must realise who obeys this great inspiration. The Great in soul who came to save this suffering world and rescue it out of Time‟s shadow and the Law; must pass beneath the yoke of grief and pain: they are tied to the Wheel of the world that they had hoped to break, they must bear man‟s load of fate on their shoulders. They bring the riches of heaven, by their own suffering they pay the price or they pay the gift of knowledge by sacrificing their lives. The Son of God born here as the Son of man and has drunk the bitter cup, and owned to repay the Godhead‟s debt, the debt that the Eternal owes to the fallen earthly race; man‟s will is bound to death and struggling life and thus his yearnings for rest and endless peace is in vain. Now the debt is paid and the score of original account is wiped off. The Eternal suffers in a human form, in a document of his salvation he has signed with his blood: he has opened the doors of his imperishable peace. God compensates the claim of the mortal creature, the Creator bears the law of pain and death; the stroke of vengeance falls on the incarnate God. His love has constructed the mortal‟s road to Heaven: he has given his life and light to balance here the dark account of mortal ignorance. Now the dreadful mysterious sacrifice is finished and God has offered his martyred body for the world; now his journey to the burial ground and Grave are his lot, he carries the cross on which man‟s soul is nailed, the curses of the crowd are his escort; the insult and mockery are his right‟s acknowledgement; two thieves slain with him mock his mighty death of self sacrifice (as of Jesus Christ). He walked with his bleeding brows in the Saviour‟s way. He who has found his identity with God pays with the body‟s death his soul‟s vast light. By his death his immortal knowledge gets victorious. While his cut body hanging in the gallows, (446) and he faeels his crucified voice proclaims that he was God and in answer to that the Heaven‟s deathless reply said that all is God. The seed of Godhead sleeps in the mortal hearts; the flower of Godhead grows on the world-tree: all shall discover God in themselves and in the universal things. But when God‟s messenger comes to help the world and lead the soul of earth to higher things, he too must carry the burden of the yoke that he came to release; and must bear the pain that he had come to cure: exempted and unaffected by earth‟s fate, how shall he cure the maladies he never felt? He covers the world‟s suffering and pain with his calm; but though no sign appears to the outward eye and peace is given to our broken human hearts, the struggle is still there and the unseen price had to be paid; the fire, the struggle and the wrestle are within him. He carries the suffering world in his own breast; the burden of the sins of the world weigh heavily on his thoughts, the grief of the world he makes his own: earth‟s ancient load lies heavy on his soul; night and its obscure powers surround and besiege his slow steps, he bears the Titan opponent‟s clutch; his march is a battle and a pilgrimage. The evil powers of Life strike him and the world‟s pain is penetrated into him; a million wounds became wide open in his secret heart. He journeys without sleep through an unending night; hostile forces crowd across his path while his journey; his inner life is a fortification and a battle. Even if he has to pay a heavy price and had to bear the dreadful pain of the world: his large identity and all-sheltering love shall bring the pain of the universe into the depths of his heart, the sorrow of all living things of the world shall come and knock at his doors and live in his house; a dreadful cord of his sympathy can tie the world‟s suffering into his single grief and make the world‟s pain his own. He meets an ancient opponent Force, (447) the strike of whip that tears the world‟s exhausted heart; he is beaten with it, tears of the centuries oozes down from his eyes: he had to bear the blood-stained fiery Centaur‟s shirt and his throat is stained by the poison of the world. In the market place of Matter‟s capital amidst the bargaining over the exchange of merchandise of the affair called life he is tied to a post to which a person was bound for execution by being burnt alive in a sacrificial Fire; he burns on an unseen original corner that Matter may be turned to spirit stuff: he becomes the prey of his own sacrifice. The Immortal tied to earth‟s subjection to death and appearing and perishing on the roads of Time creates God‟s moment in Time by the touch of his eternity. He dies that the world may be new-born and live. Even if he escapes from the fiercest fire and the world breaks not on him like an all-devouring sea, only by hard sacrifice a high heaven can be earned; he who would conquer have to confront Hell must face the battle and the pain to the extent required. In the depth of the human heart, in the hidden heart of the worldly Time a dark concealed hostile force is lodged that claims the right to change and harm God‟s work. On the path of the world‟s march; a secret animosity lives hiding; it leaves a mark on thought, speech and act: it impresses blemish and flaw on all things done; till it is destroyed completely peace is forbidden on earth.

There is no visible enemy but invisible enemies surrounds us, impalpable forces beset us, touches from unknown kingdoms and thoughts not our own overtake us and coerce our mistaking heart with their influence to act according to them; our lives are caught in a net of confusion and doubt. An opposing Force is born here that belongs to the primeval age; it is the raider of the life of mortal man, and hides from him the straight immortal path. A Power descended down on earth to veil the eternal Light, a opposing Power of the eternal will turns aside the message of the unerring divine Word, (448) it twists out of the normal shape of the size of the cosmic plan: a murmur entices the human heart towards evil, it shuts the eye of wisdom and soul‟s sight, it is the source of our suffering in this world, it binds earth to disaster and pain. Those who would bring down God‟s peace must conquer all these. The hidden enemy lodged in the human breast that man must either defeat it or miss his higher fate. This is the inevitable inner war.

“The world saviour‟s work is very heavy and hard; the world itself becomes his opponent, those to whom he would save are his enemies: this world is in love with its own ignorance, its darkness turns away from the saviour light, as against the value of the crown it gives presentation of cross. Hence his work in this world becomes like a drop of light in the long night; he sees in the long march of the Time, that a little only has been achieved; a few are saved, the rest attempt and fail: the luminous Sun has passed and a shadow of the darkest Night falls on earth. Yes, there are happy ways nearer to God‟s Sun, but few only can walk in the sun lighted

139 path: only the pure in soul can walk following that lighted path. From the worldly sorrow, darkness and chain, a way is shown of hard escape but how a few escaped can save the world? The human mass is tied beneath the burden of yoke linger there. However high the escape from the world may be, it cannot rescue the life that is left behind on a fallen earth. The escape from the world cannot raise the abandoned race beyond or bring to it victory and the kingdoms of the God. A greater power and a larger light must come descending down on earth. Although the divine Light grows on earth and the darkest Night recedes, yet till the evil is destroyed fully in its own home and the Light invades the world‟s Inconscient base and the opponent Force is destroy, (449) the world recoverer must still have to labour on, because his work still remains half-done. Yet there is a possibility of One to come armoured plated, protected and unconquerable; his immobile will shall confront the mobile time; the blows of the world cannot bend his victorious head; in the growing Night his steps shall be sure and calm; even if the goal retreats, he never hurries his speed, he would not turn his listening to the attractive high voices in the night; he would not seek any aid from the inferior gods; his eyes are fixed on his unchangeable aim.

Even if man turns aside or chooses easier path he would keep to the one high and difficult road that alone can climb to the Eternal‟s heights; in the mean while the indescribable planes already have felt the quivering of the footsteps of his arrival; though he has made heaven and earth his instruments, but the limits of earth and heaven fall from him; though he transcends their law but may use them as his means. He has seized life‟s hands in his tight grip and he has mastered his own heart. The deceiving way of Nature cannot mislead his sight, because his look towards Truth‟s far end is unalterable; the deaf resistance of fate cannot mislead or break his will. In the dreadful passages, and fatal paths his soul shall remain imperishable, and his heart remain unhurt, he overcomes the opposition of the earthly Powers and the secret hidden attacks of Nature and the world. His spirit‟s eminence transcending the worldly pain and bliss faces evil and good with calm and equal eyes. He too must wrestle with the riddling Sphinx (problem of the world) and plunge into her long darkness. He would break into the Inconscient‟s depths that remain veiled even from their own regard; he has witnessed that the God‟s sleep has created these magic worlds. He has watched the dumb God fashioning of Matter‟s frame, and dreaming the dreams of its ignoring sleep, and watched the unconscious Force that built the stars. He knew the Inconscient‟s workings and its law and its inconsistent thoughts and inflexible acts, *(450) its chance wastes of impulse and ideas, the disorder of its mechanic frequencies, its purposeless calls, its inspirations falsely true and the misleaders of the screened listening soul. All those things come to its ear but yet nothing endures, all things rose from the silence and goes back to its hush. The universe was founded on the sleep of the Inconscience; its darkened wakening makes the world seem vain. Arisen from Nothingness and turned towards Nothingness, its dark and powerful ignorance was earth‟s start; all was made from this waste stuff; and the creation can collapse into its deeps. Its opposition blocks the march of the soul and it is the mother of our ignorance. The World recoverer must call light into the dark gulf of the Inconscient, otherwise Truth can never conquer Matter‟s sleep and all earth can never look into the eyes of God. His knowledge must illumine all the darkest things; his power must loose the knot of all wicked things: he must pass to the other shore of falsehood‟s sea, and enter into the world‟s dark to bring there the divine light. The heart of the world‟s evil must be compelled to become naked before his eyes, he must learn the causes of the cosmic blind necessity of that evil, and also learn with regard to its right and its dire roots in Nature‟s soil. He must know the thought that moves the act of the demon and justifies the Titan‟s mistaken pride and the falsehood that remains hidden in earth‟s crooked dreams: he must enter the eternal darkest Night and know God‟s darkness as he knows his Sun. For this he must go down into the bottomless deepest depths and invade the suffering Vasts. Though he is imperishable, wise and infinite, he still must have to travel into Hell to save the world. He shall emerge into the eternal Light that exists on the borders of the meeting of all the worlds; there on the edge of Nature‟s highest steps (451) the secret Law of each thing is fulfilled and all contraries done away with their long difference. There the eternal opposites do meet and clasp, there pain becomes a tremendous fiery joy; evil turns back to its original good, and sorrow lies upon the breasts of divine Bliss: there Nature learned to weep glad tears of happiness; her sight is filled with yearning ecstasy. Then only the Law of Pain shall be ended here upon earth. Earth shall be made the home of Heavenly light, a heaven-born seer shall dwell in human breasts; the superconscient beam of light shall touch men‟s eyes and the truthconscious world shall come down on earth and possess Matter with the Spirit‟s ray, the earth‟s silence shall be awakened to immortal thoughts and the dumb heart of the world shall awake to the living Word. This mortal life shall house Eternity‟s bliss, and body‟s self shall taste immortality. Then only the world-saviour‟s work shall be achieved.

“Till then life must carry its seed of death and sorrow‟s cry be heard in the slow earthly Night. O mortal, bear this great world‟s law of pain and rely upon God‟s strength for your soul‟s support in your hard passage through a suffering world and turn towards high Truth, and aspire for love and peace. A little bliss and a divine touch on your human lives given to you as help from above. Make your daily way of life a pilgrimage, because through small joys and grieves you move towards God. Do not make haste towards Godhead on a dangerous road and do not open your doorways to a nameless Power, do not climb towards godhead by the Titan‟s road. Because the Titan‟s fixes his single will against the divine Law and across that way he throws his pride of might. The Titan climbs laboriously with hands and feet towards heaven on a stair of storms, (452) with an aspiration to live near the deathless sun. The Titan tries hard with a giant strength to take away by violent twist of force the immortals‟ right from life and Nature; he takes the world and fate and heaven in a speed of the storm. He never comes to the high World-maker‟s seat nor waits for the help from the outstretched hand of God to raise him out of his mortality. He desires to make all universal things his own and leave nothing free without possession, and stretching his small self to become equal with the infinite. Blocking up the Gods‟ open ways he makes earth‟s air and light his own

140 estate; he is a monopolist of the world-energy, and dominates the life of common men. He makes his pain and others‟ pain his means for accomplishment of his work: he builds his throne on death and suffering. In hurry and prolonged high sound of his heroic acts, in his uncontrollable lavish display and excess of fame and shame, by the magnitude of his hate and violence, by the quaking of the world beneath his feet he matches to make himself equal with the Eternal‟s calm and feels in himself the greatness of a god: and feels his power as an image of a divine self. The Titan‟s heart is like a sea of fire and force; he rejoices in the death, ruin, and fall of the worldly things, he feeds his strength with his own and others‟ pain; he is delighted in the world‟s suffering and passion, his pride and his might invites hard contest and pain. He always feels glorious in his bodily sufferings and covers the stain of suffering in the name of Selfcontrol in adversity. His sightless and blind eyes look towards the sun, but the true seeker‟s Sight having receded from his heart he could find no more the light of eternity; he sees the beyond as an emptiness without the soul and thinks his night as a dark infinite. His nature aggrandizes the unreal‟s blank and sees in Nothingness the sole reality: (453) he desires to impress his single figure on the world and to spread the influence of his single name in world‟s rumours. He takes his moments as the navel centre of the vast universe and sees his little bodily self as God in the fullest sense. His little Ego (“I”) has swallowed the whole world and stretched into infinity. His mind is a stir in original Nothingness, writes his thought in mysterious letters on a slate of timeless Time. He builds a huge philosophy of Nothingness on a mighty vacancy of soul. In him Nirvana lives, speaks, acts and creating an impossible universe. An eternal void is his formless self and his soul is the void impersonal absolute. O growing soul of man; do not step forward in the titan‟s way and do not throw you into the night of God. The path of eternity cannot be seen by the suffering soul or the redemption of life by sorrow is not the demand of heaven. O mortal, bear and do not invite the stroke because grief and pain will come soon and find you out and possess you. That daringness is too enormous for your human will; because man‟s strength can be safe only within limits; yet your spirit‟s goal is infinity; behind the world‟s face of tears, there exists the bliss of soul. A power exists in you that you do not know; you are a vessel of the imprisoned divine spark (soul). It always seeks relief from the seize of Time, and while you shut it in the result is pain: bliss is the Godhead‟s crown, eternal, and free and not burdened by life‟s blind mystery of pain: pain is the sign and stamp of Ignorance and is the proof of existence of secret God in man denied by life: until life finds him out pain can never end. Calm is the soul‟s victory conquering over fate. Endure; you shall find at last your road to bliss. The presence of bliss is the secret cause of worldly existence, (454) even pain and grief is disguise of the world-delight and is hidden behind your sorrow and cry. Because your strength is a part of God‟s strength and not the God‟s whole, and distressed by the little self your consciousness forgets to be divine and walks on the vague light of senses, it cannot bear the world‟s tremendous touch, and you cry out and say that there is pain. The joyful Dancer on his ways of work wearing the triple disguise of indifference, pain and joy hides the body of God‟s bliss from you. Your spirit‟s strength shall make you one with God and your human pain shall be transformed into divine ecstasy, indifference shall be transformed into infinity‟s calm and the joy shall openly laugh on the summits of the Absolute.

“O mortal, you who complains of death and fate do not blame the harms that you have yourself invited; because you have chosen this troubled world for your home and hence you are the creator of your pain. Once in the immortal boundlessness of the supreme Self, in a vast of Truth and Consciousness and Light the soul looked out from its dwelling of heavenly happiness. It felt the supreme Spirit‟s unending bliss and knew itself as deathless, timeless, spaceless and one and saw the Eternal and lived in the Infinite.

Thereafter eager to know of a shadow thrown by the heavenly Truth on earth it made a great effort to come towards some otherness of self and consequently drawn to an unknown Face that was looking through night. It felt a negative infinity, and saw a supernal void whose immense access imitating God and everlasting Time, offered a place for Nature‟s perverse birth and Matter‟s rigid hard unconsciousness sheltering the brilliance of a transient soul that lights up a birth, death and ignorant life. (455) Thereafter a Mind arose that looked at Nothingness till figures formed of what could never have been possible and housed the contrary of all reality. Then an Unreality appeared as Being‟s huge hidden cause, a blank infinite was seen there as its dumb support in whose unfathomable depths the spirit must disappear: thereafter a darkened Nature lived and held the seed of the Spirit that was hidden and pretended as if it did not exist. The eternal Consciousness became a caprice of an unsouled almighty Inconscient, and it was not possible to breathe any more in the spirit‟s natural atmosphere, the divine bliss remained there as an incident of a transient moment and as a stranger in a lifeless universe. As one is pulled down by the grandeur of the Void below, the soul was attracted and inclined down towards the Bottomless depth: it wished for the adventure into Ignorance and the marvel and surprise of the Unknown and the endless possibility that remained hiding in the womb of primeval Confusion and in Nothing‟s gulf or looked from the immeasurable eyes of Chance. The soul tired of its unchanging heavenly happiness turned away from immortality: it was drawn to the call of chance and danger‟s attraction, it yearned for the worldly suffering of grief and the drama of pain, the danger of the eternal hell and the wounded bare escape and the music of ruin and its enchantment and crash, the sweetness of the pity and the gamble of love and passion and the doubtful face of Fate. A world of hard endeavour and difficult labour, a battle on the dangerous verge of extinction, a clash of forces, a vast incertitude, the joy of creation out of Nothingness, unfamiliar meetings on the roads of Ignorance and the comradeship of halfknown souls or the solitary greatness of a separate self-born being conquering its world, (456) called the soul down from its too safe eternity. Consequently a huge descent and a great fall began: because what the spirit sees creates a truth out of that and what the soul imagines builds a world. A Thought that sprang from the Timeless became an indicator of the consequences of the cosmos and the guide on the ways of the gods, and a cyclic movement in eternal Time. Thus was born from a blind tremendous choice this great

141 bewildered and discontented world, this field of Ignorance and home of Pain: here are pitched the tents of desire and the headquarters of grief. Consequently a vast disguise conceals the Eternal‟s bliss here on earth.”

Thereafter Aswapati answered to Narad: “Is then the spirit ruled by an outward world? If so is there no remedy within us? But what is Fate if it is not the spirit‟s will which after a long time is realised by the cosmic Force? I considered that a mighty Power had descended with Savitri from heaven and is not that Power comparatively higher than Fate?” But Narad answered to Aswapati covering truth with truth: “the worldly ways seems to be complicated along whose edges in the uncertain moments of the gods your footsteps either bewilder or run, yet these least trippings on the way due to obstructions are foreseen above in heaven. The lines of the circle of the movement of life are drawn faultlessly following the flow of Time through the unknown; and are regulated and controlled by a secret clue that is kept hidden by the calm immortals. This description in heraldic terms of a symbol representing significance hidden from view of prophet morns the meaning of which is more deep and is unintelligible to the shut mind but how shall my voice convince the earthly mind with regard to its high meaning? Heaven‟s wiser love rejects the prayer of the mortal being; and not blinded by the mortal breath of desire, and not clouded by the mist of mortal fear and hope, (457) it itself leans over the struggle of love with death; it gave Savitri her privilege of pain. Greatness is present in your daughter‟s soul that can transform her and all around, but she must cross on the stiff and hard stone-like worldly suffering to reach her goal. Although she was designed like a vessel of heavenly nectar and was made of heavenly substance, and since she sought this earthly atmosphere she must share the human need of grief and transform all her cause of joy to pain. The mind of mortal man is guided by words and his sight goes back behind the walls of real Thought and only looks out through half-opened doors. He divides the boundless heavenly Truth into small sky-strips and takes every strip for all the heavens. He looks continuously at infinite possibility and gives the name of Chance to the plastic Vast; he sees the long result of an allwise Force planning a sequence of steps in endless Time, but in its links imagines a senseless chain or felt the mechanical hand of a cold Necessity; he could not respond to the mystic divine Mother‟s heart and as such misses the intense affectionate attachment of the Mother towards her child and only feels the touch of the cold rigid limbs of a lifeless Law. In the free absolute steps of cosmic Truth he thinks that the will of Timeless working in Time to be a dead machine or an unconscious Fate. A great Magician‟s formulas have made the worldly Matter‟s laws and as long as they last all the worldly things are bound by those laws; but the consent of the spirit is needed for each act and Freedom walks in the same rhythm with the Law. All can change in this world if the divine Magician choose; if human will is tuned with God‟s will and human thought could echo the thoughts of God, then man might become all-knowing and almighty; but now he walks in Nature‟s doubtful ray. Yet if man‟s mind can receive God‟s light, (458) and the force of man can be led by the Divine Force, and then he can become a miracle doing miracles. If this only can be achieved then he can become Nature‟s king. It is decreed that Satyavan must die, the hour of his death was also fixed and his fatal stroke is chosen. The other thing that shall happen is written in Savitri‟s soul but till the time reveals the fateful script of those writings it would remain unintelligible and unknown. Fate is a Truth that works out in Ignorance. O king, your fate is a transaction done at every moment between Nature and your soul and God for its unique foreseeing judge. Fate is the balance of credit and debit drawn in the account book of Destiny. Man can accept his fate and can also refuse. Even if the One and the Alone maintains the unseen decree, he writes your refusal for the fruits of past deeds in your credit page: because death is neither a last result nor a mystic end. The spirit arisen from disastrous crash of life and from the body‟s torture and death gets mightier by its defeat; with each fall its godlike wings grow wider and stronger. The sum total of its glorious failure is victory. O man, the events that meet you on your way of the worldly life, though they hit your body and soul with joy and grief, are not your fate, they only touch you awhile and pass; even death cannot cut short spirit‟s walk: the goal and the road you have chosen are your fate. Till the gods have not opened to you your secret soul and made you one with the indwelling God go on consecrating your thought, heart, works and fate as sacrifice on the altar of the gods. O soul, you are an unauthorized entrant in Nature‟s ignorance and an armed traveller to the unseen exalted heights, your spirit‟s fate is a battle and a ceaseless march against invisible opposing Powers and a passage from the worldly Matter into the timeless Self. (459) It recklessly dares through blind unforeseeing Time, its forced advance through a long line of lives pushes its pointed spearhead to reach heaven through the centuries. The army of this way lost god marches across the dust and mud of the earthly plane, on many guarded squadrons of army confronting many dangerous situations, escaping from dire attacks, and in wounded slow retreats, and guarding the ideal‟s surrounded and ruined fort or fighting against many odd situations like lonely sentries, or camped in night around a fire burning near the temporary encampments awaiting for the slow victorious trumpets of the dawn, in hunger and in plenty and in pain, overtaking danger and victory and defeat, through life‟s green lanes and over the desert sands, crossing the solitary planes rising to sunlit peaks, in ranked army groups and its tired soldiers left behind led by the wandering pioneer‟s signal fires moves on endlessly. Then at last the human soul felt the inexpressible joy, and remembers his forgotten self and refound the heaven from which he fell on earth. At last the invulnerable line of troops of army that were in his front crosses the last mountain like passes (paths) of Ignorance: advancing beyond Nature‟s last known borders, and tracing the over powering unknown, beyond the landmark of visible things, it mounts through a miraculous heavenly atmosphere till reaching the silent peaks of the world and stands upon the luminous-peaks of God. Hence your grief that Satyavan must die is in vain; his death is a beginning of a greater life and death is the spirit‟s opportunity. A vast intention has brought two souls of Savitri and Satyavan close and love and death conspire towards a great and ultimate consequence. Because out of danger and pain the divinebliss shall come and time‟s unforeseen events and God‟s secret plan shall be known. This world was not built with the stray bricks of

142 Chance, (460) a blind god is not the creator of destiny; a conscious power has drawn the plan of life and there is a meaning inherent in each curve and line of that plan. The world is a high and a grand architecture built by many named and unnamed masons in which unseeing hands obey the Unseen and Savitri alone is the one master-builder of it.

“O queen, do not try hard anymore to change the secret will; the accidents that takes place in the worldly time are only steps in its vast scheme. Across the fathomless moments of Savitri‟s heart that knows its single will and God‟s will as one do not to bring your brief and helpless human tears: it can embrace its inimical destiny; it can alone sit with grief and facing death, confronting adverse fate armed and alone it can stand. In this great world Savitri standing alone in the mightiness of her silent spirit‟s will and in the passion of her soul of sacrifice her lonely strength shall stand facing the universe, confronting fate it does not ask for neither man‟s nor god‟s help: sometimes one life is charged with earth‟s destiny and never cries for help from the time-bound powers. She alone is equally capable to her mighty task. Do not interfere in a struggle that is too great for your capability, and too deep for the mortal thought to sound, its question to this Nature‟s rigid bounds when the soul confronts the infinite nude of its coverings and with its very great topic of a lonely mortal will enters into the silence of eternity. As a star moves alone in heaven not astonished by the greatness of the Space travelling the infinity by its own light, so also the great souls are strongest when they stand alone. A God-given might of being is their force and a ray of light that comes from the solitude of their soul is their guide; and the soul that can live alone with itself meets God; (461) it‟s lonely universe is the appointed meeting place of Nature and the soul. A day may come when Savitri must stand unhelped on the dangerous border of world‟s doom and her own grim destiny carrying the future of the world on her lonely breast, carrying the human hope in a heart left alone either to conquer or fail on a last desperate verge, alone with death and nearer to dissolution‟s edge. Then her single greatness in that last tremendous scene must cross alone a dangerous bridge in Time and reach the peak of the worlddestiny, where all is won or all is lost for man. In the deciding hour of the world‟s fate in that tremendous silence uncompanioned and lost, in her soul‟s climbing beyond mortal time when she stands alone with Death or alone with God apart upon a silent helpless border, alone with herself, and death and destiny as on some verge between Time and Timelessness when being must end or life rebuild its base, she must alone conquer or alone must fall. No human help can reach her in that moment and no armoured god stand shining by her side. Hence do not cry looking towards heaven because Savitri can alone save herself. For this the silent Force came having been sent down on earth; the conscious Divine Will took a human shape in her: she only can save her and save the world. O queen, stand back from that amazing great scene and do not come between her and her hour of Fate. That hour of Savitri must come and none can intervene: do not think to turn Savitri from her heaven-sent work, and do not try to save her from her own high will. You have no place in that tremendous struggle; and your love and yearnings cannot be an exclusive deciding factor there; leave the world‟s fate and her fate to God‟s sole guard. Even if God seems to leave her to her lone strength, and even though all stumbles and falls and sees an end (462) the heart fails and only death and night are there, her God-given strength can battle against doom even on a verge where Death alone seems the last end and no human strength can hinder or help. Do not think to interfere with the hidden Will of Savitri and do not intervene between her spirit and force and leave her to her mighty self and Fate.”

Narad spoke and ceased and left the earthly scene. He turned towards his far off blissful home away from the struggle and suffering on our globe. The luminous body of the heavenly seer assailed the purple glory of the noon like a brilliant arrow pointing straight to heaven and disappeared like a receding star that vanished into the light of the Unseen. But still a cry was heard in the infinite and still to the listening soul on mortal earth a far imperishable voice sang the song of victory of the eternal love.

-End of Canto Two -End of Book Six

143

BOOK SEVEN The Book of Yoga

144

Canto One The Joy of Union; The Ordeal of the Foreknowledge of Death and the Heart‟s Grief and Pain

(465) Fate goes on following her foreseen unchangeable road. Man‟s hopes and strong desires build the journeying wheels of the chariot that carries his destiny and lead his blind will towards an unknown goal. His destiny that is inherent in him shapes his works and rules him; the face and form of his destiny are already born in man and the secret soul is its ancestry (lineage): here on earth Matter seems to give shape the body‟s life and the soul follows where its nature drives. By the compulsion of Nature and Fate the free-will of man is chosen. But greater spirits can reverse this equality and capable of making the soul the creator of its destiny. This is the mysterious truth (that carries a spiritual meaning) that is hidden by our ignorance from us: death is the daily means of passage of our inborn force and for the test of fire that man has to face in his life is the choice of the hidden soul. The rhythms and processes of human life is inner being‟s own decree. All that Savitri‟s flower-like soft, unyielding, passionate and calm heart had chosen at her own will was fulfilled, and on her strength‟s unbending road forced the cosmic long curve on its way towards its ultimate goal. Once more Savitri sat in her chariot behind the loud hastening hooves of the horses; a speed of the horses driven by the armored drivers of the chariot and a far-heard voice of the chariots carried her from her home. While her chariot passed the earth that was asleep was awakened from its silent meditation and looked up at Savitri from a vast laziness: hills covered with bright mist, and large lands reclined at ease beneath the summer skies, spacious region after region spread in bright sunlight, cities luminous like gems in the wide sunlight and rivers flowing like the hairs of lion curling and flowing downwards (466) with its yellow waters led to the Shawl‟s lands of green wide borders and a happy front of iron like vastnesses, with pure and stern peaks and great solitudes. Once again was near the pretty and destined place, the forests‟ bright delighted borders where first Savitri met Satyavan and Satyavan like one awakened from dream saw some timeless beauty and reality, the moon-gold sweetness of heaven‟s earth-born child Savitri. Her past life receded and future neared: now far behind lay Madras‟s (Savitri‟s place of birth her father‟s palace‟s spacious halls, the white cut out stone pillars, the cool shadowy resting places of the gardens, the colored mosaic of the crystal floors, ornamental buildings for public entertainment with towers, pools waving in wind, and gardens filled with the droning sound of the murmur of bees, the fountain‟s scattering water in the pools lined with white stones and thoughtful noontide‟s trance like peace, the grey dreaming picture of the span of lights fixed between pillars in the peaceful evenings and the slow rising of the moon at the beginning of the Night were either soon forgotten or a little memory of them remained in her. Now the faces known were left far behind along with happy mild tone from the laughing lips and the intense clasping hands of her intimates and the affectionate worshipping light in their cherished eyes they offered to their lord of life.

Now Nature‟s primeval loneliness was here: and only the voice of bird and beast, and ascetic‟s exile in the dim-souled huge inhuman forest dwelling far-away from the cheerful sound of man‟s joyous and carefree conversation and busy life. In a broad evening with red clouds in the sky through a narrow opening and a green flowered fissure and crossing the sight of earth and the sky drivers of the chariot of Savitri reached into a mighty home of the green dusk. From there on wards her chariot moved led by a faint lighted long path that passed through the shadow of great trunks of the trees (467) and under the arches of faint sunshine, they saw low thatched roofs of a hermitage gathered beneath a blue sky in a sunlit open yard that seemed the sudden appearance of a glad smile of the forest‟s huge heart and a primitive shelter for the thought and will of man surrounded by the giant trees of the forest. The men who came with Savitri from her father‟s palace to leave her arrived in that roughly constructed hermitage thatched with leaves and handed over Savitri their pride and loved one to the great blind king who was a royal pillar of fallen mightiness and to the stately care-ridden woman who was once a queen and now hoped nothing for herself from life except only hoping for things for her one child Satyavan and praying from the partial Fate all joy of the earth and heavenly bliss on the single head of Satyavan and the men came with Savitri questioning no more regarding the strangeness of Savitri‟s fate gave her. Now Savitri adoring wisdom and beauty of Satyavan like a young god‟s she could see that Satyavan was loved by heaven as loved by herself, Savitri joyful in Satyavan‟s brightness and relied in his fate and knew not the evil that was approaching near. The men who had come with Savitri to leave her at the forest hermitage of Dyumatsena, like those who keeps away departure‟s pain they after lingering some days upon the verge of Shalwa forest and unwilling to part with the sorrowful clinging hands of Savitri, unwilling to see for the last time the face of Savitri and heavily burdened with the sorrow of her coming days and astonished at the carelessness of Fate who breaks with idle hands her supreme works, they parted from Savitri with pain laden hearts as forced by inescapable fate we part from one whom we shall never see again; driven by the singularity of her fate, helpless against the choice of Savitri‟s heart they left her to her rapture and doom in the savage (fierce) charge of the tremendous forest. Now Savitri put behind her all that was once her life, she welcomed all that shall hereafter be of Satyavan and hers (468), she dwelt with Satyavan in that wild forest: she deemed her joy with Satyavan as priceless that was too close to death living alone with love, she lived for love alone, as if remaining in soul‟s state above the march of her days her motionless spirit watched the haste movement of the worldly Time, it became like a statue of passion, and an unconquerable force and a perfection of a sweet sovereign will and an unyielding and unchangeable peace and violent treatment of the gods.

145 At first to her under the blue skies the loneliness of the huge forest was felt by her like a great scene witnessed in a dream, a sacred place of worship of summer‟s dazzling brightness and fire, a sky-touching palace of the gods adorned with vases of flowers and hung there and all its scenes as a smile on delight‟s lips and all the forest‟s voices as of poets of happiness. There in casual wind a song was also heard, a little sun light was felt as filled with glory; the night was felt by Savitri as a jewel burning on a velvet cloth, and a concealed darkness or filled with deep moonlight; day was felt as a festival of purple colour and chant of hymn and a wave of laughter of light from morning to evening. Satyavan‟s absence in the hermitage was felt by Savitri as a dream of memory, and his presence there was felt as the empire of god. A joyful union of earth and heaven, her past nuptial joyful magnificence‟s stir a rushing of two spirits to be one and as the burning of two bodies in one flame. It was felt by her that the gates of unforgettable joy were opened before her: two lives were locked within an earthly heaven and fate and grief passed away from that fiery moment. But soon the summer‟s intense fire like breath failed and swarms of clouds crept through the sky and rain poured down on leaves drop by drop and storm became the forest‟s huge titan voice. Then listening to the thunder‟s fatal crash in the sky (469) the fleeting quick tapping sounds of the footsteps of the showers and the long unsatisfied breathings of the wind and vague and sorrowful mutterings in the sound-distressed night, the grief of the entire world came near to her. Night‟s darkness appeared to her as her future‟s threatening face. Now her heart that is subject to death was frightened as the shadow of her lover‟s death arose before her. The time passed all swiftly and mercilessly as in race before Savitri, fear spread over her mind, and her mind remembered the date given by Narad with regard to Satyavan‟s death. As a trembling thoughtful accountant of her riches, she calculated the insufficient days left between the present moment and the date as predicted by Narad with regard to the demise of Satyavan, a fierce expectancy was knocking at her breast; the footsteps of the passing hours were creating great dread in her: grief came as a passionate stranger to her gate: but it was fleeing away when she was in Satyavan‟s embracing arms, but came again when she rose from her sleep in the morning to look into her face. Her trial for entering into a fathomless bliss from her pursuing foresight of the end of Satyavan‟s life proved to be in vain. The more she plunged into her love the more her pain grew; from her sweetest depths arose. The remembrance of Savitri of the date prophesied by Narad created an intense pain in her heart and she felt that each day passed as golden leaf (page) torn out cruelly from her very thin book of love and joy. In this way Savitri oscillating in the strong flood in the wind of happiness and swimming in the dark waves of advancing sign of the trouble and feeding her sorrow and terror with her heart‟s grief, because the things now sat among the guests of her heart or wandering apart in her inner chamber and her eyes looked blindly into the future‟s dark night. Out of her separate self she looked and saw moving amid the unconscious faces loved (her in-laws), though in heart so near but in mind a stranger, the ignorant smiling world go happily upon its way towards an unknown doom and she was astonished at the careless lives of men. Although her in-laws and husband were living close to her they walked as if living in a different world (470) confident of the returning sun at the end of each night they were plunged in little momentary hopes and works, but Savitri was alone in her dreadful knowledge. Once the rich and the happy loneliness that made room for Savitri as if in a silver grove separately and lonely in a bright nest of thoughts and dreams, that now made room for her tragic hours of solitude and the lonely grief that none could share or know and made a body that would see the end of joy to soon and the transient happiness of its mortal love. Her calm, immobile and sweet face and her graceful daily acts covered them now like a disguise; her search for ground of stillness and the spirit‟s peace in her depths proved to be vain. Still the silent Being within her was veiled from her, who sees the passage of life‟s drama with fixed eyes and supports the sorrow of mind and heart and bears in human breast the world and fate. Sometimes a glimpse or flash of her being was seen but the real Presence was hid from her sight. Only her violent heart and passionate will were pushed in front from within to meet the unchangeable grim destiny, but they were defenseless, helplessly bound to her human lot and had no means to act and no way to save. Savitri controlled these feelings and nothing was shown outside: she was still to her in-laws the child they knew and loved; they could not see the sorrowing women‟s inner state. In her beautiful motions they could not notice any change from outside: once who was the worshipped empress and to serve whom there was competition amongst her attendants in her father‟s palace now here in the forest‟s thatched hermitage made herself the diligent slave of all, she did not spare the labour of broom, jar and well and close gentle nursing of the beasts or to burn the fire of the altar and kitchen, she allowed not even a slight task to be done by others that her woman‟s strength could very well do. In all her acts a strange divinity was noticed: in her simplest movement she could bring oneness with the earth‟s orb of luminous light and lifting up her common acts by love. (471) All the world‟s love was hers and like a golden tie it binds all in its one heavenly rope. But when her grief pressed too near to the surface from within, the things that were once attractive substance of her joy, appeared meaningless to her as a bright shell, or like a mechanical recurrence and void and only were her body‟s unwilling actions. Always behind this peculiar divided life her spirit like a sea of living fire possessed her lover and clung to his body in one close embrace to guard her life partner from the indication of harm. Remaining awake at night through the slow silent hours she was pondering over the treasure of Satyavan‟s bosom and face, she used to lean over the sleep-bound beauty of his brow or laid her burning cheek upon his feet. When she woke up in the morning her lips endlessly clung to his lips and never willing to separate from that or lose that honeyed flow of delaying joy, unwilling to lose his body from her breast and the warm inadequate signs that love must use. Her heart‟s passion, intolerant to the miserliness of Time available at her disposal, intended the use of centuries of her unselfish love and the sea of ecstasy in one day; catching at the passing moments; in a seclusion keep Satyavan‟s soul sat in her own in mortal time by the deep union of two human lives attempts heart build a little room for timelessness. Even in spite of getting all love of Satyavan unsatisfied by his strong embrace

146 she still demanded and yearned to say, “O compassionate Satyavan and lover of my soul give more and more of love you can, to her whom you have loved. Imprint yourself in my every nerve to keep that thrills to you with the message of my heart. Because soon we may be separated and who knows what a length of time is needed before the great Time‟s wheel that rotates in its monstrous round (472) restore to each other our love?” As she loved Satyavan so well that she never wanted to speak her sorrowful fate‟s word to him and lay her burden on his head: she pressed the wavelike movement of her grief back into her breast and dwell within silently, unhelped and alone. But Satyavan sometimes half understood her inner feelings or felt at least with the uncertain answer of the thought-blinded heart‟s unuttered need and the unfathomable depth of her passionate want. Satyavan from all of his speeding days that he could spare from the labour in the forest in cutting wood and seeking food in the wild forest lanes and service done to his father‟s sightless life he gave to her and helped to increase her hours by the nearness of his presence and his clasp, by his profuse softness of heart-seeking words and the intimate quivering of two hearts, yet all was too little for her bottomless need. If in his presence she forgot for a while the grief that would visit her soon, but in his absence the grief is filled with its painful touch; and she could see the desert of her coming life imaged in her every solitary hour. Though with a vain imaginary bliss of her fiery union with him through death‟s door of escape she dreamed of her body covered with the funeral flame of Satyavan, yet she knew that she must not hold on to that happiness of dying with him and follow him seizing his robe across other countries like glad travellers into the sweet or terrible Beyond. Because those sad parents would still need her help here on earth for their empty small remaining life. Often it seemed to her that the pain of the ages had pressed their essential substance into her single grief and concentrating in her a tortured world. In this way in the silent chamber of her soul she, shutting her love with secret grief, dwelt like a dumb priest near the hidden gods (473) that were unsatisfied by the wordless offering of her life and lifting to them her sorrow like incense sticks making her life the altar, and herself the sacrifice. Yet their union with each other ever grew more and more until it appeared that no power could create division between them, even the body like walls could not divide. Because when Satyavan wandered in the forest Savitri‟s conscious spirit often walked with him and knew his actions as if he moved in herself; Satyavan being less aware was thrilled with her from afar. Always the state of Savitri‟s passion grew and grief and fear became the fuel of the fire of mighty love. Her love increased by its torment filled the whole world and the whole earth and heaven became all her life. Though life was born as a child of hours, yet it walked immortal unslayable as the gods: her spirit stretched measureless in the divine strength and become like an anvil to bear the blows of Fate and Time: or tired of sorrow‟s passionate luxury, her grief‟s self became calm, dull-eyed and strong minded awaiting some result of its fiery struggle and some deed in which it might at least be victorious over itself, and death and tears and meet its end forever.

The year now reached the point of changing of seasons. Though the storm did not sail in the sky with its stupendous wings and thunder did not wander in anger across the world but still a little muttering was heard in the sky and rain was pouring in tiredly through the mournful sky and the grey slow moving clouds surrounded the earth. So her grief like a heavy sky was shut in her heart. A still soul hidden behind but shed no light: no voice descended from the forgotten heavenly heights; only in the privacy of its concentrated pain her human heart spoke to the body‟s fate.

-End of Canto One

147

Canto Two The Parable of the Search for the Soul

(474) Savitri sat in the watchfulness of the sleepless night in the hermitage of the Forests of Shalwa kingdom through the slow heavy-footed movement of the silent hours suppressing in her breasts the load of grief, looking with concentration at the silent passage of Time and the approach of the ever-nearing evil Fate as predicted by Narad, an invocation from her being‟s highest heights came, a sound and a call that broke the knot of the Night. A mighty Voice came from the centre where will and knowledge meet above her brows and filled her mortal mind‟s sky. It appeared to have come from inaccessible heights and yet was intimate with the entire world and knew the meanings of the steps of Time and saw eternal destiny‟s changeless scene filling the far wideness of the universal sight. At the touch of the Voice her body became a hard and rigid golden statue of motionless trance and an idol like a stone of God lighted by a soul of precious stone of bluish-purple colour containing unusual capacity for retaining spiritual force. Quieted calmness of her body all grew still: her heart listened to its slow and rhythmic quivering, her mind becoming thoughtless heard and was silent: the voice said to Savitri, “O Spirit, O immortal energy, why you came to this dumb death-bound earth, to this ignorant life beneath indifferent skies and tied like a sacrifice on the raised platform offering to a deity of Time, if it was to nurse grief in a helpless heart or with hard tearless eyes await your grim-destiny? O soul, arise and defeat and conquer Time and Death.” But Savitri‟s heart replied in the dim night: “My strength is taken away from me and was given to Death. Why should I lift my hands to the heavens that are shut or struggle with silent inevitable Fate (475) or hope in vain to uplift an ignorant human race who holds squeezing tightly with arms to their lot and jeer at the savior Divine Light and see in Mind the only temple of wisdom, in its harsh peak and in its Inconscient base it feels as a rock of safety and an anchor of sleep? Is there any God to whom the mortal cry can move? The God sits in peace and leaves the strength of the transient being incapable against his calm almighty Law and the Inconscience and the almighty hands of Death. What is the necessity for me , or Satyavan to avoid the worldly dense black complicated meshed net, and the darkest door or call a mightier Light into life‟s closed room and a greater Law into man‟s little world? Why should I struggle to change earth‟s unchanging laws or avert the danger of death‟s unavoidable hour? This surely is best to make a pact with my fate and follow close behind my lover‟s steps and pass through night from twilight to the sun crossing the darkest river (the evil Baitarani) that divides the borders of earth and heaven.

Then we could lie embracing each other keeping breast upon breast and not disturbed by our mortal thoughts and mortal hearts, forgetting man, life, time, its hours, and eternity‟s call and forgetting God.” The inner Voice then replied: “Is this enough, O spirit? And what shall your soul say when it wakes and knows that for the work for which it came was left undone? Or is this all for your being born on earth entrusted with the responsibility by an order of eternity, to become a listener to the voices of the Time, follower of the footprints of the gods, and pass leaving unchanged the old dusty laws? Shall there be no new laws made, no new divine Voice heard on earth and no greater light descend upon earth for liberating earth‟s spirit from unchangeable Fate? (476) Did you not come down upon earth to open the doors of Fate, the iron doors that appeared to have been shut forever and lead man to Truth‟s wide and golden road that runs through finite things to infinity? Is this then the report that i must make bowing down my head in shame before the Eternal‟s seat that the power he kindled in your body has failed and his labourer returns, leaving her task unfinished?” Then Savitri‟s heart became silent and no word came out of her. But holding back her troubled rebel heart and keeping it straight, erect and strong and calm like a hill, overcoming the seas of mortal ignorance a Power that was immutable above her mind‟s sky answered the still Voice: “I am your portion here charged with the responsibility of your work as you are like myself seated above forever, speak to my depths and command, O great and deathless Voice, because I am here to execute your will.” The Voice replied: “Remember why you came upon earth: (be conscious with regard to the aim of your life): find out your soul, seek out your hidden self and in silence find out god‟s meaning in your inner depths and change mortal nature into divine nature. Open the God‟s door, and enter into his trance.

Remove Thought (Mind) from you that is a swift imitator of divine Light: in God‟s tremendous silence make your brain calm and Immobile and wake within you his vast Truth and know and see it. Remove away the feelings of your senses from you that veils the spirit‟s sight: in the great emptiness of your mind you shall see the Eternal‟s body in the world, and know him in every voice heard by your soul, in the contacts of the world meet his single touch; then all things shall envelope you into his embrace. Conquer your heartbeats and let it beat in God: your nature shall be the engine of his works, your voice shall house the mightiness of the eternal Word: then you shall harbour my force and conquer Death.” (477) Then Savitri sat by her ill fated husband still in her rigid, golden, motionless pose, like a statue of fire of the inner sun. In the darkest night the roar of storm swept across the sky, the thunder crashed above her, the rain hissed and its million drops poured down on the roof. Savitri becoming impassive mid the movement and the cry of storm, like a witness of the thoughts of her mind and the moods of life, looked into herself and sought for her soul.

Thereafter a dream revealed to her the past of the universe, the divine-seed that lies in the cave and its mystic origins, and the vague beginning of the world-fate: a symbol lamp lighting the hidden truth shown to her through the medium of images of the world‟s occult significance. The way in which the creation took its first mysterious steps in the uncertain formlessness of self, and how the body‟s shape was made as the house of soul and Matter learned to think and person grew; Savitri saw how the Space was filled with the seeds of life and the human creature born in Time. At first appeared a dim half-lifted tide of being that came out of infinite Nothingness: a consciousness looked at the Inconscient Vast and pleasure and pain stirred in the senseless Void. All was the work of

148 a blind World-Energy: unconscious of her own strange works she shaped the universe out of the Void. She became aware of the unfinished beings: gathered round a small ego‟s pin-point head in a formless matter of little capacities to feel; she saw a living creature found its support, it moved and lived and became breathing and thinking whole. A formless surface consciousness awoke on a dim ocean of subconscient life: a stream of thoughts and feelings came and went, (478) foam of memories hardened and became a bright outer covering of habitual sense and thought, a seat of living personality permanently imitated the recurrent habits. A mind in the act of being born in a changeable form, it built an impermanent house on shifting sands and built a floating island upon a bottomless sea. A conscious being was created by this labour; it looked around it on its difficult field in the green wonderful and dangerous earth; it hoped to survive in a brief lived body relying on Matter‟s false everlastingness. It felt godhead (soul) in its easily broken (bodily) house; it saw blue heavens and dreamed immortality.

A conscious soul In the Inconscient world hidden behind our thoughts, hopes, and dreams, like a calm Master signing Nature‟s acts makes the delegate mind as an seeming king. In his floating house upon the sea of Time the king sits engaged at work restlessly; he is like a dancing doll dances in the dance of worldly Time; he is driven by the hours and in the stream of works, and compelled by the moment‟s call to meet the multitude of life‟s need and burdened with the heavy confusingly sounded voices of the world. This mind neither knows silence nor dreamless sleep, in the unending circling of that mind‟s steps her thoughts moved forever through its listening brain; it works like a machine pauselessly. The dream-god‟s messages endlessly crowd down into its body‟s manystoried chambers. All became a hundred-toned murmur and stir and incoherent sound and there was tirelessness and a haste of movement and a ceaseless cry running to and fro. As a result of this the hurried servant like senses answer to every knock upon the outer doors, and bring in time‟s visitors and reply to each call, (479) allow entrance to the thousand questions and the calls and messages of the transmitting minds and of unnumbered lives the heavy business and all the thousand fold commerce of the world.

Even in the region of sleep the mind gets very little rest; the mind in strange subconscient dreams makes a fun of life‟s steps, even in the subtle kingdom of symbol scenes it becomes way lost, its night is packed with flashes of dreamy visions and dim forms or filled with slight floating shapes and spends only a moment in the silent Self. Daring to travel into infinite mind-space he opens his wings of thought and flies in inner sky or travelling in an imagination‟s car crosses the globe, and journeys beneath the stars, his fly through the ethereal skies takes him to subtle worlds, on Life‟s miraculous peaks he visits the Gods and communicates with Heaven and interferes with the Hell. This is the little surface figure of man‟s life. This is the man and his whole universe, he rises to the Unseen reality and his inner depths dare into the Bottomless Depths; the man is a mini universe and a whole mysterious world is locked within him. Unknown to him the hidden king of his life lives behind the rich painted screens of the great mysterious rooms; he is an enjoyer of the pleasure of the spirit‟s unseen joys, and lives on the sweet honey of loneliness: he is a nameless god in an inaccessible temple, in the secret inmost part of his soul beneath the threshold and behind the shadowy gates or shut in the vast chambers of Inconscient sleep he guards the being‟s covered mysteries. The taintless and All-Wonderful Divine throws into the white purity of man‟s soul as reflected in a majestic mirroring glass his splendour, his greatness and the light of self-creation that existed in Time‟s infinity. In the worldly life man works out the dreams of God. (480) All exist in man, even God‟s opposites; he is a little front layer of the universal Nature‟s works and a thinking external image of a secret Force. The Nature reveals in him all that is in her, all the glories and the darkness‟s of Nature moves in man. Man‟s life like house not only holds the gods alone: there are hidden Shadows and darkest Powers, they are the dwellers of life‟s threatening lower parts, they are a shadowy world‟s tremendous citizens. Man is a careless guardian of his nature‟s powers, and gives shelter to dangerous forces in his bodily house. The Titan, the Fury (Monster), and the Djinn (Diabolical power) lie suppressed in the depths of his subconscient cave and the Beast power lies in his deepest depths (antre den): in their sleep dreadful mutterings and murmur rise from them. Sometimes the rebellious monstrous mystery that hides in life‟s depths and the mystery of dark and fallen worlds and the dreadful faces of harmful Kings raise their huge head in him. The dreadful powers that were suppressed within man‟s depths become his masters or ministers (advisers), they attack his bodily house enormously and can act following his acts, and contaminate his thought and life. The hell rises up into the human atmosphere and touches all with a destroying breath.

Vague forces like a subtle polluted exhalation creep stealthily through the little openings of the closed doors of his bodily house, they discolours the walls of his upper mind and leave behind a foul smell of sin and death in which he lives a fair and apparently right but not a real life: in man not only rises the unnatural movement of his thought but also comes formless influences that are difficult to overcome, and also presences and terrifying shapes: huge forms and faces mounting dim steps look at times into his living-rooms or called up for a moment‟s passionate work (481) they impose a dire habit‟s claim upon his heart: because they came arisen from their sleep they could not be kept bound anymore. Distressing the daylight and spreading the sense of danger in the night, they attack at will man‟s bodily house, the dangerous dire inhabitants of rigid darkness mounting into God‟s light disturb all light. All that they have touched or seen in man‟s bodily house they make their own, they take shelter in Nature‟s lowest parts and gets filled up in the mind‟s lanes and passages, they break apart the links of thoughts and its sequences of ideas, break through the soul‟s stillness with noise and cry or they invite the inhabitants of the hell, they invite the innate pattern of behaviors especially of animals of the forsaken joys, they shake the life‟s floor waking an ironic laughter of dread demonic joy and with the lowermost tumult and loud revelry. Man the house holder being powerless to subdue the terrible prisoners from his bodily house, sits above horrified and helpless and as a result his house is taken from him and becomes no more his own. Consequently he is bound and forced to become a prey of their play or in their

149 mad and mighty prolonged loud and annoying noise attracted for moving in the enjoyment of joy. The dangerous forces of his nature arisen create a rebellion at will. Those rebellious forces arisen from the darkness of the hell where they have remained in a state of bending position lowering the body with knees bent close against the chest in the depths and prisoned from the sight can be held no more; now the passion of his nature becomes his lords. Once put down or wearing false illusory names and dresses the beings of Hell and demon powers dwells there. Man‟s lower nature hides these dreadful guests. Sometimes their vast transmitting influence takes a firm hold on man‟s world. On man‟s soul a terrible rebellion becomes over powerful. In house and house the huge rebellion grows: hell‟s companies remain free to do their work and enter into the earth-ways by breaking out from all doors; with the lust of blood and will to slay they invade in the God‟s fair world and filled with dread and destruction. Death and his hunters pursue stealthily a tortured earth; the frightful sprit hits at every door: (482) and a terrifying laughter of jeers at the sight of worldly pain, and the instruments of mass destruction and torture make a stupid smile at Heaven: consequently all becomes the prey of the destroying force; thus creation trembles and reels from top to base. This evil Nature housed in human hearts is a foreign inhabitant and a dangerous guest: the soul that provides it shelter it can remove and expel the householder and possess the house. It is an opposite power that contradicts God and a momentary Evil‟s almightiness obstructed the straight path of Nature‟s acts. It imitates the Godhead it denies, puts on his figure and assumes his face. It is a Manichean (evil) creator and destroyer; this can abolish man and destroy his world. In spite of all these human tragedies there exists a guardian power, there are saviour Hands, and calm divine eyes that regard the human scene.

As a tree waits to grow up in its seed all the world‟s possibilities are waiting in man: his past lives in him that drives his future‟s steps; his present acts mould his future‟s fate. In his house like Life the unborn gods hide. The unknown devil spirits overshadowing man‟s mind and shaping their dreams into live frames of thought, the frames in which his mind builds out its world. His mind creates around him a universe of his own kind. All that existed in the past now renews in him its birth and all that would take place in future are duly formed in his soul. Those growing out in his work appear on the roads of the world and draw the lines of the paths of the secret purpose of the gods that are unintelligible for the interpreting reasoning guesses of mind. The lines of the complex plan drawn by them runs through strange directions; their aim is concealed from human foresight, and the far intention of some ordering Will or the order of the life‟s despotic (whimsical) risk (483) finds out its settled position and its determined hour. By reason‟s sight our surface consciousness proved to be vain: assailed by the extempore passion of the unseen our surface consciousness helplessly records the accidents of Time, and also life‟s unwilled ups and downs. A little part of us only could foresee its steps and in a very little part of life there exists a will and purposeful movement. A vast subliminal consciousness is man‟s immeasurable part. The indistinct subconscient dark is his inner most foundation (starting point). In the walks of Time even though our past lives were abolished vainly yet it still it lives in our unconscious selves and by the weight of its hidden influences our future‟s self-discovery‟s shape is determined.

In the like manner all in our life‟s movement is an inevitable chain and yet appears to be a series of accidents. The forgotten moments of the past repeat the old acts in us, our dead past clings round our future‟s ankles as a chain and drags back the new nature‟s glorious steps of our present life, or from its buried dead bodies old ghosts arise, old thoughts, old desires and dead passions live again, and recur in our sleep or drive the waking man towards such words that forcefully obstructs of the human lips, drive him towards such deeds that suddenly start and overleap man‟s head of reason and his guardian will. In our new self an old self hides still, hence in our present life we rarely escape from what once we had been in our past: through the indistinct light of our habit‟s passages and in the subconscient dark tunnels all things are carried by our carrier nerves and nothing could be checked by the innermost mind, and the guardians of our body‟s door could not investigate them well and as such they are allowed to pass into our body by a blind natural ability of memory, because the old gang of servers were dismissed, they could use the old invalid passports. Thus what was once living in us nothing is wholly dead, in shadowy tunnels of the world‟s being and our being the old rejected nature still survives; (484) the dead remains of its past destroyed thoughts raise their heads and visit mind‟s walks in the night in sleep, its suffocating tendencies live, move, rise and all keep a ghostly immortality. The Nature‟s series are unavoidable: the seeds of our past rejected sins do again sprout from hid soil; and once more we face the evil that was exiled from our hearts; our dead selves come to kill our living soul. A portion of us only lives in the course of present Time, a secret great portion of us fumbles in an unclear inconscience, arisen out of the inconscience and subliminal we live in our mind‟s uncertain light and try to know and possess a world filled with duality, the purpose and meaning of the same are hidden from our sight. Above us dwells a superconscient God hidden in the mystery of his own light: a vast ignorance is around us lighted by the uncertain ray of human mind and below us that dark and mute Inconscient sleeps.

But this is only Matter‟s first self expression and a step and series in the Ignorance. This does not represent of all that we are and our entire world. Our greater being of knowledge waits for us and it is a supreme light in the vast truth-consciousness: it looks from the peaks beyond our thinking mind and moves in a greater heaven that transcends life. A day may come when it shall descend on earth and make earth‟s life, life divine. This world was a creation of the Truth and not of a blind Nature-Force. Because our large diviner heights are not here; in the superconscient light our summits are glorious with the very face of God: there exists our point of view of eternity and the figure of god that we are, and his young and timeless look on deathless things, his joy in our escape from death and Time, and his immortality, light and bliss. (485) our larger being sits behind the unknown walls: and aid from the deep indwelling Gods: and feel that someone speaks within us, and Divine Light comes to us from above. Our soul begins to be active from its mysterious

150 chamber in our body; its influences pressurizing our heart and mind inspires them to exceed their transient selves. Its aim is Good, Beauty and God (Satyam, Sivam, Sundaram); beyond our ego-self‟s walls we see our boundless self, we could only see through our world‟s mirror the vast worlds that could only be half-seen, we seek for the Truth behind the easily visible things. Our inner Mind dwells in a larger light, its brightness falls on us through hidden doors; consequently our inner limbs grow luminous and Wisdom‟s face appears in the doorways of the mystic chamber: when Wisdom enters into our house of outward sense, then we look up and see, above, her sun. A mighty life-self with its inner power supports the dwarfish little things we call life; it has got the capacity to add on our worldly creep two powerful wings like graft. Our body‟s subtle self in its unknown palace of truthful dreams that are the bright shadows of the thoughts of God sits throne within us. Man in the prostrate vague blind start of the human race took shape from the bowed apelike man. With a godlike form and force he stood erect and thereafter with soul‟s thoughts looked out from earth-born eyes; man stood erect wearing the thinker‟s brow: he looked at heaven and saw his comrade stars; and a subtle vision of beauty and greater birth came slowly emerging from the heart‟s temple of light and moved in a white luminous sky of dreams. As a result he could see his being‟s unrealized vastnesses, and aspired for the demigod that was about to take birth and given shelter to him within himself. Out of the shadowy caves of his inner self (486) the demigod who was seeking secretly came into the open: he could hear from far away and touched the untouchable, he looked into the future and the unseen; he used the powers that was beyond the control of earth‟s instruments, and made impossible his field of sports; could catch up fragments of the thoughts of the All knowing, and scattered the formulas of the All powerful around him. Thus man in his little bodily house made up of earthly dust grew towards an unseen heaven of thought and dream and looked into the vast fields of his mind on a small globe that is like a dot in the infinity. At last climbing a long and narrow stair he could stand alone on the highest peaks of the earthly things and saw the light of a spiritual sun. By his aspiration he could transcend his earthly self and, freed from the encirclement of mortal things he stands in his new-born soul‟s largeness, he moves in a pure, free, spiritual kingdom as in a rare breath of a subtle sky; he mounts by a frail thread to his high source in the last end of the far lines of divinity; he reaches his fount of immortality, and calls the Godhead into his mortal life. All these realizations concealed in her spirit were now fulfilled in Savitri: like a portion of the mighty Mother marked Savitri at the center of the wide-drawn scheme of the world, Savitri in the passion of her far-seeing spirit dreamed to mould humanity into God‟s own shape and lead this great blind struggling world to light or to discover or to create a new world. She realised that the earth must transform her and become equal to Heaven or Heaven should descend into earth‟s mortal state. But for such vast spiritual change to occur, (487) the heavenly Psychic being escaping out of the mystic cave in man‟s heart must put off her veil and step into common nature‟s crowded rooms and stand naked in nature‟s front and rule its thoughts and fill the body and life. Savitri now sat surrendering to a high divine command; and realised that time, life and death were passing incidents obstructing her divine sight with their transient view; her sight must now break through all the barriers of the worldly things and liberate the God imprisoned in the blind mortal man. Her inferior nature born from ignorance still takes a large place and veiled her self and must have to be pushed aside to find out her soul.

-End of Canto Two

151

Canto Three The Entry into the Inner Countries

(488) As if coming out from a loud crowded market and entering into a cave by an inward moment‟s magic at first she came out of the busy low sound like that of a bee of her mind. Her soul became a bare silent emptiness: her mind became thoughtless and looked into the empty depths of silent infinity. The heights she had reached went back, the depths behind her were closed; everything fled away from her and left her blank. But when she returned back to her kingdoms of thought of her human self, she became once more the human thing on earth, a lump of Matter, an unseen house, and a mind that is compelled to think out the things of ignorance, a life-force burdened with heavy workload and the material world became her limited field. As one dumfounded and ignorant she sought her way out of the complexity of man‟s unknowing past that took the surface personal form as the soul. Thereafter a Voice that dwelt on her secret heights spoke: “You are all seeking is ment for man and not for yourself alone. If only God assumes human mind and puts on mortal ignorance as his outer covering and makes himself the Dwarf with triple steps spreading them to Heaven, Earth and Hell then he can help man to grow into the God. The cosmic Greatness of God disguised as man works and finds out the mysterious unreachable gate and opens the Immortal‟s golden door. Consequently man the human follows in God‟s human steps. Hence accepting man‟s darkness you must bring light to him and accepting his sorrow you must bring bliss to him. In this body made up matter that you hold you must find out your heaven-born soul.” Thereafter Savitri came out of her human frame (489) and stood a little away outside herself and looked into her subtle being‟s depths within and in its heart as in a lotus-bud she sought for her secret and mysterious soul. At the shadowy gate of her inner life that obstructs the physical mind from our inner depths and all that lives by the breath of the body, she knocked and pressed against a gate made of hard black wood (ebony). From each hinge of that living gate an offencing resisting sound came out with severe reluctance, it complained passively against the cruelty of the spirit‟s touch. From within her a dreadful voice that is difficult to overcome cried out: “O creature of earth, return back or else you would die tortured and torn.”

From there a terrible murmur rose like a dim sea; at the threshold of the gate a Serpent stretching its fatal guardian hood with monstrous coils rose with its sibilant sound, the dogs of the darkness barked opening wide their jaws, the trolls (the underground dwarf ghost), goblins (diabolical forces), and gnomes (underground spirits) looked at Savitri with anger and the roaring (loud noise) of the wild beasts thrilled her blood with fear and unclear threats in a dangerous tone. Yet, Savitri with her strong and steadfast will without being shaken pressed on the strong bars of the gate, thus the gate was wide open with a protesting sound, the opponent Powers now withdrew their dreadful guards and her being entered into the inner worlds. At the gate of the subconscient through a narrow passage she breathed with difficulty and pain and tried hard to find her inner self concealed in sense. She forced her way through body to the soul into a close packed subtle Matter, in a depth filled with blind mass of power, despite opposition of the misleading lights, and heavy barriers of blind sight, she passed across a dangerous borderline where Life dips into the subconscient dust or struggles to escape from Matter into the chaos of mind filled with the cluster of beings of lower vital origin (490) and trembling shapes of uncertain halfbodied thought and unrefined beginnings of a force lacking self-restraint. At first Savitri faced a difficult impossible narrowness and a fought with an opposition of uncertain powers and unstable wills; because all was there but nothing was in its proper place. At times an opening came and a door opened forcibly; she had to cross through skies of secret self and walk through the passage of inner Time. At last she entered into a world of forms and a beginning of limitedness and a world of sense: but all was still in a state of confusion and nothing was seen in their shape of self. Soul was not there but there existed only cries of life. A crowded and noisy atmosphere encircled her. An insignificant multitude of sounds, irrelevant clash of cries and contrary calls was heard, a mass of innumerable visions were opened across the sight, a roughly struggling order of succession of madness was filled there, and feelings were pushed through a packed and burdened heart, and each forced to walk in their separate meaningless way but they had no other attention except to go on their ego‟s drive. There was gathering without key of any united will, thought looked at thought astonishingly and pulled at the tied brain as if to pluck the reason from its seat and throw its dead remains into life‟s wayside drain; so that reason the sentinel of the soul is abandoned, slain and might lie forgotten in Nature‟s mud. Thereby the life‟s power could reject from it the mind‟s rule, Nature giving up spirit‟s government and naked elemental energies and make the sense a glory of boundless joy, a splendour of ecstatic lawlessness and a mighty and mad riot of utter bliss. This was the soulless sense‟s inborn impulse or when the soul sleeps hidden without power, but now the vital godhead woke within and lifted the life with the touch of the Supreme. (491) If the mind is thrown away into the bottomless depths then how shall the glory and flame come? Because body without mind looses the light, and looses the joy of the sprit sense and the joy of light; all then submerges in the depth of the subconscient and dark, the inconscience puts its seal of disgrace on Nature‟s breast, or else a mad disorder whirls the brain putting it along a damage nature‟s roads, and into a confusion of disordered impulses where no light, and joy or peace can come. This state of threatening crisis appeared but now Savitri pushed this away from her. As if in a long endless tossing street (in a way where one rises and falls due to heavy crowd) one is driven amid the crushing of the hurrying crowd Savitri walked hour after hour without release, strengthening her will power amid the senseless barking of the dogs; and out of that dreadful press she pulled her will power and concentrated her mind upon the God‟s savior Name; thereafter everything grew still and empty, she became free from that. A great liberation and an expanse of calm were felt. She moved for a short time through a blank peace of open Light of an invisible sun, in an emptiness of a void of a bodiless happiness and a blissful vacuum of nameless peace. But now Savitri faced a mightier danger that drew near her: the pressure of her physical mind and the aimless thought and will

152 created by the Inconscient had fallen from her. A gigantic demon of Life that does not obey the reign of mind or soul approached Savitri in its magnified form and subconscient and vast. It thrashed all power into a single stream and made its power as a might of dangerous seas. Into the quietness of Savitri‟s silent self, and into the meditating white wideness of Space a flood, and a current of speed of Lifeforce broke out like wind driven mass of waves and raced on a dry floor of summer sand; it drowned its banks like a mountain of climbing waves. (492) the life‟s streams passionate voice was too great. While the voice spread like a flood it cried to Savitri‟s listening spirit, demanding God‟s surrender before a chainless Force. Its deaf force calling to a dumb status and invited the thousand voices of the silent Vast sky, it claimed her heart‟s support for its joy, and the witness Soul‟s consent for its need to act, and the consent of her neutral being for the satisfaction of its passionate desire of power. It brought into the wideness of her witness self the force of the large scale Breath of Life; in its rushing stream carried all the world‟s hopes and fears, its dissatisfied hungry cry of all life and all nature and its longing (yearning) that all eternity of time cannot fill. It invited the mountain like caves of secrecies of the soul and the miracle of the immortal fire, it spoke to the first inexpressible joy that was hidden in the stir beat of Life; out of the unseen deepest depths of the hell it rooted out its attraction and magic of disordered bliss, and poured into earth‟s light its complicated network of grace and beauty and drank from the world desire‟s bottomless well and pot full of Nature‟s primitive joy, and the fire and mystery of forbidden delight and the honey-sweet poison-wine of passionate desire and death but dreamt that as a wine of glory of life‟s gods and felt it as a golden solace of celestial joy. The aeonic cycles of infinite desire and a sorcery that made an unrealized world wider than the known and nearer than the unknown in which the dogs of mind and life search forever, it enticed a deep dissatisfied strong desire within to yearn for the unfulfilled and ever far things and to make this life upon a limiting earth a climb towards the summits vanishing in the void, and a search for the glory of the impossible. The life dreamed of the forms that was ever unknown to it, (493) and clutched things that have never been possessed, it driven away the enchantments that flies away from the heart‟s soon lost delight into a Elysian (Heavenly) memory; it dared for the force that kills and the joys that hurt, the bodied shape of unachieved things and summons to an Enchantress‟s (that has the magical power to change men into swine or only lower form) transmuting dance and in the court of love for the permanent possession of love and the wild Beasts‟ ramp and romp (mad play) with Beauty and Life. It brought the cry and on rush (surge) of its opposite powers, its brief moments of the touch of luminous planes, its flame like ascensions and sky-high vast attempts, its fiery towers built by the wind of dream, its sinking towards darkness and the bottomless depths, its honey of pity, and its sharp wine of hate, and its shadow of clouds and the changing of the rays of the sun, and change of laughter and tears, its bottomless depths of danger and its swallowing gulfs, its fear, joy, ecstasy, and despair, all its occult magic‟s, and its movements in simple lines, its great meetings and uplifting moments, its faith in heaven and its relations with hell. These powers of life-force were not dulled and deadened with the heavy weight of the earth; they bring in the taste of ambrosia (heavenly nectar) and the sting of the poison. There was a zeal filled into the eyes of Life that could see heaven blue in the grey sky of Night: its god ward aspirations soared on wings of passion.

Mind‟s thoughts like horses raising their high neck with the glowing splendour as of a seven lustrous colored mane ran in a high speed, they were wavering a set of coordinated jewels of intuition‟s light; they could imitate its flame gallop like of the horses: the voices of mind imitated the stress of inspiration and its unerring stress of meter and the speed and lightning heavenward movement of the Gods.

This mind is like a sharp blade that tears away the nets of doubt; its insight is like a sharp sword that seemed almost divine. Yet all that knowledge the mind had was like a reflection of sun; the forms that were seen there were not heaven-born (494) and its inner voice could only utter unreal‟s Word; its dangerous and autocratic power could mix poison with the wine of God. Falsehood rode on these high thought-like shining horses‟ backs; there truth with delight clasped in the passionate arms of falsehood sails downstream in a joyous golden boat: she (truth) sharpened her ray with a splendid lie. Here in Life‟s lower kingdoms all contraries meet; Truth looks at them and does her works with bandaged eyes and Ignorance is Wisdom‟s backer here: those minds horse like galloping hooves of in their enthusiast speed could bear life to a dangerous intermediate zone (neither earth nor heaven but in between) where Death walks wearing a dress of immortal Life. Or they enter in the valley of an impermanent Light from where souls imprisoned or becomes a prey of this illusive Ray, trapped in the net of that region can never escape. They were not Life‟s being‟s agents (slave) but not masters, and serve life‟s desires laboring for ever caught in the trap of worldly Time. Their bodies born out of the womb of some Nothingness and they keep the spirit trapped in the transient dreams, then they perish into the sink of Nothingness getting vomited the immortal soul out of Matter‟s belly. Yet some uncaught, un-slain, can pass very skillfully carrying the image of Truth in their sheltered heart and pluck Knowledge out of the screening clutch of error and breaking path through the blind wall of the little self, and then travel on to reach a greater life. Now all these scenes passed besides Savitri in the Life world that appeared before her subtle sight as if around high and silent island a great sound of waters from unknown hills that swallowed its narrow banks with its crowding waves and made a hungry world of white dangerous foam: like a dragon hastening with its million feet its cry was like a giant drunken demon confused the mischief, and its black curling hair tossed into God‟s sky and declined receding with its distant roar. (495) There after there smiled again a large and tranquil atmosphere before her: there in a blue heaven and green earth remained as partners of Beauty‟s empire lived in happiness as ancient companions; and in the world‟s heart the joy of life laughed again. Now everything became still, the soil became dry and pure. But Savitri through all these scenes remained neither immobile nor plunged in vain waves. Out of the vastness of her silent soul the uproar of life passed away, her spirit became silent and free.

153 Thereafter travelling forward through the wide silence of the soul she gradually reached a brilliant regulated Space. There Life dwelt in a fixed peace and its strong rebellious heart was chained. Life learned the humility of her measured steps of movement, she could not keep any more her rush and impassioned movement; she had lost the sure poise of sublimity of her thought and the ample greatness of her royal force; all her mighty luxuries and innumerable waste were restrained and her revels of mad play were made calm, her lavish wastes in the desire‟s market were cut down, her unrestricted will and her whimsical dance were subdued, and a dry firmness restrained forcibly her revel of sense. The fate of life became like a majesty of a king without freedom; once who was the sovereign on its throne now began obeying the command of her ministers: her servants like mind and sense that now governed her house: the limits of her soul they have kept with iron like defensive walls guarded by a close drawn armoured rules the reason‟s balanced ruling, and maintained order and peace. Her will was prisoned within the stone like walls of law, her force was bound with stark chains that pretended to adorn her, her favorite luxurious and uncontrolled imagination was prisoned in a fort; the state of reality and the harmony of reason were set in its place guarded by marshaled (like sentinels) facts, they gave to the soul a seat of Justice as its throne and gave as a kingdom a small world of rule and line: (496) the wisdom of the aenoed contracted into a state of scholars lines and made smaller into a pattern of copy-book design. Here the Spirit‟s all-powerful freedom did not exist: a scholarly mind had captured life‟s large sky, afraid of losing its soul in the infinite she had chosen to live in simple and small chambers to be safe from the too vast dangerous universe. Even the divine Conception‟s unlimited range was cut into a system of cult and tied to a fixed theory or riveted to Matter‟s solid ground: or else the soul was lost in its own heights: the mind obeying the Ideal‟s lofty law made its throne on unsubstantial sky hating earth‟s trivial flatness; it forsook realities to live in its dreams. Or remained watching that the whole universe runs systematically: life‟s empire was a continent that tied by laws, and her thoughts remained like a disciplined and ranked army; at the command of the trained commander mind they kept uniformly the logic and rhythm of their fixed place. Or each stepped into its place like a star or marched through fixed and constellated skies or kept their rank and position among its co-stars in the sky‟s unchanging cosmic hierarchy. Or like a maiden from a high an ancestry with beautiful eyes always forbidden to walk without veil in public paths, so also she must have to move in the close and secluded chambers whose inner feelings was only known in the temples or in the paths of the gardens. The path of Life was kept in a safe level and hence it could not venture the temptation of greater and difficult heights or climb to be a neighbor to a lonely star or to pass along the border of the of the steep face of rock or the edges of a dangerous situation or was never dared to be enticed by the foam-curled waves‟ dangerous laugh, and dared not to become the adventures player of lyre, and made danger its pastime or never dared to invite some flaming god into her chamber or leave the world‟s boundaries and meet with the heart‟s passion the Adorable where no limits exists (497) or couldn‟t dare to set the world burning with its inner Fire. She without breaking out of the cabin of idea or trespass into rhythm too high or vast in the pure adjective of the prose of life she had to keep coloured just her sanctioned space (little area). Even when it climbed into the ideal sky above her then the flight of its thought did not lose itself in the sky‟s blue: it drew upon the skies the picture of the flower created by its mind with its proper beauty and harmonic light. A self restrained alert spirit of mind ruled life and its acts were the creation of the considering thought, it was too cold to burn itself nor set the world burning, or by the careful reason‟s tactful moves could not test the means of predestined end, or at the highest level could not follow some calm Will‟s plan or could not adopt a plan of action of some High command within to conquer the secret treasures of the gods, or win some glorious world for the secret king, it is not a work of an instructive soul, and it‟s not the point of the being and its moods, nor it is a free high winging of a conscious spirit, it is not a sacred influence of life‟s communion with the still Supreme, or it is not the pure movement on the Eternal‟s road. Or else perhaps for holding the body of some high Idea a house was built with too close fitting bricks; and joining action and thought like cement made a wall of small ideals for limiting the soul. Even in meditation concentrated on a narrow seat; and worshipped to a God other than its desired one at will, in a church it prayed to the universal God whose doors were shut against the universe: or with a mind shut to the influence of love and fire kneeled to the formless Impersonal: a religion based on reason dried the heart. It planned a smooth life‟s acts with the rules of morality (498) or offered a cold and flameless sacrifice in the sacrificial fire. The Scripture lay on its sanctified desk and kept tied by interpretation‟s silken thread: a creed (formulated belief) suppressed its spiritual sense.

Here a quiet country of fixed mind was seen where life and its passion‟s voice was no more all in all; the cry of sense had sunk into a silence. Soul and spirit were not there but mind alone was there; that claimed to be the spirit and the soul. The spirit saw itself as a form of mind and the mind‟s light lost itself in the glory of the thought and made the light of sun invisible from the sight. Now Savitri came into a firm and settled space where everything was still and kept in its proper place. There each found what it had sought and knew its aim. All had at last a final stability. There one bearing a sign authority on a notable brow and held a ruling rod in his hand and stood; and in his expressive movement and tone there embodied an image of command; his speech that was formed by scripture‟s stone like strong wisdom and his sentences were an indication of a divine voice. That voice said “O traveller or pilgrim of an inner world, you are fortunate to reach our brilliant sky flashed with the luminosity of thought‟s supreme finality. O aspirant of the perfect way of life, find it here; and cease from further seeking and live at peace. This is our home of severing certainty. Here exists the truth and the Divine harmony. Register your name in the register of the selected and admitted by the sanction of the few choose and adopt your seat of knowledge and the field of your mind hold your own position, occupying your befitting place in the office of Life and praise your fate that made you one amongst us. Here everything is kept in its proper place that the mind can understand easily, all the gifts of God

154 to life are schemed by law. (499) This is the end of all the worlds and heaven and there is nothing beyond it. Here exists the last wall of safety and clear sword of bright Light and the one and unique truth is victorious here, here burns the diamond of imperishable bliss.

Live here as a favorite of Heaven and Nature.” But Savitri replied to the too-satisfied and confident sage of that mental world casting her sight‟s deep freedom in her heart‟s questioning inner voice: since here the heart has no voice to express, and here ruled only the clear daylight of intellect that is limited, dry and precise. “Hence they are happy who in this disordered world and in the unending course of the movement of Time can find the single Truth and the eternal Law: and live without the touch of doubt and fear. In this uncertain and world of duality happy are men who are caught in a fixed belief like an anchor, or who have planted one small grain of spiritual certitude in their heart‟s rich soil. Happiest are those who stand with faith as on an immobile foundation of rock. But I must pass further leaving the so called last search and also leaving the Truth‟s fixed and immutable rounded result and this ordered knowledge of apparent things. I cannot stay here because I seek after my soul.” In that bright happy world none answered Savitri or only they have acted in their accustomed way astonished to hear questioning in that atmosphere or noticing the thoughts that could still turn its aim to the Beyond. But some murmured passers-by from the sphere like mind could reply softly, each judged what Savitri spoke by the set of their mental conception. “Who then is this who knows not that the soul is a least gland or a secretion‟s fault that perturbs the still smooth ruling of the mind, and disordering the function of the brain, or is only an yearning lodged in Nature‟s mortal house (500) or a dream whispered in man‟s cave of hollow thought and would prolong his brief unhappy living or cling to a living in a sea of death?” But others said “No, no her spirit she seeks. It is a magnificent shadow of the name of God, it is a formless luminosity from the imaginary kingdom of the Spirit‟s Ideal, the Spirit is only the Holy Ghost of Mind; but none has yet touched it physically or seen its face.

Each soul is the great Father‟s crucified Son, and Mind is that soul‟s one parent and its conscious cause, it is a field on which there trembles a brief passing light, and Mind, is only the creator of the visible world. All that exists here is the part of our own self; our minds have created the world in which we live.” Another who loved his slain belief and grieves on the death of that belief questioned in his mystic and unsatisfied view “Is there anyone who seeks for a Beyond? Can still the path be found and opened the gate?”

Thus Savitri advanced crossing her silent self on her path. She came to a road that was filled with an intense crowd with flame-like footsteps and with eyes spledours like sunlight who were advancing with swift speed pressing to reach the world‟s mysterious wall, they passed through the mysterious doorways into the outer mind where neither Light nor the voice that comes from the Beyond or the mundane universe could come, they were the messengers from our subliminal grandeurs, and Guests from the cave of the secret soul. They enter breaking into the dim spiritual sleepiness or pour down wide wonder on our waking self, and they were the Ideas that visit us with their radiant walk, and Dreams that are hints of the unborn Reality, the strange goddesses with deep-pooled magical eyes, the strong gods flying their hairs like wings carrying the harps of hope, they were the great divine visions like the colour of the moon floating through the golden coloured sky, they were the sun-dream head and star-carved limbs of aspiration and emotions that make common hearts sublime. (501) Savitri joining in that glorious crowd, and yearning for the spiritual light they bore, and craved desired once to hasten like them to save God‟s world; but she held back her high passion in her heart because she could realise that first she must discover her soul. She could know that only those who save themselves can save others. In contrary sense she faced the puzzling truth of life: those luminous gods were proceeding towards the outer world hurried with eager feet carrying the light to suffering men; but her sight was turned towards the eternal source. Outstretching her hands she requested the crowd to stay for a while, she called them as happy company of the gods and asked them to reveal as to who knows the road that she must follow, because surely that brighter place was their home and she requested them to show her the path to find out the birthplace of the mysterious Fire and the deep large grand temple of her secret soul. From the crowd one answered pointing to a dim silence on a far extremity of sleep in some far background of the inner world. “O Savitri, we came from your hidden soul. We are the messengers and the mysterious gods and help men‟s dry and ignorant lives to wake them to beauty and the wonder of things and allowing opportunity to them to have the touch of the glory and divinity; in evil we light the deathless fire of good and hold the torch of knowledge on the ignorant human roads; we are your will and the will of all men towards Divine Light. O human copy and disguise of God, who sought the deity that you had kept hiding within yourself and lived by the Truth you had not yet known, follow the world‟s circuitous highway to its source. There in the silence where few have ever reached, you shall see the Fire burning on a bare stone and the deep cave of your secret soul.” Then hearing their advice Savitri followed the great winding road and reached a place where the path had become narrow, (502) where only some rare wounded pilgrim feet have reached. From unknown depths a few bright forms came out and looked at Savitri with calm and immortal eyes. There was no sound to break that meditating silence and one felt the nearness of the silent soul.

-End of Canto Three

155

Canto Four The Triple Soul-Forces (503) From a low wide inclined and quiet ground the strong enthusiasm of the first ascent began at this place, a Woman with her moon-bright face and dark bunch of hair sat with a mild brilliant robe. An uneven and a sharply projected soil was her seat, beneath her feet it was without usual covering, there was a sharp edged stone that inflicts injury. She was an image of divine pity shrined in the highest heights of the world, and was a spirit affected deeply by the inner grief of all the living things of the universe, she looked out far and could see from her inner mind this controversial world of outward things, and of false appearances and shapes that looked believable, the doubtful universe stretched into the ignorant Nothingness, and the pain of earth and the labour and attempt and the whirling speed of the planets and the painful labour pain of birth and its sorrowful end (death). She was the Mother of seven sorrows accepting the universe as her body of grief and affliction, bore the attack of seven wounds with pointed knife that entered her bleeding heart: the specimen of sadness stayed on her face and her eyes were dim with the discolours of tears of long past. Her heart was rent by the unbearable pain of the world and burdened with the sorrow and conflict in the stream of Time, in her fully absorbed voice a painful music was afloat. Engrossed in a deep pity of joy, lifting the mild ray of her patient sight she spoke to Savitri in her soft and sweet voice that she (the Godly woman) was her secret soul. To share the suffering of the world she had come and draws the pain and suffering of her children into her own heart. She is the nurse of the worldly sorrow and grim destiny beneath the stars; she is the soul of all who were crying in grief crushed under the pitiless plough-in equipment of the Gods fixed with blades that tears as it goes distressing greatly. (504) She was the woman, nurse and slave and the beaten beast; the hands that gave her cruel blows she takes care of them. She served the hearts that reject her love and zeal with hate; she is the queen and all anxiously waits for her alms of grace, she was a cherished toy in human shape, she was the giver of pot of rice to all and the worshipped Goddess of the House. She dwells in all the universal beings who suffer and cries. Hers is the prayer from earth that rises in vain, and the suffering of the creatures that crosses her inner being; she is a spirit of the painful world. The high pitched distressed cry of tortured flesh and hearts of the living beings fallen back on unheard by Heaven pierced into her soul and torn it forcibly with helpless grief and anger. She had seen the peasant burning into ashes in his hut, and the cut pieces of the dead body of the slain child, and heard woman‟s cry, who was forcibly pulled, and made naked and raped, amid the barking like dogs of the hell-bound mob of the disorderly crowd of people, although she had looked on, but she had no power to save, she had not brought any weapon of strength to help or to slay; God only gave her love but not his force. She had shared the labour of the yoked animal‟s difficult heavy menial work pushed by goad and whipped; she had shared the fear-filled life of bird and beast in their daily uncertain long search for food, in their stealthy and secret escape and lying on the ground and preparing for the leap on its prey to catch it and moving here and there in hunger in search of their prey, and in their pain and terror created by the seize of beak and nails. She had shared the daily life of common men in their petty pleasures and cares, and in the press of troubles and their pinching heaps of ills, and the earth‟s ways of sorrow that were hopeless of relief and their unwanted boring labour without joy, and their burden of misery and the strokes of fate. She out of pity leaning over the pain of all, and to heal the wounded heart with her tender smile and her sympathy makes life‟s miseries less hard to bear. Man has ever felt her unseen face and hands near; (505) she became the sufferer and his suffering, she had lain down with the crushed, and the slain, and lived with the prisoner in the dark cell of the prison house. The weight of this worldly Time weighs heavily like a yoke on her shoulders: she without refusing anything of creation‟s load had borne all and knew that she still must have to bear in future: perhaps when the world sinks into a last sleep she too may have to sleep in dumb eternal peace. She had endured the calm disinterestedness of Heaven for men, watched Nature‟s cruelty to suffering things while God passed by silently and did not turn to help. Yet she had never raised her voice against his will nor accused his cosmic Law. Only to change this great hard world of pain a patient prayer has risen from her breast; a calm endurance of difficulty shined in her brow with light, a blind faith and a mercy dwells in her; she is the carrier of the fire that never can be extinguished and the compassion that supports the lighting of the suns. She was the hope that looks towards her God, who never came to her till now; she even bears the voice of God that said he would come. She knew that God shall come at last some day or other. Then her voice stopped and like an echo from below answering her sadness of divine complaint a voice of anger took up a dire tone of the Goddess as if a sound of thunder or a roar of angry beast that lies sleeping and roars within man‟s depths and a voice of the Titan once a God and was inflected of severe pain. It said that he is the Man of Sorrows and is nailed on the wide cross of the universe; to enjoy his suffering and pain God built the earth, and has made his strong emotion the topic of his drama. God has sent him naked into his bitter world and beaten him with rods of grief and pain that he might cry and fall at his feet and (506) offer him worship with his blood and tears. He is the titan Prometheus (who helped men in many ways from suffering) torn and wounded under the beak of the vulture and lying helplessly on the ground, and is the man the discoverer of the immortal fire, in the flame of the fire burned by God he is lighted burning like an insect; he is the seeker of God but can never achieve, he is the fighter who never can win, and the runner who could never reach his goal: hell inflicts on him with the severe pain of sharp edges of his desire, heaven tortures him with the splendours of his dreams. What profit he had taking birth as an animal, and having his human soul? He works

156 hard like the animal and dies like the animal. He is the man who revolts, and man the helpless slave; he deprived him from his rightful wages his Fate and his fellow men. Shedding his blood he loosens the chain of his slavery and shake from his aching neck the knees of his oppressor but it resulted only in making a seat for the new oppressor on his back: his teachers taught him the lesson of slavery, and was shown God‟s stamp or sanction and his own signature upon the sorry contract of his fate. Though he had loved all but none had loved him since his birth; and the fruit of his work is given to other hands. All that remain in him is his mind‟s evil thoughts and his stigma of dispute against God and man, and he is enviousness of the riches that he can never possess, and hate of the happiness that could never be his own. He knew that his fate would forever be the same, and there could be no change in his nature‟s way: he had loved for the satisfaction of his selfish desire and not for the sake of the beloved; he has lived for himself and not for others‟ lives.

According to Nature‟s law each in himself is separate. Thus God has created this hard and dreadful world, and so he built the petty heart of man. Man can survive only by his force and trick: because kindness is a weakness in his heart, his virtue is a slackness of his nerves, (507) his kindness to others is an investment only for getting return out of it, man‟s unselflessness is his ego‟s disguise: he serves the world that the world may serve him in return. If the strength of the Titan could once wake in him, and if Enceladus (the hundred armed Titan) could arise from beneath the volcanic mountain of Etna then he (the man of sorrow) would rule as a master of the world and enjoy man‟s bliss and pain like a god. But God has taken from him the ancient Force. There exists only a very little consent in his lethargic heart, and an ardent satisfaction in his desire that pains as if they made him greater than his own kind; he can be preeminent only by suffering. He is the prey of titanic wrong deeds and is the doer of deeds like a demon; he was created for committing evil and only the evil is his lot; he must become evil and live by it; he could not be anything else other than what he originally was; he must remain what Nature had made him. He suffers labour unendingly, weeps, mourns and hates. Savitri‟s heart heard the voice and the echo and turning her being of kindness she spoke designating the goddess as Mother of suffering and divine grief, that she is a portion of her soul put forth to bear the unbearable sorrow of the world. On account of her presence men do not yield to their dreadful destiny, but ask for happiness and struggle with fate; because of her presence the miserable still can hope to survive.

But hers is the power only to solace but not to save. One day Savitri will return bringing the strength with her and made her drink from the Divine cup; the streams of the force of God shall then be victorious in her limbs and the calm of the divine Wisdom shall control her passionate heart. Her love shall keep bound the entire human kind in a close tie; her divine compassion shall be the lord of Nature‟s acts: consequently the worldly misery shall pass abolished from the earth, and the world shall be freed (508) from the anger of the Beast and the cruelty of the Titan and his pain. Then there should be peace and joy for ever more.

Thereafter Savitri passed on her spirit‟s upward route. A glowing grandness made her climb mid creepers, bushes and rocks, and a quiet wind cajoled her heart with warmth, a finer fragrance from delicate trees entered her breath. Before her all became beautiful, subtle, high and strange. Here on a boulder that was chiseled and moulded like huge throne a Woman sat in her golden and purple (red & blue) colure glow armed with a trident and a thunderbolt and her feet were resting upon a sleeping lion‟s back. An overpowering smile shaped round her lips, and luster of the heaven‟s fire was shining in the corners of her eyes; her body was like a mass of heavenly courage and strength, she subdued the operation and victory of the lower gods. An aureole of lightning‟s flamed around her head and sovereignty was like a great girdle around her robes, and majesty and victory (jaya & vijaya) sat beside her as her comrades and aides ever guarding in the wide cosmic battlefield against the meaningless equality of Death and the all-leveling rebellious Night, the hierarchy of the regulated Powers, the high changeless values, the highest grandeur and the privileged special power of the highest Truth, and in the governing Ideal‟s sunlight the triple power of wisdom, and love and bliss and the sole absolute power of the supreme Light. The Mother of Might majestically sitting in the inner world of Mind looked down on transient things of the world, listened to the advancing movement of Time; saw the irresistible wheeling‟s of the suns and heard the thunder like sound of the march of God. Amid the struggling Forces her word of luminous command was overpowering, her speech rang like a cry in the battlefield or a chant of hymn of a pilgrim. (509) Like a magic that restores hope in failing hearts aspired the harmony of her mighty voice: she said to Savitri that she is her secret soul. She came down into the human world and watched the movement of the world with her sleepless Eye and the dark opposites of earth‟s fate and the battle between bright and dark Powers (the gods and the demons). Standing upon the earthly paths of danger and grief she helps the unfortunate and saves him who is destined to be ruined.

To the strong she brings the prize of their strength, to the weak she brings the protecting cover of her force; to men who are ardently desirous she carries their desired joy: she is fortune justifying the great and wise by the cheer of the crowd and then crush them with the armed heel of fate. Her ear is leaned to the call of the oppressed; she overthrows the thrones of the oppressive kings: the banished and tortured lives appealing to her against a pitiless world, and a voice of the abandoned and wretched and the lone prisoner in the darkest cell of prisons that always pray reaches her. Seeing her coming men always welcome the Almighty‟s force or praise with thankful tears his savior Grace. She tramples the Titan who crushes the world and slays the world-devouring demon (ogre) in his blood-stained cave. She is Durga, the goddess of the proud and strong, and Laxmi, the queen of the fair and the fortunate; she wears the face of Kali when she kills, and crushes with heavy steps the corpses of the gangs of the demons. God entrusted her for the mighty accomplishment of his work, and she always serves God‟s will who sent her forth into the world without caring for anything and careless of the danger and the earthly consequence. She never takes into consideration of the worldly sin and virtue but always carried out the work that God had inspired within her heart. She is not afraid of the angry look of Heaven and never steps back from the violent

157 attack of Hell; (510) she crushes the opposition of the gods and walks down over the million obstacles of the diabolical forces. She guides man in the path of the Divine and guard him from the bloodlust Wolf and the poisonous Snake. She sets the heavenly sword in mortal hands and puts on him the breast-plate of the gods. She breaks the ignorant pride of human mind and leads the thought to the wideness of the divine Truth; she destroys man‟s narrow and apparent successful life and forces his sorrowful eyes to look at the sun that he may die to earth and live in his soul. She knows the goal of man and the secret route; she has studied the map of the invisible worlds; she remains in the forefront of the battle and she is the guiding star of the journey. But the great unyielding world resists her Word, and the criminality and the evil in man‟s heart is stronger than Reason and profounder than the Pit of the abyss, and the enviousness of deadly Powers puts cunningly back the clock of his destiny and seems mightier than the eternal Will. It is very hard to root out the evil that reigns in the cosmos, and the cosmic suffering is too vast to be remedied. A few of those whom she guides do pass her towards the divine Light; she could save a few but the mass falls back unsaved; she could help a few, but many tried hard for the same and fail. But despite all these worldly failures she has hardened her heart and went on doing her work: slowly the light grows greater in the East, and the world progresses slowly on God‟s road. God‟s sanction is there on her work and hence it cannot fail; she shall hear the silver swing of the heaven‟s gates when God comes out to meet the soul of the world. She spoke this and from the lower human world an answer came like a perverted echo and met her speech; the Voice came through the spaces of the mind of the dwarfTitan, the deformed chained god who strives to master his nature‟s rebel stuff (511) and make the universe his instrument. The Ego of this great world of desire claimed earth and the wide heavens for the use of man, and for the man who is at the top of life created by the ego on earth, its representative and conscious soul, and symbol of evolving light and force and the vessel (base) of the future godhead. Man is a thinking animal and the battling lord of Nature, and has made Nature as his nurse, tool and slave and pays her as wage and emolument in accordance with the insurmountable laws of the world his heart‟s grief and his body‟s death and pain: the pains of man are her (Nature‟s) means to grow, and to see and to feel; and man‟s death helps Nature‟s immortality. Man becomes a tool and slave of his own slave and tool, though he praises his own freewill and his mastermind yet is pushed by her upon her chosen paths; though he is the possessor yet he is possessed, and though he is the ruler, yet he is ruled and becomes the conscious automation of Nature and is deceived by her desire. Man‟s soul is a guest in the house of Nature, though a supreme, yet becomes dumb and inactive, his body is Nature‟s robot, the life he lives is in Nature‟s way to live, man‟s conscious mind is Nature‟s strong revolted slave. The said voice rose up in loud tone through some inner sun. The voice said that he is the heir of the earthly forces, and slowly he establishes his just right to his estate; he is a growing godhead in her divinised mud, and climbs as a claimant to the throne of heaven. Though he is the last-born on earth but now stood as first; the slow movement of the millenniums of the earth waited for his birth. Though he lives in Time‟s snare besieged by Death and an uncertain owner of his body and soul housed on a little spot amid the stars, yet the universe was made only for him and his use. He is an immortal spirit in the perishing clay i.e. his body is mortal, he is a God still unevolved in human form; even if God does not exist yet he exists in him. (512) The sun and moon pour light upon his path; the air was invented for his lungs to breathe, the sky was made fit as a wide and wall-less path for his winged chariot‟s wheels to pass as on a road, the sea was made for him to swim and sail and bear his golden commercial goods carried by ship on its back: it (sea) laughs violently by seeing his pleasant sailing that floats cutting across the wide waters of it, and he too laughs at the sea‟s threatening fate and death. The earth is his floor of living and the sky is his living roof. All was prepared through many a silent age and God made experiments with many animal shapes and when all was ready he was born. He was born weak, small and ignorant, and a helpless creature in a difficult world travelling through his short span of life with death besides him: he has grown greater than Nature and wiser than God. He had made real what Nature never dreamed, he has seized the powers of Nature and utilised for his work, he has shaped the metals of Nature and made new once out of it; he shall make glass and beautiful cloth out of milk and make iron as velvet and water as an unbreakable stone, like God in his unique clever artist skill, mould from one primal plasm many variable forms and in single Nature make multitudinous lives, and all that are unattainable or untouchable by mind and only can be conceived by imagination he would remolds those newly in Matter‟s solid and plastic concrete shape. No magic can surpass his skill of magic. There shall be no miracle that cannot be achieved by him. Whatever God had left imperfect he would complete them, out of bewildered mind and halfmade soul he would eliminate all sin and error; things that are not invented by God he shall invent: God was the first creator and he is the last. He has discovered the atoms from which God had created the worlds: one day the first tremendous cosmic energy (513) sent to earth shall jump forcefully down on earth to slay his enemy like kith and kin, blot out a nation or put an end of a race, and where exist the laughter and joy there the silence of death shall pervade. Or the invisible atom being broken shall use God‟s force to extend his comforts and expand his wealth, now his car that is driven by the lightening to increase its speed shall replace the same and bring into the engines his magical new movements. He would take the means of God‟s wizardry from God‟s hands and with them do greater wonders than the best wonders of God. In spite of all these achievements he had kept his mind in a balanced order; he has studied his being and examined the world, and had grown as a master of the arts of life. He has domesticated the wild beast and trained it o be his friend; and it guards his house and looks up at him waiting for the fulfillment of his will. He had taught people of his own kind to serve and obey him. He has used the mystery of the cosmic waves to see far distance and to hear far words; he has conquered Space and tied all earth closely. Soon he shall know the secrets of the Mind: he plays with knowledge and ignorance and sin and virtue are his creations which he can transcend or overpoweringly use. He shall know all the mystic truths and seize supernatural powers. He shall

158 slay his enemies with the help of his single glance or thought, and understand the unspoken feelings of all hearts and see and hear the hidden thoughts of men. After conquering earth he shall conquer heaven; then the gods shall be his aides or menial folk, whatever he wished would never remain unfulfilled: he shall be the master of omnipotence and omniscience. And Savitri heard the voice and the perverted echo, turning her being of power she said designating the Goddess of might and the Mother of works and force, that she is a portion of his soul put forth to help mankind and help the child birth like pains of Time. Due to her presence in man he dares and hopes; (514) because you exist in man, men‟s souls can climb to the heavens and walk like gods in the presence of the Supreme. But without wisdom the power is like a wind, it can breathe upon the heights and kiss the sky but it cannot build the extreme eternal things.

You have given strength to men but could not give wisdom. One day Savitri shall return as a bringer of divine light, she would then give the Mother of might the mirror of God; by that she would see self and world as they are seen by God reflected in the bright pool of her soul. Her wisdom shall be as vast as her power. Thereafter hate shall no more dwell in human hearts, and fear and weakness shall be vanished in men‟s lives, there the cry of the ego shall be hushed within, and its lion like roar that claims the world of food will be fully abolished and all shall be might, bliss and happy force.

Savitri still ascending in her spirit‟s upward route reached into a high and happy space, a wide magnificent vision‟s high state from where all could be seen and all was centered in a single view as when in a distance separate scenes grow one and a harmony is created of scenes of different colours loosing their difference. There the wind was still and the atmosphere was filled with fragrance.

There was a joyful singing of the birds and murmur of the bees and all that is familiar and natural and sweet and that were intimately divine to the heart and soul. A nearness of the spirit to its source was felt and things of the depths clearly seemed near and true. Here in the living centre of that vision of peace a Women (in the shape of a Goddess) sat in a clear and crystal like bright light: heaven‟s luster was fully luminous in her eyes, her feet were lustrous like moonbeams and her face was like a bright sun, her smile could inspire a dead like wounded heart to live again and feel the hands of calm. From her floating voice of the Goddess a low music was heard coming in, (515) she said to Savitri: that she is her secret soul. She came down to the wounded and distressed earth to alleviate its pains and solace her heart to rest and lay her head upon the divine Mother‟s lap and be comforted so that she may dream of God and know his peace and draw down the harmony of higher spheres into the rhythms of earth‟s unpleasant troubled lives; she shall show to earth the figures of the bright gods and bring strength and solace to her life that strives hard to get free; the high things that are now only words and forms for earth, she shall reveal them to it in the real shape of their power. She is the peace that stealthily enters into man‟s war-tortured tired heart, amid the kingdom of Hell, she builds by the acts of man a hostel where Heaven‟s messengers can lodge; she is the benevolence (charity) living in the gracious hands that pours down blessings; she is the silence mid the noisy movement of life; she is the divine Knowledge and intently studies the cosmic map. In the inconsistencies of the human heart where Good and Evil remain as close life companions and Darkness pursued Light at every step, where man‟s largest knowledge is an ignorance, she is the Power that labours towards the best and works for God and looks up towards the diviner heights. She makes even sin and error as stepping-stones and makes all experience a long march towards the divine Light. She builds consciousness out of the Inconscient, and lead the Life to reach immortality through death. Here on earth God grows in man in many forms; they stamp man‟s thoughts and deeds with divinity, uplift the state of human perishable dwarf body of earth or slowly transform it into heaven‟s gold. God is the Supreme Good and to achieve that men fight and die, and he is the War of Right with Titan wrong; he is the Freedom rising immortally from her funeral fire; he is the danger-ridden Courage guarding still the dangerous narrow mountain paths or stands lone and erect on the destroyed barrier (wall) (516) or as a sentinel in the dangerous echoing Night. He is the crown of the martyr burned (one who undergoes death in support of a principle) ever burned in the flame and the glad and ungrudging self surrender of the saint and he is the courage impassive to the wounds of Time and the hero‟s might wrestling with death and fate. He is the Wisdom incarnate on a glorious throne and the calm absolute empire of the sage‟s inner reign. He is the high and solitary Thought who stands aloof and above the ignorant clamour of the multitude: he is the prophet‟s voice and the sight of the seer. He is the Beauty and the nectar of the passionate soul and the Truth by which the spirit lives. He is the riches of the spiritual Vast poured out in remedying streams on the poverty stricken and distressed Life, he is Eternity, time‟s moments lured him in every step, and he is infinity in a little space and immortality in the arms of death. She is all these powers of God and at her call they come upon earth. Thus she slowly lifts man‟s soul nearer to the divine Light. But the human mind clings to its ignorance and the human heart clings to its littleness and the earthly life clings to its right to grief. Only when Eternity takes Time and rules it in his hands and Infinity joins the finite‟s thought then man can be free from him and live with God. Meanwhile she shall bring the gods upon the earth; bring back hope to the frustrated heart; she gives peace to the humble and the great and pour her grace on the foolish and the wise. She shall save earth if earth consents to be saved. Then the divine Love shall at last walk unwounded on earth‟s soil; man‟s mind shall admit the unbarred rule of the divine Truth and the human body shall bear the immense descent of God. She spoke and from the ignorant lower plane a cry, a naked and perverted echo came quivering. It was a voice of the sense-bound human mind (517) carrying its proud complaint of godlike power and confined with the limits of mortal thoughts and bound in the chains of earthly ignorance. The mortal imprisoned in his body and brain cannot see God‟s mighty whole or share God‟s deep and vast identity who stands unguessed within our ignorant hearts and he is all knowing because he is identified with all. Man only sees the apparent gross scene of the cosmos. Then curious to know what lies hidden from the sense he digs a little way to depths below: but soon he stops because he cannot reach life‟s core nor keep contact

159 with the quivering heart of the universal things. Man sees the naked body of the Truth, though often confused by Truth‟s endless coverings, but he cannot look upon the soul of the Truth within. Then in a wild anger for gaining a perfect knowledge he digs its various particles and goes on digging for details: but by this process he could only hold for use the surface contents of the shape and the spirit escapes his search or dies beneath his knife. He sees the crowding riches of the infinity as a blank expanse, and a great waste of a dry desert. He has made the finite as his central field and analyse in detail its plan and masters its processes, but That which moves in all universal things is hidden from his sight, and his exterior surface sight absorbed in studying miss the unseen behind. He has only the blind man‟s subtle sense of faultless touch or the slow traveler‟s sight of the distant scenes; but he does not have the soul‟s revealing close contacts. Yet the intuitive light flashes before him and inspiration from the Unknown comes; but only he feels his reason and sense as sure and they are his trusted witnesses. Thus he has missed the reality and his glorious effort becomes vain; his knowledge only sees bright pebbles on the shore of the huge ocean of his ignorance. (518) yet in his cry‟s rhythm a greater emphasizing stress was there and the pity of the cosmos trembled in its tone. The perverted echo said that he is the being of mind of God‟s great ignorant world ascending to knowledge by the steps God had made; he is the all-discovering Thought of man. He is a god caught in the net of Matter and sense, an animal prisoned in the fence of thorns, a beast of labour seeking for his food and a smith tied to his anvil and his forge. Yet he has loosened the rope that was tied to him, and enlarged his field. He has mapped the heavens and analysed the Stars, and through the grooves of the Space he had drawn the map of the orbit of the stars, measured the distance of the sun from other suns in the unit of miles and calculated their longevity in worldly Time. He has dug below earth‟s interiors and torn out the riches that were guarded by earth‟s dull brown soil. He has classified the aeonic changes of earth‟s stony crust and by reading the biography discovered earth‟s birth date and rescued the pages of all Nature‟s plan. He has drawn the sketch of the tree of evolution and placed its each branch, twig and leaf in its own place, entering in its unborn offspring seen the history of its primal forms and framed the hierarchy of the birth of all living universal things. He has seen the plasm, cell, gene and the ancestral primeval life of man, and the humble originals from whom he had taken birth and knows how man was born and how he dies; only he did not know yet as to what end man serves or if there is any aim at all or any end or push of rich creative purposeful joy in the wide works of the terrestrial power. He has possessed the complex processes of the terrestrial power and left nothing untraced: the huge machinery of the terrestrial power is now in his clutches and he has seized the cosmic energies for his use. He has observed thoroughly the invisible atoms and the molecules of the terrestrial power and unveiled them: (519) the Material world is a great book which he has already read and only some pages are yet left to read. He has seen the ways of life and the paths of mind; he has studied the methods of living of the ants and apes and learned the behavior of man and worm. If at all God is at work of the universal creation he knew its secrets. The Cause of original creation of the universal things is still left in doubt in him, because their truth fled from his pursuit into the Void; even when everything was explained he knew nothing. By whom the process of creation was chosen and from where the Power came out he knew not yet and perhaps shall never know. The mighty Nature‟s birth is a mystery and the evasive stream of mind is also a mystery and the frequent and highly changing caprice of life is also a mystery. Whatever he has learned Chance jumps to contradict and whatever he has built the unimaginable Fate seizes and ruins it. He can foresee the acts of the Matter‟s force but not see the march of the destiny of man: man is always driven on paths he did not choose at will and falls crushed underneath the rolling wheels of the evil powers. His great philosophies are only a reasoned guess; the heavens beyond that claim their right over the human soul are a magical pretence of the imaginary brain: all is a speculation or a dream. In the end the world itself becomes a doubt: the mass and shape are the mockery of the atoms and molecules and an ironical laugh comes out from the infinite‟s finite disguise. Perhaps the world is an error of our human sight, it is a trick that is magically repeated in each flash of sense, an unreal mind deludes the soul by its strong vision of false reality or a dance of Maya veils the unborn Void. Even if he could reach a greater consciousness what profit shall it be for Thought to win God who is Real and forever inexpressible or to search to its last layer the bodiless Self (520) or make the unknowable the target of the soul? He said that instead of entering into all these complications it would be better to do his work within his mortal bounds, and would not live beyond life or think beyond the mind; because human smallness saves humanity from the Infinite. He does not want to be called to die the great eternal death, in a frozen grandeur lone and desolate and also to be left naked from his own humanity in the chill vast of the spirit‟s boundlessness. Each creature lives by his nature‟s limits and how can he evade his native fate? He is human and wanted to remain human till in the Inconscient he falls dumb and asleep. To think that God lives hidden in the clay and the eternal Truth can dwell in Time and to call them to save the human self and world is a high madness and a wild and fanciful conception. How man can grow immortal and divine transforming the very stuff of which he is made? This can be dreamed only by illusive gods but not by thinking men.

Savitri heard the voice and the distorted answer of the sense driven human mind and turning to her own being of light she said to the Mother of light, joy and peace that she was a portion of herself put forth to raise the spirit to forgotten heights and wake the soul by the touches of the heavens. Because of the existence of the Mother of might, the soul is drawn near to God and love grows in man in spite of hate and knowledge walks unhurt in the darkest Night. But by pouring down heaven‟s golden rain upon the human intellect which is hard and is like a rocky soil the tree of Paradise cannot be made to flower on earthly ground and the Bird of Paradise cannot sit upon life‟s branches, and the winds of Paradise cannot blow in the mortal atmosphere. Even if she pours down the intuition‟s rays man‟s mind will think it as earth‟s own light, his spirit would sink by spiritual ego or (521) his soul shall dream shut in sainthood‟s

160 brilliant cell where only a bright shadow of God can come. Man‟s hungers for the eternal she must nurse and fill his eager heart with heaven‟s fire and bring down God into his body and life. One day Savitri shall return holding God‟s hand in her hand when the Mother of light, joy and peace shall see the face of the Absolute. Then shall the holy marriage between the Soul and Nature can be achieved and then the divine family shall take birth on earth. Light and peace shall pervade in all the worlds.

-End of Canto Four

161

Canto Five The Finding of the Soul

(522) From there Savitri passed advancing further seeking the soul‟s mysterious cave. At first she entered into the depth of the night of God. There the light that helps the laboring world and the power that struggles and gets obstructed in our lives was extinguished; this incapable mind gave up its way of thoughts and the human heart that tries hard gave up its fruitless hopes. All knowledge failed in her and the Idea of forms in her and the Wisdom feeling a Truth too great for thought or speech, and formless, inexpressible and ever unchangeable veiled its bowed head in the admiration mixed with fear. Like one who worships a formless God an innocent and pure Ignorance began worshipping to an unseen Light that it could not claim nor make its own. Her mind in a simple purity of emptiness knelt down before the unknowable. All in Savitri was abolished except her bare soul and the longing of the bowed submission of her surrendered heart: and the pride of her inner strength and force was vanished; out of shame the upward burning flame of her desire was extinguished and the false pride of her separate self and the hope of spiritual greatness fled away from her, she did not seek for salvation nor a heavenly crown: now to her humbleness seemed as a too proud state. Now her human self seemed to her as nothing and for her God alone was all, she did try to know God but only knew that he was. Now a sacred darkness spread within her and the world was felt as a great deep bare darkness. Now this great nothingness seemed to have held more than all the abundant worlds, this blank was felt more than all that Time has borne, now this dark appeared to have known dumbly and immensely the Unknown. But all was formless, voiceless and infinite. (523) Like a shadowy figure walks in a shadowy scene, and like a small nothingness passing through a great Nothingness, and like a night of person in bare form crossing a fathomless impersonal Night, Savitri moved silently, empty and the one and the unique. In the course of endless Time her soul reached a wide end that spaceless Vast became her spirit‟s place of dwellings. At last a change took place in her movement and consequently the emptiness broke; a wave rolled within her, the creation had stirred; once more her inner self became her refuge. She felt a blissful nearness to the goal; and she felt as if the heaven leaned down to kiss the sacred hill, strong enthusiasm and delight. Like a rose of heaven bloomed on a tree of dreams, out of the mooned twilight the face of Dawn was disclosed. Like a priest of sacrifice of joy Day came into the worshipping silence of her world; carrying immortal luster as his robe, like a purple scarf tracked heaven it wore a red sun as his vermilion caste-mark. As if an old remembered dream comes true, Savitri recognised in her prophetic mind the imperishable light of that sky, the trembling sweetness of that happy air, and the mystic cave in the sacred hill that was covered from mind‟s view and life‟s approach, knew it to be the dwelling of her secret soul. As if into the occult depths of some Beatific abode, and Truth‟s last retreat from thought‟s perverted touch, and as if hid in a rock-temple‟s solitude, God took refuge from an ignorant worshipping world, her soul lay withdrawn even from life‟s inner sense, and receding from the complexity of heart‟s desire, before Savitri‟s eyes a marvelously meditating twilight appeared and a holy stillness surrounded that mute great Sky. A terrifying dimness covered the great rock-doors (524) made by cutting out of massive stone of Matter‟s trance. Above the door ways to golden serpents curled round the lintels, surrounding with their pure and dreadful strength looked out with wisdom‟s deep and luminous eyes. Above it an eagle covered with its wide conquering wings: like flames of self-absorbed immobile daydream, the doves crowded the grey meditating cornices like postures cut out of stone of white-bosomed peace. Savitri crossing the threshold of the lower ground level entered in and found herself amid the great figures of gods and though those were having stone bodies, yet they were looking conscious and living without breath, watching the soul of man with fixed look, those were the executive figures of the cosmic self and world-symbols of unchangeable strength. On the walls that were covered with significant shapes of the life-scene of man and beast and with the high meaning of the life-gods looked at her, the power and necessity of these numberless worlds, and faces of beings and stretches of world-space spoke to Savitri in brief and full essential and inexhaustible details of the sacred secret message of the climbing planes. Those gods were the indication of their infinite immensities and were the extension of the self of God, they were impartially giving shelter and receiving all, they had housed in themselves God‟s figures and his small and mighty acts, his passion, birth, life and death and his return to immortality. To the ever enduring and the eternal, and to the pure Sat (existence) that is everywhere the same, to the sheer consciousness and the absolute force and the unimaginable and formless bliss, to his joy in Time and timeless mystery of the triune being (Sat, Chit, Ananda) who is all and unique, yet no one except himself apart is there climb. There existed no mark of footsteps of breathing men, no sound was heard, and there existed only the living nearness of the soul. (525) Yet all the worlds and God himself were there, because there every symbol was a reality and brought the presence that had given them their life. All this Savitri could see and felt within and knew by the self but not by some thought of mind. There a light not born of sun or moon or fire, and a light that dwelt within and saw within radiating an intimate visibility made secrecy more revealing than the word: our earthly sight and sense are a faulty seeing and only the spirit‟s vision is wholly true. Likewise she passed that mysterious place through room and room, through door and door cut out of stones, she felt identified with all that she saw. A concealed everlasting identity woke within her, she knew herself as the Beloved of the Supreme, and these Gods and Goddesses were he and she: she was the Mother of Beauty and Delight, the Word (Mahasaraswati) in Brahma‟s vast creating clasp, on almighty Shiva‟s lap she was the World-Puissance (Parvati), the Master and Mother of all lives watching the worlds their twine sight had made, and Krishna and Radha forever interabsorbed in bliss, the Adorer and Adored self-lost and one. In the last chamber one sat on a golden seat whose shape no vision could describe, there one felt only the world‟s unattainable fount, a Power of which she was a wandering Force, an invisible Supreme Beauty, goal of the world‟s desire; a Sun of which all knowledge is a beam, a

162 Greatness without whom no life could exist. From there all departed into silent self and all became formless, and pure and bare.

Thereafter through a tunnel dug in the last rock Savitri came out to a place where a deathless sun was shining. There was a house made up of flame and light (526) and crossing a wall of doorless living fire Savitri suddenly met her secret soul.

In mortality an immortal being stood, though deathless but playing with momentary things, pity and sorrow could not stain her wide eyes of peaceful happiness, from there the infinity turned its gaze on finite shapes: she was the observer of the silent steps of the moments, and the eternity that supported the acts of every moment and the passing scenes of Everlasting‟s play. In the mystery of its selecting will power and in the Divine Comedy he is an actor, a conscious representative of the Supreme Spirit, and God‟s delegate in our humanity, comrade of the universe, the Transcendent ray, she had come to the mortal body‟s room to play at ball with Time and Circumstances. Here a joy in the world was her supreme movement; the passion of the play in the world lighted her eyes: a smile on her lips welcomed earth‟s bliss and grief, her laugh was her return to pleasure and pain. All was seen by her as a disguise of Truth in its covering of Ignorance, those crossing the worldly Time moves towards immortality; all she could face with the strong spirit‟s peace.

But since she knows the labour of mind and life as a mother feels and shares her children‟s lives, she puts forth a small portion of herself a being no bigger than the thumb of man into the hidden region of the heart to face the sorrow and to forget the bliss, to share the suffering and bear earth‟s wounds and labour mid the labour of the stars. This portions of her laughs and weeps in us, and suffers the stroke, delighted in victory; struggles for the crown; (527) identified with the mind, and body and life, it takes on itself their pain and defeat, bleeds with Fate‟s whips and hangs upon the cross, yet it is the unwounded and undying self supports the actor in the human scene. By the means of this she sends to us her glory and her powers, through the gulfs of anguish she pushes us to wisdom‟s heights; she is the giver of strength to do our daily work and the sympathy that takes share of others‟ grief and the little strength we have to help our race, she gives strength to us, that we who must fill the role of the universe acting itself out in a small human shape and to carry the struggling world on our shoulders. This in us the godhead small and disfigured, as long as this divinities human portion does not stand on a heavenly summit as king till such time the Goddess imposes the greatness of the Soul in Time to uplift it from light to light and from power to power. In its body it is weak, in its heart an invincible might, climbs stumbling, held up by an unseen hand, it is labouring spirit in a mortal shape. Here in this chamber of flame and light Savitri and her occult soul met; they looked upon each other, knew themselves, the secret deity and its human part, the calm immortal and the struggling soul. Thereafter with a speed of magical transformation they rushed into each other and became one.

Once more Savitri returned to her human state upon the earthly soil in the night‟s low unclear tone amid the rain-swept forest and the rude cottage where she sat in trance: that subtle world withdrew deeply within her behind the sun-veil of the inner sight. But now the half-opened lotus bud of her heart had bloomed and stood opened to the earthly ray; in an image revealed her secret soul.

(528) There existed no severing wall between her soul and mind, and guarding from the claims of life there remained no mystic fence.

As if sitting on concentration‟s marble seat Savitri‟s being sat in its deep lotus home and prayed the mighty Mother of the worlds to make this earthly room her house. Like a flash from supernal light a living image of the original Power of the Mother of the worlds, a face, a form came descending down into her heart and made of it its temple and pure dwelling. But when the Mother‟s feet had touched the trembling lotus bloom there as if a world were shaken and found its soul: a mighty movement oscillated in the inner sky: out of the Inconscient soulless mindless night a flaming Serpent rose (Kundalini force) released from the sleep. That serpentine force rose waving its coil and stood erect and climbing mightily, stormily on its way, it touched the centers of Savitri‟s body with its flaming mouth; as if a fiery kiss had broken their sleep they bloomed and laughed surcharged with light and bliss. Thereafter at the crown (thousand petalled lotus) of Savitri‟s top head it joined the Eternal‟s space. In the flower of the head, in the flower of Matter‟s base (Muladhara) and in each divine strong fort and in the knot of Nature it held together the incomprehensible stream that joins the viewless super natural summits with the unseen depths, and the fences of the force that that make the fragile defense safeguarding us against the enormous world and its lines of self-expression in its Vast. There sat an image of the original Power wearing the mighty Mother‟s form and face. She was armed, and the bearer of the weapon and sign whose mysterious might no magic can imitate, though she was many shaped, yet she sat as one and unique, she was a guardian force: a savior gesticulation stretched her lifted arm, and the cosmic strength was her native symbol a sacred beast lay prostrate below her feet, (529) it was a silent flame-eyed mass of living force. Now within Savitri a high heavenly change: great powers and divinities breaking the black Inconscient blind mute wall, erasing the circles of Ignorance, bursting like flame appearing in each part of Savitri‟s being trembling with rapture lay overwhelmed with tides of happiness and saw the hand of the divine mother in every circumstance and felt her touch in every limb and cell. In the country of the lotus of the head (the thousand petalled lotus) which the thinking mind has made its busy space, in the fort of the lotus between the brows from that shoots the arrows of its sight and will, in the passage of the lotus of the throat from where speech must rise and the expressing mind and the heart‟s impulse run to give shelter to word and act, in Savitri a glad uplift and a new working came. The immortal‟s thoughts displaced on our limited view and possessed the earthly filthy idea and sense; all things now bore a deeper heavenlier sense.

A glad clear harmony marked their truth‟s outline, reset the balance and measure of the world in a new and systematical order. In Savitri each shape showed its occult design, unveiled God‟s meaning in it for which it was made and the bright splendour of God‟s artist thought. As a channel of the mighty Mother‟s choice the immortal‟s will took into its calm control our blind or faulty rule of life and

163 a loose republic that was once of wants and needs then bowed down to the uncertain leader mind, life now obeyed to a diviner rule and every act became an act of God. In the kingdom of the lotus of the heart Love chanting its sacred songs, made life and body as mirrors of a sacred joy and all the emotions surrendered them to God. (530) In the navel lotus‟ vast kingdom the proud longings and an overpowering eager and passionate desire of life turned into instruments of a great calm power to do the work of God on earthly soil. In the narrow lower centre‟s petty parts its child like play of daily dwarf desires was changed into a sweet and lively play, and an amusement of little gods with life in Time. In the deep place where once the Serpent (kundalini) slept there came a grip on Matter‟s giant powers for large utilities in life‟s little space; there a firm ground was made for Heaven‟s descending might. Behind all these Savitri‟s all conquering deathless soul established and ruled: her soul throwing aside its veil of Ignorance built the harmony of its human state associated with gods, cosmic wings and powers, in the duality of the Inconscient world Savitri surrendered herself into the great World-Mother‟s hands and only obeyed her single supreme command. A secret soul behind supporting all is the master and witness of our ignorant life admits the Person‟s look and Nature‟s role. But if once the hidden doors are opened then the veiled king steps out in Nature‟s front, a Divine Light descends down into the Ignorance, and the painful knot of the Ignorance loosens its grip: the mind becomes a tamed instrument of the soul and life becomes the colour and figure of the soul. All happily grows towards knowledge and bliss. Then a divine Force takes Nature‟s place and drives the movements of our body and mind; and becomes the possessor of our hopes and dreams and the beloved autocrate ruler of our thoughts and acts, with her unlimited force she streams into us and pours down the Immortal‟s joy and power into our mortal limbs. An inner law of beauty shall shape our lives; (531) our words shall become the natural speech of Truth, each thought shall become a wave on a sea of Light. Then sin and virtue would leave the cosmic battlefield; they would no more battle in our liberated hearts: our acts would be tuned with God‟s simple natural good or serve the rule of a supreme Right. Then all the unpleasing, evil and falsehood moods would abandon their stations from the vast disorder and hide their shame in the subconscient shadow. Then mind lifting its cry of victory would say, “O soul, my soul, we have created a Heaven, within us here we have found the kingdom of God, built his fortress in a loud ignorant world. Our life is established firmly between two rivers of Light, we have turned space into a gulf of peace and made the body a Capitol (temple on the top of a hill) of bliss, what more, what more, is there anything more still left to be done?” In the slow process of the evolving spirit and in the brief gap between death and birth at last a first perfection‟s stage is reached; out of the wood and stone like of our nature‟s stuff a temple is shaped where the high Gods could live. Even if the struggling world is left outside one man‟s perfection still can save the world. A new nearness to the skies is won, a first union of the Earth and Heaven, a deep tie is established between Truth and Life: a camp of God is pitched in human time.

-End of Canto Five

164

Canto Six Nirvana and the Discovery of the All-Negating Absolute (532) From the calm heavens a Calm slow sun shined down on earth. Like a group of troops detached to protect the rear disorder of the defeated army retreating in a miserable condition, the last rains fled murmuring across the forest or failed mid the leaves with a hissing sound, and the great charming of the blue sky recovered the deep joy of its smile. The rich beauty of the light of the sky freed from the harshness of storm-licked heats found room for a luxury of warm mild days, across the ripples of wind the night appeared with its gold coloured treasure of autumnal moons that came floating like a ship in the sky. Savitri‟s life was glad and gratified like the earth; she discovered herself and knew her being‟s aim. Though her kingdom of marvellous change remained unexpressed within her secret breast, yet all that lived around her in that forest felt its magic‟s fascination: the rustling voice of the trees of the forest told it to the winds, flowers through the medium of their bright colors expressed an unknown joy, the song of the birds became a hymn, the wild beasts forgot their conflict and lived at ease. The mild saints and sages of the forests absorbed in wide communion with the Unseen divine received a sudden greatening of their lonely motionless meditation. This bright perfection of Savitri‟s inner state poured overflowing into her outward scene, and thus made dull common natural things beautiful and made action wonderful and turns into divinity. Even the smallest meanest work became a sweet or glad and glorious sacred offering and an offering to the self of the great world or a service to the One and the Unique in each and all. (533) A light from her being sprang and poured down on all the universal things; her heart-beats cast supreme bliss: shared with her and by her touch happiness grew happier and grief found some relief with her nearness. Now she did not see Fate‟s dark and death‟s deadliest circle of darkness above the loved head of Satyavan; before Savitri‟s new-born predicting sight her all domineering life a golden circle around a mysterious sun was revealed in a cyclic round. Now Savitri in her inner vision and now the deep-impressed truth of dreams and in the swift shifting of her future‟s heavy screen that Satyavan did not lay as a prey of a sad decree in the darkest cave of death or borne to blissful regions of heavens far from her forgetting the sweetness of earth‟s warm delight, forgetting the passionate oneness of love‟s clasp, absorbed in the self-enchantment of immortal‟s bliss. Savitri felt that Satyavan was always with her, a living soul that met her eyes with close loving eyes and a living body near to her body‟s joy. But now that they no longer remained in these great wild forests in relationship with the lives of birds and beasts and levelled to the bareness of earth‟s brown breast, but mid the thinking high-built lives of men in colourfully painted chambers on mosaic crystal floors, in armored towns or gardened pleasure-walks, even when they were in distance felt closer than her thoughts body to body near, soul near to soul, moving as if by a common breath and will they were tied in a single circling of their days together by love‟s unseen atmosphere, inseparable like the earth and sky. Thus for a while Savitri walked in that Golden Path; but this feeling of her was like the light of sun before the darkest Night.

Once when as she sat in this deep apt meditative state, still thrilling by the touch of her lover‟s strong embrace (534) and made her joy a link between earth and heaven, when she was in a such a state of thought a bottomless wide opening of devouring jaws suddenly seen beneath her heart. As the wild beast drags its half killed prey an enormous and nameless fear dragged at her nerves; that did not seem to have sprang from any cave; it was not hers, but hid its unseen cause. Thereafter its immense and fearful Source came rushing. A formless great Fear opening its shapeless endless wings filling the universe with its dangerous breath, and a denser darkness than the Night could bear enveloped the heavens and possessed the earth. Like a rolling wave of silent death, it came circling round the far edge of the quacking globe, wiping heaven with its enormous footsteps it willed to get rid of the choked and pain stricken atmosphere and to end the imaginary story of the joy of life. It seemed rejecting Savitri‟s spirit, and abolishing all that by which her nature lived, and labored to eliminate her body and soul, it seemed as a clutch of some half-seen Invisible, and ocean of terror and all conquering might, and the shape of person and a black infinity. It seemed to express to Savitri the message of its dark eternity and the dreadful meaning of its silences without thought and word: Arisen out of some furious monstrous immensity, and out of the bottomless depth of some blind and regardless self‟s imagined grief and fear, it was a joyless consciousness of being, thoughtless, incapable of bliss, and seemed to have felt life as blank and no where found a soul, a message to the dumb pain of the heart conveyed a stark sense of unexpressed words of the heart; Savitri in her own depths of heart heard the unuttered thought that made unreal the meaning of the world and life. It questioned Savitri as to who she was claiming her crown of separate birth, (535) and the misimpression of her soul‟s reality and the personal goddess on an ignorant globe bearing an animal body of imperfect man? Listening to the unspoken Word and dazzled by the inexpressible Ray not to dream, and hope to be happy in a world of pain and dream not to transcend the mute Superconscient kingdom and to give a body to the Unknowable, or for a sanction to her heart‟s joy, to burden with bliss the silent-still Supreme staining its bare and formless holiness, or to invite the Divine into her chamber and sit with God to enjoy a human joy. The voice said that it has created all and swallow all; it is Death and the dark terrible Mother of life, she is naked black Kali in the world, she is Maya and the universe is her cheat. She lays waste human happiness with her breath and slay the will to live and the joy of existence that all may pass back into nothingness and only obey the eternal and absolute. Because only the blank Eternal is true. All else is shadow and flash in Mind‟s bright glass, mind is a hollow mirror in which the Ignorance sees a great figure of its own

165 false self and dreams to have seen a glorious solid world. That voice designating Savitri as a soul and an inventor of man‟s hopes and thoughts, that she herself is the creation of the moment‟s stream, centre of illusion or subtle highest point, and advised Savitri at last to know herself and cease from the existence of the life of falsehood. After that like a shadow of that Supreme negation, like the wave of the intolerant Darkness the dreadful Voice travelled back passing Savitri and sank within her. It left behind Savitri‟s inner world like a desert: imposed the weight of heavy burden of a barren silence upon her heart, consequently Savitri‟s kingdom of delight did not exist anymore there; (536) awaiting the unknown eternal her soul only remained in its emptied stage. Thereafter from the heights a greater Voice came descending down and it was the Word that finds the soul and absorbs the heart, and the voice of a Divine Light after the voice of Night: like the cry of the Bottomless depths that attracts Heaven‟s reply, and a might of the Sun that drives away the might of the storm. The voice designating Savitri as a soul said not to keep open her kingdom to the enemy, to agree to hide her royal wealth of bliss, or else Time and Fate would find out their ways and beat with thunderous knock upon her gates. To hide her treasure of separate self as long as she can behind the luminous defensive wall of the fort of her depths till it becomes a vaster empire‟s part. The Self is not won for the bodily egoistic self; and advised her not to remain satisfied conquering only one kingdom; and to adventure all to make the whole world hers and turn her force to enter into greater kingdoms. If she wanted to become all then she should not fear to nothing; and to consent to the emptiness of the Supreme that everything in her might reach its state of supremacy. She must accept to be small and human on earth, and obstruct her new-born divinity, so that man may find his complete state self in God. She is an immortal spirit, if she had come only for her own sake into the death bound world, and to establish her luminous kingdom in God‟s dark, and as one shining star in the Inconscient kingdom, amidst Ignorance open one door towards light then what need had she to come at all? She came down into a conflicting world to help a blind and suffering death bound race, to open the eyes to Light that could not see, to bring down bliss into the heart of grief, and make her life a link between earth and heaven; if she would like to save the severely labouring universe (537) then she should make the vast universal suffering as her own: she must bear the sorrow that she claims to cure; the day-bringer must have to walk in the darkest night. He who would save the world must share its pain, if he does not know the grief then how shall he find grief‟s remedy? If she walks far above the peak of being subject to death, then how shall the fatal reach that too high path? If one sees that one of them reaches heaven‟s highest height then they can hope to learn the skill of that titanic climb. God must be born on earth and become as man then only man being human may gradually grow even as God. He who would rescue the world must become one with it and bear the grief and joy of all the living things and suffering things to live in his heart‟s space. His soul must be wider than the universe and all his bodily stuff feel eternity as its own stuff, and getting rid of his moment‟s personality know itself older than the birth of Time, and take creation as an incident in its consciousness, Arcturus and Belphegor (the star Ardra & Swati) are grains of fire circling in a corner of its boundless self, and feel the world‟s destruction as a small quickly passing away storm in the calm infinity it has become. If she would like to little loosen the immense chain of the world then she should draw back from the world that her Idea has made, and draw back her mind‟s choice from the Infinite, she should forget the dance of atoms and molecules on her sense like mirror, and then she shall know how the great bondage came. Hence she should drive away all thoughts from her and become God‟s blank. Then she shall see the Unknowable barely and the Superconscient consciousness shall grow on her upper limbs; the vision of the infinity shall burst out through her sight; she should look into the eyes of the Unknown, she should discover the Truth in the universal things that are looking like void and false, behind known things she should discover the secret seat of the Supreme Mystery. She should become identified with God‟s bare reality (538) and the miraculous world the god has become and the divine miracle that shall still take place in future when Nature who is now an unconscious God would grow clear in the Eternal‟s light, Nature‟s seeing shall turn into God‟s sight, Nature‟s walk shall turn into Spirit‟s steps of power and life is filled with spiritual joy and Matter shall become Spirit‟s willing bride. Hence she should consent to be nothing and none, dissolve Time‟s work, cast of her mind and step back from form and name. Abolish herself in such a way that God only may exist.

Savitri heard the mighty uplifting Voice that spoke likewise; in the silent Night she bowed down her head and meditated plunging her deep sight in her soul‟s isolation. She stood back aloof detached and calm, became a witness of the drama of her life, an observer of her own interior scene; she watched the strong feeling and the labour of life and heard in the crowded paths of mind the ever coming and returning sound of the footsteps of her thoughts. She allowed all the thoughts to rise that choose to stir and calling, compelling, or forbidding nothing, and she left all to the process formed in Time and the free initiative of Nature‟s will. Following likewise the complex human play she heard the prompter‟s voice behind the scenes, and could understand the text of a vocal original musical work and the dominating melody of a musical instrument of the composer Force. All she could observe that rose like waves from man‟s depths, the beast like natural tendencies that wander restlessly in the life like forests, the innate passions that maliciously advise the heart and passion‟s vigilant storm that swept through the nerves; and saw the Powers that stare from the Bottomless depths and the wordless Light that liberates the soul. But mostly her sight was aimed at the mystery of the birth of thought. (539) Freed from the sight of surface mind she was neither looking on to her familiar daily routine of works nor looked towards the thought-sounds rising from the brain, and soundless words and the voices stored within but unheard by men, and its mint and treasury of shining coin. These were like counterfeits in mind‟s symbol game, a gramophone‟s discs, reproduction‟s film and a list of signs, secret scripts and symbolic letters.

Thought is born from our unseen subtle body or it enters there coming from the cosmic field. Frequently from her heart there arose a naked thought luminous with mysterious lips and wonderful eyes: or stepping out from within her heart some burning face emerged and

166 looked for life and love and passionate truth, aspired to climb to heaven or embraced the world or like a floating moon led the imagination of life to float, across the dull sky of man‟s common days, as if in a dark room seeing a transcribed picture of one living rose from a golden vase and laughed amidst the doubtful certitude of earth‟s wisdom gave form to the celestial beauty of confidence. In her heart‟s depths a mediating sage sat and compelled the forward march, upward look till when at last the flood of wonder flowed into the illumined breast and the life becomes marvellous with the hope of transformation. A seeing will power stayed meditating between her brows; her thoughts like shining Angels, equipped with flashing weapons and with folding hands of prayer, stood behind her brain and poured down heaven‟s rays into her earthly form. From her breast imaginations and unearthly beauty flamed, touches of surmounting joy and plans of super naturalism, dreams of delight rose up: around her navel lotus large sensations of the unnumbered worlds closely crowding streamed their dumb movements of the unformed Idea; (540) invading the small sensitive flower of the throat to kindle the figures of heavenly speech they brought their silent unuttered echoes of sounds. The desires that stayed below at the lower part of the body gave a shape to their wordless wish, and the yearnings of physical sweetness and ecstasy formed the grasp on objects and their clasp on souls that translate into the happy stress of the tone of a cry. Her body‟s thoughts climbed above from her conscious limbs and carried their yearnings to its mystic crown where Nature‟s murmurs join the Inexpressible. But for the mortal limbs prisoned in the outward mind all must present their passport at its door; disguised they must bear the official cap and covering or pass as manufactures of the brain, and they had to keep unknown their secret truth and hidden source. They only speak direct to the inner mind, put on a body and utter a massage, then only their passage could be seen, their message heard and known, their birthplace and native mark revealed, our nature‟s messengers coming to the witness soul had to confess their secrets to an immortal‟s sight. The inner chambers of the spirit‟s house that cannot be penetrated and sensible for the fatal sense disclosed before Savitri their happenings and guests, her eyes looked through the holes in the invisible wall and through the secrecy of the unseen doors there came thoughts into mind‟s little frontal room that enlarged our limited human range, lifted the ideal‟s half-quenched or sinking torch or looked through the finite at the infinite. Consequently a sight was opened towards the invisible and saw the shapes that mortal eyes have never seen, heard the sounds that the mortal ear cannot hear, the blissful sweetness of the touch that cannot be realised; the objects that are here like empty air to us are there were the stuff of daily experience (541) and the common familiarity of sense and thought. The beings of the subtle kingdoms and scenes concealed behind our earthly scene appeared before her; thus she could see the life of remote continents and distance could not create any deafness in hearing the voices coming from far away; she could feel the movements that were crossing unknown minds; the events of the past occurred before her eyes. Thus the great world‟s thoughts became a part of her own thought; the feelings that were forever dumb and shared by none, the ideas that never found expression became a part of her own thought. The dim subconscient unintelligible hints laid bare before her a deep, complex and strange meaning, and the fantastic secret of their clumsy or nervous speech, and their links with the underlying reality were opened before her.

Whatever was unseen grew visible and became distinct in her sight: thoughts sprang down from a superconscient sphere like eagle‟s coming down from viewless peak, like golden fishes luminously rising from a hidden sea of thoughts rose up from the screened subliminal depths. Before her this world became a vast unbroken entirety, and became a deep oneness that joins its contrary powers; and became God‟s summits that look back on the mute Bottomless depths. On account of this, though man evolving to divine‟s heights still linked with the animal and Djinn (the Supernatural spirit who is made of fire and elastic in shape); till now the human godhead with eyes like the stars lives in one house with the primal beast. The higher beings lives with the lower beings, all is a single plan. In this way Savitri could see the many births of thought, if at any time eternal birth is possible; because the powers of the Eternal are like himself, those were Timeless in the Timelessness and ever born in Time. This too she saw that all is made in outer mind but not born, a product subject to decay and forged in the body‟s factory by the earth-force. This mind is an ever active small machine producing endlessly, (542) with raw materials drawn from the outside world in the patterns sketched out by an artist God till it wears out. Often our thoughts like finished universal goods admitted by a silent office gate of the universal market and pass through the tunnels of subconscient galleries, and sold in the Time‟s market as a private make. Because now they bear the living person‟s sign; a trick, a special colour claims them as his own. All else here in this world is a Nature‟s craft and this too is her creation. Our works are allotted to us, but we are nothing but the instruments; whatever we create is not our own; and the Power that acts in us is not our force. Our genius too receives from some high fount the work concealed in supernal secrecy that gives him an immortal name and fame. The word, the form, the charm, the glory and grace are sparks sprang from a stupendous Fire, a sample from the laboratory of God, of which God is the only possessor of the patent upon earth, that comes to man in golden coverings; he listens Inspiration‟s postman knock and takes delivery of the priceless gift, though it is spoiled a little by the receiver mind or mixed with the process of manufacture of his brain, but when least absurd then it is most divine. Although, man‟s ego claims the world for its use, yet man is a dynamo for the cosmic work, mostly Nature does in him and God is his ultimate end: only man‟s soul‟s acceptance is his own. This soul once independent the holder of the supreme power was self-born before the universe was created, accepting cosmos binds himself as Nature‟s slave till he becomes her freedman or God‟s slave. This is the appearance in our mortal front, our greater truth of being lies behind: our consciousness is universal and immense, (543) but only when we breakthrough Nature‟s Material wall we can stand in that spiritual vast wideness where we be capable of living as the masters of our world and the mind is only a support of living state and body a tool. Because much before the birth of our body and thought our spirit‟s being of truth in the naked self and from that height it

167 surveys the unlimited world. Thereafter Savitri rose above the mind to escape its law that it might sleep in some deep shadow of self or fall silent in the muteness of the Unseen. Freed from Nature‟s mounting height she stood and saw creation‟s life from far above, from there she laid her omnipotent will upon all to consecrate it to God‟s timeless calm: thereafter all grew tranquil in her being‟s space, like quiet waves upon a silent sea or waves passing over lonely pool when a stray stone disturbed its dreaming rest only sometimes small thoughts arose and fell in her. Yet the mind‟s factory had ceased to work, there was no sound heard of the dynamo‟s stir, there came no call from the still fields of life. Thereafter even those stirrings within her rose no more; her mind now seemed like a vast empty room or like peaceful natural scenery without sound. To this men call as quietude and prize as peace. But to her deeper sight all yet was there bubbling like a chaos under a lid; feelings and thoughts cried out for word for expression and means to act, but found no response in the silenced brain: Although all was suppressed but nothing yet were rooted out; so there was possibility of explosion at every moment. Thereafter this state was also silenced; the body seemed as a stone. All now became a wide mighty vacancy, but a shutout from eternity‟s hush; because now it was yet far away from the tranquility of the Absolute (544) and the ocean of silence of Infinity. Even now some thoughts could cross her loneliness; these were not thrown from formlessness to quest for forms and were not arising out from the depths or within, and those were not expressing the body‟s need nor voiced life‟s call. These did not seem to have been born nor created in human Time: these were the children of cosmic Nature came from a far world, and were of Idea‟s shapes in complete defense of words posted like travellers in a foreign space. They seemed to have come out of some far expanse as if carried on vast wings like large white sails and with easy access reached the inner ear as though they had a natural privileged right to enter into the high royal gates of the soul. Yet their path was deeply-concealed in light. Then Savitri looking to know from where these unknown unauthorized entrants have come and saw a spiritual immensity possessing and encompassing the world-space like the ether surrounds our transparent perceptible atmosphere and through it a thought was seen sailing in tranquilly. As a ship being ignorant of prohibition and bar, confident of its entrance and the visa‟s seal, smoothly sails to its nearing ports, it came to the silent city of the brain towards its accustomed and expectant port, but by the blow of Force and push of a great force sank disappearing completely in the immensity. After a long vacant interval another thought appeared and others one by one suddenly emerged, those who are the mind‟s unexpected visitors from the Unseen like far-off sails upon a lonely sea. But soon that coming and going failed, none could reach mind‟s coast. Then all grew still, nothing moved any more: an immobile self absorbed timeless, solitary silent spirit spread over the silent Space.

(545) In that utter bare stillness difficult to overcome in all-negating Supreme Void was seen by Savitri that claimed its mysterious Nothingness‟ all powerful right to cancel Nature and deny the soul. Even the naked sense of her self grew dull and thin: an impersonal, sinless, without distinctive features, formless a pure blank consciousness had replaced her mind. Her spirit seemed as the substance of a name, and the world appeared as a pictured symbol drawn on self, a dream of images, a dream of sounds built up the superficial appearance of a universe or imposed on the spirit an appearance of a world. This was a sign of self-seeing; in that unbearable hush no idea and no concept could take shape, there was no sense to frame the figure of things, a pure self-sight was there, and no thought arose. The heart‟s passion slept deep down in the still heart or lay buried in the burial of peace: as if the heartstrings were torn and could work no more and joy and grief could never raise again all feelings seemed as inactive, calm and dead.

The heart was beating on with an unconscious rhythm but no response and no voice came from it. The excitement of events was vain, no answer was coming from within her for an outside touch, and there neither nerve was stirred nor reaction rose. Yet till then her body could see and move and speak; it could understand without the help of thought, it said whatever needed to be said and did whatever needed to be done. There was no personality behind the act, no mind that chose or passed the fitting word: all worked like an unerring appropriate machine. As if continuing old habitual rotations and pushed by an old unexhausted force the engine did the work for which it was made: (546) her consciousness looked on and took no part; it supported all, took no share in anything. There existed no strong sportier will; that launches an inconsistence crossing a firm void entered into an order of related unplanned occurrence. There a pure direct knowledge of understanding was the only power that stood behind her action and sight. If that withdrew, then all objects would disappear quickly, her private universe would not exist, the house she had built with bricks of thought and sense in the beginning of the birth of the Space shall also be smashed. This seeing of Savitri became identical with the seen; it knew without knowledge all that could be known, it saw impartially the world go by, but in the same sleeping unmoving sight could see to its unreality of the deepest depths. It saw the figure of cosmic game, but the thought and inner life in forms seemed as dead, those were abolished by the collapse of her own thought: an empty physical skeleton persisted still. All seemed as a clear shadow of itself and as cosmic film of scenes and images: the permanent dense aggregation and outline of hills seemed as a design sketched on a silent mind and held to an uncertain falsity joined to an ever thrilling imaginary sight. The forest with its green multitudes covered the vague empty Space with its show of colours, painting‟s colors hiding the surface void that flickered upon great destruction‟s edge, the blue heavens appeared as a false appearance to the eyes, and seemed as a canopy spread over a mind‟s false impression of a world. The men who walked beneath an unreal sky seemed as moving puppets cut out of a card-board and pushed by unseen hands across the soil or seen as moving picture upon a Unreality‟s (Imagination‟s) film: so also (547) there was no soul within, and no power of life. The vibrations of the brain that appear like thought, the brief responds of the nerve to each contact‟s knock, the heart‟s quivering that was felt as joy and grief and love were the sudden involuntary contraction and movement of the body, appeared as her seeming self, her body forged from atoms and

168 gas was felt as of a manufactured lie of Maya‟s make, and life seemed to be a dream seen by the sleeping Void. The animals in single or in groups running through the small narrow path of the forest seeking for fodder seemed like a passing short living vision of beauty and elegance imagined by some all-creating Eye. Yet something was there behind the vanishing scene, wherever she turned, at whatsoever she looked, although felt as if directly understood, yet the same was hidden from mind and sight. The One and Alone that was the only real shut itself from Space and stood away from the idea of Time. The truth of the One and Unique was hidden from shape, line and colour. All else appeared unsubstantial, self-lost, this everlasting only seemed as true, yet it dwelt nowhere, it was timelessness. The supreme only could justify the significance of the labour of sight, but our sight is incapable to define its form; this only could satisfy the unsatisfied ear of Savitri but hearing failed to listen that missing sound; this could not answer the sense, nor invited the Mind. This was caught by Savitri as the uncaught and unheard Voice that speaks for ever from the Unknowable. Savitri saw it like an omnipresent point pure of dimensions, unfixed, invisible, its multiplied beat of single oneness made prominent (all pervading) without any dimensions, not fixed anywhere, invisible its multiplied bit of unique oneness made prominent its only eternity. It appeared before Savitri as some vast immeasurable, immense Nothingness, an endless No to all that seems to exists, an endless Yes to things ever unconceived and all that is unimagined and unthought, an eternal zero or an un-totaled anything, (548) a spaceless and a placeless Infinite. Yet eternity and infinity seemed as nothing except words which was joined vainly by mind‟s incapability to eternity and infinity‟s great lone reality. The world appeared as nothing but a spark-burst from eternity and infinity‟s light, all moments were appeared like flashes from the Timelessness, and all objects were like the faint sign of the Bodiless that disappear from Mind when That is seen. The One and the Unique held as if a shield (a covering) before its face, a consciousness that saw without a seer, the Truth without Knowledge and Knower nor Known, the divine Love self-lost in its own delight in which there is no Lover nor the Beloved bringing their personal passion into the Vast, the Force that remains almighty in quietude and the Bliss that none can ever hope to taste. The One and alone cancelled the believable deceit of self; a truth existent in nothingness was its mighty key. If all existence (Sat) could renounce its being and Being takes refuge in Non-being‟s arms and Non-being could abolish it circle of empty round yet some luster of that Reality might appear. A formless liberation descended on Savitri. Once that established alive in her brain and flesh Savitri had risen up from body, mind and life; she was no more a Person in a world, she was liberated into infinity. What Savitri had been once herself had disappeared, there was no frame of things, no figure of soul. Now Savitri escaping from the necessity of thought, liberated from Knowledge and Ignorance rescued from the true and the untrue, became a refugee from the domain of sense and she shared beyond the self-born Word, the nude Idea, the first bare solid ground of consciousness and the Superconscient high shelter; (549) beings were not there, existence (Sat) had no place, there was no temptation of the joy of existence (life). All was wiped out from her beyond description, she was no one and nonexistent, now Savitri became a point in the unknowable and became a vanishing shine like a violet trace, and a faint record merely of a self that is now past. Now there remained with her only some lost abolition and dissolution‟s indistinct undesirable step: yet a memory of being was still there and kept her separate from nothingness: although she was in that but still became not that. This shadow of her that was so near to nothingness could again be self‟s point of refuge to live, return out of the Unthinkable and become what some mysterious Vast might choose. Even as determined by the Unknowable she might be naught or new-become the All, or if the omnipotent Nothingness took a shape she would emerge as someone and re-liberate the world. Even, she might learn what the mystic void held this seeming exit or closed end of all could be a blind dark passage screened from sight, her state could become the eclipsing shell of a darkened sun on its secret way to the Inexpressible. Even now her luminous being might flame back out of the silence and extinction, become a brilliant lustrous portion of the All-wonderful, a power of some all-affirming One and the Alone, or there is a possibility of her becoming a shining mirror of the eternal Truth to show to the Onein-all its manifest face and to the souls of men their deep identity. Or she might wake into God‟s quietude beyond the cosmic day and cosmic night and rest satisfied in his white eternity. But this was now unreal or remote or covered in the mystic fathomless blank. (550) Now the infinite Nothingness was the last sign or else the Real was Unknowable. A lonely Absolute negated all: it wiped the ignorant world from its solitude and drowned the soul in its everlasting peace.

-End of Canto Six

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Canto Seven The Discovery of the Cosmic Spirit and the Cosmic Consciousness (551) Amidst the forest in the little hermitage in the sunlight, moonlight and the dark the daily human life went on even as before with difficulty and labour with its steam of small unchanging works and its limited outward body of routine and happy quietude of ascetic like peace. As the old beauty of the earthly scene smiled; Savitri too became her old likeable self to men. The Ancient merciful and beneficent Mother clutched her child to her breast embracing her close in her clasping arms as if earth could forever keep the same living spirit and body in her clasp and there were no death nor end nor any possibility of change. But habituated only to know through outward signs none ( her in-laws and husband Satyavan ) could see a little newness in her, none could discover her state, they could see a person where existed only God‟s vast, and a still being or a mighty nothingness. She was the same perfect Savitri before all: she poured out from her upon the little world greatness, sweetness and a light. Her life showed to all the same familiar face, her acts followed the old unchanged round, she spoke the words that she always was accustomed to speak and did things that she had always done. Her eyes were watching the earth‟s unchanging face, around the silence of her soul all moved in the old way; a vacant consciousness watched from within her as witness, it was blank but was a bare supreme Reality. There was no will behind her word and act, no thought formed in her brain to guide the speech: (552) an impersonal emptiness walked and spoke in her, perhaps something unfelt, unseen, unknown guarded her body for its future work, or Nature moved in her old stream of force. Perhaps she consciously bore in her breast the miraculous Nothingness that was the birthplace of our souls and the source and sum of the vast world‟s events, the womb (birth) and the grave (a burial ground) of thought, a symbol of God, and a zero circle of being‟s totality. It was active in her speech and acted in her acts, it was beautifying in her limbs, breath of her life; it was the original Mystery that wore her human face. Thus she was lost and became a separate self within her; her mortal ego was destroyed amidst God‟s night. Only a body and ego‟s shell was left that was floating in the wave and foam of the world-sea, it was a sea of dream watched by a motionless sense in a figure of the unreal reality. An impersonal divine sight could already see everything from the past that the individual die and the cosmos perish, after these perishable things are gone, the transcendental grew as a devil or legend, a Holy Ghost (great life) without the Father and the Son, or an underlying substance of what once had been, a being that never willed to bear a world becoming impassive, sole, silent, and unreachable returned to its original loneliness in the thoughtless knowledge of the spirit, even now it seemed nearer and inevitable. Yet in this deep loss all was not vanished and her being not travelled towards nothingness. In her being there existed some high all exceeding Secrecy, and when she sat alone with Satyavan then her still mind searched and tried hard with Satyavan‟s mind, in the silence of the deep and intimate night her sight was directed towards a veiled voiceless Truth that hid in the dumb caves of her heart (553) or waiting beyond the last peak that could be climbed by Thought and that Truth itself remaining unseen sees the struggling world and inspires our quest, but never cares whether anybody searches it or not, in the mean while out of that distant Vast a reply came. Something unknown, unattainable, unintelligible sent down the messages of its bodiless divine Light, that light crossing the immobile silence of Savitri‟s mind: flung lightening flashes of an unearthly thought: in its might of absolute supremacy seized on Savitri‟s speech to give those a flaming shape, in a word stirred the heart of wisdom and spoke immortal things through mortal lips. Or as a result while hearing to the questions and answers with the sages of the forest high strange revealing of divine knowledge impossible to be conceived by men came out from within her, she felt that something or someone secret and far away from her took hold of her body for his use, that was beyond the perception of the senses and seized her mouth to express inexpressible truths, and an unthinkable knowledge sprang from her words. The sages and saints of the forest astonished by new enlightenment in Savitri invaded by a flash of lightening of the Absolute, marveled at her, because she seemed to know of what they had only brief view at times afar. In her listening brain this thought were not formed, her vacant heart was like a string less harp; her body did not claim those voices as its own without any emotion, but let the luminous greatness to pass through it. Still a dual nameless and invisible power acted at her being‟s mystic poles: used her divine emptiness as their instrument. Out of those dual Powers one was Inconscient Nature that slipped through the conscious void she had become in the world it had made and using still Savitri‟s body‟s instruments; and the other one was the superconscient Mystery that missioned its word to touch the thoughts of men through that Void. As yet this great impersonal speech was rare in the world. (554) But now the still wide spiritual space in which Savitri‟s mind survived peacefully and barely, admitted a traveller from cosmic expanse: it was a thought that came disguised as on outer voice. That thought needed not the help of witness mind, it did not speak to the silenced receiving heart; it came direct to the pure seat of concrete and direct understanding‟s that was now only a center of consciousness, though it was a centre yet there all seemed as wide as sky only; her being shut no more by body‟s walls and gates and became a circle without circumference, now it transcended all cosmic limits and spread more and more into infinity. This being of Savitri was its own unbounded world which was without form, or shape or circumstance; it had no ground, no wall, no roof of thought, yet it saw itself on all around in a motionless and illimitable silence. There was no person, nor centered mind, no seat of feeling on which events beat or there was no objects worked and shaped reaction‟s stress. There was no motion in this inner world, all was still and even infinity. In her the Unseen, the Unknown waited his hour.

170 But now Savitri with in her awakening sat near sleeping Satyavan, and the enormous Night surrounded her with the vast of the Unknowable. In the meanwhile a voice began to speak from her own heart, though that was not hers, yet mastered her thought and sense. Immediately after the voice spoke all was transformed within and without her; she felt all existed and lived and all being as one; in her feeling the existence of the world of unreality was abolished, confined in the outward structure and sign there was no more a universe built by mind; a spirit, a being used to see created things (555) and flung itself into unnumbered forms and became one with what it saw and acted; all now grew an evidence of one stupendous truth, a Truth in which negation had no place, it became a being and living consciousness, and a stark and absolute Reality. The unreal could not exist there and the feeling of unreality was slain: there all was made in Eternal substance and all was conscious and made of the Infinite. Yet this was the same that cannot be Seen, Real or Interpreted, it seemed to have cast from it universe like a dream and vanishing for ever into an original Void. But this was no more some vague all pervading point or a cipher of vastness in unreal Naught. It remained as the same but now no more seemed to be far to the living clasp of Savitri‟s recovered soul. It was her own self (soul) and the self of the whole world, it was the reality of all living things, it was the consciousness of all that lived and felt and saw, and it was Timelessness and Time. It was the Bliss of formlessness and form. It was complete Love (entre) and the One Beloved‟s arms; it was sight and thought in one all-seeing Mind, it was joy of Being on the peaks of God. Savitri passed beyond the limits of Time into eternity, slipped out of the horizon and became the unlimited; her being rose into that could not be overcome (surmounting) heights and found no end of its journey in the Supreme Self. Her being plunged into the unfathomable deeps and could not find no end to the silent mystery that held all world within one lonely breast, yet harbored all creation‟s multitudes. She became all vastness and one immeasurable point, she was a height beyond heights, a depth beyond depths; she lived in the everlasting and was all (556) that harboring death and bears the Time‟s wheels (Kalachakra). She exceeding measure, change and circumstance of all contraries became true in one huge spirit. She was an individual, becoming identified with cosmic self in the heart of the Transcendent‟s miracle and the secret of World-personality became the creator and the lord of all. The being of Mind was a single innumerable look upon himself and all that he became. Life was his drama of cosmic self (i.e. the world is his play) and the Vast in a universal stage, the universe was his body and God its soul. All was one single immense reality and all had become its innumerable directly observed events or scenery.

Her spirit (soul) saw the world as living God; seeing the One and Alone knew that all was He. She knew him as the Absolute‟s self-space (supreme Brahma‟s self-expression); one with her soul and ground (base) of all things here in which the world guarded behind its disguise of ignorance: wanders seeking for the Truth: Savitri followed the Truth through the march of endless time.

All Nature‟s happenings were felt as her inner events, and felt the heart-beats of the universe became her own, she felt that all being‟s thought moved in her; she dwelt in the vastness of the world (universe), the distances of the world became her nature‟s boundaries, its nearness‟s were her life‟s intimacies. Her mind became familiar with the universal mind, the body of the universe became her body‟s larger frame in which she lived and knew herself in it as One, and multitudinous in the multitudes. She was a single being, yet became all things; the world was her sprit‟s wide circumference, the thoughts of others were her intimates, their feelings were near to her universal heart, their bodies became her many bodies related to her; she became no more herself but all the world. (557) All came to her out of the infinitudes, and she spread into the sentient (conscious) infinitudes, and infinity became her own natural home. She dwelt nowhere, her spirit was everywhere, and the distant constellations wheeled round her: earth saw her born, all worlds became her colonies, the greater worlds of life and mind were hers; all Nature reproduced her shape in it‟s every lines. Nature‟s movements became large copies of Savitri‟s own movement. She was identified with all the selves, she was in them and they were all in her. This was her first immense identity in which her own identity was lost: what seemed as she was an image of the Whole. She became the subconscient life of tree and flower, she became the blooming of the honeyed buds of spring; she burned in the passion and splendour of the rose, she was the red heart of the thorny flower, the dream-white of the lotus in its pool. Out of the subconscient life she raised to mind, she became the thought and the passion of the world‟s heart, she was the godhead hid in the heart of man, and she was the climbing soul of man to God. The whole universe flowered in her and she became its field. She was Time and dreams of God in Time, she was Space and the wideness in the way of his life. From this Savitri rose where Time and Space does not exist; the superconscient consciousness became her native atmosphere, infinity became her movement‟s natural space; Eternity looked out from her on Time.

-End of Canto Seven -End of Book Seven

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BOOK EIGHT The Book of Death

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BOOK VIII Canto Three Death in the Forest (561) Today it was here (in this thatched hermitage and the fated day as declared by Narada, heavenly seer regarding the death of Satyavan) it was here in this great golden dawn. When her husband sleeping yet and remaining in a horizontal position by her side Savitri looked into her past as one about to die looks back upon the sunlit fields of his past life where he too ran and sported with the rest, lifting his head above the huge dark stream into whose depths he must forever plunge. All she had been and done before she lived again. On that day the memories of the whole year swept through her into the depths of the past that cannot be recovered in a swift and whirling race. Thereafter she rose silently and completed all her services, bowed down to the great goddess the figures of which were simply cut out by Satyavan upon a forest stone. What prayer she had offered only her soul and Mother Durga knew.

Perhaps Savitri felt in the huge dim forest that the infinite Mother watching over her child and the screened Voice spoke some unutterable word. At last she came to the mother queen whose face was looking pale. She spoke to her with carefully guarded lips otherwise some careless word or misleading look should enter into the mother queen‟s unknowing breast with regard to the dreadful for knowledge of the grief to come and slaying all her happiness and need to live. Savitri only spoke as much as needed and all else she pressed back into her pain-stricken heart and covered upon her speech an outward peace. (562) She said that she had lived one year with Satyavan under the blue sky of the vast forest on its green edge within the iron circles of enormous mountain peaks, that she had not gone into the silences of this great woodland that encircled her thoughts with mystery, nor ever wandered in its miraculous green beauty, except this small (the thatched hermitage area) that was her whole world. Now to go with Satyavan holding his hand into the life he had loved and touch the herbs on which he had walked and know the forest flowers and hear at ease the songs of the birds and the hurried life that starts and ceases soon, and the rich far gentle sound of the branches of the trees and all the mystic whisperings of the forest a strong desire had possessed her whole heart. She requested the queen Mother to release her now to go and render peace to her heart. The queen Mother answered designating her as calm child-queen with the eyes that rule to do as her wise mind desires.

Because she had considered Savitri as a strong Goddess who came to them pitying their vain life, and she had served them even as a slave might do, yet she was beyond all that she did and all their mind conceived regarding her and her services done were like the strong sun that serves earth from above. Thereafter the ill-fated husband and the woman, who knew with regard to his grim destiny, went with linked hands into the dignified world where beauty and grandeur existed and hushed dream, where Nature‟s mysterious silence could be felt communing with the secrecy of God. Satyavan walked beside her in full joy because she moved with him through his daily seeking in the green forest: he showed her all the riches of the forest, innumerable flowers of every fragrance and colour and red and green soft thick clinging creepers and strange varieties of birds with coloured feathers, and Satyavan drew her attention to every cry that touched coming sweetly from distant branches of trees and replied with the great singer‟s name uttering more sweetly.

(563) He spoke to her of all things he loved that were his boyhood‟s comrades and his playfellows, of equal age and companions of his life here in this world of forest whose every mood he knew: their thoughts that are inexpressive to the mind of common man, he shared to every exiting instinctive feeling gave an answer. Savitri deeply listened to those voices, but she was eager to hear those tender words which would soon stop and she wished as to treasure its sweet beloved rhythms for lonely memory when none by her walked and the beloved voice of Satyavan could speak no more. But her mind concentrated little upon their meaning; she thought of death and not life or life‟s only end. Love in her breast hurt with a sharp edge of pain and grieved at every step with pain, crying that now, now perhaps his (Satyavan‟s) voice shall stop forever. Sometimes even tyrannized by some vague touch her eyes looked round as if their eyeballs might see the pitiless and dreadful god‟s (Death‟s) approach. But in the meanwhile Satyavan and stopped from moving further. He meant to finish his labour here so that they two happily with linked hands might wander free from anxiety in the green thick ancient and crude mystery of the forest‟s heart. He chose to cut a tree that raised its tranquil head to heaven relaxing comfortably in its green beauty, inviting breeze with lovely wideness of its branches and with his steel axe Satyavan had stricken the brown, rough and strong branch hidden in its green beauty. Savitri watched near him wordlessly, the bright face and body of Satyavan which she loved and did not want to lose any pose of it. Now her life was in seconds and not in hours, and every moment she economized like a pale merchant leaned above his valuables, and the miser of his little remaining gold. But Satyavan struck on the branch a joyous axe, while so cutting the wood he sang sublime words of a sage‟s chant of Vedic hymns (564) that uttered with high voice the victory over death and slaughter of the demons, he sometimes paused to cry to Savitri in sweet speech of love and mockery tenderer than love: Savitri like a panthers (a female tiger) leaped upon his words and carried them and treasured in her deep heart. But as Satyavan started working again his grim destiny came upon him. The ferocious and hungry dogs of pain travelled through his body biting as they passed silently, and suffocated his suffering breath and tried hard to tear to pieces his life‟s strong heart-cords from his body and be free.

Thereafter as if a beast left its prey Satyavan felt helped for a while, in a wave of great relief of a moment he regained strength and in a happy ease stood rejoicing and resumed his confident work of cutting but with less seeing strokes of his axe. Now that the great woodsman (the King of death the yama) had cut him and his labour stopped: lifting his arm he threw away the sharpened axe far from him like an instrument of pain. Then Savitri came to Satyavan in silent pain and clasped him; and he cried to her and expressed that a pain enters cutting through his head and breast as if the axe was cutting it into pieces and not the living branch. Such pain tore him as the tree must feel when it is cut and must lose its life, so he told Savitri to let him lay his head upon her lap and asked her to guard him with her hands from evil fate: he said to Savitri that because immortal her touch, perhaps death may pass. Thereafter Savitri, leaving the tree that was cut by the sharp axe of Satyavan sat under a green, wide, and cool branched tree against the sun and leaned beneath a fortunate kingly trunk and guarded Satyavan in her bosom and tried hard to solace his painful brow and body with her hands. Now all grief and fear were dead within Savitri and a great calm had fallen on her. The wish to lessen Satyavan‟s suffering, the passion that opposes pain (565) was only the mortal feeling left in her. Then that too passed away; Savitri waited being strong and unlamented like the gods. But now Satyavan‟s sweet familiar colour was changed into a dull grayness and his eyes became dim, and

173 Savitri‟s loved Satyavan had given up the clear light. Only his dull and physical mind was left, vacant of the bright spirit‟s luminous sight. But once before it faded back wholly Satyavan cried out in a clinging last hopelessness to Savitri thrice to lean down on his soul and kiss him while he dies. And even as Savitri pale lips pressed on his lips, his life failed, lost the last sweetness of response; his cheek pressed down Savitri‟s golden arm. As if she could persuade his soul to come back with her kiss she sought his mouth still with her living mouth; then she became aware that both Satyavan and Savitri were no more alone there. Something had come there conscious, vast and dreadful. Near her she felt an immense silent shade making the noon cool with the darkness of its back. A dreadful silence had fallen upon the place: the cry of birds and voices of the beasts were heard no more there. As if last dissolution‟s mystery had taken a sensible form a terror and a mental suffering filled the world. An universal mind looked out on all from terrible eyes hating all with its unbearable gaze and with its immortal lids and vast brow saw in its immense destroying thought all things and being as a pitiful dream, rejecting Nature‟s delight with calm hate, the silence of its deep regard voiced the unreality of things and the life that would exist for ever but never was and its brief and vain unceasing recurrence and as if from a Silence without form and name the Shadow of a remote uncaring god condemned the unreal universe to Nothingness and cancelled its show of idea and act in Time and its imitation of eternity. Savitri could know that the visible God of Death was standing there and Satyavan had passed from her embrace.

“Canto Three” -End of Part Two -End of Book Eight

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PART THREE

BOOKS IX - XII

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BOOK NINE

The Book of Eternal Night

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Canto One Towards the Black Void

(571) In this way Savitri keeping her husband‟s corpse on her deserted breast surrounded by a indistinct thoughtless world left alone in the huge forest. In her vast silent motionless spirit she did not calculate her loss with helpless thoughts, nor broke with tears the stone like burden of pain: she not yet rose to face the dreadful god of Death. Her soul leaned out in a great stillness without any voice or stir over the body she loved as if her mind had died with Satyavan. But still her human heart was beating on.

She still knowing that Satyavan‟s being was near to hers, she closely clasped to her the silent lifeless form of Satyavan as though to guard the oneness they had been and keep the spirit of her husband still within its bodily frame. There after there came suddenly a change on her that in terrific moments of our lives can sometimes overtake the human soul and hold it up to its luminous source.

Now the covering that makes man pathless is torn, the thoughts of her mind is no more a guide in her: only her spirit did see and all is known. Then she could observe that a calm Power seated above our brows, undisturbed by our thoughts and deeds, its stillness bears the voices of the world: it was immobile but it moves Nature, and looks on life‟s play. It unchangeably shapes its far seen intentions; amid error and tears of life it remains unaffected and calm and remained immeasurably above our hard endeavoring wills, its sight controls the violent whirl of the universal things. The Glory it sees the spirit grows to meet it, then the voice of life is tuned to infinite sounds (572) the moments come on great wings of lightning and godlike thoughts create surprise in the mind of earth. A miraculously born luster of a growing moon falls Into the soul‟s splendour and intensity whose mysterious surface luminosity floats in the bright void. As thought is enraptured in the heaven of strength & silence; all this living mortal clay of the body is possessed and in a swift and fiery flood of touches shaped by an unseen All Harmonizing God. As a result a new sight awakens and new voices form in us and a new rhythm of music of the Gods formed. Nameless immortal aspirations descend down, large quivering of seeking of godheads run swiftly upon a mighty field of calm, weave a high and lonely ecstasy of will. This in a moment‟s depths was born in Savitri. Now to Savitri‟s limitless way of sight of things that were hidden from human thought‟s earthly lids, disclosed the cosmic Spirit hidden in Nature rose up into the worlds out of his luminous nest: like a vast fire it climbed the skies of night. Likewise the knots of her self-forgetfulness were torn: Savitri like one who looks up to far heights as on a windless summit could see an old, strong centre from where in her lone mind in a sole tower of self labouring apart she had once worked and seen the source of all that, a power that one projected into cosmic space, a gradual embodiment of the will of ages, a starry portion of the eternal Truth, the passionate tool of an unmoved Power. She witnessed a Presence God that was filled there in the listening world; her boundless life took on the form of All the Gods. She could see mastery, a silence, swiftness, spread over all the immeasurable depths that were she. As the unheard sounds (573) carries the best music a Force descended widening the lengthy line of its endless lights: linking Time‟s seconds to infinity, the above mentioned force illimitably surrounded the earth and in Savitri like a waist plate: it sank into her soul and she was transformed a new. Thereafter like a thought fulfilled by some great word (mantra) that mightiness assumed a symbol form: with its touch Savitri‟s being‟s spaces were thrilled, it covered her like immortal wings, and gave her fearless shelter, on her lips the curved line of unuttered Truth was seen, it looked like a halo (circle of light) of Wisdom‟s lightening like its crown entered the mystic lotus in her head, that is a thousand-petal led home of power and light. It was the immortal leader of her mortality, doer of her works and fountain of her words, the one that unassailable by Time, almighty stood above her and in a calm, immobile and silent state.

As if the remainder of her own humanity that once was there with her was slain by Death and all in Savitri faced now with that mighty moment. The young divinity that was in her earthly limbs assuming a wide spiritual control filled her mortal part with heavenly strength making life‟s sea as a mirror of heaven‟s sky. Consequently her constant pain and wrenching fear was over: her grief had passed away, her mind became still, and her heart beat quietly with the supreme force. She was freed from her heartstring‟s hold, now all her acts rose rapidly from a state of godhead‟s calm. The dead-body of her husband that was still laid upon her breast she calmly lay upon the forest soil and turned away from it: now she rose alone to meet the dreadful god of Death. That mightier spirit of Savitri turned its diviner look on life and all things, that was the inheritor of works left to it unfinished from Savitri‟s halting past life, (574) when she with her mind was yet a passionate learner, and her work was hard and her ill-shaped bodily instruments were moved unrefinedly. Now her poor human ways were transcended; only there remained her supreme power and a godlike will. She remained motionless for a moment and looked down on the dead man at her feet; thereafter like a tree recovering from a wind she raised her noble head; before her eyes she saw there stood something unearthly, dark, and grand, and was a limitless denial of all beings and bore a shape of terror and wonder. That gloomy Form in his horrifying look bore pity of the worlddestroying gods; a sorrowful satiric word curved his dreadful lips that spoke the word of death or ruin. Like the Eternal Darkness the god of Death with the dreadful beauty of an immortal face arose as if showing pity, and as an only shelter of the mortal creatures from their suffering and world-pain drawing forever all that lives into its fathomless heart. His shape of nothingness was now made real; his limbs were looking like the monuments of things that last for only a short time and beneath his brows of un-tired calm and large like lids looked silently on the mortal life that was rolling like a serpent. His timeless wide unchanging immobile look had seen

177 the unprofitable cycle of an eons pass; it survived the passing of unnumbered stars and still sheltered the immutable circle of light in his eyes. Now the two, the woman and the universal god of death looked opposed with each other: around Savitri, much inhuman solitude came close piling their void of unbearable loneliness upon her mighty unaccompanied soul. Vacant timelessness that were destroying hope laid upon her their huge and lifeless look, and silencing earthly sounds to Savitri‟s ears there arose a sad and over powering voice (575) that appeared to be of the whole world of hostility. The voice cried to her to leave Satyavan and relax her passionate influence and designating her as a slave of earthly Nature, and changing instrument of a changeless Law, said that she vainly revolts against the weight of his yoke and asked her to relax her earthly elemental clutch and to leave the dead and to weep for a while and forget, to entomb her passion in the living grave of Satyavan. The king of death said to Savitri to leave now her once loved spirit‟s abandoned body like an outer garment and return back alone to her vain life on earth. Thereafter that voice stopped, Savitri remained motionless and death‟s voice spoke again lowering its mighty tone to human tone, yet a frightening cry behind the uttered sound of the king of Death echoing all sadness and timeless hate made a sound like a hunger of far wandering waves. The king of death told Savitri that because she herself was a creature destined to die like her husband and now denying death‟s calm and silent rest to the soul of Satyavan would she be able to forever keep her passionate husband‟s fascination? Asked Savitri to loosen her clasp as the dead body of Satyavan belongs to earth and to her, the ownership of Satyavan‟s spirit now becomes of a greater power. He asked Savitri to designating her as woman to see that her husband suffers. Savitri now drew back her heart‟s force that clasped still her husband‟s body where from her lap renounced and lay softly on the smooth grass, as often in the past she did in sleep when from their couch she rose in the white dawn called by her daily tasks to attend: now too, as if called she has to respond to that call and stood gathered in her lonely strength, in the field of wrestling like a wrestler who drops his dress for a race and waits for the signal motionlessly in her inner swiftness. She did not know as to what course she should adopt: her spirit was above on the secret summit of her subtle body like a sentinel immersed in work left on a mountain peak, and like a still sail upon a windless sea a fiery footed mighty splendour with the help of powerful wings her voiceless soul flamed and watched silently. An anchored white passionless might rode its power and waited to see as to what far-ridged impulse should arise out of the eternal depths and cost its waves. (576) As leans the night over tired lands when evening pales and fading light breaks down the horizon‟s walls nor yet the dusk grows mystic with the moonlight, then Death the king with its boundless shape leaned down. The shadowy figure and dreadful godhead Death rose erect from his brief inclining to his touch on earth, and like a dream that breaks out of a dream, as if someone over viewless borders stepped emerging on the edge of unseen worlds, leaving the poor frame of that dead body another luminous Satyavan arose upright from the reclining earth. Here in the earth‟s daylight the silent marvellous figure of Satyavan stood between Savitri the mortal woman and the god of Death. As if one dead came again bearing the light of a heavenly shape, Satyavan seemed as magnificently alien to the mortal atmosphere. But the mind always sought him whom it has loved long and seeing the unfamiliar colour‟s beauty of a face gets frustrated and baffled, and dissatisfied by the sweet radiant form, and although unwilling to believe its too bright hint of heaven, yet it look for its desired one, brought up in the rays of material suns, desiring the warm creations of the earth to life‟s clasp that brilliant shadow seemed to be too strange, that glorious shade could not be grasped by the senses; not withstanding this the spirit only could know the spirit still and the heart knew the old loved heart though changed. Like one who is blind listens for a command, the luminous shape of Satyavan stood between two kingdoms immovable but fixed in a quiet strong state of expectation. Thus those three were immobile on that earthly field; they were not powers of the earth, though one of them was of human clay. On either side of Savitri two bodiless spirits strove; silence battled with silence and vast struggled with vast. But now the inspiration of the Path was felt for moving from the Silence which supports the stars (577) to reach the last end of the visible world. The figure of luminous Satyavan moved in front, behind him Death went slowly with his noiseless steps, as seen in dream-built fields a shadowy herdsman runs behind some escaped cattle or animal from his dumb herds so also Savitri moved behind eternal Death, her mortal steps was equaled with the god‟s. Savitri travelled voiceless in her lover‟s steps, her human feet followed where Satyavan‟s feet had moved into the dreadful dangerous silences beyond.

At first Savitri as if journeying upon an unseen road in a dense forest moved with unusual inhuman steps on the soil.

Around her on the green and pictured earth the hanging creepers and branches of the forest surrounded her steps; its thick luxurious obstacles of boughs besieged her body pressing dimly through in a rich kingdom of whisper that are easily perceived and all the sweet low muttered beauty of leaves waved around her like a bright green robe. But more and more the murmur us sound grew as an unheard sound and her old own intimate body seemed to her as a burden that her being bore from far off. She herself lived far in some uplifted scene where to her trans-bound vision of pursuit, those sole presences (the figure of dead Satyavan and the king of Death) were seen as an empty sky seen in a dream; the luminous spirit of Satyavan was advancing slowly and the great shadow Death travelled vaguely behind. Yet like the lovely crowd of seeking hands (the trees and creepers) softly entreated by their old desires and her senses felt earth‟s close and gentle atmosphere cling round them and from the swinging branches of the trees she felt the uncertain steps of a faint-foot wind: Savitri felt dim fragrances and the touch of the far callings; as if a long breath coming from some forgotten world she felt the wild bird‟s voice and its sound of flapping wings. (578) Though the earth stood aloof away from her, yet as if remaining near it poured its sweetness and its greenness and delight around her and its brilliant of well-loved

178 living colours, the golden splendour of the sunlight of noon and the blue of the sky poured down their loving touch of the soil. The ancient mother Earth offered her as gift to her child her simple world of kind familiar things. But now it seemed to Savitri as if her body‟s senses held restraining the godhead (soul) of her infinite walk and freed those spirits to their splendid road to cross some boundary‟s untouchable barrier, and now the silent god Death grew mighty and remote in other spaces and the soul she loved lost its consenting nearness to her life at will. Now they seemed to enlarge away into an enormous windless, stir or soundless depths and unfamiliar atmosphere drawn by some wide pale distance from the warm control of earth and grown far from her: it seemed to Savitri that as if they would escape now only from the range of her sight. Thereafter her furious spirit rose like a flame of fire from her body‟s nest warned with danger and soared at Satyavan. Like a fierce she-eagle by the threatening of death to her children getting angry at the hunting pointed spear of Death rose winging out of her nest from the heaven surrounded mountain in a terror and wrath divine stream against the ascending death borne on a rush of force and cry out winging like a mass of golden fire. So Savitri borne on a spirit‟s flaming outrush crossed the borders of dividing sense; while so ascending her mortal members fell back from her soul like discarded covering dropped down in a dullness. There came a moment of her inner body‟s sleep, her soul‟s trance knew not of sun or earth or world; thought, and time and death were fled away from her grasp: (579) Savitri knew not self, and forgot herself. Now all became in her the turbulent ocean of a will where her only aim, joy, origin Satyavan alone lived prisoned to her immense lovely touch, possessed in a supreme identity. Her supreme lord prisoned in the inner depth of her being and stirred there like a rhythmic heart, but Savitri herself was still in a different state, like a hoard of precious metal or gems saved from the collapse of space she kept her lover enveloped in her intense clasps. Around Satyavan nameless and infinite she rose higher and higher, her spirit remained fulfilled in Satyavan‟s spirit, rich in all the stress of Time as if Love‟s immortal moment had reached she remained as a pearl within eternity‟s white shell. Thereafter out of the over whelming sea of trance her mind rose bathed in light bearing the various colours of Divine vision and awoke once more in the stream of Time, and returned to give shape to things and live in known borders. In her soul‟s inner sight the three moved on still. As if walking through parts of a dream she herself seemed to travel on; like an inner vision‟s shape, imagining many other mediators walking like her and imagined that she herself walked in their lonely sleep.

Familiar and old scenes like un-conceived, unreal, pieces of partly divided memory, often passed before her, never lived anywhere for a moment, discarding forgotten goals fled past surpassing her without caring for anything. They were travellers in silent spheres alone in a new world where there were no souls, but only living moods were there: around them there was a peculiar hushed illusive country, strange far skies above, a doubting space where dreaming objects lived within themselves following their one unchanged idea. There the grasses and the treeless plains were illusory; a peculiar road as if running out of fear hastening towards that of which it has most terror, (580) and it passed like shadowy figures of phantom between conscious rocks that are dark and high and pillared through the great silent gates whose stone thoughts lost their huge significance beyond in a night of very larger kind. Those were the ambiguity of the carved stone-like sleep of the Inconscient, symbols of the approach to old darkness and a structure of long reminder of her titanic rule, those were like the bottomless depths opening like dumb frightful jaws waiting for a traveller down a seeking path and attracted him to a mystery that slays, they watched across Savitri‟s road becoming cruel and silent, they were the sentries of the inevitable dumb Fate, they were silent heads of awakened and harmful darkness, and a hewed out disguised head of a shadowy enormous world. Thereafter they arrived at that tremendously cold, dry, heavy line where Satyavan‟s feet touched the shadowy border regions, and luminous Satyavan turning his face stopped his movement and looked back with his wonderful eyes at Savitri. But Death in his vast bottomless cry like a roar of the thunder designating Savitri as a mortal being asked her to turn back to her transient race, and refrain from aspiring to accompany Death to his home as if her breath could live where Time must die. And hence she should not hope vainly. Asked her not to think that her mind-born passion is a strength that came from heaven to uplift her spirit from her earthly base and breaking out from the material cage (her bodily form) would raise her feet of dream in bottomless Void and bear her through the pathless infinite. Only within human limits man lives safe. Asked her not to believe the unreal Lords of Time, and not to think that this image of herself as immortal built by the Lords of Time on a floating ground of Dream. To be careful not to allow the dreadful goddess to prompt her soul to enlarge her vehement trespass into the worlds where it shall be destroyed like a helpless thought. To know the cold term-stones of her hopes in life. Her life is vainly armed with the baseless Ideal‟s might and she should not dare to step out of man‟s limit and measured force: (581) Because man is ignorant and gets tripped in every step, he is shut in brief boundaries, he crowns himself as the world‟s imitating emperor and with the works of Mind that torments the Nature.

The king of Death designating Savitri as a sleeper dreaming of divinity, advised her to wake trembling mid the indifferent silences in which her few weak cords of being would die. They are impermanent creatures and sorrowful foam of Time‟s sea and their fleeting loves cannot bind the eternal gods. Thereafter the dreadful voice of Death sank in the silence that seemed its intense willingness for the same (white wordless sanction from the jaws of Night). Then the Woman did not answer. Her high and bare soul stripped off the waist plate (covering of her mortality). Savitri a primal force stood up in its sheer will against fixed destiny and the routines of law.

Yet, like a statue on its pedestal lone in the silence and her vastness against midnight‟s dumb bottomless depths as if piled in front of a columned shaft of fire and light Savitri rose.

-End of Canto One

179

Canto Two The Journey in Eternal Night and the Voice of the Darkness (582) As if a world were destined to die all stood for a while on the ice cold dreadful edge of the Night and waited on the eternal silence‟s border. Through that dim and voiceless silence the sky inclined towards them like a cloudy brow of terror. As thoughts stand dumb on a border of frustration where the lost depths plunge into the nothingness and the last dream must end, they stopped for a while; in their front were a mass of darkness like shadowy wings, behind them there was the pale lifeless evening like dead man‟s sight. From beyond, the hungry night desired to devour Savitri‟s soul. But yet in its lone small recess of templed strength her motionless flame-bright spirit silent and erect burned like a torch-fire from a windowed room piercing the darkness‟ darkened breast burned towards the height. The majestic Woman first daring to travel across the eternal Night affronted bottomless depths of Hell. Secured with the protecting coverings of light Savitri advanced her foot to plunge into the fearful and colourless vacancy; her immortal and fearless spirit faced the danger of the dire desolate waste region of that darkness. In the night‟s darkest ground they made a mysterious motion following Savitri‟s human steps, they stirred a little, like figures moving before closed eyelids they seemed to swim and float and as in dreams went slipping and sliding on. Now the rock-gate‟s heavy walls were left behind, as if through a passage of receding time present and past lapsed into the Timeless; the future arrested upon dim adventure‟s border (583) and ended drowned in nothingness. Amid collapsing shapes they moved in a curved course in the darkness; the fading path of a chamber of a darkest world received them, where they though seemed to be a moving scene but yet they were still, they could not advance anywhere that they had yet to pass, they seemed like a dumb procession bounded in a dim picture and not as conscious forms passing a real scene. A boundless terror‟s mystery and a huge pitiless void gathering its hungry strength surrounded Savitri slowly with its soundless depths, and a monstrous and deeper dark shapeless throat swallow her into its shadowy depths, where she can be killed by squeezing her neck, it was felt by Savitri as a fierce spiritual suffering of a dream. As in the advent of night the shapes of trees becomes shadowy and the last light fades away around the bullock tied in the forest by hunters surrounded by the night‟s unending darkness, the darkness hung around Savitri‟s sense like cage like a curtain of dreadfulness that cannot be pierced.

The thought that tries hard in the world was destroyed here; it had given up its effort to live and know, it at last was convinced that it had never existed, all its dream of action done was perished: this solidified nothingness was its dark result. In this suffocating heavy burden of the great Nothingness her mind could not think, breath could not breathe, her soul could not remember or feel itself; it seemed as a great depth of barren emptiness, the totality she held within was forgotten and became zero, it was a state of negation of the Creator‟s joy and there was no wide rest nor depth of peace. On all that claims here in this world to be Truth and God, and conscious self and revealing Word and creative joy of the Mind and Love and Knowledge and heart‟s delight, there fell on those the immense refusal of the eternal No. (584) As disappears a golden lamp in darkness Savitri was pushed into distance away from sight, and Savitri was vanished into the darkness. Now there was no means, no path, no end or goal could be seen by her and she moved sightless amid depths that were ever unaware or drove through some great black unknown desert or whirled in a meeting of whirlwinds that were assembled by titan hands of Hazard. In that Vast terror there was none with her; she no more could see the shadowy tremendous God, her eyes had lost their luminous Satyavan. Yet for this her spirit did not fail, but held more deeply than the bounded senses which can grasp externally and at last found to have lost its loved object. So Savitri kept Satyavan‟s soul embraced more than that. So when on earth Satyavan lived with her she had felt him walking through the forest paths, and those paths remained as a scene within her, the depths of the forest were like her being‟s paths revealing their secrets of Satyavan‟s search and joy; because to the fiercely vigilant sweetness in Savitri‟s heart whatever happy spaces Satyavan‟s cherished feet preferred was felt by her as if her soul embracing his body at once, and passioning silently to the touch of his feet. But now a silent estrangement came between them and she fell into bottomless loneliness, even she felt separated from herself and far away from love. The time was felt by her as very long, because when slow movement of time is measured by the stirrings of soul‟s pain it appeared to be longer, Savitri travelled walking on the corpse of life, became way lost like the blindness of extinct souls move in a bare and unreal dreadful darkness. She lived alone in spite of death in the severe agony of the void, yet she conquered; thus her mighty being‟s oppression was proved in vain: her heavy long unchanging state of pain slowly tired of its fierce self-severe physical and mental pain. (585) As if a memory returned to dead spirits at first a dim light that cannot be put out, though dull but immortal, stirred in the darkness and a memory that wished to live again fallen in Nature‟s womb of sleep. It dissolved from mind. That lights a lost ray of the moon revealing to the night her soul of great fear; the darkness reclined like a serpent in that brief light: its blackness of the Night was lighted like the hood of the serpent that sparkle Jewell as though the mass of darkness felt all light as a cruel pain and suffered from the pale approach of hope shrank back and coiled and moved quietly away. Night felt that her heavy dark kingdom was attacked; her empire of the everlasting Nothingness was threatened by the luminosity of bright eternity with its faint light of wandering Truth. Night relentless and stark in her intolerant strength and confident that she alone was true, attempted hard to put off the weak dangerous ray; thought vigilant of an all-negating immensity raised her giant head of Nothingness, and with her

180 mouth of darkness swallowing all that existed; saw in herself the utter Darkness. But still the light survived and grew, and Savitri awoke to her lost self; her limbs rejected the cold embrace of death, her heart-beats were relieved from the grasp of pain and became successful; her soul for its joy went on claiming the soul of her beloved stubbornly that was seen no more. Before her in the stillness of that world she once more heard the footsteps of a god and out of the dumb darkness her husband Satyavan grew into a luminous shade. Then a vast sound was heard through that dead monstrous like kingdom: it was like a vast wave in a tired swimmer‟s ears heard as if a fatal iron-hearted roar of the wave, Death in that night uttered his deadly voice. (586) He said that it was his (Deaths) greatest silent dark, the home of the everlasting darkest Night, the secrecy of Nothingness that buries in the tomb of vanity of life‟s desires. He questioned Savitri designating her as a fleeting heart whether she had seen her own source and knew form what dream she was created? He questioned Savitri whether she still hopes to last and love always in the stark sincerity of bare emptiness? To this Savitri did not answer. Her spirit rejected the voice of Night that proclaimed to be knowledge and his thought that brings Death. Savitri in her beginning less infinity saw through her souls unrestricted free sight the undying sources of her life, she knew herself as eternal and unborn. But Death, the dreadful god, still opposing her with his endless night, inflicted on her eyes the immortal calm of his tremendous look: and said though she has survived coming into that unborn void, and the primal violence that created mind forcing the immobile vast to suffer and live and won this sorrowful victory to live for a little without Satyavan & she shall never be forgiven while Time exists. Death questioned as to what shall the ancient goddess give to her who helps her heart-beats? She only lengthens her vainly dreamed existence and delays her eternal sleep with the labour of living. The child of Time (Savitri) is an easily broken miracle of thinking clay walks armed with illusions only. The child of Time to fill the void around had from which she came and to which she goes she thinks to fill but gets frightened, and she makes herself larger than she really is and names it as God. To fulfill her suffering hopes she calls the help of heavens. She looks above her with a yearning heart and sees the bare spaces are more unconscious than herself and have not even the privilege of mind, (587) there except their unreal blueness other things were bare and unreal, and fills them with bright and merciful powers. Because around her the sea roars, and beneath her steps the earth quakes, and fire is at her doors and death like a wild ferocious animal opening his jaws seeks for her as its prey in the lifelike thick forest. Child of Time driven by the Presences with which she hopes and eagerly desires offers her soul in the temples of the unsatisfied gods and adorns them with the beauty of her dreams. The gods who watch the earth with sleepless eyes and guide it in spite of his great trappings‟ through the void, have given to man only the burden of his mind; in his unwilling heart they have burned their fires and sown irremediable unrest in it. Man‟s mind is a seeker like a hunter upon the unknown paths, by his vain discoveries in his seeking becomes a mockery of Time, man his thoughts deepens the mystery of his fate and changes to song his laughter and tears. The gods above distressing his mortality with immortal‟s dreams, troubling his brief-living with the infinite‟s breath, create in him such a hunger which no food can fill; he lives as the cattle of the shepherd gods.

By his body like rope he is tied by them like a grazing animal, they throw before him grief and hope and joy as fodder (food of animal): they have fenced with Ignorance his pasture ground. Into his transient undefended heart they have filled a courage that is met by death, they have given him a wisdom that is ridiculed by night, they have determined a path for his journey the goal of which could never be seen before. In an uncertain world man labours aimlessly, though he is relieved by brief relief of his pain but beaten like a beast by his infinite desire and is kept bound to the chariot of the dreadful gods. But in spite of all these tortures and sufferings of men if she(Savitri) still can hope and would love then she should return to her body‟s shell that the gods have tied to the earth and try to live with her heart‟s little leftovers. She should not hope to win back Satyavan to her. (588) Yet since her strength is worthy of great crown, he could give boons to give comfort to her wounded life. He could give that the mortal beings make the packed with fate and the wayside sweetness that the earth-bound hearts would pluck, death asked Savitri to make freely hers if her will accepts.

Because she was deceived, asked her to choose life‟s hopes as her deceiving prize. While the dreadful and tremendous Voice of death stopped, there rose unendingly in Savitri like moon lighted waves of flood a stir of thoughts born out from some silence across the sea of her dumb immeasurable heart. At last she answered and her voice was heard by the darkest Power: Savitri designating him as a huge disguise of death said that she won‟t bow her head before him, because he is a black lie of night to the frightened soul, unreal and inescapable end of all things, that he had played a harsh mockery with her immortal spirit. She walks conscious of her immortality. She was a victorious spirit and conscious of her force, she had not come to his gates as one who humbly makes a request: she had survived the clutch of Night unwounded. She said that her first strong grief could not disturb her stable wise mind; her unwept tears were converted to pearls of strength: she had transformed her ill-shaped perishable bodily vessel of clay into the hardness of strong stone like soul. Now in the wrestling of the luminous gods her strong and stubborn spirit shall not subdue against the vast refusal of the world. She could not bow like slavery crowed of large disorderly minds that run stretching their eager satisfied hands and pick from the mire mid many crushed feet the small concessions to the weak thrown by the scornful gods (who show hatred towards others). Hers is the labour equivalent to the battling gods: by imposing on the slow reluctant years the flaming will that rules beyond the stars, they lay the law of Mind on Matter‟s works and win the soul‟s wish from earth‟s Inconscient Force. (589) That her first demand whatever her husband Satyavan, waking in the forest‟s charm out of his long pure childhood‟s dreams desired and had not achieved for his beautiful life. She asked the king of Death to give if he must or refuse if he can. Death the builder of the dream like earth for man who has mocked with vanity all gifts he bowed his head in hatred of cold assent. He spoke raising his

181 ruinous voice: that lenient to the dreams his touch shall break all the attachment to the dreams, that he would yield to Satyavan‟s blind father‟s longing heart, kingdom, power and friends and greatness lost and the royal ornamental dresses for his peaceful last life, the broken splendours of man‟s vanishing days, the silvered decaying glories of life‟s fall. The one who grew wiser in spite of adverse Fate he would restore goods for living happily to the misled soul prefers to impersonal nothingness‟s bare summits. He gives satisfactory solace of sense of light to eyes that could have found a larger kingdom and a deeper vision in their fathomless night if it wishes. For that this man (Satyavan) desired and asked in vain while still he lived on earth and harbored hope. He (The king of Death) asked Savitri to return back from the greatness of his dangerous kingdoms to her small places of living. He asked her to hasten back swift-footed otherwise the great laws she had violated, and at last they shall open their stone like harsh eyes on her to slay her life. But Savitri answered to the ridicule Shade designating him as world-spirit that she was born as an equal spirit of him.

Her will too is a law, her strength is a god. In her mortality she is immortal. That she does not trembles with fear before the immobile look of the unchanging stone like hierarchies that look with stone eyes of Law and Fate. Her soul is capable of meeting them with its living fire. (590) She asked the king of Death to give back Satyavan to her again out of his shadow into earth‟s flowering spaces in the sweet fleetingness of human limbs to accomplish with him her spirit‟s burning will. That she would bear with him the ancient Mother‟s load and follow with him earth‟s path that leads to God. Otherwise the eternal spaces shall open to her and the strangehorizons around them shall recede far away, they two travelling together shall cross the great unknown. Because she who had travelled with him the paths of Time, can meet behind his steps whatever night or unimaginable stupendous dawn breaks on their spirits in that pathless transcendences of the untraveled Beyond. She shall pursue wherever he (Death) would lead Satyavan‟s soul.

But out of the rolling wastes of night there came born from the riddle of the unknowable depths a voice of majesty and threatening hate, remaining stubborn and insisting of unalterable Decree and the dire Law that cannot be satisfied and the insignificance of created things. As when in the storm effected Titan-footed sea throws on a swimmer its tremendous laugh remembering all the joy of the swimmer its waves have drowned, so from the darkness of the all powerful night, the almighty cry of universal Death arose against the Women‟s (Savitri‟s) boundless heart. Designating Savitri as a perishable creature questioned her as to whether she had god-like wings or feet to walk over his stars and with what courage she so aspires forgetting her limits of thought and her mortal role? He said that those spheres were formed before the birth of her soul. He (the God of Death) had created them out of his void; and he destroys all things created by him in them. He made the worlds as his net and each joy a mesh of it. He is a Hunger desirous of its suffering prey, this is his all swallowing life and this is his image that she could see in all things. (591) He designating Savitri as mortal said that her soul is his breath‟s bubble and her short livingness was imagined by his smile, and asked her to go back afar holding these little gains on her breast or else her heart shall be pierced by his sharp pain that Time cannot heal soon. That she is a blind slave of his (Death‟s) deaf force whom he compels to commit sin that he might punish her, compels her to be involved in desire that he might whip her with frustration and grief and at last she would come to him bleeding, recognizing her nothingness, knowing death‟s greatness, and asked her to turn away from there and not to attempt for forbidden happy fields meant for the souls who can obey his law, otherwise her (Savitri‟s) footsteps awake the Terrible goddesses‟ from their uneasy iron-hearted sleep in darkened dwellings who would take revenge for her fulfilled desire. So he asked her that she should return back out of fear otherwise in skies where her passion had hoped to live, the Unknown‟s lightning would start burning terrifying her, she would be lonely, crying and hunted by the hunting dogs of heaven, and she as a wounded deserted soul move round and round through the long sufferings of the centuries, and she cannot exhaust their tireless extreme Anger that hell cannot heal nor Heaven‟s mercy can establish calm on that. So Death told her that He would loosen the black eternal grip on her: asked her to depart in peace if peace for man is his privileged claim, clasping in her heart her fate‟s little alms. But Savitri answered to the dreadful Lord meeting hate with hate: she questioned Death as to who is the God imagined by death‟s night, hatred creating worlds and who made for vanity the brilliant stars? It is definitely not he (The God) who had built his temple in her thoughts and made her human heart his sacred field of play.

Her God is Supreme Will and is victorious in his paths; her God is love and suffers all sweetly. She had offered to him her hope for sacrifice to him and offered her longings as a consecration. Who shall prohibit or fence in his course of travel, (592) of the swift and wonderful charioteer? He is a traveller of the million roads of life, and his steps are familiar with the lights of heaven, he walked without pain in the sword-edged courts of hell; there God descends to intensify his eternal joy. The Divine Love‟s golden wings have power to blow off death‟s void; the eyes of love see star like through death‟s night, the feet of love walk naked in the hardest worlds.

God labours in the depths and rejoices greatly on the heights, Savitri said to Death that God‟s will and Love shall remake Death‟s universe. Savitri spoke and for a while no voice replied, while still they travelled through the pathless night and still that light was like a pale eye troubled the darkness with its doubtful sight. Thereafter in that world while journeying through blind Nothingness in that unreal journey once more came a deep and dreadful inaction; once more a Thought, a Word arose in the void and death made an answer to the human soul: Death questioned her as to what does she hope and aspire? This is her body‟s sweetest attraction for bliss, and what she desires is a perishable uncertain form attacked by pain, to please for few years her inactive sense and the heart‟s fire with the honey of physical longings to embrace the brilliant idol of a passing hour and a seeking of vain oneness with Satyavan her husband. And she, what she is, a soul, created by a glorious dream of brief emotions and brilliant thoughts, and it is not a thin dance of glowworms speeding through the night, and sparkling foam in life‟s sun lighted mud? Bearing a mortal heart

182 would she claim immortality crying against the eternal witnesses that she and Satyavan are endless and last powers? Death said that He and the Inconscient Void only are everlasting. Only he is eternal and out-lasts. He is the shapeless Vast inspiring fear and the emptiness that men call Space, (593) he is the timeless Nothingness carrying all, the Infinite, the mute Alone. He is Death and God, there exists no other God. All are born from his depths and they do live by him only, all return to his depths and do not exist anymore. He had created a world by his Inconscient Force. His Force is Nature that creates and slays the hearts that hope and limbs that eagerly desires to live. He had made man as Nature‟s instrument and slave, he had made man‟s body his sumptuous feast, and man‟s life his food. Man has no other help except Death; he comes to him at his end for rest and peace. He is death and the one and only shelter of Savitri‟s soul. The Gods to whom man prays are not helpful to him; they are his imaginations and moods reflected in man by the illusion‟s power. He told Savitri she sees as her immortal self is a shadowy figure of his infinite and it is Death who dreams of eternity in her. He is the immobile in whom all things move, he is the bare Nothingness in which all cease: he is bodiless and has no tongue to speak, he does not communicate with the help of human eye and ear; only her thought gave a figure to his void. The king of death designating Savitri as an aspirant to divinity she called him to wrestle with her soul, and as such he had assumed face, form and voice. But if there were a Being (satpurusha) witnessing all how can he help her passionate desire?

Remaining aloof he watches alone and unique, he shows lack of interest her attention to her eager cry in the nameless calm. His being is pure, unwounded, motionless and one and unique. He is the only one who endlessly watches the Inconscient scene where all things perish, like the foam and the stars. He is the One and Alone lives forever. There no changeable Satyavan born and there exists no Savitri (594) who claims from brief life her bribe of joy. There love never comes with his anxious eyes of tears nor there exist Time and vain vast of Space. Love wears no living face nor had any name, no eyes, no heart that throbs, he asks no second being to aid its being or to share its joys. It alone is the immortal delight. Death said to Savitri that if at all she desires immortality then she should be sufficiently alone to her soul: must live in her; and forget the man whom she loved. Then his last grand death shall rescue her from life; then she shall rise into her immobile source. But Savitri replied to the dreadful Voice of Death charging him that he always reasons but she never does, because reason looks everything intently and breaks but cannot build or if at all it builds, builds vainly because she doubts her work. Savitri said that She exists, She loves, She is the seer, She is the actor and hers is the Divine will. Death answered to Savitri in one deep surrounding cry to have knowledge, and if she does then she would cease to love and cease to will and be liberated from the clutches of her heart. Thus she can rest for ever and be hushed too agreeing to the impermanence of transient things. But Savitri replied to Death as a representative of man that she shall know when she had loved forever. Love in her knows the Truth which is covered by the perversion of obscurity. She knows that the Knowledge is a vast Universal embrace: she knows that every being is she herself and in every heart is hidden the innumerable One. She knows that the calm Transcendent bears the world, he is the veiled inhabitant, the silent Lord: she feels his secret act, and intimate fire; she could hear the murmur of the cosmic Voice. She knows that her coming upon earth was a wave like a signal from God. Because all his suns were conscient in her birth and knew that the one who loves in us comes disguided by death. Thereafter man was born among the giant stars (595) and gifted with mind and heart to conquer Death. Like one who in his everlasting dire will is sure of his empire and his armoured might hating the dreadful helpless words from his victim‟s lips Death did not answer again. He stood in silence and covered in darkness as a still figure, like a vague shadow armored with the terrors of his secret sword. Like a dark face halfseen in clouds he appeared; his matted hair was seen as night‟s dusk of Triple Crown, the ashes of the funeral pyre was his forehead‟s sign. Savitri travelled through voiceless and helpless skies blindly forbidden by dead vacant eyes became once more a wanderer in the unending Night. Around her rolled the surging waste of darkness and its swallowing emptiness and joyless death and was offensive of her thought, life and love. Through the long fading night compelled by Savitri gliding half-seen on their unearthly path the three moved in the baffling shadowy figures of the darkness.

-End of Canto Two -End of Book Nine

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BOOK TEN The Book of the Double Twilight

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Canto One The Dream Twilight of the Ideal (599) All was still filled with darkness, and dreadful and miserably solitary: there was neither change nor any hope of change in the situation. In this black dream that was the house of Void, and a walk to Nowhere was possible in a land of Nothingness, there the king death, Satyavan and Savitri ever driven without aim or goal; in some positive Non-being‟s purposeless Vast and through formless wastes dumb and unknowable, they were driven from one darkness to another intense worse darkness and from one depth to an emptier depth. Like the remembrance of a lost glory; through the darkness with a complete loss of hope of improvement an ineffectual ray of suffering light pursued their step; even while the ray of the light grew, it seemed unreal there, yet like a vague ghost of some dead eternity in that Nothing‟s ice cold region, it was perpetual unquenchable, lonely and ineffective. It seemed as if to some brilliant Maya that gave birth to her soul, She must pay now her debt for her vain undue confidence to exist and think. Her deep original sin is the will to exist, and the last and greatest sin is her spiritual pride, that made up of dust equaled itself with heaven, her hatred of the warm coiling in the mud, born from Nature‟s dream and sentenced to punishment to be a short lived being, and refusal of the transient creature‟s role, her claim to be a living fire of God, her will to be immortal and divine. This most she must clear the guilt by suffering endless pain. In that heavy and bare tremendous darkness she atoned for all since the first act from where sprang the error of the growth of consciousness of Time, the breaking of the Inconscient‟s seal of sleep, (600) the primal and inexcusable revolt that broke the peace and silence of the Nothingness existed before a seeming universe appeared in a vanity of imagined Space and life arose generating grief and pain: a great Negation holding the face of the Real prohibiting the vain process of Time: and when there was no world, no more creatures, and when Time‟s intrusion has been blotted out it shall last at peace unbodied, free from thought. Savitri having been cursed from her divine source, convicted to live for ever empty of bliss and empty of her immortality, and her severe punishment, her spirit guilty of attaining her being wandered destined to ruin moving for ever through eternal Night. But the great Maya is a veil of the Absolute; an occult Truth is the creator of this mighty world: the Eternal‟s wisdom and self-knowledge acts in every step of the ignorant Mind and in the body‟s steps. The Inconscient is the Superconscient‟s sleep. An unimaginable Intelligence invented the profound paradox of the creation, spiritual thought is packed in Matter‟s forms, and it missions a dumb energy unseen by us; and works out a miracle by a machine. All here in this world is filled with a mystery of contraries: Darkness that prevails in the world is a magic of self-hidden Light, worldly suffering is some secret pitiable disguise of extreme delight and death an instrument of continuous life. Though Death walks beside us on Life‟s road, yet it is a silent spectator at the body‟s start and a last judgment on man‟s vain works, but its other meaning is the riddle of its ambiguous face: Death is a stair, a door, a casual stumbling step of life that the soul must take to cross from birth to birth, an immemorial defeat carrying victory in its womb, (601) a whip to strike us violently towards our immortal state. The Inconscient world is spirit‟s self-made room; the eternal Night is only a shadow of the eternal Day. Night is not our beginning or our end: she is the dark Mother in whose womb we have hid safe from too swift a waking to world-pain. We came to her (Night) from a supreme Light; we live by that Light and we go to that Light. Now here in this world in this seat of mute a lone Darkness, in the heart of everlasting Nothingness Light became victorious even now by that little beam: the faint infiltration of the Light drilled the blind deaf mass of Matter; it almost transformed into a bright sight that housed the shadowy image of an aureate (golden) Sun whose orb (the circle of light) became the eye ball of the Nothingness. A golden fire came in and burned Night‟s heart; her smoky mindlessness began to dream; consequently the Inconscient became conscious, thought and feeling awoke in the Night. The intolerant Darkness having been attacked in the sovereign emptiness of its reign became pale and drew apart till such time only a few black remnants remained as a stain of that Ray. But on a failing edge of a dumb last space a great dragon body resentfully emerged; an opponent of the slow struggling Dawn defending its ground of tortured mystery, it drawn along behind its coils through the dread martyred air and curving it fled down into a grey slope of Time.

There is morning twilight of the gods; their miraculous forms arise from sleep and God‟s long nights are justified by the advent of dawn. Consequently there breaks a magnificence and passion of new birth and colour-winged subtle visions float across the eye lids, heaven‟s messengers singing hymns waken the smoky Space. The dreaming deities look beyond the things and by the power seen their thought fashion the ideal worlds (602) that once had lodged in some unfathomable heart and sprung from a limitless moment of desire. Due to the advent of the dawn, the heaviness of the blind dark passed away and all the sorrow of night was fled away: like one who wakes from his dreams to find his dream were true searches with fumbling hands astonished by a blind joy Savitri slipped where all ran after light, joy and love, into a happy misty world, there far-off raptures and deep anticipations of delight drew more nearer, those were forever eager to be grasped and held, but were never grasped, yet breathed a strange delight.

There a pearl-winged indistinctness swam in groups passing swiftly and that atmosphere could not dare to bare too much light.

There existed vague fields, bright vague pastures, vague trees, dim-hearted vague scenes drifting through the fog; vague white

185 cattle roamed spreading their light through the mist, vague spirits wandered there with a bodiless cry, vague wave of sounds touched the soul and fled pursued into harmonious distances without being held; subtle forms that were difficult to catch and halfluminous powers wishing no goal for their unearthly movements moved here and there happily through vague ideal lands, or floated without walking on their feet or their walk left steps of day dreams on sweet memory‟s ground; or being led by a slight sounded far songs of the gods they walked tuning to the measure of their rhythms of thoughts. A wave of bright wings of birds crossed the far sky; birds like faint imaginations flew with low disturbing voices of desire, as if Sun-god‟s brilliant cattle were there hidden in the mist and passing towards the sun the half-heard cry of the cattle attracted the eager attention of the listening ear. These transient being, these shapes that are difficult to catch were all seen by the eye and met the soul, and were the natural inhabitants of that world.

(603) But nothing stayed there permanently nor for long; on that soil there was no place for the mortal feet to rest, breath of embodied life could not survive there. In that fine great disorderedly region joy fled like dancing and passed away and beauty escaped from settled line and form and hid its significance in the mysteries of colours; yet joy ever repeated the same tones and gave a sense of a lasting world; there was a strange harmony of shapes; and same thoughts occur repeatedly and pass away and all renewed unendingly its charm attracting the expectant heart like music that one waits to hear, like the recurrence of pleasant rhyme. One touched there things and the edge of the worlds invisibly divine ceaselessly that were never seized. As if a line of disappearing stars there poured down upon the floating atmosphere colours and lights of brief ray that called to follow into a magic heaven, and in each cry that entered the ear very slowly the voice of an unrealised bliss. A feeling of worship prevailed in the aspiring heart, a pure spirit, a presence of marvellous beauty that is difficult to find and unfelt delight that‟s momentary and uncertain thrill however unsubstantial to our flesh and even brief in permanence seemed to Savitri much sweeter than any known delight that earth or all-conquering heaven can ever give. There heaven ever young and earth too firm and old delay the movement of the heart with their motionlessness: their creative joys last too long, their strong formations are too unalloyed; made by the pain of divine endeavour they stand up as if idols chiseled from stone on the eternal hills, (604) or collected from the living rocks of God and by perfect form win immortality. They are too intimate with eternal things: holders of the infinite importance, they are too clear, too great and too meaningful; there no mist or shadow or any uncertainty‟s soft partial shadow could bewilder the victorious sight. These only touched a golden border of supreme bliss and reached only the bright shoulder of some godlike hope and only touched the flying feet of extremely beautiful desires. Between the slow trembling extreme edges of night and day they reflected light like visitants coming from morning star, in them satisfactory beginning of perfection and first stir of imagination of heavenly world was seen: they mingle in a passion of their pursuit and thrilled with a spray of delight joy. All in this world was shadowed and not bright and looked like faces flashing on a burning fire or shapes of wonder mingling in vague colours like fleeting sceneries painting silver mists. Here vision fled back afraid of the sight and sound sought shelter from the ear‟s surprise and all experience was like a hasty joy. Here the joys gained were like half-forbidden things, like the bosom of the lovely goddess moving first to her desired transformed white soul, so also here timid soul‟s marriage takes place under delicate veils and the face of the angel covered with luminosity while crossing Eden (the garden of paradise) and trembles to fiery wand of expectation and yet nothing was familiar with bliss. In a fleeting gladness of untired delight and in the eagerness of magic change all things in this beautiful kingdom were heavenly strange. Savitri passed through vanishing fences and hurrying hints of fields mid swift escaping lanes that fled from her feet she journeyed wishing no goal as one travels through clouds (605) upon a mountain peak and hears sound of invisible streams arising out of hidden depths, she walked possessed by the illusion of a mystic space, and felt the charm of the bodiless touches and heard the pleasant sweet invitation as of voices high and dim calling like travellers upon seeking winds sweetly with an attracting cry. As if a music old yet ever new, and attracting suggestions rang in her heart-strings dwelt, thoughts finding no shelter of dwelling yet clung to her mind with passionate repetition, desires that do not create pain and always happy to live as the same and always unfulfilled sang in her heart like a heavenly harp. Thus all could last and never remained like the same for ever. As of in the mind-made beauty and dressed in its wonder rays Satyavan seemed before her as the centre of its charm and as the top of the loveliness of her longing dreams and leader of the fancies of her soul. Even the dreadful grandeur of death‟s face and its sorrow-burdened darkness could not darken nor destroy the untouchable splendour of those fleeting skies. The dark resentful and relentless Shadow of Death made beauty and laughter more pressing; enhanced by his grey colour joy grew more intense and pleasant; his dark contradiction edging ideal sight of the higher mind deepened unuttered meanings to the heart, consequently pain grew like a trembling undertone (half heard tone) of bliss and transience turned into immortality‟s floating border, adorned in a moment‟s robe of that region Savitri looked more fair and all its opposite signs sharpened her divinity. Like a comrade of the Ray and Mist and Flame she withdrew a brilliant moment, by a moon-bright face, she almost seemed as a thought mid floating thoughts (606) that hardly can be seen by a visionary mind amid white inward meditation of the soul. Savitri becoming half-victorious by the dreams happiness around her moved a while on an illusive soil but still remained possessor her soul. Above, her spirit saw all in its mighty trance but lived for her transcendent task immovable like a fixed eternal star.

-End of Canto One

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Canto Two The Gospel of Death and Vanity of the Ideal (607) Thereafter again the calm and relentless voice sounded loudly: its fatal tone abolishing hope, cancelling life‟s highest realities, pierced into the trembling atmosphere. That thin and weak lovely world swam most like some pearly departing light on the faint verge of dusk in moonless evenings. The dire voice designating Savitri as prisoner of Nature and many-visioned spirit, thought‟s creature enjoying her unsubstantial immortality in the ideal‟s Kingdom that was made by the illusion of man‟s subtle mind, said that this was the world from which her yearnings born. When that mind builds eternity from the dust then mind‟s thought paints with its paint-brush many images of illusion; and foretelling of future such glories that it shall never see and labours exquisitely among its dreams. Death asked Savitri to see the shapes that are fleeing their light-hemmed shapes, the air like dresses of unbodied gods; a delight of things that can never be born, asked her to hear the immortal songs sang by hope to hope, cloud satisfies cloud, shadowy images to another shadowy image leans sweetly, clasping sweetly or chased sweetly. This is the stuff from which her ideal is formed: its builder is thought and its base is the desire of the heart, but there was no real answer to their call. The ideal does not dwell in heaven nor on earth, it is a bright insanity of man who hopes to drink the wine of its own caprice. It is a brilliant shadow‟s dreamy path‟s line. Her vision‟s error builds the blue skies, and drew the rainbow‟s arch; (608) her mortal lust made for her a soul. This angel (soul) in her body she had named as love, who shapes his wings from the colours of her emotions, born from the secretion of the yeast of her body and it must die with the body that had given it shelter. It is a passion of her hankering cells, a flesh that calls to other flesh to serve its passionate desire; it is her mind that seeks an answering mind and dreams a while that it has found its comrade; it is her life that desires a human support to uphold its weakness lonely in the world or satisfies its hunger on another‟s life. Love is a beast of prey that goes about stealthily in search of its prey; it hides in a state of bending under a bush with splendid flowers to seize a heart and body for its food: this beast which she dreams as immortal and a god. The king of death designating Savitri as a human mind said that she vainly causes severe torment to a moment‟s delight to extend through infinity‟s long void and fill its formless and passionless gulfs, and to give everlastingness to perishing things, persuading the insensible Depths and deceiving the weak movement of the heart with her spirit‟s false appearance of immortality in the world. All here became known born from Nothingness; and lasts encircled by the emptiness of Space, and upheld awhile by an ignorance Force, and then falling back into its parent Nothingness gets smashed: only the dumb Alone can exist for ever. There is no room for love in the One and Alone. Vainly to clothe love‟s perishable mud she had woven the ideal‟s richly coloured ever brilliant attire with the Immortal‟s loom brought temporarily. The ideal never yet was made real. That glory imprisoned in the earthly form cannot live: shut into a body it cannot breathe anymore. The unattainable, remote, for ever pure, (609) all ruler of its own brilliant void unwillingly descends to earthly atmosphere to inhabit a white temple in man‟s heart: rejected by his life it only shines in his heart. The unchangeable, unbodied, beautiful, grandeur, dumb sits motionless on its luminous throne, though dumb, yet it receives man‟s offering and prayer.

It has no voice to answer to his call, no feet to move or no hands to take man‟s gifts: a statue made up of air of naked Idea, is an unsubstantial thing like an unmarried girl giving birth to a bodiless god, its light excite man the thinker to create the earthly shapes of divine things is also unreal. Its coloured reflection falls on man‟s acts; all institutions of man are like a monument without the corpses, man puts his signature on his lifeless customary practices with the name of love, man‟s goodness‟s are Ideal‟s sky like robe and a holds a shadowy light of the outline of love‟s face: man hides their littleness with the divine Name. Yet man‟s bright pretence like love is not sufficient to cover their poverty and earthliness: there exists earth but not some heavenly source. If heavens are there they are veiled in their own light, if a Truth eternal somewhere reigns unknown, it burns like a fuel in a tremendous void of God; because truth shines far from the falsehoods of the world; hence how can the heavens descend on an unhappy earth and eternal dwell in the ever changing flow of time? How shall the Ideal walk on earth‟s sorrowful soil where life is only a labour and a hope, a child of Matter and fed by Matter, a fire burning low in Nature‟s furnace, a wave that breaks upon a shore in Time and journeys with laboriously slow footsteps the goal of which is death? The life and death of the Avatars is vain, vain was the sage‟s thought and the prophet‟s voice; (610) and vain is their seeing of the upward shining divine Way. Beneath the circling sun earth lies unchanged, because she loves her fall and hence no omnipotence can do away its mortal imperfections and on man‟s twisted ignorance force Heaven‟s straight line or in a world of death to establish gods‟ colony. Death questioned Savitri designating her as a traveller in the chariot of the Sun, and the high priestess in her holy fancy‟s temple, she who worships the ideal and eternal love with a magic ritual in earth‟s house, what is that love that her thought has worshipped as a god and made this sacred tale and the immortal product of imagination? It is a conscious lust of her flesh, a glorious burning of her nerves and a rose of dream-splendour petalled in her mind, and an intense rapture and torment of her heart. Making a sudden transformation of her life it passes away and the world remains as before. It is an enrapturing sharp edge of sweetness and pain, a throb of emotion in its eager longing makes it seem divine, to cross the roar of Time it justifies itself as a golden bridge, and pretends to be a cord tying her to eternity. What is this happy closeness of soul to soul; this honeyed comradeship of body, this lofty joy and ecstasy in the veins and this strange

187 illumination of the senses, how brief and frail and how soon ended the treasure squandered by the gods on man? If Satyavan had lived then love would have died; but because Satyavan is dead love shall live a while in her sorrowful breast until his face and body is wiped off from her memory‟s wall and other faces and bodies replaces that. When love suddenly enters breaking into life then at first man feels as if stepped into a world of the sun; in his passion he feels his heavenly element: (611) but only a fine sunlit portion of earth can share the marvellous aspect of rushing out of heaven; the snake and the worm is there in the heart of rose. A word and a moment‟s act of man can slay the god; man‟s immortality is uncertain, he has a thousand ways to suffer and die. By heavenly food alone love cannot live, it can only survive on the sap of earth. Since her passion was a refined sensual desire, and a hunger of the body and heart; so her want can cease and tire or turn elsewhere. Or love may meet a dreadful and pitiless consequence by bitter betrayal, or by anger with cruel wounds get separated, or her unsatisfied will depart to others when first love‟s joy lies bare and slain: an inanimate lack of interest replaces the fire of love or a habit inspiring affection imitates love: an outward and uneasy union lasts only or lasts the routine of a life‟s compromise: where once the seed of oneness had been cast into the likeness of a spiritual ground by a divine adventure of heavenly powers there two constant associates deprived of joy struggles, two egos tied in a single rope stretch tightly each other, two minds divided by their disagreeing thoughts, and two spirits (consciousnesses) disconnected and become for ever separate. Thus in man‟s world the ideal is proved to be false; consequently either negligible or of a great importance, the dream with regard to the ideal breaks, life‟s severe reality looks at the soul: the hour of god postponed and flees into the bodiless Time. Death only saves her and Satyavan from this embarrassing situation: Satyavan now is safe delivered from him; he travels to silence and felicity. Hence she should not call him back again to the betrayal of earth and the poor petty life of animal Man. Death advised Savitri to let Satyavan sleep in death‟s vast peaceful spaces (612) in harmony with the mighty silence of death where love lies asleep on the breast of peace. And she should go back alone to her breakable world: to purify her heart with knowledge, to remove the bandage from her eyes to see that her nature is raised into clear living heights, and the heaven-bird looks on her from the unimagined summits. Because when she makes her conscious spirit to float in the dream then hard necessity shall strike and awake her soul: purest delight began and it must end. She too must know that her heart was not swung by an anchor and her cradled soul is not caught tied by chains like a ship tied with chain in the eternal seas. The creation of the cycles of her brilliant mind is vain. Hence forgetting joy, hope and tears she should renounce her passionate nature in the bottomless depths of happy Nothingness and wordless Calm, and get freed into his (Death‟s) mysterious rest. Becoming one with his fathomless Nothingness she should forget all. She should forget her formless spirit‟s waste of force, forget the tiresome circle of her birth, and forget the joy and the struggle and pain, the vague spiritual quest which first began when first worlds broke forth like bunches of fire-flowers, and when great burning thoughts travelled through the sky of mind and Time and it‟s a eons crept across the vast and souls emerged into mortality.

But Savitri replied to the dark Power Death that now he had discovered a dangerous music mixing his speech in harmonious tone of pain and plays his flute attracting the tired hopes mingling the sad tones of truth with his falsehood. But she rejects his voice to slay her soul. Because her love is not a hunger of the heart and the hankering of her flesh, it came to her from God and returns to God only. Even in all that life and man have ruined, a whisper of divinity is still heard, (613) a breath is felt from eternal spheres. Allowed by Heaven and wonderful to man a sweet fire-rhythm of passion raises its hymns to love. In its thrilled infinite cry a hope stirs, it rings with callings from forgotten heights, and when its tones are silenced to the high-winged souls in their beautiful heaven, then its burning breath survives beyond in the delightful core of suns that flame for ever pure in unseen skies and a voice of the eternal Ecstasy is heard. One day she shall see her great sweet world uncovered from the dire disguises of gods, and freed from terror and bared from the covering of sin. Then with great satisfaction they shall draw near their divine mother‟s face and place their frank souls upon her lap; then they shall clasp the divine ecstasy that they seek for and they shall thrill in joy finding their long-sought God and hear Heaven‟s unexpected sweet tone. There not only exists the hope of finding pure godheads; but also the ferocious and darkened gods descended down from one breast out of anger to find out as to what the white gods had missed: they too shall remain safe, the divine mother‟s eyes are on them and her arms stretched out in love desiring her rebel sons. One who came descending from beyond as eternal love, lover and beloved had built for himself a miraculous field and made the rhythms of a marvellous dance. From there he arrives here attracted in its circles of a dance and magical movements and returns being repelled.

In the great deceitful promptings of his mind he tastes the honey of tears and puts off joy in repentance, and has a laughter and anger in him, and both are like a broken music of the soul which seeks out reconciled its heavenly rhyme. He comes to us ever across the time bearing a new sweet face that is the old. (614) He sees us and laughs in delight, or sometimes like an unseen attracting tune of flute throbbing from the moonlit branches of the great forest and calls us concealed from behind attracting our angry search and passionate pain. The Lover in disguise seeks our souls and attracts us. He has named himself for her as Satyavan and manifested. Because they were man and woman from the beginning of the creation and born as twin souls from one undying fire. Had he not rise like daybreak on her in other stars? How has he through the tangle of trees of like the world and pursued her like a lion in the night and came upon her suddenly in the ways and seized her with his glorious golden leap?

Unsatisfied through the course of time he longed for her sometimes with anger and sometimes with sweet peace desiring her since

188 first the world began. He rose like a turbulent wave out of the floods and dragged her in her helpless state into the seas of bliss. Out of her unknown past he stretching his arms touched her like the soft persuading wind, and his arms have plucked her like a glad and trembling flower and in a supreme happy clasp burned her in a pitiless flame. She too has found him in charmed attractive forms and ran delighted to his distant voice and crossing many tremendous obstacles clasped him. If there is yet a happier greater god then let him first wear the face of Satyavan and his soul be one with whom she loved, in that state let him seek her in such a manner that she may desire him. Because only one heart beats within her breast and one god sits throned there. She asked Death to advance beyond the illusive beauty of that world because she is not one among its citizens. She only worships and devoted to the God of Fire but not God the Dream. But the God of Death once more inflicted on her heart the majesty of his calm and dreadful voice and said (615) that her thoughts are a bright illusion. She is a prisoner tied by a spiritual cord and drawn, the eager slave of her senses and she sends her heart‟s words winged with intense splendour in the poise of an eagle to meet the sun. But knowledge does not dwell in the passionate heart; the heart‟s words falls back on earth unheard from Wisdom‟s throne. Her desire to build heaven on earth is vain. The mental consciousness is a builder of Ideal and Idea and a child of Matter in the womb of Life that persuades his parents‟ steps to higher levels: but as they were not suitable they could not follow the daring guide. But Mind is a glorious traveller in the paths of sky, on earth it walks crippled and with slow footsteps; it is incapable to shape the life‟s revolting stuff and hold the reins of the galloping hooves of sense: his thoughts look straight into the very heavens; they draw the raw gold from celestial mine, his acts works with great difficulty with a common ore. To console mind‟s slow work in Matter‟s jail all her high dreams were made by Matter‟s mind, and Matter‟s jail is the only house where it alone seems to be true. To support the works of Time a solid image of reality Matter cut out of being, it sits strong and sure on the firm earth. It is the first-born of created things, it stands last when mind and life is slain and if Mind is ended then all would cease to exist. All else of the creation is only the produce of Matter or its phase: her soul is a brief flower created by the gardener Mind in the field of matter: and that flower perishes with the plant on which it grows, because it draws its heavenly colour from earth‟s juice: her (Savitri‟s) thoughts are sparkles of light that passes away on Matter‟s verge, her life is a wave which lapses on Matter‟s sea. Matter is a careful storekeeper of Truth‟s limited means: (616) saves treasuring her sure facts from the squandering Power, it ties mind to the tent-posts of sense, it keeps bounded Life‟s caprice to a harsh grey routine of works and ties all creatures with the ropes of Law. Matter is a vessel of transforming magic, like a paste that sticks together mind and life, if Matter fails then all cracks and falls broken into pieces. As if remaining firm on a rock all stand sheltered on Matter. But this security and guarantor exerted pressure for evidence of its trustworthiness proved to be a deceiver: a cheat of substance where there is no substance, it is only an appearance, a symbol and a nothingness, its forms have no original right to birth: its aspect of fixed stability is like a covering of restrained whirling motion, an order of the steps of Energy‟s dance whose footmarks leave forever the same signs, it is a real face of an unreal Time, and like a sign of drops of dots on the emptiness of Space: it seems as a stable movement without change, yet change arrives and the last change is death. Matter that once seemed as most real is only a disguise of Nothingness. Matter‟s shapes are such illusive nets that trap and prison the sense; the beginning less Void was its creator: nothing is there in the material world except apparent shapes outlined by Chance and seeming shapes of seeming Energy. All by the mercy of Death breathe and live awhile in this Matter‟s world and all think and act by the grace of the Inconscient. Death designating Savitri as habituated or mad with the luxury of her thoughts, she should not turn her sight within herself to look at visions in the bright crystal of Mind, and should not close her eyelids to dream the forms of Gods. At last she should agree to open her eyes and see the stuff of which she and the world are made. From the dumb Inconscient Void inconsciently a moving world sprang forth that cannot be made intelligible to mind: (617) this world remained secure for a while sinking in happy Inconscient, it could not rest satisfied with its own truth. Because something was born in its Inconscient breast and was convicted to see, know, feel and love, it watched its acts, imagined a soul within: it searched for truth and dreamed of Self and God. When all was unconscious, then all was well. He the Death was the king and kept stable his royal state and was creating his desire less and unerring plan with a calm heart that does not have the perception. In his unreal all-ruling power compelling nothingness to take form, using his blind thoughtless force unerringly making by chance a fixed law like fate, and by his whims made formulas of Necessity, and on the empty ground of the Void founded the sure strange shapes of Nature‟s scheme. He made the empty gaseous state of the sky (ether) into Space; by a huge expanding and contracting Breath gave shelter to the fires of the universe: he could burn the supreme original spark and through the Naught spread its rare-grouped sparks like ranked armies, manufactured the stars from the occult radiances, and arranged the platoons of the invisible dance; out of gas and atoms he formed earth‟s beauty and built the living man from chemical fluid of blood. Thereafter Thought came in and spoiled this harmonious world: Matter began to hope, and think and feel, tissue and nerve bore joy and sorrow. The Inconscient universe tried hard to learn its task; an ignorant personal God was born in Mind and invented reason‟s law to understand, the Vast impersonality quivered back to man‟s desire, and consequently in this great world‟s blind tranquil heart a wave of trouble rolled and Nature lost her wide immortal calm.

Thus was seen this perverted unintelligible scene (618) of souls tied in the net of life‟s delight and pain and Matter‟s sleep and Mind‟s mortality; of beings waiting for death in Nature‟s prison and consciousness left in seeking ignorance and evolution‟s slow arrested plan was seen. This is the world in the complex path ways of the human mind, and human life‟s inescapable circling, thinking that God is here she searches for her soul being bewildered and way lost and move here and there. But where is room for

189 soul or place for God in the brute immensity of a machine? That she (Savitri) had taken for a soul a transient Breath born from a gas, a plasm, a sperm, and a gene, magnified image of man‟s mind as God, which was a shadow of her reflected upon Space. Her consciousness inserted between upper most and lower most Void reflects the world around in the perverting mirror of Ignorance or to catch imaginary stars ascends upwards. Or if a half-Truth is playing with the earth spreading its light on a shadowy ground then it touches only and leaves a luminous stain. She claims immortality for her spirit but it is for imperfect man and for a god who hurts himself at every step, it would be a cycle of eternal pain. That she claims wisdom and love as her privileged right; but knowledge in this world is a comrade of error, a brilliant gratifier of the lust of Ignorance, and human love is a poser on earth-stage who imitates with liveliness a fairy dance. Man‟s knowledge is an extract of the essence pressed from hard experience stored in the barrels of Memory and has the harsh taste of mortal drink: a sweet secretion from the glands causing stimulation of desire that cajoles and tortures the burning nerves, (619) love is a honey and poison in the heart of man and drunk by him as the nectar of the gods. Earth‟s human wisdom is not the highest head of power, and love is not the brilliant angel from the skies; if human knowledge and love and wisdom aspire to reach beyond earth‟s filthy atmosphere for arriving sun wards with their own weak wings of wax then by that forced unnatural flight how high that could reach? But on earth the divine wisdom cannot rule and divine love cannot be found; those were heaven-born, only in heaven they can live; or else there too (i.e. in heaven) they are perhaps shining dreams. Nor, is not all she is and what she and does not a dream? Her mind and life are tricks of Matter‟s force. If her mind seems to her as a radiant sun, and her life runs a swift and glorious stream, then this is the illusion of her mortal heart blinded by a bright ray of happiness or light.

When their supporting ground is cut away, these children of Matter to live by their own divine right and convinced of their brilliant unreality then they die into Matter. Even Matter vanishes into Energy‟s vague and Energy is a motion of old Nothingness. How shall the Ideal‟s unreal colours can stiffly be painted on earth‟s brilliant red pigment made from cinnabar (red mercuric sulphate) mark and how a dream within a dream can be proved as doubly true? How shall the fire-fly become a star? The Ideal is a disease of her mind, a bright disorder of her speech and thought and a strange wine of beauty lifting her to false sight. It is a highest imaginary myth created by her yearnings and must share her human imperfection: its forms in Nature disappoint the heart and it shall never find its heavenly shape and can never be fulfilled in Time. The king of death designating Savitri as a soul said that she was way-lost by the splendour of her thoughts (620) she being the earthly creature who dreams of heaven, should obey and surrender to the earthly law and remain still and satisfied. She should accept the brief light that falls upon her life, as far as she can receive Life‟s permitted joy, bowing down to the test of fire of fate‟s whip and suffer the grief and doom that is destined by her. Thereafter Death‟s long calm night of everlasting sleep shall approach silencing her passionate heart and the hush from which she came she would retire.

-End of Canto Two

190

Canto Three The Debate of Love and Death (621) As if leading the advancing march of Life into some still original Empty space the sad destroying voice of Death sank. But Savitri answered to almighty Death designating him as possessor of dark forehead and makes false reason of the universe he who veils the Real with his own Idea, hiding Nature‟s living face with brute objects and screening the eternity with the dance of death, he had woven the ignorant mind into a screen and made of divine Thought as an imitator and supporter of error and a false witness of mind‟s servant sense. A lover of the sorrow of the world, a favourite of the cause of a cruel and sad philosophy and used words to shut out the divine Light and called in Truth to justify a lie. He made a false reality as a crown of falsehood and a perverted truth her richest gem. She told to the king of Death that he spoke the truth that slays but she answers to him now with the savior Truth. God is a traveller who discovers himself in a new line and made of Matter‟s world his starting point, made of Nothingness his dwelling and the darkest Night a process of the eternal Light and death a goad towards immortality. God had veiled his head from sight in Matter‟s hood of covering, his consciousness plunged steeply downward into the depths of Inconscient in such a way that his All-Knowledge seemed as a huge dark Ignorance; he is the infinity and illimitable but bore the form of a boundless zero. His unfathomable bliss became insensible deeps and his Eternity became a blank spiritual Vast. He is Timeless and cancelling an original vacancy (622) took its seat in emptiness and drew the figure of a universe that the spirit might descend in adventure into Time and wrestle with thunder like a hard Necessity and the soul pursue a cosmic pilgrimage. A spirit moved in blank immensities and built a Thought in ancient Nothingness; a soul became luminous in God‟s tremendous Void like a secret labouring light of fire beginning to develop. In the gulf of the vast Void his mighty Force worked; that Force swung her formless motion into shapes and made Matter the body of Bodiless. Thereafter the infant like dim eternal Mights awoke. In the inactive Matter a sleeping Life breathed, in a subconscient Life Mind lay asleep; the Mind in order to shake and throw from it the sleepy state of its drowse stretched its giant limbs in waking Life; a senseless substance quivered into sense, the world‟s heart commenced to beat, its eyes began to see, in the crowded dumb vibration of a brain thought moved in a circular movement to find itself, it discovered speech and gave inspiration to the new-born Word that bridged with spans of light the world‟s ignorance. The Thinker built his house in waking Mind. A reasoning animal willed and planned and sought; he stood erect among his own nature‟s animals, and built life anew, measured the universe, stood opposing his fate and wrestled with unseen Powers, conquered and used Laws that rule the world and hoped to ride the heaven and reach the stars, and to become a master of his huge environment. Now the demigod looked continuously through the Mind‟s windows hidden behind the curtains of man‟s soul: he saw the Unknown and saw the open face of Truth; now the eternal sun‟s ray had touched him, motionless and voiceless in foreseeing depths (623) he stands awake in Super nature‟s light and sees a glory of arisen wings and the vast descending might of God. Savitri said to Death that he sees on an unfinished world attacked by him and its unsure road, and filled with imperfect minds and ignorant lives and says that God does not exist and all is vain. She questioned death as to how shall the child already be the man? Because he is a child shall he never grow? Because he is ignorant shall he never learn? In a small easily damageable seed a great tree hides, in a drop like gene a mental being is shut; in a little sperm a little element is shut; it grows and becomes a victorious hero and a sage. Savitri questioned to Death then would he deny God‟s mysterious truth and the occult spiritual miracle?

Then still could he say that there is no spirit and no God? A mute material Nature wakes and sees; she has invented speech and expressed a will. There something waits beyond towards which she tries hard, something surrounds her into which she grows, the Nature‟s transcendent task is to unveil the spirit to transform into God and exceed her. The world that began to manifest concealed in God, it travels slowly towards manifest God: our imperfections makes slow painful progress towards perfection, the body is the future state of our soul, the infinite holds the finite in its arms. Time travels towards revealed eternity. Matter is a miracle creation of the eternal Magician and hides its mystery from its own eyes; it is like a scripture written out in occult signs and exists as an occult document of the All-Wonderful arts. The entire universe is a witness to God‟s secret might and in all we feel his presence and power. The sun is a flame of his all possessing glory, (624) the golden lustrous moon is his glory, his dream of purple sky is a glory.

The wheeling stars are a march of his greatness. In green trees his laughter of beauty bursts out, his beautiful moments exults in the flower, the songs of blue sea and the wandering voice of the rivers are murmurs pouring down from the harp of the Eternal. This world is the fulfillment of the outward expression of Divine perfection. His diverse ways puzzles our reason and sense; driven by our blind brute impulses of an ignorant Force, we disregard as little, dim and trifling of greatness founded upon little things, he has built a world in the unknowing Void. He has massed from infinitesimal dust his forms in the world and built his marvels from insignificant things. If mind is crippled and life untaught and crude, and brutal disguises and evil acts are there, they are the incidents of his vast and varied plot and his great and dangerous drama‟s needed steps; he with these and all the universal things makes his passionplay, it is a play and yet no play but the deep scheme of the transcendent Wisdom finding ways to meet her Lord in the shadow and

191 the darkest Night: above her there exist the awakened stars; watched by a solitary Infinitude in dumb matter the Wisdom embodies the Divine, and embodies the Absolute in symbol minds and lives. The creation of wonder is her mechanical skill; Matter‟s machine going on working out the laws of thought, life‟s engines does the labour of a soul: the Mighty Mother worked out her creation and a huge caprice self-bound by iron laws shut God into an enigmatic world: she made to sleep by her solace the Omniscient into an ignorant sleep, making the Omnipotent to sit on inert Matter‟s back she drove, the Mighty Mother moves securely with her unconscious steps (625) in the enormous circle of her wonder-works. Here in this world immortality is assured itself by death; the face of the Eternal is seen carried through the current of Time. The Lord has disguised his knowledge as Ignorance, his Good he has planted in Evil‟s monstrous field, and made error a door for the entrance of the Truth; he has watered with Sorrow‟s tears his plant of bliss. A thousand aspects point back towards the One, and a dual Nature covered the Unique. In this meeting of Eternal‟s interdependent and mixing in fanciful disguises, and the complex-dance of passionate opposites locking like lovers in the quarrel of their lost identity in a forbidden embrace, through this extreme wrestle and war of argument of the Supreme Power earth‟s million roads struggled towards the deity. Although all tripped on following a stumbling Guide, yet every stumble is a needful footstep towards an unknowable goal on unknown routes. Even though all were mistaken and way lost yet they proceed towards the One Divine. As if changed by a titanic charm the eternal Powers assumed a doubtful face: and becomes idols of a crooked divinity, they wore the heads of animal or subterranean dwarf, assumed the ear of a deer, the hoof of satyr (partly-man and partly-goat shaped imaginary woodland deity) or the demon-like evil spirits filled in their sights: they made of the thinking mind as a deceitful network of puzzled pathways, and they suffered the change of the heart, as in a drunkard‟s covered dens they were admitting the drunken revellers from the Night into the temple of pure delights. On the highways, in the gardens of the world, they forgetting their divine state roll about in mud as drunkards of a dreadful Enchantress‟s wine or like a child who walks and plays rising and falling in Nature‟s mud. Even wisdom the builder of the roads of God, becomes a partner of this deep dangerous game: (626) now the wisdom like pilgrim has lost the purse and bag, she fails to read the map and watch the star. An inconsiderable self law binding virtue and reason‟s determining search or theoretical sight is her stock or she teaches the skill of a brief hour‟s success and becomes a gate keeper in utility‟s school. On the surface of the vast Consciousness in little depths of water like catching small fishes catches small thoughts but the great truth escapes from its narrow cast of the net; guarded from vision by creation‟s depths, unseen they swim in blind enormous gulfs, safe from the little measuring rods of mind that is too far for the little diver‟s shallow plunge. Our mortal sight only sees with ignorant eyes; it cannot pierce into the depths of the universal things. Our knowledge walks depending on the shelter of Error‟s staff, a worshipper of false principles and false gods, or believer of an extremely fierce intolerant creed (religion) or a seeker who doubts every truth he finds, a sceptic (one who is incredulous) facing Light with adamant No or with dry ironic smile makes the heart ice cold, a cynic (pessimist i.e. with a gloomy tendency) wipes out the thought of God in man; as in darkness it walks in the paths of Time; or it lifts its giant head to stain the stars, covering like a cloud the interpreting mind it arrests the divine revelation of the Sun. Yet the divine Light is there it stands at Nature‟s doors: it holds a torch to lead the pilgrim traveller to enter within. It waits to be burned in our secret cells; it is a star that illuminates an ignorant sea and a lamp burning at the back edge of our life like boat that pierces into the night‟s darkness in the world like ocean. According to the growth of knowledge the inner Light flames up, it works like a shining warrior in our mind, it is like an eagle of dreams in our responding heart and is armour in the fight and a bow of God. Then large dawns arrive and the magnificence of the Wisdom arrive (627) crossing through the dim halflighted fields of being; philosophy climbs up the clouded summits of Thought and material Science shows tearing out Nature‟s occult powers, giant supernatural spirits who serves the small needs of the dwarf like man exposes the secret tiny details of Nature‟s art, and conquers Nature by her own prisoned force. On heights unreached by mind‟s most daring climb and crossing upon a dangerous edge of failing Time the soul enters back into its immortal Self; and then man‟s knowledge becomes God‟s supernal Ray. There is a mysterious kingdom from where leaps the power whose fire burns in the eyes of the seer and sage; there exists a lightening flash of subtle vision, it plays upon an inward verge of mind: consequently thought getting silenced sees into a brilliant Void. A voice comes down from mystic unseen peaks that are beyond the reach of our senses: it was heard as a cry of splendour coming out of the mouth of the storm, it is the voice that speaks in the deepest night and it is the thunder and the flaming call. Above the planes that climb from ignorant earth, a hand is lifted towards the Invisible realm beyond the Superconscient‟s kindled line that blinds the human eyes and plucks away the screens of the Unknown: thus the spirit within looks into the Eternal‟s eyes. It hears the divine Word to which our hearts were deaf, it sees through the burning flame in which our thought grew blind; it drinks from the naked breasts of glorious Truth, and learns the secrets of eternity. Thus all was plunged into the confusing network of enigmatic Night, thus all is raised to meet with a bright blinding light of the Sun. Savitri drawing the attention of Death said that this is the mystery of his ruling.

When in earth‟s irregular and magic field mid the forced marches of the great dumb stars carried in the aimless journey by the sun darkness occupied the fields of God, and this Matter‟s world was governed by death‟s shape. (628) His disguise had covered the Eternal‟s face, and the Bliss that created the world has fallen asleep. Abandoned in the Vast the Divine Bliss plunged in sleep: her limbs were possessed by an evil transformation till she could not know herself anymore. Under the sky‟s blue laugh mid green hemmed trees, and in the happy scattering of fragrances and colours, in the field of the golden movements of the sun and in the awakened dream-splendour of the stars, amid high meditating peaks of hills, on the bosom of the luxurious rain-kissed earth and in

192 the waves of the blue waters of the sea frail memories of the joy and beauty meant under the skies only moved rapidly through her creative sleep of a lightning flash. But now the primal innocence does not exist and Death and Ignorance govern the mortal world and Nature‟s face wears a greyer colour. Earth has still kept her childhood‟s charm and grace, in its limb‟s grandeur and beauty are still there, but the divine Inhabitant remains veiled. The souls of men have wandered far away from the Divine Light and the great Mother turns away her face. The eyes of the creatrix Bliss are closed and she feels the touch of sorrow in her dreams. As much as she turns and tosses on her bed of Void without peace and stillness so much so, she cannot wake and find herself and cannot build again her perfect shape, forgetting her nature and state, forgetting her natural ability of felicity and her will to create a world of joy, and she weeps and makes her creatures‟ eyes to weep, testing with the sorrow‟s sharp pointed edges her children‟s breasts she spends the intense luxury of her grief and tears on life‟s vain mirage of hope and toil. In the great distressed change of her halfconscious dream, she tortured herself and with the touch of torture (629) she comes to our hearts, and bodies and our lives wearing a cruel disguise of pain. On account of premature birth our nature becomes perverted and returns crooked answers to life‟s rude questionings and in the world‟s pain feels a bitter taste, drinks the intense wine of unnatural grief. Thus on the pure joy of life a curse is laid, the divine Delight that is God‟s sweetest sign and the twin of Beauty creates a great fear of the aspirant saint and selfdisciplined sage, and rejected by him as a dangerous and multi-sensed deception, and an illusive trick of hellish Power that attracts the soul to its self-hurt and fall. A moralist God made pleasure here as a poisonous fruit or as a red drug in the market-place of Death, and made sin as the child of Nature‟s ecstasy. But in spite of that every creature seeks for happiness and from the dull breast of the inanimate globe buys with harsh pain or tears by strain some particle or some broken dust of bliss. Even joy itself becomes a poisonous drink because in this world the hunger for happiness is made as a dreadful hook of Fate. All means are held as good by them to catch a single beam of light and for the enjoyment of a moment‟s bliss Eternity is sacrificed: yet the earth was made for joy and not for sorrow, not as a dream in endless suffering Time. Although God created the world for his delight yet an ignorant Power took charge of it and seemed as his Will and Death‟s deep falsity has mastered Life. Here all grew as a sudden play of Chance pretending to be a Fate.

Like a deep blue heaven our sprit breathe and live in a secret atmosphere of pure joy; our bodies and hearts feel the indistinct call of the spirit and our senses seek for it and touch and lose. If our spirit would have withdrawn then the world would have sank in the Void; if the spirit would not have been there, then nothing could move or live in this world. (630) At the primal root of the universal things a divine Bliss is hidden. A silent divine Delight watches Time‟s countless works: to house God‟s joy in everything, the Space opened its wide expanse, and to accommodate God‟s joy our souls were born in self. An old charm guards this universe, the objects of the universe are chiseled out cups of World-Delight whose charmed wine is some soul‟s joyful drink: the All-Wonderful has filled heaven with his dreams; he has made the blank ancient Space as his marvellous palace; he poured down as rains his spirit into Matter‟s signs: the All Wonderful fires of greatness lights the great sun, he crosses the sky in silent steps through the dim trembling light of the moon; he is the beauty that walks chanting songs in the fields of sound, he utters the stanzas of the hymns of Wind, he is the silence that watches in the stars at night; awakening at dawn he calls from every branch of the trees, he lies fainted in the stone and dreams in flower and tree. Even in this world filled with toil and distress of Ignorance, and on the hard dangerous ground of difficult earth in spite of the prevalence of death and evil circumstances a will to survive and a joy to exist.

There is a joy in every contact of sense, a joy in all experience of the soul, a joy in evil and in good, a joy in virtue and joy in sin: displaying lack of attention to the threat of the Karmic law (the results of work), joy dares to grow upon this prohibited soil, its juice runs through the plant and flowers of Pain, it thrills with the drama of fate and disastrous pitiless grim destiny, from sorrow and ecstasy pulls apart with force its food from it, on danger and crisis it sharpens its strength; it rolls about in the mud with the reptile and worm on earth and lifts its head to be equal with the stars of heaven; it takes part in fairies‟ dance and eats and drinks with the goblins, it bathes in the light and heat of many suns, the sun of supreme Beauty and the sun of supreme Power (631) gratify with honor and helping it by scattering their golden beams, it grows towards the Titan and the God. Through the symbol of earth‟s pleasure and pain it loiters on earth drinking its deep juice and tastes the grapes of Heaven and the fragrance of the Bottomless depths, it endures the pouring down of fire and the skilled torture of Hell and loiters to taste the smoky fragments of the glory of Paradise. In the small and petty pleasures of man‟s life, and in his petty passion and joy it finds a taste, feels a taste in tears and the torture of broken hearts, and in the crown of gold and crown of thorns, and in life‟s sweet nectar and the taste of its bitter wine. In order to enjoy an unknown bliss it thoroughly examines all being and tests experience to discover new and unknown things. It brings life and glorious language from a brighter sphere into the earthly creature‟s days: it sinks deeply in his meditation and his Art, it exults in the splendour of some perfect word, and rejoices greatly in his high determinations and sublime deeds, wanders in his paths of error, daringly walks to the bottomless depths, it climbs in his climbing, and rolls about in the mud in its fall. To be the possessor or competitors for his life‟s heart at the Angel and the demon brides becomes his roommates. To the enjoyer of the cosmic play his greatness and littleness are equal, the colour of his nobility and ignobility casts on some impartial background of the gods: he admires the skill of the Artist‟s who planned it all. But this danger game he would not endure here forever: because beyond the earth but meant for liberated earth, Wisdom and joy prepare the perfect crown; and the Superhuman Truth invites to thinking

193 man. At last the soul turns to eternal things, in every temple it expresses its yearning for the clasp of God. Then there is played the topmost Mystery and the longed-for miracle is achieved. (632) The goddess of immortal Bliss shall open her wide heavenly eyes on the stars and stirs her mighty limbs; to the beautiful tone of her song of love Time shall thrill and the Space would be filled with her brilliant delight. There after leaving the human heart to its grief, abandoning speech and namable kingdoms, she would climb crossing through the luminous far-seen sky of wordless thought, through naked thought-free heavens of perfect sight to the summits where the unborn Idea remembering the future that must be immutable above the world she had created shall look down upon the works of labouring Force. Like a great heaven touching bird remains spreading its wings on a quiet sea, she would remain poised by wings of creative joy on the still deep of the Eternal peace in the vast golden laughter of Truth‟s seen. This was the aim and the supreme Law of the creation, this was the task allotted to the Nature when beauty sank in the dim mist-waters of Inconscient sleep, out of the Void this great creation rose, for this only the Spirit entered into the Bottomless depths and charged with its power Matter‟s ignorant force, to establish the victory of the temple‟s spans of Light in the Night‟s darkest session and to reestablish immortality in the kingdom of Death. A super natural slow transformation that is beyond the perceptions of sense works continuously. All our earth that starts from mud whose goal shall end in the heaven, and Love that was once an animal desire then shall become a sweet madness in the delighted heart, and an intimate comrade of happy mind, shall become a wide space of spiritual yearning. Then a lonely soul shall become passionate for the one and Alone, the heart that loved man shall thrill to the love of God and the body would become God‟s own house and temple. Then our being shall be rescued from separateness; shall become all itself and it shall have all new-experience in God: God the supreme Lover then leaning from his temple‟s door (633) would embrace the whole world into his single breast. Then the business of Night and Death shall fail: when unity is won, and when struggle is abolished and all is known and clasped by Love then who and why would turn back to ignorance and pain?

Then Savitri told Death that she had conquered over him within herself; she no more trembles with the stroke of grief; a mighty calmness seated deep within her has occupied her body and sense: it bears the world‟s grief and transforms it into strength and makes the world‟s joy one with the Divine joy. Her eternal love sits throned on God‟s calm; because Love must ascend beyond the very heavens and find its inexpressible secret sense; and must change its human ways to divine ways, yet keep its all powerful right of earthly bliss. She said to Death that she claimed from him the living Satyavan not for the fulfillment of her heart‟s intense sweetness or for the enjoyment of her body‟s happiness but alone for her and his work that is their sacred charge. Beneath the constellation of stars Satyavan‟s and her lives are messengers of God; for dwelling under the shadow of Death they have come and for attracting God‟s light to earth for the ignorant race, to fill Satyavan‟s love in the hollow depths in men‟s hearts, and to heal the worldly unhappiness with Satyavan‟s bliss. Because she is the force of God in the form of woman and Satyavan is the Eternal‟s delegate soul in man. Savitri said to Death that her will is greater than his law, her love is stronger than the bonds of Fate: the love of her and Satyavan is the Supreme Lord‟s heavenly sanction. She guards that command against his (death‟s) ruinous hands. Love must never be vanished upon the earth; because it is the bright link between earth and heaven and it is an angel of the far Transcendent and man‟s rightful claim on the Supreme. But Death the god replied to the woman (634) with the ridiculous laughter of his voice discouraging the labour of the stars: said that like this men cheats the Truth with his brilliant thoughts. Thus would she engage on hire the glorious deceitful crooked Mind to weave from his Ideal‟s sky‟s delicate fiber a fine cloth to cover her body‟s naked desire and clothe her heart‟s clutching greedy passion? He said to Savitri not to paint crudely the delicate cloth of life with the colours of magic: rather to make her thought a plain and faithful glass reflecting Matter and mortality, and know that her soul is a product of the flesh and a self created thing in a constructed world. Her words are great murmurs in a mysterious dream. Because how can the pure grandeur of her dream-built God could dwell in the dull heart of man or who can see a face and form of divine in this naked two-legged worm whom she call as man? Death designating Savitri as the holder of human face to throw away all her mind-painted disguises: to remain as animal and the worm meant by Nature; to accept her vain birth and narrow life. Because truth is open like stone and hard like death, asked her to live uncovered in the bareness and hard in the hardness of the truth. But Savitri replied to the dire God: that it is true that she is human, because in humanity waits his hour of God, so man transcending grief, pain, fate and death to reach the immortal peaks shall crush him down on earth. She affirmed that her human shape is a disguise of God: he is immanent in her and the regulator of her acts, and turns on the great wheel of his cosmic work. That she (Savitri) is the living body of Gods light, the thinking instrument of his power, she incarnates Wisdom in an earthly breast, and she is his ever victorious and imperishable will. In her the formless conscious Spirit drew its shape. In her dwells the Nameless and the secret Name (635) Death replied to her from the impossible Darkness in a loud voice designating Savitri as a priestess of Imagination‟s house first she should subdue Nature‟s fixed unchangeable laws and make the impossible her daily work. Questioned her as to how she can compel to bind in the ties to unify two eternal enemies? Starkly opposed in their embrace they abolish the glory of their extreme purity: an unhappy tie mutilates their retarded force. Then how her will shall make one the true and false? Where Matter is all in all, there the Spirit is dream: if all are Spirit, then Matter is a lie, and who was the liar that created the universe? The Real with the unreal cannot match. He who turns towards God must renounce the world, he who would live in the Spirit, must sacrifice his life; and he who has met the Self, renounces his egoistic self. The travellers of the million routes of mind those who have travelled through

194 Existence to its end, and sages those who have discovered the world-ocean‟s vast expanse, they too have determined extinction as the only safe harbour. There are only two gates of man‟s liberation, one is his body‟s death which is the Matter‟s gate to enter into peace and the other is the Death of his soul which is his last great happiness. In him all take shelter because he is Death and God. But Savitri replied to the mighty Death: that her heart is wiser than Reason‟s thoughts, and her heart is stronger than his bonds. Her heart sees and feels that the one and unique Heart beat in all, it feels the high Transcendent‟s sun like stretched hands and sees the cosmic Spirit at its work; in dim Night it lies alone with God. Her heart‟s strength can carry the grief of the universe and never loses its way from its luminous path and the white tremendous path of orbit through God‟s peace. It can drink up the sea of AllDelight and never lose the white spiritual touch, (636) and he is the calm that meditates in the deep Infinite. Death in reply questioned her designating her as heart and soul whether she is indeed so strong and so free? Questioned whether she can gather bright pleasure from his way side flowering branches of trees and never stumble from her goal in her hard journey, and can confront world‟s dangerous touch and never fall? He asked her to show her strength and freedom from his laws. But Savitri replied that she shall surely find from the green and whispering forest of Life heart filled joys, they were her own because they belong to him (Satyavan) or hers for him, because their joys are one. If she stays about then the Time is theirs and God‟s, and if she falls then would not his saviour hand present near her? All is a single plan and each way side act deepens soul‟s response and brings the goal nearer. Thereafter Death the scornful Nothingness answering her asked Savitri whether can she prove her absolute force before the wise gods by choosing earthly joy? Asked her to demand for herself and yet live free from self (spirit) and its gross disguise. Then he will give whatever her soul desires, all the brief joys earth has kept for mortal hearts. Her only deepest and dearest wish that exceeds all and rejected by his hard laws and her ridiculous fate i.e. giving back Satyavan‟s life to her. That his will once worked out remains unchanged through Time and hence Satyavan can never again be hers. But Savitri replied to the vague Power that if the eyes of Darkness can look straight at Truth, then he should look into her heart and knowing who she is give what he wills or what he must. She claims nothing except Satyavan. As if a doubtful fate a silence was spread over there. Like one filled with hatred in his heart still yields a point Death bowed his all conquering head in the silent assent and said that he shall give her whatever once the living Satyavan desired in his heart for her except from the clutches of death and painful fate. (637) He shall give her bright noon‟s and imperishable dawns, daughters of her own shape in heart and mind, fair hero sons, and unhampered sweetness of union with her dear and true husband. In her happy home she shall enjoy the surrounded delightful evenings. Love by her shall bind many gathered hearts. The opposite sweetness of her daily life shall meet in one way her life‟s desired person‟s pleasant service and in the other way the loving empire over all she loved and two poles of bliss shall be made one. He asked Savitri to return to earth that she had left. But Savitri replied that she resists his gifts. If she returns alone then the earth cannot blossom. Like a lion pursues with severe anger his escaping prey Death once more expressed his angry cry asking her as to what she knew regarding earth‟s rich and changing life and she who thinks that by the death of one man all joy must cease? She should give up the hope to live unhappy till the end: because grief dies soon in the tired human heart; and soon the vacant chambers of love shall be filled by other guests. Love was made like a brief painting on a holiday‟s floor a picture drawn for a moment‟s beauty, or if love is like a voyager on a sea pursuing eternal foot steps then whatever objects embraced by it change fluently like waves to a swimmer upon infinite seas. But Savitri replied to that vague god asking him to give back Satyavan her only lord. His thoughts are vacant to her soul that feels the deep eternal Truth in transient things. Death answered her as to why she should not return back and try the strength of her soul? Soon she shall find with satisfaction that other men on this plentiful earth have beauty, strength and truth and when she had half forgotten, one of these shall envelop himself around her heart that needs some human answering heart against her breast; (638) because who being mortal can dwell gladly alone? Then Satyavan shall slip into the past and by new love and her children‟s soft hands her gentle memory shall be pushed away from her till she shall astonish that she had at all loved. Such is the life that earth‟s labour and suffering has conceived and life is a constant flowing stream that never is the same. But Savitri replied to the mighty Death: designating him as dark form and bitter critic of God‟s work that he jeers the mind and body‟s uncertain search because what the heart would once hold in a prophet hour and the timeless immortal soul shall make its own. Though her heart was deprived yet worshipped the image of God that its love adored; to travel in his steps she has burned in the flame. She questioned that are they (i.e. Savitri and Satyavan) not those who in the great solitude seated upon the hills alone with God? She questioned Death as to why does he vainly struggles with her, her mind that is freed from dusky thoughts to whom the secret of the gods are plain? Because she now at last knew beyond all doubt that the great stars burn with her unceasing fire and life and death is both its fuel. Life only was her blind attempt for love: Earth saw her struggle and heaven is witness of her victory; all shall be possessed, transcended; and there the eternal bridegroom and the eternal bride removing their veils before the marriage fire shall kiss. At last the heavens shall accept their broken flights. On their life‟s boat that sails breaking the waves of Time no signal light of hope has ever burned in vain. Thus Savitri spoke; as the ocean‟s shadowy breast stirs by the open moon‟s light the boundless limbs of the god of Death as if affected by the secret ecstasy shivered silently. Then lifted up as by a sudden wind (639) around Savitri in that vague little lighted world like a bursting veil the twilight trembled.

195 Thus the great opponents conflicted in the debate of words. Around those spirits in the gloomy mist a deepening half-light fled with its pearly wings as if to reach some ideal Morn. Savitri‟s thoughts exceeding the boundary line flew through the glowing mist and that light‟s brightness mixed with the light of the mist and veils and all her words like shining jewels were swallowed into the glow of a mysterious world caught with a rainbow shifting of its colours floated like an echo and mixed with a far sound became dull.

There all speech and all mental state combined becomes an un-enduring tissue woven by mind in a beautiful changing delicate robe. Savitri in her silent will walked on the dim grass of vague unreal plains, in her front a veil of inner vision was floating, and behind her every step a hem of dreams was swinging. But now her spirit‟s flame of conscient force fruitlessly retiring from sweetness called back her thoughts from speech to sit within a deep room of meditation, because only there could dwell soul‟s firm truth: there an imperishable sacrificial fire flames unquenched upon the central hearth, where burns for the high household and his mate the homestead‟s sentry and witness fire, from which the fire of the altar of the gods are burning. All (the three) still compelled to walk on without change, in those contrary worlds was still in order: they were led by the mortal and the god and the spirit of Satyavan followed her and although she was behind was yet the leader of their march and they in front were followers of her will. They advanced onward in their journey through the wavering paths and were vaguely accompanied by the little lighted mists. (640) But now as if disturbed they all fled faster escaping from the clearness of Savitri‟s soul. Like a heaven-bird borne upon jewelled wings of wind borne like a coloured and inner fire by the faeries into a pearl-coloured cave her soul moved on through the enchanted dimness. Death walked in front of her and Satyavan in the dark front of Death was seen like a failing star. Above was oscillating the unseen balance of Death‟s fate.

-End of Canto Three

196

Book Ten Canto Four The Dream Twilight of the Earthly Real

(641) There appeared a slope that sank slowly downward, and slipped towards a depth with some obstacles in between that was black and white in colour. The ideal‟s unclearly perceived heart of marvel was vanished; it‟s crowding wonder of bright tender dreams and vague half-shaped heights she had now left behind: thought fell towards lower levels and dragged and tensely dominated by strong feelings for immature reality. That twilight still floated but changed its colours and covered its less delightful dream under a hard strip with its tired limbs the twilight settled on the atmosphere; the symbol colours of the twilight were like duller reds and almost seemed as a dull mist of the day. Thereafter a tightly stretching dreadful rope siezed Savitri‟s heart; her sense was burdened with dangerous load, deplorable and more intense sounds entered into her ears, and through a bright and flickering light her vision could mark hurriedly running plains and cloudy mountains, wide grey streams, cities full of high minarets and towers heading towards an ineffectual changeless sky: long banks, river Ghats (places of crossing) and harbours‟ filled with white sails fell in her sight awhile and then were passed away. Amidst those sceneries she could see suffering labourious multitudes in ever changing perishable groups wearing grey dress of dream like shadowy shapes, in a vain cinema. They imagining meaningless in the uncertain environments in life‟s unbearable shocks and counter shocks trusted and waited for death to change their spirit‟s scene.

Thereafter a barbaric uproar of labour and heavy footsteps of armoured life that were engaged in war and the tiring or boring sound (642) of thoughts and acts that were ever unchanging as if the dull repeated sound of a great brute machine and as an old dissatisfied cry like the roaring of a ghost in a loud unquiet sea surrounded her soul. A huge inhuman demoniac‟s voice, creating a song of Confusion rising to heaven, a vibration of engines and sound of tools brought the deep slow tone of that was existing in the depth of labour‟s pain. As when a pale lightning tear a tortured sky high above was heard a series of encircling sound of clouds chasing like a smoke driven from a red chimney, Savitri could see the floating of forced creations of an ignorant Mind: she saw ghostly shapes of human thought and confounded hopes, the shapes of Earthly Nature and the arts of man, all philosophies and disciplines and laws, the dead spirit of old societies, and the creation of the Titan and the worm that were floating and like pictured pieces were hurrying away. As if lost remainders of forgotten light, there fled with flapping wings before her eyes fainted revelations and liberating words that were purposeless and with no strength to save, the messages of the gods who proclaim good news or gospel, the voices of prophets, and the scriptures of vanishing creeds. She could see that each claimed eternity of their transience and went by: ideals, systems, sciences, poems, crafts there perished tirelessly and again recurred having been sought restlessly by some creative Power; but all were dreams crossing an empty vast only. From mountain tops or river banks or solitary forest lanes the ascetics voices of lonely seers was heard by her who were seeking heaven‟s rest or the spirit‟s wordless peace, or in bodies motionless like statues, fixed in trance cessation of their sleepless thought (643) sat sleeping souls, but this too was a dream. All things made in the past and destroyed were there, its forgotten forms that once had lived, and all the present that cherishes as newrevealed forms and all the hopes that the future brings had failed and already caught and spent in vain efforts, those repeated fruitlessly age after age were seen there. All returned tirelessly insisting still because of joy in the pursuit of pain and joy to labour and to win and lose and joy to create and keep and joy to kill. The rolling cycles passed and came again that brought the same toil and the same fruitless end, forms ever new and ever old and the long dreadful revolution of the world were also seen there.

Once more there arose the great destroying voice of the king of Death and his huge denial‟s all-defeating might pursued the ignorant march of pain-stricken Time across the fruitless labour of the worlds. He asked Savitri to see the figures of this symbol kingdom and its solid outlines of creative dream inspiring the great concrete works of earth. In its rolling story of human life here she can find out the consequence that Nature gives to the sin of beings and the error of things and the desire that compels the human beings to live and man‟s irremediable serious problems of hope. In an unchangeable order‟s series where Nature does not change, man is unable to change: he ever obeys the fixed changed law of Nature; in a new version of Nature‟s often-told tale the Nature turns the human race in ever-wheeling cycles. The mind of man is shut in circling boundaries: because man is a mental being, he cannot rise beyond thought. If man could leave his limits then he would be safe: (644) although he looks towards greater heavens; but cannot mount even if he is winged, and thus he sinks back to his native soil. Man is prisoned in his net like mind and beats soul‟s wings against the walls of life. His heart‟s yearning prayer lifted up vainly to the brilliant Gods filled in the formless Void; then disappointed returns to the Void and in its happy nothingness asks for liberation and the calm Nirvana of his dream self; consequently the Word ends in silence and his name ends in Nothingness. Alone amid the mortal multitudes he calls the unattainable Godhead to be the lover of his lonely soul or casts his spirit into God‟s void embrace. Or he finds a figure looked like him in the impartial All; he expresses his own will to the Immobile, lays his anger and love to the Eternal Lord and lends a thousand names to the Nameless. Asked Savitri, she should not hope to call God down into man‟s life. How shall she bring down the

197 Everlasting here upon earth? In the course of hurrying Time there is no house for God to dwell. She vainly seeks for an aim in Matter‟s world; where there is no aim, and a will to survive only exists. All in the universe bound by Nature walks in the same way forever. Death asked Savitri to look on the forms that stay awhile and pass away, and these lives that desire and attempt hard and then vanish; to see all these structures that have no enduring reality, to see these savior systems of religion that cannot save themselves but perish in the deadly grip of the aeonic cycles, given up from man‟s thought, proved false by Time, these philosophies that take into consideration all problems in detail but from the beginning of the earth nothing has ever been solved, the omnipotence of science is in vain with the help of which men learn from what substance suns are made, transforms all forms to serve their outward needs, and ride through the sky and sail beneath the sea (645) but have not learned as to by what substance they are made and why they were created; these man‟s brain made forms of administration or state that surrounded man‟s soul with wall of bricks of evil and good, and then cottages and palace at once made into a jail, rotten awhile they rule and break into pieces before being fully destroyed; these revolutions and demon or drunken god, torturing the wounded body of mankind only to paint in new colours on an old face, these wars, these victorious slaughter or massacre, and mad destructions, the work of centuries vanishing in an hour, the stream of blood of the defeated and the crown of the victorious which men to be born must have to pay in future with their pain, the hero‟s face divine bearing the limbs of satyr (an animal), the demon‟s magnificence mixed with the demigod‟s, the glory and the beast hood and the shame; the labour and the loud and annoying noise, the transient joy, the unending seas of tears, the longings, hoping and the cry out of eagerness, the battle and the victory and the fall, the aimless journey without any interval, this waking severe labour, disconnected sleep, songs, shouts and weeping, wisdom and idle (vain) words, the laughter of men and the mockery of the gods, why is it all? Where leads the march and to where the life‟s pilgrimage advances? Who keeps the map of the route or planned each stage of his journey? Or else the world walks self-driven in its own way, or nothing exists there except a Mind that dreams: or the world is an imaginary mythological legend which happens to be true in course of time, a story told to itself by conscious Mind, and pictured and played on a masked Matter‟s ground on which it stands in an unsubstantial Vast. Mind is the author of this plot (drama), spectator, actor and the stage: Mind only exists and what it thinks is seen. If Mind is all then she should renounce the hope of bliss; if Mind is all then she should renounce the hope of Truth. Because Mind can never touch the body of the Truth (646) and it can never see the soul of God; only it comprehends his shadow but cannot hear his laugh because it turns from God to vain apparent things. Minds is a tissue woven of Light and shade where right and wrong have sewn their mixed parts; or Mind is Nature‟s union of a contractual marriage pact between truth and falsehood, and between joy and pain: this struggling pair no court can separate. Each thought is a bright alloyed gold coin and falsehood and truth are its two opposite sides: Mind is the Royal mintage of the brain and of this kind is all its currency. Death asked her not to think to establish living Truth on earth or to make Matter‟s world the house of God; Truth does not come there but the thought of Truth only comes, God is not there but only his name is heard there. If at all the Supreme Self is there then it is bodiless and unborn, it is no special one and possessed by none. Death questioned her as to on what base she shall build her happy world? If she cast off her mind and life then she would become an all-seeing and omnipresent (all-pervading) Self stark and alone. If there is God then he is impressive for the world; he sees all things with calm indifferent sight, he has ill fated all hearts with the punishment of sorrow and desire, he has bound all life (the universal life) with his relentless laws, he does not answer to the ignorant voice of prayer. While the ages make slow painful progress beneath him he sits eternally, unmoved and unstirred by any little thing created by him, he sees the animal‟s suffering and the fate of man like negligible incident mid this stars: he is immeasurably wise and remains above her (Savitri‟s) thought; his secluded joy does not look for her love. His truth (the truth divine) cannot dwell in human thought, if she wants Supreme Truth then she should make her mind still forever, and slay it by the dumb unseen Light. Supreme bliss does not live in human atmosphere: (647) he questioned Savitri as to how shall the mighty Mother keep fragrant her calm delight in this narrow breakable vase i.e. human body or keep her sweet unbroken ecstasy in hearts that are attacked by earthly sorrow and in bodies that careless Death can slay at will? Death asked Savitri not to dream to change the world planned by God and not to attempt to alter his eternal Law. Even if there exists some heavens the gates of those are shut to grief and there she should seek the joy that she could not find on earth; or live as child of Eternity in the imperishable hemisphere (region) where Light is native and Delight is king and Spirit is the deathless base of all things and she should chose her high station there. If she is Spirit and Nature is her covering dress then she should cast her covering and be her naked self without any perversion in its undying truth, she should remain ever Alone and unique in the silence. Then she should turn God ward, and leave all behind for him, forgetting love and forgetting Satyavan and vanish herself in God‟s stable peace. Death designating Savitri as soul advised her to sink in God‟s still rapture. Because to reach God‟s height she must die herself: he is the god of Death and the gate of entering into immortality. But Savitri answered to the false reasoning God; questioning him would he once more call Light to make blind the eyes of Truth and make Knowledge a catch in the net of Ignorance and the Word as a dart (a pointed spear) to slay her living soul? She asked the king of Death to offer his boons to tired spirits and hearts that could not bear the wounds of Time, and to those who were tied to body and mind to tear off those bonds and flee into white calm crying for shelter from the play of God. She said that surely his boons are great since is He. But how shall she seek rest in endless peace being the holder of mighty Mother‟s violent force, she had turned the mighty Mother‟s vision within herself to observe the riddled world; (648) she had toughened her will in the light of Wisdom‟s sun and established the flaming

198 silence in her heart of love. The world is a spiritual paradox created to serve the need in the Supreme Unseen, this world is a poor translation to the creature‟s sense of That which is for ever beyond its idea and speech, a symbol of what can never be symbolised; a language mispronounced, misspell, yet true. Its powers have come from the eternal heights and plunged into the Inconscient dim waterless depth and now risen from it to do their marvellous work. The soul of the being (creature) is a figure of the Unmanifest, the mind labours to think the Unthinkable, the life attempts hard to call the Immortal into birth, and the body labours to turn itself into a sacred temple of the Illimitable. This world is not cut off from Truth and God. Savitri said to Death that he has vainly dug the dark unbridgeable gulf and built the blind and doorless wall: man‟s soul crosses through him to Paradise. Heaven‟s sun making its way descends through death and darkness; its light flashes upon the verge of their being. Her mind is a torch lighted from the eternal sun, her life is a breath drawn by the immortal Guest, and her mortal body is the Eternal‟s house. The torch has already become the inextinguishable ray, and the life has already become the Immortal‟s force, her body like a house grows as the householder‟s part and one. Hence she questioned the king of Death as to how he says that Truth can never illuminate the human mind and Bliss can never possess mortal‟s heart and God would never descend into the world he created? If creation rose in the meaningless Void, if from bodiless Force Matter was born, if Life could climb in the unconscious tree, its green delight break into emerald leaves and its beauty of laughter bloom in the flower, if sense could wake in tissue, nerve and cell (649) and Thought possesses the grey matter (active substance) of the brain, if soul can look from its secrecy through the flesh, then how shall the nameless Light not descend on men and unknown powers emerge from Nature‟s sleep? Even now hints of luminous Truth arise like stars in the mind-mooned luminosity of Ignorance; even now they feel the deathless touch of the divine Lover: if the door of our body like chamber is little open, then what can hinder God from entering silently and who can forbid God‟s kiss on the sleeping soul? Already God has come nearer and Truth is close to them; since the obscure body which does not believe in the existence of God and does not know him must the sage deny the Light and the seer denies his soul? She said that she is not limited by thought or sense or shape, she lives in the glory of the Infinite, she is near to the Nameless and Unknowable, and the Inexpressible now is her household mate. But standing on Eternity‟s luminous edge she has discovered that the world is nothing but He; she met Spirit with spirit, Self with self, and has loved too the body of her God. She had pursued him in his earthly form. A heart that has grown one with every heart a lonely freedom cannot satisfy it: she is a deputy of the aspiring world and her spirit‟s liberty she demands for all.

Thereafter again rang the deeper cry of Death. As if beneath the weight of fruitless law and oppressed by its own obstinate meaningless will, hateful, tired and compassionate, it kept no more its old intolerant sound but seemed like the unnumbered paths of life that is working hard for ever and achieving nothing on account of birth and change, life‟s mortal powers by which she survive and with the shelter of which it turns around a fixed boundary post (650) turning of a wide circling aimless race whose course for ever speeds but remains as the same. The earth-mind in its long play with Fate and Chance and Time assured of the game‟s vanity lost or won, crushed by its load of ignorance and doubt under which although his knowledge seems to increase and growth seems to enlarge but it sinks there and despairs and looks old, tired and discouraged on its work. Yet was all nothing or achieved vainly? Some great thing has been done, some light, some power liberated from the firm hold of the huge Inconscient: that mind has emerged from night; it sees its dawns circling for ever though no dawn can stay. This change was noticed from the farflung voice of the godhead of Death; his form of terrible fear was altered and though it admitted our transient effort for arriving at eternity, yet flung his vast doubts with regard to what might else have been on grandiose hints of an impossible way of life.

Thereafter the great voice of Death onrushing cried to Savitri: that since she knows the wisdom that transcends the Idea of Formlessness and Form she should arise liberated by the seeing gods. If she had kept her mind free from the fierce stress of life then she might have been omniscient and calm like those gods. But her violent and passionate heart prohibits that. It is like a storm bird of a lawless Power that would lift up with great effort the world and violently disrupt from it the inscrutable script of Fate, and Death‟s rule and Law and the unknowable Will. These great spirits who are hasteners to action and traitors with disrespect of God‟s law have too much love in their hearts, and they who were formed like her because both are she and have come to the narrow bounds of life with too large natures across the stream of time. She among them were the worshippers of a force who do not know the recoil (reaction) of that, their giant wills brought by compulsion the troubled eons. (651) The wise are calm and silent as the great hills they ceaselessly rise towards their unreached sky, seated firmly on their unchanging base they keep their dreamless heads in a trance merged state in heaven‟s unchangeable domain. Those mighty mediators lifting their climbing soul half-way to heaven stand content on their peaceful aspiring tops high and still, to watch the revolutions of the stars: though starts motionlessly moving with the might of the earth, see the ages pass in the same manner. The thought of the wise moves turning with the cycles of the ages in the same rhythm, they hear the footsteps of far-off things; patiently and not being affected by emotion they keep their venturesome wisdom restrained in their depths, otherwise like a ship dragged by a bound leviathan (a giant water-living creature) into the boundless depths of his stupendous seas man‟s transient life should sink into the unknown. The king of Death asked Savitri to see as to how all trembles when the footsteps of the gods are heard too near? All moves as is in danger, pain stricken, torn and lifted up as in a wave. If strength from heaven descends surprising the imperfect earth and veiless knowledge come and touch these unfit souls then the hurrying aeons would trip on too early. Here in this world the gods have screened their tremendous power: God hides

199 his thought and even he seems to be mistaken. Hence she should be quiet and peaceful in the slow wise world. She became mighty living with dread goddesses filled in the thick forest to which she calls at dawn. Hence she should not use her strength like the wild Titan souls? She should not interfere in the fixed systems and principles and ancient laws, and should respect the calm of great established things. But Savitri replied to the great god of Death, designating him as a maker of Law: as to what is the calm that he vainly boasts? Is it not the blind like inert footsteps of outrageous soulless stone-eyed energies seeing dreams like a machine chained in stark round? She said if the changeless Law is all then soul‟s hope is vain: (652) the speeding cycles of ages justifying God‟s existence press on forever to the new and the unknown. If while man‟s slow life way leaped hurried into sudden splendid paths by the inspiration of divine words and human gods and the ancient obstructions were never broken and glories not sprang forth bursting their obscure seed then what were the meaning of earth‟s cycles of ages? She asked the king of Death not to impose upon conscious minds and hearts the dark fixity that binds to lifeless things. The unconscious rule is befitting for the animal breeds who are content to live beneath the unalterable yoke; but man too turns to a nobler walk and a hero‟s path. She said to Death that she can crush his law with living feet; because to arise in freedom she was born. She said if she is mighty then let her force be unveiled and be an equal companion of the timeless Powers, or else let her frustrated soul sink down in the original sleep unfit of its Godhead. She claims from Time her will‟s eternity and God from death‟s moments. Death replied to her as to why should the highest and immortal will shall bow down to the petty works of the transient earth forgetting freedom and Eternal‟s path? Or is this the high use of strength and thought to struggle with the bonds of death and time and spend the labour that might be worthy of earning divinity and battle and bear suffering of wounds to grasp the trivial joys which earth can guard in her small treasure-chest of passing things? Death questioned Savitri designating her as a child as to whether only to win broken pieces of earthly life for him whom she loves cancelling the grand release, keeping away Satyavan‟s soul which the merciful deities have called from the early joy of the heavens smashing the god‟s with her feet? Whether her arms are sweeter than the courts of God? Savitri answered that she can walk straightaway crushing with heavy steps on the road, the powerful and energetic hand that had constructed and planned the paths for both her and Satyavan. (653) That she runs there from where God‟s sweet dreadful voice commands and she is driven by the bridals of God. Had it not been for that purpose then why he drew his schemes of mighty worlds and filled infinity with his zealous breath? Or if he had not wanted to form his human image richly shaped in thought and largeness and golden powers in her to achieve, to flower, to love then why he should have built her mortal form and sown in it his bright and strong Will Powers? Far Heaven can wait for some more time for their arrival into its calm. To create heavens is easy for God; Creation of earth was his difficult thing, the glory of the earth created the problem and the race and the struggle. On earth there exist evil ominous masked disguises, and the terrible powers; and there to create the gods is greatness. Savitri questioned to Death, is not the spirit immortal and always free from the firm hold of Time? If not then why it came down into the mortal‟s Space? Lord gave a charge to his high spirit in man and wrote a hidden decree on Nature‟s tops. To remain large within the limits of life, to be strong in Matter‟s knots, to make fine wisdom from coarse and scattered threads, to create love and beauty out of war and night, for building great stuff of action from the worlds is the meaning of the freedom of the ever seated soul, and the wonderful bet or challenge in confidence and the game divine. Unless the soul stands bare and released from the bonds by its kiss that the Lover winds around his playmate‟s limbs by choosing his cruel and oppressive rule and crushed in his embrace then what liberty has the soul that feels not free? To seize him better with the boundless heart of her playmate she accepts the limiting circles of his arms, bows full of bliss beneath his mastering hands and laughs in his rich compulsions, when most bound then most free. Savitri replied to Death that this is her answer to his lures (attractions).

(654) The king of death unyielding to Savitri‟s answer replied to her in a tone of denial: he said that however mighty she is and whatever her secret name uttered in hidden private assembly of the gods, her heart‟s short-lived passion cannot break the iron wall of accomplished things with which the great Gods protect their camp in Space. Whoever she is behind her human disguise and even if she is the Mother of the worlds and established her claim in the kingdoms of unplanned occurrence, the comic Law is stronger than her will. Even God himself obeys the Laws he made: the Law is permanent and change therein is impossible, only the Supreme Person is a bubble in Time‟s sea. Her soul is the creator of its independent Law to become a forerunner of a greater Truth to come, boasting of a Force behind which it leans and Light above that none except her has seen, she claims the first fruits of the Truth‟s victory. Death questioned Savitri as to what that Truth is and who can find her from amid the illusive images of sense, amid the crowding guesses of the mind and the dark dualities of the world filled with the in certitudes of Thought? The king of Death questioned as to where Truth exists and when was her footsteps heard amid the endless loud voice of Time‟s mart and which was her voice amid the thousand cries that cross the listening brain and cheat the soul? Or is not Truth an ordinary name of high stars, or a vague and splendid word by which man‟s thought sanctions and dedicate his nature‟s choice, and the heart‟s wish wearing knowledge as robe and is not the cherished idea of elect among the elect, is it not thought‟s favorite mid children of half-light who with great voice crowd in the playground of the mind or filled the dormitories in infant sleep? All things here in this world hangs between God‟s yes and no, (655) two Powers are real but to each other are untrue, two comrade stars in the mooned night of mind that look towards two opposite horizons, and unreal like the white head and black tail of the mystic duck, the swift and lame foot, its

200 wings strong, wing broken sustaining the body of the uncertain world, and unreal as great snake in the skies. The Matter‟s mortal littleness is too dangerous and is too difficult for her high proud truth to survive there. All in this world is true, yet all is false: and all its thoughts vanish into an eternal zero, and its deeds swell and its sum total becomes zero in Time‟s globe. In this way man is at once animal and god, and an opposite mystery of God‟s make who is unable to free the Godhead‟s form within himself, man is a being less than himself, yet something more than the apparent, he is the aspiring animal and the frustrated god, yet he is neither beast nor god but man, but he is that man tied to the earth‟s labour and to get higher things he tries hard to exceed his present state by climbing the stairs of God. The earthly objects only seem and none knows their truth, and the earthly ideas are only guesses of an ignorant god. In earth‟s unreasonable breast Truth has no home, yet without reason life is conflict of dreams, but reason is stationed above indistinct bottomless depth and stands at last upon a footboard of doubt. Eternal truth does not live with mortal men.

He asked Savitri that if the truth dwells within her mortal heart then to show him the body of the living Truth or draw for him the outline of her face so that he too may obey and worship her. There after he would give back her husband Satyavan. But here on earth exist only facts and steel-bound Laws. He knew this truth that Satyavan is dead and even her sweetness cannot attract and take him back. No magic Truth can bring the dead to life, (656) no power of earth can cancel the thing once done, no joy of the heart can last even after death and no bliss induce the past to live again. But Life alone can solace the wordless Void and fill the emptiness of Time with thought. Hence the king of Death asked Savitri to leave her dead husband and live her life. The grandiose Woman answered to the great Shadowy figure and as she spoke mortality disappeared from her; her Goddess self grew visible in her eyes and the Light that is a dream for heaven became lustrous in her face. She told Death that he too is God and yet has not borne his shape, but only his black shadow on his path as leaving the Night he takes the upward Way and drags with him its clinging Inconscient Force. He is the unconscious God‟s shadowy head; he is the unrepentant sign of his Ignorance, the natural child born out of vast darkest womb and the evil barrier on his way of immortality. All contraries are various aspects of God‟s face; he is the Many but innumerable One, He is the One and carries the multitude in his breast; he is the Impersonal, mysterious, and unique, He is the one infinite Person seeing his world; the Silence bears the Eternal‟s great dumb signature, his light inspires the great eternal Word; he is the Immobile deep and immortal silence, its white and signless blank negating calm, although he is all yet he is the creator Self, the almighty Lord and watches that his will is carried out by the forms of Gods and the desire that torments halfconscious man and the reluctant and unseeing Night. These wide divine extremes, these opposite powers are the right and left side of the body of God; Existence (Sat) remaining balanced between two mighty arms keeping the mind baffled with the unsolved unfathomable depth of Thought. The deepest Darkness below and immeasurable divine Light above are joined with Supreme Light, (657) but divided by the divisible Mind stand face to face, though they are opposite yet inseparable, though those two are opposite were needed for God‟s great World-work and the current of those two poles wake the immense World-Force. The Supreme Self in his great secrecy, and above the world remains spreading his two equal wings, in his dual states he is one, he is beginning less and endless, transcending both he enters the Absolute. His being is a mystery beyond mind, his ways baffles mortal ignorance; he is the finite parked in its little sections, never amazed of God‟s daringness who dares to be the unimagined All and see and act as the Infinite might do. Although he is known yet remains for ever unknowable, being in everything yet transcend the mysterious whole, he is Absolute, yet lodges in a relative world of Time; he is Eternal and all-knowing yet suffers the pain of birth, he is Omnipotent yet sports with Chance and Fate, he is Spirit yet descends into Matter and the Void, and test form, he is illimitable beyond form and name, yet dwells within a body, he is one and supreme yet bears the form of animal, and human and divine: he is a quiet deep sea, yet his laugh floats in rolling waves; he is Universal, he is all and transcendent yet is none of them, against human reason this is his offence. To man‟s virtuousness this is his cosmic crime, he is Almighty, dwells beyond good and evil leaving the good (the saints) to their fate in a wicked world and leaving the evil to rule in this enormous scene. Before the eyes that see a part and miss the whole all seems as an opposition, struggle and chance, and an aimless labour but its sense appeared to be very small, because man sees only the surface and could not see within the depths: an opposing mystery or a discouraging mean miracle challenges their view.

(658) Yet in the exact Inconscient rigid self vanity, and in the casual error of the world‟s ignorance a plan, and a hidden Intelligence is viewed briefly. There is a purpose inherent in each blunder and fall; and Nature‟s most careless lolling (reclining in an indolent and idle manner) is a pose preparing some forward step and some deep result. Cleverly contrived tones are mixed into motived score (a moving music-script), these million incoherence of the world express their harmonious theme of the evolution‟s huge orchestral dance (dance-drama). A supreme Truth forced the world to take birth; as if remaining cover under a veil it has veiled itself in Matter, and a veil of Death and a veil of Ignorance. It compelled the suns to burn through silent Sky, in a wide covering of ether‟s formless meditation and it compelled to burn: the flame-signs (light) of its uncomprehended (unrealized) Thought (genius): it turns into a vain all struggling light, of Being (Sat) it made an ignorant, dense and dumb substance and of Bliss it turn into the beauty of an inanimate world. In finite things the conscious Infinite dwells; it remain involved (interned) and sleeps in Matter‟s helpless trance, it rules the world from its sleeping senseless great vacuum; in dream it throws out mind, and heart and soul to labour crippled, bound on the hard earth; he is a broken whole and works through scattered points; its bright parts are Wisdom‟s diamond thoughts, its shadowy semblance is our ignorance. From silence mass revels in countless sparks, it creates a being out of brain and nerve and from its pleasure and pains creates a sentient (conscious) creature. He is a collection of Vega feelings, like a dot (point) of sense answering

201 the shocks of life survives for a while and thereafter at last crushed or its force spent, leaves the dead form and leaves the huge universe in which it lived as an insignificant uninvited guest. But the soul grows concealed within its house; it gives to the body its strength and excellence; (659) it goes on following aims in an ignorant aimless world, To earth‟s meaningless life it lends meaning.

A demigod animal, born as thinking man; although rolls in mud, yet rises heavenward in thought; he plays and ponders (thinks), laughs, weeps and dreams, satisfies his little desires like the beast; absorbed in studding the book of life with student eyes. At last he wakes out of this net of intellect and sense, and out of the narrow scope of finite thought wakes into spiritual mind; his high freedom and luminous expanse begins in him: he sees eternity and touches the infinite, in great and unexpected moments he meets gods, he feels the universe as his larger being, in order to join the heights and depths of being in light he makes place and Time his opportunity in heart‟s depth he speaks secretly with God. But these are only the experiences of the touches and high moments; only some parts of the Truth Supreme have lighted his soul, yet that was only like reflections of the sun in still waters. But a few have dared the last supreme ascent breaking through the borders of blinding light above and feel a breath of mightier air around, receive a vaster being‟s messages and dares to bathe in its immense intuitive Ray. At the highest summit of Mind there exists radiant heights exposed to the splendour of Infinity, there exists outer areas and dependencies for the house of Truth, and Mind‟s measureless upraised estates. There man can visit but cannot live. A cosmic Thought spreads out there with its vastnesses; its smallest parts are here on earth‟s philosophies that claims their detailed immensity, each figuring (claiming) an omniscient scheme (plan) of the universal things. But the ascending light can still climb higher; there exist all vast divine visions and the orbs of eternal suns, (660) there exists oceans of immortal luminousness, and flame-hills that touches heaven with their peaks, the dwellers there become a flaming seer; a burning peak of actual vision leads the mind, thought waving its long comet tail pursues it; the heart glitters and becomes an illuminate and seer, and senses becomes luminous by identity. A highest flight climbs to a deepest view; intuitive knowledge‟s bright lightning‟s in a lot bringing all hidden truths out of their caves, its fiery edge of its perfect secret sight breaking into locked unknown expanses of self enters there, and in every sky-like corner of the brain searches here and there intently, and lights up the secret chambers of the heart, its pointed sharp spear of discovery striking on the cover of the name and the screen of form and opens all the secrets of the cosmic soul. There thought has sun-bright eyes of direct knowledge; the Word turned into a mighty and inspiring Voice, and enters into the inmost cabin of Truth‟s privacy and tears away the screen from God and life. Thereafter too vast for the experience of man‟s soul stretches the boundless finite‟s last expanse, the cosmic empire of the Over mind, and time‟s little interior kingdom that borders the Eternity, all here gathers beneath one golden sky: the Powers that creates the cosmos are stationed in their proper position in those grandiose kingdoms of the infinite possibility; each god from there builds world of his own nature; there the divine Ideas remained in their closeddrawn lines like a group of suns, and each Idea controls its own group of rays. Attracted and possessed by only one sight thoughts that crowd there in masses; there all Time is converted into one body and Space, by a single look: there exists the Godhead‟s sovereign sight and from there starts the boundaries of immortal Mind: (661) the line that divides and joins the lower and upper hemispheres that surrounds the field of the work of the Gods and like a fence separates eternity from the toil of Time. The truth supreme all powerful and all knowing and alone all ruler and ruled by none in her glorious kingdom of eternal light in a golden country preserves her measureless house; and remaining in the corridors of that house hears the sound of the footsteps that comes out of the Unmanifest and never returns till the Unknown is known and seen by men. Above the wideness and radiance of cosmic Sight, above the silence of the wordless Thought, the formless creator of immortal forms, the nameless yet holds the name divine, transcendening Time‟s moments and Timelessness the Mighty Mother sits in luminous calm and holds the eternal Child upon her knees waiting for the day when he shall speak to Fate.

There exists the image of our future‟s hope, and the sun for which all darkness waits, there exists the indestructible harmony; the world‟s contradictions climbs to her and becomes identified with her: there exists the Truth of which the world‟s truths are only broken particles, there exists the great Light of which the world‟s ignorance is the shade and that remains there till the Truth draws back the shade that it has cast, there exists the supreme Love to which our hearts call down to put to right to all of our conflict, there exists the supreme Bliss for which the creations sorrows that were left to fall into ruins waits eagerly: from there comes the glory that is sometimes seen on earth, the Godhead comes from there and visits the human soul, from there comes the supreme Beauty and the dream that bursts out sometimes in Nature‟s face. From there the eternal perfection calls to its Time-born perfection, the truth of God descending down surprising human life, and the image of God coming down to earth possessing finite shapes. There in the world of everlasting Light in the kingdoms of immortal Super mind, (662) the Truth that hides here her head on earth in the mystery and whose riddle in the hard structure of material form is found impossible to be understood by our reason, there it lives without mystery and from her face the covering or disguises were perfectly dropped, and there it is Nature and the common law of things.

There in a body made up of spirit‟s stuff, and on the stone altar (hearth-stone) of the sacrificial inextinguishable Fire, divine action gives shape to the movements of the soul, thought‟s steps becomes unerring and total and life is a continual worship‟s rite, and a sacrifice of bliss offered to the One and the Alone. An universal vision and a spiritual awareness feels all the infinite lodged in finite form and seeing through a thrilling ecstasy of light discovers the bright face of the Formless, in a moment of the truth and in the moment of a soul can sip the honey-wine of Eternity. A Spirit who is no one and innumerable, the one mystic infinite Person of his world who manifests in multiples of his myriad personality, and on all his bodies marks his divinity‟s stamp and sits in each immortal

202 and unique. Behind each daily act The Immobile stands for ever, he is the background (refuge) of each movement and scene and with his might and calm upholds the creation and gets changed on the Unchangeable deathless state. He is the Timeless and looks out from the dynamic moments, he is Unutterable puts on a robe of speech where all its words are woven like magic threads attracts them with beauty, and inspiring them with their splendour, and every thought that was recorded in the memory of the world takes up its appropriate destined place. The vast and impersonal supreme Truth faultlessly makes fit the time and circumstance, the substance of the Truth supreme is a pure gold and remains forever the same but shaped into vessels for the spirit‟s use, (663) its gold becomes the wine jar and the vase. All there is an advent of the supreme: the All-Wonderful makes each event marvellous and in each shape the All-Beautiful is a miracle; the All-Blissful fills with rapture the thrilling of the heart, there visits a pure heavenly joy only for the use of sense. There each being is part of the supreme Self, and a portion of the million-thoughted All, a claimant to the timeless Unity, the sweetness of the many and the joy of difference became effective with the intimacy of the One and Alone.

Savitri replied to Death as to who can show to him Truth‟s glorious face? Because our human words are only her shadow.

To our thought she is an unthinkable joy of light, to our speech she is a marvel that is in inexpressible. She said to Death that if he could touch the Truth supreme he would grow wise suddenly and cease to exist. If our souls could see and love and clasp God‟s Truth then its infinite radiance would seize our hearts, our being be remade in God‟s image and earthly life transform into the life divine. There after Death the last time answered Savitri that if Truth supreme is separated by perfect Knowledge and the summit Vasts transcends her shadow here then what bridge can cross the gulf that she has left between her and the dream-world she has made? Or who could hope to bring her to men down and earth and induce her to walk on the harsh globe with wounded feet leaving her unapproachable glory and bliss, wasting her splendour on the dirty earthly atmosphere? The king of Death questioned Savitri designating her as the beauty of mortal limbs and soul who beats its wings to escape his net and does she possess that strength?

Then he asked her as to whom she is hiding in human disguise? Her voice carries the sound of infinity, she is the possessor of Knowledge, she is Truthful; the light of things beyond shines in her eyes. (664) But where is her strength to conquer Time and Death? Has she God‟s force to build heaven‟s values here? If divine Knowledge cannot bring down the world‟s transmuting power and if supreme Right does not come to give to Truth her right, then truth and knowledge are vain light. Then a blind Force but not Truth is the creator of this ignorant world, a blind Force but not the Truth is the controller of the lives of men: the great Gods rule the world by Power but not light, power is the arm of God and the recognition of Fate. The king of Death designating Savitri as a human claimant for immortality to reveal her power, to lay bare her spirit‟s force, then he would give back Satyavan to her. Or if the Mighty Mother is with her then that she should show him her face that he might worship her; let deathless eyes look into the eyes of Death and an imperishable Force touching the brute things transform earth‟s death into immortal life. Then only her dead husband can return to her and live. The prone earth perhaps shall lift her eyes and feel near her the secret body of God and love and joy can possess the passing Time.

Savitri remained unanswered and looked on Death. It seemed almost as if the world‟s darkness which was in his symbol shape consented to Heaven-light and God needed no more to bear the Inconscient‟s screen. A mighty transformation descended on Savitri. A circle of divine Light of the immanent Divine within her and the Immortal‟s brilliance that glimmered in her face with its radiance established in her bodily house and its flux made the atmosphere a luminous sea. In a blazing moment of advent the God incarnate thrust aside its veil. Although Savitri‟s was a little human figure in infinity yet it stood and seemed as Eternal‟s very home, as if the world‟s centre became her very soul (665) and all wide space was nothing except its outer robe. A curved line of the calm brows of far heaven descending into earth‟s abasement made her forehead‟s span an arch of the Omniscient‟s sight, and her eyes became like two stars that watched the universe. The Power that ruled from her being‟s summit, and the Presence lodged in her lotus secrecy (the thousand petalled lotus came down and held the centre in her brow where the mind‟s Lord sits in his control-room i.e. the lotus between and above her brows; throned there on concentration‟s native seat and opens the third mysterious eye in man and then the Unseen‟s eyes that looks at the unseen, and when Light with golden ecstasy fills man‟s brain and the Eternal‟s wisdom drives his choice and the eternal Will seizes the mortal‟s will. Thereafter that power stirred in the lotus of her throat of song and consequently in her speech thrilled the immortal Word; her life was tuned with the steps of the world-soul and harmonized with the cosmic Thought. As slips the God‟s sun into the mystic cave where hides his light from the pursuing gods, it slips into the lotus of her heart and woke up in it the Force that transforms Fate. Thereafter it poured into her navel‟s lotus depth, lived in the little lifenature‟s narrow home, blossomed heaven‟s rapture flower on the body‟s longings and transformed desire into a pure heavenly fire, thereafter that power entered into the cave where the World-Energy sleeps coiled and woke the thousand-hooded serpent Force that rose flaming up high and clasped the World-Self above; joined Matter‟s muteness to the Spirit‟s silence and filled the acts of earth with the Spirit‟s silent power. Transformed in this manner Savitri waited for the great Word to speak. Eternity looked into the eyes of Death and the Darkness could see God‟s living Reality. Thereafter a Voice was heard that seemed to be of stillness‟ self (666) or seemed as the low calm utterance of infinity when it speaks to the silence in the heart of sleep. The Voice said to the Death designating him as almighty and the victorious that it greets him enthusiastically, he is the grandiose Darkness of the Infinite. Calling

203 him as a Void the voice said that it makes room for all to exist, that he is the hunger who by biting the universe with his teeth consumes the cold remnants of the suns and eats the whole world with his jaws of fire, that he is the waster of the energy that has created the stars, he is the inconscience, the carrier of the seeds of thought; he is the Ignorance in which All-Knowledge sleeps buried as in a tomb and slowly emerges in its hollow breast wearing the mind‟s disguise of bright Ignorance. The voice said to Death that he is his shadow and instrument. It had given him the terrifying shape of dread and the sharp sword of terror, and grief and pain to force the soul of men to struggle for light in man‟s short lived half-conscious life. He is the prick and pinch to encourage him towards greatness in his works, the whip to his yearning for eternal bliss and his intense need for immortality. The voice said to Death to live awhile and be still his instrument. One day man too shall know his fathomless heart of silence and the meditating peace of Night and his grave obedience to eternal Law and the calm established pity in his sight. The voice said to Death designating him as timeless Mightiness asking him to go back to a distance from Savitri and leave the path for her incarnate Force.

Ask him to relieve the radiant God Satyavan from his black veil, to release the soul of the world called Satyavan making him free from his clutch of pain and ignorance that he may stand as master of life and fate, and be man‟s representative in the house of God, and comrade of Wisdom and better half of Light and the eternal bridegroom of the eternal bride. The voice said and yet Death being unconvinced still resisted (667) although he knew he refused still to know, although he saw he refused still to see. He stood unshakeable claiming his right. Though his spirit bowed, yet his will obeyed the law of its own nature that was even binding on Gods. Both the king of Death and Savitri stood opposed each other face to face. Death‟s being rose like a huge fort of darkness, around it the light of Savitri encircled him like a surrounding ocean. The Shade (like Death) survived awhile resisting heaven: a mass of conscious power attacking from the front and the oppression from above and the oppression of Savitri‟s divine aspiration he bore.

A pressure of intolerable force weighed heavily on his unbending head and stubborn breast; light like a burning tongue licked up his thoughts, it caused a luminous severe pain in his heart, light floated in him as a great physical suffering through his nerves; consequently the darkness of the king of Death destroyed muttering in Savitri‟s flaming-luminosity. Savitri‟s all powerful Word possessed his every limb and left no room for his enormous will that seemed pushed out into some helpless space and could no more re-enter but left him void. Thereafter the king of Death called to the darkest Night but it fell back trembling with fear, he called to Hell but it retired resentfully: he turned to the Inconscient for support from which he and his vast sustaining self was born, but it dragged him back towards boundless vacancy as if he would swallow up himself, he called to his strength but it refused his call. His body was eaten up by light, his ego self was devoured. At last knowing his defeat as inevitable he left the shape that he had worn being broken to pieces and given up the hope to make man‟s soul his prey and force the immortal spirit to be mortal. He fled afar avoiding Savitri‟s dreaded touch and took refuge in the retreating Night. (668) In the dream twilight of that symbol world the dire universal Shadow of Death disappeared vanishing into the Void from which it came. As if deprived of its original cause the twilight kingdom passed fading from their souls, and there Satyavan and Savitri were alone but none of them could stir from their places and between those figures rose a mute invisible translucent wall. In the long blank moment‟s pause all remained still and could not move: all waited on the unknown mysterious Will.

-End of Canto Four -End of Book Ten

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BOOK ELEVEN The Book of Everlasting Day

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Canto One The Eternal Day: The Soul‟s Choice and the Supreme Consummation (671) On worlds of immortal bliss and perfection‟s home a Superb sun has risen from the skies of ecstasy, possessing the secret heart-beats of divine delight the magical revelations of the Eternal‟s smile appeared. God‟s everlasting day surrounded Savitri; kingdoms of eternal light appeared and swam into all Nature with the Divine rapture. With the touch of eternity Savitri‟s body thrilled with joy and her soul stood intimately close to the founts of the infinite. She lived for ever new to an everlasting sight in the infinity‟s finite bonds. Eternity multiplied its vast self-look transforming its endless mightiness and joy into divine delight that soul‟s playing in the course of Time could share in grandeurs ever new-born from the unknown depths, and in powers that sprang immortal from unknown heights, and in deathless love‟s passionate heart-beats, and in scenes of unfading sweetness. Under the tranquil arches of semi-transparent cheerful calm Savitri could see that from All-wonder‟s vast bright skies descended down a deep bright blue coloured precious stone (like gems) and sunlit eyes that could see the absolute ray without any pain and the immortal clarities (brightness) of form. Twilight and mist had no place to exist in that atmosphere; in such radiant heavens the existence of night was impossible. Born majestically from the still beauty of creative joy the spiritual wideness‟s were seen firmly established in the bosom of that immense region; (672) for the pleasure of some self-willed divine peace embodied thoughts held in harmonious dimensions mate the deep demand of infinite sense and its need of forms to provide room for its bodiless thrill. A march of universal powers in Time and the soul‟s larger syntheses in their cyclic harmonies and rhythmic movements harbored a cosmic extreme delight‟s merrymaking festival, in thinks planned by the artist who has dreamed the worlds; and endless figuring of the spirit and of all the beauty and marvel here and of all Time‟s tangent varieties eternity was the substance and the source, those were not made from Matter‟s plastic substance, they offered before Savitri the signs of their depths and opened the great series of their powers. Beneath a triple mystic heaven the wonderful seven immortal worlds appeared arisen with their great grandeurs: and appeared the homes of the blest (realized persons) freed from death and sleep where grief or pain can never come arriving from self-lost and seeking worlds and alter Heaven-nature‟s changeless quietude and mighty posture of eternal calm and its pose of immortal ecstasy were seen.

Plains that seemed to be God‟s wide sleep lay expanded there, thought‟s climbed up winging towards heaven‟s vast peaceful state and lost in the blue extremes of immortality. There Savitri could feel that her changed earth-nature felt the breath of peace. There air seemed as an ocean of explicit great happiness or the happy bed of the unknown spiritual rest, a vast quietness swallowing all sound into a voicelessness of intense bliss; there even Matter brought a close spiritual touch, all there thrilled with the one divine that was permanently pervading the universe. The lowest of these seven immortal worlds was still a heaven transforming the beauty and brightness of earthly scenes into the magnificence of divine things. (673) Like a carved outline on a sapphire stone engraving the borders of heaven‟s lustrous noon in bright layer of eternal mountains were seen climbing like piled temple stairs, and from their heads of topless meditation‟s and rising from below the sound of the approach of a blue pilgrim multitude and also a great arriving voice of the wide travel hymn of timeless seas was also heard. From the mountain bosoms there came floating the singing crowd of hymns passing through branches fragrant with the smell of flowers hurrying through sweetness‟s with joyous footstep; the murmurous rivers of felicity divinely waved honey-voiced mixing with their sister of eddies (whirling) of delight and then widening to a movement of calm voiced slow speed that were flowing down to many brightened wide tidal mouth of rivers of dream and went whispering mixed into lakes of liquid peace. In an ecstasy beyond the perception of sense guarding an eternal poise of thought souls like sculptured images sat in an unalterable attitude of strong bliss were seen by the side of rivers of sound absorbed in dream. Around Savitri encircled the children of God‟s day dwelt in an unutterable joy, and in an uninterrupted happiness and immortal‟s ease, they were the eternity‟s glad blissful multitude. Around her she heard the movement and speech of the deathless nations, souls of luminous heavenly delight, shapes of faces with superb beauty, limbs made up of the divine Ray; in cities that were cut like gems from conscious stones and in wonderful pastures and on lusterous coasts‟ bright forms and eternity‟s luminous tribes were seen. Above Savitri the godheads in their rhythming meters were whirling the spheres, for whose absorbed mobile fixities blindly sought by orbits of our stars here. Blissful voices came and entered into her hearing‟s chords, and in the movement of each a music of all its own is found bursting out; (674) songs of birds whose feathers are of imaginations‟ wings of seven colours of the rainbow were throbbed upon evergreen branches of the trees. Immortal sweetness of smell was filled in the trembling wind. In small woods that seemed as of tender bosoms and trembling depths the million flowers of immortal spring were seen blossomed there, pure unnumbered stars as if tinged in colour of delight gathered for shelter in their emerald sky: that was coloured with brighter green flower masses of supreme beauty looked with laughing eyes. Like a sea changing its various colours the unbounded dances of flowers were eternally going on before ever-wakeful Heaven‟s sight and the splendour of superb beauty of the petals of flowers floated across the curtain like lids of eyes of dream were seen. Immortal rhythms of sweet and melodious sound waves were filled in Savitri‟s listening ear; a great spontaneous utterance of hymns of high heavens and passages from a tune trembling with the secrets of the gods borne on Titan wings of rhythmic grandeur poured down from some deep spiritual heart of sound. There a spirit

206 wandered happily in the wind, and a being self (soul) remained in a state of meditation in the leaf and stone; the voices that awakens thought wandered along a living verge of silence was heard, and from some inner depth an uncomprehended, inexpressible, singings of hymn of a wordless tongue of thing rose expressing the voice of the Unknown. There Music a climber on the invisible stair of sound not aspired with these few and striving steps that wander upon short-lived strings, but transformed its ever new uncounted tones in a passion of unforeseen discovery, and kept its old unforgotten ecstasies as a growing treasure in the mystic heart. There a consciousness that yearned through every sound of cry of unknown attraction and desire, found that voice and again searched the unsatisfied depths like a hunter, in some deep secret heart to find some lost or missed delight felt by Savitri fit to be expressed in a song was heard. (675) In those far lapsing tones of music was heard from foam and laughter attracting forward front of the boat and the charm of pure Circean islands of enchantress water goddesses inviting to adventure without danger into the beautiful lands where the Wonder sea nymph, whose songs attracted the sailors in the boat from rhythmic rocks in ever-foaming seas Savitri could hear piercing through the bewitching of her enrapturing sense the light, singing voice from the boat of the sea voyage of a divine soul. Savitri in the harmony of an original sight freed from our limiting ray of thought and reluctance of our blinded hearts to embrace the Godhead in whatever guise she could see all Nature as marvellous faultless (she realised God in Nature).

Her being‟s fiber reached out vibrating invaded by the beauty‟s universal revel (luxury) desired deep union with its outer selves, her heart like a harp‟s chords were made pure to seize all tones than earthly life can endure heaven‟s subtle touch that forcibly filled entirely all the living raptures. What would be seen as suffering here upon earth was felt as a fiery bliss in those heavenly worlds. All here on earth among the sensuous things before the inner prophet who perceives the spirit of delight that seemed to be nothing but passionate hint and mysterious shade, there turned to more sweetness than can now be dreamed here. The stress of the mighty signs of which earth fears and trembling because she cannot understand and keep them veiled in strange and lofty forms, here in this heavenly sphere the first fundamental dictionary of the infinite mind that expresses the idea of eternal bliss. Here in these heaven‟s rapture (delight) is an incident of daily common routine. Our human pleasure here are at is a fallen thread of all loveliness of those embraced thrill and all that lay here in symbol shape of careless ornament there that was sewn on the rich brocades of God head‟s dress. There the Things of those heavenly kingdoms were made as ideal‟s houses where mind (676) arrived for the experience of a deep real joy, the heart was a torch kindled from infinity, and the limbs were soul‟s dense bliss. These heavenly worlds were the first domains and outer courts, these were immense but least in view of wideness and value, and is the heaven of the slightest ecstasies of the immortal gods. Savitri‟s vision‟s swing swept higher and admitted through large sapphire opening and knew that these are the gates opening into the wideness of light beyond and were only fully decorated doors to enter into nobler and more well-chosen fair worlds. She endlessly aspired for climbing into those heavens; and in her uprising view one after another realm was seen. Thereafter on what seemed as a peak of her ascent where finite and infinite united as one, there Savitri in her protected vision could see the immortal‟s indestructible seats that live for an immortal joy, and to rule in the middle regions of the inextinguishable Ray. In one above the other immortal series great forms of deities sat established, through a clearness of crystal fire eyes of an unborn sight inclined towards Savitri and saw her. The heaven‟s cup barer angels with shapes of enchanting sweetness and of beautiful bodies from created from ancestry of joy raining down bliss, heaven‟s cup bearers were serving round Eternal‟s wine with their feet glimmering upon the sun stone court of mind. A group of bright bodies of moving souls pursuing the intimate and inter twined delight, in their harmonious walk as if sun beams made living and divine forever joined in the passionate oneness of mysteries‟ joy, in groves the golden-bosomed Apsara goddesses were seen like floating ever through a luminous sapphire dream, and were seen bathed in a whitest disc of bliss in a closely worn dress that reflects their golden limbs walked with shining footsteps wandering in the grasslands of the fairy kingdom, they in their pure motion of revel innocence‟s moved (677) and they whirled there in linked hands in moonlit joy of the heart taking their lavish enjoyment as a dance of God. There the wind-haired Gandharvas who were the faultless artists of unerring forms, magician builders of sound and rhythmic words sang to her ear the song that shape universal thought and lines tears the coverings from God‟s face and the rhythms that bring the sounds of wisdom‟s sea. Our great forefathers with immortal shapes and illumined brows moved in those bright lighted kingdoms with unending power and satisfied of light of those kingdoms enjoyed all the significances for which we try hard here on earth. There the high seers, absorbed poets met with those eternal thoughts that like travellers coming from beyond arrive to us like gods disfigured by the pains of birth deformed by our search, and deceived by our disguising mind, they seized the great words that were now uttered here as broken sounds by difficult joy on a mortal tongue. The strong heroes who walk here on earth in faulty and tripping feet were calm proud gods in those heavens. There Savitri‟s human nature filled with lightning flame and brightness and melting in waves of sympathy and sight of Truth tuned like a harp that throbs to the tune of the bliss of other‟s harp, drawn by the cords of unknown ecstasies gets fainted with heaven‟s delight, there she witnessed the clasp of love that can never be had on earth and bore the immortal eyes of veilless love. Savitri climbed more and more above and reached level after level that is inexpressible and beyond what mind can dream: she saw worlds of infinite levels stirring Nature‟s top. There she saw a great tranquil sweetness and subtler ether‟s field and mightier schemes well in order than heavenliest sense can give. There breath carried a stream of seeing mind, form was a slender covering of the soul: colour was a visible pose of ecstasy; shapes were seen as half immaterial (not corporeal) by the eyes (678) though touchable as sensual pleasure of objects yet became worthy of touch by the indwelling spirit. There the high

207 perfected sense lived illumined as a happy follower of inner ray, each feeling was the Eternal‟s hero child and every thought was a sweet burning god. There air was a radiant feeling, sound was a voice of the soul, sunlight was the soul‟s vision and the moonlight was like its dream. On a vast living base of silent calm all was spread into strength and a crystal clear joy. Like a bird soaring up higher who mounts unseen mixing his voice to the ascending voice his quivering heart of melody till its last complete quivering cry comes to an end of closing wings and he is silent with his soul discharged and freed from his heart‟s burden of delight. Savitri‟s soul floating up ascended beyond those heights. Her experience mounted on joy‟s coloured breast to inaccessible spheres in a winding flight. There Time dwelt identified with eternity as one; infinite joy remained linked with joyful rest.

As drowned in a sea of magnificence and bliss Savitri turning mutely in the puzzling network of paths of these surprising worlds and turning here and there saw their living knot and source, and key to their charm and fount of delight, and there by seeing could know towards that he is the same who traps our lives and captures in his dire pitiless terrifying net, and makes the universe his prison-like camp and makes in his immense vacant vast the labour of the stars a vain circuit and death the end of every human road and grief and pain as a reward of man‟s labour. One whom her soul had confronted as Death and Night now became a sum of all sweetness‟s gathered into his limbs and blinded Savitri‟s heart to the beauty of the suns that grows in him. (679) Now the dreadful tremendous shape of Death was transformed. Abolishing for ever his dense darkness and his sad destroying power, disclosing the mystery of his high and dire deeds, a secret grandeur rose revealed to her sight where once the vast embodied Void stood (the shape of the king of death). The dim disguise of the darkest Night (of Death) had grown into a wonderful face. The vague infinity whose darkness was shaped from the terrible unknown and the dark disastrous figure of a god now was slain, the error that arms the hands of grief fled away, and lighted the ignorant gulf whose hallow deeps had given to nothingness a dreadful voice. As when before the eye that wakes in sleep is opened the dark binding of a book and the illumined letterings are seen clear and inscribed with a golden light of thought within so also a marvellous form was seen before Savitri‟s eyes whose sweetness proved life‟s blindest pain as worthwhile; and on account of this all Nature‟s struggle was its easy price and the universe and its suffering seemed justified. As if the outer membrane of a bud of a flower of the air visible on music‟s waves, a lotus of light-petalled ecstasy took shape out of the joyous heart of the universal things. Consequently there was no more pain and suffering under the stars, the evil could no more take shelter behind Nature‟s disguise, there was no more the shadowy pretence of hate and the cruel gaping of mouth out of jeer existed on Love‟s altered face. There hate was the grip of love‟s strife; here on earth a dire love that only intents to possess replaced the sweet original god of love. The pretentious love forgetting the Will-to-love that gave it birth and the passion to lock itself and to unite it would swallow all into one lonely self, devouring the soul that had made it its own; (680) the unwillingness to be one has to suffer the annihilation‟s pain and punishment, the refusal of the world for love and passionate to take and not knowing how to give has to face anger. But now Death‟s dark covering was cast away from Nature‟s face and the godhead death‟s hidden laugh shed light on Nature. All grace, glory and all divinity were here collected in a single form of the transformed godhead Death; all worshipped eyes looked through his eyes from one face; he bore all godhead in his splendid limbs. An ocean like spirit dwelt within him, intense and irresistible in joy a flood of freedom and transcendent bliss rose bearing the immortal shape of beauty. In him lived the fourfold Being (four faced Brahma) bearing the royal crown that wears the mystery of a Nameless Name and the universe went on writing its tremendous sense of the inexhaustible meaning of a word. In him lived the architect of the visible world who at once is the art and artist of his works, world sprit, and thinker of things seen, Virat who lights his camp-fires in the suns and the star filled ether is his kingdom, and he expressed himself making Matter his speech: the universal objects are his alphabet, forces are his words, events are the crowded history of his life, sea and land are the pages of his story. Matter is his means and his spiritual sign; rolls the waves of thought in his eyelids lift; in the current of his blood makes the soul to flow. In the atom and molecules (cold) his dumb will is at work, his Will acts without feeling or motive, he needs not Intelligence to think or plan, hence the world creates itself irresistibly; because his body is the body of the Lord and in its heart stands Virat, the King of Kings. (681) In him the Golden Child reflects the shadow of his form who swings in the cradle in Sun Vast peaks: his name is Hiranyagarbha (Brahma), the author of the thoughts and dreams, who sees the invisible and hears the sounds that is never heard by a mortal ear, he is the discoverer of unthought realities that are Truer to Truth than all we have ever known, he is the guide on the inner roads; he is a seer, he has entered the forbidden worlds; he is a magician with the omnipotent wand (stick) of thought, the creator of the secret uncreated worlds. He holds the golden speech in his tongue and the diamond vision in his eyes, he is the divine vision and had ability to foresee and practice foretelling: he is an imagist (creator of forms) and casts the formless into shape, he is the maker and traveller of the unseen paths, he is the carrier of the hidden fire, he is the voice of the Inexpressible, he is the invisible seeker of the light, the Angel of mysterious ecstasies and conqueror of the kingdom of the soul. A third spirit (conscious force) stood behind him (Supreme Self) who is the hidden cause of all his powers, he is a mass of super conscience encircled in light, in his all-knowing sleep creates the universe. As grows a tree the universe was created from his stillness (peace), he is our seed and inmost centre and our top and base. All light is nothing but a flash from his closed eyes: an all-wise Truth is an inherent mystery of his heart, the All-Conscious Ray is shut behind his eyelids: he is the Wisdom that comes not by thought; his wordless silence brings the immortal word. He sleeps in the atom and burning star, he sleeps in man, god, beast and stone: because he exists, the Inconscient does its work, because he is there the world forgets to die. He is the God like centre of the circle, he is the circumference of Nature‟s wandering. (682) His sleep is an Almightiness of the cosmos, when he is awake then he is the Eternal and the Supreme. Above he was the wide bliss of the Infinite, and its omniscient and omnipotent peaceful state, its absolute and immobile silence and alone. All powers were sewn in him in countless harmony here. The world creator bliss lived in his body; love and delight were the summit of this immortal sweet form.

His proud blissful limbs in the enticing meshes (nets) of their snare recaptured all joys that run out of the hearts that are breathlessness and transient from life‟s prisioned desire. All visions that escaped from the sight of the eye, all happiness that comes in dream and trance, the nectar poured down from the trembling hands of love, the joy imperceptible by forms created by Nature

208 was crowded in the beauty of his face were waiting for bursting out in the honey of his laugh. Things hidden by the silence of the hour (moments), the ideas that could not be expressed by words on living lips, the soul‟s meeting with the infinity from the words had taken birth and became a flaming fire: the secret murmur of the star and flower revealed its secret (mysterious) meaning in the immeasurable depth of his look. Like a rosy splendour of dawn in the curved pose of his lips words burst out fluently and expressively, his tender smile creates wonder in the mind and stayed in the heart when escaped from the edges of his lips were luminous with the radiance of the morning star and remained like the various splendourous gems for the wide discovery of heaven.

His look was the look of eternity; the spirit of its sweet and calm thought of ideas was the wise home of gladness and in the rapture of the moments expressed the light of the ages, and it was like a sun of wisdom in a marveled grove. In his mind‟s great harmonious tones all contrary seekings reach their close relationship, (683) in the mutual marveling of their myriad tones with a deep heart met each other astonishingly and dwelt like brothers of one family having discovered again their common and mysterious home. As from the harp of some rapturous God there springs a harmony of blissful songs trying hard to leave no heavenly joy unsung, such was the joy of life in that embodied Light. There the transformed king of Death seemed as the wideness of a boundless sky, and the passion of a sorrowless earth and the burning of a world-wide sun. Savitri and the Godhead looked upon each other and Soul saw Soul.

Thereafter like an anthem (hymn of praise and gladness) soared up a voice from the hearts luminous cave whose magic sound could turn the intense weeping of the earth into a breath of delight and her cry to a song of spirit. That voice designating Savitri as a human image of the immortal word questioned her as to how she could see beyond the topaz (precious heavenly gem) walls the sisters of the divine gate glittering in light, brought from their wakeful sleep their genii (powers), and how could she open by force under the revelation‟s arches the doors made up of sculptured fine arts that baffles the mind and removed the barriers on the paths of the spiritual sight and taught her enraptured soul that held the golden key to enter into heavenlier states? In her the secret sight which man‟s blind eyes had missed has opened its view to reach his chariot-course moving across Time and death and his tunnel through which he drives life to reach his unseen distances of bliss. He is the silent search of the vigilant gods and they while pursuing his wisdom‟s vast mysterious work meet him in thousand ways of heaven. He is the beauty of the unveiled ray and draws the unconquerable pilgrim soul of earth while walking through the deep roads of the infinite night (684) beneath the blazing light of the stars. He is the Supreme sacred Ecstasy; those who have seen him shall grieve no more. The eyes that live in the darkest night shall see his form. Beneath the sky of suffering the shadowy shores foaming inflexible narrow passage waters that flows two powers born from one original ecstasy moved near but separated in man‟s life; one leans to earth from beyond and the other aspires to the highest: heaven in its joy dreams of perfect earth, Earth in its sorrow dreams of perfect heaven. Though two yearn to join each other, but due to vain self vanity divided on a false pretext and walk on separate paths, due to their illusive fears they are kept separated from their oneness mysteriously by miles of thought, they gaze each other across the silent gulfs of sleep. Or upon his vast wideness‟s they both sleep side by side like bride and bridegroom magically divorced, though they look to each other by waking up but can never clasp and while on the nuptial couch between the lover and the beloved a shadowy eidolon (image) of a sword flickering thinly which they hesitate to cross. But when the ghostly or illusive flame-edge quenches unable to burn further, then space and time never can create division between the lover and the loved, Space shall draw back its great transparent curtain and Time shall become the spirit‟s quivering endless bliss. He advised Savitri to wait for the moment of heavenly fate. In the meanwhile they two should serve the dual law which now only the divine seer of vision could glimpse crossing through the forest of their thoughts and reached and found the narrow bridges of the kingdom of gods. He advised Savitri to wait patient of the brittle obstacles of form and by the inner attraction of the throbbing sky make division her delightful means of happy oneness rapturously enhancing the same. (685) Yet if she would like to abandon the problematic world, impassive to the dark cry of things below, then she should walk on the thin thread like bridge and overleap the flood, cancel her contract with the laboring Force of the world; abandon the tie that joins her to earthly life and eradicate her sympathy with mortal hearts. She should arise and justify her spirit‟s conquered right, giving up her charge of transient breath, under the cold sight of indifferent stars and leave her borrowed body on earth and ascend into her blissful home. In this heavenly realm in the playground of the magnificent comrade under the sky spiritually lit by an un setting sun, and live as those godheads live who do not care for the world and do not share in the toil of Nature‟s powers and dwell absorbed in their self- ecstasy. He advised Savitri to forsake the earthly life‟s (uncertain mirage) misleading fable of desire and arise to divine bliss.

Savitri on hearing that harmonious enchanting voice in her peaceful heart a joy exceeding earth‟s and heaven‟s, and the bliss of an unknown eternity, and a rapture from some waiting Infinite poured down on her. As if the first beam of the morning sun rippled along two wakened lotus-pools from her eyes‟ as a confident messenger of felicity a smile came rippling out in her wide eyes. Savitri designating the godhead as the seizer of man‟s soul with birth and death, and the world‟s pleasure and pain and Day and Night, tempter of man‟s heart with far attraction of heaven, tester of his strength with the close touch of hell, she said that she does not want to climb to his everlasting Day, even as she had rejected his eternal Night. Savitri asked the Godhead (686) to return back to her other self coveted by her nature to her who does not turn from that Godhead‟s earthly Way. His heavenly spaces needs him not for increasing its joy; earth needs Satyavan‟s beautiful spirit created by him to spread delight down on earth like a net of gold. Earth is the elected place of mightiest souls and the battlefield of the heroic spirits; Earth is the factory where the Archmason

209 (Cosmic Worker) gives shape to his works. Savitri designating the godhead as King replied that his slavery on earth is greater than all the glorious liberties of heaven. The heavens were once to her natural home, she too had wandered in the star-jewelled small forests with fruit and flower trees and walked in golden sun lighted grazing grounds of animals and moon‟s silver lighted and expanse of short grass lands and heard the harp like laughter of the streams of heaven and rested under branches of trees spilling sweet fragrances, she too had a merry making in the fields of light touched by the ethereal subtle hem of the winds, and wandered around the circles of his wonderful music, lived in the luminous thoughts‟ of unlabouring rhymes, she walked tuning with the vast rapture‟s swift and harmonious pose, she had danced in the spontaneous measures of the soul the great and easy dances of the gods. The lanes on which the god children walked were fragrant with beautiful fragrance and very lovely is the memory of their footsteps amid the wonder-flowers of Paradise (parijat flowers of the heavens): her footstep were heavier and her touch is mightier.

There where the gods and demons battle in the night or engaged in wrestling on the borders of the Sun, her spirit of immortal love taught by the sweetness and pain of life to bear the uneven disharmonious beat that throbs against the intensity of some divinest hope, and to dare the impossible with these pangs of search in her and the spirit of immortal love stretches out its arms to embrace mankind. His heavens are too far for her from the suffering men. The joy that is not shared by all is imperfect. Savitri expressed with exclamation that as long as his whole world is filled with love she wants to spread love within more and more hearts (687) and surround and clasp them. How wonderfully beautiful the life that exists beneath the wheeling stars? She wants that life to be victorious in the battlefield with death, and bend the fierce difficult bow to strike out the arrows and flash the splendid sword of God. She requested the Godhead who blows the trumpet in the battlefield not to separate the handle from the sword before its use and not to take away the warrior before he strikes his arrows in the bow. She questioned whether there are not still a million battles to carry on? She designating the Godhead as king-smith (cosmic worker) requested him to go on striking the hammer still because his work of the universe has only begun and to join both Satyavan and Savitri in his strong smith like fire of life. She requested him to call the handle of the jeweled sword as Savitri and blade‟s exultant smile as Satyavan. She requested the Godhead to fashion them in beauty and drive them piercing through the world. Not to break the harp till the song comes bursting out because there are countless songs still to be sung. Savitri prayed the Godhead designating him as the secret immanent singer of the ages to blow up in her flute the diapason (fine seven tunes) that he had filled in it, to wake that cadence to the first wild passion of love divine and sing that which is not yet sung. She said that she knew that she can lift man‟s soul to God and Satyavan can bring the Immortal down on earth. Their will is at work on earth permitted by Godhead‟s will, and without him their work is like an empty roar of the storm; the Titan‟s force is a meaningless whirlwind and without him the strength of the gods is an illusive snare. She prayed The godhead not to let the Inconscient gulf to swallow man‟s race that struggles towards his Light through earth‟s ignorance. Savitri designating the godhead as a Thunderer flashed with the lightning of the soul not to hand over his sun to darkness and death, to achieve his wisdom‟s hidden decree and to fulfill the established command of his secret world-wide love. Savitri could not speak anymore and was lost in the thought‟s immensities that seized at the last edge of sound and hid its meaning in far distances, the stir of which exceeds even the speech she had own from the Unthinkable, (688) and the fount and end of all our thought and more intense than the word of the Inexpressible from whom all words come.

Thereafter the godhead of the wonderful vision like the noonday skies expressing his grandeur smile questioning Savitri asked as to how shall the earth-nature and man‟s nature that the earth still keeps intact can rise to heavenly levels? Heaven and earth look towards each other across a gulf that few only can cross, but none can touch, arriving through an indistinct ethereal mist out of which all things take shape and move in space; although all can see both the shores but none can reach there and touch.

Sometimes heaven‟s light coming down on earth and touches the earthly mind, consequently like lonely stars the heavenly thought burns in earthly sky; and like beautiful birds fluttering wings there moved soft heavenly seekings in earth‟s heart, and visions of joy that can never be attained by earth float in the fading mirror of her dreams. Sorrowful flowers blossoms from the faint trees (seeds) of earthly light and bliss, faint tones gathered from a half-heard song fall fainting in the baffling tone mid the sounds that has the painful effect, foam from the heaving luminous seas where dwells the beautiful and the far delight of the gods, unknown raptures and miracled happiness come and thrilled the earth and pass away giving half-shape to her mind and sense. Above her limited fields of finite steps, indifferent to the obstacles or pause she enough feels the experience of the worlds made up of strange perfection beyond law and rule, of a universe of self-discovered delight, an inexpressible rhythm of timeless tones, the manymovemented heart-beats of the One and Alone, the magic of the boundless harmonies of the soul, order of the freedom of the infinite, and the wonder-plastic substances of the Absolute. There in that heaven exist the perfect Truth and the timeless bliss. But the light of the world are the fragments of the light of the vanished star, (689) and gods visit the earth only accidentally and carelessly. They come with a divine Light that fails, and a Word (like a Mantra) soon becomes mute and nothing meant for earth can stay longer. High glimpses of the beyond fall on earth, but not the everlasting sight. A few persons can only climb near to the imperishable sun or live on the edges of the mystic moon and send the magic ray to earth-mind. There exists on earth a few heroes and demigods (people like gods) to whom immortal voices speak nearer and in their acts the gods (the heavenly race) themselves come near and inspire. Rare are the silences on earth where the Supreme Truth is heard and the timeless utterances expressed in

210 her depths, and there the glorious moments of the seers are few. On earth heaven‟s call is rare and rarer are the hearts that hears the heavenly voices attentively; the doors of light are closed to common mind, the earthly needs nail to earth the human mass, men only answers to the touch of greater things in the stress of an uplifting hour: although they are raised by some strong hand to breathe heaven-air, yet they fall back to earthly mud from which they climbed, the mud from which they are created, whose law they know, they feel joy in safe return to earth as a friendly base, and though something in them weeps for the glory lost and greatness lost, they accept their fall easily. On earth to live as common man they think as the best, in living like others they feel delight.

Because most of the human beings are built on Nature‟s primeval plan and they owe a small debt to a superior plane; living in the human average is their highest level and in a thinking animal‟s material range is their degree of highness. In the long ever-mounting hierarchy and in the stark necessity of cosmic life each creature is bound to its predetermined task and place by his nature‟s form and his spirit‟s force. If there is a little excellence or a little disturbance in that then it would break the settled balance of created things; (690) then the everlasting systematic arrangement of the universe would shake and in the strong tie of Fate a gap is created.

If there were no men and all were luminous gods on earth, then the mediating stair would have been lost by which the spirit awaking in Matter winds accepting the circuits of the middle Way, by heavy labour and slow aeonic steps reaching the bright miraculous nearness of God into the glory of the Oversoul (supreme self) (the evolutionary process would have been hindered). The Godhead said that his will and his call is inherent in men and things; but the Inconscient lies settled in the world‟s grey screen and draws all into its depths of Night and Death and Sleep. A little fragment of a consciousness that lies imprisoned in its dark and dumb bottomless depth, it lets escape but intolerant of the growing light holds back it close to the dark edges of its cave as if the fond ignorant mother kept her child tied to the trail of her robes of Ignorance. The Inconscient could not know the mystery of the world created by its sleep without the help of man‟s mind: to unlock a conscious door man is its key. But as yet the Inconscient holds man in its clutch enticingly in a suspended state: it draws its giant circle around his thoughts and shuts his heart from supreme Light.

Above man a high and dazzling limit shines and below a black and blinding border rules: man‟s mind is shut between these two skies. Man seeks the Truth through words and figures, concentrating his sight on surface and outer brute objects or dipping his cautious feet in shallow (less deep) seas seeks for Truth, and even then his Knowledge is Ignorance. He is shut up from his own inner depths; and thus he is deprived from the opportunity of looking on the face of the Unknown. Hence how shall he see with the Omniscient‟s sight and will with Omnipotent‟s force? The Godhead designating Savitri as a too compassionate and eager Dawn (691) asked her to leave the earthly race to the circling aeon‟s slow movement and to the working of the Inconscient Will and to its imperfect light: then all shall be achieved by the long act of Time. Though the human race is bound by its own nature, yet the soul of man is greater than his fate: remaining above the flow and wave of Time and Space, severed from the cosmic commonalty by which all life is closely related in grief and joy, freed from the universal Law the sun like single and transcendent spirit piercing through the mind‟s barrier wall can blaze its way and alone burn in the eternal sky and can become an inhabitant of a wide and endless calm.

He drew the attention of Savitri designating her as a flame to withdraw into her luminous self or else to return to her primal force on a seer-summit above thought and world; to become a partner of the Godhead‟s timeless eternity and identified with his infinite power: because she was the World-Mother and the World-Bride. Getting out of the fruitless yearnings of earth‟s life, out of her feeble (very little) unsatisfactory dreams wearing the wings that can cross infinity he asked Savitri to pass back into the great Power which was her birth place. She by her formless flight can rise up to that and her heart can rise from its unsatisfied stir and feel the immortal and spiritual joy of soul that is ever blissful. She has to lift up her fallen and disturbed heart of love and throw down her immeasurable desire into the gulfs. Rescued for ever out of Nature‟s shapes she has to discover as to what the aimless cycles of Time want, here on being relieved from terrestrial from vainly seekings for earth and there get entwined (linked) with all that her life has meant. To break into eternity her mortal mould; designating her as lightning Godhead asked her as to why not she melt it in her invisible flame? (692) The Godhead designating Savitri as an Ocean to keep clasped deep into herself her being identified with her inner wave‟s peaceful heaving‟s and remain happy for ever and to grow one with the still passion of the depths. Then leaving the limit that divides Satyavan and herself she shall know the supreme Lover and the Loved. Receive Satyavan into her boundless self and lose herself into infinite Satyavan. The Godhead designating her as a miracle and advised her as to why she does not cease there from where she had began?

But Savitri answered to the radiant God that he vainly allures two spirits saved out of the suffering world with solitary bliss, Satyavan‟s soul and her soul are linked unbreakably in the one task for which their lives were born, to raise the world to God through immortal Light, to bring down God to the world on earth and to transform earthly life to life divine they came. Her will is immutable to save the world and man; she said to the blissful Godhead that even the charm of his attractive voice cannot seize and snare her. She cannot sacrifice the earth preferring to happier worlds. Because the Eternal‟s vast Idea and his dynamic will dwelt in men and things, so only this enormous creation began. Savitri questioned the Godhead as to from where came this meaningless confused barrens of stars and the mighty sterile wheeling of the suns? Who then in the course of earthly Time created this bound soul in this worldly fruitless life, planted an aim and hope in the heart, set Nature to a huge and meaningless task or planned to waste the Nature‟s million-aenoed effort? What force compelled these conscious creatures to take birth, and to die and shed tears

211 that were crawling on the globe? If earth can look up to the light of heaven and hear answer to her lonely cry then the meeting of earth and heaven is not vain and the touch of heaven is not a snare. If he the (Godhead) and herself (Savitri) are true then the world is true; although he hides himself behind his works, (693) the existence of life is not a senseless riddle; since God has created the earth, hence earth must make God born in her; things hidden in earth‟s breast she must reveal. Therefore she claims him for the world that he has created. If man is tied to the bonds of his humanity, and to his pain for ever then let a greater being arise from man, the superhuman the mate off the eternal manifest and through earthly form let the Immortal god shine. Else this creation is vain and this great world is nothing though that appears to exist in Time‟s moments. But she had seen through the mask of lifeless things; and felt the stir of the secret spirit in things carrying the body of the growing God: the spirit‟s sight looks through veiled forms at veilless truth; it pushes back the screen that hides the gods; it ever climbs towards its own eternity. But the god answered to the woman‟s heart: designating Savitri as a living power of the incarnate Word, all that the Spirit has dreamed she can create: she is the force by which he created the worlds; she is his vision, will and the voice. But she is also the possessor of knowledge and she knows the world-plan and the slow process of Time‟s movement. In the forceful drive of her heart of flame, in her passion to liberate man and earth, with her anger at the obstructions and hindrances of Time and the evolution‟s slow and steady steps, she should not lead the spirit of an ignorant world to adventure towards Light and to push the bound and sleeping god in man into endless paths of the unknown and the unseen awakened it mid the inexpressible silences and across the lost boundaries of the limiting Mind and the Superconscient dangerous border line into the danger of the Infinite she should not dare too soon. (694) But if she would not wait for Time and God then she should go on doing her work and force the influence of her will on Fate. As he (king of Death) had taken back from her the load of his night and taken back from her his twilight‟s doubts and dreams, so now he takes away his light of the complete Day. These are his symbol kingdoms but here on earth no great choice can be made for determining the fate or uttered the sanction of the supreme Voice. The godhead advised her to arise upon the ladder of greater worlds to the infinity where worlds do not exist. But in the wide sky where greater Life uplifts its mystery and its miracle, and on the luminous peaks of summit Mind or where subtle Matter‟s inner spirit hides its secret in faint diffused light or there the Eternal‟s firm command cannot be heard which joins the head of destiny to its base. These are only the mediating links; that does not have the creative (originating) sight or the fulfilling act or last support that forever bears the cosmic load. Two are the Powers that hold the two ends (edges) of Time; one is the Spirit that foresees, and the other is the Matter that unfolds the thought of the spirit and without omission of any iota and dot dumbly executes God‟s decrees, those were Inconscient, stark and unquestioning obedient agent in between animate beings and inanimate things evolving inevitably a burdening load it contains in Time and Space, works out the intention of God‟s force, infallibly fulfills its allotted task and cancels not a little of things done, it never deviates in any way from the divine command and does not alter the steps of the Unseen. He asked Savitri if she wants really to liberate man and earth on the spiritual heights then she should look down on life and discover the truth of God, and man and world; (695) then knowing and seeing all she should do her work. The Godhead designated Savitri as a soul advised her to ascend into her timeless self, and choose the way of destiny and inscribe her will on the breast of Time. The godhead ended his advice and with that last sound a power came out and shook the strongly established spheres and loosened the stakes (bonds) that hold the tents of form. Freed from her vision‟s tie and net of her thought and severed from her feelings of sense like disappearing screens in the stupendous theatre of Space, the heaven-worlds vanished in the spiritual light. Around her a beginning less vast discovery and momentless in its unthinkable timeless return: a movement, and a cry and a word was heard: in spaceless orbits and around timeless roads the eternals Thought like songs that were rhythming unutterably in calm she heard as if sung by a regular group of singers. She lived fulfilled in an inexpressible world. Savitri became an energy of the triune Infinite, and dwelt in a measureless Reality, in order to keep tied the whole universe in God‟s immense delight housing a multitudinous embrace within her she became a power of Truth (being), Consciousness (force) and Bliss (rapture), a linked and myriad-motioned perfection, a chaste unity, a luminous Bride, and bearing the burden of universal love, bearing the eternity of every spirit she became an unparallel mother of unnumbered souls. She became the all knower of things she imagined or willed all: her ear was opened to ideal sound, any customary shape bound no more her sight, and her heart became a thousand doors of oneness. A cave and sanctuary (temple) of all pervading light and the last secret place of things beyond appeared before her. Thereafter in its circling round the enormous command of the godhead was hushed, silence gave back to the Unknowable what it had received. Her listening thought became still. (696) The form of things had vanished in her soul. Now that perfect godhead became invisible. Like a mysterious flame stays around a melting pearl some tremendous spirit lived around Savitri, and from that abolished Space‟s of ghostly shadow a voice that was never heard said: designating Savitri as a spirit to choose her supreme choice that cannot be given again; because from his highest being looks at her the nameless and formless peace where all things rest. He advised Savitri to experience the immense extinction (Nirvana) in a blissful high happy cessation in the lap of the eternity, to become a point that disappears in the infinite, now to enjoy the satisfaction of the extinguished flame, to become like a last sinking of a wave in a boundless sea, to feel the end of the troubles of her wandering thoughts, to see the last result of the journeying of her pilgrim soul. Designating her as a music asked her to accept the tiredness of the tones of her songs, as a river to accept the (to get plunged in the immense silence) the breakings of her stream‟s banks to make her limited shape as limitless. On Savitri hearing the voice the moments of Time became eternity. But someone yearned unknowingly within her bosom and silently the woman‟s heart

212 replied: addressing the voice as Lord she said that his peace is a boon to keep within her amid the roar and ruin of violent Time for the magnificent soul of man on earth. And His calm that bears his hands of joy to remain as a blessing of human mass. Like a roar of limitless ocean around a lonely island the eternal cry arose for the second time. The voice said that unutterable gates are wide open in front of her. To break the knot of earth his spirit leans down, passionate of oneness without thought or sign to break down all the walls and fence and make heaven bare, he advised Savitri to see with the large eyes of infinity and to tear the net of the stars above and pass into silence. In an immense and world-destroying pause Savitri heard the call of million creatures. Through the great stillness of her thoughts (697) the woman‟s nature immeasurably spoke: addressing the voice as Lord that his oneness that exists in many approaching hearts, her sweet infinity that exists in numberless souls is also her sweet infinity. Like a mighty retreating sea in ebb for the third time the great warning voice had swelled in: that he has spread abroad the refuge of his arms.

That the extremity of the magnificence of his supreme powers of sleep withdrawn above the dreadful whirling of the world his power looks forward out of its unattainable fathomless deeps. As a sound of gasping noise of the universal things was the answer to the voice, with her heart‟s passion the woman replied that she may be endowed with the energy that with the might of that she would clasp all man and woman, take all things and creatures in their grief and gather them into a mother‟s arms. Tranquil and distant like an angel‟s harp‟s tone for a last great time the warning sound was heard by Savitri: the voice said that he opens the wide eye of solitude to express before her the inexpressible rapture of his bliss, out of whose stir the throb of all hearts was born and that in a pure and exquisite hush lies motionless in its slumber of ecstasy, and resting from the sweet madness of the dance out of whose beat the throb of hearts was born. Thereafter breaking the Silence a hymn of tireless adoration with appeal and cry like a rhythm of music of the uniting souls wandering in the skies climbed above unendingly, then the perfect woman yearningly with all her womanhood replied begging to give her for the well-being of earth and men his embrace that crushes the living knot of pain, his joy in which all creatures can breathe, and his deep love‟s magical flow and its sweetness.

Once as arose from the womb of the Infinite when the first whispering strange delight imagined in its deep to seek the joy, (698) and the divine passion to discover and to touch, and the loved laugh that rhymed the musical songster‟s world: the voice of calm rapturous a tone began designating Savitri as a beautiful body of divine incarnate Word said that her thoughts are his and in her voice his voice is only uttered. His will is hers, what she has chosen has been chosen by him: all that she has prayed for earth and men he had granted. All shall be written out in destiny‟s book by his trusty of thought, plan and act, the executor of his will, the eternal Time. But since she has refused his imperishable Calm and turned from his limitless peace in which is abolished the existence of Space, and the shape of Time is lost, and from the happy extinction of her separate self in his uncompanioned lone eternity, because for Savitri the nameless wordless Naught and the annihilation of her living soul and the end of thought, hope, life, and love in the blank immeasurable Unknowable is not meant, hence he lays his blessing hands upon her soul of flame, upon her heart of love, and ties her to his power of work in Time because she obeyed his timeless will, she had chosen to share earth‟s struggle and fate and leaned in pity over earth-bound men and turned aside with the inspiration of help and yearned to save, therefore he binds her heart of passion to his heart and impose his splendid yoke (load) upon her soul. Now he would achieve his marvellous works through her. He would subdue her spirits limbs by his delight, and make her a living knot of all his bliss and build in her his exalted and crystal home. Her days (Life) shall be his shafts of power and light, and all her nights shall become his joy‟s mysterious galaxy of stars and all his clouds would adorn her thick bunch of hairs greatly and all his waves of spring shall flash in the tips of her lips. (699) He designated Savitri as Sun-Word (as the word from the Sun) and blessed her that she shall raise the earth-soul to the Divine Light and bring down God into the lives of men; earth shall be his workshop and his residence i.e. it would become heaven, and his garden of life to plant a seed divine. When all her work in human time is finished then the mind of earth shall become a home of light, the life of earth shall become a tree growing towards heaven, and the earth shall become the temple of God. Men awakened from the mortal‟s ignorance shall become luminous with Eternal‟s ray and in their thoughts the glory of his sun-lift (travel in the sun) shall be manifested and they shall feel the sweetness of his love and in their hearts and in their acts they shall feel his Power‟s miraculous inspiration. His will shall be the significance of their lives; living for him, by him, in him they shall live. In the heart of his creation‟s mystery he shall enact the drama of her (Savitri‟s) soul and inscribe there the long play of romance between him and her. He would pursue her across the centuries; the world barred from the veil of dividing ignorance and without getting any means to hide from his luminous gods in the enchantment of love would go on seeking for her. No shape shall cover her from his divine desire, nowhere she shall escape from his living eyes. With the help of her bare discovered soul, in her extreme identification with all and shunning of covering of humanity, liberated from the dense veil of human thought, made her one with every mind, body and heart, with all Nature, with Self and God and by summing in her single soul his mystic world he would possess in her the universe and the universe shall find all that he is in her. She shall bear all things that all things may be transformed; she shall fill the universe with his magnificence and bliss, and meet the whole universe with her transforming soul. (700) Attracted by his infinitudes above and thrilling in joy in the immensities below, pursued by him through his mind‟s unbarred vast, in the waves of his ocean-like life like a swimmer lost between two rising like seas by his outer pains and inner sweetness‟s and finding his joy in his opposite mysteries she shall eagerly yearn for him from every nerve. To meet him in the hellish depth and on the regions beyond, to

213 feel him in the storm and the calm, and love him in the noble and vile (morally base), in beautiful things and terrible desire a vision shall compel her inhaling and exhaling breath, her heart shall move her on the wheel of works and her mind shall urge her through the flames of thought. Even the pain of hell shall be to her his kiss; the flowers of heaven (parijat) shall make her remember his touch to her. Even his great frightening disguises shall bring his attractions to her. She shall hear the music even in the voice of swords; beauty shall pursue her through the heart of flame. In the rolling of the planets she shall recognize and meet he in the atoms of the whirling‟s universe. The wheeling forces of his created universe shall make her hear by uttering his name. His Delight shall drop down on her from his nectarous moon, his fragrance shall bind her in the snare of the jasmine flower, his eyes shall look upon her from the orbs of the sun. Being made as a secret mirror of the spirit of Nature in the universe she shall reflect his hidden heart of joy, she shall drink to the brim his pure sweetness without any mixture whatsoever in his pure lotus-cup marked with immortal stars. His dreadful hands laid on her bosom shall force her being to bathe in the violent longing‟s streams (rivers). She shall discover the one and alone thrilling song and tone and the harp of all his sweet music‟s (sounds) and roll (heave) his foaming wave in the seas of love. (701) Even his ruinous strong clutch shall be to her the stark test in fire of his joy‟s opposite shape: in the depths of her pain his secret face shall smile on seeing her: even amid the world‟s intolerable wrongs she shall bear his undiminished dreadful beauty, crushed by heavy steps of the cruel misdeeds of Time her yearning shall call to the ecstasy of his pleasure‟s honeyed touch. All beings shall be his messengers for the maintenance of her life; his creatures attracted to him on the bosom of her lover and compelled to meet him even in her enemy‟s eyes, they shall aspire for him from her heart. She shall not draw back from any of her twin soul. She shall be attracted helplessly to all. Men seeing her shall feel the solace of his hands of joy, in sorrow‟s pain they shall feel the touch of the foot-steps of the world‟s delight, and in mutual craving of two opposites their life shall experience his disorderly shock. With the touch of her love all hearts shall respond to his call, in the revealing distinctive emphasis of her tone they shall discover the ancient music of the planets and of her presence they shall draw nearer to him: inspired by love by her spirit‟s loveliness they shall embrace his body in her soul, in her life they shall hear the sweetness of his laugh and know the thrilled bliss with which he had created the worlds. All that she has is meant for other‟s bliss, and all that she shall belong to his hands. He would pour delight from her as from a jar, through all the ways of the universe he would whirl her as his chariot, he would use her as his sword and harp, he would sing his hymns of thought through her when she is vibrant with the universal ecstasy; and when she lives as one spirit with the universal things, then he would keep her alive not only from his living fires but also make her a channel of his timeless force. Unknown to her his hidden presence in her would lead her (702) unknown to her from her beginning in earth‟s hushed bosom through life, pain, time, will and death, outer shocks and inner silences along the mystic roads of Space and Time to the experience that the universal Nature hides. Those who seek to realise him and achieve him becomes his prisoner: here after this she shall learn from her heart-beats. The voice designating Savitri as beautiful slave of God advised her to go on loving forever. Designating Savitri as a rope of his rapture‟s widening snare, advised her to become his rope of universal love. The spirit chord by charm she should force it to the sweet and fathomless delight of oneness of the creation, and compel them to embrace his myriad unities and all his endless forms and divine souls. Designating her as Mind he advised her to grow perfectly in the eternal peace; and advised her to sing the immortal hymn; because the golden temple has been built and the flame-child born.

The voice advised directing Savitri to descend to her field of life again with him her heart desires. Attracting the attention of both Satyavan and Savitri it spoke that he had sent them from the time of primeval creation beneath the stars, they two were the dual power of God in an ignorant world, in a creation bound by limits shut from limitless self, for bringing down God to the inanimate globe, for lifting earth-beings to immorality. In the world of his knowledge and ignorance where God remains unseen and only his Name is heard and knowledge is trapped within the limits of mind and life is dragged in the net of desire and Matter hides the soul from its own sight, and in order to uplift earth‟s fate they shall be his active Force and between the extremes of the spirit‟s night and day they shall be his ever moving being on the immense inclined path from above. Satyavan is his soul who climbs from ignorant Night through life, mind and super nature‟s Vast to the light of Timelessness and his eternity hid in the rolling Time and (703) his boundlessness cut by the curve of Space (the horizons). It climbs to the greatness it has left behind and to the beauty and joy from which it fell, to the nearness and sweetness that can be had in all divine things, to the boundless light and illimitable life, and for the taste of the depths of the Inexpressible bliss, and to achieve the touch of the immortal and the infinite. Satyavan is his soul who fumbles out of the blindness of the beast to reach humanity‟s heights of luminous thought and to reach the nearness of the supreme Truth. Satyavan is the godhead who is the gradual evolving divinity in human lives embodied in earth-being‟s forms: he is the soul of man climbing to God in Nature‟s ascent like a wave out of earth‟s ignorance. To Savitri the voice said that she is his spirit‟s Power, the revealing voice of his immortal Word, the face of guiding Truth upon the roads Time pointing out to the souls of men the routes towards God. As if a dim moon light falls on a thick forest‟s lane while the dim light from the veiled Spirit‟s peak falls on Matter‟s rigid Inconscient sleep and Mind moves in a half-light amid half-truths, the human heart only knows human love and life is only a tripping and imperfect force and the body counts out the uncertain days of its existence, then she shall be born into man‟s doubtful moments in forms which hides the soul‟s divinity and show through the earth‟s doubting atmosphere his (God‟s) glory as a sun rises piercing through the clouds or burning like a rare and inward fire and fill men‟s lives with his (God‟s) nameless influence. Yet they shall look

214 up as looking to God‟s peaks and feel God like an encompassing atmosphere and rest on God as on a motionless base. Yet there shall glow on mind like a growing moon the Spirit‟s luminous splendour shall burn in dim skies (704) and light man‟s life upon his God ward road. But more is concealed there in God‟s beyond that shall one day reveal its hidden face. Now mind and its uncertain ray is all on earth and is the leader of the body and life, it is the thought-driven chariot of the soul carrying the luminous wanderer in the night to paths of a far uncertain dawn, and to the fulfillment of the Spirit‟s bottomless desire, to its dream of absolute truth and supreme bliss. There are greater destinies remain fixed on the summit of the evolving Path that is beyond the conception of the mind and the Traveller now travels in the paths of Ignorance without knowing his next step and his goal. Mind in its tireless climb can not make the soul reach at all places, there is a fire burning on the top most highs of the worlds, there exist the house of the Eternal‟s light, and an infinite truth and an unique power. The mightiness of the Spirit shall throw away its disguise; its greatness of shaping the world‟s course shall be felt by all: as a star rising from the Inconscient night and a sun climbing to Super nature‟s peak the spirit shall be seen in its uncovered beams. A few after abandoning the doubtful middle Way shall have a brief view of the wonderful Origin and some shall feel in her (in Savitri) the secret Force and they shall turn to meet the nameless walk and shall become the adventurers into a mightier Day. They ascending out of the limiting scope of mind shall discover the world‟s huge design and step into the Truth, the Right and the Vast (Sat, Rit, Brihat). She (Savitri) shall reveal to them the hidden eternities, and the breath of the infinitudes that were not yet revealed, some rapture of the world creating bliss, some rush of the force of God‟s omnipotence, some beam (Ray) of the almighty Mystery. (705) But when the hour of God arrives near then the Mighty Mother shall be born in Time and God be born into the human clay through the medium of forms made ready by human lives. Then the Truth Supreme shall be given to men: there exists a being beyond the being of mind, he is Immeasurable and cast into many forms, and this is the play of miracle of the varied multitudinous One. There exists a consciousness that is beyond the touch of the mind, it is beyond the utterance of mind‟s speech and its thought cannot reveal it. On earth there is no dwelling place worthy of it, this consciousness has no centre in man, and yet it is the source of all things thought and done, it is the fount of the creation and its works, and the origin of all truth here, it is the concentrated circle of the rays of the sun, infinity‟s heaven that pours down the rain of God‟s mercy, it is the Vast that calls to man to expand his Spirit, it is the supreme Aim that justifies man‟s narrow attempts, he is the stream from where man gets the little tastes of bliss allotted to his lot. Then some shall be made as the container of the glory and vehicles of the Eternal‟s luminous power. They shall be the high forerunners, and the crowns of the Time, the great liberators of mind bound by the ties of earth, the great transformers of human clay and the first-born children of new divine race. He is the incarnate dual Power shall open God‟s door, and the power of the Eternal super mind shall touch earthly Time. Through the medium of mortal man the superman shall wake and manifest the hidden demigod or growing into God-Light and God-Force reveal the secret deity in the cave. Then the earth shall receive the touch of the Supreme-Self, his bright uncovered Transcendence shall illumine the mind and heart and force the life and act to interpret his inexpressible mystery through the help of heavenly alphabet of Divinity‟s signs. (706) His living universal spirit abolishing the decree of death and pain, destroying the formulas of Ignorance shall encircle the being ready for immortality, with the deep significance of beauty and life‟s hid sense, his regard (sight) crossing infinity‟s waves bring back to Nature her early joy to live, and the lost delight‟s rhymed (metered) heart-beats, the tone of a forgotten ecstasy and the dance of the first world-creating Bliss. Then the Inherent who dwells in the body shall be the witness God and seated on his many-petalled lotus-throne watching his actionless personal being and his silent might ruling on earth-nature according to eternity‟s law, he shall be a thinker waking up the Inconscient world, and sitting in his thousand-pillared temple on the coastal sands of Time‟s sea and shall be an immobile centre of many infinitudes. Then the embodied being‟s life shall live as one who is the thought, and a will of the Divine, a disguise or robe of his divinity, an instrument and partner of his Force, and a point or a line drawn in the infinite and a clearly revealed shape of the Imperishable. Then the super mind shall be his nature‟s fount, the Eternal‟s truth shall be the regulator of his thought, and acts and his light and guide. Then all shall be transformed, a magic order shall come and overtop this mechanical universe. A mightier race shall inhabit the mortal‟s world. On Nature‟s luminous tops, on the field of the Spirit, the superman shall rule as king of life, almost make earth the mate and peer (equal) of heaven and lead man‟s ignorant heart towards God and Truth and lift his mortal being towards the godhead. A power released from the encircled boundaries and its height shall be pushed up beyond death‟s hungry reach, (707) life‟s tops shall flame with the Immortal‟s thoughts, and divine Light shall possess the darkness of its base. Thereafter in the process of evolving Time the whole creation shall be a part of a single plan, a divine harmony shall ever become the earth‟s law, her way of life shall be remade with beauty and joy: even the body made up of Matter‟s substance shall remember God, Nature shall draw back liberated from the clutches of mortality and the Spirit‟s fires shall be the leader of earth‟s blind force, Divine Knowledge shall descend down into the aspiring Mind and bring into the aspirant Thought a high nearness to Truth and God. The super mind shall possess the whole world to express its Light in it and thrill the absorbed heart with the love of God, and on Nature‟s lifted head place Light‟s crown and on her unshaking base shall establish Light‟s rule. A greater truth than earth‟s shall remain on earth like a canopy and shed its sunlight on the roads of mind; an unerring power shall lead the thought, a seeing ascetic Might shall be the ruler of life and act, and in earthly hearts shall burn the Immortal‟s fire. In the Inconscient‟s house a soul shall wake, the mind shall become God-vision‟s temple, the body shall become the instrument of intuition and life shall become the channel of God‟s visible power. All earth shall become the home of Spirit‟s revelation, the spirit shall no

215 more be screened by the body, and life and mind‟s ignorance; an unerring Divine Hand shall shape event and act. The Spirit‟s eyes shall look through Nature‟s eyes; the Spirit‟s force shall occupy Nature‟s force. The world shall be God‟s visible garden-house, and the earth shall be a field and camp of God, man shall forget consenting to his mortality and his embodied mortal impermanence.

This universe shall uncover its mystic sense, the process of the creation shall change its antique front, (708) an ignorant evolution‟s hierarchy shall release the supreme Wisdom chained below its base. The Spirit shall be the master of his world and no more hide in form‟s darkness and Nature shall reverse her method of action, the outward world shall disclose the Truth it covers; all the universal things shall manifest the secret God, all shall reveal the Spirit‟s light and might and move towards its destiny of great happiness.

Even if a hostile force claims its everlasting sovereign rights and cling to its rule and man refuse his spiritual fate, yet the secret Truth in things shall only win. Because in the march of all-fulfilling Time the auspicious moment of the Transcendent will must come: in Nature‟s fixed inevitable course decreed since the beginning of the world in the deep essence of created things all shall turn and wind towards their predestined goals: even as a high crown of all there shall come the end of Death and the death of Ignorance. But before that takes place first the high Truth must set her feet on earth and man aspires to the Eternal‟s light and all his bodily members must feel Spirit‟s touch and all his life obey an inner Force. This consequence too shall happen because a new life shall come, the embodied Superconscient truth shall come and the Super nature‟s mights shall get their native field: it shall transform earth‟s ground of ignorance into Truth‟s colony, even truth shall make Ignorance a transparent robe through which the brilliant limbs of Truth shall shine like a sun on Nature‟s top and Truth shall be the guide of Nature‟s steps and Truth shall look out from her lowest depths. When superman is born as Nature‟s king his presence shall transform Matter‟s world: (709) he shall burn Truth‟s fire in Nature‟s night, and establish Truth‟s greater law upon earth; man too shall turn responding towards the Spirit‟s call. Man shall awake to his inner hidden possibility and to all that slept within his heart and all that Nature ment when earth was formed and the Spirit made this ignorant world his home, and he shall aspire to Truth, God and Bliss. A higher race shall be the Interpreter of a diviner law and become an instrument of a supreme design, shall lean to lift up man. Consequently man shall aspire to climb to his own heights.

The Truth from beyond shall wake a lower truth, even the dumb earth shall become a conscious force. The Spirit‟s peaks and Nature‟s base shall draw near to their secrets of separate truth and know each other as one divine being. The Spirit shall look out through Matter‟s sight and Matter shall reveal the Spirit‟s face. Then man and superman shall become one and all earthly life shall become one. Even the common multitude shall hear the immanent Divine‟s immortal Voice and turn to commune with the Spirit within and try hard to obey the high spiritual law: this earth shall stir with the higher innate passions, humanity shall awake to his deepest self, and Nature shall recognize the hidden divine being. Even the many shall become receptive and shall bear the splendour of Divine rush and respond to his vehement knock at the unseen doors. A heavenlier passion shall uplift men‟s lives, their mind shall share the inexpressible light and their heart shall feel the ecstasy and the fire. Earth‟s bodies shall become the conscious soul; the bond slaves of the kingdoms of death shall be freed from their bonds, mere common men shall grow into spiritual beings (710) and see awake the unexpressed mute divinity. Intuitive rays shall touch the nature‟s peaks, a divine revelation shall stir the nature‟s depths; the Supreme Truth shall be the guide of their lives, their thought and speech and act shall be controlled by the direction of the Truth, they themselves shall feel lifted up nearer to the sky and feel themselves were as if little lower than the gods.

Because knowledge shall pour down in radiant streams and even darkened mind shall thrill with new life and kindle and burn with the Ideal‟s fuel and turn to escape from mortal ignorance. The boundaries of the Ignorance that causes obstruction on the way shall recede, consequently more and more souls shall enter into light, all human minds shall be lit and inspired and hear the call of the mystic inviter and all lives shall blaze with a sudden inner flame and all hearts shall grow inspired with the love of divine delight and human wills tune to the divine will, these separate human selves of earthly beings shall feel the oneness and identity of the Supreme Spirit, the earthly senses shall grow capable of heavenly sense, these flesh and nerves shall feel the thrill of miraculous ethereal joy and mortal bodies shall be capable of gaining immortality. A divine force shall flow through tissue and cell and take the charge of breath, speech and act and all the thoughts shall become a light of the suns and every feeling shall become a heavenly thrill. A lustrous inner dawn shall come oftenly lighting the chambers of the sleeping mind; an unprecedented bliss shall run through every limb and Nature and be filled with a mightier Presence. Thus the earth shall open towards divinity and common human natures shall feel the wide uplift, common acts shall be illumined with the Spirit‟s ray and meet God in common thing. Nature shall live to manifest the un manifested God, the Spirit shall take up the human play and this earthly life shall be transformed into the life divine.

(711) The accent of the subtle music ceased. The soul of Savitri sank down with a hurried swimming floating lapse through unseen worlds and bottomless spaces like a star. Amidst laughter of unearthly harp‟s she could hear around her nameless triumphing voices of an innumerable sound. A group of singers of rushing winds came to meet her. She bore the burden of infinity and felt the stir of all ethereal space in her limbs. An unparalleled sweet face that seemed as of a youth‟s pursuing in her fall came, it was the symbol of all the beauty that the eyes have never seen, and her head was crowned as with richly coloured peacock plumes seemed to have been shaped in a sapphire, her hearts stirring smile unsatisfactorily attracted to its delight, and it plunged into the intensely delighted embrace of Savitri‟s soul. Although its shape is yet was joyfully the same, like a moonlit night clouds with stargemmed were drifting it gradually grew into a woman‟s dark colour and beautiful shape, its glory was shadowy and its depth was

216 stormy, its will was tremulous and she is terrible in love. Her eyes were looked like Nature‟s blind ecstatic life sprang from some Spirit‟s passionate depth that missioned her to the whirling dance of earth. Like a bird held in a child‟s satisfied hands amidst the head long rapture Savitri‟s fall in an enchanted grasp her spirit strove admitting no release till Time should end and as a fruit of mysterious joy, kept within her strong embosomed soul like a flower hidden in the heart of spring the soul of Satyavan drawn down by her in such a manner that it cannot slip from her hold in that mighty lapse. As she fell invisible heavens group after group in a flight soared passing over her. Then all the blind and (712) near attractions of earth in a joy quickened the fearful rapidities of downward pull of her coming down. Lost in the giddy proneness of that speed she whirled, sinking, overcome in a broad unconsciousness disappeared like a leaf spinning from the tree of heaven as in a pool; a welcoming softness drew her into a wonder of miraculous depths, above her a darkness of closed wings covered her and she was buried in a mother‟s breast.

Thereafter from a timeless plane that watches Time, a Spirit looked out upon destiny, in its Timeless moment saw the ages pass. All was still in a silence of the gods. The prophet moment covered limitless Space and cast into the heart of hurrying Time a diamond light of the Eternal‟s peace and a crimson seed of God‟s bliss, a glance of undying Love‟s sight fell on it. A wonderful face looked out with immortal eyes; a hand was seen removing the golden bars that guard the imperishable secrecies. A key opened the shut doors of Time that were closed with a mystic lock. But from where the silence of the gods had passed a greater harmony born from the stillness surprised the yearning hearts with joy and sweetness, and with an ecstasy, and laughter and a cry.

A power leaned down upon earth and consequently happiness found its own home. The infinite bliss spread over the wide earth.

-End of Book Eleven

217

BOOK TWELVE Epilogue

218

Epilogue The Return to Earth (715) Savitri‟s soul woke out of extreme trance. Laid on the earth-mother‟s calm Inconscient breast she saw that the green branches of the trees of the forest lean above her guarding her sleep with their bewitched life, and above her head a blue-winged ecstasy flapping wings flew from branches to branch with high-toned songs. Into the enchanted secrecy of the Forest she could see that almost and ending day through a green opening of the leaves like window in the wideness of lazy skies reclined and the thinning day turned to its slow fall into evening‟s peace. Thereafter she intensely clasped the living body of Satyavan: she with an unspoken joy to exist and to live bore the blissful burden of his head between her breasts‟ in a delightful warm cherishment, in the waking gladness of her limbs from the state of trance she felt the weight of heaven in Satyavan‟s limbs and his touch was felt like the sum total of joy of the universal things, and all her life was conscious of his life and all her being rejoiced encircling his being.

The far immense state of her trance had passed away; she once again returned to her human state and became earth‟s Savitri, yet she felt in her an illimitable change. A power too great for earth dwelt in her soul, a bliss too large for heaven lived in her heart, and a Light too intense for thought and a love too boundless for earthly heart‟s emotions lighted her skies of mind and spread through her deep and happy seas of soul. All that is dedicated to God (spirituality) in the world drew attracted near to her divine unresisting mood. A wonderful voice of silence expressed her thoughts of mind. All things in Time and Space she made as her own; (716) They moved in her and lived and existed in her, she felt that the whole wide world created for her enraptured embrace of love clung to her for delight. Now in her soul‟s boundless and spaceless wideness a numberless year seemed as moment‟s determined from a long time and like the brilliant times sparks of eternal time. Like a bird flies winging out from its bright nest her earthly morns became like glowing flights of joy. She became boundless and a form of infinity. Her spirit no longer absorbed by the moment‟s beat felt the unending future and lived with all the beginningless past. Her life became like dawn‟s victorious advent, the dream of her past and future days were felt as fulfilled, old vanished evenings and noon‟s of the future gave hint to her of a vision with regard to the foresighted moments. She lay a while prostrate in meditating bliss, in the wonder of a waking trance thereafter in a half-risen state she looked around as if to recover old sweet common threads, old happy thoughts and small treasured moments and weave them into one immortal day. Like an ignorant infant spirit unknowingly lain lulled to sleep by lovely songs on the verge of two consenting worlds she ever held her lover on the paradise of her breast allured into a deep sleep. But soon she leaned down over her loved husband on his closed eyelids to call back his mind to her; with the touch of her love; now her still look of intense delight remained settled, she had no other yearning now, but her sight was deepened with limitless joy or in last paramount satisfaction, and was pure, passionate with the passion of the gods. There was no desire in her because all was made like an arch of a gate of heavenly rays and an absorbed control of sky on earthly plane and heaven‟s leaning down to embrace earth from all sides (717) and a tranquil rapture and a vast security pervaded over there. Thereafter at the touch of Savitri the soft winged-sleep of Satyavan rose sighing from his flower like lids and fluttering its wings flew murmuring away. Satyavan awoke and found that Savitri‟s eyes were waiting to see his eyes, and felt the touch of her hands, and saw the earth his home was given back to him once more and his passion‟s fount Savitri became his own again. Satyavan encircling with his arms held Savitri locked around embracing her like a living knot to make an instant possession. Satyavan murmured her name with his trembling lips and cried in a wonder of vague recollection designating Savitri as an holder of golden beam, and holder of all sweetness‟s like a container of jewellery brilliantly bright like sunlight surrounded with walls and Godhead and woman, moonlight of his soul as to from where she had brought him back prisoned with her chain of love? Because surely he had travelled in strange worlds accompanied by her, ever pursuing soul, together they had contempted the gates of night as trivial and came back leaving it. He said that he had turned away his face from the heavenly joy because without her the heaven was insufficient for him. He questioned Savitri as to where that dreadful Shape has passed now that was standing between them, the Spirit of the Void creating a great barrier and claimed the world as Death and Nothingness, denying God and soul? Or was all a dream or a vision seen in a spiritual sleep, or a symbol of the oppositions of Time or a mind-lit light of significance or in some stress of darkness lighting on the Way or guiding a swimmer through the straits of Death or a scout and voyager came from Eternity finding out the soul that came into the world-adventure in a gully (lane) mid the crowded streets of uncertainty with the help of its ray? But Savitri replied to Satyavan that their parting was a dream; they are together and alive. She asked Satyavan to look around and see their glad and unchanged (718) home this forest with its thousand cries and the whisper of the wind among the leaves, through the little opening of the leaves the bright precious stone scenes of the evening sky, that was like God‟s canopy of blue that sheltered their lives and the birds crying for heart‟s happiness, who were the winged poets of their solitary kingdom and their friends on earth where they were king and queen. Only their souls have left behind Death‟s night, being changed by a mighty dream‟s reality illumined by the light of the symbol worlds and the stupendous summit self of things they stood now at the gates of Godhead unbound and free.

219 Thereafter filled with the glory of their happy mood safely locked with their fingers clinging each other they rose hanging on each other in a silent look. But Satyavan with a new wonder in his heart and new worshipping flame in his eyes questioned Savitri as to what a high transformation had taken place in her? She was ever splendorous, still a calm pure goddess, yet her sweet human limbs given to her by earth are seen dearer and more divine to him. She was the Supreme Goddess of his adoration, his desire leaned down to become an offering to her, his daringness clasped her claiming to make her body and soul his life‟s empire, joy‟s playfield, love‟s sweet property, a lonely statue of silence in his soul‟s temple and an attracting Godhead and a golden bride and clasped her. He said that now she seemed almost too lofty and great for mortal worship; Time lies prone below her feet and the whole world seems only as a part of her, her presence appears as the silent heaven in which he inhabits, she seemed to look at him in the eyes of the stars, yet she is the earthly keeper of his soul, his life seems as a whisper of her dreaming thoughts, his morns are a splendour of her spirit‟s wings, and his day and night are a part of her beauty. (719) He questioned Savitri had she not taken his heart to treasure it in the safe environment of her breast? Awakened from silence and sleep he had consented to live for her only.

His mortal arc of life has greatened by her, but in an exclamation he said as to what far heavens and unknown infinitudes she has brought for him as her illimitable gift? If to fill these she would advance in her sacred ascension to the beyond then his human earth shall still be yearning for her bliss. He wanted his life to be turned into a song of joy through her refuge and make his silent being wide and deep by her. Savitri, the heavenly queen consenting to Satyavan‟s will clasped his feet, with her temple like sacred deep hairs enveloped in a soft cloak of love and answered softly like a vague tone guitar like instrument ( an harp, orchestral musical instrument: she said everything has been changed now, yet all still is as before. Asked him to see that they have looked upon the face of God, their life has opened with the touch of divinity. They have borne identity with the Supreme and realised the meaning of His play in their mortal lives. Although by the mighty touch of the Supreme their love has become greater and they have realised the heavenly significance of it, yet in their mortal love‟s delight nothing is lost. Heaven‟s touch brings perfection to the earth but does not make it meaningless: the bodies of both are needed for the last perfect perfection; the heavenly secret rhythm still repeats in their breast and their human heart-beats are passionately nearer to each other. She still is the same woman who once came to him mid the murmur of sunlit leaves upon the verge of this forest; she is the same daughter of the king of Madra, Savitri. As she was to him before now still she is the same to him as his close comrade of thoughts, and hopes and toils, she would join for him all happy contraries. All sweet relations in their lives became fruitful; she is his kingdom as he was to her, she is the empresses and the slave of his desire, (720) she is the prostrate possessor of his feet, the comrade of his soul, the mother of his wants, he is her whole world, her needed earth and her thoughts‟ adorable heaven, and the world she inhabits and the god she adores. That his body is the counterpart of her body and their limbs are complementary to each other, his heart is the key to all her heart-beats, this is what she is for him and what he is for her. She said to Satyavan that their married life began anew and neither gladness nor the depth of mortal joy is lost. She told Satyavan to let both of them go through that world and live their life there which is the same, because it is again given back to them, but they could know that this is the play-ground and dwelling-house of God who hides himself in bird, beast and man that he sweetly finds himself again by love and oneness. His (Gods) presence leads the rhythms of life that seek for mutual joy in spite of earthly pain. She inviting the attention of Satyavan said that in the great light of the discovered soul they have found each other. Asked that they should return back to home as evening has covered the skies. Now grief is ended and serene bliss remains for ever more in their lives. She asked Satyavan to look at this very wonderful world, and let both of them give joy to all because they were the possessors of joy. Because their souls have not come for themselves alone out of the veil of the Unmanifest, out of the deep immense Unknowable upon the ignorant breast of this enigmatic earth, into the ways of labouring and seeking men, they were the two fires that burn towards the parent Sun, and the two rays that travel to the original Light. To lead man‟s soul towards the truth and God, to draw the scheme of the frequent changes of fortune of mortal life into some semblance of the Immortal‟s plan and to make it little nearer to the divine Idea and to shape it closer to an image of God they were born. (721) Savitri surrounded Satyavan‟s breast and head with the bounds of her arms as if to keep him on her bosom worn for ever through the journeying of the years. Thus they stood embraced each other for a while that their kiss and passion-bounded embrace would remain as a meeting-point in their mingling spirits one for ever and two-souled, two-bodied for the joys of Time. Thereafter they left that solemn place with hand in hand now filled with mute unusual memories returning slowly through the forest land to their far green thatched hermitage in the woods. Around them the afternoon changed to evening, light slipped down to the brightly sleeping verge, the birds came winging back to their nests and day and night leaned to each other‟s arms.

Now like dreaming phantom spirits and long night, the trees that became shadowy due to dusk stood near around them, the grey-eyed meditative evening heard their footsteps, and the cries and movements of the four-footed wanderers of the night came from all sides of the forest at the approach of the night. Thereafter a human rumour long unknown to their solitary lives arose invading the enchanted wilderness of leaves and broke violently its imperishable sleep and the state of their secluded loneliness that was once sacred. As if floating of a coloured wave upon the eye many voices and the sound of the brilliant strenuous crowded lives of men till they are seen by them have come breaking in through the screened dusk deepened still neared. Thereafter raising many flashing lights a great brilliant company of men arrived. Bringing its stream of unknown faces gathered with gold-fringed turbans,

220 wearing gold-embroidered robes, (722) glittering ornaments, fluttering edges of clothes in its ordered heaving came wavering, hundreds of hands parting through the branches of the trees of the forest and hundreds of eyes searched in the complicated narrow paths of the thick forest. Calm priests clad with white cloths bringing their grave-eyed sweetness, hero warriors armed with glorious armour, splendid-hooved horses came crushing through the forest. Relieved from blindness and disabled-limbs king Dyumatsena walked in front, but his far seeking eyes fully confident and self dependent on light could see clearly this outer world of forms; walked firmly on the soil with monarch steps. Besides him the queen mother of Satyavan who once in her weakened strength of tired labour had borne the fallen life of those she loved came changed her anxious face from its burdened look. Like the departing evening‟s gathered light‟s closed sight her patient eye‟s paleness wearing a mood of a glow of deep thought could foresees her child like a the morning glow of sunrise. She sinking in quiet splendours of her life‟s sky lived a while meditating upon the hope of her child, the brightness of her eyes rich receding light brought a thoughtful forecast of musical dawn. She only could see first her children Satyavan and Savitri. But at the vision of beautiful figures of both Satyavan and Savitri the sky and air awoke perturbed with growing cries and the swift parents went hurriedly to their child who was the cause of their life now and had given them breath possessed him with their arms. Then king Dyumatsena in a tenderly chiding tone said to Satyavan that gods of good luck have poured down on him merciful, a Kingdom seeking came for them and his eyes got the heavenly rays. But asked him as to where he was till such late hours? He said to Satyavan his child and the cause of his life that he had tormented gladness with fear‟s dull shadow. Questioned him as to with what danger encircled he was detained in the darkening forest ? Or how could pleasure while passing in her ways forgot that without him the circle of light of his eyes are worthless (723) and only for his sake (to see him) rejoice at light? Thereafter he also told Savitri that this behavior was not as worthy of her because she did not lead back her husband to their arms soon knowing fully well that Satyavan‟s presence besides him brings his taste in food and on account of his touch in the evening and morning he lived content in his remaining life. But Satyavan replied to Dyumatsena with smiling lips to lay all his gratitude on her because she is the cause of all these changes in their lives. With her enchantments she had kept he twined intimately together. Attracting the attention of his father Satyavan said that today at noon leaving this earthly house like body he wandered in far off eternities, yet still bound in the clutches of her golden hands, again after returning he wandered in his (Dyumatsena‟s) little hill lock called green earth and in the moments of his transient sun lived glad among the busy works of men as is witnessed by him now. Thereafter the sight of all eyes turned their astonishing looks where stood the holder of a deepening redder gold cheeks with eyes of humility the lovely child Savitri and this one consenting thought effected with emotion every heart that gathered there. They questioned as to what a bright marvel of the earth or skies stood silently by human Satyavan indicating luminosity in the dusk of the evening? If this is she the name of whom the world has heard then there is no reason of more wonder in any happy change. Because each easy super natural event of great happiness of her transmuting heart is a magic. Thereafter who seemed as a priest and sage questioned her designating her as a woman soul as to from what light and the strength of what power she had achieved the swift marvels of this day that had opened by her a happier new age‟s horizons for them? Then Savitri‟s eye lashes opening upwards gathered into a divine vision that could see immortal things and in a joyful mind saw human forms for their delight. They claimed Savitri as the life of all these souls to become Savitri‟s life for her deep child like motherhood, and thereafter her eyelashes having been closed veiled the light. She replied drawing the attention of the sage (724) intimating the sage that she awakened to the meaning of her heart to feel love and oneness is to live the perfect life and this is the magic of their golden transformation, this is the whole truth which she knew or sought. They wondered at her and her too luminous words turned returning westward in the fast thickening night.

Freed from the entangling verge of creepers, leaves and bushes of the forest they came into a dimness of sleeping earth and travelled through the faint and sleeping plains of the earth. Murmur and movement and the footsteps of men broke the night‟s solitude; the cry of the horses rose from that indistinct and voiceful sea of life and all along it‟s marching the rhyme of hooves of the horses and the chariot‟s homeward voice swelled up. Drawn by white manned horses upon a high-roofed chariot with the help of the partially burnt torches went with linked hands Satyavan and Savitri hearing a marriage march and nuptial hymn and proceeded there where waited for them the many-voiced human world. Innumerable stars swam in the sky on their shadowy field shedding the light on their ways in the darkness of the night. While they reached the southward verge of their kingdom of Shalwa then the night merged in the circle of light of her musing brows and the moon dreaming in heaven in silver white peace possessed her luminous reign. The night brooded through her stillness on a thought deeply-guarded by her mystic layers of light and carried in her bosom a greater dawn.

THE END