Articles on Savitri by Mangesh Nadkarni

At the head she stands of birth and toil and

fate, In their slow round the cycles turn to her call; Alone her hands can change Time’s

dragon base. Hers is the mystery the Night

conceals; The spirit’s alchemist energy is Mangesh Nadkarni

hers; She is the golden bridge, the wonderful

fire. The luminous heart of the Unknown is she, A power of silence in the depths of God; She is the Force, the inevitable Word, The magnet of our difficult ascent, The Sun from

which we kindle all our suns, The Light that Originally Published in the “Next Future” (Journal of Sri Aurobindo Society) leans from the unrealised Vasts, The joy that from February 2003 until October 2007

beckons from the impossible, The Might of all

that never yet came down. All Nature dumbly calls to her alone To heal with her feet the aching throb of life And break the seals on the dim soul of man And kindle her fire in the closed heart of things. All here shall be one day her sweetness’ home, All contraries prepare her harmony; Towards her our knowledge climbs, our passion gropes; In her miraculous rapture we shall dwell, Her clasp shall turn to ecstasy our pain.

Articles on Savitri

Contents 1. Introduction ............................................................................................................................................. 4 2. Mahabharata Story ................................................................................................................................ 11 3. Departures from Mahabharata Legend ‐ Books One to Four ............................................................... 19 4. Departures from Mahabharata Legend – Book Five and Book Six Canto One ..................................... 30 5. Departures from Mahabharata Legend – Book Six Canto Two ............................................................. 42 6. Departures from the Mahabharata Legend – Book Seven Cantos One, Two and Three ...................... 55 7. Departures from the Mahabharata Legend ‐ Savitri Yoga .................................................................... 66 8. Book One Canto Four ............................................................................................................................ 72 9. Book Seven Canto Three ‐ Entry into the Inner Countries .................................................................... 77 10. Book Seven Canto Four ‐ Triple Soul‐Forces ...................................................................................... 86 11. Spiritual Evolution and Levels of Consciousness ................................................................................ 95 12. Book Seven Canto Five ‐ The Finding of the Soul .............................................................................. 100 13. Book Seven Canto Six ‐ Nirvana and the Discovery of the All‐Negating Absolute ............................ 106 14. Book Seven Canto Six – Continued ................................................................................................... 114 15. Book Seven Canto Six – Conclusion ................................................................................................... 122 16. Book Seven Canto Seven, The Discovery of the Cosmic Spirit and the Cosmic Consciousness ....... 132 17. Book Eight ‐ The Book of Death ........................................................................................................ 141 18. Death and God of Death .................................................................................................................... 147 19. Book Nine: The Book of Eternal Night; Canto One: Towards the Black Void .................................... 153 20. Book Nine, Canto Two: The Journey in Eternal Night and the Voice of the Darkness ...................... 161 21. Book Ten Canto One ......................................................................................................................... 172 22. Book Ten Canto Two ‐ Beginning ...................................................................................................... 178 23. Book Ten Canto Two – Continued ..................................................................................................... 189 24. Book Ten Canto Two – Conclusion .................................................................................................... 195 25. Book Ten Canto Three – Beginning ................................................................................................... 205 26. Book Ten Canto Three – Continued .................................................................................................. 214

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27. Book Ten Canto Three – Continued .................................................................................................. 225 28. Book Ten Canto Three – Conclusion.................................................................................................. 232 29. Book Ten Canto Four – Beginning ..................................................................................................... 239 30. Book Ten Canto Four – Continued .................................................................................................... 246 31. Concept of Evolution ......................................................................................................................... 255 32. Evolutionary Future of Man .............................................................................................................. 265 33. Book Ten Canto Four – Continued .................................................................................................... 272 34. The Main Issues of Debate of Savitri with Death .............................................................................. 279 35. Levels of Conciousness ..................................................................................................................... 286 36. The Supermind .................................................................................................................................. 293 37. Book Ten Canto Four – Continued .................................................................................................... 300 38. Book Ten Canto Four – The Last Speach of Savitri ............................................................................ 306 39. Book Eleven ‐ The Book of Everlasting Day ....................................................................................... 313 40. Book Eleven – Continued .................................................................................................................. 320 41. Book Eleven – Continued .................................................................................................................. 327 42. Book Eleven – Continued .................................................................................................................. 335 43. Book Eleven – Continued .................................................................................................................. 342 44. Book Eleven – Continued .................................................................................................................. 349 45. Book Eleven – Continued .................................................................................................................. 356 46. Book Eleven – Continued .................................................................................................................. 364 47. Book Eleven – Continued .................................................................................................................. 371 48. Book Eleven – Continued .................................................................................................................. 378 49. Book Eleven – Continued .................................................................................................................. 385 50. Book Eleven – Continued .................................................................................................................. 393 51. Book Eleven – Continued .................................................................................................................. 400

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1. Introduction1

Savitri has come to occupy a special place among Sri Aurobindo’s works which include such highly acclaimed books like The Life Divine, The Foundations of Indian Culture, The Human Cycle, Essays on the Gita and On the Veda. The Mother has called it “the supreme revelation of Sri Aurobindo’s vision”. She once recommended the study of Savitri to one of her disciples in these words: “Indeed Savitri is something concrete, living, it is all replete, packed with consciousness, it is the supreme knowledge above all human philosophies and religions. It is the spiritual path, it is Yoga, Tapasya, Sadhana, everything, in its single body. Savitri has an extraordinary power, it gives out vibrations 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 that Sri Aurobindo brought down on the earth. My child, one must try to find the secret that Savitri represents, the prophetic message Sri Aurobindo reveals there for us. This is the work before you, it is hard but it is worth the trouble.”

This is the first of a series of articles on Savitri which Next Future proposes to bring to you. The main purpose of this series is not to deal directly either with the spiritual vision of Sri Aurobindo, or to discuss the exquisite quality of its poetry which often reaches the grandeur of a mantra – a unique achievement in the English language. In other words, our aim is not to “explain” Savitri to you; that is beyond our capacity. Our purpose is to try to create in you enough confidence to start reading Savitri and enough interest in it to want to read it. There is a teacher present in every line of Savitri – the consciousness of Sri Aurobindo himself. And once you establish contact with it, you need no other teacher. Savitri will then directly begin to speak to you and open for you all the spiritual treasures it contains. With its help alone, as the Mother has assured us, you will be able to climb to the highest step of the ladder of yoga.

Savitri cannot be understood by the mind alone, no matter how well‐equipped it is. It is too refined and subtle for that. There must be a new extension of consciousness and aesthesis to appreciate the new kind of poetry which Savitri is. Savitri is essentially the poetry of tomorrow, what Sri Aurobindo called “Future poetry”. It is in meditation that Savitri can be best received.

We hope to achieve our objective in this series by inviting you to appreciate certain selected excerpts from the poem. Each excerpt will be presented together with some aids to appreciation, namely, an introduction and a brief exegesis. These passages will mark for you the important milestones in your progress through Savitri. The introductory material will include a reference to the context in which the excerpt occurs in the poem, and other material

1

All section titles are added by compiler; original articles were entitled “Introduction” or “Instalment”

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which you will find useful in understanding the excerpt. An attempt will also be made to sensitise you to the occult vision and to some of the spiritual experiences contained in these excerpts. The exegesis will take you through the passage step by step. The mantric quality of its poetry will certainly be felt by you when you read the passages repeatedly in the manner indicated above. If you are at all sensitive to such things, you cannot miss this magic. This is a matter of experience.

There is something very special about the composition of Savitri. Sri Aurobindo completed the first draft of this poem between 1916 and 1920 and at that point in time, it was a narrative poem 1637 lines long. The second phase of its composition extended from 1930 to 1945, although he seems to have taken the decision to do so on after 24 November 1926 when he had a major and decisive spiritual siddhi. Prior to this for six years he had put a stop to all writing and devoted all his time to intense sadhana. During this second phase, he began to consider Savitri as his major literary work. During these years he concentrated on what has now become Part One of Savitri; here you see a new Aswapati and the emphasis now is on the Yogic experiences of Aswapati and on his spiritual and philosophic vision. This was an aspect not much in evidence in the first draft of Savitri. Then during the third phase, which extends from 1945 to 1950, he returned to the latter parts of the epic, and he revised what he had already written and added much new material, including several cantos on Savitri’s Yoga (Book Seven). The work in this last phase was largely done through dictation.

We must remember that Sri Aurobindo had written between 1914 and 1920, within just six years and a half, almost all of his major works, now occupying about 24 volumes of the 35 volumes of his Collected Works, currently under print, a feat unheard of in the world’s literary history. All these major works were serialised in the pages of the monthly journal Arya. It looked as though he commanded a Niagara of inspiration. Why then did he take more than thirty years to finish Savitri?

He himself has answered this question. One of the reasons was that during all the time he worked on Savitri, he was listening for the true inspiration and rejecting all that fell short of it, however good it might seem from a lower standard, until he got that which he felt to be absolutely right[1]. He has explained this more clearly in another letter of his: “I used Savitri as a means of ascension. I began with it on a certain mental level, each time I could reach a higher level I rewrote from that level. Moreover I was particular – if part seemed to me to come from any lower levels I was not satisfied to leave it because it was good poetry. All had to be as far as possible of the same mint. In fact Savitri has not been regarded by me as a poem to be written and finished, but as a field of experimentation to see how far poetry could be written from one’s own yogic consciousness and how that could be made creative.”[2] Sri Aurobindo describes here the standards he set for himself in writing Savitri. He wanted to write not what would amount to just good poetry; what he wrote had to be good from the

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highest spiritual plane possible. The spiritual plane had to be reflected in what he wrote in terms of poetic values. That is, it should carry in it the vibrations and the power of the peak consciousness reached by Sri Aurobindo in his yogic journey. Through its truth, its power and its beauty it should help the sensitive reader to ascend to the spiritual heights which Sri Aurobindo had scaled.

He has further identified the precise spiritual plane from which much of Savitri has come. “ As [Savitri] now stands there is a general Overmind influence, I believe, sometimes coming fully through, sometimes colouring the poetry of the other higher planes fused together, sometimes lifting any one of these higher planes to its highest or the psychic, poetic intelligence or vital towards them.”[3] Amal Kiran, a disciple as well as a poet of esteemed order, reminds us that the mention of Overmind aligns Savitri to the top reach of the Vedas, the Upanishads and the Gita, and the enormous mass of it, nearly 24000 lines, renders it a super‐scripture, an unparalleled store‐ house of spiritual wisdom.[4] In Savitri this wisdom comes at its best in the form of what the ancients called the Mantra. We will take up the subject of poetry as mantra in one of our subsequent instalments.

The general reader may find quite a few sections of Savitri difficult to comprehend. This is not because there is anywhere here an attempt at a dark or vague profundity or at an escape from thought but because the truths it expresses are unfamiliar to the ordinary mind or belong to an untrodden domain or domains or enter into a field of occult experience. The thinking here is not intellectual but intuitive or more than intuitive, always expressing a vision, a spiritual contact which has come by entering into the thing itself, by identity.[5] It is this which makes Savitri worth every effort. As a Western philosopher critic, Raymond Frank Piper, has said; “Savitri is perhaps the most powerful artistic work in the world for expanding man’s mind towards the Absolute.”[6] In this introduction, let the magic of Savitri unfurl itself upon you without too much interference on our part. We present here two passages from Savitri. The first is probably the most memorable description of the monsoon in world literature. The second passage is an equally exquisite description of another season equally cherished by our poet, namely, spring.

Both these passages occur in Book IV Canto One of the poem. They set the stage and prepare the reader for the birth of Savitri.

Now before you begin to read this passage, a word about how to read Savitri. The Mother once explained this as follows: “ 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.” Amal Kiran, a well‐known student of Savitri, also advises the reader to “practise a dedicated silence in the mind[7]” to be able to

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be receptive to the mantric quality of the poetry. Then he advises the reader who wishes to make the reading of Savitri his mode of sadhana to read it not with the eyes alone but also with the ear. We have to hear and not just see the lines. In a slow subdued voice we have to communicate Savitri to ourselves; only then will we able to capture something of the wonderful rhythmic properties and the life‐throb of the poetry in Savitri.

Passage 1[8] Next through its fiery swoon or clotted knot Rain‐tide burst in upon torn wings of heat, Startled with lightnings air's unquiet drowse, Lashed with life‐giving streams the torpid soil, Overcast with flare and sound and storm‐winged dark The star‐defended doors of heaven's dim sleep, Or from the gold eye of her paramour Covered with packed cloud‐veils the earth's brown face.

Armies of revolution crossed the time‐field, The clouds' unending march besieged the world, Tempests' pronunciamentos claimed the sky And thunder drums announced the embattled gods.

A traveller from unquiet neighbouring seas, The dense‐maned monsoon rode neighing through earth's hours: Thick now the emissary javelins: Enormous lightnings split the horizon's rim And, hurled from the quarters as from contending camps, Married heaven's edges steep and bare and blind: A surge and hiss and onset of huge rain, The long straight sleet‐drift, clamours of winged storm‐charge, Throngs of wind‐faces, rushing of wind‐feet Hurrying swept through the prone afflicted plains: Heaven's waters trailed and dribbled through the drowned land.

Then all was a swift stride, a sibilant race, Or all was tempest's shout and water's fall.

A dimness sagged on the grey floor of day, Its dingy sprawling length joined morn to eve, Wallowing in sludge and shower it reached black dark.

Day a half darkness wore as its dull dress.

Light looked into dawn's tarnished glass and met Its own face there, twin to a half‐lit night's: Downpour and drip and seeping mist swayed all And turned dry soil to bog and reeking mud:

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Earth was a quagmire, heaven a dismal block.

None saw through dank drenched weeks the dungeon sun.

Even when no turmoil vexed air's sombre rest, Or a faint ray glimmered through weeping clouds As a sad smile gleams veiled by returning tears, All promised brightness failed at once denied Or, soon condemned, died like a brief‐lived hope.

Then a last massive deluge thrashed dead mire And a subsiding mutter left all still, Or only the muddy creep of sinking floods Or only a whisper and green toss of trees.

(Savitri: p.349 – 350) As you read this passage aloud, don’t you hear the thunder of the clouds and the cloudburst and the downpour of torrential rain and rain drops dripping from the roof and don’t you see all around you overcast skies and quagmire and small streams of water rushing in all directions with a hissing sound?

Passage 2 Then Spring, an ardent lover, leaped through leaves And caught the earth‐bride in his eager clasp; His advent was a fire of irised hues, His arms were a circle of the arrival of joy.

His voice was a call to the Transcendent's sphere Whose secret touch upon our mortal lives Keeps ever new the thrill that made the world, Remoulds an ancient sweetness to new shapes And guards intact unchanged by death and Time The answer of our hearts to Nature's charm And keeps for ever new, yet still the same, The throb that ever wakes to the old delight And beauty and rapture and the joy to live.

His coming brought the magic and the spell; At his touch life's tired heart grew glad and young; He made joy a willing prisoner in her breast.

His grasp was a young god's upon earth's limbs: Changed by the passion of his divine outbreak He made her body beautiful with his kiss.

Impatient for felicity he came, High‐fluting with the coïl's happy voice,

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His peacock turban trailing on the trees; His breath was a warm summons to delight, The dense voluptuous azure was his gaze.

A soft celestial urge surprised the blood Rich with the instinct of God's sensuous joys; Revealed in beauty, a cadence was abroad Insistent on the rapture‐thrill in life: Immortal movements touched the fleeting hours.

A godlike packed intensity of sense Made it a passionate pleasure even to breathe; All sights and voices wove a single charm.

The life of the enchanted globe became A storm of sweetness and of light and song, A revel of colour and of ecstasy, A hymn of rays, a litany of cries: A strain of choral priestly music sang And, swung on the swaying censer of the trees, A sacrifice of perfume filled the hours.

Asocas burned in crimson spots of flame, Pure like the breath of an unstained desire White jasmines haunted the enamoured air, Pale mango‐blossoms fed the liquid voice Of the love‐maddened coïl, and the brown bee Muttered in fragrance mid the honey‐buds.

The sunlight was a great god's golden smile.

All Nature was at beauty's festival.

(Savitri: p.351 – 352)

[1] Savitri (Letters) 1993, p. 801 [2] ibid. p.728 [3] ibid, p. 730 [4] Mother India, January‐February 1987 [5] Savitri (Letters), p. 740 [6] Quoted in Savitri by K.R.S.Iyengar, SABDA, 1972, p. 636 [7]Mother India, January‐February, 1987 [8]

The edition of Savitri which I am using for this series is the 10th impression (2000) of the

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4th revised edition (1993), published by Sri Aurobindo Ashram Publication Department. It has the advantage of having line numbers (every 5th line), which makes reference to the text easy.

http://nextfuture.sriaurobindosociety.org.in/feb03/nffeb03_savitri.htm

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2. Mahabharata Story

Sri Aurobindo gave to his epic Savitri the subtitle “A legend and a symbol”. The legend that is narrated here is the story of Satyavan and Savitri, which occurs as an upakhyana (a minor episode) in the Vana Parvam (The Book of the Forest) in the Mahabharata. Sri Aurobindo uses the framework of this legend to give a mantric expression to his yogic experiences and spiritual vision. In this process it becomes a symbolic narrative describing the conquest of death on earth and all that death stands for ‐‐ the imperfections, suffering and incapacity which now have human life in their grip. We will take up the symbolic aspect of this epic in one of the later installments.

It is believed that the legend itself had its origin in one of the spiritually charged Vedic myths.

The Mahabharata legend of Satytavan and Savitri is also known as Pativrata Mahatmya. It is so called because it describes the heroic deeds of a married woman, Savitri, who is faithful and chaste, and who through her austerities and sacrifices acquires such dynamism of Dharma (righteousness) that through it she is able to free her husband from the clutches of the Lord of Death. Although the story seems to extol the ideal of womanhood, the manner in which it is narrated suggests that it is not merely a holy tale told for the edification of the pious.

Markandeya, the narrator of this story to Yudhisthira in the Mahabharata, was a Rishi of great spiritual achievements and is counted among the immortals (chiranjeevi) and the legend has a certain spiritual charge to it which must have been one of the reasons that prompted Sri Aurobindo to choose it as a vehicle for his greatest work of poetry.

Narrated in the Mahabharata in exactly 300 slokas or 600 hemistichs, Sri Aurobindo takes this legend and develops it into an epic poem of nearly 24000 lines. What exactly did Sri Aurobindo do to give to this story such a massive expansion? Did he add more characters or incidents to the original story line? No. Sri Aurobindo in fact has kept the story intact more or less. He has, however, made some changes to make it an effective framework for the great load of symbolic meaning he wove into it. Before we take up this issue of what changes Sri Aurobindo makes in the original story, let us take a brief look at the story as narrated in the Mahabharata legend.

The Mahabharata Story of Savitri and Satyavan A long long time ago, King Aswapati ruled over the Madra kingdom. He was a virtuous and high‐souled King but was sorrow‐stricken since he was childless. For eighteen years he underwent austerities and performed daily a yajna (sacrifice) in honour of the goddess Savitri.

One day, the goddess, pleased with his devotions, appears before him and promises a daughter of great beauty soon to be born to him. The daughter, being the gift of the great goddess, is consequently named Savitri. She grew up into a maiden of great beauty and incandescent inner

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splendour. Everybody admired her but because of her great beauty and fiery splendour of youth, no suitor dared approach her seeking her hand in marriage. Aswapati reproached himself on his failure to fulfill his obligation to find a suitable husband for his daughter. One day when she was visiting Aswapati after offering flowers and worship at a temple, he spoke to her about this and asked her to go out into the world to seek and choose a husband for herself.

Savitri obeyed her father’s command.

She sets out on her search and travels through different kingdoms and lands. She returns to her father’s court after one year and finds him in the company of the heavenly sage Narad. When asked to report on her mission, she informs them that she has met Satyavan, the son of the now blind and exiled king Dyumatsena living in a forest, and declares that Satyavan alone is worthy to be her lord and husband. Narad describes this choice as a great mistake although he is all praise for Satyavan whom he describes as handsome, truthful, noble, self‐controlled and righteous. Pressed by Aswapati to name his fault, Narad answers: “One fault, and one only; his race run, Satyavan will die a year hence!” The King is shocked and tries to persuade Savitri to choose again, but she answers with a firm resolve: “These are things done but once; I have chosen and cannot choose again”. Narad is impressed by Savitri’s defiant resolution and advises the King to act according to Savitri’s desires, and gives the assurance that all shall still be well.

Aswapati now sets out to meet the exiled king Dyumatsena and seeks the hand of Satyavan in marriage for his daughter Savitri. Dyumatsena demurs at first because he wonders whether Savitri will be able to put up with the rigours of life in a forest. Aswapati assures him that life in a forest can have no terrors for Savitri since she knows very well that happiness and sorrow are impermanent. The marriage is now performed and Satyavan and Savitri are both happy in having secured their heart’s desire.

Savitri, although blissful to be able to live with Satyavan, has no inner peace because she cannot forget the fateful word spoken by Narad. When hardly four days away from the threatened day, Savitri undertakes the tri‐ratra vow, which involves austerities like fasting, praying and standing night and day. On the fated day, when Satyavan is about to set out for the forest, Savitri approaches his parents and seeks their permission to accompany him because she says she is eager to see the forest in bloom. The permission is granted.

The young couple sets out happily for the forest. Satyavan first gathers fruits and then starts chopping wood. Soon he begins to perspire profusely and is overcome by fatigue and his head begins to ache. He comes down the tree and tells Savitri of his splitting headache and a desire to sleep. She makes him sit by her side, and lays his head on her lap. She realises that this is the hour foretold by Narad, and indeed it was. Soon she sees in front of her Yama, the God of Death, a bright‐robed, majestic, and an altogether terrifying figure.

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Yama now walks away with Satyavan’s soul in his noose, and Savitri follows him to the utter consternation of Yama. Now begins the great debate between fixed fate symbolised by Yama and the power of love, symbolised by Savitri. Yama asks Savitri to return to earth and attend to her husband’s funeral rites. She replies that wherever her husband goes or is taken, she must follow him in accordance with the marriage vows she had taken. During their conversations, Savitri reveals a great understanding of Dharma and this pleases Yama and he bestows on her a boon by which Dyumatsena’s eyesight is restored. The debate continues and Yama, impressed with Savitri’s speech, its flawless diction and syntax, its logic and prosodic structure, bestows upon her boon after boon. These boons restore his kingdom to Dyumatsena and Aswapati is blessed with a hundred sons. Savitri still goes on arguing with Yama and tries to convince him that according to dharmic injunctions her place is always with her husband.

Finally, Yama restores Satyavan back to her and blesses her heartily.

Savitri then returns to earth with the soul of Satyavan. They come back to the place on earth where Satyavan’s dead body was lying. Satyavan soon regains consciousness and wakes up as if from some deep sleep. Satyavan vaguely remembers having seen a dark and terrifying figure in his sleep. Savitri tells him that it was Yama himself but that he had now gone away. She stalls further questions from Satyavan and promises to answer them on another day. Satyavan suddenly realises that they had not yet returned to the hermitage and is quite worried on account of his parents. Satyavan insists on returning to the hermitage forthwith.

In the meanwhile Dyumatsena has regained his sight but is very distressed that Satyavan and Savitri had not yet returned home. The great Rishis living in their neighbourhood reassure him that nothing harmful would have befallen Satyavan because he is accompanied by Savitri, who is endowed with noble and exceptional qualities and is very advanced in her tapasya. Not too long after this, Satyavan and Savitri reach the hermitage. There is great jubilation among all those present. They all want to know why Satyavan and Savitri were late in returning, and all that transpired. Savitri narrates everything in detail right from Narad’s prediction, the reason why she had undertaken the tri‐ratra vow, why she had accompanied her husband to the forest on that morning, and finally of her confrontation with Yama.

This, then is the story of Savitri and Satyavan. We are now ready to examine what changes Sri Aurobindo has made in this legend when he adapts it to his purpose in the epic. But before we take up this important topic in the next installment, let us savour here one more sample of the exquisite poetry of Savitri.

At this stage in our study, we can take up only those passages for the appreciation of which one does not need much by way of background information. Let us take a look at a wonderful passage which occurs very early in the poem ‐‐ in Canto 2 of Book I. This canto has the title “The Issue”. The very first canto of Savitri gives a description of the dawn of the day on

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which Satyavan was destined to die; it also describes how Savitri too “awoke” that morning.

Then in Canto 2 we have our first full view of Savitri as she looked on that fateful morning.

Savitri knew that it was the most fateful day of her life. So naturally she casts a rapid glance on her life so far, and reminds herself of the primary issue of her life; “Altered must be Nature’s harsh economy;” ( Line 67, p. 12). She was destined to “Look into the lonely eyes of immortal Death/ And with her nude spirit measure the Infinite’s night.” (Lines 77 & 78, p. 13). This issue gets crystallised later in the canto in these lines: Whether to bear with Ignorance and death Or hew the ways of Immortality, To win or lose the godlike game for man, Was her soul’s issue thrown with Destiny’s dice.

Lines 233 – 236, p. 17

In the passage presented above, Savitri remembers how “Love came to her, hiding the shadow, Death” on the fringe of this very forest in which she is living now. That was in fact where she fist encounters Satyavan. And how did love come to her? – “with the suddenness divine advents have” (Line 124). She had met Satyavan on the verge of the forest and the god of Love had done the rest.

At this point the poet observes that since man’s evolutionary progress towards a higher level of being began, through the long ordeal of this journey, Love had never found a “rarer creature” to bear his shaft. The reference here is to the poetic convention that one falls in love when the God of Love strikes a human being with his flowery arrow. It is not easy to be worthy of the fiery ordeal of love. But Savitri was certainly the fittest creature ever to have been struck

by Love’s shaft. This gives the poet an opportunity to present us with a portrait of Savitri.

Ego and love cannot live together, and Savitri’s heart was consecrated solely to love since it had been vacated by ego. And the following lines contain a wonderful portrait of Savitri, the golden princess, now a wife, who had acquired through her tapasya the power to heal the aching throb of life. One must remember that this is what Savitri looked like on the morning of that fateful day, a few hours before she was to confront the God of Death. This is a portrait of Savitri the tapasvini.

All in her pointed to a nobler kind. 134 Near to earth's wideness, intimate with heaven, Exalted and swift her young large‐visioned spirit Voyaging through worlds of splendour and of calm Overflew the ways of Thought to unborn things.

Ardent was her self‐poised unstumbling will;

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Her mind, a sea of white sincerity, 140 Passionate in flow, had not one turbid wave.

As in a mystic and dynamic dance A priestess of immaculate ecstasies Inspired and ruled from Truth's revealing vault Moves in some prophet cavern of the gods, 145 A heart of silence in the hands of joy Inhabited with rich creative beats A body like a parable of dawn That seemed a niche for veiled divinity Or golden temple‐door to things beyond. 150 Immortal rhythms swayed in her time‐born steps; Her look, her smile awoke celestial sense Even in earth‐stuff, and their intense delight Poured a supernal beauty on men's lives.

A wide self‐giving was her native act; 155 A magnanimity as of sea or sky Enveloped with its greatness all that came And gave a sense as of a greatened world: Her kindly care was a sweet temperate sun, Her high passion a blue heaven's equipoise. 160 As might a soul fly like a hunted bird, Escaping with tired wings from a world of storms, And a quiet reach like a remembered breast, In a haven of safety and splendid soft repose One could drink life back in streams of honey‐fire, 165 Recover the lost habit of happiness, Feel her bright nature's glorious ambience, And preen joy in her warmth and colour's rule.

A deep of compassion, a hushed sanctuary, Her inward help unbarred a gate in heaven; 170 Love in her was wider than the universe, The whole world could take refuge in her single heart.

The great unsatisfied godhead here could dwell: Vacant of the dwarf self's imprisoned air, Her mood could harbour his sublimer breath 175 Spiritual that can make all things divine.

For even her gulfs were secrecies of light.

At once she was the stillness and the word,

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A continent of self‐diffusing peace, An ocean of untrembling virgin fire; 180 The strength, the silence of the gods were hers.

In her he found a vastness like his own, His high warm subtle ether he refound And moved in her as in his natural home.

In her he met his own eternity. 185

Savitri: pages 14 –15

Notice that the passage begins with a precise one‐line sentence (Line 134). This is a device which Sri Aurobindo often uses to sum up briefly and pointedly the theme of what has gone before or what is to follow. In this case, it is the latter; the focus is on the heightened and large nobility of Savtri’s being. The next 4 lines (135‐138) describe the peculiar charm of Savitri’s being; it is intimate with both the best on earth as well as with the best in heaven. She is heavenly without losing the earthly touch. Her spirit was young and yet it was uplifted by a largeness of vision; it was swift in movement and happy and noble and it moved through realms of splendour and of calm. The rigidities of human thought did not limit her; she soared beyond the ways of thought to realms yet to be born. Her mind was passionate in its flow but did not have in it one turbid wave. (Lines 135 – 139).

As you read the following lines, pay attention to the rhythm of these lines; you will find yourself quickly uplifted in spirit. The sound, the sense and the rhythm together give you this lift. These are undoubtedly some of the most magical lines in the poem. Lines 135 to 150 are truly mantric, and the entire passage if read out properly can bring to the reader a great feeling of calm and inner felicity. Consider the description of Savitri’s mind ‐‐ passionate in flow but without a single turbid wave.

Lines 142 to 150 present to the reader a complex yet unified image charged with powerful spiritual vibrations; Savitri looks like a priestess of immaculate ecstasies in a mystic and dynamic dance in some prophet cavern of the gods, and the dance is inspired by the revelations from the high vault of Truth; she is like the heart of silence in the hands of joy; her body is like a parable of dawn, which seemed a special alcove of veiled divinity, or like a golden temple‐door to things to the glories of the transcendental world. These figures give rise in the mind of the hearer to wave after wave of delight and this rasa of sublimity is very rare in modern poetry. One is either baffled by such lines because the modern mind is not used to sublimity in poetry and mistakes it for bombast or syrupy verse. These lines are neither; one has to learn to receive these lines in a mind made calm and let them work their magic on one’s inner being.

When Savitri walked, it looked as though she was moving to the beat of some immortal rhythms. Savitri’s smile and look are described as awaking celestial sense even in earth‐stuff,

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and their intense delight poured a supernal beauty on the lives of earthly men. The poet effortlessly conveys to us through these lines the divinity of Savitri’s being. Then there is reference to her magnanimity in self‐giving; her magnanimity was as vast as that of the sky or the sea and it made all the recipients feel great by its touch. This is very finely put because there are certain kinds of magnanimity which make the receiver feel small, but Savitri’s magnanimity greatened the spirit of the receiver. (Lines 151 – 158) The warmth and kindness of her caring are compared to the warmth and brightness which we receive from “a sweet temperate sun”. The ardour of Savitri’s being was always calm like “a blue heaven’s equipoise”. There was nothing dry or cold about Savitri. (Lines 159 – 160) Then comes the wonderful image of a hunted bird flying to escape from a world of storms to a quiet spot warm and safe like a loving heart; the tired human soul sought refuge in Savitri and found there a haven of safety and repose of splendid softness; there it could regain the lost habit of happiness and drink back life in streams of honey‐fire. Her being is a hushed sanctuary (meaning either a temple /shrine or a resort), an ocean of compassion. Savitri’s nature had a bright ambience in which one could preen (trim one’s feathers – this refers back to the image of the hunted bird) and adorn oneself and feel warm and colourful. The spiritual healing Savitri was capable of imparting is highlighted in these lines. (Lines 161 – 168) She was like an ocean of compassion, a temple bathed in silence; her inward help opened a spiritual gate to whosoever sought such help from her. (Lines 169 – 170) The secret of her being was that love in her was wider than the universe, and the whole world could take refuge in her single heart. Love, the godhead who normally finds most hearts cramped and too narrow for his residence because of the encroachments of the aggressive human ego found immense space in Savitri’s heart because it had been vacated by the dwarf self of the ego. Ego is self‐love, love directed to oneself, while true love is Divine love and tries to embrace the whole world. It is because of this that everything about Savitri became spiritual and had the power to make divine whatever it touched. (Lines 171 –176) She had realms of being not easily accessible to all but even these were sanctuaries of light.

And finally we are told that she was both the stillness (a monument of peace and silence which spread all around her); she was also the creative word that originates from this stillness (the Vedic etymological meaning of the word “Savitri”) She is described also as the virgin fire which is steady and untrembling. She had the strength and also the silence of the gods. (Lines 177 – 181) The God of Love found in Savitri a vastness like his own, and he moved in her as in his natural home. He met in her his own eternity. (Lines 182 – 185) I have tried in the foregoing lines to identify some of the main strands of the “sense” of this passage. No further comments are necessary. But even here each image is rich with vibrations

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of the Vedic lore and I have not explored that aspect of the meaning here. Nor is it necessary to say anything about the magic created by the sound and the rhythm of these lines. It is there waiting for you.

Read these lines slowly aloud to yourself a couple of times paying attention to the quality of each vowel and to their deeply enchanting rhythm. That should be enough even to blow away any tension you may have in your head or heart.

http://nextfuture.sriaurobindosociety.org.in/apr03/nfapr03_savitri.htm

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3. Departures from Mahabharata Legend ­ Books One to Four We have now acquainted ourselves with the legend of Satyavan and Savitri as it is found in the Mahabharata. The first draft of Savitri that Sri Aurobindo wrote between 1916 and 1918 was primarily a re‐telling of this legend. But as he gradually discovered its potential to be the central vehicle of his spiritual message, he began recasting this first draft from about 1928, more systematically from about 1930, and continued working on it until a few weeks before he left his body in December 1950. He has himself explained in a letter why he took so long to finish Savitri: …if I have not poetical genius, at least I can claim a sufficient, if not an infinite capacity for painstaking: that I have sufficiently shown by my long labour on Savitri. Or rather, since it was not labour in the ordinary sense, not a labour of painstaking construction, I may describe it as an infinite capacity for waiting and listening for the true inspiration and rejecting all that fell short of it, however good it might seem from a lower standard, until I got that which which I felt to be absolutely right.

(Letters on Savitri in Savitri (1993)) The final version of Savitri that thus emerged shows some departures that Sri Aurobindo has made from the original Mahabharata story. These departures are mostly of the nature of giving a great deal of expansion to some parts of the story and dealing with some other parts rather briefly. I do not think that the great Vyasa would have disapproved of any of these departures because in almost all cases they bring out what was implicit in Vyasa’s legend. Sri Aurobindo breathes a new life and power into this Vedic myth. Besides, these adaptations enhance the symbolic meaning of the story.

We will take up the issue of symbolism at a later point in our study. Here I would like to take a close look at some of the departures from the Mahabharata legend that we find in Savitri. Together with this I will also try to indicate how the entire epic is structured – what Books of the epic poem deal with what part of the story. This will provide you with a good road‐map of Savitri and enable you to open the poem at any canto of any Book and immediately grasp what part of the story is being dealt with in that canto. We may not be able to complete the discussion of these topics in one instalment; it will have to be continued in one or more of the instalments to follow. We will, however, conclude this instalment as usual with an excerpt from the epic poem presented for your appreciation.

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Departures in Savitri from the Mahabharata Legend 1. The Mahabharata Legend:

Aswapati is an ideal king firmly established in dharma. He has all the blessings of life but he is issue‐less. So with the intention of getting a son he engages himself in arduous austerities for eighteen years. He thus worships goddess Savitri with all devotion. Pleased with his austerities and devotion, goddess Savitri emerges out of the sacrificial fire and grants him the boon of a daughter. She assures him that a beautiful and effulgent daughter will be born to him and that this boon is being bestowed upon him at the instance of Brahma, the Creator, himself. This part of the story is narrated in about 20 slokas in the Mahabharata legend. The description of Aswapati’s austerities or penance, however, takes actually no more than six lines.

Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri Aswapati’s yajna or penance of eighteen years becomes in Sri Aurobindo’s epic “Aswapati’s Yoga”. Yajna or sacrifice is a Vedic concept which is often misunderstood. Its primary objective is not, as is generally believed, to obtain material prosperity during one’s life time and the blessings of heaven after death. Nor does its performance entail observance of certain rituals.

It is basically a profound psychological or spiritual practice or discipline which enables man to pass from the world of mortal existence to the vast world of the immortal spirit. It is a path that leads to life immortal (amritatatwaaya gacchati), says the Rig Veda. Sacrifice in the Veda thus represents a symbolic process which enables man to rise into the highest spiritual status.

In Savitri, this is the kind of sacrifice, sacrifice in the Vedic sense, that Aswapati undertakes.

The description of this yoga takes 10974 lines, spread over twenty‐two cantos – cantos 3, 4 and 5 of Book I, all the fifteen cantos of Book II, and all the four cantos of Book III. It is worth examining why Sri Aurobindo needs such a vast canvas to describe what Vyasa manages to do in about six lines?

Very early in Canto Three of Book I we begin to see that Sri Aurobindo’s Aswapati is “a thinker and toiler in the ideal’s air” and that he is “A colonist from immorality”. Further details about him reveal to us that although he is described as King Aswapati in this epic poem too, he personifies in many ways the sensitive modern man in search of a perfect life for himself and his fellowmen here on earth. In his concerns and in his aspirations, he is almost our contemporary. He seems to be familiar with what the East and the West have so far contributed to make the human legacy so rich and varied – religion, spirituality, liberal arts, culture, science and technology. He too like his counterpart in Vyasa’s legend, performs austerities, not external rites and rituals, but he follows an inner spiritual discipline, a yoga.

Why does he perform this yoga? In spite of what mankind has achieved through its long and difficult struggle, man’s life here on earth is still riddled with suffering, evil, limitations of

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various kinds and finally death. Man has tried in vain to change this situation through science and technology, through effecting changes in his social and economic institutions, through political revolutions. Nor have traditional religions and spiritual practices helped change this situation in any radical and permanent way. A realisation of this prompts Aswapati to seek a creative power, a Truth which will transform human life and bring to it an integral perfection, so far only dreamt of but not realised in reality. Towards this end he undertakes a triple yoga.

Sri Aurobindo has explained in one of his letters the nature of this yoga (Letters on Savitri, in Savitri, 1993, page 778): Aswapati’s Yoga falls into three parts. First, he is achieving his own spiritual self‐ fulfilment as the individual and this is described as the Yoga of the King. Next, he makes the ascent as a typical representative of the race to win the possibility of discovery and possession of all the planes of consciousness and this is described in the Second Book: but this is also yet only an individual victory. Finally, he aspires no longer for himself but for all, for a universal realisation and new creation. This is described in the Book of the Divine Mother.

Cantos 3 (“The Yoga of the King; The Yoga of the Soul’s Release”) and 5 (“The Yoga of the King: The Yoga of the Spirit’s Freedom and Greatness”) of Book I describe Aswapati’s yoga through which he attains his psycho‐spiritual transformation. Canto 4 (“The Secret Knowledge”) describes the deeper knowledge which the yoga reveals to him. The world around us is to a large extent a creation of our ego and therefore as long as we remain closed within the cocoon of our ego, we can not see the world as it is. For that one needs to rise above one’s ego and take a stand in the consciousness of one’s soul. This is what Aswapati achieves during the first phase of his yoga. And then he realises that this world is as yet an imperfect manifestation of the Supreme Reality and it is destined to evolve further towards a great fulfilment, and a perfect manifestation of the Divine Reality. He also realises that for this to happen the Truth‐ Light must be found and with it “earth’s massive roots” must be struck so that the world may “manifest the unveiled Divine”.

This realisation prompts him to be a “Traveller of the Worlds”. He wishes to explore the various worlds; these are worlds made of substances other than the gross‐physical substance of which our world is made. Until modern enlightenment put blinkers on our eyes and made us blind to all non‐physical reality, religions and spiritual traditions in all parts of the world assumed the existence of these non‐physical worlds. Aswapati’s experiences of this travel through all the worlds from the subtle physical to the highest manifested spiritual worlds are described in Book II. Canto 1 (“The World‐Stair”) of Book II describes the varied worlds which Aswapati sees as a world‐pile, a huge column of worlds rising from the plinth of Matter. It also describes how this macrocosm is reflected in the microcosm of our inner being. Thus Aswapati becomes a traveller basically of the inner worlds. He travels through four kinds of worlds – physical worlds (Canto 2), vital worlds (Cantos 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9) mental worlds (Cantos 9, 10 and 11) and

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spiritual worlds (Cantos 12, 13, 14 and 15). It should, however, be noted that the description of Aswapati’s experience of the spiritual worlds in also found in Books I and III of the epic as well.

As he reaches the apex of the spiritual worlds, he feels strongly pushed into the world of Nirvanic experience. This is the theme of Canto 1 (“The Pursuit of the Unknowable”) of Book III. Aswapati refuses to regard the Nirvanic state as the highest possible state attainable by man because that state takes him out of this world and leads him to a dissolution of his being and merger with the static Brahman. This amounts basically to an escape from this world and undoubtedly the escape brings a tremendous liberation from all that plagues man here in his earthly life – dualities of pleasure and pain, sense of being finite and limited etc. But Aswapati had undertaken this arduous route to find ways of bringing fulfilment and perfection to life in this world not to escape from it. So he deliberately retraces his steps from the Nirvanic region and takes a leap into the Transcendental world. He has to take this step because so far whatever he has done, and all the worlds he has explored have not revealed to him the secret of bringing perfection to life on earth. Here on the topmost verge of the Overmental world he feels the presence of the Supreme Divine Mother, the Creatrix of this world. All this is described in Canto 2 (“The Adoration of the Divine Mother”) of Book III. Here I would like to draw your attention to a glorious passage which you will find on pages 314 and 315. This passage is a mantric invocation, a veritable stuti “laud”, “a hymn of praise’ offered to the Divine Mother. Sanskrit literature contains many wonderful examples of such hymns, and Sri Aurobindo has now created a few of these in English as well.

At the head she stands of birth and toil and fate, In their slow round the cycles turn to her call; Alone her hands can change Time's dragon base.

Hers is the mystery the Night conceals; The spirit's alchemist energy is hers; She is the golden bridge, the wonderful fire.

The luminous heart of the Unknown is she, A power of silence in the depths of God; She is the Force, the inevitable Word, The magnet of our difficult ascent, The Sun from which we kindle all our suns, The Light that leans from the unrealised Vasts, The joy that beckons from the impossible, The Might of all that never yet came down.

All Nature dumbly calls to her alone To heal with her feet the aching throb of life And break the seals on the dim soul of man And kindle her fire in the closed heart of things.

All here shall be one day her sweetness' home,

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All contraries prepare her harmony; Towards her our knowledge climbs, our passion gropes; In her miraculous rapture we shall dwell, Her clasp shall turn to ecstasy our pain.

Our self shall be one self with all through her.

In her confirmed because transformed in her, Our life shall find in its fulfilled response Above, the boundless hushed beatitudes, Below, the wonder of the embrace divine.

At last in this transcendental realm Aswapati sees the world of perfection he has been looking for – the Supramental world. In sections 3 and 4 of Canto 3 (“The House of the Spirit and the New Creation”) of Book III is a description of what we can take to be the future Supramental creation. Nowhere in Book III does Sri Aurobindo use the word “Supermind’; it is referred to as a “vast Truth‐Consciousness”. Consider these lines which describe this new world: A new and marvellous creation rose.

Incalculable outflowing infinitudes Laughing out an unmeasured happiness Lived their innumerable unity; (lines 224 – 227, page 323)

In Canto 4 (“The Vision and the Boon”) of Book III, Aswapati prays to the Divine Mother to send on earth an emanation of hers who alone would be able to bring down to earth this new consciousness he has found in the transcendental world. The Supreme Divine Mother advises Aswapati to be patient because in her view man is not yet ready for the descent of this new consciousness. But Aswapati is disconsolate, and strongly urges the Divine Mother to grant him his request for the sake of the long‐suffering humanity. Finally, the Divine Mother accedes to his request and assures him that an incarnation of hers will be born on earth who will make it possible for man to conquer death and all the inadequacies it represents so that the Life Divine blossoms on earth. And the passage in which this assurance is given is once again one of the magic passages in Savitri.

O strong forerunner, I have heard thy cry.

One shall descend and break the iron Law, Change Nature's doom by the lone spirit's power.

A limitless Mind that can contain the world, A sweet and violent heart of ardent calms Moved by the passions of the gods shall come.

All mights and greatnesses shall join in her;

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Beauty shall walk celestial on the earth, Delight shall sleep in the cloud‐net of her hair, And in her body as on his homing tree Immortal Love shall beat his glorious wings.

A music of griefless things shall weave her charm; The harps of the Perfect shall attune her voice, The streams of Heaven shall murmur in her laugh, Her lips shall be the honeycombs of God, Her limbs his golden jars of ecstasy, Her breasts the rapture‐flowers of Paradise.

She shall bear Wisdom in her voiceless bosom, Strength shall be with her like a conqueror's sword And from her eyes the Eternal's bliss shall gaze.

A seed shall be sown in Death's tremendous hour, A branch of heaven transplant to human soil; Nature shall overleap her mortal step; Fate shall be changed by an unchanging will.”

This brings us to the end of Book III and also of Part I of Savitri.

Please note that the description of Aswapti’s yoga begins with Canto 3 of Book I and concludes with Canto 4 of Book III. The description of Aswapati’s yoga thus accounts for the whole Part I of the epic except Cantos 1 and 2 of Book I. How are these two cantos related to the rest of this epic? Canto 1 (“The Symbol Dawn”) of Book I describes the dawn of the day on which Satyavan was fated to die. Since the death and the resuscitation of Satyavan are the two central events of this story, we can say that the epic begins ‘in media res’, right in the middle of the action.

Such a beginning is in keeping with the Western tradition. “The Symbol Dawn” is a description not only of the dawn of that fateful day, but it also evokes in a sensitive reader images of several other dawns as well. Then in the second section of this Canto we are told how Savitri too awoke on that morning as well. Then in Canto 2 (“The Issue”), we are given the first full view of Savitri as she looked on that fateful morning. (An excerpt from this canto was presented for your appreciation at the end of our instalment 2.) The issue of Savitri’s life is Whether to bear with Ignorance and Death Or hew the ways of Immortality, To win or lose the godlike game for man, Was her soul’s issue thrown with Destiny’s dice.

(Lines 233‐ 236, p. 17)

Then suddenly the narration freezes at the end of Canto 2 – around the forenoon of the fateful day. There is a flashback to Savitri’s antecedents. “A world’s desire compelled her mortal birth”

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says the very first line of Canto 3 of Book I. To understand this line – what was the world’s desire, and how it compelled Savitri’s birth, etc. we need to know of Aswapati and of his triple yoga. And this is described as we have seen in Cantos 3, 4 and 5 of Book I and in Books II and III. The narration of the story which freezes at the end of Canto 2 of Book I is picked up again in Book VIII. In the meanwhile the flashback keeps us busy with that part of the story which deals with Aswapati and his yoga, Savitri’s birth, her growing up into a beautiful maiden, her going into the world to seek a partner for life, her meeting with Satyavan and falling in love with him, Narad’s prophecy and the problems it creates for Savitri. All this brings us to Book VII, which describes what happened four days before the fateful day – Savitri takes up a very difficult yoga to prepare herself for the fateful day prophesied by Narad. Book VIII then picks up the story from where it was left in Canto II Book I and what happened after the forenoon of that day elapsed and the noon arrived. Satyavan died in the forest around noon that day.

Vyasa’s Legend

1. The Mahabharata story then goes on to report that when the child was born she was called Savitri, since she had been given by the goddess of that name. There is no reference at all here to the notion of Savitri being a divine incarnation, even if it was present in the Vedic origins of the myth. Here we are told how Savitri grew up into a fair and beautiful young girl like the Goddess of Fortune herself incarnate.

Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri In Sri Aurobindo’s epic, the birth of Savitri is clearly the birth of an Avatar, of a divine incarnation. Aswapati had undertaken the arduous yoga to free humanity from the clutches of the forces of obscurity, inconscience, inertia and negation. This can be achieved only if the Supramental consciousness is brought down on earth. This is a stupendous task beyond the capacities of any normal human being. That is why he prays to the Supreme Divine Mother for an incarnation of hers on earth. . “Mission to earth some living form of thee” says Aswapati.

Savitri’s birth is this birth of the Divine into a human body. This and her childhood which shows clearly the stamp of greatness of her spirit are described in Canto 1 (“The Birth and Childhood of the Flame”). As Savitri grows into a young maiden of exquisite inner and outer beauty, she also acquires a varied knowledge of many philosophies and sciences, of arts and crafts. Her eminence is recognised by all around her, and because of this no prince dares to approach her seeking her hand in marriage. All this is the theme of Canto 2 (“ The Growth of the Flame”) of Book IV. Vyasa’s Legend 2. Savitri grows up into a radiantly beautiful young woman and looks like a goddess (devarupini). One auspicious day Savitri, pays a visit to the temple, offers prayers and oblations to the gods, and goes to see her father. When she approaches him, she touches his feet in

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obeisance and offers him the prasad and flowers she has brought from the temple. Aswapati sees that his daughter has grown to full youth and is beautiful like a goddess but feels distressed that she is yet unmarried. He deems it a failure on his part not to have found for her a suitable husband. Because of her great beauty and radiance, no prince dares to come forward. Aswapati therefore asks her to go out into the world to seek a young man who would be her companion for life.

Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri The way Sri Aurobindo describes this event is somewhat different. Aswapati in Sri Aurobindo’s epic is a great and accomplished yogi. Therefore he is in communion with the spiritual planes and forces that constantly act on the human plane and mould the happenings and movements here. He has a strong feeling that man’s aspiration for a perfect life on earth is going to be fulfilled. Suddenly one day he hears a heavenly voice which says that a great destiny awaits mankind but man is unable to rise to it since “ The Gods are still too few in mortal forms”. As the Voice withdraws, he sees Savitri in front of him. This occasions another glorious description of Savitri, this time as seen by her father. (We will study this passage at the end of this instalment.) He sees her as a “shining answer from the gods” to all his perplexity about man’s future. Then suddenly his lips open up and there come out of his mouth “words from Fate” He tells her that her spirit has not come down like a star alone. There must be someone who is on earth, “ the second self her nature asks”. He asks her to venture through the deep world to find her companion for life. She must find this person who will give voice to what is yet mute in her.

This command of her father sinks deep into Savitri’s consciousness and works like a mantra. She departs on her quest. All this is described in Canto 3 (“The Call to the Quest”) of Book IV. This is followed by Canto 4 (“ The Quest”) of Book IV. In this canto we have a travelogue of sorts, describing what Savitri saw during her year‐long journey across the whole of Bharatvarsha (India of that time) – the urban scene as well as the rural scene and the scene in the forests where lived Rishis, and seekers of truth of various kinds. Almost a whole year has gone by in this journey, and on a bright day in summer she happens to come to a forest grove, which proves to be her journey’s end. We will continue this study of the points of departure that Sri Aurobindo has made in the story of Savitri and Satyavan in our next instalment.  Before concluding this instalment, as usual we will take a close look at a passage from Savitri. The passage I have chosen gives us another portrait of Savitri. In the previous instalment we saw Savitri as she looked on the morning of the fateful day of Satyavan’s death.

The passage I am presenting below shows Savitri as seen by her father at the peak of her maidenly beauty and radiance. I have just mentioned in the foregoing paragraph how one day Savitri comes to meet her father. As we have noted, her flaming beauty keeps all would‐be suitors away from her; they adore her from a distance. That morning she had gone to the

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temple to offer worship to the deity. (This is a detail we learn from Vyasa.) And immediately after offering the worship she comes to see Aswapati, her father. He has just heard a voice which prophesies a great future for mankind. As soon as the voice stops, Aswapati sees young and radiant Savitri approaching him. This is how he sees Savitri at that moment.

The Voice withdrew into its hidden skies.

But like a shining answer from the gods 110 Approached through sun‐bright spaces Savitri.

Advancing amid tall heaven‐pillaring trees, Apparelled in her flickering‐coloured robe She seemed, burning towards the eternal realms, A bright moved torch of incense and of flame 115 That from the sky‐roofed temple‐soil of earth A pilgrim hand lifts in an invisible shrine.

There came the gift of a revealing hour: He saw through depths that reinterpret all, Limited not now by the dull body's eyes, 120 New‐found through an arch of clear discovery, This intimation of the world's delight, This wonder of the divine Artist's make Carved like a nectar‐cup for thirsty gods, This breathing Scripture of the Eternal's joy, 125 This net of sweetness woven of aureate fire.

Transformed the delicate image‐face became A deeper Nature's self‐revealing sign, A gold‐leaf palimpsest of sacred births, A grave world‐symbol chiselled out of life. 130 Her brow, a copy of clear unstained heavens, Was meditation's pedestal and defence, The very room and smile of musing Space, Its brooding line infinity's symbol curve.

Amid her tresses' cloudy multitude 135 Her long eyes shadowed as by wings of Night Under that moon‐gold forehead's dreaming breadth Were seas of love and thought that held the world; Marvelling at life and earth they saw truths far.

A deathless meaning filled her mortal limbs; 140 As in a golden vase's poignant line They seemed to carry the rhythmic sob of bliss Of earth's mute adoration towards heaven

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Released in beauty's cry of living form Towards the perfection of eternal things. 145 Transparent grown the ephemeral living dress Bared the expressive deity to his view.

Escaped from surface sight and mortal sense The seizing harmony of its shapes became The strange significant icon of a Power 150 Renewing its inscrutable descent Into a human figure of its works That stood out in life's bold abrupt relief On the soil of the evolving universe, A godhead sculptured on a wall of thought, 155 Mirrored in the flowing hours and dimly shrined In Matter as in a cathedral cave.

Annulled were the transient values of the mind, The body's sense renounced its earthly look; Immortal met immortal in their gaze. 160 Awaked from the close spell of daily use That hides soul‐truth with the outward form's disguise, He saw through the familiar cherished limbs The great and unknown spirit born his child.

(Pages 372 – 373) “The Voice” in line 109 refers to the voice just heard by Aswapati. This Voice now recedes into its unseen source. As if as an answer from the gods to what the Voice had said, Savitri, bright, and resplendent with the glory of youth, appeared on the scene. The Voice talked about a glorious future for man and mentioned what had thwarted the coming of this future so far – there are not enough Gods on earth yet. You can see the clear suggestion here – Savitri is born to make good this inadequacy in man. Her life’s mission is to transform the half animal and half divine human race into a fully divine one. (Lines 110 – 111) Savitri came advancing through a column of tall trees; she was wearing a colourful apparel.

What did she look like? She looked like a moving torch of incense and flame burning towards the eternal realms above held aloft by a pilgrim’s hand in an invisible shrine which had the sky as its roof and the earth as its ground soil. (Lines 112 – 117) The appropriateness of this comparison of Savitri to a torch of incense and flame held aloft by a pilgrim hardly needs any comments. But notice that the poet is taking us with every such deft stroke closer and closer to the inner being of Savitri. He doesn’t seem particularly interested in portraying for us a clear image of the outward form of Savitri.

This sight of Savitri brings to Aswapati a sudden revelation. He now begins to see with a deeper sight and this sight enables him to see more truly than the mere superficial physical sight. He

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now suddenly sees Savitri as the embodiment of the delight behind this world. Then in four lines the poet raises this description step by step to a height where our understanding and imagination feel almost breathless in wonder. Savitri is a wonderful creation of the Divine artist who has carved her like a nectar cup for thirsty gods. She is described as the breathing Scripture of the Eternal’s joy and a net of sweetness woven out of golden fire. (Lines 118 – 126) Now the poet describes Savitri’s delicate face, her brow, her long, dark and thick hair and her eyes and then her limbs. Each one of these brings to the transformed sight of Aswapati intimations of her inner nature. Her delicate face is like a parchment made of gold‐leaf on which are seen letters which remind us of her several sacred births in the past; she looks like a serene world‐symbol chiselled out of life. (Lines 127 – 130) Her eyebrows and the forehead which together make her facial expression give one the impression of clear, stainless heavens; her forehead in particular, looks like a powerful and secure seat of meditation. The curve of her eyebrows look like the brooding line of infinity. (Lines 131 – 134) Then comes the description of her eyes under the dreaming breadth of her forehead amid her thick dark tresses of hair; they are like seas of love and deep contemplation; they look at the world around them and marvel at it and see the distant truths. (Lines 135 – 139) Her limbs seem to suggest a deathless meaning. Like the contours of a golden vase, they seem to carry the rhythmic cry of bliss of the silent adoration of the things upon earth for the perfection their heavenly counterparts manifest. (Lines 140 – 145) The outer physical form of Savitri had grown transparent to Aswapati’s vision and he could see through it the manifesting deity within. (Lines 146 – 147) The external sight and sense could not capture the full significance of the harmony of the outlines of her form since it seemed to be a symbol of a Power. This is the power that is born again and again through a mysterious descent into a human figure. This line brings to mind the great lines in the Gita in which the Lord explains the mystery of Avatarhood: “ though I am the Lord of all existences, yet I stand upon my own Nature and I come into birth by my self‐Maya (Gita IV: 6). Each time the Avatar stands in bold relief in this evolving universe. He is a veritable godhead who leaves a permanent mark on the thought of the race like a sculpture mounted on the wall of thought, and his influence is reflected in the flowing stream of time and permanently enshrined in the temple‐cave of matter. (Lines 148 – 155) Aswapati now undergoes a great change and the ephemeral values of the mind undergo a change; the body’s sense gave up its limited earthly range, and the immortal in him met the immortal in Savitri. (Lines 156 – 160) He is now awakened from the limiting spell of the ordinary consciousness which is incapable of seeing the soul‐truth because of the disguise of the outward form; he now saw through the loved and familiar figure of his daughter, the great and unknown spirit who was born as his child. (Lines 161 – 164).

http://nextfuture.sriaurobindosociety.org.in/may03/nfmay03_savitri.htm

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4. Departures from Mahabharata Legend – Book Five and Book Six Canto One

In the preceding instalment we took a bird’s eye‐view of Books I, II, III and IV of Savitri, and noted the departures made by Sri Aurobindo in this part of the epic from the legend as narrated in the Mahabharata. We now continue with our review of the Books that follow.

The Mahabharata Legend In the Mahabharata story there is no description of the journey Savitri undertook in compliance of her father’s wishes. We are told that Savitri as advised by her father set out on a golden chariot and travelled through several distant lands. The next event in the story is the return of Savitri to her father’s court after completing her journey. Between these two events a most interesting event has taken place. Savitri meets Satyavan and finds him an “agreeably proper husband” and chooses him so in her mind. This is all that we are told in the Mahabharata story.

Where exactly Satyavan and Savitri meet and what must have happened between them ‐ all this is left to our imagination.

Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri In Sri Aurobindo’s epic one of the most enchanting of all Books is Book V: the Book of Love, and in Vyasa’s narration of the legend, as we just saw, there is nothing corresponding to this Book at all. In this Book we see how after Savitri’s chariot had passed through several kingdoms and lands, Savitri suddenly finds herself in the sylvan surroundings of an opening in a forest and this is where Savitri and Satyavan first see each other. They meet in this wilderness, fall in love with each other. Sri Aurobindo is in no hurry when he reaches this point in the story. First, he devotes a whole canto (Canto One of Book V) to describe ‘the destined meeting place”. He describes the place as ‘a sanctuary of youth and joy”, “ a highland world of free and green delight, where spring and summer lay together and strove in indolent and amicable debate, inarmed (arm in arm), disputing with laughter who should rule”. Through his description of this place the poet creates a wonderful atmosphere of expectancy as if Nature in this wilderness was waiting for Love to meet Savitri.

Then in Canto Two (Book V) we see Satyavan entering this sylvan spot. He is described in these words: “As if a weapon of living Light,/Erect and lofty like a spear of God/ His figure led the splendour of the morn.” ( p. 393: lines 40‐42). He had the glow of a Rishi on his face and was a good student of the mystic lore of the unwritten book of Nature. His mind was open to the infinite mind of Nature and the mastery of free natures was his. “His body was a lover’s and

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a king’s”. On that morning it looked as though someone had laid the spell of destiny on his feet and drawn him to the forest’s flowering verge, since this place did not lie on one of his accustomed paths.

As noted earlier (in the previous instalment), Savitri’s chariot had just reached this spot. Here Satyavan and Savitri meet. The rest of this canto (Canto Two of Book V) gives a most wonderful description of the occult process of what is called ‘falling in love’. The poet manages to bring out the magic of this almost mystical event with such sensitivity and refinement that the reader feels that he is going through a spiritual experience. And added to this, the poetic brilliance of these lines is such that if Sri Aurobindo had written nothing else save this canto of the Book of Love, he still would have made a unique and priceless contribution to English literature. This whole Book is probably be unexcelled anywhere in world literature. No poet has sung of love in this exalted vein without hiding its unpleasant manifestations. Look at these lines, for example,: To live, to love are signs of infinite things, Love is a glory from eternity’s spheres.

Abased, disfigured, mocked by baser mights That steal his name and shape and ecstasy, He is still the Godhead by which all can change. (p. 397, lines 206‐10) Again consider these lines later in the same canto: Rare is the cup fit for love’s nectar wine, As rare the vessel that can hold God’s birth; A soul made ready through a thousand years Is the living mould of a supreme Descent. (p. 398, lines 241‐44) Not only do Satyavan and Savitri fall in love with each other, they also realise why Destiny has brought them together. (Canto 3 Book V) Satyavan is so much enraptured by the joy and beauty Savitri seems to have bought into his world that he makes the first advances and entreats her to step down from the chariot. Satyavan had until now received a great deal from his communion with Nature all around him; he had often felt oneness with all through his oneness with Nature. But often he had felt this joy being overshadowed by the fact that so far in life the body and the soul have remained disunited and he had always hoped that one day the body too would be able to share in the glorious destiny of the soul. Now he begins to feel that Savitri is coming into his life to make this miracle possible.

Then we come to a glorious description of a gandharva marriage (a marriage solemnised with Nature and the gods as its witnesses) which unites Satyavan and Savitri in matrimony. Savitri weaves “a candid garland” with the flowers she has picked up from the clustering swarms that

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she finds around her and she puts it on the bosom of Satyavan. And this is how Satyavan responds to her gesture:

He bent to her and took into his own Their married yearning joined like folded hopes; As if a whole rich world suddenly possessed, Wedded to all he had been, became himself, An inexhaustible joy made his alone, He gathered all Savitri into his clasp.

Around her his embrace became the sign Of a locked closeness through slow intimate years, A first sweet summary of delight to come, One brevity intense of all long life.

In a wide moment of two souls that meet She felt her being flow into him as in waves A river pours into a mighty sea.

As when a soul is merging into God To live in Him for ever and know His joy, Her consciousness was a wave of him alone And all her separate self was lost in his.

As a starry heaven encircles happy earth, He shut her into himself in a circle of bliss And shut the world into himself and her.

(p. 410, lines 362‐81)

The poet now elevates this union of Satyavan and Savitri by investing it with a vaster, almost a cosmic significance.

Each now was a part of the other's unity.

The world was but their twin self‐finding's scene Or their own wedded being's vaster frame.

On the high glowing cupola of the day Fate tied a knot with morning's halo threads While by the ministry of an auspice‐hour Heart‐bound before the sun, their marriage fire, The wedding of the eternal Lord and Spouse Took place again on earth in human forms: In a new act of the drama of the world The united Two began a greater age.

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(p. 411, lines 391‐400)

After this, Savitri takes leave of Satyavan to go to her father to inform him of her choice of Satyavan as her husband and promises to return to him soon and never to part from him again.

This entire Book (Book of Love) is a departure from the Mahabharata story. There is no reference whatsoever in Sri Aurobindo’s epic to any traditional, ritualistic marriage of the kind referred to in the Mahabharata legend.

The Mahabharata Legend

5. When Savitri returns to her father’s palace from the journey, she finds her father in the company of Narad, the heavenly sage. She bows respectfully at the feet of both these elders.

Narad at this point asks Aswapati where his daughter had gone and from where she was returning. He also asks him why he had not yet given her in marriage to a suitable husband. Aswapati explains that she had gone out at his bidding with the intent of finding a suitable husband for herself and that she is just returning from that journey. He then asks Savitri whom she had chosen for her lord and husband. Savitri is brief in her reply and tells them about the just and warrior king of Shalwa, renowned by the name of Dyumatsena, and how when he became blind, an old enemy of his attacked him and seized his kingdom. Then accompanied by his wife and their child still of a very tender age, Dyumatsena retired to a forest and began to spend his time in austere tapasya. Their son Satyavan was brought up in the penance‐grove and is now grown up and in him, Savitri announces, she saw an agreeably proper husband and that she had chosen him so in her mind. This is followed by Narad’s alarming statement that Savitri has done something “accursed that forebodes a great evil”. Narad also has high praise for Satyavan. He describes him as bright like the Sun‐god, and quick and sharp in intelligence like Brihaspati[1] and valiant as Indra[2], and forbearing like the earth, strong in build and handsome as one of the Aswinikumars[3]. He goes on to describe the excellence of Satyavan’s character and describes him as exceedingly munificent and large‐ hearted, soft‐natured, full of truth, friendly with everybody, and radiant. Aswapati then asks him what then was the blemish in him, Narad answers: in spite of all his high merits and virtues, there is one blemish in him and that is, one year from that day he is destined to die. On hearing this, Aswapati gets alarmed and asks Savitri to proceed again on another journey since her choice of Satyavan has been has proved to be a flawed one. But Savitri is unshaken in her resolve to get married to Satyavan and refuses to go out and choose a second time. Narad then intervenes and strongly supports Savitri’s decision to stick to her choice of Satyavan because, he thinks, it is in conformity with dharma in every respect. He further adds that since no one else possesses the qualities that Satyavan does, in his opinion, it would be

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proper to give Savitri in marriage to him. Aswapati agrees to accept Narad’s advice since he feels that whatever has to be, will be. Narad then blesses the proposed marriage with the words “Let always noble and propitious things be to all” and takes leave of the assembly.

Vyasa narrates this part of the story very briskly in about 32 stanzas (about 64 lines). We have already seen that in Sri Aurobindo’s epic Book V (“The Book of Love’) is entirely new and this part of the story is narrated in Sri Aurobindo’s epic in two Books – Books V and VI comprising 5 cantos (nearly 75 pages or 2462 lines). There is no reference in his narration to Malawi, Aswapati’s wife and Savitri’s mother. We shall see that, as Sri Aurobindo narrates the story, she has an important part to play in this meeting with Narad in Aswapati’s court.

After it becomes clear that Savitri is firm in her resolve to marry Satyavan, Aswapati begins preparations for her wedding. On an auspicious day, accompanied by the elderly Brahmins, he visits the hermitage of Dyumatsena. After the exchange of courtesies Aswapati tells Dyumatsena that the purpose of his visit was to request him to accept Savitri as his daughter‐ in‐law. Dyumatsena says he has reservations about her only on one count ‐‐‐ whether the fair princess would be able to bear the hardships associated with life in a hermitage. Aswapati assures him that Savitri should have no problem with this since she knows that both happiness and sorrow are transient in life. Dyumatsena then happily accepts Aswapati’s proposal, and declares that it had been a long‐cherished desire of his to have Savitri as his daughter‐in‐law.

This is followed by a brief description of the formal marriage ceremony.

After the marriage Savitri begins to live in the hermitage with Satyavan and happily adjusts to the forest life by donning bark garments and red‐dyed clothes. She looks after Satyavan’s parents with loving care and Satyavan and Savitri are happy in each other’s company. But her heart is heavy with the burden of Narad’s dire prophecy about Satyavan’s death; she just can’t forget this prophecy. We will see that Sri Aurobindo’s epic does not talk about the formal, ritual wedding at all but devotes a whole canto (Canto One of Book VII) to describe Savitri’s state of mind during the one year she spends with Satyavan in the hermitage, all the time tormented by the dire words of Narad’s prophecy.

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Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri In Sri Aurobindo’s epic we are now at the beginning of Canto 1 of Book VI, “The Book of Fate” This canto begins with a description of how Narad, “the heavenly sage from Paradise”, slowly descends to earth. Savitri has now known of Love but she must also know of Death because it is her life’s mission to conquer Death by the power of Love. The purpose of Narad’s visit is to steel Savitri’s will to accept the challenge of Death which threatens the life of the man she loves, namely, Satyavan. As he comes down from his paradisal home, Narad sings songs about the glory and marvel still to be born on earth. He eventually arrives at Aswapati’s palace where he is welcomed with full honours by King Aswapati and his wife. Even as he was exchanging greetings with his hosts, Savitri arrives there from her one‐year long journey. She looks radiant and transformed by the halo of the love that she has found in the wilderness. Then there follows another portrait of Savitri, this time of Savitri the bride as seen

by Narad. This is an unusual description of Savitri very rich and subtle in the literary devices used in it for us to be able to talk about it in any detail here. These words of Narad also give us the feeling that the sage’s inner vision has seen much more about this young bride than he is willing to reveal at the moment because what he has seen is not all equally auspicious. This description begins on line 126 (page 418) with the following words: He cried to her, “Who is this that comes, the bride

And concludes on line 201 (page 420) with the words: If for all time doom could be left to sleep.

Sri Aurobindo’s Aswapati, as we know, is also a great yogi; he has himself caught more than a glimpse of what Narad has seen in his yogic vision, namely the dark shadow of death hovering over Satyavan, and so he implores Narad to let Savitri pass her mortal life unwounded.

Realising that words are vain where Fate is lord, Narad changes the subject and asks Savitri on what mission she had gone out and what God, what face supreme, she met suddenly?

As she does in Vyasa’a legend, Savitri briefly mentions Dyumatsena, “blind, exiled, outcast, once a mighty king” and she reveals that she met Dyumatsena’s son, Satyavan, “on the wild forest’s lonely verge” and then concludes with the words: “ My father I have chosen (him). This is done”. Aswapati immediately responds and tells her that he approves her choice, and adds that he is sure that all will be well since the secret will in things only works for good, although appearances might be contrary. He also requests Narad not to reveal the destiny he has foreseen for Satyavan since ordinary mortals cannot cope with prevision. Then listening to this exchange Savitri’s mother (Malawi, her name is not mentioned in Sri Aurobindo’s epic) gets alarmed and requests Narad to assure them that Satyavan in fact will prove to be a happy choice for Savitri. She says further that, “if wings of Evil brood” above Satyavan, then Narad

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should say so because then they will be able to take measures to rescue themselves from the hazard of this entanglement with Satyavan. In reply, Narad says that future knowledge is a torturing burden and a fruitless light because our steps in life are compelled by a mysterious Power. But Savitri’s mother is insistent and wants to know from Narad what destiny has decreed for Satyavan. Narad begins by praising Satyavan; he describes him as “a star of splendour or a rose of bliss”, as “a godhead quarried from the stones of life”, “a being so rare, of so divine a make” but then he concludes by saying Heaven’s greatness came, but was too great to stay.

Twelve swift‐winged months are given to him and her; This day returning Satyavan must die.

(P. 431, lines 586‐88)

When she hears this, Savitri’s mother declares that whatever be the excellent qualities of Satyavan, his choice by Savitri has been proved erroneous for “Death is the cupbearer of the wine”. She therefore rejects the grace and the mockery. She now entreats Savitri to mount her chariot and to travel once more through the peopled lands and choose once again. She asks Savitri not to insist on her choice of Satyavan because death has made it vain. But Savitri is adamant and declares that once her heart has chosen and it will not choose again. Her heart has pledged itself to Satyavan and nothing can break this pledge, neither Time nor Death. The intuition that comes out of the true Love is hers now and she declares that she is stronger than her fate and that her love for Satyavan remains unshaken and has the strength to triumph over Death. Savitri’s mother is desperate and doesn’t give up easily. She tries to reason with her, she tries to coax her to change her mind about Satyavan. She asks her to remember that she is no more than a mortal and not to think like a god. She begs of her to use her reason and not leave the path of vigilant light to follow a beautiful face. But Savitri remains resolute and declares: This, this is first, last joy and to its throb The riches of a thousand fortunate years Are a poverty. Nothing to me are death and grief Or ordinary lives and happy days.

And what to me are common souls of men Or eyes and lips that are not Satyavan's?

I have no need to draw back from his arms And the discovered paradise of his love And journey into a still infinity.

Only now for my soul in Satyavan I treasure the rich occasion of my birth: In sunlight and a dream of emerald ways I shall walk with him like gods in Paradise.

If for a year, that year is all my life

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And yet I know this is not all my fate Only to live and love awhile and die.

For I know now why my spirit came on earth And who I am and who he is I love.

I have looked at him from my immortal Self, I have seen God smile at me in Satyavan, I have seen the Eternal in a human face.”

(P. 435, lines 735‐55)

What do you say to someone who can declare her love in such words? So, as the poet says, none could answer to her words. “Silent, they sat and looked into the eyes of Fate”; and the pronoun “they” refers her to Narad, Aswapati and his Queen.

We have now reviewed in this instalment all the three cantos of Book V, “The Book of Love” and also Canto 1 (“The Word of Fate”) of Book VI, “The Book of Fate”. Now we will take a close look at one of the passages in Book VI, Canto one. This passage once again contains a description of Savitri the bride, as seen by Narad. We have already examined two passages describing Savitri – Savitri as she looked on the morning of the day on which Satyavan was destined to die (Instalment ‐ 2) and Savitri as a young woman through the eyes of her father (Instalment – 3). The passage given below, gives you one more portrait of Savitri, this time describing her as she was returning after meeting Satyavan. She has discovered love in the wilderness and married Satyavan with nature and the Gods as witnesses and her entire being is rendered resplendent by this deep experience of love. And Narad’s yogic vision unmistakably notices this transformation in Savitri. This is a fairly long passage, and consists of 75 lines. I will not attempt to comment on it in detail. It is enough to note the peculiar literary device the poet is using throughout this passage. For example, he does not describe directly Savitri’s eyes or hands; he describes them in terms of the enchanting scenes of nature’s beauty which remind him of some aspect of her being.

“Who is this that comes, the bride,

126 The flame‐born, and round her illumined head Pouring their lights her hymeneal pomps Move flashing about her? From what green glimmer of glades Retreating into dewy silences 130 Or half‐seen verge of waters moon‐betrayed Bringst thou this glory of enchanted eyes?

Earth has gold‐hued expanses, shadowy hills That cowl their dreaming phantom heads in night, And guarded in a cloistral joy of woods, 135 Screened banks sink down into felicity Seized by the curved incessant yearning hands

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And ripple‐passion of the up‐gazing stream: Amid cool‐lipped murmurs of its pure embrace They lose their souls on beds of trembling reeds.

And all these are mysterious presences In which some spirit's immortal bliss is felt, And they betray the earth‐born heart to joy.

There hast thou paused, and marvelling borne eyes Unknown, or heard a voice that forced thy life To strain its rapture through thy listening soul?

Or, if my thought could trust this shimmering gaze, It would say: thou hast not drunk from an earthly cup, But stepping through azure curtains of the morn Thou wast surrounded on a magic verge In brighter countries than man's eyes can bear.

Assailed by trooping voices of delight And seized mid a sunlit glamour of the boughs In faery woods, led down the gleaming slopes Of Gandhamadan where the Apsaras roam, Thy limbs have shared the sports which none has seen, And in god-haunts thy human footsteps strayed, Thy mortal bosom quivered with god-speech And thy soul answered to a Word unknown.

What feet of gods, what ravishing flutes of heaven Have thrilled high melodies round, from near and far Approaching through the soft and revelling air, Which still surprised thou hearest? They have fed Thy silence on some red strange-ecstasied fruit And thou hast trod the dim moon-peaks of bliss.

Reveal, O winged with light, whence thou hast flown Hastening bright-hued through the green-tangled earth, Thy body rhythmical with the spring-bird's call.

The empty roses of thy hands are filled Only with their own beauty and the thrill Of a remembered clasp, and in thee glows A heavenly jar, thy firm deep-honied heart, New-brimming with a sweet and nectarous wine.

Thou hast not spoken with the kings of pain.

Life's perilous music rings yet to thy ear Far-melodied, rapid, grand, a Centaur's song, Or soft as water plashing mid the hills, Or mighty as a great chant of many winds.

140

145

150

155

160

165

170

175

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Moon-bright thou livest in thy inner bliss.

Thou comest like a silver deer through groves Of coral flowers and buds of glowing dreams, Or fleest like a wind-goddess through leaves, Or roamst, O ruby-eyed and snow-winged dove, Flitting through thickets of thy pure desires In the unwounded beauty of thy soul.

These things are only images to thy earth, But truest truth of that which in thee sleeps.

For such is thy spirit, a sister of the gods, Thy earthly body lovely to the eyes And thou art kin in joy to heaven's sons.

O thou who hast come to this great perilous world Now only seen through the splendour of thy dreams, Where hardly love and beauty can live safe, Thyself a being dangerously great, A soul alone in a golden house of thought Has lived walled in by the safety of thy dreams.

On heights of happiness leaving doom asleep Who hunts unseen the unconscious lives of men, If thy heart could live locked in the ideal's gold, As high, as happy might thy waking be!

If for all time doom could be left to sleep!”

180

185

190

195

200

Notice that the first thing Narad sees about Savitri are the festive flashes of the “hymeneal pomps” around her. (“hymeneal” = pertaining to marriage). She has just got married and the sense of fulfilment she has from this is writ large on her face. Then he goes on to describe her eyes but not directly. The glory of the enchantment of her eyes reminds him of the “green glimmer of glades” (open spaces in a forest) retreating into dewy silences and of half‐seen river banks which would have remained unseen if they were not moon‐lit. So the poet first describes the green glimmer of glades and half‐seen verge of waters moon‐betrayed and then relates these to Savitri’s eyes. This is the technique he uses through most of this passage.

(Lines 126 –132) There is something about Savitri’s expression that reminds Narad of the golden‐hued expanses of the earth, of shadowy hills that cover their dreaming hazy, indistinct peaks in night and of wood‐screened banks which swoon with delight as they are ravished by the yearning ripples of the streams which amid cool‐lipped murmur of their pure embrace lose themselves on beds of trembling reeds. These are all mysterious presences in which one can feel the immortal bliss of some spirit as it is seen filling its earth‐born heart with joy. Narad says to Savitri: “it looks as though you have paused in all these wonderful places and your eyes carry something of the

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enchantment of these places and the expression on your face shows that you have heard with your soul’s listening a voice that has enraptured your entire being. Narad says further to Savitri: if I can trust the lustre of your eyes, I would say that the bliss you have tasted is not of the earthly kind; you have certainly drunk fulfilment but not from an earthly cup, you must have stepped through the blue curtains of the morning into a magic world in countries too bright for mortal eyes to bear.” This kind of massing of sensuous nature imagery to describe a person in a particular mood is an unusual feat in English poetry. And if you dwell on these lines you will appreciate how aptly they succeed in describing the glow of marital bliss reflected in Savitri’s entire person. (Lines 133 – 151) The description continues. “Assailed by voices of delight and seized in the sun‐lit glamour of boughs in faery woods as on the gleaming slopes of Gundhamadan ( a mountain and forest described in Hindu mythology, renowned for its fragrance) where the Apsaras (celestial damsels of joy) roam, your limbs must have shared the sports which none has seen, and in god‐ haunts your footsteps must have strayed, and your mortal bosom must have vibrated with god‐speech and your soul must have responded to it.” (Lines 152 – 159) “You still seem to be hearing in great surprise the footsteps of gods and the ravishing flutes of heavenly melodies approaching you from far and near through the soft air.” The description is put in the mode of a question. The footsteps of what gods and what ravishing heavenly melodies are you listening to? “These seem to have fed your silence with some red strange‐ ecstasied fruit and you seem to have trodden the moon‐peaks of bliss.” In other words, Narad says to her that her face has the rapt look of happiness of someone who is having these wonderful experiences. That is the import. (Lines 160 – 165) “Tell us, o bird with the wings of light, from where you have flown to us, hastening bright‐hued through the green forest, with the body rhythmical with the call of the spring‐bird? The now empty roses of your palms are filled with their own beauty and the thrill of a remembered clasp, and you are glowing like a heavenly jar, your heart recently rendered brim‐full with a sweet and nectarous wine.” (Lines 166 – 173) “Until now you have been a stranger to pain. Life’s hazardous music yet rings to your ears far‐ melodied, rapid and grand, and enchanting like the Centaur’s song, or soft as water mid the hills, or mighty as the great chant of many winds. Moon‐bright you live in the inner bliss. You have come like a silver deer through groves of coral flowers and buds of glowing dreams, and you run like a wind‐goddess through leaves, or roam like a snow‐winged dove flitting through the thickets of your pure desires with the beauty of your soul unwounded.” (Lines 174 – 185) “These felicities within you that I have described in terms of the images of this earth but they are meant only to capture the truth of what you are within. For such is your spirit, a sister of the gods,, your earthly body is lovely to the eyes, and you are akin in joy to heaven’ sons.”

(Lines 186 – 190)

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“You have come to this great perilous world which you have so far seen only through the splendour of your dreams, but this is a world in which love and beauty can hardly live safe; you, O Savitri, are dangerously great, but you have lived safe so far in the golden house of thought walled in by the safety of your dreams. You can continue to live on these heights of happiness, if your heart can live locked in the golden realm of the ideal; you may then be able to live leaving Doom asleep who hunts unseen the unconscious lives of men.” Notice that Narad gives some hint of the impending disaster but is discreet about it in holding back the knowledge he has. (Lines 191 – 201) This opulence of sensuous imagery from nature which the poet has used in this passage is truly oriental and classical and many a modern reader may need to get used to the literary devices used so deftly by the poet here which remind one of the classical poet Kalidas rather than of Keats, probably the most sensuous of the English romantic poets.

1] The preceptor of the Gods [2] The leader of the Gods [3] The twin Vedic deities, known for their handsomeness who symbolise powers of Truth, of

intelligent action and of right enjoyment.

http://nextfuture.sriaurobindosociety.org.in/jun03/nfjun03_savitri.htm

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5. Departures from Mahabharata Legend – Book Six Canto Two At the end of the previous instalment, we saw how the grim prophecy of Narad ‐ that Satyavan had only one more year to live ‐ had the effect of steeling Savitri’s resolve to marry Satyavan.

At that point we had reached the end of Canto One of Book VI ofSavitri. We now move on to Canto Two of Book VI (‘The Way of Fate and the Problem of Pain’). Because of the important matters it deals with, this entire instalment will be devoted to this canto.

The Mahabharata Legend 6. In the Mahabharata legend, as soon Savitri reveals that she has chosen Satyavan for her husband, Narad immediately bursts out saying that Savitri has done “something accursed, that forebodes a great evil”, although he does not spell out the nature of this evil until a little later.

He then goes on to say some excellent things about Satyavan. At this point, Aswapati asks what then was the blemish in Satyavan which Narad was so concerned with as soon as he heard the name of Satyavan from Savitri. In reply, Narad makes the prophecy about Satyavan’s death at the end of that year. We have seen how Aswapati then tries to persuade Savitri to go out again and choose a second time, but she is adamant. At this point Narad resolves the issue in Savitri’s favour and advises Aswapati to accept her choice and Aswapati bows down to Narad’s sage advice.

Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri We have already seen that in Sri Aurobindo’s epic, it is Savitri’s mother (Malawi), who gets very upset when she hears Narad’s prophecy, and we have seen how hard she tries to persuade Savitri to go out and choose again, and we have also seen how Savitri makes everyone speechless by the great declaration of her love to Satyavan. She sticks to her resolve here depending entirely on her own inner strength: Narada does not come to her help as he does in the Mahabharata legend. Secondly, Sri Aurobindo must have introduced Savitri’s mother in this part of the story to represent the purely human reaction to the situation. Aswapati, we have already seen in Sri Aurobindo’s epic, is a very great Yogi, and knows probably as much as Narad does of what the future holds for Satyavan and Savitri. Therefore, in Sri Aurobindo’s epic, the role of trying to persuade Savitri to choose a second time has been assigned to Savitri’s mother.

When finally Savitri’s mother is convinced that it is futile to persuade her to change her mind about Satyavan, Sri Aurobindo uses Malawi for another important purpose. She now feels totally frustrated at the turn of events and reacts to them in a totally human way. She raises

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some fundamental questions about ‘The Way of Fate and the Problem of Pain’ which have always baffled human understanding , and seeks Narad’s answers to them. These also happen to be some of the questions which have baffled most philosophical systems. This canto, which takes up 26 pages (909 lines), “The Way of Fate and the Problem of Pain” is totally new in Sri Aurobindo’s epic; it has nothing correspondng to it in Vyasa’s version of the legend.

When Savitiri refuses to change her mind about Satyavan in spite of seveal entreaties from her mother, the latter naturally feels angry and frustrated that the one person dearest to her, namely, Savitri, is getting ready to enter a trap set for her by fate but, although she is her mother, she is totally helpless and can do nothing about it. When she looks into the future she sees nothing but a life‐time of pain and suffering ahead for Savitri once Satyavan is dead at the end of that very year, as predicted by Narad. Why was Savitri being punished in this manner when she has done nothng to deserve it? She is so young, so gifted, so full of love and grace, why is she is not being allowed to live a normal life of fulfilment? Why did her chariot have to bring her face to face with the one young man who had this accursed fate and why did she lose her heart to him when there were countless other young people whom Savitri could have met? The questions that Savitri’s mother now asks Narad are prompted by this puzzlement of hers at the turn of events in Savitri’s life. This leads her to raise some fairly general questions like, Why is there pain and suffering in life? Did God really create such an imperfect world or did some other force interfere and God remained helpless to prevent the imposition of pain and suffering on human life? And then what is this that is called “Fate”? Is it just random chance, or are the accidental events of which it is made governed by some intelligence? What about evil? How could it have arisen when God who is all‐good, all‐compassion, omnipotent is the creator of this world? How could he allow such a thing? Savitri’s mother describes life as it is experienced by man here on earth in these words:

Mind suffers lamed by the world's disharmony And the unloveliness of human things.

A treasure misspent or cheaply, fruitlessly sold In the bazaar of a blind destiny, A gift of priceless value from Time's gods Lost or mislaid in an uncaring world, Life is a marvel missed, an art gone wry; A seeker in a dark and obscure place, An ill‐armed warrior facing dreadful odds, An imperfect worker given a baffling task, An ignorant judge of problems Ignorance made, Its heavenward flights reach closed and keyless gates, Its glorious outbursts peter out in mire.

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On Nature's gifts to man a curse was laid.

All walks inarmed by its own opposites, Error is the comrade of our mortal thought, And falsehood lurks in the deep bosom of truth, Sin poisons with its vivid flowers of joy Or leaves a red scar burnt across the soul; Virtue is a grey bondage and a gaol.

Pp. 438 ‐ 439

This is a very brilliant summing up of life as seen by the human mind. This analysis naturally leads her to the inevitable conclusions that there is no meaning to life, and all this talk of an omnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent creator and of a deathless soul in us is just an illusion. As Savitri’s mother puts it: Perhaps the soul we feel is only a dream, Eternal self a fiction sensed in trance.

P. 442

Savitri’s mother raises here some of the most difficult problems which philosophers everywhere have grappled with but without complete success. These are not merely philosophers’ questions. Most of us are forced to ask similar questions when in life, we feel betrayed by treachery, when our friends turn false, and when we find that our gods have clay feet, and our dreams and ideals begin to look like a mockery.

Savitri’s mother’s critique is devastating and almost irrefutable particularly if one believes in the concept of an omniscient, omnipotent God who is extra‐cosmic, who stands outside this creation and has full control over it. The hypothesis of an extra‐cosmic God assumes that God is outside his creation and he works out his purpose in the world through the intense sorrow and sufferings of those created by him. If God imposes on his creation pain, evil and suffering from which he is immune, we then have a God who is even morally reprehensible. If God is indeed all‐kind and all‐powerful, how is it that he has created this world where pain and suffering are so rampant, where evil triumphs over good most of the time and God stands helpless. Is it either because he does not care or because he is not strong enough to prevent what is happening in the world? Thus Savitri’s mother makes here a case against the existence of God more or less along the lines adopted by the modern age of enlightenment.

Narad does not take up these questions as there are so many metaphysical problems that need to be answered. Sri Aurobindo has done this in his metaphysical magnum opus, The Life Divine. The perception of the Western philosophers is that by and large Hindu philosophers are rather cavalier in their treatment of evil. This perception is based on a wrong reading of the Indian point of view. But this is not the right forum for discussing these matters. Sri Aurobindo is unlike most Hindu philosophers in several ways, particularly in his treatment of evil. For him

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evil is not just the problem for an individual which gets dissolved when he rises above the Ignorance in which he lives. There is also the problem of cosmic evil and before evil can disappear from this world, the problem of cosmic evil has to be dealt with.

Sri Aurobindo offers an evolutionary perspective on this cluster of problems and provides probably the best solution to them. He does not regard either physical evil, in the shape of pain and suffering, or moral evil as an inseparable part of life or as a permanent feature of the world. In the course of evolution, the former enters the world with the emergence of life just as moral evil enters with the emergence of the finite rational will. Sri Aurobindo believes that the solution to these problems lies in a radical transformation of the world, which will take this creation to the next stage in evolution. An individual may be able to find freedom from evil and pain by attaining spiritual maturity and by being lifted into the full freedom of the self. But this will not solve the cosmic problem of evil. For that we need the descent of a greater power of intensity and purity which Sri Aurobindo has called the Gnostic or the Supramental consciousness. This, in brief, is Sri Aurobindo’s metaphysical solution to this problem.

Narad’s reply is not couched in metaphysical terms. He first reiterates that the Eternal, whose real nature is bliss, lives in the human heart but we are not aware of him because of the darkness of Ignorance which stands between us and him. He tells Savitri’s mother that since she sees the world in the light of the Ignorance she can not see God’s meaning in the world.

Our desires and hopes hide it from us. Our craving for earth’s joys hides from us the Immortal’s bliss.

He does not then deny existence of pain in our lives, but he points out that “Where Ignorance is, there suffering too must come”. We in our ignorance feel that we have a right to be happy and we have our own idea of happiness. But the inner truth about our life is that we are here on earth to grow in consciousness, to evolve from a lower to a higher consciousness through all kinds of experiences, some pleasant some unpleasant. Both these are needed for us to grow in life. Pain often comes to shake us out of our complacency and to persuade us to climb towards the sun of perfect consciousness shining on the summits of our being. This is how Narad puts this idea: Pain is the hammer of the gods to break A dead resistance in the mortal's heart, His slow inertia as of living stone.

If the heart were not forced to want and weep, His soul would have lain down content, at ease, And never thought to exceed the human start And never learned to climb towards the Sun.

p. 443

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From pain in individual beings, Narad goes on to speak of the cosmic role of pain. Pain was the first‐born of the Inconscience from which this creation has evolved. Pain is what has stirred Matter from its sleep in the inconscience and made the evolution of spirit possible. The great world redeemers take on this pain on themselves and help this world evolve to a higher consciousness. This is the will of God and it must be worked out in human life against the evil that rises from the gulfs of the inconscience, against man’s ignorance and against the deep folly of the human heart. Man’ spirit is doomed to pain till man is freed from evil and its result, the ignorance. Though all the tragic spectacle of blood, sweat, toil and tears, the evolutionary effort moves on and men suffer and die that man may live and God be born in him. Pain is the hand sculpturing men to greatness. This is what we find in the lives of “the Great who came to save this suffering world”. The poet cites here as an example Jesus Christ and his crucifixion.

(Read from line 290 to line 320). This is the lot of all those who come to help the world and lead the soul of earth to higher things. Their life is a constant combat with evil which they have to conquer to free mankind from the hold of the inconscience and its forces.

But when God's messenger comes to help the world And lead the soul of earth to higher things, He too must carry the yoke he came to unloose; He too must bear the pang that he would heal: Exempt and unafflicted by earth's fate, How shall he cure the ills he never felt?…

He carries the suffering world in his own breast; Its sins weigh on his thoughts, its grief is his: Earth's ancient load lies heavy on his soul; Night and its powers beleaguer his tardy steps, The titan adversary's clutch he bears; His march is a battle and a pilgrimage.

Life's evil smites, he is stricken with the world's pain: A million wounds gape in his secret heart.

He journeys sleepless through an unending night; Antagonist forces crowd across his path; A siege, a combat is his inner life.

p. 446

In this part of his reply, Narad gives expression to Sri Aurobindo’s occult view of evil. In several places in Savitri Sri Aurobindo has referred to the four powers of Inconscience which constantly resist the evolutionary effort to rise to progressively higher levels of spiritual consciousness and manifest here in Matter the perfection of the Divine. These four powers are the attack of obscurity, the resistance of universal inconscience, the refusal of the universal

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inertia, and the obstruction and conservatism of the material negation, as identified by Sri Aurobindo in some of his other writings[1].

A dark concealed hostility is lodged In the human depths, in the hidden heart of Time That claims the right to change and mar God's work.

A secret enmity ambushes the world's march; It leaves a mark on thought and speech and act: It stamps stain and defect on all things done; Till it is slain peace is forbidden on earth.

There is no visible foe, but the unseen Is round us, forces intangible besiege, Touches from alien realms, thoughts not our own Overtake us and compel the erring heart; Our lives are caught in an ambiguous net.

An adversary Force was born of old: Invader of the life of mortal man, It hides from him the straight immortal path.

A power came in to veil the eternal Light, A power opposed to the eternal will Diverts the messages of the infallible Word, Contorts the contours of the cosmic plan: A whisper lures to evil the human heart, It seals up wisdom's eyes, the soul's regard, It is the origin of our suffering here, It binds earth to calamity and pain.

This all must conquer who would bring down God's peace.

This hidden foe lodged in the human breast Man must overcome or miss his higher fate.

This is the inner war without escape.

Pp. 447‐48 That is why the world‐redeemer’s task becomes so difficult. This world is in love with its own ignorance, and whoever comes to remove this ignorance is perceived as the enemy, and therefore it rewards with the cross those who come to save it from ignorance. There are some who enable you to liberate yourself from the ignorance but in the process also to escape from this world. Of course these lucky few find fulfilment for themselves, but how can the ignorance which afflicts the world be removed just by a few escaping from the world? Running away from the world in trying to evade the hold of ignorance and suffering ‐ this is what all the world’s great spiritual teachers have taught so far. They offer this solution because of their belief that

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the evil, suffering and pain which pursue life in this world at every step cannot be shaken off.

So the best solution to them is to abandon the world to its own fate and seek one’s own personal salvation.

What then is the solution to the problem of evil, and pain? Narad says that the work of bringing real freedom to this world cannot be achieved fully … till the evil is slain in its own home And Light invades the world’s inconscient base And perished has the adversary Force,

P. 448 Narad then talks about a world‐redeemer who may yet come and take up this challenge and go down into the abysm of the Inconscient and slay evil in its own house. This saviour will have to grapple with the riddling Sphinx of obscurity and plunge into the vast obscurity of the Inconscient. He will have to call the light of consciousness into these dark caves. He will have to make Truth‐Light conquer Matter’s sleep of inertia and make all earth look into the eyes of God. For this he will have to bring light to all things that are perverse, to explore the very heart of evil and see how deep its roots are in nature’s soil. He will have to enter the eternity of Night and know God’s darkness as he knows his Sun. In other words, this saviour will have to enter the dolorous vasts and travel through Hell to be able to save the world. He will not be able to do all this with the mental light alone; he will need the more powerful light of the Truth‐ Consciousness ( or the Supramental consciousness) to be able to perform this great feat. And then from the bottom of the inconscience he will be able to break into the eternal Light of the Truth‐consciousness on the other side. This world will then get totally transformed: There meet and clasp the eternal opposites, There pain becomes a violent fiery joy; Evil turns back to its original good, And sorrow lies upon the breasts of Bliss: She has learnt to weep glad tears of happiness; Her gaze is charged with a wistful ecstasy.

Then shall be ended here the Law of Pain.

Earth shall be made a home of Heaven's light, A seer heaven‐born shall lodge in human breasts; The superconscient beam shall touch men's eyes And the truth‐conscious world come down to earth Invading Matter with the Spirit's ray, Awaking its silence to immortal thoughts, Awaking the dumb heart to the living Word.

This mortal life shall house Eternity's bliss,

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The body's self taste immortality.

Then shall the world‐redeemer's task be done.

p. 451

Until this happens, “until the Truth‐Conscious world come(s) down to earth”, life will continue to be troubled by pain and death, and man will have to put up with these things and bear them leaning on his faith in God for his support. “ Make of thy daily way a pilgrimage,/ For through small joys and griefs thou mov’st towards God.” That is his advice for man for now. There is, however, the Titan’s way which strives to wrest by force what belongs to the Immortals. This way is not good for man because it seeks to storm the heavens by force and it brings a great deal of suffering all around. The Asura resorts to hurry, riot, excess, hate and violence in order to be equal to the Divine; he sees his little self as very God and wants to stamp his single figure on the world. Narad asks man not to take that road.

Narad re‐affirms that infinity is man’s real goal and man carries within himself a spark of the Divine. It is man’s refusal to recognise the Divinity within himself that is the real cause of pain and suffering.

Pain is the signature of the Ignorance Attesting the secret god denied by life: Until life finds him pain can never end.

p. 453

In fact, it is Bliss that is the secret of all that lives, “even pain and grief are garbs of world‐ delight”. It is the limitation of our ego, the little separated self, that it cannot bear “the world’s tremendous touch” and this failure results in pain. Indifference, pain and joy are a triple disguise of bliss. Only by the strength of the Spirit within will man be able to convert all the agony he now feels into ecstasy.

Then Narad takes up the problem of the origin of pain and says “Thou art thyself the author of thy pain.” “Thou” here is not the human you which is now complaining but the central being in us who accepted or even invited the adventure of the Ignorance. Sorrow and struggle are a necessary consequence of the plunge into the Inconscience and the evolutionary emergence out of it. The Supreme Reality, whose nature is Consciousness and Bliss, became curious of a shadow thrown by Itself, and sensed a negative infinity and this became the ground for Nature’s ignorance, unconsciousness and inertia. This led to the lure of the adventure of manifestation, of the silent One manifesting as the many in terms of ignorance and inertia.

Then began a huge descent, a giant fall.

As one drawn by the grandeur of the Void The soul attracted leaned to the Abyss:

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It longed for the adventure of Ignorance And the marvel and surprise of the Unknown And the endless possibility that lurked In the womb of Chaos and in Nothing's gulf Or looked from the unfathomed eyes of Chance.

It tired of its unchanging happiness, It turned away from immortality: It was drawn to hazard's call and danger's charm, It yearned to the pathos of grief, the drama of pain, Perdition's peril, the wounded bare escape, The music of ruin and its glamour and crash, The savour of pity and the gamble of love And passion and the ambiguous face of Fate. p. 455

Thus came, born from a blind tremendous choice / This great and perplexed world / This haunt of Ignorance, this home of pain.”

Sri Aurobindo has pointed out elsewhere[2] that the origin of pain and suffering is fundamentally a cosmic problem and needs a cosmic consciousness to understand it; the perspective of the human consciousness is too narrow to understand this. This is not the place for us to discuss this problem in all its details. Suffice it to say here that Sri Aurobindo’s solution to the problem of pain and suffering is metaphysically probably the soundest so far presented.

At this point, Aswapati asks Narad, “Is the Spirit then ruled by an outward physical world? Is there no remedy within for this problem of fate? What is Fate after all if not the will of the spirit which is fulfilled by the cosmic forces after a protracted period of time? At least in Savitri’s case I had thought a mighty Power is housed in her which has the capacity to deal with the vagaries of Fate”. To this question Narad does not give a straight reply.

He says that although Fate seems to walk with random steps there is nothing casual or accidental in this world; our least stumblings are foreseen above. There is a sublime meaning to the seemingly meandering steps of Time but the human mind is incapable of understanding it.

Often some of our prayers are rejected by the wisdom of Heaven because its love is wiser. And this wisdom has kept for Savitri her privilege of pain. There certainly is a greatness in Savitri’s soul that can transform her and all around her and yet she must walk on the hard and painful stones to reach her goal. She too must share the human need of pain. The mind of man is led by words; he can not see the integral Truth; he has to cut it into strips and can see only one strip at a time. Man sees this as a dead, mechanical universe, driven by chance or necessity. He misses the heavings of the Mother’s heart, he feels here only her rigid cold limbs. Matter’s laws seem rigid and all seem to be bound by them, but the spirit’s consent is needed for each act.

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Freedom and law walks step in step here. All here can change if human will could be made one with God’s. By doing that, man can be all‐knowing and omniscient. If man’s mind can receive God’s light, and his force driven by God’s force, then man himself becomes a miracle doing miracles.

It is decreed that Satyavan must die; the hour is fixed and chosen also is the fatal stroke. But what shall transpire after that is written in Savitri’s soul, the power that is in Savitri will decide this; but this writing will remain illegible until the hour comes for this future to unfold itself.

Fate is Truth which works itself out through our Ignorance. Man can accept his fate or refuse it.

Even death is not a close; the events of life, happy or otherwise are not our fate. The goal, the road we choose are our fate. Fate is a mechanism that keeps working through ignorance until it has made us one with our indwelling God. Since the path we now walk is the path of Ignorance, it is full of strange happenings whose significance man always misreads. Fate will keep chasing man through peril and through triumph and follow him until he goes beyond the last post of Ignorance and “ stands upon the splendour‐peaks of God. In vain, Narad says to Savitri’s mother, do you mourn that Satyavan must die. Death is the spirit’s opportunity and for Satyavan, it will be “a beginning of a greater life”. A vast intention has brought Satyavan and Savitri close and love and death conspire in their lives to bring about a great end. Out of danger and pain heaven‐bliss shall come. That is God’s secret plan. Many great souls in the past have contributed to make this plan a reality, and of its master‐builders she is one. Then come the following most reassuring lines: This world was not built with random bricks of chance, A blind god is not destiny's architect; A conscious power has drawn the plan of life, There is a meaning in each curve and line.

It is an architecture high and grand By many named and nameless masons built In which unseeing hands obey the Unseen, And of its master‐builders she is one.

p. 460 I have dealt with this canto in detail because most of us are interested in the questions Savitri’s mother asks Narad and in the answers Narad gives. As I pointed out earlier these problems are treated in great detail by Sri Aurobindo in The Life Divine. Here Narad puts some of these thoughts most succinctly. What is particularly worth noting here is how Sri Aurobindo takes abstract philosophical thought and transforms it into poetic utterance of great lyrical intensity.

You will see many instances of this in Part III of Savitri. Sri Aurobindo is probably the world’s greatest poet for transforming mental thought into wonderful poetry.

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In all the earlier instalments of this series, I always gave you one or more passages from Savitri with some comments for your enjoyment. This instalment has already become more than sufficiently long. So this time I have decided to present to you a most glorious passage which in fact concludes Narad’s reply to Savitri’s mother’s questions. It is undoubtedly one of the poetic peaks in this epic. It is a fairly long passage but I am sure you will love reading it aloud. Read it aloud slowly and deliberately giving each vowel sound its full value and paying full attention to the rhythm of the lines. And after all the preceding discussion as the background, you should be able to understand the passage and enjoy it without any detailed commentary from me.

In these lines Narad advises Savitri’s mother not to try to change the secret will and not to let purely human concerns stand between Savitri and her fate. Savitri has the strength to confront fate all by herself because her will has been made one with God’s will. Her life seems to be charged with the earth’s destiny but she is equal to her mighty task. O Queen, leave her to her mighty self and fate, urges Narad.

“Queen, strive no more to change the secret will; Time's accidents are steps in its vast scheme.

Bring not thy brief and helpless human tears Across the fathomless moments of a heart That knows its single will and God's as one: It can embrace its hostile destiny; It sits apart with grief and facing death.

Affronting adverse fate armed and alone.

In this enormous world standing apart In the mightiness of her silent spirit's will, In the passion of her soul of sacrifice Her lonely strength facing the universe, Affronting fate, asks not man's help nor god's: Sometimes one life is charged with earth's destiny, It cries not for succour from the time‐bound powers.

Alone she is equal to her mighty task.

Intervene not in a strife too great for thee, A struggle too deep for mortal thought to sound, Its question to this Nature's rigid bounds When the soul fronts nude of garbs the infinite, Its too vast theme of a lonely mortal will Pacing the silence of eternity.

As a star, uncompanioned, moves in heaven Unastonished by the immensities of space, Travelling infinity by its own light,

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The great are strongest when they stand alone.

A God‐given might of being is their force, A ray from self's solitude of light the guide; The soul that can live alone with itself meets God; Its lonely universe is their rendezvous.

A day may come when she must stand unhelped On a dangerous brink of the world's doom and hers, Carrying the world's future on her lonely breast, Carrying the human hope in a heart left sole To conquer or fail on a last desperate verge.

Alone with death and close to extinction's edge, Her single greatness in that last dire scene, She must cross alone a perilous bridge in Time And reach an apex of world‐destiny Where all is won or all is lost for man.

In that tremendous silence lone and lost Of a deciding hour in the world's fate, In her soul's climbing beyond mortal time When she stands sole with Death or sole with God Apart upon a silent desperate brink, Alone with her self and death and destiny As on some verge between Time and Timelessness When being must end or life rebuild its base, Alone she must conquer or alone must fall.

No human aid can reach her in that hour, No armoured God stand shining at her side.

Cry not to heaven, for she alone can save.

For this the silent Force came missioned down; In her the conscious Will took human shape: She only can save herself and save the world.

O queen, stand back from that stupendous scene, Come not between her and her hour of Fate.

Her hour must come and none can intervene: Think not to turn her from her heaven‐sent task, Strive not to save her from her own high will.

Thou hast no place in that tremendous strife; Thy love and longing are not arbiters there, Leave the world's fate and her to God's sole guard.

Even if he seems to leave her to her lone strength, Even though all falters and falls and sees an end

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And the heart fails and only are death and night, God‐given her strength can battle against doom Even on a brink where Death alone seems close And no human strength can hinder or can help.

Think not to intercede with the hidden Will, Intrude not twixt her spirit and its force But leave her to her mighty self and Fate.”

[1] Sri Aurobindo: Archives and Research, December 1994, pp. 149‐50 [2] Nirodbaran’s Correspondence with Sri Aurobindo, p. 277

http://nextfuture.sriaurobindosociety.org.in/jul03/nfjul03_savitri.htm

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6. Departures from the Mahabharata Legend – Book Seven Cantos One, Two and Three

In our preliminary exploration of Savitri, we have now reached the end of Book VI. Book VII “The Book of Yoga” is another Book wholly devoted to the description of Yoga, this time it is Savitri’s yoga as Books I, II and III primarily dealt with Aswapati’s yoga. We hope to deal with these yogas – Aswapati’s and also Savitri’s in some detail a little later in this study. Here we will present only a general outline of Savitri’s yogic journey as we did earlier with respect to Aswapati’s yoga. As in earlier installments, we will continue noting the departures from the Mahabharata legend that we find in Sri Aurobindo’s epic.

The Mahabharata Legend 7. As already mentioned earlier, Aswapati performs the marriage of Satyavan and Savitri following the prescribed rites and ceremonies. Savitri is now settled in the hermitage as Satyavan’s wife. Satyavan is very happy to have such a beautiful and virtuous wife and Savitri too is joyous that her heart’s desire to have Satyavan as her husband has been fulfilled.

Savitri puts aside all the rich ornaments and robes which she used to wear when she lived in her father’s palace and begins wearing bark clothes and clothes dyed in red. With great inner composure and humility, she now takes charge of all the household chores. She looks after the physical needs of her mother‐in‐law and father‐in‐law. With sweet and loving speech, she attends on her husband and makes sure that he is happy. But then Savitri has a great anguish in her heart and is languishing from inside as she remembers the dire prophecy of Narad. All this is narrated in about ten verses (20 lines) in the Mahabharata legend.

Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri Sri Aurobindo more than adequately covers this part of the Mahabharata story in about 320 lines in Canto One of Book VII. This canto is appropriately called, “The Joy of Union; the Ordeal of the Foreknowledge of Death, and the Heart’s Grief and Pain”. This is one of the most poignant cantos in the entire epic.

The first 16 lines of this canto are of a prefatory nature and make some profound observations about how fate works in our lives. In the case of most people, fate seems to lead them blindly to an unknown goal since in their lives it journeys on the wheels built by their hopes and longings. In the case of these people, Matter seems to mould the body’s life and the soul looks as if it is driven by nature. But greater spirits can reverse this balance and make the soul the artist of one’s fate. This is the mystic truth about fate which our ignorance hides. Even when one has to face an ordeal, it is because one’s soul has chosen that route. Ananke (Destiny,

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Fate) is the mandate of our own soul. The appropriateness of these observations must be seen in the context of the great ordeal that Savitri is about to face now.

The poet then briefly describes Savitri’s journey from Aswapati’s palace in Madra to Satyavan’s hermitage on the borders of the forest. She notes the difference between her past and the future she has embraced. This was the past which she was now leaving behind her: Far now behind lay Madra's spacious halls, The white carved pillars, the cool dim alcoves, The tinged mosaic of the crystal floors, The towered pavilions, the wind‐rippled pools And gardens humming with the murmur of bees, Forgotten soon or a pale memory The fountain's plash in the white stone‐bound pool, The thoughtful noontide's brooding solemn trance, The colonnade's dream grey in the quiet eve, The slow moonrise gliding in front of Night.

Left far behind were now the faces known, The happy silken babble on laughter's lips And the close‐clinging clasp of intimate hands And adoration's light in cherished eyes Offered to the one sovereign of their life.

Page 466

The Future she has chosen to embrace is described in these words: Here only was the voice of bird and beast,— The ascetic's exile in the dim‐souled huge Inhuman forest far from cheerful sound Of man's blithe converse and his crowded days.

Page 466

Sri Aurobindo does not forget the sadness in the hearts of the people who had escorted Savitri from her father’s palace. They knew what an opulent life Savitri had left behind and probably also knew something of the dire fate that awaited Satyavan. So they take leave of Savitri with a heavy heart.

Lingering some days upon the forest verge Like men who lengthen out departure's pain, Unwilling to separate sorrowful clinging hands, Unwilling to see for the last time a face,

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Heavy with the sorrow of a coming day And wondering at the carelessness of Fate Who breaks with idle hands her supreme works, They parted from her with pain‐fraught burdened 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 her doom In the tremendous forest's savage charge.

Page 467

Sri Aurobindo is not the poet only of spiritual illuminations and mystical visions. Even when it comes to portraying the vital range of human life, he can reach rare poetic heights. This is how he portrays the ecstatic life of fulfilled love which Savitri and Satyavan were now living in their forest hermitage: At first to her beneath the sapphire heavens The sylvan solitude was a gorgeous dream, An altar of the summer's splendour and fire, A sky‐topped flower‐hung palace of the gods And all its scenes a smile on rapture's lips And all its voices bards of happiness.

There was a chanting in the casual wind, There was a glory in the least sunbeam; Night was a chrysoprase on velvet cloth, A nestling darkness or a moonlit deep; Day was a purple pageant and a hymn, A wave of the laughter of light from morn to eve.

His absence was a dream of memory, His presence was the empire of a god.

A fusing of the joys of earth and heaven, A tremulous blaze of nuptial rapture passed, A rushing of two spirits to be one, A burning of two bodies in one flame.

Opened were gates of unforgettable bliss: Two lives were locked within an earthly heaven And fate and grief fled from that fiery hour.

Page 468

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(chrysoprase = the ancient name of a golden‐green precious stone which shone in the dark)

But then, Savitri could not forget the dire prophecy of Narad, and that opened for her the grief of all the world. And the poet describes the poignancy of this grief with equal felicity in these lines: The shadow of her lover's doom arose And fear laid hands upon her mortal heart.

The moments swift and ruthless raced; alarmed Her thoughts, her mind remembered Narad's date.

A trembling moved accountant of her riches, She reckoned the insufficient days between: A dire expectancy knocked at her breast; Dreadful to her were the footsteps of the hours: Grief came, a passionate stranger to her gate: Banished when in his arms, out of her sleep It rose at morn to look into her face.

Vainly she fled into abysms of bliss From her pursuing foresight of the end.

The more she plunged into love that anguish grew; Her deepest grief from sweetest gulfs arose.

Remembrance was a poignant pang, she felt Each day a golden leaf torn cruelly out From her too slender book of love and joy.

Thus swaying in strong gusts of happiness, And swimming in foreboding's sombre waves, And feeding sorrow and terror with her heart,— For now they sat among her bosom's guests Or in her inner chamber paced apart,— Her eyes stared blind into the future's night.

Page 469

Savitri’s suffering became all the more oppressive because she could not share it with any one else. As the poet says, “ She in her dreadful knowledge was alone.” She tried in vain to find a ground of stillness and the spirit’s peace within herself. But she controlled this inner turmoil and nothing was shown outside. For those around her she was still the loving and serene Savitri they knew.

She was still to them the child they knew and loved; The sorrowing woman they saw not within; No change was in her beautiful motions seen:

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A worshipped empress all once vied to serve, She made herself the diligent serf of all, Nor spared the labour of broom and jar and well, Or close gentle tending or to heap the fire Of altar and kitchen, no slight task allowed To others that her woman's strength might do.

In all her acts a strange divinity shone: Into a simplest movement she could bring A oneness with earth's glowing robe of light, A lifting up of common acts by love.

Page 470 The poet has portrayed in the following lines in a masterly fashion Savitri as she is torn between love and grief. Such an intensity as we see here projected in the portrayal of Savitri is possible only for poets of the very first order. The picture of Savitri desperately seeking relief from her intense suffering in the strong embrace of Satyavan’s love is a great triumph of Sri Aurobindo’s poetic craft.

Always behind this strange divided life Her spirit like a sea of living fire Possessed her lover and to his body clung, One locked embrace to guard its threatened mate.

All night she woke through the slow silent hours Brooding on the treasure of his bosom and face, Hung o'er the sleep‐bound beauty of his brow Or laid her burning cheek upon his feet.

Waking at morn her lips endlessly clung to his, Unwilling ever to separate again Or lose that honeyed drain of lingering joy, Unwilling to loose his body from her breast, The warm inadequate signs that love must use.

Intolerant of the poverty of Time Her passion catching at the fugitive hours Willed the expense of centuries in one day Of prodigal love and the surf of ecstasy; Or else she strove even in mortal time To build a little room for timelessness By the deep union of two human lives, Her soul secluded shut into his soul.

After all was given she demanded still;

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Even by his strong embrace unsatisfied, She longed to cry, “O tender Satyavan, O lover of my soul, give more, give more Of love while yet thou canst, to her thou lov'st.

Imprint thyself for every nerve to keep That thrills to thee the message of my heart.

For soon we part and who shall know how long Before the great wheel in its monstrous round Restore us to each other and our love?”

Too well she loved to speak a fateful word And lay her burden on his happy head; She pressed the outsurging grief back into her breast To dwell within silent, unhelped, alone.

Pages 471 – 72

The poet says Satyavan sometimes half understood the “the unplumbed abyss of her deep passionate want” and tried to spend with her as much time as he could spare from his usual daily labour. But “all was too little for her bottomless need.” Any separation from Satyavan became unbearable to her, and sometimes thinking of the day she must part from Satyavan as prophesied by Narad, she even thought of a fiery union with him through death’s door of escape. But she would dismiss that idea for the sake of Satyavan’s old parents who would need her by their side after Satyavan is gone. Thus grief and love occupied the whole of her world.

The poet describes this state of mind in these wonderful lines: Often it seemed to her the ages' pain Had pressed their quintessence into her single woe, Concentrating in her a tortured world.

Thus in the silent chamber of her soul Cloistering her love to live with secret grief She dwelt like a dumb priest with hidden gods Unappeased by the wordless offering of her days, Lifting to them her sorrow like frankincense, Her life the altar, herself the sacrifice.

Pages 472 – 73

Yet through all this tapasya of love and grief, Savitri and Satyavan “grew into each other more”.

This inner identity became so intense that even when Satyavan wandered in the forest alone, Savitri felt that her spirit walked with him and knew every movement of his as though he moved in her inner space.

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Grief and fear became the food of the great love in Savitri. Increased by their torment, her love became the whole of her life, her whole earth and heaven. It gave her a strength so divine that she could now bear the blows of Time and Fate unflinchingly. She now became from within calm and resolute, awaiting some outcome of this fiery struggle.

By now a whole year had passed, one cycle of seasons had passed since she came to live with Satyavan in this hermitage. She was waiting patiently for some guidance from within.

We are now ready to move on to canto Two of Book VII, with which begins the description of Savitri’s yoga. Canto One of Book VII is preparatory to this yoga, since such grief, great, soul‐ searing grief, can sometimes prepare one for yoga. Normally when one is confronted with such intense grief, one tries to run away from it by burying oneself deeper than ever before in work, or by seeking diversions from it in various kinds of self‐amusement. But neither of these really can really enable one to come to terms with one’s grief, it only makes one’s situation more desperate until one somehow allows Time to heal it in some fashion. But there is another way of handling grief of this kind as shown here by Savitri. She does not run away from grief, she faces it boldly, and by using all the resources at her command she confronts it. It is not a pleasant or an easy way, but when one does this sincerely, something happens to one’s being.

The consciousness of such a person takes a leap and from its new perch it looks at the cause of grief and finds that one it has risen above the hurt. The event or the circumstances which had caused the grief probably remain more or less unchanged but they do not have any more the power to hurt. This happens to Savitri at the conclusion of this Canto. The yoga of Savitri described in the remaining six cantos of Book VII is the leap her consciousness takes. How high such a leap will land one depends upon the inner resources of the person facing the crisis. We will take up this subject in the forthcoming instalment.

In this instalment I have tried to present to you the development in the story‐line in this Canto largely in the poet’s own words. This is because I wish to demonstrate to you that it is not true that Sri Aurobindo is always abstruse and mystical and hard to comprehend. It is true that when he writes about experiences that belong to higher domains of consciousness, we may find it difficult to comprehend him, since these experiences are out of our range. In fact, in such situations listening carefully with an inner silence to the flow of his words itself becomes a way of coming into contact with these experiences. But then when he writes about domains of experience familiar to us, he is most lucid and the poetry takes up instantly captive by its magic.

We will now take a close look at a brief excerpt from Savitri which will make you aware of another facet of Savitri; it is also a gold‐mine of insights into yogic practices. The passage I bring to you this time occurs early in the description of Aswapati’s yoga and describes very succinctly a most important practice of yogic sadhana, namely, meditation.

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The precise context in which this passage occurs is not crucial to its understanding. By yoga or spiritual sadhana we mean certain practices which induce in us the process of inner growth by which we progressively become aware of the inner and higher states of our being or by which our normal being transforms itself into a higher and diviner being. There are several yogic paths that can lead us to this goal. But common to all these yogic paths is an in‐gathered attitude, a state of inner concentration. The practice of meditation is the method most widely used to inculcate this inner concentration. That is why most people think of meditation as synonymous with the spiritual life. But this would be reducing spirituality to a set of practices and can give rise to a false understanding of spirituality. Spiritual life is not ordinary life plus certain practices of meditation. True spirituality is a matter of living in a certain state of consciousness, no matter what activities we are engaged in. Such a state of consciousness can also be arrived at through action and work done as an offering to the Divine, and through devotion and an inner surrender to the Divine.

Sri Aurobindo has spoken basically of four kinds of meditation. He points out that by the Indian concept of “dhyana’ is meant mental concentration, whether in thought, vision or knowledge.

It can be rendered into English by the two English words: meditation and contemplation. By meditation is meant the concentration of mind on a single chain of ideas arising out of a single object. Contemplation means holding in the mind a single image or idea so that the knowledge about it may naturally arise by force of concentration. There are two other forms of “dhyana”.

One is a form of meditation in which you stand back from your thoughts and simply observe them. This is concentration for self‐observation. A more difficult form of this is the emptying of all thought out of our mind and leaving in it a sort of vigilant blank. This may be called the dhyana of liberation since it frees the mind from slavery to the mechanical action of thinking.

Of these four forms of dhyana, meditation, contemplation, self‐observation and liberation, one can choose whichever chooses one’s bent and capacity or use them all according to one’s inner need.

The conditions that are most essential for meditation, the essentials of the process, and the highest results one can hope to obtain from it are beautifully presented by Sri Aurobindo in these lines:

In moments when the inner lamps are lit And the life's cherished guests are left outside, Our spirit sits alone and speaks to its gulfs.

A wider consciousness opens then its doors; Invading from spiritual silences A ray of the timeless Glory stoops awhile To commune with our seized illumined clay And leaves its huge white stamp upon our lives.

In the oblivious field of mortal mind,

5

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Revealed to the closed prophet eyes of trance 10 Or in some deep internal solitude Witnessed by a strange immaterial sense, The signals of eternity appear.

The truth mind could not know unveils its face, We hear what mortal ears have never heard, 15 We feel what earthly sense has never felt, We love what common hearts repel and dread; Our minds hush to a bright Omniscient; A Voice calls from the chambers of the soul; We meet the ecstasy of the Godhead's touch 20 In golden privacies of immortal fire.

Savitri: Pages 47‐48 (Book I, canto 4)

There are really no essential external conditions for meditation, although for the beginner, solitude and seclusion and stillness of the body are necessary in most cases. But once the habit of meditation is formed, one should be able to meditate in all circumstances. The first internal condition necessary is the withdrawal of our consciousness which is ordinarily dispersed, running after one object or another, running in this direction now and in that a little later. As a result, it is in a state of continual disquiet and agitation. This is because our normal consciousness has the sense of being separate, an individual, an ego, separate from the rest of the universe. This dispersed consciousness has to be drawn back, gathered together and concentrated within ourselves. Such a concentration of consciousness is needed for any serious pursuit, whether you are a poet working on a poem, or a botanist studying a flower. The yogic concentration is an extension and intensification of this. Thus the poet says that during meditation, “the inner lamps are lit”. The light of our consciousness illumines our inner being; this is concentration within ourselves. This is the first condition. The second helpful internal condition is freedom from all the cherished guests. Normally our consciousness is pre‐occupied with several guests, namely our projects, desires, longings, and thoughts and misgivings about their fulfilment. Now all these guests have to be left behind. This brings about a purity and calm to the inner consciousness. And then our consciousness sits alone and begins to communicate with its own depths. (Lines 1 –3) The object of one’s meditation would depend upon one’s nature and highest aspirations.

According to Sri Aurobindo, Brahman is the best object of meditation – the idea of God in all, all in God and all as God. While meditating, one can concentrate either in the heart‐centre or above the head or between eyebrows. Concentration in the heart centre opens that centre and one gains in aspiration, love, bhakti and surrender. Concentration above the head brings peace, silence and

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a sense of liberation from the body sense, mind and life. Concentration between the eyebrows opens the centre there and liberates the inner mind and vision.

The most difficult problem one faces for quite a long time during meditation is that of the distracting buzz of mental activity. Thoughts of all kinds come in and distract one. Sri Aurobindo has recommended three principal methods of getting rid of this problem. One is to look at the thoughts and give no sanction to them; this will gradually bring them to a stand‐still. The second method is to look upon the thoughts as not your own, as things coming from outside, from Prakriti (from Nature), and take no interest in them. The third method he recommends is perhaps the most difficult, but also perhaps the most effective; this is to be vigilant from within and watch the thoughts as they come in, and to throw them out before they enter your mental space.

When the meditation is successful, a consciousness wider than our normal consciousness opens its doors; we begin to realise that our consciousness has many dimensions. A ray of the timeless Glory, which our innermost or highest or true being is, invades our consciousness from across the spaces of spiritual silence. As this ray stoops down for a while, it imparts something of its glory to our material existence which is normally inert and placid because of the inertia of Matter to which is so close. In this process, something of the Force and Light of the higher consciousness is imparted to it. This contact, however fleeing it may be, leaves a permanent effect upon our lives. After such an experience our life is never the same again. (lines 4‐ 8) During meditation, our consciousness becomes concentrated and inwardly absorbed; in this field now, signals heralding Eternity begin to appear. These are revealed to the consciousness in us which sees them with its prophetic eyes of trance as we are plunged into a deep inner silence. The senses which take not of these signs of Eternity are the subtle senses of our Inner Being, not the external senses. (Lines 9 – 13) When this happens, the truth which our mind could not grasp earlier becomes accessible to us because it reveals itself. We hear the inspired utterances which our mortal ears have never heard before, and we feel what earthly senses have never felt before. We become capable of loving even that which the common hearts dread and avoid since we now sense the intrinsic truth behind their surface. Our mind which is normally full of chatter and routine mechanical activity now falls entirely silent and in this hush it begins to feel the presence of a bright and omniscient consciousness. A voice hails us from the secret chamber of our soul. Then in these golden moments of privacy, we are flooded with the ecstasy brought about by the touch of the psychic flame in us, and through it we experience the blissful touch of the Divine.(lines 14 – 21) This experience as it deepens, brings us in intimate contact with our psychic being, which alone knows “the secret grandiose meaning of our lives”. This section has these wonderful lines describing the psychic being in the concluding part of this section (page 49)

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A treasure of honey in the combs of God, A Splendour burning in a tenebrous cloak, It is our glory of the flame of God, Our golden fountain of the world’s delight, An immortality cowled in the cape of death, The shape of our unborn divinty.

http://nextfuture.sriaurobindosociety.org.in/aug03/nfaug03_savitri.htm

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7. Departures from the Mahabharata Legend ­ Savitri Yoga

Having explored Canto One of Book VII in the previous installment, we are now ready to step into the charged field of Savitri’s yoga, to the description of which are devoted the next six cantos of Book VII. As before, I will begin by noting how Vyasa dealt with this part of the story in the Mahabharata before I turn to Sri Aurobindo’s handling of it.

The Mahabharata Legend 8. Vyasa also talks about Savitri’s inner anguish during her first year in the hermitage spent with her husband and his parents. Narad’s words about the impending doom were fixed in her heart; and she counts down the days with each day lost. When she sees that only four days were left for that dreaded event, she decides to undertake the tri ra:tra vow, the most arduous vow of standing night and day at one single place. When Dyumatsens, Satyavan’s father, hears about this difficult vow, he tries to dissuade Savitri from going ahead with it. He entreats her with kind words to give up her resolve of undertaking such a hard and severe vow. Savitri begs of Dyumatsena not to be disturbed about this since she is confident of being able to perform this penance without much difficulty. Dyumatsena gracefully relents and says, “ How can it be proper for me to tell you to break the vow? All that a person in my position can do is to give you his blessings for a successful performance of this vow.” He blesses her and retires.

Savitri then proceeds with the performance of her vow – of standing erect on a fixed spot as though she were a wooden post. What gives her the strength to go through this hard penance is the thought that her husband is to die the following day, and it is her grief that strengthens her resolve and she remains standing until the vow is successfully concluded. The day following the completion of the vow is the fateful day foretold by Narad.

Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri Vyasa takes nine verses (about 18 lines) of Sanskrit poetry to narrate this episode of the trira:tra vow. Sri Aurobindo in his epic transforms this performance of a vow into Savitri’s yoga and devotes 2584 lines (83 pages) spread over six cantos (Cantos Two through Seven of Book VII) to the description of this yoga.

This will probably bring to your mind Aswapati’s Yoga described in the first three Books of Savitri. There too Sri Aurobindo takes up Vyasa’s brief description of Aswapati’s yajna and turns it into Aswapati’s yoga spread over several thousand lines and twenty‐two cantos. Just as Aswapati’s yoga in Savitri is supposed to be based on Sri Aurobindo’s own yoga, Savitri’s yoga is supposed to be based similarly on the Mother’s yoga. The Mother was Sri Aurobindo’s

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collaborator and she contributed in important ways to Sri Aurobindo’s mission and to the dynamics of his yoga; her relationship to Savitri, to its conception and its expansion and elaboration after 1926 was also very unique. We will deal with these subjects later in this study.

At the moment we will focus our attention on giving you a brief overview of each of the six cantos describing Savitri’s yoga.

It is somewhat difficult to give a straight forward description of Savitri’s yoga for several reasons; one is that in the earlier cantos the poet is describing some of the important features of Savitri’s yoga as they would apply also to an average sadhak doing the yoga; this intertwining of the yoga of a normal sadhak with the progress of such an extra‐ordinary person as Savitri makes the narration very complex. Secondly, some of the features of Savitri’s yoga are very unique and such a yoga was never practised on earth before. Furthermore, Savitri breaks new ground in the course of her yoga and reaches heights of consciousness which for most of us are difficult to comprehend. Yogic experience is a field which is difficult to comprehend fully unless one has been there or anywhere near there oneself. Sri Aurobindo’s charged poetry may at times give us just a clue to this experience.

It is generally believed that Aswapati like Sri Aurobindo followed the Vedantic path at least during the earlier stages of his yoga, while Savitri followed the path of the psychic right from the beginning. The yoga of the psychic is believed to be the Mother’s special contribution to the Integral Yoga. Once again, we will merely note here that the concepts needed to understand what exactly is the yoga of the psychic will have to explained at some stage in our study and proceed to give you an overview of Canto Two of Book VII. Our progress through these cantos is bound to be slow since the terrain is new to all of us, and also new to the English language itself which Sri Aurobindo had to stretch and mould to adapt it to this new use.

The Parable of the Search for the Soul, is the title of this canto. A parable is a narration or short story or episode which teaches or sets forth indirectly a moral or religious lesson. Savitri’s search for the soul is being described to suggest the typical experiences most human beings undergo in their search for their soul. As we have already seen, Sri Aurobindo has made it clear that Savitri is no mere mortal; she is an Avatar, an incarnation of the Supreme Mother herself. So when such an exceptional person begins a search for her soul, that search in many ways is bound to be different from the search in the case of ordinary human beings. The poet is describing the beginning of Savitri’s search as it would be applicable to the case of ordinary people stating on a similar quest.

We have already seen in the previous canto that Savitri’s immense anguish gradually drives her inwards; she is unable to free herself from it in her outer life, so she now turns within. As she is seated fully concentrated within herself, holding her body as if in motionless trance , her mind renouncing thought, she hears a voice speaking to her. The Voice says to her, “ Why did you

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come down to the ignorant and death‐bound earth if all you are going to do here is nurse your grief quietly and wait for your end and for the fate’s decree? It says to her, “Arise, O soul, and vanquish Time and Death.” If one wants to meet the soul, one has to vanquish Time. The soul is not something formed by the mind; it is unborn and therefore timeless. So as long as one is caught up in time, one cannot have an experience of one’s soul. Savitri is sulking, as most of us tend to do when the first summons comes to us from our inner being. She complains that the heavens are shut and God is uncaring, fate is blind and the human race is ignorant and prefers to live in ignorance, why should she struggle against “earth’s unyielding laws”? She would rather make a pact with death and seek union with Satyavan through the dark door of her own death. Then the Voice within asks her whether this is all she is going to do even though she has come down here on earth “charged with a mandate from eternity”? Shouldn’t she challenge the old and duty laws of Nature, and bring down to earth a new light and deliver life here from unconsciousness and death? Should I conclude, asks the Voice, that a power which was sent by the Eternal on earth has failed and “His labourer returns, her task undone?” Savitri’s surface being falls mute but a Power within her answers: “ I am thy portion here on earth, Command, and I will do thy will.”

Then the Voice gives Savitri a programme which, the Voce assures her, if followed should enable her to receive within her God’s force and to conquer Death. This is done in 18 lines beginning with “Remember why thou cam’st” (Line No. 86) and concluding with the line “Then shalt thou harbour my force and conquer Death.”(Line No. 104) The Yoga spelt out by the Voice can be stated in brief as follows. ‘Begin by asking yourself why you are here on earth.

You will be able to find an answer to this question only when you recover your hid self. When you are in touch with your soul, do not get lost in the bliss and peace which this state brings.

Use its power instead to change your nature from the human to Divine. The discipline you need to follow is the following: Clear your mind of all thoughts and get over the spell cast on you by the senses and conquer all desires. Identify yourself with the will of the Divine. Know the Divine in every voice and in contacts meet his single touch. Then you will be able to receive the force and conquer Death.’

It is clear that this yoga given to Savitri by her inner Voce is in all respects the same as the Integral Yoga developed by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. Suffice it to note here the twin aims of the yoga, which uniquely characterise Sri Aurobindo’s yoga as well, namely, to find union with one’s soul and “Then mortal nature to the divine”. This brings us to the end of section 1 of this canto (Line 112).

Section 2 begins. Savitri continues to sit motionless and look into herself. The cosmic past is revealed to her as in a dream. She sees how out of the formlessness of Self, creation began to take its first mysterious steps, how the whole space came to be filled with seeds of life, how the soul began to be housed in a body, and how gradually the human creature was born in time. She saw how out of the undefinable chaos creation slowly emerged and how a

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consciousness began to look out of the vast Inconscient and how pleasure and pain began to vibrate in a neutral Void.

She saw all this as the works of a blind World‐Energy, unconscious of her own vast exploits, and yet shaping a creation. The World‐Energy became conscious of itself in fragmentary beings, until all the chaos of sensibilities gathered round a small ego’s pin‐point head and a sentient being thus got formed, a being living and thinking as a whole unit. Memories of such a breathing and thinking unit become covered with the crust of habit and thus some sense of permanency and continuity are given to a conscious form. An infant mind began to form itself.

All this labour resulted in the making of a conscious being. Survival was the first concern at this stage in evolution. As Nature was working through our thoughts, hopes and dreams, the conscious Soul was giving its tacit consent leaving the mind to function as its vicegerent ( a person appointed by the ruler or king to act on his behalf). The mind felt itself like a godhead and dreamt of immortality. (Line 152) (We have a new subsection beginning on line no. 153.) This mind does not know that it is a puppet in the hand of life force; it is therefore constantly disturbed. The poet describes this mind in these memorable words: This mind no silence knows nor dreamless sleep In the incessant circling of its steps Thoughts tread for ever through the listening brain; It toils like a machine and cannot stop

(lines 163‐166)

Into this body’s many‐storeyed rooms messages originating from different sources come. There is a constant haste of movement. The senses are busy all the time attending to this thousand‐ fold commerce of the world. Even in sleep, there is hardly any rest (‘scant repose”).

Impressions stored in the subconscient come up in a distorted form mixed with transcripts of experiences from the supra‐physical worlds, like the vital, mental, psychic and so on. In imagination we cross this world and journey beneath the stars to dream of great ideals, and some times we become aware even of the beings of Heaven and Hell.

All this is the little surface of man’s life. But this is not all he is. A whole mysterious world is locked within him – planes of consciousness below, behind, above his surface consciousness.

Unknown to himself there lives within him a hidden king. He lives on the honey of solitude in the secret and innermost part of his being. This is the “immaculate Divine Wonderful” who casts the glory of his self‐creation into the soul of man. That is how man works out the dreams of God.

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But there lodge in man, not only God but even his opposites. Man is a little front through which Nature works. Nature’s glories walk in him and so do their opposites. In his unconscious and subconscious regions are lodged all dangerous forces which sometimes invade his bodily house and infest his thought and life. These dark forces seek to dislodge the soul. Then a veritable inferno surges into the human air threatening God’s creation. This has often happened in human history. These dark forces can even try to abolish man and annul his world. But there is a guardian power, there are hands that save. Calm divine eyes regard the human scene. (Line 299) (Line 300 begins a new section.) All the world’s possibilities are waiting in man as the tree waits in a seed. His past lives in him and his present is preparing his future. Within him are gods and malignant powers that create the mould in which he builds out his world. Our surface being is aware of very little of what is happening to us. There is the dim subconscient and a vast subliminal and these influences are overpowering. Our past is not really dead; it clings to us and holds us back. Our old self lurks in the new self we think we are. Our dead selves come to slay our living soul. Above us dwells a superconscient God and around us is a vast Ignorance and below us sleeps the Inconscient dark and mute. (Line 372) But this is only the first appearance of our material world. This is not all we are. On the summits of our being, beyond the thinking mind our greater self of knowledge waits for us; it is a supreme light in the truth‐conscious Vast (Supramental consciousness). It shall descend and make earth’s life divine. This world was created by this Truth and not by a blind Nature‐force.

The summits of our being are ablaze in the light of the superconscient. There dwell the aspects of our eternity; there is the immortality and light and bliss of the god that we are in reality.

There are greatnesses hidden in our unseen parts that wait their hour to step into life’s front.

They impel us to move forward. Our soul acts from the mysterious inner chamber and seeks for Good and Beauty and for God. There are beyond the walls of our surface self our subliminal being; there is an inner mind, an inner life‐self and the subtle physical and they all can help us by grafting wings upon our surface crawl.

Man grew from the bowed ape‐like figure, stood erect and became the thinker. He saw visions of being a still greater being and slowly grew in his stature. He is now almost ready to ascend to the highest ladder of his being. There he will be able to call the Godhead into his mortal life.

This was in fact what had happens in Savitri. A portion of the mighty Mother comes into her.

She becomes the centre of a vast scheme To mould humanity into God’s own shape And lead this great blind struggling world to light Or a new world discover or create.

Lines 455 – 57

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Savitri now understands what the destiny of man on earth is: Earth must transform herself and equal Heaven Or Heaven descend into earth’s mortal state.

But for such vast spiritual change to be, Out of the mystic cavern in man’s heart The heavenly psyche must put off her veil And step into common nature’s crowded rooms And stand uncovered in that nature’s front And rule the thoughts and fill the body and life.

Lines 458 – 465

Savitri sat obedient to the command she had received. She now perceives Time, life and death as passing incidents in life that obstruct from our view the soul in man. She realises that her lower nature still took too large a space in her being and veiled her self. She must now push this aside and go on to find her soul.

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8. Book One Canto Four

This time I will introduce you to one of my favourite passages in Savitri. One of the great attractions of Savitri is that if you are depressed and gloomy, read a passage of this epic poem and it will cheer you up. There seems to be something magical in the very rhythm of these verses that brightens you up. It must be remembered that Sri Aurobindo was writing Savitri during the 30’s and 40’s of the last century when Europe was either threatened

by World war II, or was actually fighting the war or was recovering from that devastating experience. This was a period of gloom for the whole world, especially for the West. This was the period when the West was moving from dogmatic materialism to stark nihilism. It saw mankind as a species “swept from darkness to darkness, like a straw on a torrent by a ruthless, mysterious and ignoble force”. That was an age of loss of faith, of spiritual desolation and intellectual despair, of T. S. Eliot’s “Waste Land”. During those years mankind was passing through a very critical phase of evolution when humanity had reached great depths of despair.

The scientific and philosophical revolutions of the preceding three centuries had created an impression that man was no more than an accidental creation, just a pawn in the play of the vast forces entirely beyond his control.

Sri Aurobindo did not share this despair and gloom. For him this creation and man in it were not either a purposeless illusion nor a fortuitous accident. He had proclaimed through his writings that this world was not an unfortunate accident but that it was a miracle that was gradually unfolding itself. In writing Savitri, he seems to have done something much more tangible and concrete; he seems to have inundated the earth atmosphere with vibrations of hope and optimism about man and his terrestrial future. He seems to have done this to counter the dark forces of suggestion that was engulfing mankind everywhere else. This has had its effect on his verse. It is vibrant with hope, sunshine and optimism.

The passage which I am presenting to you is one such passage. It occurs in Book I Canto Four.

The poet is talking about the great gods who know the purpose of evolution and intervene only a divine way in the affairs of this world. All this probably happens on the cosmic stage. But do you and I matter to them? Or, are we too insignificant to matter? Suddenly, the poet turns to us, holds our hand as it were, and assures us with these mantric lines that we do matter.

Alive in a dead rotating universe We whirl not here upon a casual globe Abandoned to a task beyond our force; Even through the tangled anarchy called Fate And through the bitterness of death and fall 5

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An outstretched Hand is felt upon our lives.

It is near us in unnumbered bodies and births; In its unshaken grasp it keeps for us safe The one inevitable supreme result No will can take away and no doom change, 10 The crown of conscious Immortality, The godhead promised to our struggling souls When first man's heart dared death and suffered life.

One who has shaped this world is ever its lord: Our errors are his steps upon the way; 15 He works through the fierce vicissitudes of our lives, He works through the hard breath of battle and toil, He works through our sins and sorrows and our tears, His knowledge overrules our nescience; Whatever the appearance we must bear, 20 Whatever our strong ills and present fate, When nothing we can see but drift and bale, A mighty Guidance leads us still through all.

After we have served this great divided world God's bliss and oneness are our inborn right. 25 A date is fixed in the calendar of the Unknown, An anniversary of the Birth sublime: Our soul shall justify its chequered walk, All will come near that now is naught or far.

Page 59

This earth, which the scientists describe as a globe that rotates around itself as it circles round the sun, is not a mechanical, clock‐work universe. Neither is it dead not is it inconscient. We are not whirling on a globe that has no purpose and we are not left here to ourselves to accomplish tasks beyond our capacities. In other words, when God gives us a task he always gives us also the capacities needed to accomplish the task. It is true that the life we live here is often made up of confused and disorderly events and happenings and since we do not see any coherence or purpose in all this, we call the power that governs our life “fate”. Life is often very harsh; we face very bitter experiences, such as of betrayal of faith and treachery , bitterness of death, etc. The poet does not deny any of these; he readily grants this ugly and painful aspect of life.

Life is a grim struggle, most of the time. In spite of this, he assures us in no uncertain terms that behind all this, behind fate and its vagaries, there is a Hand extended to protect us and guide us. (Lines 1‐6).

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This Hand has been close to us and guiding us through all the countless births and lives we have been through. Suddenly the poet lifts us and enables us to have a wider perspective on life. The more one narrows one’s focus, the more exaggerated in their importance and impact appear the passing events in our life. But then if we look at events in our life as so many episodes in one stage of a long pilgrimage that began several lives ago and which will continue for many more lives to come, the perspective changes and we seem to be capable of more detachment, a more balanced approach to the events in our life, both the happy one and the unhappy ones.

There is no event or experience in life which can be understood entirely in local terms, in terms of that life alone. The causes and effects of many an event in our life cannot be found in that very life in which they happen. The causes may have to be traced to our previous lives and in their effects they may extend even to our future lives. When we become aware of this vastness of the saga of our existence, we are less likely to exaggerate our seeming tragedies in life or the importance of our little victories.

In its firm grasp this outstretched Hand keeps for us safe the supreme goal of all our efforts, not only of this life but of all our lives, the one result no power can deny and no disaster can deprive us of ‐‐ the crown of Conscious Immortality. This is the ultimate goal of our long and seemingly tortured pilgrimage through several lives, the siddhi of our evolutionary effort. What is this goal of Conscious Immortality? Our true being , our soul, is immortal, but we are not aware of this because we are immersed in ignorance. The aim of the evolutionary journey is to manifest in each human form the plenitude, the glory of the Supreme Divine consciousness, which is often descried as Sat‐Chit‐Ananda. We are all destined to realise even in our surface consciousness that we are amritasya putrah, the children of immortality. That is our destiny, however puny, weak and miserable we may appear now. And notice the confidence in the poet’s tone. He assures us that no body or nothing on earth or heaven can cheat us of this crown of conscious immortality.

What does the crown of conscious immortality signify? It signifies the realisation that we are not the pathetic creatures we now think we are as we get helplessly sucked into the vortex of illness, physical disintegration and death; it signifies the awareness that we are not beggars, as we now seem to be as we wander from one supermarket to another, trying to acquire a little happiness. However much we shop, happiness, an inner felicity still seems to elude us except for a brief passing moment. The realisation that we are in fact the children of immorality, and that happiness is our very nature, as much as bliss and consciousness and power are – this is known in popular terms as the realisation of the Godhead veiled in us.

The poet then goes on to say that this fulfilment was promised to our souls before they agreed to undertake the arduous evolutionary journey through life and death in ignorance. He is almost implying that since this promise was made by the Lord, he is bound to rescue us from our bondage to death, ignorance and incapacity. He does not forget his part of the bargain.

That is why he pursues us down the corridors of time like the hound of heaven. Unfortunately,

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we forget our origin, our true nature, since we have fallen in love with our bondage to body, life and mind. (Lines 7 – 13) Then in one short line, he removes all our misgivings and fears that after creating this world, God might have lost control over it. Don’t we often feel like this when we see so many outrageous things happenings all around us? We feel as if this world is spinning out of control of the creator. When we see the great tragedies that strike men and countries, the great catastrophes that devastate this earth, we wonder whether any body is in control of this creation. The poet assures us that he who created this world is always its Lord, he is always in control of it.

If we make what appear like errors, it is because he allows to make them since these often create openings through which he can enter our lives, which are otherwise closed to him.

Normally we judge our actions by the material success they bring to us. All that brings material success – money, fame, etc. we consider ‘good’ and all that brings us material failure, we regard ‘bad’. Such success often shuts God out of our lives; it makes us complacent with our finiteness. Often the so‐called failures which bring us material losses make us pause in our tracks and take a fresh look at ourselves and where we are headed. These can be moments of great awakening when we feel the breath of God on our backs.

God is ever present in our lives whether we are aware of it or not. Particularly when the path we are treading is fierce and trying, he is present with us, guiding us. When we are engaged in a battle against great odds, he is present with us. His ways of working are mighty strange. He may sometimes lead us through what may look like pathways of sin and suffering. He does this to wean us from our arrogance in our virtues and goodness and from our ego‐based sense of separateness and self‐sufficiency. When we shed our lonely tears on our pillows in the middle of the night, defeated and forlorn, the Lord is there beside us. He never forsakes us. He may not always answer our prayers because we often do not ask for the right things. When he rejects our prayers, it is often a greater act of grace than when he grants them.

Even after listening to the poet’s assurance that God is always with us guiding us through life, some of us may still feel their lot in life has been exceptionally hard and unfortunate and it is not easy to reconcile God with all that has happened to them. As if to soothe such protests, the poet says, no matter how strong somebody’s present ills and how accursed his lot – and he does not deny that sometimes one feels like a traveller by a ship suddenly thrown out into the open sea in the middle of the night – we should not forget that there is still a mighty guidance working behind everything that happens to us in life, and this guidance is only pushing us closer to the crown of conscious immortality. (Lines 14 – 23) After we have gone through all the circumstances that beset our life here in this great and difficult world, God’s bliss and oneness are our inborn right. That is the assurance given to us by the Lord, and he is bound to fulfil it. Our main problem is that our private agenda does not

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correspond with what God wants for us. We seek finite pleasures, although we know that these pleasures are transient and are often immediately followed by their shadow, namely, by pain, unhappiness, frustration in some form or the other. Our inner being is never satisfied with the finite. It hungers after the Infinite. To realise this is the great awakening. Until we wake up to this realisation, the vicissitudes in our life are only a preparation for this great realisation, and happiness and sorrow both play a role in our lives. (Lines 24 – 25) The poet in giving us this assurance leaves us in no uncertainty. He tells us that a date is already fixed in the calendar of the Lord for the supreme fulfilment of each one of us. On that day will come our Birth sublime. Then will our soul feel justified in walking the chequered course through life. And when we reach our goal and look back on what looked like our chequered path in life, we will see that every fall that we suffered along our path has had a salutary effect on our subsequent journey. Life therefore is all good or a preparation for a future good. (Lines 26 –29)

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9. Book Seven Canto Three ­ Entry into the Inner Countries In this installment, we take up Canto III of Book Seven of Savitri; this canto has the title Entry into the Inner Countries and describes Savitri’s entry into her inner being and her exploration of the various regions within it. Quite a bit of it is probably known to past spiritual experience in general terms but it is being presented in such detail and in poetic form for the first time here.

As we have already seen, in the Mahabharata story, Savitri performs the trira:tra vow just before the dreaded day prophesied by Narad, and we have seen that Sri Aurobindo develops this event into Savitri’s Yoga ‐‐‐ Canto II through Canto VII of Book Seven in his epic. We have already reviewed Canto II, at the end of which Savitri learns that for bringing about the great change she wishes to bring about, she must discover the heavenly psyche present in the mystic cavern of her heart and bring it to the front and enable it to take control of her entire being.

(Lines 458 – 465 of Canto II, pages 486 – 487) This concept of the Psyche or of the Psychic Being is a crucial one in Savitri’s yoga as well as in the yoga developed by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. I shall therefore present a note on this concept in the second part of this installment. But before we come to that, let us try to get an overview of Canto III. Section 1 Since Savitri has received the inner call to discover her psyche (her true being or soul) she must now enter the inner regions of her own being. As she tried to do that, she felt like one going from the busy hum of a thronged market into a cave. Her mind became emptied of all thoughts and she experienced a stark hush of emptiness all around her. This going within is often accompanied by a stillness, a pleasant numbness and stiffness in the limbs. But whenever she returned to her thinking state, once more she found herself to be a human being, a lump of Matter, a house with all the windows closed, a mind compelled to think out ignorance and a life‐energy forced into a whirl of activities. Without establishing this emptiness in the thinking mind, it is not possible to gain entrance to our inner being. (Lines 1 – 17) As she sought her way to the inner region past the surface regions of her being, a voice said to her; “ Your seeking is not for yourself alone but for humanity as well. Man can be helped to grow into God only if God assumes the human mould, and accepts the darkness of the human mind so that he can like Vamana (God as the Dwarf Avatar) take the triple stride, covering the three worlds, namely, the physical, vital and the mental realms[1]. It is necessary to take these three strides before one can take the next stride into the world of Bliss. The Divine disguised as

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a human being finds the inaccessible mystic gate to Immortality, and opens it so that man can follow in the footsteps of God and become Divine. (This is a succinct characterization of the mission of an Avatar, of an incarnation of God on earth.). Oh Savitri, you must accept the darkness in which man labours and bring to him light, you must accept his sorrow and convert it into bliss. You must find your heaven‐born soul in the body made of Mater.” Notice that Savitri is once again being told by her inner voice that she is on earth as an incarnation of the Divine Mother. Savitri therefore may have to traverse the path of yoga in a way suited to the human aspirant for she as an Avatar has to show him the way.(Lines 18 – 30) Savitri now surged out of her body consciousness and stood at a little distance from it and looked into her body. She expected to see her mysterious soul in the lotus bud of her heart. But she found at the entrance of the inner regions a gate, which refuses entrance to the physical mind and everything physical. Savitri knocked at this ebony (black) gate but the door groaned at her touch, and was reluctant to open. (Lines 31 – 42) Just then a dreadful voice cried from within; “ O creature of earth, turn back. If you don’t, you will be torn and tortured until you die.” The guardian Power of the inner regions, a deadly serpent with huge coils, rose hissing; all the little subtler entities (trolls, gnomes and goblins) growled and protested against this intrusion by Savitri. The wild beast in the subconscient roared and there was an audible menace and danger all around. When the body’s protection is withdrawn, the vital powers awake and spread fear, which spoils the inner movement. It is well‐known to pass spiritual experience that unless one has purity and sincerity, one can get lost in this region; one is either intimidated, misled, or beguiled by various subliminal and cosmic forces. But Savitri persisted and her will pressed on the rigid bars until the dark gate swung wide open with a protesting jar. The dreadful guard of the opposing forces was withdrawn and Savitri was able to enter the inner worlds. She negotiated the narrow passage with some difficulty. (Lines 43 – 58) She now entered the realm of subtle Matter and found that to be a pit filled with a mass of blind power. She saw here misleading gleams and somehow forced herself through it all towards the inner regions. (Lines 59 – 63) Then she entered a region where life was struggling to emerge from Matter; this region was a swarm with elemental entities, and vague universal movements – those of the universal mind, the universal vital and the universal physical. This was the beginning of the world of finiteness ‐ ‐ a world recognisable by the senses. Savitri was now in the world of the senses, where there was only the clamour of the senses. There was no light of mind to organise the experiences in this region and the subconscient sought to perpetuate itself. There was a rush of feelings, each forcing its own separate way driven by the impulse of the ego. The senses normally chafe at the control being exercised on them by the mind. They would rather the mind were cast away in a wayside drain and so that this sentinel of the soul will lie forgotten in nature’s mud. When the

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senses do not get the guidance of the soul through the mind, the vital wakes up and offers to guide. But if the mind is cast away into the abyss how shall the “the glory and the flame” of the enlightened flame of aspiring life come? There is always the danger of everything slipping back into the subconscient and then into the Inconscient if the guidance of the mind is not available.

That situation threatened to overtake Savitri at this stage. There was a chaos of disordered impulses in which no light or joy, or peace could come. Savitri somehow was able to hold this senseless crowd at bay. With a great effort of her will, and with the saviour’s name on her lips, she moved into a blank and tranquil region. This was for her deliverance from the congested and oppressive world of the senses and from the pulls and pleasures of the physical mind.

(Lines 64 –126) Now ahead of her loomed the vast Vital world, controlled neither by the mind or the soul. We have a wonderful description of the power and the ecstasy of the world of the vital: A spate, a torrent of the speed of Life Broke like a wind‐lashed driven mob of waves Racing on a pale floor of summer sand; It drowned its banks, a mountain of climbing waves.

Enormous was its vast and passionate voice.

It cried to her listening spirit as it ran, Demanding God's submission to chainless Force.

Pages: 491 – 92 This force is so mighty that it seems to demand even God’s submission. In its lust for power it claims to have the support of the witnessing soul. Its torrent carries the world’s hopes and fears, and its restless hunger is a longing which even eternity cannot fill. This Life‐Force seeks to reach the unseen soul and its mystic fire of aspiration. It carries us to the ineffable ecstasy hidden in the creative beat of Life. It tears the nether depths of our life and serves life with the chaotic bliss these depths contain – the intoxicating wine of the primitive joy of Nature, the forbidden delight of our biological urges. All this is sweet but it is nevertheless the honey sweet poison‐wine of lust and death.

The vital seeks a glory and a fulfilment in this world. It invests the unseen worlds with the mystique of desire and makes us always long for them. It dreams of that which has never been known and grasps at things which have never been possessed. It searches for the glory of the impossible. It searches for the glory of the impossible even when it knows such joys can hurt.

It dreamed of that which never has been known, It grasped at that which never has been won, It chased into an Elysian memory The charms that flee from the heart's soon lost delight;

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It dared the force that slays, the joys that hurt, The imaged shape of unaccomplished things And the summons to a Circean transmuting dance And passion's tenancy of the courts of love And the wild Beast's ramp and romp with Beauty and Life.

Pages 492‐93 The vital embraces the contraries, “the cry and surge of opposite powers”. One moment it rises to touch the luminous planes above and the next it plunges into the nether dark regions. This endless engagement with contraries, with tenderness and sting of hatred, cheerfulness and depression, fear and joy and ecstasy and despair is the normal routine for the vital. They give it ambrosia’s taste as well as poison’s sting.

Then come the fast‐moving thoughts of the vital mind which appear deceptively like flashes of intuition. They try to pass off as inspiration with its stress of infallibility. They have a certain sharpness which cuts across all doubts. And yet it is a borrowed light and its source is questionable. It very often is a clever mixture of falsehood with the inspiring truth of the Divine. Therefore the poet describes this in these words: “Truth lay in delight in error’s passionate arms gliding downstream in a blithe gilded barge”.

In these nether realms of Life, Truth stares with bandaged eyes, and ignorance is wisdom’s patron. Here speeding energies of Life can mislead one into the intermediate zone where Death stalks under the guise of immortal life. Or they may mislead one into the Valley of the false gleam where souls are trapped as slaves of desire. Some souls, however, negotiate through these dangerous regions because they carry some image of the Truth in their heart.

For a while Savitri felt as if her being was like an island flooded by a violent upsurge of water surrounding it. It was as if she was surrounded by wave after wave of gleaming foam; then it ebbed away like a roar receding into a distance. Now the clamour of Life‐energies fled and her spirit was free from their onrush and she felt she was entering once again a tranquil region with blue heaven above and the green earth below, and the world’s heart once again laughed with the joy of life. (Lines 127 – 255) Section 2 Then Savitri came into a space ordered and controlled by Reason. Here Life ( the vital energies) was parked in an armed tranquillity; a chain was put on her strong rebellious spirit. Life was tamed and her vehement stride was held under check. Her squanderings in the desire’s bazaar were cut down. Her imperious will was reined in and so also the play of her fancy. Reason’s balanced reign kept order and peace. The spirit’s freedom was not found here. Life was still sovereign but she had no freedom of action. The monarch had to obey the ministers.

Imagination, which is the favourite of the vital, was imprisoned as in a fort. The soul itself was

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put on a narrow bench of law. The wisdom of the ages was reduced to the codification of a textbook.

The spirit’s almighty freedom was at the mercy of the small mind addicted to system and orderliness. Life was restrained “like a highbred maiden with chaste eyes, forbidden to walk unveiled the public ways”; she must move in secluded chambers and her feelings must live in cloisters. Safety receives the highest consideration here; the dangers of the precipice as well as the adventures of the waves of the sea were avoided. Life did not seek any more the companionship of any flaming god. No forays were permitted into realms that were considered too high or too vast for her assigned role. Elegance, discipline and harmony were the reigning gods of this realm. The movements of life were not spontaneous. Ideas were cut into systems.

Reality was not allowed to live in its dreams. Life was now a managed empire. Even meditation mused on a narrow seat and worship turns to an exclusive God. A rational religion dried the heart.

It planned a smooth life's acts with ethics' rule Or offered a cold and flameless sacrifice.

The sacred Book lay on its sanctified desk Wrapped in interpretation's silken strings: A credo sealed up its spiritual sense.

Pages 497 ‐ 98

A rational religion dries out the heart. A credo all sealed up into beliefs and opinions was the substance of its spirituality. (256 – 358) Section 3 Now Savitri entered the region of the Thought‐Mind. Life and its passion were not dominant here; the senses also had a very feeble effect here. Nor was this a domain where the soul or the spirit are supreme. Here mind claimed to be the sole reality, claimed itself to be the soul and the spirit. The spirit itself was seen here as a form of the mind. The light of this thought‐ mind covered the true source of knowledge.

Savitri now found herself in a region where everything is settled, and where everything finds what it seeks and knows its aim. All had the look of a final look of stability.

Someone was standing there who seemed to have an air of authority and he now spoke to Savitri as though his words had the finality of those of an oracle. He said to Savitri, “ Welcome, O pilgrim of the inner world, you are fortunate to have reached our brilliant world where thought has reached the final certitude. If you are searching for a perfect way of life, you will find it here. Ours is the home of cosmic certainty. Here is the truth, and God’s harmony is also here. Register your name in our book of the elite; only very few are admitted here. Thank your

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fate, which has made you one of us. Every thing here is labelled and neatly organised. This is the end of all that God permits to life. There is no beyond. Here is the safety of the ultimate wall, the clarity of knowledge. A single Truth is triumphant here and here burns the diamond of perfect bliss. Live here with us as a favourite of heaven and Nature.”

Savitri replied to the too satisfied and confident sage who presided over this world of intellect, limiting, cold and precise, “Happy are they who can live in this world undisturbed by hope, doubt and fear. Happy are they who have found spiritual certitude here. But I cannot stay in this world of ordered knowledge of apparent things. For I seek my soul.” (359 – 414) All around were astonished that someone should question the finality of things in that world and that someone still conceived of a Beyond. Some of them murmured to themselves: “Who is this person that does not know that the soul is only a tiny gland or a secretion’s fault that creates useless disquiet in the mind and a yearning in the heart and thus prolongs our unhappy existence?” Some others said, “No, it is her spirit which she seeks, which is only a splendid shadow of the name of God. Our mind is the only reality, the rest is all imagination. Our minds have made the world in which we live.”. There was among them one with mystic and unsatisfied eyes and he said, "Is there still some one left who seeks a Beyond? Can still the path be found and the gate to it opened?” (415 – 443) Section 4 Thus she proceeded towards her silent self. Then she came to a road where she found an eager crowd rushing at a great speed, their feet glowing with fire and their eyes bright with sunlight.

They had come from the secret cavern of the soul pressing on to get into the outer mind. They symbolised idealists of various kinds keen on saving the world. Their enthusiasm made Savitri feel like joining them but she controlled herself since now she had realised that only those who save themselves can save others. While these people were keen on carrying the light to suffering men, Savitri was intent on reaching her soul. (444 – 470) Savitri asked them to reveal to her the road to the deep mansion of her secret soul. They said that they had come from her hidden soul. They had set out to help the dull and drab human lives and to light the lamp of good amidst evil. They asked her to follow the world’s winding highway to its source, and there she would see the fire burning in the deep cavern of her heart.

Then Savitri followed the great winding road which was getting narrower as she proceeded.

(471 – 501).

This brings us to the end of Canto Three. The description of the vital world, of the domain controlled by Reason, of the region of the Thought‐Mind, and after that of the higher reaches of the mental consciousness are very graphic. The poet’s observations on idealists who bring a mental formula to save the world are most interesting.

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In almost all the previous instalments we brought you in the second part an excerpt from Savitri with a few comments on it. As mentioned earlier, in the second part of this instalment we bring you a note on the Psychic (mostly in the words of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother).

The Psyche or the Psychic Being: At this point in our study, I think that it is necessary to say something about the concept of the Psyche or the Psychic Being which is an important concept in Savitri’s yoga as well as in the yoga developed by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. In the West, this term means some psychological or other phenomena of an abnormal or supernormal character. The concept that plays a very central role in the spiritual literature in India is that of the Atman, the Self, the soul. Is the Psychic Being the same as this? This is not a question that can be answered with a simple “yes” or “no” as we shall see.

Nothing substantial or abiding can be achieved in our Yoga without the opening of the psychic and its infusion into the parts of our nature. The psychicisation of our being is regarded as the first solid achievement upon which the later achievements can be based. Whenever there is an aspiration for the Infinite, for a transcendence of our limited, ego‐bound being, whenever the heart aches for the bliss and knowledge of the Divine, it is because the psychic in us is astir.

Those in whom the psychic is still asleep are people who are satisfied with the materialistic life they live and are hardly awake to the perception of any higher values or to refined sensibilities in art and culture. The psychic being is like a sunflower with a natural leaning towards the sun of the Divine or His manifestation here in terms of goodness, purity, beauty, harmony and love.

In our individual composition, we seem to have formations of every cosmic principle. Thus we have a gross physical body and a subtle physical body, a life‐force or vital working in our gross body and a subliminal vital, which is larger and more flexible, a surface mind of aspiring ignorance, chained to the ego and its desires and a subliminal mind, which is wider and more open to the universal mind and its movements. Similarly we have a double soul – the egoistic desire soul in the front, living in the disquieting illusion of a separate existence, and the delight‐ soul of the Psyche, which dwells in the inmost sanctuary of our being, the immortal inhabitant of our mortal tenement.

Our psychic or delight‐soul is our eternal and essential individuality in Nature. It is made of love and bliss. In the beginning of our terrestrial evolution, the psychic remains veiled behind the turbid working of our surface nature. It exerts influence from behind and prepares the instruments of manifestation. The Psychic is the one thing imperishable in us and nothing that enters our experience can pollute its purity or extinguish the flame. This veiled psychic entity in us is a flame born out of the Divine. It is that which endures and is imperishable in us and comes with us from birth to birth, untouched by death, decay or corruption.

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According to the Upanishad, when the Divine Spirit (non‐manifest and formless) decided to manifest, several millions sparks sprang out of the central Fire. Each spark contained a truth‐ idea to be realised along its own line of fulfilment. Each of these millions of sparks chose their own line of fulfilment. The central portion of the divinity that presides over each line of development is called the Jivatman. It is the Divine Self indeed, but the Self individualised for the purpose of manifestation. Thus the Self remains one although there are millions of individualised forms of it as Jivatmans.

A Jivatman stands at the head of each line of manifestation. It is not directly involved in the manifestation. Its concern is the evolution of the truth‐idea in it. The Jivatman, however, projects a small portion of itself in the form of an emanation in the world of evolution. This projection of the Jivatman is called the psychic essence in a being. It is this that travels from life to life (from one life to the next) and in this process gathers the sap of experience. As this psychic essence develops, it becomes a psychic element and then gradually grows into a psychic being. This evolution of the psychic being is a fundamental part of human evolution.

The psychic being is not the unborn Self or Atman or the Jivatman for the Self even in presiding as Jivatman over the existence of an individual is always aware of its universality and transcendence. The psychic being is a deputy of the individual soul in the forms of Nature and is sometimes referred to as chaitya purusha in Sanskrit. It stands behind the mental, vital and physical beings in us. It watches them and profits by their development and experience. What then is the difference between the soul and the psychic being? That part of the soul which participates in evolution is the psychic being. That part which does not involve itself in evolution but merely witnesses it and holds itself aloof is not the psychic.

What is the mission of the Psychic? The answer to this question is related to our understanding of why we are born on earth. There are some philosophies like Buddhism which do not believe in the existence of a soul. For them life has no meaning or purpose. Their main concern is with the fact that we are miserable on earth and this is so because we are caught up in a web of desires. Buddhism seeks a way of getting rid of this acute misery. Therefore it teaches us how to do away with desires and to dissolve the constituent elements of the fictitious ego‐self. The aim of the Buddhist spiritual discipline is to attain to the status of Nirvana. Christianity regards life as a long preparation and counsels its adherents to prepare themselves for the kingdom of God. – “treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and whence thieves do not break through nor steal”. The life in this world should be spent in piety and charity the rewards of which will await us in heaven. The ascetic schools of Vedanta regard this life as a snare from which we should escape into the state of Brahman. They do not raise the question why the soul at all should come down and get enmeshed in this life if its only aim is to run away from it. For the Vaishnava, the world is a lila ( a sport) of the All‐Beautiful and the All‐Beloved but a lila that is mysterious and without any definite meaning or purpose.

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Sri Aurobindo and the Mother do not by‐pass this important question. According to them, the soul is here to manifest the Divine in one of His innumerable individual aspects. The world is not an illusion or an amorphous flux of chaotic possibilities but a progressive self‐manifestation of the One Omnipresent Reality. The very presence of the psychic being in the world is not only an indubitable proof of the Divine presence here but also of his will for an eventual perfection of this self‐manifestation.

Bringing the psychic to the front and making it the guide and leader of our spiritual sadhana (practice) has one great advantage. It can put a check on the tendency strong in most spiritual traditions to swerve towards the immutable Self and merge in its vast freedom and impersonality. But this is an escape from the God‐given mission of bringing to this material world God’s perfect manifestation. The psychic has an innate, an unquenchable thirst aspiration for union with the Divine, through love and self‐giving. The union that gives it the highest fulfilment and satisfaction is not a passive and partial union, but a dynamic and integral union. Such a union is self‐revealing and world‐illumining, it is a union in the body in all its activities as much as in the heart and the mind and the inner depths. It is to achieve this integral union and become a thrilled channel of the divine splendour that the soul descends into darkness and death of this material manifestation.

[1] In the original story (as in Shatapatha Bra:hmaNa) Vamana, the dwarf, (Vishnu in disguise) obtains from the Demon King Bali the gift of enough land to cover his three steps (strides).

Vamama , the dwarf then becomes larger and larger and becomes Trivikrama and with the first stride he covers the earth, and with the second the heaven, and when he has no space left for the third stride, Bali offers his own head and Bali is then pushed to patala loka and the world is thus saved from the domination of the Asuras. That is the legend of Vamana.

http://nextfuture.sriaurobindosociety.org.in/nov03/nfnov03_savitri.htm

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10. Book Seven Canto Four ­ Triple Soul­Forces We are now ready to explore Canto Four of Book VII of Savitri, and like most of the other cantos in this book, this canto too does not have a parallel in Vyasa’s narration of the legend in the Mahabharat. In Canto Three we followed Savitri as she pierces the veil between the outer consciousness and her inner being and explores the physical, vital, mental and spiritual worlds.

She begins with the subtle physical world: “Into a dense subtle Matter packed …” (Line 59) and then moves on to the vital world: “The cycles of the infinity of desire…” (Line 166), then to the mental world: “Then journeying through the self’s wide hush…” she begins to explore a still higher world where “The spirit saw itself as a form of mind …” (Line 364). “Then she fared on across her silent self.” These are the higher, spiritual regions of the mind, where she meets many bright beings from whom she seeks directions for her further journey: “O happy company of luminous gods,/Reveal, who know, the road I must tread …” (Lines 472 – 473).

After this we see Savitri reaching a still higher world of consciousness, probably the Overmental [1] region, which is the world in which the various Gods identified by the religions are to be found. Savitri meets here the “Triple Soul‐Forces”, three goddesses of the overmental world, namely the Madonna of compassion and love, the Madonna of might, and the Madonna of light and wisdom. (“Madonna” is a word normally used in English for a statue or picture of Virgin Mary, but used here as a term of respectful address.) This encounter with the Madonnas, who appear before her one after the other, turns out to be most dramatic. Each Madonna claims to be Savitri’s soul, but then immediately after each Madonna finishes what she has to say to Savitri, we meet a perversion, or an egoistic deformation, of what the Madonna stands for, protesting to Savitri and saying things very different from what the Madonna had to say.

Let us first get some sense of what the Madonnas and their disgruntled counterparts have to say; this may enable us to determine what they represent. First, Savitri comes across the Madonna of “divine pity”, a “spirit touched by the grief of all that lives”. She begins by saying: O Savitri, I am thy secret soul.

To share the suffering of the world I came.

(p. 503: lines 25 – 26) Then she recounts the various ways in which she works in the world: I am woman, nurse and slave and beaten beast; I tend the hands that gave me cruel blows;

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The hearts that spurned my love and zeal I serve; I am the courted queen, the pampered doll, I am the giver of the bowl of rice, I am the worshipped Angel of the House.

I am in all that suffers and that cries.

(pp 503‐504: lines 32‐38) She has been a witness to all the suffering of humanity: I have seen the peasant burning in his hut, I have seen the slashed corpse of the slaughtered child, Heard woman's cry ravished and stripped and haled Amid the bayings of the hell‐hound mob, I have looked on, I had no power to save. (p. 504: lines 45 – 49) She has sympathy for the suffering of even animals: I have shared the toil of the yoked animal drudge Pushed by the goad, encouraged by the whip; I have shared the fear‐filled life of bird and beast, Its long hunt for the day's precarious food, Its covert slink and crouch and hungry prowl, Its pain and terror seized by beak and claw. (p. 504: lines 52 – 57) But she confesses that she has “brought no arm of strength to aid or slay/ God gave me love, he gave me not his force.” She confesses that heaven has been indifferent and Nature cruel but yet she has not complained. She hopes that one day this great hard world of pain will change; her God has assured her that this will happen, and she is confident that one day this will indeed happen. .

As she stopped speaking, a voice of wrath, the voice of a tortured Titan, was heard and it felt like the roar of an angry beast hidden in the depths of man. On the one hand this voice was complaining bitterly against the suffering of humanity and yet at the same time seemed to take a perverse delight in his suffering. It describes itself as I am the Man of Sorrows, I am he Who is nailed on the wide cross of the universe; To enjoy my agony God built the earth, My passion he has made his drama's theme.

(P. 505; lines 97 – 100)

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He is bitter against God and voices his defiance of him. He speaks for all those in this world who toil like the animal and like the animal die, for man the rebel, the helpless serf. As he gets rid of “servitude’s seal”, he finds new tyrants on his back. He is forever obliged to labour while others enjoy the fruits of his labour. He is envious of the riches that he cannot share and of happiness that cannot be his. He is therefore left alone with his bitterness and with his evil thoughts and his quarrel with God and man. He is convinced that his fate will not change.

God, he thinks, has made this world harsh and dreadful and made the heart of man petty. Man can survive here only through trickery and deceit. He does not believe in goodness. One is good either because he is weak or because he regards it as an investment for return. He can’t revolt any more because God has taken away from him his ancient force, so he has to consent to his sufferings. He concludes his defiant speech with these words: I am the victim of titanic ills, I am the doer of demoniac deeds; I was made for evil, evil is my lot; Evil I must be and by evil live; Nought other can I do but be myself; What Nature made me, that I must remain.

I suffer and toil and weep, I moan and hate. (p. 507; Lines 152 – 158) This is the voice of the tamasic ego. Its very nature is to accept and support despondency, weakness, inertia, self‐depreciation. It is so weak, so obscure, so miserable, so oppressed, and ill‐used that it feels it has no hope. This perverted being seems to take delight in venting his bitterness and hatred and refuses to be transformed. Savitri listens to this being but chooses to respond only to the Madonna of suffering. She says to her that she is indeed “a portion of her soul put forth/ To bear the unbearable sorrow of the world” and that because of her man does not give in to despair and lives in hope. She also points to her that “thine is the power to solace, not to save”. This is something that Madonna herself is conscious of as shown in her submission that “God gave me love, he gave me not his force.” Savitri leaves her with the promise that one day she will return with the strength that will free the world from all the ills of the kind which bring out the anger of the beast and the cruelty and pain of the Titan in man.” This will rid the world of the tamasic ego and bring to it peace and joy for ever more.

Savitri presses on in her journey, and very soon she meets another Madonna, who sat in her gold and purple lustre, “Armed with the trident and the thunderbolt/ Her feet upon a couchant lion’s back”. She looked majestic and victorious. This was the Mother of Might. When she spoke, her voice sounded like a luminous command. She too begins by saying to Savitri: O Savitri, I am thy secret soul…

I stand upon the earth’s paths of danger and grief

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And help the unfortunate and save the doomed.

(p. 509: lines 213 – 219) She keeps a watch in the human world over the battle of the bright and the dark forces. She topples down the thrones of tyrant kings and smites the Titan who bestrides the world. She goes on to say: I am Durga, goddess of the proud and strong, And Lakshmi, queen of the fair and unfortunate; I wear the face of Kali when I kill, I trample the corpses of the demon hordes.

(p. 509; lines 236 – 239) But she finds that the obstinate world resists her, and the crookedness and evil in man’s heart is stronger than reason, and that the hostile forces are very crafty and constantly try to put back the clock of human progress and destiny. She admits, The cosmic evil is too deep to unroot: The cosmic suffering is too vast to heal.

(p. 510: lines 267‐268) She is able to help a few, however, the mass falls back unsaved. She too like the Madonna of Suffering is hopeful that her work will not fail because God’s seal is on it.

Hardly had this Madonna stopped speaking, when the dwarf‐Titan, the Ego of the great world of Desire, the Rajasic ego, begins to pour out his heart. He complains that his constant struggle has enabled nature on her journey of evolution but his wages have been death and pain. He believes that Nature is his slave and tool and does not realise that in reality he himself is the slave and tool of Nature. He believes that the world was made for him and for his use. He believes: The sun and moon are lights upon my path; Air was invented for my lungs to breathe, Conditioned as a wide and wall‐less space For my winged chariot's wheels to cleave a road, The sea was made for me to swim and sail And bear my golden commerce on its back:

(p. 511: lines 320‐324)

He was born weak and small and ignorant, but with time he has grown greater than Nature, wiser than God and he is quite boastful of his achievements:

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I have made real what she never dreamed, I have seized her powers and harnessed for my work, I have shaped her metals and new metals made; I will make glass and raiment out of milk, Make iron velvet, water unbreakable stone, Like God in his astuce of artist skill, Mould from one primal plasm protean forms, In single nature multitudinous lives, All that imagination can conceive In mind intangible, remould anew In Matter's plastic solid and concrete; No magic can surpass my magic's skill.

There is no miracle I shall not achieve.

What God imperfect left, I will complete, Out of a tangled mind and half‐made soul His sin and error I will eliminate; What he invented not, I shall invent: He was the first creator, I am the last.

(p. 512: lines 336 – 352)

Here we hear the voice of the ego of the scientist and the technician proud of his achievements and arrogating to himself the role of God. He goes on to boast how he discovered the atomic energy and with it he can now “Expunge a nation or abolish a race” and leave Death’s silence where there was laughter and joy.

He is confident that he has grown a master of the arts of life and harnessed the secrets of Nature to cater to his comforts. Soon, he hopes to know all the secrets of the Mind and then he will be able to play with knowledge and ignorance and sin and virtue. Soon, he hopes to be able to read the hidden thoughts of others and slay his enemies with a look or a thought.

All this egoistic boast reminds one of the great Titans of our mythologies who enslaved the humans and aspired to enslave the Gods in their heavens. This is exactly what this voice says: When earth is mastered, I shall conquer heaven; The gods shall be my aides or menial folk, No wish I harbour unfulfilled shall die: Omnipotence and omniscience shall be mine.”

(p. 513: lines 381 – 384)

Savitri has heard all that this warped Vital ego had to say but she now turns to the Madonna of Might and responds to her. She tells her that she undoubtedly is one of her cosmic powers put

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forth to help mankind. Man hopes to dare and hope because of her, and because of her he has made all this god‐like progress. But she lacks wisdom, and power without wisdom is like a wind, it cannot build the “the extreme eternal things” here on earth. One day she will return with wisdom so that the Madonna’s wisdom will be as vast as is her power now. Then the cry of the ego which now claims the world as its food shall be hushed, and all shall be light and bliss.

Savitri proceeds further along the spirit’s upward route. She now finds herself in a high and happy space, to a wide tower of vision from where all could be seen. Here her spirit was thrilled by nearness to its source; Savitri is now moving closer and closer to her soul. And here she encounters the third Madonna with the lustre of heaven in her eyes; her face had the brightness of the sun, and her smile could heal a torn and wounded heart. She now speaks to Savitri and says: O Savitri, I am thy secret soul.

I have come down to the wounded desolate earth To heal her pangs and lull her heart to rest And lay her head upon the Mother's lap That she may dream of God and know his peace And draw the harmony of higher spheres Into the rhythm of earth's rude troubled days.

(p. 515: lines 426 – 432) She gives ideals to man which he finds worth struggling to achieve. She is peace that steals into man’s war‐worn breast. She is “charity with the kindly hands that bless”. She is “silence mid the noisy tramp of life”, and “Knowledge pouring on her cosmic map”. When man is confused as to what is good and what is evil, she is the one who guides him along the pathways to God. Out of the Inconscient, she builds consciousness. She comes to man in the forms of goodness, of courage, valour, martyrdom, Wisdom, Beauty, and through them she lifts man’s soul nearer to the Light.

But human mind clings to its ignorance, And to its littleness the human heart, And to its right to grief the earthly life.

(p. 516: lines 481 – 483) She concludes by declaring: I bring meanwhile the gods upon the earth; I bring back hope to the despairing heart; I give peace to the humble and the great And shed my grace on the foolish and the wise.

I shall save earth, if earth consents to be saved.

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(p. 516: lines 487 – 491)

As soon the Madonna stopped speaking, Savitri heard the cry, the stark and protesting voice of the sense‐shackled Mental ego. He is conscious of the godlike power he has but he is bound in the chains of earthly ignorance. When he dominates the humans, they cannot see the whole of God’s Reality but see only the cosmic surfaces. Even when he sees the physical body of the Truth, he cannot probe deep enough and reach its soul. He misses the crowding riches of infinity and mistakes them as a giant waste. He probes into nature’s secrets but his “eyes miss the unseen behind”. He is often visited by intuitive light and inspiration but he does not trust them. He trusts only reason and sense‐knowledge. Because of this, his splendid efforts at knowing the Truth meet with frustration. As he speaks Savitri can hear the cosmic pathos behind his grandiose utterances.

He introduces himself as “the mind of God’s great ignorant world”, “the all‐discovering Thought of man”. But he is a god chained to Matter and sense like an animal imprisoned in a fence of thorns. Although he has not been able to set himself free, he has managed to loosen the cord and enlarge his scope. He then boasts of what he has already achieved: I have mapped the heavens and analysed the stars, Described their orbits through the grooves of Space, Measured the miles that separate the suns, Computed their longevity in Time.

(p. 518: lines 544 – 547) He then goes to describe how he has discovered the secrets of this earth by delving into its bowels. He has also sketched the tree of evolution and traced man’s descent all the way down to the protozoa from which his ancestors rose. He also has studied how man is born and how he dies, but Only what end he serves I know not yet, Or if there is aim at all or any end Or push of rich creative purposeful joy In the wide works of the terrestrial power.

(p. 518: lines 561‐564) He is confident that he has studied in detail the entire book of Matter, “Only some pages are left to read”. He has also studied the ways of life of humans as well as of apes and ants and the paths of the mind of men and women. He feels pretty confident that if there is a God who is at work, he has found most of his secrets. But, as he confesses:

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But still the Cause of things is left in doubt, Their truth flees from pursuit into a void; When all has been explained nothing is known.

(p. 519: lines 576 –578)

It is still a mystery to him how this mighty Nature was born and how the mind arose and how life assumed these different forms. Whenever he feels confident of what he has discovered, Chance and Fate often call in doubt what he tries to establish as the truth of things. He thinks all the great philosophies he has built are but a reasoned guess. But he thinks that that the mystic heavens and all talk of the human soul are a charlatanism. All this is a mere speculation.

In the end the world itself becomes a doubt, a joke of some kind perpetrated by the Infinite.

Perhaps the world is no more than an illusion.

It is said that there is a greater consciousness but it is supposed to lead you to a bodiless Self.

What use is such a consciousness? He prefers to work within his human limitations. He is human and hopes to remain human. To think that God lives hidden in Matter is no more than a fantasy. How can man ever grow divine? No thinking men would ever accept such an illogical proposition.

Savitri listens to the outburst of this warped voice, but she turns to the Madonna of Light and addresses her. She tells her that she is indeed a portion of her soul put forth to help human beings to rise to the forgotten spiritual heights. Because of her , the soul draws near to God, and there is still love left in the world. But the human intellect is a hard and rocky thing on which the tree of Paradise can never flower. Even if intuition comes to its help, it will not be of much use since at best it will still remain a prisoner of the ego of sainthood. Mind can at best receive only a bright shadow of God but not God himself. She asks Savitri to nurse the hunger for the eternal in man. One day, she promises, she will return with God’s hand in hers and then there shall be perfection of earth and light and peace in all the worlds.

We have now heard the three Madonnas, the triple cosmic soul‐forces. These are the three aspects of the World‐Mother and they have been already at work in the world. But much of their work is vitiated by the perversions these powers suffer on earth. The fair work done by the soul‐forces is defaced to a considerable extent by the triple aspects of the ego, Tamasic, Rajasic and Sattwik. It must be noted that the soul‐forces are triple and not triune; each lacks the powers of the others. The Madonna of Compassion does not have power, and the Madonna of Might does not have wisdom, and the Madonna of Light is a prisoner of her own smugness. In other words, each Madonna has as it were her own separate domain. Savitri feels that all this is not enough to bring perfection to this world. Compassion, power and wisdom should be triune powers acting on the world in unison and not separately as they do now.

Savitri therefore moves on in search of her soul. This episode is rich in significance and revels

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what is really wrong with this world and with the human consciousness as they are constituted now.

[1] There will be note in the second half of this instalment describing this and other related terms.

http://nextfuture.sriaurobindosociety.org.in/jan04/nfjan04_savitri.htm

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11. Spiritual Evolution and Levels of Consciousness

One of the major themes of Savitri is spiritual evolution. We need to clarify this notion at this stage because it is crucial to the understanding of Savitri. Here I will present to you only an overview of this important concept. We will have occasions to come back to it again as we proceed with this study. This will also help us to understand the term “Overmental” used earlier in this instalment when indicating where exactly Savitri must have encountered the three Madonnas.

The concept of evolution as it was developed in the West is fundamentally Darwinian and it is concerned with the study of the evolution of form – how progressively more complex forms evolved out of less complex ones. It does not concern itself with the question what is evolving and why. For example, why should Mind evolve out of Life and Life out of Matter. Sri Aurobindo regards evolution primarily as the evolution of consciousness. For Darwinians and other materialists, matter is the fundamental reality of this world and consciousness is only a phenomenon of reactions of Matter to Matter, of energy in Matter to energy in Matter. For Sri Aurobindo consciousness is the fundamental thing. Everything else, the energy, the motion, the movement of consciousness that creates the universe ‐‐ the microcosm as well as the macrocosm ‐‐ is nothing but consciousness arranging itself. Consciousness is not only the power of awareness of self and things, it is also a dynamic or creative energy. It not only can answer to forces but can create forces out of itself.

Evolution, says Sri Aurobindo, presupposes a prior involution. What evolves does so because it already existed involved. This creation is a manifestation of the Supreme Divine consciousness.

In a manner of speaking the Supreme took a plunge into the Ignorance and became its very opposite. He became the Inconscient and out of this Inconscient, evolved Matter, and out of Matter came Life and out of Life Mind; and this progressive evolution will gradually unfold itself and from mind will evolve higher levels of consciousness and finally the Supreme Divine.

This progressive development is inevitable because the Supreme Divine had taken a plunge into the Ignorance and Darkness, and therefore will be manifested here. Thus this creation is the story of the gradual and progressive manifestation of God in Matter. When that happens, every form created here on earth will be able to manifest one aspect or facet of the Supreme’s infinite glories.

Why did the Supreme take a plunge into its opposite or what is called the Ignorance? These are not matters easy to explain, and even when explained, easy to comprehend. For we are talking here of the movements of an Infinite Consciousness and the finite human intelligence will not be able to comprehend it unless it acquired something of the vastness of this Infinite

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Consciousness. Suffice it to say here, that the Supreme Divine Consciousness chose to take a plunge into the abyss of Ignorance for the thrill of the adventure, for lila (the joy or excitement of a sport), as it is said.

The first to evolve out of the Inconscient was the Subconscient, and then Matter. The Subconscient and the Inconscient constitute the nether being below the physical consciousness. All upon earth is based on the Inconscient, which is not really devoid of consciousness, as the term would imply. It is the deepest level reached during the plunge of involution, and the evolution of consciousness starts from this level. Matter is under the control of the subconscient out of which it comes. That is why we are not aware of what is going on in our body most of the time. Out of Matter have evolved material forms with a higher manifestation of consciousness we call Life, and out of Life has come the still higher level of manifestation we call the Mind.

The levels of consciousness are like a flight of steps, and the evolution of consciousness that has taken place so far looks like an ascent up this ladder or vertical system of levels. It has already reached the level of Mind and, as Sri Aurobindo sees it, it is certain to climb further until it reaches the level of Sachchidananda or the Supreme Divine Consciousness.

The Supreme Consciousness was formless and unmanifest before the plunge into the Inconscient was taken. The first phase of evolution through the levels of the Subconscient, Matter, Life and Mind has served the purpose of manifesting here a multitude of forms, each distinct from all the others. From Mind onwards it is a conscious, spiritual evolution. All these rungs of consciousness, already scaled and yet to be scaled, can be represented as a ladder, as shown below: 11. SACHCHIDANANDA 10. SUPERMIND 9. OVERMIND 8. INTUITION 7. ILLUMINED MIND 6. HIGHER MIND 5. MIND 4. VITAL 3. PHYSICAL (MATTER) 2. THE SUBCONSCIENT THE INCONSCIENT Evolution so far has climbed the first five rungs, and man lives primarily at the mental level. Sri Aurobindo has contended that at the moment man seems to be arrested at this level. Most of our problems, the various crises humanity has been facing today, can be traced to this single cause. Through yoga, it is possible for man to climb higher levels of consciousness. The aim of

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Sri Aurobindo’s yoga is to enable man to ascend to level ten – to the level of the Supermind.

The Supermind is in its very essence a Truth‐consciousness, a consciousness always free from the Ignorance which is the foundation of our present natural existence. It is not a superior level of the mind, but an altogether new facet of consciousness. Sachchidananda (Satchitananda) is the supracosmic Reality, the Divine, the Supreme Being who manifests himself as infinite Existence (SAT) of which the essentiality is Consciousness (CHIT), of which again the essentiality is Bliss (ANANDA).

Supermind is between SACHCHIDANANDA, the One who is above all manifestation, and this flux of the many in the manifested universe. Traditional yoga aims at taking a leap from the mind straight into Sachchidananda, and this is described as attaining the Nirvana. Sri Aurobindo maintains that it is necessary to attain the Supermind during the climb beyond the mind so that we can possess this world, this manifested universe like a God, untroubled by death, pain or ignorance as we now are. Taking a direct plunge into Sachchidananda would mean abandoning the created world to its own fate and seeking the eternity, peace and bliss of the Divine for our individual selves. Only the Supermind has the power to change human nature and to bring perfection to this troubled world of ours. The Supermind, we are told in the story as narrated

by Sri Aurobindo in this epic, was discovered by Aswapati beyond this manifested world into the Transcendental realm.

The physical world which we see around us is not the only world created by the consciousness.

It has created many other worlds. But these are not material worlds. There are vital worlds, mental worlds, psychic worlds, and other higher worlds with which we have little contact. In each of us there is a mental plane of consciousness, psychic, a vital, a subtle physical as well as the gross physical plane. The same planes are repeated in the consciousness of general Nature.

The microcosm is identical in structure with the macrocosm. In other words, the gradations of consciousness we find in the world outside are mirrored also in the being of man.

It is these worlds that Aswapati explored in search of a power which would enable him to bring perfection to this world. His exploration of these worlds is described in the 15 cantos of Book II of Savitri. Aswapati was unable to find this power in any of the created worlds. So he takes a leap into the Transcendental world, which is beyond the manifested world. Aswapati’s journey is an inner journey through his own consciousness.

Savitri too took a plunge into her inner being and explored first the physical, vital and mental realms, and then began to ascend to levels of consciousness above the rational mind, that is where she meets the glorious crowd who longed to save God’s world. (Ref. The last section of Canto Three, Book VII).

Just as there is the subconscient which lies below the physical consciousness, there is also the superconscient, consisting of levels of consciousness higher than the normal mind. A spiritual seeker has to be conscious of the subconscient levels because things or influences come from

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them into the physical, vital and mental levels which are an impediment to his spiritual progress. Similarly he has to open himself to the superconscient levels whose role is to evolve the spiritual man out of the mental half‐animal that man is today. Each of these various levels teems with forces, influences which can assume forms and acts as powers.

Sri Aurobindo distinguishes various distinct levels of consciousness among these superconscient planes which lie above the ordinary mind. This gradation can be seen as a stairway of four main ascents. These have been designated by Sri Aurobindo as the Higher Mind, the Illumined Mind, Intuition or the Intuitive Mind, and the Overmind. Beyond the Overmind, at the summit lies the Supermind. At this stage it is not necessary for us to go into a precise characterisation of these higher levels of consciousness. A brief glance at each one of these should suffice for our present purposes.

Sri Aurobindo has described the Higher Mind as a ‘luminous thought‐mind’. It does not depend on a process of deductions and inferences in arriving at the truth about things. Its most characteristic movement is a totality of truth‐seeing at a single view. The Illumined Mind does not primarily work by thought but by vision. It is more of an inner sight. It is a Mind not so much of thought but of spiritual light. The perceptual power of this inner sight is greater than the perceptual power of thought. The Intuitive Mind comes very close to what may be called knowledge‐by‐identity. It should not be mistaken for what is normally known as intuitive knowledge, the understanding that comes without the need for conscious reasoning.

“Intuition” here is used in a much deeper sense to refer to a certain gradation of consciousness. The Intuitive Mind sees the truth of things by a direct inner contact, not like the mental intelligence indirectly by indirect contact through the senses. The limitation of this mind compared to with the Supermind is that it sees things by flashes, point by point, not as a whole.

Besides, its perceptions tend to get mixed up with those of the mental movement. It marks a transitional stage between the mental seeking and the direct perception of the Supermind.

The Overmind is the passage through which one passes from Mind to Supermind. This is a consciousness in which the substance and the movements of mind become more and more illumined, powerful and wide. It is the highest of the ranges of the mental consciousness.

Although it draws from the highest Truth, it is here that the separation of different aspects of the Truth begins, and each aspect is worked out as though it is an independent Truth. This is the process which ends as we descend to ordinary Mind, Life and Matter, in a complete division, fragmentation, separation from the indivisible Truth above.

The Supermind is radically different from all the levels of consciousness described so far. In its very essence it is a truth‐consciousness, always free from the Ignorance the shadow of which falls on all other levels of consciousness in some degree or the other. It does not have to seek knowledge because its very nature is knowledge. On its summits it possesses the divine omniscience and omnipotence.

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It is believed that the Supermind had not yet descended into this creation until Sri Aurobindo and the Mother brought it down through their long and arduous tapasya of many decades. The Mother has declared that this consciousness descended on earth on 29 February 1956.

I would just like to add that it is believed that the gods and goddesses, who are the emanations of the creative consciousness of the Supreme, preside over the material universe and the earth.

And the place which is the seat of existence of these gods and goddesses is what Sri Aurobindo has called the Overmind. Thus it would seem reasonable to assume that the plane of consciousness on which Savitri met the three Madonnas was the Overmental plane.

http://nextfuture.sriaurobindosociety.org.in/feb04/nffeb04_savitri.htm

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12. Book Seven Canto Five ­ The Finding of the Soul We will be studying “The Finding of the Soul”, Canto V of Book Seven, in this installment. This is one of the most climacteric points in our story.

Savitri is pushing ahead seeking the soul’s mystic cave. As we have already noted, there is nothing in the original legend of the Mahabharata that corresponds to such an elaborate description of Savitri’s yoga. The original story gives only a brief description of the triratra vow that Savitri undertakes.

Before you proceed any further, please review the section on “The Psychic Being”, which you will find in Installment No. 8 of this series. Note in particular the distinction we have made between the Jivatman and the Psychic Being. You will need all this at the back of your mind in dealing with Section 2 of the canto under discussion.

Section 1 (Lines 1 to 141) Savitri has just encountered the triple soul‐forces, the three Goddesses, and each of these claims to be her secret soul. Savitri listens to them and also to the titanic force that follow each Goddess. She tells these Goddesses that they have come from her soul and that she has decided to go still further to find her soul. The realm of consciousness in which the gods dwell is the Overmental world. Savitri has thus already reached the Overmental world. For most spiritual pilgrims this itself is a far enough stage and very few get even this far. The spiritual aspirant has to pass through many trying and difficult phases along the way. But Savitri is spared most of these because the path she follows is the sunlit path of the psychic. Through an inner aspiration and concentration, she gains entry into the Inner countries of her being (ref.

Book Seven, Canto 3) and then pushes ahead through various regions of her inner being.

Most spiritual seekers are looking for peace or bliss as the goal of their sadhana (spiritual effort or practices). The spiritual practices they follow involve emptying the instruments of their being (body, life and mind) and bringing into them a certain degree of purity. This enables them to reflect in their heart and mind the light of the higher levels of the mind, namely, the Higher Mind, the Illumined Mind, and the Intuitive Mind. This in itself is a tremendous experience but a systematic ascent of the mind to these levels is rare. Most people who get this far tend to disregard these illuminations coming from the higher levels because they are focussed on merging with the Transcendent. Their one aim is separation from Nature. This is called variously as Nirvana, liberation, Moksha, etc.

Savitri is different. She has no personal need for salvation or for merging in the Transcendent or in what is called the ‘Beyond’. She has come “to wrestle with the shadow (whatever limits and perverts human life), and hew the ways of immortality”. She is therefore seeking for the

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Truth, the Light and the Power which can victoriously handle earth‐nature and bring to life here Light, Truth and Bliss. We have surmised that the realm in which she meets the three Madonnas is the world of the Overmental consciousness. She has not met her soul yet because it dwells in the Transcendent. Savitri, we have seen, is an Avatar of the Divine Mother, the Chit‐ Shakti (Consciousness‐Power) of the Supreme and her Jivatman is the Divine Mother herself.

Savitri has now to break through another barrier to reach the Transcendental world.

For being able to do this Savitri has to empty herself of all that now defines and limits her consciousness. Without such a process of emptying oneself, it is not possible to receive into oneself the riches of a higher illumination. And to achieve this she enters into what the poet calls “the night of the soul”. This is somewhat akin to what is described is Christian literature as the Dark Night of the Soul.

This is a state of silent and intense aspiration. She becomes thoughtless, wordless, desireless and free from all other willing. “In a simple purity of emptiness/ Her mind knelt down before the unknowable”. Everything in her was abolished save her naked self and the yearning of her surrendered heart. Even to be aware of her separate self seemed to her like a vanity; she asked for nothing, not even for salvation. Her condition is described by the poet in these words: A sacred darkness brooded now within, The world was a deep darkness great and nude.

(P. 522, Lines: 26‐27)

At last a change approached, the emptiness broke. She felt “a blissful nearness to the goal”. It was as though heaven leaned down to kiss the sacred hill. The poet is suggesting the descent of a new and wonderful consciousness in Savitri. The very air all around trembled with the power of the advent of this consciousness. It was now a new dawn. And here we have the description of a wonderful dawn. No prose can do justice to what the poet has described in these magic words: A rose of splendour on a tree of dreams, The face of Dawn out of mooned twilight grew.

Day came, priest of a sacrifice of joy Into the worshipping silence of her world; He carried immortal lustre as his robe, Trailed heaven like a purple scarf and wore As his vermilion caste‐mark a red sun. (P. 523, Lines 45 – 51)

This Day is the priest or officiator and preceptor of the great yajna (sacrifice) of joy. A silence sanctified this world. The new Day covered the whole world with his immortal lustre and in his forehead he wore the Sun.

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This place somehow looked familiar to Savitri, because it was indeed the home of her soul. This is the region of Light, beyond the empire of the Ignorance. This is Savitri’s first experience of the world of the Supramental consciousness in the transcendental world.

We have now the description of the sanctuary of the new consciousness, which she is now entering. It looked as though she was entering the occult depths of some land of Bliss. This is the retreat of the Truth‐Consciousness whose heights the human mind cannot reach. It was hidden as though in the solitude of a rock‐temple, a refuge far away from the reach of an ignorant worshipping world. The entrance to this realm was hidden in an awful dimness and a holy stillness with a marvellous brooding light. The door was carved in blocks of immobility of concentrated peace. Round the lintel on both sides there were golden serpents curled enveloping it with their pure strength and looking out with wisdom’s deep and luminous eyes.

These symbolise the divine energies of this upper hemisphere. The eagle hovering over the door with its wide wings is the Supramental Mind‐force. There was also a screen of trance of peace which covered the door like a fire‐screen. In the cornices were found the doves, the divine counterparts of the psychic aspiration, signifying peace, sweetness and purity. The doves, serpents and the eagle signifying the divine psychic, the divine vital and the divine mental respectively, lived in perfect harmony here.

The threshold of this temple can be crossed only in what is called sushupti (in sleep consciousness) when the consciousness is free from all distorting influences. As Savitri crossed the threshold she sees the Archtypes of all the movements, things and planes below. This is what is described in our sacred literature as the ka:rana jagat, where all happenings and creations in time are seen in their seed‐state. She sees the great figures of gods, great executive figures of the cosmic self, as they would look if carved in stone. On the walls, covered with significant symbol shapes she found the life scenes of man and beast, and now she could understand the meaning of the life of gods and the power and purpose of the numberless worlds. She saw there the whole plan of creation as also the ladder of existence from the Inconscient below to the Superconscient Satchidananda above, and the entire movement of involution and evolution.

There was no sound there, one felt only the living nearness of the soul. Yet all the worlds and God himself were there, for every symbol was a reality and brought the presence that had given it life.

All this she saw only (within herself) and felt and knew, not by some thought of mind, but by the self. There is a light not born of sun, or of moon or of fire, it is the light of the Atman, which shines and illumines where no other light can reach. It dwells within and sheds an intimate visibility and reveals the meanings of all things which are secret. Our normal sight and sense are a fallible gaze and touch, and only the spirit’s vision is wholly true.

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As she passed in that mysterious place from room to room, through door and rock‐hewn door, suddenly, an identity of which she was not aware until now woke within her. She felt herself made one with all she saw. She knew herself with all the powers of the Supramental powers.

She knew herself as the beloved of the Supreme, his creative, executive counterpart. She was the Mother of Beauty and Delight, she was the creative word of Brahma, she was the infinite might of Shiva, she was Vishnu, the sustainer and preserver of this creation. She was Krishna and Radha eternally entwined in bliss (the eternal’s aspect of Ananda and delight in creation).

She was the adorer and the adored lost in one.

In the last chamber one sat on a golden seat whose shape no vision could define; only one felt this was the world’s source or fountainhead of this entire creation.

In the last chamber on a golden seat One sat whose shape no vision could define, Only one felt the world's unattainable fount, A Power of which she was a straying Force, An invisible Beauty, goal of the world's desire, A Sun of which all knowledge is a beam, A greatness without whom no life could be.

Savitri: p. 525, lines 127‐134

Savitri felt that she was a wandering Force of this Power. This was the goal of the world’s desire, a Sun of which all knowledge is only a beam, a Greatness without which no life could exist. This was the Divine Supramental Gnosis.[1] From there all departed into the silent Self, and all became formless and pure and bare. Then through a tunnel in the last rock she came out where there shone a deathless sun. A house was there all made of flame and light, and crossing a wall of doorless living fire there suddenly she met her secret soul.

Section 2 (Lines 142 – 201): There stood a being there which was deathless although it looked transient because it played with momentary things and took part in the Divine Comedy of this life. The poet is now speaking of the spirit or the Jivatman which is behind the individual soul or the psychic being.

What is described in most of this section does not refer to Savitri alone; the description is general.

This being is the Spirit’s conscious representative and God’s delegate in our humanity. This is the being which presides over our destiny and guides us as we travel from life to life. Her wide eyes which bore a tranquil happiness which could not be revoked by the pity and sorrow had the gaze of infinity looking at finite shapes. She had come into the mortal world to play at ball

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with Time and Circumstance. A joy in world‐existence was her master‐movement here and the passion of the game lighted her eyes. She welcomed earth’s bliss and grief with a smile; She saw all things as a masquerade of Truth disguised in the costumes of ignorance, crossing the years to Immortality. She could face all with the strong spirit’s peace.

Since she knows how hard the mind has to toil here, she puts forth a small portion of herself into the hidden region of the heart to enable it to face the pang and to forget the bliss, to share the suffering and to endure life’s wounds and to labour here under the labour of the stars. This is the individual soul in us, a being no bigger than the thumb of man (this is the Upanishadic characterisation of the soul in us). This refers to the projection of the Jivatman into this world, and that projection is the psychic. It is this in us that laughs and weeps, suffers the strokes, exults in victory, struggles for the crown. Identified with mind, body and life, it takes on itself their anguish and defeat, bleeds with Fate’s whips, and hangs upon the cross, yet it is the unwounded and immortal self supporting the actor on the human scene. This in us is the godhead small and marred, the human portion of divinity, the soul in Time, and gives us the strength to do our daily task. It fills us with sympathy for the grief in others and the little strength we have to help the race. It is weak in body but has an invincible might in its heart, and it climbs stumbling, held by an unseen hand, a toiling spirit in a mortal shape.

Here the poet is describing how the human soul is a projection of the divine spark or the Jivatman, which stands behind and does not come down into this evolutionary world. It sends this projection, which is the psychic element in us which gradually acquires a form and becomes the psychic being in us. Its function is to support us on our Godward journey through all the vicissitudes of our earthly existence. Because of its presence in us we rise from light to light, from power to power. The individual soul climbs stumbling through life but it has all the time the support of an unseen hand of the Jivatman of which it is a projection here.

We now resume the storyline. Here in this chamber of flame and light they met – the secret deity, which is a spark of the Divine, and her projection, our individual soul involved in this earthly life. In Savitri’s case, it is Savitri’s inner being and the Supreme Divine Mother of whom Savitri is a delegate on an incarnation here. Then with a magic transformation’s speed, they rushed into each other and grew one.

[1] The reader may please note that here we are talking of things and experiences which are beyond our ken, and it is difficult to be confident about one’s understanding of what has been described here. I am inclined to believe that here Savitri has the first experience of the Supramental or Gnostic Consciousness in the transcendental world. But most of the scholars with whom I have discussed this passage do not agree with me. They are not sure exactly where Savitri is at this point. All agree that Savitri is very close to her soul. But Savitri is the incarnation of the Supreme Divine Mother, who represents the Supramental Consciousness. Therefore, it

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seems to me reasonable to assume, among other reasons we won’t go into here, that the sentence which reads, “In the last chamber on a golden seat/ … A greatness without whom no life could be.” (lines 128 – 134) describes the the Divine Supramental gnosis.

http://nextfuture.sriaurobindosociety.org.in/mar04/nfmar04_savitri.htm

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13. Book Seven Canto Six ­ Nirvana and the Discovery of the All­Negating Absolute

We now move on to Canto Six of Book VII. This canto has the self‐explanatory title “Nirvana and the Discovery of the All‐Negating Absolute”. The term “Nirvana” means “extinguishing” (the flame of the individual being); it means “to rest in the highest Non‐Existence” for the Buddhists. But by and large this term is used to mean liberation yet upon earth into an unspeakable peace and gladness. It practically meant the extinction of all suffering through the disappearance of all egoistic idea or sensation and it the ultimate goal of many lines of yoga. Sri Aurobindo’s Yoga does not look upon Nirvana of this kind as its ultimate objective, and therefore we can infer that the experience of Nirvana Savitri undergoes in this canto is of a different nature, as we shall see later in this installment.

As we have seen, in Canto Five, Savitri undergoes one of the peak experiences of her inner journey. Savitri’s inner being, her individual soul, meets in its inmost chamber of flame and light, the Supreme Divine Mother of whom Savitri is a delegate here on earth. Savitri’s individual soul is a projection of the Divine Mother and that is what makes her an Avatar, an incarnation. When they meet, they rush into each other with a magic transformation’s speed, and become one. Thus Savitri has the experience of the Gnostic Godhead in her inmost being.

Then we see that as she returns to her surface consciousness, Savitri experiences the tremendous transformation of her being which is the result of the rising of the Kundalini power to the crown of the head and its descent through the various chakras. Her mind then raises a cry of victory: “O soul, my soul, we have created Heaven, Within we have found the kingdom here of God, His fortress built in a loud ignorant world.

(p. 531, Lines 328‐30)

Section 1A (Lines 1 – 65)

Canto Six begins with a description of nature which shows that an experience such as the one undergone by Savitri has always a cosmic bearing and importance, particularly since Savitri is an Avatar. As Savitri was undergoing the tremendous experience described in Canto Five, Nature too responded to it in its own way. There were thunder‐showers, and now these rains have just abated as we begin this canto. “The last rains had fled murmuring across the woods” says the poet.

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The great spiritual experience Savitri has just been through is reflected by the calm, mellow sun looking down from tranquil heavens and the great blue enchantment of the sky. Savitri herself was different now as the poet describes the spiritual maturity and the tranquillity of her intense self‐delight in these words: And Savitri's life was glad, fulfilled like earth's; She had found herself, she knew her being's aim.

Although her kingdom of marvellous change within Remained unspoken in her secret breast, All that lived round her felt its magic's charm:

(p. 532: Lines 11‐15)

Savitri has now achieved a total transformation of her inmost being and Nature seems to recognise this and respond to her in many ways: The trees' rustling voices told it to the winds, Flowers spoke in ardent hues an unknown joy, The birds' carolling became a canticle, The beasts forgot their strife and lived at ease.

(p. 532, Lines 16‐19)

And Savitri’s new inner poise gave an upward and forward push to the yogins living in the forest pursuing the higher life. Light and Bliss radiated from her to all around her.

Absorbed in wide communion with the Unseen The mild ascetics of the wood received A sudden greatening of their lonely muse.

This bright perfection of her inner state Poured overflowing into her outward scene, Made beautiful dull common natural things And action wonderful and time divine.

Even the smallest meanest work became A sweet or glad and glorious sacrament, An offering to the self of the great world Or a service to the One in each and all.

(p. 532, Lines 20‐30)

The new consciousness in Savitri does not abrogate but lifts all true relationships to their highest intensities. It thus gives a new dimension and perfection to her love for Satyavan. She now sees above Satyavan’s cherished head not “Fate’s dark and lethal orb” but a golden circle,

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“the cycle rondure of a sovereign life”. In other words, she sees on Satyavan’s head not the gloom of death but the imperial light of life. Besides, her love for Satyavan becomes more integral and embraces all levels of her being.

Always he was with her, a living soul That met her eyes with close enamoured eyes, A living body near to her body's joy….

Even in distance 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 the single circling of their days Together by love's unseen atmosphere, Inseparable like the earth and sky.

Section 1B (Lines 65 – 220)

(p. 533, Lines 47‐62)

In the lives of many saints, we come across episodes in which as the spiritual pilgrim is about to step into the world of liberation or Moksha, he is assailed by Mara, or some adversary force which tries to mislead him or block his progress. Savitri has already in her own individual life reached a spiritual goal which is other than that of liberation or Mukti or Nirvana of the traditional kind. She has entered the Gnostic or the Supramental world, where dwells the Supreme Divine Mother, and she has returned to earth after realising her oneness with this Supreme Mother. She possesses potentially now the creative powers of this new consciousness which are capable of abolishing all imperfections from our terrestrial existence and of bringing perfection to it. Savitri now, as it were, has the key to this golden world of terrestrial perfection. This is a siddhi beyond those who escape into Nirvanic state that traditional yoga aspires to reach.

Sri Aurobindo has often spoken of a dark concealed hostility that is concealed in the human depths that claims the right to change and mar God’s work. There is a secret enemy that constantly seeks to keep man chained to his ignorance. This secret Adversary may occasionally allow a really determined spiritual aspirant to escape from this world of ignorance into the world of Nirvana or liberation or of bliss, because that does not in any way diminish his hold or sovereignty on this world. But this Adversary now feels threatened by Savitri because she has found the key to terrestrial perfection, which means the world may soon slip out of his control.

The majority of the spiritual explorers do not even hear the voice of this terrible adversary force because they escape into some luminous Beyond. Only those who rise to the highest peaks of consciousness command the view of the bottom‐most level of the Inconscient. Savitri has climbed these heights of the Gnostic consciousness. If Savitri’s progress is not blocked, she may force the Inconscient to abdicate her throne, and consequently her control over this world. This the Adversary Force would like to prevent at any cost.

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In one of his letters to a disciple, Sri Aurobindo has described what effect the supramental principle will have on our life on earth when it is established here and begins to work here. He has said, It is likely that as the supramental principle evolved itself the evolution would more and more take another aspect – the Daivic nature would predominate, the Asuro‐Rakshaso‐Pishachic prakriti which now holds so large a place would more and more recede and lose its power. A principle of greater unity, harmony and light would emerge everywhere. It is not that the creation in the Ignorance would be altogether abolished, but it would begin to lose much of its elements of pain and falsehood and would be more a progression from lesser to higher Truth, from a lesser to a higher harmony, from a lesser to a higher Light, than the reign of chaos and struggle, of darkness and error that we now perceive. [1] Savitri of course has still a long way to go before she can bring to our earth this supreme consummation, but she has the key to this perfection and the Adversary knows this. So he mounts on her a vicious attack. This Adversary, as we have seen, is none other than the Inconscient from which this creation has arisen, and therefore it believes that this world should be for ever under its control. Savitri has come to redeem this world. And therefore the fury of the Inconscient is understandable. And now Savitri is smitten by this fury.

As Savitri sat in a deep felicitous mood, savouring her joy which is a bridge between heaven and earth, An abyss yawned suddenly beneath her heart.

A vast and nameless fear dragged at her nerves As drags a wild beast its half‐slaughtered prey; It seemed to have no den from which it sprang: It was not hers, but hid its unseen cause.

(p. 534, Lines 68‐72) The felicitous mood that had settled in Savitri disappeared all of a sudden giving way to a darkness that made her feel helpless like a prey in the grip of a wild beast. It came upon her like “a rolling surge of silent death” and choked her with the threat to end “the fable of the joy of life”. This was the result of the seizure of Savitri’s being by the Inconscient, which appeared to her now as “an ocean of terror and sovereign might”. For the Inconscient, the ultimate Reality is the dark eternity – a formless, stark impersonal consciousness, from which this creation has come. Savitri was trying to change the very nature of this creation. She was determined to bring to the finite the glory and the bliss of the Infinite. If allowed to do her will, this world will not remain any more “anityam and asukham” (transient and sorrowful). The Inconscient cannot tolerate this. And so she says to Savitri: “Who art thou who claimst thy crown of separate birth, The illusion of thy soul's reality

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And personal godhead on an ignorant globe In the animal body of imperfect man?

Hope not to be happy in a world of pain And dream not, listening to the unspoken Word And dazzled by the inexpressible Ray, Transcending the mute Superconscient's realm, To give a body to the Unknowable, Or for a sanction to thy heart's delight To burden with bliss the silent still Supreme Profaning its bare and formless sanctity, Or call into thy chamber the Divine And sit with God tasting a human joy.

(p. 534‐35, Lines 102‐114) The only truth the Inconscient recognises is the truth of Nihilism and Illusionism, of the featureless Eternal. She (the Inconscient as the Mother of this universe) cannot understand Savitri’s aim of bringing to human life the perfection of a divine life here on earth. That for her is a profanity. The universe is her creation and her fiefdom, she is the dark terrible Mother of life. She declares this to Savitri in unmistakable words: I have created all, all I devour; I am Death and the dark terrible Mother of life, I am Kali black and naked in the world, I am Maya and the universe is my cheat. (p. 535, Lines 116-119) For the Inconscient, this creation is an illusion created and maintained by Maya; only the Supreme beyond this creation, in the transcendent is real. Therefore, she proclaims: For only the blank Eternal can be true.

All else is shadow and flash in Mind's bright glass, Mind, hollow mirror in which Ignorance sees A splendid figure of its own false self And dreams it sees a glorious solid world.

O soul, inventor of man's thoughts and hopes, Thyself the invention of the moments' stream, Illusion's centre or subtle apex point, At last know thyself, from vain existence cease.

(p. 535, Lines 124‐132)

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This outburst of the Inconscient threatened to devastate Savitri’s inner world; a barren silence weighed upon her heart, and her kingdom of delight was there no more. Savitri waited to know the will of the Supreme.

Then just as suddenly Savitri hears a greater Voice and it touches her heart and brings hope and certitude to it. This was the voice of Light, Heaven’s reply to the voice of the Abyss that was threatening to sweep Savitri off her feet. What the voice of Light says to Savitri is very significant. It asks Savitri to hide her royalty of bliss, her new siddhis because for now it remains the accomplishment of one single individual. Although it is the highest power of consciousness that Savitri has now realised in her inner being, it will not be able to change earth consciousness until it gets established in the collective consciousness. Till that happens Savitri must treasure her wealth of the new consciousness treasured in the sanctuary of her inner being.

O soul, bare not thy kingdom to the foe; Consent to hide thy royalty of bliss Lest Time and Fate find out its avenues And beat with thunderous knock upon thy gates.

(p. 536, Lines 146‐49) The Voice of Light then explains why this is necessary. It points out that the new siddhi that Savitri has gained is yet her personal accomplishment.

Hide whilst thou canst thy treasure of separate self Behind the luminous rampart of thy depths Till of a vaster empire it grows part.

(p. 536, Lines 150‐52)

What Savitri has achieved so far is not enough; the Supramental Consciousness is now a realisation of her inmost being; it must now be extended through all the levels of her being, and she should then make herself a perfect channel for the dissemination of this consciousness into the world around her. For this she is asked to undergo a further tapasya. Savitri is being asked to empty herself of everything that obstructs such a process.

But not for self alone the Self is won: Content abide not with one conquered realm; Adventure all to make the whole world thine, To break into greater kingdoms turn thy force.

(p. 536, Lines 153‐ 156) Then there is a second step of the tapasya recommended to Savitri. She is being asked to enlarge her consciousness such that it becomes one with the universal consciousness:

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Fear not to be nothing that thou mayst be all; Assent to the emptiness of the Supreme That all in thee may reach its absolute.

Accept to be small and human on the earth, Interrupting thy new‐born divinity, That man may find his utter self in God. Savitri is being asked to “be small and human on earth”, to identify herself completely with the human lot. Savitri is being asked to become God’s void so that she can become a completely effective channel of the Divine. She is being reminded once again that she is an Avatar who has come down into a struggling world to found God’s luminous kingdom not only in her own inner world but also in this toiling universe. She is not here to shine as a lone shining star in the Inconscient’s realm. She is here to help a struggling world to realise its destiny. Her role is to be a bridge between earth and heaven. Sri Aurobindo has spoken about the unique role of the Divine Mother in establishing the supramental consciousness of this earth. In his book The Mother, he describes the Divine Mother as the power “that mediates between the sanction and the call” – the sanction of heaven and the call or aspiration of the earth for perfection.

If for thy own sake only thou hast come, An immortal spirit into the mortal's world, To found thy luminous kingdom in God's dark, In the Inconscient's realm one shining star, One door in the Ignorance opened upon light, Why hadst thou any need to come at all?

Thou hast come down into a struggling world To aid a blind and suffering mortal race, To open to Light the eyes that could not see, To bring down bliss into the heart of grief, To make thy life a bridge twixt earth and heaven; If thou wouldst save the toiling universe, The vast universal suffering feel as thine: Thou must bear the sorrow that thou claimst to heal; The day‐bringer must walk in darkest night.

He who would save the world must share its pain.

If he knows not grief, how shall he find grief's cure?

If far he walks above mortality's head, How shall the mortal reach that too high path?

(pp. 536‐37, Lines 163‐81)

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Then in the following wonderful lines the poet once again reiterates his concept of the Avatar.

Unless an Avatar takes on all the limitations and inadequacies of normal human beings, his example would lose all meaning for us. Therefore god must be born on earth and be as man.

If one of theirs they see scale heaven's peaks, Men then can hope to learn that titan climb.

God must be born on earth and be as man That man being human may grow even as God. He who would save the world must be one with the world, All suffering things contain in his heart's space And bear the grief and joy of all that lives.

(p. 537, Lines 182‐88) At this stage we are going through a very complex part of Savitri, the part that deals with the tapasya of Savitri, the Avatar. There is no parallel to tapasya of this kind in spiritual literature.

Therefore I have chosen to go through this part slowly and with a certain deliberation.

[1] The Integral Yoga: Sri Aurobindo’s Teaching and Method of Practice, (Selected Letters of Sri Aurobindo), pp. 73 ‐ 74

http://nextfuture.sriaurobindosociety.org.in/may04/nfmay04_savitri.htm

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14. Book Seven Canto Six – Continued

Let us begin by recapitulating briefly the important stages of Savitri’s inner journey that we examined in the preceding instalment. In Canto Five of Book VII, we saw her going through the experience of meeting her own soul, which brought to her in its train a tremendous transformation of her being. This, as we noted, was the result of the rising of the Kundalini power to the crown of her head and its descent through the various chakras in her subtle body.

This brings us to Canto Six. Before she has had time to savour this tremendous victory, the felicitous mood that had settled in her suddenly disappears giving way to a darkness that made her feel as helpless as a prey in the grip of a wild beast. This was the result of the seizure of Savitri’s being by the Inconscient ‐ the formless, stark impersonal consciousness from which this creation has arisen. The Inconscient is opposed to Savitri’s attempt to free this creation from its clutches. The only truth the Inconscient recognises is the truth of Nihilism and Illusionism. For the Inconscient, this world is an illusion created and maintained by Maya; only the Supreme beyond this creation, in the Transcendent is real. This outburst of the Inconscient (lines 102 – 132, Canto Six, Book VII) weighs heavily on Savitri’s heart until she hears a greater voice from within which brings her hope and certitude.

This is the Voice of Light which fills Savitri once again with hope by explaining the significance of this unexpected seizure by the Inconscient. It asks Savitri not to remain satisfied with the siddhis (spiritual victories) she has already gained. As of now, they are no more than her individual accomplishments; they are not yet established in the collective consciousness. It is Savitri’s life’s mission to bring this about, and until that happens, she is asked to hide the treasure of her siddhis within the sanctuary of her own heart. To quote again some of the lines already quoted in the preceding instalment, If for thy own sake only thou hast come, An immortal spirit into the mortal's world, To found thy luminous kingdom in God's dark, In the Inconscient's realm one shining star, One door in the Ignorance opened upon light, Why hadst thou any need to come at all?

Thou hast come down into a struggling world To aid a blind and suffering mortal race, To open to Light the eyes that could not see,

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To bring down bliss into the heart of grief, To make thy life a bridge twixt earth and heaven;

(Lines 164 – 174)

The Voice of Light reminds Savitri that she is no ordinary mortal. Savitri is an Avatar, who has come to aid a blind and suffering world. The Avatar has to act like “a bridge twixt earth and heaven”. To be able to do this, the Avatar must begin as an ordinary mortal, subject to the same limitations of ignorance, such as pain and suffering. In fact, the Avatar shares in the world’s pain because unless he knows first hand what pain is, how will he able to find a cure for all grief and pain, and therefore to ignorance itself?

Savitri’s achievements in establishing a contact with the Gnostic or Supramental Consciousness, even if it is only at the level of her soul, is undoubtedly a heroic achievement, never accomplished on earth before. But if it remains restricted to her as her individual attainment, her Avataric mission would remain unfulfilled. The problem now is for Savitri to be able to transmit the power of this new consciousness to the world at large, to spread it in the cosmic consciousness. Only when this happens, will the world be able to escape from the hold of the Inconscient. What does Savitri have to do to achieve this?

Adventure all to make the whole world thine, To break into greater kingdoms turn thy force.

Fear not to be nothing that thou mayst be all; Assent to the emptiness of the Supreme That all in thee may reach its absolute.

Accept to be small and human on the earth, Interrupting thy new‐born divinity, That man may find his utter self in God.

(Lines 155 – 162)

But that is only one step. The Voice of Light then goes on to recommend to Savitri a related process. This is for Savitri to reject her present personality and enlarge herself and become as vast as the universe such that this creation itself is seen no more than an incident in its consciousness. This is the way by which she will be able to step into the universal consciousness. She should then be able to see the secret origin of all. She will be able see this universe itself as an Overmental version (or translation) of the Infinite on which the mind and the senses have put their gloss.

His soul must be wider than the universe And feel eternity as its very stuff, Rejecting the moment's personality, Know itself older than the birth of Time,

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Creation an incident in its consciousness, Arcturus[1] and Belphegor grains of fire Circling in a corner of its boundless self, The world's destruction a small transient storm In the calm infinity it has become.

If thou wouldst a little loosen the vast chain, Draw back from the world that the Idea has made, Thy mind’s selection from the Infinite, Thy sense’s gloss on the Infinitesimal’s dance, Then shalt thou know how the great bondage came.

(Lines 189 – 202)

Savitri is therefore being asked to “banish all thought from thee and be God’s void.” This is the way of becoming “one with God’s bare reality/And the miraculous world he has become/And the diviner miracle still to be.” Nature which is now unconscious God will become transparent to the Eternal’s light and be able to reflect God’s perfection. Then, “life is filled with a spiritual joy/ and Matter is the Spirit’s willing bride.” Therefore, the Voice of Light instructs Savitri: Consent to be nothing and none, dissolve Time’s work,

Cast off thy mind, step back from form and name.

Annul thyself that only God may be.

(Lines 218 – 220)

This brings us to the end of our recapitulation of Savitri’s experiences described in Section one of Canto Six of Book VII. Section 2: As instructed by the Voice of Light, Savitri now prepares herself for the experience of Nirvana.

By Nirvana is meant the extinction or the dissolution of individuality. It can have two different objectives: one, to pass beyond all manifestation and dissolve oneself in the static poise of Brahman, into the transcendental; the other, to go beyond the present manifestation of consciousness into the not yet manifest dynamic levels of consciousness of Brahman. The first was the traditional path followed by the Adwaitins and the Indian Buddhists. This is the path recommended for those who realise the futility of all worldly enterprise and find this world transient and unhappy; this is the way by which one puts a stop to all willing and desiring and one is released into a consciousness of peace of bliss. This has traditionally been regarded as the highest goal of all spiritual effort. But for Sri Aurobindo, this world is not a permanent abode of misery and imperfection, these constitute only a phase through which the evolving consciousness is passing. As the consciousness rises to the more dynamic levels not yet manifest here on earth, it should be possible to put an end to all the pain, ignorance and death

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that torment us so much now. The preparation to rise to these levels of consciousness also involves the emptying of all oneself. This is the Nirvana Savitri is aiming at.

In obedience to the Voice of Light that has been guiding her, Savitri takes a plunge into herself and tries to dissociate herself from the movements of Nature within her. She stands back from the movements within her.

Aloof and standing back detached and calm, A witness of the drama of herself, A student of her own interior scene, She watched the passion and the toil of life And heard in the crowded thoroughfares of mind The unceasing tread and passage of her thoughts.

(Lines 225 – 230)

She allowed all the processes and movements within her to rise to the surface as they wished; she left everything to the “free initiative of Nature’s will”. As she did this, she saw “the animal instincts prowling mid life’s trees” and she also saw the Powers that stare from the lower regions as well as wordless light that liberates the soul. Thus was her attention focussed first on the vital region of her being. Human life on the surface is no more than an arena in which there is an interplay between the forces emerging from the subconscient below and the superconscient above.

Savitri was then attracted by the mysteries of the origin of thought. When she looked at the mental consciousness, she realised that Mind is a vast region of consciousness, not limited to the activities of the brain. She saw that our brain is like an office that registers thoughts that arise elsewhere, gives them its stamp as in a mint and stores them. Thoughts are not born in the brain, they are only registered there. The function of the brain is described by the poet in these lines: The issue of forms from the office of the brain, Its factory of thought‐sounds and soundless words And voices stored within unheard by men, Its mint and treasury of shining coin.

These were but counters in mind's symbol game, A gramophone's discs, a reproduction's film, A list of signs, a cipher and a code.

(Lines 248 – 254)

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Thoughts, as Savitri begins to see, arise from the depths and the heights of the mind and the brain only registers them and each thought is thus no more than a symbol, a sign, a cipher or a code. Its full significance is therefore not understood except when we trace its origin.

Thoughts have various origins; most thoughts are born as vibrations or impulses at various levels of consciousness, deeper, wider and higher than the mind itself. Some are born in our subtle body, and some enter there from the cosmic field. Often from our soul (the psychic being) steps out a vibration “luminous with mysteried lips and wonderful eyes. These vibrations come to purify man’s outer life and establish there the ideal of love and truth. To put this in the words of the poet, Oft from her soul stepped out a naked thought Luminous with mysteried lips and wonderful eyes; Or from her heart emerged some burning face And looked for life and love and passionate truth, Aspired to heaven or embraced the world Or led the fancy like a fleeting moon Across the dull sky of man's common days, Amidst the doubtful certitudes of earth's lore, To the celestial beauty of faith gave form As if at flower‐prints in a dingy room Laughed in a golden vase one living rose.

(Lines 257 – 267)

Such vibrations from the psychic being can pervade all the parts and planes of our being and lift them to greater heights. More importantly, they can give to man faith and certitude in the midst of doubt which often clouds the mental horizon – like a living rose in a golden vase laughing at flower‐prints in a dingy room. Then the poet describes how such vibrations from the psychic being can touch the various centres (chakras) in human beings and inspire them to manifest new perfections on earth. They touch the “seeing will” situated between the brows and inspire the dynamic seeing will. They can touch the centre of thought behind the brain and inspire thoughts, which are like “glistening angels” that seek to make this earth, a region of light. When they touch the upper regions of Savitri’s heart Imaginations flamed up from her breast, Unearthly beauty, touches of surpassing joy

And plans of miracle, dreams of delight: (Lines 276 – 279)

When they touch the lotus located at the navel, large sensations inspired by new visions of the world begin to crowd the mind. When the centre of the externalising mind at the throat centre

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is touched, figures of a heavenly speech begin to crowd the mind. Even the centre of the physical‐vital below the vital responds to the touch of the psychic vibrations and fills the being with longings for physical sweetness and ecstasy. But the outer mind mistakes all these responses as the productions of the brain because they bear the stamp and wear the cap of the brain. Only the inner mind can recognise where they come from and understand their import.

Savitri was able to see how there come into the mind’s frontal room, thoughts that enlarge our limited human range and see the shapes mortal eyes cannot normally see, the sounds that mortal listening cannot hear and feel the blissful sweetness of the intangible’s touch. These thoughts encourage man to aspire higher and infuse him with a new courage and makes him look to the Infinite through the finite. Some of these thoughts also come from a source in the Superconscient and also in the subtle worlds of the Subliminal.

Thoughts leaped down from a superconscient field Like eagles swooping from a viewless peak, Thoughts gleamed up from the screened subliminal depths Like golden fishes from a hidden sea.

(Lines 309 – 311)

Besides the Superconscient and the Subliminal, some thoughts are inspired by the subconscient as well.

The dim subconscient's incoherent hints Laid bare a meaning twisted deep and strange, The bizarre secret of their grumbling speech, Their links with underlying reality.

(Lines 328 – 331)

Thus human beings receive influences and vibrations coming from diverse sources – from the psychic and the subliminal, from the Superconscient and from the subconscient. This is what makes man a playground of contrary powers and makes man an enigma. While God’s summits beckon him to evolve to higher heights, the influences of the animal and the Djinn from his subconscient regions tend to hold him back or pull him down.

This world is a vast unbroken totality, A deep solidarity joins its contrary powers.

God's summits look back on the mute Abyss.

So man evolving to divinest heights Colloques still with the animal and the Djinn; The human godhead with star‐gazer eyes

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Lives still in one house with the primal beast.

The high meets the low, all is a single plan.

(Lines 337 – 343)

Savitri has been looking at the ways thoughts are born in the human mind and what she sees is fascinating indeed. Our mind, Savitri discovers, is “a dynamic small machine” which keeps producing ‘thoughts’ from the raw material drawn from outside and a pattern is imposed on this material by the mind. Sometimes they enter the human mind as “finished cosmic wares” admitted quietly into the human being where a special trick makes them his own.

This mind is a dynamic small machine Producing ceaselessly till it wears out, With raw material drawn from the outside world, The patterns sketched out by an artist God. Often our thoughts are finished cosmic wares Admitted by a silent office gate And passed through the subconscient's galleries, Then issued in Time's mart as private make.

For now they bear the living person's stamp; A trick, a special hue claims them his own.

All else is Nature's craft and this too hers.

(Lines 352 – 362)

It should be remembered that Savitri makes this discovery as she tries to detach herself from the bondage of Nature or Prakriti. What one thinks, imagines, wills, senses etc. are all impulsions that really come from universal Nature and the individual receives them, he is not their originator. They all bear the stamp of the receiver because of the trick played by our ego.

This is a difficult truth for most to see. We are slaves of Nature but a still deeper truth is that we have willingly accepted this bondage and are comfortable with it most of the time.

For now they bear the living person's stamp; A trick, a special hue claims them his own.

All else is Nature's craft and this too hers.

Our tasks are given, we are but instruments; Nothing is all our own that we create: The Power that acts in us is not our force:

(Lines 360 – 365)

This is true not only of ordinary human beings, it is true also of men known for their exceptional gifts, great artists, thinkers, visionaries, people known as geniuses. The inspiration

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for the great idea, the mantric word, the artistic form, comes from a universal source and inspiration plays the role of the postman. Most minds cannot even receive them properly without soiling them with their impure touch. It is the ego of the artist, the poet, etc. that defaces the pure gifts brought to him by inspiration.

The genius too receives from some high fount Concealed in a supernal secrecy The work that gives him an immortal name.

The word, the form, the charm, the glory and grace Are missioned sparks from a stupendous Fire; A sample from the laboratory of God Of which he holds the patent upon earth, Comes to him wrapped in golden coverings; He listens for Inspiration's postman knock And takes delivery of the priceless gift A little spoilt by the receiver mind Or mixed with the manufacture of his brain; When least defaced, then is it most divine.

(Lines 366 – 378) [1] Arcturus: the name given by the ancients to the brightest star in the constellation Bootes.

http://nextfuture.sriaurobindosociety.org.in/june04/nfjune04_savitri.htm

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15. Book Seven Canto Six – Conclusion

Savitri, as we saw in the preceding instalment, has been doing the intense tapasya of emptying herself. The technique she follows for this purpose is self‐observation. She is trying to liberate the Manomaya (the mental) Purusha from the workings of Nature or Prakriti in the mind. As she does this, she realises that our mind is no more than a dynamic small machine, which produces ceaselessly what we call thoughts by receiving material from the outside world. This material comes into us in the form of vibrations or impulses from our inner being (from the subliminal), from below conscious levels of our mind (the subconscious) and from above the levels of the mind (from the Superconscient) as well as from sources outside us. But they all get the stamp of our individual mind before they come to the surface where we recognise them as our thoughts.

This shows us that normally we are slaves of Nature or Prakriti. Our thoughts, imagination, emotional reactions, etc. all are initiated and controlled by Nature in us, and we are for the most part not initiators but simply the location, the scene for all that happens in us. This brings to Savitri the realisation that we are but instruments.

Although his ego claims the world for its use, Man is a dynamo for the cosmic work; Nature does most in him, God the high rest: Only his soul's acceptance is his own.

(Lines 379 – 382)

There is a still deeper truth and it is that our soul becomes a slave of Nature or Prakriti of its own choice. It is not imposed on the soul from the outside. Our soul is a sovereign power. It has been here since even before this creation came into existence. The soul is eternal and unborn, it does not depend on anything. But then the question arises, why does the soul accept this slavery to Nature? This is a profound philosophical question and we cannot even begin to address it here. But Sri Aurobindo suggests, in passing as it were, an answer to this question in these four lines: This independent, once a power supreme, Self‐born before the universe was made, Accepting cosmos, binds himself Nature's serf Till he becomes her freedman—or God's slave.

(Lines 383 – 386)

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The soul chooses to be the serf or slave of Nature so that it can bring perfection to this universe, which is a manifestation of Nature.

This liberation of the consciousness (Purusha) from its bondage to Nature (Prakriti) applies to that part of our consciousness which has been contaminated by the ego. The sadhana of dissociation of the Purusha from the Prakriti results in the liberation of the individual from the limited awareness of the egoistic life on the surface. But when one pushes beyond the Manomaya (Mental) Purusha, one enters the realm of spiritual consciousness above the Mind.

Savitri now rises to these levels.

This is the appearance in our mortal front; Our greater truth of being lies behind: Our consciousness is cosmic and immense, But only when we break through Matter's wall In that spiritual vastness can we stand Where we can live the masters of our world And mind is only a means and body a tool.

(Lines 387 – 393)

Savitri now rises to these heights of the realm of the Spirit. There either one falls asleep in some deep shadow of the Self or falls asleep in the silence of the spiritual realm. In traditional yogas, spiritual aspirants rise to this height because it gives them an escape from any contact with the world of manifestation, and this is glorified as the state of samadhi, which is considered the ultimate goal of all spiritual effort. But Savitri’ yoga has an entirely different objective. What she is seeking is not an escape from this world but a way of bringing perfection to it. She rises to these spiritual heights because from these heights she can have a better look at this world and act on it. She is not seeking the laya or the absorption of her individual consciousness into this silence. She is not only awake but is quite focussed on the world. From this height she takes up the whole of this created world and dedicates it to the Divine to take it up and spiritualise it completely.

Out of the mind she rose to escape its law That it might sleep in some deep shadow of self Or fall silent in the silence of the Unseen.

High she attained and stood from Nature free And saw creation's life from far above, Thence upon all she laid her sovereign will To dedicate it to God's timeless calm:

(Lines 397 – 403)

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Now that the factory of the mind has ceased to work, the entire being of Savitri is filled with a profound peace. There arose occasionally small thoughts but they vanished soon like the quiet waves upon a silent sea, or ripples passing over a lonely pool when a stray stone disturbs its dreaming waters. There was no sound from the throbbing of the dynamo of the mind and there came no calls from the fields of life now made completely still.

Her mind now seemed like a vast empty room Or like a peaceful landscape without sound.

This men call quietude and prize as peace.

(Lines 413 – 415)

Notice that the poet describes this as a state which “seemed like an empty room”; it is the same state which most people prize as a great siddhi (achievement). But as Savitri’s deeper mind sees it, everything from which she had tried to disassociate herself was all still there “effervescing like a chaos under a lid”. Feelings and thoughts cried out for expression and action except that they found no response in the silenced brain. Savitri felt that all was suppressed and nothing was really wiped out of her being, and she feared that at any time an explosion might come shattering this façade of peace. The reason why Savitri has such misgivings about the state of peace she has reached now is that nothing in the Nature really gets changed or transformed just because we withdraw ourselves from it. Nature has been left unredeemed. It is still a field at the mercy of the three Gunas (Sattwa, Rajas and Tamas). We can intensify our detachment and make the body like an insensitive stone. This brings us closer to a greater vacancy, a profounder silence but we are still far from the silence of Infinity, from “the repose of the Absolute”.

Even now some thoughts crossed the silence that had pervaded her but these did not come from within nor were seeking a form nor did they represent any need of her body or of the vital being. They did not seem to have been either born or made in human time. These are thoughts that originated in the cosmic Mind and they came clothed in words. Since they come from the universal or cosmic Mind and since an individual’s mind is a part of the cosmic Mind, they assume that they will get an easy access to the ear and mind of the individual. Savitri was quietly observing these intruders. There was now an embargo and blockade which Savitri had put up against all such intruders. And when these thoughts came across this blockade, they had to retreat only to vanish into the vastness of the cosmic Mind from which they had come.

These thoughts came one after another like far‐off sails upon a lonely sea. But soon even this stopped.

But soon that commerce failed, none reached mind's coast.

Then all grew still, nothing moved any more: Immobile, self‐rapt, timeless, solitary A silent spirit pervaded silent Space.

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Section Three

(Lines 457 – 460)

Savitri is now ready for a direct experience of the Absolute in one of its aspects. The path she has followed is that of rejection and detachment – rejection of the effervescence of the lower Nature and detachment from the play of Prakriti. Her consciousness is now totally free from any detraction from the world of name and form. It is now ready to receive the experience of the Absolute as silence and peace. And this is what she receives.

In that absolute stillness bare and formidable There was glimpsed an all‐negating Void Supreme That claimed its mystic Nihil's sovereign right To cancel Nature and deny the soul.

Even the nude sense of self grew pale and thin: Impersonal, signless, featureless, void of forms A blank pure consciousness had replaced the mind.

(Lines 461 – 467)

What Savitri experiences now is an absolute, bare stillness; this is a glimpse of an “all‐negating Void Supreme”. This is the experience of the mystic Nihil which claims the right to deny not only the world but also the soul. It is difficult to understand this experience for minds like ours which have not seen any thing other than this world of name and form. But in Savitri’s consciousness now, the distinction between the seer and the seen has been obliterated, and even the bare sense of the Self has become so pale and thin. Her consciousness has now become “impersonal, sign‐less, featureless, void of forms”. The poet describes this state further in these words: Her spirit seemed the substance of a name, The world a pictured symbol drawn on self, A dream of images, a dream of sounds Built up the semblance of a universe Or lent to spirit the appearance of a world.

This was self‐seeing; in that intolerant hush No notion and no concept could take shape, There was no sense to frame the figure of things, A sheer self‐sight was there, no thought arose.

(Lines 467 –476)

The world appeared no more substantial than “a dream of images” and “a dream of sounds”.

The world did not have an existence separate from her. It was as much an appearance bereft of

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any substance as her own being was. There was no frame of reference by which she could figure out notions, concepts or shapes. This state is described as follows by the poet: Emotion slept deep down in the still heart Or lay buried in a cemetery of peace: All feelings seemed quiescent, calm or dead, As if the heart‐strings rent could work no more And joy and grief could never rise again.

The heart beat on with an unconscious rhythm But no response came from it and no cry.

Vain was the provocation of events; Nothing within answered an outside touch, No nerve was stirred and no reaction rose.

(Lines 477 – 486)

These lines are simple enough and need no elucidation. No emotions arise in this state; feelings are either quiet or dead; there was no feeling of either joy or grief. Nothing from the outside world affected Savitri in any way. Not a nerve of hers responded to any outside touch. And yet, “her body saw and moved and spoke” and said what needed to be said and did what needed to be done. There was no mind to choose or to find the fitting word because there was no person or individual left behind. Everything worked as in the case of an unerring machine pushed by an old un‐exhausted power. This is the power of Prakriti that still drove the engine that did the work for which it was made. Her consciousness now looked on all around her but took no part.

It supported all but it did not have a share in anything.

All wrought like an unerring apt machine.

As if continuing old habitual turns, And pushed by an old unexhausted force The engine did the work for which it was made: Her consciousness looked on and took no part; All it upheld, in nothing had a share.

(Lines 493 – 498)

What was left in Savitri now was a pure perception which stood behind everything she did and gave a coherence to what she saw. If this perception were to withdraw, all the objects of this world would cease to exist for her. After all the universe we see around us is the universe that we ourselves build in terms of our thoughts and then clothe with forms and shapes perceptible to our senses. Now in Savitri the distinction between the seer and the seen (between the subjective consciousness of the seer and the objective world) had disappeared. The seer, the

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act of seeing and the object seen were all one. This perception knows all without the aid of any conceptualisation.

It saw the world go by but this world itself seemed so utterly unreal. The world looked like a cosmic puppet‐show where no figure showed any sign of life, everything was just a hollow physical shell.

All seemed a brilliant shadow of itself, A cosmic film of scenes and images: The enduring mass and outline of the hills Was a design sketched on a silent mind And held to a tremulous false solidity By constant beats of visionary sight.

The forest with its emerald multitudes Clothed with its show of hues vague empty Space, A painting's colours hiding a surface void That flickered upon dissolution's edge; The blue heavens, an illusion of the eyes, Roofed in the mind's illusion of a world.

The men who walked beneath an unreal sky Seemed mobile puppets out of cardboard cut And pushed by unseen hands across the soil Or moving pictures upon Fancy's film: There was no soul within, no power of life.

(Lines 517 – 533)

This is a rare description of the Nirvanic experience. You are unlikely to come across such a graphic description of this experience anywhere in the literature of any language in the world.

The whole world looked like “a cosmic film of scenes and images” and this included the solid mass of the hills around her. Even the hills looked like a two‐dimensional sketch without any depth or tone. The green foliage of the forest looked like a blob of green colour occupying some empty space. The blue of the sky, which is an illusion of the eyes looked like the roof of an illusory world. The sky looked unreal and the men who walked underneath this sky looked like moving puppets cut out of cardboard and moved around like puppets by an unseen hand.

The world Savitri saw now contained “moving pictures upon Fancy’s film.” Nothing showed any sign of life or of a soul.

What in normal experience are regarded as thoughts were now seen by Savitri as no more than vibrations in the brain, and what are normally regarded as joy, sorrow and love are now perceived to be no more than twitching of nerves in response to the touches of the world. The body itself, which is made of matter, looked like “a manufactured lie of Maya’s make”. The

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whole of this life looked like a dream seen by the Void in its sleep. The animals on the hillside and in the glades of the forests, whether single or in troops, looked like “a passing vision of beauty and grace imagined by some all‐creating Eye. The brain's vibrations that appear like thought, The nerve's brief answer to each contact's knock, The heart's quiverings felt as joy and grief and love Were twitchings of the body, their seeming self, That body forged from atoms and from gas A manufactured lie of Maya's make, Its life a dream seen by the sleeping Void.

The animals lone or trooping through the glades Fled like a passing vision of beauty and grace Imagined by some all‐creating Eye.

(Lines 535 – 543)

Savitri’s experience of Nirvana does not end in mere negation of the kind that has been described in the preceding paragraphs. Although the world looks to her like a pure illusion and although this experience lingers for quite a while, she gradually begins to perceive a Reality behind this illusion. This confronted her wherever she turned, from behind whatever she was looking at. But this presence hid itself from mind and sight. This Reality stood aloof from space and time and its truth could not be captured in shape, line or colour. Everything else other than this Reality looked insubstantial and unreal. Only this Reality seemed everlasting and true.

Yet something was there behind the fading scene; Wherever she turned, at whatsoever she looked, It was perceived, yet hid from mind and sight.

The One only real shut itself from Space And stood aloof from the idea of Time.

Its truth escaped from shape and line and hue.

All else grew unsubstantial, self‐annulled, This only everlasting seemed and true, Yet nowhere dwelt, it was outside the hours.

(Lines 544 – 552)

This Reality gave to her sight the power to see but sight could not define its form, similarly although it enabled the ear to hear, the ear could not hear its voice. The sense could not grasp it nor the mind comprehend. An experience such as this is difficult to catch in words, but the poet tries to make it easy for us to grasp something of its nature, when he describes it in these words.

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It met her as the uncaught inaudible Voice That speaks for ever from the Unknowable.

It met her like an omnipresent point Pure of dimensions, unfixed, invisible, The single oneness of its multiplied beat Accentuating its sole eternity.

It faced her as some vast Nought's immensity, An endless No to all that seems to be, An endless Yes to things ever unconceived And all that is unimagined and unthought, An eternal zero or untotalled Aught, A spaceless and a placeless Infinite.

(Lines 558 – 569)

Savitri perceived it as ‘the inaudible Voice that speaks for ever from the Unknowable’. She experiences it as a point present everywhere, of pure dimensions, unfixed, invisible. The single oneness of this Reality was also present in multiplicity and this emphasized its eternity to Savitri’s perception. It is difficult for the human mind to conceptualise such a Reality. So when thought of in the context of things already manifested, the Reality seems to be none of them and therefore a “Not this”, “Not this” would seem to be a best description of it. But when we think of it in the context of things so far not manifest, nor conceived of, unimagined and un‐ thought of, “ yes, that too”, “yes, that too” seems to be an equally apt description of the same Reality. One can think of it as an eternal zero or sum of things whose total cannot be caught in numbers or words. Finally the poet ends up describing this Reality as “A spaceless and placeless Infinite”. And yet the very words ‘eternity’ and ‘infinity’ seemed but empty words merely signifying the mind’s total incompetence to comprehend this “stupendous sole reality”.

The world we experience here is just a spark‐burst from the light that this Reality is, and every object in our world is merely a glimmering of this Bodiless Reality and these things seem to vanish from the Mind when that Reality is seen. This Reality held before its face like a shield a consciousness that could see without there being a seer the Truth “where knowledge is not, nor knower nor known”. The same consciousness was Love enamoured of its own delight; it did not need the lover nor the beloved. This was also a consciousness of bliss that is beyond anybody’s capacity to experience.

It held, as if a shield before its face, A consciousness that saw without a seer, The Truth where knowledge is not nor knower nor known, The Love enamoured of its own delight In which the Lover is not nor the Beloved

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Bringing their personal passion into the Vast, The Force omnipotent in quietude, The Bliss that none can ever hope to taste.

(Lines 577 – 584)

The consciousness we are now talking about is beyond the capacity of any individual to experience. To experience that all formation, all individuality, has to be transcended. A clue to the truth of this experience lies in surrendering the whole of one’s being and in being nothing, in the experience of non‐being.

This state of consciousness is a state beyond the Nirvanic state. It is a consciousness beyond Being and Non‐Being. It can identify with everything and therefore it manifests first as the Ananda of identity and then as Love.

It cancelled the convincing cheat of self; A truth in nothingness was its mighty clue.

If all existence could renounce to be And Being take refuge in Non‐being's arms And Non‐being could strike out its ciphered round, Some lustre of that Reality might appear.

(Lines 585 – 590)

A great formless liberation had now come upon Savitri. She was once imprisoned in her body, mind and life, like all human beings. She had arisen very high from that state. She had dropped all the conditioning that comes from being a Person in the world. She had escaped into the consciousness of infinity. She was now free from Knowledge and from Ignorance, from the true and the untrue. She had reached a high retreat in the Superconscient. She stood on the bare ground of consciousness that is the foundation of all creation and manifestation. There was not even the temptation to manifest. She was now a point in this unknowable. There remained one more annulment and if she underwent that annulment too, there would not be any vestige of Savitri left. She would be dissolved in that vast Nothingness.

Savitri waits in the stillness and silence. There are a number of possibilities open to her at this point. The unknowable has to guide her from this point and she would gladly obey its decree.

One possibility is that she may be led to dissolve herself into the ultimate Nothingness or she may “new become the All”.

Even now her splendid being might flame back Out of the silence and the nullity, A gleaming portion of the All‐Wonderful, A power of some all‐affirming Absolute,

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A shining mirror of the eternal Truth To show to the One‐in‐all its manifest face, 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 appeased in his white eternity.

(Lines 629 – 638) The two possibilities are that even now her splendid being might return from this silence and Nothingness as a shining power of the All‐Wonderful Supreme and affirm the eternal truth of the Absolute and manifest the perfection of the eternal in the world below. Or, she “might wake into God’s quietude” and rest appeased in his white and blank eternity. The latter is the way of the traditional Nirvana. Savitri now sees a possibility beyond Nirvana – that of being able to bring Love, Light and Truth to all human beings.

Savitri waits in the absolute immobility and peace of the consciousness of the Absolute waiting for the Divine to choose for her the way she is supposed to follow.

A lonely Absolute negated all: It effaced the ignorant world from its solitude And drowned the soul in its everlasting peace.

(Lines 643 – 645)

http://nextfuture.sriaurobindosociety.org.in/july04/nfjuly04_savitri.htm

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16. Book Seven Canto Seven, The Discovery of the Cosmic Spirit and the Cosmic Consciousness

You must have noticed that in our progress through Savitri we have suddenly slowed down our pace. We explored just one canto, namely, Canto Six of Book VII, in three installments and once again we are going to devote this entire installment to just one canto, namely, to Canto Seven of the same Book. This is because these two cantos deal with concepts and spiritual experiences one hardly ever comes across outside the writings of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. This is true particularly of the notion of Nirvana used in these two cantos. It is also true of the notion of a Supreme consciousness which dwells beyond the Nirvanic experience. The other reason is that these cantos have not yet received the close attention they deserve. So, please bear with us a little longer.

We have now arrived at Canto Seven, the final canto of Book VII of Savitri, with the title “The Discovery of the Cosmic Spirit and the Cosmic Consciousness”. In Canto Six we saw how under instructions from her inner voice Savitri empties her entire being and offers it to the Supreme Mother to do Her will in her. She is waiting at the threshold of the Nirvanic state. We have already seen in what respect this state of Nirvana is different from the Nirvana that is the avowed goal of most traditional yogic paths. Savitri has now become like a completely empty vessel, empty of all including her rare spiritual siddhis. This keeps her vigilant and ready to receive the further plenitudes of the Divine and be an effective channel for their establishment on earth.

Section 1 As we have seen in this Book (Book VII), Savitri enters and explores the countries of her inner being, meets the Triple Soul‐Forces, finds her soul, and enters the All‐Negating Nirvanic state.

These have been stupendous spiritual achievements but they are all experiences pertaining to the inner realm and have not yet begun showing their effect on her outer being. Therefore the poet remarks, “None saw aught new in her, none divined her state”. She looked still like the old Savitri to those amidst whom she lived.

She too was her old gracious self to men.

The Ancient Mother clutched her child to her breast Pressing her close in her environing arms, As if earth ever the same could for ever keep The living spirit and body in her clasp,

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As if death were not there nor end nor change.

Accustomed only to read outward signs None saw aught new in her, none divined her state; They saw a person where was only God's vast, A still being or a mighty nothingness.

To all she was the same perfect Savitri: (Lines 8 – 15)

People around her saw the same Savitri while from within she had become God’s vast, a mighty Nothingness. As before, the same greatness, sweetness and light, the glow and warmth of her psychicised person poured out from her upon the world around her. Savitri’s Nirvanic state did not render her ineffectual in the outer world as it does to those who strive for and attain the Nirvana of self‐extinction. She continued to act effectively in the world around her as before.

She spoke the words she was “wont to speak” and ‘did the things she had always done”.

What Savitri has achieved now is a tremendous spiritual experience in which the individual experiences an entire motionless impersonality and void Calm within and from this centre gets done all the works that need to be done in the outer world. This action emanates from a vacant consciousness “empty of all but rare Reality”. The mind, heart, will and the senses in her register no movements and what seems to keep the body going is probably the energy of Nature gathered in the past.

There was no will behind the word and act, No thought formed in her brain to guide the speech: An impersonal emptiness walked and spoke in her, Something perhaps unfelt, unseen, unknown Guarded the body for its future work, Or Nature moved in her old stream of force.

(Lines: 29 – 34)

This is the experience of the Absolute Non‐Existence. It is a state of eternally unrealised Potentiality, out of which some potentialities emerge at some time and emerge into the phenomenal appearance. The poet describes this state as “a cipher of God”, “a zero circle of being’s totality”. This Nihil contains all.

Perhaps she bore made conscious in her breast The miraculous Nihil, origin of our souls And source and sum of the vast world's events, The womb and grave of thought, a cipher of God, A zero circle of being's totality.

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(Lines: 35 – 39)

Savitri’s experience of Nirvana is very close in many respects to the traditionally recognised Nirvanic experience in which there is dissolution of all individuality in the Nihil.

Thus was she lost within to separate self; Her mortal ego perished in God's night.

Only a body was left, the ego's shell Afloat mid drift and foam of the world‐sea, A sea of dream watched by a motionless sense In a figure of unreal reality.

(Lines 43 – 48) She totally lost the sense of having or being a separate self; her mortal ego got extinguished in “God’s night” or in the experience of Asat (Asat as used here is not the opposite of Sat but what exceeds or goes beyond Sat.) The body was felt as no more than an empty shell floating and drifting in the foam of the world‐sea. This is a state of consciousness in which even the boundaries between the various planes disappear – the individual, cosmic and transcendental.

The transcendental itself appeared like a myth and there was a universality in which the individual and the transcendental both lost their distinctiveness. It was a consciousness from which Maya, the power to will or bear a world also seemed to have withdrawn itself; it was a consciousness impassive, sole, silent, intangible.

The individual die, the cosmos pass; These gone, the transcendental grew a myth, The Holy Ghost without the Father and Son, Or, a substratum of what once had been, Being that never willed to bear a world Restored to its original loneliness, a Impassive, sole, silent, intangible.

(Lines 52 – 58)

Although Savitri had now reached a state of consciousness that had a close resemblance to the traditionally recognised Nirvanic state, this was not the Nirvana that culminated in the Nihil or the Shunya (the Zero) but a consciousness that led to some greater consciousness which transcended the Mutable and the Immutable, the Kshara and the Akshara. It is to this “surpassing Secrecy” to which she was now gradually opening herself. Some of the Upanishads like the Ishavasya have spoken of this state of consciousness as one that is beyond vidya and avidya.

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Yet all was not extinct in this deep loss; The being travelled not towards nothingness.

There was some high surpassing Secrecy, (Lines 59 – 61)

The power of this consciousness which lives in the distant Vast now responded to Savitri. It is described as “something unknown, unreached, inscrutable”. It is the power of the Paraprakriti (the Supreme Mother) and it sent messages of its bodiless Light. It sent flashes of thought that belong to regions of consciousness far beyond our own, and these came like flares crossing the regions of immobile silence of Savitri’s mind and possessed her with a supreme sovereignty.

Out of that distant Vast came a reply.

Something unknown, unreached, inscrutable Sent down the messages of its bodiless Light, Cast lightning flashes of a thought not ours Crossing the immobile silence of her mind: In its might of irresponsible sovereignty It seized on speech to give those flamings shape, Made beat the heart of wisdom in a word And spoke immortal things through mortal lips.

(Lines 70 – 78)

These vibrations emanating from the high source seized Savitri’s speech and gave a form to it.

Savitri’s words now conveyed a wisdom that hardly comes out of mortal or human lips. She was now speaking of immortal things through her mortal lips. When she conversed with the sages dwelling in the forest neighbourhood, she often divulged through her speech “high strange revelations impossible to men”. It appeared as though someone or some power, secret and remote, took hold of her body and made use of it as an instrument.

Her mouth was seized to channel ineffable truths, Knowledge unthinkable found an utterance.

Astonished by a new enlightenment, Invaded by a streak of the Absolute, They marvelled at her, for she seemed to know What they had only glimpsed at times afar.

(Lines 84 – 89)

Those who listened to her were astonished by the new enlightenment revealed by her words and they wondered how such unthinkable knowledge found utterance in her. It was as though a lightening streak of the Absolute was seeking expression through her. All her listeners

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marvelled at her for she seemed to know intimately what these sages had glimpsed from afar occasionally in the rare moments of highest enlightenment. It was clear that these thoughts, such enlightenment, did not come from her brain. Her entire being was now was like a string‐ less harp. Her body was now too blank and inert to claim its own voice. It just allowed the power of the luminous consciousness to pass through her.

These thoughts were formed not in her listening brain, Her vacant heart was like a stringless harp; Impassive the body claimed not its own voice, But let the luminous greatness through it pass.

(Lines 90 – 93)

Savitri did not undertake her yoga, it must be remembered, for gaining any siddhi for herself.

The Nirvana she entered was boundless, although she did not regard it as an end in itself; she emptied herself of everything, including her highest siddhi, the identity with the Gnostic consciousness she had found when she became one with her jivatman, her soul (Ref. Canto Five of Book VII). The entire purpose of her sadhana was to be the most uncluttered channel for the Supreme Divine to manifest its perfection in this created world. Therefore by thus becoming completely empty, she had acquired great power – of becoming an instrument of the Superconscient above and the Inconscient below – “ A dual power at being’s occult poles”, as the poet describes them.

A dual Power at being's occult poles Still acted, nameless and invisible: Her divine emptiness was their instrument.

(Lines 94 – 96)

The Inconscient acted on the world through Savitri’s body, and so did the Superconscient. The Superconscient sent its impulsions to touch the thoughts of men through Savitri’s being, although this communication was still rather infrequent. Savitri’s being received everything that came from these two occult sources but made no response to them herself. These impulses came like a voice coming from outside her, but her mind made no response to them, nor her heart. It came directly to the point of her central perception. She had now become the centre of a consciousness but it is difficult to speak of a centre when there is no space surrounding it on all sides, with no limits or boundaries, no walls or gates defining its shape.

Her being was now a circle without a circumference. It had surpassed all cosmic bounds and was still spreading into infinity.

A thought came through draped as an outer voice.

It called not for the witness of the mind, It spoke not to the hushed receiving heart;

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It came direct to the pure perception's seat, An only centre now of consciousness, If centre could be where all seemed only space; No more shut in by body's walls and gates Her being, a circle without circumference, Already now surpassed all cosmic bounds And more and more spread into infinity.

(Lines 106 ‐ 115)

This is a description of Savitri who had now become universal in her consciousness. She was able to be such an effective channel of both the dual Powers because she had retained her individuality but was able to free herself from all separativeness. The poet describes the state of Savitri’s being further in these words: This being was its own unbounded world, A world without form or feature or circumstance; It had no ground, no wall, no roof of thought, Yet saw itself and looked on all around In a silence motionless and illimitable.

There was no person there, no centred mind, No seat of feeling on which beat events Or objects wrought and shaped reaction's stress.

(Lines 116 – 123)

Savitri’s being was not extinguished in the Nihil of Nirvana. Her individuality remained intact, but it had no limiting circumstances or features. It had no ground, no wall, no roof of thought.

There was no person there, no centred mind. There was nothing in her which reacted to any of the events or objects; there was no reaction’s stress of any kind. There was no motion in this inner world.

There was no motion in this inner world, All was a still and even infinity.

In her the Unseen, the Unknown waited his hour.

(Lines 124 – 126)

Savitri was now ready as a channel waiting for whatever the Infinite Divine willed to manifest.

Section 2 Savitri is now waiting in the supreme silence of the Nirvanic experience, ready to receive and to broadcast to the manifested world whatever the Supreme seeks to channelise through her.

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Awake within, she is sitting by the side of sleeping Satyavan. In this spell of waiting she hears a voice that begins to speak to her from her own heart. It was not her own voice but a voice that “mastered thought and sense” because it is the voice of the true and vast consciousness from the Transcendent. It seems to be clearly aware of the external world. As this voice spoke, all changed within her and without. Everything now appeared in a different light. It now saw everything as part of an omnipresent Reality. All was and all lived according its own law of existence. The unreality of the world so palpable to Savitri until now just vanished. There was no more a universe created by the mind. Whatever the mind creates can never be anything more than a sign or a structure given by it to the Reality.

Now a spirit cast itself into unnumbered forms and was what it saw and made. Everything created was now true. There was no untruth anywhere. A being and a consciousness pervaded everything. All had a substance of the Eternal and the Infinite. But this Infinite was not the opposite of the finite, and this eternal was not the opposite of the time‐bound. Space and Time were manifestations of this Infinite and Eternal consciousness.

Reality is one and manifests differently on different planes; the Nihil, the Sachchidananda, and the Unmanifest Beyond are all different faces of the same Reality. Savitri’s soul was now captured by a living experience of this oneness, which is the hallmark of the Supramental consciousness.

It was her self, it was the self of all, It was the reality of existing things, It was the consciousness of all that lived And felt and saw; it was Timelessness and Time, It was the Bliss of formlessness and form.

It was all Love 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. (Lines 155 – 162)

It was the experience which saw the Sat everywhere at all levels. It was the reality of everything that existed. It was the consciousness of all that lived, felt and saw. It was Timelessness as well as Time. It was the Bliss that pervaded the formless as well as form. It was Love which caught everything in its embrace. All thought and sight emanated from one all‐ perceiving Mind. It was the supreme ecstasy that one experiences on the peaks of God. Savitri now passed beyond Time into eternity. She went beyond Space and became the Infinite.

Her being rose to great heights and yet found greater heights to climb; she took a plunge into the unfathomable deeps and found no end to the silent mystery that held the worlds in its breast and yet dwelt in everything that was created.

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She was all vastness and one measureless point, She was a height beyond heights, a depth beyond depths, She lived in the everlasting and was all That harbours death and bears the wheeling hours.

(Lines 171 – 174)

This was a stupendous experience of a complete oneness with this Vast Cosmic consciousness of oneness and cannot be described except in the poet’s own words: All contraries were true in one huge spirit Surpassing measure, change and circumstance.

An individual, one with cosmic self In the heart of the Transcendent's miracle And the secret of World‐personality Was the creator and the lord of all.

Mind was a single innumerable look Upon himself and all that he became.

Life was his drama and the Vast a stage, The universe was his body, God its soul.

All was one single immense reality, All its innumerable phenomenon.

(Lines 175 –186)

The highest mental consciousness, the spiritualised mind, sees the three poises of the Supreme Reality as three separate truths, namely, the individual, the universal and the transcendental.

Savitri now sees them simultaneously. The whole of life was the drama enacted by this consciousness on the stage of its own being and it is everything that is projected on this vast stage. The entire universe was the body of this consciousness and God its soul. It was itself the One and the Many.

Beginning with line 187 to the end of this canto, we have a most wonderful and poetic subsection describing the cosmic consciousness that Savitri had now acquired. The world was very real to this conscious‐ ness; it was “the world as living God”, as the becoming of God. All that happened in Nature she experienced as events in her. She felt one with this cosmos as if she inhabited the whole of it. She felt as though she was extended as far as the consciousness extended. She was one with the cosmos and yet knew herself in each of the multitudinous things it contained.

She was a single being, yet all things; The world was her spirit's wide circumference, The thoughts of others were her intimates,

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Their feelings close to her universal heart, Their bodies her many bodies kin to her; She was no more herself but all the world.

(Lines 204 – 209)

She felt everything came to her out of the infinitudes, and she herself was spread as the consciousness in this infinitude. She felt as though her consciousness was everywhere and as though the distant constellations wheeled around her. She felt as though she was already here even before the earth was born and all the various worlds were the colonies of her being.

Everything in Nature echoed what was in her. There was an immense identity in which her own identity was lost. Her sense of oneness with everything is most poetically described in these words: She was a subconscient life of tree and flower, The outbreak of the honied buds of spring; She burned in the passion and splendour of the rose, She was the red heart of the passion‐flower, The dream‐white of the lotus in its pool.

Out of subconscient life she climbed to mind, She was thought and the passion of the world's heart, She was the godhead hid in the heart of man, She was the climbing of his soul to God.

(Lines 224 – 232)

Savitri now felt as though the entire cosmos was grounded in her consciousness and flowered in her being. She felt as though Space and Time were manifestations of her consciousness. The Supramental consciousness now became her native, normal consciousness, Infinity was natural to her and Eternity looked from her being on Time.

http://nextfuture.sriaurobindosociety.org.in/aug04/nfaug04_savitri.htm

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17. Book Eight ­ The Book of Death

We have now completed our review of Book Seven, “The Book of Yoga”, which deals with certain stages of Savitri’s yoga. In some sense, this yoga continues even in part III of the epic.

The yogic path traversed by Savitri is new in many ways and so I slowed down our pace quite a bit to make sure we get as clear a picture of Savitri’s yoga as possible. Savitri is now ready to face the great challenge of her life, the death of Satyavan as foretold by Narad. The death of Satyavan is the climacteric event of our story, and now we move on to this very event, as we take up Book Eight, “The Book of Death.”

Let us briefly look at the way the original Mahabharata legend deals with the event. You will remember that in the Mahabharata legend Savitri undergoes strict austerities of the triratra vow just a few days before the day prophesied by Narad on which Satyavan was destined to die. In fact, that day happened to be the first day after the conclusion of the triratra austerities.

On that day Savitri got ready well before sunrise and offered worship to the gods and then went and paid her respects to her parents‐in‐law. They blessed her and entreated her to break her three‐day long fast but she replied that she would do so only in the evening. Next, she went to the various hermitages in the neighbourhood and offered her obeisance to the Rishis dwelling in them. They showered blessings on her wishing for her all auspicious things dear to a devout and young wife.

When she returned to her cottage, she saw Satyavan getting ready to go the forest for his daily work of collecting fruits and roots, flowers and firewood. She begged him not to go alone on that day and to permit her to accompany him. He tried to dissuade her but did not succeed. So he asked her to get permission from his parents for accompanying him to the forest. She approached her father‐in‐law and sought his permission to accompany Satyavan. The reasons she gave for this request were that she also wanted to see the forest and enjoy its beauty and also that she felt uneasy about being separated from Satyavan on that day. Dyumatsena, Satyavan’s father, remembered that during the past one year Savitri had never asked anything for herself and gave her permission to accompany her husband to the forest on that day with the advice that she should be attentive to duty even while following Satyavan to the forest.

After this the young couple set out happily. Satyavan showed Savitri various streams and rivers, the trees laden with flower and fruit, and the lush green meadows. He showed her the peacocks dancing and they heard all around them the delightful songs of birds. Savitri was delighted to have these wonderful moments in the forest in the company of Satyavan, and she responded with equal sweetness to his inquiries about her. But she was watchful since she knew that this was the fateful day and did not let him go out of her sight. Narad’s dire prophecy

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was ringing in her ears, and she knew that Satyavan’s life was now going to be a matter of hours and minutes. She was in agony from within but the discipline she had acquired in life did not let her betray openly the anxiety that was tormenting her from within.

Satyavan was in high spirits and looked particularly lustrous that morning in the forest. Savitri and he had collected a basketful of fruit. He now wished to collect some firewood, so he climbed up a tree, and began chopping the branches of the tree vigorously hoping to complete this task quickly so that he could spend the rest of his time in the forest undisturbed in the company of Savitri. But suddenly he felt exhausted and started perspiring profusely. He felt as though shafts of pain were piercing through his head. He began to feel an intense pain in his limbs and in his heart there was a burning sensation. Savitri was watching him closely and she went to him as he climbed down from the tree. She then sat down underneath the tree with Satyavan’s head in her lap. She knew now that the hour foretold by Narad had struck and looked around her expecting to see the Kala‐Purusha, the Time‐Person.

Presently, she saw a bright person standing in front of her. He looked luminous and wore a red attire and a splendid crown on his head. He looked resplendent, although dark in hue and had red eyes. He had a noose in his hand. His presence inspired great dread and he was staring at Satyavan’s prone body. This was the God of Death come to take away Satyavan’s life.

Now let us examine briefly how this part of the legend is handled by Sri Aurobindo in Book Eight of his Savitri. It may please be noted that Book Eight of Savitri has only one canto, and it is called Canto Three. We will have one or two things to say later about this unusual numbering.

We will now look at the development of the legend in this canto called “The Death in the Forest”.

At the end of Canto Three of Book Eight, we had seen Savitri was seated by the side of her sleeping husband but with her consciousness merged with the cosmic consciousness which is described by the poet in these words: From this she rose where Time and Space were not; The superconscient was her native air, Infinity was her movement’s natural space; Eternity looked out from her on Time.

Savitri: p. 557, lines 236 – 239

Savitri gradually came out of this state as a golden dawn was breaking in the skies. Lying down by the side of her sleeping husband she reviewed the whole year she had just lived through as one who is about to die would review his entire life. A whole host of memories arose and swept through her and became an irrevocable past.

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Then Savitri rose and worshipped the great goddess Durga whose form Satyavan had carved upon a forest stone. In answer to Savitri’s prayer, the Divine Mother must have responded to her with a quiet word. Then Savitri went to Satyavan’s mother and spoke to her with a great composure. She was most careful to see that not one word coming out of her revealed anything of the great anxiety and dread about Satyavan that was tormenting her, because that would have slain all the happiness of Satyavan’s mother and even taken away her desire to live.

In a quiet voice and with a tranquil demeanour she told her that she had been living for a whole year now on the verge of the green forest but had not yet gone into the silences of the forest. She was on that day seized with a great desire to go out into the forest with Satyavan.

Satyavan’s mother responded lovingly and said she had been like a strong goddess who had taken pity on them and come to serve them. And she readily consented to her request by saying, “Do as thy wise mind desires”.

Then Satyavan and Savitri set out hand in hand to explore the forest. They walked through the grandeur and majestic silence of the forest. Satyavan walked beside Savitri, both full of joy.

Satyavan was exhilarated by the presence of Savitri at his side and spoke to her excitedly and showed to her all the riches of the forest – flowers, creepers and birds and streams and rivulets. He spoke of all these as one does of old friends and playmates. The trees and birds and waterfronts were his childhood’s comrades. Savitri was listening intently not so much to what Satyavan was saying but with each step she was looking round to see if the dim and dreadful god of Death was anywhere near them. She was very much conscious of the fact that the voice she was hearing now was going to cease speaking soon and she dreaded the time when the “beloved voice could speak no more”. So she dwelt little on the sense of what Satyavan was saying.

Love on her bosom hurt with the jagged edges Of anguish moaned with every step with pain Crying, “Now, perhaps his voice will cease For ever.” Even by some vague touch oppressed Sometimes her eyes looked round as if their orbs Might see the dim and dreadful god’s approach.

Lines 77 – 82

Satyavan stopped now; he wanted to finish the job of cutting wood first so that he could devote the rest of the time to wander freely with Savitri. He chose a mighty tree climbed it up and began to cut one of its branches. Savitri was close by; she watched him wordless, always kept him in her view. But Satyavan looked to be in high spirits. He wielded a joyous axe and sang “high snatches of a sage’s chant” that sang of conquered death and demons slain.

Sometimes he would stop briefly and speak sweet and mocking words to Savitri.

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As he worked, his doom came upon him.

The violent and hungry wounds of pain Travelled through his body biting as they passed Silently, and all his suffering breath besieged Strove to rend life’s strong heart‐cords and be free.

Lines 106 – 109

For a while he felt relief from this pain, but only for a while and he resumed his confident toil.

But then again the great Woodsman, Death hewed at him and his labour ceased. He threw his axe and came down the tree. He called out to Savitri and she came to him and clasped him. He complained to Savitri of the great pain that rent him as the tree must have felt when its branches were being sundered. He says to her: Awhile let me lay my head upon thy lap And guard me with thy hands from evil fate: Perhaps because thou touchest, death may pass.

Lines 124 – 126

Savitri sat under the branches of some trees and tried to soothe his pain with her hands. All grief and fear in her had disappeared. A great calm had settled on her. The only feeling uppermost in her was how to bring him relief from the pain he was feeling. She waited griefless and strong like the gods. But soon Satyavan’s face lost its brightness and turned to a tarnished grey and his eyes became dim. Only the dull physical mind in him functioned. And before that too faded entirely, Satyavan cried out in a clinging last despair: Savitri, Savitri, O Savitri, Lean down, my soul, and kiss me while I die.”

Lines: 145 – 146

And even as Savitri bent down to kiss him, Satyavan died. Then she found that they were no more alone. Something had come there conscious, vast and dire.

Near her she felt a silent shade immense Chilling the noon with darkness at its back.

An awful hush had fallen upon the place: There was no cry of birds, no voice of beasts.

A terror and an anguish filled the world, As if annihilation’s mystery Had taken a sensible form.

Lines: 154 ‐ 160

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It was Death standing there in visible form, and soon Satyavan had passed from Savitri’s embrace.

This brings us to the end of Part II of Savitri, which consists of Books Four, Five, Six, Seven and Eight. At this point in the story, the stage has been set for the confrontation of Savitri with Death. The actual confrontation itself and Savitri’s ultimate victory constitute the theme of Part III, the concluding part of Savitri. You will notice that Sri Aurobindo’s thinking on Death is in many ways different from what is popularly understood by Death. We will discuss these issues in later installments. But here I will leave you with a few words from Sri Aurobindo on the God of Death, known to the Indian tradition as Yama.

In the later ideas Yama is the god of Death and has his own special world; but in the Rig‐ veda he seems to have been originally a form of the Sun, ‐‐ even as late as the Isha Upanishad we find the name used as an appellation of the Sun, ‐‐ and then one of the twin children of the wide‐shining Lord of Truth. He is the guardian of the Dharma, the law of the Truth, satyadharma, which is a condition of immortality, and therefore himself the guardian of immortality. His world is Swar, the world of immortality, where is the indestructible Light. The Rig‐veda hymn X.14 (known as the “funeral hymn”) is not a hymn of Death but of Life and Immortality. (Sri Aurobindo: SABCL 10: 213) Before I conclude this installment, I would like to say a few words about the actual composition of Book Eight. We will also consider here why the only canto in this Book came to be called Canto Three, instead of Canto One. Sri Aurobindo seems to have drafted the first version of Savitri in 1916, and at that point the poem consisted of 1670 lines. He took up Savitri once again in the late 1920’s and early 1930’s and continued working on it almost until the end of his life. What made him take up the poem again and at that particular point in time are interesting matters into which it is not necessary to go at the moment. In the revision, different parts of the original draft received different degrees of expansion. While what now constitutes Part I (Books One, Two and Three) is the result of an expansion of 120 times (from 980 lines in 1916 draft to 11,683 lines in the present version), the Book of Death is only about one third longer that what it was in the first version – 133 lines in the 1916 draft and 177 lines in the current version. And of these 133 lines, 108 are identical to what they are now. This means that Sri Aurobindo changed about 25 lines and added 44. In other words, this part is remarkably similar to what it was in 1916.

This does not mean that he was so happy with the original 1916 version of what is now Book Eight that he did not feel that it needed extensive revision. Probably he did not have the time to take it up for a careful revision. This is something we know from Nirodbaran’s reminiscences about the last year of the work on Savitri. Nirodbaran was the writer who took down Savitri as it was dictated by Sri Aurobindo. After he had dictated what came to be the last passage (the

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tremendous passage comprising lines 826 to 897 of Book Six, Canto Two), he asked Nirodbaran what parts of the poem were yet to receive revision, Nirodbaran said, “ The Book of Death and the Epilogue”, and Sri Aurobindo replied, “ We will see about that later”. But he never came back to them. He left his body on 5 December 1950. So we have no idea what he intended to do with the Book of Death. He simply left it as it was in the 1916 draft.

Now just a word or two about why the only Canto in Book Eight came to be called Canto Three and not Canto One. Various people have hazarded different guesses about this. I shall give my own simple‐minded explanation. The canto probably had that number in some version of the poem.

It must be remembered that in spite of its vast compass and length, Savitri is the narration of events that took place within the span of 24 hours, from the dawn of one day to the next. The dawn of this day is described in Canto One, Book One. The events of the first part of the morning of that day (say from 6.00 in the morning to about 9.00) are described in Canto two of Book One. And from Canto Three of Book One all the way to the end of Book VII, we have a narration that takes place in a flashback of the story of Aswapati’s yoga, Savitri’s birth, her growing up, her meeting with Satyavan and her marriage to him, and the one year they spent together in the hermitage in the forest. It is as it were time had stood still around 9.00 a.m. at the end of Canto Two of Book One. Chronologically, Book Eight Canto Three comes after that. It describes the events that take place between say, 9.00 a.m. and 12.30 noon of that day. So, in one sense, it is appropriate to call this Canto Three.

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18. Death and God of Death

With this installment we move on to part Three of Savitri, which consists of Books Nine, Ten, Eleven and the Epilogue. The Epilogue is brief, only eight pages in length. The three Books (Nine, Ten and Eleven), which consist of six cantos and run into one hundred pages of incandescent poetry, deal with that part of the story in which Savitri confronts the God of Death and finally succeeds in rescuing Satyavan from his hold. As has been our practice, we shall take a brief look at how this part of the story is developed in the Mahabharata legend before we turn to Sri Aurobindo’s narration of this important part of the story.

But even before we do that we need to talk briefly about the concept of Death and the God of death as they are perceived by Sri Aurobindo. This is important because, after all, the story of Savitri and Satyavan is the story of Love and Death. Thus Death is one of the main protagonists in this story. Sri Aurobindo’s understanding of death and its place in life has certain unique aspects to it, and we need to bear these in mind as we go through the part of Savitri we are dealing with at the moment. Therefore I present here a note on some aspects of Sri Aurobindo’s perspective on Death.

The Perspective of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother on Death While men of science regard Death as a predictable consequence of an increase in entropy (the degradation of the matter and energy in the universe to an ultimate state of inert uniformity), men of religion look upon it as a resting place in the passage to a higher world beyond the terrestrial. The spiritual work of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother has for its goal the establishment of a race of gnostic beings consequent upon the full manifestation of the supramental consciousness here on earth, and they regard victory over death in the conditions of earthly life as the goal of their integral yoga. Thus Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have been revolutionary even in their thinking on Death as they have been in everything else. Let me begin by presenting to you an excerpt from Sri Aurobindo: This then is the necessity and justification of Death, not as a denial of Life, but as a process of Life: death is necessary because eternal change of form is the sole immortality to which the finite living substance can aspire and eternal change of experience the sole infinity to which the finite mind involved in living body can attain. This change of form cannot be allowed to remain merely a constant renewal of the same form‐type such as constitutes our bodily life between birth and death; for unless the form‐type is changed and the experiencing mind is thrown into new forms in new circumstances of time, place and environment, the necessary variation of experience which the very nature of existence in Time and Space demands, cannot be effectuated. And it is only the process of Death by dissolution and by the devouring of life

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by life, it is only the absence of freedom, the compulsion, the struggle, the pain, the subjection to something that appears to be Not‐Self which makes the necessary and salutary change appear terrible and undesirable to our mortal mentality. It is the sense of being devoured, broken up, destroyed or forced away which is the sting of Death and which even the belief in personal survival of death cannot wholly abrogate. (Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library, Vol: 18: pp.193‐194) The first point Sri Aurobindo makes here is that Death has no separate or intrinsic reality; it exists for the sole purpose of serving life. Death is a process and phase of life itself. This is also the perception of the Gita when it says, “As the soul passes physically through childhood and youth and age, so it passes on to the changing of the body.” (Ch.2:13) According to Sri Aurobindo, life and not death is the fundamental all‐pervading truth of existence.

The death of the body really serves the interests of perpetually evolving life. Thus he points in the passage quoted above that the eternal change of form is the only immortality to which the finite living substance can aspire, and eternal change of experience in terms of new circumstances of time, place and pace the sole infinity to which the finite mind involved in time can attain. All life is a journey from the Inconscient to the Superconscient (Divinity). Such a long journey cannot be completed within the span of one brief life of seventy to one hundred years.

The soul has to be born again and again to complete this journey. By the time an individual attains to what is called old age, say eighty years or so, most of his physical faculties lose their keenness and capacity to experience life. If he continues this way longer, in most cases he is reduced to a vegetable existence. In such a situation, death comes as a great gateway through which one enters to come back again with a new and young body full of verve and enthusiasm to experience life. Besides, when an individual is reborn, he takes birth in new circumstances of time, place and space. This gives the soul scope for ever wider and diversified experiences of life, best suited for its growth. This then is the utility of death, not as a denial but as a process of life.

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother look upon the victory over death as one of the important ultimate goals of their Integral Yoga. This might appear like a most materialistic ideal for a spiritual enterprise, unless the phrase ‘victory over death’ is understood properly. This seeking after physical immortality does not arise out of our blind and egoistic attachment to body and physical life. As long as we remain attached to our body and its vital and mental domains, we cannot even be said to have launched on our spiritual journey. Secondly, it is incumbent upon every sadhak of integral yoga that he give up fear of death and the disgust for bodily cessation.

The Mother has written most insightfully on how to get rid of the fear of death. (I suggest that you read this most illuminating piece of writing by the Mother on ways of conquering the fear.

This is found in Volume Five of The Collected Works of the Mother, pages 316 – 320.) The principle way of getting rid of the fear of death completely, as suggested by the Mother, is to grow in the consciousness of the immortality of our soul or our psychic being.

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By immortality, spiritual adepts do not mean some of kind of personal survival after the dissolution of the body; they mean by it the consciousness of that inner Reality in us which the Gita describes as follows: Na jaayate mriyate vaa kadaachit naayam bhuutvaa bhavitaa vaa na bhuuyah Ajo nityah shashvato^yam puraaNo na hanyate hanyamaane shariire (2.20)

“This is not born, nor does it die, nor is it a thing that comes into being once and passing away will never come into being again. It is unborn, ancient, sempiternal; it is not slain with the slaying of the body.”

The Gita also describes it “avinaashinam. nityam, ajam avyayam” (indestructible immutable and imperishable), which the weapons cannot cleave, nor the fire burn, nor do the waters drench nor the wind dry”.

This is a consciousness which is beyond all bondage and limitation, free, blissful. Self‐existent in conscious being, the consciousness of the Lord, the supreme Purusha, of Satchidananda. This experience of the soul needs no external proof to anyone who has experienced it. It can only be acquired as a result of the elevation and widening of our consciousness through spiritual sadhana.

The sadhak of the Integral Yoga does not stop with this. For him immortality is not merely something to be attained by the soul alone, it is also the destiny of the of the human body. He does not despise the body nor does he entertain an attitude of world‐disgust; he aspires to transcend death in order that life may be divinely fulfilled. This Becoming of the Divine, which we call creation, is progressive and evolutionary. It began with the big bang and is gradually evolving towards the Super‐conscience. The present condition of life cannot be the last act of the evolutionary drama since it is afflicted with the load suffering and death. Death has to be conquered as a sign of the Being’s victory in the field of Becoming. It means, as Sri Aurobindo has explained in a letter, that “[the body] would no longer be subject to decay and disease.

That would mean it would not be subject to the ordinary processes by which death comes. If a change of body had to be made, it would have to be by the will of the inhabitant. This (not the obligation to live 3000 years, for that too would be bondage) would be the essence of physical immortality.” [1] But for this to happen, Sri Aurobindo mentions in the same letter, a dynamic action of the Truth is necessary in mind, vital and body and for such a dynamic action, the supramental descent is necessary.

We cannot enter here into a discussion of why the descent of the supramental consciousness is necessary, and of why Sri Aurobindo thinks that such a descent is inevitable. It is indeed as a result of our transformation that we arrive at a higher and higher manifestation of consciousness in our evolutionary journey. “ As Nature has evolved beyond Matter and manifested Life, beyond Life and manifested Mind, so she must evolve beyond Mind and

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manifest a consciousness and power of our existence free from the imperfection and limitation of our mental existence, a supramental or truth‐consciousness and able to develop the power and perfection of the spirit…. Light and bliss and beauty and a perfection of the spontaneous right action of all the being are there as native powers of the supramental truth‐consciousness and these will in their very nature transform mind and life and body even here upon earth into a manifestation of the truth‐conscious spirit. The obscuration of earth will not prevail against the supramental truth‐consciousness, for even into the earth it can bring enough of the omniscient light and omnipotent force of the spirit to conquer. All may not open to the fulness of its light and power, but whatever does open must to that extent undergo the change. That will be the principle of transformation.” [2] Many people, including yogis of repute, have observed that people taking up the pursuit of yoga happen to suffer from some disabilities and ailments of the body which would not have befallen them under normal circumstances. On the other hand, it is also true that we have testimony from Yogis that they have cured themselves of illnesses and have even succeeded in repelling a predestined death for a long period. The Mother has shed a flood of light on this entire phenomenon. She has identified the factors which ordinarily lead to progressive breakdown in health and ultimately to its dissolution in death.

According to her, the whole creation is evolving towards perfection. Now if one takes up yoga, this force which is pushing towards perfection gets accelerated in him. But it is only his inner consciousness that obeys this accelerating impulse because the higher parts of one’s being are subtler, and therefore more responsive to this force and much more easily adapt themselves and adjust themselves to the demands of this force than the body, which is pathetic in its ineptness in this respect. The material nature is rigid by nature and there the transformation at the level of the body is slow , too slow for the human consciousness to be able to perceive it.

The body thus gets left behind and this creates a disharmony in the nature, between the inner and the outer and the system translates it into illness. That is why people who take up yoga tend to fall ill frequently. When this lack of balance goes beyond a point, the disintegration and change of form becomes necessary. This is the real cause of death.

But according to the Mother, this necessity is not an abiding one, nor is its nature intrinsic and irrevocable. In fact, she thinks that it is wholly fortuitous and may very well be remedied. If the whole being could simultaneously advance in the progressive transformation, there would be no illness, no death. But it will have to be the whole being, from the highest to the most material, which is by nature rigid and averse to any change. We should be able to infuse into this matter sufficient consciousness so that it can fall in line with the subtler parts and become plastic enough to follow the inner progress. When this happens, death would no more be necessary.

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Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have assured us that if proper conditions for it can be created death can be done away with. The Mother has even said that death is a habit we need to break out of. This does not seem to be such a fanciful idea if one were to examine this issue in the light of the scientific evidence currently available. There is already enough biological evidence which suggests that “neither senescence nor natural death is a necessary, inevitable consequence or attribute of life. Natural death is biologically a relatively new thing, which made its appearance only after the living organism had advanced a long way on the path of evolution.” [3] It is not necessary to go into this biological evidence in any more detail for our purposes here.

There is enough evidence in contemporary science which suggests that death has not been the primary phenomenon; it is rather a late‐comer on the scene. It came through a process of progressive selection in the adaptation to the welfare of the species. “A hideous and dreadful evil for the individual, death has proved salutary for the species, since, thanks to its agency, the species can continually renovate and revitalise itself through the introduction of younger and more robust individuals replacing the worn‐out ones.” From the standpoint of the survival of the species, it is desirable for the individuals of today to give place eventually to those of tomorrow, since environing conditions keep changing over extensive periods, and it is only by giving the reproductive variants a chance that new fitness may be established and prolonged survival of the species made possible.

“It would seem that the life span is determined by the interplay of two effects ‐‐‐ the necessity of living long enough to start off the new generation and, having performed the task, the fact that a further lifetime is unnecessary, and, in many respects, harmful to the well‐being and development of the species. It is quite possible that mechanisms exist in organisms which bring about this limitation of the life period, when the biologically the useful period is over, but we do not know what these mechanisms are.” [4] Although the aforesaid biological conclusion is probably valid in the case of all infra‐human species, it is not at all so in the case of man. For, as has been noted by many observers, man is unique among living beings in having a disproportionately long, and from one point of biological view biologically useless, post‐productive period of the life‐cycle. The implication is obvious; the individual man is not here solely to fulfil the interests of the race. Man is intended to be a medium of a conscious evolution to a higher level of consciousness.

If, as we have seen above, death is not the fundamental truth and if it is to be regarded as a process of life itself in the latter’s still imperfect status of unfolding, the next question to ask is: does not man possess the capacity of outgrowing the imperfect status and eliminate the process of death altogether?

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Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have assured us that if proper conditions are created it may no longer be necessary to destroy the human body in order for man to progress. Death can be done away with. I will now leave you with two quotations from Sri Aurobindo to ponder over.

“The physical being could only endure, if by some means its physical causes of decay and disruption could be overcome and at the same time it could be made so plastic and progressive in its structure and its functioning that it would answer to each change demanded of it by the progress of the inner Person; it must be able to keep pace with the soul in its formation of self‐ expressive personality, its long unfolding of a secret spiritual divinity and the slow transformation of the mental into the divine mental or spiritual existence.” [5] “Even if Science ‐‐‐ physical Science or occult Science ‐‐‐ were to discover the necessary condition or means for an infinite survival of he body, still, if the body could not adapt itself so as to become a fit instrument of expression for the inner growth, the soul would find some way to abandon it and pass on to a new incarnation. The material or physical causes of death are not its sole or its true cause; its true inmost reason is the spiritual necessity for the evolution of a new being.” [6]

[1] Letters on Yoga: 1231 [2] The Supramental Manifestation Upon Earth in SABCL Vol. 16: pages 20‐21 [3] Quotation from Encyclopaedia Britannica, Vol. 7. pp. 111 [4] J.A.V. Butler [5] The Life Divine: 822 [6] Footnote to page 822: The Life Divine

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19. Book Nine: The Book of Eternal Night; Canto One: Towards the Black Void

We are now ready to begin our review of Part III of Savitri. The most of part III is taken up by the long colloquy between Savitri and the God of Death. The God of Death from this point on becomes an important character in Savitri, and, as we have already seen in the preceding installment, Sri Aurobindo has a perspective of his own on the phenomenon of death and its place in life. But before we begin our review of Books IX, X and XI of Savitri, which deal with this exchange with Death, it would be instructive to see how this part of the legend has been handled by Vyasa in the Mahabharata. This will enable us to appreciate better the changes which Sri Aurobindo has introduced while dealing with this part of the story of Savitri and Satyavan.

The long conversation between Savitri and the God of Death as found in the Mahabharata legend: As soon as Satyavan breathes his last, Savitri sees in front of her a bight and luminous

Person in a red attire and with a splendid crown over his head. There is a noose in the hand of this person and he is staring at Satyavan’s prone body. On seeing him, Savitri transfers Satayvan’s head from her lap to the ground and stands up with folded hands.

When asked by Saviri who he was, this luminous person introduces himself as Yama. He tells her that he was conversing with her because she is a devout and chaste woman. He further states that since Satyavan was a virtuous soul with several fine qualities, he has come himself to take away soul, instead of sending his subordinates. He then casts his noose and captures Satyavan’s soul in it and pulls the soul behind him as he starts walking away from that spot. Savitri, afflicted with grief, follows Yama in his tracks. This she was able to do because of the great powers she had acquired by observing several vows.

When Yama looks back after a while, he sees Savitri following him. Yama stops and advises her not to follow him since she already had accompanied her husband after his death over the permitted distance and paid her debt to him. He advises her to attend to the funeral rites of the dead. Savitri refuses to accept Yama’s advice and instead keeps talking to him. Since she had walked with him for more than ten steps, she claims that she has earned the right of friendship with him. She then begins to argue with him extensively on certain fundamental dharmic issues. She appeals to his sense of justice and obligation to be fair since Yama is known as Dharmaraj (the king of righteousness).

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Savitri’s speech is perfect, flawless in grammar, well‐structured in prosody and flawless in reasoning. She argues that as a wife her place is always with her husband and she cannot go back without him; in following him she is only being true to her dharma as a wife. She further declares that there is nothing a woman cannot achieve through austerity, devotion to the preceptor, love for the husband, observance of the sacred vows and through the grace of Yama himself. She then speaks of holy people and how they abide in virtuous conduct and how therefore they never face any sorrow or affliction. She observes further that the company of holy people is always rewarding and therefore one should always be close to them. Then she declares that it is by the Truth that the saints lead the sun, and through their tapasya (askesis) they uphold the earth and therefore noble people who are in the midst of such saintly people have never any grief. In the conduct of the dharma, the illustrious people help each other and do not hurt others. They are therefore the protectors of the whole world.

These soulful utterances of Savitri charm Yama immensely, and he bestows on her several boons. The more she speaks of the lofty things of dharma, the more his admiration for her grows. By the first two boons bestowed upon her by Yama, Savitri is able to get for her father‐in‐law, who had gone blind, his eyesight restored, and also his kingdom restored to him. Through a third boon she asks for a hundred sons for her father, Aswapati. When she was offered a fourth boon by Yama, she replies that she would have asked for a hundred sons for herself, but that this boon would remain unfulfilled without Satyavan, whom Yama was insisting on taking with him. She points to him the strange anomaly now confronting them. “You are willing to give me the boon of having a hundred sons and you yourself are taking away my husband; for that reason I again ask the boon of the life of Satyavan. Only thus shall your words come true.”

Yama is so exceedingly gladdened by Savitiri’s discourse on Dharma that he accedes to her request and releases Satyavan’s soul from the noose in which it was captured. He tells her that Satyavan has now been restored to good health and is fit to return to earth with her. Besides this, he grants to her a life of four hundred years with Satyavan, and advises her to perform the holy yajnas for the welfare of mankind. Then Yama blesses Savitri and sends her back with the soul of Satyavan. He then returns to his own abode.

Savitri’s Dialogue with Death in Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri

Savitri’s dialogue with Death in Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri, deals with issues of a totally different kind from those that figure in Savitri’s exchanges with Yama in the Mahabharata legend. Savitri follows Satyavan’s soul into the kingdom of Death because she loves Satyavan and she wants to take him back to earth where together they are

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going to prepare for the advent of a new age on earth. Their love and its fulfilment on earth symbolise Sri Aurobindo’s quest of perfection of life on earth for humanity as a whole. The God of Death is cast here in the role of an adversary of this ideal. He tries various strategies to dissuade Savitri from pursuing him and from laying a claim on Satyavan’s soul. First he tries to scare her by demonstrating how helpless and miniscule she is in comparison with this vast universe and its majestic march through time. When this fails, he tries to argue against the feasibility and likelihood of the ideal she holds so dear. He also tries to show that ideologically she really has no ground to stand on. In this protracted debate, he takes on the positions of the various philosophies and ideologies that can be pitted against what may be called Sri Aurobindo’s Adwaitic Integralism. In this debate almost all the major philosophies and ideologies of today figure in some form. Savitri is pitted against all these as the protagonist of Sri Aurobindo’s vision of a perfect life here on earth.

What is most fascinating here is the way that these various ideologies take on flesh and blood and come out as glowing poetry and not as dry arguments. Let us now take up the Books Nine, Ten and Eleven canto by canto. We begin with Book Nine, Canto One. Book Nine: The Book of Eternal Night; Canto One: Towards the Black Void Section 1

The poet begins by capturing in a few lines the scene in the huge wood; Savitri was all alone surrounded by the forest and she had “her husband’s corpse on her forsaken breast”. She was too benumbed by the event of her husband’s passing, either to measure her loss or to bewail it. She even ignored the presence of the “dreadful god” (the God of Death), standing in front of her. It was as though her mind had died with Satyavan. Only her heart was still active in her. She held close to her the lifeless form of Satyavan as though she could thereby guard their oneness and help Satyavan keep his spirit in his body.

And then came upon her a change that comes over human beings in great and climacteric moments of their life when the veil over the soul is torn, and there is no intervention from the mind. The spirit sees directly and all is known at once. Such a moment had now come in Savitri’s life. The poet describes in some detail the nature of this change. It is as it were one’s doors of perception suddenly get cleansed and one sees the world around him differently. There is a power above our eyebrows, which is calm and immobile. It remains unaffected by the vicissitudes of life and its pain and error and is able to control the whirl of things around us. In such great moments the spirit experiences the Glory which is truly its own. The mind of earth then receives in

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flashes godlike thoughts. A series of profound changes take place in the individual; the soul itself feels reborn to new glory. One feels bathed in a celestial music. The will becomes intensely gathered into an ecstasy. Such a miraculous birth now took place in Savitri. The Spirit in her, so far hidden in Nature, now soared out of its dwelling and ascended like a fire in the skies of night.

The cords of her self‐oblivion were torn apart and at the summit of her being she sees the source of all that she had seemed to be and all that she had worked out through her sadhana. She saw herself as an instrument of an immutable power. A force descended into her which seemed to connect her to Infinity. As this force sank into her, it entered the mystic lotus of thousand petals at the crown of her head. Savitri was now guided by this omnipotent power standing above her, calm and unmoving.

Section 2 As Savitri was being filled with this great inrush, the last vestige of any human frailty vanished from her. It is as though a young divinity filled her life‐energies with a vast spiritual power. She was now entirely free from the pain and the fear that haunted her often and the grief that lashed her from time to time. Her mind was now still and beat quietly with an imperious force.

Savitri was now free from all attachment and her acts proceeded from a godlike calm. Calmly, she placed Satyavan’s body (until now lying on her breast) upon the ground and firmly turned her gaze away from it. All alone, she now rose to meet the dreadful God of Death.

The poet comments on the significance of this event, namely, Savitri’s resolve to confront Death. The mighty spirit that Savitri embodied now is returning to a task she had left unfinished so far because until now the mind was the highest power manifested on earth and under its rule the human instrument was too crude for the task of confronting Death. Now in Savitri this human limitation is transcended and she commands a mightier power than that of mind and also a godlike will.

She looked for a lingering moment on Satyavan’s body lying at her feet and then she raised her head “like a tree recovering from a wind” to turn her gaze on the being standing in front of her. Then in a few lines the poet gives us a portrait of the spiritual truth of Death (I shall use the expressions “god of Death” and “Death”, with a capital D, interchangeably here): Something stood there, unearthly, sombre, grand, A limitless denial of all being That wore the terror and wonder of a shape.

In its appalling eyes the tenebrous Form Bore the deep pity of destroying gods;

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A sorrowful irony curved the dreadful lips That speak the word of doom. Eternal Night In the dire beauty of an immortal face Pitying arose, receiving all that lives For ever into its fathomless heart, refuge Of creatures from their anguish and world‐pain.

His shape was nothingness made real, his limbs Were monuments of transience and beneath Brows of unwearying calm large godlike lids Silent beheld the writhing serpent, life.

Unmoved their timeless wide unchanging gaze Had seen the unprofitable cycles pass, Survived the passing of unnumbered stars And sheltered still the same immutable orbs.

(Pg 574)

“The God of Death” stood there, the poet says, “unearthly, sombre, grand”. He describes him as “the limitless denial of all being”. There cannot be a better description of Death and the role he plays in this confrontation with Savitri. Death, as he is portrayed here, does not represent merely the force that brings about the physical disintegration of all living beings but it is also a power that denies and tries to thwart this very creation as it evolves to its perfection. That is why he is described as “A limitless denial of all being”. Death is a destroying god who bears deep pity for all creatures. His lips are curved in “a sorrowful irony: he gives refuge in his heart to all the creatures from their life of anguish and world‐pain on earth. The poet describes his shape as “nothingness made real” and his limbs as “monuments of transience”. His eyes are focussed silently on life, “the writhing serpent”. The eyes of Death have seen the passing away of unnumbered stars.

The woman and the universal God of Death faced each other. Savitri’s loneliness was almost palpable. And silencing all earthly sounds, Death spoke to her in a voice, sad and formidable at the same time.

Death: “O slave of Nature, you are but a changing tool of a rigid, unchanging Law. Why do you vainly rebel against my yoke? Loosen your crude grip on Satyavan. Weep and forget Satyavan.

Bury your passion. Leave now the body forsaken by the spirit of Satyavan. Return to your vain life on earth.”

Savitri made no response. And the voice of Death spoke again but this time lowering its formidable voice and it sounded like a moan of hungry far sweeping waves, echoing the sadness and scorn of the gods.

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Death: “ O Savitri, you are yourself a creature doomed like him to die some day. Do you hope to be able to hold his soul a captive of your passionate heart and deny it death’s calm, and silent rest. Loosen your grip on him. Woman, your husband suffers in this tug‐of‐war between you and me. The body of Satyavan belongs to earth and therefore it is yours, but not his spirit, which now belongs to a greater power.”

Savitri relaxed her hold on Satyavan’s body that lay on the smooth grass. She now remembered his face as it looked when he was in sleep as she rose from their couch at dawn to attend to her daily tasks. Now too she rose with all her strength gathered like a runner who drops his mantle and gets ready for the race and waits for the signal. But she did not know on what course she was going to be called upon to run. Her spirit watched vigilantly waiting to see what far‐ranging impulse was going to rise out of the eternal depths of her being.

Then Death leaned down to gather Satyavan’s soul as leans the Night over the tired lands when the evening pales and the moon is yet to rise. As he stands erect, another luminous Satyavan arose from the life‐less body as though he had emerged from another world. This silent wonder, the luminous Satyavan, stood between Savitri and the god of Death. This new figure looked as if “one departed came wearing the light of a celestial shape, splendidly alien to the mortal air.” The mind that looks for things familiar and loved in this new figure, would fall back foiled from the strangeness that surrounds it. The phantasm, the new figure representing Satyavan’s being, looked too strange to fit into the grasp of this earth. Only the spirit of Savitri recognised the spirit of Satyavan in this being, and her heart felt in it the heart which she had loved. This figure standing between Death and Savitri, was not wavering but steady and expectant like someone blind waiting for a word of command. So these three stood there, none of them powers of this earth but one of them in a human form.

On either side of this figure of Satyavan, the two spirits strove, Love and Death, “silence battled with silence, vast with vast”. Soon the impulse to move took over. The luminous figure of Satyavan moved in the front; behind him walked Death like a herdsman following a straying member of his heard. Behind these two walked Savitri. Although mortal, she walked at an equal pace with the God of Death. She walked into the perilous regions of death planting her feet in Satyavan’s footsteps.

Section 3 Savitri was now walking through a strange region in which the road was hardly seen and she felt as though she was walking through a screen of forests. She felt surrounded by the murmur of the green leaves. But gradually this sound seemed alien to her. She began to feel her own physical body far from her, a distant load she bore. She felt that she was in some high region where she saw in a trance the luminous spirit of Satyavan being followed by the great dark figure, Death.

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She felt that the earth stood aloof and yet near her. She still felt close to its sweetness, greenness and delight, the brilliance of the vivid colours, the golden sunlight, the blue skies and the soft warm soil. But now her body seemed to be slowing her down. She felt that the two spirits walking in front of her were speeding along a grander road beyond some intangible boundary. Death now looked mightier and more distant as he advanced in these spaces and she feared that she might lose contact with Satyavan’s soul. Death and he were moving ahead swiftly as if pulled away from the hold of earth. She feared she might lose them.

Alarmed, she suddenly soared out of her body and rushed towards Satyavan. She was now like a she‐eagle whose little ones are threatened by danger. Her spirit surged up in terror and as a divine fury through the rocky expanses in that space against the ascending god of Death and his weapon of death. She rose like a mass of golden fire on the wings of power and grief. Thus she crossed the borders of this tangible world on the flaming wings of her spirit. Her mortal parts dropped from her like so many sheaths discarded, and she entered her subtle body. This resulted in a momentary loss of consciousness; she forgot the sun, earth and the world; she was no more conscious of thought, time or death. She was not aware even of her own self. She forgot who she was.

In this desperate situation what sustained Savitri and gave her strength to push ahead was her supreme identity with Satyavan, the sovereign of her life who is like her heartbeat. He was herself, she felt, yet different, a veritable treasure clasped by her. All that remained with her in this collapsing of space was this treasure. Savitri’s consciousness now surged around Satyavan, her spirit fulfilled in his spirit as though the immortal moment of love had been found.

This enabled her to come out of the trance and she became once more aware of Time and began to notice the world around her. Satyavan, Death and she herself, she felt, were moving as though in her own soul‐space. She saw vague memories passing before her as scenes towards their goal. This was a totally new experience for her, of a world where there were no soul entities but only living moods.

She saw around her a strange, hushed, weird country. Even the skies above had a strange look about them. The poet describes this unearthly scene in the following words: Weird were the grasses, weird the treeless plains; Weird ran the road which like fear hastening Towards that of which it has most terror, passed Phantasmal between pillared conscious rocks Sombre and high, gates brooding, whose stone thoughts Lost their huge sense beyond in giant night.

(Pg 579 – 580)

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It would seem as though the God of Death was leading Savitri through this weird place to create fear in her. The rocky terrain, the dismal, high and brooding gates led them on to an abysmal night beyond them. The night to which these gates led them was the night of the Inconscient, waiting for them like the fearsome jaws of an ogre on a haunted path.

As they reached the chill and scorched boundary, the luminous form of Satyavan stood arrested for a while and cast a backward glance at Savitri with his wonderful eyes. It would seem that they had reached a point beyond which mortals like Savitri would have no access.

Death made this clear and cried out to Savitri in a forbidding voice.

Death: “O mortal, return to your transient world which abides in time. Do not hope to trespass into the homeland of Death. You cannot breathe and be alive in that land. The passion that drives you is a mind‐born strength and it cannot lift you beyond the earth and free you from your material cage. It will not be able to sustain you in this region of Nought and support you through the pathless infinite. It is best for man to live within human limits. Do not trust the misleading voices that make you imagine that you are immortal. That is just an unreal dream built on a floating ground. Do not be persuaded by these false gods to trespass into a world where you will perish like an alien unsubstantial thought. Know the limits, within which it is safe for you to hope and dream. Do not try to achieve what is beyond human powers.

Man is an ignorant creature and his steps are stumbling even within the brief boundaries within which it is safe for him to operate. But he fancies himself the world’s king; it is his mind that keeps tormenting his nature. Man can only dream of divinity in his sleep. When he wakes up from this sleep, he starts trembling realising how weak and fragile he is in the immensity of this space. Do not expect to bind the eternal gods with the force of your love, which is so transient and brittle.”

Savitri refused to give an answer. She shed the trappings of mortality and stood up in the primal force of her soul. Fixed destiny and rigidity of old laws did not daunt her. Alone like a statue on a pedestal in that vast silence, she rose like a column of flame and light against the mute abysses of the Inconscient massed against her.

http://nextfuture.sriaurobindosociety.org.in/nov04/nfnov04_savitri.htm

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20. Book Nine, Canto Two: The Journey in Eternal Night and the Voice of the Darkness

We saw the bright phantom‐like figure of Satyavan, followed by the God of Death just cross the boundary that separates the world of death from the world of the living at the end of Canto One of Book Nine. Death has sternly cautioned Savitri not to try to follow them and trespass into the world of death lest she “perish like a helpless thought.” But Savitri is equally determined. She drops her mantle of mortality and rises like “a columned shaft of fire and light” into this forbidden land. This takes us to Canto Two of Book Nine.

Book Nine, Canto Two: The Journey in Eternal Night and the Voice of the Darkness The first 140 lines of this canto create the atmosphere of the scene through which the trio is now passing. The impression of fear and oppression which was so far created mainly by the words and the tone of Death is now exuded by the surroundings through which they are now passing. The scene is described as it appeared to Savitri.

They all stood there in silence staring into the chill and bleak edge of Night and felt as though the world was doomed to die. Even the sky looked menacing. They stood there like thoughts lost on the brink of nothingness and despair; behind them was the pale lifeless gaze of the evening. The darkness ahead of them looked as if it was hungry for Savitri’s soul and was eager to swallow it. But Savitri’s spirit continued to burn bright like a flame, a lambent glow against the dark breast of the night. It was finally Savitri who first defiantly pushed ahead into this darkness and emptiness of the eternal Night. The immortal spirit in her faced up to the menace represented by the “ruthless eyeless waste”. Now the poet describes the new kind of gait that Savitri had to learn to be able to move about in this region. Her movement now was a combination of “a swimming action” and “a drifting movement”. Her movement resembled the movement of figures we see when we close our eyelids.

Here the divisions of Time also begin to collapse, the past, present and future all sink into a blur of nothingness. Satyavan, Death and Savitri now appeared to be moving and yet to be still, passing and yet not advancing. What they see around them are more like mute forms in a framed picture than living forms in a real world.

Savitri now found herself surrounded by a huge pitiless void breathing unbounded terror. It looked hungry for her and Savitri felt as though the cave‐like, monstrous throat of this Void wanted to swallow her. She felt the oppression of a fierce spiritual agony. The poet gives an apt analogy to give a vivid idea of the dread that she was made to live through. She was made to feel like a pathetic bullock tied to a tree in a forest by the hunters hoping to lure a tiger. The

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night has already begun to crawl in and a ferocious tiger or some predator is bound to make its appearance any moment. The night is falling thick, the trees around it are no more than blotted shades, and the last glimmer of light is fading away. This was how Savitri was made to feel.

Death sought to smother Savitri in a blanket of fear of a similar magnitude.

The poet describes the suffocating effect of this psychological terror in these words: In the smothering stress of this stupendous Nought Mind could not think, breath could not breathe, the soul Could not remember or feel itself; it seemed A hollow gulf of sterile emptiness, A zero oblivious of the sum it closed, An abnegation of the Maker's joy Saved by no wide repose, no depth of peace.

On all that claims here to be Truth and God And conscious self and the revealing Word And the creative rapture of the Mind And Love and Knowledge and heart's delight, there fell The immense refusal of the eternal No. Page 583 (lines 55 – 66)

Thought disintegrates in such an environment of terror. The mind is unable to think, even breath finds it hard to breathe and the soul is almost lost in self‐oblivion. All looks like a vacant gulf of barren emptiness. The joy of the world‐creator is blotted out. There is no repose of peace anywhere. An immense refusal and the eternal ‘No’ falls upon everything here, on all that claimed to be Truth and God. Presently Savitri disappears completely into the shadows of this world of darkness like a golden lamp disappearing in a gloom. She was now thrown into one of the recesses of this Void where she sees no path, no goal; she was driven into some great, black, unknowable Waste and was tossed about by the whirling winds. She was all alone in this terrible hour. She could not see any more the vague figure of the God of Death or the luminous figure of Satyavan. While her senses failed, her spirit kept its grip and held on to the objects it loved. The senses can get hold of things only from the outside and lose their hold on them often but the spirit’s hold is stronger.

The poet then gives an exquisite example of what it means to say, that Savitri’s spirit held on to Satyavan while her senses lost their contact with him. When Savitri and Satyavan lived together on earth, there was such a close spiritual identity between them that she often used to feel Satyavan entering her spirit inwardly as one would explore a glade, and when this happened,

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she would gladly reveal her secrets to his search and joy. Wherever Satyavan’s feet advanced in this manner into her spirit, it rushed to welcome him and embrace him.

But now Savitri finds herself in a bottomless gulf, and she found herself lonely, cast out even from her own being. She travelled for a long time in this darkness, empty and drear, and felt as though she was walking on the corpse of life with the light of the soul put out. This torture continued for a long time but through it all, Savitri lived on unconquered.

At last, a faint gleam appeared in this boundless darkness like memory returning to dead spirits. This gleam showed how dreadful the night was; it was like a serpent with a mystic glow on its black hoods. And this serpent was sliding away as though it felt threatened by the gleam of light and the hope that was advancing. Night felt that her dark reign was under attack from this bright gleam. She was unwilling to yield its sovereignty because she felt that it alone was true. She tried to smother that frail ray of light because she knew how dangerous it was for her. She raised her huge head of Nothingness and tried to swallow all that she saw around her.

She saw herself as the dark in its absolute form.

And still the gleam of light prevailed against the monstrous attack and it grew in strength.

Savitri felt revived and woke up to her self. Her limbs had refused the cold embrace of death; her heartbeats triumphed over all the pain that was heaped on her and her soul persisted in claiming for its joy the soul of beloved Satyavan, although he was visible to her no more.

And then in that stillness she began to hear once more the footsteps of Death, and out of that darkness Satyavan appeared again in the form of a luminous shade. Then through that dead monstrous realm a sound pealed through like the sea roaring into the ears of a tired swimmer.

Death speaks out: Death: “O Savitri, what you see around you is the everlasting Night, the dark immensity of my kingdom. This holds the mystery of Nothingness in which ends the vanity of all the desires of life. You are but a transient bubble. Can’t you see that this is where you come from and that out of this nothingness you are made? How can you even think to continue to live and hope in this stark emptiness?”

Savitri refuses to answer. She rejects Death’s claim to truth and refuses even to pay any heed to him and to what he is saying. But still Death is relentless and continues to try to hold Savitri in his formidable gaze. He addresses her as follows: Death: “You have survived for now the impact of this eternal Void, but it shall never forgive you. It cannot forget the original violence done to it by whatever is responsible for engendering thought and bringing life and with it suffering in its immobile vastness. You have won this brief episode of victory; you have lived here for a while without Satyavan. No ancient goddess can do anything for you here except to enable you to live for a while until you are drawn into the eternal sleep in the silence of death.

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After all, you are a fragile human, mere clay fashioned into a thinking being; you have no defence against Time except your illusions. Man dreads the void around him, the void from which he has come and into which he is surely going to be dissolved. He has no help available from anywhere, so he turns to his own self and magnifies it and calls it God. He prays to the heavens to help him and fulfil his hopes and remove his suffering. With longing in his heart he looks up to the heavens for help, but these heavens are nothing but empty spaces, more unconscious than himself that do not have even the privilege of mind which he has. The heavens are empty except for their blue colour and this too is a visual error not a reality. He peoples these heavens with bright and merciful powers, his gods.”

The irony and sarcasm Death uses here are chilling as can be seen in the following passage: A fragile miracle of thinking clay, Armed with illusions walks the child of Time.

To fill the void around he feels and dreads, The void he came from and to which he goes, He magnifies his self and names it God. He calls the heavens to help his suffering hopes.

He sees above him with a longing heart Bare spaces more unconscious than himself That have not even his privilege of mind, And empty of all but their unreal blue, And peoples them with bright and merciful powers.

Pages: 586 – 587, (lines: 166 – 176)

“Man lives a precarious existence surrounded by threats of disaster from all sides – the sea roars around him, the earth quakes beneath him, fire at his door and death is ever on the prowl barking and pursuing him through the woods of life. But then he is nurtured by certain supernatural Powers which help him to hope and to yearn and dream of beauty and happiness, and so he offers his soul to these Powers.

The gods watch over the earth and guide its giant movements. But they have given man the burdensome mind. In his heart they have lit their fires of hope and have thus sown in him a perennial unrest and discontent. His mind is like a hunter on unknown tracks and discovers things which prove inconsequential in the long run. He builds philosophical thoughts in an attempt to unravel the mystery of his fate and learns to turn his laughter and tears into songs.

Man’s mortality is constantly vexed with dreams of immortality, his transience is teased by hopes of infinity; gods have given man hunger which no food can satisfy. He is indeed the dumb cattle driven by the gods. He is tied to the rope of his body, and for fodder they throw at him grief, hope and joy, and they have enclosed his pasture ground with the fence of ignorance. The gods have been playing a cruel game with man. They have given him courage

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and a faith in himself but all this ends in death; they have given him a wisdom which is mocked by the darkness around him, they have traced for him a journey with no prospect of a destination. Therefore man toils in an uncertain world, besieged by pain with occasional intervals intended to make him feel secure; he is constantly tormented like a beast by endless desire and he finds himself bound helplessly to the chariot of these dreadful gods.

But in spite of all this, if you can still entertain hope and love, you should return to the shell of your body which is tied to the earth by the gods. You can live there with whatever is left of love in your heart. Do not hope to get back Satyavan for yourself. Yet, since you have shown uncommon courage and strength in following me so far, you deserve to be richly rewarded. I can bestow upon you gifts which can soothe your wounds. These gifts are like a bargain which transient beings make with fate. They are like the wayside sweetness which those who belong to this earth would gladly pluck. If you like, I can give you many such gifts. Choose these gifts as your prize, although they may all prove deceptive.”

Then Savitri responded to Death in these words. Note that this is the first time that Savitri condescends to speak to Death. Her words come out from some deep regions of her heart.

Savitri: “O Death, I refuse to submit to you. You are only a black lie, a huge mask, worn by the Darkness to destroy the courage of the human soul. You are unreal although you appear to be the end of all things here. You are no more than a grim jest played with the immortal spirit. I live and move in full consciousness of my immortality. I am not standing at your gate as a petitioner; I am here as a conquering spirit conscious of my force. I have already survived, as you see, the suffocation of your darkness.

My grief for what has happened to Satyavan has not rendered me weak in my mind. My unshed tears have become pearls of strength. I have transformed the brittle ill‐formed substance of my nature into my soul which has become unassailable like a statue. My spirit shall prove itself strong and tenacious in the combat of the gods against the Forces of denial and prevail against them. I am not one of those miserable people who rush to gather with eager hands the petty and contemptuous concessions thrown at the weak in the mire caused by the trampling feet of the milling crowd.

I labour here like the battling gods, and like them, I seek to impose on the slow and unwilling cycles of time the flaming will of the Supreme. The gods try to establish the law of a higher consciousness in the field of Matter and make the earth’s Inconscient force respond to the wish of the soul. First, I demand whatever Satyavan must have wanted during his childhood to make his life beautiful but could not get. Give that if you are so keen on giving, or refuse, if you can refuse.”

Before we proceed with the rest of Canto Two of Book Nine, this probably may be a good point to pause and review briefly the beginning of this crucial point in the encounter between Savitri

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and Death. What appears very striking at the beginning of this encounter is the unperturbed calm in Savitri and her supreme confidence in herself. Most people are terribly afraid of death because they are totally ignorant of what it is, and one fears the unknown. Right from the beginning, Savitri shows no sign of fear. She knows what Death is. She calls him “Black lie of night to the cowed soul of man”. As we saw in Canto One of Book Nine, she does not even take note of his presence when he first arrives on the scene. Death asks her to give up her hold on Satyavan’s soul so that he can take it away with him; it would seem as though Savitri’s love had the first claim on Satyavan’s soul, and then came Death. Nothing in the path traced by Death can stop Savitri and prevent her from following him.

Death tries to strike terror in Savitri and to convince her that he is vast and infinite while Savitri herself is no more than “an insect crawling among other ephemeral insects on a speck of surface mud and water which has managed to form itself amid the appalling immensities of the physical universe."[1] He tries to create this impression on her by showing to her the enormous Void which is his realm. Any mortal would feel totally helpless and lost in this eternity of the Inconscient. We have already considered the impact of lines like these and the sense of terror they succeed in conveying: A curtain of impenetrable dread, The darkness hung around her cage of sense As, when the trees have turned to blotted shades And the last friendly glimmer fades away, Around a bullock in the forest tied By hunters closes in no empty night.

Page 583 (lines 44 – 49)

But Savitri is not cowed down. Instead, as we have seen, she calls Death a “black lie of the night”, a “grim jest played with the immortal spirit” and declares that “Conscious of immortality I walk.” What makes a human being great is his spirit, which is a spark of the Divine, and shares with the Divine its omnipresence, omniscience and omnipotence. It is deathless as well. Without the soul, man is just a speck of dust in the infinity of space.

We have already marked the irony and sarcasm which Death uses so effectively as when he ridicules man as “a fragile miracle of thinking clay”.

When Death offers Savitri gifts to soothe her wounded life, Savitri tells him that she is no petitioner at his doors. She is not looking for gifts, transient things that amuse tired human hearts for a while. She asks for Satyavan all that he wanted but was unable to get in his childhood. Even there she does not care whether he can give these gifts or not, for she says,

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“Give, if you must, or, if thou can, refuse,” almost implying that these things are governed by a greater law to which Death himself is subject.

At this stage I shall make just one more comment. Notice what Savitri pursues with such great courage, without caring one bit for her safety and even survival, is Satyavan. And what gives her the strength to face the terror imposed on her by Death is her love for Satyavan. There are moments during her journey when she is totally lost, when she can neither see Death nor Satyavan around her; during these perilous stages it is her spirit’s hold on Satyavan that helps her to find her way through all those difficult tracks. The needle of the compass of her soul is forever directed towards Satyavan. At one stage the poet makes an explicit comment on this.

He says the hold of the senses on things is never as strong and lasting as the hold of the spirit.

Savitri is the story of the love between Savitri and Satyavan. The original legend in Mahabharata has been traditionally regarded as the story glorifying conjugal love, in particular, the wife’s devotion and loyalty to her husband (pativrata mahaatmya). That is what the average Indian mind has seen in the story. As Sri Aurobindo sees it, it is the story of a perfect and fulfilled love, and the basis of such love can only be spiritual.

[1] Sri Aurobindo: The Life Divine, pg. 43 http://nextfuture.sriaurobindosociety.org.in/dec04/nfdec04_savitri.htm

Death is unnerved in some measure by what Savitri has shown of her inner strength and determination. He now tries another strategy; he tries to get rid of her by offering some boons to her – “gifts to soothe a wounded life” as he puts it. Savitri replies, not in the tone of a suppliant, but almost defiantly: “I demand whatever Satyavan desired and had not for his beautiful life. Give if you must, or if you can, refuse.” Savitri distances herself from what Death proposes to give her. Whether you give any of these gifts or not is up to you, that is what she is implying.

Death bows his head in scornful cold assent. In his disastrous voice he replies: “When he lived on earth, what Satyavan had desired most was for his blind father to regain his lost kingdom and “power and friends and greatness lost and royal trappings for his peaceful declining days of old age”. I also restore to Satyavan’s father’s eyes “the sensuous solace of light”. But I do not know how much he would value them now because adversity has given him wisdom and blindness has enabled him to gain a deeper vision. Now at least, O mortal, go back from this world, which might prove perilous for you, to your small permitted sphere on earth.

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Hasten back lest you provoke the great laws that you have violated by your trespass into this world to slay and end your life.”

Savitri: “O Death, World‐Spirit. I was born your equal in spirit. My will too is a law, and I have the strength of a god. There is also something immortal behind my mortal appearance. I do not tremble before the immobile gaze of the stone eyes of Law and Fate. My soul has enough strength to defy them. Release Satyavan from your shadows. I need him on earth in the sweet transience of his human limbs so that we can together achieve our great purpose, which is to bear with him the ancient Mother’s load of ignorance and suffering and take earth on a path which leads to God. If not, I shall follow him into the eternal spaces and I am prepared to face whatever night or stupendous dawns we might have to encounter in the untrodden Beyond.

No matter where you take his soul, I will follow him.”

But Death remained unappeased and his opposition to her resolve became stronger. For him all created things like human lives were insignificant. He stood for the unbending and unchanging laws of Nature, exactly that which was Savitri’s intention to break. And so his voice rose in anger and scorn like the voice of a titanic gale lashing at a swimmer in the sea remembering all the joys its waves have drowned. So from the darkness of the sovereign night an almighty cry arose challenging Savitri.

Death: “Do you have god‐wings or feet that can tread my stars? The orbits of this universe were coiled before you were born. I, Death, created them out of my void. All things I have built in them and I destroy them as I please. You are caught in a net I have cast and each joy is a mesh in this net. Life is a hunger that devours everything. Savitri, you are no more than a wandering breath of mine; you are made to be transient and will live at my pleasure. Run with whatever poor gifts you can take with you, otherwise my pangs will begin to torment you. You are a blind slave of my deaf force; I compel you to sin so that I may punish you, to desire so that I may afflict you with despair and grief. You will finally come to me at last bleeding, recognising my greatness and your nothingness. Do not try to trespass into places forbidden to mortals and meant for only those who obey my law. Your tread may awake the sleeping furies who avenge every fulfilled desire. You may start in the skies under which you hope to live the lightening of the Unknown , and then, terrified, alone, sobbing and hunted by the hounds of heaven, you will start running through the long torture of the centuries. You will be a wounded and forsaken soul and you will not be able to appease these furies which even hell cannot satisfy nor heaven’s mercy assuage (temper down). I shall free you from the grip of this dark fate, Clutching to your heart the scanty dole fate has meted out, depart in peace, even though you do not deserve even this peace.”

Thus Death is trying to instil into Savitri a dread, the fear of the unknown. The bottom line for him is that Savitri should leave. She has no business in this forbidden kingdom of death. But Savitri is made of a different mettle. So she responds to Death meeting scorn with scorn.

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Savitri: “Who is this God imagined by your dark mind? He seems to be creating contemptuously all these despicable worlds you have been describing. It would look as though your God made these brilliant stars just to satisfy your vanity. My God is different. He is will and triumphs in his paths no matter what the hurdles. He is love and sweetly suffers all. To such a God I have offered my hope as sacrifice and my aspirations as my sacrament. My God is the Wonderful, the swift, the charioteer. Who shall prohibit or restrict his course when he is the charioteer? He travels on the million roads of life; his steps are used to walking in the light of heaven and can tread without pain the sword‐paved courts of hell as well. He even descends into them to bring them some thing of the eternal joy. Love’s golden wings have power to fan your Void. The eyes of love gaze star‐like through death’s night and the feet of love can walk naked on the hardest of worlds. He labours in the depths and also on the heights, and he shall remake your universe, O Death.”

After Savitri stopped speaking, there was silence for a while until once again Death confronted Savitri with the following words: Death: “What is this hope that is driving you? What do you aspire to achieve? What you call your hope is only your body’s enticement for its bliss. You hope to please for a few years your faltering senses with the honey of physical longings, seeking to embrace with the heart’s fire in a vain attempt at oneness with the brilliant idol of a fugitive hour. And you, yourself, what are you, what is it you call your soul? It is just a glorious dream made of brief emotions and glittering thoughts, a thin dance of fireflies spreading through the night, a sparkling ferment in life’s sunlit mire?

Does your heart wish to claim immortality? You have been loudly protesting to the eternal witnesses that Satyavan and you are eternal powers and that you will last! Only Death lasts and the Inconscient Void. I, Death, am the only eternal and I last. I am the shapeless and formidable Vast, and I am the emptiness that men call space, I am timeless Nothingness carrying all. I am the illimitable, the mute Alone. I, Death, am He, there is no other God. I have made this world out of my Inconscient Force. Nature is my Force and it creates and slays the hearts that hope and limbs that long to live longer. I have made man Nature’s instrument and slave; I have made his body my banquet and his life my food. Man has no one he can turn to but Death. He comes to me at the end of it all for rest and peace. I, Death, am the sole refuge of your soul.

The Gods that men pray to for help cannot really help him because they are my imaginations and my mood’s reflected in him by the power of my imagination. That which you see as your immortal God is a shadowy icon of my infinite, is Death dreaming of eternity in you. I am the Immobile in which all things move, the vast emptiness in which they cease. I have no body and no tongue to speak. The human eye cannot see me, nor the ear hear me. Because your thought gave a form to my emptiness, and you have called me to wrestle with your soul, I have

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assumed a face, a form, a voice. But if there is a Being witnessing all this, how would he help you in fulfilling your desire? Aloof from everything, he would watch, calm and totally indifferent to your cry for help. His is a being pure and motionless, uninvolved with anything.

That one lives for ever. There is no Satyavan there, nor Savitri claims there for her brief life her bribe of joy. Love never can come there with tears in his eyes. Neither Time is there, nor Space.

That Reality wears no face and has no name. It has no heart that throbs. It has no one else to share its joys with. It is delight alone for all time. If you desire immortality, then learn to be sufficient unto yourself. Live by yourself. Forget the man you love. Wait in that grand aloofness until my death comes to you to liberate you from life. Then you will rise to your unmoved source.”

Savitri responded calmly to the God of Death in these words: Savitri: “O Death, you reason. I reason not. Your reason scrutinizes things and breaks them in the process but it cannot rebuild them or even when it does try to build, it suspects her work. I am, I love, I see, I act, I will.”

Savitri is telling Death that there are many things about our life which reason cannot figure out. Reason cannot repudiate, nor explain the fact that Savitri exists, that she is no figment of anybody’s imagination. In the same manner love is a domain totally beyond the comprehension of reason. All that reason can see about love is that it is another name for the body’s craving for physical bliss. Reason has no clue to love. Then Savitri adds also that she acts and she wills. She has the capacity to change the present and bring about another future. All these seem to be beyond the purview of reason. Life has come out of the chaos of the inconscience. No reason could have foreseen this, nor can it explain it away. Love and hope are the verities of life which are beyond reason’s comprehension.

Death answered back in a resounding cry.

Death: “Know also. And if you know (how transient this show around you is, and in which you are participating), you shall cease to love and cease to will and hope. And delivered from your heart, you will rest for ever and be still, recognising the impermanence of things.”

And Savitri replied to Death on behalf of man.

Savitri: “Only when I have loved enough then truly shall I know. Love in me knows the truth which all the changing appearances hide. I know that knowledge is a vast embrace. I know that everything is myself. In every heart is hidden the One in myriad forms. I know the calm Transcendent who bears this world. I also know him as the veiled inhabitant of this visible world. I sense his secret act, His intimate fire. I hear the murmur of His cosmic voice. I know I have come as a wave from God. All the great truths have lived in me since my birth. The one who loves in us, the soul, the spark of the Divine, has come down into this world in a form that

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is veiled by death. Thus was man born among the huge stars endowed with a mind and heart to conquer you, O Death.”

Savitri makes clear her intentions in following Death into his kingdom. She hopes to conquer Death. There is something immortal in man, the divine spark he essentially is, his soul. But it is veiled here by Death. Whatever the necessity of death at one time, man’s destiny is not to remain forever its prey.

It must be noticed that all the attempts made by Death to scare Savitri through his physical immensity and then by putting psychological pressure on her have failed. Not only has she fearlessly lived through all these experiences, she seems to have emerged stronger and more determined. She is quite certain of one great truth. The unborn and the undying reality about man is his soul. This world in which he takes birth and the elements which have given him his body, vital energies and his mind are also a becoming of the Divine. Therefore there is no place for death in such a world.

Death is baffled by Savitri. He knows that his eternal will is ruthless and he is sure of his empire and confident of his might. And so whatever he has heard so far from Savitri are nothing but violent words from a helpless being, from a victim he has firmly under control. All that Savitri has been saying is so disdainful to his hears that for a while he just decides to ignore her and says nothing. He stood there in silence, wrapped in darkness, like a figure motionless, a shadow vague, surrounded by the terrors he can use against all his adversaries. He looked like Rudra as his sombre face appeared among the clouds, the crown of the night’s darkness appeared like his matted hair, and on his forehead were the ashes of the pyre.

Once more Savitri felt like a wanderer in the unending Night facing the forbidding eyes of Death. She kept travelling through the vasts which looked hopeless. Around her rolled the shuddering wastes of gloom; its emptiness threatened to swallow her. This was the kingdom of death which was hostile to her thought, her life and her love. Through the long fading night, gliding half‐seen on their unearthly path, phantasmal in the dimness moved the three, Death, Satyavan’s spirit and Savitri. But already the initiative seems to have come to Savitri and she seems to be guiding the group through this night.

This brings us to the end of Book Nine. We have seen in the Book the first round of the confrontation between Savitri and Death, and, on the whole, Savitri seems to have held her ground. Her resolve to retrieve Satyavan from the grip of Death has become stronger. No terror death subjects her to can daunt her spirit. In fact, as the poet has subtly suggested in the line “Through the long fading night by her compelled,” the initiative seems to have now come into the hands of Savitri. http://nextfuture.sriaurobindosociety.org.in/jan05/nfjan05_savitri.htm

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21. Book Ten Canto One

We concluded our survey of Book Nine of Savitri in the preceding instalment. If you take a look a the Contents of Part Three of this epic poem, you will notice that the journey which begins with Death leading Satyavan’s soul and Savitri through the realm of the Eternal Night proceeds then through two realms of twilight – the twilight of the Ideal and of the Earthly Real before it arrives and concludes in the Eternal day of Savitri’s victory over death. When Death realises that Savitri’s spirit is dauntless and cannot be subdued through terror, psychological and physical, he changes his strategy and tries to convince her that the ideals she cherishes in her heart are empty of any real significance and hardly worth realising. You will see in the rest of this interchange between Savitri and Death, the latter changing his philosophical position, his one aim being to convince Savitri that nothing is to be gained by following Satyavan’s soul. But Savitri is relentless in her pursuit and as their interchange proceeds Death realises the truth behind Savitri’s position. But that is jumping ahead in our story.

Section 1 In this canto, (Canto One of Book Ten) we have a description of the realm through which the trio is now travelling. It was still dark all around them, which made everything look dreadful and desolate. It looked as if there was not going to be any change in this scene. Savitri felt as though she was living through a black dream where everything was emptiness, and she was walking towards nowhere in this land of emptiness. They seemed to be drifting forever without aim or goal. Gloom led to worse gloom, death to an emptier death, in some positive Non‐ being’s purposeless Vast, through formless wastes, dumb and unknowable. The poet makes here the emptiness and the sense of purposelessness almost palpable.

Through the despairing darkness a beam of suffering light totally now looking futile in this formless and dumb Vast dogged their steps. Even as this light grew it seemed almost unreal and out of place there, and like a pale ghost it haunted this chill, stupendous realm of the Nihil.

Why was Savitri being subjected to all this suffering? It was as though she was required to atone for her presumption to exist and think in this Nihil’s realm. She must absolve now with endless pangs of suffering her deep original sin. And what was her original sin? – the will to be, and the spiritual pride she exhibited. What did death see as an “exhibition of pride” in her?

How could she, who was made of dust, aspire to equal heaven and claim to be immortal and divine? Shouldn’t she realise that she was no more than a worm writhing in the mud, condemned to be ephemeral forever. How then could she refuse to remain ephemeral, just a casual dream of nature and claim to be a spark of the divine insisting on her right to be immortal and divine?

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This most she must absolve with endless pangs, Her deep original sin, the will to be And the sin last, greatest, the spiritual pride, That, made of dust, equalled itself with heaven, Its scorn of the worm writhing in the mud, Condemned ephemeral, born from Nature's dream, Refusal of the transient creature's role, The claim to be a living fire of God, The will to be immortal and divine.

Lines: 19 – 27 (page 599)

Savitri atoned in that heavy and empty darkness for all that has happened since the first act from which sprang the error of consciousness in time, the tearing of the Inconscient’s seal of sleep. This was the original and unpardonable revolt that broke the peace and silence of the Nothingness. In the beginning all that existed was Nothingness before an apparent universe appeared in the vanity of imagined space, and life arose in it nursing grief and pain. A great Negation was the face of the Real and it prohibited even the process of Time as something vain. This Nothingness will be the one thing that will last when there will be no world, no creature, and when the intrusion of Time would have been blotted out. This Nothingness will then be at peace without any form and any thought. Savitri was accursed in her godhead source and was condemned to live forever empty of bliss. Her spirit was held guilty of coming into existence and it wandered around moving in this eternal Night.

The poet now intervenes and assures us that Maya, this outward appearance of emptiness and darkness is only a veil on the face of the Absolute. A great occult Truth has made this vast world. The Eternal’s wisdom and self‐knowledge act even in the ignorant mind and in all the movements of the body. What looks like the Inconscient is in fact the sleep of the Superconscient; it is as if the Superconscient has fallen into a coma. An intelligence, too vast for our present understanding, has created this profoundly paradoxical universe. In all the forms of nature, the Spirit is hidden; although unseen it throws out an energy and works miraculously like a machine (whose source of power we do not see).

All here is a mystery woven out of contraries; darkness is, in fact, Light self‐hidden, and suffering is only a tragic mask of some secret rapture, and death itself is an instrument of perpetual life. Then the poet presents to us this altogether different perspective on death, not the usual one as the denial of life.

Although Death walks beside us on Life's road, A dim bystander at the body's start And a last judgment on man's futile works,

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Other is the riddle of its ambiguous face: Death is a stair, a door, a stumbling stride The soul must take to cross from birth to birth, A grey defeat pregnant with victory, A whip to lash us towards our deathless state.

Lines: 61‐ 68 (pages: 600‐601)

Death is our companion and walks alongside of us throughout our life. At the beginning of the bodily life, it is there as an unnoticed spectator, and at the end of this bodily life it comes like a judgement on man’s futile efforts all through life. On its ambiguous face there is a riddle writ large. Death is in fact like a stair or a door; it is a stumble we must take to cross from one birth to the next, from one life to the next. It may look like a defeat since it ends one life but it also heralds a victory because one who dies is certain to be reborn. It is like a painful lash of a whip which constantly keeps reminding us of the deathless state which is our destiny. Stung by death, man strives to transcends death.

The Inconscient world is but a self‐projection of the spirit. What looks like eternal Night is no more than the shadow of Eternal Day. Night is neither our beginning nor our end. She is only the dark Mother in whose womb we hide ourselves so that we remain safe until we are ready to face world‐pain. We come to this dark Mother from a supernal Light, and by that light we live and ultimately we go to it as our destination.

One important aspect of Sri Aurobindo’s vision is that he notices the darkness around as much as any one else but he sees beyond it and finds a reason even for the interim darkness. This spirit of hope and optimism keeps throbbing throughout Savitri and that is one of the reasons why we always feel refreshed and at peace when we read a passage or two from this great epic poem.

We now return to our story. Here in this land of darkness through which Savitri is now moving, in the heart of this seemingly everlasting Nothingness, Light conquered now as the feeble beam (mentioned earlier in lines 9 through 14 of this canto) infiltrated into the blind and deaf mass of darkness. Almost the scene changed into a glimmering sight. A golden fire came in and burned the heart of this Darkness. Her mindlessness began to dream. The Inconscient began to grow conscious, even this Night seems to have feelings and thoughts. The intolerant Darkness paled and began to withdraw and only a few remnants of it stained the bright light. Then on the distant horizon, the great dragon body of the Inconscient suddenly loomed. This is the adversary of the slow struggling dawn. The dragon of the Inconscient keeps trying to defend itself. This dragon was seen fleeing down a grey slope of Time.

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Section 2 The scene has entirely changed now. There was now what resembled a morning twilight of the gods when the forms of the gods arise from sleep looking miraculous, as if god’s long nights are justified by the brilliance of the dawns that follow them. There breaks out a passion and splendour of new birth, and multi‐coloured visions appear before the eyes. The dim‐eyed space wakes up to a heavenly chanting, and the dreaming deities fashion in their thoughts ideal worlds. These are like concrete shapes taken by desire that were once housed in some deep heart. (This creation itself is believed to be a manifestation of the desire that arose in the heart of the Transcendent Supreme.)

Now the heaviness of the blind darkness had lifted and the oppressive sorrow of the Night was no more. Savitri slipped into a happy, misty twilit world where all seemed to be running after light and joy and love. This too was a strange world in which one felt as though things anticipated to bring delight and rapture to one’s heart were moving closer to one all the time and yet they always remained beyond one’s reach. Yet they brought one a strange feeling of ecstasy. There was a pearly indistinctness all around one and it looked as though this world could not suffer too much light. The predominant note of this realm was vagueness or indistinctness which the poet describes in these words: Vague fields were there, vague pastures gleamed, vague trees, Vague scenes dim‐hearted in a drifting haze; Vague cattle white roamed glimmering through the mist; Vague spirits wandered with a bodiless cry, Vague melodies touched the soul and fled pursued Into harmonious distances unseized; Forms subtly elusive and half‐luminous powers Wishing no goal for their unearthly course Strayed happily through vague ideal lands, Or floated without footing or their walk Left steps of reverie on sweet memory's ground; Or they paced to the mighty measure of their thoughts Led by a low far chanting of the gods.

Lines: 117 – 129 (page 602)

These fugitive beings, these elusive shapes were all that met the eye and delighted the soul and these were the inhabitants of this world.

Subtle, half‐luminous, elusive forms and powers wandered happily though these vague ideal lands; they floated or walked as in a reverie; they seemed to be pacing to the great rhythms of their thoughts, led by a low and distant intoning of the gods.

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A wave of shining wings crossed the far sky like pale imaginations. Their indistinct lowings were like the disturbing voices of desire. It was as though one heard the brilliant herds of the Sun‐ god hidden in mist and moving towards the sun.

But nothing there was fixed or stayed for long. No embodiment could linger there, no mortal feet could rest upon that soil. In that world neither joy nor beauty could stay for long in one place since they kept fleeing all the time. And yet since the same glad note was repeated often, it gave the feeling of an enduring world. There was a strange consistency of shapes and of thoughts that passed by, and all renewed its charm alluring the expectant heart like music that one always waits to hear, like the recurrence of a haunting rhyme. One touched always things one could never seize. It was as though one was in a world skirting an invisible divine world.

There showered upon the floating atmosphere colours and lights that made this world look like a magical heaven and each cry that fell on the ear there was the voice of an unrealised bliss.

One felt there an eluding presence of unearthly beauty and ungrasped delight whose thrill, however brief and vague, seemed much more sweet than any rapture known to us either on earth or heaven. In this twilight world all is shadowy, nothing is clearly outlined – like figures dancing on a sheet of fire or wonderful forms in a hued blur or fleeting landscapes appearing as paintings on silvery mists. All things in this fair world were strange in a heavenly way; and there was a fleeting gladness of untired delight.

Savitri journeyed past vanishing hedges and glimpses of fields rapidly passing amidst lanes that seemed to flee beneath her feet; she did not feel like ending this journey through this enchanting realm. She felt as though she was walking through mystic space – as though she was walking through clouds upon a mountain slope, hearing the sound of unseen streams. She felt the charm of formless touches upon herself and heard the sweet and melodious cry of the winds.

In this twilit world, everything was a sweet promise but nothing substantial was ever grasped.

Everything was tantalisingly sweet yet always fleeting, nothing was fixed and steady. One felt desires which did not hurt but these desires did not get any fulfilment either. Everything seemed to last forever but nothing stayed the same for long. The poet piles up details to create the feeling one would get if one stood in such a world watching it – everything enchantingly, seductively beautiful and soft and comforting, but nothing steady or firm.

In this beauty as of mind made visible, Dressed in its rays of wonder Satyavan Before her seemed the centre of its charm, Head of her loveliness of longing dreams And captain of the fancies of her soul.

Even the dreadful majesty of Death's face

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And its sombre sadness could not darken nor slay The intangible lustre of those fleeting skies.

Lines: 227 – 234

As Savitri watched this enchanting world, Satyavan dressed in wondrous rays appeared to be the very centre of this charm, the source of all the loveliness of her longing dreams and the captain of the fancies of her soul. Even the dreadful majesty of the face of Death and its sadness could not mar the lustre and enchantment of this world. In fact the sombre presence of Death rendered the beauty and happiness of this world look almost indispensable. It made the air of this place look brighter and happier.

Even Savitri looked intangible in this world. Partly conquered by the dream‐like happiness of this world, Savitri moved about in that world of enchantment for a while, but she was ever in possession of her soul and therefore did not feel lost in that world. Like an eternal star her spirit stood above everything, saw everything but lived aloof, focussed on its high task.

We have now the physical and psychological backdrop for the remaining three cantos of Book Ten which follow this canto. The argument which death can now present is that all ideals like the ones that Savitri is pursuing now, come from this insubstantial world and are therefore bound to remain vague, insubstantial and therefore unrealisable in practice.

http://nextfuture.sriaurobindosociety.org.in/feb05/nffeb05_savitri.htm

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22. Book Ten Canto Two ­ Beginning

Vague fields were there, vague pastures gleamed, vague trees, Vague scenes dim‐hearted in a drifting haze; Vague cattle white roamed glimmering through the mist; Vague spirits wandered with a bodiless cry, Vague melodies touched the soul and fled pursued Into harmonious distances unseized; Forms subtly elusive and half‐luminous powers Wishing no goal for their unearthly course Strayed happily through vague ideal lands, Or floated without footing or their walk Left steps of reverie on sweet memory's ground; Or they paced to the mighty measure of their thoughts Led by a low far chanting of the gods.

Lines: 117 – 129 (page 602)

This, as we saw in Canto One of Book Ten, is a description of the land of twilight Savitri is now passing through along with Death and the soul of Satyavan. This is indeed a land of vague enchantment, where nothing is substantial. So far, there has been silence all around them.

Then was heard the booming voice, calm but relentless, of the God of Death. There was something about that voice which seemed to abolish all hope and cancel all the golden truths one would like to believe in. It also made the delightful world through which they were passing appear frail and thin. Death spoke to Savitri thus: Death: “O prisoner of Nature, dreamer of visions, every thing around you is unsubstantial; you are yourself a creature of thought enjoying an insubstantial immortality in the realm of ideals.

Look at these fleeing light‐tasselled shapes; these are like unbodied images painted by man’s illusions on some ethereal raiment. These shapes figure a rapture of things that can never take birth on earth. Here hope builds on hope, cloud satisfies cloud, one phantom breeds another.

All this is sweet. This is the stuff from which your ideals are made. The real fabricator is thought and the motivation comes from the heart’s desire. The ideal has no place to dwell; it can dwell neither in heaven nor on earth. Drunk with the wine of his own fantasy, man has created all these images in a frenzied excitement of hope. The blue of the sky is a creation of the vision’s error, so is the arch of the rainbow. These are all the tricks caused by the error in the viewer’s vision. What you call the soul is indeed your mortal longing.

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This angel in your body you call love has wings which take the colour of your emotions and it is born in a ferment of your body. With the death of the body which houses it, love too must die.

It is a passion of your yearning cells; it is flesh that calls to flesh to serve its lust. It is your mind that seeks an answering mind and dreams awhile that it has found its mate. It is your life that seeks a human prop to sustain its weakness, lonely in the world. Love is a hunger that feeds on another life. It is a beast of prey that pauses in its prowl; it crouches under a bush in splendid flower to seize a heart and body for its food. And it is this beast which you call love and you dream that it is immortal and a god.

O human mind, love is at best an hour’s delight but you vainly torture it and try to stretch through the long void of your enter life and its passionless gulfs. You are trying to lend eternity to something as fleeting as love. You trick yourself into casting the fragile movements of your heart into the spirit’s pattern of immortality. All here is born out of Nothingness and is encircled by the emptiness of space as long as it lasts; it is held aloft for awhile by some Force we do not even understand and it relapses into the Nought from which it has come. Only the mute Alone can exist forever and in that Alone, there is no room for love.

You clothe love’s perishable mud with the ideal’s gorgeous and unfading robe which you have woven on the Immortal’s borrowed loom. The ideal always remains an ideal, it is never made real here. When you try to imprison it in a body, it doesn’t live any more; when shut in a body, it ceases to breathe. Intangible, remote, and forever pure, it is a sovereign of its own brilliant void. It descends reluctantly to earth and inhabits a white temple in man’s heart where it shines but is rejected by his life. Immutable, bodiless, beautiful, grand and dumb (in the sense of not having the capacity to propel itself into realisation), the ideal sits immobile on its shining throne; it receives man’s offerings and his prayer but is too dumb to act. It has no voice to respond to his call, no feet on which it can move, no hands to take his gifts. The ideal is a fanciful and unsubstantial statue of the bare idea; its light stirs man the thinker to create an earthly semblance of diviner things. Its coloured reflections fall upon man’s acts. His institutions are its tombs (cenotaph: a tomb or a monument erected in honour of a person whose remains are elsewhere); he signs his dead conventions with its name and clothes his virtues with the Ideal’s ethereal robes, hiding their littleness with the Divine Name. The ideal has for its face only an outline covered by a luminous vapour. Yet the bright pretence of ideals is insufficient to hide their impoverished and earthly make.

All we have is the earth and not a heavenly source for the ideals. If heavens there are, they are veiled in their own light. If a Truth eternal somewhere reigns unknown it burns in a tremendous void of God, for Truth shines far from the falsehoods of the world. How can the heavens come down to unhappy earth, or the Eternal lodge in drifting time? How do you expect the Ideal to come down and walk on the miserable earth, where life is only hard labour done hoping in vain for better things? Life is a child of Matter and is sustained by Matter, a low‐burning fire in the

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furnace of Nature, just a brief wave that rises only to break upon a shore in Time. It is a toilsome and laborious march with death as its only goal.

Even the Avatars have lived and died in vain (without being able to change life’s basic nature or quality); vain was the sage’s thought, the prophet’s voice; in vain is seen the shining Upward Way. Earth lies unchanged beneath the circling sun – she loves her fall and no omnipotence can erase her mortal imperfections, or force upon man’s crooked ignorance Heaven’s straight line, or colonise a world of death with gods.”

(This is quite a damning indictment on all ideals and idealists. The God of Death now speaks like a philosopher criticising idealism. As this encounter continues, you will see him changing his position, but whatever position he takes, from that position he mounts as ferocious an attack on the stand taken by Savitri. He combines effectively, common wisdom, philosophic acumen and sarcasm and tries to make an effective case against Savitri’s idealist position. And here he attacks the very heart of her enterprise, namely, love. Savitri has persisted in following him in the forbidden land of death in pursuit of the man she loves – Satyavan. The aim of her heroic effort is to get back Satyavan because she loves him. Death tries to impress on her how unsubstantial this ideal of love is like all ideals. Like all ideals it feeds on human fancy and never gets realised on earth. The world from which all ideals come is an unsubstantial world built by man’s thought which project human desires into this world. Since these have no contact with the earth, the ideals can live only in their ethereal world. Just as there is no physical reality to the blue of the sky, nor to the arch of the rainbow, so also there is no reality to any of the ideals. The Ideals are mute, lame and inert; they have no will in them to propel themselves into realisation. The institutions raised to house the ideals end as their cenotaphs, empty tombs, because the ideals never live on earth, never get realised on earth; they are too insubstantial to have bodies. Ideals cannot descend on earth which is such an unhappy place full of falsehood and corruption. Then he comes out with a severe indictment on all idealists which stings but it is not entirely untrue: The Avatars have lived and died in vain, Vain was the sage's thought, the prophet's voice; In vain is seen the shining upward Way. Earth lies unchanged beneath the circling sun; She loves her fall and no omnipotence Her mortal imperfections can erase, Force on man's crooked ignorance Heaven's straight line Or colonise a world of death with gods.

Lines: 101 – 109 (pages 609 – 610)

It can not be denied that in spite of the appearance on earth of prophets and men of God from time to time, great souls who appear to be Avatars, the load of suffering on the back of man is

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still crushing. Man is still being lashed by falsehood, ignorance, ego, and death. The shining upward way shown by these great souls remains untravelled after some time and earth lies unchanged. This is because we seem to love the fetters of ignorance which hold us down here.

The omnipotence, or the power that is needed to erase the imperfections of man has not yet descended on earth. The human nature continues to be crooked like the tail of a dog, it can not yet be transformed and made straight, therefore we have not been able to colonise this world of death with immortal gods, which, we believe, is our secret destiny.

The God of Death now mounts almost a frontal attack on Love, his bete noire. Love is his favourite target because for Savitri puts it at the apex of the spiritual values to be pursued in life. He does this by presenting a cameo portraying the transience of love among humans. Its sarcasm is biting and cynicism chilling. It reads like an outline of one of the modern novels. Let us listen to the God of Death.

Death: “O high priestess in the holy fancy’s shrine, who with a magic ritual in earth’s house worships the ideal of Love, what is this love your thought has deified? It is only a conscious yearning of your flesh, it is glorious burning of your nerves.

What is this love thy thought has deified, This sacred legend and immortal myth?

It is a conscious yearning of thy flesh, It is a glorious burning of thy nerves, A rose of dream‐splendour petalling thy mind, A great red rapture and torture of thy heart.

A sudden transfiguration of thy days, It passes and the world is as before.

Lines 113 – 120 P. 610)

However rosy love may appear, however magical its breath, it passes as suddenly as it comes, and then the world looks as dull as it always looked. But as long as it is alive, it gives a ravishing edge of sweetness and pain to life, a thrill in its yearning makes it seem divine, a golden bridge across the expanse of years, a cord tying you with eternity. And yet how brief and frail! How soon is spent this treasure wasted by the gods on man, this happy closeness of soul to soul, this honey of the body’s companionship, this heightened joy, this ecstasy in the veins, this strange illumination of the sense !

(Consider these lines which is a telling comment on normal human love and see how simply and yet cunningly they are crafted: If Satyavan had lived, love would have died; But Satyavan is dead and love shall live A little while in thy sad breast, until

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His face and body fade on memory's wall Where other bodies, other faces come.

Lines: 131 – 135 (page 610)

When the poet says, “But Satyavan is dead and love shall live”, we expect him to say something less biting about love than what he actually says. First he says it shall live only for a short while in her memory, until even this is obliterated by the tangible reality of other bodies, faces. In five short lines, the poet arrests the short‐lived character of all vital love in a memorable way.

Let us now continue with what the God of death has to say.)

Death: “When love breaks suddenly into his life, man steps first into a world of the sun. In his passion he feels the heavenly element hidden in himself. But only a small sunlit patch of earth has caught the marvel of heaven’s sunburst. The snake is there, and the worm in the heart of the rose. A word, a moment’s act, can slay this god of love. His immortality is indeed very precarious – depending entirely on uncertain circumstances This god of love has thousand ways to suffer and die; he cannot live by heavenly food alone; he can survive only on earthly sustenance.

You must realise that your passion is a sensual want refined, it is no more than a hunger of your body and heart. Your want can tire and cease, or turn elsewhere, or love meet a dire and pitiless end by bitter treason, or wrath inflicting cruel wounds and thus separate the lovers. Or, your unsatisfied will may depart to others when love’s joy lies stripped and slain. Then a dull indifference replaces the original fire of love or an endearing habit imitates love. An outward and uneasy union lasts, or the routine of a life’s compromise. Where once the seed of oneness had been cast, two strive, constant associates without joy, two egos straining in a single leash, two minds divided by their jarring thoughts, two spirits disjoined, forever separate. Thus is the Ideal falsified in man’s world. Trivial or sombre, disillusion comes; life’s harsh reality stares at the soul.

Death saves you from all this disenchantment and frustration and saves Satyavan too. He now is safe, delivered from himself. He travels to silence and felicity. Call him not back to the treacheries of earth and to the poor petty life of animal man. In my vast tranquil spaces let him sleep in harmony with the mighty hush of death, where love lies slumbering on the breast of peace.”

This indeed is a most impressive case that Death builds against love. You cannot hold him guilty of either misrepresentation or of indulging in too much exaggeration. Nor is he spreading a falsehood. What he says is in fact true of all vital love.

He catches the magical moment when two people fall in love and graphically describes the precariousness of the whole thing. There are a thousand ways in which love can die. As he says, Love “has a thousand ways to suffer and die.’ He correctly diagnoses the nature of this love. It

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is a “sensual want refined”, “a hunger of the body and the heart’. And like everything that originates in the vital, it is short‐lived. And when love dies, for whatever reason, “an endearing habit imitates love’, or “the routine of a life’s compromise”. Love is an attempt to find one’s identity in someone else; it is “an adventure of heavenly powers”. It fails because the vital is not the locus of true love; it can only reflect true love. True love belongs to the soul. When one fails to use the vital love as a ladder to reach its true source, and wallows in it, it gets spent soon. And when that happens, the lovers begin to resemble two egos tied to a single leash, each growling against the other and trying to pull in the way it chooses.

At this point we can note that the God of Death has seen only a very limited aspect of love.

Savitri will slowly show him the other, more divine aspects of love. http://nextfuture.sriaurobindosociety.org.in/mar05/nfmar05_savitri.htm

Death tries to convince Savitri that love which she claims she is pursuing in following Satyavan’s soul into the kingdom of death is a precarious thing and has “a thousand ways to suffer and die”. Since it is no more than a “a sensual want refined/ A hunger of the body and the heart”, this want can tire and cease or turn elsewhere. He predicts that her love for Satyavan would have gone the way of all such love. He predicts the dire end of this love in these words: Two strive, constant associates without joy, Two egos straining in a single leash,

Two minds divided by their jarring thoughts, Two spirits disjoined, for ever separate.

Page: 611 (Lines 161 – 164)

Then he triumphantly concludes that he has saved her and Satyavan from this disaster by taking away Satyavan’s life. He urges her not to “Call him back to the treacheries of earth”, since he is now resting in tranquillity in the world of death.

He asks her to go back alone to her frail world. He advises her to chasten her heart with the knowledge of the real. “Discard the veil of idealism,” he admonishes her, “that has prevented you from seeing the reality of love.” All delight in this world must end sooner or later. When one is given to dreaming, hard necessity smites one awake. “You will be able to see clearly and recognise the truth of what I am saying when your heart is freed from all attachments. Vain are the spiralling thoughts of your brilliant mind. Renounce everything, your joy, hope and tears in the bosom of my profound Nothingness and silent calm. Forget this vain waste of your spirit’s force. Forget the vague spiritual quest that first started when these worlds burst forth like so many clusters of fire‐flowers and great and intense thoughts passed through the mind and time rolled across the vasts and souls emerged into this state of mortality.”

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But Savitri was unmoved and she said to the dark Power: Savitri: “What you have now played to me, O Death, is dangerous music. You have fluted it alluringly to tired hopes. You have mingled your falsehoods with sad strains of truth. But I forbid your voice to slay my soul.” Then she declares the great truth of love that governs her life: “My love is not a hunger of the heart, My love is not a craving of the flesh; It came to me from God, to God returns.

Even in all that life and man have marred, A whisper of divinity still is heard, A breath is felt from the eternal spheres.”

Pages: 612 – 613 (Lines 206 – 211)

(For Savitri, love is not something that is primarily a matter of ‘heart or flesh’ – not based in the vital but it comes from a much deeper source; it comes from God, or that which reflects God in us, our soul. Such a love is given back to the soul of the person we love, to the God in the beloved.)

“Even in all that life and man have marred a whisper of divinity still is heard in love, a breath is felt from the eternal spheres. Even when love is reflected by the vital in man, in that sweet fire‐ rhythm of love, we can feel something of the eternal spheres of the soul to which it belongs.

That is what makes vital love so wonderful, although if not properly nurtured, it can show all perversions. Even in the wild cry of this mundane love, there is infinite hope. It brings us intimations from the forgotten heights of our soul. And its strains reach the high‐winged souls in their empyrean and reach even beyond as a voice of the eternal Ecstasy.”

“One day I shall behold my great sweet world, put off the dreadful disguises forced upon it by the gods, see it step out of the veil of terror cast on it and cast off the robe of terror and sin.

When this happens, we shall draw near the face of the Divine Mother and repose our candid souls upon her lap. Then will we be able to embrace the ecstasy that we have till now unsuccessfully chased; only then will we thrill with the long‐sought God of Love; then will we find in it the unexpected felicities of heaven.

“Because of love, there is hope not only for the godheads that are pure but also for the violent and darkened deities that leaped down in rage from the breasts of the Supreme to find what the gods (the pure ones) have missed. They (the Asuric forces) too are safe, because the Mother’s eyes are on them and her arms are stretched out in love and she wants to claim these rebel sons of hers.”

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( Note: There is a belief that when the Supreme decided to manifest himself, he sent out four emanations from himself. These were Light or Consciousness, Ananda, Truth and Life. But these forces got separated from the Divine and changed into falsehood. Light or Consciousness became Darkness and Inconscience, Ananda became hatred and Suffering, Truth became falsehood, and Life became Death. Thus the first four emanations sent out by the Divine ended up by becoming hostile or adverse forces, Asuras. Their aim is to prevent this creation from manifesting the perfection of the divine. Now to bring them back into the fold of the Divine, the Supreme had to do something, and so he sent down into creation a strong vibration of divine love. This is intended to transform the Asuras into powers serving the Divine. I shall give here a quotation from the Mother on this subject: Love is a supreme force which the Eternal Consciousness sent down from itself into an obscure and darkened world that it might bring back that world and its beings to the Divine. Love came into the darkness; it awakened all that lay there asleep; it whispered, opening the ears that were sealed, “There is something that is worth waking to, worth living for, and it is love.” And with the awakening of love there entered into the world the possibility of coming back to the Divine. The creation moves upwards through love towards the Divine and in answer there leans downward to meet the creation divine Love and Grace.

(Collected Works of the Mother: Vol. 3, pp. 73 & 74.)

Now we return to the text of Savitri: “The Eternal, who is at once the lover, the beloved and the love, came and built himself a wondrous world and wove the measures of a marvellous dance. There into its magic circles and turns he comes when he feels attracted, and when he is repelled he runs away. In the wild and winding movements of his mind, he enjoys the honey (the rasa) of tears, putting aside joy in repentance; he goes through the experience of anger and merriment since both are derived from the broken notes of the music of his soul, which when reconciled is really a seeking for the celestial rhythms. The eternal comes to us again and again, each time with a new face, which is a sweet recast of the old. His bliss laughs to us bewitchingly or calls us from its secret place, like the magic notes of a flute from far‐off throbbing forests in the moonlight, making us search for it impatiently and in passionate anguish. This is how the disguised Lover seeks and draws our soul.

“He named himself for me and grew in Satyavan. For we have been man and woman from the first, like the twin souls born of one undying fire. Has he not met me in other worlds? Through the maze of the world he has pursued me like a lion in the night, descending upon me suddenly and seizing me with his glorious golden leap. He was never satisfied with what he got of me; he longed for me across the ages, sometimes angrily and impatiently and sometimes with

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sweetness and in peace, desiring me always since the birth of the world. From out of the veiled past his arms have come feeling me; they have touched me with the softness of a gentle wind; they have plucked me like a glad and fulfilled flower, thrilled and happy to be plucked. When they clasp me, I have always been happy to be consumed in the relentless flame of love. I too have found him charming me in many lovely forms. I have run in delight chasing his voice coming from afar. I have pushed myself towards him past many dreadful obstructions. If there is a happier and greater god, let him first wear the face of Satyavan and let his soul be one with the soul with Satyavan’s whom I love, and then let him seek me if he wishes me to desire him.

For in my breast beats only one heart and that is given to Satyavan; only one god sits there enthroned and that is Satyavan.”

“O Death, advance beyond the phantom beauty of this insubstantial world around you, for I am not one of its citizens. I cherish love in the form of the flaming fire not in the form of a phantom dream.”

I wonder whether anywhere in world literature we have anything like this great declaration and affirmation of love that we have just heard from Savitri. This is no apologetic defence of love against Death’s tirade against love, and its transience. It totally demolishes all cynicism about love. We have seen earlier in this canto how Death ridicules even the idea of love. He calls it a mere physical want, a hunger of the flesh, a hunger that is transient and fleeting. He even asks Savitri to be grateful to him because by taking away Satyavan from her, he has spared the experience of the collapse and death of her love.

If Satyavan had lived, love would have died; But Satyavan is dead and love shall live A little while in thy sad breast, until His face and body fade on memory’s wall Where other bodies and other faces come.

This passage contains a most biting tirade against love; Death says that it is always short‐lived and the eternal love to which lovers swear is a sham. As against this, Savitri’s declaration contained in this passage (beginning with line 201) is a triumphal declaration of love, its sweetness, and transforming power. Savitri is lyrical in pointing out that this world is the creation of a God who is essentially a lover and that their love (the love between Savitri and Satyavan) began when life on this world began. Satyavan and Savitri have pursued each other through several lives and sought each other passionately. The intensity of love and its pursuit

by Satyavan and Savitri across several lives is expressed in the following memorable lines: Did he not dawn on me in other stars?

How has he through the thickets of the world Pursued me like a lion in the night

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And come upon me suddenly in the ways And seized me with his glorious golden leap!

Unsatisfied he yearned for me through time, Sometimes with wrath and sometimes with sweet peace Desiring me since first the world began.

Page: 612 (Lines: 255 – 262)

The following lines are a celebration of a great love fulfilled again and again in the lives of Satyavan and Savitri. Love for Savitri is not a phantom of her imagination. It is something intensely real which she has experienced.

He rose like a wild wave out of the floods And dragged me helpless into seas of bliss.

Out of my curtained past his arms arrive; They have touched me like the soft persuading wind, They have plucked me like a glad and trembling flower, And clasped me happily burned in ruthless flame.

Page 614 (Lines: 263 – 268)

Death had described human love as fickle and evanescent, and that for it, one pretty face is as good as any. Savitri has given in the following lines a most fitting reply to this charge and she does it in a poetically most delightful manner with a declaration of the eternity of her love for Satyavan.

I too have found him charmed in lovely forms And run delighted to his distant voice And pressed to him past many dreadful bars.

If there is a yet happier greater god, Let him first wear the face of Satyavan And let his soul be one with him I love; So let him seek me that I may desire.

For only one heart beats within my breast And one god sits there throned.:

Page 614 (Lines: 269 – 277)

It should be noted here that Savitri does not deny the truth of what the God of Death has been saying. There is a love which does not last because it belongs to the vital nature of man. But that is not the whole truth about love. The God of Death has not seen the integral truth about love – that there is a love which lasts, and this is the love which has its roots in the human soul or spirit. Vital love has glamour but it falls away when one gets to a higher level. I would like

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you to reflect carefully on one of the letters of Sri Aurobindo on this subject. The letter reads as follows: It is the ordinary nature of vital love not to last or, if it tries to last, not to satisfy, because it is a passion which Nature has thrown in in order to serve a temporary purpose; it is good enough therefore for a temporary purpose and its normal tendency is to wane when it has sufficiently served Nature's purpose. In mankind, as man is a more complex being, she calls in the aid of imagination and idealism to help her push, gives a sense of ardour, of beauty and fire and glory, but all that wanes after a time. It cannot last, because it is all a borrowed light and power, borrowed in the sense of being a reflection caught from something beyond and not native to the reflecting vital medium which imagination uses for the purpose. Moreover, nothing lasts in the mind and vital, all is a flux there. The one thing that endures is the soul, the spirit. Therefore love can last or satisfy only if it bases itself on the soul and spirit, if it has its roots there. But that means living no longer in the vital but in the soul and spirit.

The difficulty of the vital giving up is because the vital is not governed by reason or knowledge, but by instinct and impulse and the desire of pleasure. It draws back because it is disappointed, because it realises that the disappointment will always repeat itself, but it does not realise that the whole thing is itself a glamour or, if it does, it repines that it should be so. Where the vairagya is sattwic, born not of disappointment but of the sense of greater and truer things to be attained, this difficulty does not arise. However, the vital can learn by experience, can learn so much as to turn away from its regret of the beauty of the will‐o'‐the‐wisp. Its vairagya can become sattwic and decisive.

(Letters on Yoga), Page: 761

http://nextfuture.sriaurobindosociety.org.in/apr05/nfapr05_savitri.htm

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23. Book Ten Canto Two – Continued

The God of Death is not yet ready to give up the campaign he has mounted against idealism and idealists. According to him, Savitri has been pursuing one of the flimsiest of these ideals, namely, love. We have seen that Savitri does not completely reject his condemnation of love as something transient and no more than a physical want which the human imagination recasts into rainbow colours. Savitri explains to Death that this is only one facet of love among humans but it is not the entire truth about love. Love is born in the soul and is reflected at a certain stage by the vital parts of our being. If it remains restricted to that level, it certainly turns out to be transient and a matter of the nerves and the flesh. She then declares that the bond between her and Satyavan is a closeness woven through several lives in each of which they have sought each other passionately. Satyavan is the God that she has cherished and pursued and if there is a happier God, he should first wear the face of Satyavan and be one in soul with Satyavan.

The God of Death now directs his attack on idealism itself; he dismisses all idealism as no more than a hallucination, a self‐deception. He continues his tirade against all idealism as follows: Death: “Savitri, you are only a slave of your own sensuous will. You, idealists, send words coloured by the passion of your heart soaring like eagles to meet the sun. But knowledge does not dwell in the human heart. The heart has no true knowledge and the heart’s words fall back unheard from the high throne of wisdom.

“Your longing to build a heaven on earth is in vain. The human mind is good at inventing Ideals and it crafts beautiful ideas but the Mind itself is a child of Matter and Life. The mind tries to persuade its parents –Matter and Life– to move upwards to higher levels of existence; but they are not fit for this and can hardly follow in the footsteps of their daring guide. Though the Mind is a splendid voyager in the sky, it walks lamely on the earth with slow and faltering steps. The Mind finds it difficult to manage unruly life‐energies and to control the galloping footsteps of the senses. Man’s thoughts look straight into the very high heavens and they draw their gold from a celestial mine, but his acts work painfully at the common ore of ordinary existence of material life.

“All your high ideals are but mere dreams fabricated by the Mind, which is only the child of Matter, in order to comfort itself as it works at its dull routine in the prison‐house of Matter.

This prison is the only reality on this earth, and everything else is unreal. Matter is the first‐ born among created things. It will alone remain when mind and life are gone. If matter ended, all else would end. All else here is only an epiphenomenon, a secondary phenomenon accompanying Matter and caused by it. What you call the soul is a short‐lived flower created by the Mind, who is only the gardener of the Matter’s terrain plot. It too perishes when the plant

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on which it grows (namely, the body) dies. The heavenly colour on the face of the soul is drawn from the sap of the earth. Your thoughts are flashes that move on the borders of Matter. Your life itself is but a passing wave on the sea of Matter.

“Matter is a careful custodian of the limited means of Truth. It guards its limited resources from being squandered wastefully by Nature. It ties down mind to the tent‐posts of sense. It fastens the whims and fancies of Life to a dull, hard routine and ties all creatures to the rule of Law. Matter is vessel containing many transforming alchemies that transmute the very nature of things. It is the glue that holds Mind and Life together. If Matter fails, all else crumples and falls.

Matter is the veritable rock on which all stands firm.

“Yet this security and guarantor of everything (all forms and beings), turns out to be an impostor (a fraud) when you examine it closely for its truth. It is found to be a cheat of substance for there is no real substance; it is just an appearance, a symbol, a mere nothing. Its forms have no intrinsic life. What appears as a fixed stability is in fact only a cover, a surface appearance of what is in fact a whirl of an imprisoned energy in motion, a sequence in the dance movements of Energy whose footprints always leave the same impressions. It is the substantial appearance of something that is itself unsubstantial. It is a trickle dotting empty space. It only appears to be stationary but it is in reality a (constantly changing) movement.

Change comes, and the final change is death.

What appears most real thus turns out to be a Nihils’ show, a show of Nothing. It throws up figures which trap and capture the senses. An eternal Void is its fabricator. Look carefully behind the appearance and you will see that there is Nothing except some aspects sketched out by Chance and some seeming shapes of an Energy that is itself a mere seeming, not a reality.

“All breathe here by the mercy of Death and live for awhile; they even think and act by the grace of the Inconscient. But then you get addicted to the luxury of your thoughts and then you turn your gaze within yourself to look at the visions in the gleaming crystal of your mind; you even shut those eyes and think that you see the forms of Gods in your reverie. But I would urge you to consent to open your eyes to the reality that surrounds you and the reality about you and your world. In the still, Inconscient Void, an Inconscient world sprang up inexplicably. This world was secure for some time, happy and undisturbed in its insensibility. But it could not stay content for long with its own truth.

This is because something was born on its Inconscient breast which was compelled to see and know, to feel and to love. This was a self‐observant consciousness that watched its acts and imagined that there was a soul within; it started searching for the truth behind things and dreamed of Self and God. When all was unconscious, all was well, I, Death, was the king and I kept my royal state. I designed a plan of my own without even willing consciously, and it worked unerringly since all worked with a calm, unfeeling heart.

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“Exercising my sovereign power of unreality, I obliged nothingness to take a form. My blind, mechanical force acted infallibly and created by chance a fixed order – as fixed as the determinism of fate– and by its whims, it created the formulas of Necessity. Thus was created the concrete fantasy of nature’s scheme on the hollow ground of the unfeeling Void.

“I created the five elements. I pressed ether and made from it Space and the vibrating air, and this expanded and contracted to provide the basis for fire. It was I who lighted the first spark and made the stars out of the occult radiances and marshalled platoons of these stars into empty space and set them on their dance. Out of atoms and gas I built the earth in its beauty and from the chemical plasm I formed the living man.

“All this was harmonious and free from any pangs of suffering or any touch of evil. Then Thought came and spoilt everything. Matter began to hope and think and feel; tissue and nerve began to respond in terms of joy and agony. The Inconscient cosmos strove to learn its task. An ignorant power (personal god) took shape in the Mind and in order to understand things, reason and its laws were invented. The impersonal Vast of the Universe seemed to respond to man’s desire and the result was the great world which until then was peaceful but was now thrown into agitation. Nature lost her wide immortal calm.

“This is how this distorted, perplexing world came about in which the souls are enmeshed in the dualities of happiness and sorrow, and get caught up in the sleep of Matter and the mortality of Mind. That is why we see around us beings imprisoned by Nature, and awaiting death. Consciousness here is in the embrace of an ignorance which seeks to know the slow‐ moving and often arrested plan of evolution.

“This is the world in which you live, O Savitri, and move; you go astray in the confused ways and byways of the human mind; you thus get absorbed in the pointless rounds of your life, vainly looking for a soul and imagining there is God somewhere here.

This is the world in which thou mov'st, astray In the tangled pathways of the human mind, In the issueless circling of thy human life, Searching for thy soul and thinking God is here.

But where is room for soul or place for God In the brute immensity of a machine?

A transient Breath thou takest for thy soul, Born from a gas, a plasm, a sperm, a gene, A magnified image of man's mind for God, A shadow of thyself thrown upon Space.

Page: 618 (Lines: 396 – 405)

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But where is room for soul or God in this brute immensity of a machine that this world is? You take your transient breath for your soul. How can there be a God here in this world born of gas, and created entirely by Nature’s machinery and agencies, such as a plasm, a sperm and a gene?

You take a magnified image of man’s mind for God, but your God is no more than a shadow of yourself thrown on the vast screen of Space.

“Your consciousness is like a distorting mirror of ignorance that reflects the world around it and there is a Void above it and a Void below it. Your consciousness soars upwards as though to grasp the stars but there is only a Void above you filled, at best, with the products of your imagination. If there is even a partial Truth that is at play with this earth, it only casts its faint light on the dark shadowy ground, and so even if touches the earth, it leaves behind it only a shining spot.

Immortality thou claimest for thy spirit, But immortality for imperfect man, A god who hurts himself at every step, Would be a cycle of eternal pain.

Wisdom and love thou claimest as thy right; But knowledge in this world is error's mate, A brilliant procuress of Nescience, And human love a posturer on earth‐stage Who imitates with verve a faery dance.

Page: 618 (Lines; 413 – 421)

“You demand immortality for your spirit, but immortality would be a cycle of eternal pain for man who is so imperfect that he hurts himself at every step. You also demand wisdom and love as your right, but in this world knowledge always has error as its inseparable companion, and error is the means by which Nescience manages to acquire knowledge. And human love is a fake on the earth‐stage who imitates the faery dance of true love with great verve.

“What is human knowledge after all? It is an extract processed from hard experience and stored away in vats of memory and has always the taste of a drink of human origin. And what is love? It is a sweet secretion from the erotic glands, now exhilarating and then again painful to the nerves; it is a sweet poison in the breast, drunk by it as if it were nectar of the gods. Earth’s human wisdom is not by any means an exalted power, nor is human love an angel from the skies. If they aspire to rise beyond the dull air of earth, and to soar towards the sun, how high would they be able to fly and what height would they reach on their wings made of wax?

But not on earth can divine wisdom reign And not on earth can divine love be found;

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Heaven‐born, only in heaven can they live; Or else there too perhaps they are shining dreams.

Page: 619 (Lines: 434 – 437)

Divine wisdom cannot reign on earth, nor can divine love be found on earth. They are heaven‐ born and can therefore only live in heaven. Or perhaps, they cannot be found even there and are but glittering dreams.

“Come to think of it, is this not all a dream, all you are and all you do here? Your mind and life are but just tricks played by Matter’s force; they do not have any independent existence or truth of their own. If your mind appears to you a bright sun of illumination and your life a swift and grand dream, it is because of the illusion of your mortal heart, which is dazzled by a mere ray of happiness or knowledge, that comes its way.

“Mind and Life cannot live by their own right; they know that they have no existence of their own and that they are only a secondary phenomenon, although a brilliant epiphenomenon.

When their supporting base is cut away, these children of Matter die and get absorbed once again into Matter. Even Matter has no claims to being the primordial reality, because it vanishes into Energy and Energy itself turns out to be a motion of the ancient Nothing.

“How can you paint the unsubstantial and ethereal colours of the ideal on the brilliant red blur of the earth? How can a dream within a dream come doubly true? Man himself is an unsubstantial dream of Matter, and how can his dreams, that is, his Ideals, ever come true?

How can such elusive and delusive things like ideals ever become true like shining stars?

“The Ideal is a disease of your mind, a bright frenzy created by your thought and speech, a heady wine of beauty raising you to a false sight. It is only a noble fiction concocted by your intense desires and therefore it must share your human imperfection. The actual forms the ideals take in the real world are always disappointing to our heart, because they can never appear here in their heavenly form, and never can they be fulfilled here in Time.

“O soul, you are misled by the splendour of your own thoughts, O earthly creature, you dream of a heaven that can never be reached, be resigned and calmly accept your earthly lot. Accept the little light that falls upon your days; take what you can from Life’s permitted joy. Submit to the whip of Fate, and accept you share of suffering, toil and anxieties. At long last, my long, calm night of endless sleep in the form of death will come to you and wrap you up in a silence from which you came and from which you will never be able to escape.”

One must admire the skilful way in which death presents here its case against all idealism. It is comprehensive, based on an appeal to the findings of modern science and common sense. A more cogent case against idealism and in favour of Realism has never been made, and that too

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in such wonderful poetry, anywhere in world’s literature. In our next instalment, we will make a few observations on this impassioned plea made for Realism by Death.

http://nextfuture.sriaurobindosociety.org.in/may05/nfmay05_savitri.htm

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24. Book Ten Canto Two – Conclusion

Canto Two of Book X of Savitri has the title “The Gospel of Death and the Vanity of the Ideal”.

We have seen that the God of Death mounts a bitter attack on love in the first part of this canto, which Savitri counters with a glorious defence of love. We still hear lines like the following from Savitri reverberating through the corridors of our mind: My love is not a hunger of the heart, My love is not a craving of the flesh; It came to me from God, to God returns.

Even in all that life and man have marred, A whisper of divinity still is heard, A breath is felt from the eternal spheres.

Allowed by Heaven and wonderful to man A sweet fire‐rhythm of passion chants to love.

There is a hope in its wild infinite cry; It rings with callings from forgotten heights, And when its strains are hushed to high‐winged souls In their empyrean, its burning breath Survives beyond, the rapturous core of suns That flame for ever pure in skies unseen, A voice of the eternal Ecstasy.

Page: 612 (Lines: 206 – 220)

The second part of this canto consists of a very forceful denunciation of all idealism as “a bright hallucination”, impossible to realise on earth. Even here as at the end of the long tirade against love, what is preached is the gospel of death; Savitri is being offered the “calm night of everlasting sleep”. Now before we go on to the next canto (Canto Three of Book X), it would be very interesting to examine how exactly Death builds his case against all idealism.

The God of Death begins by denouncing the “longing to build heaven on earth” as a vain enterprise never likely to succeed in the real world. The reason given is that this world is basically a world of Matter. He goes on to claim that nothing can be allowed here which challenges the sovereignty of Matter. Whoever refuses to acknowledge that Matter is the supreme lord of all here does so at his own peril. Death invites Savitri to meditate on this fundamental reality of Matter.

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All thy high dreams were made by Matter's mind To solace its dull work in Matter's jail, Its only house where it alone seems true.

A solid image of reality Carved out of being to prop the works of Time, Matter on the firm earth sits strong and sure.

It is the first‐born of created things, It stands the last when mind and life are slain, And if it ended all would cease to be.

Page: 615 (Lines: 302 – 310)

All the dreams of idealists are dreamt by their minds which are made of Matter. For the God of Death, Mind and Life are but complex formations of Matter. Matter existed when there was no life or mind, and Matter will continue to exist when Mind and Life will cease to be. So Matter alone is real.

A vessel of transmuting alchemies, A glue that sticks together mind and life, If Matter fails, all crumbling cracks and falls.

All upon Matter stands as on a rock.

Page: 616 (lines: 323 – 326)

Matter is the reality out of which all things are formed and upon which all things are dependent for their continued existence. Matter is a great truth, and this must be accepted by a seeker of integral truth.

But Death goes beyond this when he declares that Matter is the only truth of this creation. It is the Absolute truth. To say that Matter is a great truth does not necessarily mean that there are no other truths, and that Life, Mind and Soul are but shadows of the splendour of Matter. But this is what Death is claiming here. As for thoughts, he describes them as “gleams that pass on Matter’s verge”, and this in his view applies to all ideas and ideals Savitri has been trying to uphold. As for Life, he describes it as “a lapsing wave on Matter’s sea”. Thus for him Life is no more than an accident in the flux of the undirected motion of Matter.

This gospel of the monism of Matter too doesn’t stand close scrutiny, and falls apart into some sort of nihilism because even Matter turns out to be “a cheat of substance where no substance is”. The fixed stability of Matter is in fact the cover of a captive motion’s swirl – a fixed pattern of the movement of particles of energy (”a stable‐seeming movement without change”). Death puts the truth as he sees it in these words:

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Nothing is there but aspects limned by Chance And seeming shapes of seeming Energy.

All by Death's mercy breathe and live awhile, All think and act by the Inconscient's grace.

Addict of the roseate luxury of thy thoughts, Turn not thy gaze within thyself to look At visions in the gleaming crystal, Mind, Close not thy lids to dream the forms of Gods.

At last to open thy eyes consent and see The stuff of which thou and the world are made.

Page: 616 (Lines: 343 – 352)

Death tries to convince Savitri that all that she stands for and for which she has been waging this struggle has no meaning and her efforts are going to be in vain.

The world sprang forth inexplicably from the Inconscient into the dumb Inconscient Void of this universe. It looked secure and happy for some time and everything worked according to Matter’s mechanical law. With the aid of death everything was carried out as form changed into another form. But this peace was disturbed by something which condemned this creation “to see and know, to feel and love”; it groped for a truth and dreamed of Self and God, And with that, all its troubles and anguish began. Death remembers the old days before the trouble began: I, Death, was king and kept my regal state, Designing my unwilled, unerring plan, Creating with a calm insentient heart.

In my sovereign power of unreality Obliging nothingness to take a form, Infallibly my blind unthinking force Making by chance a fixity like fate's, By whim the formulas of Necessity, Founded on the hollow ground of the Inane The sure bizarrerie of Nature's scheme.

Page: 617 (Lines: 362 – 371)

But then this peaceful state was disturbed when man appeared and with him, came thought. In the mind of man are seeds of dissent and disharmony. Man’s mind asks questions which have no answers and worries about meaning in a world which has no meaning. It demands justice from the mechanical process governing this creation.

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I formed earth's beauty out of atom and gas, And built from chemic plasm the living man.

Then Thought came in and spoiled the harmonious world: Matter began to hope and think and feel, Tissue and nerve bore joy and agony.

The inconscient cosmos strove to learn its task; An ignorant personal God was born in Mind And to understand invented reason's law, The impersonal Vast throbbed back to man's desire, A trouble rocked the great world's blind still heart And Nature lost her wide immortal calm.

Thus came this warped incomprehensible scene Of souls emmeshed in life's delight and pain And Matter's sleep and Mind's mortality, Of beings in Nature's prison waiting death And consciousness left in seeking ignorance

Page: 617 (Lines: 379 – 394)

Death built this earth and on earth he built man out of “chemic plasm”. Then at some stage, thought was born and it spoilt the harmonious world. Man began to think and feel and his nerve and tissue bore pain and happiness. Man wanted to know the universe in which he lived and he began to understand how reason worked. With all these developments, a trouble rocked the still heart of this world. Thus came to be this incomprehensible scene of souls enmeshed in life’s delight and pain, in mind’s mortality and matter’s sleep. All beings are caught up in nature’s prison house waiting for death.

The argument of Death here is that life, mind and soul are all impotent and besides, no good has come out of these. Only Matter is real because in Matter alone is there secure truth, and death is the only faithful ally of Matter. So Savitri should embrace the truth of Matter and welcome death as the home of peace.

The absolute monism of Matter hardly provides a basis for any of the ideals which Savitri hopes to realise. In The Life Divine, Sri Aurobindo has discussed some of the fundamental characteristics of Matter. One of them is its concreteness, its solidity and tangibility. Concrete substance is the touchstone of reality for man, and whatever is not concrete and tangible is to that extent less real to him. While this renders matter available to our senses to perceive, it also brings with it a principle of division, separation, and individual isolation. For Matter operates either by uniting or by separating. Fundamental units of Matter combine to form larger and more complex units. In this process smaller units are inevitably lost in the new form.

Or, we observe the opposite process in which a complex aggregation is broken into smaller

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units. In either case, the identity of material forms is always under threat. This seems to be the inexorable law under which Matter works. The material world is also a world in which the ultimate destruction and loss of identity seems to be inevitable.

If man is fundamentally an individual formation of concrete Matter and nothing more, he must also accept this law of division and conflict and his ultimate destruction as the inescapable law of his existence.

Many people regard themselves primarily as physical bodies and spend all their time and energy trying to increase its value and duration of existence. This was true of humanity in general particularly before technology developed and man could live in a relatively safe environment. This has also been described by Sri Aurobindo in an earlier section of Savitri.

Absorbed they lived in the passion of the scene, But knew not who they were or why they lived: Content to breathe, to feel, to sense, to act, Life had for them no aim save Nature's joy And the stimulus and delight of outer things; Identified with the spirit's outward shell, They worked for the body's wants, they craved no more.

Page: 143 (Lines:397 – 403)

This predominance of the physical mind may not be evident today in the same degree as it was at an earlier stage in human evolution. But it is found even today in the emphasis we place on sensual experience and pleasure. Even today for many, they are primarily their physical bodies.

Nothing that is physical can be immortal. As we have seen, the solidity and concreteness of Matter gives us something to hold on to, but this advantage is taken away by another characteristic of Matter, namely, its enslavement to the laws of mechanical motion. All Matter is in constant motion. Even what appears to us solid is in fact a swirl of perpetual change. At every moment, even the human body sheds innumerable old cells and acquires more or less an equal number of new ones. Matter is surrounded and overwhelmed and finally consumed by change. Matter may be immortal but material forms are not.

For one who accepts Matter as the sole truth or the sole reality, no human achievement, ideals and values would appear really worthwhile because nothing is stable here, nothing lasts long enough here. Nothing is worth striving for here, nothing is worth achieving because everything gets destroyed sooner or later.

Anyone who accepts this truth about Matter is bound to look upon human love as an illusion. It is not that the God of Death alone dismisses human love as a transient feeling, “a yearning of thy flesh’. Even Savitri’s mother asks Savitri not to be blinded by the passion of love. She says

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this to Savitri when after hearing Narad’s dire prophecy about Satyavan’s death, Savitri refuses to go out once again to look for a more suitable companion for life. Savitri’s argument is that it is her love for Satyavan that is the supreme value in her life. And Savitri’s mother tries to dismiss love exactly like the God of Death does. Now compare the two denunciations and notice how close they are in their underlying philosophies. This is Savitri’s mother speaking to Savitri: Thou lendst eternity to a mortal hope.

Here on this mutable and ignorant earth Who is the lover and who is the friend ?

All passes here, nothing remains the same.

None is for any on this transient globe.

He whom thou lovest now, a stranger came And into a far strangeness shall depart: His moment's part once done upon life's stage Which for a time was given him from within, To other scenes he moves and other players And laughs and weeps mid faces new, unknown.

The body thou hast loved is cast away Amidst the brute unchanging stuff of worlds To indifferent mighty Nature and becomes Crude matter for the joy of others' lives.

Page: 432 (Lines: 641 – 655) This is what, as we saw in Canto two of Book X, the God of Death says to Savitri when she gives her love for Satyavan as the reason why she is pursuing him even in the kingdom of death: And yet how brief and frail! how soon is spent This treasure wasted by the gods on man, This happy closeness as of soul to soul, This honey of the body's companionship, This heightened joy, this ecstasy in the veins, This strange illumination of the sense!

If Satyavan had lived, love would have died; But Satyavan is dead and love shall live A little while in thy sad breast, until His face and body fade on memory's wall Where other bodies, other faces come.

When love breaks suddenly into the life At first man steps into a world of the sun; In his passion he feels his heavenly element: But only a fine sunlit patch of earth

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The marvellous aspect took of heaven's outburst; The snake is there and the worm in the heart of the rose.

A word, a moment's act can slay the god; Precarious is his immortality, He has a thousand ways to suffer and die.

Page: 610

The argument here is that love cannot endure because it is the product of life and mind immersed in Matter and therefore it is subject to the laws of change by which Matter is bound.

And what is true of love is true of all ideals, whether it is truth, beauty, faith, justice, etc. All these vaunted ideals to which men dedicate themselves are insubstantial as much as love is.

That is why Death takes Savitri to a place where everything is vague (Ref. page 602, lines 117 onwards: Vague fields were there, vague pastures gleamed, vague trees,/Vague scenes dim‐ hearted in a drifting haze;/vague cattle white roamed glimmering through the mist;/Vague spirits wandered with a bodiless cry,/vague melodies touched the soul and fled/ …) and shows her how all ideals are vain: “Prisoner of Nature, many‐visioned spirit, Thought's creature in the ideal's realm enjoying Thy unsubstantial immortality The subtle marvellous mind of man has feigned, This is the world from which thy yearnings came.

When it would build eternity from the dust, Man's thought paints images illusion rounds; Prophesying glories it shall never see, It labours delicately among its dreams.

Behold this fleeing of light‐tasselled shapes, Aerial raiment of unbodied gods; A rapture of things that never can be born, Hope chants to hope a bright immortal choir; Cloud satisfies cloud, phantom to longing phantom Leans sweetly, sweetly is clasped or sweetly chased.

This is the stuff from which the ideal is formed: Its builder is thought, its base the heart's desire, But nothing real answers to their call.

The ideal dwells not in heaven, nor on the earth, A bright delirium of man's ardour of hope Drunk with the wine of its own fantasy.

Page: 607 (Lines: 7 – 27)

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This then is the nature of all that derives from man’s heart and mind – of all his ideals.

The perception that there is no real escape from the mechanical laws which bind Matter is gloomy enough because it gives no chance here for any of our ideals to be realised. But there is a further point made by the God of Death which leads to utter despair – namely, that there is nothing we can do to alter this predicament. If there are mechanical laws that operate here, man can try to understand them and still learn to use them in a way that would enrich his life.

If these laws are rigid, that would still suggest that there is some order, some reason directing this colossal machine called Nature. So there is still a silver lining here. But no, even this is obliterated by the third characteristic of Matter, namely, its ultimate ignorance.

There seems to be no purpose behind the mechanical laws that Matter follows; the direction in which they move the world is not guided by any purpose. It is all chance movement, not guided by any preconceived plan of progress or purpose. If there is a cosmic will behind all this, matter is incapable of understanding it, nor can it understand the thoughts and feelings of its products, like life and mind. Matter is thus ignorant of its own action and is indifferent to the hopes and desires of the products of those actions. The creation or destruction of any one form or of a group of forms has for Matter the same value as the creation and destruction of any other form or group of forms. This is the Ignorance to which Matter is inexorably bound.

This then is the nature and truth of Matter and Sri Aurobindo seems to have fully experienced this aspect of Matter. (We shall say more about his struggle in the heart of Matter’s Night on some other occasion.) If this were the only truth operating in our world, the spiritual quest of man would be in vain. Then it would be wise to heed to the advice the God of death gives to Savitri towards the very close of Canto Two, Book X: O soul misled by the splendour of thy thoughts, O earthly creature with thy dream of heaven, Obey, resigned and still, the earthly law.

Accept the brief light that falls upon thy days; Take what thou canst of Life's permitted joy; Submitting to the ordeal of fate's scourge Suffer what thou must of toil and grief and care.

There shall approach silencing thy passionate heart My long calm night of everlasting sleep: There into the hush from which thou cam'st retire.”

Page: 619

But Savitri is unfazed by this onslaught by the God of Death because she knows that there is a more integral truth beyond this truth of Matter, and she responds to the God of death, in her

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very first words, she reveals this at the beginning of the following canto, namely canto Three, Book X: But Savitri answered to almighty Death: “O dark‐browed sophist of the universe Who veilst the Real with its own Idea, Hiding with brute objects Nature's living face, Masking eternity with thy dance of death, Thou hast woven the ignorant mind into a screen And made of Thought error's purveyor and scribe, And a false witness of mind's servant sense.

An aesthete of the sorrow of the world, Champion of a harsh and sad philosophy Thou hast used words to shutter out the Light And called in Truth to vindicate a lie.

A lying reality is falsehood's crown And a perverted truth her richest gem.

O Death, thou speakest truth but truth that slays, I answer to thee with the Truth that saves.

Page: 621

Before we resume, and go on to canto Three, Book X, I would like to remind the reader that there are many passages in Savitri which describe the mechanical nature of the laws of Matter from which man has no escape. Man does not seem to have any freedom; he seems to be a helpless pawn in a game in which every move is predetermined. Man himself is made like a machine, and like a machine he lives and disintegrates like one. To give you only one example of this: All now seems Nature's massed machinery; An endless servitude to material rule And long determination's rigid chain, Her firm and changeless habits aping Law, Her empire of unconscious deft device Annul the claim of man's free human will.

He too is a machine amid machines; A piston brain pumps out the shapes of thought, A beating heart cuts out emotion's modes; An insentient energy fabricates a soul.

Or the figure of the world reveals the signs Of a tied Chance repeating her old steps

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In circles around Matter's binding‐posts.

A random series of inept events To which reason lends illusive sense, is here, Or the empiric Life's instinctive search, Or a vast ignorant mind's colossal work.

Page: 20 (Lines: 334 – 350)

The passage I have just presented to you comes from an early part of Savitri. It occurs in Canto Two of Book I in which the poet is describing the central “issue” of Savitri’s life. And what is this issue of Savitri’s life?

For this she had accepted mortal breath; To wrestle with the Shadow she had come And must confront the riddle of man's birth And life's brief struggle in dumb Matter's night.

Whether to bear with Ignorance and death Or hew the ways of Immortality, To win or lose the godlike game for man, Was her soul's issue thrown with Destiny's dice.

Page: 17 (Lines: 229 – 234)

Thus Matter and its refusal to accommodate any higher truth is one of the many themes of Savitri. But more about this on some other occasion.

http://nextfuture.sriaurobindosociety.org.in/june05/nfjune05_savitri.htm

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25. Book Ten Canto Three – Beginning

The God of Death has been trying to convince Savitri that in the brute immensity of a machine which this creation obviously looks like there cannot be any room for soul or place for God. Similarly it would be an error to look on earth for divine wisdom and divine love. These are all but dreams like Savitri’s being itself and all that she does here. The only reality here is Matter, and Mind and life are but tricks of Matter’s force. As we have seen in the foregoing instalment, Death draws from all this the following conclusion: How shall the Ideal's unsubstantial hues Be painted stiff on earth's vermilion blur, A dream within a dream come doubly true?

How shall the will‐o'‐the‐wisp become a star?

The Ideal is a malady of thy mind, A bright delirium of thy speech and thought, A strange wine of beauty lifting thee to false sight.

A noble fiction of thy yearnings made, Thy human imperfection it must share: Its forms in Nature disappoint the heart, And never shall it find its heavenly shape And never can it be fulfilled in Time.

Page 619 (Lines 450 – 461) Death’s advice to Savitri is that she should submit to what has befallen her, namely, Satyavan’s death, accept the earth’s law, and wait for her own final lapse into the final night of everlasting sleep.

“The Debate of Love and Death”, Canto Three of Book X, begins with Savitri’s reply to this long sermon on the Vanity of the ideal given to her by Death. Savitri breaks the spell of gloom cast

by Death’s dismal pronouncements by sizing him up him as “an aesthete of the sorrow of the world”, and as “a champion of a harsh and sad philosophy”. She tells him that he has “called in Truth to vindicate a lie”. She tells him: O Death, thou speakest truth but truth that slays, I answer to thee with the Truth that saves.

Page: 621 (Lines 18 – 19)

She does not deny that there is an element of truth in what he has said about the fundamental reality of Matter, and also about the difficulties all ideals have to face here on earth. To say

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that Matter is a truth does not mean that whatever has come out of Matter, namely, Life and Mind, are either not truths or are secondary truths. Man is a traveller new‐discovering himself, evolving gradually. Matter is certainly his starting‐point. God begins his manifestation here by making Nothingness his living‐room and Night a process of the eternal Night, and death a spur towards immortality. The Divine has wrapped his head in Matter’s cloak and hidden himself in it; His consciousness has taken a plunge into the depths of the Inconscient. His Knowledge has taken on the appearance of a huge dark Nescience. Infinity wore a form of a boundless zero.

God’s abysms of bliss became the insensible deeps and his Eternity became a blank spiritual vast.

The Eternal took its ground in emptiness and manifested itself in the figure of a universe. Thus began the Spirit’s mighty adventure into Time in constant struggle with the adamant mechanical laws of Necessity. Thus began the soul’s cosmic pilgrimage. A mighty Power laboured in the black immensities of the Inconscient and built a Mind and its creations in the primeval Nothingness; a soul was built in God’s tremendous Void, and this was the fire that glowed secretly in the heart of this Void. This set in motion the process which gave the body of Matter to the bodiless energy. A slumbering Life was found breathing in inert Matter, and in the subconscient Life Mind was found lying asleep in Life. When Life awoke, it stretched its giant limbs and shook off the torpor which had subdued it. Sense began to quiver in the senseless substance. The world’s heart commenced to beat, its eyes to see. In the crowded vibrations of the brain thought fumbled and found itself. Speech was discovered and the Word bridged with spans of light, the world’s ignorance. Thus the Mind woke up and man the thinker arrived, the reasoning animal willed, panned and sought. Man stood erect among his brute compeers. He began to remould his life, measured the universe, took cudgels against his fate and wrestled with unseen Powers. He conquered Nature and used his mastery of its laws to rule the world. He hopes to ride the heavens and reach the stars, a master of his huge environment.

Now through the window of the Mind stares the demigod hidden behind the curtain of man’s soul. He has seen the Unknown, has looked on Truth’s face; a ray of the eternal Truth has touched him. Motionless and voiceless, he is standing awake in Supernature’s light and sees the glory of the wings that have arisen; he has seen the vast descending might of God. Thus Savitri gives the God of Death an important lesson in integral Truth, which comprehends Matter and Spirit, and all the grades of evolutionary manifestation that connect them. She speaks to him of Involution – of how the Supreme Reality or God took a plunge into the Inconscient and how evolution is the gradual evolution of the Divine consciousness out of Matter. She then goes on to address the God of Death as follows: “O Death, you are looking but on an unfinished world constantly attacked by you and not very sure at the moment of the road it should take. At the moment it is peopled by imperfect minds

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and ignorant and unhappy lives, and from this how can you conclude that there is no God and all is vain? What you see is something that is transitional, a work in progress; because what you see today is a child, will he never grow into an adult? Man is just now an infant, he has so much growth ahead of him. Please do not conclude that because he is ignorant today, he will never grow wise and perfect. You know that in a fragile tree a great tree lies in wait. In a tiny gene, a thinking being is shut. It may be a little element in a little sperm. But who knows, when it grows, out of this sperm may come out a mighty conqueror or a sage! Then will you throw out God’s mystic truth, and deny the occult spiritual miracle? Will you still maintain that there is no spirit, no God? “Nature, which was at one time mute and entirely made up of Matter has now woken up and begun to see; she has invented speech and unveiled in her a will. She has realised that there is something yet beyond her towards which she strives. She is trying to grow into something that surrounds her. She is striving to uncover the spirit in her, to change back into God (from which she descended in the first place). She is trying to exceed herself, and that is her inspiring task.”

Savitri now puts this all very succinctly in the following memorable words: In God concealed the world began to be, Tardily it travels towards manifest God: Our imperfection towards perfection toils, The body is the chrysalis of a soul: The infinite holds the finite in its arms, Time travels towards revealed eternity.

Page 623 (Lines 91 – 96)

“The world began to manifest as an act of concealment by God (God concealed himself into the primordial material creation). Slowly, it travels towards manifest God (God’s perfection manifested in this world). All our imperfections toil towards their perfections. The body is a sheltered state or stage of being or growth of the soul. The Infinite holds the finite in its arms.

Time travels towards revealed eternity (What was hidden is revealed gradually as Time travels).

(This is an idea which finds expression in many places in Savitri and is basic to Sri Aurobindo’s concept of how the creation came to be. It also explains why the manifestation of God’s perfection here on earth has to be the inevitable goal of this evolutionary adventure. In Canto One of Book Two, the poet expresses this basic concept succinctly in the following words; Our life is a holocaust of the Supreme.

The great World‐Mother by her sacrifice Has made her soul the body of our state; Accepting sorrow and unconsciousness

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Divinity's lapse from its own splendours wove The many‐patterned ground of all we are.

An idol of self is our mortality.

Our earth is a fragment and a residue; Her power is packed with the stuff of greater worlds And steeped in their colour‐lustres dimmed by her drowse; An atavism of higher births is hers, Her sleep is stirred by their buried memories Recalling the lost spheres from which they fell.

Pages 99 – 100 (Lines 166 – 178)

Sri Aurobindo describes this plunge of the Divine into the Inconscient as the ‘holocaust of the great World‐Mother, whereas the Veda describes it as the holocaust of the Supreme Purusha.)

“Matter has the miracle structure given to it by the eternal Magician, and this hides its mystery from its own eyes. It is like a scripture written out in cryptic (having or seeming to have a hidden or ambiguous meaning) signs; it is an occult document of the All‐Wonderful’s art.

Everything here bears witness to the secret might of this wonderful Magician; in all we feel his presence and his power”. Listen to these wonderful lines which describe the glory of this wonderful Magician: A blaze of his sovereign glory is the sun, A glory is the gold and glimmering moon, A glory is his dream of purple sky.

A march of his greatness are the wheeling stars.

His laughter of beauty breaks out in green trees, His moments of beauty triumph in a flower; The blue sea's chant, the rivulet's wandering voice Are murmurs falling from the Eternal's harp.

This world is God fulfilled in outwardness.

Pages 623 – 624 (Lines 103 – 111)

“The sun himself is the blaze of His sovereign glory; so also is the gold and glimmering moon another manifestation of His glory. The purple sky, and the wheeling stars also manifest His glory. His laughter of beauty can be seen in the green foliage on the trees and His moments of beauty triumph in the blossoming of a flower. The chant of the blue sea, the wandering voice of the rivulet are like sounds emanating from His harp. This world itself is God fulfilled in outwardness.

“His ways are baffling to our reason and also to our senses. By what appears like the blind brute movements of an ignorant Force and by means which we tend to dismiss as small,

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obscure and base, He has built this world in the unknowing Void. Often he builds greatness founded upon little things. He has built forms massive and small from infinitesimal (immeasurably or incalculably small) particles of dust. He has built marvels out of insignificant things.

“If at this point in time, mind looks crippled, life untaught and crude, if there are brutal masks and evil acts – these are but incidents of His vast and varied plot, the needed steps of His great drama which often goes through its dangerous phases. He constructs with these and other things His, often painful, but nonetheless passionate, drama of this creation. Although this has many elements of a play, it is not just a pure lila (a sport or a play without any goal or purpose), since there is behind all this apparent play a deep scheme that is being unfolded by the transcendent Wisdom of the Divine. This scheme works out ways by which the Shakti (the Force) at work here is able to meet her Lord (the Supreme Divine) in the shadow and the Night of ignorance. Above her, the stars keep the vigil; watched by a solitary Infinitude she embodies the Divine in dumb Matter, and manifests the Absolute in symbol minds and lives. Her mechanical craft works out miracles; she makes Matter’s machine master and implement the laws of thought and life’s engines serve the labour of a soul. This is how the Mighty Mother has fashioned this creation. She has made it look like a huge whim (a sudden, impulsive, and seemingly unmotivated action, what many rationalists have called a series of blind accidents) bound by iron laws and shut God into an inscrutable world. She has lulled the Omniscient into Inconscient sleep; she has persuaded the Omniscient to ride on the back of Inertia and has made the Divine tread perfectly with unconscious steps. This is the enormous domain of her wonder‐works.

(This is an important notion which is once again basis to Sri Aurobindo’s integral philosophy.

One does not apologise for God because his creation at the moment is full of imperfections and suffering and evil. Traditionally Vedantic philosophy has been at pains to explain this paradox of a perfect God creating such an imperfect world. So it denies absolute reality to this world and regards it as an illusion. Sri Aurobindo avoids this trap.) “She is using death as a way of ensuring immortality (Death gives each embodied soul an opportunity to continue its adventure of consciousness in a new body and under totally new conditions. The pilgrimage of the soul from the inconscience of Matter to the Superconscience of the Divine is too long a journey to be competed in one life. Therefore rebirth is an important aspect of Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy. What makes rebirth possible is death. Thus death is a process and not an end of life.). The face of the Eternal was seen through the flow of Time. His knowledge he has disguised as Ignorance (The world tends to look upon true knowledge as ignorance.) His good he has sowed in the monstrous bed of Evil and made error a door by which Truth could enter in. He waters his tree of bliss with tears of sorrow. (Sorrow often stings us to the quick and enables us to dissolve a knot of ignorance. As our knots of ignorance are dissolved, we discover the bliss that is the very nature of our soul and of this creation.)

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“A thousand aspects of this creation point back to their origin in the One. The Unique was concealed by a two‐fold Nature. This world is an intermingling of the Eternal’s many disguises; it is a dance in which each passionate dancer tries to entangle the other; they often look like lovers trying to resolve the quarrel of their lost identity in a forbidden embrace. This is seen here as the wrestle and struggle of the extremes of Power (Purusha and Prakriti) and this struggle is what we see happening all along earth’s million roads towards the Supreme.

“All here seems to follow a stumbling gait behind a guide who too seems to be stumbling, and yet every stumble turns out to be a needed stride on roads which are unknown to a goal which is unknowable. All here blunder and struggle towards the one Divine.

(This idea too is very basic to Sri Aurobindo’s thinking and has found expression in other places too in Savitri. Take for example, the following lines from Canto II in Book Six: This world was not built with random bricks of Chance, A blind god is not destiny's architect; A conscious power has drawn the plan of life, There is a meaning in each curve and line.

Pages: 459 – 460 (Lines 818 – 821) )

“The eternal powers, as if transformed by a titan’s spell, took on a dubious appearance. Forms of an obscure divinity, they wore the visage of animal or dwarf, put on the ears of the fawn or the hoof of the horse or the goat or harboured a demoniac look in their eyes. They turned the thinking mind into a crooked maze, their hearts underwent a complete change as they were assailed by the uncontrolled impulses from the nether world pouring into their chamber of delight, like drunken revellers joining in a wild masked ball.

(There are dark periods in human history when titanic forces to upset the even flow of life and bring about great catastrophes and cause much political and social upheaval. The forces of good seem to be in retreat everywhere and evil seems to be in the ascendant. There is a reference to such dark phases of human history in these lines.)

“On the highways and in the gardens of the world, these powers, forgetting their divine functions, reeled like those who have drunk an intoxicating magical wine or were like children who sprawl and play in nature’s mud. Even wisdom , whose function it is to build the paths to God, joined in this deep and calamitous game. She behaved as though she has failed to consult the traveller’s wallet and bag and to consult the map and take the directions for the journey.

Wisdom, when entangled in this unfortunate game, had only a self‐righteous virtue as it stock; she uses the pragmatic gropings of reason or the powers of abstraction not in search for truth but to serve the cause of technology and thus becomes an escort in utility’s school.

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(The reference to the misuse of religion and of science very often in human history is hinted at here. Religion is intended basically to build pathways to God, instead, very often we find becoming one of the temporal powers and failing to serve its intended purpose and. Similarly science, whose primary aim is the discovery of truth about the phenomenal world, ends up as a purveyor of human comforts through technology.)

“On the ocean surface of a vast Consciousness, the Mind ends up catching in its net only shoals of small fish but the great truths escape her narrow cast; These great truths are safe from sight in the depths of consciousness; unknown they swim in the dark huge gulfs of the ocean where the Mind cannot easily fathom them; they are too far down beyond the reach of the shallow plunge of the weak diver.

“This is the condition of our human vision; it tries to see but with ignorant eyes and naturally, it cannot look into the heart of things. Our knowledge walks leaning on Error for a walking stick; therefore it ends up choosing false gods and false dogmas for worship. Or it becomes the votary of a fierce intolerant creed. Or, sometimes it becomes a dilettante of a seeker doubting every truth it finds. Then it becomes a sceptic obstinately denying the Light it finds or chilling the heart with a dry ironic smile; thus the human mind becomes a sceptic stamping out the god in man. Thus there are spells of darkness that beset the paths of Time. This darkness sometimes lifts its head so high as to blot the stars; it often turns the interpreting mind into a cloud and blocks the intimations coming from the sun of Truth.

(This is an apt description of our own age, for example. There is a groping for truth undoubtedly and often it is serious in purpose. But the spirituality such an age spawns is often spurious; people seem to be running after false gods. And then there are sections of the society which become fundamentalist and narrow and intolerant. We also have the non‐ believers who obstinately refuse to see the Light even when they chance upon it.)

“Yet there is Light here; it stands at Nature’s doors like a torch to lead the traveller in. This light waits to be kindled even in our cells. It is like a star lighting up the sea of ignorance all around.

It is like a lamp on the stern of our ship piercing the darkness of the night and showing the way.

As knowledge grows, this Light flares up from within. It is like a shining warrior in the mind and harbours soaring dreams in the intuitive heart; it is our armour of protection in our fight against the adversary forces. Then the effulgent dawns arrive and wisdom in its magnificence breaks through the obscurely lit fields of our being. Then philosophy soars on the cloud‐bank peaks of thought, and science unveils the secret powers of Nature. Enormous powers are released that serve the small needs of the puny creature that man in his ignorance is. Science conquers Nature and makes her its prisoner.

“On the heights unreached by mind in its normal reach, on the borders where Time fades into Timelessness, the soul draws back into its own immortal Self. Man’s knowledge now becomes a ray of God’s heavenly wisdom. There is a mystic region of consciousness from where descends

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the power which shines in the eyes of the seer and the sage; it is a lightening flash of visionary sight and plays upon the inner borders of the mind. That silences the mind and makes it gaze into a luminous Void.

From those mystic peaks which remain unseen, a voice comes down like a cry of splendour from a mouth of a storm. It is the voice that speaks to the depths of silence of the night. It is like a thunder and a flaming call addressed to the soul.

“Above the planes that climb from the Inconscient earth, a hand is lifted towards the realm of the Invisible beyond the dazzling borders of the superconscient and it pushes away the screen that veils the face of the Unknown. This enables the soul within to look into the eyes of the Eternal. The soul then hears the great word our human hearts cannot hear, because it can pierce through the blaze in which our thoughts grow blind. It drinks from the naked breasts of the glorious truth and learns the secrets of eternity.

“Thus, although at one time all was plunged into the mysterious darkness and obscurity of Nescience, all is raised to meet the glorious Sun. O Death, this is the mystery of your reign. In the paradoxical and tragic field of earth, as it was whirling in its aimless journey around the sun, amidst the vast landscape of the great dumb stars, a gigantic darkness settled in the fields of God and the world of Matter came to be governed by your form, O Death. You have covered the face of the Eternal on earth with your dark mask. Consequently the bliss that created the world has fallen asleep. Abandoned to her fate, this world continued to be in its deep slumber.

An evil transformation came on all her parts until she knew herself no more. In her creative slumber, there still flit across vague memories ‐‐ of the joy and beauty that were meant to manifest here under the laugh of the blue sky, in the green‐scarfed trees and in the happy profusion of scents and colours in the promenades gleaming in the sun, and in the vigil of the dreamy light of the stars, and amid the tall meditating peaks of hills, on the bosom of the rain‐ kissed earth and the sapphire tumblings of the waves of the sea.

“But now the original innocence is lost. Death and ignorance govern this mortal world and nature’s face wears a gloomy colour. The earth has still retained her early physical charm and grace; the grander and beauty of nature are still there but the divine in‐dweller is veiled. The souls of men have strayed away from the Light and the Supreme Mother seems to have withdrawn herself, since her face is not visible any more. The eyes of Bliss of the Mother who created this world are closed and sorrow’s touch has found her even in her dreams.

“The creatrix ( the feminine form of ‘creator’) of the world tosses restlessly on her bed of Void because she is unable to wake up and find herself and to build again the perfection in this creation she intended. She has forgotten her true nature and state of being. She has forgotten how to create a world of felicity. Therefore she weeps and makes her creatures too weep . She tests her children with the sharp edge of sorrow and spends on life’s vain and waste of hope and toil the poignant luxury of grief and tears. In the nightmare of her half‐awake dream, which

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is a torture to her own self besides being a torture for us, her creatures, she comes to our hearts and bodies and into our lives wearing a hard and cruel mask of pain.

“Our nature perverted because of its birth through pain returns dry and cynical answers to life’s questioning shocks and finds a pungent and bitter taste in the world’s pangs and drinks with relish the sharp wine of grief’s perversity. A curse seems to have been laid on the pure joy of life. Delight which is the sweetest sign of the presence of God and which is born as a twin with Beauty is dreaded and avoided by the saint and the austere sage because they think it is a dangerous and uncertain cheat. They look upon it as a clever trick of a dark power created to tempt the soul to its fall. They look upon God as a puritan who has made of pleasure a poisonous fruit or a deadly drug in the market‐place of death. For them sin is born out nature’s natural joy.

“Yet every creature hunts for happiness here and pays for it with hard suffering. Or it is something they tear by violence from the dull breast of the indifferent world and they get at most some fragment or broken piece of the bliss. Even joy has become here a poisonous drink.

The hunger for joy is turned into a dreadful hook of Fate. All means are considered justified if they can catch even a single ray of happiness and a whole eternity is sacrificed for a moment’s bliss. Yet it is an undeniable truth it was for joy and not for sorrow that the world was created, and certainly not as a dream in endless suffering. Although God made the world for his delight, an ignorant Power seems to have charge of it and imposed its will on it as though it were God’s own Will. Thus the falsehood called death has mastered life, and thus all came to appear as chance wearing the appearance of fate.”

Savitri has not yet finished what she has to say to the God of Death. For the rest of her statement we will have to wait until the next instalment.

http://nextfuture.sriaurobindosociety.org.in/july05/nfjuly05_savitri.htm

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26. Book Ten Canto Three – Continued

Savitri’s answer to the God of Death, which we examined in Instalment 23, is a very clear exposition of the integral truth she stands for as against the partial truth which he espouses.

She does not deny that the world as it is today is riddled with imperfections of various kinds.

But that is no reason to take this as an unchanging or permanent feature of the world and to conclude that there is no God, and that nothing much will ever come out of this world and therefore to conclude all ideals are false, etc. Her reply is best summarised in these lines: In God concealed the world began to be, Tardily it travels towards manifest God: Our imperfection towards perfection toils, The body is the chrysalis of a soul: The infinite holds the finite in its arms, Time travels towards revealed eternity.

A miracle structure of the eternal Mage, Matter its mystery hides from its own eyes, A scripture written out in cryptic signs, An occult document of the All‐Wonderful's art.

Page: 623 (Lines 91 – 100)

She describes the various vicissitudes through which man has moved towards the Divine; there was plenty of the animal nature in his early approaches to wisdom, virtue and other things. He used his reason to sound only the shallow waters and to catch small fish missing the great truths that live in the depths. Man’s mortal vision peers with ignorant eyes; he often worships false Gods. In spite of all this, the “Light is there”. It slowly grows. From beyond the regions of the Mind, inspirations come to man.

The mask of death “has covered the Eternal’s face” and “The Bliss that made the world has fallen asleep”. It has forgotten itself completely and it looks as though death and Ignorance govern this world. But the bliss is still there in Nature, “The grandeur and the beauty still are hers, But veiled is the divine Inhabitant.” The eyes of the creatrix Bliss are closed and sorrow has found her even in her dreams. Man often takes a perverse delight in suffering. Even sages have dreaded the experience of Bliss, which is “God’s sweetest sign”. And yet every living being hunts for happiness and works hard for some “broken shard of bliss”. This was where we were at the end of the foregoing instalment.

Savitri’s reply to death is not concluded yet. She goes on to say:

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“A hidden bliss is at the root of things. Our spirits breathe an air of pure felicity on their heights. Our hearts and bodies feel its obscure call, and our senses grope for it. If this Bliss were not to exist, our world would sink in the Void; if this were not, nothing could move or live here.”

(Then we have these wonderful lines, to which no prose explication can do adequate justice.

Bliss exudes from the very diction and rhythm of these lines:) A hidden Bliss is at the root of things.

A mute Delight regards Time's countless works: To house God's joy in things Space gave wide room, To house God's joy in self our souls were born.

This universe an old enchantment guards; Its objects are carved cups of World‐Delight Whose charmed wine is some deep soul's rapture‐drink: The All‐Wonderful has packed heaven with his dreams, He has made blank ancient Space his marvel‐house; He spilled his spirit into Matter's signs: His fires of grandeur burn in the great sun, He glides through heaven shimmering in the moon; He is beauty carolling in the fields of sound; He chants the stanzas of the odes of Wind; He is silence watching in the stars at night; He wakes at dawn and calls from every bough, Lies stunned in the stone and dreams in flower and tree.

Page: 630 (Lines: 319 – 335)

“There is a bliss that is hidden behind everything. A quiet delight regards everything that takes place in time. Our souls were born to house God’s joy in self; Space was created to give ample space to God’s joy in things. This universe is charged with an enchantment and every object in it is a carved cup meant to hold World‐delight. The blank space is a house of marvels. God’s fires of grandeur burn in the great sun; God glides in the heaven in the shimmering moon. He is silence watching in the stars at night. It is He who wakes at dawn and calls from every bough.

He lies stunned in the stone and dreams in flower and tree.”

“A will to live, a joy to be, persists here even in this labour and misery of Ignorance, on the hard and perilous ground of this difficult earth, in spite of death which seems to be triumphant here.

There is a joy in all that meets the sense, a joy in every experience of the soul, a joy in good as well as in evil, a joy in virtue and a joy in sin. It defies the karmic law and dares to grow even on forbidden soil. Its sap runs through the plant and flower of pain. It thrills with the drama of fate and of the tragic doom; it tears food even from sorrow and as well as from ecstasy, and it

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whets its strength on danger and difficult challenges. It wallows even with the worm and the reptile and raises its head as an equal with the stars. This bliss is present when the faeries dance as well as when the gnomes dine. It basks in the light and heat of many suns. The suns of Beauty and the suns of Power flatter and foster it with their golden beams. This bliss can grow towards the Titan as well as towards the God.’ “Bliss lingers on earth drinking its deep fill through pleasure as well as pain. It feeds on the grapes of Heaven and also on the flowers of the Abyss, on the torment‐craft and flame‐stabs of Hell and on the dim fragments of the glory of Paradise. It soaks itself with the small and paltry pleasures of man’s life and finds a taste in its petty passions and joys; it finds a taste even in tears and in the torture of broken hearts, in the crown of gold as well as in the crown of thorns, in life’s nectar‐like sweetness as well in its bitter wine. It explores all levels and aspects of being for an unknown bliss and sounds all experience for things new and strange.”

“Life often brings into the common days of the earthly creature a tongue of glory from a higher and brighter sphere. It gives a depth to his philosophy and to his Art. It leaps at the splendour of some perfect word as in poetry. It also exults in man’s high resolves and noble dreams. It wanders with him when he errs and dares the brink of the abyss. It soars when he climbs and wallows in his fall. He shares his bed‐chamber with angelic as well as with demonic brides, for both kinds of brides compete for his heart. There is a delight which enjoys every moment of the cosmic unfolding of life; it enjoys man’s greatness as well as his littleness; for it his magnanimity and meanness are but colours cast on some neutral background created by the gods; there is plenty to admire in the skills of the Artist who has planned it all.”

(Some of these lines bring to mind an early poem of Sri Aurobindo, written in 1908, the poem entitled “Who”. You will enjoy reading this poem. Please refer to Collected Poems, Volume Five of Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library. Here I can only quote only a couple of stanzas from this poem.

In the blue of the sky, in the green of the forest, Whose is the hand that painted the glow?

When the winds were asleep in the womb of the ether, Who was it roused them and bade them to blow?...

In the strength of a man, in the beauty of woman, In the laugh of a boy, in the blush of a girl; The hand that sent Jupiter spinning through heaven, Spends all its cunning to fashion a curl. …

We will tell the whole world of His ways and cunning: He has pleasure of torture and passion and pain; He delights in our sorrow and drives us to weeping, Then lures with His joy and His beauty again.

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All music is only the sound of His laughter All beauty the smile of his passionate bliss; Our lives are His heart‐beats, our rapture the bridal Of Radha and Krishna, our love is their kiss. )

Now to return to Savitri: “But this danger game does not endure for ever. Beyond earth, but meant for earth delivered from Ignorance, wisdom and joy prepare their perfect crown. The superhuman Truth calls the thinking man, the slow transfiguration takes place and at last, the human soul turns to eternal things. It makes man look for the clasp of God in every experience and in every contact with the world. Then there is achieved the longed‐for miracle.”

“Immortal bliss opens her wide, celestial eyes and gazes upon the world, upon the stars.

Through her mighty limbs flows the stream of bliss. Time thrills to the sapphics (a verse type popularised by the Greek poetess Sappho; it normally has four lines with a rigid metrical pattern) of her love song, and Space is filled with a wide beatitude. The immortal bliss at last climbs to the summits of consciousness, leaving the human heart to its accustomed grief, withdrawing totally from this field of manifestation in word and form. It soars far beyond the words, the mental skies of thought. And there in the happy ardour of her creative joy, like “a great heaven‐bird on a motionless sea’ she is poised on the still deep of the Eternal’s peace.

It is for this great delight that the world was created, and it is for this the spirit descended into the Inconscient and charged Matter’s Inconscient force with its power. This is how it gradually hopes to repatriate immortality in death’s realm. This is how the slow mystic transformation works.”

This perception that bliss is the true nature of this creation; it was born out of bliss and exists in bliss, and is moving towards bliss – this is the Vedic and Upanishadic explanation of genesis of this creation. This was how early Hinduism viewed life, a vision entirely different from the cosmic sorrow of Buddhism and also from the cosmic disillusionment of Mayavada. The highest wisdom realised by Bhrigu is described in the Taittariya Upanishad as follows: “He knew Bliss for the Eternal. From Bliss alone, it appears these creatures are born and being born they live

by Bliss and to Bliss they go hence and return.” (Taittariya Upanishad:Chapter Six).

Sri Aurobindo in his Essays Divine and Human (p. 215) explains this perception in these words: The world lives in and by Ananda. From Ananda, says the Veda, we were born, by Ananda we live, to Ananda we return, and it adds that no man could even have the strength to draw in his breath and throw it out again if there were not this heaven of Bliss embracing our existence as ether embraces our bodies, nourishing us with its eternal substance and strength and supporting the life and the activity. A world which is

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essentially a world of bliss—this was the ancient Vedantic vision, the drishti of the Vedic drashta, which differentiates Hinduism in its early virility from the cosmic sorrow of Buddhism and the cosmic disillusionment of Mayavada. But it is possible to fall from this Bliss, not to realise it with the lower nature, in the Apara Prakriti, not to be able to grasp and possess it.

But is this really true that bliss predominates in our life over pain and suffering? Does not this world appear to us rather as a world of suffering than as a world of the delight of existence?

This problem is discussed by Sri Aurobindo is The Life Divine (Part I, Chapters 11 and 12). The treatment there is metaphysical. For our present purposes, it should suffice to look at a letter of his on the same subject: It is fundamentally true for most people that the pleasure of life, of existence in itself, predominates over the troubles of life; otherwise most people would want to die whereas the fact is that everybody wants to live—and if you proposed to them an easy means of eternal extinction they would decline without thanks. That is what X is saying and it is undeniable. It is also true that this comes from the Ananda of existence which is behind everything and is reflected in the instinctive pleasure of existence. Naturally, this instinctive essential pleasure is not the Ananda,—it is only a pale and dim reflection of it in an inferior life‐consciousness—but it is enough for its purpose.”

Letters on Yoga: Page 1235 Before I conclude, I would like to add that one of the glories of Savitri is that it expresses the Vedic vision in incomparably beautiful English poetry. We have just seen an instance of this. http://nextfuture.sriaurobindosociety.org.in/aug05/nfaug05_savitri.htm

Savitri continues her grand exposition of the integral truth and holds it against the one‐sided truth that the God of Death has presented to her. She now proceeds to summarise very succinctly the philosophy of evolution. And for this she uses love as an example. It is this love that the God of Death has dismissed as no more than “a conscious yearning of the flesh, a glorious yearning of the nerves”. Savitri does not deny this but points out that that this is a description of only one stage in the evolution of love.

All our earth starts from mud and ends in sky, And Love that was once an animal's desire, Then a sweet madness in the rapturous heart, An ardent comradeship in the happy mind, Becomes a wide spiritual yearning's space.

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A lonely soul passions for the Alone, The heart that loved man thrills to the love of God, A body is his chamber and his shrine.

Then is our being rescued from separateness; All is itself, all is new‐felt in God: A Lover leaning from his cloister's door Gathers the whole world into his single breast.

Then shall the business fail of Night and Death: When unity is won, when strife is lost And all is known and all is clasped by Love Who would turn back to ignorance and pain?

Page: 632 Savitri explains: “There are many things here on earth which have an humble origin; they start as it were from mud, but they all undergo a gradual transformation and finally end up exalted and elevated at the level of the sky. So does love. It often begins as animal desire, but can change into a sweet intoxication in the ecstatic heart. This by itself is a great spiritual change, since its total dependence on the physical aspects gets reduced and sublimated to a great extent. If refined further, this love blossoms into an ardent companionship in the happy mind, and then if still further refined, it becomes a wide spiritual yearning. So what was once largely physical, then takes on the emotional tone, and becomes a largely mental companionship and finally turns into an ontense spiritual yearning. It then reveals its real nature. Love is in fact the passionate yearning of a lonely soul caught up in the prison house of the ego for oneness with the Divine.

Thus the heart that loves a man thrills to the love of God. The body itself transcends its carnality and becomes sacred, becomes the home and the shrine of the Beloved.

“This is the great secret power of love; it releases us from our “separateness”, the root‐cause of all our anxiety, insecurity and fear. When we discover and experience this true love, we begin to see God in everything, the world looks new in the consciousness of God. Thus a lover leaning out of his lonely cloistered existence is able to gather the whole world into his single heart. When this happens the business of the Night of ignorance and Death is finished. Love establishes this unity and with this strife vanishes. When all is known and is clasped by Love who would turn back to the rule of ignorance and pain?”

(Savitri reveals here the great secret of love which was first announced to the world by the Upanishadic Rishi Yajnavalkya in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad (2.4.5.). There he declares to his wife, “Maitreyi, lo, verily not for the love of the husband is a husband dear, but for the love of the Atman ( the Divine in us) a husband is dear. Not for the love of a wife is the wife dear, but for the love of the Atman in her is the wife dear. Not for the love of the sons are sons dear but for the love of the Atman in them are the sons dear. ... Not for the love of the beings are

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the beings dear but for the love of the Atman in them are they dear.” The real basis of love is the Atman or the soul. When we feel we love somebody, it is because unknown to us the soul in us has found some affiliation with the soul of the other person. All souls are kindred sparks from the Divine. That is the true source of love.

In other words when we love someone or something, we in fact love the Atman (the Divine) in them. Whatever appears beautiful or dear to us is so because of the presence of the Divine in it. So the origin of all love is the Divine. The Divine is what makes things in this world dear to one another. ) Savitri continues: “O Death, I have conquered you within myself. I tremble no more when grief attacks me. A great calm seated deep within me fills my body and my senses. This calm has given me the strength to take the grief of the world and change it into strength. It makes the joy of the world one with the joy of God. My eternal love is seated on God’s calm. Love must rise beyond the very heavens and find its secret sense that is beyond words. Only then will it be able to change its human ways to ways divine without foregoing its sovereignty of earthly bliss.

“O Death, if I have claimed the living Satyavan from you, it is not solely for my own heart’s sweet fulfilment, nor is it for my body’s bliss alone. I want him back also for the work he and I have to do here, for the sacred mission of our lives. We have to live our lives here on earth as God’s messengers; we have come here and chosen to live under the shadow of death so that we can draw God’s light to earth and awaken the ignorant human race and fill the empty human hearts with God’s love and to heal the unhappiness of the world with God’s bliss.

“I would urge you to bear in mind that I the woman am the shakti (the force) of God, and he, Satyavan, is the Eternal’s delegate soul in man. He represents the evolving Godhood in humanity and I am the Divine’s shakti that has the mission to uphold this adventure of the growing Divine in man. My will, O Death, is greater than your law, and my love is stronger than the bonds of Fate. Our love (the love between me and Satyavan) has on it the heavenly seal of the Supreme. It is my responsibility to guard that seal against your efforts to break it and tear it apart.”

(It should be noted here that poet reveals what Savitri and Satyavan symbolise. Savitri symbolises the Divine’s grace and power, which comes down to earth to support the adventure of consciousness which Satyavan undertakes. Satyavan symbolises the carrying the aspiration of evolving towards Godhood. There is something of Satyavan in all of us. There is a time in our lives when we are idealistic, when we want to change the world, leave this world a better place, when we fall in love, when we write poetry and dream of greatness on earth. But unfortunately, this Satyavan is us dies young and most of us lose our idealism and becomes stark realists or even cynics before we step into our forties. Wherever we find an exception to

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this, and the aspiration for perfection continues through out one’s life, it is because of the Divine Grace supporting such a person. Please look at the Author’s Note, which you will find given immediately after the Contents pages in any recent edition of Savitri. This Author’s Note gives what Sri Aurobindo himself had to say about each of the major characters in the Savitri legend. He says there, “Satyavan is the soul carrying the divine 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;…”

He concludes this Note with this significant observation: Still this is not a mere allegory, the characters are not personified qualities, but incarnations or emanations of living and conscious Forces with whom we can enter into concrete touch and they take human bodies in order to help man and show him the way from his mortal state to a divine consciousness and immortal life.

What is being hinted at here is that the drama of Savitri and Satyavan is being enacted in each age in some form or the other, and our own lives may be the theatres for this drama.)

Then Savitri reveals one more glory of love and its role in creation in these most memorable words: Love must not cease to live upon the earth; For Love is the bright link twixt earth and heaven, Love is the far Transcendent's angel here; Love is man's lien on the Absolute.

Page: 633

“Love must not be allowed to disappear from the earth. For it is the bright link between earth and heaven. Love is the far Transcendent’s angel here. Love is man’s lien on the absolute. In other words, it is the guarantee that one day the Absolute, the Supreme Divine’ will redeem and fill it with his manifest glory and perfection.”

(All spiritual teachers have lauded the supreme importance of love not only for the redemption of individuals but also for the redemption of the human collectivity. If the Christian scripture tells us ”to love thy neighbour as thyself”, the Hindu scriptures remind us that the so‐called neighbour is not an alien, but that he is yourself in another form and with a different face, and therefore he should receive from you the same consideration that you receive from yourself.

Love the other as much as you love yourself, that is the teaching, formulated in another form.

The Mother has emphasised the importance of divine love through a parable about the genesis of this creation and has explained how evil, falsehood, suffering and death came to catch hold

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of it. When the Supreme Divine decided to manifest itself in this world, four divine forces, Bliss, Light or Consciousness, Truth and Life emanated from the Divine. But in the process of manifestation something went wrong. These divine forces lost their connection with the divine and consequently, they got transformed into their opposites. Light or Consciousness became Darkness and Inconscience, Love became Hatred, Delight became Suffering, and Life became Death. Then, realising that His creation has been misled into Inconscience, hatred, Suffering and Death, the Supreme divine decided to send a special emanation of himself into this creation which had the power to redeem these misguided emanations and bring them to the Divine, and this special emanation was Love.

In one on her Prayers and Meditations (page 161), we find the following prayer: “O victorious power of divine love, Thou art the sovereign Master of this universe, Thou art its creator and its saviour, who hast permitted it to emerge from chaos, and now leadest it to its eternal goal.”

Once we recognise that love is nothing but the Self in one recognising the Self in the other or in others dimly or clearly and therefore a seeking for oneness and the bliss of oneness, we can understand why love is recognised as the saviour. We pass through different stages of physical, vital, emotional, mental and spiritual love. But none of these can ever give a permanent or complete satisfaction to human beings until one arrives at the point where all these outer forms of love culminate in the divine Love.

Then one realises that love is one of the great universal forces and its movement is free and independent of the objects in which and through which it manifests. It manifests wherever there is receptivity, wherever there is some opening for it. Love in its real nature is not a personal or individual thing; what makes it appear so is only the individual’s capacity to receive and manifest this universal force. It is a supremely conscious power. It chooses its instruments consciously, and endeavours to realise in them that which is its eternal aim. And when the instrument is found wanting, it drops it and turns to look for others. Men think that they have suddenly fallen in love; they see their love come and grow and then they see it fade away. But their sense in this of a personal experience all their own is an illusion. It is a wave from the everlasting sea of universal love.

It is a divine Force; and the distortions we see in its apparent workings belong to its instruments. Love manifests everywhere, not in human beings alone. Its movement is there in plants as well. In the animals it is easy to detect its presence. All that distorts and deforms this great and divine power comes from the obscurity and ignorance and selfishness of the limited instrument. Love, the eternal force, has no clinging, no desire, no hunger for possession, no self‐regarding attachment. It is in its pure movement, the seeking of for union of the self with the Divine. Love divine gives itself and asks for nothing. Although the humans have turned it into such an ugly and repulsive thing, the first touch of love even in human beings something of

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its purer substance. They become capable for a moment of forgetting themselves; for a moment its divine touch awakens and magnifies all that is fine and beautiful.

One can manifest the Divine love to the extent one is capable of receiving it. Only a few have the capacity to receive and manifest love in its original purity. Love is a mightyvibration coming straight from the One, and only the very pure and very strong are capable of receiving and manifesting it. In this same epic poem, in Savitri itself, we have these wonderful lines explaining why pure love is such a rare thing in this world: Too far from the Divine, Love seeks his truth And Life is blind and the instruments deceive And Powers are there that labour to debase.

Rare is the cup fit for love's nectar wine, As rare the vessel that can hold God's birth; A soul made ready through a thousand years Is the living mould of a supreme Descent.

Page: 398

One who is not open to love in its essence and in its truth cannot approach the Divine. Even the seekers through knowledge come to a point beyond which if thy want to progress, they are bound to find themselves entering at the same time into love and to feel the two as one, knowledge the light of the divine union, love the very heart of knowledge.

The Mother, on whose writings much of this discussion of the importance of love is based (Ref. Collected Works of the Mother, Vol. 3, pp. 69 – 72), has this to say about how love figured in the genesis of this creation and how love alone will be able to claim this world for God and make here on earth the manifestation of the perfection of God possible: The manifestation of the love of the Divine in the world was the great holocaust, the supreme self‐giving. The Perfect Consciousness accepted to be merged and absorbed into the unconsciousness of matter, so that consciousness might be awakened in the depths of its obscurity and little by little a Divine Power might rise in it and make the whole of this manifested universe a highest expression of the Divine Consciousness and the Divine love. This was the supreme love, to accept the loss of the perfect condition of supreme divinity, its absolute consciousness, its infinite knowledge, to unite with the unconsciousness, to dwell in the world with ignorance and darkness.. And yet perhaps none would call it love; for it does not clothe itself in a superficial sentiment, it makes no demand in exchange for what it has done, no show of its sacrifice. The force of love in the world is to trying to find consciousnesses that are capable of receiving this divine movement in its purity and expressing it. This race of all beings towards love, this irresistible push and seeking out in the world’s heart and in all hearts, is the impulse

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given by a Divine love behind the human longing and seeking. It touches millions of instruments, trying always, always failing; but this constant touch prepares these instruments and suddenly one day there will awake in them the capacity of self‐giving, the capacity of loving.

(Collected Works of the Mother, Vol 3, p. 71) The love that has triggered off this discussion is the love between Savitri and Satyavan. This love is called ‘conjugal love’ because in our story Savitri and Satyavan are married and the word ‘conjugal’ connotes the married state or the relations between married persons. It was because of this that in the Puranic lore the story of Satyavan and Savitri came to enjoy a celebrated status, and Savitri came to be looked upon as a model wife. But merely viewing this love as conjugal love or love between man and woman diminishes the value of what this symbolises. It is symbolic of all human love. And if human love were just that, an attraction between two human beings or an ardent devotion for each other, it would cease to have the universal significance with which all great spiritual leaders have invested it.

When the God of Death ridicules love as something physical and vital, therefore transient and fleeting, he was only looking at one kind of love and that too at its manifestation at a fairly lower end of the scale. Savitri reveals to him the real secret of love, which she herself has put in these most memorable lines, which we have already once quoted above: Love must not cease to live upon the earth; For Love is the bright link twixt earth and heaven, Love is the far Transcendent's angel here; Love is man's lien on the Absolute.

Page: 633

http://nextfuture.sriaurobindosociety.org.in/sep05/nfsep05_savitri.htm

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27. Book Ten Canto Three – Continued

We have so far heard from Savitri a most convincing and inspiring description of love in this canto (Book Ten, Canto Three). She has explained why it has been regarded as “the bright link between earth and heaven” and as “the far Transcendent’s angel here”. But the God of Death is not moved or convinced and his cynicism is not overcome yet. So with an ironic laughter in his voice, showing a total disbelief in what Savitri has so far said about the great role love has played in the evolution of this creation, he responds to Savitri as follows: “Savitri, I must admit that you have like all human beings used splendid thoughts to cheat the Truth by giving a false ring to it. You have hired the services of the swindler called Mind, and with its help you have woven a fine garment out of the ethereal fabric of idealism to hide the real nature of your naked desires. You have dressed up your heart’s greedy passion and made it look presentable and even respectable. But please do not paint the web of life with such magic colours. Make your thought a plain and faithful mirror so that it can reflect in itself Matter and mortality as they really are. When you see them for what they really are, you will come to know that your soul is a product of the flesh, that it is a fancifully conceived thing belonging to a world fabricated by the fancies of the mind. Your words are like murmurs in a mystic dream.

For how can the pure grandeur of your dream‐built God live in the soiled heart of man? Or, who can see a divine face and form in the naked two‐legged worm you call ‘man’? O human face, put off the mind‐painted masks you are wearing. Just be the animal, the worm that Nature intended you to be. Accept your futile birth, the narrow life. For truth is bare like stone and hard (inescapable) like death. Live the bare life which is also hard like Truth.

The God of Death is still haughty and dismissive of everything that Savitri is saying. It would look as though the integral truth that Savitri is trying to present to him is too vast for his limited understanding. Savitri notes how he tried to belittle her by referring repeatedly to her human status – “the naked two‐legged worm thou callest man” Therefore Savitri responds to him in these words: “Yes, I am human. Yet in my humanity the god awaits his hour. Mankind through me will trample you down to reach the immortal heights, transcending grief and pain, fate and death.

Yes, my humanity is a mask of God. He dwells in me, and he is the mover of my acts. It is God who turns the great wheel of his cosmic work. I am the living body of his light, and I am the thinking instrument of his power. I incarnate his Wisdom and I am his conquering and unslayable Will. The formless spirit drew in me its shape. In me are the Nameless and the secret Name.”

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(Savitri is making the point that man is not the limited being his physical size may suggest. He carries in him the Infinite Spirit and that gives value to his finite form. Man has already reached a high rung on the ladder of the evolution of consciousness and what has been evolving all along, unrecognised by most, is the Supreme Divine consciousness. So it is only a question of time before the evolution reaches a point at which, not only grief and pain, but also fate and death are transcended, because these cannot have a pace in the Divine consciousness which has risen beyond Mind. When that happens, the rule of Death would end.)

The God of Death is exasperated; Savitri seems to have an explanation for every inconvenient point that he brings up to make her see his point of view. So he now throws at her another intricate and difficult problem. He says to her: “O Savitri, you are still speaking like a high priestess of the shrine of imagination. Nature has fixed laws which brook no change, and you will have to persuade Nature to change these laws.

And then you will see that you have a whole string of these laws. Will you be able to change these laws? Besides, you will have to bring about a close union between two eternal foes – Matter and Spirit. In this creation, these two irreconcilables find themselves in each other’s embrace. They are joined together in an unhappy wedlock in which they only manage to cancel the glory of each other. You describe yourself as the Will of the Spirit, but how will you be able to make one of them true and the other false through the exercise of your will? The Real and the unreal cannot co‐exist. Where Matter is real, there the Spirit can only be a dream, and if the Spirit is the reality then Matter must be false, unreal. From this it would follow that he who would turn to God must leave the world, and he who would live in the Spirit must give up life.

He who has met the Self (the Spiritual Being) in himself has been able to do so because he has renounced his individual ego‐self. This has been the experience of all the voyagers of the many routes of the spiritual path, of all those who have travelled through Existence to its end, of all the sages who have explored the vast spaces of the world‐ocean. They have found extinction or Nirvana the only safe harbour. Man can find an escape from his miserable predicament in life only through one of these two doors – the death of his body is the Matter’s gate to peace, and the extinction of his soul in the Brahman or the Shunya the last felicity of his soul. Whichever way one looks at it, all take refuge in me. I, Death, am the final God, the ultimate liberator.”

(The God of Death regards Savitri as the votary of the Spirit, but he cannot understand why then she cares for this world and why she is so concerned about bringing perfection to life here on earth. That would seem to be a purely materialistic goal. Consider some of her statements: The formless Spirit drew in me its shape; In me are the Nameless and the secret Name.

(Lines 497‐97)

and again,

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Our lives are God's messengers beneath the stars; To dwell under death's shadow they have come Tempting God's light to earth for the ignorant race, His love to fill the hollow in men's hearts, His bliss to heal the unhappiness of the world.

(Lines 447 – 451)

The God of Death finds Savitri’s position a jumble of contraries. Either the Spirit is true or Matter is true, both cannot be true at the same time. That is the wisdom of most philosophical thinking of a certain kind. It would seem that the God of Death is arguing here in the manner of Shankara, the great exponent of Illusionism and of Buddha. According to the classical theory of Illusionism (or Mayavada, as it is called) there is only one Reality, and that is the absolute transcendent Brahman, or the Spirit, and the universe is not a genuine creation. Those of us who are afflicted by Ignorance see the Supreme Spirit in the figure of this creation as a man might see a rope in the figure of a snake. The entire apparent world, in which good and evil seem to co‐exist, and which we want to change and bring to perfection, is a mere illusion, and does not exist in reality. Action in an illusory world is, of course, of no significance, except possibly as an exercise to purify the mind in preparation for union with the Absolute. Whether one renounces all action or whether one practises only pious actions, the intention is the same – to escape the world. This is essentially the claim of all those who believe in the truth of the Spirit. They draw a strong mental support for this belief in the perceptions of the thinking mind about this world: …that there is an illusion behind all human effort and terrestrial endeavour, the illusion of his political and social gospels, the illusion of his ethical efforts at perfection, the illusion of philanthropy and service, the illusion of works, the illusion of fame, power, success, the illusion of all achievement. Human, social and political endeavour turns always in a circle and leads nowhere; man's life and nature remain always the same, always imperfect, and neither laws nor institutions nor education nor philosophy nor morality nor religious teachings have succeeded in producing the perfect man, still less a perfect humanity,—straighten the tail of the dog as you will, it has been said, it always resumes its natural curve of crookedness. Altruism, philanthropy and service, Christian love or Buddhist compassion have not made the world a whit happier, they only give infinitesimal bits of momentary relief here and there, throw drops on the fire of the world's suffering. All aims are in the end transitory and futile, all achievements unsatisfying or evanescent; all works are so much labour of effort and success and failure which consummate nothing definitive: whatever changes are made in human life are of the form only and these forms pursue each other in a futile circle; for the essence of life, its general character remains the same for ever

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The Life Divine, Page: 416

That is what the God of Death proclaims – that he is God, the ultimate refuge of all, the ultimate end of the body and also of the illusory self that is born in ignorance in this world of multiplicity. That is why the God of Death cannot understand Savitri; she swears by the Spirit but seems to be equally committed to this material world that is regarded as unreal and illusory. That is why he says: If all are the Spirit, Matter is a lie, And who was the liar who forged the universe?

The Real with the unreal cannot mate.

He who would turn to God, must leave the world; He who would live in the Spirit, must give up life; He who has met the Self, renounces self.

Page 635 (Lines 509 – 514)

If the Spirit (Brahman‐Atman) alone is real, then no reality can be ascribed either to Savitri or to Satyavan and the love between them which Savitri values so highly would seem to have no significance at all.

From this, it should not be concluded that the philosophical position of the God of Death is the same as Shankara’s or Buddha’s. He represents here basically the Nihil, the Inconscient from which the world has evolved. He is here to guard the empire of the Inconscient. He does not want the world to evolve towards the Divine and manifest here the Divine’s glory and fullness and perfection. He makes use of different philosophic positions as weapons against Savitri in order to dissuade her from pursuing him further and from getting back Satyavan from him and from thus conquering death on behalf of mankind. As we have already seen, death takes a position against what he feels is the idealistic position of Savitri. When it doesn’t work he shifts his stand and argues like a Shankara or a Buddha. But it is clear that he is not an enthusiastic believer in Shankara’s position either. He hints at it when he says: Where Matter is all, there Spirit is a dream: If all are the Spirit, matter is a lie, And who was the liar who forged the universe?

(Lines 508 – 510)

The theory of Illusionism states that there is only one Reality, the absolute Transcendent Brahman, and that we falsely see the Brahman in the figure of the cosmic, as a man might see a rope. The universe, they state, is a “superimposition” made by Maya on the Brahman and so

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the multiple cosmos is seen where only the unitary Brahman exists. We do see this universe for a time, and we are able to operate in this illusory cosmos. So it is not entirely unreal.

But if it is true that this world is perceived, who perceives it? Since Brahman is the only reality, then Brahman must be also the percipient of Maya. This would imply that maya is a power of Brahman consciousness. If so, then there must be a dual status of consciousness in Brahman, one consciousness of the reality, and the other conscious of maya. Thus we are forced into duality in order to maintain the illusory character of what Maya produces, together with the reality of Brahman itself. This is an argument which Sri Aurobindo has used in the Life Divine to show that Brahman as the percipient of maya leads to the conclusion that maya is more likely a real manifestation of the real Brahman. We will not pursue this philosophical inquiry any further. My point here is that the God of Death is making use of the Shanakarite position on Illusionism as a weapon in his dialectical struggle against Savitri, not necessarily because he believes in this position.

Savitri is not interested in giving a philosophical reply to the problems raised by the God of Death. She could have pointed out as Sri Aurobindo has in the Life Divine (p. 420), that this world is a manifestation of a divine Truth or a divine possibility in which under certain conditions an initiating Ignorance must intervene as a necessary factor, and that the arrangement of this universe contains in it a compulsion of the Ignorance to move towards Knowledge, of the imperfect manifestation to grow into perfection, of the frustration to serve as a step towards a final victory, of the suffering to prepare an emergence of the divine Delight of Being. In that case the sense of disappointment, frustration, illusion and the vanity of all things would not be valid; for the aspects that seem to justify it would be only the natural circumstances of a difficult evolution: all the stress of struggle and effort, success and failure, joy and suffering, the mixture of ignorance and knowledge would be the experience needed for the soul, mind, life and physical part to grow into the full light of a spiritual perfected being. It would reveal itself as the process of an evolutionary manifestation; there would be no need to bring in the fiat of an arbitrary Omnipotence or a cosmic Illusion, a phantasy of meaningless Maya.

But although Savitri and The Life Divine were both written by Sri Aurobindo, the latter is metaphysical in its nature while the former is poetry from beginning to end, and even when high philosophy is presented in it, it takes on flesh and blood and comes out as lived experience. So there is no place of philosophical argument in Savitri.

Savitri replies to Death as follows: “O Death, I do not act on the basis of what Reason dictates to me, but on the basis of what my heart, the love I carry in my heart, prompts me, since that love is wiser than all your reason.

The love in me is stronger than all the laws by which you try to hold this world captive. It sees and feels the one Heart throb in all – the undeniable presence of the Divine in all. Because of it

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I can sense the warm hands of the Transcendent at work here; I can see also the cosmic spirit at work here, and even in the ignorance of the dim Night here on earth I can see the Divine supporting the struggling individual being. The love in my heart has enough strength to bear all the grief of this universe and never falter on its luminous evolutionary way in the vast orbit through God’s peace. It can at the same time drink up the sea of All‐Delight and never lose the spiritual presence, the calm that broods in the deep Infinite.”

The God of Death is baffled by what Savitri has just said about herself, about her love – about its wisdom and also power. So he asks her: “Savitri, are you really so strong and so free as you have just now declared yourself to be? Can you really gather pleasure from the wayside flowering boughs of your way and yet not falter on your difficult path to a difficult goal? Can you really get involved in this world and yet not forget the goal which you have to reach? Show me then your strength and freedom from my laws.”

Savitri has now turned the tables on the God of Death. Initially he sounded confident and treated Savitri with a certain condescension. Now that confidence in him has just evaporated.

Savitri has got the better of him now. And he is anxious to know where she draws all her power and wisdom from. Savitri replies: “I find enough pleasures among the green and whispering woods of life. But mine are close‐ bosomed pleasures. They are mine since they are Satyavan’s in the first place, or they are mine for him because our joys are one. And if I seem to linger anywhere it does not matter because Time is ours and God’s. And I have no fear of falling because if I fall, his hand is always near mine to support me. All is a single plan, each wayside act, however casual, deepens the soul’s response, brings us closer to each other and to God.” Savitri says that she does not scorn the pleasures of this world so long as they are Satyavan’s too. For her this world is not a mere phantasy, an illusion. This for her is a real world. The God of Death had assumed that for Savitri this world held no charms and that she was all ethereal and spiritual. He now sees that although she takes her stand on the Spirit, she also seeks a fulfilment which is really of the world. So almost mockingly he says to her, “Then why not prove to the gods your supreme force by choosing earthly joy. For your own self demand what you desire, and at the same time be free from the desire self and its gross masks.

If you can show me that you can do this, I shall give all that your soul desires – every mortal and finite joy that the earth keeps for human hearts. But the hard laws that operate in the world and your own ironic fate forbid the granting of one wish that is dearest to you and outweighs all your other wishes. My will once exerted will remain unchanged for ever; Satyavan can never return to thee again.”

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It now becomes clear to Savitri that the God of Death has not recognised her, has not seen through her human mask, so he is speaking in a language that suits the human world of ignorance. She says to him: “O Death, you have not yet been to able to understand who I am. Your eyes of Darkness cannot look straight at the Truth I embody in my human form. Look deep into me, and try to see what I am, know the Truth that I embody. Then decide what you can give me and what you must give me. I am not here as a supplicant; I am here to claim Satyavan. I shall be satisfied with nothing less.”

http://nextfuture.sriaurobindosociety.org.in/oct05/nfoct05_savitri.htm

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28. Book Ten Canto Three – Conclusion

We are now approaching gradually the climacteric point in this confrontation between Savitri and the God of Death. We have already seen how the God of Death uses different strategies to dissuade Savitri from pursuing her single objective of getting back Satyavan from the clutches of death. Psychological pressure he has tried but that had little effect on Savitri. Then he subjects her idealism to a scathing criticism and tries to show that love is no more than animal lust disguised in colourful words and sentiments. He tries to demoralise her by questioning and denying the very foundations on which her idealism is built. He directs Savitri to realise the actual reality of love among humans and animals. For him that is a reality which is well‐ grounded in actualities, and which represents something already accomplished. As against such a reality, Savitri’s idealism, he claims, is nebulous and unsubstantial, a thing more of words and thoughts than of live actualities. Savitri does not deny that idealism is a thing ineffective so long as it remains a mental thing in us. She declares that her attempt is to convert her idealism into a spiritual realism which sublimates the lower reality of our sensational, vital and physical nature with a strong touch of the higher reality of the spirit.

The argument from the Illusionists also does not deter Savitri. For her the Supreme Reality is true and so is the world which has issued from it. She finds no need to reject the world and life on it because it is still imperfect. She has seen the Supreme at work even in the abysms of Matter’s night. She never holds herself back from the dangerous touch of the world because she has the strength to bear it without faltering. The world and the experiences one gathers in it are all parts of one plan and each experience brings us near to God. Then the God of Death throws a challenge at her. He offers to give her all that she has ever wanted of the joys of this earth on condition that she remains free from the desire self and its deformations. But there is one thing, he says, he cannot give her because the hard laws of nature and her ironic fate forbid it. He cannot grant her the one wish that is dearest to her heart – Satyavan can never return to earth. Savitri answers: If the eyes of Darkness can look straight at Truth, Look in my heart and, knowing what I am, Give what thou wilt or what thou must, O Death.

Nothing I claim but Satyavan alone.

Page: 636

This is the point which we had reached in our previous instalment.

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Savitri makes it clear that she wants nothing but Satyavan to go back with her to life on earth.

When Savitri says this, there is a hush as though Fate itself is doubtful and hesitating how to respond to Savitri. The God of Death can see the power of conviction and faith behind Savitri’s words. He has to yield to her something of Satyavan. He then responds to her as follows: “I shall give you, reclaimed from death and painful fate, what Satyavan keenly desired for you when he was alive”.

Bright noons I give thee and unwounded dawns, Daughters of thy own shape in heart and mind, Fair hero sons and sweetness undisturbed Of union with thy husband dear and true.

And thou shalt harvest in thy joyful house Felicity of thy surrounded eves.

Love shall bind by thee many gathered hearts.

The opposite sweetness in thy days shall meet Of tender service to thy life's desired And loving empire over all thy loved, Two poles of bliss made one, O Savitri.

Return, O child, to thy forsaken earth.”

Page: 637

“I give to you, O Savitri, wonderful days consisting of bright noons and happy dawns. I shall give you daughters resembling you in heart and mind, and fair and valiant sons, and undisturbed sweetness of union with your husband, who will be true and dear to you always. In your joyous house you will have the satisfaction of passing your days surrounded by all your loved ones.

You will bind with your love the hearts of many people gathered around you. You will live to enjoy the double bliss of being able to serve those you love and also hold a loving empire over their hearts. Now Savitri, my child, return to earth which you have forsaken.”

(Notice that the God of Death paints for her a perfect life of domestic bliss, and this is what he is offering her. Daughters very much like her in looks and in character, and sons, fair and valiant. To top it all he offers her the love of a husband true and dear and a long, and an undisturbed life with him. Savitri will always be surrounded by those she loves and she will always find her love reciprocated.

In making this offer to her, the God of Death shows how insensitive he is to what Savitri has been aspiring for. After all, what is Satyavan to Savitri? According to the God of Death, he is just the male member of the conjugal unit of husband and wife, or man and woman. Savitri is given the assurance that he will be true to her and love her dearly. They will together be able to raise a loving family consisting of wonderful sons and daughters. And on top of it all, her companionship with her husband will be a long‐lasting one this time.

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It looks as though the God of Death has either forgotten or never understood what love means to Savitri. For Savitri has already declared to him: My love is not a hunger of the heart, My love is not a craving of the flesh; It came to me from God, to God returns.

Even in all that life and man have marred, A whisper of divinity still is heard, A breath is felt from the eternal spheres.

Allowed by Heaven and wonderful to man A sweet fire‐rhythm of passion chants to love.

There is a hope in its wild infinite cry; It rings with callings from forgotten heights, And when its strains are hushed to high‐winged souls In their empyrean, its burning breath Survives beyond, the rapturous core of suns That flame for ever pure in skies unseen, A voice of the eternal Ecstasy.

Page: 612 (Lines 203 – 220)

The God of Death shows himself totally incapable of understanding such an elevated and divine notion of love. Again, Savitri has told him that the love that binds Satyavan and her is a bond that has bound them together over many lives. And any other male person cannot be for Savitri a husband, true and dear. Savitri has already said all this clearly to the God of Death: For we were man and woman from the first, The twin souls born from one undying fire.

Did he not dawn on me in other stars?

How has he through the thickets of the world Pursued me like a lion in the night And come upon me suddenly in the ways And seized me with his glorious golden leap!

Unsatisfied he yearned for me through time, Sometimes with wrath and sometimes with sweet peace Desiring me since first the world began.

He rose like a wild wave out of the floods And dragged me helpless into seas of bliss.

Out of my curtained past his arms arrive; They have touched me like the soft persuading wind, They have plucked me like a glad and trembling flower,

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And clasped me happily burned in ruthless flame.

I too have found him charmed in lovely forms And run delighted to his distant voice And pressed to him past many dreadful bars.

If there is a yet happier greater god, Let him first wear the face of Satyavan And let his soul be one with him I love; So let him seek me that I may desire.

For only one heart beats within my breast And one god sits there throned. Advance, O Death, Beyond the phantom beauty of this world; For of its citizens I am not one.

I cherish God the Fire, not God the Dream.”

Page 614 (Lines; 253 – 280)

The God of Death in total disregard of these high sentiments of Savitri is now trying to appease her by offering her a most materialistic paradise of domestic bliss – a loving husband and a house full of bright children.)

Understandably, Savitri is abrupt in response to this offer. She says: “Please hold back your gifts. Earth cannot flower if I alone return to it alone, without Satyavan.”

This abrupt reply infuriates the God of Death. He feels like a lion when it sees its prey escaping.

After all the trouble he has taken to rebuff Savitri and shake her challenge to his dominance, she gradually seems to be getting the better of him. He seems to have lost all his power over her.

“O Savitri, you do not seem to know much about the rich and constantly changing life of earth.

Why do you imagine that with one man’s death all the joy of earth will cease? Do you think you will be able to remain unhappy like this for long, until the end of your life because Satyavan is dead? For human hearts get tired of grief soon and the ache of separation passes away and soon other guests fill the vacant chamber of the heart.

Of course, there is something called love. But it is like the passing moment of beauty; it is like an ephemeral painting drawn on the floor to amuse oneself on a holiday. Or, if you look upon love from the point of view of a traveller on an eternal course, then the lover is like a swimmer and those he loves are like the waves in his embrace which keep changing as he proceeds on the infinite sea of life.

But Savitri impatiently intervened and said the following:

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“Give me back my Satyavan; he is my only Lord. None can take his place in my life. All your thoughts and arguments and musings are meaningless to my soul which perceives the deep eternal truth that lives even in transient things.”

The God of Death replied: “O Savitri, why not give yourself a real chance. Go back to earth and see what happens. Very soon you will notice that there are other men on this earth who have beauty, strength and truth, and this will change your perspective on love and life. One of these men will wind himself around your heart once you have half‐forgotten Satyavan. After all, your heart needs an answering heart. Who in this mortal world can live alone and yet be happy? Soon even the memory of Satyavan will drift into the past, he will become a gentle memory pushed away from you by a new love and the tender hands of your children. Then you will begin to wonder whether you ever really loved Satyavan at all. This is the way it always goes in life; it is a flowing stream that changes from moment to moment.”

Savitri gives the following reply to the God of Death: “O dark and sarcastic critic of the work of God, You are making fun of the faltering and slow attempts of the mind and the body of man to catch up with what his heart is certain of achieving at a certain destined hour and what his immortal spirit shall one day make its own.

My heart has worshipped the image of the god its love has adored, although I have been left here separated from him. I have indeed burned myself in the flame of that love to follow in his footsteps. He and I have shared the vast solitude on the hill‐tops alone with God. Why do you engage yourself in this vain strife with me? My mind is free from vague and uncertain thoughts.

The secrets of the gods are plain to my mind. I know now that the fire which burns unceasingly in the great star burns in me as well. Life and death are the fuel of this fire.

“My life is totally dedicated to love, un‐distracted by any thing else. Earthly eyes may have seen my struggle but the eyes of heaven have seen the victory of my love. My love will overcome all difficulties and obstructions on the way . I am certain that through us the eternal bridegroom ( the Purusha = the Spirit)) and the eternal bride (the Prakriti = Matter) will cast off their veils before the marriage fire and exchange kisses. The heavens accept our attempts to fly beyond the limits of this earth although our flights are at times broken. On our life’s prow that ploughs through the waters of life, no light of hope has ever gleamed in vain.”

(Notice how elevated Savitri’s conception of her union and oneness with Satyavan is; she feels that through her union with Satyavan the eternal bridegroom and the eternal bride will be united. Notice the contrast between this concept of love and that assumed by the God of Death – love as a mere union of man and woman which produces conjugal bliss, and the domestic felicity of a happy brood of sons and daughters.

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In one sense, the destiny of all idealistic tendencies and endeavours is to fail, because idealism by its very nature is a light that gleams above what is already realised and has become practicable. It therefore represents something which at the moment looks beyond reach. But its very function is to open up the doorways to an unrealised future, to kindle aspirations for what has not yet been achieved so far, to set for humanity a goal one step higher than what it has ascended so far. The love that Savitri and Satyavan have found in each other may now seem too far from the reach of ordinary mortals. But it is, nevertheless, a light on the prow, a light of hope that illumines the still turbid waters of life.)

As Savitri made this declaration above (contained in lines 615 to 637), something unexpected happened: the vast limbs of the God of Death trembled, as if overcome by a secret ecstasy; they heaved as do the waters of the ocean in the presence of the moon. In other words, the poet is suggesting here, that something within the God of Death is awaiting the hour when the God of Death himself will be freed from the harsh task which now has befallen him. It is hints like these that suggest to us that even the God of Death is a functionary of the Divine, keeping a strict vigil to ensure that nobody who does not deserve it, is allowed into the kingdom of the Divine.

Then the twilight around them, the dim and glimmering surrounding atmosphere, lifted up as though by a sudden waft of wind and trembled like a veil that is getting ready to part.

Thus the two great antagonists strove with each other with potent speech as their weapon.

Around them in the glittering mist, a deepening half‐light fled away on pearly wings as if to reach some ideal morning. Savitri’s thoughts flew through the gleaming haze, mingling with its lights and veils. Like dazzling jewels they glowed into that mysterious realm before fading off into distant echoes. In this realm, all speech, all moods become an enduring tissue used by the mind to construct an ethereal robe for bringing about a charming change. Intent upon her silent will, Savitri walked on the grass of the dim, hazy, none‐too‐real plains. In front of her there was a floating veil of visions; behind her was a trailing robe of dreams, all vague and constantly changing. Now Savitri withdrew her consciousness from the surroundings and gathered it into the depths of her meditative being. For the unshakeable truth of the soul can dwell only in this deep chamber of the being. It burns there like a flame in the centre of the hearth, like a sacrificial fire. This fire serves as the sentinel and witness for the Lord of the house and his companion.

The three – Savitri, the God of Death and the soul of Satyavan – continue to glide through that space as if compelled by some force. The physical order is still the same – the God of death in the front, followed by Satyavan’s spirit, followed by Savitri. But this is only in appearance. In fact, the leadership of the march has now come to Savitri. She led and the God and the spirit of Satyavan follow her directions. So now the leader was at the back and those in the front of the line were the followers. Onward they journeyed on the drifting paths through the vague,

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gleaming mists. But now everything seemed to be moving faster, as if there was an attempt to escape from being caught in the clear light of Savitri’s soul. Her soul moved on through that enchanted dim realm, a celestial bird upon jewelled wings of the wind. Her soul moved on through the enchanted dimness like a colourful flame carried aloft by the spirits of that realm.

Death walked in front of Savitri and Satyavan. In front of Satyavan was Death who now looked like a failing star. Above both of them hung in an unseen balance Satyavan’s fate still to be decided.

http://nextfuture.sriaurobindosociety.org.in/nov05/nfnov05_savitri.htm

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29. Book Ten Canto Four – Beginning

The God of Death has now taken Savitri through the Dream twilight of the Ideal and Savitri comes through it all unfazed. This undermines considerably the confidence of the God of Death, and he begins to sense the great power working behind her and through her. Now he takes her through another Dream twilight world ‐‐ that of the earthly Real. The landscape through which they are travelling also indicates this change.

The marvel of the ideal world was slowly getting lost, and so was its crowding wonder of delicate dreams and the vague half‐etched sublimities. Thought itself seemed to have fallen to a lower level; it had now become hard and tense as if it longed for the touch of some crude reality. The twilight floated as before but its symbol colours were pale and wrapped a much less delightful dream than before and resembled the dull, greyish mist of a sombre day. Savitri heard louder and sadder sounds and her eyes caught vast stretches of planes and cloudy mountains and tawny streams. She saw cities with minarets and towers, long quays, ghauts and harbours white with sails. These scenes lingered before her for a while and were gone. In between these scenes, she saw toiling multitudes in ever changing groups. All these were shadowy shapes as in a foiled cinema.

The tedium of the repetitiousness of life and its machine‐like thoughts and acts is also felt. The poet describes this in these words: A savage din of labour and a tramp Of armoured life and the monotonous hum Of thoughts and acts that ever were the same, As if the dull reiterated drone Of a great brute machine, beset her soul,— A grey dissatisfied rumour like a ghost Of the moaning of a loud unquiet sea.

Pages: 641‐ 642

These were all the creations of an ignorant mind, philosophies, disciplines and laws created by man. The messages of the evangelists, of the prophets, the ideals, systems, poems and crafts were like dreams crossing an empty vast. On the whole, it was a dismal spectacle which reinforced the pessimism of the God of Death.

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Once more was heard the great destroying voice of the God of Death, rising above the spectacle of the fruitless labour of the worlds. His huge denial seems to have pursued the ignorant march of Time. He says to Savitri: “Behold, Savitri, this futile spectacle on earth man is forever engaged in creating. Look at these great deeds accomplished on earth and the ultimate outcome that nature gives to these human efforts. Everything is devoured here by time and everything gets destroyed.

Man’s primary sin is the sin of being, of existence and his great error is his desire to live and of nursing the incurable malady of hope. Since nature cannot change, man too will not be able to change. He seems to be obeying nature’s fixed law, which allows only a change in form but only ends up creating newer versions of her often‐repeated old forms. He thinks that he is creating something new, but ends simply creating a newer version of the old. Man’s mind is confined within circling boundaries. For Mind is man, and beyond it he cannot rise. If only he could rise beyond his mind and thoughts, he would be safe, but even when he sees this, he cannot mount to greater heights. He is a captive in the net of his mind, and even with wings he rises only to fall back to his native soil. He beats his wings in vain against the walls of life.

“In vain his heart lifts up its yearning prayer to Gods, who, he believes, live in the formless Void.

But he is disappointed because nobody in the Void responds to his prayers. This disappointment drives him to seek his release in Nothingness. He seeks the Nirvana (the extinction) of the dream of his self. The Word, all that is created, thus ends in silence. In Nought is there release for everything and everybody.

“When he finds himself lonely among the human multitudes, man calls upon God to be the lover of his lonely soul and casts his spirit into the empty embrace of this imagined God. He formulates his own copy in the impartial, impersonal All, and imparts to it his will and attributes to it his own anger and love, and thus gives to the Ineffable a thousand forms and names. Do not, O Savitri, hope to call God down into this life. How will the eternal and the infinite live in this finite and Time‐bound world?

“Savitri, you are making a mistake in believing that that there can be an aim to this Matter’s world. There is no aim here, but only a will to be. Everything is bound by Nature and is forever the same. As an illustration of what he has been saying the God of Death unveils before Savitri a fleeting panorama of the history of this world. This is one of the most memorable passages depicting human drama in this epic poem.

Look on these forms that stay awhile and pass, These lives that long and strive, then are no more, These structures that have no abiding truth, The saviour creeds that cannot save themselves, But perish in the strangling hands of the years,

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Discarded from man's thought, proved false by Time, Philosophies that strip all problems bare But nothing ever have solved since earth began, And sciences omnipotent in vain By which men learn of what the suns are made, Transform all forms to serve their outward needs, Ride through the sky and sail beneath the sea, But learn not what they are or why they came; These polities, architectures of man's brain, That, bricked with evil and good, wall in man's spirit And, fissured houses, palace at once and jail, Rot while they reign and crumble before they crash; These revolutions, demon or drunken god, Convulsing the wounded body of mankind Only to paint in new colours an old face; These wars, carnage triumphant, ruin gone mad, The work of centuries vanishing in an hour, The blood of the vanquished and the victor's crown Which men to be born must pay for with their pain, The hero's face divine on satyr's limbs, The demon's grandeur mixed with the demigod's, The glory and the beasthood and the shame; Why is it all, the labour and the din, The transient joys, the timeless sea of tears, The longing and the hoping and the cry, The battle and the victory and the fall, The aimless journey that can never pause, The waking toil, the incoherent sleep, Song, shouts and weeping, wisdom and idle words, The laughter of men, the irony of the gods?

Where leads the march, whither the pilgrimage?

Who keeps the map of the route or planned each stage?

Pages: 644 – 45

(Incidentally, this passage leaving out the last two lines consists of 280 words and is probably the longest single sentence in the whole of Savitri. If you come across a sentence longer than this in this poem, please let me know.)

“The God of Death shows to Savitri scenes of the ever‐changing drama of human history. They all flourish for a while and then just disappear. They do not seem to have any abiding truth

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about them. Nothing here lives forever. There are some which appear as saving creeds but these do not seem to be able to save themselves even. They perish at the strangling hands of time, discarded from men’s thought, or proved false by Time. Then there are philosophies which seem to be able strip all problems bare but which have not solved any real problem facing man since the time the world began. The same is true of sciences as well. They seem to have made man omnipotent but in vain. Man has learnt from them what the suns are made of, and transform almost everything to make them serviceable to man. They have taught him how ride through the sky and sail underneath the sea, but they have no clue to what human beings are made of and why they are here on earth.

“Look at these varied political organisations that man has built one after the other; each of them contains as many bricks of good as of evil; they are all attempts to wall in the human spirit and yet each of them has cracks in them, and they can serve as palaces as well as jails.

Even when they reign, they degenerate and become corrupt, and finally start disintegrating before they crash.

“These are the much‐vaunted revolutions during which men behave violently like demons or drunken gods. They shake violently the wounded body of mankind, only to paint new colours on an old face, without achieving anything worthwhile for all the drama and turmoil.

“Then look at these wars during which carnage becomes triumphant and there is mad ruin everywhere. These wars destroy in a brief hour what took centuries to build. The blood of the vanquished as well as the crown of the victor take a heavy toll on generations to come.

Generations to come pay for the victory of the victorious as much as for the defeat of the vanquished. The glory of a war is like a heroic face on the limbs of a Satyr (a sylvan deity in Greek mythology having certain characteristics of a horse or goat). It is like bringing together the demon’s grandeur with that of a demi‐god. You have there glory, beasthood and shame all put together.

“One often wonders why does all this keep happening, all this labour and all this discordant welter of sounds? What is the meaning of all these transient joys? And why should there be this endless sea of tears? This constant longing, and the hoping and the cry, the battle, this victory and the defeat, and this aimless journey that has gone on without a pause! All the endless toil during waking hours followed by an incoherent sleep! All the song, shouts and all the weeping, and all the wisdom and all the idle words man uses so glibly, this laughter of men and the irony of the gods – where leads this march, and to which place is this pilgrimage? Is any one planning this pilgrimage or is this world of ours self‐moved and goes its own way?

“Or is there no final truth behind all these things but all this is only a play of the Mind that dreams. Is the world then a mere myth, something wholly imaginary that happened to come true? Is it a legend told by a conscious Mind to itself and imaged and enacted on the false ground of Matter in an unsubstantial Vast? Mind then is the author, the spectator, the actor

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and the stage of this entire drama. If so, Mind must be the only reality, and what it thinks, we see around us.

“But if Mind is all that is, then renounce the hope of bliss, and the hope of finding the truth, for Mind can never touch the body of Truth and Mind can never see the soul of God. It can only grasp his shadow or his laugh since its tendency is to turn away from him to the unreal appearance of things. Mind is a tissue woven of light and shade; it is as often right as it is wrong. Or Mind is Nature’s marriage of convenience between truth and falsehood, between joy and pain, this struggling pair no court can separate.

“Each thought that issues out of Mind is like a gold coin covered with a bright alloy, and error and truth are its obverse and reverse. It comes from the royal mintage of the brain and all the currency that issues out of this mint is of the same kind.

(The human mind, Sri Aurobindo has explained in The life Divine, is in its essence a consciousness which measures, limits, cuts forms of things from the indivisible whole and contains them as if each were separate integer. It cannot see the Truth as a whole. There are many places in his writings where he has discussed the strengths and limitations of the human mind. I shall quote one brief passage below: Mind is not sufficient to explain existence in the universe. Infinite Consciousness must first translate itself into infinite faculty of Knowledge or, as we call it from our point of view, omniscience. But Mind is not a faculty of knowledge nor an instrument of omniscience; it is a faculty for the seeking of knowledge, for expressing as much as it can gain of it in certain forms of a relative thought and for using it towards certain capacities of action. Even when it finds, it does not possess; it only keeps a certain fund of current coin of Truth—not Truth itself—in the bank of Memory to draw upon according to its needs. For Mind is that which does not know, which tries to know and which never knows except as in a glass darkly. It is the power, which interprets truth of universal existence for the practical uses of a certain order of things; it is not the power which knows and guides that existence and therefore it cannot be the power which created or manifested it.)[1] “Do not hope to plant the living Truth on earth or do not try to make Matter’s world the home of God. There is no God or he exists only in name. And if there is a Self, it is bodiless and is never born. It cannot be identified with anyone and it is nobody’s possession. On what shall you then build your happy world here? Be ready to cast off your mind and life, be the stark Self.

An all‐seeing Omnipresence alone, and all by itself, exists; even if there is a God, he does not seem to care for the world. He sees everything with an indifferent gaze. He has doomed all hearts to sorrow and to desire and he has bound all of life with pitiless laws. He does not respond to the ignorant voice of prayer.

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“He is eternal while the word he made toils below through time but he is unmoved and untouched by whatever happens here in the world he created. He sees the agony of his animal creatures as also the fate of man as just minute details of his vast creation. Being immeasurably wise, he exceeds your thought. He takes joy in his solitariness and does not need your love.

Human thinking cannot hold God’s truth. If you desire truth, then stop all your thinking and still your mind forever, and then the unseen Light of God’s truth will dawn on you. Immortal bliss cannot live within any finite human mould. The mighty Mother will not consent to keep her calm delight in the narrow fragile vessel of the human mind, or to lodge her sweet unbroken delight in human hearts which earthly sorrow can overwhelm and in human bodies which careless death can slay at will.

“It is futile to try to change the world which God has planned so carefully.”

Then the God of Death tries to clinch his argument by what seems to be an unassailable argument, which he puts in these words: Dream not to change the world that God has planned, Strive not to alter his eternal law.

If heavens there are whose gates are shut to grief, There seek the joy thou couldst not find on earth; Or in the imperishable hemisphere Where Light is native and Delight is king And Spirit is the deathless ground of things, Choose thy high station, child of Eternity.

If thou art Spirit and Nature is thy robe, Cast off thy garb and be thy naked self Immutable in its undying truth, Alone for ever in the mute Alone.

Turn then to God, for him leave all behind; Forgetting love, forgetting Satyavan, Annul thyself in his immobile peace.

O soul, drown in his still beatitude.

For thou must die to thyself to reach God's height: I, Death, am the gate of immortality.”

Page: 647

“This world is governed by certain eternal laws which God has made, and since they cannot be changed, the world cannot be changed. If there are heavens whose gates are shut to human sorrows, you can seek there the joys you could not find on earth. Or choose your eternal station in the deathless hemisphere where knowledge is native and delight rules supreme and undisturbed. This will be the world of the Spirit.

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But then if you really are the Spirit and nature is only a garb which you are wearing, cast off your garb and be your naked self. This self is changeless and deathless, and it lives in its loneliness (kaivalya). Turn then entirely to God and for him leave everything behind. Forget Love and forget also Satyavan. Seek thy annulment; seek to dissolve yourself in the immobile peace of that realm. O soul, if that is what you are seeking, drown yourself in this still beatitude. But you must die to yourself, abandon all that you are, your individuality, your dreams of a perfect love on a perfect earth with Satyavan as your companion, etc. to reach this height. I, death, am the gate of this immortality”.

The God of Death is now using the central argument of a certain variety of Indian spirituality. It says that you cannot find either truth or bliss or perfection of any kind on this earth.

Generations have tried for these ends over millennia but to no avail. Therefore wise men have rightly concluded that this world is going to remain forever imperfect, a home of inadequacy, incapacity, frustration, sorrow and death. And therefore the wise man rejects this world, turns his attention within and tries to find peace, bliss and fulfilment in the kingdom of God that dwells within us.

Thus negation of life becomes the most favoured path of spirituality. Even today, the Indian mind understands spirituality to mean renunciation of life. Sri Aurobindo has put it trenchantly: All voices are joined in one great consensus that not in this world of dualities can there be our kingdom of heaven, but beyond, whether in the joys of the eternal Brindavan or the high beatitudes of Brahmaloka, beyond all in the featureless unity of the indefinable existence. And through many centuries a great army of shining witnesses, saints, teachers, names sacred to Indian memory and dominant in Indian imagination, have borne always the same witness and swelled always the same lofty and distant appeal … renunciation the sole path of knowledge, the acceptance of physical life the act of the ignorant, cessation of birth the right use of human birth, the call of the Spirit, the recoil from Matter.[2] It is interesting that the God of Death takes this stand against Savitri’s position. A moment’s reflection will show you that this canker of world negation is found at the heart of all religions in some form or the other.

[1] Sri Aurobindo: The Life Divine, page 118.

[2] Sri Aurobindo: The Life Divine (SABCL Vol. 18) p. 23. http://nextfuture.sriaurobindosociety.org.in/dec05/nfdec05_savitri.htm

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30. Book Ten Canto Four – Continued

In the first few pages of Canto Four Book X, which we reviewed last month, the God of Death mounts an assault on Savitri’s ideological position from a new flank. He begins by pointing out that nature is immutable, unchanging and “Where nature changes not, man cannot change”.

Secondly, since man is “a captive in his net of mind” he cannot rise beyond thought. All his prayers prove to be vain yearnings. He imparts to his God his own will and his own wrath and love Then comes his long and shattering indictment on the drama of human history, which concludes with these lines: These wars, carnage triumphant, ruin gone mad, The work of centuries vanishing in an hour, The blood of the vanquished and the victor's crown Which men to be born must pay for with their pain, The hero's face divine on satyr's limbs, The demon's grandeur mixed with the demigod's, The glory and the beasthood and the shame; Why is it all, the labour and the din, The transient joys, the timeless sea of tears, The longing and the hoping and the cry, The battle and the victory and the fall, The aimless journey that can never pause, The waking toil, the incoherent sleep, Song, shouts and weeping, wisdom and idle words, The laughter of men, the irony of the gods?

Page: 645

Then he goes on to argue that even if there is a God, there is no home for him on this earth. He thus concludes by declaring: Dream not to change the world that God has planned, Strive not to alter his eternal law.

Page: 647 He then goes on to show two possible resolutions for man’s problems: if you think that there are heavens shut to grief, then seek your fulfilment in such a heaven. Or, if you think you are

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Spirit, and nature is only your garb, then “cast off thy garb and be thy naked self”. In either case, I am the gate of immortality.

Now as was remarked earlier, this is the solution which has been most widely accepted by almost all religious and spiritual traditions, and by the Indian tradition as well, particularly after the Buddha gave it the stamp of his strong personality. Thus renunciation came to be looked upon the sole path of knowledge, the acceptance of physical life as the act of the ignorant, cessation of birth the right use of human birth. The call of the Spirit came to signify the recoil from Matter.

It is against such a recoil from life in Matter that, in Part I of Savitri Aswapati protested in these words as he stood on the threshold of Nirvana.

O soul, it is too early to rejoice!

Thou hast reached the boundless silence of the Self, Thou hast leaped into a glad divine abyss; But where hast thou thrown Self's mission and Self's power?

On what dead bank on the Eternal's road?

One was within thee who was self and world, What hast thou done for his purpose in the stars?

Escape brings not the victory and the crown!

Something thou cam'st to do from the Unknown, But nothing is finished and the world goes on Because only half God's cosmic work is done.

Page: 310

The importance of this revolution in Indian spirituality which Sri Aurobindo brought about cannot be emphasised enough. One of his principal contributions to Indian spirituality is a new view of existence which is based on a synthesis of the spiritual realisations of the Indian tradition with a full, active life in the world. This gives our life in this world a new, enlarged spiritual significance and character. Sri Aurobindo has emphasised enough the importance of the realisation of the Self or Atman, which is the goal of most traditional yogas. But as the Mother has pointed out, Sri Aurobindo’s yoga begins where the others leave off. This does not take away anything from the primary importance of the realisation of the true Self, but it also emphasises that there is plenty to realise even after the nirvanic realisation.

The realisation of the Self is looked upon in Sri Aurobindo’s yoga as a crucial step, but there are others with which it must be integrated. This inner harmonisation must enable us to achieve harmony with the whole world and all the experiences which it throws at us. The realisation of the true Self comes about with the dissolution of the ego which makes us identify ourselves with a particular mind, life and body. To quote from Sri Aurobindo’s Synthesis of Yoga (p. 356):

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The formation of a mental and vital ego tied to the body‐sense was the first great labour of the cosmic Life in its progressive evolution; for this was the means it found for creating out of matter a conscious individual. The dissolution of this limiting ego is the one condition, the necessary means for this very same Life to arrive at its divine fruition: for only so can the conscious individual find either his transcendent self or his true Person.

Our journey is from the inconscience to omniscience, and in this evolutionary journey, breaking out of the temporary construction called the ego is the first step. We should go on from there to the divine fruition of life in the cosmos. Instead of this, the traditional yogas aim at the immersion of self and its disappearance in the transcendent Self.

Savitri takes this position in her debate with Death. This is what she says in reply to the God of Death: “Once again, O Death, you are making use of light to blind with it Truth’s eyes. You are making use of knowledge as a catch of the snare of Ignorance, and are using the power of the sacred word as an arrow to slay my soul.”

(The God of Death has used some bits of what is considered as accepted knowledge to shut out greater truths. All that he has been saying has an appearance of truth. It is true that there is no home for God in this world. But isn’t there a possibility of this world itself undergoing fundamental changes which will make it a proper home for God? This is after all an evolutionary world, and what we see here is a progressive manifestation of the truth about this world. Similarly, it is true that the drama of human history has been a long aimless journey. But through all this the human consciousness is slowly advancing, however falteringly, towards a higher consummation. Again, it is true that if Mind is all, we will have to renounce the hope of bliss and truth. But what if Mind is only a temporary halting station of the long journey of consciousness from inconscience to the omniscience?)

“If there are those who feel the bondage of body and mind too heavy for them to bear, let then tear off these bonds that cannot bear the wounds inflicted by Time, and let them seek refuge from the play of Gods and seek the boons of peace and joy. But I cannot rest in such endless peace because I have in me the dynamic force of the Divine Mother. I read the enigma of this world through Her eyes. I carry within me Her will tempered in the blaze of Wisdom’s sun, and her flaming silence of her heart of love.

“This world is not easy to understand because it represents a spiritual paradox invented by some need in the unseen. Our senses can make only a poor translation of it. It is a symbol of that which always exceeds the capacity of thought and speech; thought cannot fully comprehend it and speech cannot express it adequately. It is a symbol for which no symbolisation is adequate. It is like an expression in a language which is mis‐pronounced and even mis‐spelt but which for that reason does not make it untrue. The powers that have

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created this world have come from the eternal heights but they have plunged into the Inconscient dim Abyss and are slowly rising to do their marvellous work.

“Our soul is a representative of the Unmanifest. Our mind struggles to think the Unthinkable, our life to call the immortal into birth, and the body to enshrine the Illimitable. This world is not totally cut off from Truth and God. You, Death, have dug the seemingly unbridgeable dark gulf of death to separate it from God; in vain have you tried to build a blind and doorless wall around life. But man’s soul can cross all your barriers to reach the happier realms of Paradise.

The radiant light from heaven forces its way through death and darkness and its light is seen on the edges of our being. My mind is a torch lit from the eternal sun; my life is a breath of the immortal Guest seated in me, and my mortal body is yet the Eternal’s house. Already what looked like a torch is looking more like an undying ray, already life looks like the force of the Immortal; it is as though the house is taking on more and more of the characteristics of the dweller of the house. Nature out of which the human body, vital and mind have been fabricated to house a soul, has started reflecting many features of the soul.”

Then come some of the most memorable lines in this epic poem, which capture the essence of the evolutionary movement and its progressive manifestation of the qualities of the Divine: How sayst thou Truth can never light the human mind And Bliss can never invade the mortal's heart Or God descend into the world he made?

If in the meaningless Void creation rose, If from a bodiless Force Matter was born, If Life could climb in the unconscious tree, Its green delight break into emerald leaves And its laughter of beauty blossom in the flower, If sense could wake in tissue, nerve and cell And Thought seize the grey matter of the brain, And soul peep from its secrecy through the flesh, How shall the nameless Light not leap on men, And unknown powers emerge from Nature's sleep?

Even now hints of a luminous Truth like stars Arise in the mind‐mooned splendour of Ignorance; Even now the deathless Lover's touch we feel: If the chamber's door is even a little ajar, What then can hinder God from stealing in Or who forbid his kiss on the sleeping soul?

Already God is near, the Truth is close: Because the dark atheist body knows him not,

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Must the sage deny the Light, the seer his soul?

Page: 648

Savitri: “It is true that at the moment the mind in man is incapable of seeing the whole truth; but how can you be sure that it will for that reason remain so limited for all time to come?

Similarly, human existence is now beset with pain, suffering and evil and death, but how can you be sure that this condition will remain unchanged forever? How can you be sure that because the human heart is now often tortured by unhappiness, it will and can never be a receptacle of bliss? God has not yet descended on earth and he has not yet started working here. But how can you be sure that this will be the situation of this world for all time to come?

“Look at this bustling creation. It has evolved out of chaos. We learn from science that after the big bang, there was a tremendous whirl of energy in what looked like a meaningless Void. It took many billions of years for the chaos to settle down into the creation we see around us today. Out of what was once a bodiless Force, a blind, mechanical energy, Matter evolved gradually. And there was a time a few billion years ago when there was no life here on earth. It looked like a dead universe. That must have been the situation for several billion years. But then slowly and gradually out of this seemingly dead and lifeless universe, vegetation emerged signifying life. There were creepers, bushes, plants and trees and forests.

“A tree or a plant is all Matter except for this difference ‐‐ life has learnt to climb from the roots to the top of the tree; the roots suck the energy needed for the sustenance of the tree and then this is transported all along its trunk, branches and twigs, and leaves, flowers and fruit.

The tree can propagate itself. From one tree there come about a number of trees and the parent tree itself will die some day. All this in itself is a miracle. This is what Matter evolved into Life is capable of achieving. The green leaves on a tree manifest this delight of life just as the blossoms on its branches constitute its laughter. There are further evolutionary miracles that have taken place subsequently. From plant life evolved the life of the animal world and with it slowly, sense became active in tissue, nerve and cell. Then came man, in the grey cells of whose brain, thought began to form itself. Thus out of chaos came this creation, from Matter evolved Life, and from Life came the Mental Man. With the advent of man, slowly the spiritual being in man began to peep from the secrecy of the flesh.

“If these miracles have actually taken place in this world of ours, how can you be so confident that further miracles of this kind will not happen? For example, how can you be sure that the Light of the Spirit will not leap on men and powers hitherto latent will not emerge from Nature’s sleep? Even now if you look around carefully, you will see the early hints of a greater light of consciousness adding to the splendour of the human mind. Even now, we can feel the touch of the divine Lover only if only we kept the doors of the prison of our ego a little ajar.

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“Who or what then will be able hinder God from stealing in, and who can forbid his kiss on the sleeping soul? Already God is very close to us; we are very near the truth. It is our physical being that still fails to feel the presence of the divine within itself. This does not mean that the seer and the sage in us also should go along with the body and deny the existence of the Light of the Spirit in us.

“I know that I am the Spirit although I have a body, the senses and the mind with its thoughts. I experience and live in the glory of the Infinite. I am very close to the Nameless and the Unknowable parts of my being. The Ineffable glory of my spirit is an inalienable part of me. But standing on the brink of Eternity, I have discovered that this world is also the becoming of the Divine. I know myself as the Spirit and the Self, but I have also loved the body of my God. I have come down on earth seeking him in his earthly form.

“I have identified myself with the entire world, with the whole of humanity. My heart has become one with every heart. Therefore a lonely freedom, exclusive to my being alone does not satisfy me. I represent the aspiring humanity; I ask the liberation given to me to be given to the whole of humanity.”

In this reply to the God of Death Savitri brings into focus two important concepts of Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy of Integralism. One is that this is an evolutionary world, which began with the Inconscience of Matter and is evolving towards omniscience of the Superconscience or the Divine. The second important concept is that the dichotomy between the Self and the non‐ Self, although useful at a certain stage and for certain purposes, is fundamentally erroneous.

Everything here, including Nature is divine and therefore has a divine fulfilment. These issues are of great importance to the understanding of Savitri, and therefore I propose to spend some time looking at both of them briefly in subsequent instalments.

For now let me leave with you a few quotations from Sri Aurobindo and one from the Mother pertaining to the first of these important concepts, namely, evolution: The Western idea of evolution is the statement of a process of formation, not an explanation of our being. Limited to the physical and biological data of Nature, it does not attempt except in a summary or a superficial fashion to discover its own meaning, but is content to announce itself as the general law of a quite mysterious and inexplicable energy. Evolution becomes a problem in motion which is satisfied to work up with an automatic regularity its own puzzle, but not to work it out, because, since it is only a process, it has no understanding of itself, and, since it is a blind perpetual automatism of mechanical energy, it has neither an origin nor an issue. It began perhaps or is always beginning; it will stop perhaps in time or is always somewhere stopping and going back to its beginnings, but there is no why, only a great turmoil and fuss of a how to its beginning and its cessation; for there is in its acts no fountain of spiritual intention, but only the force of an unresting material necessity. The ancient idea of evolution was

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the fruit of a philosophical intuition, the modern is an effort of scientific observation.

Each as enounced misses something, but the ancient got at the spirit of the movement where the modern is content with a form and the most external machinery… The modern scientist strives to make a complete scheme and institution of the physical method which he has detected in its minute workings, but is blind to the miracle each step involves or content to lose the sense of it in the satisfied observation of a vast ordered phenomenon.[1]

We speak of the evolution of Life in Matter, the evolution of Mind in Matter; but evolution is a word which merely states the phenomenon without explaining it. For there seems to be no reason why Life should evolve out of material elements or Mind out of living form, unless we accept the Vedantic solution that Life is already involved in Matter and Mind in Life because in essence Matter is a form of veiled Life, Life a form of veiled Consciousness. And then there seems to be little objection to a farther step in the series and the admission that mental consciousness may itself be only a form and a veil of higher states which are beyond Mind. In that case, the unconquerable impulse of man towards God, Light, Bliss, Freedom, Immortality presents itself in its right place in the chain as simply the imperative impulse by which Nature is seeking to evolve beyond Mind, and appears to be as natural, true and just as the impulse towards Life which she has planted in certain forms of Matter or the impulse towards Mind which she has planted in certain forms of Life…the animal is a living laboratory in which Nature has, it is said, worked out man. Man himself may well be a thinking and living laboratory in whom and with whose conscious co‐operation she wills to work out the superman, the god. Or shall we not say, rather, to manifest God?”[2] Avatarhood would have little meaning if it were not connected with the evolution. The Hindu procession of the ten Avatars is itself, as it were, a parable of evolution. First the Fish Avatar, then the amphibious animal between land and water, then the land animal, then the Man‐Lion Avatar, bridging man and animal, then man as dwarf, small and undeveloped and physical but containing in himself the godhead and taking possession of existence, then the rajasic, sattwic, nirguna Avatars, leading the human development from the vital rajasic to the sattwic mental man and again the overmental superman.

Krishna, Buddha and Kalki depict the last three stages, the stages of the spiritual development—Krishna opens the possibility of overmind, Buddha tries to shoot beyond to the supreme liberation but that liberation is still negative, not returning upon earth to complete positively the evolution; Kalki is to correct this by bringing the Kingdom of the Divine upon earth, destroying the opposing Asura forces. The progression is striking and unmistakable.”[3]

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This evolution, this spiritual progression—does it stop short here in the imperfect mental being called Man? …There is at least the possibility, there comes at a certain point the certitude, that there is a far greater consciousness than what we call Mind, and that by ascending the ladder still farther we can find a point at which the hold of the material Inconscience, the vital and mental Ignorance ceases; a principle of consciousness becomes capable of manifestation which liberates not partially, not imperfectly, but radically and wholly this imprisoned Divine. In this vision each stage of evolution appears as due to the descent of a higher and higher Power of consciousness, raising the terrestrial level, creating a new stratum, but the highest yet remain to descend and it is by their descent that the riddle of terrestrial existence will receive its solution and not only the soul but Nature herself find her deliverance…”[4] Man is a transitional being, he is not final; for in him and high beyond him ascend the radiant degrees which climb to a divine supermanhood. The step from man towards superman is the next approaching achievement in the earth's evolution. There lies our destiny and the liberating key to our aspiring, but troubled and limited human existence—inevitable because it is at once the intention of the inner Spirit and the logic of Nature's process. ”[5] The following quotation comes from the Mother: There is an ascending evolution in nature which goes from the stone to the plant, from the plant to the animal, from animal to man. Because man is, for the moment, the last rung at the summit of the ascending evolution, he considers himself as the final stage in this ascension and believes there can be nothing on earth superior to him. In that he is mistaken. In his physical nature he is yet almost wholly an animal, a thinking and speaking animal, but still an animal in his material habits and instincts. Undoubtedly, nature cannot be satisfied with such an imperfect result; she endeavours to bring out a being who will be to man what man is to the animal, a being who will remain a man in its external form, and yet whose consciousness will rise far above the mental and its slavery to ignorance.[6]

[1] Volume: 13 [CWSA] (Essays in Philosophy and Yoga), Page: 317 [2] Volume: 18‐19 [SABCL] (The Life Divine), Page: 3 [3] Volume: 22‐23‐24 [SABCL] (Letters on Yoga), Page: 401 [4] Volume: 22‐23‐24 [SABCL] (Letters on Yoga), Page: 25

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[5] Volume: 12 [CWSA] (Essays Divine and Human), Page: 157 [6] Volume: 12 [CWM] (On Education), Page: 116

http://nextfuture.sriaurobindosociety.org.in/jan06/nfjan06_savitri.htm

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31. Concept of Evolution

In this instalment, we shall discuss briefly the concept of evolution as it is understood in the philosophy of Integralism of Sri Aurobindo, one of the key‐concepts we need to understand Savitri’s stand in her colloquy with the God of Death. The Webster Dictionary defines evolution as “a process of change in a certain direction; a process of continuous change from a lower, simpler, or worse to a higher, more complex, or better state”. Since Charles Darwin brought it to the Western world with the publication of his The Origin of the Species, evolution has been a very influential concept not only in the physical sciences but also in sociology, politics and literary criticism. It has influenced decisively the moral temperament of the last two centuries.

Evolution asks the fundamental questions which have always fascinated us, namely, “How have we as a species become what we are?” and “Does the past of our species hold any clue to our future?” All human cultures have their own theories to explain the origin of the world, of man and other creatures. Most religions have their own creation myths and through them explain the origin of all living beings as the creation of an omniscient God. The modern theory of evolution was first propounded by Charles Darwin in his 1859 publication entitled On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. Along with Copernicus, Galileo and Newton, Darwin is regarded as one of revolutionary thinkers who ushered in the modern era of scientific thinking on all matters concerning man and his life here on earth. They gave several severe jolts to the medieval Christian beliefs about God and his place in human life. All these new ideas had the effect of making God suddenly redundant!

Physical phenomena such as tides and eclipses had now an explanation in terms of natural laws. To Darwin goes the credit of showing on the basis of detailed evidence that evolution had occurred, that diverse organisms share common ancestors, and that living beings have changed drastically over the course of the earth's history. In an important sense, he extended to the living world the idea of nature as a system of matter in motion governed by natural laws.

Darwin was amazed by the diversity of the beaks of certain birds in Galápagos Islands, a group of islands in the Pacific Ocean, constituting a province of Ecuador, about 1,050 km (about 650 mi) off the western coast of South America. This is where he did his basic research as a natural scientist. He found that each species had a unique beak tailored to its specific diet. From this he theorised that the dozen or so variations arose from a single ancestor whose descendants spread out and adapted to different conditions, eventually evolving into different species. This idea became the cornerstone of his theory of evolution. Did God, the supreme intelligence, condescend to design different beaks to these birds according to their diet?

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Darwin’s great achievement was that he suggested a plausible mechanism for evolution. To a world brought up to see the hand of God in every part of Nature, he suggested a different creative force altogether – an undirected, morally neutral process called natural selection.

Others characterised it as “survival of the fittest”. He was very much aware of the fact that in the animal world there is a continuous struggle to survive and reproduce against the prevalence of predators, disease, and a finite food supply. The winners in this struggle must have some small advantage over those who fall behind and perish. Darwin’s critical insight was that organisms which by chance are better adapted to their environments – a faster fox or deer – have a better chance of surviving and passing those characteristics on to the next generation.

The latter is now known as “the passing on the genes”. Better adaptation to circumstances may mean different things according to the context of environment. These small changes passed on from generation to the next culminate in the emergence of an entirely new species. Darwin wrote: “From the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of higher animals directly follows”.

This theory had a more troubling implication. Until then it was a general belief among Christians that man was made by God in his own image. In a later publication entitled The Descent of Man, Darwin explicitly linked human beings to the rest of the animal kingdom by way of the apes. Darwin put man at the very summit of the original scale, he also said,” that man with all his noble qualities – still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin”. This makes it clear that Darwin not only contradicted the Biblical account of a six‐day creation, but also undercut the very basis of most theistic religions. Darwin thus made it possible, as pointed out by a fellow biologist, for one to be an intellectually honest atheist.

According to Darwin, a process called natural selection accounts for the variations in living forms. In nature, many more individuals are created than can survive to maturity. Certain individuals survive because they have some advantage over the others; they are more successful in reproducing and in passing on their particular advantages to succeeding generations. It is in this way that living forms change over time.

Darwin’s theory created a virtual storm in scientific and social circles of his time. Christians, who believed in a literal interpretation of the Genesis, aggressively denied Darwin’s theory for the simple reason that it was incompatible with the gradual evolution of humans and other organisms by natural processes. The Biblical account of genesis maintains that all kinds of organisms abruptly came into existence at the Creation, that the world is only a few thousand years old, and that the Noachian Flood was an actual event in which only one pair of each animal species survived. These and other related Christian beliefs are contrary to the evolutionary origin of man from nonhuman animals.

In fact, this issue is still simmering in the United States of America. In the 1920s the four states in the U.S., namely, Arkansas, Mississippi, Oklahoma and Tennessee, prohibited the teaching

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of evolution in their public schools. It was as late as 1968 that the Supreme Court of the United States declared unconstitutional any law banning the teaching of evolution in public schools.

Since that time Christian Fundamentalists have been trying to find ways of introducing into schools the intelligent‐design theory of the creation of this universe. In the 1980s Arkansas and Louisiana passed acts requiring the balanced treatment of evolution‐science and creation‐ science in the schools.

Modern science, following Darwin in the main, has tried with considerable success to explain the process of evolution. Natural selection, and later studies in genetics, appear to confirm that on the outside, evolution is governed by changes in the environment. However, the origin of life itself remains hazy in biology and takes recourse to chance and probability far more often then it should. Moreover, science does not offer us any clues as to the future. It also states that there is no visible end towards which evolution is moving. There is, in other words, no intention, aim or purpose in the process of evolution. In effect, it does not answer the key questions we started out with. As Sri Aurobindo has pointed out, the Western idea of evolution is the statement of a process of formation, not an explanation of our being. It is limited to the physical and biological data of Nature, and does not attempt except in a summary or a superficial fashion to discover its own meaning, but is content to announce itself as the general law of a quite mysterious and inexplicable energy.

The Darwinian theory of evolution starts with assumption that all evolved out of indeterminate matter.

“Hence it conceives the world as a sort of automatic machine which has somehow happened. No intelligent cause, no aim, no raison d'être, but simply an automatic deployment, combination, chance self‐adaptation of means to end without any knowledge or intention in the adaptation. This is the first paradox of the theory and its justification must be crushing and conclusive if it is to be finally accepted by the human mind.”[1] Just as Copernicus proved that we did not need a God to put the sun up in the sky every morning, Darwin showed that we did not need a God to create this world and that too in six days as described in the Bible. This world is the result of a slow process of evolution which has taken billions of years. Sri Aurobindo has no quarrel with Darwin except that he thinks that his scientific theory explains only form‐evolution and physical life‐evolution and does not explain the cardinal fact of spiritual evolution, which Sri Aurobindo regards as the meaning of our existence here. If evolution is a truth, it has to account not only for the physical evolution of species, but also for the evolution of consciousness, because the evolution of consciousness is as much a fact of life as the evolution of forms. Evolution has also taken the form of a series of ascents, from the physical to the vital, and thence to the mental being. The physical theory of evolution does not bother to answer the question what it is that is evolving. Sri Aurobindo

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believes that it is primarily consciousness that is evolving here, from a lower level to a higher one. Mind cannot be the last manifestation of this evolving consciousness because mind is fundamentally an ignorance seeking for knowledge. It is only the Supramental Truth‐ Consciousness that can bring us the true and whole knowledge of the Self and the world. It is only through that we can get to our true being and the fulfilment of our spiritual evolution.[2] In other words, evolution is the path the Divine has chosen to unveil himself in the world in which he manifested himself. Evolution itself is the yoga which this creation is going through, and we who are born here in this evolutionary world are the carriers of the evolutionary baton.

In other words, we are all yogis, some are conscious yogis in the sense they try to accelerate their evolution and others are also yogis who have left it to Nature to lead them along the evolutionary path. Since it is the individual who evolves and grows into a more and more developed and perfect consciousness, obviously this cannot be done in the course of brief span of a single human life. The evolving consciousness must come back to this evolutionary world again and again through what is called rebirth. The great composer and director Gustave Mahler once wrote, “We all return; it is this certainty that gives meaning to life and it does not make the slightest difference whether in a later incarnation we remember the former life.

What counts is not the individual and his well‐being, but the great aspiration towards the Perfect and the Pure which goes on in each incarnation.”[3] This, in brief, is Sri Aurobindo’s theory of spiritual evolution. Evolution has been perceived in the West as a phenomenon which masks the face of God, while for Sri Aurobindo it is a process by which the face of God behind and in this creation is gradually unveiled. So, for Sri Aurobindo evolution is no reason to dispense with God. It in fact establishes God on a much firmer basis.

Let us now look at Sri Aurobindo’s theory in some detail.

What we call evolution may be described as a journey which begins from the fundamental Reality or the Pure Existent or Sat. Another aspect of this fundamental reality is movement.

This movement is a movement of the Sat, and this aspect of the Sat is called Consciousness‐ force or Chit. The stability of the Sat and the movement of the Chit are only our psychological representations of the Absolute, which is beyond stability and movement. Sri Aurobindo has expressed this basic insight of Indian spirituality in this beautiful sentence: “World‐existence is the ecstatic dance of Shiva which multiplies the body of the god numberlessly to the view: it leaves that white existence precisely where and what it was, ever is and ever will be; its sole object is the joy of the dancing.”[4] This journey of the Consciousness‐Force begins from the eternal Centre, in the Divine, and takes place in Him. In fact the whole movement may be said to be He. “Himself the play, Himself the player, Himself the playground.”[5] He is outside space, outside time, pure Being, pure Consciousness, where all is in a state of involution, contained yet formless. When He ‘becomes’ Force, we call it “She”. This is Force separated from Consciousness, She from Him,

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and the voyage begins. Shakti or Force flings herself forth in an outburst of joy, to play at finding Him again in Time. But it is a perpetual beginning, not fixed anywhere in time; when we say ‘first’ the Being and ‘then’ the Becoming, we fall into the illusion of a spatio‐temporal language, just as when we say ‘high’ and ‘low’, because like our vision of the world, our language is limited and false. In reality Being and Becoming are two simultaneous faces of the same eternal fact – the universe is a perpetual phenomenon, as perpetual as the Silence beyond time. The perpetual passage from Being to Becoming, we may call a devolution. The Supreme Consciousness ultimately devolves into matter.

This happens gradually, a result of incessant fragmentation of consciousness worked through successive planes. Once the Play starts at the summit, it will not stop until the single Consciousness‐Force has realised all the possibilities, even those which seem to be the absolute opposite of the eternal Player. At the other end of the spectrum, consciousness is obscured, and hidden in the densest inconscience. When the devolution is complete we have Matter.

In Savitri, Sri Aurobindo has talked about the various aspects of spiritual evolution in glorious poetic language. I quote one such passage below: As one drawn by the grandeur of the Void The soul attracted leaned to the Abyss: It longed for the adventure of Ignorance And the marvel and surprise of the Unknown And the endless possibility that lurked In the womb of Chaos and in Nothing's gulf Or looked from the unfathomed eyes of Chance.

It tired of its unchanging happiness, It turned away from immortality: It was drawn to hazard's call and danger's charm, It yearned to the pathos of grief, the drama of pain, Perdition's peril, the wounded bare escape, The music of ruin and its glamour and crash, The savour of pity and the gamble of love And passion and the ambiguous face of Fate.

A world of hard endeavour and difficult toil, And battle on extinction's perilous verge, A clash of forces, a vast incertitude, The joy of creation out of Nothingness, Strange meetings on the roads of Ignorance And the companionship of half‐known souls Or the solitary greatness and lonely force Of a separate being conquering its world, Called it from its too safe eternity.

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A huge descent began, a giant fall: For what the spirit sees, creates a truth And what the soul imagines is made a world.

A Thought that leaped from the Timeless can become, Indicator of cosmic consequence And the itinerary of the gods, A cyclic movement in eternal Time.

Thus came, born from a blind tremendous choice, This great perplexed and discontented world, This haunt of Ignorance, this home of Pain: There are pitched desire's tents, grief's headquarters.

A vast disguise conceals the Eternal's bliss.”

P. 455

Sri Aurobindo has stated succinctly in one of his letters what evolution is and what it is all about. “The creation has descended all the degrees of being from the Supermind to Matter and in each degree it has created a world, reign, plane or order proper to that degree. In the creating of the material world there was a plunge of this descending Consciousness into an apparent Inconscience and an emergence of it out of that Inconscience, degree by degree, until it recovers its highest spiritual and supramental summits and manifests their powers here in Matter.”[6] The manifestation of the Being in our universe takes the shape of an involution which is the starting‐point of an evolution, ‐ Matter the nethermost stage, Spirit the summit. In the descent into involution there can be distinguished seven principles of manifested being, seven gradations of the manifesting Consciousness of which we can get a perception or a concrete realisation of their presence and immanence here or a reflected experience.[7] SAT ANANDA CHIT SUPER MIND MIND VITAL PHYSICAL Seven gradations of the manifesting consciousness Everything seems to point to a spiritual and not merely a physical evolution. We discover that the Inconscient from which all starts is apparent only, for in it there is an involved Consciousness with endless possibilities, a consciousness not limited but cosmic and infinite, a concealed and self‐imprisoned Divine, imprisoned in Matter but with every potentiality held in

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its secret depths. Out of this apparent Inconscience each potentiality is revealed in its turn, first organised Matter concealing the indwelling Spirit, then Life emerging in the plant and associated in the animal with a growing Mind, then Mind itself evolved and organised in Man.[8] With man, we come to a very crucial point in our evolutionary story. Now She (Force) has the possibility of finding Him (Consciousness). Our humanity is the conscious meeting place of the finite and the infinite and to grow more and more towards the Infinite even in this physical birth is our privilege. A special phenomenon is also seen in physical nature: at the preceding stages, the profusion of plant life seems to subside once the animal stage is reached, and the profusion of the animal type subsides when man arrives on the scene. It does not seem that Nature has created any new animal or plant since man has come. In other words, these other species have become stationery and have achieved a static perfection in their own types. Now man, even though he is now set in his type is far from satisfied, far from perfect – he has not the joy or the harmony.

Man is an abnormal who has not found his own normality,—he may imagine he has, he may appear to be normal in his own kind, but that normality is only a sort of provisional order; therefore, though man is infinitely greater than the plant or the animal, he is not perfect in his own nature like the plant and the animal. This imperfection is not a thing to be at all deplored, but rather a privilege and a promise, for it opens out to us an immense vista of self‐ development and self‐exceeding.[9] Indeed, if we were ‘perfect’ and without error, we would be a stationary species, just like bacteria or the chimpanzee.

So the journey of evolution is not yet over. In a beautiful letter Sri Aurobindo writes, “This evolution, this spiritual progression—does it stop short here in the imperfect mental being called Man?… There is at least the possibility, there comes at a certain point the certitude, that there is a far greater consciousness than what we call Mind, and that by ascending the ladder still farther we can find a point at which the hold of the material Inconscience, the vital and mental Ignorance ceases; a principle of consciousness becomes capable of manifestation which liberates not partially, not imperfectly, but radically and wholly this imprisoned Divine. In this vision each stage of evolution appears as due to the descent of a higher and higher Power of consciousness, raising the terrestrial level, creating a new stratum, but the highest yet remain to descend and it is by their descent that the riddle of terrestrial existence will receive its solution and not only the soul but Nature herself find her deliverance.[10] And again, with regard to evolution and the glorious future which awaits us, Sri Aurobindo has said:

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We speak of the evolution of Life in Matter, the evolution of Mind in Matter; but evolution is a word which merely states the phenomenon without explaining it. For there seems to be no reason why Life should evolve out of material elements or Mind out of living form, unless we accept the Vedantic solution that Life is already involved in Matter and Mind in Life because in essence Matter is a form of veiled Life, Life a form of veiled Consciousness. And then there seems to be little objection to a farther step in the series and the admission that mental consciousness may itself be only a form and a veil of higher states which are beyond Mind. In that case, the unconquerable impulse of man towards God, Light, Bliss, Freedom, Immortality presents itself in its right place in the chain as simply the imperative impulse by which Nature is seeking to evolve beyond Mind, and appears to be as natural, true and just as the impulse towards Life which she has planted in certain forms of Matter or the impulse towards Mind which she has planted in certain forms of Life…The animal is a living laboratory in which Nature has, it is said, worked out man. Man himself may well be a thinking and living laboratory in whom and with whose conscious co‐operation she wills to work out the superman, the god. Or shall we not say, rather, to manifest God?[11] The Mother has made this point most lucidly in the following passage: There is an ascending evolution in nature which goes from the stone to the plant, from the plant to the animal, from animal to man. Because man is, for the moment, at the summit of the ascending evolution, he considers himself as the final stage in this ascension and believes that there can be nothing on earth superior to him. In this he is mistaken. In his physical nature he is yet almost wholly an animal, a thinking and speaking animal, but still an animal in his material habits and instincts. Undoubtedly nature cannot be satisfied with such an imperfect result; she brings out a being which will be to man what man is to the animal, a being who will remain a man in its external form, and yet whose consciousness will rise far above the mental and its slavery to ignorance.

Man is indeed a transitional being, and in spite of our terrible condition today, we are assured of a better tomorrow, or at least a day after. At the moment, we turn and toss in our beds of misery and suffering, one is search of his heaven, the other in search of his earth, unable to join the two ends. But the time is now to seize the day and take on the burden, or the joy, of evolution in our own hands and to seek to fulfil consciously the evolutionary intention in the universe.

But is such a consummation possible? Listen to this reassurance from Sri Aurobindo: “…whatever be the heavy weight of strife and suffering and darkness in the world, yet if there is this as its high result awaiting us, all that has gone before may not be counted too great a price by the strong and adventurous for the glory that is to come. At any rate

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the shadow lifts; there is a Divine Light that leans over the world and is not only a far‐off incommunicable Lustre.”[12] The following reply that Savitri gives to the God of Death (already quoted in instalment 280) and the optimistic note in it can now be better understood in the light of Sri Aurobindo’s concept of evolution.

How sayst thou Truth can never light the human mind And Bliss can never invade the mortal's heart Or God descend into the world he made?

If in the meaningless Void creation rose, If from a bodiless Force Matter was born, If Life could climb in the unconscious tree, Its green delight break into emerald leaves And its laughter of beauty blossom in the flower, If sense could wake in tissue, nerve and cell And Thought seize the grey matter of the brain, And soul peep from its secrecy through the flesh, How shall the nameless Light not leap on men, And unknown powers emerge from Nature's sleep?

Even now hints of a luminous Truth like stars Arise in the mind‐mooned splendour of Ignorance; Even now the deathless Lover's touch we feel: If the chamber's door is even a little ajar, What then can hinder God from stealing in Or who forbid his kiss on the sleeping soul?

Already God is near, the Truth is close: Because the dark atheist body knows him not, Must the sage deny the Light, the seer his soul?

P. 648

[1] Sri Aurobindo: Essays in Philosophy and Yoga, Volume: 13 [CWSA], Page: 171.

[2] Sri Aurobindo: The Life Divine, p. 47.

[3] Quoted in Georges Van Vrekhem: From Man to Superman, Paragon House, Minnesota, 1998.p. 90.

[4] Sri Aurobindo: The Life Divine, Volume: 18‐19 [SABCL] p. 78.

[5] Sri Aurobindo: The Life Divine, Volume: 18‐19 [SABCL] Page: 122; [6] Sri Aurobindo: Letters on Yoga, Volume: 22‐23‐24 [SABCL]), Page: 1 [7] Volume: 18‐19 [SABCL] (The Life Divine), Page: 662

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[8] Volume: 22‐23‐24 [SABCL] (Letters on Yoga), Page: 25 [9] Sri Aurobindo: The Human Cycle, Volume: 25 [CWSA] Page: 234 [10] Sri Aurobindo: Letters on Yoga, Volume: 22‐23‐24 [SABCL], Page: 25 [11]ri Aurobindo: The Life Divine, Volume: 18‐19 [SABCL], Page: 3 [12] Sri Aurobindo: Letters on Yoga, Volume: 22‐23‐24 [SABCL], Page: 25

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32. Evolutionary Future of Man

We have now looked at Sri Aurobindo's concept of evolution in some essential details. Savitri relates this notion to the evolution of man so far and to his future evolution as well; she is also able to explain why there is no need to be discouraged by the appearance of the world as it exists today. If anything, we have every reason to be optimistic about the eventual manifestation of the divine in all its glory in this world of ours. The world appears like an eternal paradox which contains within itself an eternal truth, says Sri Aurobindo in The Life Divine (p. 4) Thus the eternal paradox and eternal truth of a divine life in an animal body, an immortal aspiration or reality inhabiting a mortal tenement, a single and universal consciousness representing itself in limited minds and divided egos, a transcendent, indefinable, timeless and spaceless Being who alone renders time and space and cosmos possible, and in all these the higher truth realisable by the lower term, justify themselves to the deliberate reason as well as to the persistent instinct or intuition of mankind.

There is one more aspect to the truth that Savitri represents in her philosophical encounter with the God of Death, and it is that here in the course of evolution, liberation or perfection is intended not only for the soul, but also, for the instruments that embody the soul in matter ‐ to the human body, vital and mental. This world is not something essentially non‐divine; it is the becoming of the divine, and it too has its place in the eventual divinisation of the manifested world.

But standing on Eternity's luminous brink I have discovered that the world was He; I have met Spirit with spirit, Self with self, But I have loved too the body of my God. I have pursued him in his earthly form.

P. 649

This theme keeps occurring throughout the poem, and we shall explore it in some detail here.

In the Indian philosophical tradition, philosophy is called 'darshan', which means something 'seen' or directly experienced and not something established only through reasoning and logic.

Indian philosophy is based primarily on spiritual perceptions obtained in higher states of consciousness although sensory observation and rational argumentation also play an important part in it. For example, there are states of consciousness in which one realises the unreality of this world. Then careful logic and perceptive psychological analyses are brought in to build

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intricate metaphysical systems around this experience. Therefore in Indian philosophy the nature of the spiritual experience, and not logic is the final arbiter of all philosophical debates.

Since Savitri is a mouthpiece of Sri Aurobindo, we need to glance briefly at Sri Aurobindo's spiritual biography to arrive at an estimate of his great spiritual authority. He has himself stated that his philosophy is an attempt to set down in philosophical terms his spiritual experiences.

There are four distinct spiritual experiences in Sri Aurobindo's life which have shaped the intellectual exposition of his philosophy. Sri Aurobindo himself speaks of the four following great realisations as the foundations of his yoga and spiritual philosophy. (Ref. Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library, Vol. 26, p. 64) i) the realisation of the silent, spaceless, timeless Brahman attended in the beginning by a feeling and perception of the total unreality of the world: this tremendous experience came to him in Baroda at the end of a 3‐day meditation session with Lele, his yogic mentor. This was akin to the experience of nirvana. It brought to him a series of powerful experiences and a radical change of consciousness that made him see the world as a cinematographic play of vacant forms in the impersonal universality of the absolute Brahman ii) the realisation of the cosmic consciousness and of the Divine as all beings: this is the experience he had in the Alipore jail and he has described his vision of Sri Krishna as the all‐ pervading Lord of creation in his Uttarapara speech. This is the experience of the living Lord to whom he surrenders his whole being. iii) the realisation of the supreme Reality with the static and dynamic Brahman as its two aspects. This realisation was in a way a synthesis of the preceding two. It was a vision of the supreme Reality as a multiform unity, simultaneously static and dynamic, characterised by silence and expression, emptiness and creativity, infinite and yet composed of manifold forms.

This vision occurred when Sri Aurobindo was in Chandernagore in 1910. iv) the realisation of the higher planes of consciousness leading to the supermind. This experience of Sri Aurobindo's sadhana came to him on November 24, 1926.

After settling down in Pondicherry, Sri Aurobindo was trying to transform the lower levels of the being by the descent of the higher planes. From the time of his confinement in Alipore jail, he had been aware of these levels of consciousness above the ordinary mind, to which he gave these names later: Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuitive Mind, Overmind. These are the principle gradations of consciousness which lead to the Supermind, the real source of Consciousness‐Force. These are not mere modes of knowing but realms of being, fields of existence.

The third and the fourth realisations mentioned above constitute the bases of much that is new in Sri Aurobindo's philosophy. In Chandernagore he realised that the dark half of the reality we see around us is not meant to be rejected but to be illumined and transformed. He also found

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out that as one up in one's consciousness, one acquires also the capacity to go down into the nether levels. Normally the dark levels of our consciousness as well as the bright upper ranges are out of our sight.

In his own yogic sadhana, Sri Aurobindo descended from the rational consciousness through the vital consciousness first into the consciousness of the body which organises the tissues and cells of our body. Below this level he found that there is a physical consciousness (the subconscious) which contains the experiences of our evolutionary past ‐ our fears, deceptions and a tendency to cling on to repetitive activities. As he descended further, he came to a vast region, in which life itself is embedded. This is a realm of inexorable universal law and Sri Aurobindo experienced it as a blind rejection of life's upward evolutionary thrust. In the heart of this Inconscient Sri Aurobindo found himself precipitated into the Supreme Light.

This was the beginning of his realisation that this Inconscient too was a manifestation of the Divine. He realised that Night, Evil, Death were not the ultimate truth; they were only a mask on the face of the Divine. There is only the one Divine Consciousness in the very heart of Matter. In Savitri, Aswapati (who in many ways represents the persona of Sri Aurobindo) enters the world of Darkness, Night and Evil in his exploration of the various worlds. This is described in Cantos Seven and Eight of Book II of Savitri. When he enters these nether levels, he sees the face of evil and darkness in many forms. But he doesn't give up.

He saw in Night the Eternal's shadowy veil, Knew death for a cellar of the house of life, In destruction felt creation's hasty pace, Knew loss as the price of a celestial gain And hell as a short cut to heaven's gates.

Then in Illusion's occult factory And in the Inconscient's magic printing‐house Torn were the formats of the primal Night And shattered the stereotypes of Ignorance.

P. 231

He realised that the Night was only a veil drawn on the face of the Eternal, and death as a stage of transition and hell as a shortcut to heaven's gates. This is a very crucial experience because here we have the basis of Sri Aurobindo's affirmation of the Divine in the world and the setting of his goal as the transformation of the mental, the vital and the material into fully worthy instrumentalities of the Divine. We don't have turn our face away from the earth to be holy, or fight the flesh with its spiritual opposites. Sri Aurobindo proposed to utilise the very qualities of the earth and the flesh. God is already there; he does not have to be brought in but only to be liberated. This needed the descent of a consciousness he called the Supramental consciousness..

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As we go up the ladder of consciousness from mind, each ascending stage brings about an integrating transformation in the person. We also begin to realise our closeness to the other members of the human community. There is an increase in the sense of quiet, peace, light, and harmony with others, as we go up from one level to the next. But it is not easy to transform the lower levels of our being. Nature resists the attempts at transformation and clings to its fixed old habits of operating within its old grooves. This tendency of our lower levels of being, namely our physical, vital and mental consciousness, to persist in order to cling to their accustomed ways of being is so strong that this effort is generally regarded hopeless and most spiritual luminaries think it a waste of effort. They regard it as an attempt as vain as that which tries to straighten the tail of a dog, which for ever remains crooked no matter how hard your try. If after all the heroic efforts to change this world, it remains 'anityam" and "asukham" in the language of the Gita, it is best to take the stand that the Brahman alone is the truth and this jagat, the terrestrial world is an illusion, maya. But Sri Aurobindo based on his spiritual experiences believes that the lower planes of our being can be transformed. He also believes that the key to this transformation lies in bringing down into the lower planes the power of the original creative consciousness, of what he calls the Supermind. Even overmind, the highest range of consciousness already manifested on earth does not have this power of transformation. It can only come from a level of consciousness which Sri Aurobindo has called the Supermind.

Here lies the crux of the problem and the issue on which Sri Aurobindo has views which distinguish him all other thinkers belonging to the Indian spiritual tradition. Man always has had an intuition of perfect world beyond the world of imperfection we see around us. But this world of perfection has always been seen as belonging exclusively to the supracosmic or transcendental world ‐ a chinmaya loka, or a Vaikunth or a Kailas. This has encouraged the spiritual aspirants in their ardour for the transcendental world and their intolerance with man's terrestrial existence. Therefore most spiritual thinkers regard the worldly existence as an unreality, a vanity. Man's mind often finds that the senses often trick it, the vital mind finds its appetite for novelty and excitement always exceeds the satisfaction this world can give it, and the thinking mind finds that there can be no certitudes here, and the soul exclaims in its frustration everything here is relative and valueless. Then the next step is to conclude that the Absolute and the Eternal is real, and this world is an immense delirium, an immense cosmic illusion. The Absolute Brahman is the only reality and this world is a maya, an illusion, a falsehood.

In The Life Divine, in which Sri Aurobindo deals with this issue at some length, he has pointed out that in India this philosophy of world negation has been given formulations of supreme power by two of her greatest thinkers, Buddha and Shankara, although he also makes it clear that this was not the attitude of the Vedic Rishis.. He also points out further that

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All voices are joined in one great consensus that not in this world of dualities can there be our kingdom of heaven, but beyond, whether in the joys of the eternal Brindavan or the high beatitudes of Brahmaloka, beyond all in the featureless unity of the indefinable existence. And through many centuries a great army of shining witnesses, saints, teachers, names sacred to Indian memory and dominant in Indian imagination, have borne always the same witness and swelled always the same lofty and distant appeal … renunciation the sole path of knowledge, the acceptance of physical life the act of the ignorant, cessation of birth the right use of human birth, the call of the Spirit, the recoil from Matter. [1] It is undoubtedly true that the spirituality which Sri Aurobindo aims at is very difficult.

Perfecting the inner being of man is easier. To transform the outer being of man and with it the outer world is an extremely difficult undertaking, and nobody so far even has claimed that it is possible to achieve such an ideal, except Sri Aurobindo. He knew how difficult it is to change particularly the vital and the physical beings of man. But he was confident that this could be done. In a letter he wrote to the Mother in 1916 he referred to this problem: It is this to which our nature is most recalcitrant. It persists in the division, in the dualities, in the sorrow and unsatisfied passion and labour, it finds it difficult to accustom itself to the divine largeness, joy and equipoise ‐‐ especially the vital and physical parts of our nature; it is they that pull down the mind which has accepted and even when it has long lived in the joy and peace and oneness. That, I suppose, is why the religions and philosophies have had so strong a leaning to the condemnation of Life and Matter and aimed at an escape instead of a victory.

But the victory has to be won; the rebellious elements have to be redeemed and transformed, not rejected and excised.

It must be clearly understood here that Sri Aurobindo had no doubt about either the value or the validity of the experience of Nirvana. Without the experience of Nirvana, it is difficult to rise beyond the ignorance of the mind‐constructed world and to realise our freedom from the determinations of Nature. Only in this way can the fundamental self recover its position as pure consciousness And when the spiritual aspirant falls suddenly into a state of oneness with the timeless, immobile self in the experience of Nirvana, the world he has so far taken as the only reality and the reality revealed by the experience of Nirvana is striking that he is moved to believe that the world of multiplicity he saw was unreal and the silent self alone is real. Sri Aurobindo himself was no stranger to the state of Nirvana. He knew exactly what the experience was and has described it in his letters. (Letters on Yoga, pp. 48 ‐ 51) The question that is relevant here is whether the Nirvana experience is one of the experiences of approaching the Supreme Reality or it is the only experience or the culminating experience, the ultimate experience? Sri Aurobindo's answer to this is that beyond the Nirvana experience is a still higher and more inclusive spiritual realisation which grants a place of validity to both the Nirvanic experience and to the world‐consciousness of which it is the negation.

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The normal tendency to identify oneself with an individual body, life and mind leads to an illusion. This is the view given to us by our mind as long as it is unenlightened. The reality is that there is a Self, a pure existence of which all things here are becomings. At some point the spiritual seeker has to discover that the finite is one self‐representation of the manifestation of the Infinite. A spiritual seeker begins in the negative way, saying, "I am not the body, not the life and not the mind". From there he must go on to the realisation, "I am That, the pure, the blissful". The truth is that our reality is that of a Self which is a pure existence of which all these things are becomings.. In other words, he should be able to say "This body is also potentially divine, so is this vital being and the mind". This is the truth which we have to realise, to make operative in our outer and inner life. And in arriving at this truth the Nirvana experience is certainly most valuable. But our seeking should not end with the transcendent Reality. We must repossess the outer world with this spiritual consciousness, because the world of multiplicity is the Absolute's dynamic nature and aspect.

What Sri Aurobindo finds unsatisfactory in traditional Indian spirituality is not its strong leaning towards the experience of Nirvana but its tendency to get stuck with it, stopping half‐way. It is the pressing problem of evil that drives many spiritual aspirants to this extreme. How to reconcile the ever‐pure, blissful, perfect Infinite with this world of impurity, falsehood, evil and suffering? The best solution seems to be to deny any reality to the world outside and to withdraw into the glories of the transcendent within ourselves. But this, says Sri Aurobindo, is an escape rather than a solution.

With this escape, we become petrified in our present imperfections, weaknesses and suffering, and deny to ourselves the opportunity of participating in the divine action. Evolution, we have seen, is the way the divine has chosen of progressively manifesting himself in this creation. God is liberating himself here from falsehood into truth, from ugliness into the good and the beautiful, from suffering into delight. And man has to be the leader of this great effort for in him Nature has an instrument in man who can understand her purpose and co‐operate with her.

The Nirvanic solution to the problem of life is that it is destructive of values at all levels. We make that an excuse for not striving to elevate the whole race to the highest possible level of perfection, by changing the material life of the race into fresh forms, religious, intellectual, social or political. Sri Aurobindo does not accept the common idea that a man leading a spiritual life is expected to be lost to the rest of the community and its pressing concerns. In his view God gave man life on earth precisely in order that the higher might be expressed in terms of the lower. To refuse this vocation is neither to serve God not to fulfil one's own manhood.

To reject the world altogether is to miss "the Divine Being's larger joy in cosmic existence ... the total sense creation and the entire will of God.

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[1] Sri Aurobindo: The Life Divine (SABCL Vol. 18) p. 23.

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33. Book Ten Canto Four – Continued

In the last two instalments, we strayed away from the text of Savitri in order to review briefly Sri Aurobindo's basic concept of evolution as the evolution of consciousness and also his concept of the perfection of the entire being of man – his body, life and mind as well as the liberation of his soul – as the goal of his yoga. We now return to our study of Canto Four of Book X of Savitri.

Savitri uses the logic of evolution to answer the God of Death's contention that this earth is a hopeless enterprise and it is foolish to try to bring down God here. There is no home for him here. He shows to her the panorama of human history and its futile round of civilisations built and destroyed, of wars and ruination of all that man builds carefully over centuries of hard labour and destroys in an instant of frenzy. The human mind dreams but in vain because the world is a myth that happens to come true. If Mind is all, the God of Death declares there is no hope of Truth, for Mind can never see the body of Truth. He asks her to cast off her mind. Even if God is there, he cares not for this world. He sees everything with a calm indifferent gaze. In any case, man cannot hold in his mind God's truth. He tells Savitri that it is foolish to try to change the world God has made.

He asks Savitri to cast off life and mind so that she can realise herself as the soul. And if she is Spirit, and Nature is only the garb of Spirit, cast off your garb and be your naked self. That is the only truth of life. Turn to God, O Savitri, leave everything behind, and seek the immobile peace of the spirit. I am the gate to immortality. This, it must be remembered, has the sanction of various spiritual traditions. Not here on earth can there be any fulfilment for man, but in the other worlds, or in the world within can man find the kingdom of God. In certain schools of Indian philosophy, this is known as the Mayavada. It takes the position that the world is an illusion (maya) and the solitary Self, designated Atman‐Brahman is alone real. Action is an illusory world, of course, can have no significance except possibly as an exercise for the purification of the mind in preparation of its union with the Absolute. The intention here is the greatest wisdom lies in escaping from this world.

We have now also examined briefly the philosophical implications of what the God of Death has been claiming as the truth about this world and how Savitri confronts him with the integral truth that evolution of consciousness shows him. Furthermore Savitri now begins to emphasise that she is a deputy of the aspiring world and that she seeks not only the liberty for her spirit but for all. The aim of the yoga pursued by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother did not have the salvation of the individual as its supreme goal but the redemption of the whole of humanity.

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One can see the growing insistence of this in Savitri's struggle with the God of Death from now on.

Then once again, a deep cry was heard from Death. But this time his voice sounded different. It continued to be disdainful but did not have the ring of confidence it had earlier. It sounded weary and compassionate as though it felt oppressed by its own obstinacy. It now sounded more like Life's, somewhat bewildered by traversing countless paths and tired. His form of dread was altered as though he admitted our transient effort to attain eternity. He still had doubts about any thing good and beautiful ever emerging on this earth from its long and seemingly unavailing struggle with Fate, Chance and Time.

The voice of Death cried out to Savitri: "You, Oh Savitri, know the wisdom that goes beyond both the acceptance and the rejection of forms; that is why you are delivered by the seeing gods. If only you had kept your mind aloof from the fierce pressure of the struggle of life, you too would have been omniscient and calm like the gods. But your heart is passionate and it refuses to dwell in calm aloofness; it is like the storm‐wing of an anarchic power. It seeks to tear up the decree of Fate, overthrow the rule of Death, and the governing law and Will that maintains all. Such great spirits like you who are fired with excessive love for all in this creation hasten action and tend to violate the laws of God. They are like you; they come into the narrow bounds of life with natures too large for life.

These worshippers of force do not know how life recoils with unexpected results as they compel the troubled years to move in the direction of their choice.

"But those who are wise are tranquil; they are not like the imperious ones. Like the great hills they are seated on their unchanging base trying ceaselessly to rise towards their un‐reached sky, with their heads dreamless in the immutable domain in the heavens. These mighty mediators, who are sublime and still, are content to watch the movements of the stars. They may look motionless but they are the might of the earth; they see the ages pass, but they themselves are ever the same.

"The wise think largely, in terms of the cycles of time; they foresee things that are yet to happen far ahead in the future; they hear the tread of far‐off things; patient and unmoved, they keep their dangerous wisdom restrained in their depths to prevent the possibility of man's fragile ship foundering and sinking into the abyss of the stupendous seas, dragged down by some leviathan (monster) chained and kept captive there "Lo, how everything shakes when the gods come too near! All moves, all is in danger, all is in anguish and everything is torn and thrown up. If heaven's strength were to surprise this imperfect earth, and knowledge without any veils on it were to strike these unfit souls on earth, the speeding ages would plunge chaotically into some abyss. That is why the gods veil their frightful powers. God seems to hide his thought, and at times he even seems to err. In this

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world always be calm and slow in your reactions. You, Savitri, are filled with the might of powerful goddess (Durga) to whom you offered worship this morning. Do not use the strength as the wild Titans do. Do not disturb the fixed and well laid‐out lines; these are ancient laws.

Respect the serene calm of great established things."

(We can clearly see here that the God of Death has once again changed his strategy. He is not any more haughty and imperious. He cannot just ignore Savitri or pretend that what she is trying to do is of no consequence to him. So now he uses the technique of 'damning her with faint praise'. He recognises the great power she has within her, but in the interest of the world and in her own interest he advises her to be calm and wise. Do not please disturb the peace of settled things. Please respect the wisdom of the creator who has made this world what it is.

Leave it to him to initiate what changes he might like to make in it and when he might to like to make them.)

Savitri now replies to the huge God: " O Death, what is this calm you have suddenly started praising so much? Is it not just the mechanical and inert tread of huge, inhuman energies chained to an unchanging round entirely soulless? If unchanging law is the supreme reality, then the soul's hope is all in vain. The speeding ages ever move on ceaselessly to the new and unknown and justify the purpose of God in this creation. Look at the great ages of the earth and the progress they have brought about; how could they have come about if not by breaking the chain of all fixed laws? It is only through such a free and open adventure into the new that life has leaped on to the hurried paths it has taken. In this, the earth was encouraged by the inspiring divine words which human gods have left behind. Do not impose on sentient minds and hearts the dull fixity that is appropriate only to inanimate things. The rule you admire so much is only for the animal species which are content to live beneath the unchanging yoke of Nature. But it is not meant for man, who aspires to a higher walk and seeks to master all.

'With my feet I trample upon your law O Death, for I was born to live in freedom. If I am mighty, let my force be unveiled, and you will see that it is equal companion of the dateless power. Or else, let my frustrated soul sink down in the original sleep, since it is unworthy. I claim from Time my will's eternity and I claim God in his becomings in the moments of Time."

(Savitri has no respect for the counsel of inertia; she doesn't fancy sticking to the old laws and not daring anything new which the God of Death tries to hold up before her as a great ideal.

She reacts against such an ideal almost vehemently and denounces the attempts of Death to imprison her in the past. Evolution would not have come so far if it had not shown the daring to leave old ways and try out new modes of being.)

Death now uses very subtle arguments to try to confuse Savitri: Why should the noble and immortal will Stoop to the petty works of transient earth,

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Freedom forgotten and the 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 earn the gods And battle and bear agony of wounds To grasp the trivial joys that earth can guard In her small treasure‐chest of passing things?

Child, hast thou trodden the gods beneath thy feet Only to win poor shreds of earthly life For him thou lov'st cancelling the grand release, Keeping from early rapture of the heavens His soul the lenient deities have called?

Are thy arms sweeter than the courts of God?" P. 652

The God of Death asks Savitri in effect whether it is the best use of her great capacities and talents to use them to fight death here on earth? After all what does earth have to offer but disappointment, suffering, struggle and death? Death brings to the being released from the nightmare of life great relief and peace. So he asks her: "Why should you let your noble and immortal will stoop to the petty works of transient earth, forgetting its own high freedom and its proper path to the eternal? Or is this the right and high use of your strength and creativity to struggle on earth with the bonds of death and time and waste the effort that might earn you godhood if employed elsewhere? Why do you fight and bear the agony of wounds, only to grasp the trivial joys that earth can guard in her small treasure‐chest of passing things? O child, have you risen even beyond the gods to win only poor shreds of earthly life for him (Satyavan) whom you love cancelling the great release the lenient gods have granted him by taking him away from the earthly life? Are your arms then sweeter than death?

Savitri answered: "I walk unhesitatingly on the road that has been hewn for me by the mighty hand of God who has planned all for us. I run where the sweet and imperious voice of God commands me and where I am driven by the reins in his hands. If all this creation is futile, why did God draw such a wide scheme of the great worlds and why did he fill all infinity with his passionate, intense fervour? Or why did he build my human form and sow in me his bright and high desires if not to achieve something through them, to see them blossom in me and enable me to grow in love?

Has he not carved in me his human image richly shaped in thoughts, his largeness and his golden powers?

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"Heaven can wait our coming in its calm. The heavens were easy for God to build. Earth was difficult to build, for in building the earth he had glory and he had problems to face, and he had strife to contend with. There on earth are the foreboding masks, the terrible powers to conquer. To create the gods on earth is the real challenge.

Far Heaven can wait our coming in its calm.

Easy the heavens were to build for God. Earth was his difficult matter, earth the glory Gave of the problem and the race and strife.

There are the ominous masks, the terrible powers; There it is greatness to create the gods.

P. 653

(These lines remind us of a very famous declaration of Sri Aurobindo which goes as follows: "Heavens we have always possessed, it is the earth that we have yet to possess, and the aim of my yoga is, in the language of the Vedas, to make heaven and earth equal and one." This is central to the entire thinking of Sri Aurobindo. True spirituality should help in making the manifestation of the perfection of God here on earth. It does not seek to escape from the problems of this world to some distant heavens or Nirvana, or chid‐loka, or Kailasa. Savitri is reiterating here this central idea of Sri Aurobindo's spiritual thought. And then in the following lines, she clinches the issue.)

Is not the spirit immortal and absolved Always, delivered from the grasp of Time?

Why came it down into the mortal's Space?

P. 653

Savitri is asking Death what is the whole point of running away with one's soul to a world of liberation, or Nirvana? Isn't the soul always immortal and free, always delivered from Time. The Bhagavad Gita describes it as that "which is not born, does not die" as "unborn, immutable, eternal, imperishable and ancient" as something that is "eternally stable, immobile, all‐ pervading, and is for ever and ever." (Bhagavad Gita: Ch. 2: 20‐25) If the whole purpose of this life is that we should use it to find the quickest way to run away from it, why did God create it then? Is it being suggested that God made a mistake in creating this world, and we try correct him by running away from it? If the immortal spirit came down and wrapped itself in ignorance here, that must be for a purpose. What is that purpose?

Savitri declares that God has given a noble mission to man when he sent his high spirit to this earth and he has stamped his decree on Nature's forehead.

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A charge he gave to his high spirit in man And wrote a hidden decree on Nature's tops.

P. 653

What is this charge given to man's high spirit by God? Freedom is this with ever seated soul, Large in life's limits, strong in Matter's knots, Building great stuff of action from the worlds To make fine wisdom from coarse, scattered strands And love and beauty out of war and night, The wager wonderful, the game divine.

P. 653 When the Divine sent the soul of man to be engulfed in the limiting and suffocating world of matter and life, he gave it the inner freedom, and set up a divine game. What was the aim of that game? "To make fine wisdom from coarse, scattered strands" ‐ to weave fine wisdom out of the coarse strands of life's experiences in matter and the vital and the early ranges of the mind. And second? To create "love and beauty out of war and night". There is so much strife and darkness here on earth, but to create love and beauty out of all this ‐ that is the divine game, that is the "wager wonderful, the game divine", Sri Aurobindo puts it very beautifully at the very beginning of his philosophical magnum opus The Life Divine (pp. 1‐2): To know, possess and be the divine being in an animal and egoistic consciousness, to convert our twilit or obscure physical mentality into the plenary supramental illumination, to build peace and a self‐existent bliss where there is only a stress of transitory satisfactions besieged by physical pain and emotional suffering, to establish an infinite freedom in a world which presents itself as a group of mechanical necessities, to discover and realise the immortal life in a body subjected to death and constant mutation,‐this is offered to us as the manifestation of God in Matter and the goal of Nature in her terrestrial evolution.

Now Savitri takes up the challenge thrown at her by the God of Death when he asked her, "You are trying to call him back to earth and its miserable life from the great peace and relief that death has given him. He had asked her: "Are thy arms sweeter than the courts of God?" Are your arms then sweeter than the courts of God to which death has sent him? Her answer is contained in the following lines: What liberty has the soul which feels not free Unless stripped bare and cannot kiss the bonds The Lover winds around his playmate's limbs, Choosing his tyranny, crushed in his embrace?

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To seize him better with her boundless heart She accepts the limiting circle of his arms, Bows full of bliss beneath his mastering hands And laughs in his rich constraints, most bound, most free.

This is my answer to thy lures, O Death."

P. 653

What kind of liberty does the soul enjoy then if he is not free to strip himself bare and kiss the bonds of the Beloved which wind around his limbs, choosing her tyranny, crushed in her embrace? In order to seize her more effectively with his unbounded heart, the soul accepts the limiting circle of her arms, abandons himself entirely under her masterful hands and takes immense delight in her rich constraints. He is most free when he is thus most bound.

This is not only a most wonderful poetic statement of the basic mystery of this life but it also makes philosophically a most profound statement. The Brahman is in the grip of the tight embrace of maya; does a lover suffer when he is embraced tightly by his beloved? Does it show he is helpless? The Supreme Brahman allows himself to be bound by Ignorance, by Maya, not because he is helpless and Maya is too strong for him and he has no choice but to submit to her. This would be tantamount to admitting that Maya is a greater truth than the Surpeme Brahman. This would mean admitting another reality that is as powerful as the Supreme Brahman. To avoid getting caught into this trap Shankara and his followers claim that Ignorance or Maya is not real, except in its pragmatic effect. They are bound to describe Ignorance as unreal and this world created by the Ignorance also as unreal, as a mirage. Sri Aurobindo, on the other hand, proclaims that the so‐called Maya is also real and real also this world it creates.

The world is imperfect, but this self‐limitation is not imposed on the Supreme by any force outside of himself – it is a voluntary self‐limitation he gladly submits himself to. As he says in The Life Divine (Vol. II, Part1, p. 280), this self‐limitation, which the Ignorance represents, is for a particular working. Instead of being incompatible with the absolute conscious force of the Divine Being, it is precisely one of its powers which exists among the manifold energies of the Infinite. The Supreme binds himself because he is free to bind himself. That is a sign of his omnipotence and absolute freedom and not of any limitation on his freedom.

Savitri has now given the God of Death a fitting reply to his question to her: "Are your arms then sweeter than death?" http://nextfuture.sriaurobindosociety.org.in/apr06/nfapr06_savitri.htm

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34. The Main Issues of Debate of Savitri with Death

Before we proceed, we should review briefly the main issues that have emerged out of this debate between Savitri and her adversary in the previous instalment. Savitri has now declared in the following words the value of this world: Far Heaven can wait our coming in its calm.

Easy the heavens were to build for God. Earth was his difficult matter, earth the glory Gave of the problem and the race and strife.

There are the ominous masks, the terrible powers; There it is greatness to create the gods.

P. 653 To create perfection here on earth is the real challenge. To create the gods in heavens is comparatively an easy matter; but earth offers real problems; it is still in the grip of the Inconscient, and to release life here from the hold of the adversary forces, is a glorious challenge.

In fact, there can be two different ways of looking at the world ‐ in terms of its value for God and in terms its value for us. When we ask what its value to us is we tend to dismiss the world as "anityam, asukham" (transient and unhappy) and therefore we are tempted to use it at best as an instrument to strengthen our souls so that we get an entrance into an extraterritorial heaven. And when we regard it in terms of its value for Divine, we find it to be a challenging field for the fullest manifestation of his glory. Can the world be redeemed from its present state of imperfection and corruption and subjection to death and ignorance? Most spiritual philosophies have tended to answer this question in the negative. But here Savitri gives what is basically Sri Aurobindo's answer to this question. Not to escape from the world because of its imperfections but to live in it and to transform life on earth as we transform ourselves is the real challenge our manhood is supposed to take up.

Savitri's question to the God of Death is very interesting: Is not the spirit immortal and absolved Always, delivered from the grasp of Time?

Why came it down into the mortal's Space?

P. 653

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The spirit is always immortal and is always free from death, imperfection, and sin and corruption. Why did it descend into the grip of time and space and consent to be bound by ignorance? What does it wish to achieve through such an act? Or should we conclude that the Divine's decision to manifest himself as this manifold world was a mistake and we should correct the Divine by trying to cop out of this world through the escape route of Nirvana?

Sri Aurobindo does not believe that it is the creator's intention that we should escape this world in order to escape misery and evil. He believes that it is the intention of Nature to conquer all imperfections and the pain we experience here is but a spur to our efforts to achieve this victory. As Kapali Sastry puts it in his Lights on the Fundamentals (Madras, Sri Aurobindo Library, 1950, p. 78.), the Divine potentialities of the Infinite Self are latent in the finite and it is the revelation of the Divine nature and infinitude hidden in the finite that is the purpose of the limitless Self discovering himself in limitation of the finite.

The second major problem a monistic philosophy has to answer is how does the Divine get entangled in this bondage to ignorance? Is it because he is under some kind of determination, necessity or need to create? Sri Aurobindo very clearly states that God's creation of the world is undertaken deliberately and in freedom. If the Divine does not have freedom to bind himself in the net of Ignorance for the joy of the play, lila, we will have to regard that the Divine is not entirely free. Savitri refers to this freedom the Divine feels in choosing to be bound: What liberty has the soul which feels not free Unless stripped bare and cannot kiss the bonds The Lover winds around his playmate's limbs, Choosing his tyranny, crushed in his embrace?

To seize him better with her boundless heart She accepts the limiting circle of his arms, Bows full of bliss beneath his mastering hands And laughs in his rich constraints, most bound, most free.

This is my answer to thy lures, O Death."

P. 653

The God of Death is rendered speechless by Savitri's replies to his questions about the reality and the value of the world. Notice that she adheres to the advaitic monism of Sri Aurobindo's philosophy. So Death now takes up another line altogether. He says to her: "Whoever you may really be , and however powerful you may be behind your human mask, O Savitri, your heart's passion cannot overrule the firm, established laws of the Gods that operate here. Satyavan is dead and will remain dead, that is the established rule of the Gods here. It is so firmly established here that you cannot hope to change it. Even if you are the Mother of the worlds behind your human mask, you will not be able to impose your will on the cosmic law

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which, you will find, is greater than your will. Even God obeys the laws he has made. The law abides, it cannot be changed. An individual person is after all only a temporary bubble on the sea of Time.

"You claim to be a forerunner of a greater Truth that is to come, and your soul is trying to create a freer law of its own. In doing so, you seem to be leaning on a Force and a Light no one but you have seen. And you are claiming the first fruits of this victory of this new power. But what is Truth? And when was her footfall last heard amid the endless clamour in the mart of time? And which is her voice amidst the thousand cries that crowd and pass through the listening brain and deceive the soul? Perhaps Truth is nothing but a high name, remote like a star. Or is it a vague and impressive word which serves to justify and rationalise man's desires?

May be it is cloak man uses to hide his heart's wish, may be it is a preferred idea, most elected among the elect; may be it is the favourite thought among the many children born of the mind's half‐light crowding the playground of the mind with their loud voices and filling its dormitories in their infant sleep!

"All things move here between God's Yes and No, two Powers real but to each other untrue.

They are like two stars in the moonlit night of the mind gazing at two opposite horizons. They are like the white head and the black tail of the mystic drake (male duck) signifying the earth soul. They are the swift foot and the lame foot, the strong wing and the broken wing sustaining the body of this multidimensional dragon that is this uncertain world.

"Your high proud truth must live too dangerously in this world because it is entangled in the mortal littleness of Matter. All in this world that appears to be true turns out in the end to be false. Ultimately, all thoughts of this world culminate in an eternal zero, all deeds come to nothing in Time.

"For man is at once an animal and a god, a disparate (containing or made up of fundamentally different and often incongruous elements) enigma of God's make. There is a form of Godhead within but he is unable to liberate it from its imprisonment. Man is an aspiring animal, the frustrate god. ( A potential god, but in actuality something less than himself.) But he is neither wholly a beast not yet wholly a god; he is man but man bound to the labour of the earth to exceed herself, to climb the higher stairs of consciousness towards god's consciousness.

"In this world there are only appearances and no one knows what the truth about them is.

Man's ideas are just so many guesses of a fallible god. Truth has no home on the irrational breast of earth. Yet without reason, life will become a tangle of dreams. But this reason is poised precariously above a dim abyss and stands at last upon a plank of doubt. Eternal truth cannot live in mortal beings, or if it lives within your heart show me the body of living truth, or draw for me at least the outline of her face so that I too may obey and worship her. If you can do that, I shall give back Satyavan to you.

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"But here are only facts and the laws hard like steel. I know this truth ‐ that Satyavan is dead and nothing can bring him back, not even your sweetness. There is no magic that can bring back the dead to life. There is no power on earth that can do this. Nothing, no joy of the heart, no bliss can persuade the past to live again.

"Life alone can comfort and fill the mute Void created by death and fill with thought the emptiness of Time. Leave your dead behind, and live a full life."

Savitri, the great World‐Mother incarnate in a human body, answers to the mighty Shade, the dark figure of Death. And as she speaks her mortality disappears; the Goddess in her becomes visible in her eyes, like a dream of heaven Light glows on her face. And she says to the God of Death: "O Death, you too are God and yet you are not quite that. You are his black shadow clinging to him as he leaves the Night of Nescience and takes the way upward, dragging with him the still clinging Inconscient force of the Night.

(This description of the God of Death as just now given by Savitri is very close to the spirit which he represents, or the Force he embodies in Sri Aurobindo's conception of him. In the traditional Indian system, Death is primarily Yama, the God who annihilates finite forms when their span of life on earth is over. In Sri Aurobindo's Savitr,i he is the representative of the Nescience from which this creation has evolved. He is interested in pulling this creation back towards the Nescience from which it was born.)

"O Death, you are the dark head of the unconsciousness of this creation; you are the unrepentant sign of the ignorance of this world, and the natural child of the dark womb of Ignorance, and you are therefore an unlucky bar on immortality.

"All contraries are aspects of God's face. The Many here are only the One showing itself innumerably. The One supreme Divine carries the multitude in His breast; He is the Impersonal, inscrutable, and sole; He is the one infinite Person seeing the world He has manifested. The Silence bears the Eternal's great dumb seal, and the eternal word is also inspired by His Light.

The deep and deathless hush of the Immutable with its pure, featureless blank all‐negating calm is He. And yet He Himself is the creator Self, the almighty Lord who watches His will executed by the gods who are His own forms. He watches the compelling desire goading the half‐conscious man and also goading the reluctant and blind Night into movement.

"These wide divine extremes, these inverse powers, are the right and left side of the body of God. It is one Existence poised between two mighty arms that confronts the mind with unsolved profundities of thought. Below there is darkness, and above there is endless Light.

The two contraries are joined in Light but the dividing Mind tears them asunder and they stand facing each other as opposites, ever in confrontation. The two contraries are indispensable for

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the great World‐task of the Divine. They are the two poles whose opposite currents in their interaction awake the mighty immense World‐Force.

"He stands above the world in the mighty secrecy of his Self and broods in concentration with equal wings; he assumes both the contraries in himself, and is without beginning or end.

Transcending both of the contraries, he enters the state of Absolute. God's being is a mystery beyond mind, his ways bewilder mortal ignorance. The finite is parked in its little sections and is amazed by God's audacity and cannot believe that what it sees is true ‐ that the Self can become the All and yet see and act as the one Infinite would.

"This seems to be the Absolute's offence against human reason ‐ being known to be for ever unknowable, to be all and yet to transcend the mystic whole, to be the Absolute and yet dwell in a relative world of Time; to be the Eternal and all‐knowing and yet to suffer birth as finite beings and things, to be omnipotent and yet appear to be sporting with Chance and Fate, to be the Spirit and yet to be matter and the Void, to be the illimitable, beyond form and name, yet to dwell within a body, to be the one and the supreme and yet to be animal, human and divine.

The Supreme is still like the deep sea and yet he laughs in rolling waves, he is Universal, he is all and yet he is the transcendent, he is none.

(The Supreme Divine baffles the human intellect because He does not fit into its neat categories and is not bound to its logic of the finite. How is the Divine to be understood? Is He universal, transcendental or immanent and individual? How can He be all these three at the same time? Is He the Formless or does He always wear a form? If He is infinite, then why does He take birth only in finite things and beings? If He is omnipotent, why does He look so helpless in His finite individual forms? How can He be an animal, man and the divine at the same time?

Is He the quiet, immobile depths of the ocean, or is He the ever‐active waves on the surface of the ocean?)

"To man's sense of righteousness this seems to be God's cosmic crime ‐ that although Almighty, He chooses to dwell beyond good and evil leaving the good to their fate in this wicked world and letting evil rule the immense scene. To those who see only a part and miss the whole, all this creation appears to be a vast, aimless labour with but scanty result, everywhere there seems to be opposition, strife and dance. People scan only the surfaces, the depths do not yield to their search. The world confronts and challenges us either as a hybrid mystery or as a sordid miracle.

(There are two kinds of people who are baffled by the Divine. We have just seen how he baffles those who depend on their reason and intellect to make sense of this world. The second category of people who are committed to righteousness. They expect God at least to be as moral as they are. How can God the Almighty let the evil triumph more often than the Good in this world? Why does he not do anything about it? Does he not hold the same moral values that we hold, or is he totally indifferent to the good and the evil? Why is there so much strife

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and suffering in a world controlled by a kind and benevolent God? Does he not care enough or is he too weak to help even if he cared? These are some of the grounds which built up the case for atheism and the denial of God, particularly in the West in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

As we have already seen, Sri Aurobindo has an entirely different notion of the Divine and how and why the Divine created this universe. He just did not create this universe outside of himself, with the substance too which is outside of himself. He became the world. If there is imperfection and suffering and death in this world, it is god himself who is undergoing this experience. He is not sending these experiences to the inhabitants of the world while he is exempt from them. So Sri Aurobindo's God is not morally culpable on that account. The real question then is why does the Divine choose to go through this experienced of pain, suffering and death? So while an answer to this question has still to be found, and Sri Aurobindo has answered this question in The Life Divine, the fact that there is evil and imperfection in the world, or the fact that God is beyond our rationality, are not arguments that can be used to dismiss his very existence.)

"Yet in this seeming exactness of the workings of the Inconscient, in the careless error of the world's ignorance, one sees a plan, a hidden intelligence. There is a purpose in each stumble and fall. Even in what looks like the most careless, lazy movement of Nature is only an appearance, a posturing preparing behind it some forward step, some significant result.

"Individual events and happenings are like cleverly designed notes woven into a purposive composition ‐ they may look discordant but are in fact they are the tiny notes of a harmonious whole, which is a huge orchestral dance of Nature's evolution.

"A supreme Truth has brought this world into being; it has wrapped itself in Matter as in a shroud ‐ a shroud of Death, a shroud of Ignorance. It compelled the suns to burn through silent space; they are like the flame‐signs of its uncomprehended Thought in a wide brooding ether's formless muse. It made of Knowledge an obscured and struggling light, of luminous being into an Inconscient, dense and dumb substance, Bliss into the beauty of an insentient world.

"The conscious infinite lives in finite things. When it gets involved (the process of involution, which precedes evolution), it sleeps in Matter's helpless trance. It rules the world even when it is asleep in Matter's senseless Void. From its dreaming state, it throws out mind and heart and soul which struggle and labour in their crippled and bound conditions on the hard earth, inhospitable to them. This fragmented whole works through many scattered points. Its broken pieces are the thoughts of wisdom which glisten like diamonds and its shadowy reflex is our ignorance here.

"The Infinite starts its evolutionary journey from the dumb Inconscient Matter in numberless jets in innumerable points, and throws itself out in countless forms; out of physical brain and nerve, it shapes a conscient being and from the pleasures and pain of life it develops a sentient creature. The physical form is a bundle of obscure feelings, a sensitive bundle of matter; it

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survives the various shocks to its existence. Either by being crushed or getting exhausted otherwise, it dies and departs from the huge universe in which it lives but only as an insignificant, inconsequential guest. But all the while, the soul grows concealed within its house. It gives to the body its strength and its greatness. In this ignorant and aimless world, the soul follows its own aims and lends significance to earth's otherwise meaningless life."

We have now reached the mid‐point in Savitri's long discourse on integral philosophy which is intended to answer all the questions the God of Death might have for her. http://nextfuture.sriaurobindosociety.org.in/may06/nfmay06_savitri.htm

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35. Levels of Conciousness

Savitri has been explaining to the God of Death the seeming paradox of life. She tells him that a supreme Truth has created this world by wrapping itself in matter and in a shroud of Death. It has organised the physical world as we see it today. To create this universe as we see it now, Knowledge had to be veiled and turned into a struggling light, the Supreme Being had to be converted into a substance nescient, dense and dumb, and the divine's Bliss had to be made into the beauty of the insentient world. In finite things, dwells the Infinite. The finite human mind cannot grasp the logic of the Infinite. It is baffled by every step by what it sees as a sordid miracle.

His being is a mystery beyond mind, His ways bewilder mortal ignorance; The finite in its little sections parked, Amazed, credits not God's audacity Who dares to be the unimagined All And see and act as might one Infinite.

Against human reason this is his offence, Being known to be for ever unknowable, To be all and yet transcend the mystic whole, Absolute, to lodge in a relative world of Time, Eternal and all‐knowing, to suffer birth, Omnipotent, to sport with Chance and Fate, Spirit, yet to be Matter and the Void, Illimitable, beyond form or name, To dwell within a body, one and supreme To be animal and human and divine: A still deep sea, he laughs in rolling waves; Universal, he is all,‐transcendent, none.

To man's righteousness this is his cosmic crime, Almighty beyond good and evil to dwell Leaving the good to their fate in a wicked world And evil to reign in this enormous scene.

All opposition seems and strife and chance, An aimless labour with but scanty sense, To eyes that see a part and miss the whole; The surface men scan, the depths refuse their search:

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A hybrid mystery challenges the view, Or a discouraging sordid miracle.

P. 657

Yet in what looks like the workings of the Inconscient, one sees a plan, a secret intelligence at work. The careless, lazy movement of Nature is only an appearance behind which some significant forward steps are planned. The conscious Infinite dwells in finite things. It is not only a physical evolution that is taking place here. In this ignorant‐looking and apparently aimless world, the soul or consciousness is also growing and it is that which gives a meaning to earth's seemingly meaningless life.

Savitri continues her discourse to the God of Death on the Integral truth about this life on earth: A demigod animal, came thinking man; He wallows in mud, yet heavenward soars in thought; He plays and ponders, laughs and weeps and dreams, Satisfies his little longings like the beast; He pores upon life's book with student eyes.

Out of this tangle of intellect and sense, Out of the narrow scope of finite thought At last he wakes into spiritual mind; A high liberty begins and luminous room: He glimpses eternity, touches the infinite, He meets the gods in great and sudden hours, He feels the universe as his larger self, Makes Space and Time his opportunity To join the heights and depths of being in light, In the heart's cave speaks secretly with God. P. 659

Savitri continues; "Just look at the thinking man. He is both an animal and a semi‐god at the same time. Like an animal he wallows in the mud of life but in his thoughts he soars high heavenwards. He plays and ponders, laughs and weeps and yet also dreams. He is like the beast in satisfying his petty desires, but he is also capable of poring upon the book of life most diligently. He struggles through the confusion created by the rigidness of the intellect and the confident senses and gradually rises into the higher regions of his mind. Here he begins to experience a wide freedom and a radiant afflatus.

"Here in the regions of the spiritual mind, he gets a glimpse of eternity, and has even some contact with the infinite consciousness, however faint and fleeting it may be to begin with. In

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great and unexpected hours he even encounters the gods. He begins to feel that the universe is his own wider self. He uses Space and Time as opportunities to infuse the heights and depths of his being with the supernal light. He even becomes capable of communicating with God in the secrecies of his heart.

"But these are only touches, fleeting experiences of his high moments in life. At this stage only a few fragments of the supreme Truth have touched and illumined his soul, like reflections of the sun in still waters. They are not yet his normal life, not a permanent state of his soul. Only a few have dared to climb beyond this state and have achieved the supreme ascent. They have broken through the borders of the blinding light which is above them and breathed a mightier air and received intimations of a vaster existence and bathed their being in the immense intuitive light. On the highest planes of the mind are planes open to the radiance of Infinity; they are the outskirts and dependencies of the home of the Absolute Truth; therefore these estates of the mind are most exalted and measureless.

"Man can visit these heights but he cannot live there. It is the realm of cosmic Thought spread out in its vastness. Small portions of this consciousness take formulations as great philosophies here, immense in their details. Each such philosophy has its own scheme of the universe.

"The ascending light can climb still higher regions, where can be found vast spaces of vision under eternal suns and oceans of immortal luminousness and flame‐hills assaulting heaven with their peaks. There everything turns into a blaze of light. A burning head of vision dominates the mind there and thought follows the lead of vision. Here the mind sees the truth while the heart also feels it. The heart becomes an illuminate and a seer. And all this intimate knowledge comes through an identity with the object of knowledge.

In this ascent, the higher we rise, the deeper can we see. From the illumined mental consciousness described just now, one can climb still higher and enter the still wider horizons of the Intuitive Mind. Intuition flashes here in clusters and hunts out hidden truths from their hideouts. The fiery edge of intuition cuts through closed and unexplored regions of the self, delves into the high recesses of the brain and lights up the secret chambers of the heart.

Intuition has great powers of penetration and it breaks through the veil of name and form and reveals the secret soul of everything.

"Thought here has the sun‐bright eyes of revelation. The Word becomes a mighty voice of inspiration and enters the inmost cabin of privacy and tears away the veil that covers the reality of God and of life.

Then beyond the heights of the Intuitive Mind, we come to the last rung of the ladder of the mental consciousness, namely, to the Overmind. The Overmind is cosmic in its range; it is as it were a buffer state between Time and Eternity, the belt at which the Eternal crosses into the temporal. This realm is too vast for the normal experience of most people.

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"Here all is gathered below one golden sky. The Powers that build the cosmos in this field of unbounded possibilities take their respective positions here. (These Powers are called the Gods.) Each God operates from here and builds his own world according to his nature. Real‐ Ideas are arranged here in deep ranks and files like an army formation and are held together by the regard of one God or Power. Here Time is one frame, and all space is one single extension.

There in the Overmental region is the universal gaze of the Godhead. That is where the boundaries of the immortal mind lie, and that is the boundary that separates the upper and the lower hemi‐sphere of creation. It fences Eternity from the finite fields in which the Gods labour in Time." * Here the poet is describing the higher levels of the mental consciousness which Sri Aurobindo has described in some detail in The Life Divine and other writings of his. Above our thought‐ mind and below the Supermind, he has recognised four distinct levels of mental consciousness.

These are the Higher Mind, the Illumined Mind, the Intuitive Mind and the Overmind. We shall review very briefly here in his own words how he has described each of these levels: The Higher Mind "Our first decisive step out of our human intelligence, our normal mentality, is an ascent into a higher Mind, a mind no longer of mingled light and obscurity or half‐light, but a large clarity of the Spirit. While our thought‐mind deals with one thing at a time; it divides, segments, analyses and discriminates. The Higher Mind takes many things at the same time, multiple thoughts without going piecemeal. Knowledge here is spontaneously inherent, not arrived at through the labour of reasoning. There is a clarity of the spirit, as if daylight brings so many things into view. This mind is nevertheless dominated by thought, by luminous thought."

The Illumined Mind "The Illumined Mind is a greater force than the Higher Mind; it is a Mind no longer of higher Thought, but of spiritual light. Here the clarity of the spiritual intelligence gives place or subordinates itself to an intense lustre, a splendour and illumination of the Spirit. It is lightening‐like play of a spiritual truth and power that breaks from above into the consciousness. It adds to the calm and wide enlightenment and the vast descent of peace which characterise the action of the larger conceptual‐spiritual principle, a fiery ardour of realisation and a rapturous ecstasy of knowledge. A downpour of inwardly visible Light very usually envelops this action. The Illumined Mind does not work primarily by thought, but by vision; thought is here only a subordinate movement expressive of sight. ("The human mind, which relies mainly on thought, conceives that to be the highest or the main process of knowledge, but in the spiritual order thought is a secondary and not an indispensable process. In its form of verbal thought, it can almost be described as a concession

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made by Knowledge to the Ignorance, because that Ignorance is incapable of making truth wholly lucid and intelligible to itself in all its extent and manifold implications except through the clarifying precision of significant sounds. It cannot do without this device to give to ideas an exact outline and an expressive body. But it is evident that this is a device, a machinery.

Thought in itself, in its origin on the higher levels of consciousness, is a perception, a cognitive seizing of the object or of some truth of things which is a powerful but still a minor and secondary result of spiritual vision. It is a comparatively external and superficial regard of the self upon the self, the subject upon itself or something of itself as object: for all there is a diversity and multiplicity of the self. In mind there is a surface response of perception to the contact of an observed or discovered object, fact or truth and a consequent conceptual formulation of it; but in the spiritual light there is a deeper perceptive response from the very substance of consciousness and a comprehending formulation in that substance, an exact figure or revelatory ideograph in the stuff of the being ‐ nothing more, no verbal representation is needed for the precision and completeness of this thought‐knowledge. Thought creates a representative image of Truth. It offers that to the mind as a means of holding Truth and making it an object of knowledge. But the body itself of Truth is caught and exactly held in the sunlight of a deeper spiritual sight to which the representative figure created by thought is secondary and derivative, powerful for communication of knowledge, but not indispensable for reception or possession of knowledge.")

"A consciousness that proceeds by sight, the consciousness of the seer, is a greater power for knowledge than the consciousness of the thinker. The perceptual power of the inner sight is greater and more direct than the perceptual power of thought. It is a spiritual sense that seizes something of the substance of Truth and not only her figure. But it outlines the figure also and at the same time catches the significance of the figure, and it can embody her with a finer and bolder revealing outline and a larger comprehension and power of totality than thought‐ conception can manage. As the Higher Mind brings a greater consciousness into the being through the spiritual idea and its power of truth, so the Illumined Mind brings in a still greater consciousness through a Truth‐sight and Truth‐light and its seeing and seizing power. It can effect a more powerful and dynamic integration."

The Intuitive Mind There is, indeed, a higher form of the buddhi that can be called the intuitive mind or intuitive reason, and this by its intuitions, its inspirations, its swift revelatory vision, its luminous insight and discrimination can do the work of the reason with a higher power, a swifter action, a greater and spontaneous certitude. It acts in a self‐light of the truth which does not depend upon the torch‐flares of the sense‐mind and its limited uncertain precepts; it proceeds not by intelligent but by visional concepts: it is a kind of truth‐vision, truth‐hearing, truth‐memory,

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direct truth‐discernment. This true and authentic intuition must be distinguished from a power of the ordinary mental reason which is too easily confused with it, the power of involved reasoning that reaches its conclusion by a bound and does not need the ordinary steps of the logical mind.

Intuition has a fourfold power. A power of revelatory truth‐seeing, a power of inspiration or truth‐hearing, a power of truth‐touch or immediate seizing of significance, which is akin to the ordinary nature of its intervention in our mental intelligence, a power of true and automatic discrimination of the orderly and exact relation of truth to truth,‐these are the fourfold potencies of Intuition. Intuition can therefore perform all the action of reason,‐including the function of logical intelligence, which is to work out the right relation of things and the right relation of idea with idea,‐but by its own superior process and with steps that do not fail or falter. It takes up also and transforms into its own substance not only the mind of thought, but the heart and life and the sense and physical consciousness. Already all these have their own peculiar powers of intuition derivative from the hidden Light; the pure power descending from above can assume them all into itself and impart to these deeper heart‐perceptions and life‐ perceptions and the divinations of the body a greater integrality and perfection. It can thus change the whole consciousness into the stuff of Intuition; for it brings its own greater radiant movement into the will, into the feelings and emotions, the life‐impulses, the action of sense and sensation the very workings of the body‐consciousness; it recasts them in the light and power of truth and illumines their knowledge and their ignorance.

The Overmind "This is the faculty containing all the powers of Intuition and also of the other preceding stages but it is also capable of receiving the light from above. Sri Aurobindo describes it as a superconscient cosmic Mind which is in direct contact with the supramental consciousness. The Overmind is the last step of the stair of the lower hemisphere. It is the highest peak of the mind and therefore belongs to the lower hemisphere. It may be the highest rung but still it has the shadow of the Ignorance.

"The overmind is a power of the cosmic consciousness. It is therefore only by an opening into the cosmic consciousness that the overmind ascent and descent can be made wholly possible.

The preceding stages are not cosmic in nature, but in the Overmind consciousness expands and widens itself. A high and intense individual opening upwards is not sufficient; to that vertical ascent towards summit light must be added a vast horizontal expansion of consciousness into some totality of the Spirit. When the Overmind descends, the predominance of the centralising ego‐sense is entirely subordinated, lost in largeness of being and finally abolished. A wide cosmic perception and feeling of a boundless universal self and movement replaces it: many motions that were formerly egocentric may still continue but they occur as currents or ripples in the cosmic wideness.

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"In its nature and law the overmind is a sort of delegation of the Supermind, it is the passage through which one passes from mind to Supermind. It has the vision of the truth and yet it is the first parent of Ignorance; ignorance in the sense of divided knowledge, knowledge of parts and aspects of the truth, not the integral unifying knowledge superior to all mental substance and movements.

"The Overmind can unite the individual mind with the cosmic mind, but it cannot lead it beyond itself, it cannot dynamise the Transcendent, for it is only the Supermind that has the direct power of manifestation of the Transcendence. Besides, the Overmind is not able wholly to transform the Inconscient, for even this higher power enters the inconscient it is subject to the diminishing law of the nescient substance, and as long as the basis of nescience remains un‐transformed it can re‐invade the gnostic being at any time."

(These passages describing the different levels of the mind are taken mainly from Sri Aurobindo's The Life Divine (pages: 939 ‐ 962), and one from The Synthesis of Yoga (page 447.))

http://nextfuture.sriaurobindosociety.org.in/jun06/nfjune06_savitri.htm

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36. The Supermind

As we saw in the previous instalment, Savitri is giving the God of Death an overview of the evolutionary future of man. She is giving him a brief description of the levels of consciousness that are above the thinking mind. These spiritual levels of the mental consciousness begin with the Higher Mind, and above it is the Illumined Mind; then after that comes the Intuitive Mind and after that we have the Overmind. The lower hemisphere of this evolutionary creation ends with the Overmind. What comes after the overmind?

In her glorious kingdom of eternal light All‐ruler, ruled by none, the Truth supreme, Omnipotent, omniscient and alone, In a golden country keeps her measureless house; In its corridor she hears the tread that comes Out of the Unmanifest never to return Till the Unknown is known and seen by men.

"Above the overmind is the glorious kingdom of eternal light where the supreme Truth, which Sri Aurobindo calls the Supramental consciousness, dwells in the gold‐bright country of the Spirit. This consciousness is the ruler of all and it is ruled by none; it is all‐powerful, all‐knowing and alone. It is in the corridors of this realm that the tread of the eternal coming out of the Unmanifest can first be heard. When the unmanifest Spirit moves into manifestation, this is where it first appears. From here it enters the lower hemisphere until it is seen by all."

(The distinction between the Overmind and the Supermind is brought out very clearly in the following paragraph by Sri Aurobindo: The overmind is a delegation from the supermind which supports the present evolutionary universe in which we live here in Matter. If supermind were to start here from the beginning as the direct creative Power, this world would have been full of divine Light from the beginning, there would be no involution of the inconscience in Matter. A line is drawn therefore between the higher half of the universe of consciousness (parardha) and the lower half (aparardha). The higher half is constituted of Sat, Chit, Ananda, Mahas (the supramental), and the lower half of mind, life, Matter. This line is the intermediary overmind which, though luminous itself, keeps from us the luminous itself, the full indivisible supramental Light. It depends on it indeed but in receiving it, divides, distributes, breaks it up into separated aspects, powers, and multiplicities of all kinds. As we reach further diminution of consciousness such as we reach in Mind, each of

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these comes to be regarded as the sole or chief Truth and all the rest as subordinate or contradictory to it. This action of the overmind is meant when the Upanishad talks of the face of the Truth as covered by a golden Lid. It is by this primitive divisional principle that the Mind is enabled to regard, for example, the Impersonal as the Truth, the personal only as a mask or the personal Divine as the greatest Truth and impersonality as only an aspect. This is how all the conflicting philosophies and religions arise, each exalting one aspect or potentiality of Truth presented to Mind as the whole sufficient explanation of things. This divisional principle pursues man's mental knowledge, everywhere and even when he thinks he has arrived at the final unity, it is only a constructed unity, based on an Aspect. This bedevils the scientist who seeks to found the unity of knowledge on some original physical aspect of things, Energy or Matter, Electricity or Ether, and even the Mayavadin who thinks he has arrived at the absolute Adwaita by cutting existence into two, Brahman and Maya. It is the reason why mental knowledge can never arrive at a (SABCL 22: 242 ‐ 243) ) final solution of anything.

Savitri describes this transcendental Supramental world, which is the home of the Supreme Mother, in these words: Above the stretch and blaze of cosmic Sight, Above the silence of the wordless Thought, Formless creator of immortal forms, Nameless, investitured with the name divine, Transcending Time's hours, transcending Timelessness, The Mighty Mother sits in lucent calm And holds the eternal Child upon her knees Attending the day when he shall speak to Fate.

There is the image of our future's hope; There is the sun for which all darkness waits, There is the imperishable harmony; The world's contradictions climb to her and are one: There is the Truth of which the world's truths are shreds, The Light of which the world's ignorance is the shade Till Truth draws back the shade that it has cast, The Love our hearts call down to heal all strife, The Bliss for which the world's derelict sorrows yearn: Thence comes the glory sometimes seen on earth, The visits of Godhead to the human soul, The Beauty and the dream on Nature's face.

There the perfection born from eternity Calls to it the perfection born in Time,

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The truth of God surprising human life, The image of God overtaking finite shapes.

P. 661

"This is the transcendental world beyond the realm of the cosmic consciousness and above the silent stretches of wordless thought. This is the abode of the formless creatrix of immortal forms, of the nameless who ratifies every divine name by which she is known, and who transcends both Time and Timelessness. This is where the Supreme creatrix, conceived as the Mother of the universe sits holding the eternal child (this creation) on her knees, waiting patiently for the child to grow up and realise the Destiny for which he has been brought into being.

"This is the full figure of our hope for the future; this is the radiant sun for which all the darkness of the world below waits. There in that world we have the undying harmony for which the world yearns. This is the home of the Mighty Mother. All the contradictions in our world climb to this realm and find there their resolution in her.

"There in this realm is the Truth of Truths of which the truths of our world are little fragments; there is a Light there of which the world's ignorance is the shade which lasts till the Truth that casts it draws back. There is the Love which our hearts pine for and want to call down to heal all the strife and conflict of our world. There exists too the Bliss world's abandoned sorrows long.

"From this world comes the glory that we sometimes see on earth as God descends into the human soul in the form of special beauty and there is the glory of a dream on nature's face.

"There, in that realm, the perfection born from Eternity calls to it the perfection born in Time.

Then the truth of God surprises human life, and the image of God overtakes finite shapes and invests them with a divine significance.

"There in the realms of the immortal Supermind is a world of everlasting Light. Truth which hides here in our world her head in mystery and which in the stark structure of its material form looks like an impossible riddle for human reason to unravel lives freely and without any ambiguity in this world of Light. The face of the Truth is unmasked there. There too is nature and the common law of things.

"There in a body made of spirit substance, the everlasting Fire burns as in a hearth. Actions in such a body are expressions of the soul impulses and thought puts infallible and absolute steps.

Life is a continual worship's rite here, a joyous sacrifice of rapture offered to the One. "A cosmic vision and a spiritual sense enable one to feel the Infinite lodged in finite forms and it sees through a quivering ecstasy of light the bright face of the Bodiless in the truth of a moment; one can sip the honey‐wine of eternity in the momentary movements of the soul.

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"A Spirit who is no one in particular stands supporting the innumerable many. The one mystic Person of this world multiplies and becomes the multiple personalities; He puts his divinity's stamp on all his innumerable bodies and sits in each rendering it immortal and unique.

"Behind each daily act the Immobile stands supporting it, forming the background of the movement and scene. On the foundation of its might and calm the Immobile upholds the creation, and all changes take place on the unchanging, deathless poise of the immutable.

"That which is Eternal looks out through the moving hours of time. That which is incapable of being expressed in words puts on a robe of speech, in which the words are woven like magic threads; they evoke beauty and inspire us with their glow.

"The Truth supreme, although vast and impersonal, adjusts itself faultlessly to the hour and circumstance; its substance is always the same pure gold but it is shaped into vessels of different shapes for the spirit's use; its gold becomes the wine jar of bliss and the vase of beauty.

"All in that world is a supreme epiphany (divine manifestation). The All‐Wonderful makes a marvel of each event, the All‐Beautiful makes a miracle of each shape. The All‐Blissful fills each heart‐throb with rapture unspeakable. The use of senses there is a pure heavenly joy and wonder.

"Each being there is a member of the Self (is a manifestation of the Self), a portion of the million‐thoughted All. Each claims to have the unity of the timeless. The sweetness of each unique thing is its difference from everything else; and yet each has the intimate flavour of the One. "But who can show you Truth's glorious face? Our human words can only throw a shadow on her and hide her. Thought despairs of capturing her unthinkable rapture of light, to speech she is a marvel of the inexpressible.

"O Death, if you could only feel a touch of this Truth supreme, you will suddenly grow wise and cast off your present shape and form and thus cease to be. If our souls could see and love and clasp God's Truth , its infinite radiance would seize our hearts and our being will be remade in God's image and this earthly life become the life divine."

(In the long passage we have just been through we have Savitri's first description of the supramental world. In its main features, her description of the Supramental world is very similar to the description in Aswapati's characterisation of this same world. In Book Three, Canto 3, we have Aswapati's description of this world. Compare the following lines with what we have just read about the Supramental world from Savitri's description of it: A Bliss, a Light, a Power, a flame‐white Love Caught all into a sole immense embrace;

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Existence found its truth on Oneness' breast And each became the self and space of all.

The great world‐rhythms were heart‐beats of one Soul, To feel was a flame‐discovery of God, All mind was a single harp of many strings, All life a song of many meeting lives; For worlds were many, but the Self was one.

P. 322.

Please read sections 3 and 4 of Canto 3 of Book Three for further similarities between the two descriptions.)

(Now that we have seen a poetic description of the main features of the Supramental world, it would be useful to take a look at the following passage from The Synthesis of Yoga, in which Sri Aurobindo describes the nature of the Supermind: The Supermind is not some kind of a magnified mind; it is beyond the mental level altogether.

It involves a radical change of consciousness, in the mind, in the heart, in the life‐regions. What is the fundamental nature of the supermind if it has to replace our evolving mind and function as the leader of evolution?

1. Knowledge that is natural to the gnostic mind is knowledge by identity and oneness. The Spirit is one everywhere it knows all things as itself and in itself and so sees them always and therefore knows them intimately, completely, in reality and in their appearance. Even when it sees anything as an object of knowledge, it yet sees it as itself and in itself and not as a thing separate from itself. The knowledge that mind commands is a separative knowledge. The mind holds itself separate from the objects of knowledge, studies it as something other than itself, and arrives at a formulation of a perception. The mental awareness we have of our own subjective existence, although in some respects is akin to knowledge by identity, yet it is not the same thing as this identity and self‐knowledge, because what it sees are mental figures of our being. It is only a partial, derivative and superficial action that appears to us while the largest and the most secretly determining parts of our are occult to our mentality. The supramental spirit has the inmost and total knowledge of itself and of all its universe and of all things that are its creations and self‐figurings in the universe.

2. The second characteristic of the Supermind is that its knowledge is real because it is total.

The mind collects bits of knowledge, fragments of knowledge, and can know only one thing at a time. What it knows it may know thoroughly, but other things it is not aware. The Supermind has a total knowledge. The totality of which the supermind is in possession is the reality of the individual, the reality of the universal, the reality of the transcendental. It has the vision of the transcendental and sees the universe not only in its own terms but in relation to the

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transcendent of which it proceeds and of which it is an expression. It also sees the individual in term of its relation to the universal. The mind is incapable of this totality of knowledge. The mind cannot grasp the universal and the transcendental, at best it can have a mental idea of these things.

3. The third characteristic of the supermind is that it is directly truth‐conscious, a divine power of immediate, inherent and spontaneous knowledge. It does not use logical steps to lead it from the known to the unknown. The supermind contains all knowledge in itself The background of mind is ignorance, since it is not fully evolved, mental knowledge is always troubled by error, restriction and limitation.

4. The supermind is not only the knower but also the creator. What it knows it wields the power to manifest that knowledge in form, in movement. Even when the mind knows, it does not always have the power to render what it knows in terms of manifestation. (The Synthesis of Yoga: 754‐769) (783‐ ? CWSA)) Let us also take a look at a comparatively more recent formulation of the concept of the Supramental as found in Sri Aurobindo's Supramental Manifestation Upon Earth (page 558 in CWSA Vil.13): The Supermind is in its very essence a truth‐consciousness, a consciousness always free from the Ignorance which is the foundation of our present natural or evolutionary existence and from which nature in us is trying to arrive at self‐knowledge and world‐knowledge and a right consciousness and the right use of our existence in the universe. The Supermind, because it is a truth‐consciousness, has this knowledge inherent in it and this power of true existence; its course is straight and can go direct to its aim, its field is wide and can even be made illimitable.

This is because its very nature is knowledge: it has not to acquire knowledge but possesses it in its own right; its steps are not from nescience or ignorance into some imperfect light, but from truth to greater truth, from right perception to deeper perception, from intuition to intuition, from illumination to utter and boundless luminousness, from growing widenesses to the utter vasts and to very infinitude. On its summits it possesses the divine omniscience and omnipotence, but even in an evolutionary movement of its own graded self‐manifestation by which it would eventually reveal its own highest heights, it must be in its very nature essentially free from ignorance and error: it starts from truth and light and moves always in truth and light. As its knowledge is always true, so too its will is always true; it does not fumble in its handling of things or stumble in its paces. In the Supermind feeling and emotion do not depart from their truth, make no slips or mistakes, do not swerve from the right and the real, cannot misuse beauty and delight or twist away from a divine rectitude. In the Supermind sense cannot mislead or deviate into the grossnesses which are here its natural imperfections and the cause of reproach, distrust and misuse by our ignorance. Even an incomplete statement made by the Supermind is a truth leading to a further truth, its incomplete action a step towards

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completeness. All the life and action and leading of the Supermind is guarded in its very nature from the falsehoods and uncertainties that are our lot; it moves in safety towards its perfection. Once the truth‐consciousness was established here on its own sure foundation, the evolution of divine life would be a progress in felicity, a march through light to Ananda. ) Lets us now return to our study of Savitri from where we left off.

Now the God of Death answers to Savitri one last time: "If the Supreme Truth transcends everything here and if it is separated by the supreme Knowledge and by such vast ranges of consciousness from this nether world, what bridge can span the gulf between that truth and this dream‐world of creation? Who can hope ever to bring down that supreme truth to men and persuade that Truth to walk on this harsh world with feet that are sure to be wounded? If this Truth is not brought down, all that will happen is that this unreachable glory will be in our world only an aspiration, its splendour will never sanctify this pale and weak earth. Do you have you that strength, O Savitri, O beauty made of mortal limbs, to fly away from my net and bring down this truth to man and earth?

"Who then are you hiding in this human disguise? Your voice has the ring of the sound of infinity. Knowledge seems to be with you; Truth speaks through your words. You have the light of the worlds beyond in your eyes. But where is your strength to conquer Time and Death? Do you possess God's force which is needed to build heaven's truths here on earth?

"For truth and knowledge by themselves are a futile gleam if Knowledge does not bring with it the Power needed to change the world, if Might does not come and ensure that Truth gets her rights. A Force, a blind Power and not Truth seems to have made this ignorant world, and it is such a Power that governs the lives of men. If the great Gods rule this world, they do so with a Power and not Knowledge. This Power is the arm of God and it alone can put the final seal of fate.

"O Savitri, O human claimant to immortality, reveal thy power to me, lay bare the spirit's force.

Only when I see your power and how strong it is, will I give you back Satyavan. Or if the Mighty Mother is with you, show me her face, so that I too can worship her. Let her immortal eyes look into my eyes, the eyes of Death. Let an imperishable Force touch brute things here and transform earth's death into an immortal fire.

"Then alone can your dead Satyavan return to you and live with you. Once that is accomplished, then will this prostrate earth be able to lift her gaze and feel near her the secret body of God, and Love and Bliss will overtake the fleeting Time." http://nextfuture.sriaurobindosociety.org.in/july06/nfjuly06_savitri.htm

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37. Book Ten Canto Four – Continued

The God of Death has now exhausted all the arguments he could muster to convince Savitri that her quest is not worth all the effort and zeal with which she has been pursuing it, nor is the goal she is seeking feasible or natural. At the beginning he haughtily dismissed her as a two‐ legged animal not worth his attention. This arrogance of the God of Death gradually vanished and he now has a genuine admiration for Savitri. What she is seeking is the release of Satyavan from the hold of death and his return to earth with her. The God of Death has tried to convince Savitri what she adores as love is no more than a biological hunger and like all vital urges it is but a fleeting passion. Secondly, it is the law of nature that once death has claimed someone, he cannot be retrieved. The hold of death is impregnable, no one and nothing can escape from its iron grip. Thirdly, death is the inevitable end of all life. Satyavan's soul may be immortal, but then a similar immortality is not obtainable to Satyavan in a human body. Spirit and Matter are at odds in this world, and therefore what she is seeking is unfeasible and impractical.

We have now seen how Savitri refutes each of the arguments the God of Death advances. Her refutation is directed at showing not so much that his arguments are erroneous in themselves as in showing that each one of them is based not on an integral truth but on a partial truth.

Savitri explains to him the truth of a manifestation which is constantly evolving and which has yet to evolve further. The human mind which is now the apex of the evolutionary world is not by any means the final stage of evolution. It is only an intermediate stage for beyond the thinking lie the spiritual levels of the mental consciousness beginning with the Higher Mind.

Above it is the Illumined Mind; then after that comes the Intuitive Mind and after that we have the Overmind. She also gives a brief description of the crown of terrestrial evolution, the Supramental consciousness: Above the stretch and blaze of cosmic Sight, Above the silence of the wordless Thought, Formless creator of immortal forms, Nameless, investitured with the name divine, Transcending Time's hours, transcending Timelessness, The Mighty Mother sits in lucent calm And holds the eternal Child upon her knees Attending the day when he shall speak to Fate.

There is the image of our future's hope; There is the sun for which all darkness waits, There is the imperishable harmony; The world's contradictions climb to her and are one:

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There is the Truth of which the world's truths are shreds, The Light of which the world's ignorance is the shade Till Truth draws back the shade that it has cast, The Love our hearts call down to heal all strife, The Bliss for which the world's derelict sorrows yearn: Thence comes the glory sometimes seen on earth, The visits of Godhead to the human soul, The Beauty and the dream on Nature's face.

There the perfection born from eternity Calls to it the perfection born in Time, The truth of God surprising human life, The image of God overtaking finite shapes.

P. 661

Here we have Savitri's first description of the supramental world that is waiting in the transcendental to come down on earth. This will be the key to the transformation of the world as it is today into a veritable manifestation of the glory and perfection of the Supreme consciousness which has created it.

The God of Death seems to be impressed by Savitri's description of the glories of the Supramental consciousness. His question now is: "Who can hope ever to bring down that supreme truth to men and persuade that truth to walk on this harsh world with feet that are sure to be wounded? If it is not brought down, it will remain for ever an aspiration in the heart of the earth. He then pointedly asks Savitri: "Do you have that strength, O Savitri, to bring down this truth to man and earth?"

He continues: "If you can do this I would like to know who you really are hiding in this human disguise. Your very look and voice and your words suggest you have some special power in you.

Do you then have the power needed to bring down this glorious power, the Supramental consciousness down on earth? Where is your strength? Where is your strength to conquer Time and Death? Do you possess God's force which is needed to build heaven's truths here on earth?

"If you do have this strength, O Savitri, reveal your power to me; only when I see your power and understand its nature and source, will I give you back Satyavan. Or if the Mighty Mother is with you, show me Her face, so that I too can worship Her. Let Her immortal eyes look into my eyes, the eyes of Death. Let an imperishable Force touch brute things here and transform earth's death into an immortal fire".

This is how the long colloquy between the God of Death and Savitri ends.

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Savitri looks on the God of Death in silence. It is as though she is looking at Death and sees him as the symbol of the world's darkness which has finally yielded to heaven‐light and God and doesn't need any more to hide itself behind the veil of the Inconscient. It is as though Savitri has made the God of Death realise his limitations.

Then a great transformation comes over Savitri. The aura of glory of the Divinity dwelling in her, the radiance of the Immortal that has always lit her face and shone through her body overflows from her being and turns the air around her into a sea of light. In a flaming moment of revelation the Incarnation that Savitri is pushes aside its human veil. The little human figure that Savitri was is now seen as holding in her the immensity of the Infinite; she is seen as the very source and home of the Eternal. Her soul is now seen as the centre of the world and the entire wide space as the outer robe of her soul. Her gaze now acquires the calm and incomparably high dignity of the highest heavens looking at the meekness of the earth; the gaze of the Omniscient shines across her forehead; her two eyes are like two stars watching over the whole universe.

Then we have a powerful description of the descent of the Mahakundalini in Savitri through the seven chakras which are located in the subtle body, sukshma deha. The Light and Power which Savitri has so far held in check within her now descends into her through the various chakras.

The topmost chakra is the sahasrara or the thousand‐petalled lotus which commands the higher thinking mind and the illumined mind and it is open upwards to the consciousness of the intuitive mind, intuition, overmind and beyond . This Power enters the secret chamber of the thousand‐petalled Lotus chakra at the crown of her head, and from there comes down and occupies the centre of the ajna chakra, situated at the junction of the eye‐brows from where the mind's Lord functions as if from his control‐room. The ajna chakra commands thought, will and vision. The Lord of the Mind (symbolised in the Vedas as Indra, the King of Gods, as the foremost of the agencies responsible for the descent of the Supramental light) sits there in his natural seat of concentration and becomes the controlling will‐power. He opens the third eye in man, the subtle eye that is able to see all that is unseen by our physical eyes. It opens when a spiritual a Light which brings with it a golden ecstasy fills the brain. When this happens, the wisdom of the Eternal compels the mortal's choice and the Eternal Will replaces the mortal will.

This Power now enters the vishuddha chakra, the mystic lotus of the throat and her speech throbs with inspired and immortal words. The throat centre or the vishuddha chakra commands expression and all externalisation of mind movements and mental forces. Her life now gets in tune with the World‐soul and her thoughts move in harmony with the cosmic thought.

The descending power now moves smoothly into the lotus of the heart, the anahata chakra that commands the emotional being of man and has the psychic deep behind it. In this cave it

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hides its light from the lesser powers, which are in pursuit of it. It wakes up in this centre the irresistible Force that can change even Fate.

This Power now pours into lotus of the navel, the manipura chakra, which commands the larger life‐forces and the passions and larger desire‐movements. From there it goes further down into the centre of the lower‐vital desires, the svadhisthana chakra, which commands the small vital movements the little greeds, lusts and desires, and the small sense‐movements. Owing to the impact of the descending Power, a heavenly rapture begins to flow even from the grosser physical longings and desire itself turns into a pure celestial flame.

The Power now breaks into the cave at the base of the spine, the muladhara chakra, where the World‐Energy sleeps. This is normally visualised as a multiple headed serpent power, Kundalini.

As the descending Power strikes the serpent‐force, it rises and thrusts its way upwards till it meets and joins the World‐Self seated in the thousand‐petalled lotus (the sahasrara chakra) at the crown of the head. Thus takes place the momentous event of the meeting of the Force from below with Self seated above ‐ the union of Shakti and Shiva. The dumbness of Matter is joined to the vast silence and the infinite Power of the Spirit.

This is the tremendous change that comes over Savitri. She is now waiting for the Word (the inspired, mantric Word) to speak through her. Through her, Eternity looks into the eyes of the God of Death, and the Darkness of death in turn saw the living Reality of the Godhead facing it.

(This brings to mind a somewhat analogous situation known as the vishvarupa darshan ‐ the Vision of the World‐Spirit in the Gita (Chapter 11). There Arjun, who knows that the imperishable greatness of the divine conscious soul is the secret of all that happens in the universe, desires to see the very form and body of this Godhead. However, the human eye can see only the outward appearances of things but it cannot grasp the universal form of the Lord, so the Lord now gives him the eye which can see the divine's universal form. Arjun then is able to see the wondrous form of the Supreme divine ‐ God magnificent, and beautiful and terrible.

But in the greatness of this vision is too the terrific image of God the destroyer. Arjun can hardly bear to see this aspect of the Lord and cries to the dreadful Godhead to show his auspicious form.

Here the context is entirely different; Arjun was a devotee but the God of Death begins as an adversary contemptuous of Savitri. Gradually, as he carries on the colloquy with her, he begins to feel that she is probably the Mighty Mother herself, but he wants to be sure about this. And therefore asks her to reveal to him the power that is behind her.)

Then is heard a Voice that seems to be the very self of stillness; it sounds like the low, calm voice of infinity when it speaks to the silence which reigns in the sleep consciousness. (One of the three kinds of consciousness spoken of by the Upanishads, the two others being the waking Consciousness and the Dream consciousness.)

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"I hail you, almighty and victorious Death, You are the ostentatious Darkness of the Infinite.

You are the Void that creates room for all to exist. (Death creates room for the new to live by consuming the old.) You are the hunger that nibbles at the universe and chews it and thus consumes the remnants of what were once upon a time the suns, which once burned and then died and became cold. You eat the entire world with your jaws of fire, and try to weaken the energy that made the stars.

"You are the Inconscience but you carry the seeds of all thought (all Real‐Ideas) in your bosom.

You are the Nescience in which all Knowledge is dormant and from which it emerges slowly wearing the mask of the bright ignorance of the mind.

"But you are only my shadow and my instrument. It is I who has given you the awful shape of dread and your sharp sword of terror and grief and pain so that you can force the soul of man to struggle for light to illumine his short span of life which he lives half‐consciously.

"You drive and force man to achieve greatness in his otherwise drab, mechanical life. You act like the whip which makes him yearn for the eternal bliss and makes him agonizingly aware of the need of conscious immortality. O Death, live for some more time and continue to be my instrument. One day man too shall come to understand your fathomless heart of silence, your brooding peace of Night, and your solemn obedience to the eternal law that governs all, and the calm pity in your gaze.

"But right now, Oh timeless Mightiness, step aside and leave the path of Savitri, who is my incarnate Force. (Please note that here is a clear indication that the Being that is now addressing the God of Death is not the human Savitri but the Supreme Divine Mother who has now descended into her.) Free the radiant god, Satyavan, from your black mask you have put on him; release the soul of the world called Satyavan so that freed from your clasp of pain and ignorance, he may stand as the master of life and fate, as man's representative in the house of God, the eternal bridegroom of the eternal bride that is Savitri."

(This is an extra‐ordinary passage which explains the role of death in life. Sri Aurobindo has always looked upon death not as a denial of life but as a process of life. Besides, at this moment when Savitri completely vanquishes the God of Death, she hails him as the "almighty and victorious Death" (ref. line 893, page 666) Furthermore, Savitri appeals to Death "Live, Death, awhile, be still my instrument" (ref. line 912, page 666). These are some of the questions about this passage, which we need to answer, and we shall do so in the next instalment.)

Savitri has now spoken (or, the Supreme Divine Mother herself has spoken through Savitri.) But still the God of Death is not fully convinced and tries to resist her. He now knows the truth about Savitri but he still refuses to accept it. He has now seen who she really is but refuses to acknowledge what he has seen. He stands there unshakeable, still claiming his right to be. His

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spirit, however, bows down but his will obeys the law of his own nature which is binding even on the Gods.

The two antagonists stand there face to face opposing each other. The being of the God of Death towered like a huge fortress of darkness; around this fortress Savitri's power of life grows until it sieges and engulfs it from all sides like an ocean. Death continues to defy the spirit of Savitri. He bears this concrete mass of conscious power as it assaulted him from the front and from above. He withstood the divine desire to be. The God of Death represents the Nihil, the total negation of being. A pressure of force hard to bear weighs on his unbowed head and obstinate heart. But Light emanating from Savitri licks up all his thoughts and he feels it like a torture in his heart. It courses throughout his being like a splendid agony and runs through his nerves. His darkness mutters in protest as it perishes in the blaze. Savitri's mastering Power dominates every limb of his and the God of Death finds that his enormous will has no power left in it and he feels that this has left him altogether empty and bereft of any force.

The God of Death then calls in Night to aid him but that too shudders and retreats; he then calls to Hell but that too sullenly retreats. Finally he turns to the Inconscient for support since he himself was born out of it and owes his vast being to its sustaining power, but the Inconscient draws him back towards the boundless vacancy of itself as if it wants one vacancy to swallow up another vacancy. He then calls up his own strength to support him but it too refuses to respond.

His body is now eaten up by light, his very spirit is devoured by it. At last, the God of Death realises that his defeat is inevitable and this leaves crumbling the shape that he had worn all along. Thus he abandons his hope of making man's soul too his prey and of forcing mortality even on his immortal spirit.

The God of Death now flees from the dreaded touch of luminous Savitri and takes refuge in the Night that is in retreat. In the dream twilight of that symbol world the fearful universal shadow, Death, disappears, thus vanishing in the Void from which it had come. And as though the very reason for its existence is now no more with the disappearance of Death, the twilight from the souls of Savitri and Satyavan also fades and disappears.

Now at last Savitri and Satyavan find themselves alone, but neither of them stirs. Between the two of them arises a mute, invisible and luminous wall. In that long bank moment of pause, nothing is able to move. All waits upon the unknown and inscrutable Will of God. This brings us to the end of Book X, Canto Four.

http://nextfuture.sriaurobindosociety.org.in/aug06/nfaug06_savitri.htm

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38. Book Ten Canto Four – The Last Speach of Savitri

In our preliminary study of Savitri, we reached the end of Canto Four of Book X in the preceding instalment and are now ready to move on to Book X1. But before we do so, it may be useful to take a closer look at the last speech of Savitri addressed to the God of Death. This is a remarkable speech in many respects and gives us an opportunity to understand Sri Aurobindo's perspective on death and what is beyond it.

This is in one sense Savitri's victory speech. Her triumph over the God of Death is now complete. Savitri has shown to her redoubtable adversary that all his disdain and contempt for her came from his ignorance of who she is; all the veils of intellectual obscuration by which he has been trying to protect his realm of half‐truth have been ineffective in the presence of the integral truth that Savitri stands for. Finally, he has now seen the halo of the deity dwelling in her. And yet, notice how Savitri begins what I have called her 'victory speech'. She begins by hailing the God of Death as the 'almighty and victorious Death".

I hail thee, almighty and victorious Death, Thou grandiose Darkness of the Infinite.

O Void that makest room for all to be, Hunger that gnawest at the universe Consuming the cold remnants of the suns And eatst the whole world with thy jaws of fire, Waster of the energy that has made the stars, Inconscience, carrier of the seeds of thought, Nescience in which All‐Knowledge sleeps entombed And slowly emerges in its hollow breast Wearing the mind's mask of bright Ignorance.

Thou art my shadow and my instrument.

I have given thee thy awful shape of dread And thy sharp sword of terror and grief and pain To force the soul of man to struggle for light On the brevity of his half‐conscious days.

Thou art his spur to greatness in his works, The whip to his yearning for eternal bliss, His poignant need of immortality.

Live, Death, awhile, be still my instrument.

One day man too shall know thy fathomless heart Of silence and the brooding peace of Night

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And grave obedience to eternal Law And the calm inflexible pity in thy gaze.

But now, O timeless Mightiness, stand aside And leave the path of my incarnate Force.

Relieve the radiant God from thy black mask: Release the soul of the world called Satyavan Freed from thy clutch of pain and ignorance That he may stand master of life and fate, Man's representative in the house of God, The mate of Wisdom and the spouse of Light, The eternal bridegroom of the eternal bride."

P.666 To understand this speech, we need to understand how Sri Aurobindo and the Mother look upon Death. So we begin with a brief review of their perspective. While men of science have regarded Death as a predictable consequence of an increase in entropy (the degradation of matter and energy in the universe to an ultimate state of inert uniformity), men of religion have generally looked upon it as a resting place in the passage to a higher world beyond the terrestrial. The spiritual work of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother has for its goal the establishment of a race of gnostic beings consequent upon the full manifestation of the supramental consciousness here on earth, and they regard victory over death in the conditions of earthly life as the goal of their integral yoga. Thus Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have been revolutionary even in their thinking on Death as they have been in everything else. Let me begin by presenting to you an excerpt from Sri Aurobindo's The Life Divine: This then is the necessity and justification of Death, not as a denial of Life, but as a process of Life: death is necessary because eternal change of form is the sole immortality to which the finite living substance can aspire and eternal change of experience the sole infinity to which the finite mind involved in living body can attain. This change of form cannot be allowed to remain merely a constant renewal of the same form‐type such as constitutes our bodily life between birth and death; for unless the form‐type is changed and the experiencing mind is thrown into new forms in new circumstances of time, place and environment, the necessary variation of experience which the very nature of existence in Time and Space demands, cannot be effectuated. And it is only the process of Death by dissolution and by the devouring of life by life, it is only the absence of freedom, the compulsion, the struggle, the pain, the subjection to something that appears to be Not‐Self which makes the necessary and salutary change appear terrible and undesirable to our mortal mentality. It is the sense of being devoured, broken up, destroyed or forced away which is the sting of Death and which even the belief in personal survival of death cannot wholly abrogate. (SABCL: 18:193‐194)

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The first point Sri Aurobindo makes here is that Death has no separate or intrinsic reality; it exists for the sole purpose of serving life. Death is a process and phase of life itself and, as he says elsewhere, life and not death is the fundamental all‐pervading truth of existence. In Thoughts and Aphorisms, he casts the same insight in another form: This world was built by Death that he might live. Wilt thou abolish Death? Then life too will perish. Thou canst not abolish death, but thou mayst transform it into a greater living.

If Life alone were and not death, there would be no immortality …. Death transformed becomes Life that is Immortality."

The death of the body is really an instrument which serves the interests of perpetually evolving life. Then he goes on to point out that the eternal change of form is the only immortality to which the finite living substance can aspire, and eternal change of experience in terms of new circumstance of time, place and space the sole infinity to which the finite mind involved in time can attain. All life is a journey from the Inconscient to the Superconscient (Divintiy). Such a long journey cannot be competed within the span of one life. By the time an individual attains to what is called as old age, say eighty‐five or ninety years or so, most of his physical faculties lose their keenness and capacity to experience life. If he continues this way much longer, in most cases he is reduced to a vegetable existence. In such a situation death comes as a gateway through which the soul enters again in a new and young body full of verve and the enthusiasm to experience life. Besides, when the individual is reborn, he takes birth in new circumstances of time, place and space. This gives the soul scope for a wider and more diversified experience of life , best suited for its further growth. This then is the utility of death; it is not a denial but a process of life.

In his great epic poem Savitri too, Death is seen not as an eternal opposite of the Light, but is seen as an instrument of evolution: Although Death walks beside us on Life's road, A dim bystander at the body's start And a last judgment on man's futile works, Other is the riddle of its ambiguous face: Death is a stair, a door, a stumbling stride The soul must take to cross from birth to birth, A grey defeat pregnant with victory, A whip to lash us towards our deathless state.

Pp. 600‐601

Thus in Sri Aurobindo's vision Death has a meaning and purpose and Savitri calls him God:

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O Death, thou are God and yet not He, But only his own black shadow on his path As leaving the Night he takes the upward Way And drags with him its clinging inconscient Force.

P. 656 In Thoughts and Aphorisms , the service that death performs to life is succinctly put in these words: Death is a question Nature puts continually to Life and her reminder to her that it has not yet found itself. If there were no siege of death, the creature would be found for ever in the form of an imperfect living. Pursued by death he awakes to the idea of perfect life and seeks out its means and its possibility.

Savitri hails Death as "victorious Death" at the beginning of her final speech because Death has finally succeeded in awakening man to the possibility of a perfect life and to seek out its means and its possibility. Death's success lies in ultimately making a human being so perfect that death itself would have no place in such a life. Savitri has incarnated that possibility in her life now, and since an Avatar comes to set an example for others to follow, other human beings also will now begin to realise this possibility in their lives.

But there is a catch here. Victory over death, which is the ultimate goal of the Integral Yoga, might look like a most materialistic ideal for a spiritual enterprise, unless the phrase is understood properly. This seeking after physical immortality is in no way related to our blind and egoistic attachment to body and physical life.

As for immortality, it cannot come if there is attachment to the body, for it is only by living in the immortal part of oneself which is unidentified with the body and bringing down its consciousness and force into the cells that it can come (Letter on Yoga; 1234) Secondly, it is incumbent upon every sadhak of integral yoga that he gives up the fear of death and the disgust for bodily cessation. The Mother has written most insightfully on how to get rid of the fear of death. The principle way is to grow in the consciousness of the immortality of the soul.

By immortality, spiritual adepts do not mean some kind of personal survival after the dissolution of the body; they mean by it the consciousness which the Gita describes as follows: Na jaayate mriyate vaa kadaachit naayam bhuutvaa bhavitaa vaa na bhuuyah Ajo nityah shashvato^yam puraaNo na hanyate hanyamaane shariire (2.20) "This is not born, nor does it die, nor is it a thing that comes into being once and passing away will never come into being again. It is unborn, ancient, sempiternal; it is not slain with the slaying of the body."

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The Gita also describes it as "avinaashinam. Nityam, ajam avyayam" (unborn, immutable and imperishable), which the weapons cannot cleave, nor the fire burn, nor do the waters drench nor the wind dry".

This is a consciousness which is beyond all bondage and limitation, free, blissful. self‐existent in conscious being, the consciousness of the Lord, the supreme Purusha, of Satchidananda. This experience of the soul needs no external proof to anyone who has experienced it. It can only be acquired as a result of the elevation and widening of our consciousness through spiritual sadhana.

In The Life Divine, Sri Aurobindo speaks of two kinds of immortality, the timeless immortality of the soul, and time‐immortality. By the latter is meant the knowledge of self in the birth and becoming, and a sense of persistent identity of the soul through all the changes of mind, life and body. In almost all spiritual disciplines, the double realisation of timeless immortality and time‐immortality leads the sadhak to withdraw from the field of terrestrial becoming. He seeks the Nirvanic extinction from what he regards as the vain cycle births and death.

The sadhak of the Integral Yoga does not entertain an attitude of world‐disgust; he aspires to transcend death in order that life may be divinely fulfilled. This Becoming, which we call creation, is progressive and evolutionary. It began with the big bang and is gradually evolving towards the Super‐conscience. The present condition of life cannot be the last act of the evolutionary drama since it is afflicted with suffering and death. Death has to be conquered as a sign of Being's victory in the field of Becoming. It means, as Sri Aurobindo explained in a letter, that "[the body] would no longer be subject to decay and disease. That would mean it would not be subject to the ordinary processes by which death comes. If a change of body has to be made, it would have to be by the will of the inhabitant. This (not the obligation to live 3000 years, for that too would be bondage) would be the essence of physical immortality."

(Letters on Yoga: 1231) But for this to happen, Sri Aurobindo mentions in the same letter, a dynamic action of the Truth is necessary in mind, vital and body and for such a dynamic action, the supramental descent is necessary.

We cannot enter here into a discussion of why the descent of the supramental consciousness is necessary, and of why Sri Aurobindo thinks that such a descent is inevitable. It is indeed as a result of our transformation that we arrive at a higher and higher manifestation of consciousness in our evolutionary journey. " As Nature has evolved beyond Matter and manifested Life, beyond Life and manifested Mind, so she must evolve beyond Mind and manifest a consciousness and power of our existence free from the imperfection and limitation of our mental existence, a supramental or truth‐consciousness and able to develop the power and perfection of the spirit…. Light and bliss and beauty and a perfection of the spontaneous right action of all the being are there as native powers of the supramental truth‐consciousness and these

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will in their very nature transform mind and life and body even here upon earth into a manifestation of the truth‐conscious spirit. The obscuration of earth will not prevail against the supramental truth‐consciousness, for even into the earth it can bring enough of the omniscient light and omnipotent force of the spirit to conquer. All may not open to the fullness of its light and power, but whatever does open must to that extent undergo the change. That will be the principle of transformation." (The Supramental Manifestation Upon Earth in SABCL Vol. 16: pages 20‐21) Many people, including some spiritual adepts, have observed that people undertaking the pursuit of Yoga happen to suffer from some disabilities of the body which would not have befallen them under normal circumstances. It is also true that we have testimony from Yogis who have cured themselves of illnesses and have even succeeded in repelling a predestined death for a long period. The Mother has shed a flood of light on this entire phenomenon. She has explained the factors which ordinarily lead to progressive breakdown in health and ultimately to its dissolution in death.

According to her the whole creation is evolving towards perfection. Now if one takes up Yoga, this force gets accelerated in him. But it is only his inner consciousness that obeys this accelerating impulse because the higher parts of one's being are subtler, and therefore more responsive to this force and much more easily adapt themselves and adjust themselves to the demands of this force than the body, which is pathetic in its ineptness in this respect. The material nature is rigid and there the transformation is slow, too slow for the human consciousness to be able to perceive it. The body thus gets left behind and this creates a disharmony in the nature, between the inner and the outer and the system translates it into illness. That is why people who take up Yoga tend to fall ill frequently. When this lack of balance beyond a point, the disintegration and change of form becomes necessary.

But according to the Mother, this necessity is not an abiding one, nor is its nature intrinsic and irrevocable. In fact, she thinks that it is wholly fortuitous and may very well be remedied. If the whole being could simultaneously advance in the progressive transformation, there would be no illness, no death. But it will have to be the whole being, from the highest to the most material, which is by nature rigid and averse to any change. We should be able to infuse into this matter sufficient consciousness so that it can fall in line with the subtler parts and becomes plastic enough to follow the inner progress. When this happens, death would no more be necessary.

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have assured us that if proper conditions for it can be created death can be done away with. This does not seem to be such a fanciful idea if one were to examine this issue even in the light of the scientific evidence currently available. In his Destiny of the Body, Jugal Kishore Mukherjee presents enough biological evidence which suggests that "neither senescence nor natural death is a necessary, inevitable consequence or attribute of

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life. Natural death is biologically a relatively new thing, which made its appearance only after the living organism had advanced a long way on the path of evolution." (Quotation from Encyclopaedia Britannica).

Undoubtedly death has served life well in many ways. Death has spurred life to persuade her to evolve progressively higher and higher forms of existence. From a practical point of view, the dispensation of a natural death comes as a boon to individuals who live in an ego‐bound consciousness. It saves us from the tedium of living in a never‐ending now. Without death, there would have been no secure permanence for any species because then there would be no opportunity for a species to renovate and vitalise itself through the introduction of younger and more robust individuals replacing the worn‐out ones.

I would like to close with a few observations on this problem made by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. The real cause of death is not physical. Sri Aurobindo observes in an interesting footnote in The Life Divine (page 822) as follows: “Even if Science ‐ physical Science or occult Science ‐ were to discover the necessary condition or means for an infinite survival of the body, still, if the body could not adapt itself to so as to become a fit instrument of expression for the inner growth, he soul would find some way to abandon it and pass on to a new incarnation. The material or physical causes of death are not its sole or its true cause; its true inmost reason is the spiritual necessity for the evolution of a new being."

In Integral Yoga, the aim is not to keep the same physical body forever. What is sought to be achieved is the elimination of the elements of inevitability and forceful dissolution in the process of death, a complete freedom from the attacks of illness and the power to prolong life at will. But this can be achieved through the power of Yoga. The Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother aims at the supramental transformation of our limited and rigid existence down to the very cells of the material body and enable our earthly life to flower into the immortal Life Divine.

Before I conclude this discussion, I would like to draw your attention to another interesting line in this speech of Savitri to the God of Death. The first several lines of this passage describe the several roles Death has played in the evolutionary saga of this creation; we are told that Death has been given its various forms to hasten man's evolution towards "greatness in his works, the whip to his yearning for eternal bliss, his poignant need of immortality." But then comes this most puzzling line. Savitri has defeated Death, and yet she says, "Live, Death, awhile, be still my instrument." Is it possible that Savitri suggests that although she has individually triumphed over death, she would like Death to continue to do the evolutionary work of preparing the whole of mankind for immortality? http://nextfuture.sriaurobindosociety.org.in/sep06/nfsep06_savitri.htm

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39. Book Eleven ­ The Book of Everlasting Day

We are now ready to begin our exploration of Book Eleven of Savitri, which consists of only one Canto, and this has the title "The Eternal Day: The Soul's Choice and the Supreme Consciousness". Incidentally this is the longest single canto among the 49 cantos of this epic poem.

We saw at that at the end of a long colloquy between Savitri and the God of Death, which takes up the two cantos of Book IX and the four cantos of Book X, ends with Savitri's triumph over Death. Savitri answers all the questions and problems raised by the God of Death against her plea to him to release Satyavan's soul from the clutches of death and take him back with her to earth. She also effectively meets the challenge thrown by the God of Death in these words: But where is thy strength to conquer Time and Death?

Hast thou God's force to build heaven's values here?

For truth and knowledge are an idle gleam If Knowledge brings not power to change the world, If Might comes not to give to Truth her right.

A blind Force, not Truth has made this ignorant world, A blind Force, not Truth orders the lives of men:

By Power, not Light, the great Gods rule the world; Power is the arm of God, the seal of Fate.

O human claimant to immortality, Reveal thy power, lay bare thy spirit's force, Then will I give back to thee Satyavan.

Or if the Mighty Mother is with thee, Show me her face that I may worship her; Let deathless eyes look into the eyes of Death, An imperishable Force touching brute things Transform earth's death into immortal life.

Then can thy dead return to thee and live.

The prostrate earth perhaps shall lift her gaze And feel near her the secret body of God And love and joy overtake fleeing Time.

P. 664

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On hearing this, Savitri felt that the world's darkness which had worn the symbol shape of the God of Death was now ready for Heaven‐light and revealed to him her real form. Then came upon Savitri a transformation described in these lines: A mighty transformation came on her.

A halo of the indwelling Deity, The Immortal's lustre that had lit her face And tented its radiance in her body's house, Overflowing made the air a luminous sea.

In a flaming moment of apocalypse The Incarnation thrust aside its veil.

A little figure in infinity Yet stood and seemed the Eternal's very house, As if the world's centre was her very soul And all wide space was but its outer robe.

P. 664

With this transformation, a descent comes over Savitri. In a flaming moment of apocalypse the Incarnation thrust aside its veil. The Powers that she had so far kept back came down and descended into her being all the way from the sahasrara to the muladhara. Eternity saw into the eyes of Death and darkness saw God's living reality.

Then a voice was heard, which sounded like the calm utterance of Infinity. We have already analysed the content of this speech of Savitri. She hails him as "victorious Death" for constantly prompting man to seek the immortal being in him. The God of Death is asked to live a while and still be the instrument of the Divine until one day man will understand his real nature. She concludes the speech with these words: But now, O timeless Mightiness, stand aside And leave the path of my incarnate Force.

Relieve the radiant God from thy black mask: Release the soul of the world called Satyavan Freed from thy clutch of pain and ignorance That he may stand master of life and fate, Man's representative in the house of God, The mate of Wisdom and the spouse of Light, The eternal bridegroom of the eternal bride.

P. 666

Death knew he was defeated and yet he stood there defiant. A pressure of intolerable force weighed down on him from all sides. Light surrounded him from all sides. He called to Night

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and hell and none came to his aid. Even the Inconscient from which he was born was unable to help him. At last he knew his defeat was inevitable. His shape began to crumble and finally the universal Shadow (the God of Death) disappeared into void of the dream twilight.

With that the twilight realm passed and faded from the souls of Savitri and Satyavan and they were alone. Neither of them stirred. Between them arose a mute, invisible and translucent wall. "All waited on the unknown inscrutable Will."

Now we are at the very beginning of Book XI. The first section of this canto which consists of 267 lines begins with a description of the Eternal day. The God of Death has already taken Savitri through several worlds, namely, the world of Eternal Night, the world of the Dream Twilight of the Ideal and of the Dream Twilight of the Earthly Real. And the poet graphically and very aptly describes these worlds, and so does he with this world of God's Everlasting Day. The opening section of this Canto is a splendid poetic attempt to describe God's everlasting day. From the description, it would appear that this is not an entirely imaginary scene described by the poet. The several details suggest that this is based on a direct experience of some of the God's everlasting day. Everything seen, heard and experienced here seems to come from the eternal source and from the eternal's own substance without any diminution or dilution. A cosmic rapture seems to manifest here in an endless figuring of the spirit. All the occult planes are seen and are found active. Even the earth nature seems to have changed here; air and matter were transformed, other earths are seen and also other beings. Savitri sees here children of God's day living in a happiness never lost. All sounds here are musical, with birds with coloured feathers singing, and with breeze full of fragrance, flowers with laughing eyes. One felt the embrace of God in every touch. There was no suffering of any kind here, only bliss. On this plane rapture was a common incident. There were also seen great forms of deities, with bright bodies exuding delight. Apsaras and Gandharvas were there. The great forefathers of mankind were also seen moving in splendour. It must be remembered that this is a description of something actually seen and experienced by the poet and not something woven out of his imagination.

From the skies of ecstasy a marvellous sun shone on worlds of deathless bliss; these worlds looked like the home of perfection, like the magical revelations of the Eternal's smile. Savitri's body quivered with the eternity's touch; she felt as though her soul stood close to the springs of the infinite. Savitri was surrounded by God's everlasting day.

She felt that she lived in the finite projections of the Infinite, which looked ever new. Infinity multiplied its vast self‐look and translated its mightiness and joy into delight which souls which lived in the realm of Time could share in ever‐new vistas, in grandeurs ever newborn from the unknown depths, in powers that leaped immortal from unknown heights, in passionate heart‐ beats of an undying love, in scenes of a sweetness that could never fade. Thoughts sublimely born in the still beauty of creative joy came as answers to the deep demand of an infinite sense

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and its need for forms to house its bodiless thrill. Plains were there that looked like the expanse of God's wide sleep. Even the very air seemed an ocean of felicity. A vast and calm serenity swallowed all sound into a voicelessness of utter bliss. Even in Matter there was an intimate spiritual touch. Twilight and mist were banished from this air. Where there is such radiance, there cannot be a night.

The divine Artist who had dreamed these worlds into existence created in a cosmic rapture a pageant of universal power in Time, a harmonious order of the vasts of the self in cyclic patterns and rhythmic planes. Eternity was the source and the substance of the beauty and the marvel here. They were not moulded from the mist of Matter; they showed the great power from whose depths they had emerged.

A march of universal powers in Time, The harmonic order of self's vastitudes In cyclic symmetries and metric planes Harboured a cosmic rapture's revelry, An endless figuring of the spirit in things Planned by the artist who has dreamed the worlds; Of all the beauty and the marvel here, Of all Time's intricate variety Eternity was the substance and the source; Not from a plastic mist of Matter made, They offered the suggestion of their depths And opened the great series of their powers.

P. 672

A spirit wandered happily in the wind, and it brooded in the leaf and the stone. There were eternal mountains rising ridge on gleaming ridge, like lines engraved on a sapphire plate. From the secrecies of blue mountains, there descended murmuring rivers which slipped past trees with branches fragrant with flowers; there were ripples and eddies of delight in these rivers which gradually widened and acquired and flowed into many estuaries of dream until they formed themselves into the whispering lakes of peace.

Since she was delivered from our narrowing limits of thought and from the narrowness of our hearts, Savitri saw all Nature as something marvellous and without any fault. Around her lived the children of God's day in an indescribable felicity, a glad eternity's blissful multitude. There were souls of radiant celestial joy, faces of sheer beauty, limbs of the divine Ray of Light moulded in form. In cities cut like gems of conscious stone were seen bright forms, the luminous tribes of eternity. Ecstatic voices assailed the ears, there each movement had a music of its own. Birds, the colour of whose plumage had been caught from the rainbow, sang thrilled from the unfading branches. Immortal fragrance wafted with the quivering breeze. The million

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flowers of the undying spring, sheltered in the green of the grass, bloomed like so many stars of delightful hues these flower‐masses looked like fairies with laughter in their eyes. This is how the poet describes "the dancing chaos", the iridescence of the colourful flowers: A dancing chaos, an iridescent sea Eternised to Heaven's ever‐wakeful sight The crowding petal‐glow of marvel's tints Which float across the curtained lids of dream.

P. 674

This is how he describes the immortal harmonies that fill Savitri's ears: Immortal harmonies filled her listening ear; A great spontaneous utterance of the heights On Titan wings of rhythmic grandeur borne Poured from some deep spiritual heart of sound, Strains trembling with the secrets of the gods.

P. 674

Savitri's experience of oneness with all other forms is described vividly in these lines: Invaded by beauty's universal revel Her being's fibre reached out vibrating And claimed deep union with its outer selves, And on the heart's chords made pure to seize all tones Heaven's subtleties of touch unwearying forced More vivid raptures than earth's life can bear.

What would be suffering here, was fiery bliss.

P. 675

What Savitri had so far seen were the initial domains, the outer courts; they were immense but least in their range and value. Now Savitri's vision soared higher and she was admitted through large sapphire gates into the wideness of a light beyond to worlds nobler and more felicitously fair. These heavens too kept climbing endlessly. Then in what looked like one summit of ascent, where the finite and the infinite join, she beheld the seats of the immortal gods who live for a celestial joy and preside over the middle regions of the unfading Ray. The deities with their magnificent forms were seen here in deathless tiers; they all looked at Savitri through a transparency of crystal fire.

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In the beauty of bodies wrought from rapture's lines, Shapes of entrancing sweetness spilling bliss, Feet glimmering upon the sunstone courts of mind, Heaven's cupbearers bore round the Eternal's wine.

A tangle of bright bodies, of moved souls Tracing the close and intertwined delight, The harmonious tread of lives for ever joined In the passionate oneness of a mystic joy As if sunbeams made living and divine, The golden‐bosomed Apsara goddesses, In groves flooded from an argent disk of bliss That floated through a luminous sapphire dream, In a cloud of raiment lit with golden limbs And gleaming footfalls treading faery swards, Virgin motions of bacchant innocences Who know their riot for a dance of God, Whirled linked in moonlit revels of the heart.

Pp. 675‐76

Heaven's cup‐bearers went round bearing the Eternal's celestial wine. Like sun‐beams made living and divine, the golden‐bosomed Apsaras (heavenly nymphs) whirled, linked in the passionate oneness of a mystic joy. These Apsaras circle arm in arm in groves flooded with the silver light of the moon of bliss that floated through a luminous sapphire dream. Then there were the Gandharvas, the celestial musicians, magic builders of sound and harmonic words; these heavenly minstrels had wind‐like hair, and their songs gave rise to and shaped the universal thought. There were also seen our great ancestors moving in that splendour , immortal figures with illumined brows. They had great power but they were satisfied with knowledge. They seemed to enjoy the essence of all that for which we mortals try. There were high seers and inspired poets who saw the eternal thoughts coming from the higher regions and arriving into our world deformed because of our restless search for them. She saw how mind disfigures them. The great words of these saints and seers become feeble sounds when they are caught by the mortal tongue for their rapture is too difficult for us express.

Savitri's human nature was overwhelmed by the delight of this world. Her nature was filled with flashes of glory; it melted in waves of sympathy and sight. She was like a harp and responded to the throbs of bliss from everywhere. She saw and bore the touch and clasp of the unveiled love denied to earth. Worlds after worlds revealed themselves to her on the ever‐ soaring heights, beyond the reach of mind. They spread out infinitely on the rising stair of Nature.

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A greater tranquil sweetness reigned there. It was a subtler and a profounder ether's field, a scheme mightier than the most heavenly scheme one can imagine. There, breath carried a stream of seeing mind, form was a tenuous (thin), fragile covering of the soul instead of being an obscuring veil; colour was significant, visual tone ecstasy. There shapes that seemed half immaterial to the eye were yet sensuously palpable (easily perceptible) to the touch. Each feeling here was a mighty wave of the Infinite, each thought vibrated with a sweet flame of god.

The very air was vibrant with luminous soul‐feeling; every sound carried a soul‐voice; sunlight was a vision of the soul and moonlight its dream. All was pervaded by a lucid joy accompanied by a calm. Savitri's soul went floating high into the summit of the worlds of this plane, like a soaring bird who mounts unseen, voicing as it soars the throbbing heart of melody, until pause comes when the wings closed with a last contented cry, and the soul is silent because it has delivered the entire burden of delight it carried. Savitri arrived at a place where Time companions with Eternity and a vast felicity was one with a self‐rapt repose.

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40. Book Eleven – Continued

Book XI of Savitri begins with a description of the Eternal Day, which we examined in some detail in the preceding instalment. Savitri feels in this world close to the founts of the Infinite. A marvellous sun looks down from ecstasy's skies. She sees immortal earths and griefless heavens. They all thrill with the immanence of the one Divine. She sees nature around her marvellously faultless, rapturous and beautiful. She sees realms after realms of felicity which are the homes of gods, nymphs, Gandharvas and noble seers. There is a lucent joy everywhere.

We now move on to section two of this canto ‐ you must have noticed that Book XI has only one canto.

Savitri feels virtually drowned in a sea of splendour and bliss; she is mute with wonder and awe as she finds herself in the complex and intricate network of these astonishing worlds. And she now sees the living knot and source of all this charm and delight.

She sees that the source of all this delight is the same Being who traps our lives through his attractions in this creation and makes the universe our prison camp. It is the same being who makes the stars circle in vain in his immense and vacant vasts, and makes death the end of every road, and grief and pain the wages of man's toil. She then realises that this Being is none other than he whom her soul had faced as Death and Night, and she finds him again now but entirely transformed into an epitome of sweetness. His formidable and awe‐striking figure was transformed completely and he now appears as one whose limbs have gathered all sweetness and who blinds her heart to the beauty of the suns. Where once the vast embodied Void (Death) had stood, a secret splendour rises, abolishing forever his darkness and his all‐negating and all‐destroying Night and revealing the mystery of his high and powerful deeds.

It now looked as though Night, the dim mask, had grown a wonderful face. The vague infinity whose gloom had outlined the terrible and obscure figure of the God of Death was now completely wiped out. The error that had given strength to the hands of grief had fled, and the ignorant gulf whose hollow deeps had given to Nothingness a dreadful voice was now lighted up. Now a marvellous form responded to her sight, whose sweetness justified life's blindest pain. All the struggle of Nature now seemed worthwhile before the sweetness of this marvellous form. It was as though somebody woke up from sleep and saw the dark and gloomy binding of a book suddenly opening to reveal an illumined script containing a golden blaze of thought.

There was no more the torment under the stars now. There was no more the dark evil sheltered behind Nature's mask. There was no more the dark pretence of hate, the cruel

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grimace on the face of love. Hate is only a tenacious hold in love's fearful strife. The original God of Love is always intent on giving but this God is displaced by the impostor Love, which wants only to possess. It forgets the will to love which gave it birth; it forgets its passion to merge itself and become one with the beloved and instead wants to swallow everything into its one single self, to devour the soul that it has loved and made its own. When it cannot have its way, it is angry with the refusals of the world to submit to its demands. It is passionately eager to take but does not know how to give.

Death's depressing and serious look was removed from Nature's brow. Instead, there lighted on her the lurking delight of the laugh of God. Then the poet describes a very wonderful revelation of this divine form: All grace and glory and all divinity Were here collected in a single form; All worshipped eyes looked through his from one face; He bore all godheads in his grandiose limbs.

An oceanic spirit dwelt within; Intolerant and invincible in joy A flood of freedom and transcendent bliss Into immortal lines of beauty rose.

P. 680

All grace and glory and all divinity were here collected in a single form. In the grandiose limbs of this divine figure, he bore all godheads. The eyes of all the adored and worshipped figures looked out from the eyes of this figure. An oceanic figure surged within him. A flood of freedom and supreme transcendent bliss surged out from this figure with an intensity too great for anyone to bear.

In this transformed form which Savitri sees before her now, she also sees the Divine Consciousness in its four poises. The concept of the four poises of the Divine Consciousness or Brahman is prominently introduced by the Mandukya Upanishad, although there is reference to it in some other Upanishads such as the Chhandogya Upanishad as well.

The Mandukya introduces some of the fundamental ideas of Vedantic philosophy in the following verse: Sarvam hi etad brahma / ayam aatmaa brahma / sah ayam aatmaa catushpaat.

"All this Universe is the Eternal Brahman, this Self is the Eternal, and the Self is fourfold."

According to Sri Aurobindo the four grand truths proclaimed by the Upanishads are the following: a) They proclaim that all this Universe is the eternal Brahman. The Upanishads regard the phenomenal Universe as a manifestation of the Brahman ‐ nityo anityanaam (the

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One Eternal in many transient). b) Then they go on to declare that the central reality about us, the Atman, the Self in living beings, the Self too of man, is also the Brahman ‐ chetanaschetanaanaam. c) The Upanishads then proclaim the notion that the Self in the individual is as complete as the Self of the universe ‐ so'ham (He am I). d) And finally the Upanishads say that he who knows the whole Self knows the whole universe ‐ aham brahmaasmi (I am Brahman, the eternal.) ( For more on this, please refer to Chapter One of Sri Aurobindo's "Philosophy of the Upanishads" in his book The Upanishads, SABCL, Vol. 12).

In the formula quoted from the Mandukya Upanishad above, we have some very seminal notions about the Brahman. To quote Sri Aurobindo: The Upanishads regard the phenomenal Universe as a manifestation of the Brahman, and if we know this phenomenal world completely we know the Brahman to a certain extent and in a certain way ‐ not as absolute Existence but under the conditions of the phenomenal existence. This is where the European scientist stops but the Yogin goes farther. He has discovered the universe of subtle matter penetrating and surrounding the gross; it is to this universe to which the spirit withdraws partially and for a brief time in sleep but more entirely and for a longer time through the gates of death. This is also the source of all psychic processes, and the link which connects this universe with the gross material world is to be found in the phenomena of life and mind. The Yogin goes even further than this and declares that there is a third universe of causal matter, penetrating both the subtle and gross. This is the universe to which the spirit withdraws in the deepest and most abysmal states of sleep and trance and also in a remote condition beyond the state of man after death. This is the source from which all phenomena arise.

Now Brahman manifests Himself in each of these Universes: in the universe of causal matter as the Cause, Self, inspirer, poetically styled Prajna, the Wise One; in the universe of subtle matter as the Creator, Self and Container, styled Hiranyagarbha the Golden Embryo of life and form, and in the universe of gross matter as the Ruler, Guide, Self and Helper, styled Virat the Shining and mighty One. And in each of these manifestations He can be known and realised by the spirit of man. (The Upanishads, SABCL vol. 12, p. 11) Thus the Mandukya Upanishad recognised four states of consciousness in the individual ‐ wakefulness, dream, sleep, and Superconciousness or Self‐consciousness, and the names given to them are Vaishvanara, Taijasa, Prajnaa and Atman. These have played a very large part in the later more systematised Vedanta. But it must be noted that the Upanishad does not make mention of the corresponding four states of the consciousness of the Cosmic Self. In later Vedanta, these four states of the cosmic consciousness came to be called Viraat (Viraaj), Hiranyagarbha, Isa, and Brahman respectively. These are in the macrocosm and the states described in the Mandukya are in the microcosm. The basis for this representation of correspondence between the microcosm and the macrocosm can be found in the Chandogya Upanishad.

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Ancient psychology in India distinguished three strata of the conscient self ‐ the waking (the superficial), dream (the subconscient or subliminal) and the sleep (the superconscient) selves of man. The superconscient seems as the inconscient to us because its state of consciousness is the reverse of ours: for ours is limited and based on division and multiplicity, but this is "that which becomes a unity"; ours is dispersed in knowledge, but in this other self conscious knowledge is self‐collected and concentrated; ours is balanced between dual experiences, but this is all delight. It is that in us which fronts everything and enjoys the delight of existence.

Therefore, although its seat is that stratum of our consciousness which to us is deep sleep (for the mind there cannot maintain its accustomed functioning and becomes inconscient), yet its name is He who knows, the Wise One, prajna. The Mandukya Upanishad describes it thus: " This is omniscient, omnipotent, the inner control, the womb of all that from which creatures are born and into which they depart." (Sri Aurobindo: The Supramental Manifestation, SABCL, Vol. 16: p. 262) As we have seen, Upanishads talk about the identity between the objective and the subjective, the Brahman and the Atman. Tat twam asi (Thou art That) and sarvam khalvidam brahma (All here is the Brahman) are the great mystic truths proclaimed by the Chhandogya Upanishad long before Plato was born.

In his Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1, Dr. S. Radhakrishnan explains these basic concepts as follows, using a slightly different terminology. The different conceptions of Brahman described above correspond to the different ideas of the Atman and vice versa. The highest Brahman which is Ananda is just Atman, as realised in the fourth of the Turiya state. There the object and the subject are one. When we identify the Atman as the self‐conscious individual, Brahman is viewed as the self‐conscious Ishwara. When the Atman is identified with the mental and vital self of man, Brahman is reduced to the Hiranyagarbha or the cosmic soul. This Hiranyagarbha is looked upon as related to the universe in the same way as the individual soul is related to its body. The world in which we live has its own mind, and this mind is Hiranyagarbha. This conception of the world soul appears in the Upanishads under various names and forms. It is called Karya Brahma, or the effect God, as distinguished from the Karana Brahman, the Causal God of Ishwara. This effect God is the totality of created existences of which all finite objects are parts. The conscious totality of all effects is Brahma or Hiranyagarbha. It is not radically different from Brahman . Brahman is One, without a second. Once he is looked at as the creator or Isvara, again as the created or Hiranyagarbha. When we identify the Atman with the body, Brahman becomes the Cosmos or the Virat. Virat is the all, the hypostatisation of the conception of the world as a whole. The body of the Virat is made of the material objects in their aggregate. In the form of Virat, Hirnyagarbha becomes visible. The Virat is the universal self manifested in the gross physical matter of the universe, Brahman is the same manifested in the subtle matter of the universe. The Sutratman is Hirantagarbha. The supreme self beyond cause and effect is the Brahman, but when it becomes self‐conscious with a non‐ego opposed

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to it, we have the Ishwara. (In the sushupti state we have the subject self with the object self world suppressed, not abolished. The following table suggests the scheme: Subject (Atman)

Object (Brahman)

1. The bodily self (visva)

1. Cosmos (Virat or Vaishvanara)

2. The Vital self (Taijasa)

2. The soul of the world (Hiranyagarbha)

3. The Intellectual self (Prajna)

3. Self‐Conscious (Ishwara)

4. The Intuitive Self (Turiya)

4. Ananda (Brahman))]

This note should suffice as a background for you to follow the description in Savitri of the Divine Being in its four poises ‐ Waking, Dream, Sleep, and the Transcendent. The Divine Being whom Savitri was facing now symbolised like the word the inexhaustible meaning of the whole universe. The poet begins with the description of the Virat, the waking consciousness, which the Upanishad characterises as bahihprajnah ‐‐ the consciousness of what is outside.

In him the architect of the visible world, At once the art and artist of his works, Spirit and seer and thinker of things seen, Virat, who lights his camp‐fires in the suns And the star‐entangled ether is his hold, Expressed himself with Matter for his speech: Objects are his letters, forces are his words, Events are the crowded history of his life, And sea and land are the pages for his tale.

Matter is his means and his spiritual sign; He hangs the thought upon a lash's lift, In the current of the blood makes flow the soul.

His is the dumb will of atom and of clod; A Will that without sense or motive acts, An Intelligence needing not to think or plan, The world creates itself invincibly; For its body is the body of the Lord And in its heart stands Virat, King of Kings.

P. 680 He is Virat, architect of the visible world, the Self in the Waking state. The Mandukya Upanishad describes him as follows: Jaagritasthaanah bahishprajnah saptaangam ekonavimshatimukhah sthuulabhuk vaishvaanarah prathmam paadah.

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"He whose place is wakefulness, who is wise of the outward, who has seven limbs, to whom there are nineteen doors, who feels and enjoys gross objects, Vaishwanara, the Universal Male, He is the first."

He presides over the wakeful state of consciousness. He is the great designer of the gross world; he is the seer of things seen physically. He lights his camp fire in the suns, and the star‐ entangled ether is his base. Matter is the medium of his expression.

In his speech which uses Matter as the medium, material objects are his letters and active forces are his words, and the sea and land are the pages of his tale. Matter is his means and also his spiritual mark. He hangs the thought with the support of the vital's drive and makes the soul flow along the movement of the blood.

He is the dumb will in the atom and the clod. It is the will of the Virat, which acts without apparent motive or sense. There is an implicit intelligence in the material world which is his and which does not have to think or plan. This world creates itself invincibly. For its body is the body of the Lord in whose heart stands the Virat, the King of Kings.

This is poise of an individual's consciousness called the waking consciousness, and it is regarded as the first foot of the Atman in the individual being. The waking consciousness has its abode in the wakeful condition of the individual. It is, as we have seen, bahihprajnah ‐‐ conscious of only what is outside. This consciousness is concerned primarily with 'other' things not with ourselves. It is focussed on the external world. It is also described as saptaanga, 'seven‐limbed', and ekonavimshatimukhah as having has nineteen mouths, and it is sthulabhug ‐‐ eats the gross.

In the analysis of this waking self, an attempt is made to bring about the harmony between ourselves and the world, between the Jiva and the Ishwara. The seven limbs in the definition belong to the cosmic Self, while the 19 mouths to an individual. In both, the waking consciousness is aware only of the external aspect, although there is a subtle difference between them in this respect. The Mundaka Upanishad describes the Virat as the seven limbed Virat Purusha, the Universal man ‐ the shining regions of the heaven as his head, the sun and the moon as his eyes, the four quarters as his ears, the revealed Vedas as his speech, the air of the cosmos as his breath, the whole universe as his heart and the earth as his feet. This is the Virat as also described in the Purusha Sukta, the Virat as seen by Arjuna on the battlefield, and the Virat Krishna who showed himself in the Kaurava court, and the Virat whom Yashoda saw in the mouth of the baby Krishna. He is called Vaishvanara.

Virat is the name we give to the Consciousness animating the physical universe, this vast cosmos, with all its stellar and planetary systems, with all its milky ways. He is immanent in all things, secretly present in everything whether conscious or not. As described in Savitri, "He is the dumb will of atom and clod." He is present in the animate as well as in the inanimate by

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means of the gunas ‐ sattva, rajas, tamas. When he is totally tamasic, he is inanimate as in stones and rocks. When Prana begins to operate we have the world of plants and vegetation.

"In the current of the blood makes the flow of the soul." When the higher Pranas begin to operate we have the animals. There is a still higher degree of the manifestation of Reality when we reach the human level. This is an approximation to Sattva. The higher functions of ratiocination, understanding and reasoning approximate to vijnaana. There is a still higher step we have to take beyond the Vijnaana, and that will take us to the realm of Ananda or divine Delight.

While the Cosmic Person is the universal aspect of the waking consciousness, he has also an individual aspect. It is here that it is supposed to have 19 mouths. By mouth is meant the organ by which we take in things. There are 19 functional apparatuses of this wakeful consciousness by which it receives experiences of the external world ‐ the 5 senses of knowledge, 5 of action (speech, hands, feet, organs of regeneration and ejection) 5 pranas 'the universal Life‐Forces' ( praana, which introduces in the individual universal vitality and actuates him towards more abundant living, apaana, which leads him to expend energy and so towards death; samaana, which regulates the incoming and the outgoing forces and maintains as far as possible an equilibrium of interchange; vyaana, which distributes the vital energies by a pervasive movement in the system; and udaana, the finest form of all, which serves as the strength of human aspiration towards the Divine and a secret channel of communication between the physical life and the greater life of the spirit ), and antahkaranacatustaya (manas, buddhi, ahnkaara, citta). It is with the help of these 19 instruments we come into contact with the world outside. It is these instruments that relate us with the world outside.

We shall discuss the three other posies of the Divine Consciousness in the following instalment.

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41. Book Eleven – Continued

We saw in the previous instalment how Sri Aurobindo weaves into his poem the great psychological insights which the Mandukya Upanishad announced to the world so long ago.

Indian psychology never lost sight of the fact that only a small part whether of the world‐being or our own being comes into the range of our perception, understanding, or our action. The rest is lost to us because it is either hidden behind in subliminal reaches in the depths of the subconscient or in the highest peaks of superconscience. This fact is expressed in ancient Indian psychology by dividing consciousness into three provinces, waking state, dream‐state, sleep state, jagrat,swapna, sushupti. It posits in the human being a waking‐self, a dream‐self, a sleep‐ self, with the fourth or the Turiya beyond.

Sri Aurobindo gives a succinct description of these states in this passage taken from the Synthesis of Yoga (CWSA, Vol. 23‐24, page 520): If we examine the phraseology of the old books, we shall find that the waking state is the consciousness of the material universe which we normally possess in this embodied existence dominated by the physical mind. The dream‐state is a consciousness corresponding to the subtler life‐plane and mind‐plane behind, which to us, even when we get intimations of them, have not the same concrete reality as the things of the physical existence. The sleep‐state is a consciousness corresponding to the supramental plane proper to the gnosis, which is beyond our experience because our causal body or envelope of gnosis is not developed in us, its faculties not active, and therefore we are in relation to that plane in a condition of dreamless sleep. The Turiya beyond is the consciousness of our pure self‐existence or our absolute being with which we have no direct relations at all, whatever mental reflections we may receive in our dream or our waking or even, irrecoverably, in our sleep consciousness.

We have already noted that the Mandukya Upanishad gives to these four states of consciousness in the individual these names: wakefulness, dream, sleep, and Superconciousness or Self‐consciousness, and the technical names given to them are Vaishvanara, Taijasa, Prajna and Atman. In later Vedanta, four states of consciousness are also recognised in the macrocosm or cosmic consciousness, and they came to be called Viraat (Viraaj), Hiranyagarbha, Isa, and Brahman respectively. These are in the macrocosm and the states described in the Mandukya are in the microcosm. The basis for this representation of correspondence between the microcosm and the macrocosm can be found in the Chandogya Upanishad.

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Savitri recognises these four states of cosmic consciousness embodied in the marvellous figure now standing in front of her. We have already studied the lines 336 to 353 in Canto One of Book XI which describe the Viraat aspect of the Brhaman. Now before we move on to the description of the Hiranyagarbha aspect of the Supreme consciousness ‐ the consciousness of the dream‐form, let us take a brief look at how the Mandukya Upanishad describes the Hiranyagarbha aspect of Brahman: It describes it as follows: Swapna sthaanah antahprajnah saptaangam ekonavimshatimukhah praviviktabhuk taijasah dvitiiiyah paadah He whose place is the dream, who is wise of the inward, who has seven limbs, to whom there are nineteen doors, who feels and enjoys subtle objects, Taijasa, the Inhabitant in Luminous Mind, He is the second.

It is a consciousness which has dream as its abode (swapna sthaanah). It is internal to the waking consciousness (antahprajnah). It has seven limbs (saptaangam) like the waking consciousness (head, heart, arms, nose, eyes, ears and feet being its seven limbs). Like the waking consciousness, it has also nineteen mouths (ekonavimshati‐mukhah). These have been mentioned in the previous instalment. This consciousness enjoys or absorbs into its being only the subtle (praviviktabhuk). Now this is how this aspect of the Supreme consciousness is described in Savitri In him shadows his form the Golden Child Who in the Sun‐capped Vast cradles his birth: Hiranyagarbha, author of thoughts and dreams, Who sees the invisible and hears the sounds That never visited a mortal ear, Discoverer of unthought realities Truer to Truth than all we have ever known, He is the leader on the inner roads; A seer, he has entered the forbidden realms; A magician with the omnipotent wand of thought, He builds the secret uncreated worlds.

Armed with the golden speech, the diamond eye, His is the vision and the prophecy: Imagist casting the formless into shape, Traveller and hewer of the unseen paths, He is the carrier of the hidden fire, He is the voice of the Ineffable, He is the invisible hunter of the light,

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The Angel of mysterious ecstasies, The conqueror of the kingdoms of the soul.

P. 681

Hiranyagarbha, the Self of the Dream‐world is close to Viraat, like its subtle shadow.

Hiranyagarbha, the Golden Child, takes his birth in the luminous Vasts above. He is the source of thought and dream and his sight penetrates the invisible. His ears catch sounds which have never reached the human ear. So in a real sense, the dream consciousness is a higher and a subtler consciousness as will be clear when we compare it with the physical state of dream.

(It should be borne in mind that the dream‐state in which Hiranyagarbha functions is not the same as the physical state of dream. The latter belongs to the physical mind, while in the former the mind proper is at work, liberated from the intimate mingling of the physical mentality. Sri Aurobindo explains the difference between the dreams of the physical mind and the dream consciousness we are talking about here as follows: The dreams of the physical mind are an incoherent jumble made up partly of responses to vague touches from the physical world round which the lower mind‐faculties disconnected from the will and reason, the buddhi, weave a web of wandering phantasy, partly of disordered associations from the brain‐memory, partly of reflections from the soul travelling on the mental plane, reflections which are, ordinarily, received without intelligence or coordination, wildly distorted in the reception and mixed up confusedly with the other dream elements, with brain‐memories and fantastic responses to any sensory touch from the physical world. In the Yogic dream‐state, on the other hand, the mind is in clear possession of itself, though not of the physical world, works coherently and is able to use either its ordinary will and intelligence with a concentrated power or else the higher will and intelligence of the more exalted planes of mind. It withdraws from experience of the outer world, it puts its seals upon the physical senses and their doors of communication with material things; but everything that is proper to itself, thought, reasoning, reflection, vision, it can continue to execute with an increased purity and power of sovereign concentration free from the distractions and unsteadiness of the waking mind. (Volume: 23‐24 [CWSA] The Synthesis of Yoga, Page: 521) This is also why this consciousness is described in the lines of Savitri quoted above as the "discoverer of unthought realities/ Truer to Truth than all we have ever known." This consciousness is also the leader on the inner roads. Hiranyagrbha is a seer who can enter the realms normally closed to the waking consciousness. He is a magician wielding an all‐powerful faculty of thought; he builds the secret uncreated worlds.

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We have noted above that Dream consciousness can use the will and intelligence of more exalted planes of mind since it is entirely free from the distractions and unsteadiness of the waking mind.

This consciousness is armed with "the golden speech, the diamond eye,/His is the vision and the prophecy,". He constantly casts the formless into forms; he hews paths hitherto unseen and travels upon them. He is the carrier of the hidden fire, and he is the voice of that which is beyond speech. He is the invisible hunter of the light that eludes, the Angel of the mysterious ecstasies of the subtle realms. He is the conqueror of the kingdoms of the soul.

The greatest strength of the dream state lies in its power to open up easily the higher ranges and powers of thought, emotion and will by which the soul grows in height, range and self‐ mastery. Since this consciousness is free from the distraction of sensible things, it can by an ever deeper vision and identification hope for access to the Divine. It can by an absorbed inner joy and emotion prepare itself for the delight of union with the Divine beloved, the Master of all bliss, rapture and Ananda.

The third quarter of Brahman is called Ishwara or Prajna at the level of the Atman.

Macrocosmically we regard this consciousness as the creator of the whole universe, while microcosmically it is the creator of the internal world of the Jiva. The Mandukya Upanishad describes it as follows: Yatra suptah na kamcana kaamam kaamayate, na kamcana swapnam pashyati, tat sushuptam / susupta sthaana ekiibhuutah prajnaanaghana eva aanandamayah hi aanandabhuk cetomukhah prajnah triitiiya paadah "When one sleeps and yearns not with desire, nor sees any dream, that is the perfect slumber. He whose place is the perfect slumber, who becomes Oneness, who is wisdom gathered into itself, who is made of mere delight, who enjoys delight unrelated, to whom the conscious mind is the door, Prajna, the Lord of Wisdom, He is the third."

He is the third quarter or aspect of the Brahman consciousness. This consciousness is likened to the state of dreamless sleep, where there are no desires, and the very nature of this Being is delight.

Eshah sarveshwarah eshah sarvajnah eshah antaryamin eshah yonih sarvasya prabhavaapyayau hi bhuutaanaam.

This is the Almighty, this is the Omniscient, this is the Inner Soul, this is the Womb of the Universe, this is the Birth and Destruction of the creatures.

This consciousness is designated as the Master of all things (eshah sarveshwarah). This being is also all‐knowing, omniscient (eshah sarvajnah). This knowledge of Ishwara is not merely perceptional or cognitive. It is knowledge by identity. He is the womb of all things. He

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permeates all things (eshah antaryamin). All things come from him and return to him. This entire universe is fully present in the Being of the Causal state. (eshah yonih sarvasya).

Everything comes forth from Him and everything returns to him, and everything is sustained by Him. (prabhavaapyayau hi bhuutaanaam.)

This consciousness is described in Savitri as follows: A third spirit stood behind, their hidden cause, A mass of superconscience closed in light, Creator of things in his all‐knowing sleep.

All from his stillness came as grows a tree; He is our seed and core, our head and base.

All light is but a flash from his closed eyes: An all‐wise Truth is mystic in his heart, The omniscient Ray is shut behind his lids: He is the Wisdom that comes not by thought, His wordless silence brings the immortal word.

He sleeps in the atom and the burning star, He sleeps in man and god and beast and stone: Because he is there the Inconscient does its work, Because he is there the world forgets to die.

He is the centre of the circle of God, He the circumference of Nature's run.

His slumber is an Almightiness in things, Awake, he is the Eternal and Supreme.

P. 681

Behind both the Viraat and the Hiranyagarbha stands a third spirit or aspect, the Prajna, the secret cause of the other two. That is a massed superconscience which is enclosed in light. This all‐knowing consciousness is called the Sleep state; this consciousness is beyond thought, beyond emotion and beyond will.

All grows from his silence as a tree grows from a seed. He is at once our seed, our core and our base. All light is but a flash from his closed eyes; in his heart is the mystic all‐wise Truth, behind his eyelids is the omniscient ray of Light. He is the Wisdom that comes not by the process of thought but is self‐existent. His wordless silence brings the immortal word.

He is the one who sleeps in the atom and also in the burning star. He is asleep in all forms ‐ in man, god, beast and stone. Because of his presence, the Inconscient does its work. Because of his presence in it, the world forgets to die. He is the centre of the circle of God; he is also the

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circumference along which Nature moves. He is the creative slumber that represents the presence of God in everything. When awake he is the eternal and the Supreme.

(The sleep‐state represents a higher power of being, beyond thought into pure consciousness, beyond emotion into pure bliss, beyond will into pure mastery; it is the gate of union with the supreme state of Sachchidananda out of which all the activities of the world are born. The use of the words dream and sleep for these higher states is symbolic. The normal physical mind is not at home in these higher states of being. It is not true that the Self in the third status called perfect sleep, sushupti, is really a state of slumber. The sleep self is on the contrary described as Prajna, the Master of Wisdom and Knowledge, Self of the Gnosis, and as Ishwara, the Lord of being. To the physical mind it may feel like sleep ‐ a wider and subtler consciousness, a greater waking. To the normal mind all that exceeds its normal experience but still comes into its scope, seems to be a dream; but at the point where it borders on things quite beyond its scope, it can no longer see truth even as in a dream, but passes into the blank incomprehension and non‐reception of slumber. Awake on these levels the soul becomes master of the ranges of gnostic thought, gnostic will, gnostic delight. Even on the yet higher level open to us, that of the Ananda, the awakened soul may become similarly possessed of the Bliss‐Self both in its concentration and in its cosmic comprehension. CWSA, Volume: 23‐24 The Synthesis of Yoga, Page: 525.)

The Mandukya Upanishad describes not only the gross, subtle and causal conditions of the manifested consciousness but also Consciousness as such. This is Reality in itself, independent of all relations. Even Ishwara is a description of a relationship in the universe, the lordship of the universe. What is the swarupa lakshana, the essential nature of the supreme consciousness? It abides by itself, in its majesty. What is that Light which cannot be seen by others, which shines but shines not upon anything? That is the state of Pure Consciousness, the Absolute consciousness, which the Mandukya calls Turiya, that which transcends all relational manifestations. The Mandukya Upanishad describes it as follows: Na antah prajnam na bahih prajnam na ubhayatah prajnam na prjnaanaghanam na prajnam na aprajnam / adrishTam avyavahaaryam agraahyam alakshaNam acinntyam avyapadeshyam ekaatma pratyaya saaram prapancopashamam shantam shivam advaitaam caturtham manyante sah aatmaa sah vijneyah "He who is neither inward‐wise, nor outward‐wise, nor both inward‐ and out‐ward wise, nor wisdom self‐gathered, nor possessed of wisdom, nor unpossessed of wisdom, He who is unseen and incommunicable, unseizable, featureless, unthinkable, and unnameable, Whose essentiality is awareness of the Self in its single existence, in whom all phenomena dissolve, Who is calm, Who is Good, Who is the One than whom there is no other, Him they deem the fourth; He is the Self; he is the object of Knowledge."

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Our discussion of the four quarters or aspects of the Supreme Consciousness has taken us to the metaphysical intricacies dealt with in the Mandukya Upanishad. I have tried to show here the closeness between the descriptions of these states of consciousness with the corresponding descriptions in Savitri. The God of Death who appeared throughout Books IX and X as Savitri's adversary was finally vanquished in the fourth canto of Book X. Here in the beginning of Book XI, the same God of Death appears again but in an enchanting form described in these lines: One whom her soul had faced as Death and Night A sum of all sweetness gathered into his limbs And blinded her heart to the beauty of the suns.

Transfigured was the formidable shape.

P. 678

It is in this enchanting figure that Savitri sees all the four aspects of the Supreme Consciousness. We have already seen this with regard to the Viraat, Hiranyagarbha and Ishwara aspects. Now Savitri sees in this figure the Turiya aspect as well.

Above was the brooding bliss of the Infinite, Its omniscient and omnipotent repose, Its immobile silence absolute and alone.

All powers were woven in countless concords here.

The bliss that made the world in his body lived, Love and delight were the head of the sweet form.

P. 682

Above the Prajna aspect, Savitri saw the infinite in its conscious bliss, reposing in its omniscience and omnipotence, alone and absolute in its immutable silence. All powers were held together there in infinite harmony.

The poet continues to describe the enchanting figure now standing in front of Savitri in lines 395 to 437. We shall take up these lines in the following instalment.

Before we conclude, we should ponder over the significance of what we are examining here – the total transformation the God of Death undergoes. The poet clearly states that this figure now standing before Savitri blinding her heart to the beauty of the suns, and who has gathered all sweetness into his limbs is none other than the one whom she had faced as Death and Night. After all, the God of Death then is not an unmitigated evil. There is no such thing as unmitigated evil living by itself and forever in Sri Aurobindo's metaphysical system. If there is something called Evil, and that lives independent of Good, then you have a duality as the truth about this world. For Sri Aurobindo, there is only the Supreme Reality, and that is the Brahman,

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and in this manifested world His real swarup 'nature' is Sat‐Chit and Ananda. But where does evil in the form of Death come from? Sri Aurobindo has pointed out that Death is a functionary of God, he must have created him for some purpose. He therefore will continue to be around us as long as he is useful for the Divine's purpose in this creation. What is the main function of Death? His main function is to prod the human soul caught in the meshes of ignorance to wake up and realise his Godhood and Godlike perfection here on earth. Let me conclude for now with a very beautiful aphorism in which Sri Aurobindo captures this insight: Death is the question Nature puts continually to Life and her reminder to it that it has not yet found itself. If there were no siege of death, the creature would be bound for ever in the form of an imperfect living. Pursued by death he awakes to the idea of perfect life and seeks out its means and possibility.(CWSA, Vol. 13, p. 205)

http://nextfuture.sriaurobindosociety.org.in/dec06/nfdec06_savitri.htm

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42. Book Eleven – Continued

Savitri sees all the four aspects of the Supreme Divine in the most enchanting form standing in front of her. We have already seen how the Virat, Hiranyagarbha and Ishwara aspects of the Supreme are described by the poet. Now Savitri sees in this figure the Turiya aspect as well.

Before we examine how this aspect is described, let us briefly examine how it is characterised in the Mandukya Upanishad. The Mandukya describes it as follows: Na antah prajnam na bahih prajnam na ubhayatah prajnam na prjnaanaghanam na prajnam na aprajnam / adrishTam avyavahaaryam agraahyam alakshaNam acinntyam avyapadeshyam ekaatma pratyaya saaram prapancopashamam shantam shivam advaitaam caturtham manyante sah aatmaa sah vijneyah "He who is neither inward‐wise, nor outward‐wise, nor both inward‐ and out‐ward wise, nor wisdom self‐gathered, nor possessed of wisdom, He Who is unseen and incommunicable, unseizable, featureless, unthinkable, and unnameable, Whose essentiality is awareness of the Self in its single existence, in whom all phenomena dissolve, Who is calm, Who is Good, Who is the One than whom there is no other, Him they deem the fourth; He is the Self, He is the object of Knowledge."

We see above how the Upanishad makes an attempt to describe in words what is basically ineffable. Let us see now how Sri Aurobindo handles this challenge: Above was the brooding bliss of the Infinite, Its omniscient and omnipotent repose, Its immobile silence absolute and alone.

All powers were woven in countless concords here.

The bliss that made the world in his body lived, Love and delight were the head of the sweet form.

In the alluring meshes of their snare Recaptured, the proud blissful members held All joys outrunners of the panting heart And fugitive from life's outstripped desire.

Whatever vision has escaped the eye, Whatever happiness comes in dream and trance, The nectar spilled by love with trembling hands, The joy the cup of Nature cannot hold, Had crowded to the beauty of his face,

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Were waiting in the honey of his laugh.

Things hidden by the silence of the hours, The ideas that find no voice on living lips, The soul's pregnant meeting with infinity Had come to birth in him and taken fire: The secret whisper of the flower and star Revealed its meaning in his fathomless look.

His lips curved eloquent like a rose of dawn; His smile that played with the wonder of the mind And stayed in the heart when it had left his mouth Glimmered with the radiance of the morning star Gemming the wide discovery of heaven.

His gaze was the regard of eternity; The spirit of its sweet and calm intent Was a wise home of gladness and divulged The light of the ages in the mirth of the hours, A sun of wisdom in a miracled grove.

In the orchestral largeness of his mind All contrary seekings their close kinship knew, Rich‐hearted, wonderful to each other met In the mutual marvelling of their myriad notes And dwelt like brothers of one family Who had found their common and mysterious home.

As from the harp of some ecstatic god There springs a harmony of lyric bliss Striving to leave no heavenly joy unsung, Such was the life in that embodied Light.

He seemed the wideness of a boundless sky, He seemed the passion of a sorrowless earth, He seemed the burning of a world‐wide sun.

Two looked upon each other, Soul saw Soul.

Pp. 682 – 683

The Divine as the Prajna Purusha has already been described in the lines preceding the lines reproduced above. Above this Prajna Purusha is the Infinite in its conscious bliss, reposing in its omniscience and omnipotence, alone and absolute in its immobile silence. All powers are present here since they are woven into countless concords (harmonies).

Here in the body of this figure can be seen the bliss that has made the world, and of the sweet form of this figure, love and delight are the head. All the joys that flow from the passionate

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human heart when its desires are fulfilled are recaptured and held captive by the blissful limbs of this being as in the captivating meshes of a net.

In the beauty of the face of this figure is collected all the beauty, including even the beauty that the human eye cannot capture fully; all the happiness including that which comes in dream and trance, and the sweet nectar spilt by love in excitement, all the joy that nature's vessel cannot contain ‐ all these are contained in his honeyed laughter.

There are things that lay veiled by the silence of earthly time and there are also ideas that cannot be expressed in speech; all these burn bright in his being; in him takes place the potent meeting of the inner soul with infinity. In his fathomless look stands revealed the secret whisper of the flower and the star.

The curve of his lips is as eloquent as a rose of dawn. His smile plays with the wonder of the mind and stays in his heart when it leaves the mouth; it shines with the radiance of the morning star, shining like a gem of heavenly revelation.

His look is the stare of eternity. In its sweetness and calm is the felicity of a sage; it reveals the wisdom of the ages in the mirth of fleeting hours. In it shines a sun of wisdom as in an enchanted wood.

In the harmony of his mind all opposites find a close mutual relationship; these contraries appear wonderful to each other and marvel at each other's myriad differences; they dwell together like the members of one family, who have found their common and mysterious home.

This embodiment of Light standing before Savitri stood like a harmony of lyric bliss issuing from the lyric of an ecstatic God, trying to make sure that no heavenly joy is left unsung.

He seemed as wide as the boundless sky; he seemed to personify the passion of an earth freed from sorrow; he seemed like the burning of a world‐wide sun.

The two looked upon each other, Savitri and this effulgent figure in front of her. The soul of Savitri saw the soul of what had appeared like the God of Death.

Then like an anthem rising from the transparent cave of the heart, a voice soared up whose enchanting sound seemed to have the power of changing the painful weeping of the suffering earth into sobs of ecstatic joy and her cry into a happy song of the spirit. This was the voice of the enchanting figure standing in front of Savitri. " O Savitri, O human image of the immortal word, you have seen beyond the ornate walls of the senses and forced the thought‐covered doors to swing open and seen through the arches of revelation and unlocked passages of spiritual sight. You have found the entry into the heavenly state of the soul and found the golden key to the treasures beyond. I am wonder‐ struck that you have been able to do all this.

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There has opened in you the secret sight which man misses in his blindness and it has enabled you to see beyond Time and revealed to you the course which my chariot takes, and disclosed to you how death is my underground channel through life to reach my hidden vistas of bliss."

Then the enchanting presence in front of her tells Savitri who he is: I am the hushed search of the jealous gods Pursuing my wisdom's vast mysterious work Seized in the thousand meeting ways of heaven.

I am the beauty of the unveiled ray Drawing through the deep roads of the infinite night The unconquerable pilgrim soul of earth Beneath the flaring torches of the stars.

I am the inviolable Ecstasy; They who have looked on me, shall grieve no more.

The eyes that live in night shall see my form.

Pp: 683 – 84

"I am the object of the hushed search of the jealous gods who pursue my wisdom's vast mysterious word. I am the beauty of the secret Divine Ray, which attracts the unconquerable pilgrim soul of the earth as it trudges along the tangled roads of the endless night, beneath the flaring torches of the stars. I am the Ecstasy that is secure from assault or trespass. Those who look on me shall never grieve again. Only they for whom the external world and its show are a night (who have no absorbing interest in the outer world and its drama) shall see my form."

(Now this enchanting Divine being begins to weave a subtle net which he wishes to cast on Savitri as one final test of her integrity and dedication to her mission in life. As usual, it is prefaced by a philosophical note which highlights how impossible it is to achieve what Savitri is keen on achieving ‐ the transformation of earthly life into its perfect divine image.)

The Divine being continues, " On the shores of the sea of consciousness which flows through several straits, underneath an agitated sky (reflecting the stress the sea of consciousness is experiencing), two powers which originated from the same source walk up and down close to each other and yet are separated in the life of man; they are Soul and Nature. Nature leans down to embrace the earth, and the Soul longs to touch the skies.

Two powers from one original ecstasy born Pace near but parted in the life of man; One leans to earth, the other yearns to the skies: Heaven in its rapture dreams of perfect earth, Earth in its sorrow dreams of perfect heaven.

The two longing to join, yet walk apart,

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Idly divided by their vain conceits, They are kept from their oneness by enchanted fears; Sundered mysteriously by miles of thought, They gaze across the silent gulfs of sleep.

P. 684

Heaven in the rapture of its perfection dreams of making earth perfect like itself, and earth in its sorrow dreams of a changing itself into a perfect heaven. These two powers yearn to unite but still walk apart from each other, vainly divided by their sense of vain self‐importance. What keeps them apart from one another are their mysterious fears of each other. They are thus separated from each other inexplicably as though by a long distance of several miles. All they really do is to gaze at each other across the gulfs of the Ignorance.

Or side by side reclined upon my vasts Like bride and bridegroom magically divorced They wake to yearn, but never can they clasp While thinly flickering hesitates uncrossed Between the lovers on their nuptial couch The shadowy eidolon of a sword.

P. 684

"Or these two powers recline upon my vast spaces side by side like a bride and bridegroom, but mysteriously separated. When they wake up, they yearn for each other but they cannot clasp one another as long as the shadowy sword of state hangs above threateningly between the lovers on the marriage bed." (It is a notional sword not a real one but it is enough to keep the lovers separated until they realise the imaginary status of this sword.)

But when the phantom flame‐edge fails undone, Then never more can space or time divide The lover from the loved; Space shall draw back Her great translucent curtain, Time shall be The quivering of the spirit's endless bliss.

P. 684

"But once it is realised that it is only a phantom sword, not a real one, it gets dissolved along with its flame‐edge. Then nothing, neither space not time, can separate the lovers. Space will draw back her great transparent curtain, and Time shall quiver with endless bliss of the Spirit."

Attend that moment of celestial fate.

Meanwhile you two shall serve the dual law Which only now the scouts of vision glimpse

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Who pressing through the forest of their thoughts Have found the narrow bridges of the gods.

Wait patient of the brittle bars of form Making division your delightful means Of happy oneness rapturously enhanced By attraction in the throbbing air between.

P. 684 "You will have to await that moment of celestial fate when the phantom sword which keeps the lovers separated dissolves once and for all. In the meanwhile you and Satyavan will have to learn to accept and follow the law of duality (of Soul and Nature separated). The true nature of their relationship is now grasped only by those whose acute vision takes them beyond the thick forests of thought to a vision of the narrow bridges of the gods which span the gulf."

"Wait in patience and bear with the fragile separation created by outer forms, hoping to see a happy oneness uniting them one day. Even you can see this division as a delightful means of enhancing their oneness. You can understand this if you contemplate the secret behind the ecstatic attraction they feel for one another."

(At this point, the Divine being offers to Savitri a glorious alternative to what he has just described. This alternative amounts to Savitri as disowning this world and leaving it to its ambiguous fate and to climbing on to the blissful home in which she can play as an eternal divine child.)

Yet if thou wouldst abandon the vexed world, Careless of the dark moan of things below, Tread down the isthmus, overleap the flood, Cancel thy contract with the labouring Force; Renounce the tie that joins thee to earth‐kind, Cast off thy sympathy with mortal hearts.

P. 685 "But, O Savitri, there is yet another fate you can choose. But to make that choice, you should be willing to give up this troubled world; you should pay no heed to the sad groaning and complaining that is for ever going on this earth, you should turn your back on earth and this life. You should cancel your contract to be in the world and keep working for its redemption.

You should cut off the bond that ties you to earth‐kind and cast off your sympathy with human hearts and their aspirations. Once you are thus liberated from your self‐imposed bondage to earth, you can rise and claim the spirit's rights."

Arise, vindicate thy spirit's conquered right: Relinquishing thy charge of transient breath, Under the cold gaze of the indifferent stars

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Leaving thy borrowed body on the sod, Ascend, O soul, into thy blissful home.

P. 685 "You should then relinquish your charge of the transient breath which has tied you down to your body. Abandon your body borrowed from Nature and leave it on this earth under the cold stare of the indifferent stars and be the soul you are and ascend to your blissful home in the transcendent world." (The assumption here is that our soul comes from the Supreme in the transcendental world and as long as we remain bound to our body, vital and mind complex, we are tied down to earth and its imperfections which manifest and torment human life in the forms of sorrow, old age, ignorance and finally death. So as long as we are on earth in this complex of body, life and mind, we shall remain alien to the glories of the Spirit ‐ its bliss, immortality and truthful existence. That is why a choice is placed before Savitri.)

Here in the playground of the eternal Child Or in domains the wise Immortals tread Roam with thy comrade splendour under skies Spiritual lit by an unsetting sun, As godheads live who care not for the world And share not in the toil of Nature's powers: Absorbed in their self‐ecstasy they dwell.

Cast off the ambiguous myth of earth's desire, O immortal, to felicity arise."

P. 685

'Once you ascend to this home of the Spirit, you will be like the eternal child playing in the playground of bliss. You will then be walking with your comrade in splendour, Satyavan, in the domains of the wise immortals. There in the spiritual skies, the sun never sets. You and Satyavan will be able to live there as gods live. You will have no care, you will not be sharing in the toil and hardship of nature as in earthly life. You will live like gods ever‐absorbed in your self‐ecstasy. Cast off the dubious myth of a perfected earth. Arise to felicity, O mortal being."

(As we see here, this Divine being is very persuasive. He tries to convince Savitri as the God of death did in the earlier cantos that human life on this earth cannot be redeemed. There cannot be any perfection here, neither for the body, nor the vital, nor the mental being of man. Only the Spirit encaged here in the physical form of a human birth can rise to the status of perfection, if it relinquishes what Nature has supplied to it in the course of this evolution. This, you will realise, is tantamount to an attempt to sabotage the very purpose and mission of Savitri's birth. Savitri of course rejects the alternative placed before her.) http://nextfuture.sriaurobindosociety.org.in/jan07/nfjan07_savitri.htm

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43. Book Eleven – Continued

As we noted towards the end of the preceding instalment, although Savitri has triumphed over the God of Death, she is still being tested, although this time by the enchanting figure of the Supreme standing before her. He asks her to "Cast off the ambiguous earth's desire" and to rise to felicity forever. His argument this time is subtle. In this world, for the play of manifestation to continue, Spirit and Matter, or the soul and Nature have to remain separated, like "bride and bridegroom magically divorced"; they can only yearn to clasp each other but will never succeed in doing so. They remain separated because over their nuptial couch there hangs 'the shadowy eidolon (unsubstantial image) of a sword". Until this shadowy sword gets dissolved, which will take a long, long time, Savitri and Satyavan will have to abide by this law of separation.

But there is an alternative. Savitri can leave her body on earth and ascend as a soul into her blissful home, and live there with Satyavan as her companion like eternal children in an eternal garden of bliss. But before she can do that she will have to fulfil a crucial condition. This condition is described by the poet in these words: Cancel thy contract with the labouring Force; Renounce the tie that joins thee to earth‐kind, Cast off thy sympathy with mortal hearts.

P. 685

In other words, Savitri will have to give up this terrestrial existence and relinquish her interest in it.

This alternative offered to Savitri is along the lines of what is regarded as the highest wisdom by almost all the spiritual traditions of the world. The life which we live in this world can only be 'anityam' and 'asukham' (in the words of the Gita), and the kingdom of God can never be founded here. It is to be sought either in the world within us or in other world beyond this earth ‐ in some heaven, Kailash, or Vaikunth.

As Savitri was listening to these words from the enchanting image of the Supreme standing before her, a joy poured down on her exceeding any joy on earth or heaven. It was the bliss of some eternity unknown until now, a rapture of some Infinite waiting for her. She responds to this voice with a confident felicity in her heart. A smile rippling across her wide eyes like the first beam of the morning sun rippling over two lotus pools: "You are the Supreme who overwhelms man's soul with the gift of life and also with the experience of death, with the pleasures of this world and with its pain which follow one

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another like Day and Night. You tempt man's heart with the allure of heaven, and you also test his strength and endurance with the close touch of hell. But right now with this offer of yours, I cannot tell which of these you are doing, whether you are testing my resolve or enticing me with the offer of a home of bliss. But reject your offer and I refuse to climb to your everlasting Day just as I have rejected your eternal Night. "Eternal Night" here refers to the experiences to which she was subjected to when she first stepped into the Kingdom of Death. These are described in Book IX of Savitri. You probably remember how the God of Death tried to create in her a pressure of psychological terror and tried to convince her of the utter insignificance of the human being in this vast universe which he held under his sway. As a sample of the verbal terror he uses there, let me quote a few very telling lines from Book IX, Canto 2: A fragile miracle of thinking clay, Armed with illusions walks the child of Time.

To fill the void around he feels and dreads, The void he came from and to which he goes, He magnifies his self and names it God. P. 586, lines 165‐170

Savitri now explains why she is refusing his offer: "I choose not to turn away from your terrestrial Way, however uncertain and full of hazard it may appear. All I ask of you is my other self ‐ Satyavan. You don't need him in your worlds to enhance their joy or felicities. The earth needs his beautiful spirit created by you so that we can cast the net of delight over the whole of life.

(And then in some of the most glorious lines in this entire poem, Savitri declares her total commitment to this earth and to human life on earth.)

Earth is the chosen place of mightiest souls; Earth is the heroic spirit's battlefield, The forge where the Archmason shapes his works.

Thy servitudes on earth are greater, King, Than all the glorious liberties of heaven.

P. 686

"The mightiest of souls choose earth as their workplace. Only those who are heroes can choose it as their battlefield. The life on earth is the forge in the fire of which the great builders fabricate their material. For me, O King, the servitudes which you impose on me on earth are a greater blessing than all the glorious liberties of heaven."

(The heavens, no doubt, give the soul all the great liberties but they have always existed there.

The soul doesn't have to do anything to earn them. They are in fact the very nature of the soul.

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But the soul chose this adventure of consciousness, this plunge into the Inconscient so that the One can be manifested as Many and in each of the Many recreate the great liberties and felicities of the Supreme. This requires a great struggle, the participation in a long struggle, through the Night and the Ignorance, until the consciousness evolves from the Inconscient to the Superconscient. This is the meaning of this evolutionary journey. In one of the letters Sri Aurobindo wrote to the Mother when she was in Japan, he expresses this basic idea in these words: "Heaven, we have always possessed, but not the earth, and the aim of my yoga, is to make, in the words of the Veda, heaven and earth equal and one". That is why the servitudes on earth are sweet; they spur us on to get rid of these imperfections. This is the whole excitement of existence.")

Savitri continues: "I am no stranger to heavens; they were once my natural home, before I came down to earth."

(Heavens were our home too before our souls embarked on this adventure of consciousness through the Inconscient and Ignorance. Savitri has been depicted as an Avatar in this poem, but we are ordinary mortals. Nevertheless, the process of the birth of an Avatar is not all that different from the process through which we ordinary mortals are born, as explained by the Gita. In an Avatar, the Divine is born by the conscious control of the Prakriti by the Purusha, so the Prakriti is full of light and the will of the Purusha. The Divine being is thus born through atma maya, but fully conscious of the divinity within. ( Gita 4.6 ) In the birth of ordinary beings, we too come from the divine, but we are born in such a way that we become helplessly subject to the controlling power of Prakriti. (Gita 9.8) We seem to be suffering from some kind of amnesia and do not know who we really are.) Now to resume what Savitri was saying: "I too have wandered in the star‐studded groves of heaven, and walked in their sun‐gold pastures and through their meadows brightened by the silver sheen of the moon. I too have heard the musical laughter of the streams in heaven and stood under branches exuding the aroma of myrrh.

'I too have revelled in the fields of light cooled by the ethereal winds. I too have danced to the wonderful beat of music there, have danced to the spontaneous beats of the great and easy dances of the gods. Surely, the lanes through which your children walk are fragrant and lovely is the memory of their feet walking amid the marvels of the flowers of that Paradise.

"But mine is a heavier tread, a mightier touch because I dwell on earth. There where I dwell, gods and demons battle in the night; I am engaged in a wrestle with the forces of darkness and ignorance on the borders of the spirit's realm. My being has been taught to bear and endure the uneven and arduous beat of life on earth. I hold on to the edge of some great divine hope. I dare the impossible with this painful struggle. In me the spirit of immortal love stretches its arms out to embrace the whole of mankind. The heavens to which you invite me seem to me too remote from suffering humanity. A joy which I cannot share with all is for me imperfect.

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This is why I reject your offer of a heaven for me and Satyavan alone. Oh, how I wish I could spread myself to encircle and capture in my net of love more and more hearts until love in us pervades the whole world!

What Savitri has said here in these four lines: In me the spirit of immortal love Stretches its arms out to embrace mankind.

Too far thy heavens for me from suffering men.

Imperfect is the joy not shared by all.

P. 686 may be taken by some readers as an expression of the highest sentiments of modern Western liberalism or the noblest sentiments of the moral idealism. But in Savitri's case, these sentiments are born out of a purely spiritual realisation of an inner unity of the soul with all.

The Gita (6.29) describes this exalted inner state as that in which one sees the Self in all beings and all beings in the Self. It also describes this state (6.30) as that in which one sees the Divine everywhere and all in the Divine. This is a spiritual state in which there is a total identity between you and your neighbour and so the question of asking you to love your neighbour as yourself does not even arise. This experience of spiritual oneness goes beyond the philosophical or moral notion of equality. For such a person how can there be his lonely salvation? Since he sees all as himself, he even takes upon himself the burden of their happiness and sorrow by which he himself is not affected. For such a sage, doing good to all creatures is his occupation and delight. He is a true lover of God who loves God wherever he finds him and he finds him everywhere.

Savitri continues in an ecstatic tone: O life, the life beneath the wheeling stars!

For victory in the tournament with death, For bending of the fierce and difficult bow, For flashing of the splendid sword of God! O thou who soundst the trumpet in the lists, Part not the handle from the untried steel, Take not the warrior with his blow unstruck.

Are there not still a million fights to wage?

"O what a wondrous thing is this life beneath the wheeling stars in the sky! For victory of life in the tournament with death, for bending the fierce and difficult bow (like the one which Rama is famed to have strung before he won the hands of Janaka's daughter Sita) and for the vital as the splendid sword of God ‐ these are mighty tasks worth achieving. For this O Lord, you have blown the trumpet as at the beginning of a tournament. But please do not separate the handle

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from the steel bade which holds it firmly in its clasp, please do not take away the warrior from the battlefield before he has had an opportunity to strike his blows."

O king‐smith, clang on still thy toil begun, Weld us to one in thy strong smithy of life.

Thy fine‐curved jewelled hilt call Savitri, Thy blade's exultant smile name Satyavan.

Fashion to beauty, point us through the world.

P. 687

"O king‐smith, clang on and weld us into one in the strong furnace of your smithy of life. Let me, let Savitri be the fine‐curved jewelled handle of the sword, let Satyavan be the jubilant smile on the shining blade. Fashion us into an exultant and beautiful weapon and point us through the world.

Break not the lyre before the song is found; Are there not still unnumbered chants to weave?

O subtle‐souled musician of the years, Play out what thou hast fluted on my stops; Arise from the strain their first wild plaint divined And that discover which is yet unsung.

P. 687

Do not break the lyre before it has found the song it wishes to play. Are there not still a great number of songs for us to play? O subtle‐souled musician, play out what you have started to play on the instrument of my being. Ascend from the movement the first wild note played on it intuitively, and discover that which is still unsung.

I know that I can lift man's soul to God, I know that he can bring the Immortal down.

Our will labours permitted by thy will And without thee an empty roar of storm, A senseless whirlwind is the Titan's force And without thee a snare the strength of gods.

P. 687

I know I can lift man's soul to God. I know that man will ultimately succeed in bringing down the Immortal down to earth. Our will can labour and succeed only when permitted by your will.

But without your sanction and support, even the force of the titan turns out to be a senseless whirlwind, and without you even the strength of gods can be a trap.

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(Savitri states here that her aim of transforming human life by bringing down God's consciousness down on earth can be achieved because it seems to be God's will too. She is not trying to do something contrary to divine Will. She is not driven by any titanic ambition fuelled by the ego. Sri Aurobindo in dreaming of the perfection of life on earth goes beyond what so far has been thought possible by our Acharyas and leaders of thought. But this, he has discovered from his own sadhana, is God's own plan for mankind, and that is why he is able to declare with such supreme confidence, as he has done in the concluding paragraph of his book The Mother that "The supramental change is a thing decreed and inevitable in the evolution of the earth‐consciousness; for its upward ascent is not ended and mind is not its last summit.")

Savitri concludes her reply with these words: Let not the inconscient gulf swallow man's race That through earth's ignorance struggles towards thy Light.

O Thunderer with the lightnings of the soul, Give not to darkness and to death thy sun, Achieve thy wisdom's hidden firm decree And the mandate of thy secret world‐wide love."

P. 687

"Let not the gulf of inconscience swallow the human race that is still struggling through earth's ignorance towards the Light of the Divine. O thunderer with the lightnings of the soul, this creation of which man is the leader now, do not let darkness and death frustrate man in his quest for God's perfection on earth; do not let your bright sun sink unto inconscience and death. Achieve the hidden decree of your firm resolve and the mandate of your secret world‐ wide love."

Savitri's words seemed to get lost in the immensities of thought which seize them at their high points and conceal their meaning and they seem to have been lost in the unthinkable and the ineffable. But these are the sources from which thoughts and speech which shape the future originate.

This instalment is a brief summary of the entire argument of Savitri. There is at the outset the assumption made by almost all spiritual traditions that perfection in this life is impossible to achieve. This world will for ever remain 'anityam, asukham' (transient and unhappy). Some individuals can find escape from this world into the kingdom of God which is either within ourselves or in some other world. For all those living in this world to attain this realisation is impossible, because very few can attain to that inner state which makes this liberation and release into another world possible. So this world will always remain what it is. Therefore, Savitri is offered an exclusive heaven for herself and Satyavan in which they can live happily for ever. Savitri rejects this age‐old solution to human problems. She is totally averse to rejecting

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this world in the name of spiritual happiness and fulfilment. If spirituality has any value, it is as a resource to bring perfection to this imperfect world. Savitri knows that this is a difficult goal to achieve. But then why was this world created at all, if getting out of it into some heaven is the only issue here? Are we suggesting that that the Divine made a mistake in creating this world and you and I are now trying to correct his mistake by rejecting this world in favour of some remote heaven?

Savitri therefore rejects the offer made to her by the Divine figure standing before her. She opts for this world and wants to continue the evolutionary struggle which has so far traversed from the Inconscient to Matter, and from Matter to Life, and from Life to Mind, and then higher and higher grades of the Mind. She has understood God's plan behind this creation. The One wanted to be the Many but each of the many had to manifest God's perfection in all aspects of life. She knows that this supreme achievement cannot be won with the mental consciousness as our highest resource. We need to bring down here on earth a higher consciousness, the Supramental consciousness, which alone has the power to change human nature. She and Satyavan want to go back to earth where they will work together to make this supreme consummation possible. This is the meaning of Savitri's soul's choice, which is a part of the title of this canto and of Book XI of Savitri. http://nextfuture.sriaurobindosociety.org.in/feb07/nffeb07_savitri.htm

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44. Book Eleven – Continued

We have now seen on several occasions that Savitri brings a new dynamics to man's spiritual enterprise and a new purpose to his existence on earth. She is a realist enough to recognise that human life today is riddled with death, desire and incapacities of various kinds but she does not regard these circumstances as permanent features of life but only as so many existential challenges to be overcome in the course of the evolutionary journey towards perfection.. The fulfilment of our life does not lie in some extra‐territorial realm like the Vaikuntha or Kailasha, nor does it lie in an existence of absorption in an inner liberation, peace and bliss while the external being of man is besieged by ignorance, incapacity, sorrow, uncertainty and death. Therefore, as we have seen, she refuses the offer of a separate heaven of fulfilment for Satyavan and her. What she is seeking is not a heaven but transformed territorial existence ‐‐ a perfect life for the whole of mankind here on earth. She pleads to the Supreme standing before her to let her and Satyavan return to earth because they still have "unnumbered chants to weave" and rid man of the burden of existential problems. She says with great confidence I know that I can lift man's soul to God, I know that he can bring the Immortal down.

Our will labours permitted by thy will And without thee an empty roar of storm, A senseless whirlwind is the Titan's force And without thee a snare the strength of gods.

P. 687

Savitri is also aware of the fact that this is the secret purpose of the creator of this world. That is why she is seeking the Divine's blessings in this project of hers. She concludes her impassioned plea for man's fundamental right to live the life divine on earth with these words: Let not the inconscient gulf swallow man's race That through earth's ignorance struggles towards thy Light.

O Thunderer with the lightnings of the soul, Give not to darkness and to death thy sun, Achieve thy wisdom's hidden firm decree And the mandate of thy secret world‐wide love.

P. 687

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This defiant response from Savitri leaves the Godhead (the figure of the Supreme standing in front of her) undaunted. With a bright smile on his face, he says to her: "If the nature of man and that of the earth get transformed and become celestial, how can earth continue to exist? Heaven and earth can never be one; they gaze at each other and long for each other, but there is such a vast gulf between them which few can cross. The dualism between earth and heaven is impossible to eradicate. None coming from the ethereal sources from which all forms come can touch the other shore which although all can see, none can ever reach.

"It is of course true that heaven's light sometimes visits the mind of earth, but heaven's thoughts burn in the skies of the mind like solitary stars. Heavenly aspirations and seekings, like the beautiful and fluttering wings of birds, often move the human heart and fire it with great hopes and dreams. Visions of joy, which for ever seem to be beckoning man to rise beyond himself, stir him. But earth has not yet realised any of these dreams and the lustre of these dreams seems to be for ever diminishing.

"Some of these seeds of light and bliss bear sorrowful flowers. They touch human heart like faint notes of harmony grasped from a song half or indistinctly heard and they get lost amidst the cacophony of several wandering voices. Some of these intimations that touch the humans are like foam from the tossing luminous seas which reflect the beautiful but distant delight of gods; they are raptures unknown to humankind, almost a miracle of happiness; these thrill the earth and spread like a vague influence her mind and senses.

"Earth is aware that above her little finite steps and scope, there is a new pattern of perfection quite beyond her laws and rules. That is a universe of self‐found felicity, not dependent on anything outside its own self. An inexpressible rhythm of timeless beats pervades this world and this beat is one of the heart‐beats of the One, which has many different movements. That is a magical universe created by the harmonies of the self; the freedom of the infinite is the law there and all forms in that world are wonderful and it would appear as though the Absolute has become a plastic substance out of which they are fabricated. There, in that world, is the All‐ Truth and also the All‐Bliss.

"But this world is still too remote from earth. The earth can at best boast of containing some fragments of a star‐lost gleam; of a few casual visits by the gods. All that visits bring her are no more than a Light that fails, a divine Word that soon falls silent. Nothing that these Gods can offer stays on earth for long. That is one great inadequacy of this earth; she can neither receive enough from the world of Gods, and very little of what she receives, can she retain within herself.

(Savitri touches in this passage the heart of the problem of human inadequacy. This is not the occasion to discuss the problems which our rationalists have about the very concept of God.

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We assume here that Gods exist and that they are not mere figments of the believer's imagination. By 'Gods' we mean beings or powers of consciousness that dwell on a higher plane and shape the human consciousness through their influence. The influence the "Gods" are able to exert on us determines the nature of our consciousness. The nature of our consciousness should concern us more than the perfection and the glory of the beings of the Gods. This is because on the nature of our consciousness depends the world around us.

Therefore, to what extent our consciousness is able to reflect the power and light of the Gods, or how much of the Divinity we can now incarnate in our consciousness becomes of crucial importance.

Our consciousness is an arena open to various kinds of influences, all of them not from the Gods alone. There are also hostile forces in the occult worlds which often act upon the human consciousness and corrupt it. Again, our consciousness has arisen out of the Inconscient and so it has on it a large stamp of the source from which it has arisen. Our own subconscient contains "dark caverns" as the Rigveda describes them, a mental, a vital, and a physical subconscient ending in what Sri Aurobindo has called the Nescient. These regions harbour a multitude of brutal forces and forms, including finally the forces of death and disintegration and these forces rise and contaminate the human consciousness in various degrees. The influence received from the Gods of the higher planes is thus ranged against all these various elements, some of them decidedly hostile. Thus man's consciousness is a battleground on which the forces of good and evil contend for supremacy.

As noted earlier, the world we create around us depends very much on our consciousness, and the world we have managed to create around ourselves happens to be still corrupt and imperfect. That shows that the consciousness we possess today is itself imperfect and corrupt.

Not only is this corruption and imperfection reflected in the life all around us in the form of human suffering and human depravity but it has also shown itself capable of harbouring the great perpetrators of evil in our midst such as Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Idi Amin, and Osama Bin Laden. These are not just autonomous beings unrelated to us, and we cannot just shrug our shoulders and disown responsibility for the monstrous forces they unleash. They are merely the concrete and objective forms of certain tendencies we ourselves harbour and nurse in our consciousness; and therefore they feed on us. When we think of the century we have just left behind, the harm done by some of these personifications of evil mentioned above eclipses all the good that our saintly Gandhis, Florence Nightingales and Martin Luther Kings have done.

Our world is what it is ‐‐ so full of imperfections, corruption, and suffering caused by man's cruelty to man, as well as by death and incapacity ‐ a) because our consciousness is still not capable of reflecting the divine influences in a sufficient measure, and b) because the Gods that have so far descended into this creation are not powerful enough to counter through their influence and action the effects of what may be called the evil or asuric tendencies in our consciousness. From this follows the conclusion that there can be no real change or improvement in the human condition unless man acquires a greater or higher consciousness

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than the mental consciousness he now has, which can receive more powerful divine influences or influences hitherto not accessible to him. This would require that man rises from the mental to what Sri Aurobindo has called the supramental consciousness. ) To resume our study of Savitri ‐ "From the earth you can have a few glimpses of the heights of the perfect world but it is incapable of having a lasting view of this world”: A few can climb to an unperishing sun, Or live on the edges of the mystic moon And channel to earth‐mind the wizard ray.

P. 689

"Only a few can climb to the unperishing sun of spiritual truth or very few can live on he edges of the mystic moon of spiritual bliss and direct the earth‐mind to this perfection or create a channel through which the influences emanating from this illumined world of truth and bliss can be received on earth.

The heroes and the demigods are few To whom the close immortal voices speak And to their acts the heavenly clan are near.

Few are the silences in which Truth is heard, Unveiling the timeless utterance in her deeps; Few are the splendid moments of the seers.

P. 689

"There have been until now very few heroes and demigods among the humans who can communicate with the immortal Gods and receive their influences. Very few human beings are close enough to the Gods in consciousness and the truth of these Gods is not yet heard clearly.

The splendid moments of the seers precisely aim at this communion, but even such moments are very rare.

Heaven's call is rare, rarer the heart that heeds; The doors of light are sealed to common mind And earth's needs nail to earth the human mass, Only in an uplifting hour of stress Men answer to the touch of greater things: Or, raised by some strong hand to breathe heaven‐air, They slide back to the mud from which they climbed; In the mud of which they are made, whose law they know They joy in safe return to a friendly base,

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And, though something in them weeps for glory lost And greatness murdered, they accept their fall.

P. 689

"The call of the Spirit is very rare among humans. And even among those who are called, fewer still heed the call and respond to it. For the average human mind the doors of knowledge are sealed and the needs of his outer being nail him to the earth to such an extent that he behaves as though it were the only reality. Men sometimes respond to the touch of great ideas and ideals but that is only for a short time and that too under the inspiration and influence of the uplifting hour. Often it is the inspired example or teachings of a strong and noble human leader that lifts us and we aspire to breathe heaven‐air. But once this uplifting element or the inspiring individual leaves the scene, men slide back to the mud from which they had climbed to a higher level of existence. They slide back into the world of ignorance, corruption and falsehood. They are much more comfortable in that downward slide because they are made for the most part from ignorance and they understand very well the laws that govern ignorance.

They return to their base in ignorance and take delight like one who has romped home. And yet sometimes they miss something of the glory that they had experienced briefly and weep for it, for the greatness they have murdered, and quietly accept the fall.

To be the common man they think the best, To live as others live is their delight.

For most are built on Nature's early plan And owe small debt to a superior plane; The human average is their level pitch, A thinking animal's material range.

P. 689

"They come to believe that it is best to be the common man, and take delight in living as other folks live. This is because most people are built according to an earlier cast of evolutionary nature and do not have any natural affiliations to any higher planes of consciousness. The average human level is their ideal and they remain for ever confined to the range of a thinking animal.

"Nature climbs the ladder of evolution step by step and it is a long ascent, and in the rigid economy of cosmic life, each creature is assigned a place and a task and it is bound to these by the form taken by its nature and by the force which nature invests in it. The evolutionary force has bound each of us by our swarupa and swabhava. One cannot easily disturb this settled order and functioning without upsetting the nature's balance. Any attempt to do this will create a huge disturbance in the established order of things, and there will appear a huge gap in the pattern set up by nature. If there were no men left on this earth and all were to become transformed into brilliant gods, then the human species which now functions as a mediating

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stair would be lost. Such a linking stair is indeed very much needed because the consciousness awakened in Matter needs to get used to the rigours of a slow and difficult evolution through the vital and mental realms until it reaches the miraculous borders of a spiritual realisation and the glories of the soul world.

"My will, my call, is there universally in men and things. But the huge python‐like Inconscient lies at the bottom of this creation and tries to pull back to its breast of Night and Death and Sleep the whole of this creation lest it escapes its hold. It holds most of this creation in the dark and dumb abysm and allows only a little consciousness to escape from this prison, but it is intolerant of the growing light in this consciousness and tries to hold it back as close to the mouth of its cavernous being. The Inconscient is very much like a fond ignorant mother and tries to keep her child for ever tied to the apron strings of Nescience.

"This mysterious creation has come out of the Inconscient, where all consciousness sleeps in a slumber of self‐oblivion. The Inconscient itself cannot understand this mystery without the help of man's mind. Man is its key to unlock a door of consciousness (of self‐awareness). But this very Inconscient holds man dangled in its grasp; it has drawn a huge circle around his thoughts so that they can range far and wide but within the bounds of the circle drawn around them. It shuts his heart to the light of the Spirit. Man's mind is closed from above by a dazzling light that shines above it and is also closed from the bottom by a black and binding border. He seeks the Truth not directly but through words and images about the truth. He pores laboriously over the surfaces and brute outsides (as he does in his science) and when he delves within, his cautious steps do not go deeper than the shallow seas. Therefore even his Knowledge is a form of Ignorance. His view is barred from his own inner depths; he cannot look on the face of the Unknown Reality. How do you expect such a limited being to see with the Omniscient eyes, and how can he will with the Omnipotent force? How can man who has made a fetish of his finiteness ever see or understand the Infinite?

"Savitri, you are no doubt very compassionate and therefore very eager to help man to throw off the limitations of his ignorance. But this is too huge a task best left to the slow pace of Nature inching its way upwards through the ages as it follows the directions of the Will that works even through the Inconscient. Leave the earthly race to its imperfect light. All shall be achieved in the fullness of Time.

"Although the human race is bound to its human nature, to its strengths and limitations, man's soul is greater than his present fate. This spirit in him can rise imperiously above the circumstances imposed by Time and Space and detach itself from subjection to the universal common nature because of which all life is subject to the dualities of grief and joy. Thus freed from the hold of the universal law, the radiant spirit can blaze its way triumphantly across the limitations of the mind, no matter how obscuring, and burn alone in the skies of the Eternal, an inhabitant of a vast and endless calm.

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"O Savitri, O Flame Divine, draw back into your own luminous self. Or, return to your original form and power on the seer‐summit of thought and world. You are indeed the partner of my eternal being. Be one with the infinity of my power. For you are the World‐Mother and the Bride of the Supreme. Withdraw your identification with the fruitless yearning of earth for a perfect life and detach yourself from this unconvincing dream of the earth, and recover your wings that can fly across infinity and pass back into the Power from which you have come. You can raise your flight to that height, and when your heart rises above the unsatisfied beats on earth, it can feel once more the immortal and spiritual joy of a soul that never lost its felicity by coming down to earth and its woes. Raise your heart of love which has fallen into the abyss of desire and moves about in an agitated manner in that gulf. Liberate yourself for ever from Nature's forms and find out what the aimless cycles of Time seek to realise in earthly shapes.

"Break your mould of mortality into eternity, melt like lightening into the invisible flame that you really are. O ocean‐like being, draw in and clasp the waves that roll on your bosom and be happy for ever in that all‐encompassing surge. Become one with the stillness of your depths, and in that stillness you shall know the Lover and the Loved who become one discarding what divides you from him. Receive your lover into the boundless Savitri, and merge yourself into the infinite Satyavan. O miracle, cease where you began".

In one sense, the Supreme Being proclaims here the ultimate negation of everything ‐ of this creation, of the human enterprise on earth and the significance of Savitri's role as the Avatar.

http://nextfuture.sriaurobindosociety.org.in/mar07/nfmar07_savitri.htm

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45. Book Eleven – Continued

Savitri has now heard from the figure of the Supreme standing in font of her a most persuasive appeal for relinquishing what she regards as her life's mission. As we have seen, Savitri has been depicted in this epic poem as an incarnation of the Supreme Mother come down on earth to take the evolutionary ascent, now epitomised in man, one step higher ‐ to lift man, and with him evolution itself, one step higher, from the mental to the Supramental stage. This is not the work that can be accomplished by a Vibhuti, by an exceptionally brilliant manifestation of the Supreme in a human being. Such a mission requires the direct descent of the Supreme Consciousness into a human embodiment. But in the speech we have just heard from the Supreme, there is an appeal to Savitri to give up her Avataric mission and return to her original status as the 'partner of the divine's 'unhoured eternity'' and to merge with the Divine as the 'infinity' of his power. During the long colloquy with the God of Death Savitri had to encounter similar appeals, often supported by strong arguments. So encountering a negative attitude is not something new for Savitri. But this time the negation is total and final.

This time the arguments advanced by the wondrous figure of the Supreme, who has replaced the God of Death but who still pursues his agenda as relentlessly as Death did, are quite formidable. The first one is that earth and heaven are destined to remain separated for ever although the earth has always aspired to reach heaven. The second argument is that "A few can climb to an unperishing sun", and that Heaven's call is rare, rarer the heart that heeds; The doors of light are sealed to common mind And earth's needs nail to earth the human mass, Only in an uplifting hour of stress Men answer to the touch of greater things: P. 689

The third argument is that even among those who manage to scale these heights, very few feel comfortable there, and "when the uplifting hour of stress" subsides, they prefer to slide back to "the mud from which they climbed" because they feel comfortable there. The fourth argument is that "Each creature to its appointed task and place/ is bound by his nature's form, his spirit's force/. In other words, man is cast by nature into a certain mould of swarupa and swabhava. It would be difficult to break this settled arrangement made by Nature. The fifth argument is that man, as he is now made, is playing a crucial and indispensable role in the scheme of things. He is now the mediating stair by which the Spirit once awakened in Matter winds its way and gradually learns the difficult task of growing through the difficult intermediate stages until it is

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ready for the glory of the Oversoul. The next argument is that the Inconscient out of which this creation has emerged is unwilling to let man seek his liberation out of her clutches. She has made sure that his mind and heart are forever under her control; she has put severe limits to their growth such that omniscience and omnipotence are for ever beyond his reach. He is even barred from his own inner depths. Therefore, O Savitri, Leave to the circling aeons' tardy pace And to the working of the inconscient Will, Leave to its imperfect light the earthly race: All shall be done by the long act of Time.

P. 691

Man is best left alone to his fate as it will be worked out in her own time by Nature in her wisdom.

Man is not only a helpless creature caught up in Time and space and tied down to his own kind but there is also the soul in him which will one day free him from the cosmic commonalty and raise him to his highest destiny. The suggestion made here is that some day his soul will gain its liberation, while the rest of him will for ever remain what it is already. This is a change that nothing can change.

Then he tries to persuade Savitri to give up her Avataric mission of trying to persuade human nature to change so that man can achieve perfection not only in his inner life but in its outer manifestations through body, life and mind as well. He asks her to withdraw into her luminous self and be one with the infinity of the Divine. She is in reality "the World‐Mother and the Bride", the bride of the Supreme. So long as there is a manifestation, the Satyavan and Savitri as individuals will remain always divided, separated. Savitri can merge only with the infinite Satyavan, and only the boundless Savitri can receive Satyavan into her.

This is almost the final appeal that is made to Savitri to give up her mission. We have seen how in the first phase of this long colloquy, the God of Death was very haughty and dismissive of Savitri. When these tactics failed, the adversary began to confront Savitri with arguments from almost all philosophic positions, from Nihilism to idealism, almost from Sartre to Shankaracharya. Savitri does not dismiss any argument of the God of Death as untenable but points out in each case how one‐sided it is. She confronts the God of Death with a truth which is integral. At a later stage, the God of Death accepts defeat and gives up his case. But very soon, he is replaced with a wonderful image of the Supreme, who is friendly, but he too uses subtle ways of testing Savitri's resolve, as we have seen. His speech which we have just now analysed is his very last attempt to dissuade Savitri. This is a finite world and is destined to remain imperfect and 'anityam' and 'asukham', transient and unhappy, in the words of the Gita. No Avatar can rescue the manifested world from its imperfection.

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We have now reviewed the implications of the long appeal made by the figure of the Supreme to Savitri contained in lines 607 to 755 of Book XI. He makes the apparently irrefutable argument that although the human race is bound to its own kind, the soul of man is greater than his fate. He urges her to withdraw into her luminous soul and thus return to her original might. He reminds her that she is the World Mother and the Bride. He entreats her to rise out of the fruitless yearning of earth's life and pass back into the Power from which she came. This is the same kind of advice which traditionally spirituality gives to all of us suffering mortals. It does not make any difference that Savitri is no ordinary mortal but an Avatar. There is no perfection possible here on earth, so withdraw into the Kingdom of God within you and live there in your soul.

Like a wave in the ocean, be one with the surge of the ocean. In the manifested world, the Lover and the Loved are always separate; they can truly be united only as spirits. "O miracle, where thou beganst, there cease!" is the final word spoken to Savitri by the figure of the Supreme standing by her side.

Savitri is unmoved either by the logic or by the eloquence of the Supreme. She has something say in response to the position that the manifested world is not real but only the spirit is, therefore it does not matter if one withdraws from the manifested world when the going gets tough. She now reveals as it were the metaphysical foundation for her faith in the manifested world. She says: "In vain are you tempting two spirits with bliss saved out of a suffering world.

My soul and Satyavan's are linked indissolubly for the one task for which we have taken birth on earth.

In vain thou temptst with solitary bliss Two spirits saved out of a suffering world; My soul and his indissolubly linked In the one task for which our lives were born, To raise the world to God in deathless Light, To bring God down to the world on earth we came, To change the earthly life to life divine.

P. 692

"There is one task for which we have taken birth here ‐‐ to raise the world to God in deathless light. We have to bring down God's perfection down to the world and thus to change the imperfect, human life swaddled by death, desire and incapacity to life divine, to a life of perfection, characterised by immortality, bliss and power. I am firm in my resolve and will always hold on to will to save the world and man. O blissful Godhead, even the charm of enchanting voice cannot take control of my will and snare it. I shall not abandon the earth to gain other worlds, however happy they may be.

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"How do you think this world has come into manifestation? There has always dwelt in men and things the Eternal's vast Idea (the Real‐Idea or a creative Knowledge‐Will, a truth that will be self‐effective) and his dynamic Will. It was because of this that this vast creation began and the manifestation has come so far. Otherwise from where else could have come about this vain wilderness of stars, these mighty, bare revolutions of the sun?

(The implication here is that all this is intended by the Divine and therefore this vast, inexplicable universe has come about, with so many things about it we cannot easily comprehend. This idea is further expressed in a most poetic way in the following lines.)

Who made the soul of futile life in Time, Planted a purpose and a hope in the heart, Set Nature to a huge and meaningless task Or planned her million‐aeoned effort's waste?

What force condemned to birth and death and tears These conscious creatures crawling on the globe?

P. 692

"Who made the soul, (which is eternal and immortal) in the otherwise futile life which begins and ends in time? Who planted a purpose, this aspiration and hope in the human heart ("the divination of Godhead, the impulse towards perfection, the search after pure Truth and unmixed bliss, the sense of a secret immortality" Ref. The Life Divine by Sri Aurobindo: page 1)?

Who set Nature to a huge and seemingly meaningless task of manifesting such a vast and complex creation, or who planned this wasteful effort of Nature which has been going on for so many aeons and which might continue for several aeons more? Who or what force condemned to birth, tears and death all these conscious creatures crawling, running about or flying or walking on this globe? The answer of course is obvious ‐ the Divine Creator, who is also the Lord‐dancer on the stage of this universe, inviting all of us to participate in the ecstatic play.

(These few lines we have just examined remind us of a splendid poem by Sri Aurobindo which makes us gallop to its anapaestic measure (anapaest is a metrical foot consisting of two short syllables followed by one long syllable or of two unstressed syllables followed by one stressed syllable: for example the word unaware). I shall reproduce here just two stanzas from this poem entitled "Who", written by Sri Aurobindo even before he came to Pondicherry.

In the blue of the sky, in the green of the forest Whose is the hand that painted the glow?

When the winds were asleep in the wombs of the ether, Who was it roused them and bade them to blow?

He is lost in his heart, in the cavern of Nature, He is found in the brain where be builds up the thought:

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In the pattern of and bloom of the flowers He is woven, In the luminous net of the star he is caught.

SABCL, Vol.5, p. 40

The next few lines take up an idea that was first raised by the figure of the Supreme and then dismissed as not of much consequence If earth can look up to the light of heaven And hear an answer to her lonely cry, Not vain their meeting, nor heaven's touch a snare.

P. 692

"If earth can look up to the light of heaven and receive a response to her lonely cry, their meeting can not be considered vain, nor can the touch of heaven be regarded as a snare."

This seems to be a rejoinder to the following lines from the figure of the Supreme which describes the contact of heaven and earth as not being very fruitful. I shall quote those very lines in which he says this: Heaven and earth towards each other gaze Across a gulf that few can cross, none touch, Arriving through a vague ethereal mist Out of which all things form that move in space, The shore that all can see but never reach.

P. 688

The next few lines from Savitri are among the most crucial lines in the epic poem Savitri.

If thou and I are true, the world is true; Although thou hide thyself behind thy works, To be is not a senseless paradox; Since God has made earth, earth must make in her God; What hides within her breast she must reveal.

I claim thee for the world that thou hast made.

Pp. 692‐93

"If you and I are true, then the world also must be true. It can't be a falsehood, a mere illusion, although you hide yourself behind your works. In this creation, we see the works of the Creator but not the Creator himself. The creator has become the creation from a part of his own being.

God has made this earth: God has become this earth and so God is bound to emerge out of this earth. After all God hides in the breast of this creation, and so the earth must reveal what she

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already has hidden in her. All I am doing here is to claim you for the world you have created out of yourself."

(The supposedly predominant Indian view of this world, at least according to the Western understanding of it, is that Brahman or the Supreme divine Consciousness alone is real and the world is an illusion and a mithya. Sri Aurobindo is totally opposed to this view articulated most vigorously by an Advaitic creed associated with Shankaracharya and his followers. Sri Aurobindo holds that the world is real because it is the becoming of the Supreme Divine. It is not a creation in the sense a potter creates a pot and the pot is separated from the potter in substance and existence but is casually dependent on the creator. Sri Aurobindo uses the word "manifestation" in place of "creation" because the former implies that the product, the world, is inherent in the producer. If the world is of the very substance of the Supreme Divine, who is real, then world is also inescapably real. The normal theistic conception of creation ex nihilo (from or out of Nothing) is unacceptable to Sri Aurobindo because it would make Nothing a second reality alongside the creator. Sri Aurobindo rejects Shankarite Mayavada because, according to him, not only is it unsound in its metaphysics, but it also fails to attach any value to our life in the world.

Because of the excessive prestige accorded to the school of Shankaracharya in the West, Mayawada, this stereotyped view of Indian philosophy is prevalent in India as well as outside India. This view, as we have seen, is characterised by the position that the world is an illusion and the Brahman alone is real. Any action in an illusory world is of no significance and the only worthwhile action is that which enables one to develop a thorough distaste for the world and encourages one to escape from it. Therefore according to this view nothing needs be done to develop the world in its own terms, and there can be no progress in society. Sri Aurobindo's The Life Divine denies this position and argues against it extensively. The arguments that move Sri Aurobindo more deeply are the arguments which arise from the effect of the mayawada on the values of a society. He points out that the belief in the world as an illusion can bring about a weakening of the life‐impulse and an increasing littleness of its motives. At best it leads to an absorption in an ordinary narrow living. Mayawada does not support the great progressive human idealism by which we are spurred to a collective self‐development. Sri Aurobindo provides a positive programme in contrast to mayawada in which the world and each being living in it is thoroughly real, intrinsically valuable, and progressing toward greater value. This much should suffice at the moment on the significance of Sri Aurobindo's insistence that the world is real. We may have to return to this central issue in Sri Aurobindo's philosophy at some later sage.)

Then Savitri continues and presents another principal doctrine associated with Sri Aurobindo.

If man lives bound by his humanity, If he is tied for ever to his pain,

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Let a greater being then arise from man, The superhuman with the Eternal mate And the Immortal shine through earthly forms.

Else were creation vain and this great world A nothing that in Time's moments seems to be.

P. 693

Savitri now turns to another point raised by the figure of the Supreme earlier. He had said that man is irreplaceable on the evolutionary ladder, because he is now the mediating stair "By which the spirit awake in Matter winds/Accepting the circuits of the middle way". In reply Savitri now says that if for whatever reason man is bound for ever to his humanity, and if he is for ever bound to pain, "Let a greater being then arise from man", so that this superhuman being arising out of man can carry on the evolutionary torch further until the Immortal divine shines through earthly forms.

Savitri is suggesting here that if man cannot hold within himself the greater consciousness called the Supermind, let there be a new successor to man who will have the capacity to hold this new consciousness. This has often happened during the course of evolution. When a higher form of consciousness than that capable of functioning in the vegetable kingdom had to descend on earth, the world of sentient life (animal life‐form) evolved here and with that animal life flourished here. When it was time for the Mental consciousness to come down in its full measure, the animal world until then was found inadequate and the human being appeared on the scene. Similarly if for whatever reason the present human species proves incapable of receiving the Supermind, a successor to man, a form superior to him, will appear on the scene.

Else were creation vain and this great world A nothing that in Time's moments seems to be.

P. 693

If this consummation does not happen, then this creation which has come thus far will be in vain and this great world which exists in time will have no issue, or final resolution. But I am sure, she says, that this shall not happen.

But I have seen through the insentient mask; I have felt a secret spirit stir in things Carrying the body of the growing God: It looks through veiling forms at veilless truth; It pushes back the curtain of the gods; It climbs towards its own eternity.

P. 693

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"But I have seen", says Savitri, "through the mask of the insentience that covers the evolving spirit. I have sensed a secret stir in the spirit carrying the body of the growing body of the God. It looks through the veiling forms at the truth that is unconcealed. It is impatient to push back the curtain put over by the Gods, to climb back to its own eternity, to its own perfect manifestation on earth." http://nextfuture.sriaurobindosociety.org.in/apr07/nfapr07_savitri.htm

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46. Book Eleven – Continued

The figure of the Supreme standing besides Savitri tries to dissuade her one more time. He already knows who Savitri is and has seen how adamantine is her resolve to enable earth to grow into the Divine perfection. Her one strong argument is that since “God has made earth”, (God has become earth,) earth must remake itself into God. The tussle now seems to be between Being and its Becoming. The God asks Savitri to go back to her original Being, O flame, withdraw into thy luminous self.

Or else return to thy original might On a seer‐summit above thought and world; Partner of my unhoured eternity, Be one with the infinity of my power P. 691

But Savitri argues that this creation is real, and what is already hidden in the earth’s breast, the earth must have the freedom to reveal. If man is too bound by his humanity, If he is tied for ever to his pain, Let a greater being then arise from man, The superhuman with the Eternal mate And the Immortal shine through earthly forms.

P. 693

The God standing by her side now makes one last attempt to dissuade Savitri from pursuing her goal. He says to her: “O living power of divine creativity manifest in the world, you can indeed create all that the spirit has dreamed; you are indeed the force by which I made these worlds. You are my vision, my will and my voice. You are the power which executes my will, and you are my voice and through you I express myself. But you have knowledge as well; you know the world‐plan and you also know at what a slow pace Time moves.

“In the intensity of the drive of your passionate heart and in your zeal to redeem man and earth, do not be impatient with the obstacles placed by time and with the slow pace at which evolution puts its lazy steps. Do not challenge the spirit in this ignorant world to dare too soon the adventure of the Light; do not prod the bound and slumbering godhead in man and wake him up since he will then find himself in the endless realms of the unknown and unseen beyond

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the last limits of the limiting mental consciousness. Do not push man beyond the perilous border into the Superconscient’s realm and into the danger of the Infinite.

“But if you are unwilling to wait for Time and God, then you can do your work and force your will on Fate. But this is not where you can make that great choice and alter fate. This is not where the Supreme Voice can give its sanction to your choice. But for that you will have to climb on a ladder of greater worlds where no world can be. So far, I have been taking you through my symbol kingdoms, first through the dark night of negation, and then through the twilit worlds of doubts and dreams, and even now you are in my symbol world of absolute and pure day. I am now releasing you from all these symbol worlds.

“The realms in which Greater Life reveals its mystery and miracle, or the summits of the mental region, or the magic worlds where the subtle physical hides its bright secrecies – these are not the realms in which the Eternal’s command joining the issue of destiny to its origin can be heard. Because these regions are only the mediating links; they do not have the originating vision, nor can they take the action which takes this world to its fulfilment, or provide the support that holds perpetually the cosmic pile of this creation.

“There are two powers that hold the two ends of this create on Time; these are the Spirit that foresees everything and Matter that brings into manifestation the thoughts of the Spirit.

Matter is the dumb executor of all the decrees of God or the Spirit; it does so without leaving out even an iota or a dot. It is an agent who doesn’t question. Although it is Inconscient and bare, it brings into manifestation through evolution the content which is bequeathed to it as its charge by the Divine – his intentions in Time and Space, in inanimate things as well as in animate beings. Matter fulfils without changing anything the task given to it, it does not cancel even a small part of what is done. It does not deviate even one bit the fiat of the Divine; it does not change the steps of the unseen.

“If you wish to liberate man and earth, ascend to the heights of the Spirit and from there look down on life and discover the truth of God and man and the world. Only then, seeing all and knowing all, do what you propose to do. But first of all, rise O Soul, into your timeless self; and from there decide how to change destiny and then stamp your will on it.”

It should be noted here that much of this is really not new to Savitri, nor does this in any way a contradict Savitri. Savitri knows who she really is, and she has been through an intense tapasya prior to the day on which Satyavan was destined to die. Her inner spiritual resources are all easily accessible to her now. She has already discovered the Cosmic Spirit and attained the Cosmic Consciousness as we saw in Canto Seven of Book VII. So Savitri is ready even to ascend into her timeless self.

Besides, as mentioned above, the god is trying to be helpful in the speech we just had from him. He frees her from all the heaven‐worlds which he had imposed on her during their

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journey. He tells her also what she must do to stamp her will on Fate and Time. He admits that Matter is bound to execute all that the Spirit wills. Matter may look dumb and even Inconscient but it does not alter in any way the obligation on it to execute what the Spirit wills without leaving out even an iota or dot.

Two are the Powers that hold the ends of Time; Spirit foresees, Matter unfolds its thought, The dumb executor of God's decrees, Omitting no iota and no dot, Agent unquestioning, inconscient, stark, Evolving inevitably a charged content, Intention of his force in Time and Space, In animate beings and inanimate things; Immutably it fulfils its ordered task, It cancels not a tittle of things done; P. 694

If Savitri is convinced that it is the Spirit’s design or plan to bring perfection to man on earth, then nothing can stop this from happening. It must be noted that this is the speech of the so‐ called adversary of Savitri, who has now appeared by her side in the wondrous form of the supreme – the place occupied earlier by the God of death before he was vanquished by Savitri.

As soon as the god ended and the sounds gave way to silence, a power went forth and shook the founded spheres and loosed the stakes that hold the tents of form. Savitri was now freed from the hold of vision and the coverings of thought, and the heaven‐worlds around Savitri vanished like in the spiritual light in the vast theatre of Space.

Then there was a movement all around, a cry, a word was heard beginningless in its vast discovery and timeless in its return beyond the range of thought. Savitri hears the eternal Thought set in the rhythm of the calm seas and vibrating ineffably in orbits beyond Space and on the roads of the timeless. Savitri now lived fulfilled in an ineffable world.

She felt that she was the energy of the Sat‐Chit‐Ananda and dwelt in a measureless Reality as a rapture, a being, a force, a many‐motioned and interlinked fullness; she felt that she was a luminous spouse of the Divine extending a vast embrace in which all are held in the immense Divine delight, bearing the eternity of spirit, bearing the burden of universal love – a wonderful mother of innumerable souls. She felt she knew all things, imagined or willed. Her ear was now receptive to the ideal sound; her sight was no more bound to the convention of form. Her heart, she felt, had become a thousand doors of oneness. She saw a sanctuary of brooding light and on the other side of which was the beyond.

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Then paused the enormous fiat in its formidable movement. Silence with all that it contained rolled back in the Unknowable. Savitri was absolutely still. She transcended within herself the phenomenon of form. Even that radiant god standing by her side was not to be seen any more. Savitri felt that around her there lived a tremendous spirit like a mysterious flame around a melting pearl. In that phantom‐like atmosphere, with even Space abolished, there was a voice speaking words which the ears could not hear. Now Savitri has to face the ultimate test of her resolve to go beyond the goal of personal salvation, peace, silence and bliss for herself. She has rejected this ideal for a nobler ideal for keeping working on earth with Satyavan as her companion until she can convince humanity of the need to rise to a higher consciousness and bring that consciousness down to make human life here perfect. But so far the choice that Savitri had made was theoretical, in the realm of ideals. But now the God confronts her with a most tempting offer which will have immediate practical consequences.

The God is willing to offer her a great choice, which in fact turns out to be four choices or in the form of boons. But it is important to note that Savitri has a choice in each case. Nothing is thrust on her without her consent. What does the God offer? As the first boon, he offers her Peace and a most happy cessation of being.

Choose, spirit, thy supreme choice not given again; For now from my highest being looks at thee The nameless formless peace where all things rest.

In a happy vast sublime cessation know,— An immense extinction in eternity, A point that disappears in the infinite,— Felicity of the extinguished flame, Last sinking of a wave in a boundless sea, End of the trouble of thy wandering thoughts, Close of the journeying of thy pilgrim soul.

P. 696

The Voice said, “Choose, O spirit, this choice will not be given again. For now I am speaking to you from the highest heights of my being. I offer you the peace that is beyond name and form, the peace in which all things come to rest. In a happy vast sublime cessation of being you will know what felicity of extinguished flame is – the immense extinction in eternity, a point that disappears in eternity. It is like the sinking of a wave in a limitless sea, the end of the trouble of all wandering thoughts, the end of the journey of your pilgrim soul. Accept, O music, that the notes of music which life is producing for you have become weary, O stream, the banks of the channel through which you flow are already breached and broken.”

The moments fade into eternity, and there is some yearning within a bosom unknown, and Savitri feels this and her heart silently replied: “Your peace, O Lord, give me your peace as a

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boon to keep within for the magnificent soul of man struggling amid the roar and ruin of wild Time, give me your calm, O lord, which brings your joy with it.”

This first boon is in essence the boon of Nirvana – the peace beyond name and form, the peace in which all things rest, the feeling of felicity at the sublime extinction of a flame. This is like the sinking of a wave into a limitless sea. Savitri gratefully accepts the offer of peace but adds an important condition to it. She says give peace to me as “a boon to keep within for the magnificent soul of man struggling here in the roar and ruin of wild time”. She wants the peace and the joy it rings for man who is still leading an anguished life on earth. She wants it to be available to man to pursue his goal of perfection of life on earth.

Limitless like the ocean around a solitary island, the cry of the eternal rose a second time, and the god offered a second boon: Wide open are the ineffable gates in front.

My spirit leans down to break the knot of earth, Amorous of oneness without thought or sign To cast down wall and fence, to strip heaven bare, See with the large eye of infinity, Unweave the stars and into silence pass.

P. 696

“O Savitri, the gates to the ineffable are wide open right in front of you. My spirit leans down to liberate you by breaking the knot of earth that has held you down. Drawn to a oneness without sign or thought, my force shall throw down all walls and fences that separate the earth beings. It will strip heaven bare, so that you can look at the whole thing with the large eye of infinity, and it will unweave the stars and dismantle the creation so that it may pass into silence.” Following these words that were capable of destroying the world, there was an immense pause during which Savitri heard a million creatures cry to her. Through the tremendous stillness of her mind, Savitri spoke: “Give me your oneness, O Lord, your oneness in the many hearts that are turned to me; give to me the sweet infinity of your own numberless souls.”

Savitri wants oneness, not the oneness which annihilates all differences in this world but which is the oneness of the souls, the sweet infinity of many souls coming together.

Then she is offered the third boon: “I spread abroad the refuge of my wings.

Out of its incommunicable deeps My power looks forth of mightiest splendour, stilled

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Into its majesty of sleep, withdrawn Above the dreadful whirlings of the world.”

P. 697 Retreating mightily like a sea in ebb, the great voice swelled a third time in admonition and said, “I spread everywhere the shelter of my wings, and I offer you the refuge of my powerful wings. From its great depths, beyond the reach of any person or thing, my power of utmost splendour looks forth, held still in its majesty of sleep and withdrawn from dreadful whirlings of the world below.” In answer to the voice, there was a sob of things as if to remind Savitri how much this power is needed to overcome all the myriad inadequacies of life on earth everywhere. And passionately Savitri replied: Thy energy, Lord, to seize on woman and man, To take all things and creatures in their grief And gather them into a mother's arms.

P. 697

“Give to me your energy, O Lord, to gather all men and women, and to take all things and creatures in their grief and gather them lovingly like a mother into my arms.” Once again, she accepts the boon to be able to continue with her mission on earth.

Solemn and distant like the note of an angel’s lyre, the warning sound was heard one last great time. It said, “I open to you the wide eyes of my solitude to reveal to you the sheer rapture of my bliss, where it lies in a pure and perfect hush, unmoving in a trance of ecstasy. There it was resting from the sweet madness of the dance from which the creative throb of hearts was first born.” A hymn of great adoration climbed like a musical beat of winged uniting souls breaking the silence with this appeal. In an immense yearning, Savitri’s response is: Thy embrace which rends the living knot of pain, Thy joy, O Lord, in which all creatures breathe, Thy magic flowing waters of deep love, Thy sweetness give to me for earth and men.

P. 697

“Give me your embrace, O lord, which takes away the living knot of pain, your bliss in which all creatures breathe, the magic flowing waters of love. Give me all your sweetness for earth and for men and women living on it.”

Before I conclude, I would like to comment briefly on this episode of the four boons, or the choices given to Savitri four times and her responses to these. In the original Mahabharata story as narrated by Vyasa, during the colloquy between Yama and Savitri, Yama is greatly impressed by Savitri’s knowledge of Dharma, her cultured manner of speaking and her

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language, even her polished diction. So pleased is he with Savitri for these extraordinary accomplishments of hers that he urges Savitri to seek from him a boon asking for anything she wants except Satyavan’s life. Savitri asks for the restoration of the eye‐sight for the father of Satyavan, Dyumatsena. Yama grants this but he is not satisfied. He asks her to seek from him another boon, and then another and then another, until he ends up giving her four boons. For a second boon, Savitri asks that Dyumatsena’s lost kingdom be restored to him. By the third boon, she asks that her sonless father be granted a hundred valiant sons. Then Yama encourages her to ask for a fourth boon. Savitri then says: “By our union, mine with Satyavan, let there be a hundred sons, noble and heroic in deed, well‐born, extending the glory of the house.” Then when Yama realises that Savitri cannot have the sons he had bestowed on her by his fourth boon, except through Satyavan, he bestows on her the fifth boon – that of Satyavan’s life. And with that Satyavan is restored to life.

Unlike Yama in Vyasa’s Mahabharata story, the God of Death in Sri Aurobindo’s legend is the quintessential Adversary. His aim is to thwart Savitri’s enterprise, so, as we have seen, he keeps opposing Savitri with all his power and with all the intellectual resources he can muster. But he is finally vanquished by Savitri, and he disappears and his place is taken by the enchanting figure of the Supreme God. When arguments and persuasion fail to have any effect on Savitri, he tries to win her over to his side by offering these four boons we discussed in this instalment.

Savitri doesn’t ask for these boons, the God offers this choice. In the Mahabharata story, it is Yama’s feeling that Savitri might go back satisfied with what he has to offer her as his boons.

Besides, he genuinely likes her and admires her for her learning and for her virtuousness and understanding of Dharma. He wouldn’t like to send her back empty‐handed. But in Sri Aurobindo’s legend, these boons represent one last attempt to persuade Savitri to give up her commitment to earth and to bringing Divine perfection to it.

It is but natural that the God should offer her what until now has been regarded as the highest rewards of a spiritual life – Nirvana and the blessings that go with it. These are peace, oneness (the annihilation of the sense of the other), energy and bliss. These are no doubt spiritual felicities but with one built‐in drawback to them. They make you escape from life. Savitri would, like to retain these spiritual felicities but turn them to good use in ushering in the age of new consciousness or what Sri Aurobindo has called the Supramental consciousness. If that is done, then these very features will be seen as the features characterising the supramental consciousness. http://nextfuture.sriaurobindosociety.org.in/may07/nfmay07_savitri.htm

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47. Book Eleven – Continued

We have now seen how Savitri makes use of the four boons offered to her by the wondrous figure of the Supreme to further her mission in life; she asks nothing for herself, for what is there in the entire creation which an Avatar would ask for himself/herself except the fulfilment of the mission for which the Avatar has appeared on earth?

Savitri’s choice of the four boons turns out to be somewhat of a climacteric or peak event in this epic poem, since, after that event, the entire tenor of the story changes. The supreme Divine accepts her totally and declares her mission on earth as his mission as well. In the beginning, she had to contend with the attitude of an adversary who as the God of Death used every possible means, including psychological terror and trivialising her most cherished ambition in life, to hinder her and thwart her advancement towards her goal of taking mankind beyond imprisoned in the fish‐bowl of the human mind. When this strategy failed, the God of Death used various kinds of arguments to counter Savitri’s resolve to reach her goal. Savitri won this encounter with the God of Death, and the latter was vanquished and left the scene.

His place is then taken by the wondrous figure of the Supreme who still continues but in a friendly way to dissuade Savitri by describing why and how it is impossible to realise Savitri’s hopes for mankind. He uses the most profound metaphysical arguments hallowed by tradition.

He evens tries to tempt her by offering to create for her and Satyavan a separate heaven.

When none of this has any effect on Savitri, the very drift of the story changes, and he hails her in these words: O beautiful body of the incarnate Word, Thy thoughts are mine, I have spoken with thy voce.

This change in the story comes about soon after Savitri makes her choices for each of the four boons offered to her. Therefore it is necessary to take a good look at this event and to understand the significance of the boons which Savitri chooses.

What Savitri chooses as the boons are all spiritual gifts for “man on earth”. As the first boon, she asks for Thy peace, O Lord, a boon within to keep Amid the roar and ruin of wild Time For the magnificent soul of man on earth.

Thy calm, O Lord, that bears thy hands of joy.

For the second boon, she asks for

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Thy oneness, Lord, in many approaching hearts,

My sweet infinity of thy numberless souls.”

The third boon she asks for is Thy energy, Lord, to seize on woman and man, To take all things and creatures in their grief And gather them into a mother's arms.

The fourth boon she chooses is Thy embrace which rends the living knot of pain, Thy joy, O Lord, in which all creatures breathe, Thy magic flowing waters of deep love, Thy sweetness give to me for earth and men.

Pp. 696‐697

In summary, what Savitri seeks for humanity are the Divine’s peace and calm that bears the hands of joy, the Divine’s oneness with all, the Divine’s energy to gather all suffering creatures in the world as does a mother her children, and the Divine’s embrace which removes all pain so that all creatures can breathe the Divine’s joy and feel the magic flow of the Divine’s love and sweetness.

All these are great spiritual blessings. But the question can be asked why Savitri did not ask from the Divine for man on earth the most important thing for the fulfilment of her avataric mission, the descent of the Supramental consciousness on earth and in man? She was after all born to bring this new consciousness down on earth and establish it here. A short answer to this question is that these great realisations cannot just be gifted away even by the Divine. In the play of the evolution of consciousness, through which the Divine has chosen to uncover Himself stage by stage, there is no place for such magical gifts. Otherwise, all this wonderful drama of the gradual rise of consciousness from the Inconscient to the super‐conscient would not be needed at all. Therefore the possibility of any power just granting such a thing as the Supramental consciousness to man does not arise.

What then are the rules by which the Supreme has decided to play this lila (sport) of his evolutionary drama? It should be pointed out here that the ascent of the consciousness from the mental to the Supramental level represents a steeper climb on the ladder of the evolution of consciousness than was represented by its ascent from the animal to human consciousness.

Besides, such transitions are not undertaken just as an individual’s gain or achievement; the entire human species and the whole of the human nature are going to be affected by this ascent of consciousness. For such a great transition to happen, three things are necessary:

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One, on the part of mankind, an ardent aspiration for the new consciousness and readiness in at least a representative section of humanity to do the tapasya needed to acquire the capacity to receive and hold the new consciousness, Two, the sanction of the Supreme which allows the powers of the Supramental world to respond to the human aspiration, and Three, the presence of the Divine Mother on earth to mediate between the Grace from above and the call from below.

Sri Aurobindo in his book The Mother mentions these three conditions including the importance of the crucial role the Divine Mother plays in this great and difficult thing. He has pointed out that (1) there has to be “a fixed and unfailing aspiration that calls from below”, and (2) there should be “the supreme Grace from above that answers”. It is further specified that the call from below should be strong and should have the will to recognise and not to deny the Light when it comes. But equally important is (3) the presence of the Divine Mother because the power that mediates between the sanction from above and the call from below is the presence and power of the Divine Mother.

Now in our story of Savitri as told by Sri Aurobindo, we have the presence of the Divine Mother in the form of Savitri herself, As Sri Aurobindo has told us, the divine Mother is always present on earth, whether she is recognised or not as an Avatar, whenever a new evolutionary rung is to be scaled, and this time she has descended on earth as Savitri. We have seen how Savitri has struggled against all the odds and impediments which lie in the way of the descent of the new consciousness and how finally she triumphs over death itself. Since we have examined earlier in some detail the great struggle which Savitri wages against the God of Death, we need not elaborate on her contribution to the advent of the new consciousness here.

In addition to this work of Savitri, we have also the tremendous work Aswapathy has done to support Savitri’s cause – that of bringing the new consciousness to earth. For this, on the one hand, he carries the human aspiration all the way to the Divine Mother in the transcendental world (Book III) and, discovers the Supramental consciousness in this realm and aspires to bring it down to earth. Besides, he fights against the adversary forces which are opposed to the descent of the new light or consciousness (Cantos Seven and eight of Book II). We have assumed throughout in this epic, that Aswapathy basically represents Sri Aurobindo himself, his indomitable will, his great tapasya, his great spiritual power. He himself has told us in his autobiographical poem “A God’s Labour” how he “laboured and suffered in Matter’s night to bring the fire to man” and how he in the process had to bear a thousand and one gaping wounds amidst darkness and strife fighting the adversary forces.

This is an aspect of Aswapathy that Vyasa’s Mahabharata legend does not bring out.

Aswapathy in Vyasa’s legend is Savitri’s father; he is a noble, righteous and compassionate

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king. Here in Sri Aurobindo’s treatment of the legend, Aswapathy emerges also as an Avatar.

When the Supramental consciousness comes down, his contribution to this great task will be regarded as important as Savitri’s. That is why sometimes Sri Aurobindo and the Mother are spoken of as the twin Avatars. More about this at some later point in our study.

To return to our main argument: Out of the three conditions needed for the descent of new consciousness, as we have noted, two are fulfilled. The divine Mother is present in the form of Savitri on earth precisely to mediate between the call from below and the Grace from above.

We have also seen that because of the joint efforts of Aswapathy and Savitri, the supreme grace is also ready to come down in the form of the new consciousness. But is man ready to receive it?

Man has remained the main problem for ages now for the advent of the new consciousness, and he is still the almost insurmountable roadblock. This is because in his Inconscient levels of his being he is harbouring many forces which work against this ascent in consciousness. And it is these forces that Aswapathy was trying to quell. Men of God have come down on earth every now and then and shown man the supreme upward way or ways. The best among us heed this call. But after the first few years, we get tired of following the upward way, particularly after those who have shown the upward way depart from this earth. We have already come across this observation made by the wondrous figure of the Divine as an argument against Savitri’s enterprise.

The heroes and the demigods are few To whom the close immortal voices speak And to their acts the heavenly clan are near.

Few are the silences in which Truth is heard, Unveiling the timeless utterance in her deeps; Few are the splendid moments of the seers.

Heaven's call is rare, rarer the heart that heeds; The doors of light are sealed to common mind And earth's needs nail to earth the human mass, Only in an uplifting hour of stress Men answer to the touch of greater things: Or, raised by some strong hand to breathe heaven‐air, They slide back to the mud from which they climbed; In the mud of which they are made, whose law they know They joy in safe return to a friendly base, And, though something in them weeps for glory lost And greatness murdered, they accept their fall.

To be the common man they think the best, To live as others live is their delight.

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For most are built on Nature's early plan And owe small debt to a superior plane; The human average is their level pitch, A thinking animal's material range.

P. 689

Soon after Sri Aurobindo gave up his body on December 5, 1950, the Mother of Sri Aurobindo Ashram gave this as the reason for Sri Aurobindo’s departure from this world: “The lack of receptivity of the earth and men is mostly responsible for the decision Sri Aurobindo has taken regarding his body.” Again, on April 11, 1953, she said, Sri Aurobindo has given up his body in an act of supreme unselfishness, renouncing the realisation in his own body to hasten the hour of the collective realisation. Surely, if the earth were more responsive, this would not have been necessary… (Collected Works of the Mother, Vol. 13. p. 9.)

It would require an elaborate article to explain adequately this quotation from the Mother. I am referring to this quotation and the one before this, and to Sri Aurobindo’s passing in order to give the reader some idea of howSavitri is not only the narration of a story that belongs to the ancient past of this land but how it also symbolically presents the plight of man in our own age and the significance of the advent of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother on earth. The responsiveness of the earth mentioned in the quotation here refers to the capacity of the earth, and in turn of the most advanced being on it, namely, man, to receive the new or the Supramental consciousness.

Preparedness on the part of man in full measure is precisely the one thing that is still lacking and it is something that cannot be gifted away. Man has to earn it through his own sadhana and tapasya. The resources mankind needs for this tapasya are spiritual qualities, nor higher and better intellectual faculties. It is these spiritual qualities that are most needed for man if he has to undergo the triple transformation of psychicisation, spiritualisation and supramentalisation which Sri Aurobindo has mentioned as the prerequisites needed for the descent of the Suprmental consciousness in the human adhara. Only when this triple transformation takes place, would man acquire the capacity to receive the new consciousness that is ready to descend on earth. The spiritual qualities chosen by Savitri as her boons are precisely those which man needs during his hard upward struggle.

Sri Aurobindo has referred to these spiritual powers in a few letters of his to his disciples. In one of them he says: The descent of peace, the descent of Force or Power, the descent of Light, the descent of Ananda, these are the four things that transform the nature. (Letters on yoga; p. 1170)

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Sri Aurobindo mentions in this letter the spiritual qualities needed for the transformation of nature in man. Savitri too asks for the Divine’s peace and calm as the first boon. The second boon of “Divine’s oneness with all” which Savitri seeks for humanity is a characteristic feature of the Supramental consciousness. This can only come as a result of what Sri Aurobindo calls in this letter “the descent of Light”. Aswapathy describes the salient features of this new consciousness when he ascends the Transcendent plane and has a vision of the future. This is described in Canto three entitled “The House of the Spirit and the New Consciousness” of Book III ofSavitri. And one of the most important of these features is Oneness: There Oneness was not tied to monotone; It showed a thousand aspects of itself, Its calm immutable stability Upbore on a changeless ground for ever safe, Compelled to a spontaneous servitude, The ever‐changing incalculable steps, The seeming‐reckless dance's subtle plan Of immense world‐forces in their perfect play.

Appearance looked back to its hidden truth And made of difference oneness' smiling play; It made all persons fractions of the Unique, Yet all were being's secret integers.

All struggle was turned to a sweet strife of love In the harmonised circle of a sure embrace.

Identity's reconciling happiness gave A rich security to difference.

P. 324

Thus the Divine’s oneness which Savitri chooses for man is intended to prepare him to transcend the dividing ego‐consciousness and to ascend to the consciousness where the ego does not figure at all. Until man transcends the Overmental consciousness, the ego‐sense pursues man, and this is basically a separative consciousness. It sees the many but fails to see ‘One’ behind the many. This continues all the way in the ascent of consciousness until man goes beyond the overmental consciousness.

“When the Overmind descends, the predominance of the centralising ego‐sense is entirely subordinated, lost in largeness of being and finally abolished. A wide cosmic perception and feeling of a boundless universal self and movement replaces it: many motions that were formerly egocentric may still continue but they occur as currents or ripples in the cosmic wideness.” (The Life Divine p. 950)

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The third boon Savitri chooses for mankind is the Divine’s energy to gather all suffering creatures in the world as does a mother her children, and the Divine’s embrace which removes all pain. Sri Aurobindo refers to this power in his letter as “the descent Force or Power”. This is characteristically the Mother‐aspect of the Divine, which takes all human beings, however weak and wayward under her wings and gives them protection and grace so that they can grow out of their littleness and limitations. The Mother is the Divine’s executive power; she is therefore called the Consciousness‐Force of the Divine.

The fourth boon Savitri seeks for man is the Divine’s joy and the magic flow of Divine’s love and sweetness. This is basically the spiritual gift of Ananda that Sri Aurobindo refers to in his letter quoted above.

I have tried to show the correspondence between the four boons which Savitri seeks for man and the great inner spiritual qualities mankind needs to carry on its evolutionary growth not only in terms of the liberation and evolution of the soul but also in terms of the liberation and transformation and then the perfection of human nature. Savitri wants to ensure that the conditions for man’s upward evolution not only of his soul but also of his outer Nature are established on earth.

Liberation of the human soul from the hold of Ignorance is the primary goal of all spiritual endeavour. This state, called Moksha, has always been regarded by most varieties of spiritual discipline as the goal of the spiritual quest, as the summum bonum of all spirituality. This is where Sri Aurobindo differs from all other spiritual teachers. He too regards Moksha as a very important realisation, but he regards it only as a condition for achieving a still greater goal – that of achieving the transformation of human nature. This latter goal cannot be achieved except on the foundation of the soul’s liberation.

And this is a difficult goal. The transformation of human nature has so far been regarded as an impossible undertaking. Since it is impossible, it is also impossible to bring perfection to life here on this earth. Sri Aurobindo has pointed out that on the basis of the mental consciousness, one cannot bring about the perfection of human life. It requires a more powerful consciousness, which he has called the Supramental consciousness. To rise to the Supramental consciousness, man needs to undergo a rigorous tapasya, and it is the facilities needed for humanity to undergo this tapasya that Savitri has obtained for man on earth through the four boons she has chosen.

http://nextfuture.sriaurobindosociety.org.in/jun07/nfjun07_savitri.htm

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48. Book Eleven – Continued

We have now reviewed the long colloquy which Savitri had to carry on first with the God of Death, and, after he was vanquished, with the wondrous form of the Divine, who replaced him.

This long colloquy ended with four boons being bestowed on Savitri, by the figure of the divine who seemed to have been very pleased with her. We have now studied the significance of the boons Savitri chose. We move on from that point to a nearly 16‐page long passage (lines 959‐ 1495) which follows. At the beginning of this passage the mysterious form of the Divine reveals himself fully and not only showers his benedictions on Savitri and Satyavan but also reveals to us the significance of the heroic story of Savitri. It is here that we get Sri Aurobindo’s prophetic vision of the future of humanity in a rapturous poetic form.

After Savitri had chosen her final boon, there reigned a profound silence for some time. Then here was heard a blissful voice, calm and serene, like the cry which must have arisen from the Infinite when the first whisperings of delight began to stir its heart. This was like the delight of the primordial creative urge felt by the Infinite when it was moved to manifest in order to have the joy of seeking, discovering and touching the other. It was the blissful laugh which brings the enchanted world into existence. This blissful voice now proclaimed: “O Savitri, O beautiful body of the incarnate Word (creative word: Savitr, (Savita) is the God of illumination, and the word Savitri comes from this. Savitri is here addressed as the divine grace descended here on earth to bring down a new power), these great and wise thoughts you have been speaking out are mine. In fact, I have spoken through your voice. My will is also yours, what you have chosen I too choose. All you have asked I shall give to earth and men. All this shall be written out in destiny’s book by my trustee of thought and plan and act, the executor of my will, eternal Time.

[This is quite a revelation to us readers. We have been given enough evidence in the text to feel that the God of Death was indeed Savitri’s adversary because he uses every strategy he could command to thwart Savitri’s attempt to lead the evolutionary pilgrimage to a higher plane, transcending mind. The God of Death uses various philosophical arguments to show to her what she has in mind is contrary to nature’s laws, not feasible and not worth attempting. We as readers have our sympathies with Savitri most of the time and yet we feel that there is some merit in the argument of the God of Death that human nature cannot be transformed from an animal to a spiritual nature. That is because of the impact on us of the traditional spiritual teaching, which. Traditional teaching says that human nature is governed by the three Gunas – Tamas, Rajas and Sattwa. There is never an equilibrium among these three Gunas and it is always the case that one of the three Gunas is predominant. And if a man tries to be

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really trigunantita, transcend all these three Gunas, he loses control of the terrestrial world, and is lost in the transcendental world. When that happens, the individual can be said to have escaped from the stress and folly of life, but in most cases this leads to an individual escape, leaving the nature of the world essentially unchanged; the world remains unredeemed. How is this to be changed? By not escaping into the transcendental world, but by bringing down the new consciousness on to earth from the transcendental world and under its power to change human nature, so that the Tamas, Rajas and Sattwa are transformed into their equivalents in the dispensation of the Surpramental consciousness.

Man must first cease to be identified with Nature and what causes suffering in Nature, namely, the interaction between the three Gunas. But even if he succeeds in this, it would be only a partial victory according to Sri Aurobindo, because Nature still remains to be conquered. Sri Aurobindo believes that the Nature of the three Gunas is not an original substance but a lower formation of a higher divine Nature – para prakriti. Therefore it should be possible to change the material Nature by replacing the Gunas and their strife by their real counterparts. In The Synthesis of Yoga (pp. 661‐62),he says that the three Gunas stand for the three essential powers of the Divine which are not merely existent in perfect equilibrium of quietude, but unified in a perfect consensus of divine action. If this transformation of the three Gunas is achieved, all limitations and suffering fall away from man.

Tamas can be transformed into a divine calm capable of supporting enormous activity, Rajas can be transformed into a self‐effecting will of the Supreme power, and Sattwa into a self‐ existing light of the divine being. When this transformation takes place, man becomes the swarat (conqueror of self) as well as the samrat (the conqueror of the world). For a person who has reached this stage, there is no need to abandon the world or to escape from it; he continues to be in the world and works for lokasangraha (welfare of the world). Thus we see that Savitri’s mission has a solid basis. Therefore, ultimately, the Divine eagerly accepts her mission as his own mission in the world. With this, we now return to the text at line no, 972.)

“You have refused to enter the realm of my perfect calm, and turned away from my limitless peace in which both Space and Time are abolished, and you have desisted from the happy dissolution of yourself in my solitary, single eternity. You have thus rejected the nameless, world‐less, empty Nihil, because it imposes on one the state of the extinction of one’s living soul, the end of all thought, hope, life and love in the blank measureless Unknowable. In doing this, you have indeed obeyed my eternal will, and therefore I shall take hold of your heart of love, and I shall yoke you to my power of work in Time.

(In doing so, Savitri has shown, as have just seen, that the onward progress of mankind along the evolutionary ladder is more important for her than her own personal Mukti. Savitri has now earned the right to be the Divine’s engine of work in the world, his perfect instrument.)

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“You have obeyed my timeless will, and have chosen to share in the struggle and fate of earth, and have shown so much compassion for earth‐bound human beings. In order to be able to do all this for earth, you have turned away from peace and bliss for yourself. I shall therefore bind your heart with mine and lay the magnificent yoke of my work upon your soul.

“Now I shall do my marvellous works in you. I will fasten your nature with my strength, overwhelm your limbs with my delight and transform you into a living centre of my pervading bliss. I will build in you my proud and lucent home. Your days shall be my shafts of power and light, your nights my mysteries of joy, and all my clouds shall lie tangled in your hair, and all my spring seasons unite in your mouth.

“O Sun‐Word, you shall raise the earth‐soul to the Light Divine and bring down God into the lives of men. (This is the very purpose of Savitri’s incarnation.) Earth shall be my work‐chamber and my home, my garden of life wherein I shall plant a seed of the life divine. When all my work in human time is done, the mind of earth will be a home of light and the life of earth a tree growing naturally towards heaven. The body of earth will be a house of worship.

“Men will wake up from mortal ignorance and will be illumined with the ray of the Eternal Knowledge; their thoughts will be radiant with my sunward thrust; they will feel the sweetness of my love in their heart and will find my miraculous drive in their acts. The execution of my will be the meaning of their days. Men shall thus live for me, by me and in me.

“In the heart of my creation’s mystery I will enact the drama of your soul, inscribe in it the long romance of you and me, Purusha and Prakriti. I shall pursue you across the ages. You will be hunted through the world by love, and you will not be guarded by the protecting veil of ignorance and you will be without cover from the radiant gods. No shape will be able to conceal you from my divine desire; nowhere shall you be able to hide from my questing eyes.

“In the nudity of your discovered self, disrobed of the covering of humanity, divested of the dense veil of human thought, you shall be made one with every mind and body and heart, made one with all Nature, in a bare identity with all that is. I will possess in you my mystic world, I will possess in you my universe and the universe will discover in you all that I am.

“You will endure all things that all things may change; you will fill all with my splendour and my bliss; you will meet all with my transmuting soul. You will be overwhelmed by my infinitudes above and thrilled by my immensities below, you will be pursued by me through my mind’s wall‐less vastness, and become oceanic with the mighty surges of my life in you. You will be like a swimmer submerged like a swimmer between two leaping seas – by my outer pains and inner sweetnesses. Finding my joy in my opposite mysteries, you will respond to me from ever nerve.

(In this paraphrase of these ecstatic poetic lines, you will miss the power of Sri Aurobindo’s poetry. So let me quote a few lines from this section.)

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A vision shall compel thy coursing breath, Thy heart shall drive thee on the wheel of works, Thy mind shall urge thee through the flames of thought, To meet me in the abyss and on the heights, To feel me in the tempest and the calm, And love me in the noble and the vile, In beautiful things and terrible desire.

The pains of hell shall be to thee my kiss, The flowers of heaven persuade thee with my touch.

P. 700

“A vision shall compel you through every breath of yours and drive you on this wheel of works.

Your mind shall urge you through the flames of thought to meet me in the abyss and on the heights, feel me in the tempest and in the calm, and love me in the noble and the vile, and desire me in things beautiful and terrible. The pains of hell shall be to you my fiery kiss; the flowers of heaven persuade you with my touch.

My fiercest masks shall my attractions bring.

Music shall find thee in the voice of swords, Beauty pursue thee through the core of flame.

Thou shalt know me in the rolling of the spheres And cross me in the atoms of the whirl.

The wheeling forces of my universe Shall cry to thee the summons of my name.

Delight shall drop down from my nectarous moon, My fragrance seize thee in the jasmine's snare, My eye shall look upon thee from the sun.

Mirror of Nature's secret spirit made, Thou shalt reflect my hidden heart of joy, Thou shalt drink down my sweetness unalloyed In my pure lotus‐cup of starry brim.

My dreadful hands laid on thy bosom shall force Thy being bathed in fiercest longing's streams.

Thou shalt discover the one and quivering note, And cry, the harp of all my melodies, And roll, my foaming wave in seas of love.

P. 700

“My most compelling attractions will come to you wearing masks most fierce. Music will greet you in the clang of the swords, and you will find beauty in the heart of the flame. You will know

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me in the rolling of the spheres and meet me in the atoms as they whirl. The wheeling forces of my universe shall cry to you the summons of my name. Delight shall flow down from my nectarous moon and in the enchantment of the jasmine shall my fragrance seize you. My eyes shall look upon you from the sun. You will become a mirror of the secret spirit of nature; you will reflect my hidden heart of joy. You will drink down my sweetness unmixed in my pure lotus cup with the starry brim. My hands shall be on your bosom and compel your being to be bathed in the streams of the fiercest longing. You will discover the one and quivering note and cry. As like the waves in the sea you will roll on in my foaming sea of love.

Even in disaster will you see the contrary shape of my rapture. My secret face will smile on you through the heart of pain. Amidst all the intolerable wrongs of the world my ruthless beauty shall press upon you. Even when trampled by the violent misdeeds of Time, you will feel the touch of my rapture and respond to its ecstasy.

“All beings shall be my emissaries to your life. Whether they see me in you as your friend or enemy, my creatures shall be either themselves attracted to me or compelled to meet me.

They shall demand me from your heart. You will not be able to draw away from any soul. To all shall you be helplessly attracted.

“On seeing you, men shall feel the touch of hands of joy and even in the pangs of sorrow feel the steps of the world’s delight; your life shall be Their life shall experience a tumultuous shock in the mutual craving of the two opposites, sorrow and happiness. Hearts touched by your love shall answer to my call; they shall discover the ancient music of the spheres in the revealing notes of your voice. Because you exist they will all draw nearer to me. Enthralled by the loveliness of your spirit , they shall truly embrace my body in your soul, hear in your life the beauty of my laugh and experience the thrilled bliss I made the worlds.

All that thou hast, shall be for others' bliss, All that thou art, shall to my hands belong.

I will pour delight from thee as from a jar, I will whirl thee as my chariot through the ways, I will use thee as my sword and as my lyre, I will play on thee my minstrelsies of thought.

And when thou art vibrant with all ecstasy, And when thou liv'st one spirit with all things, Then will I spare thee not my living fires, But make thee a channel for my timeless force.

My hidden presence led thee unknowing on From thy beginning in earth's voiceless bosom Through life and pain and time and will and death, Through outer shocks and inner silences

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Along the mystic roads of Space and Time To the experience which all Nature hides.

Who hunts and seizes me, my captive grows: This shalt thou henceforth learn from thy heart‐beats.

For ever love, O beautiful slave of God! O lasso of my rapture's widening noose, Become my cord of universal love.

The spirit ensnared by thee force to delight Of creation's oneness sweet and fathomless, Compelled to embrace my myriad unities And all my endless forms and divine souls.

O Mind, grow full of the eternal peace; O Word, cry out the immortal litany: Built is the golden tower, the flame‐child born.

Pp. 701‐02

“All that you have shall serve for the bliss of others, and all that you are shall belong to my hands. I will pour out delight on the world from you as from a jar; I shall use you as my chariot and whirl you through the pathways of he universe. I shall use you as my sword as well as my lyre and will play on you my songs of thought. And when you are vibrant with sheer ecstasy, and when you begin to live as one spirit with all things, then will I heap on you all my living fires and make you a perfect channel for my timeless force. It is my hidden presence that has led you on without your being aware of it, from the very beginning in the mute bosom of the earth through all the vicissitudes of life and pain, and time and will and death – through all the outer shocks and inner silences along the mystic roads of Space and Time – to the experience of the fulfilment of Divine manifestation on earth which all nature is busy hiding.

“Whoever pursues me and seizes me becomes my prisoner. This you will learn henceforth from your very heart‐beats. O beautiful slave of God! You are indeed the lasso (the widening noose of a rope used especially for catching horses and cattle) of rapture’s widening noose, become my spiritual bond of universal love; capture and bind the whole world with it. Force to delight the spirit ensnared by you in the sweet fathomless oneness of creation; compel it to embrace my myriad unities and my endless forms and divine souls.

O Mind, grow full of the eternal peace; O Word, cry out the immortal litany: Built is the golden tower, the flame‐child born.

P. 702

These lines carry a force that can be palpably felt if they are read out properly. The intensity of a thrilled delight emanating from these lines brings you a living experience. As reported in The

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Mother’s Agenda Vol. 2, (pages 27‐28) the Mother (of Sri Aurobindo Ashram) has said that she lived the experiences conveyed by these lines as she read them. And about the following lines in particular: For ever love, O beautiful slave of God! O lasso of my rapture's widening noose, Become my cord of universal love.

P. 702

She has said, “And when I came to this particular line… I was as if I was suddenly swept up and engulfed in eternal truth. Everything was abolished except this: “For ever love, O beautiful slave of God”. This line, she has said, gave her the most overpowering experience of the entire book.

Take note also of the last line: “Built is the golden tower, the flame‐child born.” The “golden tower” here refers to the tower of truth, the truth of the Supramental world, and “the flame‐ child” refers to the new creation.

http://nextfuture.sriaurobindosociety.org.in/july07/july07.pdf

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49. Book Eleven – Continued

For ever love, O beautiful slave of God! O lasso of my rapture's widening noose, Become my cord of universal love.

These were some of the lines with which we concluded the previous instalment. Recall that we characterised them as very special. As it was pointed out, the Mother of Sri Aurobindo Ashram was especially struck by these lines. This is what she said about one particular line in this excerpt: “And when I came to this particular line, it was as if I was suddenly swept up and engulfed in eternal truth. Everything was abolished except this: “For ever love, O beautiful slave of God””. This line, she has said, gave her ‘the most overpowering experience of the entire book’.

This “most overpowering experience” is the experience of being a captive slave of the Divine.

This can be described as the highest siddhi of the yoga of a total surrender to the Divne, the siddhi that both Sri Aurobindo had as he reveals in his Record of Yoga, a sort of logbook he maintained for several years to record the progress of his own yoga. The first entry in this record is dated 17 June 1909, and the last entry is dated 31 October 1927. For eighteen years from time to time, he made entries into this diary regarding his experiments, and progress in his yoga, Let us take close look once again at these lines and the entire passage in which they are set in so that we understand their significance fully. Scholars1 have now shown that the first draft of what eventually became the epic Savitri was written by Sri Aurobindo in 1916. At that time the poem had about 800 lines; Sri Aurobindo worked on it some more and by 1918, it had become a narrative poem of about 2000 lines. He did not return to it until about 1928 He then took up this poem once again, and kept revising it until 1950 (until a couple of weeks before he left his body) and now it has become a vast epic with 30 times as many lines (23817 lines) as the first draft of 1916 had (800 lines). But it is interesting to note that the phrase, “slave of God” occurred in the first draft as well. The passage then had 32 lines, most of which are found in the present version as well with some changes in their order and wording. The passage I propose to study here is reproduced below in its present form.

Mirror of Nature's secret spirit made, Thou shalt reflect my hidden heart of joy, Thou shalt drink down my sweetness unalloyed

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In my pure lotus‐cup of starry brim.

My dreadful hands laid on thy bosom shall force Thy being bathed in fiercest longing's streams.

Thou shalt discover the one and quivering note, And cry, the harp of all my melodies, And roll, my foaming wave in seas of love.

Even my disasters' clutch shall be to thee The ordeal of my rapture's contrary shape: In pain's self shall smile on thee my secret face: Thou shalt bear my ruthless beauty unabridged Amid the world's intolerable wrongs, Trampled by the violent misdeeds of Time Cry out to the ecstasy of my rapture's touch.

All beings shall be to thy life my emissaries; Drawn to me on the bosom of thy friend, Compelled to meet me in thy enemy's eyes, My creatures shall demand me from thy heart.

Thou shalt not shrink from any brother soul.

Thou shalt be attracted helplessly to all.

Men seeing thee shall feel my hands of joy, In sorrow's pangs feel steps of the world's delight, Their life experience its tumultuous shock In the mutual craving of two opposites.

Hearts touched by thy love shall answer to my call, Discover the ancient music of the spheres In the revealing accents of thy voice And nearer draw to me because thou art: Enamoured of thy spirit's loveliness They shall embrace my body in thy soul, Hear in thy life the beauty of my laugh, Know the thrilled bliss with which I made the worlds.

All that thou hast, shall be for others' bliss, All that thou art, shall to my hands belong.

I will pour delight from thee as from a jar, I will whirl thee as my chariot through the ways, I will use thee as my sword and as my lyre, I will play on thee my minstrelsies of thought.

And when thou art vibrant with all ecstasy, And when thou liv'st one spirit with all things, Then will I spare thee not my living fires,

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But make thee a channel for my timeless force.

My hidden presence led thee unknowing on From thy beginning in earth's voiceless bosom Through life and pain and time and will and death, Through outer shocks and inner silences Along the mystic roads of Space and Time To the experience which all Nature hides.

Who hunts and seizes me, my captive grows: This shalt thou henceforth learn from thy heart‐beats.

For ever love, O beautiful slave of God! Savitri, pp. 700‐702 Compared to the extensive revisions and expansions other passages in Savitri have received, in Sri Aurobindo’s quest for a mantric expression, the passage cited above shows that it has received only minor modifications in this process ‐‐ an addition of about 20 lines and some change in the order and wording of some of the lines. That must be because while revising them he must have found that these lines already had the revelatory or mantric power he was aiming at. Secondly, the experience these lines describe are so basic to Sri Aurobindo’s conception of Savitri, and this conceptiondid not undergo any change in the process of the revision of the poem. Now what is the crucial experience that these lines convey?

In Book XI of Savitri, we have the concluding part of a long colloquy which Savitri had first with the God of Death, and when he was vanquished, it continued with the wondrous form of the Godhead who appeared in his place. Now in this particular section with which we are now dealing, the figure of the godhead has been completely won over by Savitri, and he now pours on her his benedictions. Notice that when the colloquy first began, the God of Death, who sounded and acted hostile to her, had addressed her as “a slave of Nature”. The actual wording is: “Unclasp”, it cried, “Thy passionate influence and relax, O slave of Nature,” (page 575) Now towards the conclusion of this colloquy Savitri is being addressed as a “beautiful slave God”.

Now who is a slave of Nature? And how does such a person become a slave of God? Man, as he is today, is a slave of Nature. He is totally immersed in ignorance and is tied like a sacrificial beast to Nature. The ego‐self is the hall mark of this state in which he is forever tossed about by the play of the three gunas – Sattwa, Rajas and Tamas. He is lashed by desires, imprisoned in this ignorance, and is totally at the mercy of Death. This miserable condition of man is described contemptuously by Death in these words: A fragile miracle of thinking clay, Armed with illusions walks the child of Time.

To fill the void around he feels and dreads,

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The void he came from and to which he goes, He magnifies his self and names it God. P. 586 Of course Savitri never was in such a pitiable situation. She was an Avatar and had taken a human embodiment. The God of Death does not know this and he treats her as a representative of mankind, and therefore he calls her a “slave of nature”.

How does a slave of Nature become transformed into a slave of God? Savitri had become a slave of God through a long and arduous yogic sadhana, described in Book VII of Savitri. In fact, Savitri did not to have to go through the preliminary steps of the yoga; she was already on a very high rung of what Sri Aurobindo has called integral Yoga even from the beginning. A glimpse of this can be had from Canto Two of Book I, which gives us a glimpse of Savitri’s inner being on the morning of the day on which Satyavan was going to die.

A wide self‐giving was her native act; A magnanimity as of sea or sky Enveloped with its greatness all that came And gave a sense as of a greatened world: Her kindly care was a sweet temperate sun, Her high passion a blue heaven's equipoise.

As might a soul fly like a hunted bird, Escaping with tired wings from a world of storms, And a quiet reach like a remembered breast, In a haven of safety and splendid soft repose One could drink life back in streams of honey‐fire, Recover the lost habit of happiness, Feel her bright nature's glorious ambience, And preen joy in her warmth and colour's rule.

A deep of compassion, a hushed sanctuary, Her inward help unbarred a gate in heaven; Love in her was wider than the universe, The whole world could take refuge in her single heart….

At once she was the stillness and the word, A continent of self‐diffusing peace, An ocean of untrembling virgin fire; The strength, the silence of the gods were hers.

In her he found a vastness like his own, His high warm subtle ether he refound And moved in her as in his natural home.

In her he met his own eternity.

Pp. 15‐16

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The details of the yogic path she followed are described in Book VII where the three peak experiences of her yoga are all described ‐‐ her realisation of the psychic being and the self (described in Canto Five), her experience of Nirvana and of the All‐Negating Absolute (described in Canto Six), and her discovery of the Cosmic Spirit and her attainment of the Cosmic Consciousness (described in Canto Seven). Here, we shall briefly look at one such peak experience of hers – her identification with the Cosmic Consciousness: She was a subconscient life of tree and flower, The outbreak of the honied buds of spring; She burned in the passion and splendour of the rose, She was the red heart of the passion‐flower, The dream‐white of the lotus in its pool.

Out of subconscient life she climbed to mind, She was thought and the passion of the world's heart, She was the godhead hid in the heart of man, She was the climbing of his soul to God. The cosmos flowered in her, she was its bed.

She was Time and the dreams of God in Time; She was Space and the wideness of his days.

From this she rose where Time and Space were not; The superconscient was her native air, Infinity was her movement's natural space; Eternity looked out from her on Time.

P. 557

The three limbs of the personal effort required in integral yoga are aspiration, rejection and surrender. Surrender is in fact the main secret of this yoga. From the following statement of Sri Aurobindo, we can judge how important surrender must be for one’s success in this yoga: The first word of the supramental Yoga is surrender; its last word also is surrender. It is by a will to give oneself to the eternal Divine, for lifting into the divine consciousness, for perfection, for transformation, that the Yoga begins; it is in the entire giving that it culminates; for it is only when the self‐giving is complete that there comes the finality of the Yoga, the entire taking up into the supramental Divine, the perfection of the being, the transformation of the nature. Essays Divine and Human, p. 367.

The “slave of God” is a person who has ‘daasya’ or total surrender, submission and servitude to the Divine of the supreme degree”. This state of inner being is the key to liberation in action.

Only when the ego is totally defeated and surrendered is the spirit in man victorious and this seeming helplessness is the secret of omnipotence.

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Sri Aurobindo has written more extensively in his Record of Yoga on this subject of daasya than in any other writing of his. He has given us extensive accounts of three forms of daasya. The first form of daasya is simple or primary daasya. It is defined as free obedience, the attitude of a servant of the Divine who retains a certain independence. Already there is the implication that the state of being a slave of god is a higher stage than that of being his servant. The essential principle here is that one is increased, and not diminished, by every increase in the degree of self‐subordination to the Divine.

When the spiritual aspirant gives up the sense of being the doer and perceives that Prakriti is the only doer of all our actions big or small, he may be said to have moved on to double daasyam. In primary daasya, the sadhak perceives the movement of the action to be his own but the determining principle is perceived as coming from the infinite Nature above or around us. The wearing away of this distinction raises the surrender from ‘servanthood’ to the divine ‘servitude’.

In this secondary stage, the personality of the Ishwara is only indirectly perceived behind the workings of Prakriti, and what is left of the ego is felt as a portion of Prakriti, a centre of her action, of her knowledge, of her vision and of enjoyment. In the tertiary stage of daasya, the presence of the Purusha is directly felt dominating the surrendered centre of the Prakriti. Here the aspirant sees himself as merely an “instrument and a slave”. The third and the highest stage of daasya is that in which one becomes a slave of the Divine.

The three degrees of daasya are also described much more simply by Sri Aurobindo in ‘The Yoga of Divine Love’ in part III of his Synthesis of Yoga: Obedience is the sign of the servant, but that is the lowest stage of this relation, dasya. Afterwards we do not obey, but move to his will as the string replies to the finger of the musician. To be the instrument is this higher stage of self‐surrender and submission. But this is the living and loving instrument and it ends in the whole nature of our being becoming the slave of God, rejoicing in his possession and its own blissful subjection to the divine grasp and mastery. With a passionate delight it does all he wills it to do without questioning and bears all he would have it bear, because what it bears is the burden of the beloved being. (Synthesis of Yoga, CWSA, Vol. 24, p. 603) In fact, all the lines in the long passage I have quoted above on pages 1 and 2 of this instalment describe the ecstasy of this daasya bhava most beautifully. Consider also the lines preceding the lines just quoted: Even my disasters' clutch shall be to thee The ordeal of my rapture's contrary shape: In pain's self shall smile on thee my secret face: Thou shalt bear my ruthless beauty unabridged Amid the world's intolerable wrongs, Trampled by the violent misdeeds of Time

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Cry out to the ecstasy of my rapture's touch.

All beings shall be to thy life my emissaries; Drawn to me on the bosom of thy friend, Compelled to meet me in thy enemy's eyes, My creatures shall demand me from thy heart.

Thou shalt not shrink from any brother soul.

Thou shalt be attracted helplessly to all.

Men seeing thee shall feel my hands of joy, In sorrow's pangs feel steps of the world's delight, Their life experience its tumultuous shock In the mutual craving of two opposites.

Hearts touched by thy love shall answer to my call, Discover the ancient music of the spheres In the revealing accents of thy voice And nearer draw to me because thou art: Enamoured of thy spirit's loveliness They shall embrace my body in thy soul, Hear in thy life the beauty of my laugh, Know the thrilled bliss with which I made the worlds.

All that thou hast, shall be for others' bliss, All that thou art, shall to my hands belong.

P. 701

The stage of being a living and loving instrument in the hands of the Divine is described in the following lines with regard to Savitri: I will pour delight from thee as from a jar, I will whirl thee as my chariot through the ways, I will use thee as my sword and as my lyre, I will play on thee my minstrelsies of thought.

And when thou art vibrant with all ecstasy, And when thou liv'st one spirit with all things, Then will I spare thee not my living fires, But make thee a channel for my timeless force.

P. 701

To all these grades of daasya Sri Aurobindo adds one more – madhura bhava. This relationship is a particular relationship between the soul and the Divine, often seen in the relationship between Krishna and Radha. This is a relationship of ineffable sweetness and to describe this

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Sri Aurobindo compares it to the relation of the bandini dasi, the captive “slave‐girl”. This is described by the following lines: Who hunts and seizes me, my captive grows: This shalt thou henceforth learn from thy heart‐beats.

For ever love, O beautiful slave of God! P. 702

Now what is the point of all this? What does one gain by assuming this poise of the consciousness, first, that of the Divine’s servant, then of his instrument, then of his slave, and finally of his “captive slave‐girl”? The answer is that Savitri through her perfection in this yoga was able to have the siddhi of being able to change the world. It is the power through which she was able to vanquish the God of Death. That is why Sri Aurobindo has said, “Self‐surrender to a supreme transmuting Power is the key‐word of the Yoga.” (Essays Human and Divine, P.365). Now we understand why the Mother described the following mantric line as the most powerful line in the epic: For ever love, O beautiful slave of God!

1. This has been shown by Richard Hartz in his articles serialised in The Mother India from October 1999 trough November 2003 under the title The Composition of Savitri. This is a seminal contribution for which every student of Savitri would be grateful to Richard. http://nextfuture.sriaurobindosociety.org.in/aug07/nfaug07_savitri.htm

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50. Book Eleven – Continued

The section we examined in the preceding instalment ends with this line:

Built is the golden tower, the flame‐child born.

The ‘golden tower’ is the tower of the Supramental Truth and Power, and the flame‐child, which is the new creation manifesting this truth, is born. It may not be visible to the human eye, because it has not yet manifes‐ted in the gross physical world. But Savitri through her yogic efforts has removed all the impediments to its manifestation so that this new world can be said to be waiting to manifest in the subtle planes.

We now move on to the next subsection. In the very first utterance of his, the luminous God grants Savitri her heart’s desire – she can return to earth with Satyavan restored to life. Then he continues: “O Satyavan, O luminous Savitri, I had sent forth both of you a long time ago into this world as a dual power of God to work in an ignorant world, in a world separated from the boundless self. You are the dual powers of God (Purusha and Prakriti) in an ignorant world, in a creation hedged in by ignorance and closed to the awareness of the limitless self, of which it is a manifestation. Your mission here is to bring down God into the insensible world and to lift earth‐beings to God.” Savitri and Satyavan are being told that they were sent down on earth so that they bring down God, the Divine’s perfect manifestation on earth and lift earth‐beings to God. An Avatar like Savitri comes down and takes a human embodiment for the ultimate purpose of lifting man from ignorance to Godhood. This is stated as the main purpose of all Avatars by Sri Aurobindo in this poem and elsewhere: A mutual debt binds man to the Supreme: His nature we must put on as he put ours; We are sons of God and must be even as he: His human portion, we must grow divine.

P. 67

“In the world where my knowledge and ignorance co‐exist, where God is unseen and is heard only as a name, and knowledge is trapped within the boundaries of the mind and life is caught in the drag‐net of desire, and Matter hides the soul from its own sight, you are my Force

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working to uplift earth’s fate, my own self which moves up the incline between the extremes of the spirit’s night and day.

[There is knowledge as well as ignorance in this world but most people have eyes only for the world as revealed by the ignorance. The dragnet which captures us here is woven out of desires and once we are caught in it, we are at their mercy. ‘Dragnet’ is a most appropriate simile to suggest how desire operates in our life. A dragnet is a net pulled along the bottom of a river or a lake so that nothing can escape it, or it connotes a network of actions and methods by which a criminal is caught. Desires have a similar network in our life and we find it difficult to escape from them. In this world of ignorance, the soul is not visible either to the eye of the flesh, nor to the eye of the reason. In such a world, Savitri has to work as the Divine’s Shakti and lift slowly and gradually mankind from its preoccupation with ignorance and set it up so that it begins to climb the steep incline that leads from the night of ignorance to the light of the spirit.

This is what we pray for when we say “tamsor maam jyotirgamaya” – lead me to Light from Darkness.]

“Satyavan is my soul that climbs from the Night of nescience through life and mind and the supernature’s Vast to the supreme light of Timelessness and to my eternity that lies hidden in moving Time and my infinity which is segmented by the curve of space. The soul climbs to the greatness it has left behind and to the beauty and joy from which it has fallen, to the closeness and sweetness of all things divine, to light without restrictions and life illimitable, to the taste of the depths of the Ineffable’s bliss and to the touch of the immortal and the infinite. Satyavan is my soul that gropes out of the beast and reaches humanity’s heights of bright thought and the vicinity of the sublimity of truth. He is the godhead growing in human lives and in the body of all earth‐beings; he is the soul of man climbing to God in Nature’s upsurge out of earth’s ignorance.

[We are told here what Satyavan symbolises. He symbolises the consciousness that climbs through the several stages of ignorance, through life and mind and levels above the mind until it reaches the Supreme status of vastness, beyond all space and time. This evolution is inevitable because this consciousness is the result of the Supreme Divine’s plunge into the Ignorance. Its upward evolution to the status of the Supreme is inevitable. That is why there is an irrepressible urge in human beings to grow beyond the limitations of the mental consciousness to a higher consciousness.]

“Savitri, you are my spirit’s power (Shakti), the revealing voice of my immortal Word, the face of Truth upon the roads of Time guiding the souls along the routes to God. [A. B. Purani in his Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri; an Approach and a Study, gives the etymological meaning of “Savitri” as follows: “The word “Savitri” is derived from the word “Savitru” which in turn is derived from root “su” = to give birth to”. The word ‘soma’ which indicates an exhilarating drink, symbolising spiritual ecstasy and delight, is also derived from the same root

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“su”. It links therefore the creation and the delight of creation. In the Veda, Savita is the god of illumination, the God of creation. Usually he is represented by the material sun which also illumines the solar system and is its creator and sustainer in the material sense. Savitri therefore would mean etymologically “some one descended from the sun: “an energy derived from the Sun, the Divine Creator.”

“Savitri’ s the feminine counterpart of Savitr, who, in the Veda, is the Sun‐God, Master of the Truth, in his creative aspect, “he who brings forth from the unmanifest Divine the truth of a divine universe. Savitri represents essentially the power of the illumined Word. This is how Aswapati addresses the Goddess he sees at the end of his Yoga (Book III Canto (p.345): O Truth defended in thy secret sun, Voice of her mighty musings in shut heavens On things withdrawn within her luminous depths, O Wisdom‐Splendour, Mother of the universe, Creatrix, the Eternal’s artist Bride

( Richard Hartz Mother India March 2001)]

“When like a pale moonbeam on a dense glade the dim light from the peak of the veiled Spirit falls upon the stark inconscience of Matter, and the Mind moves in a half‐light amid half‐truths and the human heart knows only the imperfect human love, and life is a stumbling and imperfect force and the body counts out its precarious days, you shall be born in the perplexed hours of man. You shall be born in forms that hide the soul’s divinity and show through veils of earth’s doubting air my glory breaking as through a bank of clouds the sun and with my nameless influence fill men’s lives. Yet shall men look up to the summits of God and feel God all around them and rest on God as on a motionless, steady base. Yet there shall glow on mind like a half‐full moon the crescent splendour of the Spirit in pale skies and light up man’s life upon his God‐ward road.

[This is in some sense the idea behind the famous statement in the Gita that an Avatar is born when ‘there is the fading of the Dharma and the uprising of unrighteousness’ (Gita:4.7). Here the state of ignorance is described – when the mind moves about in a half‐light of truth and falsehood and the human heart does not even know what real love is, and the human body becomes one’s preoccupation. When the Avatar is born, most people are deceived by his human appearance, they don’t see the divinity, and yet an impact is made on human minds despite their doubting disposition. The Avatar fills men’s lives with a nameless influence. Many people may even be able to reach God by following the example of the Avatar. Note how the state of being one with God is described – “rest on God as on a motionless base”. This is the state of Nirvana which has been so far regarded as the highest realisation possible on the spiritual path. This is oneness with the static poise of the Divine, which detaches itself from the world and its concerns.]

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“But there is much more hidden in God’s Beyond and all that shall one day reveal its hidden face. At present, mind with its uncertain light is everything for man; mind is the leader of the body and life, it is the thought‐driven chariot on which it carries the luminous soul who wanders in the night towards vistas of a far uncertain dawn, to the end of the Spirit’s fathomless desire, to its dream of absolute truth and sheer bliss.

[The Divine can be experienced and manifested at any level of our being, but the manifestation will always be limited by the nature of the level at which it takes place. Right now, Mind is the highest level of consciousness that man has reached. At present mind is the prāna śarīira nethā, “the leader of the mind and the body” as described in the Upanishad. The Kathopanishad also compares the human life to a journey on a chariot as follows: ‘the body is the chariot and the soul the master of the chariot, with reason or thought as the charioteer and the mind for reins and the senses as the steeds, etc.’. So the luminous wanderer travelling in the chariot is the soul and he is travelling with the help of the mind through vistas of an uncertain dawn. This journey takes us to a destination where the soul feels fulfilled with truth and bliss.]

“There are greater destinies the mind cannot even guess and these are fixed on the heights of the evolving Path; the human traveller now treads it in the Ignorance; he doesn’t know his next step since he doesn’t know his goal. Mind is not all that his tireless climb can reach; there is a fire on the heights of the worlds; there is a house there of the Eternal’s light; there is an infinite truth, an absolute power there.”

[There are greater destinies which the human consciousness is destined to rise to and these are fixed on the heights of the evolutionary path and the mind cannot even guess them. The mind is a limited and obscure light and doesn’t know even the next step that lies ahead of it. Mind is not the last rung of the evolutionary ladder, and man can rise to these higher levels. There is a fire on the heights, an infinite truth and an absolute power.]

“The might of the Spirit shall cast off its mask; its greatness shaping the course of the world will be felt. It shall be seen in its own veil‐less beams of light as a star rising from the night of the Inconscient, a sun climbing to the peak of Supernature.”

[As man progresses along the evolutionary path, the spirit will gradually cast aside the mask covering it and man shall see it in its own beams of light. He will see it as a star from the night of the Inconscient; he will see it as a sun climbing to the peak of supernature.]

“Finally, abandoning the middle way of the present consciousness (between the inconscient and the superconscient), a few shall glimpse the miraculous origin of all this creation and some shall feel in you the secret Force and they shall turn to meet a nameless footstep and these will be the adventurers into to a mightier Day. Rising out of the limiting regions of the mind, they

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shall discover the huge design of this world and step into the Gnostic realm of the Truth, the Right and the Vast.

[The middle way is the way of the mental consciousness, because mind is midway between the Inconcient and the Superconscient. Some among them who venture to go beyond the mind will be able to glimpse the miraculous origin of this creation, and some of them shall turn to you because they feel the advent of a new age of the Truth, the Right and the Vast on the path shown by you, and these people will be adventurers into a greater world. Rising out of the limiting regions of the mind, they will discover the supramental worlds and step into world of the Supramental Truth. For now, the following characterisation of the Surpramental consciousness should suffice: [By the supramental is meant the Truth‐Consciousness (whether above or in the universe) by which the Divine knows not only his own essence and being but his manifestation also. Its fundamental character is knowledge by identity by which the Self is known, the divine Sachchidnanda is known but also the truth of manifestation is known. Mind is an instrument of the Ignorance trying to know, while supermind is the knower possessing knowledge, because one with it and the known. It is a dynamic and not only a static Power, not only a Knowledge but a Will according to Knowledge. There is a supramental Power which can manifest direct its world of Light and Truth in which all is luminously based on the harmony and unity of the One, not disturbed by a veil of Ignorance or any disguise. The supermind therefore does not transcend all possible manifestation, but it is above the triplicity of mind, life and Matter which is our present experience of manifestation. (Letters on Yoga, SABCL 22: 242)] “You shall reveal to them the hidden eternities, the breadth of infinitudes not yet revealed, some rapture of the bliss that made the world, something of the force of God’s omnipotence, some beam of the omniscient mystery.” [Notice the work the Supreme assigns to Savitri whenever she comes down on earth as an Avatar.]

“But when the hour of the Divine Manifestation draws near, the Mighty Mother shall take birth in Time and God shall be born into the human clay in human forms made ready by the human lives of both of you. Then shall the Truth supreme be given to men: there is a being beyond the being of mind, an Immeasurable Reality cast into many forms, a miracle of the multitudinous One, There is a consciousness which mind cannot touch, its speech cannot express it nor can it reveal its thought. It has no home on earth, no centre in man, yet is it the source of all things thought and done, the spring of this creation and its works; it is the origin of all truth here; it is the orb of the sun of which the mind radiates only fragmentary rays; It is Infinity’s heaven that spills the rain of God, the Immense that calls man to grow in the Spirit; it is the wide aim that justifies all the faltering and narrow attempts of man; it is the channel for the little bliss that man tastes. [Here it is made clear that before the Divine Manifestation can take birth in time, the Divine Mother must have taken birth in time because She is the one who mediates

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between human aspiration and the grace of the Supreme. Savitri and Satyavan are told here that it is their responsibility to make ready human forms made of clay to receive the power of the Divine Manifestation. If the Divine manifestation descends into human forms not yet made ready for the descent, then the forms shall burn themselves out. Thus when the pātra, the receptacle is baked and ready, the Truth Supreme shall be given to men. There is this truth of the Supramental which the mind cannot touch, nor can human speech express it, and there is no centre for it yet in the human being. The Surpamental is the full orb of the sun of which the mind itself is a small radiating centre but it radiates only the broken rays of truth. Man is able to aspire to expand the Spirit because of the influence of the Supramental consciousness on him.]

“Some shall be made the receptacles of this glory and vehicles of the Eternal’s luminous power.

These will be the high forerunners, the leaders of advancing Time, the great deliverers of earth‐ bound mind, the powerful transformers of human clay, the first‐born of a new celestial race.

The incarnate dual Power shall open God’s door and the eternal Supermind shall touch earthly Time. The superman shall wake in mortal man and manifest the demi‐god hidden in man or grow into the God‐light and God‐Force revealing the secret deity in the cave. Then shall the earth be touched by the Supreme; and the bright uncovered Transcendence shall illumine the mind and heart of man and it shall force his life and act to interpret the inexpressible mystery of the Supreme in a heavenly alphabet of Divinity’s sign.”

Instead of commenting on the advent of the Supermind, I shall reproduce here one of Sri Aurobindo’s letters on these lines and a few lines preceding them. Since the concept of the Supermind is so basic to our understanding of Sri Aurobindo’s yoga and vision, it is worth taking the trouble to hear from Sri Aurobindo himself on this subject.

What we are doing, if and when we succeed, will be a beginning, not a completion. It is the foundation of a new consciousness on earth—a consciousness with infinite possibilities of manifestation. The eternal progression is in the manifestation and beyond it there is no progression. If the redemption of the soul from the physical vesture be the object, then there is no need of supramentalisation. Spiritual Mukti and Nirvana are sufficient. If the object is to rise to supra‐physical planes, then also there is no need of supramentalisation. One can enter into some heaven above by devotion to the Lord of that heaven. But that is no progression. The other worlds are typal worlds, each fixed in its own kind and type and law. Evolution takes place on the earth and therefore the earth is the proper field for progression. The beings of the other worlds do not progress from one world to another. They remain fixed to their own type.

The purely monistic Vedantist says, all is Brahman, life is a dream, an unreality, only Brahman exists. One has Nirvana or Mukti, then one lives only till the body falls – after that there is no such thing as life.

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They do not believe in transformation, because mind, life and body are an ignorance, an illusion—the only reality is the featureless relation‐less Self or Brahman. Life is a thing of relations; in the pure Self, all life and relations disappear. What would be the use or the possibility of transforming an illusion that can never be anything else (however transformed) than an illusion? There is no such thing for them as a “Nirvanic life”.

It is only some yogas that aim at a transformation of any kind except that of ignorance into knowledge. The idea varies – sometimes a divine knowledge or power or else a divine purity or an ethical perfection or a divine love.

What has to be overcome is the opposition of the Ignorance that does not want the transformation of the nature. If that can be overcome, then old spiritual ideas will not form an obstacle.

It is not intended to supramentalise humanity at large, but to establish the principle of the supramental consciousness in the earth‐evolution. If that is done, all that is needed will be evolved by the supramental Power itself. It is not therefore important that the mission should be widespread. What is important is that the thing should be done at all in however small a number; that is the only difficulty.

If the transformation of the body is complete, that means no subjection to death—it does not mean that one will be bound to keep the same body for all time. One creates a new body for oneself when one wants to change, but how it will be done cannot be said now.

The present method is by physical birth—some occultists suppose that a time will come when that will not be necessary ‐‐ but the question must be left for the supramental evolution to decide.

The questions about the supermind cannot be answered profitably now. Supermind cannot be described in terms that the mind will understand, because the terms will be mental and mind will understand them in a mental way and mental sense and miss their true import. It would therefore be a waste of time and energy which should be devoted to the preliminary work—psychicisation and spiritualisation of the being and nature without which no supramentalisation is possible. Let the whole dynamic nature led by the psychic make itself full of the dynamic spiritual light, peace, purity, knowledge, force; let it afterwards get experience of the intermediate spiritual planes and know, feel and act in their sense; then it will be possible to speak last of the supramental transformation.

SABCL 22: Letters on Yoga Page: 10

http://nextfuture.sriaurobindosociety.org.in/sep07/nfsep07_savitri.htm

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51. Book Eleven – Continued

The Supreme Being is, as we have seen, extremely happy with Savitri and her single‐minded pursuit of her mission on earth as an Avatar, in spite of opposition, first, from the God of Death, and then from the Supreme Being itself. The Supreme Being now reveals to her who she and Satyavan really are and why they have been sent on earth. They are supposed to prepare man for the advent of the surpamental consciousness on earth.

What is the Supramental consciousness?

It is a consciousness beyond the mind, which the mind cannot comprehend and which as yet has no home on earth, no centre in man. But it is the source and the fount of the creation and of all its activities. It constantly keeps calling man to rise to its level and find fulfilment to all his aspirations. Some shall be the high forerunners and the first‐born of the new celestial race embodying the supramental consciousness. Then shall the radiance of the new consciousness light up the heart and soul of man and his vital and physical parts too will respond to its touch.

(This was where we concluded the preceding instalment.)

Then we have a group of 28 lines (line 1156 to line 1273) which bring in a theme which Sri Aurobindo frequently returns to – the three statuses of the Divine – the transcendental, the universal or cosmic, and the immanent or the individual. The poet looks at the new truth of the Supramental consciousness as seen from these three different standpoints.

Then shall the earth be touched by the Supreme, His bright unveiled Transcendence shall illumine The mind and heart and force the life and act To interpret his inexpressible mystery In a heavenly alphabet of Divinity's signs.

P.705

“The veil on the face of the Transcendent will be lifted, and the Transcendent consciousness will illumine the mind and heart and the life and act and this will look like inexpressible mystery interpreted in a heavenly alphabet of Divinity’s signs.”

His living cosmic spirit shall enring, Annulling the decree of death and pain, Erasing the formulas of the Ignorance, With the deep meaning of beauty and life's hid sense, The being ready for immortality,

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His regard crossing infinity's mystic waves Bring back to Nature her early joy to live, The metred heart‐beats of a lost delight, The cry of a forgotten ecstasy, The dance of the first world‐creating Bliss.

P. 706

Now the Supreme Being refers to the manifestation of the new consciousness at the universal or cosmic level. “The cosmic or universal manifestation of the new consciousness will put an end to the decree of death and pain; the formulas of the Ignorance which govern the universal level will be wiped out . When this happens, the deep meaning of beauty and the hidden sense behind life will be revealed . The human being who lives in this consciousness will be ready for immortality. His gaze will cross infinity’s mystic waves and bring back to Nature the joy she had in living, the metred heart‐beats of lost delight, the cry of a forgotten mystery, the dance of the bliss which first created this world.”

The Immanent shall be the witness God Watching on his many‐petalled lotus‐throne His actionless being and his silent might Ruling earth‐nature by eternity's law, A thinker waking the Inconscient's world, An immobile centre of many infinitudes In his thousand‐pillared temple by Time's sea.

Then shall the embodied being live as one Who is a thought, a will of the Divine, A mask or robe of his divinity, An instrument and partner of his Force, A point or line drawn in the infinite, A manifest of the Imperishable.

P. 706

“The Immanent God or the Divine in the individual will have two poises, one that of the witness watching from his many‐petalled lotus‐throne, his static being and silent might ruling earth‐nature by the laws of Eternal. The other is the poise of a thinker awakening the world of the Inconscient to many infinitudes in its multitudinous temple‐creation on the shores of the sea of Time. Then as an embodied being, the new consciousness will live as one who is a thought, a will of the Divine, a mask or a robe of his divinity, an instrument and partner of his Force, a point or a line drawn in the infinite, a manifestation of the Imperishable."

After this the Supreme Being returns to prophesying.

The supermind shall be his nature's fount,

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The Eternal's truth shall mould his thoughts and acts, The Eternal's truth shall be his light and guide.

All then shall change, a magic order come Overtopping this mechanical universe.

A mightier race shall inhabit the mortal's world.

On Nature's luminous tops, on the Spirit's ground, The superman shall reign as king of life, Make earth almost the mate and peer of heaven, And lead towards God and truth man's ignorant heart And lift towards godhead his mortality.

P. 706

“The supermind shall be his nature’s fount, the Eternal’s Truth shall mould man’s thoughts and acts, the Eternal’s truth shall be his light and guide. All shall then change and a magic order will come overtopping this mechanical universe. A mightier race shall inhabit the human world. On Nature’s luminous tops, on the Spirit’s ground, the superman shall reign as king of life; he will make earth almost the mate and peer of heaven, and lead towards God and truth man’s ignorant heart and lift his mortality towards godhead.”

[These are some of the lines often quoted to explain the aims of Sri Aurobindo’s Yoga. We have been told in lines 1252 and 1253 that the new consciousness will annul “the decree of death and pain” and erase “the formula of the Ignorance”. In Canto Two of Book I, this was also mentioned as the mission of Savitri on earth: For this she had accepted mortal breath; To wrestle with the Shadow she had come And must confront the riddle of man’s birth And life’s brief struggle in dumb Matter’s night.

Whether to bear with Ignorance and death Or hew the ways of Immortality, To win or lose the godlike game for man, Was her soul’s issue thrown with Destiny’s dice.

But not to submit and suffer was she born; To lead, to deliver was her glorious part.

Here was no fabric of terrestrial make Fit for a day’s use by busy careless Powers.

P. 17

The Supreme Being confirms here in the lines we quoted above from page 706 that Savitri was sent down to earth precisely for this purpose and she was now on her way to fulfill this aim.

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It has to be remembered that the conquest of death does not imply that one is very much attached to one’s body and even turns to Yoga to keep living in the same body for ever. This would be seeking spiritual life for the most, or grossest material benefit. One cannot be said to have even begun one’s spiritual life, as long as one has this attachment to the body. Then what is the justification of seeking immortality for the body? The aim of Integral Yoga taught by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother is first, to realize the Divine and second, to manifest him at all levels of our being. This second aim, if achieved, will ensure that we become integrally divine, and no part of us is left behind in the Ignorance. Since we seek identification with the Divine in all the parts of our being, we cannot deny this transformation or divinisation to our physical body; the body too has to be released from the clutches of the Ignorance. This can only happen when the new consciousness (the Supramental consciousness) inundates our body as well.

Thus the conquest of death is an indication that the whole of our being has been possessed by the Divine, and the Inconscient has no hold on any part of our being.

All then shall change, a magic order come Overtopping this mechanical universe.

A mightier race shall inhabit the mortal's world.

On Nature's luminous tops, on the Spirit's ground, The superman shall reign as king of life, Make earth almost the mate and peer of heaven, And lead towards God and truth man's ignorant heart And lift towards godhead his mortality.

P. 706

These are some of the lines already quoted above. When the new consciousness descends on earth, everything will change, because the mechanical laws that now govern life on earth will be replaced by the laws of the Higher or Divine Nature. Gradually the human race will be replaced by a mightier race, and earth will become a companion of heaven, and man’s ignorant heart will be led towards its Divine destiny. Making earth almost “the mate and peer of heaven” has always been an aim of his Yoga that has been dear to Sri Aurobindo for a long time. In one of his letters written to the Mother when she was in Japan (and this was before 1920) Sri Aurobindo said, “heavens we have possessed, but it is the earth we have yet to possess, and the aim of Yoga is to make, in the language of the Veda, heaven and earth equal and one.”]

A power released from circumscribing bounds, Its height pushed up beyond death’s hungry reach, Life’s tops shall flame with the Immortal’s thoughts, Light shall invade the darkness of its base.

Then in the process of evolving Time All shall be drawn into a single plan,

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A divine harmony shall be earth’s law, Beauty and joy remould her way to live: Even the body shall remember God, Nature shall draw back from mortality And Spirit’s fires shall guide the earth’s blind force; Knowledge shall bring into the aspirant Thought A high proximity to Truth and God. P. 707

“Life will then be a power released from the various restricting bonds of Ignorance and its heights will be pushed up to a level which is beyond the hungry reach of death. The tops of Life will be ablaze with the Immortal’s thoughts, and Light shall invade the darkness at the base of Life. Then as evolution proceeds, all shall be drawn into a single plan. All the laws of earth will be illumined by a divine harmony, and beauty and joy will remould Life. Even the body will not be left behind from this consummation. It will remember that it too is a manifestation of the divine. The luminous fires of the Spirit shall guide the blind force of the earth. Knowledge shall lead all aspiring thought to a nearness to Truth and God.” The supermind shall claim the world for Light And thrill with love of God the enamoured heart And place Light’s crown on Nature’s lifted head And found Light’s reign on her unshaking base.

A greater truth than earth’s shall roof‐in earth And shed its sunlight on the roads of mind; A power infallible shall lead the thought, A seeing Puissance govern life and act, In earthly hearts kindle the Immortal’s fire. p. 707

“The supermind shall establish its claim on earth and illumine everything here with its light; then the captivated heart of Nature will thrill with the love of God; it shall put Light’s crown on Nature’s raised head and establish the reign of Light on her unshaking base. A greater truth than the one the earth has found so far shall cover the earth and the roads to the mind will be lit up by this Light. An infallible power shall lead the thought; a conscious Power shall govern life and action and the Immortal’s power shall be kindled in human hearts.”

A soul shall wake in the Inconscient’s house; The mind shall be God‐vision’s tabernacle, The body intuition’s instrument, And life a channel for God’s visible power.

All earth shall be the Spirit’s manifest home,

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Hidden no more by the body and the life, Hidden no more by the mind’s ignorance; An unerring 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.

“A soul shall awake in the very home of the Inconscient, and the mind shall be the living abode of God‐vision, and even the body shall be an instrument of intuition and life itself a channel for the manifest power of God. The whole of earth shall be the unmistakable home of the Spirit, which will be no longer hidden by the body and the life, nor by the mind’s ignorance. Every event and act shall be shaped by an unerring guiding hand. The Spirit’s eyes shall look through Nature’s eyes and the Spirit’s force shall flow through the forces of Nature.”

[One of the reasons for the tardiness of the progress of evolution on earth is the total darkness of the Inconscient. No matter how hard the other parts of man’s being try, the darkness of the Inconscient pulls man back to his Inconscient base, as it were. But with the advent of the Supramental consciousness, this will gradually change because this new consciousness will cleanse the Inconscient and make it more responsive to the evolutionary urge. In fact, this is the only consciousness which has the power to reach into the abyss of the Inconscient and cleanse it. The mental consciousness can neither reach to this depth nor does it possess the capacity to cleanse the Augean stables there. The purification of the Inconscient base will help man’s body, life‐energies and the mind to respond more positively to the onward push of the evolutionary urge. When this change takes place, in the unending war that is going on in man’s heart between the forces of Good and the forces of Evil, the former will be strengthened and they will ultimately triumph.]

This world shall be God’s visible garden‐house, The earth shall be a field and camp of God, Man shall forget consent to mortality And his embodied frail impermanence.

This universe shall unseal its occult sense, Creation’s process change its antique front, An ignorant evolution’s hierarchy Release the Wisdom chained below its base.

Pp. 707‐708

“This world shall be God’s visible garden‐house, the earth shall be a field and camp of God; man shall no more give his consent to mortality, and will cease to look upon himself as a frail transient being. The universe shall then reveal its hidden meaning, creation’s process shall change its age‐old appearance and finally out of the hierarchy of evolution in ignorance, the wisdom chained below its base will be released.”

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The Spirit shall be the master of his world Lurking no more in form's obscurity And Nature shall reverse her action's rule, The outward world disclose the Truth it veils; All things shall manifest the covert God, All shall reveal the Spirit's light and might And move to its destiny of felicity.

P. 708 “The Spirit which is now lurking in the obscurity of form will come out and be the master of this world; Nature shall reverse the process of its action, and the external forms shall readily reveal the truth they have veiled. All things shall openly manifest the God so far hidden within them.

All shall reveal the light and might of the Spirit embodied in them and move towards the destined goal of felicity.”

Even should a hostile force cling to its reign And claim its right's perpetual sovereignty And man refuse his high spiritual fate, Yet shall the secret Truth in things prevail.

The hour must come of the Transcendent's will P. 708 “Even if an adverse force were to try to cling to its reign and claim its right to permanent sovereignty over this earth and even if man were to refuse his high spiritual destiny, still, the secret Truth in things will prevail finally. For the hour must come when the will of the Transcendent Supreme has to establish itself on earth.”

[You will recall that earlier in this very canto, when the Supreme Being was testing Savitri’s resolve, he had wondered whether Savitri’s attempt to take the whole of mankind to a higher level of consciousness would ever succeed. He had pointed out to her that only ‘A few can climb to an unperishing sun’ because ‘The heroes and demigods are few/to whom the immortal voices speak’ and that very few hear the heaven’s call; besides, most people, even when they answer to the touch of greater things, in an uplifting hour of stress, slide back to the mud from which they climbed, in the mud of which they are made. They all feel safe when they return to their base. Most people seek the average human pitch and are extremely wary of rising to any higher plane of consciousness. (Lines 644 to 669, Canto One, Book Eleven). This is also the reason why the glorious work done by many saints and God‐men on earth does not seem to leave any permanent mark on humanity. Savitri of course doesn’t pay much heed to this objection – obviously a trap set for her. Here the Supreme Being himself answers this question. And the answer is that no matter how average human beings are and how much in love they are with ignorance, when its hour strikes, the Transcendent’s will shall impose itself on earth and the new consciousness will be established in mankind, whether man likes it or not.]

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All turns and winds towards his predestined ends In Nature's fixed inevitable course Decreed since the beginning of the worlds In the deep essence of created things: Even there shall come as a high crown of all The end of Death, the death of Ignorance.

P. 708

“Nature’s course has been fixed, sanctioned and decreed from the very beginning of the worlds in the core of created things; its turns and winds are so designed as to take this world to its predestined ends; and it shall one day reach the high crown of all – the end of Death and the death of Ignorance.”

But first high Truth must set her feet on earth And man aspire to the Eternal's light And all his members feel the Spirit's touch And all his life obey an inner Force.

This too shall be; for a new life shall come, A body of the Superconscient's truth, A native field of Supernature's mights: It shall make earth's nescient ground Truth's colony, Make even the Ignorance a transparent robe Through which shall shine the brilliant limbs of Truth And Truth shall be a sun on Nature's head And Truth shall be the guide of Nature's steps And Truth shall gaze out of her nether deeps.

When superman is born as Nature's king.

P. 708

“But before this consummation can come about, the high Truth must first descend on earth and man must aspire for the light of the Eternal, and all the parts of his being must feel and respond to the touch of the Spirit and all his vital movements must obey the inner Force of the Spirit. And this too shall come to happen, for a new life shall come. It shall be a native field for the play of the powers of Supernature. It shall make earth’s nescient base a colony of Truth and make even Ignorance a transparent robe through which the radiant limbs of truth shall shine.

The sun of Truth shall shine at the head of Nature, and Truth shall guide the steps of Nature.”

http://nextfuture.sriaurobindosociety.org.in/oct07/nfoct07_savitri.htm

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Due to the sudden demise of Nadkarni‐ji on 23 September 2007, the series could not be completed, with only 16 pages of Savitri left to cover.

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