Perspectives of Savitri - Part 2

Apropos of Savitri

Part One

Introducing Savitri

tat savitur varam rūpam jyotiḥ parasya dhìmahi !

yannah satyena dipayet !

Let us meditate on the most auspicious form of Savitṛ, the Light of the Supreme which shall illumine us with the Truth.¹

This is Sri Aurobindo's Gayatri Mantra. The meditation is on the auspicious form of the Sun, the Sun of Divine Light. The Mantra affirms that the Light shall illumine us with the Truth. It shall illumine all the parts of our being, even the very physical. In it shall be our true progress. The threefold reality of Sat-Chit-Ananda shall express itself in this creation. Even the physical shall express the dynamic Truth.

In it we shall be immune from contingencies of Time, from the workings of fate. We shall be uncircumscribed by ignorance. We shall be free from death.

Sri Aurobindo's Gayatri Mantra is different from the traditional Gayatri Mantra, the Mantra given by Vishwamitra. In Vishwamitra

'The original translation of the Gayatn Mantra in English as given by Sri Aurobindo is presently not available in his own handwriting. We do not know how he wrote in English the Sanskrit word savitṛ

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the invocation to the Sun-God savitṛ is for the illumination of our intuition, of our perception, of our perfect understanding of the things. In that perfect understanding shall be our great spiritual achievements. In Sri Aurobindo's Gayatri Mantra the emphasis is on the auspicious form—varam rupam. The implication is that of physical transformation.

The Vedic-Upanishadic Rishis had knowledge of the supreme Reality. They knew that it is the support of the entire creation. But about the manifestation of the dynamic Truth in this mortal world, in mrityuloka, they did not have the working intuition. They did not know the way towards physical transformation. Perhaps it was too early to realise it collectively here in this death-bound world.

Now Sri Aurobindo by his yoga-tapasya has prepared the required ground. He has made it a reality in the evolutionary manifestation. He has invoked the supreme Grace to incarnate here. She must come here and take up the work in her own hand.

The coming down of that Grace is the birth of Savitri. She alone can bring about that transformative miracle. Savitri is the incarnate power who shall establish divinity in the terrestrial phenomenon.

That creative power should bring truth and light and force and bliss to the mortal world, to this creation presently governed by death. That will be her work for the fulfilment of the mortal world. Such is the significance of the esoteric birth of Savitri.

This mrityuloka is the great concern of Savitri. She must bring down the Truth in this world, must make that Truth dynamically operative in it. She must espouse the Truth howsoever difficult the circumstances, even in the presence of ubiquitous death.

It is to do this that Savitri comes here. She comes here as the Observer of the Vow of the Lord. She comes as pativratā. In the story of the Mahabharata Savitri is committed to the joyous husbanding of the Truth, that in the evolutionary way this mortal creation be an expression of multifold divinity. This is the significance of the legend of Savitri. In it is the revelation of the Sun-God's transformative power.

The significance is proclaimed to us by narrating it as a story. What otherwise proves to be beyond the reach of our understanding, what is too occult to grasp, that is made tangible through the medium of a household episode. The story thus turns out to be a fruitful device; by it the higher truth is made to us somewhat comprehendible.

The story belongs to the early Vedic times.

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Aswapati, the king of Madra land, is issuless. He desires to have a son to perpetuate his ancestral line. In that way would the continuity of the Vedic Yajna be assured. Therefore it becomes an aspect of dharmic duty and Aswapati wishes not to fail in it. It is in the dharma alone that the order of the society can be maintained. And he is keen to uphold it.

Thereupon Aswapati retires to a forest and engages himself in the worship of Goddess Savitri. He is devout in nature and is firmly established in the truth. Everyday he offers one hundred-thousand oblations to the Goddess. Living a strict life and observing all the vows of the sacrifice, he does arduous tapasya for eighteen long years.

Goddess Savitri is pleased with Aswapati's great devotion, by his single-pointed dedication to the Truth. She grants him a boon. She tells him that soon a radiant daughter will be bom to him. The Goddess also tells him that the boon has the sanction of Creator-Father Brahma himself. The birth of the radiant daughter is therefore already marked by a high intention. It carries in it the Will of the Supreme himself.

Soon the princess grows into full maidenhood. But no hero-prince dares to approach her. None comes forward seeking her hand in marriage. She is an exceptional princess of fiery splendour and therefore none takes courage to court her.

But, according to the custom of the time, her father advises her to go out in search of a partner in life,—one who is endowed with qualities like her own.

She meets Satyavan in the Shalwa forest and they at once pledge to be together.

Savitri returns to the palace and tells to her parents about her meeting with Satyavan. But at that time sage Narad happens to be present in the palace. It seems that at this particular juncture he was making a purposeful visit to them. It seems that he was prompted to do so by some divine intention. The sage makes an announcement, of a foreboding prophecy. He makes known to them that destined death awaits Satyavan one year after the marriage.

But Savitri remains undeterred in her resolve.

The marriage is duly solemnised and the princess goes to the forest to live in her new home. She joyously accepts the rigour of harsh life.

But inwardly Savitri is actively engaged in yogic practices. She is getting fully prepared to meet the dire eventuality, that of Satyavan's death as foretold by Narad. Savitri has acquired inner strength to meet the God of Death.

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Now it won't be too long for the fated day to arrive. On this day Satyavan must die.

Satyavan's death occurs in the forest. Yama himself comes to carry Satyavan's soul, he being an ocean of noble qualities.

Savitri follows Yama and discusses matters of Satya Dharma with him. Her understanding of the principles of righteous living pleases Yama. She maintains that the commerce of the world is actually borne by the spiritual practices of the saints and seers.

In a tremendous moment of revelation she discloses that it is by the Truth that the saints lead the sun, by askesis the saints uphold the earth, that in the saints all the three divisions of time find their refuge.²

Yama is immensely gladdened by her utterances and releases the soul of her husband.

Savitri wins a unique victory over death.

This is the tale of Savitri, a very familiar tale in India. It is the story of a beautiful young princess marrying a doomed youth. She was made aware of the short life of Satyavan, but she stayed steadfast in her decision. She even asserted that the choice of Satyavan was the choice of her soul and that there was no question of her reconsidering the decision. She had the conviction that she was driven from within.

That is the true Dharma, Satya Dharma, of being driven from within.

This spiritually eventful story shows Savitri not only firm-minded. She is shown as one having exceptional qualities, qualities which put her apart from everybody around.

In the narrative we have in the Mahabharata Savitri is presented as a radiant daughter, kanyd tejasvini; she is beautiful like a damsel of heaven, devarupini; she is dhyānayogaparāyaṇā, an adept in the Yoga of Meditation; she is one who is learned in the lore of the tradition, is fully conversant with the shastras, is an observer of difficult vows.

It is obvious that the Story of Savitri is not just a social episode designed to declare moral values. It actually enshrines the greatness of a woman's love for her husband even in the circumstance of death. It is even more than that,—the Triumph of Love over Death.

It is a story that depicts functionally the merit of the path of righteousness. Although it may seem to have the colouring of an ethical illustration, the story is spiritually charged. Even in the simple

² R.Y. Deshpande, Vyasa's Savitri, p. 55.

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narrative of the Mahabharata we see a purpose behind the story. In it we notice the seeds of a brighter world taking birth.

This birth of a bright world may not be in the immediate context, but it is bound to occur in the evolutionary future. It is a new world whose birth is helped and supported by Yama, true Yama as the possessor of gracious kindness. In it the authentic meaning, the high purport of mrityuloka, becomes clear. Yama shall thus prove to be the true Upholder of the Worlds. He shall then be pitrarājastām bhagavān, the beneficent King-Father and Lord of Creatures, as Vyasa says.

Sri Aurobindo utilises this legend to give mantric form to his yogic experiences and realisations, to his avataric work. His Savitri is therefore not only a legend and a symbol, a symbol describing the conquest of death. It is also a double autobiography.

In it the pregnant Gayatri Mantra of twenty-four syllables gets expanded to fill the earthly spaces by growing itself into twenty-four thousand lines.

It has wide and far-reaching dimensions of the expressive-revelatory Word. It is that Word which shall bring noble plenitudes of divinity to this evolutionary creation. It is on this foundation that we have Sri Aurobindo's epic.

In the epic Savitri came to live with grief, to share the mortal's lot, to stay the wheels of doom, to confront death. This was the great divine task she was engaged in. For that she made the sacrifice of her suffering to the presiding Deity, surrendered herself completely to the Will of the Supreme. Indeed in it she attempted all and achieved all. In it she received the most wondrous boon of divine life on earth.

The Divine Savitri had assured Aswapati that she shall take birth as his daughter and accept the burden of the world:

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.³

Incarnate Savitri accomplished what was promised. Now the Powers of the Spirit gaze upon destiny and there is its living presence

³ Savitri, p. 346.

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even in the commonest things. Luminous crimson seeds of God's felicity have been sown in the earthly soil. These shall-sprout and

This earthly life become the life divine.⁴

Who is Savitri?

Who is this Savitri? What is her role, what is her business? Tradition makes her an unusual princess who wins back the soul of her dead husband from the God of Death. We already have in her story a supernatural element describing the most extraordinary event in the spiritual history of the earth. It therefore becomes obvious that it is a significant myth reciting the prophetic achievement of a woman in this death-dominated creation. If she is one who bears in her womb the secret birth of divinity, if she is janani, then surely she can't accept sorrowful infliction of the death of her own child. She must become death-victorious, mrityu-vijayini. Her one concern is indeed to establish immortal birth in this mortality. The root sense of the name Savitri itself makes it clear to us so.

The Sanskrit word savitr means the Sun-God, who is also the creator of the world. The descendent of savitṛ is therefore sāvitṛ, or as feminine savitri. The invocation to savitṛ in the Gayatri Mantra of Sri Aurobindo taken in the context of his magnum opus Savitri then assumes a revealing meaningfulness. In gracious answer to the invocation is the incarnation of savitri. She brings with her the dynamism of Truth and Light which no darkness can dim. There is thus the infallibility of success in her action, an action in the high Will itself. That shows how charged with spiritual connotations the word savitṛ is.

If the Sun-God or savitṛ is the creator of this entire universe, we have then to understand why this world is beset by the presence of Death. Which implies that the operative veil savitṛ has put on himself in the pregnant circumstance of this Inconscience has to be removed by his own power of illumination. After all, Death is also the descendent of savitṛ himself and therefore it becomes his concern to deal with him. For that to happen his expressive power who is the Sun-Word should come as savitri. But this happens only when the ground for her descent is well prepared here.

Such is the task cut out for Savitri. She makes a splendid sacrifice of the eminence of her heavenly abundances and accepts the travail

⁴Ibid., p. 711.

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of evolutionary growth; she leaves her "vaster Nature" behind to work in the limits of our little terrestriality. This is an aspect of the process of manifestation itself, assuring in it the Supreme's direct involvement in the person of Savitri.

It was in a wondrous act of Love that the Supreme had plunged into the darkness of the Inconscience. In that way would appear out of it another creation for incessant progress in the growing possibilities of the Spirit. Savitri's incarnation is for joining this Love in conformity with and accomplishment of the Supreme's Will. That is how the story of Savitri also becomes the story of Love triumphing over Death through her action. If it is through the agency of Supermind that the world came into being, it is Supermind alone who will then bring authentic fulfilment to it in joyous glories of the Truth and Light and Force and Awareness. In it is the work of Surya-Savitri. It is that we celebrate in the Savitri-legend given to us as a great gift.

Such is the Savitri Mantra although we call it Gayatri Mantra. There is a certain difference between the two. One is the Mantra of Manifestation, the other of Transformation. In the Transcendent the executive Power of the Supreme is Gayatri; but bom here upon earth she takes the name of Savitri, the daughter of the supramental Sun. When we are invoking her on the earth, we are actually invoking that Supreme's creative executrix herself, asking her to make this a place for her habitation, for her to live in, a place where divinity in luminous magnificence of its aristocracy can find itself at home. The Creator can't be very happy with the conditions as they prevail now and, if there is an issue, it becomes his concern to deal with it. Therefore in response to a call from the praying soul of the earth he sends to this world his power as Savitri. "A world's desire [compels] her mortal birth." By condescending to be bom here Savitri accomplishes the heavenly task. She removes the dark Obstacle that lies across the path of the divine Event and makes the manifestation of a new world a reality.

If we choose the Pauranic language we can say that Brahma's conceptive-expressive power as the supreme Creatrix is present in two aspects,—in the modes of transcendental and terrestrial creation. That Creatrix in the nature of the Word is held by Brahma in his clasp⁵ and, when she comes out, she comes out as Gayatri in the Transcendent and Savitri in this world of ours. While as Gayatri she is the creative force in the Transcendent, in the mortal world she

⁵ Savitri, p. 525.

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takes birth as Savitri for the transformative action. If from that Word world after splendid world wheels out in interminable glory and grandeur, "in metres that reflect the moving worlds,"⁶ there is also the evolutionary delight in a mysterious unfoldment of the eternal Time. We can meet the underlying identity of these two goddesses in the dynamism of the Truth-Being, in Brahma himself. In him Satyam and Ritam are one and inseparable. In fact their oneness belongs to the manifestive Truth in its twofold operation. If Savitri as the Truth-Word gives form and definiteness to the Truth-Idea in this world, Gayatri as the Truth-Rhythm sets that Truth-Idea into its spacious expanding movement,—one always supporting the other. If substantiality of form in its Truth-contents is bestowed on it by one, the other breathes majesties of a widening life into it.

In the context of the metres that move the worlds, Gayatri as chhanda-devatā appears in her triple measure. It consists of three parts each with eight syllables, indicating the triple occult formation with its enduring transcendental realities vis-à-vis this vast creation. These give rise to the triple world of Sat-Chit-Ananda. The Veda speaks of the three strides of Vishnu in the transcendent and we may as well conceive these to be the eight-syllabled three parts of this devatā. The virgin goddess of this supernal world is the one who, over there, luminously up-bears the lower triple world. "Determining all that shall be in this universe and in the terrestrial evolution by what she sees and feels and pours from her, she stands there above the Gods and all her Powers and Personalities are put out in front of her for the action and she sends down emanations of them into these lower worlds to intervene, to govern, to battle and conquer, to lead and turn their cycles, to direct the total and the individual lines of their forces."⁷ Such is Gayatri in the language of what we may call the Tantra in the Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo.

The lower world, more specifically this mrityuloka, is the great concern of Savitri. She is the power of the ever-expanding divine creation in an evolutionary way in this death-dominated world, mrityuloka. She deals with death to give to it a deathblow, that by it the Supreme may emerge in another way. It also means that she has been here throughout the evolutionary history of the earth. Hers is an eternal birth. Since the beginning of the evolution whenever and wherever there was a possibility of the divine manifestation, she was present there. In fact it is she who works out that possibility. She

⁶ Ibid., p. 383. ⁷ The Mother, SABCL, Vol.25,p.23.

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takes birth as a radiant daughter,—kanyd tejasvini as Vyasa puts it. She keeps on coming as the princess of Madra, the daughter of the timeless king Aswapati. For, hers is an eternal birth which is also the birth in eternal Time. Thus the fascinating Story of Savitri is actually an unfolding Story of the Eternal himself, being simultaneously told and retold on multiple levels. It is an exalted story of the evolutionary manifestation, which cannot be set into the domains of what we see as the past, present, and future.

Whereas Savitri comes as a radiant daughter, Gayatri always remains a virgin goddess. Gayatri who stands far above the mortal world, above this pain-fraught mrityuloka thus provides the needed transcendental foundation for the evolutionary Savitri. The essential oneness of the two assures the success even in the circumstance of mortality. We may as well say that it is this golden oneness which makes Savitri's coming here possible as well as meaningful. Because of their identity in the vastness of the Truth that is Brahman in every respect, it is Brahman himself who richly and rightfully greatens himself in another vast evolutionary dimension. This is an inalienable aspect of the supreme creative Will itself, of the divine samkalpa in the delight of existence.

But the advent of Savitri is to be preceded by preparing the needed occult-spiritual support to bear the weight and majesty of her Grace. A "world's desire" has to rise to bring her birth amongst us. This is done, again, by the Supreme himself, coming here as the Son of Force. He comes here as eternal Aswapati, as the king of Madra in the Land of Tapasya. He does intense Yoga-Sadhana in the Earth-consciousness. He discerns the "wide world-failure's cause" and offers his prayer to the supreme Goddess to mission down a living form of her. It is here that things have to happen and these can happen only through her. The purpose of the Yoga-Sadhana of Aswapati is therefore to prepare the necessary base, to provide a resplendent support, the firm needed ādhār for executive action of the omnipotent Goddess. He "keeping the traditions of those times goes," in the Savitri-story, "to the forest and performs penance for eighteen years, at the end of which the Divine Mother Gayatri appears to him and gives him a boon that she would be bom to him... He names her Savitri... Savitri and Gayatri are the same Deity."⁸

⁸Collected Works of M.P. Pandit, edited by Rand Hicks, Vol. 1, p. 337.

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They are the same, yet they are different in their roles. Of course there is no exact algebraic equivalence between Gayatri and Savitri; but we can meet their underlying selfsameness in Brahma himself. The virgin goddess of this world, the World of Sachchidananda, is the one who, from that source, makes things in the lower triple world possible. The radiant daughter, accepting the conditions of the inconscient Ignominy, sets herself to work those things out in the rhythms of the Truth-conscient.

We may also state it differently: The Adya Shakti, the original Primaeval Might, always stays in the transcendent. That is her viewless home. Her office is there, up there, and it i$ from there that she supports all these thousand actions, actions even in the lower difficult hemisphere. But for the decisive change to take place she has to project herself as the supramental Force. Indeed, it is in that form that she will come down to doing the work. Thus while the supreme Adya Shakti will always remain in the Transcendent, it is Savitri with the transformative power who will come down and take charge of the evolutionary process upon earth. In fact that has been her responsibility all along.

It is in this way that the Supermind will belong to the evolutionary line. However, its descent will mean the descent of its powers and not the descent of the Transcendent itself. Gayatri will always remain there. More and more of her aspects will stream into this growing process, but that will not imply her own stepping into it. The Transcendent upholds evolution in its splendid evolutionary play, but it itself does not become a part of the evolution. But perhaps it is through this play that the Transcendent will grow further to make that growth richer in the terrestrial happiness.

To describe the entire sequence in a somewhat plain language we can put it as follows. The unmanifest Divine plunges as Love into the depths of Inconscience, into the Horror of Inconscience. That is the first Avatar, "the permanent Avatar" whose presence alone will make the Inconscience luminous, make it a means for his own widening manifestation. But in the meanwhile silently he suffers the great Affliction in a divine manner. To redeem that Love, the Divine incarnates here in mortality in an evolutionary way and does intense Tapas. This radiant ground of Tapas then becomes the foundation or adhar for his executive Power's action to assert his Will in this mortal creation. She prevails over almighty Death, the dire Antagonist, and wins a unique victory. Thus is established the unfolding sovereignty of Love in which transformed Death participates with his noble

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benignities. Indeed that is how in a mysterious creative act of delight all is done by the Divine himself.

Such is the significance, the excellence of Sri Aurobindo's Savitri which is in fact the Word of Revelation adopting the fruitful form of a creative Myth, the myth that transcends the restrictive boundaries of space and time. It is a myth whose truth is being realised at every instance and at every place. It is the Mantra of Transformation which also implies Manifestation. It is built into the very origin of the creation, into the stuff of things by which they acquire their validity, in turn making that myth itself an eternal reality. Be it one single resplendent word Savitri holding the Sun-God's wide infinity, or twenty-four syllables reverberating from some deep-toned womb of the omniscient Hush, or, in "sessions of the triple Fire," twenty-four thousand lines spreading into the everlasting day, we have in them all present the Mantra Devata in her dynamic action to establish the supreme Truth on earth. We have in them all, and variously, the entrancing sweetness of her Love alone.

Autobiographical

It is well known that Savitri is the poetic record of spiritual experiences of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. In this connection we may recall what the Mother told Mona Sarkar:

All this is his own experience, and what is most surprising is that it is my own experience also. It is my sadhana which he has worked out. Each object, each event, each realisation, all the descriptions, even the colours are exactly what I saw and the words, phrases are also exactly what I heard. And all this before having read the book... earlier when he was writing he used to read it to me. Every morning I used to hear him read Savitri. During the night he would write and in the morning read it to me. And I observed something curious, that day after day the experiences he read out to me in the morning were those I had the previous night, word by word... Yes, they were exactly my experiences of the previous night which he read out to me the following morning.⁹

⁹ Mona Sarkar, Sweet Mother—Harmony of Light, pp. 26-27. See also Perspectives of Savitri /, 46-47.

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We also have a few letters of Sri Aurobindo indicating the aspect of his yogic realisations forming a part of Savitri. In this sense the poem is a double autobiography, but an autobiography in a different sense. Certainly, it is not a chronological presentation of events as are narrated in works of the kind. Nor is the approach Newtonianly linear in the successive manner of a cause-and-effect series. In fact it transcends the dimensions of Time and at once becomes intuitively supple to extend into psycho-spiritual relationships. We may say that when Sri Aurobindo is describing the upward journey of Aswapati climbing the ascending hierarchy of these innumerable worlds,

Erect like a mountain-chariot of the Gods

Motionless under an inscrutable sky,¹⁰

it is not a curve of Time that he is tracing in sequence. Nor can we generally get from Savitri the dates of their various spiritual achievements, their Siddhis. More important is perhaps the fact that it is a work which graphically characterises the entire evolutionary march of the Soul of the Earth. That is why the autobiography is a legend, an intense and powerful Legend of the Future, a future that is being enacted all along. Yet there is also specificity pertaining to the present avataric enterprise.

During the most unremitting phase of his unique effort to bring down the Supermind in the physical and make it a part of the earth nature, Sri Aurobindo considered nothing insignificant or small, spared no labour to achieve the objective. Every minute detail had to be attended to, every nook and corner of the darkness searched with the light of the spirit. If the "supramental change is a thing decreed and inevitable in the evolution of the earth-consciousness... [if the change has to] arrive, take form and endure, there is needed the call from below... and there is needed the sanction of the Supreme from above."" To prepare earth nature to send this call and to obtain the sanction of the Supreme is the task of Sri Aurobindo. Towards this he absorbed into himself all the glories and all the travesties of the earth nature, that thus alone could he make it freely receptive, luminously pliable to shape it in the possibilities of the higher powers. The "aspiring Secrecy"¹² has to reach the transcendental greatnesses that thus alone would pour into it flaming oceans of felicity. For that he attempted all and in the process achieved all.

¹⁰ Savitri, p. 98. ¹¹ The Mother, SABCL, Vol.25,p.40.

¹² Savitri,p.421.

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But the power that graciously intercedes between the call and the sanction is the executive Power who can "alone rend the lid and tear the covering... and bring down into this world of... falsehood and death Truth... and the Immortal's Ananda."¹³ To accomplish this she has to "adventure through blind unforeseeing Time"¹⁴ and stand on a dangerous brink... alone with death and close to extinction's edge.¹⁵ The failure of her work would mean sure collapse of the creation itself; but the success would entail divine prosperity in the sunlit widenesses of the earth. Such are the happy or else grave dreadful consequences which we have to recognise in the avataric endeavour of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. Savitri is the only yogic record through which we might glean the enormity of the difficulty and come to know what they did for us little mortals. But it is also the bright flame with which we can kindle our souls to grow more and more into its wonders.

If in Savitri we see such an extraordinary marvel we have to understand that it became particularly so, in the time-sequence, only during the last fifteen years of its composition. In one of his early letters in 1931, addressed to Amal Kiran, Sri Aurobindo writes as follows: 'There is a previous draft, the result of the many retouchings... but in that form it would not have been a magnum opus at all. Besides, it would have been a legend and not a symbol. I therefore started recasting the whole thing..."¹⁶ This makes it abundantly clear that the symbolic aspect of the magnum opus became more manifest than the legendary as an expressive necessity. In fact the entire thrust was to give a definite and dynamic shape to spiritual verities, in the process making them forever a part of the divinity in the earth. We see a quantum leap in the work of the incarnate God turning his gain into an enduring luminous evolutionary gain. The symbol thus becomes the Sun-Word itself. This is further corroborated by his letter to Amal Kiran in 1947: "Savitri is the record of a seeing, of an experience which is not of the common kind..."¹⁷

How does it become the Sun-Word? "Savitri is represented in the poem as an incarnation of the Divine Mother. This incarnation is supposed to have taken place in far past time when the whole thing had to be opened out, so as to 'hew the ways of Immortality.' "¹⁸

¹³ The Mother, SABCL, Vol. 25, p. 41. ¹⁴ Savitri, p. 459.

¹⁵ Ibid., p. 461. ¹⁶ Ibid., p. 727.

¹⁷ Ibid., p. 794. ¹⁸Ibid ., p. 729.

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About hewing "the ways of Immortality" we have what Amal Kiran calls,¹⁹ the Gayatri Mantra of the Mother. In a talk given to a women's association, dated 15 December 1911, the Mother expresses a very remarkable wish of hers. She proposes to the members of the association to make a resolution to raise themselves

... each day, in all sincerity and goodwill, in an ardent aspiration towards the Sun of Truth, towards the Supreme Light, the source and intellectual life of the universe, so that it may pervade us entirely and illumine with its great brilliance our minds and hearts, all our thoughts and our actions.²⁰

The Mantra is striking in several respects when we also realise that the Mother received it indeed even before she met Sri Aurobindo in 1914. This was in Paris when she was just 33,—showing us that "the Mother had been spiritually conscious from her youth."²¹ The ardent invocation to the Supreme Light to "pervade us entirely and illumine us with its great brilliance" is certainly the imploration, as well as the defining assertion, with which both Sri Aurobindo and the Mother started their work even before they came together. Years later, thanks to Doraiswami,²² we see it embodied in the "auspicious form" of the Gayatri Mantra itself. The result is the transformative disclosure in the nature of a metrical formula in Sanskrit, made perhaps in the early '30s. In this case the coming of the Avatar—the twin Avatar—therefore also means the coming of the revealing Word of Manifestation. We should not be therefore surprised that it should have been formulated, though independently but in an identical manner, by both the Mother and Sri Aurobindo.

In 1914 itself the Mother had a very definite intuition of the "sublime mandate," of the "New Manifestation" which shall be an

¹⁹The Sun and the Rainbow, p. 123.

²⁰Words of Long Ago, CWM, Vol. 2, p. 28.

²¹Prayers and Meditations, CWM, Vol. 1, p. 380.

²²An Aiyar Brahmin from Chennai, Doraiswami was Sri Aurobindo's devotee. He maintained that he would perform the thread-ceremony of his son Mithran only if he received a Mantra from the Master. A nationalist and a leading advocate by profession, he was Sri Aurobindo's emissary who carried his message to the Congress Working Committee when, in 1942, Sir Stafford Cripps's proposal to create a new Indian Union with a Dominion Status was being discussed in New Delhi. Unfortunately Sri Aurobindo's recommendation to accept the proposal was rejected.

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"integral manifestation." She was sure that

A new Light shall break upon the earth.

A new world shall be bom.²³

If this is the nature of the work she envisaged for which she got the mantric knowledge, there is also the certainty of her joining the Master to carry it out and to give to it a dynamic form in his bright eminent Will. In her prayer dated 11 January 1914 addressed to the "sovereign Lord" she speaks of a new life dedicated entirely to the Divine:

I know that a day will come when Thou wilt transform all those who come to us; Thou wilt transform them so radically that, liberated completely from the bonds of the past, they will begin to live in Thee an entirely new life, a life made solely of Thee, with Thee as its sovereign Lord.²⁴

This was in Paris about two and a half months before she actually met Sri Aurobindo. But even at that time she was speaking of the aspirant souls approaching them seeking transformation to lead a new life. We should pertinently mark the phrase "those who come to us" in her prayer to the sovereign Lord. She already 'knew' the one who would make them free from the dismal bonds of the past, by his yogic tapasya remove their dark encumbrances so that they may live a life dedicated to the Supreme to progress in the possibilities of the Spirit. The phrase "those who come to us" is already a wonderful prevision of what was to take place on the most eventful afternoon of 29 March 1914 in Pondicherry.

That by saying "us" in her prayer the Mother definitely meant herself and Sri Aurobindo becomes obvious from another prayer of hers addressed to the "marvellous Unknown One", dated 11 August 1914. They are the ones by going to whom a new life will begin:

O Thou marvellous Unknown One, Thou who hast not yet manifested Thyself, Thou who awaitest the propitious hour and hast sent us upon earth to prepare Thy ways, all the elements of this being cry to Thee, "May Thy will be done" and give

²³Prayers and Meditations, CWM, Vol. 1, p. 249 (25 September 1914.)

²⁴Ibid., p. 54.

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themselves to Thee in a supreme, unconquerable urge...

The coming together of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo was thus divinely foreordained; they were sent—"Thou... who... hast sent us upon earth"—to prepare the ways to do things in the Will of the Marvellous, in His samkalpa. But for that to happen "the propitious hour" had to arrive. Because they were sent by Him it is no wonder that they, even without coming in contact with each other on the physical plane, should have given the same Mantra for the Transformation of Life. Indeed there cannot be any contingent spatiotemporal separation in the Mantra. The Mantra existed in the very samkalpa itself. That is why it is a part of that endless propitious hour awaited by the Unknown One. However, terrestrially that propitious hour, that providential moment, has also got to be fixed in the timeless birth of the Avatar himself. This hour in the yogic tapasya of the Avatar has also to acquire its Siddhis, become an accomplished realisation. Surely, then, that propitious hour in its executive potency itself becomes the Mantra. That is Savitri.

Sri Aurobindo explains the significance of the Mantra as follows:

Brahman in the Vedas signifies ordinarily the Vedic Word or Mantra in its profoundest aspect as the expression of the intuition arising out of the depths of the soul or being. It is a voice of the rhythm which has created the worlds and creates perpetually. All world is expression or manifestation, creation by the Word.... And the word of creative Power welling upward out of the soul is also brahman.²⁶ The Vedic poets regarded their poetry as mantras; they were the vehicles of their own realisations and could become vehicles of realisations for others.... Anything that carries the Word, the Light in it, spoken or written can light this fire within, open a sky, as it were, bring the effective vision of which the Word is the body.²⁷

The Word or Brahman the Creator of the Worlds can thus express itself in us, embody the auspicious powers of the spirit to make progress in its widening manifestation. Savitri achieves it. In terms of its reality-content we may as well say that the Mother had already

²⁵Ibid., p. 218.

²⁶The Secret of the Veda, SABCL, Vol. 10, pp. 303-13.

²⁷The Future Poetry, SABCL, Vol. 9, pp. 510-11.

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written Savitri in 1911 itself, when she addressed her prayer to the Sun of Truth.

But we have to also see the entire sequence in terms of its modus operandi. The aspect of terrestrial chronology has certain pertinence in consolidating the mantric powers in it. If we connect the birth of Sri Aurobindo's Gayatri Mantra in the '30s with the work of physical transformation he was engaged in, we perhaps get some idea about the intensity with which it was being pursued during that period. In 1935 Sri Aurobindo had written to Nirodbaran that the Supramental Light was coming down but there was also the upsurge of the dark and dismal crudeness making things difficult. The Mother later told Amal Kiran, in 1954, that she used to see the Supermind descending in Sri Aurobindo in 1938; but at that time what he could not do was to fix it in the physical.²⁸ That his yogic tapasya along with the revelation of the Gayatri Mantra in the '30s and the composition of Savitri during the period are interconnected is therefore extremely significant. In fact we might assert that the period between 1935 and 1950 is greatly consequential from the point of view of actualising the work of physical transformation.

That Savitri is a double autobiography is indisputable in its spiritual sense. The happy device used by the poet is to write or asseverate it in the form of a legend. But, though (he legend is an ancient legend, it is a time-transcending legend. Actually right from its creation it has been the Legend of the Future. It has the Vedic vision that sees the mortal world sans death. In it immortality shall be the basis as well as the means for endless progress in the aspects of the transcendental realities. It proclaims a divine Manifestation. Thus in the legend we have Aswapati as the Protagonist and Savitri as the resplendent incarnate Word in her occupation with the Soul of the Earth called Satyavan,—they timelessly engaged in the world-transforming action. They are, in the legend carrying the ancient symbolism, "emanations or incarnations 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."²⁹ We have therefore powers and incarnations which have been eternally here; they are not simply the time-honoured characters belonging to Vyasa's

²⁸For a fuller discussion of the theme, see R. Y. Deshpande, Sri Aurobindo and the New Millennium, pp. 235-61, (1999).

²⁹On Himself, SABCL, Vol.26,p.265.

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illustrative Upakhyana in the Mahabharata, where also they stand for eternal or sanātana values in life that must be cherished. That may be taken as the reason why we don't need an identification mark to recognise Sri Aurobindo as Aswapati and the Mother as Savitri of the story. It is the same Aswapati who evolutionarily marching through the ages comes to us as Sri Aurobindo. Aswapati is the eternal incarnation of the Supreme. In fact without identifying himself with this ageless Aswapati Sri Aurobindo would not have been able to bring himself out in Savitri.

Now he comes here, because the propitious hour has arrived. Presently this propitious hour has an intended connection with Death's tremendous hour.³⁰ It is in this tremendous hour that the evolutionary march shall overleap its mortal step. This is the most felicitous blessing received by Aswapati from the supreme Goddess herself. In fact there is an unmistakable corroboration between the Gayatri Mantra of Sri Aurobindo and the Boon described by him in Savitri. In the Mantra the invocation is to the Sun-God to illumine all the parts of our being. However, before the benignities of the Sun-God are freely admitted into our lives, the physical presently prone to death must receive the solar illumination. Therefore Savitri must meet Death, Death as the incarnation of the Inconscience stubbornly standing across the path of the divine Event. She must encounter him and remove him from the scene. She must become mrityu-vijayini. Sri Aurobindo's epic of victory asserts that she shall do it with a victor's might and in the tremendous hour sow the seeds of grandeur. For this to happen of course Death's tremendous hour has to arrive. That also implies the occult necessity of Sri Aurobindo's 'death'. Thus the luminous affirmation of the Gayatri Mantra foreholds in its operative aspect the necessity for Death's transfiguring hour. It is this which assures the opening of the earthly life to its Light and Force. Then the Sun of Truth shall illumine with its splendour even the unregenerate physical to do things of its splendour.

The Descent into Night

If we wish to see the autobiographical—rather more appropriately the aurobiographical—account in the ancient tale of Savitri, then there should not be any difficulty in associating the Mother with Savitri

³⁰ Savitri, p. 346.

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and Sri Aurobindo with Aswapati himself. This is true not only in the sense of its legendary bearings but also in terms of its symbolic contents. The one-to-one correspondence that is likely to come in the first is enlarged in its spiritual context by the other aspect. It is the great visionary power of the legend that luminously supports the revealing possibilities of the symbol. In a certain sense they actually enrich each other.

This simply means that Savitri's is not a story of something which happened in the deep past. Indeed, we never ask a question as to who Savitri was; instead we always yearn to know as to who Savitri is. Vyasa's kanyā tejasvini Sri Aurobindo's Sun-Word is "the living goddess, the Word, and the Fire, that still works in us when we read the Mantra... It is effective word, which re-enacts her birth and tapasya in the hearer and the reader." That mantric force and vigour bring about an on-going rebirth in us. Such is precisely the purpose for which the goddess takes the "mortal birth", that thus alone she might take ever-recurring birth in our consciousness. As is the identity of Savitri and the Mother, so too is the oneness of Aswapati of the timeless past and ageless Sri Aurobindo. The two have all along been carrying the same soul of divinity in them. The external circumstances of life bring in them the least difference. This is particularly so when we also become aware of the fact that Aswapati that is Sri Aurobindo is not a frozen figure belonging to a given epoch. He is kālātit, beyond the circumscribing boundaries of time, yet growing in time to take time along with him.

The birth of Savitri means the birth of a new world. This she brings about by meeting the luminous Presence behind Death and obtaining the boon of a divine life upon earth. She always works in us towards that change, awaking us to the sense of our true innate spiritual entitlement. Sometimes it is feared that by laying too exclusive a stress on the aspect of the legend alone, we might somewhat overshadow this mantric power of hers. This will have the deleterious effect of distancing us away from what Sri Aurobindo intended it to be. If such is the danger then we should at once disassociate ourselves from the apprehensive outcome which the notion of a legend may carry in it. Our conjoining with its trenchant historicity could thus shut us off from the future it can unfold for us. But we should appreciate the fact that the ancient tale of Savitri in its charged symbolic contents is assuredly the auroral fore-history of the new age that is dawning on us. It is timeless in purpose and poignant in relevance.

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The symbolic legend of Savitri describes a twofold journey. If one is a journey that climbs greater and greater spiritual heights into the Transcendent, the other journey is a deepening journey which plunges into the occult depths of this material existence. One is the Journey of the Lord of Life and the other the Journey of the Sun-bright Executrix. They have undertaken the journeys by assuming human forms in full acceptance of all the thousand limitations of ours, by embracing all the ordeals of our mortality. The exalted purpose is to open out ways of infinity for this creation to progress in its unbounded possibilities. Behind this purpose is of course the blazing happy samkalpa of the Supreme himself, his Will. But, in order to accomplish it, contingencies of the inconscient workings have to be also taken care of. Across the path of this arduous journey there stands presently an incorrigible power, the colossal shadow-figure of Death.

The Mother and Sri Aurobindo's age-old concern has been to decisively deal with this Death. Their incarnation—a double incarnation—is the sine qua non for the success. This aspect is well focused in the traditional story. To win back the evolving soul of Satyavan from Yama, the uncompromising Immortal, it is necessary that, from the fire-altar of Aswapati's tapasya emerge Savitri as a radiant daughter. The Vedic Rishis had this intuition when they presented to us the Myth of Savitri in the context of the issue involved in this Mrityuloka. That is the enduring truth behind it.

But the issue gets fully matured only in our own time, waiting as it were for the arrival of the twin Avatar; fate seems to have conspired towards this. The splendid imperative is now to resolve it. Therefore Sri Aurobindo has to go to the domain of darkness, which is the birthplace of the antagonist Death. Thus we see the Yogin of Savitri entering the ashen abysses of creation to discover this wide world-failure's cause. This also means that presently his yogic tapasya in terms of its consequences approaches certain finality to get things done. In terms of specific autobiographical details we may say that this started happening around 1935. If we have an early suggestive glimpse of it in Sri Aurobindo's experiential A God's Labour³¹ its fuller account in the nature of the journey of the Traveller of the Worlds is given in Cantos Seven and Eight of Book Two.

The poet of Savitri is sufficiently expressive to reveal to us what had transpired when he entered into this primordial darkness that prevails in the Non-being's Void. Much more might have happened

³¹Collected Poems, SABCL, Vol. 5, pp. 99-102.

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than is indicated, but even that little only goes to show the enormity of the "terrible Inane" denying the Spirit's interminable Truth. We have in The Descent into Night a few action steps as follows:

He turned to find that wide world-failure's cause.

He sent his gaze into the formidable Infinity asleep.

He saw the fount of the world's lasting pain.

He saw the body and visage of the dark Unseen.

He followed the dim steps returning to the night.

He passed the no-man's-land without debate.

He came into an armoured fierce domain.

He witnessed the shadow depths of Life.

His vision discovered Hell's trade-mark.

He wrestled with powers that snatched from mind its light.

He entered a gaunt spiritual blank.

He strove to shield his spirit from despair.

His spirit became an empty listening gulf.

His being from its own vision disappeared.

His body was lapped by a tenebrous tongue.

He must bear all this with hope of heaven estranged.

He endured all, stilled the vain terror.

He mastered the tides of Nature with a look.

He met with his bare spirit naked Hell.³²

It will be rewarding to know the chronology as to how exactly the corresponding passages through the various drafts of Savitri developed. But as these are spiritual experiences in the nature of a poetic record we will have to observe some caution also; their sequence cannot be taken strictly as that of an event-by-event account. Yet an archival approach in dating these can shed interesting light vis-à-vis the yogic accomplishments. It seems that the prime seeds of these consequential developments had just started appearing during the late '20s and early '30s. We may briefly trace these as follows.

³² Savitri, pp. 202-19.

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The present version of The Descent into Night consisting of 609 lines essentially belongs to the 1942 draft which was revised and enlarged in the double column copy-text of 1944. But of the total number of lines of Canto Seven and Canto Eight put together there were hardly 60-70 lines present in the earlier draft of 1935-36³³ and of these scarcely a couple of lines existed prior to this. But then around this time the symbolic as against the legendary character of the epic had just started emerging more and more prominently. It became more experiential and pinpointed towards the transformative objective during the '40s. Previous to this 'first draft' there was practically nothing in Savitri to indicate the grimness of the Night's sway over the creation. This first draft—and A God's Labour— therefore forms the first recorded statement of the Yogin's stifling Assignation with the Night. In 1938 he had a rendezvous with her and, carrying God's deathless light in his breast, he had gone there to woo her dark and dangerous heart; but he had no definite idea of how he would win her over. He, however, had the conviction that his celestial Friend is there always with him to help him and that his determined engagement with the Night would pave the path towards Immortality.³⁴

When the Avatar puts his foot on the soil of the Night it indeed marks the beginning of the Everlasting Day. In Sri Aurobindo's Yoga-tapasya it means the first decisive step towards integral transformation. In its sequel great things happen,—including the upsurge of terrible forces. That this business with the jeopardous Night should have coincided with the Second World War when the Regiments of Darkness had heavily precipitated therefore does not come as a surprise. The fate of the evolutionary creation was hanging in the balance. But he came out victorious. Savitri informs us about that aspect of occult history. Here the symbol has certainly gone far ahead of the traditional legend.

Yet if we go into the deep past we have certain clues about the attempts which were made earlier. In this respect we have a very perceptive comment from David Frawley alias Vamadeva Shastri: "It seems that the urge to transform the Earth consciousness was stronger in the earlier ages of light. It fell away during the worst of Kali Yuga, when it was enough for a few individuals to gain liberation and the collectivity was too caught in tamas. As we move back towards

³³This early version has been published in Mother India, 1983.

³⁴Collected Poems, SABCL, Vol. 5, p. 132.

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the ages of light it is arising again. The Rig Vedic Rishis were at the dawn of this cycle of civilisation and were mainly concerned with setting forth the seeds of the upcoming culture, particularly on a spiritual level, but also as the social order. It is hard to say whether physical transformation as Sri Aurobindo envisioned it was part of their yoga but we do have the tradition that many Rishis lived for long periods of time (which could have been done by various methods occult, tantric, yogic, ayurvedic). They seem to have included the idea of transforming physical matter as part of their long-term aspiration for humanity, but they were also aware of Asuric forces in the material world that are very difficult to overcome."

Vamadeva further adds: "The Rishis' pursuit of physical and spiritual rejuvenation is reflected in the Vedic knowledge of Soma. There were many types of Somas both external (prepared with herbs) and internal (produced through yogic practices like pranayama) for rejuvenating body and mind and for gaining immorality on various levels. The Bhrigus were particularly known for their knowledge of rejuvenation. Even Brihaspati of the Angirasas sent his son Kacha to gain this knowledge from Shukra of the Bhrigus. Yet it is hard to tell whether the Rishis ever tried to, or were in a position to, create a naturally divine body such as Sri Aurobindo envisioned. This would require the most powerful form of Soma. It would be, as it were, a body naturally made of pure Soma, matter with the capacity of perpetually rejuvenating itself. Yet there is no reason to think that they were not aware of the possibility, given their pursuit of Soma on all levels. We could also describe this as bringing the Soma of Mahar Loka into the genetic matrix of physical matter. Of course the Asuras would try to prevent this as much as possible as this would mean the end of them."³⁵ But with the descent of Mahar itself in the earth-consciousness this cannot happen. Asuras are helpless against it. That was the truth seen by Sri Aurobindo and he worked towards it and firmly established it in the earth's subtle-physical. Things now will happen in the dynamism of the Truth-consciousness itself.

In one of the Vedic Riks we have the description of Agastya digging into the darkness of the Night, khanan as it says. But the Rishi found it difficult to deal with the physical nature. He could not bring light to it. His body was afflicted with a triple poison and could not bear the sunlight. It was like an unbaked clay-pot, atapta tanu. Similarly, Vamadeva could live here in a divine body, divya tanu, only for sixteen

³⁵ Private communication.

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years.³⁶ These ancient Rishis certainly knew what could bring about the physical transformation, the Mahar or Supermind, but they did not know its full modus operandi. The attainment of immortality in the luminous worlds or divyaloka is one thing and its knowledge in mrityuloka is another. The aspect of dynamic immortality in the physical is the work of the executive Force and unless her incarnation takes place it cannot be accomplished. Though the intuition of her descent to bring about materially the transformation was there,—and that is what the significant legend of Savitri narrates,—the field, the necessary resplendent spiritual support, ādhār, for its universal action was not yet ready then. The eighteen-year arduous tapasya of Aswapati, that is to stay Sri Aurobindo, was exactly for preparing the ground for her transformative action. In that respect we see the importance of the radical step that was taken by him. In fact what he achieved he achieved precisely because Savitri that is the Mother in her full energetic splendour also accompanied him. This was not so earlier. Cycles of evolution had to be silently worked out to arrive at this point.

In this context we may also recall the great Vedic revelation in which we see Yama and our illustrious forefathers having together an ambrosial drink under Supalash Vriksha.³⁷ The mention of supalāsha in the Rik is extraordinarily striking, particularly in association with Yama whom we take as the God of Death. The reference to a cluster of palāsha trees by Vyasa in his Savitri-narrative lifts up that narrative itself to another level of symbolism embodying in its richness a whole world of bright future possibilities. The botanical name of this tree is Butea Frondosa, which is popularly known as the Flame of the Forest. But the spiritual significance of it is far deeper than we can discern even from its poetic nomenclature. The Mother sees palāsha as the Beginning of the Supramental Realisation. That Yama should be linked up with it, enjoying the drink of immortality under its rich branches in the happy company of our forefathers and other gods, only indicates the centrality of his role in the entire process of supramentalisation of the physical. Here is the kind and gracious God who bestows on this creation the desirable boons of a glorious life in the splendours of the spirit. Yama shall thus fulfil himself terrestrially also.

³⁶ For a detailed discussion of some of these aspects, see R.Y. Deshpande, Sri Aurobindo and the New Millennium, pp.201-27.

³⁷ Rig Veda, X.135.1.

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That lends another meaning to the Savitri-legend itself. Savitri's winning back the soul of Satyavan from Yama therefore acquires another sense that points towards this marvellous realisation. But in order that this should happen the dark sombre veil which has been worn by Yama must be removed. Radiant Savitri, the daughter of the Sun-God, alone can do that. In fact Yama has put on a double veil, the veil of the incorrigible Antagonist and the veil of the luminous Inveigler. Behind him is indeed present the loving Supreme himself. It was the removal of this double veil, this double transformation which was accomplished by Savitri. Thus behind the darkness of this creation she meets her bright father to receive authentic boons of divine life upon earth. The Yoga-tapasya of Aswapati has thus borne the fruits of godly felicity.

Some Imponderables

There is no doubt that the ancient tale of Savitri is charged with the contents of physical transformation; but then we also see that in its swift narrative it has left many details unsaid. Thus Savitri's winning of the very unusual boon of Satyavan's life from Yama,—the Vedic immortal drinking ambrosia under the Supalāsh tree,—undoubtedly acquires its significance in the marvellous intent of this world's creation. But the story, although it is sufficiently careful to drop the necessary hints, does not go into the multiple processes that operate in time's dynamism. The yogic vision behind it is the Vision of the Future though it may not spell out the means and the details to make it a reality upon earth.

Many questions in the story will therefore trouble the modem mind, but suggestive answers are also to be found in it. Take as an example the tapasya of Aswapati. He retires to the forest and worships goddess Savitri with the intention of getting a boon from her to have a son. For upholding and perpetuating the truth-values in the society, in the collective life, he considers this to be necessary. The continuance of the race of the meritorious engaged in sacrifices is an aspect of Satya Yuga, the Age of the Right, and the responsible should not fail in it. Instead Brahma sanctions him, through Savitri, a daughter. The immediate cause of it is not made known to us and we remain greatly puzzled. This evidently goes to show that the reason behind Aswapati's tapasya lay far beyond the present social concerns; his was more a concern in the direction of the future of the race itself. If

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so, naturally then, Aswapati would invoke that executive Shakti who alone could grant him the propitious boon which would lead him towards the fulfilment of his singular desire. Therefore we can well understand why he worships Savitri and not, say, Shiva or Vishnu,— or the Sun-God himself if the tale belongs to the Vedic times.

The deeper imponderable of the story is perhaps the premature death of Satyavan. Why was he preordained to die in his "beauty's bloom,"—as Torn Dutt says? If it is generally taken for granted that people in the Vedic age lived for a full span of a hundred years then this death took place too early. This is particularly disturbing when we are also told that he was a noble prince, a lustrous youth of exceptional spiritual attainments. He was, as Vyasa says, an ocean of virtuous qualities and therefore it was Yama himself who had come to carry away his soul. But why in the prime of his youth? Was not the Ordainer of the Worlds upsetting the Order of the Worlds by this action of his? In the story we have no clue anywhere as to why Yama should have come so soon, why Satyavan's death was premature. Was it providence, was it fate, was it divine dispensation that worked here? What stands as reality behind this death?

The Vedic life is divided in four stages or ashramas. But the noble prince had hardly completed the first stage. He therefore remained Vedically unfulfilled in the integrality of life that was his native right. This in many respects seems to be incongruous. All that we can say is that in the story Satyavan had to die, that thus alone would Savitri meet Yama and fulfill the purpose of her incarnate birth. But that will not make any sense if she is going to get back the same Satyavan from the God of Death. Yet in the legend there are also sufficient indications of a symbolic nature to tie all these aspects together. It does not go into the rapturous lyricism of love between the two, but Savitri's firm determination to remain fixed in her resolve even in the worst circumstance of life has tacit connotations that go beyond all verbal descriptions. Hers is love that triumphs.

Why should Satyavan die one year after meeting Savitri? But this cannot but happen. That is the power of her love. Its alchemy has to transmute him into absolute gold, lustrous in the tight of the sun. "A curse [was] laid on the pure joy of life"³⁸ and that curse had to be removed. She was there to do that. Their togetherness through a cycle of earthly seasons moved inexorably towards the miracle to set themselves into seasons of the spirit. The moment she chose him as

³⁸ Savitri, p. 629.

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her life's partner, all that he had in him as the buried past had to disappear. His deep buried past included the presence of the dark almighty Death himself and it had to get consumed in the fire of her victorious will. That is why the story of Savitri is the story of love conquering death. The moment she saw him and recognised who he was the wondrous deed was done. Savitri's love hastened Satyavan's death. How dangerous! Yet how desirable! If only we die like him in the love of the eternal Savitri who is ever seated within our heart! But his was a ready soul to woo the fiery beloved:

Noble and clear as the broad peaceful heavens

A tablet of young wisdom was his brow,

Freedom's imperious beauty curved his limbs,

The joy of life was on his open face.

His look was a wide daybreak of the gods,

His head was a youthful Rishi's touched with light,

His body was a lover's and a king's.³⁹

The moment Savitri met Satyavan her inner vision knew who he was.

A marvel of the meeting earth and heavens

Is he whom Savitri has chosen mid men,

His figure is the front of Nature's march,

His single being excels the works of Time.

A sapphire cutting from the sleep of heaven,

Delightful is the soul of Satyavan,

A ray out of the rapturous infinite,

A silence waking to a hymn of joy.

A divinity and kingliness gird his brow;

His eyes keep a memory from a world of bliss.⁴⁰

But what was the intention behind the love of Satyavan and Savitri,— if we have, so to say, to ascribe an intention to the spontaneity of love? The higher imperative was

To mould humanity into God's own shape

And lead this great blind struggling world to light

Or a new world discover or create.

39 Ibid., p. 393. ⁴⁰Ibid., pp429-30

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Ultimately if this creation is to make progress in the ways of the spirit

Earth must transform herself and equal Heaven

Or Heaven descend into earth's mortal state.⁴¹

To be Savitri's life partner in the magnificence of her divinity Satyavan had to shed the unregenerate burden of the evolutionary antiquity. He was in his deeper nature now ready to do it. Therefore Narad proclaims loudly that Satyavan, his life here expended, will one year from that day abandon his body, samvatsarena kshinayurdehanyasam karishyati. He is going to abandon his body and not die helplessly. Such was the power of love that moulded his inner will, perhaps he being unaware of it. "Twelve swift-winged months [were] given to him and her,"⁴² but that was enough for Savitri to do whatever was to be done. Her one-year association with him in love's oneness was occultly essential when whatever had to be worked out was worked out in the enduring greatness of efficacious love. Time prepared the destiny that goes beyond time's cycles. The sanction of one-year period was a necessary and sufficient condition for the intense yogic preparation.

If we have to understand this love's alchemic work in the Dantesque language, we may say that it was the Power of Love that really conquered Death, Love that moves the sun and all the stars. Thus "Love in the wilderness met Savitri"⁴³ to fulfill himself. She enshrined him in her inner soul to make him dynamically triumphant. Now perhaps we know why "Love came to her hiding the shadow, Death,"—that

Well might he find in her his perfect shrine.⁴⁴

But here is a shrine which is not a frozen lifeless structure, but is the House of Truth itself which imparts its own rhythm of joyous movement to what it enshrines. Fulfilment happens when the lovers pass together through one cycle of divinely operative time. In this way grace, consciousness, truth, redemption and bliss can all be seen on one single thread, the diamond thread of the wonderful Savitri-legend.

⁴¹Ibid., p. 486. ⁴² Ibid., p. 431. ⁴³ Ibid., p. 391. ⁴⁴ lbid., p. 14.

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When Narad sees that Savitri has chosen Satyavan for a husband, he at once bursts into an optimistic rapturous song. He sings of the glory of the name of Vishnu and makes sudden haste to reach king Aswapati's palace in Madra. He is extremely happy that the things that were promised long ago shall now be fulfilled. He is gladdened that in the fire of Savitri's love Satyavan will die, die to his afflicted deathful life. He therefore, as if to precipitate the issue further, designedly makes known to Savitri the impending death of Satyavan. His death was inevitable in the very nature of things and it could not have been avoided. Nay, it was already fixed in the glorious moment of the eternal lovers' meeting. But then why had it to be made known? Why had Narad to carry the Word of Fate? What imperative compelled him to utter in Aswapati's palace the calamitous sentence? This is an imponderable which again moves in an altogether different dimension that should also take care of love's unfailing triumph over death.

But love can conquer death only when it acquires power in the measure that can weigh up to the demands of the task. Narad clearly foresees the magnitude of the problem and, divinely inspired, rushes in righteous urgency to do something marvellous. He must, in the ironfisted circumstance of life prevailing here presently, "steel the will of Savitri."⁴⁵ She must do Yoga and in her soul harbour the might of the supreme Goddess whose incarnation she was. In that context Narad shows a certain sense of responsibility towards it and actively participates in Savitri's task of moulding the future. He thus proves to be the heavenly preceptor who initiated Savitri on the path of Shakti Yoga. Savitri would not have succeeded in her mission had this not happened.

The fulfilment of Savitri's Shakti Yoga is complete, its Siddhi being the life divine upon earth. She did it entirely in the Will of the Supreme as a sun-bright truth of existence. It is at times said that "the supreme epic of Savitri presents one great conquest of Death and not the last." If it is so then we will have to say that Savitri left her task half-done. This is such a major commentary on the avataric work that it sounds almost suspect and hence unacceptable. But, though Savitri has already vanquished Death, she also tells him to be still there, to be the instrument of her will and her work: functionally she still needs Death,—as if nothing is superfluous in this creation. Should this continued presence of Death be then interpreted in the sense that further conquests are yet to be achieved? But this is not true,—because

⁴⁵ Ibid., p. 429.

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hence onward in whatever form he might continue to exist at the bidding of Savitri, he is always going to be her instrument in universal affairs, in the universal commerce. What greater conquest or greater mastery over Death is then needed than making use of him for her own purposes in the scheme and details of the evolutionary process? The meaning of the mortal world, mrityuloka, indeed becomes clearer to us only when we see the positive dynamism of veilless Death in it. In fact the moment the double covering that Yama had put on himself was removed Savitri's task was done.

Another puzzling feature of the Savitri-epic is the passive role of Satyavan in the great events that were happening in it. If we do get some idea about the role of Aswapati, Savitri and Narad from what is described in it, we should also understand from it the kind of part that was being played by him in the drama of the earth. If Satyavan and Savitri are a dual power of God, then how does he complement her in the work of God? How does he support the play through his wise passivity, through his calm and tranquil submission? Sri Aurobindo has broadly hinted about it especially in the eleventh Book of Savitri.

If the climbing of the earth's soul, the soul that is now ready to receive Supernature's transformative gifts with her powers and potentialities poised to emerge in their great crystalline manifestive glory, then we can understand how through silent ages he had taken upon himself this mortality-bound birth. The question that rather needs to be answered is why at all did Satyavan take this mortality-bound human birth. Why did he come here, to all immediate appearances without any power, as "the Eternal's delegate soul in man"?⁴⁶ And what is it that took him closer to the fiery Princess of Madra, Savitri, to whom none would dare approach claiming her hand in marriage? Or was the silent helpless preparation under the yoke of fate and circumstance the contributive factor towards this? Is to suffer, so unredeemably, accepting the dicta of the evolutionary nature, also a means to acquire transcendental awareness? Or is there some smouldering fire by which the fuel itself gets somehow kindled in its quiescent transformative blaze?

The incarnate dual Power shall open God's door,

Eternal supermind touch earthly Time.⁴⁷

⁴⁶Ibid, p. 633.

⁴⁷Ibid., p. 705

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This is what the passage says. What so far was a revelation has now materialised and taken actual shape. Supermind has touched the earthly time, has entered into the terrestrial process. "Touched"—yes, that was set as the present goal. Sri Aurobindo's task got fulfilled in achieving it. Because the supermind has entered into time, time itself shall unfold the dynamism of its growing ages.

We therefore recognise the 'dual power' as the double divinity incarnate in the context of the terrestrial work. Yet the question remains: Who is Satyavan with all his passive wisdom as the collaborator of his Savitri? Perhaps we may attribute the nature of this power as belonging to a different category. The Mother speaks of Satyavan as an Avatar⁴⁸ evolutionarily climbing from mortality to divine felicity in life, a permanent incarnation of the Supreme in the inconscient creation. And in it lies his passive wisdom waiting upon the establisher of the truth to manifest himself in the earthly play. He comes here and puts himself in the hands of Nature, Purusha shaped by Prakriti. Satyavan of his own accord cannot climb to divinity without the arrival of Savitri whose birth needs the occult-yogic support, the tapasya, the Divya Yoga of her father Aswapati. To this dual term we have therefore to add the most important aspect of the divine Will now directly entering the matured evolution. In it we can understand the story of Satyavan and Savitri:

Two fires that bum towards that parent Sun

Two rays that travel to the original Light.⁴⁹

The quiet flame and the roaring flame merge into a superfire, that it be kindled in the heart of the earth. Has this not happened? If Savitri has been doing the Shakti Yoga, Satyavan has all along been engaged / in the Yoga of the Earth, the Prithvi Yoga. The dual power of God has been set on the march by God. Therefore in saluting that power we indeed salute God himself.

⁴⁸ Questions and Answers, CWM, Vol. 5, p. 391. For discussion of several related aspects, see also R.Y. Deshpande, Satyavan Must Die.1996.

⁴⁹ Savitri , p. 720.

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Part Two

A Brief Resume

In this section we shall quickly run through the several articles that have been included in the present volume. The one single common thread, the diamond thread that ties them together is the spirit of Savitri itself. There are spiritual aspects, occult and mystical aspects, religious aspects, philosophical, literary, aesthetic aspects and each one can be a lifetime engrossment for us to grow into the multi-dimensionality of the creative Word. When the Mother says that Savitri is the supreme revelation of Sri Aurobindo, we see at once that its power can take us to the splendours of the future. It is inexhaustible and no amount of treatises or metaphysical discussions or interpretative rationalisations can come anywhere closer to its resplendent form. Vyasa speaks of Aswapati's daughter Savitri as kanyā tejasvini, a radiant daughter. Such indeed is also the poem Savitri. She has the form of such beauty that she looks like a damsel of heaven, devarūpini. No wonder none takes courage to court her, exceptional as she is in her fiery brilliance. Our approaches to her are too human. Yet it is only through them that we can enter into her realms of gold. She makes our mortality bear the touch of the immortal. Each study here may be a first-rate study, but when put together everything seems too insignificant, too little that our eyes can see in her. But hers is also the role of uplifting us to her own grandeur in the delight of endless spiritual progress. To our intimacy with her she shall bring luminous richnesses of the manifesting divinity. We should therefore see the studies entirely from that point of view.

1: Sri Aurobindo spoke of future poetry as the voice of the spirit. It does not automatically follow that there shall be future painting or future music or future science expressing one aspect or another of that creative truth. These have to happen, but not as corollaries. The aesthetic urge has to find the needed means, appropriate instruments and manners of elegant and beautiful expression. One example of the opening of this possibility is the Mother's work in bringing out the Savitri-paintings through Huta. The Mother had told her that she wanted to do something new. This has been done. If we can enter into the true meaning of these paintings then the gain is entirely ours. It becomes a sadhana for our growth, showing the way of spiritual progress. "The Mother," tells Huta, "took my consciousness to other spheres and let me see many extraordinary things in detail, she also

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made me feel their vibrations and meet numerous strange beings of different types. Without her direct instructions, guidance and constant help nothing could have been achieved." No wonder there is the atmosphere of light, golden yellow or golden red, or else that of a lake filled with diamond-like lotuses having emerald leaves. There shines the Sun in its tranquil majesty, tranquil glory. It is that glory which shall be present in future painting.

Such is also the wondrous harmony we find in Sunil Bhattacharya's music, music that moves in the rhythms of Savitri.

2: When in the context of the line "All things shall change in God's transfiguring hour" from Savitri the Mother was asked if man can delay or hasten this hour, she replied:

Neither one nor the other in their apparent contradiction created by the separate consciousness, but something else which our words cannot express. In the present state of human consciousness, it is good for it to think that aspiration and human effort can hasten the advent of the divine transformation, because aspiration and effort are needed for the transformation to occur.

Can Matrimandir at Auroville, for instance, mean that transformative aspiration and effort of which the Mother spoke? Yes, it is so; it is a symbol and a possibility. About the body's cells holding the Immortal's flame she says that it is a poetic way of expressing the transformation which will take place. To make that poetic way real, to effect it in the physical, she spared no effort. In that effort in the Will of the Lord she brought the proclaimed future at our doorsteps.

3: After the siddhis of the Individual Yoga and the Universal Yoga Aswapati has to move forward. He has yet to discover the solution to the problem of imperfection of this suffering world. In the Transcendental Yoga of Aswapati a moment comes when he has to make a choice: he must either leave behind all that he had achieved or else he must transform all that into powers of the spirit. But that is possible only by living in pure existence. Then only could he approach the Divine Mother and invoke her to step into the mortal creation in order to transform it. In the Yoga of Savitri,—through which she embodies higher and higher powers of the Divine Shakti in herself,— there arrives also a somewhat similar stage, that she must discover the cosmic spirit and cosmic consciousness. This is in the context that Savitri has a task to do and she cannot disappear into the

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Unmanifest. The gulf between that Ultimate Reality and this Manifestation has to be filled. Only after that the Divine Shakti would work in her in order to deal with Death.

Savitri has attained the supreme Nirvan of divine emptiness. "She is passing through the great experience of the Buddha, Sakyamuni, and the Seer of the Taittiriya Upanishad who spoke of the Asat, the Non-Existent." She has offered her gnostic individuality to the Supreme by passing through the experience of Nirvan. She would have vanished into it and gone out of existence. This immergence or laya into her origin would have marked eternal failure of her role in this creation. But the ancient guardian Shakti clutches her and holds her back. Savitri cannot disappear so. On the other hand, the imperative is the integral readiness to embody and manifest the whole in her person. Such is the only decisive or essential factor. Savitri must presently open herself out to hold in her the Divine Shakti for the work of the Divine. Towards this "all finitising movement of the instrumental members of the personality" must be overcome.

Savitri has done this. Now tranquil or receptive identification with all manifested forms is an accomplished fact with her, an inevitable consequence of surrender to the pure Truth that sustains everything. That puts the seal of success on the Yoga of Savitri.

4: Savitri's occult disputation with Death is becoming ineffectual. She therefore decides to resort to a yogic action by entering into her meditation's house. In it her "silent will" joins the Will of the Divine. In that house she witnesses the Vedic Yajna going on with the house-lord and his mate offering oblations. But who are they performing the eternal sacrifice? We may say that on the individual level they are the soul of Satyavan and the soul of Savitri. But the great sacrifice has to also grow on other levels. On the cosmic dimension in her house of meditation Agni is the Lord of the House with Aditi as Swaha seated to his left offering oblations. In its transcendental aspect the Supreme himself is the house-lord with the executrix Shakti as his mate engaged in this sacrifice for the sake of the creation. Out of this Tapas-Yajna or the force of concentration were the worlds bom and in that sacrifice shall they ever grow. The human Savitri on entering her house of meditation sees the divine reality of her own self and makes her will one with the transcendent Will. It is in that divine reality of her self that she gets the power which is vaster and mightier than the power of Death the Terrible. Now she becomes the indisputable leader of the evolutionary march and is sure of her victory. Although a small Yajna is constantly being performed in the heart of

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each one of us, this Yajna of Savitri is unique in its triple dimension of the Supreme. If her Yajna is to dissolve ignorance and death, that in the ever-progressive manifestation divinity may inhabit this house of Matter, ours is to grow in that sun-bright splendour of divinity itself. That is the House of Meditation.

5: Our journey starts in the morning, the hour of the symbol dawn. Around us the star-field stretches to infinity, but now let us look down far below where a dark planet is moving ponderously in its orbit around the sun. We are about to begin our journey, the fascinating journey towards new life in a new world. Sri Aurobindo himself, as Aswapati, is our guide. Savitri, with its luminous images and powerful music that speak directly to our innermost being, is the supreme travel-guide. Everywhere in that pilgrim-chant are invoked by the magnificence and majesty of Sri Aurobindo's language and vision luminous powers who, unseen companions, accompany us at every step of journey: "Varuna active within is a remover of limits, Saraswati a bringer of revelation, Sarama the power of intuitive mind to search out Truth. In the mind's silence they interpret for us the images that rise and change before our eyes, as if by some magical process, conjures them line by line. These are images charged with a profound truth and significance beyond the capacity of language to express." Eventually the journey arrives at the yoga of integral surrender to the Divine. When we are conscious in every part of our being, then perfect offering becomes possible. The path then becomes a path of action and will.

6: Savitri has to meet Death. Therefore Death comes to her in the form of the death of her husband Satyavan. It is through the death of Satyavan that she has to work out the victory for which she had incarnated herself in this mortal world. In that sense Satyavan's body becomes her alter-body. If we actually see this episode in the deep biographical context of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother we recognise that the identity of their consciousness has a decisive role in the work of transformation. When in 1949 it became occult-yogically necessary for one of them to leave the body for the fulfilment of their work, it was Sri Aurobindo who took the strategic decision to 'die'. It was a kind of prophetic destiny, just as Satyavan's destined death. It was dying to Death itself. In the sequel, in 1961 the Mother had to battle with the Lord of Death and she came out victorious.

In the epic Savitri represents the Mother in totality, and there are no two views about it. But regarding Satyavan or Aswapati there are opinions. "Sri Aurobindo has always been the Earth's Jiva, Satyavan, the Original Avatar and in this incarnation a combination of Aswapati

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and Satyavan." In any case the coming together of Satyavan and Savitri is absolutely necessary if there has to be the birth of the New Race. They are the bright parents of the sons and daughters who will be bom to live a divine life upon the earth. For the purposes of the manifestation their mystic union is essential. The answering Grace from above that is Savitri and the aspiring Soul from below who is Satyavan meet only because of Aswapati's intense Yoga-Tapasya.

7: It is well known and also well recognised that the mind of man is a not an adequate instrument for the discovery of the gnostic Truth from which all the faculties originate. But when mind fails what can come to our help is sight. It is by acquiring the sight of the Spirit that we may get some idea of the vast reality that is there behind this creation which otherwise looks to be a dim and shadowy world of ignorance. In fact ascending through the grades of spiritual consciousness, our sight also climbs to higher and higher worlds and in the process it acquires a certain universality; it can leap even into the transcendent. What was so far incomprehensible now comes into its all-encompassing view. In that sight an identity between the subject and the object is at once experienced. Then the "spirit is no more hid from its own view." The gaze of eternity itself spreads across this cosmic manifestation. In it sight can penetrate into the form to see the formless, as much as it can be the other way around also. When one has this sight one sees that the form itself is inherent even in the formless, that it already exists in its mystic latency everywhere. It is only the divine sight which is truly capable of seizing the supreme form. This mystic latency finally progresses into a recognised full-grown potency in the play of manifestation. Indeed, there is no end to sight when it becomes one with the Eternal' s gaze. A vision that is omniscient sees and sustains all that is.

8: If we put Savitri in the class of religious texts, such as Saptashati and Devi Bhagavata, then it has to be recited aloud daily. It has the power of profound vibrations that can create in us states that have sound forms of reality. Although such an approach of looking at it as a scripture may not be the right one to live in the world of Savitri, it has yet the merit of exploring the occult aspects that are present in the depths of our nature, our inner existence that should open to higher working. It tells a story, it makes us think, meditate, struggle; "it takes us to the spaces of a divine calm where all is one seamless Ananda." Aswapati's invocation to the Divine Shakti and her response, that she shall descend carrying all mights and greatnesses in her, are sufficiently indicative of the role of the Tantra in the efficacy of the

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Integral Yoga. To effect transformation in all the details, including even our obdurate physical constitution, she incarnates herself here. She is bom as a daughter to the Tapasvin. "Again and again we are drawn to the Mother idea in Savitri, for Sri Aurobindo found this to be the most potent instrument to lead man to the life divine." A fixed and unfailing aspiration is answered by the supreme Grace from above. This boon which Aswapati received has therefore behind it the sanction of the supreme Creator himself. However, it must be immediately noted that the Tantrik elements in Savitri are not ritualistic, as are generally associated with this discipline.

It is interesting to see the growth of Aswapati's daughter Savitri with the scriptural ideas. The Tantra texts deal extensively with the different ages of the Mother. "Sri Aurobindo follows this idea and we have a whole canto that had been inspired by a single term in Vyasa: kanya tejasvini." From this point of view we may see that Savitri is actually set as a devt kāvyam. "Hence we have also to grow along with the idea of the Devi; and so we are granted a double vision through the magic of poetry to watch the human and the divine as an indivisible whole. We see Savitri as one among her kind and yet, somehow, different." Can it then be said that the epic's "Book of Yoga draws a major portion of its material from the Tantra"? But this may be considered more as a part of integral Tantrism entering into operation of the occult-spiritual. Just as we recognise the deities of the Tantra to embody their powers in us, to experience their living presence in us, to grow in them, the world of Savitri also needs to be seen as an experiential truth. If physical nature, with the character of ignorance housing death, has to be tackled then surely the powers of this New Tantra Shastra are available to the desirous soul.

9: If Savitri abounds in the ancient Indian spiritual lore, there is also a good deal of Bible in it. We have references such as God's covenant with the Night, the Son of God, the Father, the Holy Ghost, God's martyred body, Gethsemane and Calvary, or Christian Madonna's or images of cathedral and tabernacle. About the Great who come to save this suffering world we have in Narad's speech a picture of Christ. If Savitri was bom in the greatness of the Saviour then she must accept the lot of mortality in order to change it. The elaborate biblical picture of Christ is taken as an illustration. The Son of God comes as the Son of Man to drink the bitter cup. This is a direct echo of Christ's words in the Bible with the symbolism that is at once obvious. Jesus undergoes intense agony not long before the great sacrifice. The cause of this agony is Man's callousness, denial,

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betrayal. The phrase "It is finished" is famous and Sri Aurobindo has used it in the most appropriate manner in the context.

Christians do not think in terms of God the Mother. But if there is an identity between Jesus and Lady Wisdom as the Word of God, then there seems to be a close link between the Lady Wisdom and the Supreme Mother and her incarnation as Savitri. It is she who is "the Incarnate Word of God" in the poem. She is the Saviour. While speaking of her Narad brings before us the magnificent vignette of the Crucifixion. "There are hints of the association of Savitri with Christ from the very beginning of the poem. Though association does not imply identification, it nevertheless does imply a close link between the two." Regarding Savitri's suffering we have the symbolism of passion-flower which "suggests the instruments of Christ's passion or his suffering on the Cross. The corona of the creeper suggests the crown of thorns." The Christ-figure is seen in Savitri in relation to the world's evolution and as a step in the direction.

A study of Savitri seems to make the Old Testament's Book of Job most spiritual. Pain as the hand of nature sculpturing Man is the Aurobindonian interpretation of Job's suffering. "In Job it is the Lord himself who causes pain and suffering on the protagonist in order to raise him from the Sattwic state of perfection to the state of a Gunatita who can have the direct vision of the Lord." Finally, the Lord reveals his Infinity to Job. "Once Job sees the Lord with his own eyes, there is neither pain nor grief. It is possible that a study of Savitri could throw at least some light on other portions of the Bible as it can on other Scriptures." This is so because Savitri is a Scripture that includes, and transcends, the essence of all other Scriptures.

10: The epic Savitri is a wonderful piece of architectural engineering. It is also vibrant in the sculpted forms that can embody the breathing souls of formless Infinity. The rock-hewn temple in the mystic cave of Savitri's heart is a beautiful example of this Art. She enters into the deep recess and finds herself amidst great figures of the gods conscious in stone and living without breath. In fact, this Art itself can then become a great yogic Art. We may therefore say that in it is the world of "true matter" where the supramental physicality will first manifest. Accordingly, it can be viewed as the sculptor's stone or clay through which is expressed the divine idea behind the form. It is an idea that is inaccessible to the ordinary human mind. Here then a creative artist becomes a Shilpa Yogin, with his art as heaven's art. He passes beyond sensible Nature and as an artist enters the Age of Subjectivism. He develops a highly specialised

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technique of vision. The form is held in view in "an act of non-differentiation" to execute in stone, pigment or other material that which is invisibly seen.

Yet this inner visualisation could become a constraint as a subjection to external reality. There has to be an art with eyes wide open. The modern Shilpa Yogin's has to be sajāg-sādhanā. Such contemplation and representation is the invitation for the future art. "The Gods must be shaped within to live in us and an inspired dynamic union with the Transcendent's sphere lead us into a Divine Life on earth." That shall be the future Art.

11: Is the Yoga of Aswapati a series of negations? There may be a certain atmosphere of grief and gloom spread over Savitri, but nowhere do we have pessimistic or negative feeling about things to come. What is displayed is the pragmatism in handling the issue of pain and suffering in the mortal world. It is the deep-rooted problem of death that is being tackled by the three protagonists, affirming the evolutionary future in the splendour of divinity. Aswapati invoking the divine grace, Savitri carrying out successfully the occult battle, and the soul of the earth called Satyavan stepping into the world of knowledge mark the unfoldment of the epic's theme. It may also be considered as a multiple biography extending over space and time far beyond the parameters of the legend.

But from the point of view of a biography there are a number of questions that demand proper elucidation. Why does, for instance, Sri Aurobindo write the name Aswapati for the first time on page 341 in the epic? This may be partly seen in terms of the legend on which the epic is built. Although this part of the poem is directly experiential-autobiographical in nature, the poet has retained the pregnant elements of the legend to serve his purpose of narrating those yogic realisations. The author resorts to the plain comprehensible technique of story telling. The legendary figure of Aswapati thus turns out to be the most apt. It would have been therefore unaesthetic and incongruous to keep on harping all the while the name of Aswapati the protagonist as the Avatar. The problem of identifying Aswapati of the legendary past with Sri Aurobindo of the divine future thus reduces to the understanding of the nature of the device of a story used by Sri Aurobindo. It is in this way that he gives expression to his avataric work. There is the least doubt that half of Savitri is Sri Aurobindo's occult-spiritual biography. It is therefore well said that if "one reads the first half of Savitri without Sri Aurobindo himself in mind (and in the heart),

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one not only misses its true significance: one also erects a screen between the spiritual vibration conducive to his Yoga and one's own receptivity."

12: The traveller Aswapati is moving through several worlds in the pursuit of that which shall unravel the enigma of this creation and give a clue to the solution of its difficulties. As long as death is present in this world there cannot be true progress and happiness. Aswapati climbs these hierarchies, these worlds rising one above another in an endless series; he experiences their limitations and their possibilities, finds their meaning and purpose in the scheme of things, their realities. Even in the heart of the Night, Aswapati finds a place where all conflict is resolved. In that hostile emptiness he suddenly comes across the spring of divinity. It is that divinity which must emerge from the darkness and step into the light of the everlasting day. Soon Aswapati enters the domain of the World-Soul. Here are lovely landscapes and lakes and streams. A fragrance fills the ambience. Here is the meaningful rest for souls to assimilate the bygone experiences in order to sketch the map of a new life. It is in this world that Aswapati meets the twofold being in one who is seated in a trance of creative joy. The Divine Mother, sole and omnipotent, stands there supporting all. Aswapati falls prostrate at her feet. Then, in the Kingdom of the Greater Knowledge, he could see all the creative powers in their plenitude, powers quiet and fulfilled, powers that can take care of our mortality.

Aswapati is now free from the bondage of death and ignorance. But his aim is not only to realise the Divine; it is to manifest the perfection of the Divine in the world. He was looking for the one who would enable him to accomplish this unique task. That was the purpose of his long extraordinary odyssey described in 210 pages of the epic. These are the incredible experiences of Aswapati which become the foundation for the Divine to descend, to come as the power of grace to transform mortality. Aswapati realises that such a power, the supramental consciousness, is not yet manifest in the cosmic formula and unless that comes here, there cannot be the genuine fulfilment of this creation. He is now ready for the Yoga of the Transcendental to establish the supramental upon earth.

13: "Once Jesus of Nazareth, we are told in the New Testament, narrated to the people a parable. He said the kingdom of God is like a pearl that is most sought after. And when one has found it, one goes out and sells that entire one has and buys the pearl. Savitri is such a pearl for which one could give up what one has in order to get it."

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What is that so pearl-like in Savitri? It depends upon one's approach towards it: there is philosophy in it, there is rich metaphysics, mysticism, occult knowledge, religion, science, literature, cosmogony, history of civilisation, history of evolution, everything that one wishes to have. But indeed it is the supreme revelation which brings divinity to our mortality in order to transform it into its own nature that draws us closer to it. What is it that which one will not or should not sacrifice for its sake?

One of the most appealing aspects of Savitri is of life that passes from time into eternity, as much as the other way around. It is a quest for the Divine even in this mortality-bound world. Jacob's ladder was built long ago, the ladder on which the angels of God move up and down. It is available to us also,—if we wish to use it. But today we are trapped in a time warp. Our helplessness is the inability to get out of the constraints of time.

The problem ultimately gets quintessenced in the death of Satyavan. Sage Narad says that Satyavan must die after a year of the marriage; but that also means that Satyavan will live for one year. This is the year during which we can get ready to meet death. We are in the angst of death, of facing nothingness. In it is the annihilation of our own being. But the very consciousness of this dread can catapult us to realise our own being to go beyond whatever death entails in its negatively creative aspect.

That is what we get from Savitri, which is "not a book of sweet poems and blissful spirituality. It is not like the musings of a poet, of an imaginary spiritual heaven. It comes to grips with the nitty-gritty of life in sharper contrast than the existentialists claim." Zen-like Savitri tells us to be aware of the world. But that is awareness in the truth of existence. In it we have to grow as conscious individuals. It is this awareness that has to be a means for the Divine to express itself in this world. We move in time to make progress in awareness. Time is given to us precisely for that purpose. The cycle of time, symbolised by one year after which Satyavan is to die, thus becomes triumphantly meaningful. In it indeed is the significance of Savitri's great victory over Death. Our search for the pearl is to always live in that glory.

14: When we talk of true poetry that goes beyond the mental level or else our quick ordinary vitalistic satisfaction, we await the revelatory word that can make the sublime a part of our humdrum life. That is what Savitri does to us. It is the noblest experiential poetry, the veritable Veda of the Modern Age. It communicates mantric

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vibrations that defy analysis. "Savitri may remain on hands, lap or desk, but we find ourselves soaring, in repeated flashes of extraordinary illumination, intonormally inaccessible heights; or plunging into hitherto unsuspected and otherwise mortally dangerous depths." In the process when life only becomes an attempt to love, without integrating it with death, what we get is just a far glimmer of victory over death. Both life and death have to be offered as fuel to make the stars bum in the sky in their true and all-comprehensive brightness. Savitri had God-given strength and, for the creation of the new world, she put that God-given strength entirely at the disposal of that God himself. Thus she became entirely, including even her physical body, a luminous instrument that could express the Will of the Lord in the freest possible way. In that supreme identification her task was accomplished and now whatever has to happen that will happen in the certainty of that wonderful achievement of hers. Is that not devotional or Bhakti poetry par excellence? That is Savitri.

15: It is at times said that a poet should be a philosopher, a prophet and a seer. His vision should stretch to the stars. His philosophy should unravel the mystery of the creation. As a prophet he should bring nobility of the spirit to our life. Can we say all that about Lucretius, the Latin poet? He promises to reveal the ultimate realities of heaven and of the gods. But the promise is a materialist's promise. In contrast to that Sri Aurobindo's Savitri has "the twin task of knowing the causes of things and laying all fears of Fate and roar of Death under his feet."

Lucretius waxes lyrically about the universe when he lays Aristotelian geocentricity aside. There is no outside to the universe and hence is not bound. Space is infinite and so matter too should be infinite. For him there is no necessity of a god to arrange the universe. On the contrary, he argues that the notion or supposition of the presence of divine nature in cosmic order will be full of flaw. There is neither past nor future to life and therefore we should remain unconcerned to life. Indeed all our dreams are made by Matter's mind. Here is Death himself, the dark and terrible entrepreneur, upholding the nihilist ideal of existence that has no issue to enter into any enterprise, whom we meet in Savitri speaking eloquently. The poet's extraordinarily bleak attitude to love makes him suggest promiscuity as a natural condition. This is Epicureanism at its extremest.

Contrast this with Savitri: In her love is not a hunger of the heart but that which has its origin in god's delight. Savitri asserts that Love is the Transcendental's angel here, man's lien on the Absolute. No

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wonder, Lucretuis's epic should end with a gruesome account of the great plague in Athens at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War. This is so, argues he, because man must be courageous to face even death. In Savitri, on the other hand, we have the promise of immortality upon earth, bringing multifold divinity into life. In it is the well-bom and virtuous fructification of our deepest aspiration and that is why it becomes to our excellent sense admirable and acceptable. The theory of negativism can be put pretty forcefully but, ultimately, it fails to satisfy the warm intimate urges of our inner soul and our spirit. Savitri is at once that promise and that fulfilment.

16: It is well known that the composition of Savitri went through several stages. There are bafflingly a large number of manuscript and typescript sheets of the drafts that preceded the final emergence of the text as we have presently with us. "The opening pages of the earliest known manuscript of Savitri are dated August 8th-9th 1916. In November 1950, the month before his passing, Sri Aurobindo dictated the last passages to be added to the work. Between 1916 and 1950, Savitri grew from a medium-length narrative poem, consisting of about eight hundred lines in the first draft, to an epic of thirty times that length, all-embracing in its scope and inexhaustible in its significance." Before the 'final' printed version of Savitri came out it went through some eight thousand pages of drafting with revisions and additions taking place at every stage. There are some parts that evolved through as many as fifty versions.

Thus the story of the composition of Savitri itself turns out to be an absorbing story. It may very well run into several fat volumes which, we hope, will one day be available to the researchers of the epic. In the entire process of composition the Savitri-legend itself acquired new dimensions and new significances. What began as a simple narrative became a symbol characterising the predicament of the evolutionary world. Through the untiring work over long years Sri Aurobindo approached the problems of death, fate and pain in the context of his spiritual engagement. The revolutionary of yesteryears rose in him to battle and conquer the dark forces that beset this unfortunate ignorant creation. To win authentic freedom for the unhampered growth of the spirit was now his single concern. If for this purpose the stubborn, rather anachronistic, Law of decay-disintegration-death had to be trampled over, there were no compunctions about it. In fact in order to achieve it there was nothing left undone and full price was paid towards it. We thus understand Sri Aurobindo's Aswapati as an autobiographical symbol of "the

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concentrated energy of spiritual endeavour that helps us to rise from the mortal to the immortal planes." In it is the success of Savitri's divine mission which also forms an inalienable part of that double autobiography. In it Savitri accomplished that for which at his invocation she had taken the mortal birth.

17: There are very respectable critics who do not see Sri Aurobindo as a poet at all. There are even advices recommending that yogis as a matter of rule should be debarred from expressing themselves in verse since, it is maintained, they do it so badly. If we should accept such a criticism to be well meant, then we may see that the problem actually lies in the inability to go beyond the immediate ideas of aesthetic enjoyment. It is unfortunate that the modem mind, though we quite appreciate its caution against emptiness and imprecision, due to its ineptitude fails to go to the worlds of deeper rhythm or image or thought. That undoubtedly would make the poetry of the spirit abhorrent or anathematical to its psychology.

But what is needed is a special intuitive faculty if we are to enter into the poetry of Savitri which is a revelatory Word that can make that revelation itself a reality here. Its poetic achievement must be seen in terms of the divine riches it brings to us in their happy abundance. "And nowhere in Savitri is his use of language more powerful, complex and original than in the first half of the first canto of Book One. Here Sri Aurobindo achieves something that... has never been attempted elsewhere in world-literature... certainly nowhere else in the history of the English language. The only parallel might be found in the composition of the Rig Veda where an inner psychological sense is, as Sri Aurobindo has shown, carried by an outer one that is physical and ritual. For in this overture to the mighty symphony of his epic, Sri Aurobindo fuses multiple layers of meaning—literal, psychological, occult and spiritual—in a single flow of incomparable music." Here we have inspired 'ambiguity' in poetic language which allows several meanings to be present simultaneously. If we are alert to their simultaneous significances, world after wondrous world opens out to our perception in luminous spontaneity. We live in their glad and gracious benignances to grow more and more in the aspect of the manifesting divinity. That is the power of mantric speech brought to us by Sri Aurobindo in his Savitri. That indeed is the nature of the Mantra of the Real, Satya Mantra.

18: The fascination that the Symbol Dawn of Savitri holds for us is indubitably beyond any description. It is a unique creation in the entire world literature. It is not only spiritually profound; even on the

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literary-aesthetic level we are "touched by its splendid imagery, its subtle rhythms, and its majestic movement." From the point of view of its architect what we most admire is its internal structure and its integral relationship with the imagery. "It has been observed that Savitri is written in lines of iambic pentameter with approximately four to six lines per sentence (indicated by a full stop). It has also been observed that within a four- to six-line sentence, a main clause in the first line or a main clause or phrase in the final line summarises the idea presented in that sentence. In addition to the sentence, there are structural divisions within the cantos which the poet indicates with visual devices such as blank lines and paragraph indentation. A close reading of the first canto, however, reveals that between the sentence and these larger sectional divisions, there is another level of logico-thematic structure... and that these thematic units are marked by single-line sentences (or, in some cases, independent clauses). These units are integral to our understanding of the first canto."

Looking at it in an essayistic manner it is noticed that the development of a particular theme is generally preceded and followed by single-line sentences. Not only has this technique a structural relevance; it also makes poetry evocative. Time vs. Timelessness, World and Nature vs. Spirit and God, Darkness and Sleep vs. Light and Awakening are the three lines of imagery that are used to work out the idea-substance in several degrees of significance of the coming Dawn. This aspect of supreme artistry in Savitri as a poem perhaps reinforces its mantric quality in a mutually advantageous way. "The three lines of imagery which run throughout this canto reverberate in our minds and hearts like a repeated mantra," carrying us to the richer worlds of the Spirit. The builder and deviser of form scales calm blue heights in the yogic sky of wonder and beauty. To appreciate its sublimity and grandeur we too should have that faculty which alone can reveal the poetry.

19: Lotika Ghose's brief but perceptive study of her uncle Sri Aurobindo's poetry was one of the earliest works that has the mark of an enduring literary evaluation. She was the daughter of Sri Aurobindo's poet-brother Manmohan. Once she was taken aback when Spiegelberg, the admirer of The Life Divine, told her that the poetry of the author of the philosophical opus was "entirely Greek". This was before 1949, when only two volumes of Sri Aurobindo's earlier poetry and dramas had come out as Collected Poems and Plays in 1942. Undoubtedly, one sees in them the chiselled perfection of images drawing inspiration from the master sculptors of Greece, giving

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ample justification to what Spieglberg had observed. "The formal purity, the restraint even in richness, the freedom from rhetorical device and verbal excess mark his poetry away from Sanskrit poetry."

Even when it comes to the spiritual themes Sri Aurobindo does not veil his mystic realisations. His insights in allegory, his use of myth or symbol, all have the language of living experience in poetry. No wonder that in his hand the legend of Savitri should win for us its deepest symbolic truth. "Through āropa or superposition he has made the legend the purveyor of his spiritual realisations." That is precisely what makes Savitri as the great fulfilment of Sri Aurobindo's poetic genius. Indeed, that should immediately dispel the doubt that a Yogi's experiences can at all form the subject-matter of poetry. Had not Dante taken the Christian mystical experience and made an attempt to grasp the inner unity through a traditional myth? The result is a wondrous pictorial beauty. Much more than that is Savitri. In Sri Aurobindo the myth is made to yield up its truth-element and to embody his accomplishments in which we can, and should, live gainfully. One of the powers of great poetry lies in the illumination it renders to the subject. Obviously, and paradoxically, it needs a fine eye to see such a brilliance. He would be a bold critic indeed who would deny to Savitri the high estimate of such poetry. But if there are such brave critics their's would be the voices of the past, the past that is trying to survive in the inevitable death. In this tachyonic age of information technology, one may rightfully ask if there are books of poetry at all that get sold in thousands? The professional critic has remained rather unfortunately shut to its marvels; but a large perceptive readership, though perhaps less adept at its multifold wonder, has also grown around it. The wizardry, the enchantment of Savitri is felt only by a receptive soul and therefore what is necessary for us is to open ourselves to it.

20: Sri Aurobindo is categorical in his statement that he never wrote anything in Savitri merely for the sake of "picutresqueness or rhetorical turn". But that does not mean that there are no images or other poetic features that we commonly take as attributes of good poetry. If we yet want to go by these canons of judgement, we do at times see in Savitri what may be called "detachable ornaments". But even these detachable ornaments always organically form an integral part of its composition. Sri Aurobindo accepts them and uses them to create great poetry. The magic of inspiration has the power to make all these as its breathing reality. Symbolism in Savitri can be

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understood and appreciated only by going into the nature of the poem and the power of its evocative Word.

Usage of symbols forms the most important element of Savitri's poetic technique. Indeed, it brings nearer to us the presence of the Divine. Through symbolic language the poet gives rapturous expression to things inaccessible to our immediate experience. Symbols in Savitri come with their truth-revealing power. There are several categories of images in the epic: groups of words as images, single line expressions, paintings in words, idioms carving figures of truth and beauty, long and sustained metaphors as we have in the symbol dawn or the world-stair or the sailor of the cosmic sea; then we also have an entire canto as a symbol of the poet's yogic vision. But nowhere is to be seen a deliberate indulgence in image making. Spiritual truth and its expression are the main concerns in Savitri. Symbolism in Sri Aurobindo's poetry thus becomes not a pale decorative ornament to satisfy merely certain aesthetic tastes; what is intended is to bring out through them the soul of a radiant creation in the felicity of the spirit. It adds another quality to the overall expression inspired by the Goddess of Poetry.

21: We must recognise that historical-literary influences, howsoever great or appealing these be, can hardly form the basis for appreciating Sri Aurobindo's Savitri. Yet it does not mean that in noble and lofty poetry we look for originality in the sense of "chemical purity". Contact with literature of the past has its own alchemic role to play,—even in what is called the Overmind aesthesis. The deeper sources of inspiration that have been explored by the past can be the part of a larger experience of the future when explored and assimilated in its creative enterprise. In that sense "influences do not discredit a great poet; on the contrary, they reveal the wideness, complexity and power of his poetic mind." Savitri has all these in rich abundance. Take the use of the old legend itself. It belongs to those legends which are "very simple and beautiful" and have "infinite possibilities of sweetness and feeling, and in the hand of great artists have blossomed into dramas and epics of the most delicate tenderness or the most noble sublimity." This is justification enough to take for themes these legends and myths. But there are other aspects of 'influence' also. From the Indian tradition Valmiki, Vyasa and Kalidasa are present in Savitri as far as possible in the genius of the English language. Both inspiration and vision of the early Vedic poets have left their mark on Savitri; but it is the Upanishads that have directly contributed to the formulation of the new poetics.

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If an essential relation between the linguistic form and the content goes to make a great creation, then it can be gainfully asserted that "the blank verse of Savitri has evolved from Kalidasian influence and culminated to what it is through that of the metrical Upanishads." Perhaps some of these elements have themselves recreated the Vedic experience of the Mantra of the Real in Savitri. But it goes beyond even these glorious achievements. It is, as Sri Aurobindo says, "a new poetry with a new law of expression and technique." It is the poetry of the future built on the great poetic realisations of the past. In it the human and secular legend of Savitri becomes the Legend of the Future. Surely, that opens out another window to view the many-hued perspectives of its aesthetic possibilities.

22: If for a moment we go only by the stylistic considerations, we at once see that Savitri makes a marked departure from the traditional invocation having the story's beginning with the end-stopped line. In Milton's Paradise Lost we have just 26 lines to get going; but in Savitri Sri Aurobindo takes time to state the gist of the theme. The theme itself looks into the fundamental issue as to why Paradise should have been lost at all. Paradise needs no Death who, after all, is an inevitable spoiler; but, then, neither is there freedom from the frozen happiness of that typal world howsoever grand it be. To justify the larger ways of God wisdom seems to see the desirability of an antagonist foe in the efficacy of the initial working. Then shall come the flaming warrior and redeem the creation. That is how through Aswapati's eyes the poet of Savitri presents his visions.

Let us take some examples. Wisdom, beauty, gladness of life all contribute to the image of Satyavan, with joy on his open face. His^v look a wide daybreak of the gods, his head a youthful Rishi's touched by light, his body a lover's and a king's,—that is Satyavan. But then this splendid youth had to be short-lived, he doomed to die too prematurely. When Savitri met him in the forest she wanted him to speak until the light would enter her heart. In her words there was a "passionate urgency", in her imploration the wish to feel through his words the significance of her own deathless inner being. Yet Savitri had to meet the existential crisis, epitomised in the death of her husband. The waging of last battle thus becomes inevitable. In it Death's recourse is, to put it from the point of view of a literary critic, to "anaphoral devices to mesmirise the flaming lady." But she uses prophetic idiom to meet the challenge. "The debate is a curious interplay of pessimistic irony and inspired optimism." While this may be taken as a literary mode of expression, the opposing figures hurl

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occult powers against each other. Finally, the deeper and undisclosed issue in the clashing of forces is resolved in the expressive Word itself. In it a new Paradise on this mortal Earth is bom to grow in the Ways of the Infinite.

23: Fine jewellers and gem-setters often remain themselves unrecognised and what is generally adored is their artistic creation. In their hand even the commonest metal can acquire a godly quality of amazement which we may profitably worship. In India where a roadside stone can be turned into an idol, it is little wonder that precious metals and gemstones as repositories of occult powers should find place in mystic-spiritual poetry. Precious stones are structurally more perfect than ordinary stones. These can be charged with consciousness. Such can also be their use in literary creations. This use can go far beyond the ideas of ornamentation or embellishment to create certain effects in writing. In fact they become embodiments of secret deities to breathe majesties in our life.

Keats travelled much in the realms of gold and was led to the discovery of oneness of truth and beauty. Savitri abounds in the unity of many other powers of conscious existence. Its sunlight can be golden red or gold and green or simply golden yellow. Each one carries an unerring psychological shade bringing out one aspect or another of our association with the spirit. As an example, take the "moon-gold feet" of Savitri when we see her meeting Satyavan for the first time. She is still in her chariot and looks at him with wondering eyes. Already a sea-change has taken place in her. But her coming down would imply the descending Spirit touching and transforming Matter. She combines in herself both divinity and feminine earthly grace and the description is poetically as well as romantically very apt. Indeed, throughout we are made conscious of the fact that "she is the Sun-Word, the ultimate perfection that poetry aspires to achieve, the magnificent Mantra that puts us in contact with the worlds of Truth and Beauty and Joy."

Similarly, on several occasions we witness that, "what is exquisite about Sri Aurobindo's imagination is the gentle yoking of usually irreconcilable elements like sky and forest into one metaphor: emerald." He transfers the fabulous quality of centaurs to Nature with the colour of emerald mane. Or else when Satyavan is described as a "sapphire cutting" from heaven, it is suggested that he is also the possessor of that immensity of luminous heaven in his soul. Towards the end of the epic we see Savitri bearing the burden of Infinity and coming back to earth with the soul of Satyavan. Yet someone with

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peacock plumes of gorgeous hue, framing a sapphire, pursues her with a heart-disturbing smile. "In this context 'sapphire' at the metronymic level is a gem worn by the youth; at the metaphoric level sapphire is the insignia of his royalty. Savitri is assured the fulfilment of her mission." There are other precious stones also in Savitri and where they occur they have significant roles in the development of specific themes of the poem. Thus diamond threads signify the invincible strength that binds the lovers together. Time and Eternity, which remained apart in Satyavan's earlier life, have now got joined with each other. Similarly, what seemed to be abstract about the higher planes of consciousness at once becomes concrete in the image of the crystal. The crystal mood of air conveys a sense of mystery that condenses and expands into purity of air.

The effective use of jewels and gold with poetic and spiritual connotations provides insights into the depths of Savitri. Jewels become a medium for depicting abstruse and subtle shades of the spiritual experience. This medium not only conveys the power of the word, its concretising mantric effect; it also gives to it a gleaming solidity. Objects are matched together and metamorphosed through strikingly new images. That makes Savitri the poem a jewelled hilt in the hands of a daring Warrior to win new kingdoms of aesthetic joy and wonder. But the Poet as a Master-creator uses all these devices with absolute precision to bring those marvellous worlds of joy and wonder into our being. A new sense of beauty is seized to seize truth and delight in this life of ours. That is the creative power of spiritual poetry which comes here in measures of rich felicities.

24: The Mahabharata legend of Savitri given as Pativrata Mahatmya is rarely narrated in simple Sanskrit prose. In fact the very contents of the original text have unfortunately undergone several unacceptable changes in the course of time as it got transmitted through different vernaculars. These narratives not unoften present a naive picture of the radiant princess who fought the battle with Yama to win immortality for man's soul in the earthly existence. The dilution of the Mahabharata story has also led to the unhappy loss of the real significance of a spiritual possibility depicted in the form of a household occurrence. It is necessary that we should adhere to the text that has an exceptional nobility which can convey the true spiritual purport that is there behind it. Precisely because the ancient tale of Savitri is so powerful that, Sri Aurobindo made it a basis for giving us his magnum opus which is capable of rising to the stature of an autobiography.

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25: Ancient Ballads of Hindustan is a remarkable work of young Tom Dutt (8 March 1856-30 August 1877) falling in the genre of early creative Indian writings in English. This "daughter of Bengal, so admirably and strangely gifted, Hindu by race and tradition, an English woman by education, a French woman at heart, [she] blended in herself three souls and three traditions." The character of Savitri fighting with Death himself, fighting with the power of love and getting "better of him", becomes more appealing in her when she also recognises that he, as Yama, is both the Destroyer and the Upholder of the Worlds. The Ballads was published posthumously in 1882. Speaking about Toru Dutt, Sri Aurobindo tells us as follows: "Toru Dutt was an accomplished verse-builder with a delicate talent and some outbreak of genius and she wrote things that were attractive and sometimes something that had strong energy of language and a rhythmic force."^so While commenting on the 19th century literary contributions of Bengal, he mentions that Toru Dutt "could write English with perfect grace and correctness and French with energy and power."⁵¹

It was a remarkable insight of Toru Dutt to have seen in the Savitri-ballad the sublime character of Yama. In the discourse with Yama we can discern what Savitri felt in the depth of her soul. Toru Dutt reveals that the God behind the traditional Yama is Love indeed. That imparts to the legend a genuine quality charged with high spiritual contents. Transformed Death in Sri Aurobindo's Savitri is this noble Yama bestowing the boon of divine life on earth. Toru Dutt's poetry is not only enchantingly lyrical; it is also luminous. Let us take an example. When Savitri upholds the Law of Righteousness even in the face of Death, in Vyasa we have:

By the Truth the saints lead the sun;

by askesis the saints uphold the earth;

the past, present and future find their refuge in the saints.

Noble persons in the midst of the saints have never any grief.

Toru Dutt re-creates it as follows:

⁵⁰The Future Poetry, SABCL, Vol. 9,p.453

⁵¹Harmony of Virtue, SABCL, Vol. 3,p.79.

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Of all the pleasure given on earth

The company of the good is best,

For weariness has never birth

In such a commerce sweet and blest;

The sun runs in its wonted course,

The earth its plenteous treasure yields,

All for their sake, and by the force

Their prayer united ever wields.

Oh let me, let me ever dwell

Amidst the good, where'er it be.

Whether in lowly hermit-cell

Or in some spot beyond the sea.

We may not have Vyasian austerity in it, but surely it has the substantiality that is trans-traditional. Another soul of mystical secularism breathes happily in it

.

26: The Legend of Savitri actually belongs to the Vedic cycle, but the form in which it is familiar to us appears in the Book of the Forest of the Mahabharata. It has been narrated in 300 shlokas in praise of the greatness of a woman who is unswerving in her conviction even in the face of the worst possibility that life can extend to her. She remains firm in her resolve, even in the knowledge of the death of her chosen lover who is prophesied to die one year after the marriage.

But the story is built in the values that simultaneously operate at several levels in the pursuit of life's aims. It has a religio-ethical purport for the maintenance of the social order, it has literary-artistic bearings, it has the truth-driven dharmic connotations to uphold the sublimity of righteous conduct, it has far-reaching spiritual implications as if it foresees the sound resonant prospects that are awaiting human race in the evolutionary future. The most important aspect in the Aurobindonian context is the mythic-symbolic substance it carries in the dignity of a language that expresses the verities of the Spirit. Were it not so, the poet of the great epic would not have made it a basis for the revelation of the Idea-Truth realities that can manifest in the terrestrial scheme.

If presently we are living in a world where the Law of Life is as proclaimed by Death, then the assertion is that there shall be the Freedom of Life in the joyous dynamism of the Truth. Indeed, eventually, the real meaning and purpose behind even this creation, that is at the moment full of strangling mortality, shall turn out to be none other than the expression of the Will of the gracious Supreme.

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The one who stood as frightful Death, demanding submission of the incarnate Shakti, shall stand through her triumphant accomplishment as the Creator spreading his everlasting Day for the growth of the Soul of the Earth. That is the epic magnificence, mahātmya, of the Savitri-tale.

27: Out of thousands of sheets of Savitri drafts in Sri Aurobindo's own hand even a few should help us to get some faint idea about the enormous effort that has gone behind its literary composition over several years. But the yogic aspects of it will always remain beyond our immediate ken. Yet by living in the worlds of Savitri we shall progressively have the Truth and the things of the Truth. The Revelation carries in it that power of Realisation.

Part Three

Concluding Note

In the previous section we have given a kind of quick précis of the various articles that are present in this volume. The numbers indicate the serial order in which they occur in it. It may be mentioned here that, except for a few, most of these writings are appearing in print for the first time. When the authors were approached for the contributions it was suggested that these should be generally around ten thousand words in length. This was a hard stipulation but then there were restrictions of space also. In addition to this there was a time constraint, if the book had to come out by the end of this year. We are glad that, in spite of these boundary conditions, the response from the writers was very positive for which we extend our sincere thanks to them. In this connection we may mention here another point. According to the modem practices of bringing out edited anthologies, we should have provided a brief introductory bio-data of the authors present in it. But we desisted from this, simply for the reason that the focus should remain not on contextual but, essentially, on the thematic aspect. But then each one of them stands out distinctly in his article and that itself can become the best introduction of him.

While inviting the authors to contribute articles for the anthology an attempt was made to define certain areas in order to cover, as far as possible, the infinity that Savitri is. These could be the spiritual aspects, occult, yogic, scriptural aspects, mystical, religious, philosophical, literary, poetic, social, historical, comparative or lexico-

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graphic aspects; there could also be a biographical angle shedding light on the avataric work of the divine incarnate. But we do not know if this has been achieved with any degree of success, particularly when we recognise that here is God's own account of his evolutionary engagement in the manifestation of a divine life upon earth. Furthermore, it is to be well understood that, not only in terms of its extraordinary esoteric but also exoteric-secular contents, Savitri's knowledge is oceanic and of that ocean what we can hold in our palms is insignificantly human. To adapt a simile of Jnaneshwar, we are like a bird that can hardly hold in its beak any quantity of the water of a vast sunlit lake by which side it builds its tiny nest. Yet whatever is there in that little bird's bill is that lake's own wonderment. Such only could be the glad merit of a collection of works being presented in two volumes with some fifty and odd articles in it.

It is always true that the study of Savitri has to be for the improvement of our faculties, our spiritual faculties, for the growth and enrichment of our soul and our spirit. It is a book of revelation, as the Mother says, and what we have to do is to live in it, allowing it to work in us whatever has to be worked out for our true betterment. Which means that our approach should be supple-intuitive rather than mental-discursive. Therefore we have to guard ourselves against a possible danger as well, the danger of excessive rational thinking. Thought had to be there, but thought that has its birth in the silence of the mind. The purpose of this anthology in two volumes is hence specifically to provide a certain mental support leaping into intuition while approaching Savitri.

Take the example of orchids that are so dear to Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of beauty. They have mythical associations also; the Chinese name for these flowers is pretty significant, which means perfume and gracefulness. Any number of stories have grown around the orchids and it is said that they are special plants if for no other reason than the mystique that surrounds them. But as the Renaissance in Europe began to fade and the Age of Reason started making its appearance things took another turn. Nature became an object of investigation instead of an object of joyous amazement and admiration. The unfortunate result was that the "strange beauty of orchid flowers worked their magic on those who would one day be called scientists." Instead of living in the happy glorious ambience of Nature, we took up scalpels in our hand and started dissecting to learn. Let that not happen to Savitri.

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But that cannot happen to Savitri, and no crudity of instruments can despoil its beauty and charm. If we are to use the language of the Gita, we may say that "weapons cannot cleave it, nor the fire bum, nor do the waters drench it, nor the wind dry." Such is the soul as much as the shining body of Savitri. Therefore when we look at Savitri as a means to grow, then every help is available and we need not have any complex that we are mentalising it. In fact the power of its unfissionable Word is such that it can lift up all our understanding to the integrity of the spirit in its moods of rapturous self-expression.

It is believed that these two volumes of Perspectives of Savitri will form a foundation to launch on specialised themes in future. There have been too many repetitive discussions and the hope is that a sense of direction may now come to the Savitri-studies. We are perhaps moving from general to specific and distinguishing aspects in our approach towards the Masterwork that Savitri is. Such deeper studies will conceivably give some access to the inner realities and in that respect the gain will be entirely ours. Possibly that will be one way of entering into its sublimities and profundities that also spread outward to establish Sachchidanadaic realities in the world.

We may well remember here Shankaracharya's prayer to the Ineffable who is beyond all description. The Acharya is genuinely conscious of his inability to find speech that would be acceptable for singing his glories. But then he also pleads to him that whatever he would utter let that become a stotra or a chant of praise to him. It is in that spirit that our studies can become a hymn to Savitri. Let us live in Savitri who shall give us the Truth and the things of the Truth.

R.Y. DESHPANDE

PART I

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My Savitri Work with the Mother

tat savitur varam rūpam jyotiḥ parasya dhìmahi,

yannaḥ satyena dipayet

Savitri is Sri Aurobindo's mantric epic. He says in one of his letters:

Savitri is the record of a seeing, of an experience which is not of the common kind and it is often very far from what the general human mind sees and experiences.

The work of illustrating the whole of Savitri through paintings was given to me by the Divine Mother on 6th October 1961. It was so great, so beyond the capacity of little instrument she had summoned, that only her Grace working in Sri Aurobindo's Light could have seen me through.

The Mother wrote to me on 12 .7.1956:

Bonjour

To my dear little child

To my sweet Huta

Indeed I shall show you how to paint and I shall be glad if you

learn well.

¹Sri Aurobindo on Himself, SABCL, Vol. 26, p. 513.

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One day I shall call you and do a painting in front of you.

With my love and blessings always

The Mother

On 14.12.1956, in the morning, I went to the Meditation Hall upstairs, as previously arranged by the Mother. There she taught me painting right from the very beginning, because I did not know how to draw even a straight line, or how to hold a brush—nor did I have any colour sense.

After a few days the Mother sent me a card showing a vase with beautiful carnations of various colours. Her encouraging words were:

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24.12.56

Bonjour

To my dear little child

To my sweet Huta

Here is a nice vase of "Collaboration", for indeed we shall collaborate to do nice things and express in painting a higher world and consciousness.

Truly the Divine Grace is over you to lead you to an exceptional realisation.

Along with it my love and blessings never leave you.

The Mother

The Mother has given this significance to the Carnation:

Collaboration, ever ready to help and knowing how to do it.

After that the Mother started sending me for painting numerous objects from her rare collections. Also many varieties of exquisite flowers, along with her own sketches, in order to show me their right composition and perspective.

I received a letter from the Mother, dated 7.2.57:

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Bonjour

To my dear little child

To my sweet Huta

I have received your nice letter. Yes, we are going towards a painting that will be able to express the supramental truth of things.

My love and blessings and the Presence of the Divine Grace are always with you

The Mother

That same evening she explained to me:

I want you to do something new. You must try to do the Future Painting in the New Light.

There is a reason why I always ask you to paint mostly on a white background. It is an attempt to express the Divine Light without shadow in the Future Painting. But everything will cone in its own time.

In the Future Painting, you must not copy blindly the outer appearance without the inner Vision. Never let people's ideas influence your mind and impose their advice about the Future Painting. Do not try to adopt the technique either of modem art or of old classical art. But always try to express the true inner vision of your soul and its deep impression behind everything to bring out the Eternal Truth and to express the glory of the Higher Worlds.

Truth is behind everything. For the Divine dwells in flowers, trees, animals, birds, and rivers as well as human beings—in fact, in every creation of Nature.

You must have the psychic touch to see and feel the vibrations, the sensations and the essence of the Truth in everything and that Truth is to be expressed in the Future Painting.

To paint perfectly is not an easy thing. It certainly takes time. But by the growth of consciousness you can have inspiration, intense vision, delicacy of colours, harmony and subtlety of true beauty. Then you can surely express wonderful things in painting. Otherwise painting will be a lifeless confusion.

The growth of consciousness is essential for doing marvellous paintings. I shall help you, I shall put my Force into you so that there will be a link between our two consciousnesses.

I asked the Mother: "Without seeing the Divine Light, how can I paint?"

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She laughed softly and said:

Child, it will come.

Now it was apparent that I had to learn numerous things from various angles in painting in order to step into the unknown domain of the secret and higher worlds where I could release lavishly, freely my imaginations, reveries and inspirations to express exactly what the Mother wished me to do.

The play of colour—balanced distribution of light and shadow to bring out the perfect harmony of colour—the subtle infusion of light, the transcendent spontaneity, the magical changes of Nature—the supreme Colourist's realism and visions—all these I had to put on canvases with vibrant, various strokes of brushes.

I was perfectly aware that it was not going to be easy, but life now beckoned me along strange paths which I must tread. There was no turning back since I had committed myself to the spiritual life and the higher artistic sphere.

The Mother has stated:

If you want art to be true and highest art, it must be the expression of a Divine World brought down into this material world.

She valued true feeling and right consciousness more than only precise and decorative work without vibrations and vividness. She put stress on "White Light without shadow." It is the vibration of Light which alone can give life and colour to every scene painted.

The Mother gave a proper training to my hands. In 1956 she asked me to clean the inside of her two carved cupboards which are in the Meditation Hall upstairs, so that I might learn to hold the most precious, delicate and fragile objects with steadiness, great care and concentration. She made my hands conscious, receptive and sensitive by putting her Force, Light and Consciousness into them.

She also sent me thousands of the most exquisite picture-cards, so that I might perceive and grasp their beauties and obtain inspiration from Nature: trees, flowers, mountains, rivers, animals and so on. These cards were prepared by Champaklal. He used to paste the pictures on folders, on which the Mother wrote to me.

Surely the Mother did not take up the Savitri work abruptly. She educated me both outwardly and inwardly, knowing that these types of paintings were not of the common kind. This training went on for years with patience and perseverance. Nobody knew of it!

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On 21.1.57 the Mother revealed to me about her way with paintings:

I enter into their consciousness and find out their meanings, the truth and beauty behind each painting.

Some paintings are indeed very nice to look at—they have pretty and gorgeous colours, but when there are no living vibrations and deep harmony, then obviously the paintings are lifeless and without value. But where there is a combination of the two—outward charm and inner vision—then they are real and can be considered as true art.

In your paintings I have felt the living vibrations and that is very good.

The Mother added:

A true artist never speaks of what he has done: "Oh! I have done a nice painting!" Instead he thinks and says, "Oh, no. I could not do it nicely, it is not what I wanted to do."

In fact, he is never satisfied with his work and he continues his effort until he paints masterpieces. An artist puts the full power of his aspiration in his work to reach perfection.

Not only was the Mother teaching me painting, but also giving me lessons of life: how to be modest and persistent in my endeavour to reach perfection and develop into a true artist.

None can beat the Mother's vision, conception and knowledge. A pointer to her being and her ways may be found in Savitri, Book Four, Canto 1:

And from her eyes she cast another look

On all around her than man's ignorant view.

All objects were to her shapes of living selves

And she perceived a message from her kin

In each awakening touch of outward things.²

The Mother never failed to encourage me. On 19.2.57 she sent me a beautiful card depicting her coloured photograph. Her words were:

Bonjour

To my dear little child To my sweet Huta

This is to say to my sweet child, on the occasion of my birthday,

²Savitri, p. 357.

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how glad I am of the progress she is making both spiritually and in her painting—and to assure her of my constant and affectionate help so that this progress will increase without stop. My love and blessings and the presence of the Divine Grace never leave you.

The Mother

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Towards the end of 19581 went to London according to the Mother's wish. I came back in August 1960.

This was the New Year message of 1961 from the Mother to all:

This wonderful world of delight waiting at our gates for our call to come down upon earth.

As always, she gave me diaries in which to write my journal.

On 1st September 1961, my physical birthday, the Mother called me to the Meditation Hall upstairs and gave me a folder. When I opened it, I found my own paintings on either side. One was "Soul of Beauty," and the other was a vision the Mother had seen in my heart and asked me to paint in 1957. Underneath the picture these lines from Sri Aurobindo's Savitri (p. 397) were inscribed:

This golden figure...

Hid in its breast the key of all his aims,

A spell to bring the Immortal's bliss on earth.

The Mother looked at me for a few seconds. Then her eyes closed gradually. She slid into a profound trance which lasted more than ten minutes. On opening her eyes she said:

I achieved in my tender age the highest occult troths. I have realised and seen all the visions set forth in Savitri.

Actually I experienced the poem's supramental revelations before I arrived in Pondicherry, and before Sri Aurobindo read out Savitri to me early in the morning day after day at a certain period of the Ashram. I never told Sri Aurobindo all that I had seen in my visions beforehand...

She laughed softly, sweetly, and resumed:

I have seen the beauties and wonders of the higher worlds. Now I think of expressing them in painting by various colours—blues, golds, pinks and whites—with certain vibrations of Light—all in harmony forming the New World.

I wish to bring down upon earth this New World. Since I have no time physically, I will paint through you.

The world of Supreme Beauty exists. I shall take you there, you will see the things, remember them and then express them in paintings.

Yes, yes, my will shall be done—the Supreme Beauties exist. I will certainly take you there.

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I see the butterfly ready in its cocoon. I do not wish it to come out soon, but gradually. Then after emerging from the chrysalis you will have enough knowledge to reach your goal.

Once again the Mother closed her eyes—a slight smile hovering on her lips. When she awoke, she said:

I realised the Divine in my early twenties, your age!

You see, the Inner Divinity is Omnipotence, Omniscience,

Omnipresence. This Divinity is constantly with me—guiding and inspiring me.

I held her hands and said eagerly: "Oh, I haven't yet realised the Divine."

She smiled and assured me:

You will.

Further she added:

For occultism one needs a Guru. But spirituality can be transferred (she made a gesture moving her index finger from the middle of her chest towards my heart), like this.

On another occasion, the Mother said:

Child, our work is a work of the Future—a work of tomorrow for younger generations who will be the builders of the New . World.

She also revealed:

Savitri is the prophetic vision of Sri Aurobindo. It will surpass the Gita and the Bible.

Without reading Savitri intellectually I could not go any further. So in 1961 the Mother arranged for me to read it with Ambalal Purani. We finished reading Book One. Then in 1963 he went to the U.K. and the United States. After he had returned from abroad he fell ill. In 1965 he passed away. So the Mother arranged for me to read Savitri with Amal Kiran (K. D. Sethna).

Sri Aurobindo first introduced Savitri to Amal in private drafts, and wrote toiiim most of the letters that are now published along with the epic.

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Amal and I met for the first time in 1961, upstairs in the passage which connects the Mother's and Sri Aurobindo's rooms. I casually asked him about a chess board, because just then the Mother and I were doing something on that theme. He drew one and made me understand it.

When we started our reading of Savitri some people warned Amal against me and asked him to discontinue. Amal cut them short, saying: "The Mother has arranged our reading. Besides, I have seen and felt Huta's soul. I cannot back out."

Amal made me understand Savitri intellectually and aesthetically. As soon as he would leave my apartment after out study sessions, I used to write down what he had explained to me in detail. I have numerous cherished notebooks which are of great value to me.

It was 7th August 1965 when I finished reading the whole of Savitri with Amal. I could not check my tears of joy. He too was moved. We shook hands over the long harmonious collaboration and absorbing discussions.

That day in the afternoon I went to the Mother to inform her about it. She smiled, heaved a sigh of happiness, and said:

Ah, one big work is done.

Here are Amal's own words, published in the Mother India, Monthly Review of Culture, in May 1979, page 276:

An appreciative treatment of Savitri in its poetic quality—an elucidation of its thought-content, its imagery-inspiration, its word-craft and its rhythm-impact: this [the Mother] did not consider as beyond another interpreter than herself. I can conclude thus because she fully approved Huta's proposal to her that I should go through the whole of the epic with Huta during the period when the Mother and she were doing the illustrations of the poem, the Mother making outline sketches or suggesting the general disposition of the required picture and Huta following her instructions, invoking Sri Aurobindo's spiritual help, keeping the Mother's presence constantly linked to both her heart and hand and producing the final finished painting.

It was a long-drawn-out pleasure—my study-sessions with the young artist who proved to be a most eager and receptive pupil, indeed so receptive that on a few occasions, with my expository enthusiasm serving as a spur, she would come out with ideas that taught a thing or two to the teacher.

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I never knew he would write such a thing about me. I always marvelled at his modesty, selflessness and goodwill.

Meanwhile the month of October 1961 had arrived—slowly, like a benediction, hope and peace diffused in my whole being.

The Mother called me to the Meditation Room upstairs on 6 October 1961 in the morning, to take up the work of Savitri painting.

She and I exchanged flowers and smiles. Then I looked at her eagerly to show me how to do the first painting. I felt as if the doors of hidden worlds were going to open before me. From the Mother's expression I gathered that now I would always be submerged in this wonderful consciousness from where I would never come out. Ah, it is true so far!

The date 6 is auspicious—according to the Mother the number 6 signifies "New Creation".

She was absolutely indrawn in sheer silence. After her deep meditation she looked at me unblinking. Then there was the sudden flicker of a smile in her eyes when she spoke:

Child, have you thought of painting the jacket of the book which will be published after we have finished some paintings of Savitri ?

Once more she lapsed into a profound trance. She awoke, took a piece of paper and a pencil and drew a cover picture. She explained:

Show the descent of the Supreme Mother. A flash of white Light forming the feet which rest on the globe of the earth. Don't forget to paint the outline of a lotus, which must be mingled with the white Light.

She also made me understand the colour-scheme.

Then she held my hands, and pressed them in order to fill them with her Consciousness. She kissed my forehead.

With a blank mind I reacher my apartment, sat on a chair in my studio where the Mother herself had sat when she declared open my apartment on 10th February 1958.

There was the jumble of colour-tubes, brushes, palette knives, distilled turpentine, Unseed oil, rags.

I put the canvas board on the easel and squeezed liberal quantities of pigments on a palette. The Mother had shown me how to arrange colours on the palette when she started teaching me painting on 11th December 1956.

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I finished the painting and sent it to the Mother that very morning. She returned it through Ambu who broughtprasad from her at midday along with this note:

There is no need of changing anything. It is excellent.

This was the beginning of our work.

The following name was given by the Mother to this work:

It is impossible for me to give the full description of all the Savitri paintings here. But I shall try to convey glimpses of some of them.

The Mother explained to me the sixth picture of Book One Canto One:

All can be done it the God-touch is there.

A hope stole in that hardly dared to be

Amid the Night's forlorn indifference...

Into a far-off nook of heaven there came

A slow miraculous gesture's dim appeal...

A wandering hand of pale enchanted light

That glowed along a fading moments brink....³

Child, you must show in your painting the rays of White Light streaming out from all the fingers of "a wandering hand".

In reality, from the occult point of view the White Light flowed from the Mother's own fingers.

On 4th November 1961 she made me understand the eighth picture of the same book, the same canto:

The darkness failed and slipped like a falling cloak From the reclining body of a god.^3a

She went into a deep meditation for quite a long time. When she opened her eyes. I felt as if she were still dreaming. The Mother said:

3Ibid., p. 3. ³⁸Ibid.

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I saw in 1904 the vision of a Spirit when I went into the Inconscient. The form of this Spirit was neither of man nor of woman. Nor was it Vishnu or Shiva or Krishna.

Once again she closed her eyes to recall what she had seen in the fathomless darkness. When she awoke she instructed me:

Child, you must paint a pale gold reclining figure of a God. His right cheek is resting on his right palm. His head with long golden hair is on a white cushion. And in the background you must show a myriad rainbow hues of opals. Also the black colour of the darkness sliding off Him.

It was difficult to paint rainbow colour. I could not finish the painting. That very night I had a vision:

The shimmering waves of the divine White Light enveloped me as they turned into brilliant multi-colours. They were in gradations— from pale blue to night sky, from shell-pink to deepest crimson, from pale green to Nile green, and the same with the rest of the hues.

Then suddenly they assumed the faces of beautiful beings—but their lower bodies were like trails of different colours. These beings mingled with one another, yet retained their individualities. Their dancing movements were like music, the tinkle, the chime of numerous bells echoing and re-echoing through the sweet silence of eternity. My eyes drank in the melody of the vivid, various colours with as much joy as I would have had hearing an ethereal symphony in perfect harmony in the Divine Light.

This was an ecstasy, an indescribable thrill. I was floating upward into a realm of glory beyond anything I had ever beheld or ever known.

This vision of mine reminds or me of Sri Aurobindo's poem The Life Heavens:

Sounds, colours, joy-flamings—Life lies here

Dreaming, bound to the heavens of its goal,

In the clasp of a Power that enthrals to sheer

Bliss and beauty body and rapt soul.⁴

Indeed the Savitri paintings were expressed in multi-colours to accord with the twelve dimensions known to occultism.

The next morning I finished the picture, and showed it to the Mother

⁴Collected Poems, SABCL, Vol. 5, p. 574,

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in the afternoon. She clasped my hands, looked into my eyes for a moment or two and gave me a kiss on my forehead. Her gesture conveyed to me everything.

My memory winged back to the year 1958. On 8th February in the evening the Mother and I had met. She looked at me for a few seconds and plunged into deep meditation. I could not have cared less, did not respond, did not concentrate; my vagrant thoughts rambled on. She was serenely peaceful, unruffled, untouched. Then the Mother opened her eyes and said with great regret:

Just now I saw in my vision beautiful luminous beings from above bringing precious gifts for you. They wished to enter your whole being with these boons. But unhappily, you were completely shut up and denied them. So they went back to where they had come from.

There were no tears in my eyes—only solid unutterable despair.

The Mother looked at me and smiled—a sad smile I had failed to collaborate, to receive, to assimilate. I felt sick, very sick, in my heart, mind and body.

She leaned from her couch, patted my cheeks and affirmed:

The luminous beings will return one day and enter your whole being.

So they came back to me by the Divine's Grace.

The Savitri paintings left me day after day in wonder.

The Mother took me with her to the world of true art, the world of Beauty from which all the inspiration came, a world of ecstatic joy, unbounded happiness, a world of magnificence.

Sri Aurobindo has written:

The Mother believes in beauty as a part of spiritual and divine living.

On 6th November 1961 the Mother met me in the morning in the Meditation Hall upstairs and explained to me the ninth picture:

A glamour from the unreached transcendences

Iridescent with the glory of the Unseen,

A message from the unknown immortal Light

Ablaze upon creation's quivering edge,

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Dawn built her aura of magnificent hues

And buried its seed of grandeur in the hours.⁵

She drew a faint line here and there on a piece of paper. I could hardly make out anything. The Mother wished me to use various colours for the painting. She asked me:

Have you seen the dawn?

I said: "No, Mother. Because I work late at night I cannot get up early to see the dawn. I am sorry."

She laughed softly and left me in an ambiguous state.

I was terribly nervous when I reached my apartment. Tears welled up in my eyes and I thought again and again, "why, oh why did I take up this difficult work?" My anger rose to match the situation.

Then at last I dragged myself towards the easel in my studio. I sat on a chair, squeezed out several colours at random on the palette and started blindly giving strokes here and there on a board with a single brush, without thinking, caring, or even trying to sketch the Dawn.

In the afternoon I went to the Mother. She looked at the picture, a meditative gleam in her eyes, and said:

Oh, it is excellent!

I frowned with perplexity. She laughed and said:

You see, while I was taking my lunch I was thinking, "I did not quite make the girl understand how to paint the Dawn. How is she getting on with it?" Meanwhile, I saw Sri Aurobindo in a vision. He informed me that I should not worry about the girl. She is getting on well with the painting. And now I can see what he meant!

At that very moment I was made to understand that not only did the Mother's Consciousness help me in this work, but that Sri Aurobindo's Consciousness too played its role admirably.

According to Sri Aurobindo:

Dawn always means an opening of some kind—the coming of something that is not yet fully there.

On the morning of 8th November the Mother instructed me about the tenth picture:

⁵Savitri, pp. 3-4.

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On life's thin border awhile the Vision stood

And bent over earth's pondering forehead curve.⁶

The Mother saw my picture in the afternoon and liked it. I drew her attention to the arms of the Vision, saying, "Mother, aren't they too long?" She assured me:

Never mind. They are impressive and symbolic.

Then she got up from her high-backed carved chair, came very close to me, looked at my face with her luminous gaze for a few minutes, cupped it in her hands and said firmly:

Now, just now, I saw a beautiful brilliant face of an angel. One day it will come out.

She kissed me on my forehead and bade me "Au revoir."

In the domain of our souls there are numerous beautiful beings or angels. When the Mother spoke she always meant the spiritual and occult truths, which are beyond our comprehension.

The Mother interpreted the sixteenth picture:

All sprang to their unvarying daily acts;

The thousand peoples of the soil and tree

Obeyed the unforeseeing instant's urge,

And, leader here with his uncertain mind,

Alone who stares at the future's covered face,

Man lifted up the burden of his fate.⁷

She remarked:

In this painting there is a purpose behind. One likes to see it over and over again. Man is an ignorant being, and yet he is an exception in Nature.

On 17th November 1961 the Mother explained to me the seventeenth picture:

And Savitri too awoke among these tribes

That hastened to join the brilliant Summoner's chant...

⁶Ibid., p. 4.

⁷Ibid.,p.6.

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A narrow movement on Time's deep abysm,

Life's fragile littleness denied the power,

The proud and conscious wideness and the bliss

She had brought with her into the human form,

The calm delight that weds one soul to all,

The key to the flaming doors of ecstasy.⁸

She did the sketch in front of me, and told me about the colour-scheme. She said:

Child, when you paint Savitri's portrait, you must see that throughout you have to paint the same face but with various expressions. Different features will look odd.

I asked her about Savitri's complexion. The Mother said,

Why, the fair Indian complexion, ivory—a sunny ivory complexion.

I inquired: "Mother what is 'sunny ivory'?" She leaned a little forward from her chair, patted my arm and said with a smile:

Like your complexion.

I blushed. Yes, at that time I had a very fair complexion. I remember the Mother always admired it. As the years passed, gradually the awful weather, constant psychological struggle, perpetual assaults of the invisible entities, setbacks, sufferings and difficulties spoiled my skin considerably. However the essential thing in life, I believe, is the charm and beauty of the soul.

On 19th November the Mother made me understand the nineteenth picture of Book One, Canto One:

Inflicting on the heights the abysm's law,

It sullies with its mire heaven's messengers:

Its thorns of fallen nature are the defence

It turns against the saviour hands of Grace;

It meets the sons of God with death and pain.⁹

⁸ Ibid.

⁹Ibid., p. 7.

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She did the sketch and asked me to show blood oozing from Savitri's hands and right foot.

When the Mother saw the painting she said:

The expression of Savitri is very good indeed.

On 24th December the Mother greeted me with three white roses and a charming smile. She read the passage:

As in a mystic and dynamic dance

A priestess of immaculate ecstasies

Inspired...to things beyond.¹⁰

Instead of explaining to me through a drawing, the Mother gave me a dancing pose—the right foot was lifted—the right hand came down— the left hand went up. She showed me how the priestess should dance.

This reminds me that in one of her births she was also a priestess in Egypt.

Now it was 24th November—the Darshan day. The Mother distributed to people this message, which appealed to me very much:

It is by a constant inner growth that one can find constant newness and unfailing interest in life. There is no other satisfying way.

Sri Aurobindo

For several months the Mother and I worked continuously. We were working on Book One, Canto Four, when in May 1962 the Mother was taken seriously ill. She convalesced for quite a long time in her second-floor apartment. She never came down again. After that I went to her for our work on Savitri—in the music-cum-interview room.

There she explained to me the sixth picture of Book One Canto Four:

Along a path of aeons serpentine

In the coiled blackness of her nescient course

The Earth-Goddess toils across the sands of Time.¹¹

This expressed the Mother's own struggle, I felt.

Time flew on rapid wings. Our work progressed considerably well. The Mother took my consciousness to other spheres and let me see many extraordinary things in detail. She also made me feel their

¹⁰ lbid.. p. 15.

¹¹Ibid., p.50.

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vibrations and meet numerous strange beings of different types. Without her direct instructions, guidance and constant help nothing could have been achieved.

Some people thought that the paintings of Savitri were mere pictures; some even mocked and criticised. Some passed remarks out of sheer jealousy and disdain. They believed the paintings to be my personal possessions and affair, because I had done them and because the Mother had graciously granted me the copyright of them—which much later I passed on to the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education. But really speaking, the paintings of the whole of Savitri are the Mother's own creation, based not only on her series of visions but also on her own guiding sketches: they are a reflection of her own Yoga.

On the morning of 18th December 1964 the Mother explained to me one of the paintings of Book five, The Book of Love.

For Satyavan she drew trousers and said:

He should wear tight trousers.

I raised my eyebrows and inquired, "Mother, tight trousers? They are modem—what about a dhoti?" She said:

Why, but the trousers are all right. I do not like a dhoti here, because it is modem.

When I showed the painting to the Mother I thought it was awful. Once again I broached the subject of the dhoti. She said firmly:

Ah no, I prefer trousers here. It is better if you change the colour of the trousers to pale greyish-blue instead of brown. Then they will look nice.

Here too some people criticised when they saw the exhibition of the Savitri paintings. The Mother once remarked that people do not see beyond their noses. She always reiterated:

All these paintings are paintings of tomorrow—future paintings.

When Book Six, The Book of Fate, was in progress, I did the painting of Savitri's mother. I did not cover her head with the sari, so she lacked the appearance of royalty. The Mother asked me to cover her

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head. I said: "As I have painted the first picture of her without any covering, how will it look in other pictures if I cover her head?" The Mother smiled and said:

Why, but she can always cover her head when the sari slips. In the first picture the sari had slipped and in another picture she has pulled it up!

I savoured her sense of humour.

The Mother was very particular about covering. I remember that one day while I was working my sari got disarranged. She arranged it and advised me:

Child, you should always cover yourself properly.

I painted the Mother's eyes from the photograph depicting her eyes. She liked the painting very much and asked me to include it in Savitri's Book Ten, The Book of Double Twilight, picture thirteen:

And Savitri looked on Death and answered not...

A mighty transformation came on her...

A curve of the calm hauteur of far heaven

Descending into earth's humility,

Her forehead's span vaulted the Omniscient's gaze,

Her eyes were two stars that watched the universe.¹²

As days, months and years passed, our work approached a close. Each day was a new revelation for me. Each painting had its own story, told and written by the Mother.

I am sorry that I cannot give a full account of my work with the Mother. What I am writing here is just a glimpse, an outline. All the details will be given when my spiritual autobiography, The Story of a Soul, is published in book-form in several volumes.

The Mother saw the last paintings of Book Twelve, Epilogue, on 1st September 1965. The lines for the last picture run:

Numberless the stars swam on their shadowy field

Describing in the gloom the ways of light.

¹²Ibid., pp. 664-65.

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Then while they skirted yet the southward verge,

Lost in the halo of her musing brows

Night, splendid with the moon dreaming in heaven

In silver peace, possessed her luminous region.

She brooded through her stillness on a thought

Deep-guarded by her mystic folds of light,

And in her bosom nursed a greater dawn.¹¹

When the Mother saw the painting she told me in moving words:

It is beautiful, excellent—full of feeling.

I actually saw her eyes moist with tears of happiness—because indeed she was anxiously waiting for the auspicious day to come: the great Dawn of the Supramental World.

Then with a smile she put a garland of jasmines around my neck— this was a reward to me. In my birthday card she wrote:

With my blessings for your whole being to become conscious of your soul and to manifest it constantly in your thoughts, feelings and actions.

In Eternal Love.

I told the Mother: "When I have finished re-touching and re-doing the Savitri paintings according to your guidance, I shall have no work." She smiled and affirmed:

You see, you will have so many things to do. Only idle people can say they have no work!

The Mother had the paintings of Meditations on Savitri, Book One, Cantos One to Five, published in book form in four volumes from 1962 to 1965. She did not allow me to retouch or repaint the Savitri paintings for these books, because, she said:

These volumes are only an experiment. I want to show to the world how the consciousness is developed.

For each volumes the Mother gave a wonderful message, respectively:

¹³Ibid., p. 724.

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While teaching me occultism during out Savitri work, the Mother disclosed to me the mysteries of the higher luminous worlds, as well as the horrible nether worlds. In fact she took my consciousness to those worlds in order to give me experiences and make me understand the hidden truth of things.

The Mother did hundreds of Savitri sketches along with her explanations. Also she wrote a number of letters in this regard.

I recall one of her letters:

7.4.65

Dear little child Huta,

The sketches are very good. Especially the 3 heads of Savitri are excellent. I have made a little change to the man of power. His hands must be chained separately each one to a machine on both sides of his body, because he does not see the chains and believes he is free.

LOVE

The Mother

Here the man represented Ego—the lines are from Book Seven, Canto Four:

She spoke and from the lower human world

An answer, a warped echo met her speech...

The voice rose up and smote some inner sun:

"I am the heir of the forces of the earth,

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Slowly I make good my right to my estate...

When earth is mastered, I shall conquer heaven;

The gods shall be my aids or menial folk,

No wish I harbour unfulfilled shall die:

Omnipotence and omniscience shall be mine."¹⁴

The Mother also taught me how to read Savitri:

¹⁴Ibid., pp. 510-13.

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7.7.65

Dear little child of mine

You like to read Savitri to me and to say your feelings about it—this is quite all right—and I like your understanding of Savitri, which is also all right. So everything is all right and you can be sure of my friendship.

LOVE

The Mother

*

The Savitri paintings, and other visionary paintings of that time, were done in the midst of hideous difficulties and sufferings. Many a time the Mother was taken suddenly ill: she ran a temperature along with a cold and cough. Despite all this, she never stopped explaining to me about the Savitri paintings.

On my side too there were spells of indisposition. But the stress of inspiration was so intense that I could not stop.

The Mother gave certain days in the week for our work. The rest of the days I was so preoccupied with painting that sometimes I found no time even to comb my hair. When my maid-servant was absent, I had no time to go to the Dining Room, and had to make do with bits of bred and water.

Often the electricity failed. The inspiration was so intense that I had to hold a flashlight in one hand and keep on paiting with the other—I simply could not halt. During the rains, water would leak in from all sides of the ceiling. I suffered from a severe cold and cough.

I had to clean the rooms before I retired late at night. The Mother had instructed me that I should clean the brushes and the palette as soon as my work was over. Several times I got electric shocks in the water while cleaning the brushes—they were terrifying.

Later this was rectified by Bula-da, for whom I had a great regard. Once he told me: "Huta, let other people go by the Frontier Mail, we will go in the Goods Train. That too will reach the goal—slowly but surely." I liked his advice.

The Mother's Force was working ceaseless in my whole being to fulfil my soul's aspiration. She believed in killing several birds with one stone. Only the Divine Diplomat can do this.

When I was completely absorbed in painting, I forgot to use my handkerchief on my face; instead I would wipe my face with the rags

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I used for cleaning the paintbrushes—and wiped the brushes with my handkerchief! After finishing work I went to clean my brushes and glanced at the mirror. I was horrified to see my face. My hair was dishevelled, and several patches of different colours added a rainbow glory to my visage!

Sometimes while painting I started feeling suffocated, owing to some heaviness in my heart. The inner churning was constant. Tears rolled down my cheeks. With one hand I was painting and with the other wiping my eyes.

The Mother's strides were getting longer and quicker. At times it was difficult to keep pace with her. I got exhausted. There were days when nothing existed for me except the mission of finishing the task I carried in my heart.

Throughout the whole year of 1966 the Mother asked me to retouch and repaint many of the Savitri paintings according to her instructions.

She had arranged to display 468 Savitri paintings in the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Exhibition Hall in February 1967. But before that the Mother expressed her wish to see all the paintings once again in order to fill them with her Force, Light and Consciousness. For she once commented that the Savitri paintings were not mere paintings but living beings full of vibrations. So I took the paintings to the Mother a few at a time. She touched each of them and concentrated on them. Above all, she Was extremely happy to see them, and remarked:

People see these types of paintings from the material point of view, while I always see them from the spiritual point of view. They are visions—they are symbolic.

On 16.1.1967 the Mother wrote to me:

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My dear little child Huta

You have worked wonderfully!

With all my love

I was touched by her letter, and wrote to express my aspiration to reach the Divine Goal. Then she replied to me:

As the paintings were done, so the Goal will be reached.

With all my love

For the exhibition the Mother gave the following message:

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Here is

Savitri

The importance of Savitri is immense.

Its subject is universal.

Its revelation is prophetic.

The time spent in its atmosphere is not wasted.

Take all the time necessary to see the exhibition.

It will be a happy compensation for the feverish haste men put

now in all they do.

10.2.1967

I had seen the final arrangements of the paintings. Krishnalal, Jayantilal, Vasudev-bhai and others were there to arrange everything. The Mother asked me not to go to the Exhibition Hall once the exhibition of the Savitri paintings was declared open by Amrita. Nolini-da, Dyuman and Udar accompanied him. I obeyed her. A dear old lady said to me with good will:

Huta, I saw the exhibition of Savitri paintings. You have done the work of 100 births in this one life. You are liberated.

I replied that it was all the Grace of the Divine.

Here I recall Michelangelo's words:

The true work of art is but a shadow of the divine perfection.

It is well known that the Mother was a fine artist who excelled in drawing and sketching as well as oil-painting. When she started teaching me how to draw objects I realised how engrossed she would be when doing sketches.

While explaining Savitri to me and showing me the way to paint it, the Mother simply poured her heart out in expressing through a few strokes the whole vision of each selected passage.

On 18th July 19661 went to the Mother for the Savitri work. After the work I told her: "Mother some people have said that you are preparing to go..."

She laughed softly and answered:

Yes, people think like that. It is a falsehood. And a falsehood has no influence on the Truth. But the Truth has an influence

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on falsehood. Let them think as they like...

I said: "Mother, somebody also asked me, 'How can the Mother do sketches when her hands are shaky?' Some other think you are suffering from paralysis. Everything is awful. These people are really ridiculous!"

The Mother replied with surprise:

Oh, but my hands are not shaky, and I am quite all right. You see, my child, ever since I retired people have started imagining all sorts of things. But it is a mistake. I do my work all the same.

In this context, I later asked the Mother: "If you kindly permit, I greatly wish to exhibit your sketches along with the paintings of Savitri. If you trust me, I shall have them best displayed." She smiled sweetly and said:

Yes, I leave this matter to you. Do whatever you like.

I said joyously: "Mother I am honoured and happy. I am eager to show people these sketches, because some have thought that one of your hands was too shaky to draw anything. After seeing hundreds of your sketches they will realise that there is no shakiness in your hands."

The Mother was extremely happy and caressed my cheeks.

So along with the Savitri paintings, many of the Mother's sketches were also exhibited.

Later, after the exhibition was over, the Mother was requested by Jayantilal and others to select some of her sketches and allow them to be printed. She laughed merrily and said to all of us:

Ah, you see, when good food is served we must not tell everybody how it was cooked. Similarly we must not print the sketches and disclose the secret of how the paintings were done. People must find that out by themselves.

Once the Mother told me:

The Supreme has the supreme humility, because He is everything.

After the exhibition, on 8.3.1967, the paintings were taken to two rooms in Golconde, according to the Mother's wish.

Then, on the morning of Friday 8.1.99 I brought the Savitri paintings and two huge cupboards to my place, because I was asked

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to do so by Mona L. Pinto. The paintings remained in Golconde for 31 years or so.

In the near future these paintings will go to Savitri Bhavan at Auroville.*

During that time too, the Mother's recitations were going on. For the paintings, the Mother had asked me to choose the passages from Savitri which could be pictured. I wrote them out with a felt-pen on big sheets of handmade paper, so that she could easily read the selected passages which corresponded to the paintings. As she read, I tape-recorded her recitations.

The Mother completed the recitations from the whole of Savitri towards the end of 1967.

Gradually I gave to Sunil-da copies of all the recordings of the Mother's recitations, so that he could compose the Savitri music, according to the Mother's wish.

Sunil-da told me:

Huta, now I will have to read the whole of Savitri in order to understand the epic and then compose the music. According to the Divine's inspiration, you know, it was my aspiration to compose Savitri music. If you would not have recorded the Mother's recitations and given me the tapes I could not have composed the music. And your tape-recording is very nice—like a professional one.

I replied: "Sunil-da, I am honoured! You are very kind and appreciative. You see, everything is decided and arranged by the Supreme Lord. We are his instruments. I am fortunate and very happy to be one."

The Mother wished slides to be made of the Savitri paintings, so that they could be shown at the Ashram theatre as part of the celebrations during Sri Aurobindo's Birth Centenary Year, 1972. With the Mother's blessings Richard Eggenberger took up the work of preparing the slides from early 1971 onwards. He and his assistants finished taking slides of all of the Savitri paintings on 27.9.1971.

* These are now at Savitri Bhavan.—Editor.

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On 26.2.71 the Mother heard her own organ music along with her recitations. She liked it very much and fully approved of it to be used as an accompaniment throughout the slide shows. The Mother had given these names to her music:

Mystic Solitude, Quiet Power, Joy, Compassion of the Divine, Life in Eternity, Construction of the Future.

As for Sunil-da's Savitri music, the Mother arranged for it to be played in the Playground during the meditations on Thursdays and Sundays. In this connection she gave me a special blessings packet for Sunil-da. He was very pleased.

The Mother wished to know the exact date and time for showing in the Ashram theater the slides of the Meditations on Savitri paintings along with her own organ music and her recitations, recorded by me, of Savitri passages which corresponded with the paintings, so that she would put her special Force and Light during the programme. The first show was on Friday, 25.2.72 at 8.30 pm. On 21.7.72 was the last one. People enjoyed the shows. The Mother did not want me to attend the shows. I obeyed her.

In 1967, after the display of Savitri paintings in the Ashram Exhibition Hall, when I asked the Mother about making a movie of the Savitri paintings, she held my right hand, shook it with a broad smile and said with a face full of enthusiasm:

Yes, my child, we shall collaborate!

Years passed. I was wondering about the movie. On 6.7.72 M. Andre" had written to me:

Dear Huta

It is the Mother who told me, when I read your letter to her, to inquire from Kireet what his idea exactly was.

Now I have again spoken to her and she said it is very doubtful if Tarachand would take up this job, and besides the pictures would not come out well.

With kind regards

Yours,

André

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Now at last it seemed that the time had cone to get the movie of the Savitri paintings made. On 6.2.1973 it was decided by the Mother that the movie would be made by Michel Klostermann of Germany. When he was in charge of film production in Auroville, the Mother gave the name "Filmaur" for his project. The Mother gave Michel and me beautiful leather-bound folders with Sri Aurobindo's and her own photographs.

She wanted her own organ-music to be played as a background during her recitations of the Savitri passages corresponding to the paintings. She also wished that the movie should be full of liveliness, vibrations and vividness.

On 19.5.73 I wrote a letter to the Mother.

My dearest Mother

Michel has already started to make the movie of the Savitri paintings with your blessings. According to your instructions he will surely give to the paintings vividness, vibrations and liveliness while filming.

Your own organ-music and your recitations of Savitri passages will have stereophonic sound which will give a superb effect to the movie:

Meditations on Savitri

I pray you to make everything possible and done by your Force and Grace. Victory to the Supreme!

With love and kisses

Yours ever

Huta

She sent blessings packets through M. André.

Now Michel has fulfilled the Mother's wish by making the movie of all the Savitri paintings from Book One to Book Twelve. He has sent video cassettes of the movie to me, and to Shraddhavan for Savitri Bhavan, Auroville.

Meanwhile, a new work had started.

On the morning of 20th December 1967, the Mother saw me in her music-cum-interview room. She asked me:

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Have you brought anything to show me?

I said: "Yes, Mother. Here is the file of four hundred and sixty-five passages from Savitri which you recited and which were put below the Savitri paintings when they were exhibited in February 1967.

Mother, will you please explain these passages to me, and allow me to take down your explanations of them on my tape-recorder as I have done with your recitations of the passages? Then surely people will understand the Savitri paintings more easily."

She concentrated for a moment or two and then said enthusiastically:

If I have to explain these passages, I would prefer to start from the very beginning and give a full explanation of the whole of Savitri.

In fact, this had already been planned in the Mother's Vision long ago before I came to stay near her on 10th February 1955.

Once she revealed to a small group of sadhaks, soon after the first one-volume edition of Savitri was published in 1954 by the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education:

Savitri is occult knowledge and spiritual experience. Some part of it can be understood mentally—but much of it needs the same knowledge and experience for understanding it. Nobody here except myself can explain Savitri. One day I hope to explain it in its true sense.

On 18th January 1968 in the morning the Mother and I commenced our new work on Savitri.

On 28th January the Mother gave it the name:

I may indicate how we proceeded. The Mother read out the passages from Savitri, and then, after a deep contemplation, gave her comments which I tape-recorded and later transcribed. Afterwards she saw and corrected my transcriptions.

All the comments by the Mother are wonderful. Here I would like to present one of them, from Book One Canto Three, which appeals to me very much. She recited this passage:

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Only a while at first these heavenlier states,

These large wide-poised upliftings could endure.

The high and luminous tension breaks too soon,

The body's stone stillness and the life's hushed trance,

The breathless might and calm of silent mind;

Or slowly they fail as sets a golden day.

The restless nether members tire of peace;

A nostalgia of old little works and joys,

A need to call back small familiar selves,

To tread the accustomed and inferior way,

The need to rest in a natural poise of fall,

As a child who learns to walk can walk not long,

Replace the titan will for ever to climb,

On the heart's altar dim the sacred fire.

An old pull of subconscious cords renews;

It draws the unwilling spirit from the heights,

Or a dull gravitation drags us down

To the blind driven inertia of our base.

This too the supreme Diplomat can use,

He makes our fall a means for greater rise.¹⁵

Her comment runs:

This is the great difficulty in the physical life. It is the strength of the old habit that pulls down the body to its old way. Then comes the struggle, and if the faith is sufficient, if the ardour for progress is there, then out of this fall we can rise to a higher receptivity and a better achievement.

In fact, there is nothing in this experimental life that is not meant to push the whole creation towards the luminous marvellous Divine End that is promised to our effort and to our faith.

Never despair. Never lose courage. Never, never lose faith. The Grace is there and marvellously uses everything to reach, as quickly as possible, the Goal that is promised to our effort.

If we can enlarge our consciousness sufficiently, we see that even the apparent defeats are marvellous steps towards the final Victory.

As we went on, the Mother uncovered Sri Aurobindo's vision and hers of the New World, expressing the Supramental Light, Consciousness, Force and Delight. She disclosed their effect on the

¹⁵Ibid., p. 34.

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cells of the body. She took the theme of Savitri only as starting-point and, when the right time came, spoke about the action of the New Consciousness which had been manifesting since the beginning of the year 1969.

On 21st March 1969, after our Savitri work, the Mother said:

Child, do you know, from the beginning of this year the New Consciousness has been coming down upon earth, which tells everything—what to do and what not to do—to people who are conscious and want to change.

This Consciousness is gradually and gently organising everything.

When you can withdrawn quietly and silently, and listen to it, it will tell you what you should do and what you should not.

This Consciousness does not do anything violently and forcibly but gently and gradually. It does not work only in the mind and the vital being but also in the body. It takes great care of the body and everything else.

I am putting this Consciousness around you. You will see it and feel it. It will tell you everything.

It is always smiling—it never gets angry, it never scolds, but is very gentle and very sweet, you'll see!

The Mother always kept her promise. I became more and more aware of the New Consciousness and its action.

The Mother's message of 1st April 1969 to all, in connection with the talk she gave me, runs:

Since the beginning of this year a New Consciousness is at work upon earth to prepare men for a New Creation, the Superman. For this creation to be possible the substance that constitutes man's body must undergo a big change, it must become more receptive to the Consciousness and more plastic under its working.

These are just the qualities that one can acquire through physical education.

So, if we follow this discipline with such a result in view, we are sure to obtain the most interesting result.

My blessings to all for progress and achievement.

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On 26th December 1969 I went to the Mother to hear the New Year music. There was also a message given by her:

The world is preparing for a big change. Will you help?

That day happened to be one of my days with the Mother. She recited from Savitri only one passage, for it was very long. After the work she read my prayer, and on the same sheet of paper she wrote:

It will be realised by the Supreme Power and Love.

That night I had a wonderful vision.

I went out of my body. My subtle body was now soaring up and up in an enormous space. There were the moon and stars. The atmosphere was very light, cool and soothing. I felt free like a bird. I did not realise how far I went up but now I could not see the moon and stars. I was beyond the heavenly bodies. There was endless space before me. Suddenly I saw something shining from the far horizon. I headed towards the glow. Now I was not soaring up vertically but my movement was as if I were swimming into a vast space. I was coming closer and closer to my destination. My first glance fell on two huge Suns. The one on the right was golden yellow and the other on the left was golden red. Their edges were touching and mingling with each other. I came still closer by crossing an immense lake which was packed with diamond-like lotuses and emerald leaves. The reflection of the two Suns added glory to the breathtaking beauty of the marvellous scene which was spread out like a panorama before my eyes.

I was now floating a little above the lake. Its coolness enveloped my subtle body.

Here the Divine had strewn lavishly her exquisite Beauty and Wonder and Quietude. The divine vibrations were overwhelming. I was engulfed by the new consciousness.

I reached the Suns. Their Force and Power were absolutely still and calm. Then I saw a narrow passage between the two Suns. I entered it, and on the other side I saw a golden world. There was nothing there except golden Light. I landed slowly on the divine soil, but to my surprise I was a little above the ground. I could not set my feet there. I was not walking but floating in this enchanting atmosphere. I came across a few luminous beings who were active, but their activities were without any sound. Everything was heavenly. There I felt the perfect Consciousness, Harmony, Peace, Beauty and Silence. I was simply bathed in the golden Light, in the soothing vibrations of a quiet joy and happiness.

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I roamed here and there freely, and silently communicated with the beings. Nothing was new to me because I identified myself completely with this magnificent World of Golden Light.

I was reluctant to come back to the dark world of falsehood. But alas, the next morning I saw myself lying in my bed. I felt extremely sorry and lost, and shed a few silent tears.

At once I remembered the whole passage from Savitri which the Mother had recited the previous morning and on which she had given her comment. The passage recounts an experience of Aswapati, the Yogi-King, father of Savitri.

A glimpse was caught of things forever unknown;

The letters stood out of the unmoving Word.

In the immutable nameless Origin

Was seen emerging as from fathomless seas

The trail of the Ideas that made the world,

And, sown in the black earth of Nature's trance,

The seed of the Spirit's blind and huge desire

From which the tree of cosmos was conceived

And spread its magic arms through a dream of space.

Immense realities took on a shape:

There looked out from the shadow of the Unknown

The bodiless Namelessness that saw God bom

And tries to gain from the mortal's mind and soul

A deathless body and a divine name.

The immobile hps, the great surreal wings,

The visage masked by superconscient Sleep,

The eyes with their closed lids that see all things,

Appeared of the Architect who builds in trance.

The original Desire bom in the Void

Peered out; he saw the hope that never sleeps,

The feet that run behind a fleeting fate,

The ineffable meaning of the endless dream.

As if a torch held by a power of God,

The radiant world of the everlasting Truth

Glimmered like a faint star bordering the night

Above the golden Overmind's shimmering ridge.

Even were caught as through a cunning veil

The smile of love that sanctions the; long game,

The calm indulgence and maternal breasts

Of Wisdom suckling the child-laughter of Chance,

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Silence the nurse of the Almighty's power,

The omniscient hush, womb of the immortal Word,

And of the Timeless the still brooding face,

And the creative eye of Eternity.¹⁶

The Mother's comment ran as follows:

All these images are meant to break the ordinary receptivity of mind and to open it to the conception—vaster, truer, creative— of the Supramental.

It is only in a receptive silence—when the whole inquisitive mind stops moving—that one can feel and understand the images described in these verses.

Also my memory flew back to one of the Mother's letters of the preceding year, when I had expressed to her my wish to go back to my own world of Beauty and Peace. She wrote:

I am leading you to a place much more beautiful than the one from which you came—a place of full and harmonious Consciousness...

I felt strongly that my vision of the Golden World was a glimpse which the Mother had given me, and that actually she had taken my consciousness there. But according to our human nature, I thought that the vision might be some kind of mental formation by myself; it could be simply a dream. I wrote to the Mother in order to make sure, because what I had seen had the look of a living thing, which I can never forget. She answered:

¹⁶ Ibid., pp. 40-41.

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Happily, the true worlds, and the true Consciousness are not a dream, but the only real Reality for those who are sincere and conscious.

Bonne Annee

for 1970

with all my love and blessings

Then I did the painting of my vision and showed it to the Mother. She said:

It is very impressive.

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This painting will appear, along with the verses and the Mother's comments, in the book About Savitri, Part Three.

Days passed. One day the Mother confirmed:

Now I have caught the exact thing regarding the work—now I know what Sri Aurobindo wants me to do.

On another occasion she said:

You see, Savitri is very good for me also, because while I read and recite, I do not think at all. I am only inspired. I need this experience.

I said:

Ah, Mother, you don't need anything, because you are the Divine, aren't you?

She laughed softly and stated:

Yes, that I am, but this is physical (pointing to her body). And there is the physical world and it must be perfected. In fact, nothing is enough for me.

Then, on the following session of our Savitri work, she revealed:

The work is really very good. I like it. When I concentrate and go back to the Origin of the Creation, I see things as a whole in their reality and then I speak.

You see, each time when I speak, Sri Aurobindo comes here. And I speak exactly what he wants me to speak. It is the inner hidden truth of Savitri that he wants me to reveal.

Each time he comes, a wonderful atmosphere is created. I have read Savitri before but it was nothing compared to this reading.

*

On 29th March 1972 I offered to the Mother twelve copies of About Savitri, Part One, consisting of Book One, Canto One.

The Mother's message for the book was:

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She gave me a copy and wrote on it:

To Huta,

With love and appreciation

and blessings

There are four parts of About Savitri. Two are already printed. The rest will be published in the course of time.

I have brought together the Mother's explanations along with my paintings, inspired and approved by her. She wrote:

All can be done if the God-touch is there.

This is what Sri Aurobindo has written in Savitri, and how true it has proved! I am really happy to share this splendid gift with everybody, in Sri Aurobindo and the Mother's Light. My profound gratitude to Sri Aurobindo and the Divine Mother for their Grace and Love.

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HUTA

(Copyright: Huta D. Hindocha)

Page 43

Some Reflections on Savitri

1: Guidance from the Mother on Savitri

In February 1967 an exhibition of Huta's paintings of Savitri was held at the Ashram. After seeing it I wrote to the Mother: "The Savitri exhibition is full of images of Savitri, the ascent of the being, the descent of divinity and the divine play, from which radiates a light, as beautiful as powerful, similar to that which I see near You. Is this my imagination or is it true?"

The Mother answered: "It is quite true and I am glad that you saw it."

Later, in 1968 and 1969, on occasions, I referred some lines from Savitri to her and got her comments.

Sri Aurobindo has written in Savitri

Yes, there are happy ways near to God's sun;

But few are they who tread the sunlit path

Only the pure in soul can walk in light.¹

What a joy it would be to possess the required purity!

The Mother: When one is living among men with all their miseries, it is only the Grace that can bestow this state—even in those who have abolished their ego by tapasya. It is beyond all personal effort.

Sri Aurobindo speaks of Savitri's firmness of purpose in the following line:

Immutable like a fixed eternal star.²

Can one say that such determination is demanded of the sadhak of transformation?

The Mother: This is the great mystery of creation: Immutable and yet eternally renewed.

¹Savitri, p. 448.

²Ibid., p. 606.

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Savitri Says:

Not only is there hope for godheads pure;

The violent and darkened deities

Leaped down from the one breast in rage to find

What the white gods had missed: they too are safe;

A Mother's eyes are on them and her arms

Stretched out in love desire her rebel sons.³

What had the white gods missed?

The Mother: The conversion of the Asuras.

Looking at the push being given to me by the Mother towards transformation and at my banality and mediocrity, I am reminded of this line of Savitri:

All can be done if the God-touch is there.⁴

The Mother: As soon as one has a contact with the divine Consciousness, this mediocrity of the outer being becomes obvious, but the promise of Savitri is true and will be fulfilled.

Aswapati was very fortunate. For him,

Each day was a spiritual romance...

Each happening was a deep experience.⁵

The Mother: This possibility is open to all those whose aspiration is fervent.

A knowledge which became what is perceived,

Replaced the separated sense and heart,

And drew all Nature into its embrace.⁶

Is Sri Aurobindo referring here to knowledge by identity?

The Mother: Yes, it is a very exact description.

A greater force than the earthly held his limbs...

Unwound the triple cord of mind and freed

The heavenly wideness of a Godhead's gaze.⁷

³Ibid., p. 613. ⁶Ibid.,p.28.

⁴Ibid.,p.3. ⁷Ibid., p. 82.

⁵Ibid., pp. 30-31.

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What does "the triple cord of mind" mean?

The Mother: The cords stand for the limitations of the mind, and there are three of them because there is a physical mind, a vital mind and a mental mind.

The days were travellers on a destined road,

the nights companions of his musing spirit.⁸

I see the need of continuous sadhana day and night.

The Mother Yes, there comes a time when nothing, absolutely nothing is outside the Yoga and the Divine's Presence is felt and found in all things and all circumstances.

A last high world was seen where all worlds meet;

In its summit gleam where Night is not nor Sleep,

The light began of the Trinity supreme.⁹

Is the "Trinity Supreme" Sachchidananda?

The Mother: Yes.

Our body's cells must hold the Immortal's flame.¹⁰

Is this the secret of the luminous body?

The Mother: It is a poetic way of expressing the transformation which will take place and which is more complicated than that.

None can reach heaven who has not passed through hell.¹¹

But still, Mother, doesn't the soul chosen by the Divine go through hell in a different way than others?

The Mother: This quotation means that in order to reach the divine regions one must, while on earth, go through the vital, which in some of its parts is a veritable hell. But those who have surrendered to the Divine and have been adopted by Him are surrounded by the Divine protection and for them the passage is not difficult.

His failure is not failure whom God leads.¹²

Because it is part of the play?

⁸Ibid., p. 43. ¹⁰Ibid., p. 35. ¹²Ibid.,p.28.

⁹Ibid., p. 89. ¹¹Ibid,, p. 227.

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The Mother: It is the human mind that has the conception of success and failure. It is the human mind that wants one thing and does not want another. In the divine plan each thing has its place and importance. So it is not success that matters. What matters is to be a docile and if possible a conscious instrument of the Divine Will. To be and to do what the Divine wants, this is the truly important thing.

All things shall change in God's transfiguring hour.¹³

Can man delay or hasten the coming of this hour?

The Mother: Neither one nor the other in their apparent contradiction created by the separate consciousness, but something else which our words cannot express. In the present state of human consciousness, it is good for it to think that aspiration and human effort can hasten the advent of the divine transformation, because aspiration and effort are needed for the transformation to occur.

All that transpires on earth and all beyond

Are parts of an illimitable plan

The One keeps in his heart and knows alone.¹⁴

Does the man who is united with the One know the "plan"?

The Mother: To the extent it is necessary for the execution, yes, and to the extent of the need, but not in its integrality all at once.

In the context of happening on the first of January¹⁵ the following lines of Savitri become more significant:

The superman shall wake in mortal man

And manifest the hidden demi-god

Or grow into the God-Light and God-Force

Revealing the secret deity in the cave.¹⁶

The Mother: Yes, undoubtedly that is what is going to happen.

When

The eyes of mortal body plunge their gaze

Into Eyes that look upon eternity.¹⁷

¹³ Ibid., p. 341. ¹⁶Ibid.,p. 705-06

¹⁴Ibid., p. 52. ¹⁷ Ibid., p. 71.

¹⁵The Descent of Supermen Consciousness on 1 January 1969; see Notes on the Way, CWM, Vol. 11, p. 148.

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One finds there his native land!

The Mother: That is to say the Divine origin. It is true. You are becoming a poet in your expression.

[The author's correspondence with the Mother as given above was originally in French. The quotations from Savitri were sent in English except the last one where the French version was given. Facsimiles of the original correspondence appear as an annexure at the end of the article. — Editor]

2: Durga in Savitri

In Sri Aurobindo's Epic Savitri, passing onwards in her spirit's upward route after meeting the Mother of Sorrows, meets the Mother of Might:

A Woman sat in gold and purple sheen,

Armed with the trident and the thunderbolt.

Her feet upon a couchant lion's back.

A formidable smile curved round her lips,

Heaven-fire laughed in the comers of her eyes;

Her body a mass of courage and heavenly strength,

She menaced the triumph of the nether gods.¹⁸

Obviously it is the Durga-aspect of the Divine Mother.

A halo of lightnings flamed around her head

And sovereignty a great cestus zoned her robe

And majesty and victory sat with her

Guarding in the wide cosmic battlefield

Against the flat equality of Death

And the all-levelling insurgent Night

The hierarchy of the ordered Powers,

The high changeless values, the peaked eminences...¹⁹

So that is Durga, the Slayer of the Asuras. She is there on the cosmic battlefield, engaged in the continuous fight between the Gods and the Asuras, between the armies of Light and the armies of Darkness. Revealing herself, she speaks in a voice "like a war-cry" or "a pilgrim chant":

¹⁸Ibid., p. 508. ¹⁹Ibid.

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I smite the Titan who bestrides the world

And slay the ogre in his blood-stained den.

I am Durga, goddess of the proud and strong,

And Lakshmi, queen of the fair and fortunate;

I wear the face of Kali when I kill,

I trample the corpses of the demon hordes.

I am charged by God to do his mighty work...²⁰

In God's mighty work Durga tolerates the opposition of none, not even of the Gods. Says she:

Uncaring I serve his will who sent me forth,

Reckless of peril and earthly consequence.

I reason not of virtue and of sin

But do the deed he has put into my heart.

I fear not for the angry frown of Heaven,

I flinch not from the red assault of Hell;

I crush the opposition of the gods,

Tread down a million goblin obstacles.

I guide man to the path of the Divine

And guard him from the red Wolf and the Snake.²¹

Durga is also the Saviour in the physical world. She delivers us from tyrants: that is the aspect in which She was called by Sri Aurobindo in the days of India's struggle for independence early twentieth century. In his Hymn to Durga written in that period, he invoked Durga who tramples tyrant and oppressors with "the armed heel of Fate."²²

Here are her words of assurance in Savitri:

My ear is leaned to the cry of the oppressed,

I topple down the thrones of tyrant kings:

A cry comes from proscribed and hunted lives

Appealing to me against a pitiless world,

A voice of the forsaken and desolate

And the lone prisoner in his dungeon cell.

Men hail in my coming the Almighty's force

Or praise with thankful tears his saviour Grace.²³

²⁰Ibid.,p. 509. ²¹Ibid., pp. 509-10. ²² Ibid., p. 509. ²³ Ibid.

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In the dawn of the destined date when Satyavan had to die, Savitri gazed into her past, and

Then silently she rose and, service done,

Bowed down to the great goddess simply carved

By Satyavan upon a forest stone.

What prayer she breathed her soul and Durga knew.²⁴

The prayer and the answer we can guess from what Durga had already revealed earner:

I know the goal, I know the secret route:

I have studied the map of the invisible worlds;

I am the battle's head, the journey's star....

A few I guide who pass me towards the Light;

A few I save...²⁵

Savitri does not accept the decision of the Lord of Death to snatch Satyavan away from the life on earth and, finally, Satyavan is given back to her and to the world. Savitri descends from the higher regions with the soul of Satyavan.

In the return journey, although the names of Krishna and Kali are not mentioned, they are the godheads looking after her. Krishna, the ever delightful, and Kali, "the dark terrible Mother of life", the "World-Puissance on almighty Shiva's lap," and the one whose enormous dance steps on Shiva's breast:

Pursuing her in her fall, implacably sweet,

A face was over her which seemed a youth's,

Symbol of all the beauty eyes see not,

Crowned as with peacock plumes of gorgeous hue

Framing a sapphire, whose heart-disturbing smile

Insatiably attracted to delight, Voluptuous to the embraces of her soul.

Changed in its shape, yet rapturously the same,

It grew a woman's dark and beautiful

²⁴Ibid., p. 561.25Ibid.,p. 510.

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Like a mooned night with drifting star-gemmed clouds,

A shadowy glory and a stormy depth,

Turbulent in will and terrible in love.

Eyes in which Nature's blind ecstatic life

Sprang from some spirit's passionate content,

Missioned her to the whirling dance of earth.²⁶

3:Fate in Savitri

In the opening canto of Savitri, speaking of the earth and man, Sri Aurobindo says:

And, leader here with his uncertain mind,

Alone who stares at the future's covered face,

Man lifted up the burden of his fate.²⁷

It is amidst such a humanity that Savitri is bom. Savitri,

A mighty stranger in the human field²⁸

is

Too unlike the world she came to help and save²⁹

and,

Accepting life's obscure terrestrial robe,

Hiding herself even from those she loved,

The godhead greater by a human fate,³⁰

came

To live with grief, to confront death on her road,³¹

and

The mortal's lot became the Immortal's share.³²

But with a difference which is hinted at soon:

Calm was her face and courage kept her mute.

Yet only her outward self suffered and strove;

Even her humanity was half divine.³³

²⁶ibid.,p.711. ²⁹Ibid.,p.7 ³² Ibid.

²⁷ Ibid., p. 6. ³⁰Ibid., p. 8. ³³Ibid.,p.8.

²⁸Ibid ³¹ Ibid., p.8.

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Because she is

Too great to impart the peril and the pain,

In her torn depths she kept the grief to come.³⁴

She has the "dark foreknowledge" of the "fatal morn" that has arrived. She knows and none else, except three who are not there:

This was the day when Satyavan must die.³⁵

It is the hour "when fail all Nature's means."³⁶ The dolorous moment is close; soon Savitri will

Look into the lonely eyes of immortal Death

And with her nude spirit measure the Infinite's night.³⁷

Alone comes to battle this "combatant in dreadful lists".

No helper had she save the Strength within;

There was no witness of terrestrial eyes;

The Gods above and Nature sole below

Were the spectators of that mighty strife.³⁸

A year ago when Savitri had returned to her father's palace after her quest of Satyavan, the sage Narad had announced that

Twelve swift-winged months are given to him and her;

This day returning Satyavan must die.³⁹

At that time, when the irrevocable fate was prophesied to her by the foreseeing sage, Savitri could have renounced; indeed she was advised by her human mother, the queen, to renounce Satyavan. But Savitri would not.

Once my heart chose and chooses not again.⁴⁰

Mark the irrevocability of Fate, one would be tempted to say, for , Savitri does not attempt to avoid the course of Fate.

My heart has sealed its troth to Satyavan:

Its signature adverse Fate cannot efface,

Its seal not Fate nor Death not Time dissolve.

Those who shall part who have grown one being within?

³⁴Ibid. ³⁶Ibid., p. ³⁸Ibid. ⁴⁰Ibid., p.432.

³⁵Ibid., p. 10. ³⁷Ibid ., p.13 ³⁹Ibid.,p.431

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Death's grip can break our bodies, not our souls:

If death take him, I too know how to die.⁴¹

It is an age-old sentiment of the immortality of love, the wish to dissolve oneself once the beloved is snatched away by Death, the Fate. But for Savitri this is not enough. Before she closes her short reply to her mother's pleadings to choose another course, she adds;

Let Fate do with me what she will or can;

I am stronger than death and greater than my fate;⁴²

and then the final sentence,

Fate's law may change, but not my spirit's will.⁴³

Here is a first challenge to the inexorability, the inflexibility, the unchangeability of Fate.

In Savitri the conscious Will has taken human shape and she has come to earth for a certain purpose.

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.⁴⁴

And this, as the poet told us earlier, is in the face of the fact that

The world unknowing, for the world she stood.⁴⁵

She is doing it so. Later we are told:

A day may come when she must stand unhelped...

Carrying the world's future on her lonely breast.⁴⁶

The lonely breast is of Savitri who, in the Kalidasian simile, is as delicate as a flower and as hard as a thunderbolt, "flower-sweet and adamant."⁴⁷

The story of Savitri tells us that Satyavan did die on the fated day; also Savitri put her spirit's might against Yama, the Death-god, and got Satyavan back to live on the earth.

'Not that in it the authority of Fate, established from time immemorial, has been ignored or underestimated in any way. When Savitri returns to Madra after meeting Satyavan, "carrying the sanction of the gods/To her love and its luminous eternity,"⁴⁸ she hears Narad speaking of doom "Who hunts unseen the unconscious lives of men":

⁴¹Ibid. ⁴³Ibid. ⁴⁵Ibid., p. 13. ⁴⁷Ibid., p. 465.

⁴²Ibid. ⁴⁴Ibid.,?. 461. ⁴⁶Ibid.,p.461 ⁴⁸ Ibidp. 418.

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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!⁴⁹

Our days are links of a disastrous chain,

Necessity avenges casual steps.⁵⁰

The certainty of Fate, niyati, is expressed in a few simple words:

It is decreed and Satyavan must die;

The hour is fixed, chosen the fatal stroke.⁵¹

Next, Fate is adṛṣṭa, the unknown, the unseen. For man

The future's road is hid from mortal sight:

He moves towards a veiled and secret face.

To light one step in front is all his hope

And only for a little strength he asks

To meet the riddle of his shrouded fate...

He feels not when the dreadful fingers close

Around him with the grasp none can elude.⁵²

But if Fate can be foreseen, will it help man? The queen voices this hope when she argues with Narad:

If wings of Evil brood above that house,

Then also speak, that we may turn aside

And rescue our lives from hazard of wayside doom

And chance entanglement of an alien fate.⁵³

On the other hand, if Fate is unchangeable, one cannot "turn aside". Fate should have, and instances are abundant, its way in spite of the foreknowledge, in spite of all the mighty precautions taken to ward off its lash. Narad makes the point:

What help is in prevision to the driven?

Safe doors cry opening near, the doomed pass on.⁵⁴

He, further adds that

A future knowledge is an added pain,

A torturing burden and fruitless light

On the enormous scene that Fate has built.⁵⁵

⁴⁹Ibid., p. 420. ⁵¹Ibid., p. 458. ⁵³Ibid., p. 426. ⁵⁵Ibid.

⁵⁰Ibid., p. 428. ⁵²Ibid., p. 425. ⁵⁴Ibid.

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Therefore was the king's suggestion to Narad:

Lend not a dangerous vision to the blind,

The dire ordeal that foreknowledge brings.

One doubts

Perhaps the blindness of our will is Fate.⁵⁶

And what is free-will, if "man lives like some secret player's mask?"⁵⁷

He knows not even what his lips shall speak.

For a mysterious Power compels his steps

And life is stronger than his trembling soul.

None can refuse what the stark Force demands.⁵⁸

and,

Nature and Fate compel his free-will's choice.⁵⁹

Yet we are told,

Man can accept his fate, he can refuse.⁶⁰

The clue is in the line:

But greater spirits this balance can reverse

And make the soul the artist of its fate.⁶¹

This is one of the mystic truths revealed by Savitri. If the fundamental truth of our being is spiritual, it is our self, our soul that must determine our evolution. Our spirit must be greater than Fate or Destiny or Law.

In fact the question of Fate and Free-Will has been one of the knottiest problems of metaphysics, especially due to the love of the human mind for trenchant solutions. In this case the mind likes to have either Fate or Free-Will, one of the two as the supreme Force, thus refusing to see the complex play of forces that the universe is and treating a partial truth as the whole truth.

The force of Fate or Destiny is undeniable. But even where destiny has been foreknown or announced in advance, whether through oracles or through the hieroglyph of stars by astrology, man has tried to have his own way by his individual energy; he has endeavoured to change

⁵⁶Ibid., p. 425. ⁵⁸Ibid. ⁶⁰Ibid., p. 458.

⁵⁷Ibid., p. 427. ⁵⁹Ibid., p. 465. ⁶¹Ibid., p. 465.

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the daiva by his puruṣakāra. The inevitability of Doom or blind Necessity has not deterred man from his seeking after a different consummation. If we do not reject a priori the proposition that the creator of destiny is not bound by the destiny created at some point of time, it becomes easier to appreciate other aspects of the world-life. An indication of this possibility of altering destiny can be had from the fact that even the readers of destiny predict different alternative possibilities, some of which depend entirely on the individual concerned and not on exterior circumstances or others. Then, in the Theory of Karma which has been so popular in India, man is said to be bound by his own acts, what he has sown he must reap, and the chain continues; but here too the logical conclusion is accepted that if a person does something now to counteract what was done before, the result of the earlier act can be cancelled, neutralised or modified. Of course it has been said that there are certain acts, utkata karma, which cannot be thus modified. That again is a matter of the trial of strength between the two forces; the principle stands. The question will be that of discovering a force superior to the one present in utkata karma.

Naturally, this force has to be the force of the Spirit. For, amidst the planes of being it is the Spirit that stands at the top, and in the play of forces, although each force appears as supreme on its own plane, ultimately it is modifiable here by the higher or highest force. This can also be seen from the instances where the astrological predictions have proved to be correct up to a certain stage and the character and events took a different course when the subject turned to the spiritual life.

Spiritual realisation means union with the Spirit; union with the Spirit implies union with the Will of the Spirit,—and for the spiritually realised being it is the Will of the Spirit that prevails.

The same truth stated in philosophical terms finds expression in The Life Divine:

Fate, whether purely mechanical or created by ourselves, a chain of our own manufacture, is only one factor of existence; Being and its consciousness and its will are a still more important factor. In Indian astrology which considers all life circumstances to be Karma, mostly predetermined or indicated in the graph of the stars, there is still provision made for the energy and force of the being which can change or cancel part or much of what is so written or even all but the most imperative and powerful

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bindings of Karma. This is a reasonable account of the balance: but there is also to be added to the computation the fact that destiny is not simple but complex; the destiny which binds our physical being, binds it so long or in so far as a greater law does not intervene... behind our surface is a freer Life-power, a freer Mind-power which has another energy and can create another destiny and bring it in to modify the primary plan, and when the soul and self emerges, when we become consciously spiritual beings, that change can cancel or wholly remodel the graph of our physical fate.⁶²

If Spirit is liberty, fate cannot be inflexible for those great souls who have completed the transition from the present mental consciousness into the higher and superior consciousness, the spiritual, the Divine. Indeed nothing less than that enables man to transcend his fate.

4: Sun-Ray in Savitri

In the twelve pillared inner chamber of Matrimandir at Auroville we have the Mother's symbol at the centre of the marble floor. Four golden symbols of Sri Aurobindo stand on it forming a square upon which sits a crystal globe. The sun enters the Chamber as a ray that, turning with the hours, always falls on the globe. That was the Mother's vision.

A beautiful work of art indeed, says the artistic sense coming to the fore. But a piece of art with a deep significance,—says some inner chord of our being. For the Sun is a symbol of the Supramental Truth, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have told us; and the sun-ray will be the symbol of the ray of that Truth.

In the Vedas the Sun has been called the Lord of Truth, "...the rays of Surya are the herds of the Sun, the kine of Helios slain by the companions of Odysseus in the Odyssey, stolen by Hermes from his brother Apollo in the Homeric hymn to Hermes. They are the cows concealed by the enemy Vala, by the Panis ...'^,63 In modem imagery we would speak of the rays of Truth covered by the coat of falsehood, the rays of Light shrouded by the dense mantle of Darkness, coming out of their covering. This uncovering is indicated in the Vedas when it is said our "fathers found out the hidden light, by the truth in their

⁶²The Life Divine, SABCL., Vol. 19, p. 809.

⁶³The Secret of the Veda. SABCL, Vol. 10, pp. 119-20.

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thoughts they brought to birth the Dawn,"⁶⁴ or we "have crossed over to the other shore of this darkness!"⁶⁵

The supramental world is the foundation of the Truth, and it is the foundation of the Dawns:

Dawn bom in heaven opens out things by the Troth, she comes manifesting the greatness.

Dawn comes divine repelling by the Light all darkness and evils.⁶⁶

And to the Troth-Sun-Light-Ray of the Mother's vision in the hall of the Matrimandir will mount the Vedic prayer:

O Ray, mayst thou be with us and pray with us, unifying the knowledge with the shining of the breath of life...⁶⁷

This Ray can very well be

... the Ray no mortal eye can bear,⁶⁸

... a saviour touch, a ray divine,⁶⁹

... a ray of the original Bliss,⁷⁰

from which some passion of the inviolate purity breaks through;

... the supernal Ray⁷¹

with which we have to acquaint our depths;

The ray revealing unseen Presences;⁷²

a ray that

... replied from the occult Supreme;⁷³

a vaster being's

... immense intuitive Ray⁷⁴

and

... the unfading Ray.⁷⁵

When the Deva-Purushas will

⁶⁴Ibid., p. 123. ⁶⁵Ibid.

⁶⁶Ibid.,p. 127, p. 129. ⁶⁷Hymns to the Mystic Fire, SABCL, Vol. 11, p. 232. ⁶⁸Savitri,p.57. ⁶⁹Ibid., p. 179. ⁷⁰lbid., p. 123. ⁷¹Ibid., p. 172. ⁷²Ibid., p. 327. ⁷³Ibid., p. 331. ⁷⁴Ibid., p. 659. ⁷⁵Ibid., p. 676.

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... channel to earth-mind the wizard ray,⁷⁶

then

Awakened from the mortars ignorance

Men shall be lit with the Eternal's ray,⁷⁷

and receive from above

... the effulgence of a Ray.⁷⁸

When

The timeless Ray descends into our hearts

And we are rapt into eternity.⁷⁹

Mind pauses thrilled with the supernal Ray,⁸⁰

for, indeed,

The whole world lives in a lonely ray of her sun.⁸¹

The vision is described:

A gold supernal sun of timeless Truth

Poured down the mystery of the eternal Ray

Through a silence quivering with the word of Light

On an endless ocean of discovery,⁸²

and one sees Matrimandir as a place that

... lay like a closed soundless oratory

Where sleeps a consecrated argent floor

Lit by a single and untrembling ray

And an invisible Presence kneels in prayer.⁸³

There

The soul lit the conscious body with its ray,

Matter and Spirit mingled and were one.⁸⁴

Behold

⁷⁶Ibid., p. 689. ⁷⁷Ibid., p. 699.

⁷⁸Ibid., p. 241. ⁸¹Ibid., p. 276. ⁸⁴Ibid., p. 232.

⁷⁹Ibid., p. 276. ⁸²Ibid., p. 264.

⁸⁰Ibid., p. 278. ⁸³Ibid., p. 332.

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A magic porch of entry glimmering

Quivered in a penumbra of screened Light,

A court of the mystical traffic of the worlds...⁸⁵

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.⁸⁶

The pilgrim

... seeks through a penumbra shot with flame

A veiled reality half-known, ever missed,

A search for something or someone never found,

Cult of an ideal never made real here,

An endless spiral of ascent and fall

Until at last is reached the giant point

Through which his Glory shines for whom we were made

And we break into the infinity of God.⁸⁷

5: Three Lines of Savitri

There are these three lines of Savitri in the Symbol Dawn:⁸⁸

It was the hour before the Gods awake.

All can be done if the God-touch is there.

This was the day when Satyavan must die.

All the three are well known, placed among the most quoted ones.

The first is the opening line. The second comes after a short gap, as line 78 to be precise. And the third marks the end of the opening canto.

For me it is a case of love at first sight with these three, that continues to live even after more than five decades.

There is no need of any particular situation for it to manifest; these lines, one or two or all of them just come in a flash.

A little while before, I lay stretching myself on the floor in the house when I saw beyond the open door the Auroville sky with white afternoon clouds above the rising trees of different states of life and

⁸⁵Ibid., p. 88. ⁸⁶Ibid., p. 48. ⁸⁷Ibid., p. 24. ⁸⁸Ibid., pp. 1-10.

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greenery. And the three lines flashed...

I moved to the writing desk and opened the canto again and chanced upon the following lines:

One lucent comer windowing hidden things

Forced the world's blind immensity to sight.

The darkness failed and slipped like a falling cloak

From the reclining body of a god.

and then, finally:

Her soul arose confronting Time and Fate.

Immobile in herself, she gathered force.

Now I read all the lines in their serial order:

It was the hour before the gods awake...

All can be done if the God-touch is there...

One lucent comer windowing hidden things

Forced the world's blind immensity to sight.

The darkness failed and slipped like a falling cloak

From the reclining body of a god...

Her soul arose confronting Time and Fate.

Immobile in herself she gathered force.

This was the day when Satyavan must die.

Is it not a glimpse of legend and the symbol that is to unfold?

And I got up with a surge of my love for the three lines with which we started.

SHYAM SUNDER JHUNJHUNWALA

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Annexure: Facsimiles of Correspondence on

Savitri With the Mother

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Page 78

Savitri, the Mother

1

THE cup has to be emptied again and again if it is to be filled with ever-new riches. The vessel of the human consciousness has to be kept free and ready for the advent of the felicities of the higher altitudes of being. For what prevents the inflow of the Higher Consciousness into the Lower is precisely the spirit of holding, grabbing and egoistic appropriation. Such a spirit not only insulates the gifts of Grace and therefore shuts the personality from the Source but goes on distorting and corrupting them and therefore degrading itself in the process. This may lead to the denial and betrayal of the Grace, which becomes the iron curtain separating the being from That. The solution recommended in all spiritual disciplines to avoid this perilous rejection of Grace, brahma nirākaraṇa, is to offer the gifts of the Divine Mother to Herself for Her use and work. This keeps the being always in contact with the Divine, before, during and after the act of receiving. And the consciousness of the sadhaka begins to realise that the Divine is greater than all Her gifts and Her gifts are valuable because they embody Her Consciousness. So the true delight of the being is in communing with the Divine Consciousness in the gifts and not in the powers which accompany them. In fact, a gift from the Divine is a partial manifestation of the Divine Consciousness sent to the sadhaka to prepare him for receiving more and more complete manifestations till the whole and integral Divine Plenitude is established in him. This process is prevented or stopped only by the play of the separative individual consciousness with its ambitions in its ignorant and perverted state, and with its pride of knowledge and self-righteousness in its comparatively enlightened but none-fhe-less unregenerate state. The true fulfilment for the individual is in being a focal centre, one of the multitudinous centres for the manifestation of the Divine Consciousness. It is to be at the centre of the Cross for the manifestation of the Higher Part of the Transcendent both sideways and downwards in the universal consciousness around and below. This is possible only when the separate formation of the individual personality is dissolved and the separate limited functioning of the

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instruments is made silent. The organs in man—his senses, vital being, heart, mind and the inner being—are so many concentrations and therefore limitations of consciousness meant and developed to cognise, express and execute very finite movements of the finite and finitising lower consciousness. These concentrations have to be released and the consciousnesses pent up in them soaked in the Divine substratum and its infinity if they are to manifest the Eternal. This twofold preparation of the individuality and the instrumental personality is achieved by the great discipline and experience of Nirvana. For, Nirvana ensures an eternal emptiness in the being and the becoming and therefore a permanent foundation for the manifestation of the Highest Superconscient. The Divine Consciousness is a paradoxical blending of Mastery and Servitude, Transcendence and Immanence, Lordship and Humility, Fullness and Emptiness. The sadhana of Nirvana establishes in Savitri, the Mother, this divine emptiness, the prelude to the Suprarnental Manifestation.

2

The profound inner revolutions and heightenings of consciousness in the Yoga of Savitri when she began the search for the soul, entered into the inner countries, contacted the Triple Soul-Forces, found the Soul, entered into Nirvana and discovered the All-Negating Absolute, are essentially experiences within and they have not yet begun to change her corporeal substance enough to make all the human beings recognise the mighty transformation in her. They are "accustomed only to read outward signs" and so "none saw aught new in her, none divined her state." They are engaged in their normal daily routine of sparing activities and plodding, small unchanging works in the atmosphere of the happy quiet of ascetic peace, and the characteristic smiling old beauty of the landscape. Nature, the Ancient Mother, continued to be passionately attached to Savitri and responded in a thousand different ways revealing her possessive love and ignorance of the changes within or the possible and inevitable mutations without.

She too was her old gracious self to men....

To all she was the same perfect Savitri:

A greatness and a sweetness and a light

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Poured out from her upon her little world.

Life showed to all the same familiar face,

Her acts followed the old unaltered round,

She spoke the words that she was wont to speak

And did the things she had always done.*

The glow and warmth of her psychicised personality manifesting the wideness of the higher consciousness have been the experience of all before and they feel the same even now. They are not aware of the inner transformation in her consciousness.

They saw a person where was only God's vast,

A still being or a mighty nothingness.

Savitri's experience of Nirvana "does not lose hold of Existence and the universe. This Nivarana, this self-extinction, while it gives an absolute peace and freedom to the soul within, is yet consistent in practice with a desireless but effective action without." She has realised "the possibility of an entire motionless impersonality and void Calm within doing outwardly the works of the eternal verities, Love, Truth and Righteousness." She is passing through the great experience of the Buddha, Sakyamuni, and the Seer of the Taittiriya Upanishad who spoke of the Asat, the Non-Existent, which "alone was in the beginning and out of which the existent was bom." The mind, heart, will and the senses register no movement, for there are no formations in them at all. And everything is done in and by the Void—all word, speech and act. An unknown unfelt energy kept the body intact or it was impelled by the momentum gathered in the past, by Nature.

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.

It used her speech and acted in her acts,

It was beauty in her limbs, life in her breath;

The original Mystery wrote her human face.

*N.B. All Savitri quotations in this article are from The Book of Yoga, Canto Seven, pp. 551-57.

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The Absolute Non-Existence is "an absolute eternally unrealised Potentiality, an enigmatic zero of the Infinite out of which relative potentialities may at any time emerge, but only some actually succeed in emerging into phenomenal appearance." All the movements of the instrumental personality are now taking place without their instrumentation. This is an experience more profound than the one in which all the instruments make their movements because of the very presence and presiding influence, sannidhimātra, of a deeper consciousness. The Nihil contains all and so it does all including waking, speaking, breathing, maintenance of the cell-shape and cell-harmony. Savitri is passing through the great experience of the Tao.

3

Steeped in the womb of Nirvana, Savitri could well see the other possibility taken advantage of by the souls with the push to Nirvana as their elected and chosen destiny. It is the absolute withdrawal of the consciousness from all manifestation and the possibility of it at all and dissolution or laya in the Asat. Now the mortal ego perishes 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.

The progressive dissolution of the separative consciousness seems to lead inevitably by the very momentum gathered by the annihilating power of Nirvana to the absolving of all individuality as well. One could foresee in one's impersonal consciousness with its peculiar non-mental mode the threatening abrogation of all individuality and even cosmic consciousness.

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,

Impassive, sole, silent, intangible.

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This is a state beyond all gradations of consciousness where hierarchy has no meaning and all fixation of boundaries and planes of being has become fluid and non-existent. Thus the Transcendent Divine Father and the Individual Immanent Divine Son have merged in their basic substratum of the enveloping and brooding consciousness of all so-called planes of being and becoming, the Holy Ghost. Each world is only a kind of concentration or crystallisation of the Original Consciousness delimiting itself and measuring itself in a special way and keeping to the particular rhythm or Dharma which holds all things, beings, forces and personalities in that plane. This power of finitising the Infinite, the Great Maya, is passed by and penetrated and the basic Asat is experienced. Or rather, the sole Original loneliness has withdrawn the Maya into itself and so Infinity remains Itself without any other. A complete plunge into this Original Immense Nude Consciousness is well-nigh possible and it is certainly the most powerful way of exit from the cosmos, Moksha. And there are souls with the definite push to Moksha as the deepest aspiration of their being and the path of exclusive Nirvana is the one quite valid and proper to them. Nirvana for them is an end in itself. The supreme and sublime Silence, Shanti, defying, denying, withdrawing and transcending all dynamism is all for them.

4

The Avyakta, Akshara or Shunya to which the experience of Nirvana leads is only an aspect of the Supreme Truth-Consciousness, which somehow includes it along with all mutable consciousness. The supreme Brahman, in the words of the ancient wisdom of the Upanishads, is at the same time the Quality-less and the All-Qualitied, nirguṇo guṇi The Great Purushottama, in the words of the Bhagavad Gita, transcends and includes the Immutable and the Mutable, Akshara and Kshara. The blending, and integration, of the two apparent opposites of Silence and Activity is made possible in the Infinite by a Higher effectuating Power, Para Prakriti, the Supramental Ishwari Shakti. And the road to the realisation of the Supramental is in and through the Silence. The poise in the Kshara and the lower Prakriti denies the static substratum and so becomes the field of contraries and dualities and therefore Ignorance—a Darkness. The stationing in the mere Akshara where Prakriti is held back denies all movement and so becomes the field of the One without any field. It is no doubt

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the realm of knowledge of the One but this knowledge, Vidya, excluded the Many and because of its apparent finality is, in the words of the Isha Upanishad, a greater Darkness —tato bhūya iva tamaḥ. If the Silence of the Nirvana is sought neither for its own sake nor as an end in itself and if one's aspiration is not limited by it, Nirvana points beyond itself to a Higher Superconscience, the plane of Integral Knowledge—vidyāṁ ca avidyāṁ ca ubhayaṁ veda. This makes the working on Prakriti by the Para Prakriti directly and with all its native dynamism and power for transformation a certainty and even inevitability. For this complex and complicated interconnectedness of the higher and the lower, the Divine and the Antidivine and Undivine, the Silence and the Activity, itself ensures and warrants the interplay of the Higher on the Lower and the consequent transformation when the highest is brought into touch with the lowest. The divine emptiness of the consciousness of Savitri has made the working of the Supramental on the lower triple world of Ignorance, where she has come, possible. So with Savitri the Silence of the Nirvana becomes the base, the necessary base, for the Transcendent Supermind to manifest in the world of Ignorance.

Yet all was not extinct in this deep loss;

The being travelled not towards nothingness.

There was some high surpassing Secrecy...

In the hush of the profound and intimate night

She turned to the face of a veiled voiceless Truth

Hid in the dumb recesses of the heart

Or waiting beyond the last peak climbed by Thought,—

Unseen itself it sees the struggling world

And prompts our quest, but cares not to be found,—

Out of that distant Vast came a reply.

This Supermind is contacted in two ways: by the method of vertical ascent of consciousness crossing the Overmental Cosmic or global awareness—the last peak climbed by Thoughts—or by the lateral inward penetration of consciousness leading to the identification with the Divine behind the Psychic Being who lifts the blazing lamp of Supramental Knowledge from within to the completely consecrated devotee; teṣamahaṁ samuddhartā jnānadipena bhāswatā. And this miracle happens in the depths and the heights of the being far removed from the daylight wakeful awareness, in the night of the surface consciousness, yā niśā sarvabhūtānāṁ tasyāṁ jāgarti saṁyamī. The

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immobile silence of Nirvana in which all the instruments have been steeped has stopped their finitising, delimiting and even at their very best only translating power. Mind, heart and body have become ready to manifest the Transcendent directly.

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.

Her consciousness has become the playground of the Infinite with its White Lightning Light, the All-Puissant Agni, the Omniscient Vidyashakti. What the sages had realised as far distant glimpses in a trance of the highest tapasya, she reveals naturally and spontaneously to their joy and surprise.

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 immoral things through mortal lips.

Or, listening to the sages of the woods,

In question and in answer broke from her

High strange revealings impossible to men,

Something or someone secret and remote

Took hold of her body for his mystic use,

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.

5

The sadhana of Savitri differs basically from the sadhana of most yogis and tapaswins. They start by forming a strong individual

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personality, an enlightened Purusha in some level of their being— Vital, Mental or Overmental or very rarely indeed Supramental. But the Purusha so formed however great and unique and full of Light and Plenitude of the Higher and sometimes even the Highest Truth-Consciousness remains an isolated miracle of creation, a Siddha or Perfect Man in a world of imperfect beings. For, even the formation of one Gnostic Individual does not solve the problem of earth-consciousness. But Savitri has offered even this very Gnostic individuality of hers to the Supreme Lord by passing through the experience of Nirvana, the extinction of all separative individuality and delimiting finitising movement of the instrumental members of the personality. She has "annulled herself so that God might be. So her divine emptiness has become now an instrument of the dual power at being's occult poles"—the supreme Superconscient above and the nethermost Inconscient below.

Inconscient Nature dealt with the world it had made,

And using still the body's instruments

Slipped through the conscious void she had become;

The superconscient Mystery through that Void

Missioned its word to touch the thoughts of men.

All the movements of this world with its Inconscient foundation are accepted and have their impact on her consciousness. But her consciousness on any level no longer gives the usual response of the finite members in ignorance. For there is now no witnessing mind in her, not the hushed receiving heart, nor the individualised separate person reacting with whatever great or small poise of her being.

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;

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.

This is the state of being the universalised individual, a conscious "nit not separative intermediary between the Inconscient and the

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Superconscient, the Lord and His universe.

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 reactions's stress.

Her identification with the Lord is so complete that she no longer reacts in any sense of the word. All outer and inner response bom of a separate individual formation in personality or instrumentality has given place to an absolute stillness and immobility and therefore absolute readiness and passivity for the Supramental Shakti and the Divine's hour of manifestation. This integral readiness to embody and manifest is the whole and the only question now. And the readiness is all.

There was no motion in this inner world,

All was a still and even infinity.

In her the Unseen, the Unknown waited his hour.

6

All spiritual sadhana or cultivation of inner life involves the cleansing, enlarging, deepening and heightening of the instruments of perception in man's personality. Every instrument—the senses, the vital, the mental or the subliminal—is just a finite concentration of consciousness in one plane of Being, and that is the reason why its vision of the world outside is so partial and limited. The most intensive and extensive cultivation of any one of these instruments could give the vision of the corresponding element in its field of functioning— the outer forms of things for the senses, the dynamic feelings motivating things for the vital the Idea-Forces working behind for the mind and the occult Forces permeating these for the subliminal. But even the sadhana which does not neglect any one of these instruments but includes them all misses the basic substratum of the Spiritual Ether where all worlds have their being. Hence the need felt in the

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great spiritual adventure of negating all these in order to get at the Fundamental Spiritual Essence. The instrument which perceives this Essence is often the spiritualised mind which sees It as a Vast Impersonal Infinite Consciousness negating all worlds and when it is completely steeped in That sees only That and declares all worlds as non-existent and That as the sole Existent. The next step is to deny the Existence of the Existent and lose all consciousness or awareness in the All-negating Void, the Non-Being behind even the Being. Sometimes the Essence is approached through the spritualised heart and its vision of That is of a Supreme Person to whom all must raise their being, leaving aside all the worlds. Anyway, the gulf between the Ultimate Reality and the Manifestation remains unbridged and is pronounced unbridgeable. In fact, all such talk of bridging the gulf is looked upon as an indication of ignorant attachment to the Darkness and a lack of readiness for the plunge into the Great Light of the Supreme. But the yogic sadhana of Savitri, the Mother, shows a different road to the Essence which sees no gulf, because there is no gulf, between the Ultimate and the Manifestation. The gulf is the creation of the spiritualised mind or the spiritualised heart because of their inability to hold together what appear to be sharp opposites. For, in the language of the Isha Upanishad: "It is He that has gone abroad—That which is bright, bodiless, without scar of imperfection, without sinews, pure, unpierced by evil. The Seer, the Thinker, the One who becomes everywhere, the Self-existent has ordered objects perfectly according to their nature from years sempiternal." The problem arises because the Reality and the Manifestation are seen not as the Reality sees but as the faculties or the instruments in man's personality, however spiritualised, perceive. One has to pass beyond the spiritualised consciousness to the Spirit and partake of Its creative integral vision. The natural poise of the Supreme Spirit is the Supramental Truth-Consciousness, Rita-Chit, where all contraries are reconciled and realised as complementaries so necessary for the fulfilment of the complex destinies of the many-sided manifestation. To raise oneself to the Supramental is to realise immediately that Its Consciousness is a complete fulfilment of all that the faculties or instruments of perception in man have been aspiring for. In fact, there is a Divine Sense, a Divine Vital, a Divine Mind and a Divine Subliminal in the Supramental whose distortions or imperfect manifestations are these so-called instruments of perception. It is possible by opening all the instruments to the corresponding divine counterparts in the Supramental to divinise and transform these, and

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every individual who does this in himself free from any egoistic motive becomes himself the bridge between Eternity and Time.

7

The sadhana of Savitri hitherto has been precisely one of passing beyond all faculties or instruments of perception and her entry into Nirvana has served the purpose of liberating her simultaneously from the imprisonment in the separative ego or individuality and the finite faculties. She now waits on the threshold of the Transcendent Supramental in an integral readiness to receive and transmit to the world around whatever That chooses to reveal or manifest. In this trance in waiting and luminous tranquillity she hears the Word of the Silence, the supreme Anahata Nada. This trance is not indeed a hypnotic one of blissful non-awareness of the world around but one which combines with the complete wakeful awareness of the external world—with its sleeping Satyavan and the enormous Night—the awareness of all the ranges of consciousness between the surface and the superconscient, with the Unknowable's Vast.

A voice began to speak from her own heart

That was not hers, yet mastered thought and sense.

Now she listens to "a great Word bom from the mute unseen omniscient Ray. The Voice that only Silence' ear has heard leaps missioned from an eternal glory of Day." This voice is beyond all thought and feeling, the two major powers or instruments of man's personality—the reflecting, brooding or seeing part and the contacting, experiencing or emotive part. But the voice is the voice of the all-fulfilling Supramental and therefore it masters thought and sense. Human thought and human sense are now completely taken and transformed into the nature of Divine Thought and Divine Sense. The result is an instantaneous transvaluation of all values in the light of the Supramental Truth-Consciousness.

As it spoke all changed within her and without;

All was, all lived; she felt all being one.

It is the vision of the One omnipresent Reality affirming all, denying nothing, no, not even the nothing or non-being or the all-negating

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Absolute. All was. But everything not only exists but has a movement characteristically its own, a growth of consciousness according to its nature, Swabhava, and rhythm of self-development, Swadharma. All lived. The Ultimate Reality is not only the supporting consciousness of all but That is the moving dynamic consciousness of all. But all the multitudinous organisations of consciousness are still the One Supreme Being. She felt all being one. The vision of Oneness everywhere and always in all planes of being and rhythms of movement is the keynote of the Music of the Supramental. The deluded impression of the unreality of the world which is the product of looking at things from the standpoint of the spiritualised mind is no longer there. There is now no need for erecting a mental model of an external universe which is only a structure in the mind and at best an indicative symbol or sign. For now the Spirit sees all with its own characteristic supramental mode of Truth-Vision.

A spirit, a being saw created things

And cast itself into unnumbered forms

And was what it saw and made; all now became

An evidence of one stupendous truth,

A Truth in which negation had no place,

A being and a living consciousness,

A stark and absolute Reality.

All are seen as the Brahman, sarvam khalwidaṁ brahma, vāsudeavḥ sarvaṁ. The Reality is not only all being but also all becoming, purusha evedaṁ sarvaṁ.

There the unreal could not find a place,

The sense of unreality was slain:

There all was conscious, made of the Infinite,

All had a substance of Eternity.

The Finite is not the opposite of the Infinite but one mode of being of the very Infinite. Time is not the opposite of Eternity but one organisation in the Eternal's bosom. Space and Time are only the frontal manifestations of the Infinite and the Eternal.

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8

Reality is One whatever be the plane of manifestation and the same Sachchidananda is in the end as the Unmanifest Beyond. Even the Non-Being glimpsed and entered into in the experience of Nirvana is the same Reality:

Yet this was the same Indecipherable.

In fact, there is even a resemblance between the experience of the universe in the state of Nirvana and the present experience of the world in the Supramental Vision—the perception of the universe as a dream. Only, in Nirvana the dream is an unsubstantial pageant emerging from nowhere, existing in a void and dissolving into Nothing, leaving not a rack behind. The seer and the seen in Nirvana are negated and dissolved in the original Void. But in the Supramental Vision, the soul is recovered and made one with the world it sees in a tremendously real spiritual consciousness. The universe and the manifestation are the dynamic dreams of the Truth-Consciousness with a reality as concrete and more concrete than the wakeful reality. The solidity and substance of the dream get their strength from embodying the being or consciousness of the Eternal. The clasp of the world by the soul is a living experience of ecstatic oneness.

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.

The Supreme Lord is Sat, eternal Existence in all the levels of consciousness and organisations of consciousness in each level Chit, the consciousness which comprehends and feels in all, and the principle of Ananda which holds all together and in existence. Eternity and Time, Impersonality and Personality are one Divine Consciousness. The subject, the object and the contacting or enveloping or uniting medium of all experience of knowing and loving are the Lord's Being. The Supermind is the creator of all and organiser

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of all and once in tune with it one gets absolutely free from the cramping limitations of movement of the instruments of perception. One moves and ranges freely in all the planes of consciousness in the manifest and the unmanifest levels. One explores the infinites of the Infinite in the Superconscient above with as much freedom as one sounds the depths of the Inconscient below. Or one widens oneself to embrace the whole universe laterally or reduces one's consciousness to a point. All kinds of concentration of consciousness, inclusive, exclusive, transcendent, enveloping and encompassing are normal and natural and simultaneous to the Supramental Awareness.

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.

It is precisely because of the limitations of the powers of awareness of the instruments of perception that the contraries appear as contraries. But in the Supramental Awareness

All contraries were true in one huge spirit

Surpassing measure, change and circumstance.

Thus the three poises of the Individual, Universal and the Transcendent usually perceived by even the spiritualised mind or heart as exclusive of each other and therefore capable of being experienced only separately are perceived simultaneously.

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, Life and Body are not opposites of the Spirit but fields for the manifestation of endless powers of the higher consciousness.

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.

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All phenomenon are the self-deployings of the one Noumenon.

All was one single immense reality,

All its innumerable phenomenon.

9

The Supramental Vision "not only recognises eternal Spirit as the inhabitant of this bodily mansion, the wearer of this mutable robe, but accepts Matter of which it is made, as a fit and noble material out of which He weaves constantly His garbs, builds recurrently the unending series of His mansions. Perceiving behind their appearances the identity in essence of these two extreme terms of existence, it is able to say in the very language of the ancient Upanishads 'Matter also is Brahman,' and to give its full value to the vigorous figure by which the physical universe is described as the external body of the divine Being."

Her spirit saw the world as living God;

It saw the One and knew that all was He.

The ground of all manifestation, the space where all the creation is laid and the movements happen is the Absolute Consciousness. Ignorance and Knowledge, Light and Darkness are organised in the same Sachchidananda. Even all the movements in time are only the movements of the Divine Consciousness. Nature and the Self, Prakriti and Purusha are no longer separate but the whole of Nature is felt in the self.

All Nature's happenings were events in her,

The heart-beats of the cosmos were her own,

All beings, thought and felt and moved in her.

This identity with the universal consciousness and beings is not limited to the mental or the vital but extends and includes all the physical consciousness as well.

Her mind became familiar with its mind,

Its body was her body's larger frame

In which she lived and knew herself in it

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One, multitudinous in its multitudes.

She was a single being, yet all things.

"She is the world and of the world, but also exceeds it in her consciousness and lives in her self of transcendence above it; she is universal but free in the universe, individual but not limited by a separative individuality. Her true Person is not an isolated entity, her individuality is universal; for she individualised the universe: it is at the same time divinely emergent in a spiritual air of transcendent infinity, like a cloud-surpassing summit; for she individualises the divine Transcendence. All beings are to her her own selves, all ways and powers of consciousness are felt as the ways and powers of her own universality."

She was no more herself but all the world.

Out of the infinitudes all came to her,

Into the infinitudes sentient she spread,

Infinity was her own natural home.

Nowhere she dwelt, her spirit was everywhere,

The distant constellations wheeled round her,

Earth saw her bom, all worlds were her colonies,

The greater worlds of life and mind were hers;

All Nature reproduced her in its lines,

Its movements were large copies of her own.

She was the single self of all these selves,

She was in them and they were all in her.

10

The first experience of this complete identification with the cosmic consciousness in one of losing one's separate identity in the universal subconscient, material, vital, emotional and mental consciousness.

What seemed herself was an image of the Whole.

She was the subconscient life of tree the 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,

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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.

A deep concentration seized on me, and I perceived that I was identifying myself with a single cherry-blossom, then through it with all cherry-blossoms, and, as I descended deeper in the consciousness, following a stream of bluish force, I became suddenly the cherry-tree itself, stretching towards the sky like so many arms its innumerable branches laden with their sacrifice of flowers. Then I heard distinctly this sentence:

"Thus hast Thou made thyself one with the soul of cherry-trees and so Thou canst take not that it is the Divine who makes the offering of this flower-prayer to heaven."

When I had written it, all was effaced; but now the blood of the cherry-tree flows in my veins and with it flows an incomparable peace and force. What difference is there between the human body and the body of a tree? In truth, there is none, the consciousness which animates them is identically the same.

Then the cherry-tree whispered in my ear:

"It is in the cherry-blossom that lies the remedy for the disorders of the spring..."*

Having thus the whole of the cosmos in her consciousness she rises into the Transcendental and so becomes the conscious bridge between the Eternal and the Temporal, the Infinite and the Finite, the Superconscient and the Inconscient.

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.

Within a few days the new conquest was established, affirmed. And what Thou expectest from the centre of consciousness represented at present upon earth by my whole being, grew clear before it: To be the life in all material forms, the thought organising and using this life in all forms, the love widening, enlightening,

* Prayers and Meditations. CWM, Vol. 1, p. 359.

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intensifying, uniting all the varied elements of this thought, and thus, through a total identification with the manifested world, to be able to intervene with full power in its transformations.

On the other hand, by a perfect surrender to the Supreme Principle, to become aware of the Truth and the eternal Will that manifests it. Through this identification having become the faithful servant and sure intermediary of the divine Will, and uniting this conscious identification with the Principle to the conscious identification with its becoming, to mould and model consciously the love, mind and life of the becoming in accordance with the Law of Truth of the Principle.

This is how the individual being can be the conscious mediator between the absolute Truth and the manifested universe and intervene in the slow, uncertain march of the Yoga of Nature in order to give it the swiftness, intensity and sureness of the divine Yoga.

This is how in certain periods the entire terrestrial life seems to cross miraculously over stages which at other times would require thousands of years to traverse.

At present, O Lord, the state of perfect and conscious surrender to Thy eternal will is, as far as I can tell, constant, invariable behind every act, every movement of the mind, the vital or the body. This imperturbable calm, this deep, peaceful, unchanging bliss, which never leave me—are they not a proof of this?

Passive or receptive identification with life, thought and love in all manifested forms is an accomplished fact, apparently inevitable consequence of surrender to pure Truth.

But the moments when consciousness becomes effectively the life animating and moulding all material forms, the intelligence organising life, and the love illuminating the intelligence, in an active and fully conscious way, at once in the totality and the least detail, with a sense of infinite plenitude and precise powers— these moments are still intermittent though growing more and more frequent and lasting.

It is in these movements that the two consciousnesses are simultaneous and fuse into a single, almost indescribable, ineffable consciousness in which are united Immutable Eternity and Eternal Movement. It is in these moments that the present work begins to be accomplished.*

M.V. SlTARAMAN

* Ibid .,pp. 300-01.

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Savitri's House of Meditation

Introduction

In the course of Savitri's encounter with Death we have in Sri Aurobindo's epic the following passage¹ which marks a significant stage in her attempt to win back the soul of deceased Satyavan.

Intent upon her silent will she walked

On the dim grass of vague unreal plains,

A floating veil of visions in her front,

A trailing robe of dreams behind her feet.

But now her spirit's flame of conscient force

Retiring from a sweetness without fruit

Called back her thoughts from speech to sit within

In a deep room in meditation's house.

For only there could dwell the soul's firm truth:

Imperishable, a tongue of sacrifice,

It flamed unquenched upon the central hearth

Where burns for the high house-lord and his mate

The homestead's sentinel and witness fire

From which the altars of the gods are lit.

Then the squence of events at once takes a sudden change:

The mortal led, the god and spirit obeyed

And she behind was leader of their march

And they in front were followers of her will.

Along with the witness fire we also witness the efficacy of Sacrifice, of the Vedic Yajna that is going to give measure and strength to Savitri in order to meet the dire eventuality. In it is going to be decided the fate of her mission and with it the uncertain fate itself of the evolutionary travail upon the earth. But who is the house-lord and who his mate, they making offerings to the well-kindled sacrificial fire? What is that fire in which are lit the fires of the cosmic powers that govern the worldly rounds leading them on the spiritual path, that on which they must progress in their expressive splendours of the supreme Truth?

¹ Savitri, p. 639.

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We are here in Sri Aurobindo's epic at a crucial point in the development of the legend's narrative and presently a lot is going to hinge upon the way the occult battle will be fought in the frightening and terrible abysses of space; in it will be shaped destiny. It will be therefore worthwhile if we can get some idea about this very significant meditation of Savitri.

In the story of Vyasa, as given in Vana Parva of the Mahabharata, Savitri is described as one who was an adept in the Yoga of Meditation, dhyānyogaparayaṇā. Just before going to the forest on the fated day she pays her obeisance to the Rishis and receives their benedictions. By entering into that Yoga she confirms and fixes their utterance in the nature of the Truth as a living dynamism in life.² The essentiality that is there behind this Yoga of Meditation is what is actually revealed to us by Sri Aurobindo in the present passage. Indeed, Savitri's meditation is unique in its quality and we cannot enter into its magnificence, unique as it is in its depth and in its transformative character to fully take care of all our mortality. But we can certainly live in its warmth and greatness to profit from it; in it we can make spiritual progress,—to the extent that we can even transform the physical body into an altar for her sacrificial fire that shall bring auspicious merits of the Yajna to us.

The Deadlock

Yama as the Dark Terrible has snatched the soul of Satyavan and is taking it away to the Abode of the Departed which is located deep in the South. Savitri follows him closely, her mortal pace equalling the god's, and enters into the "perilous silences beyond". But she is weighed down by her mortality and is afraid that the two would soon vanish out of her sight. Then in "a moment of a secret body's sleep"³ in which is not present the dividing sense nor human frailties and faculties, she does something decisive. She forgets herself. In a swift occult action she discards all the heavy sheaths, disburdens herself from what would hold her back to the gross earth. Savitri

²R. Y. Deshpande, Vyasa's Savitri, pp. 31-32.

³Savitri, p. 578.

The Mother tells the following: In sleep you reach a stage when you are on the borders of form. There everything stops, all vibrations subside. There is perfect silence. CWM, Vol. 6, p. 186.

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then moves out and surrounds Satyavan with her nameless infinity to give him love's complete protection. The three march on in a procession, Savitri behind Yama and Satyavan in front of them. They cross the "weird country" and reach dangerous regions of Death's colossal nothingness. The Dark Terrible declares to her:

This is my silent dark immensity,

This is the home of everlasting Night.⁴

Savitri survives the Dread. Not only that. Like an undaunted warrior unmindful of hazards of the battle yet as if certain of his victory, she steps into the very camp of the harsh Adversary. She is in a place where dwells for ever only endless Night. Yama looks at her with a stem and fearsome gaze and forbids her to accompany them any farther; for, there even Time must die. Savitri tells him that she is not just a creature of mortality, a lump of helpless matter, but is strength matching his own. It is with that strength she wants back

Into earth's flowering spaces Satyavan.⁵

Death refuses to give the dead back to her. He proclaims himself to be the sole and supreme creator who brought the universe out of this immense dark void. Savitri cannot trespass into his kingdom and violate the ordained laws; instead she must return to the ways of the transient world and cling to the brief joys by which we little creatures spend our days hoping in the long travail of life for nothing else. After all, the love for which she is asking Satyavan back is but a queer passion, a fancy's fleeting fondness,—if not a figure of utter falsity. Later he even grants her two boons: for Satyavan's father Dyumatsena kingdom and power and friends and lost greatness and royal trappings for his peaceful age and, by the second, the sensuous solace of light to eyes which could have found a larger realm, a deeper vision in their fathomless night.⁶ He asks her to return, go back to the mortal world in the safety that she can have there. But Savitri refuses and asserts that she is his equal and that her birth was a special birth in which several suns were conscient. She further adds that the task in which she is engaged here is actually the "labour of the battling gods" and its fulfilment lies only in Satyavan's return with her to the earth. But Death is not concerned about it. Rather he considers that it is Savitri's hallucination, that things can really be changed here. Through the ages Avatar after Avatar has come but

⁴ Ibid., p. 586. ⁵ Ibid., p. 590. ⁶ Ibid., p. 589.

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then the world has remained ever the same,—an inert, inconscient, ignorant mass of crudeness always afflicted by misery. He tells Savitri that she is a helpless priestess in imagination's temple. He even ridicules her. She is questioned if at all there is anything apart from what she has been calling love. In the same breath she is informed that it is something that has suddenly awoken in her precisely because of Satyavan's death. And what kind of love is this? Again she is told that this is a love which does not last long. It will soon fade and die when she has found the company of other men. Love, according to Death, is nothing but a habit of flesh in the darkness of the material circumstance. Life and love cannot coexist in this physical universe with its law of crude gravitating heaviness; by its dissipative potency and power everything proceeds towards extreme fragmentation, towards dissolution. Finally, of what she calls God's creation of that nothing is left.

This is the kind of spell Death tries to cast over Savitri, but she would not fall into the trap; she breaks that "dangerous music" and in the sweetness and harmony of her words brings a promise and a hope and a certitude. She is a little crescent in the sky of night cutting the gloom with the silver edge of her smile; she is a cradle holding in it the child of godly felicity. She forbids Death to slay her soul and asserts her right of love in the green and happy groves of the earth.

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.⁷

⁷ Ibid., pp. 612-13.

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Savitri's love and joy, through an intensification in the soul of Satyavan, become wide and universal. There is as if a mission also that bids her to love. By its transforming alchemy it is to save the world from suffering,—and that appears to be its purpose. Not corporeality but a bright spiritual yearning bums in her heart; it, like a flame, leaps to clasp in its folds the roseate body of her eternal lover. Indeed, the Satyavan she is claiming is not an ordinary mortal. He is the immortal in the world of death. Since the beginning of this earthly creation they have been together, man and woman from the first, the twin souls bom from one undying fire. She who came wearing a human form, that love may grow here in a happy felicitous fulfilment, is none other than the force of God; it is she who guards the seal against the rending hand of death, it is she who makes sure that love does not cease to live upon the earth. When Savitri first met Satyavan in the Shalwa woods she, without a moment's pause, recognised him to be none but the God of Love himself standing behind Death; she knew immediately that he was awaiting godly victory that a greater age be ushered in and the world opened up to the infinity of happiness and joy. Death who covered Love had to be encountered and the falsity of that presence dissolved.

But the actualities of the world, according to Death, go to show that it is as though this frail innocent lady is living in a fancy's rainbow-land, in a sky of make-believe gathered from the vaporous musings of her passion-filled heart. It seems that even in that land or sky the clouds, heavy with humidity, intercept the sunlight of what she imagines to be true. The question of questions is: How can one think of building heaven on earth when the elemental characters of the two are sharply opposed to each other, when there is a fundamental incompatibility between the two? Granting for a moment that she can at all dream of it, it shall prove to be a dream bearing the stamp of her physical mind which is nothing but a product of the working of Matter in the inconscient creation. So, finally, all becomes a play in the hands of Death, a universe for his own manifestation. Hidden behind this vast universe the only one single all-pervasive god, holding on its solid shoulders all this, is the creative Void from which Matter itself was bom. "All upon Matter stands as on a rock."⁸ Remove that rock, knock off that base and the entire superstructure will fall like a house of cards. Without respecting Matter, without knowing its laws, its modes of functioning

8 Ibid., p. 616.

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and the nature of its deep reality, without recognising the foundational aspects which sustain this massive machinery, how can Savitri hope for her love to abide and flower upon earth? Truly, the dichotomy between Matter and Spirit is so extreme and so axiomatic that to think they can coexist will only mean that one is living in an illusory moonshine. It is vain to conceive of a spiritual world emerging from the womb of inconscient Matter. What Savitri is doing, Death tells in a loud assertive voice, is simply sending imagination's birds in the sky, fictitious eagles in a high flight towards the sun; hers are words that have wings dyed in the red splendour of her heart, but it is unfortunate that they lack the essential substantiality of knowledge of things in their reality. Savitri's love cannot abide in the mud-house of Matter. And how was Matter formed after all? Was it not his creation for his own habitation? Was it not Death who himself had pressed the ether of the Void into Space?

A huge expanding and contracting breath

Harboured the fires of the universe:

I struck out the supreme original spark

And spread its sparse ranked armies through the Inane,

Manufactured the stars from the occult radiances,

Marshalled the platoons of the invisible dance;

I formed earth's beauty out of atom and gas,

And built from chemic plasm the living man.⁹

Savitri better understand the principle of this world and not chase the will-o'-the-wisp. She must lend herself to see and recognise the laws of nature operating here, respect them in the tight earthly framework of things. There is actually no room for God in this brute immensity. It is by the process of Death's Sankhya that the inconscient world arose and it is in that sense that the world is fulfilling itself. That is his position.

But the living soul of Savitri cannot be slayed by the scornful and ironic words of Death. His grim philosophy of crookedness calling Truth to defend Falsehood is itself a smoke-screen that has the effect of hiding behind it the face of the Sun of Reality. She counterargues extensively and tells him in no uncertain words that the All-Creator, making room for himself in his own Nothingness,— in fact by the supreme sacrifice of his royalty,—began to recreate

⁹ Ibid., p. 617.

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out of the eternal Night his own embodied infinities; he made that Night another starting-point for yet another kind of creative delight. What Death sees at the moment is only a half-finished world, a child yet to attain his full adulthood of divinity that shall be his happy means for endless progress. As yet Death does not realise that he himself is a part of that wonderful creative delight's process by which the miracle of creation arising out of the utter Void is being worked out.

All here bears witness to his secret might,

In all we feel his presence and his power.

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.¹⁰

There is behind all this an invisible Hand working skillfully and infallibly; it is doing quietly all that needs be done and in the process is accomplishing everything that it has set itself to do. That Hand shall remove the mask and the screen and shall reveal the glorious shape of Truth that ever resides here. By it Yama the resplendent shall be shown to us in his proper figure of greatness and glory. To draw from eternal Loss the plenitude of eternal Gain, the gain of abounding Joy, in order to multiply it immeasurably is a supreme act and only some confident supreme omnipotence can conceive of it and dare to do it. God's plunge in the Night was with the unfailing intent of lifting up every bit breathing of him to the gracious worlds of dazzling happiness, worlds over which shines the Sun of Truth. He had the glory of Being; he shall have the glory of adventurous Becoming. Indeed, because of this plunge evolution out of inconscience has become possible. But this inconscience itself is occultly creative; as a contributive aspect of that evolution Death has become a means of growth. Though apparently he is a power of negation denying the prospect of godly manifestation here, he seems

¹⁰Ibid., pp. 623-24.

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to serve a hidden purpose in the totality of an unfolding operation. In it all that is unworthy of transformation shall get dissolved into the Void, pragmatically waiting there perhaps for another occasion to bring out yet hidden and finer aspects in the scheme of things. This also implies that, presently, Savitri is not going to conquer Death the Immortal in the usual sense that he will be subdued or dissolved; rather she will transform him by removing the veil of inconscience that he has assumed as a part of the functioning. Consequently, what shall emerge will be in the bright person of love, beauty, power, knowledge, the self of bliss itself. Truly, in this entire sequence Death himself becomes in the Inconscient a frontal aspect of the Supreme; when the veil gets removed we meet him in his positive countenance in this paradoxical unfolding. Death is a mode of manifestation. Plutus, the god of wealth mentioned by Phaedrus, is a divinity who brings forth riches from the soil; Death or Yama as the son of Vivasvan the Sun-God pours radiances to illumine the mysteries of the Night. Savitri knows this mystery of Death's birth; but he doesn't know it because he has chosen himself to go behind Inconscience.

Savitri asserts that it is in the heart of the Ether of Delight that God's creation breathes and lives and grows. She sings the Anthem of Felicity. If this Felicity were not there nothing would come into existence and if it should withdraw all will collapse; it is a honey-sweetness which causes the birth of the gods and it is that which fosters them and gives them growing riches; in the overflooding of that miraculous ecstasy life and mind and body draw their nourishment; in that enjoyment they increase in deathlessness. That is why hymn after cheerful hymn is raised by the Rishis to Soma, the Lord of Delight and Immortality: "O Thou in whom is the food, thou art that divine food, thou art the vast, the divine home; wearing heaven as a robe thou encompassest the march of the sacrifice. King with the sieve of thy purifying for thy chariot thou ascendest to the plenitude; with thy thousand burning brilliances thou conquerest the vast knowledge."¹¹ Or, on another occasion: "Placed in delight he flows to the pleasant Names in which he increases; vast and wise he ascends the chariot of the vast sun, the chariot of a universal movement."¹² In the lyrical sweetness of an enchantment Savitri herself tells Death:

¹¹ The Secret of the Veda, SABCL, Vol. 10, p. 340.

¹² Ibid., p. 540.

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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 bom.

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 bum 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.

Even in this labour and dolour of Ignorance,

On the hard perilous ground of difficult earth,

In spite of death and evil circumstance

A will to live persists, a joy to be.¹³

Death remains unconvinced. He tells Savitri that it is good to imagine things that way but they are not really so. Not only imagining; Savitri is cheating herself by hiring the impudent thought-mind which is clever or bright enough to supply reason to life's passion. The harsh fact is that Truth in this world is "bare like stone and hard like death," which first she must accept. Moving on a more metaphysical level, Death tries to explain to Savitri that the laws of Nature are immutable and that there is no agency which can change them. No one has succeeded and Savitri should not attempt the futile. Restoration of Satyavan's life is against the laws of the established creation and he cannot return now to earth. Instead, Savitri can have, by Death's boon, what once living Satyavan desired for her that she may surround herself with worldly happiness:

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.¹⁴

¹³ Savitri, p. 630. ¹⁴ Ibid., p. 637.

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The dire debate continues as if with the ruthlessness of archenemies. But it is not just a debate, a wordy confrontation. Each utterance flings into the occult depths its assertive will. There is the opposition of force against force and the battle becomes fiercer as the core issue is approached. If there is a fundamental antagonism between Spirit and Matter, then it is inconceivable that they should ever be reconciled with each other. That is Death's postulate and he presses his argument forward almost with the thrust of violence:

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?

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...

Two only are the doors of man's escape,

Death of his body Matter's gate to peace,

Death of his soul his last felicity.¹⁵

The horror of passing to felicity through the door of soul's death is for Savitri no less terrifying than that of crossing the gate of peace by killing the body. In fact, logically speaking, this negative aspect cannot make Spirit and Matter self-exclusive; if they cannot be directly reconciled, it does not mean that they can cancel each other. Spirit or Matter is a wrong starting-point. True, in the evolutionary process what is predominantly seen is the latter; but the former is the substratum as well as the crown of the entire unfoldment, the essence of things. Matter evolving in Spirit gives to it substantiality which otherwise it lacks in the earthly manifestation at present. Spirit densified in the form of Matter brings to physicality God-splendour and God-might. The Ether of infinite Ecstasy acquires a luminous fixity that is at once supple and many-forming in its embodiment of the Truth-Consciousness. In the triumph of Love over Death this divine miracle shall be accomplished. Savitri in her revelation reaches a high point to even proclaim that

The great stars bum with my unceasing fire

And life and death are both its fuel made.

Life only was my blind attempt to love:

¹⁵ Ibid., p. 635.

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Earth saw my struggle, heaven my victory;

All shall be seized, transcended; there shall kiss

Casting their veils before the marriage fire

The eternal bridegroom and eternal bride.

The heavens accept our broken flights at last.

On our life's prow that breaks the waves of

Time No signal light of hope has gleamed in vain.¹⁶

In that revelation,—that the suns bum in the fire of the soul of Savitri,—Death shudders helplessly; but even in that shuddering there is a secret ecstasy which seems to be quite acceptable to him. The twilight through which they were moving also trembles, perhaps again in that shuddering: this trembling was as if to break its own magic's haunting spell.

The Vedic Yajna

The debate between the two opposing powers thus pitching up to higher and higher levels could continue interminably. Logic-chopping could be an endless pleasure. And yet it seems that Savitri was not going to win Satyavan back from Death; this would not happen on the strength of extensive arguments she was going to put forward in the long dialogue which appeared almost as a kind of metaphysical disputation. Nor the clash of forces behind these premises was going to win for Savitri the imperative victory. She is also aware that a wordy confrontation or the armoury of dialectic is not sufficient to bring the issue to a decisive conclusion. Exchanges of these kind can hardly produce concrete results; more abstract rather than life-driven, they have no pushing strength in them- to resolve the matters. Such a debate for Savitri can therefore be least availing, least absorbing for the sake of its own pleasure. For her it is an extremely serious issue and she cannot forget the basic cause of her pursuit. If such a contest should fail, if the clash of occult forces should prove to be inadequate and hence in her case negatively decisive, she will have to find some other way to win her way through. For her it is the question of life and death itself and she cannot afford the luxury of this vain or futile exercise. For Death also it is a serious challenge, questioning the very foundations on

¹⁶ Ibid., p. 638.

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which the laws of the present world are established; if they are to be disputed or if they are to fail, everything would come down with a crash. Yama as the Ordainer of the World would himself prove to be the Destroyer of the Order. Therefore, while they are adducing reasons in favour of their convictions and contradicting each other, great universal agencies also get simultaneously released with each word they utter. The occult dimension gets enlarged in this fierce battle. As they rise higher and higher in the discourse, there is a corresponding deepening of the basic issue involved in this creation itself. It is a clash, an impingement of force upon force; equally strong opponents are in battle-array and the whole atmosphere is charged with their action-thoughts. A superior power coming from the sky above has to meet a stronger might surging from the abyss below. Bright sword and dark sword hit each other.

In that great struggle Savitri is not yet certain if she would succeed. True, the percussions of her words travel far on the membrane of infinite space, touching the very edge of the dark universe, even making indentation into it. Wave after wave spreads engulfing in its folds the sable realms of Time and Fate and Death and yet its terrible abysses seem to deepen into some bottomless Nothingness. In the twilight zone there is a hope of the Mom, a breaking of the Dawn of the Ideal; but what Savitri notices is the thinning and disappearance of her thoughts and words and visions as though

All utterance, all mood must there become

An unenduring tissue sewn by mind

To make a gossamer robe of beautiful change.¹⁷

Something sweet and gladdening has no doubt touched the nether pit of gloom and grief; yet in that early haze and mist all the bright hues of her dream-imagination get faded as if tricked by some melancholy's magic. What remains of that strange uncertain ethereality and ideality is

A floating veil of visions in her front,

A trailing robe of dreams behind her feet.¹⁸

How can she then get Satyavan back? A higher power ought to supervene if she is to win. It can now be only that power's concern which always it was. Savitri might have been successful in putting

¹⁷ Ibid., p. 639.¹¹ Ibid.

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Death on the defensive. But that was not enough. She was an intruder in his domains and she would not succeed in her attempts to conquer them. She had the gains of her first victory, but hardly would they satisfy her demands. The inadequacy of her present effort can be removed only by invoking a superior might-and-wisdom, her incarnate effort complemented by going to the source of all-existence wherefrom success flows with the surety of a down-flowing stream. Savitri resorts to her "silent will"; she does not speak now; the conscient force retires within. She steps into her Meditation's House. In reality it is there alone that the firm truth of her soul dwells. Not by argument and counter-argument but by silence, by gathering in that House the needed force shall she march towards her victory.

As we have already seen, Savitri's entering into her House of Meditation is reminiscent of a similar situation, though at a somewhat different point of the narrative, in Vyasa's episode of Savitri. The day of Satyavan's death has arrived. Savitri has successfully completed the difficult three-night vow of fasting and standing at one single place throughout, trirātra vrata. On the fated day, well before the sunrise, she gets ready and lights a bright fire and makes sacrificial offerings to the gods. She then goes to her parents-in-law and pays them respect. Afterwards, she goes to the various hermitages and gives her worshipful obeisances to the Rishis. They all bless her with auspicious words dear to a young devout wife. Savitri accomplished as she was in the Yoga of Meditation at once steps within, in her House of Meditation, and wills the blessings of the great Truth-Seers to come true.

Savitri was a Yogini of exceptional merit and had advanced greatly on the occult-spiritual path to draw strength directly from the origin whence the words packed with mantric power come. By repeating in her heart of hearts the benediction-words of the holy sages and saying "Be it just so!" she fixes the force of those utterances in her consciousness.¹⁹

Presently in her encounter with Death she, in her silent will, seeks strength to vanquish the enemy. She must first get out of the gleaming haze and see in the clear flame that is ever-burning in her heart the

¹⁹ Vyasa's Savitri, p. 32.

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face of the World-Mother who alone will show her the way and lead her and give her the cherished victory. Then, to adapt Yeats's line, "At the stroke of midnight God shall win." It shall happen in the dim forest at the mid-day hour to bring the eternal noon.

And what do we see in the Meditation's House of Savitri? The soul's firm truth:

Imperishable, a tongue of sacrifice,

It flamed unquenched upon the central hearth

Where bums for the high house-lord and his mate

The homestead's sentinel and witness fire

From which the altars of the gods are lit.²⁰

Immediately everything reverses. Savitri, following Yama, Satyavan ahead of them, becomes yogically the leader of the march. The procession moves on, but her will now compels from behind the mighty god. Savitri can go to the end of things, to the end of Nothing, and recover from the hollow gulfs the soul of her lover. By the power of Dhyana Yoga, and of the sacrifice performed in the House of Meditation, she recognises the real nature of the problem with an altogether different perspective. The dire immense Subconscient thrown by Time into the Past comes alive in the form of a dark granite rock guarded by Death, the Subconscient that obstructs the path of the high Advent. Her meditation must prepare itself to negotiate with it and dissolve it. She is face to face with an Adversary who carries the burden of all history in his person and who is now standing in her way. Savitri has actually touched the core of the deep ancient Agony that resides in the heart of the Earth in her long and arduous travail of evolution. It is certain that a turning point has arrived and hence a might envisaging a decisive action must now take charge of the forthcoming event. Something that was never attempted must happen. If transformation of this earthly nature is possible and has to happen, then Savitri's Love must triumph by conquering Death. A sign "iridescent with the glory of the Unseen" must blaze in her inner sky to help her and guide her. The occult Horror must disappear. The issue posed by the "ancient disputants"—Earth and Love and Doom—is now in full focus for Savitri to tackle it. The power with which she was until now acting is inadequate to measure up to the demands of the hollow Gulf that devours in its insatiable hunger whatever is yet not truly divine in

²⁰ Savitri, p. 639.

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the fullness of its plenitude. In a certain sense, therefore, the negative role of this antagonistic presence is to assure that nothing but the best and worthy of the Supreme comes into operation in the dynamism of this creation. No wonder the debate availed very little, just in the nature of lesser boons. What Savitri had with her that Death could so far easily counter. Death yet remains secure and has nothing to lose; the soul of Satyavan is still with him. Therefore a mightier power must come into play and deal with the difficulty. Savitri must perform a yogic act. She must do Yoga in the occult Void and hold in her person the strength of the transcendental Yogini.

A flaming warrior from the eternal peaks

Empowered to force the door denied and closed²¹

must conquer the absoluteness with which the clutches of the ever-hollowing Inconscience, personified in Death, have held the world. The bounds of consciousness and time have to be overpassed to reach the infinity of the Eternal and the All-Conscient. The moment for the flaming warrior to receive that power and to force the door open is at hand; Savitri must prepare herself for that. Otherwise she will prove to be a barren woman in spite of the gifts of sons and daughters granted to her by Death; they will still turn out to be the children of Death perpetuating in a more permanent way the Rule of the Dark. But Savitri, by entering into the House of Meditation, by fixing herself there and summoning the higher power, must act in another way; the action of the incarnate Force should get directed towards one single goal—the abolition of all that resists the supreme Law of Love in this creation.

In the heart of Savitri, in the inner chamber of her House, the holy Yajna or the sacrifice that brings the power of God for the fulfilment of works is constantly being performed by the secret deity abiding within. That verily is the truth of Savitri's soul.²² That truth now ought to grow brighter and become stronger by drawing energies from the leaping flames of sacrifice. It is by sacrifice that the Supreme created the universe and it is by such a meritorious sacrifice that the creatures, and the gods too, grow in the rich-golden plenitude of Light and Love and Joy of the most auspicious immortality. Seekers of the riches, the Rishis "meditate the all-achieving laud of

²¹Ibid., p. 21.

²²See The Secret of the Veda, SABCL, Vol. 10, p. 40: the giver of sacrifice in the Vedic knowledge is the soul or the personality as the doer of works.

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the divine" and call the triumphing Fire for help and succour in their spiritual endeavour; they invoke the Master of Sacrifice, they invite "to birth the immortal in mortals, the divine who brings in the divinity." Indeed, the all-pervading Brahma, who is the giver of all fruit, is himself established in the great sacrifice. All flows from sacrifice. Savitri, well-versed in the lore of tradition and an expert in the Yoga of Meditation, enters into the deep cavern of her secret soul; kindling her silent will she gets in touch with that divinity who is the source and fount of all action. "A house was there all made of flame and light"²³ and what she observes in that house is the house-lord, Yajaman, with his mate, Yajamanin, engaged in sacrifice. That Yajna shall give her the needed strength to deal with Death in the dire yet decisive moment of life.

In that large and luminous House of Meditation the hearth is ablaze with the rich and intense yogic Fire and the determined truth of Savitri's soul is flaming bright, quenchless and imperishable. The fire that is burning there ceaselessly witnesses all actions and gives to the sacrificer the needed protection even in the face of death. Not only protection, which Savitri does not really need, but the winning strength to achieve the final result is what the Yajna is meant for. The Yajaman seated there with the Yajamanin or Grihapatni is offering Hutis to Agni. The Purohits have arranged the Sacrifice in the right order and the Ritwiks are chanting the sacred Riks. The tongues of flame leap high up to kindle even the altars of the gods, the gods who shall come there as guardians for the aspirant's Sacrifice. Presently the invocation is to the fire who is watching everything and who shall stand with Savitri at the moment of her dangerous rendezvous with the dark formidable Adversary. Armed with that might she shall chase him and follow him through the "enchanted dimness".

"Agni is a mighty benefactor of his worshippers. With a thousand eyes he watches over the man who offers him oblations; but consumes his worshippers' enemies like dry bushes, and strikes down the malevolent like a tree destroyed by lightning. All blessings issue from him as branches from a tree."²⁴ That is how A. A. Macdonell describes the action of the "mighty benefactor" who,—when his worshipper is in difficulty, when Dread and Darkness surround him and hurt him,—gives them protection. Rishi after Rishi has hymned

²³ Savitri, p. 526.

²⁴ A History of Sanskrit Literature, p. 80.

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Agni not only to complete his felicities but also to get this god's protection. Thus, for example, Kanwa Ghaur (1:36:15):

Protect us, O Agni, from the Rakshasa, protect us from the harm of the undelighting, protect us from him who assails and him who would slay us, O Vast of lustres, O mighty and young.²⁵

Or Kata Vaishwamitra (IV: 18:2):

Wholly consume our inner foe, consume the self-expression of the enemy who would war against us, O lord of the riches, consume, conscious in knowledge, the powers of ignorance; let them range wide thy ageless marching fires.²⁶

Or Virupa Angirasa (VIII:43:26):

Smiting away the foes and things that hurt, burning the Rakshasas, on every side, O Fire, shine out with thy keen flame.²⁷

Into the House of Meditation Savitri has entered; there the "homestead's sentinel and witness fire" is constantly burning. There for the welfare of creatures, and of the entire creation, the Vedic Brahminic rites are ever observed. The great Ahavaniya Fire, located in the East and in the form of a square, is receiving the holocaust; to its West, eight paces farther away, cooking for the offerings is in progress in the Grahapatya Fire which is in the shape of a circle; the Anvaharyapachana Fire at its South, and hence also known as

²⁵Hymns to the Mystic Fire, SABCL, Vol. 11, p. 48.

²⁶Ibid., p. 140. ²⁷ Ibid., p. 346.

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Dakshinagni, in the form of a half moon, is added to the Grahapatya Fire to speed up the cooking of the sacrificial food, the Havis; the Sabhya and Avasathya to the North and North-East of the Ahavaniya Fire, respectively, complete the ceremonial Fire-Altar. The construction of the Fire-Altar itself was an elaborate process extending over a period of one year. Located in a prominent place of the whole sacrificial area, it was built in five strata of bricks, 10,800 bricks in all with the lowest having 1950. The Altar looks like a great Bird, the Golden Hawk, in its flight high up in the upper skies. The Hotri has taken charge of the entire ceremony; the Ritwik is inviting and summoning the gods to attend the Sacrifice; the Potri or the Purohit has assumed responsibility of the right conduct and sequence of the offerings; the Adhvaryu is standing in front of the sacrificer, the Yajaman, the paterfamilias, and is guiding him and helping him in the details of the eternal cosmic Yajna. The Chief Priest assisted by these four, each one of them in turn assisted by three, is the Master of the elaborate mighty Ceremony. The Hotris are chanting the Hymns of the Rig Veda; the Udgatra in his melodious voice is doing the Saman recitation of the Riks; the Adhwaryu is busy with the material arrangements of the Sacrifice; the Brahman takes care of this holy Action by assiduously supervising everything. The Fire is bright-lit, the flames leaping to heaven; indeed, "only with an offering in the well-kindled Fire, Samiddha Homa, can the oblations be successful and fulfilling, Samruddha." The Sacrifice itself becomes the only determining Act. Destiny is created or moulded by it; the decrees of Fate are fixed or altered by it in a decisive way.* Although it is a Vedic rite, it is loaded with occult significance bearing far-reaching consequences to regulate the steps of Time for achieving the desired result.

The birth of Rama, the Avatar himself who had come to change the course of events and reshape the destiny of mankind, was a result of the boon which his father king Dasharatha of the Ikshwaku line had received after performing the Ashwamedha, the Horse Sacrifice; it was conducted by no less a person than the celebrated Rishi Rishyshringa. The bricks of the altar had been prepared by following the strictest measures as prescribed by the holy treatises; the priests well-versed in the sacrificial architecture erected the altar, chanting all the while the appropriate hymns; the sacrificial fire to

* Reference may be made to Chhandogya Upanishada, Section 16, Chapter 4. See also Hymns to the Mystic Fire, SABCL, Vol. 11, pp. 465-89.

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be worshipped by the Yajaman was placed ceremoniously by the expert Brahmins; the fire in its form and shape looked like Garuda, the divine Eagle himself, with his wings and tail distended; the majestic Bird was with the wings of gold.²⁸

According to the Bhagavata Purana it is Lord Vishnu himself who in his person represents all the sacrifices; he is the Lord of Sacrifice, Yajneshwara. The seven sacrifices—Agnistoma, Atyagnistoma, Uktha, Sodashi, Vajapeya, Atiratra, and Aptoryama—are the seven parts of his body. In him are present all the Mantras, and the Deities worshipped by the devotees reside in him, and the materials used for the sacrifice are found in his being. Indeed, all the activities originate in him and he is the very sacrificial Act itself. When he as the divine Boar traced the lost Earth and brought it out from the depths of the fathomless Ocean, all the Gods and the immortal Rishis sang his lauds and hailed his great sacrifice. In him all sacrifices, by which the creation grows, are founded.

But then in Savitri's House of Meditation who are the officiating priests seated at the high-built altar? And who is engaged in the Yajna and what does he intend to achieve from it? Who is the Yajaman and who the Grihapatni, the executive participator in the holy Action? To whom are the well-prepared oblations being offered? When was this altar completed and who lighted the flame and tended it and kept that flame ever-burning? Are seasons the bricks used in its construction, so that completion may come in the cycles of Time? Wherefrom was the fuel procured? How was it gathered? Was it Agni himself who, as soon as he was bom, measured out the extent and the shape of the sacrifice? Is he not a "god to the gods," the leader who goes in front of the gods? The very first verse of the Veda extols him as the chief priest and one who is the divine Ritwik summoning the gods for the sacrifice (1:1:1):

(I.1.1.)

²⁸The Ramayana, Bala-kanda, Canto 14

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I adore the Flame, the vicar, the divine Ritwik of the Sacrifice,

the summoner who most founds the ecstasy.²⁹

We might therefore say that in this cosmic Yajna Agni is the Grihapati, the Lord of the House, and he is also the Vishapati, the Lord of the Worlds, and he is the Destroyer of every Evil too, all the three at the same time. With seven tongues he consumes the sevenfold food. But then who is the Yajamanin, the Grihapatni, the Spouse of Agni, Agnayi, seated to his left and offering with him the oblations, the Havis? Indeed, she seems to be Aditi herself under the name of Swaha bom as Daksha's daughter in the manifestation, a bright and youthful bride in rich golden-red attire, she who is participating in the Yajna and fulfilling the Act in this creation. They inseparably together, one in two aspects, are engaged in promoting the cosmic march towards divinity; thus all the while are they performing the Good.

In Savitri's House of Mediation Agni is the blazing will and Swaha is the power and fiery force and they together draw energies from the great Tapas of the Supreme himself. He is the "conscious force or Will instinct with knowledge which pervades the world and is behind all its workings."³⁰ Savitri first steps into that House where her "silent will" joins the Will of the Divine in the Universe. Such is the nature of this Vedic Yajna going on in her heart.

Sat-Purusha and Adya-Shakti

A. B. Keith in his long introduction to the Taittiriya Sanhita belonging to the Veda of the Black Yajus School mentions that it, like the Shatapatha Brahmana, identifies Agni with Death which "leads to the suggestion that the sacrificer as Agni, as time, is death and as the sacrificer dies he becomes immortal, for death is his own self."³¹ But it is doubtful whether this is strictly a Vedic concept. Agni as a Vedic god has his own status and standing in the pantheon of these ancients. As the Transcendent's tapas-energy in evolution carrying it forward, he has almost a fixed role which he plays variously. He is described, and also extolled, as the seer-will, the messenger of the gods, the Bull with four horns, the Male, the great Aryan, the house-lord, the Lord of the Worlds, the knower of the births, the priest of sacrifice, the immortal in mortals leading them

²⁹ Hymns to the Mystic Fire, SABCL, Vol. 11, p. 39. ³⁰Ibid., p. 477.

³¹ Taittiriya Sanhita Part I, Harvard Oriental Series, Vol. 18; p. cxxviii.

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and protecting them on the path of heaven. As will in the material world it is he who shapes and moulds forms and brings concreteness to things ethereal. Agni is the creative principle or power of immortality in Matter. Identification with him is a certain and effective means of attaining the beatitude of deathlessness, but not presently in the embodied material form; his form has not yet evolved to that stage. "Agni manifests divine potentialities in a death-besieged body; Agni brings them to effective actuality and perfection. He creates in us the luminous forms of the Immortals."³² Agni is indeed the presiding deity here and he is also the divinity that grows in the physical universe making it grow in his own growth. We cannot therefore identify him with Death who is but the power of disintegration. We cannot in the operational scheme conceive the builder and the destroyer being one person. Time as Kala Purusha is again that agent of dissolution; it is he who destroys the order of the worlds, maybe for the purposes of its renewal but not by its own agency. True, Death is known as the son of Vivasvan, the Sun-god, and in him does the Dharma abide and by it does he protect or guard immoertality. "Surya the Lord of Light is bom as the guardian of the divine Law and the Yama-power."³³ This is the positive aspect of Yama in the creation; therefore he is also known as the ordainer of the worlds. On the other hand, Death as a dark power in the material creation leads it to its entire dissolution in the Void of the Unmanifest. Sacrificer's death cannot then take him to immortality; it would rather be his complete disappearance into the gloom of a darkness where no ray of light or hope can ever reach. Into the sunless worlds of the Isha would he sink, beyond redemption. There no sacrifice is performed and therefore in doom would he lie for ever, in the negative state of immortality. Decay, disintegration and death of the physical cause total loss of the living consciousness; the cellular death thus leads to complete insenscience and no memory or gain of the past is carried forward in the individual's next birth. For this not to happen the will of divine Agni has to be kindled in the very cells which can eventually open out the possibility of the physical transformation. The sacrificer as Agni identifying himself with the Sun-god shall tread the upward path, thus progressing into knowledge and stepping into a blissful luminous living. The seers follow this path of the gods, the path that has been paved by sacrifice

³²The Secret of the Veda, SABCL, Vol. 10, p. 268.

³³Ibid., p. 232.

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and made safe for treading. On this path of sacrifice Savitri herself sees the supreme Reality as Maha Purusha or the Great Being standing behind this figure of Death, the dark Terrible. He abandoning his fourfold divinity, by making a sacrifice of his supremeness took on that shape in the Void. Only then from that sacrifice did progress become possible. It was that shape in the Void which confronted Savitri as she was claiming back Satyavan's soul. This dual aspect can also be discerned from the Yama as has been given to us by Vyasa in his tale.

The Vedic Hymn of Creation is the sublimest laud of Sacrifice of the Divine Purusha. He at the beginning of existence volunteered to disappear from himself in order to give birth to creation. He wished to know himself through it. Thus the Vedas were born and the four austerities and the great rhythms were set into movement. In the darkness that was engulfed by darkness he moved as the Demiurge and soon the gods found the means to build up the existent. The Divine Purusha by accepting Darkness grew superconscient in many forms. He expressed himself multifoldly in the material and the supramental universe. Soon then he set himself on the path of progress.

In the Brahminic tradition Prajapati is the Lord of Sacrifice. It was in building up the body of this Begetter of Creatures that the creative act of sacrifice was performed long ago. By it shall he propagate.³⁴ That from the Supreme's dismemberment the divine body be built, the fires of the sacrifice were kindled and the chants raised and the oblations poured. The sacrificer by sacrificing himself created innumerable sacrifices. The five Yajnas bom of the Maha-Yajna maintain a fulfilling relationship, a mutually enriching harmony in different parts of this vast creation. If in Brahma-Yajna the supreme deity is invoked by chanting the Riks of the Vedas, by Manushya-Yajna the sacrificers grow by helping each other. The Devas take of the offerings of the sacrifice and to its performer grant boons in full measure. Even departed spirits and the beings of vital worlds get their share in this daily sacrifice. The Law of Sacrifice proves not only to be ubiquitous in the universality of its application* but is also inexorable. That was the way the Grecian gods were subject to the Law of Ananke. All is established in the great Sacrifice and, indeed, all these sacrifices have been extended, as the Gita

³⁴ The Gita deals with this aspect in chapters in and IV.

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says, "in the mouth of the Brahman."³⁵ The five Yajnas of the Gita are: Dravya-Yajna, Tapa-Yajna, Yoga-Yajna, Swadhyaya-Yajna, and Jnana-Yajna. The Teacher imparted this understanding of Yajna to Vivasvan the Sun-god, the father of Yama, long ago in prehistory, in the antiquity of the gods, at the beginning of the transcendent Time, and it is that he reasserted on the battlefield.³⁶ That, then, is really the seed-action in the creation.

Sacrifice is the noblest dharma. The social and spiritual order, even the occult, is founded in it; the universal harmony and concordance grow and flourish in the leaping of those mighty flames. As much as the Seers and the Rishis cherish it as do the heavenly Gods themselves, those who are the guardians of the Truth that is obscured in the night here. When Savitri got the soul of Satyavan back from Yama, the King of Dharma or Dharmaraja, he himself blessed her by granting to Satyavan a life of four-hundred years for performing the holy Yajnas, Fire-Sacrifices in the conduct of the glorious Dharma in which the creatures grow in plenitude.³⁷ Even today every household engaged in sacrifice echoes and re-echoes that famous chant of Rishi Dhirgatamasa for the fulfilment of life in that Worthy Act. In a "deep and mystic style" he proclaims (1:164:50):

By sacrifices the Gods worship the Sacrifice which is the foremost of the Dharma. Such a law of fundamental importance must have had its origin in the person of the Supreme himself, in the all-potentiality of the transcendent to bring forth the secret or hidden possibility of a world-movement in the rhythms of the Truth.

The Gita enjoins us to be engaged in works and make them a sacrificial offering to the Lord of Nature in whom they get purified for growth and progress. The quenchless flame Agni Pavaka as the purifier of action is the leader of the march through the terrestrial ways. Even as it grows it becomes more and more bright and golden:

³⁵Ibid., IV:32.

³⁶ Ibid., Iv:1.

³⁷Ibid.,R.Y. Deshpande, Vyasa's Savitri, pp. 58-9.

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With sacrifice the Lord of creatures of old created creatures and said, By this shall you bring forth (fruits or offerings), let this be your milker of desires.

Foster by this the gods and let the gods foster you; fostering each other, you shall attain to the supreme good.

Fostered by sacrifice the gods shall give you desired enjoyments; who enjoys their given enjoyments and has not given to them, he is a thief.

The good who eat what is left from the sacrifice, are released from all sin; but evil are they who enjoy sin who cook (the food) for their own sake.

From food creatures come into being, from rain is the birth of food, from sacrifice comes into being the rain, sacrifice is bom of work.

Work know to be bom of Brahman, Brahman is bom of the Immutable; therefore is the all-pervading Brahman established in the sacrifice.³⁸

In its most esoteric sense we have in the Gita (IV: 24) the following grand incantatory verse:

Brahman is the giving, Brahman is the food-offering, by Brahman it is offered into the Brahman-fire, Brahman is that which is to be attained by samadhi in Brahman-action.³⁹

While commenting on this verse Sri Aurobindo writes: "The universal energy into which the action is poured is the Divine; the consecrated energy of the giving is the Divine; whatever is offered is only some form of the Divine; the giver of the offering is the Divine himself in man; the action, the work, the sacrifice is itself the Divine in movement, in activity; the goal to be reached by sacrifice is the Divine."⁴⁰

³⁸The Gita, 111:10-15. These renderings by Sri Aurobindo given in his Essays on the Gita are compiled by Anilbaran Roy in The Message of the Gita, pp. 51-52.

³⁹Ibid., p. 79.

⁴⁰Essays on the Gita, SABCL, Vol. 13, p. 113.

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When the Yogagni, the fire of concentrated will is kindled and when it mounts to heaven a new transformation takes place in the person as much in the soul of the aspirant. The darkness of Nature is left behind and thought and feeling and the physical activities become suddenly spirit-charged; occult invisible domains of light and force open out. The deathless Flame aspires to reach "the Being's absolutes."

In a veiled Nature's hallowed secrecies

It burns for ever on the altar of Mind,

Its priests the souls of dedicated gods,

Humanity its house of sacrifice.⁴¹

But who is this Yajna-Purusha, the Yajneshwara of the Puranas, the Fire of the Yogins, the Tapas of the doers of austerities, the God of worship of the ritualists, the sacramental divinity of the religious, the bringer of the heavenly riches to the terrestrial creature, the leader of the Aryans, the fulfiller of the purpose of the Supreme in the cosmos, in whom the wheels of Time move like great rhythms of happiness and joy and ever expand into the Future claiming its felicitous abundances? Is he the alchemist in the cave experimenting with the baser materials to transmute them into the luminous self of his own gold? the physicist feeding the atomic faggots to set ablaze the cosmic conflagration in the very womb of Matter? the occultist who by his magic spell shall build the body of God with the nerve-centres of his own person? "Serene as the Antarctic silence," who is it that burns in Hegel on his death-bed? In the non-violent march of the "naked fakir" or the Blitzkrieg of the Titan, is it the same Purusha strident like a fire and roaring in the loudness of a colossus of might? When was this Yajna-Purusha bom and where does he abide? If he is in the night do the stars send their distant signals to guide him on the right path or throw their little energising brightnesses into his flames and, if in the day, do the suns pour their radiances to kindle his leaping greatnesses beyond the domains of the knowledge of the truth? If he is the Breath sublime does he survive in abysses of the inconscient Horror? Is his burning smouldered by the black Demon or is he accosted by Kumbhanda, the goblin, or is he slain by Vritra, the terrible Enemy? Is it not true that the potency of the Yajna is exploited even by the Asuras to battle against the Gods? Did not Indrajit, the son of the demon king Ravan, hide himself in a

⁴¹ Savitri, p. 279.

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secret cave and initiate the fearsome sacrifice to obtain weapons and get a swift-wheeled war-chariot to fight against Lakshmana, the younger brother of Rama the Avatar? And, knowing the efficacy of the ghastly Yajna, was it not that in time it was thwarted and victory decisively turned in favour of the Incarnate?

But then of this Yajna-Purusha what is the truth of truth, satyasya satyam? If Yajna on the physical plane is a celebrated fact, a cherished institution, an ever-living and ever-nourishing reality, if it is enduring here in spite of the travails of time, it must have had its origin, had its first birth, in some imperishable world in the sky above. If it is splendid like the Gods, if not more splendid than them, surely then it must be beyond the reach of death. The Yajna-Purusha has to be someone greater than Agni or Prajapati or Brahma performing the cosmic Yajna. His dwelling has to be in infinity of the Transcendent. As a matter of fact he himself is the Transcendent turned towards creation. If Savitri is the incarnation of the most excellent executive power of the Divine and if it is in her House of Meditation that she sees the sacrifice being performed, then it must certainly be some immediate or closest aspect of the Supreme himself who has become the Yajna-Purusha. Indeed, if not he who else can perform this Maha-Yajna in her heart which itself is the House of Flame?⁴²

To restate: the Yajna-Purusha is the transcendent Supreme himself, the Supreme in the poise of a great creative Action. In the language of the Puranas he is the creator Brahma and it was out of his Will or samkalpa that the creation ensued; out of his Tapas-Yajna or the force of concentration were the worlds bom. The metaphysicospiritual sense emerges clearly in Sri Aurobindo's analysis when he discusses the very first verse of the Rig Veda. What is Yajna in Himself?—asks he and sets forth to answer as follows. "Yajna is Being, Awareness and Bliss; He is Sat with Chit and Ananda, because Chit and Ananda are inevitable in Sat. When in his Being, Awareness and Bliss He conceals Guna or quality, He is nirguṇa sat, impersonal being with Awareness and Bliss either gathered up in Himself and passive, they nivṛtta, He also nivrtta or working as a detached activity in His impersonal existence, they pravṛtta, He nivrtta. Then He should not be called Yajna, because He is then aware of himself as the Watcher and not as the Lord of activity. But when in His being, He manifests Guna or quality He is saguṇa sat, personal being.

⁴² Ibid.

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Even then He may be nivrtta, not related to His active awareness and bliss except as a Watcher of its detached activity; but He may also by His Shakti enter into their activity and possess and inform His unⁱverse (praviśya, adhiṣthita), He pravrtta, they pravṛtta. It is then that He knows Himself as the Lord and is properly called Yajna. Not only is He called Yajna, but all action is called Yajna, and Yoga, by which alone the process of any action is possible, is also called Yajna... This Yajna, who is the Saguna Sat, does not do works Himself, (that is by Sat), but He works in Himself, in Sat by His power of Chit,—by His Awareness... When Chit that is Power begins to work, then She manifests Herself as kinetic force, Tapas, and makes it the basis of all activity."⁴³

The Yajna-Purusha is therefore Sachchidananda Himself in His world-creative Action, the Sat-Purusha in His own Person setting forth the World-Force⁴⁴ in the dynamic movement of the Manifestation. If this Action is the Yajna, then the Sat-Purusha is the Yajaman and the World-Force His Grihapatni, Yajamanin, the Consort participating in the Sacrifice. Yogeshwara and Yogeshwari, the Will of Ishwara, perform the Yajna in the Transcendent; but as World-Creatrix when she rules over the quiescent Being, Prakriti mightier than Purusha, he subject to her action, then the Yajna in the terrestrial process assumes an altogether different character. It is this terrestrial Yajna that has to be lifted up, with the help of the Gods, to its original pristine glory and grandeur. In the wake of the sacrifice of the Purusha, sung by the Vedic Rishis, she as the Adya Shakti has actually made a greater sacrifice by coming down to this creation, that it may grow in pure being, awareness, and joy she gave up her royalty of transcendence and chose to be here—because it is in the folds of inconscience that she must search or discover her lost lover. In that search ".. .she has consented to put upon herself the cloak of this obscurity, condescended to bear the attacks and torturing influences of the powers of the Darkness and the Falsehood, borne to pass through the portals of the birth that is a death, taken upon herself the pangs and sorrows and sufferings of the creation, since it seemed that thus alone could it be lifted to the Light and Joy and Truth and eternal Life. This is the great sacrifice called sometimes the sacrifice of the Purusha, but much more deeply the

⁴³Hymns to the Mystic Fire, SABCL, Vol. 11, pp. 440-41.

⁴⁴Savitri, p. 121;-see also p. 301.

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holocaust of Prakriti, the sacrifice of the Divine Mother."⁴⁵ In the Epic's passage

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

Divinity's lapse from its own splendours wove

The many-patterned ground of all we are.⁴⁶

The incarnation of Adya Shakti in the human body to do the transformative Yoga of the Supreme in the earth-consciousness forelights the certitude of its success.

This Adya Shakti takes birth in our mortality and accepts the name of Savitri. She is "the patroness of magic priestcraft, Brahmanhood" and is, as Heinrich Zimmer rightly says, "the female counterpart and divine energy, Shakti, of Savitra-Brahma, the Creator of the world; she is the all-moving, all-inspiring divine principle of creation."⁴⁷ Consort of Brahma in the Transcendent if she is known as Gayatri, here as Satyavan's beloved she becomes Savitri. But when the philosopher fails to recognise herself incarnate in the person of Savitri, "the human princess, daughter of King Aswapati, who, according to the legend, rescued her husband, Prince Satyavan, from the domain of King Death," then this Adya Shakti's direct participation in the world-processes gets denied in the reckoning. In actuality, however, without that participation world-transformation would be impossible. She has been here since the beginning of the earth in one form or another. It is she who has moulded all the major events in the history of consciousness, thus taking the evolutionary march towards God-fulfilment in the material creation. The human Savitri, on entering her House of Meditation, witnesses the divine reality of her own self, that reality vaster and mightier than Death whom she is presently confronting as a dark terrible Shadow. Savitri now merges her will with the will of the transcendent Power who is ever burning in the depth of her soul, in the jewel-bright cave of her heart. That Adya Shakti herself is Savitri, luminous, in the Yajna of the Divine.

In the deepest sense, therefore, the occult Fire that bums in the

⁴⁵The Mother, SABCL, Vol. 25, pp. 24-25.

⁴⁶Savitri, p. 99.

⁴⁷Philosophies of India, p. 154.

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central hearth in Savitri's House of Meditation is the eternal Yajna itself, the Yajna being performed by the Sat-Purusha as the house-lord with his mate Adya-Shakti seated along with him in the great Action of upholding the Creation that the Transcendent may dwell in it with its full threefold beatitude. Although a small Yajna is constantly being performed in the heart of each one of us, and in the heart of the cosmos, this Yajna of Savitri is unique in its triple dimension of the Supreme. If her Yajna is meant for dissolving ignorance and death, that in the evolutionary manifestation divinity may inhabit itself in this house of Matter, ours is to grow in the sun-bright splendour of that divinity itself. Hers is the transcendental Yajna, ours the individual. In the flaming spirit of her Yajna are kindled all these thousand Yajnas of our souls. Such is the possibility that the Divine as Death has now opened out in this earthly existence. Such is the glory of Savitri's threefold Yajna: the Individual, the Universal, the Transcendental. This is the executive Truth we see in Savitri's House of Meditation.

R.Y. DESHPANDE

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PART II

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The Book of Beginnings:

Our journey starts in the morning, the hour of the "symbol dawn". Turn the first page of Savitri and a door opens within. On this threshold pause, while Sri Aurobindo's vision unfolds to the inner eye. Around us the star-field stretches to infinity, but now look down to where, far below, a dark planet moves ponderously in its orbit around the sun. Sri Aurobindo is showing us our earth "abandoned in the hollow gulfs". He calls upon all the resources of the English language as if to counterbalance with the weight of his words the sullen inertia of the circling globe. It is heavy, dull, opaque, impassive, soulless—with more than a score of adjectives Sri Aurobindo underlines the impression of matter impervious to light. If we do not immediately recognise in this powerful symbol the image of our mortal state, our "ignorance", the physical mind's perpetual revolution in the same worn groove of thought, it is because we are accustomed to look outward and upward, away from the inner darkness. The contemplation of this darkness however, is the point at which our journey begins. For it is the hour before the gods awake.

Who are these gods? Where and when will they awake? These questions are crucial to our understanding of Savitri as a way of initiation. Sri Aurobindo describes the gods as "universal powers descended from the Truth-Consciousness which build up the harmony of the worlds and in man his progressive perfection." ¹ These powers are psychological. The first light of dawn touching the earth is Sri Aurobindo's symbol of their awakening within the individual seeker, just as, in the poem, it heralds the awakening of the evolutionary urge in nature. The Vedic Agni, coming first, rises in us as a fire of aspiration, for it is he who "speaks for us the true thought of Earth and Heaven" and "makes perfect the Rite of the Path."² These powers are delegates of the divine Mother presiding over all manifestation who "has made her soul the body of our state."

In the darkness that precedes the awakening of the gods, a child's hand reaches out blindly towards something, "someone", without a name. That child is man the seeker. In such a work as Savitri we may

¹The Secret of the Veda.

²Hymns to the Mystic Fire.

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expect the outer scene as described by Sri Aurobindo to have its exact counterpart in an inner state. This is one of the secrets of Savitri and the reason why it speaks to us so intimately. The vision his words evoke for us—the new-bom infant searching the darkness—is a symbol of the divine consciousness "asleep" in a material universe and waiting "as the tree waits in the seed"; but it is no less, for the individual, an expression of the yearning in the deepest part of his being that calls the seeker to this path:

An unshaped consciousness desired light

And a blank prescience yearned toward distant change.

As if a childlike finger laid on a cheek

Reminded of the endless need in things

The heedless Mother of the universe

An infant longing clutched the sombre vast.³

We are about to begin our journey: Sri Aurobindo himself, as Aswapati, will be our guide. Savitri, with its luminous images and powerful music that speak directly to our innermost being, is the supreme travel-guide to what we may encounter on the way. We have only to consent to listen—and see—in the mind's silence. Everything we need will be provided, so we will travel more swiftly if we bring nothing of our own but an ardent longing for this Truth we cannot yet name.

Our journey has many stages, each one culminating in an initiation, a change of consciousness or illumination making further progress possible. It is a journey of twenty-four steps lasting one lifetime or several (time and distance have no relevance here) through Part One of Savitri. The last step brings us home with one bound. But for now, let us experience the darkness of our own physical consciousness. We are about to leave behind the sightless spinning globe and when Sri Aurobindo shows it to us again, much later, we will see it with different eyes.

Becoming conscious of our ignorance, we have taken the first step. Now Sri Aurobindo begins to unveil for us the cosmic plan. Matter and Spirit are one substance: the Mother of the Universe has fallen asleep in matter and it is She herself who is bom of earth as the divine soul in us. Hers is "the infant longing" reaching out in us towards her Cosmic Self. Sri Aurobindo now sets before us a dazzling vision of divine love incarnate. In all Savitri there is no more perfect poetry

³ Savitri, p. 2.

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than the description of the radiant goddess in Book 1, Canto 2. Later she will appear in celestial splendour, but here, at the beginning, she is fully human. We recognise her as the one who from ancient times has exerted the most lasting hold on the imagination of mankind, and most powerfully drawn all peoples to her worship. Yet, as Savitri, she is more beautiful than the imagination of antiquity could conceive, more beautiful than the vision described by Apuleius⁴ which so captivated the Romans, or "the woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars" of the Book of Revelation. If Sri Aurobindo has thus unveiled her face to us so early in our quest, it is because without some glimpse of this divine potential in human nature, without some intimation of the love that only She inspires, we might lack the courage and motivating force to face the "darkness in terrestrial things," and the unknown beyond them.

Savitri, "bom among these tribes," is the Divine Word—a creative power, a saving grace. A conscious surrender to her Light is the indispensable condition of progress, for the individual as for the human race, for she alone "can link man's strength to a transcendent Force."⁵ Meditating on this light, extending its influence in our lives so that we act always from the summit of our consciousness, we prepare to take the next step: the yoga of the soul's release.

Our companion on the way is Aswapati the father of Savitri in this earthly life. It is not by chance that Sri Aurobindo portrays him as a "traveller of the worlds" and "a shining guest of time" whose mind is "like a fire assailing heaven". The same litany of titles was used by the seer-poets of the Veda to invoke the presence of Agni: "Crown must thou the guest shining with light... who makes perfect the rite of the path. Crown with your acts of purification the Seer whose speech has its home in the Light, the Carrier of offerings, the Traveller, the

⁴Apuleius describes his vision of a woman rising from the sea "with so lovely a face that the gods themselves would have fallen down in adoration of it" The vision speaks to him: "I am nature, universal Mother, mistress of all the elements, primordial child of time, sovereign of all things spiritual, Queen of the dead, Queen also of the immortals, the single manifestation of all gods and goddesses that are. My rod governs the shining heights of heaven, the wholesome sea breezes, the lamentable silences of the world below. Though I am worshipped in many aspects, known by countless names, and propitiated by all manner of different rites, yet the whole round earth venerates me." (Metamorphosis XI translated by Robert Graves)

⁵Savitri, p. 20.

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Godhead of Fire.⁶ His light in the mind enables "the strong discoverer, tireless thought" to force a passage through the lid of mind and tear open the veil behind the heart:

Thus came his soul's release from Ignorance,

His mind and body's first spiritual change.⁷

For the traveller on this path, Agni signifies the fire in the heart impelling him towards this first realisation. Everywhere in Savitri the psychological powers identified and named by the Seers are invoked by the power of Sri Aurobindo's language and vision. They, unseen companions, accompany us at every step of Aswapati's journey: Varuna active within is a remover of limits, Saraswati a bringer of revelation, Sarama the power of intuitive mind to search out Truth. In the mind's silence they interpret for us the images that rise and change before our eyes as Sri Aurobindo, as if by some magical process, conjures them line by line. These are images charged with a profound truth and significance beyond the capacity of language to express. Often we feel the nearness of

All-Knowledge packed into great wordless thoughts.⁸

and we begin to understand why the Mother declared "it is not in the mind or through the mind, it is in meditation that Savitri is revealed."

To the extent that we succeed in awakening these powers of perception lying dormant in our nature, we will be able to follow the initial stages of Aswapati's Yoga. Everything is revealed that the mind can know of Nature, and Man, and God. The Mother pointed out long ago: "He has shown the path, the way to liberate oneself from the ignorance and climb right up to the superconscience: each stage, each plane of consciousness, how they can be scaled, how one can cross even the barrier of death and reach immortality. You will find the whole journey in detail, and as you go forward you can discover things altogether unknown to man."⁹ How is this knowledge imparted to the seeker who turns to Savitri?

Through Sri Aurobindo's supreme mastery of the resources of language—yes, but even more so by living pictures that continue to unfold their infinity of meaning long after the book has been laid down. We may forget theories of evolution but who could forget the

⁶ Hymns to the MysticFire. ⁷ Savitri, p. 44.

⁸ Ibid., p. 38. ⁹ Extract from a conversation with the Mother on Savitri.

See also Perspectives of Savitri, Vol. I, p. ⁴⁶

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image of the Earth-Goddess as "with sorrow dragging at her feet" she toils across the sands of time?

A Being is in her whom she hopes to know,

A Word speaks to her heart she cannot hear,

A Fate compels whose form she cannot see.

In her unconscious orbit through the Void

Out of her mindless depths she strives to rise,

A perilous life her gain, a struggling joy-

Ignorant and weary and invincible

She seeks through the soul's war and quivering pain

The pure perfection her marred nature needs,

A breath of Godhead on her stone and mire.¹⁰

We think we understand the human condition well enough, and have speculated about the existence of a Divine Creator, yet how narrow, insufficient and unsatisfactory all our speculations now appear when we experience Sri Aurobindo's magnificent sustained metaphor of the divine soul in man as "the sailor on the flow of Time", voyaging from the obscure ports of our origin to a destination in Eternity:

He leaves the last lands, crosses the ultimate seas,

He rums to eternal things his symbol quest;

Life changes for him its time-constructed scenes,

Its images veiling infinity.

Earth's borders recede and the terrestrial air

Hangs round him no longer its translucent veil.

He has crossed the limit of human thought and hope,

He has reached the world's end and stares beyond;

The eyes of mortal body plunge their gaze

Into Eyes that look upon eternity.

A greater world Time's traveller must explore.

At last he hears a chanting on the heights

And the far speaks and the unknown grows near:

He crosses the boundaries of the unseen

And passes over the edge of mortal sight

To a new vision of himself and things.¹¹

But is it really possible to follow in the steps of Aswapati? We know, after all, that Sri Aurobindo is describing his own yogic

¹⁰ Savitri, pp. 50-51. ¹¹Ibid, pp. 70-71.

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experience and that of the Mother. Can we really expect that their experience will be renewed in us? The obvious answer must be "No", followed after a certain amount of soul-searching by a qualified "Yes". The openers of the path have gone in front, and their labour is vain if there are none to follow. The experience may be renewed in us to the extent that past preparation has been made—in this life or other lives— and to the extent that we are open to what the Mother has called "the true vibrations of each stage of consciousness." There is no doubt that we are brought into direct contact with these true vibations through the medium of Savitri: "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 Sri Aurobindo brought down on the earth. My child, one must try to find the secret that Savitri represents."¹²

The Mother's words give away part of that secret. As Aswapati climbs the World Stair, he experiences successively all the planes of consciousness that influence or impinge upon our own inner and outer being. These influences, for the most part undetected by our waking mental consciousness, are explored by Aswapati through the power of his Yoga. Their essence or their vibration as the Mother puts it, is captured and held by Sri Aurobindo before it has passed through the distorting filter of the analytic mind. It comes to us clothed in "Truth's form-robes by the Seers woven from spirit-threads"¹³ and charged with the initiatory power of a Mantra. The intellect retreats in silence from its vain attempt to analyse this miracle. So it is, that the experience may indeed be renewed for us, not only by the action in us of Sri Aurobindo's wonderful commentaries which satisfy the mind, but even more perfectly by his amazing defining insights instantly recognised as Truth.

Thus we may think we know what instinct is, but when Sri Aurobindo calls instinct the "chrysalis of Truth"¹⁴ the image opens a window in the mind onto vistas of meaning beyond the power of three common words to express. We may think we can distinguish faith from belief, until he reveals to us in a picture what faith really is:

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.¹⁵

¹² Perspectives of Savitri, Vol. 1, p. 49.

¹³Collected Poems, SABCL, Vol. 5, p. 599.

¹⁴ Savitri, p. 134. ¹⁵Ibid, p. 539.

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This is indeed "truth in its plenitude". Words we have used carelessly all our lives suddenly appear haloed with light in which the eye of meditation perceives an infinity of meaning. Images arise, beckoning the mind to follow them back to the plane of consciousness where they were bom. A phrase that seems quite ordinary is suddenly transported by the rhythm of a line or the momentum of a thought and carries the reader to a new level of understanding. This is part of the "extraordinary power" of which the Mother speaks. We do not then need to be clairvoyant or gifted with supernatural powers or fall into a trance to ascend the World-Stair with Aswapati. Each step corresponds to something deep within ourselves.

The fifteen steps of the World-Stair begin with the Kingdom of Subtle Matter and end with Aswapati's attainment of the Greater Knowledge. On the way he discovers the splendour of Life on its own plane and the "fall" of Life into material existence. To find out the cause of the fall he descends to the realm of Falsehood and Evil, then seeks in the Paradise of the Life Gods a remedy for the suffering of Earth under the rule of Night. He enters the vastness of the Mind planes and rises from them into the Heavens of the Ideal. Beyond the highest peaks of Illumined Mind, where "the Thinker sleeps in too much light"¹⁶ he discovers the World Soul. At last, surrendering his separate self at the feet of the Divine Mother, he reaches the end of his journey and the light of the Greater Knowledge.

The path of initiation also ends here. The consummation of Aswapati's Yoga is his integral surrender to the Divine. It is integral because he has become conscious in every part of his being, "has taken possession" of every part, and thus is able to make a perfect offering. Uniting his will with the Divine Will he makes an impassioned plea for an end to Earth's suffering, knowing that only the Divine Love incarnate in the world can end the reign of Falsehood and Death. His prayer is granted: Savitri will be bom on earth and thereafter she will take up the Yoga. All that can be done by Man's strength and courage and the divine soul in him is accomplished by Aswapati: What more needs to be done for earth and men is the work of the Divine Shakti. The remaining twenty-four steps of the Yoga belong to Savitri alone. This story is told in Parts Two and Three.

We who are at the beginning of the path have far to go. The world-plane of Subtle Matter lies closest te our own. Its perfect forms are the original template for our marred and contorted pirate copies.

¹⁶Ibid., p. 343.

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Leaving this plane with the memory of a lovely garden where a happy child sits laughing on a golden swing, Aswapati moves onward to explore the lavish extravagance of the Life plane, source of the heart's passions and all Man's vital longings.

He seeks the answer to a question: What power intervened to cause the fall of Life from its own perfection when it entered the world of Matter? The answer provides a key to the nature of the mission Savitri will later undertake out of love for Satyavan, who in the poem at the level of symbol represents "the soul carrying the divine truth of being within itself but descended into the grip of death and ignorance":¹⁷

The secret Will that robes itself with Night

And offers to spirit the ordeal of the flesh,

Imposed a mystic mask of death and pain.¹⁸

As we know, Savitri will one day tear away that mask. Life, free on its own plane to follow every imaginable line of development, on earth becomes a prey to Death. The constraints suffered by Life in the course of a painful evolution with its culmination in Man unroll before the witness eye of Aswapati. In the Kingdom of Little Life, Man is a "conscious doll pushed a hundred ways" by outer necessity and elemental forces that arise from the subconscious self disguised as his own impulse and desire. Mind, on its own plane "archangel of a white transcending realm" emerges in man as a "dwarf three-bodied trinity"—and who but Sri Aurobindo could flesh out such abstract concepts as physical mind, desire mind and reasoning mind, giving each a body, an appearance and human characteristics that are immediately recognisable? We know these manifestations of mind; they are people we have met and spoken to. They are also a part of our own being to be recognised and transcended.

The "Little Kingdoms" of life and mind reveal to us our lowly place on the World Stair. All our pretensions to knowledge are held up to the mirror of Truth. In a brilliant display of his mastery of language Sri Aurobindo translates the complex formulae of modem physics effortlessly into words and adds the wry comment:

Or so it seems to man's audacious mind

Who seats his thought as the arbiter of truth,

His personal vision as impersonal fact.¹⁹

¹⁷ Sri Aurobindo, Letters.

¹⁸Savitri, p. 130. ¹⁹Ibid., p. 155.

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There will be time to hold up the mirror and see ourselves reflected in it before taking the next step.

The planes of consciousness described by Sri Aurobindo are worlds, and not dependent on our own world for their existence. "That we are not conscious of them is no proof that they are not conscious. It is too late in the day to question the correctness and veracity of the utterances of the seers who have experienced these truths."²⁰ In so far as these intangible realms impinge upon our world we can sometimes discern their influence, but for the most part they exist unrecognised above or below or behind the life we know. Those who undertake to use Savitri as a guide in their own sadhana will become more and more alert to the role they play in our lives and free to accept or reject it.

A "reversal of consciousness" takes place so that where once it was difficult to believe in the existence of such parallel worlds, it soon becomes impossible to conceive of reality in any other way. By the power of the consciousness that created them, the pictures Sri Aurobindo paints for us and the wisdom they contain become part of our own interior landscape. This phenomenon, repeated at every stage of the journey, justifies the claim that Savitri can indeed be considered as a path of initiation—though the use of this word here is not intended provoke comparison with initiation rites in other cultures or contexts.

The path is not without danger. Aswapati's right of passage is often challenged by the guardian spirits of the threshold and he must pass the test of their scrutiny before he is allowed to proceed. There is always an indication of the strengths or the knowledge required:

A mind absolved from life, made calm to know,

A heart divorced from the blindness and the pang,

The seal of tears, the bond of ignorance,

He turned to find that wide world-failure's cause.²¹

These are the conditions of entry into the Darkness: A perfect equality of mind first, and then immunity from all the influences arising out of the vital world. The lesson of the Descent into Night seems to be this—sooner or later all those who seek the truth of the spirit will be compelled by the necessities of the path to confront the powers of Darkness face to face. This confrontation is the "dark right" of forces opposed to human evolution, whose presence and influence is confirmed by Sri Aurobindo in numerous letters and poems as well

²⁰ T.V. Kapali Shastri, Lights on the Tantra. ²¹Savitri, p. 202.

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as here. Sri Aurobindo did not have to search history or mythology for images of hell. Our own time has provided them in abundance. The gas chambers, the concentration camps, the killing fields, the "crowded grey and squalid huts /Neighbouring proud palaces of perverted Power"²² conceived in that Darkness are a terrible reminder of how easily our frail defences against the World of Falsehood can be breached, and how easily the Mother of Evil can take possession of human nature.

Only were safe who kept God in their hearts:

Courage their armour, faith their sword...

The hostile powers are terrible when their attack takes an outward form and tragedy strikes on a personal or collective level. They are even more dangerous when they strike unseen from within. Fear, doubt and depression or despair are their chosen weapons; the seeker is

Captured and trailed in Falsehood's lethal net

And often strangled in the noose of grief,

Or cast on the grim morass of swallowing doubt,

Or shut into pits of error and despair.²⁴

When the conscious mind sleeps, he faces something far worse than a bodily death, for the demonic powers attack with the speed of striking snake, and if in a doomed attempt to escape from the horror of that encounter, he is tempted to complicity with them, the loss of his own soul may result:

This is the tragedy of the inner death

When forfeited is the divine element

And only a mind and body live to die.²⁵

Aswapati is deprived of the protection of the body's material envelope, the native strength of the human vital and the light of the human mind: "Thought ceased, sense failed, his soul still saw and knew."²⁶ The Darkness has enveloped all that to our superficial regard makes up the human person. The indestructible divine soul that the ground of all the rest cannot be conquered; but the seeker must know how to take refuge there. Aswapati passes this test. Divinity wakes in him, and hell stands revealed a lie: "Night opened and vanished like

²² Ibid., p. 211. ²⁵Ibid., p. 225.

²³Ibid ²⁶Ibid, p. 230.

²⁴Ibid, p. 230.

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a gulf of dream."²⁷ From now on the darkness has no power over him. He steps out of the shadow into Paradise.

Does the seeker now repose in bliss? Not yet. His human nature must be reborn to sustain a delight that is more than the body can bear. This Paradise of the Life Gods is familiar in appearance to our world, but wondrously changed; transposed to a higher key. Even pain is not abolished but "transformed to potent joy."²⁸ Aswapati, however, turns his steps away from the wonders of this glorious creation of the gods, just as Sri Aurobindo did when he told the Mother: "This is not what we want." Between him and his goal lie the immense plains and towering peaks of Mind.

We are approaching the end of our journey with Aswapati. Once again, and for the last time, we may invoke the Vedic powers to guide us on the ascent to a summit so high we cannot see it. They now appear in the guise of helpful presences radiantly fronting the sun of knowledge:

Holding the thousand keys of the Beyond

They proffered their knowledge to the climbing mind

And filled the life with Thought's immensities.

The prophet hierophants of the occult Law

The flame-bright hierarchs of the divine Truth,

Interpreters between man's mind and God's,

They bring the immortal fire to mortal men.²⁹

In the final cantos of Book II, Sri Aurobindo's poetry becomes like a shining barrier erected on the extreme boundaries of human understanding. From this point on, "out of our thoughts we must leap up to sight"³⁰ and sight itself become the seer-vision "a flame-throw from identity."³¹

We are close to the consciousness in which the knower and the known are one.

Aswapati has brought us to the limits of Mind. In the Heavens of the Ideal the stairs are newly created beneath his feet as he climbs. He meditates upon the beauty of the Deathless Rose, symbol of an unattainable perfection—unattainable because even here the illusion of separate identity is preserved as each idea strives to possess its own absolute. From the Heavens of the Ideal, and from the Self of

²⁷Ibid, p. 232. ³⁰Ibid, p. 276.

²⁸Ibid, p. 235 ³¹Ibid, p. 301.

²⁹Ibid, p. 265.

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Mind, he turns away because:

Our sweet and mighty Mother was not there.¹²

At last the World-Soul opens to him. In line after line of magical poetry Sri Aurobindo evokes the images of our deepest yearning, the beauty that ever calls us home. In answer to his wordless prayer the veil is partly drawn and once again the face of Divine Love is revealed, not cast in a human mould as it was in the beginning of the path, but now an overwhelming splendour of implacable light and bliss. Aswapati surrenders his human nature at the feet of the Divine Mother and becomes a vessel of her force, passing into the "inexpressible light" of the Greater Knowledge.

Aspiring not for himself but for the world, he wins for mankind the boon of Love incarnate in a human body. This Love, as Savitri, will guide us now. The path is no longer a path of knowledge; it is a path of action and will. In the individual as in the world, the divine work is done behind a veil. The story of Savitri's Yoga and her ultimate conquest of death, fulfilling the promise of a divine life on earth, is told in the form of a legend, but its essential meaning is to be found by opening ourselves to the consciousness that transformed the legend into a symbol:

This Light comes not by struggle or by thought;

In the mind's silence the Transcendent acts

And the hushed heart hears the unuttered Word.

A vast surrender was his only strength.

A Power that lives upon the heights must act,

Bring into life's closed room the Immortal's air

And fill the finite with the Infinite.

All that denies must be torn out and slain

And crushed the many longings for whose sake

We lose the One for whom our lives were made.

Now other claims had hushed in him their cry:

Only he longed to draw her presence and power

Into his heart and mind and breathing frame;

Only he yearned to call forever down

Her healing touch of love and truth and joy

Into the darkness of the suffering world.

His soul was freed and given to her alone.³³

³²lbid., p. 286. ³³Ibid, pp. 315-16.

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The path of initiation ends when the human soul accepts union with its divine origin. The path is long, because the mind's assent or even the heart's assent is not enough. So the first necessity is the discovery of the soul. The path we have to trace in the steps of Aswapati goes far beyond an individual fulfilment. Its consummation is reached at the end of The Book of the Divine Mother when Aswapati's prayer for Earth's release from the grip of Death rises to heights where the Divine Consciousness unites will and creative power to bring about infallibly what is seen. The prayer turns into a prophetic vision of the future: a new creation and a new humanity.

Now obeying the ādesh once heard by Sri Aurobindo, "Act in the world with thy being beyond it,"³⁴ the seeker returns to take up the work the Mother gave:

The eternal seeker in the aeonic field

Besieged by the intolerant press of hours

Again was strong for great swift-footed deeds.³⁵

S. M. DYNE

³⁴Collected Poems, SABCL, Vol. 5, p. 568. ³⁵Savitri, p. 347.

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Savitri: Its Inner Significance

Savitri is, at its highest, a revelation and a flame: a revelation of the Supramental Truth and a flame of man's immemorial aspiration for immortality. This epic of inner voyage is in its essence symbolic of the answering Grace from above and the call from below embodied in the two protagonists—Satyavan-Savitri and Aswapati. While Savitri can be called an epic of the soul's "mystic voyage" upon "uncharted routes", represented by Aswapati, it is more "a significant myth" telling of the great "wrestle with the shadow" and the conquest over Ignorance and Death, represeented by Savitri.

It reveals "from the highest pinnacle and with the largest field of vision the destiny of the human spirit and the presence and ways and purpose of the Divinity in man and the universe."¹ This revelation, this "inspired body of the mystic Truth"² is poured out in mantric verses which express, with a great transforming power and an uplifting vibration "a total and many-sided vision and experience of all the planes of being and their action upon each other."³

Aswapati is "the Lord of Tapasya, the concentrated energy of spiritual endeavour" who, carrying within his bosom Man's eternal aspiration, dares "the unplumbed infinitudes" and brings to earth-consciousness the Divine Shakti who will redeem her once for all. His adventure of consciousness and joy represents on the human level the struggle and endeavour of every aspirant and thus embodies the typal spiritual efforts to reach the eternal Silence. At the same time, Aswapati is "the colonist" from the other side, whose ascent is unique, for not only does he penetrate "world after world" and "heaven after heaven" realising their "guarded powers" and cherishing "their beatitudes"—planes of consciousness quite unknown to even man's highest spiritual endeavour—but his soar reaches the "last high world" "where all worlds meet":

In its summits gleam where Night is not nor Sleep,

The light began of the Trinity supreme.⁴

Aswapati is the representative of the aspiring humanity which seeks the whither and the what and the why of human existence. He

¹The Future Poetry, SABCL, Vol. 9, p. 267.

²Savitri, p. 39. ³ Ibid., p. 738. ⁴ Ibid., p. 89.

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attempts to bring closer the Future to the Present, the Beyond to the Earth. In his quest to realise the truth of man, Aswapati comes to know that man is not just a sum total of body, life and mind, just a knot of ego but that he is a soul, a self which though it supports the human individual can expand itself to contain the all and all that is beyond the universal. This is the first of his two "yogic movements"— the psycho-spiritual transformation. Then he ascends into the other one—"a greater spiritual transformation with an ascent to a supreme power."⁵ In the first movement there is "his own spiritual fulfilment," but in the second movement he is more or a typical representative of the race to win the possibility of discovery and possession of all the planes of consciousness. The culmination or the fulfilment of this second movement is not his arriving at the House of the Spirit, the Supramental-Consciousness, but to aspire and to bring down that Truth-Consciousness to earth, so that there is a new creation and the earthly life gets transformed into a divine life. He is a protagonist of not only the Ascent but also of the Descent: he achieves not only "an individual victory" over the "structured visions of the cosmic Self'⁶ but also an universal realisation so that a new path is laid for all who aspire to ascend into the Supramental Consciousness.

In his ascent of consciousness he observes that the universe is built in a hierarchical fashion with mounting levels of consciousness. He moves from the dark and dense consciousness of the body to the beginnings of worlds of life-force, the vital-consciousness. Meeting different creatures and beings appropriate to these levels, Aswapati moves to the higher vital worlds and then to the mental worlds.

Aswapati discovers that just as there is an upward movement leading to more and more bright levels of consciousness, there is also a downward movement leading to great sinister worlds full of perversion, crookedness and falsehood and pretensions which throw all their influence upon man. Wanting to find the source of this evil, this anti-divine existence, Aswapati dives deeper only to come face to face with the Mother of Evil and the Sons of Darkness:

I saw that a falsehood was planted deep

At the very root of things

Where the grey Sphinx guards God's riddle sleep

On the Dragon's outspread wings.

⁵Ibid., p. 773. ⁶ Ibid., p. 96.

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I left the surface gods of mind

And life's unsatisfied seas

And plunged through the body's alleys blind

To the nether mysteries.

I have delved through the dumb Earth's dreadful heart

And heard her black mass' bell

I have seen the source whence her agonies part

And the inner reason of hell.⁷

"He who would bring the heavens" upon earth has to "tread the dolorous way"—so did Aswapati and only then could he move on to the worlds beyond mind, and reach the Vastness which "brooded free from sense of Space." Arrested for a while by "the uncaring bliss", Aswapati apotheosises

O soul, it is too early to rejoice!

Thou hast reached the boundless silence of the Self,

Thou has't leaped into a glad divine abyss;

But where has't thou thrown selfs mission and self s power?

On what dead bank on the Eternal's road?⁸

Aswapati's eyes open, as it were, to a new vision and understanding of creation. All existence has a meaning and a purpose and it is through a process of evolution that all things are moving towards their fulfilment. All earth shall one day be transformed into a luminous consciousness and substance; it would be similar to the existence on the Supramental plane:

None was apart, none lived for himself alone,

Each lived for God in him and God in all,

Each soleness inexpressibly held the whole.⁹

And a divine impatience grips him, for he wants to see that glorious future upon earth. He cries out to the Divine Mother.

Linger not long with thy transmuting hand

Pressed vainly on one golden bar of Time...

Let a great word be spoken from the heights

And one great act unlock the doors of Fate.¹⁰

The Divine Mother responds to the call of mankind:

⁷Collected Poems, SABCL, Vol. 5, p. 101.

⁸ Savitri, p. 310. ⁹ Ibid., p. 324. ¹⁰ Ibid., p. 345.

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O strong forerunner, I have heard thy cry,

One shall descend and break the iron Law...

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.¹¹

And the Divine Mother herself descends, as the daughter of Aswapati, as Savitri!

Savitri is the Divine Response to human aspiration, the Divine Love incarnate in a human body. This divine holocaust is perhaps the quickest method to awaken the dark obstinate consciousness of man to his higher self. But humanity resists the Divine incarnation:

Hard is it to persuade earth-nature's change,

Mortality bears ill the eternal's touch:

It fears the pure divine intolerance

Of that assault of ether and of fire.¹²

So, Savitri's task is not easy. And yet she cannot abdicate; she has to fulfil her mission. For that she prepares herself by a Yoga which is quite different from that of Aswapati's. She goes within, into the depths of the being, into the earth-consciousness, into her own body's self, as it were. As the earth represents the cosmos, and her body represents earth, she delves into the alleys of her own self. And there she comes across the falsehood of pain, suffering and death which she was commissioned to vanquish and conquer.

Death comes to her in the form of the death of Satyavan, Satyavan who is her human counter-part in the work of Transformation. As Savitri has to work out the victory over death and fate and pain on the level of human consciousness, she works it out in Satyavan, her alter-body. Satyavan is the visible sign of her invisible work upon herself: to conquer death in Satyavan is to conquer it in herself, and to conquer it in herself is to gain a victory over death itself, for her body is the representation of all earth-bound bodies.

However, in the period of her inner preparation, Savitri comes across moments of despair too:

What need have I, what need has Satyavan

To avoid the black meshed net, the dismal door,

¹¹Ibid., p. 346. ¹² Ibid., p. 7.

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Or call a mightier Light into life's closed room,

A greater Law into man's little world?¹³

Then the Divine Voice chastises her:

Or is this all for thy being bom on earth

Charged with a mandate from eternity,

A listner to the voices of the years...

To pass and leave unchanged the old dusty laws?

Shall there be no new tables, no new Word,

No greater light come down upon the earth

Delivering her from her unconsciousness,

Man's spirit from unalterable fate?¹⁴

And Savitri, awakened to her inner mission, asks the Divine Mother to give a command. She is told:

Conquer thy heart's throbs, let thy heart beat in God:

Thy nature shall be the engine of his works,

Thy voice shall house the mightiness of his Word:

Then shalt thou harbour my force and conquer Death.¹⁵

So, Savitri takes on Death and begins her work, her mission, for which she had incarnated. Death is at the outset a Nothingness, a Non-existence, a universal Negation and Destruction, and not the mere destruction of the body. This everlasting "No" is deeply embedded at the atomic level of Matter itself, arresting energy at the physical level, bringing denial and doubt in the vital life, and perversity and narrowness on the mental level. And yet, at the deeper level, Death is a purificatory agent of life; it goads life to evolve, to progress, to perfect itself.

Death at its deepest level is after all the dark form of the Divine:

I hail thee almighty and victorious Death,

Thou grandiose Darkness of the Infinite.¹⁶

The dark form is dissolved, devoured by the radiant splendour of Savitri:

His body was eaten by light, his spirit devoured...

A secret splendour rose revealed to sight

¹³ Ibid., p. 475. ¹⁴ Ibid. ¹⁵ Ibid., p. 476. ¹⁶ Ibid., p. 666.

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Where once the vast embodied Void had stood.

Night the dim mask had grown a wonderful face.¹⁷

In the involutionary process when Consciousness turned into Inconscience, it seemed that no contact was possible between the Origin and what was created. A direct Descent of the Divine Consciousness became imminent and so was there a descent of the Divine Consciousness in the form of Love. And it is this first descent of Divine Love who is "the first universal Avatar who, gradually, has assumed more and more conscious bodies and finally manifested in a kind of recognised line of Beings who have descended directly from the Supreme to perfect this work of preparing the universe so that, through a continuous progression, it may become ready to receive and manifest the supramental Light in its entirety."¹⁸

What has this story got to do with the legend of Savitri?—one may ask. We can easily connect the story and the symbol. This Love or the Original and the Eternal Avatar is represented by Satyavan. The Mother explained that Satyavan is the earth's Jiva. Once we understand the meaning of the Jiva, we will grasp the significance of Satyavan as the Jiva.

In us too we have the psychic being or the Atman. What is its need and necessity within us? It is for the evolutionary purpose that it is present in us. Our body is temporal, it lives for some time and perishes. But it is the Atman that continues the journey from birth to birth in evolution. So Satyavan being the Jiva of the Earth evolves through the millienia, through billions of years of earth's existence. He has been there all through the creation of our universe. Sri Aurobindo clarifies: "Satyavan is the soul carrying the divine truth of being within itself but descended into the grip of death and ignorance."

This single line gives the whole symbolism of Satyavan. Sat is the Truth and Satyavan is the carrier of the Divine Truth who descended into this world of ignorance and darkness for carrying this evolution further on towards the superconscient. Therefore he is the eternal Avatar who prepared the Inconscient Matter for the manifestation of Life.

According to Sri Aurobindo's philosophy of evolution we see how out of Matter Life emerged and how out of both Matter and Life,

¹⁷Ibid., pp. 667, 679.

¹⁸Questions and Answers, CWM, Vol. 9, p. 333.

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Mind came upon this creation. How could all these emerge? Not out of a chaos or disorder! In a mother's womb when a child is prepared, it is not bom just at any time—there is a particular time of its birth. Likewise, there has been a period of maturity in the womb of Matter for the manifestation of the next phase of Life. It was Satyavan within the womb of Earth who accomplished it in evolution as he is the eternal Jiva. Then Life burst forth out of Matter—in the form of grass and the flowers, plants and butterflies, fish and the amphibians, the dinosaurs and other animals and the whole dynamic kingdom of nature. So, this is how the divine consciousness, in Matter called Satyavan, brought forth Life from Matter. And when Life element in Nature was mature—it may take billions of years and it has taken truly a long long time—it is only then that he brought forth the element of Mind and that Mind is Man.

We also know from Sri Aurobindo's philosophy that evolution can take place only when the higher and lower forces meet at a point. That is the meeting of the ascent and the descent. It is not a unilateral progress from below. There has to be the descent of the higher force too. It is the combination of both that brings in a higher rung in evolution. All the previous Avatars, like Matsya or Varaha or Buddha or Sri Krishna came at a point of time when the evolution was ready for assimilating their Truth. So, in a way we can also say that there is an evolution of Avatar from the earth itself, in the sense of evolution of Matter to Life and Mind, etc. This simultaneous movement from below and above is essential.

In this manner Satyavan now represents the mental consciousness of man. He is the son of Dyumatsena and "Dyumatsena is Lord of the Shining Hosts, father of Satyavan. He is the Divine Mind here fallen blind, losing its celestial kingdom of vision." He is a blind king symbolising our present blind world. It has come to a dead end. It cannot anymore have the vision of the Supreme. So, at this stage, Dyumatsena's own son, Satyavan, is labouring to go beyond Mind. And, when Satyavan wants to break the present barriers of Mind and go to the higher reaches of Mind, there has to be the descent of another higher power to effectuate his effort at this evolutionary point so that this ascent and descent could establish the higher principle beyond mind.

This descent is represented by Savitri. Satyavan and Savitri have to unite in order to create the new world because it is only in their union that the New World will be created. Therefore, Savitri has to descend this time as Satyavan's wife. In Book Twelve, when Savitri

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returns after her battle with the Lord of Death, Sri Aurobindo says that she carries in her arms the new world like a baby. The Mother explained that this baby in Savitri's arms, or Satyavan, is the New World that she is bringing down. So the symbolism is that Savitri is bom as the wife of Satyavan and this union of Spirit and Matter is necessary for the New Creation.

Savitri is the daughter of the supreme God; she is the Divine Word, meaning the Creative Power. And, specifically here in Savitri, she is the Word of the Supramental Consciousness, as the baby that is to be bom is the Supramental World. So, Savitri in union with Satyavan brings forth the New World. She has chosen this earth for transformation, not any other planet. Even though Satyavan had to die within a year, Savitri had no other choice but to choose him because she has to transform this earth and Satyavan represents this earth.

Savitri is that fullness of incarnation of Divine Love in the form of Divine Grace and Shakti who came to manifest the Supramental Light in its entirety. A full manifestation of Divine Love alone can bring to creation its final consummation, when "the entire universe becomes the total Avatar of the Supreme."¹⁹ And the prerequisite for this final consummation of the earth, when

All shall be might and bliss and happy force,²⁰

is the conquest of Death. Of all falsehoods, Death is the greatest—it is the God of Denial, the Asat trying to annihilate the Sat. It is added to the very cellular structure of Matter and therefore all ignorance, sorrow, pain and misfortune of the earth is embedded in Matter itself. The incarnate Saviour, Savitri, has therefore to track down Death to its primal origin and dissolve it there not by any destruction, but by a transfusion of Divine Love. Finally he says:

... 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.²¹

So was the last cry of Death, the final challenge to Savitri:

And Savitri looked on Death and answered not...

In a flaming moment of apocalypse

The Incarnation thrust aside its veil...

¹⁹ Ibid., p. 334. ²⁰ Savitri, p. 514. ²¹ Ibid., p. 664.

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Eternity looked into the eyes of Death

And Darkness saw God's living Reality...

Light like burning tongue licked up his thoughts,

Light was a luminous torture in his heart,

Light coursed, a splendid agony, through his nerves;

His darkness muttered perishing in her blaze...

The dire universal Shadow disappeared

Vanishing into the Void from which it came.²²

Once Death is vanquished, all the resistance, denial and refusal are also broken down. The man of sorrows who represents the physical being and all its resistance, rejection and denial is given the assurance by Savitri:

One day I will return, a bringer of strength...

Misery shall pass abolished from the earth;

The world shall be freed from the anger of the Beast,

From the cruelty of the Titan and his pain.

There shall be peace and joy for ever more.²³

The Asuric and Rakshasic vital forces of man do not recognise the Mother of Might:

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.²⁴

But it is she to whom was given the assurance by Savitri:

The cry of the ego shall be hushed within,

Its lion-roar that claims the world as food,

All shall be might and bliss and happy force.²⁵

The Mother of Light, who represents Man's aspiration in the Mind, cannot be seized or understood by the narrow mind of man:

Nay, let me work within my mortal bounds,

Not love beyond life nor think beyond the mind;

Our smallness saves us from the Infinite.²⁶

²² Ibid., pp. 664-68. ²³ Ibid., pp. 507-08. ²⁴ Ibid., p. 512.

²⁵ Ibid., p. 514. ²⁶ Ibid., p. 520.

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So, Savitri, once again, consoles the Mother of Light:

One day I shall return, His hands in mine,

And thou shalt see the face of the Absolute.

Then shall the holy marriage be achieved,

Then shall the divine family be bom.

There shall be light and peace in all the worlds.²⁷

After conquering Death, Savitri enters the region of Everlasting Day where she is welcomed:

Leaving thy borrowed body on the sod,

Ascend, O soul, into thy blissful home.²⁸

But Savitri replies:

I climb not to thy everlasting Day,

Even as I have shunned thy eternal Night...

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.²⁹

Savitri then returns to earth with Satyavan; she returns to earth bringing with her a new world and thus fulfils her mission:

In the one task for which our lives were bom,

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.³⁰

Aswapati and Savitri are the Divine Delegates—the former ascends into the Supreme Consciousness and makes the descent of Savitri a possibility; the latter descends into the Inconscient and makes the ascent of Man into the Superman an assured probability and a promise left in the womb of evolutionary Nature:

I have gathered my dreams in a silver air

Between the gold and the blue...

There shall move on the earth embodied and fair

The living truth of you.³¹

²⁷ Ibid., p. 521. ²⁸ Ibid., p. 685. ²⁹ Ibid., pp. 686-87.

³⁰ Ibid., p. 692.

³¹Collected Poems, SABCL, Vol. 5, pp. 99-102.

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Satyavan, "the soul carrying the divine truth of being within itself but descended into the grip of death and ignorance" is not only the link in the workings of Aswapati and Savitri, but also the medium and kshetra of Savitri's transformative work for mankind and earth.

That was very much in brief two levels of Savitri at the legend and its symbolism. There is a third level to it—the factual reality. It starts with a story written by the Mother way back in 1906, the story called A Sapphire Tale?³²

The story speaks about a small kingdom somewhere in the East, where people are all happy and harmonious. Each one was doing the work chosen for him by them, the best way they could. It was all based on a wonderful harmony where there were no problems, no competition, no quarrels or disharmony. Scientists there were not creating material comforts but looking after the general good of the collectivity. Artists were creating something of subliminal beauty. Philosophers were there, four in number, who were wisely guiding the people. That little kingdom was ruled by on old king. He was intelligent and wise.

One day, as it happened in the Mahabharata's story of Savitri, the king called his son, Meotha, and asked him if he had by then found a partner or a companion for himself because, soon, he was to take the reigns of the kingdom. And the law of this kingdom was such that the ruler had to be biune for ruling his country.

Meotha replied that he had seen most of the suitable maidens in his kingdom but he couldn't yet choose one for himself. He would like to go out of the kingdom, get hiniself acquainted with other cultures, laws of administration, ways of living and thus enrich himself and in the process find his biune partner.

Meotha's father permitted him to go on his journey. After a long voyage, somewhere on a western island, a thickly wooded island, he met a young damsel called Liane. She was beautiful and charming, and she was bright in mind, and in her skills nobody on the island could match her talents. Liane had a dream in which she saw a young man who was not only fair and handsome but he wore an alien robe by which she knew that he belonged to some other kingdom. And she was sure that one day she would meet this person of her dream. So on that day when she was looking at the ocean and thinking of

³²Words of Long Ago, CWM, Vol. 2, pp. 7-11.

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this person of her dream, she felt a sudden stir in the breeze, birds flying hither and thither, the atmosphere turning mysterious. What had happened? Lo and behold! she came across Meotha, standing right in front of her. They did not exchange words, just as in Savitri, but they recognised each other through their looks and they knew they belonged to each other. Silently Liane put her hand in Meotha's hand and they boarded the ship to sail back home.

On the ship Liane asked Meotha as to where he was taking her? She said that she knew one day Meotha was to come for her but she was also in deep love with her little island. Meotha said that he had looked for her in the whole world and he found her here. And now he was taking her to that only country in the world that is full of harmony and peace. She would be the queen of that land!

It is a simple story, written in 1906. Around this period, in Baroda, Sri Aurobindo wrote the first draft of Savitri. What is interesting here is that, similar to the story of Liane, the Mother landed in Pondicherry in 1914. She came to an alien land and the first time she saw Sri Aurobindo she remembered her dream of seeing an Asiatic person, clad in a white piece of cloth around his body. She saw Sri Aurobindo exactly as she had seen him in her vision.

Before Sri Aurobindo came to Pondicherry he did Tapasya and, while he was in the Alipore jail, he had the first instruction from Swami Vivekananda as to the direction for the later Tapasya. Eighteen years later, in 1926, he got the Siddhi of his Tapasya when Sri Krishna entered in his subtle physical body. That was the merging of the Overmental consciousness of Sri Krishna in the body of Sri Aurobindo. It was the eighteen years of his Tapasya that had brought down the Truth, like the eighteen years of Tapasya of Aswapati that had brought down Savitri.

After 1926, the Mother established Sri Aurobindo as a spiritual Master to his disciples. Before this, his close disciples used to call him AG or Sir. He was looked upon as a great leader, a poet, a visionary, a writer but hardly anyone thought of him as an Avatar. That means within these many years people came to take Sri Aurobindo as the Avatar. Until then even to his closest disciples he was like Sri Krishna to Arjuna, a very close and dear friend.

After 1926 and till 1938, their roles reversed. Now it was Sri Aurobindo who established the Mother as the Divine Mother. In 1926 the Ashram began. In 1927 he wrote the book The Mother through which he established the Mother in her Transcendental, Universal

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and Individual poises alongwith her eternal four aspects that are presently at work in the Universe.

After this the next twelve years were crucial. This was the time when he resumed Savitri writing. He started around 1936 and continued till 1950. At this point of time, both having been established as the Avatars, they were acting in one identified consciousness. Savitri was written in such Biune Consciousness. Therefore, the Mother said: "Whatever I experienced, Sri Aurobindo wrote simultaneously." It was not that they told each other beforehand, whatever Sri Aurobindo read out in the morning, was the experience the Mother had the night before. That was the identification of their consciousness and perhaps in 1949, when there was a conversation between the Mother and Sri Aurobindo as to who should leave the body, Sri Aurobindo said that it was he who would leave his body for the sake of the work and that the Mother was to stay back to accomplish their work of Transformation. He said that the Mother's body was better suited and fitted for the work. So, it was a kind of a prophetic destiny, just as "Satyavan must die." There was almost a necessity of Sri Aurobindo having to leave his body.

Couldn't Sri Aurobindo continue to live on after 1950 and continue to do the work of Transformation? His was, exactly as written in Savitri, a destined death. Our death is also destined but His passing away is not like the death of our physical body. It is dying to Death itself. In 1961 the Mother had to battle with the Lord of Death or with Death itself. Like the debate between Death and Savitri in Savitri, the Mother too had to battle Death in 1961. She came out of the battle victorious, like Savitri in the epic. It was about 22 years from this experience of conquest over death that the Mother left her body. It was after this intense experience in 1961, that the Mother declared that hereafter children will be born with an altogether new consciousness, reminding us how Savitri had brought down the new consciousness through her own conquest over Death.

Savitri represents the Mother in totality. In a way, like Savitri, She too has been brought down after eighteen years of Sri Aurobindo's Tapasya. Aswapati is Sri Aurobindo the Yogi, the Rishi. Satyavan, the Mother said, is the Avatar. When Sri Aurobindo was asked about his work in his previous lives, he said that he was carrying on the evolution. So he has been continuing this work of evolution in all his previous lives. Thus, Sri Aurobindo has always been the Earth's Jiva, Satyavan, the Original Avatar and in this incarnation a combination

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of Aswapati and Satyavan, and at the same time the last Avatar in human form.

Thus, it is the coming together of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo that has given birth to the New Race. Had the Mother remained in Paris and Sri Aurobindo in Pondicherry, Supermind would have perhaps been realised but not manifested. Manifestation requires the womb of the Mother. This is seen in the Mother's own revelation:

Sri Aurobindo is the Soul of Matter, the aspiration of the whole humanity. He is the Light in Matter or the Spirit incarnated in Matter. Sri Aurobindo has separated himself from the Supreme and has plunged in this matter, in a body, with this load of inconscience and ignorance upon himself—to awaken them to the divine life. For this He has invoked the Supreme, the Grace, to descend here below on this earth to help in His work. That is why, having heard His call, I have come down here into matter in a physical body, into this world of pain, suffering and death. And it is in the union of both of us that the world will witness gradually this miracle of a divine life. It is because of Him that I have descended. It is this intense aspiration of matter from below that has sent up and the Grace has responded by a descent. What a blessed hour for the earth. It is an occasion for a tremendous progress so that the whole universe may blossom in a great élan towards the goal of its existence. With Our help which will be at its disposal and a will to pursue, what could be there that would be impossible to realise! This is the moment.³³

This is the mystic union for manifestation of the higher truths that human history has never known—such a legend, such a symbol and such a Reality. Few know about this reality. Knowing this dimension of Savitri is of great importance in order to understand Savitri in its profound and magnificent significance.

V. ANANDA REDDY

³³ The Supreme, p. 68 (as reported by Mona Sarkar.)

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The Ascent of Sight in Sri Aurobindo's Savitri

Sight in the Superconscient

Introduction

We should recognise the insufficiency of normal mind of man to be an instrument for the discovery of the Truth:

Our mind lives far off from the authentic Light

Catching at little fragments of the Truth.¹

But if mind fails, what else remains? Again, it has been affirmed that "thought nor word can seize eternal Truth."² But, then, if thought proves impotent what else is there that can take its place? The answer is: What else? It must be a sight:

Out of our thoughts we must leap up to sight.³

Yes, it has to be a sight but surely not the sight of mind; it must be a far greater sight:

His being stretched beyond the sight of Thought.⁴

So we have to advance farther into the domains of the Spirit, acquire the Spirit's sight and become a Kavi, Rishi, or Seer:

The veil is torn, the thinker is no more:

Only the spirit sees and all is known.⁵

Now this Spirit's vision can be had only in the Superconscient. But what is this Superconscient? Well, as regards the total constitution of our being, viz., the Inconscient, the Subconscient, the subliminal Intraconscient, the subliminal Circumconscient, and the Waking State, they do not suffice to give a full account of what we really are. For there is a range of being and consciousness that greatly transcends all these elements of our constitution, something which is super-conscient to all the other provinces of our existence:

¹Savitri, p. 161. ²Jbia\, p. 276. ³Ibid. ⁴Ibid, p. 260.

⁵Ibid, p. 571.

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Out of the inconscient and subliminal

Arisen, we live in mind's uncertain light-

Above us dwells a superconscient god

Hidden in the mystery of his own light.⁶

So we should see the nature of sight in those superconscient regions of our being.

If and when we pierce the veil of our limiting mind-consciousness and enter into the superconscient region, we find there various worlds of cosmic existence: there are too, be it noted, various corresponding planes of our subjective consciousness. Here is a passage from Sri Aurobindo's The Synthesis of Yoga which throws light on the point we have been discussing:

... they are as if a ladder plunging down into Matter and perhaps below it, rising up into the heights of the Spirit, even perhaps to the point at which existence escapes out of cosmic being into ranges of a supracosmic Absolute.⁷

It is worth quoting in this connection a passage from Sri Aurobindo's The Life Divine which makes clear to us the constitution of the superconscient realm:

... from the point of view of the ascent of consciousness from our mind upwards through a rising series of dynamic powers by which it cam sublimate itself, the gradation can be resolved into a stairway of four main ascents, each with its high level of fulfilment. These gradations may be summarily described as a series of sublimations of the consciousness through Higher Mind, Illumined Mind and Intuition into Overmind and beyond it; there is a succession of self-transmutations at the summit of which lies the Supermind or Divine Gnosis.⁸

Now the ascending sight of the sadhaka undergoes a progressive transformation as it mounts the ladder of the four-rung 'Spiritual Mind' series. We describe in a brief outline the nature of sight in each of the four levels represented by (i) the Higher Mind, (ii) the Illumined Mind, (iii) the Intuitive Mind, and (iv) the Overmind. But before that let us enjoy the rasa of a significant passage from Savitri:

A vision came of higher realms than ours,

⁶Ibid., p. 484. ⁷The Synthesis of Yoga, SABCL, Vol. 20, p. 438.

⁸The Life Divine, SABCL, Vol. 19, p. 938.

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A consciousness of brighter fields and skies,

Of beings less circumscribed than brief-lived men

And subtler bodies than these passing frames,

Objects too fine for our material grasp,

Acts vibrant with a superhuman light.⁹

Sight in the Spiritual Mind Planes

To recapitulate: Once we cross the confines of the normal mind of man, we meet on our ascending climb a series of hierarchised luminous planes of consciousness serving as links and bridges between the now normal waking mind of non-spiritual humanity and the native heights of pure spiritual being. These planes are in their ascending order:

(i) the Higher Mind; (ii) the Illumined Mind; (iii) the Intuitive Mind; (iv) the Overmind; and finally (v) the Supermind or Gnosis, this last being the plane of absolute and everlasting Light, that transcends altogether the aparardha or the lower hemisphere of existence. Here are some Savitri verses referring to these supernal planes:

He raised his eyes to unseen spiritual heights.¹⁰

A vision lightened on the viewless heights.¹¹

On summit Mind are radiant altitudes

Exposed to the lustre of Infinity,

Outskirts and dependencies of the house of Truth,

Upraised estates of Mind and measureless.¹²

Sight in the Higher Mind

The Higher Mind is the first plane of spiritual mind-consciousness to which the first ascent out of four normal mentality takes us. This is a mind of automatic and spontaneous knowledge, knowledge assuming the nature of Truth-Thought. Its most characteristic movement is a mass-ideation, a totality of truth-seeing in a single view. The relation of idea with idea, of truth with truth is not established by logic but emerges already self-seen in the integral whole. Thought in the Higher Mind is not an acquired knowledge but a self-revelation of eternal

⁹Savitri, p. 28. ^l0Ibid, p. 76. ¹¹Ibid, p. 42.

¹²Ibid, p. 659.

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Wisdom. For, we must not forget, "thought in itself in its origin on the higher levels of consciousness, is a perception,... a powerful but ... secondary result of spiritual vision..."¹³ Now a few verses form Savitri depicting the sight in the Higher Mind:

There Mind, a splendid sun of vision's rays,

Shaped substance by the glory of its thoughts.¹⁴

Idea rotated symphonies of sight.¹⁵

The immortal's thoughts displaced our bounded view.¹⁶

Illumined by a vision in the thought.¹⁷

A cosmic Thought spreads out its vastitudes.¹⁸

Sight in the Illumined Mind

Beyond the plane of the Higher Mind of Truth-thought lies the plane of the Illumined Mind of Truth-sight, which works primarily by spiritual vision and not by thought: thought is here only a subordinate and secondary movement expressive of sight.

Now some illustrative verses from Sri Aurobindo's Savitri:

An empyrean vision saw and knew.¹⁹

Whence it shoots the arrows of its sight and will.²⁰

Whose fire bums in the eyes of seer and sage;

A lightning flash of visionary sight.²¹

There dwelling all becomes a blaze of sight;

A burning head of vision leads the mind,

Thought trails behind it its long comet tail;

The heart glows an illuminate and seer.²²

Sight in the Intuitive Mind

Next in the order of ascension is the Intuitive Mind whose characteristic power is an intimate and exact Truth-perception which arises out of a revealing encounter between the subject and the object,

¹³The Life Divine, SABCL, Vol. 19, p. 945.

¹⁴Savitri, p. 327. ¹⁵Ibid, p. 301. ¹⁶Ibid, p. 529.

¹⁷Ibid, p. 176. ¹⁸Ibid, p. 659. ¹⁹Ibid, p. 25

²⁰Ibid., p. 529. ²¹Ibid., p. 627. ²²Ibid, p. 660.

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carrying in it as its natural consequence a Truth-sight and Truth-conception. Thought in the Intuitive Mind is revelatory in character.

Here are some verses from Savitri indicating how sight functions in this Intuitive Mind plane:

Sight's lightnings leaped into the invisible.²³

Nothing escaped his vast intuitive sight.²⁴

Intuition's lightnings range in a bright pack

Hunting all hidden truths out of their lairs.²⁵

Its fiery edge of seeing absolute

Cleaves into locked unknown retreats of self...

Thought there has revelation's sun-bright eyes.²⁶

Sight in the Overmind

Beyond the plane of the Intuitive Mind is a superconscient cosmic Mind which possesses a power of cosmic consciousness, a principle of global knowledge. In the wide cosmic perception of the Overmind,

Ideas are phalanxed like a group of sums;

Thought crowds in masses seized by one regard;

All Time is one body, Space a single book:

There is the Godhead's universal gaze

And there the boundaries of immortal Mind.²⁷

In the Overmind "all inner individual sight or intelligence of things is now a revelation or illumination of what is seen or comprehended, but the source of the revelation is not in one's separate self but in the universal knowledge."²⁸

Here are some verses from Savitri characterising the sight in the Overmind:

His boundless thought was neighbour to cosmic sight: A universal light was in his eyes.²⁹

... eyes of boundless thought.³⁰

²³lbid., p. 31. ²⁴Ibid., p. 96. ²⁵Ibid., p. 660. ²⁶Ibid.

²⁷Ibid., ²⁸The Life Divine, SABCL, Vol. 19, p. 950.

²⁹Savitri, p. 79. ³⁰Ibid,, p. 335.

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AH came at once into his single view.³¹

It enveloped all Nature in a single glance.³²

It was sight and thought in one all-seeing Mind.³³

Mind was a single innumerable look.³⁴

... the stretch and blaze of cosmic Sight.³⁵

A cosmic vision, a spiritual sense

Feels all the Infinite lodged in finite form.³⁶

Sight of the Overmental Gods

Immobile, seeing the milleniums pass.³⁷

They look on our struggle with impartial eyes.³⁸

The gods who watch the earth with sleepless eyes.³⁹

Unmoved their timeless wide unchanging gaze.⁴⁰

And look impassive on a suffering world,

Calm they gaze down on the little human scene.⁴¹

Spiritual Sight

We have been discussing the nature of sight and vision in the superconscient Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuitive Mind and Overmind levels of consciousness. Now all these sights are called 'Spiritual Sights'. Here a vague question may perhaps trouble the mind of some readers. Why are we taking care to term the cognitions in the superconscient planes as 'sights' and not purely and simply as 'knowledge' ? The question needs some clarifying answer at this point. Sri Aurobindo himself has discussed this specific point at many places in The Life Divine, The Synthesis of Yoga, Letters on Yoga. We give below a summary of his observations.

A mental figure or conception is not what is called a 'realisation' or a 'seeing'. It is no better than an indirect knowledge, paroksa. What is needed is a direct vision of the truth without the need of

³¹Ibid, p. 96. ³²Ibid, p. 26. ³³Ibid, p. 555. ³⁴Ibid, p. 556.

³⁵Ibid, p. 661. ³⁶Ibid, p. 662. ³⁷Ibid, p. 57. ³⁸Ibid.

39Ibid,. p.587. ⁴⁰lbid, p. 574. ⁴¹Ibid, p. 428.

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observation of the object, reasoning, evidence, imagination, memory or any other of the usual faculties of intellect. Now the spiritual vision, drsti, is a sort of light in the soul by which things unseen become as evident and real to it as do things physically seen to the physical eye. "It is only when after long and persistent concentration or by other means the veil of the mind is rent or swept aside, only when a flood of light breaks over the awakened mentality... and conception gives place to a knowledge-vision in which the Self is as present, real, concrete as a physical object to the physical eye, that we possess in knowledge; for we have seen."⁴²

This sight or drsti is to the Spirit what the eyes are to the physical mind and, Sri Aurobindo emphasises, "one has the sense of having passed through a subtly analogous process."⁴³

The ancient sages of India highly valued this power of internal spiritual vision; for, only this can make man a Rishi, a Kavi, or a Seer, and no longer a mere thinker.

We now quote here certain verses from Savitri which bring out in clear outline the nature of (i) the "seer's sight", (ii) the "spiritual sight", and (iii) the "spirit's sight".

Seer's Sight

My mind transfigures to a rapturous seer.⁴⁴

A Seer was bom, a shining guest of Time.^4S

It looked into the very self of things;

Deceived no more by form he saw the soul.⁴⁶

Transmitting gave to prophet and to seer

The inspired body of the mystic Truth.⁴⁷

Through vision looks at the invisible.⁴⁸

A seer, he has entered the forbidden reakms...

Armed with the golden speech, the diamond eye.⁴⁹

⁴²The Synthesis of Yoga, SABCL, Vol. 19, p. 291.

⁴³Ibid, p. 803. ⁴⁴Savitri, p. 408. ⁴⁵Ibid, p. 25.

⁴⁶Ibid, p. 26. ⁴⁷Ibid, p. 39. ⁴⁸Ibid, p. 398.

⁴⁹Ibid. p. 681.

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Spiritual Sight

It needs the power of a spiritual gaze.⁵⁰

The carved thought-shrouded doors to swing apart,

Unlocked the avenues of spiritual sight.⁵¹

Unsealed was Nature's great spiritual eye.⁵²

His sight, spiritual in embodying orbs,

Could pierce through the grey phosphorescent haze

And scan the secrets of the shifting flux.⁵³

... immediacy of errorless sight.⁵⁴

... its vision of one same stupendous All.⁵⁵

A gaze of the Alone from every face.⁵⁶

Her eyes were turned towards the eternal source.⁵⁷

Now to the limitless gaze disclosed that sees

Things barred from human thinking's earthly lids.⁵⁸

Thence gazing with an immeasurable outlook

One with self s inlook... ⁵⁹

His knowledge an inview caught unfathomable,

An outview by no brief horizons out.⁶⁰

Spirit's Sight

The Unseen's eye that looks at the unseen.⁶¹

Hardly the spirit's vision can descry

Dimmed by the imperfection of its means.⁶²

Mystic, ineffable is the Spirit's truth,

Unspoken, caught only by the spirit's eye.⁶³

Who sees life's drama pass with unmoved eyes.⁶⁴

⁵⁰Ibid, p. 49. ⁵¹Ibid, p. 267. ⁵²Ibid, p. 572. ⁵³Ibid, p. 256-57.

⁵⁴Ibid, p. 683. ⁵⁵Ibid., p. 298. ⁵⁶Ibid, p. 298. ⁵⁷Ibid, p. 272.

⁵⁸Ibid, p. 382. ⁵⁹Ibid, p. 35. ⁶⁰Ibid, p. 301. ⁶¹Ibid, p. 470.

⁶²Ibid, p. 138. ⁶³Ibid, p. 501. ⁶⁴Ibid, p. 665.

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Vision in the Higher Hemisphere

Beyond the Reach of Sight

The central theme of our essay is the study of the itinerary of the ascent of sight. Following this course we travel from the "sightless sight" of the Inconscient up to the "cosmic gaze" of the Overmind. But all these belong to what was called by the ancient Indian mystics the "Lower Hemisphere" of our existence. But the reach of the Reality far transcends the borders of this Overmind zone of consciousness.

Now there are unified principles of the Divine, viz., the Existence principle (Sat), the Consciousness-Force principle (Chit-Shakti) and the Bliss principle (Ananda), and finally a fourth principle Supermind (Mahas or Vijnana). These four supernal principles constitute the "Higher Hemisphere" of our being. Now the question is: Can sight travel to this Higher Hemisphere, or it has to stop at the upper border of the Overmind? Already the Rishi of the Isha Upanishad complained that the golden Overmind was blocking his vision from advancing farther upward. In fact, this Overmind links the lower hemisphere of Knowledge-Ignorance with the supramental Gnosis or Truth-Consciousness, but at the same time veils from our sight the greater Truth of the Supermind. The Cosmic Vision of this overmental plane of consciousness, proceeding luminously from the truth, constituted the "golden lid covering the face of the truth" (hiraṇmayeṇa pātreṇa satyasyāpihitaṃ mukhaṃ) (Isha Upanishad, Verse 15). In order to seize the Truth in its unalloyed and unmitigated glory, we have to make a last supreme ascent in the climb of our spiritual consciousness and break through the shining shield or Overmind into the realm of the supramental Gnosis. But will our power of sight be able to follow the climb of our consciousness into the four-rung zone of the higher hemisphere? Apparently not. Our "mortal" sight which has functioned in different ways on all the levels up to the Overmind abruptly avows its impotence and bows out. Conclusion: All that is above and beyond may be an object of knowledge but surely not of vision. This is apparently supported by the following verses of Savitri:

Veiled by the Ray no mortal eye can bear.⁶⁵

⁶⁵Ibid, p. 57.

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...thought and sight can never know.⁶⁶

But what That was, no thought or sight could tell.⁵⁷

Beyond the sight, the last support of form.⁶⁸

An Omniscient knowing without sight or thought.⁶⁹

But for sight the situation may not be so hopeless as that. For already the Vedic seers indicated that in the Supermind of the higher hemisphere one does not see the truth "by reflection in a mental organ of vision, but with the Sun of gnosis itself as his eye."⁷⁰

So, can it be that sight itself will undergo a supreme transformation and appear in another essence in the divine world? The following passage from one of Sri Aurobindo's letters leads us to believe that the answer may indeed be a "yes":

The supermind is an entirely different consciousness not only from the spiritualised Mind, but from the planes above spiritualised Mind intervene between it and the supramental plane. Once one passes beyond overmind to supermind, one enters into a consciousness to which the norms of the other planes do not at all apply and in which the same Truth, e.g. Sachchidananda and truth of this universe, is seen in quite a different way and has a different dynamic consequence.⁷¹

So there can possibly be a "supramental sight" in the higher hemisphere far beyond the overmental zone which represents the last rung of the lower hemisphere and closes the series in the Ignorance. But before we come to the charactrisation of this supramental sight, it would be better for our appreciation if we dwell a little longer on what the two hemispheres of existence actually signify.

Hemispheres of Existence

Our total being has a higher and a lower hemisphere of functioning, the parārdha and the aparardha of the ancient mystic Wisdom. There is a separation between these two hemispheres, very much acute in practice although unreal in essence.

⁶⁶Ibid, p. 91. ⁶⁷ Ibid, p. 308. ⁶⁸Ibid, p. 320. ⁶⁹Ibid, p. 81.

⁷⁰Tke Synthesis of Yoga, SABCL, Vol. 20, p. 462.

⁷¹Letters on Yoga, SABCL, Vol. 22, pp. 240-41.

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In reality, the origin, the continent, the initial and the ultimate truth of all that is easily anywhere in the universe is the triune principle of Sachchidananda: it is a transcendent and infinite and absolute Existence-Consciousness-Bliss which is the very nature of the divine Being.

Thus Sachchidananda is the One with a triple aspect of functioning differently in three statuses.

In the Supreme the three are not three but one. Existence, Consciousness and Bliss are there not only inseparable but so much each other that they are not distinct at all.

In the superior planes of manifestation in the higher hemisphere they become triune; that is to say, although they remain inseparable, one aspect can make itself more prominent and base or lead the others.

In the lower planes below in the lower hemisphere, they become separable and even separate in appearance, though not in their secret reality.

Sachchidanand can be experienced in either of its two aspects, static and dynamic. But the "full dynamic truth of Sachchidananda and the universe and its consequence cannot be grasped by any other consciousness than the supermind."⁷²

Sachchidananda contains all in a passive transcendent consciousness but becomes, sustains and governs everything by an active constituting consciousness.

The higher hemisphere is the realm of the Spirit's perfect and eternal reign. There it manifests its infinities, the unconcealed glories of its illimitable existence (Sat), its illimitable consciousness and knowledge (Chit), its illimitable force and power (Shakti) and its illimitable beatitude (Ananda).

The creative action of Sachchidananda, of the Existence-Consciousness-Bliss Absolute, has its centre in a fourth principle called Supermind (Mahas or Vijnana). Thus Supermind is between the Sachchidananda and the lower creation. It alone contains the self-determining Truth of the Divine Consciousness and is necessary for a Truth-creation.

Supermind is Sachchidananda's "... power of self-awareness and world-awareness, the world being known as within itself and not outside.... [It is] 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

⁷²Letters on Yoga, SABCL, Vol. 22, p. 241.

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knowledge by identity, by that the Self is known, the Divine Sachchidananda is known, but also the truth of manifestation is known, because this too is That.⁷³

Thus the Supermind is the divine Gnosis which creates, governs and upholds the worlds. And it is the supramental power that transforms our mind, life and body—not the Sachchidananda consciousness which supports impartially everything.

Mind, Life and Matter which constitute the lower hemisphere of existence are a triple aspect of the higher principles of the upper hemisphere but working here in subjection to the principle of Ignorance, and in apparent self-forgetfulness of the divine One in his play of division and multiplicity.

The lower being begins where a veil falls between Spirit in Supermind and Spirit in Mind, Life and Body. (Note: This whole section" Hemispheres of Existence" is a free adaptation of various passages from Sri Aurobindo's The Life Divine, The Synthesis of Yoga and Letters on Yoga.)

Here are just a few verses from Savitri referring to this divine Gnosis, the Supermind:

Now mind is all and its uncertain ray,

Mind is the leader of the body and life,

Mind the thought-driven chariot of the soul-

Mind is not all his tireless climb can reach,

There is a fire on the apex of the worlds,

There is a house of the Eternal's Light,

There is an infinite truth, an absolute power...

There is a consciousness mind cannot touch,

Its speech cannot utter nor its thought reveal.

It has no home on earth, no centre in man,

Yet is the source of all things thought and done,

The fount of the creation and its works.

It is the originer of all truth here.⁷⁴

There is a world of everlasting Light,

In the realms of the immortal Supermind

Truth who hides here her head in mystery,

Her riddle deemed by reason impossible

In the stark structure of material form,

⁷³Ibid, pp. 242-43.

¹⁴Savitri, pp.704-05.

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Unenigmaed lives, unmasked her face and there Is Nature and the common law of things.⁷⁵

Supramental Sight

Knowledge by identity between the subject and the object, between the seer and the seen is the basic attribute of the supramental gnosis but this supramental knowledge or experience by identity carries in it as a secondary part of itself a supramental vision. This vision can come even before there is any identity, as a sort of emanation of light from this secret underlying unity. This vision may at times be detached from the identity as a separate power. The truth or the thing known is then felt as an object subjectively seen in the self.

The supramental eye can see a hundred converging and diverging motions in one glance.

It can envelope in its harmonising vision all that seems to our fragmenting mind nothing but clash and opposition and the collision and strife of numberless contending truths and forces.

Truth to the supramental sight is at the same time single and infinite and the complexities of its play in time and space bring out with an abundant facility the rich significances of the Eternal's many-sided oneness.

The supramental gnosis starts from the truth and shows the appearances in the light of the truth. It sees the thing in itself first, penetrates to its original and eternal essence and nature, and places its processes and properties only as a self-expression of this fundamental nature. Thus the supramental vision would see not merely the thing but all its truths, forces and powers and all the eternities within it.

The supramental gnosis has the direct contact, the immediate vision and the undiluted possession of the truth and has no need of seeking any kind of procedure. The conclusion, if any, would be seen at once in its own right, by its own self-sufficient witness. All the so-called evidence would be seen too at once, along with it, in the same comprehensive figure, not at all as its 'evidence' but as its inseparable 'wings of circumstance.'

The supramental gnosis dwells in the unity and knows by it all the very various diversities. These diversities are to it not diversities making up a constructed unity but a unity constituting its own multitudes.

⁷⁵Ibid., pp. 661-62.

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The supramental gnosis lives in the infinite and views finite things only in their relation to the infinite and in the sense of the infinite and never as something divorced and different from the infinite.

Finally the supramental gnosis dominates time in one view and links past, present and future in a single continuous map of knowledge, and in an unpartitioned time-vision. (Note. This introductory section on "Supramental Sight" is adapted from various passages of Sri Aurobindo's writings.)

Now, as usual, we quote below some illustrative verses from Savitri showing the character of supramental sight,

Above the stretch and blaze of cosmic Sight.⁷⁶

A universal vision that unites.⁷⁷

All was uncovered to his sealless eye.⁷⁸

Spirit no more is hid from its own view.⁷⁹

A single and infallible look comes down.⁸⁰

A wide tower of vision whence all could be seen

And all was centred in a single view.⁸¹

He is the vision and he is the seer.⁸²

A kindling rapture joins the seer and seen.⁸³

Sight was a flame-throw from identity.⁸⁴

This seeing was identical with the seen.⁸⁵

A plan in the occult eternal Mind

Mapped out to backward and prophetic sight.⁸⁶

The long flow of its manifesting course

Was held in spirit's single wide regard.⁸⁷

Bare in that Light Time toiled, his unseen works

Detected, the broad-flung far-seeing schemes

Unfinished which his aeoned flight unrolls

Were mapped already in that world-wide look.⁸⁸

⁷⁶Ibid, p. 661. ⁷⁷Ibid, p. 325. ⁷⁸Ibid, p.83. ⁷⁹Ibid, p. 442.

⁸⁰Ibid, p. 325. ⁸¹Ibid, p. 514. ⁸²Ibid, p. 546. ^83Ibid, p. 83.

⁸⁴Ibid, p. 61. ⁸⁵Ibid, p. 342. ⁸⁶Ibid, p. 342 . ⁸⁷Ibid, p. 299.

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Divine's Self-Vision

The ascending march of sight continues even beyond the supramental gnosis and arrives at the point where the cosmic manifestation has not yet begun and the static Sachchidananda is still absorbed in himself. What is the nature of sight there?

By adapting what Sri Aurobindo has said in his commentary on the Isha Upanishad we may venture to say that we arrive, in the status of non-manifestation, at the light of the supreme superconscient in which even the intuitive knowledge of the truth of things based upon the total and integral vision—so characteristic of the supramental sight—passes into self-luminous self-vision of the one Existent. This status of sight is referred to in the following verses from Sri Aurobindo's Savitri:

Inspired by silence and the closed eyes' sight.⁸⁹

Watched by closed eyes, mute faces of the Unborn.⁹⁰

All light is but a flash from his closed eyes.⁹¹

The eyes with their closed lids that see all things.⁹²

We remember here the significant utterance of the Katha Upanishad: "For all that is bright is but the shadow of His brightness and by His shining all this shines."

(Sri Aurobindo's translation of the Upanishadic verse: tameva bhāntaṃ anubhāti sarvaṃ tasya bhāsā sarvam idam vibhāti.)

Then Sachchidananda 'decides' to initiate manifestation and opens his eyes. How does his gaze look like? Let these verses from Savitri speak:

His gaze was the regard of eternity.⁹³

A diamond purity of eternal sight.⁹⁴

... the Omniscienet's eyes.⁹⁵

Sachchidananda becomes the 'sole Seer' (ekarshi, Isha Upanishad); he is the only dṛshtā, "He alone who sees." To cite a telling aphorism of Patanjali: tada drastur svarupe avasthanam, "The Seer dwells then m His own status." His unblinking Eye shines extended in the heavens:

⁸⁹Ibid, p. 36. ⁹⁰Ibid, p. 80. ⁹¹Ibid, p. 681. ⁹²Ibid, p. 41.

⁹³ Ibid., p.682. ⁹⁴Ibid, p. 297. ⁹⁵Ibid, p. 691.

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divivā cakṣur atatam. (Rig Veda,). Here are some relevant Savitri verses:

... a still all-seeing Eye above.⁹⁶

And intolerant flames the lone all-witnessing Eye.⁹⁷

... the movement watched by an unsleeping Eye.⁹⁸

... in the vigil of a deathless gaze.⁹⁹

And guards the world with its all-seeing gaze.¹⁰⁰

An Eye immense regarding all things done.¹⁰¹

The Divine's Cosmic Vision

The Manifestation begins; the worlds are created. The passive Sachchidanda is now in his role of all-watching, all-governing Cosmic Purusha. To quote Sri Aurobindo: "The Brahman consciousness... is not the Absolute withdrawn into itself, but that Absolute in its outlook on the relative; it is the Lord, the Master-Soul, the governing Transcendent and AH."¹⁰² He is the samam brahma, "the Brahman with unbounded equal vision" of the Gita: Here are some Savitri verses which strikingly bring out this impartial all-governing vision of the Divine in his dealing with the cosmos:

Heaven's fixed regard beholds him from above.¹⁰³

Impartial fell its gaze on evil and good.¹⁰⁴

All things he sees with calm indifferent gaze.¹⁰⁵

He is the one infinite Person seeing his world.¹⁰⁶

Calm eyes divine regard the human scene.¹⁰⁷

A wide unshaken look at Time's unrest.¹⁰⁸

Outspread beneath some large indifferent gaze,

Impartial witness to our joy and bale.¹⁰⁹

⁹⁶Ibid, p. 378. ⁹⁷Ibid, p. 343. ⁹⁸Ibid, p. 509. ⁹⁹Ibid, p. 99.

¹⁰⁰Ibid, p. 317. ¹⁰¹Ibid, p. 322. ¹⁰²The Upanishads, SABCL, Vol.

12, p. 198. ¹⁰³Savitri, p. 336. ¹⁰⁴Ibid, p. 283. ¹⁰⁵Ibid, p. 646.

¹⁰⁶Ibid, p. 656. ¹⁰⁷Ibid, p. 482. ¹⁰⁸Ibid, p. 36. ¹⁰⁹Ibid, p. 5.

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The Vision of the One in the Many

This is a vision every sadhaka on the Integral Path aspires for and seeks to acquire as the sure and secure point d'appui in the ups and downs of his long tortuous journey of Yoga. Indeed, the progressive elevation and enlargement of the divided and limited egoistic sight will lead the sadhaka to a harmonising vision of the One in All and of All in the One. The sadhaka is then able to see that all becoming without exception, irrespective of the plane in which it manifests, is born in the Being of Sachchidananda who himself, of course, transcends all becomings and is always their Lord, Prajāpati. Here is a passage from The Synthesis of Yoga where Sri Aurobindo speaks of the capital importance of this momentous vision of the One in All:

The one secure and all-reconciling truth which is the very foundation of the universe is this that life is the manifestation of an uncreated Self and Spirit, and the key to life's hidden secret is the true relation of this Spirit with its own created existences. There is behind all this life the look of an eternal Being upon its multitudinous becomings; there is around and everywhere in it the envelopment and penetration of a manifestation in time by an unmanifested timeless Eternal.¹¹⁰

Here is a passge from Sri Aurobindo's Savitri which pin-points in sublime verse the essential character of this vision:

A cosmic vision, a spiritual sense

Feels all the Infinite lodged in finite form

And seen through a quivering ecstasy of light

Discovers the bright face of the Bodiless,

In the truth of a moment, in the moment's soul

Can sip the honey-wine of Eternity.

A Spirit who is no one and innumerable,

The one mystic infinite Person of his world

Multiplies his myriad personality,

On all his bodies seals his divinity's stamp

And sits in each immortal and unique.

The Immobile stands behind each daily act,

A background of the movement and the scene,

Upholding creation on its might and calm

And change on the Immutable's deathless poise.

¹¹⁰The Synthesis of Yoga, SABCL, Vol. 20, pp. 106-07.

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The Timeless looks out from the travelling hours;

The Ineffable puts on a robe of speech.¹¹¹

The Vision of the Universal Spirit

This vision does not limit itself to that of the One in the All; it extends itself to cover the integral perception of the All as the One. This universe in its entirety is the very Supreme Self figured in cosmic existence. The vision of the universal Purusha offers the sadhaka a concrete living sight, in vivid images, of the visible greatness of the invisible Divine. The sadhaka can then see the whole world related and unified in the very Body of the Divine. The Soul admitted to this awe-inspiring vision beholds all things in one view, not with a divided, partial, and therefore bewildered seeing of the mental consciousness, but with the all-embracing and therefore all-reconciling courageous vision of the heroic spirit. For the happy consequence of this vision of the Universal Spirit we may read with interest the following passage from Sri Aurobindo's Essays on the Gita:

It is this vision that... liberates, justifies, explains all that is and was and shall be. Once seen and held, it lays the shining axe of God at the root of all doubts and perplexities and annihilates all denials and oppositions. It is the vision that reconciles and unifies. If the soul can arrive at unity with the Godhead in this vision... all even that is terrible in the world loses its terror.¹¹²

Now let us take a joyous dip into some verses of Savitri wherein Sri Aurobindo is describing how the Divine intimately manifests himself through all that is in the cosmos,

The universe writing its tremendous sense

In the inexhaustible meaning of a word.

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,

Virât, who lights his camp-fires in the suns

And the star-entangled ether is his hold,

¹¹¹Savitri, p. 662.

¹¹² Essays on the Gita, SABCL, Vol. 13, p. 364.

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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 of his tale,

Matter is his means and his spiritual sign...

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 Virât, King of kings."³

We now propose to enter the forbidden land, for we are daring to speak about the vision of the Supreme Form of the supreme Divine. But does the Divine have any form? Is he not arupa or "formless" as the monistic Vedantin would affirm?

But before attempting to discuss these tricky questions it will be better if we first clearly bring out the nature of the evolving relationship between "form" and "sight"; for, that will incidentally throw some light on the question of whether the Supreme possesses a Supreme Form of his own and, if yes, whether this Form can at all be the object of any sight whatsoever.

On Form and Sight

The very first point we have to carefully note is that "not only are the properties of form, the most obvious such as colour, light, etc., merely operations of Force, but form itself is only an operation of Force. This Force again proves to be self-power of conscious-being in a state of energy and activity. Practically, therefore, all form is only an operation of consciousness impressing itself with presentation of its own workings."¹¹⁴

Thus the form is the last derivative of an action of the consciousness. A momentous implication follows from this basic fact. Supposing there is an object with its fundamental essential reality unknown and hidden. Now a subject, a viewer, looking at the object will clothe this with a form which will vary depending on the level of consciousness the seer employs while seeing the object. We cannot

¹¹³Savitri, pp. 680-81.

¹¹⁴The Upanishads, SABCL, Vol. 12, p. 195.

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but recall here a very interesting passage of Sri Aurobindo so beautifully formulated:

Of all that we know we know only the outside; even when we imagine that we have intimately seized the innermost thing, we have touched only an inner external. It is still a sheath of the covering, only it is a second or third or even a seventh sheath [and] not the most outward and visible.¹¹⁵

Thus the forms seen by a particular seer may not be the ordinary vision of man:

Forms he descried our mortal eyes see not.¹¹⁶

Aware of forms to which our eyes are closed.¹¹⁷

A sight opened upon the invisible

And sensed the shapes that mortal eyes see not.¹¹⁸

But forms of whatever subtlety and elevation they be need not always remain an inseparable accompaniment of vision; shapes need not bind the sight always:

Into a vision that surpasses forms."⁹

My vision saw unblinded by her forms.¹²⁰

Shape the convention bound no more her sight.¹²¹

But sight has the inherent tendency to clothe itself with images, images not surely gross and physical in all cases; but however subtle and sublime and elevated these images may be, they stand as a bar to the ungarbed vision of the truth. Hence a point is reached when the vision in its aspiration after the bare body of the truth seeks to distance itself from the pursuit of the imaged sight:

Here vision fled back from the sight alarmed.¹²²

But even if it is not an "imaged form", some form there must be in every act of vision and sight. Indeed, there are, as we have hinted before, forms and forms of an ever ascending order reaching up to the extreme border of manifestation. For forms are manifestations in

¹¹⁵Essays Divine and Human, C WS A, Vol. 12, p. 188. ¹¹⁶Savitri, p. 44.

¹¹⁷Ibid, p. 356. ¹¹⁸Ibid, p. 540. ¹¹⁹lbid, p. 32.

¹²⁰Ibid, p. 401. ¹²¹Ibid, p. 695. ¹²²Ibid, p. 604.

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Time and Space of something real, not arbitrary inventions out of nothing. Therefore the essentials of form carry always in them secret values and significances of an unseen reality made visible and sensible. In Sri Aurobindo's words: "Form may be said to be the innate body, the inevitable self-revelation of the formless, and this is true not only of external shapes, but of the unseen formations of mind and life which we seize only by our thought and those sensible forms of which only the subtle grasp of the inner consciousness can become aware."¹²³ But still there has to be a limiting finis to this ascending march of vision and therefore of shapes and forms. When one reaches the horizons of manifestation, standing on the dividing line of separation between manifestation and non-manifestation, one seems to discover that sight and form cannot cross the line and one is left with a pure perception alone and if this ends the whole nāmarūpatmakaṃjagat, the world of names and forms, vanishes into nothingness.

Let us pause for a moment at this critical juncture of the ascension and savour instead the beauty of the description given by Sri Aurobindo in his Savitri:

His soul abandoned the blind star-field, Space.

Afar from all that makes the measured world,

Plunging to hidden eternities it withdrew

Back from mind's foaming surface to the Vasts

Voiceless within us in omniscient sleep.

Above the imperfect reach of word and thought,

Beyond the sight, the last support of form,

Lost in deep tracts of superconscient Light.¹²⁴

A pure perception was the only power

That stood behind her action and her sight.

If that retired, all objects would be extinct,

Her private universe would cease to be.¹²⁵

Yet something was there behind the fading scene;

Wherever she turned, at whasoever she looked,

It was perceived, yet hid from mind and sight.

The One only real shut itself from Space

¹²³The Life Divine, SABCL, Vol.18, pp. 337-38.

¹²⁴Savitri, p. 320. ¹²⁵Ibid, p. 546,

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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.

This only could justify the labour of sight,

But sight could not define for it a form.¹²⁶

Have we them at last reached the end of the ascent of sight which has been the running theme of our essay? Is there indeed no form, no sight in the Transcendent Absolute? Yet it is a fact that Sri Aurobindo speaks at times of "deatless forms", of "forms in the Eternal's gaze," and of "self-bom shapes":

Vision reposed on a safety of deathless forms.¹²⁷

Formless creator of immortal forms.¹²⁸

That live for ever in the Eternal's gaze.¹²⁹

He met the forms that divinise the sight.¹³⁰

So in puzzlement we ask ourselves the question: Is the Absolute Reality absolutely formless? Can there not be a supreme Form of the supreme Divine? A human eye, it is well understod, cannot ever hope to vision this Form but is there not a divine Eye, divya caksu, to which this supreme Form may reveal itself? Our next section will be devoted to the discusssion of this point.

Vision of the Supreme Form

A very difficult question confronts us: Whether the Divine has an original supraphysical Form and power of form from which all other forms proceed, or is eternally formless.

The normal conception of the Infinite Being is formlessness but can he not be at once Form and the Formless? For the apparent contrdiction does not correspond to a real opposition and incompatibility. For, the Formless is not an utter negation of the power of formation but the condition for the Infinite's free play of formation.

^l26Ibid, p. 547. ¹²⁷Ibid., p. 329. ¹²⁸Ibid, p. 661.

^l29Ibid, p. 109. ¹³⁰Ibid, p. 235.

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The Divine is formless but by that very reason capable of manifesting all possible shapes of being.¹³¹

As Sri Aurobindo has so trenchantly put it in his Essays Divine and Human: "Nothing can arise from Nothing. Asat, nothingness, is a creation of our mind; where it cannot see or conveive, where its object is something beyond its grasp, too much beyond to give even the sense of a vague intangible, then it cries out 'Here there is nothing.' Out of its own incapacity it has created the conception of a Zero. But what in turth is this zero? It is an incalculable Infinite."¹³²

But the doubting reader may still raise a valid question here: Granted that the Formless has given rise to all these myraid forms, but does it follow from that that the Formless itself has a form of its own? In answer to the misgivings on this score expreseed by one of his disciples Sri Aurobindo once remarked that even if the Formless logically precedes Form, yet it is not illogical to assume that in the Formless itself Form is inherent and already existent in a mystic latency; also it would be equally logical to assume that there is an eternal Form of Krishna, a spirit body. Sri Aurobindo further worte:

As for the highest Reality it is no doubt Absolute Existence, but is it only that? Abslute Existence as an abstraction may exclude everything else from itself and amount to a sort of very positive zero; but Absolute Existence as a reality who shall define and say what is or is not in its inconceivable depths, its illimitable Mystery?¹³³

However, leaving aside all metaphysical debate and any misplaced zeal to score a point, which is not after all the purpose of the present essay, let us proceed to the attentive reading of a very sublime passage of Sri Aurobindo's Savitri which describes the austere and heroic attempt of the Mahayogi Aswapati to have a vision of the Ultimate Form and its spiritual afterfmath.

Aswapati's soul was passing on "towards the end which ever begins again."¹³⁴ It was approaching "the source of all things human and divine." Far beyond the zone of "nameless Gods", even beyond the Abode of Ishwara-Ishwari, "the deathless Two-in-One", "a single

¹³¹ Adaptation from The Life Divine, SABCL, Vol. 18, p. 337.

¹³²Essays Divine and Human, CWSA, Vol. 12, p. 188.

¹³³Letters on Yoga, SABCL, Vol. 22, p. 83.

¹³⁴Savitri, p. 295.

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being in two bodies clasped", who "seated absorbed in deep creative joy" sustained "the mobile world", at the fount of all stood

Who brought them forth from the Unknowable.

Ever disguised she awaits the seeking spirit;

Watcher on the supreme unreachable peaks,

Guide of the traveller of the unseen paths,

She guards the austee approach to the Alone....

Above them all she stands supporting all,

The sole omnipotent Goddess ever-veiled

Of whom the world is the inscrutable mask;

The ages are the footfalls of her tread,

Their happenings the figure of her thoughts,

And all creation is her endless act.¹³⁵

What did Aswapati do then and what followed?

Mute in the fathomless passion of his will

He outstrtched to her his folded hands of prayer.

Then in a sovereign answer to his heart

A gesture came as of worlds thrown away,

And from her raimment's lustrous mystery raised

One arm half-parted the eternal veil.

A light appeared still and imperishable.

Attracted to the large and luminous depths

Of the ravishing enigma of her eyes,

He saw the mustic outline of a face.¹³⁶

And what was the effect of this vision on Aswapti?

Overwhelmed by her implacable light and bliss,

An atom of her illimitable self

Mastered by the honey and lightning of her power,

Tossed towards the shores of her ocean ecstasy,

Drunk with a deep golden spiritual wine,

He cast from the rent stillness of his soul

A cry of adoration and desire

And the surrender of his boundless mind

And the self-giving of his silent heart.

He fell down at her feet unconscious, prone.¹³⁷

¹³⁵Ibid, p. 295. ^l36lbid, pp. 295-96. ¹³⁷Ibid, p. 296.

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"He fell down at her feet unconscious, prone." We may recall in this conection the stem warning uttered by the supreme Lord to Moses, so that the latter might not try to go near Him and 'see' Him in his original Form. For no consciousness lodged in any material embodiment can ever succeed in doing so. So Moses 'heard' the Lord from beyond the burning bush. {Exodus, 3)

But this inability, although universal now, need not remain a permanent trait of all terrestial being. For "all life is fixrd in an ascending scale"¹³⁸ and as "adamantine is the evolving Law"¹³⁹ in the march of the progressive evolution of consciousness, the instrumental transformation also is bound to follow ushering in its wake the development of a New Sight, the divine sight which will be capable of seizing the supreme Form. And this thought and high hope on our part leads us to our next and final Section.

Sight: Its Future Apotheosis

We have at last come to the end of our essay. Although the survey has been rather brief given the scope and importance of the subject, we have been, we hope, able to cover the entire ground, albeit in bare outline. But the question is: Does the 'sight' too end its itineary here? Or, who knows, has it any further evolutionary prospect?

As Sri Aurobindo's Yoga is a Yoga of Integral Transformation, it is understood that it is not merely the inner consciousness which has to undergo divine transformation; even the outer physical system of man, including all its forms and functions, has to submit itself to the unrelenting process of supramental transformation. Sri Aurobindo affirms in one of his last prose writings, The Divine Body, published in 1949 as follows:

These and other numerous potentialities might appear and the body become an instrument immeasurably superior to what we can now imagine as possible. There could be an evolution from a first apprehending truth-consciousness to the utmost heights of the ascending ranges of supermind and it may pass the borders of supermind proper itself where it begins to shadow out, develop, delineate expressive forms of life touched by a supreme pure Existence, consciousness bliss... The transformation of the physical being might follow this incessant line of progression

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and the divine body reflect or reproduce here in a divine life on the earth something of this highest greatness and glory of the self-manifesting Spirit.¹⁴⁰

Of course, it is the consciousness within that has first to change; for, our means and ways of knowledge and action must necessarily be according to the nature of our consciousness and "it is the consciousness that must radically change if we are to command and not only be occasionally visited by that higher power of knowledge."¹⁴¹

Be that as it may, we can very well visualise that in the overall transformation of the physical system the sense of sight will not be faulted and excepted: this too will have the privilege of undergoing a supremely divine transfiguration.

Now what will be the results of this supramentalisation of sight? Sri Aurobindo has dealt with this question quite in detail in the chapter . entitled The Supramental Sense in his book The Synthesis of Yoga. What follows below is an abridged adapatation of his observations.

The lifting of the level of consciousness from the mind to the supermind and the consequent transformation of the being from the state of the mental to that of the supramental Purusha must bring with it a transformation of all the parts of the nature and all its activities. "There is accordingly a change, a profound transformation in the physical sense, a supramentalising of the physical sight, hearing, touch, etc." that will reveal to us "a quite different view, not merely of life and its meaning, but even of the material world and all its forms and aspects."

The supramental eye will get a new and transfigured vision: its sight will acquire "an extraordinary totality and an immediate and embracing precision in which the whole and every detail [will] stand out at once in the complete harmony and vividness of the significance meant by Nature in the object."

In the supramental seeing one will feel as if "it were the sight of the supreme divine Poet and Artist in which we were participating and there were given to us the full seeig of his truth and intention in his design of the universe and of each thing in the universe."

There will be an unlimited intensity which will make all that is seen "a revelation of the glory of quality and idea and form and colour." The very physical eye will seem them "to carry in itself a spirit and a

¹⁴⁰The Supramental Manifestation, SABCL, Vol.16, p. 40.

¹⁴¹The Synthesis of Yoga, SABCL, Vol. 20, p. 473.

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consciousness which sees not only the physical aspect of object but the soul of quality in it, the vibration of energy, the light and force and spiritual substance of which it is made."

In this vision of the supramental eye there will always be the revelation of "the soul of the thing seen and of the universal Spirit that is expressing itself in this objective form of its own conscious being."

There will be at the same time a subtle change which will make the sight see in a sort of fourth dimension. The material object will become to this sight something different from what we see, "not a separate object on the background or in the environment of the rest of Nature, but an indivisible part... an expression of the unity of all that we see."

To the supramentalised seeing the material world and material object will cease to be material: they will be seen as spirit itself in a form of itself and a conscious extension. "The whole is a unity—the oneness unaffected by any multitudinousness of objects and details— held in and by the consciousness in a spiritual space and all substance there is conscious substance."¹⁴²

Such will be the apotheosis of sight when it gets supramentalised in course of its future evolution. Now hireare some verse from Savitri embodying the vision of the future glory of our Eye.

... the secret sight man's blindness missed.

Has opened its view past Time...¹⁴³

See with the large eye of infinity.¹⁴⁴

... a vision which had scanned immortal things.¹⁴⁵

The Supreme's gaze looked out through human eyes.¹⁴⁶

... the eyes of the Timeless might look out from Time.¹⁴⁷

The immense regard of Immortality.¹⁴⁸

Earth's seeing widen into the infinite.¹⁴⁹

And form her eyes the Eternal's bliss shall gaze.¹⁵⁰

¹⁴²The Synthesis of Yoga, SABCL, Vol. 21, pp. 836-38.

¹⁴³Savitri, p. 683. ¹⁴⁴bid, p. 696. ^l45Ibid, p. 723.

¹⁴⁶Ibid, p. 31. ^l47Ibid, p. 72. ¹⁴⁸Ibid, p. 320.

¹⁴⁹Ibid, p. 344. ¹⁵⁰Ibid, p. 346.

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The superconscient beam shall touch men's eyes.¹⁵¹

And a soul's thoughts looked out from earthbom eyes.¹⁵²

Infinity turned its gaze on finite shapes.¹⁵³

Can fill those orbs with an immortal's sight.¹⁵⁴

Infinity's vision through thy gaze shall pierce,

Thou shalt look into the eyes of the Unknown.¹⁵⁵

Yet shall they look up as to peaks of God.¹⁵⁶

His regard crossing infinity's mystic waves.¹⁵⁷

The Spirit's eyes shall look through Nature's eyes.¹⁵⁸

The Spirit shall look out through Matter's gaze.¹⁵⁹

Time's sunflowers gaze at gold Eternity.¹⁶⁰

And all earth look into the eyes of God.¹⁶¹

So the journey ends. And we are infinitely grateful to Maha-Rishi Maha-Kavi Sri Aurobindo for affording us the favour of walking in his luminous footsteps and following the long march of the ascent of sight from the "sightless sight" of the Inconscient up to the "closed eyes' sight" of the supreme Superconscient—surely not in living experience as in the case of Maha-Yogi Sri Aurobindo himself but as a meditative intellectual-cum-imaginative exercise. And that is surely no mean gain for us the ordinary mortals with our "clipped outlook" on things.

Jayatu Sri Aurobindah—Victory to Sri Aurobindo.

JUGAL KlSHORE MUKHERJEE

¹⁵¹Ibid, p. 451. ¹⁵² Ibid, p. 485. ¹⁵³ Ibid, p. 526.

¹⁵⁴Ibid, p. 370. ¹⁵⁵Ibid, p. 537. ¹⁵⁶Ibid, p.704.

^l60Ibid, p. 279. ^l58Ibid, p. 450.

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Savitri: The Devikāvyam

In the Sadhana Shastra of the Pooma or Integral Yoga posited by Sri Aurobindo, there are very helpful guides for the aspirants. While the tattva (philosophy) of man's transformation is brought to us by works like The Life Divine and The Supramental Manifestation, the hita (way) is outlined in The Synthesis of Yoga. Here 'synthesis' is not to be an "undiscriminating combination" of existing methods of Yoga. Sri Aurobindo says in this volume what the synthesis must be:

It [the synthesis] must therefore be effected by neglecting the forms and outsides of the Yogic disciplines and seizing rather on some central principle common to all which will include and utilise in the right place and proportion their particular principles, and on some central dynamic force which is the common secret of their divergent methods and capable therefore of organising a natural selection and combination of their varied energies and different utilities.¹

Thus not only do we learn a good deal about the traditionally demarcated paths of Karma, Jnana, Bhakti, Raja, and Hatha, but we also gain a deep insight into the Tantra Yoga. Sri Aurobindo makes a clarifying statement on the bases of these Yogas quite early in the volume:

In all the lord of the Yoga is the Purusha, the Conscious Soul that knows, observes, attracts, governs. But in Tantra it is rather Prakriti, the Nature-Soul, the Energy, the Will-in-Power executive in the universe. It was by learning and applying the intimate secrets of this Will-in-Power, its method, its tantra, that the Tantric Yogin pursued the aims of his discipline,— mastery, perfection, liberation, beatitude. Instead of drawing back from manifested Nature and its difficulties, he confronted them, seized and conquered.²

Part Four of The Synthesis of Yoga spells out the steps of the Yoga of Self-Perfection. This is no time-bound system but is to be a life-long affair since the plan involves an endless progression:

¹The Synthesis of Yoga, SABCL, Vol. 20, p. 46.

²Ibid., p. 47.

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All life is a secret Yoga, an obscure growth of Nature towards the discovery and fulfilment of the divine principle hidden in her which becomes progressively less obscure, more self-conscient and luminous, more self-possessed in the human being by the opening of all his instruments of knowledge, will, action, life to the Spirit within him and in the world.³

And it so happens that the universal energy is always flowing around us and into us. We have "to connect" with this divine Shakti to get the transformation going. But how can we connect unless we know what it is and how it acts? The massive recordation of Tantra gives the answers with its innumerable ranges of experience which together form "an infinite ocean of all the power and energy of illimitable consciousness, an infinite ocean of Ananda, of the self-moved delight of existence."⁴ The method of Tantra teaches us to draw the divine Shakti to us so she can transform us. The Integral Yoga brings the two poles of reality—Brahman and Shakti, Purusha and Prakriti—together. It does not countenance the mere formulaic mechanics of Tantra nor does it favour the Vedantic rejection of Shakti as a power of illusion that one must overcome. Here Purusha or the Conscious Soul is the Lord while Prakriti the Nature Soul is the executrix:

Purusha is of the nature of Sat, conscious self-existence pure and infinite: Shakti or Prakriti is of the nature of Chit,—it is power of the Purusha's self-conscious existence, pure and infinite. The relation of the two exists between the poles of rest and action. When the Energy is absorbed in the bliss of conscious self-existence, there is rest; when the Purusha pours itself out in the action of its Energy, there is action, creation and the enjoyment or Ananda of becoming.⁵

This remarkable integral dynamics of transformation was an experienced fact for Sri Aurobindo who pursued the Yoga. He gained valuable inputs for his Yoga from his spiritual collaborator, the Mother. When Sri Aurobindo turned from ratiocinative arguments in The Life Divine and The Synthesis of Yoga to the seemingly perilous paths of mystic poetry in Savitri, he was not giving in to fanciful conjectures. Even as epics of action record a racial experience, Savitri records a

³Ibid., p. 704.

⁴The Synthesis of Yoga, SABCL, Vol. 21, p. 759.

⁵Ibid., p. 48.

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spiritual experience which has an equally ancient history, though he also knew that the seeming illogical ratiocination of poetic recordation might not be appreciated easily by the general public:

Savitri is the record of a seeing, of an experience which is not of the common kind and is often very far from what the general human mind sees and experiences. You must not expect appreciation or understanding from the general public or even from many at the first touch; as I have pointed out, there must be a new extension of consciousness and aesthesis to appreciate a new kind of mystic poetry.⁶

Though Sri Aurobindo said that Savitri is "only an attempt to render into poetry a symbol of things occult and spiritual," he was not going to give us broken images, constructs that need to be deconstructed and set in place again. That was never the Indian way. Indian aesthesis calls for a fullness in presentation that would not tax the reader unnecessarily, since, as it is, the reader would be struggling with difficult concepts. The epic as we have it is a full kāvya, a scripture that is ideal for pārāyaṇa, for being recited aloud daily. It tells a story. It makes us think, meditate, struggle and then reach to the spaces of a divine calm where all is one seamless Ananda. It comes in the line of the Sapthashati, the Devi Bhagavatam.

Quite early in the epic, we are introduced to the duo of Purusha and Prakriti as the concept is used in Integral Yoga. Even as Aswapati begins his travels in the occult stair which is an image of his Yoga, he gains the "secret knowledge" which explains to him the truth about creation and how he is to go about his task. In the absence of an ability to see Reality as a whole, one is helped by the twofold explanation of Reality which is a constant balance of the static and the dynamic. In this drama of the Supreme, the Supreme as Purusha is seen as the Soul; the same Supreme as Prakriti is seen as Nature and together they are "this whole wide world":

This is the knot that ties together the stars:

The Two who are one are the secret of all power,

The Two who are one are the might and right in things

His soul, silent, supports the world and her,

His acts are her commandment's registers.

Happy, inert, he lies beneath her feet:

His breast he offers for her cosmic dance

⁶ Savitri, p. 794.

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Of which our lives are the quivering theatre,

And none could bear but for his strength within,

Yet none would leave because of his delight.⁷

It is the Ekam Sat that has caused this twyfold form to make it easier for man to comprehend the Absolute:

The Absolute, the Perfect, the Alone

Has called out of the Silence his mute Force

Where she lay in the featureless and formless hush

Guarding from Time by her immobile sleep

The ineffable puissance of his solitude.⁸

In the original Upakhyana of Vyasa the power of the Supreme as Action (Prakriti) comes to Aswapati with the promise of a daughter described by Goddess Savitri as kanya tejasvini, though the king had prayed for sons at first (putra me bahavo devi bhaveyu kulapāvanāh). At the same time, the Goddess makes it clear that the boon she was granting had its origin in Brahma. It was the Creator who had ordained that the child be a girl. While we should not be carried away by the gender-differentiation in its minutiae, the fact that the incarnation is cast as a female figure is no doubt to draw our minds to the efficacy of drawing close to Tantra in the Integral Yoga.

Sri Aurobindo was thus enabled to lay his track on the lines of Vedanta and Tantra with felicity. He prepares us for the leaning towards Tantra by the Yoga of Aswapati. The traveller of the worlds has an astonishing range of experiences after gaining the secret knowledge regarding the Purusha-Prakriti combine. All these experiences are reflections of the varied facets of the Nature-Soul within us which are revealed to Aswapati by his Conscious-Soul. He becomes "conscious" and lo! he is able to see and understand the workings of Nature in her entirety. A beginning is made with the mastery of occult powers by the "conscious" (as against persons driven by blind desire to control Nature) Aswapati:

Incalculable in their wizard modes,

Immediate and invincible in the act,

Her secret strengths native to greater worlds

Lifted above our needy limited scope,

The occult privilege of demigods

And the sure power-pattern of her cryptic signs,

⁷bid., p. 63. ⁸Ibid., p. 67.

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Her diagrams of geometric force,

Her potencies of marvel-fraught design

Courted employment by an earth-nursed might.⁹

The vast literature of Tantra, the very best in this path, is distilled and presented in evocative poetry by Sri Aurobindo. The occult siddhis are not brushed aside as fraudulent but accepted by him as part of Sat, the Existence. He also points out that whenever the Tantra Yogin seemed to get out of control because of the nature of the siddhis, the Supreme as the Conscious-Soul steps in and applies the needed correctives:

Her dangerous moods and arbitrary force

She surrendered to the service of the soul

And the control of a spiritual will.

A greater despot tamed her despotism.¹⁰

All the travels of Aswapati on the world-stair draw a good deal from Tannic lore which in turn has its beginning in the hymns of the Vedas. For, the Tantra speaks of such stairs of gods and goddesses too:

It teaches that in this creation, apart from this world in which we live, there exist other worlds and universes in serried sequence spreading over a rising tier of Consciousness and planes. There is one Supreme Deity presiding over every thing. He does so with a gradation of his powers, personalities and emenations, vibhutis, with a hierarchy of gods and goddesses who perform the functions delegated to them, deriving their authority from the Supreme Godhead. These are posited in the various planes on the rising tier of Consciousness. These are distinct and can be distinguished by their particular forms, ornaments, weapons and retinue. The numerous devatas help man in his spiritual progress, aid him in his uphill task of reaching the summit, the Supreme Deity.¹¹

Something close to such a step-by-step progression does take place in Aswapati's travels that culminate with a vision of the Divine Mother. Of course the elaborate rituals of Tantric worship are not found in Savitri. The rituals of Tantra descended from the Vedic Yajna and

⁹Ibid, p. 83. ¹⁰ Ibid., p. 87.

¹¹ S. Shankaranarayanan, Sri Chakra (1979), p. 2.

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continue to be a part of temple worship. T.V. Kapali Sastri says that though there is a parallel between the Tantric synthesis of jnānapāda (knowledge-part), yoga-pāda, kriyā-pāda (external ceremonies) and caryā-pāda(code of conduct), and the New Synthesis of Sri Aurobindo, there is an altogether different turn in the approach to sadhana:

Not that this system [the Aurobindonian synthesis] has been modelled after the Tantric, though it is true that the Tantric truths have gone into the making of it even as the vedantic conceptions have. But they do not, by any means, form the prototypes; they are important elements... for the realisation of the fundamental truths in one's being, for the development of social psychology in consonance with the principles enunciated and finally for the actual working out of the Unity of man.¹²

Sri Aurobindo has also given much thought to perfecting the instrument of his message, the blank verse in Savitri. The Vedic Rishis gave particular attention to the sound-patterns of their hymns, for the Goddess Vak was the mediatrix between the human and the divine:

When the Rishi makes an invocation by a Rik he contacts, with the power of consciousness packed in the Rik, the supernal ether and in the Ether, the particular god who vibrates in resonance to the particular frequency of the sound symbol. The Vak itself is the vehicle on which the gods come in response to the prayer of the Rishi.

Adopting this Vedic theory of Vak into its system, the Tantra has developed this line with an eye on practical utility so much that the Tantra is popularly known as mantra shāstra and acclaimed as a great sadhanā shāstra, practical science."¹³

Apart from researches in linguistics, Sri Aurobindo has written extensively on the hymns to Saraswati (Vak, Ila, Mahi) in the Vedas, and on classical prosody. He sought to draw the mantra-power into English and Savitri turned out to be his vast field for experiments:

Savitri... is blank verse without enjambment (except rarely)— each line a thing by itself and arranged in paragraphs of one,

¹² Collected Works of T. V. Kapali Sastri, Vol. I (1977), p. 294.

¹³SriChakra, p. 3.

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two, three, four, five lines (rarely a longer series), in an attempt to catch somethings of the Upanishadic and Kalidasian movement, so far as that is a possibility in English....

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.¹⁴

Any approach to the epic has to keep in mind this fact that it is Sri Aurobindo's yogic consciousness that is transmitting mystic experiences that have been seen and felt. His attempts to set them in mantric poetry have often succeeded very well, the beat of the rhythm, the seal of certitude in this message, for instance in the following:

Death is a passage, not the goal of our walk:

Some ancient deep impulsion labours on:

Our souls are dragged as with a hidden leash,

Carried from birth to birth, from world to world.

Our acts prolong after the body's fall

The old perpetual journey without pause.¹⁵

In the Book of the Divine Mother, language and thought coalesce into perfect poetry full of revelatory vibrations. There are four cantos which take in the final segment of Aswapati's Yoga. There is great poetry in these cantos but then, it is not for mere aesthetic enjoyment. Many of the passages are transformatory in character. This Book makes one understand the Mother's statement: "Reading Savitri is itself Yoga."

When we come to this Book, Aswapati has already had an experience of Paradisal felicity in the plane of Greater Knowledge. This is the realm of vijnāna far above the realm of Mind. He had achieved the "freedom from the known" that was the aim of J. Krishnamurti's philosophy, an escape from all kinds of conditioning which come in the way of self-awareness. But this is not all. How about the next step? There is no wooliness in the Aurobindonian vision, While freedom from the known is a vital step, one must also know how to enter the unknown lest one fall between the two and be lost for ever. Actually this Unknown is a realm of splendour that becomes the base of Tantra. We invoke the splendours of this Unknown through our worship of cosmic godheads. While it is

¹⁴ Savitri, pp. 727-28. ¹⁵ Savitri, p. 197.

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difficult enough to comprehend the whole of earth, it is impossible to envision the Beyond in its entirety:

The known released him from its limiting chain,

He knocked at the doors of the Unknowable.

Thence gazing with an immesurable outlook

One with self s inlook into its own pure vasts,

He saw the splendour of the spirit's realms,

The greatness and wonder of its boundless works,

The power and passion leaping from its calm,

The rapture of its movement and its rest.¹⁶

Reading this canto is like watching the Sri Chakra used for worship in Sri Vidya Upasana. Tier upon tier the alert Immortals, the sun-eyed Guardians, the immutable Lords were seen by Aswapati:

His self s infinities began to emerge,

The hidden universes cried to him;

Eternities called to eternities

Sending their speechless message still remote.

Arisen from the marvel of the depths

And burning from the superconscious heights

And sweeping in great horizontal gyres

A million energies joined and were the One.¹⁷

Aswapati was now strengthened by the primal Energy, the Adya Shakti. The traditional Sri Chakra which deals with colourful images and names helps us to understand the mystic diction of Sri Aurobindo, as Aswapati prepares to enter the realms of the Unknowable, the summit where the Divine Mother resides as an Empress, Sri Mata Sri Maharajni:

The Sri Chakra which is the abode of the Supreme Goddess, the Divine Mother, is the residence as well of all her emanations, powers and personalities. Each one of them is distinct, has a definite function to perform and has a definite and distinct place in the hierarchy. Posited in different planes in the rising tier of consciousness, in the pyramidal structure of the Meru, each one has its functioning in the particular sphere of cosmic existence, is important in its own way and fulfils a purpose in the scheme of things. They all derive their strength, their very existence

¹⁶ Ibid., p. 298. ¹⁷ Ibid., p. 300.

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from the Divine Mother, carry out her behest and accomplish her work in the various spheres allotted to them. Radiating from her, they also converge to her. When the aspirant comes within their province of influence and action, their help is there for him to enlarge his existence progressively so that he may finally perceive the source from which they all have emanated.¹⁸

To the source, then. But by its very nature this is Unknowable! Aswapati has now come here to knock "at the doors of the Unknowable" and the Book of the Divine Mother begins at this point of timeless time in Aswapati's Yoga. This is a vital moment in the sadhana because it is here that we learn not to sit back in self-satisfaction but to press forward, fully knowing that greater hurdles would block the way. This is the Yoga of an endless progression, for what is there in creation that can really satisfy man's spirit? The canto opens with deceptive simplicity:

All is too little that the world can give:

Its power and knowledge are the gifts of Time

And cannot fill the spirit's sacred thirst.¹⁹

There is also another dimension to this achievement of the Yogin at self-transcendence. He has striven and he has gained. But how about the human race? Must it go on suffering as one blindfolded unto eternity? Not unoften do we use the term 'Collective Yoga' when speaking of Sri Aurobindo's vision. The collectivity of humans should not be left behind by the fortunate few who have climbed the stair that leads to the sun of knowledge. Probably it is to instill in man the truism that "no man is an island", the Divine has imbedded chip of compassion in his heart. To the high-minded Yogin, none of his personal achievements brings unalloyed Ananda. As a true Vedantin, he thinks of "the other" all the time. When "the other" remains in the slush of ignorance, how can he enjoy the fruits of his strenuous Yoga? Such a Vedantic all-embracing emotion and compassion strike Aswapati even as he stands on the cutting edge of the Known:

All he had been and all towards which he grew

Must now be left behind or else transform

Into a self of That which has no name.

Alone and fronting an intangible Force

¹⁸ Sri Chakra, p. 47. ¹⁹Savitri, p. 305.

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Which offered nothing to the grasp of Thought,

His spirit faced the adventure of the Inane.

Abandoned by the worlds of form he strove.²⁰

At the same time, the Tantric mode that helps one "to connect" with the Unknowable helps Aswapati not to be lost in the "Everlastingness cut off from Time." There has been a single-minded meditative quest relying on the "Saviour Name" and Aswapati retains his closeness with Prakriti. Else, he would not have thought of "the other". The Mind has ceased to be, but not the spirit and it is the spirit which unites creation while Mind but divides it. In that deep of meditative silence when all else has ceased to be, the spirit of Aswapati calls out in silence. There is at once an answer. This creation has come to be because of the mātrutva in Existence, and so a child's call is always answered. This Motherhood is eternal, close, a never-failing help; the reason is that it has sprung from the glance of the Purusha as the multifoliate Prakriti.

In Tantra, this Motherhood is given a clear-cut gender-image of Lalita Tripurasundari. Though the Lalita Sahasranama lists a thousand names for her, actually her names cannot be exhausted. Seen seated on the lap of Shiva-Kameshwara, the Supreme has taken the form of a woman out of compassion. Hence she is called Lalita-Ambika: the beautiful Mother. The Lalita Sahasranama opens with the word Sri Mata and concludes with Ambika to underline this compassionate motherhood of the Supreme. Ambika is a word that connotes the mother coming to the child on her own out of loving anxiety.

Such a scene is enacted before us in the second canto of the Book of the Divine Mother. Aswapati finds himself in a tremendous stillness. No more joy or sorrow for him in this "boundless silence of the Self," but he understands that a personal release is not his aim. A world's desire to escape from the ills with which it is entangled is pressing him to become articulate. An escape into Nirvana is not in the agenda of Aswapati who represents the human family. Hence he is attentive to the voice within, the conscience that keeps track of all human movements here and in the beyond:

Only the everlasting No has neared

And stared into thy eyes and killed thy heart:

But where is the Lover's everlasting Yes,

And immortality in the secret heart,

²⁰ bid., p. 307.

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The voice that chants to the creator Fire,

The symbolled OM, the great assenting Word,

The bridge between the rapture and the calm,

The passion and the beauty of the Bride,

The chamber where the glorious enemies kiss,

The smile that saves, the golden peak of things?

This too is Truth at the mystic fount of Life.²¹

Existence-Consciousness-Bliss. Ananda: How to realise the Ananda, "the mystic fount of Life" then? Sri Aurobindo's The Mother speaks of this Ananda repeatedly. Identifying oneself completely with the Divine Mother brings us this gift:

You will know and see and feel that you are a person and power formed by her out of herself, put out from her for the play and yet always safe in her, being of her being, consciousness of her consciousness, force of her force, Ananda of her Ananda.²²

This is the language of Tantra without its external ritualism. T.V. Kapali Sastri has also indicated the triple form of the Divine Mother described by Sri Aurobindo in The Mother as the Matustrayividya with Tantrik elements:

The Transcendent Shakti: Mulashakti

The Universal Power: Vishveshvari

The Individual Mother: Jivabhutā

Again and again we are drawn to the Mother idea in Savitri for Sri Aurobindo found this to be the most potent instrument to lead man to the life divine. Aswapati, the forerunner, has nothing to help him as he stands poised on the edge of being, except the sterling faith in the Mother. Such "a fixed and unfailing aspiration" is answered by "a supreme Grace from above":

The Presence he yearned for suddenly drew close.

Across the silence of the ultimate Calm,

Out of a marvellous Transcendence' core,

A body of wonder and translucency

As if a sweet mystic summary of her self

Escaping into the original Bliss

Had come enlarged out of eternity,

Someone came infinite and absolute.

²¹ Ibid., pp. 310-311. ²² The Mother, SABCL, Vol. 25, p. 18.

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A being of wisdom, power and delight,

Even as a mother draws her child to her arms,

Took to her breast Nature and world and soul.²³

The Vishvesvari, Universal Mother had manifested in answer to the aspirant-Rishi's mantric meditation. As in days of old when the various gods and goddesses descended to the earth to answer the call of the Vedic seers, Mother Savitri appeared now before Aswapati. In Vyasa's description of the goddess no details are given except that she was a rūpini:

Then, O Yudhistira, rising from the sacrificial flames in her splendid form she appeared in front of the King, exceedingly glad as she was...²⁴

It is the joy of a mother who finds her son to be a perfect, noble person. Sri Aurobindo uses almost the same description for rūpini: "a beautiful and felicitous lustre". This is the Mother of all godheads and all strengths / Who, mediatrix, binds earth to the Supreme."²⁵ The Presence brings him the understanding of the all-embracing Nature-Soul while burning away all falsities, ignorance, self-doubts, depressions and frustrations. At this moment when Aswapati recognises the Mulashakti as Vishveshwari, Sri Aurobindo brings together with electrical ease the Vedantic and Tantric elements in our spiritual heritage. In fact, we would not be far off the mark if we consider this canto, the Adoration of the Divine Mother, to be a handbook of Integral Yoga. As Sri Aurobindo says:

Veda and Vedanta are one side of the One Truth; Tantra with its emphasis on Shakti is another; in this yoga all sides of the truth are taken up, not in the systematic forms given them formerly but in their essence, and carried to the fullest and highest significance. But Vedanta deals more with the principles and essentials of the divine knowledge and therefore much of its spiritual knowledge and experience has been taken bodily into the Arya. Tantra deals more with forms and processes and organised powers—all these could not be taken as they were, for the integral yoga needs to develop its own forms and processes; but the ascent of the consciousness through the

²³ Savitri, p. 312. ²⁴ R.Y. Deshpande, Vyasa's Savitri, p. 4.

²⁵ Savitri, p. 313.

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centres and other Tantric knowledge are there behind the process of transformation to which as much importance is given by me— also the truth that nothing can be done except through the force of the Mother.²⁶

Indeed, Aswapati's coming face to face with the Divine Mother in this canto cannot have been just an episode in the vast epic of Savitri. The Presence in Savitri is no fiction. It is an experienced reality for Sri Aurobindo; for there is verily a shower of overhead poetry that reveals the essence of Tantra, the Yoga that unites the aspirant with the Supreme. The noble accents of Sanskrit hymnology to Lalita Tripurasundari can be heard in this sublime passage:

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.

Here 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.²⁷

As Aswapati gazes at this Presence, he is invaded by a rare spiritual strength while his very nature is filled with bliss. Indeed, he does not seem to possess anything now except "a hunger of infinite bliss." How does one explain this infinite bliss, Brahmananda?

As we read this mantric passage, we realise that here is a block that stands by itself outside the epic too, an incandescent prayer of the Rishi placed within the framework of epic action. There are such wonderfully articulated prayers in the Ramayana, the Mahabharata

²⁶Letters on Yoga, SABCL, Vol. 22, p. 73.

²⁷Ibid., p. 314.

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and the Bhagavata. Stotras like Aditya Hridayam, Vishnu Sahasranamam and Gajendra's Prayer have been priceless gifts for the sadhaka down the centuries. Such prayers stop us on our tracks and we gain a rare Ananda by reciting them while reading the epic or whenever we feel drawn to the prayers themselves and are closeted with them.

The prayer in the Adoration of the Divine Mother stops the epic action for a moment. The passage itself takes us to Sri Lalita Sahasranama. This important scripture for Sri Vidya Upasana (Tantra) begins with the words Sri Mata: the Divine Mother. The opening in the prayer "At the head she stands of birth and toil and fate" draws us straight to a passage in the Sahasranama:

Vimarśarupini Vidya Vijadadhijgatprasuh;

Sarvavyaadhiprasamani Sarvamruthyunivarini;

Agraganya Achinthyarupa Kalikalmashanasini;

Katyayani Kalahantri Kamalakshnanishevita.

Here is a series of affirmations that envision the cosmic powers of the Divine Mother as Lalita, the Beautiful Mother. She is vimarśarūpini, an explanation of the inexplicable brilliance of the Supreme. She is the Word that explains, since Vak is vimarśa. The Divine Mother is Vak. She is the true knowledge which explains the Supreme in the right way. That is why Kalidasa compared Parvati to the Word that explains the Meaning which is Parameshwara: vāgarthāviva sampriktau vāgarthapratipathtaye: jagatah pitarau vande pārvati parameśwarau.

The Divine Mother is viyat-adi-jagat-prasuh, the Mother of space and all else. The Taittiriya Upanishad deals at length with creation which began with space: Air, fire, water, earth, crops and food followed one after another leading finally to the creation of man.²⁸

The Divine Mother cures all illnesses, both physical and mental: sarva vyādhi prasamani. She guards us from all kinds of unnatural deaths (apamrityu, akālamrityu, kālamrityu, etc.) and by giving us knowledge, she leads us to deathlessness (Realisation) thus saving us from death for all time.

She is agragaṇyā, the first to appear before our thoughts when we are in trouble. When we find ourselves helpless, she is very much

²⁸I have received much illumination from S.V. Radhakrishna Sastri's Tamil commentary on Sri Lalita Sahasranama for comparing the lines from Savitri with the phrases in the Sahsaranama.

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near us, close to us, part of us, guarding us as a mother guards the naked, newborn babe. She is achintyarūpā, one whose presence chases away all worries, one who is beyond our knowing.

The Divine Mother is also kālikalmasha-nāshini, for she destroys all the effects of Kali Age like pride, jealousy and hate. When we compartmentalise ourselves into the prisons of our dimunitive ego, meditation upon the Mother breaks down these shells of separativity, increases friendship and goodness so that we do not gather bad Karmas. She is Katyayani who never fails to answer our prayers. It was by praying to the Mother as Katyayani that the Gopis received Krishna, the Delight of Existence. So Katyayani is one who gives us joy, an unending Ananda.

She is kālahantri, the Destroyer of Yama. As Shivashakti she had destroyed Yama and saved Markandeya. Death approaches us only wehen we cease to meditate upon her. But when we invoke her, Time that brings Death closer to us keeps away.

The Divine Mother is worshipped by the sustainer Vishnu, Kamalaksha Nishevita. Hence she sustains us all without a moment's respite.

These cosmic powers of the Divine Mother (Vishveshwari) get engaged in the Adoration of the Divine Mother.

viyadhādhi jagatprasuh:

At the head she stands of birth and toil and fate,

In their slow round the cycles turn to her call.

kālahantri:

Alone her hands can change Time's dragon base.

achintyarūpā:

Hers is the mystery the Night conceals.

kāli-kalmasha-nāsini:

The spirit's alchemist energy is hers.

vimarsha-rūpini:

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.

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vidyā:

She is the Force, the inevitable Word.

agraganyā:

The magnet of our difficult ascent

The sun from which we kindle all our suns.

kātyāyani:

The Light that leans from the Unrealised Vasts

The joy that beckons from the impossible.

kamalāksha nishevitā:

The Might of all that never yet came down.

sarva vyādhi prasamaṇi

sarva mrityu nivārani:

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.

Coming face to face with the Divine Mother, Aswapati is quite overpowered and at the same time rejuvenated in spirit, the aim promised by Tantra Yoga:

:

Above, the boundless hushed beatitudes,

Below, the wonder of the embrace divine.

This known as in a thunder-flash of God,

The rapture of things eternal filled his limbs;

Amazement fell upon his ravished sense;

His spirit was caught in her intolerant flame.²⁹

The Yoga of the king has come to a triumphant conclusion with the manifestation of the Divine Mother. How shall he make use of the Presence now? In the original epic we find Aswapati asking for a boon of children to perpetuate his race. But the Mother's presence changes the equations. It has always been so. We know of Swami Vivekananda as the youngster Naren being advised by Ramakrishna Paramahamsa to go and pray to Mother Kali for alleviating his (Naren's) poverty as the family was in dire straights:

²⁹ Savitri, p. 315.

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At nine o'clock in the evening, Narendranath went to the Kali temple. Passing through the courtyard, he felt within himself a surge of emotion and his heart leapt with joy in anticipation of the vision of the Divine Mother. Entering the temple, he cast his eyes upon the image and found the stone figure to be nothing else but the living Goddess, the Divine Mother Herself, ready to give him any boon he wanted—either a happy worldly life or the joy of spiritual freedom. He was in ecstasy. He prayed for the boon of wisdom, discrimination, renunciation and Her uninterrupted vision, but forgot to ask the Deity for money. He felt great peace within as he returned to the Master's room and, when asked if he had prayed for money, was startled.³⁰

In our epic also we find that Aswapati ha$ ceased to think of his own dynasty, his Madra kingdom, his personal hegemony over a portion of the earth. After the yogic experiences he has been through, his vision has embraced all creation. He now addresses himself to the task of saving the entire human race and transforming it, and avoid the mistake of Pururavas who had been satisfied by the fulfilment of his personal need for Urvashi, while the earth was abandoned to Death and Fate. At this point of time in the epic we watch a new Aswapati who has been shaped by the transformatory adoration of the divine powers of the Mother:

But now his being was too wide for self;

His heart's demand had grown immeasurable:

His single freedom could not satisfy,

Her light, her bliss, he asked for earth and men.³¹

The Divine Mother: Sri Mata Maharajni Srimat Simhasaneshwari. Lalitambika: Sweet, Beautiful Mother. He must not lose this Presence by remaining dumb; for, here was the golden doorway opening into the Next Future. Nor can he afford to lose his connection with the world below in this comforting experience of being a baby on the lap of its mother. In fact, Aswapati does not even reject Inconscience as he sits in meditation, the vital base of Tantra. When we open the follow-up canto, the House of the Spirit and the New Creation, we see him seated in poised tranquillity,

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In the unapproachable stillness of his soul,

Intense, one-pointed, monumental, lone,

Patient he sat like an incarnate hope

Motionless on a pedestal of prayer.³²

No more will he desire for any personal gain! As he makes this firm resolve, a mighty transformation comes upon him and he automatically falls in rhythm with the steps of the entire creation:

He tore desire up from its bleeding roots

And offered to the gods the vacant place.

Thus could he bear the touch immaculate.

A last and mighty transformation came.

His soul was all in front like a great sea

Flooding the mind and body with its waves;

His being, spread to embrace the universe,

United the within and the without

To make of life a cosmic harmony,

An empire of the immanent Divine-

One grew the Spirit's secret unity,

All nature felt again the single bliss.³³

A certainty floods into him. All shall be yet well with this creation. When Death, Ignorance, Nescience, Inconscience and the rest are slayed by a master-act of the divine force, the world gets transformed into a divine spaceship. Ananda will be the reigning Law. Aswapati's vision recaptures the Tantric mode of understanding Existence as the Meru. No more compartmentalisations or limitations though there is a seeming hierarchy: "For worlds were many, but the Self was one." It is the Ananda that courses through one's veins which have been freed of the knots of ignorance, when one's power rises from the base of the spine to the crown on the head and pours it forth into the cleared channels of one's being, an image of the effect at the conclusion of the Kundalini's adventure:

He felt the footsteps of a million wills

Moving in unison to a single goal.

A stream ever new-bom that never dies,

Caught in its thousandfold current's ravishing flow,

With eddies of immortal sweetness thrilled,

³² Ibid., p. 317. ³⁵ Ibid., pp. 318-19.

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He bore coiling through his members as they passed

Calm movements of interminable delight,

The bliss of a myriad myriads who are one.³⁴

The Integral Yoga calls upon the seed idea of Tantra to help the aspirant move in his path with ease. Hence, Sri Aurobindo does not ask for the complete cessation of thought and action. Instead, he wants the aspirant to open his vision inward so that the sights he meets can help him achieve transformation. Aswapati acting out this approach now sees an externalised image of this thoughts that resemble the different āvaranas or coverings in Sri Chakra where the one Divine is also seen as the many in gradations of divinity:

He saw a hierarchy of lucent planes

Enfeoffed to this highest kingdom of God-state.

Attuning to one Truth their own right rule

Each housed the gladness of a bright degree,

Alone in beauty, perfect in self-kind,

An image cast by one deep truth's absolute,

Married to all in happy difference.

Each gave its powers to help its neighbours' parts,

But suffered no diminution by the gift;

Profiteers of a mystic interchange,

They grew by what they took and what they gave,

All others they felt as their own complements,

One in the might and joy of multitude.³⁵

All the facets that make up the human beings—life, mind, spirit— work in harmony in the transformed person. But Aswapati is Aswapati still. While one part of him is electrically free in the spaces of Ananda, another part of him remains conscious of the world below. Even as he bears witness to the splendours above, his soul articulates the earth's prayer set as a poetic image of incalculable charm by Sri Aurobindo:

In the centre of his vast and fateful trance

Half-way between his free and fallen selves,

Interceding twixt God's day and the mortal's night,

Accepting worship as its single law,

Accepting bliss as the sole cause of things,

⁵⁴ Ibid., p. 325. ³⁵ Ibid., p. 326.

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Refusing the austere joy which none can share,

Refusing the calm that lives for calm alone,

To her it turned for whom it willed to be.

In the passion of its solitary dream

It lay like a closed soundless oratory

Where sleeps a consecrated argent floor

Lit by a single and untrembling ray

And an invisible Presence kneels in prayer.³⁶

For the moment we brush aside all the tomes of philosophical exegesis, the complications of metaphysical calculations and the whirring chaos of Nature's activities. The Nature-soul in man itself is now withdrawn into a single-pointed prayer from the depths of the heart. It is the anxious call of the lost child searching for its mother in a crowded bazaar, interiorised as the prayer of Aswapati. This is the ultimate point of any Yoga, the calling out to the Mother, the Mediatrix, the puruṣakāra bhūtā, the one who holds our hand in darkness and light, speaks to us of what is good for us, and sustains us in such a way that we grow into the divine as a child grows into strong youth and from thence to the wisdom of maturity.

It cannot be stressed too often that Sri Aurobindo has used Tantric elements in Savitri but has scrupulously avoided the ritualism associated with the Tantra Yoga as it has been practised since the Puranic times. Thus his description of the Divine Mother remains universal and does not use symbols like the various weapons, auspicious things like flowers and the sugarcane symbolising plenty. The Divine Mother is brought to us by Sri Aurobindo in the chariot of his magnificent blank verse; it is for us to recognise her, welcome her to the temple of our heart and consecrate her on the lotus within:

The One he worshipped was within him now:

Flame-pure, ethereal-tressed, a mighty Face

Appeared and lips moved by immortal words;

Lids, wisdom's leaves, drooped over rapture's orbs.

A marble monumet of ponderings, shone

A forehead, sight's crypt, and large like ocean's gaze

Towards Heaven two tranquil eyes of boundless thought

Looked into man's and saw the god to come.³⁷

When Sri Aurobindo says that Aswapati thrills to the core with

³⁶ Ibid., p. 332. ³⁷ Ibid., pp. 334-35.

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happiness all at once is said. The Divine Mother's descent into the aspirant at this moment transforming him entirely into a being of Ananda can be understood in the light of what Sri Aurobindo says about the seven Suns of the Supermind making a steady and inexorable descent into man's material body in terms of Tantrik diction:

1.The Sun of Supramental Truth (Descent into the Sahasradala)

2.The Sun of Supramental Light and Will-Power (Descent into the Ajna Chakra, the centre between the eyes)

3.The Sun of Supramental Word (Descent into Throat)

4.The Sun of Supramenetal Love, Beauty, Bliss (Descent into the Heart-Lotus)

5.The Sun of Supramental Force (Descent into the Navel)

6.The Sun of Life-Radiances (Descent into the Penultimate Centre)

7.The Sun of Supramental Substance-Energy (Descent into the Muladhara)³⁸

One is naturally reminded of the opening stanza of the mantric poem, Rose of God:

Rose of God, vermilion stain on the sapphires of heaven,

Rose of Bliss, fire-sweet, seven-tinged with the ecstasies seven!

Leap up in our heart of humanhood, O miracle, O flame,

Passion-flower of the nameless, bud of the mystical Name.³⁹

The Mother-Son confrontation in the Vision and the Boon takes place within Aswapati, in the "listening spaces of the soul." The Divine Mother advises him not to be hasty in asking for a transformation of the life on earth into a life divine. Let evolution take its own course so that the decree of Fate need not be questioned or overruled for the general mankind. Of course she will not deny him anything since his Yoga cannot have been in vain. So she takes him back to the original intention when he had begun the tapasya. That was for the gift of a child to continue the racial line in Madra:

My light shall be in thee, my strength thy force.

Let not the impatient Titan drive thy heart,

Ask not the imperfect fruit, the partial prize.

³⁸See The Hour of God, SABCL, Vol. 17, p. 27.

³⁹ Collected Poems, SABCL, Vol. 5, p. 584.

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Only one boon, to greaten thy spirit, demand;

Only one joy, to raise thy kind, desire.⁴⁰

But it is this same Divine Mother who has now given Aswapati the strength to persevere and stop not till the goal is reached. How can the Mother still remain indifferent to the sufferings of her creation? Again, how can he have peace of mind with the comforts and joys of his palace further enriched by the gift of a progeny, when the rest of creation continues to suffer in the grip of Death and Nescience? For Aswapati this earth is not merely a material universe. It is verily Prakriti, the Nature-Soul, the Mother herself! The passage in Savitri is not unlike the cry wrung from the agonised soul of Sri Aurobindo when he wrote to Mrinalini on his three "frenzies":

... whereas others regard the country as an inert piece of matter and know it as the plains, the fields, the forests, the mountains and the rivers, I know my country as the Mother, I worship her and adore her accordingly. What would a son do when a demon sitting on his mother's breast prepared to drink her blood? Would he sit down content to take his meals or go on enjoying himself in the company of his wife and children, or would he rather run to the rescue of his mother? I know I have the strength to uplift this fallen race; not a physical strength, I am not going to fight with a sword or a gun, but with the power of knowledge...⁴¹

Sri Aurobindo had used his brahmatej in the national arena but had withdrawn to the cave of tapasya at Pondicherry, because now he had to think of rescuing not merely a single nation but the entire human family from the grip of Ignorance and Death. He had striven with single-minded application and had marked some signal triumphs. Aswapati is a projection of Sri Aurobindo's own aspirations for uplifting this fallen race of humanity that had become a prey to several ills due to involution. Must this repetitive death-birth-death cycle go on for ever? When can mankind step upwards leaving behind the darknesses of the mental plane? Aswapati had seen all the future possibilities for this marvellous tiny dot in eternity called Man. Already in the far distant was he not watching the Hunters of Joy, the

⁴⁰Ibid., p 341.

⁴¹K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar, Sri Aurobindo: a bibliography and a history, p. 200.

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Seekers after Knowledge, the Climbers in the quest of Power?⁴²

I saw the Omnipotent's flaming pioneers

Over the heavenly verge which turns towards life

Come crowding down the amber stairs of birth;

Forerunners of a divine multitude,

Out of the paths of the morning star they came

Into the little room of mortal life.

I saw them cross the twilight of an age,

The sun-eyed children of a marvellous dawn,

The great creators with wide brows of calm,

The massive barrier-breakers of the world

And wrestlers with destiny in her lists of will,

The labourers in the quarries of the gods,

The messengers of the Incommunicable,

The architects of immortality.

Into the fallen human sphere they came.⁴³

Aswapati prays for a manifestation to help humanity proceed forward quickly towards the promised future. The times call for a leader who can use all the powers of the mind and heart to draw humanity onto the right path and make them march to the life-sustaining goal:

Pack with the eternal might one human hour

And with one gesture change all future time.

Let a great word be spoken from the heights

And one great act unlock the doors of Fate.⁴⁴

The Divine Mother can be indifferent no more. The Yoga of Savitri is tuned only to success in one's endeavours and so we hear the voice of the Divine Mother, Vishweshwari, promising an individual power to incarnate on the earth, the jivabhutā who will wage the war on humanity's behalf and save the future of man. This incarnation will be an image of love, wisdom, strength and also something more. It will be an image of Ananda, a positive Power; for, "from her eyes the Eternal's bliss shall gaze."

One of the important ways used by our ancients to help the aspirant get settled in the concept of the Supreme's motherhood is to see the

⁴²Collected Poems, SABCL, Vol. 5, p. 523.

⁴³Savitri, pp. 343-44. ⁴⁴Ibid., p. 345.

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Divine Mother in different stages of age which is an easily assimilable experience for man who is controlled by the concept of Time. The Upakhyana of Vyasa briefly touches upon this aspect in just two verses:

The Princess grew like the goddess Fortune herself incarnate, fair and beautiful; then, in course of time she entered into youthful maidenhood.

With large hips and a slender waist graceful as she was, like a golden statue, people beholding her believed that some heavenly damsel had descended amidst them.⁴⁵

But the Tantra texts deal extensively with the different ages of the Mother. A one-year old girl is called Sandhya, a two-year old is Saraswati, when she is seven years old she is called Chandika, a sixteen-year old is Shodasi. Shodasi's Mantra is made of sixteen syllables. The Tamil culture has perfected a type of poetic genre called Pillai-t-tamizh. Here the deity is seen as passing through different stages of childhood, boyhood/girlhood and youth. Thus, when we read a Pillai-t-tamizh on Meenakshi or Andal we go through the stages of the Divine Mother as a babe waving one hand (the Chenkeerai-stage), the babe in the cradle, the child clapping its hands, blowing a kiss, the toddler moving forward like a tiny elephant, calling out to the moon to come and play with the baby, building sand castles as a little girl, playing 'house' with tiny utensils and winging to-and-fro in a golden swing. The sacred and the secular, the familiar baby at home and the Supreme Mother are thus brought together into an incandescent whole making us very, very close to divinity.

Sri Aurobindo follows this idea and we have the canto the Birth and Childhood of the Flame, a whole canto that had been inspired by a single term in Vyasa: kanya tejasvini. This and the following the Growth of the Flame are the Aurobindonian Pillai-t-tamizh for us. Besides, unlike the Upakhyana of Vyasa, Savitri's poem is cast in the epic scale, a Devi Kavyam, a Golden Poem. Hence we have also to grow along with the idea of the Devi; and so we are granted a double vision through the magic of his poetry to watch the human and the divine as an indivisible whole. We see Savitri as one among her kind and yet, somehow, different. Her companions sense this 'difference' too, albeit dimly:

⁴⁵ R.Y. Deshpande, Vyasa's Savitri, p. 8.

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A key to a Light still kept in being's core,

The sun-word of an ancient mystery's sense,

Her name ran murmuring on the lips of men

Exalted and sweet like an inspired verse...

Admired, unsought, intangible to the grasp

Her beauty and flaming strength were seen afar

Like lightning playing with the fallen day,

A glory unapproachably divine.⁴⁶

It then does not come as a surprise to us when Aswapati,—who has been musing one day on the way humanity has not heeded the call of ever so many seers, sages and poets,—finds Savitri advancing towards him "like a shining answer from the gods." Because she has come to this earth, "a gold-leaf palimpsest of sacred births," all will yet be well. Aswapati asks her to go and find her soul-mate. His words are like the Mantra that a Yogin absorbs in his very cells, and Savitri starts on her quest.

In this ancient culture of varied religious and spiritual quests, the Puranas have played an important part in getting the aspirant accustomed to certain ideas. For instance, the universal deities take an individual form and not only walk on this earth but go through all the motions of life as lived by ordinary man. A goddess as a Princess going in search of a consort is familiar to the Indian psyche. The wonderful Puranic tale of the Divine Mother as Princess Tadatakai (Meenakshi) finding her consort in Chokkesa (Sundaresha) has been a favourite with the worshippers of the Mother Goddess in South India. Then the marriage, an auspicious moment is renacted annually even today in several temples as Meenakshi Kalyanam, Sita Kalyanam, or Andal Kalyanam. Significantly it is only the name of the goddess which is used to indicate the divine marriage. Even the lay man will speak of Rukmini Kalyanam or Radha Kalyanam but never a Krishna Kalyanam!

Sri Aurobindo draws in for his Yoga this wonderful concept of a divine marriage, again without any of the rituals. Savitri and Satyavan have met in a forest glade, there is an instant recognition and a marvellous wedding takes place under the canopy of Mother Nature in the Book of Love:

On the high glowing cupola of the day

⁴⁶ Savitri, p. 367.

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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.⁴⁷

The Book of Yoga draws a major portion of its material from Tantra. If in Aswapati's Yoga we found him ascending and descending the several planes of the Meru, in Savitri's Yoga we find her journeying through several enclosures (āvaranās) as in the Sri Chakra. Tantra Yoga has gone into the minutest detail possible of all concepts and experiences and given them highly evocative names. Each enclosure (like Trailokyamohana Chakra and Sarvarogahara Chakra) has its own set of compartments with guardians and in-dwellers, but everything is directly connected to the Divine Mother as well. Sri Aurobindo has scmpulously avoided the use of such colourful representations. The canto, the Entry into the Inner Countries, just gives a brief indication as when in one of the corridors she finds a "glorious crowd" of gods and goddesses. As in the Tantra, these deities belonging to higher planes are helpers of man in his Yoga. They give a helpful direction to Savitri too:

O Savitri, from thy hidden soul we come.

We are the messengers, the occult gods

Who help man's drab and heavy ignorant lives

To wake to beauty and the wonder of things

Touching them with glory and divinity;

In evil we light the deathless flame of good

And hold the torch of knowledge on ignorant roads;

We are thy will and all men's will towards Light.⁴⁸

The deities direct her to the Fire burning on the bare stone / And the deep cavern of [her] secret soul." The following canto, the Triple Soul-Forces, gives us a view of the major facets of Savitri's inmost soul that is a spark of the Divine Mother as we have known her at work on earth. Each of the forces is given a recognisable image. Each of them claims to be Savitri's soul and each is partly right; but

⁴⁷Ibid.,p.411. 48Ibid., p. 501.

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Savitri will not be satisfied with partial identifications. All this has to be part of our soul's make-up but there has to be something else as well!

During Savitri's journey in the inscapes of her soul, she is first met by the Mother of Sorrows, one to whom the gods pray in Saptashati: yā devi sarvabhuteshu dayā rūpeṇa samsthithā. There are no external indications in the epic except that she is clothed in "a pale lustrous robe". The rest is a series of intuitive flashes on a major aspect of human experience on earth symbolised as a woman with "a moon-bright face in a sombre cloud of hair."

The beauty of sadness lingered on her face,

Her eyes were dim with the ancient stain of tears.

Her heart was riven with the world's agony

And burdened with the sorrow and struggle in Time,

An anguished music trailed in her rapt voice.

Absorbed in a deep compassion's ecstasy,

Lifting the mild ray of her patient gaze,

In soft sweet training words slowly she spoke.⁴⁹

Sri Aurobindo could be limning a portrait of Mother Sarada Devi here, so accurate is the vision that comes through the poetry. Philosophy and metaphysics are challenges to the mind but how can they help the heart that is buffeted around by reality? The approach of Shakta Tantra, of the Divine Mother taking universal forms to destroy evil becomes absolutely necessary for Pooma Yoga. Hence the stress on Prakriti, the Nature-Soul. Prakriti is able to understand the pain of man and also convey to him that his needs are very much in her agenda. Not so the Purusha, who is an inexorable but inactive witness to the happenings around.

The Mother of Sorrows is full of karuna. But what is the use of compassion if it is not backed by the power to alleviate the misery of humanity? Savitri tells the Madonna of Suffering that she is dear to humanity as she helps man "bear the unbearable sorrow of the world." It is the image of a mother who listens to her sad children and infuses in them the hope for a future dawn. Savitri would now journey further and get the needed strength to back compassion. She now meets the Mother of Might ( yā devi sarvabhuteshu shakti rūpeṇa samsthithā),

⁴⁹ Ibid, p. 503.

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and Sri Aurobindo brings in the image of Mahakali as found in the Tantra literature:

A Woman sat in gold and purple sheen,

Armed with the trident and the thunderbolt,

Her feet upon a couchant lion's back.

A formidable smile curved round her lips,

Heaven-fire laughed in the comers of her eyes;

Her body a mass of courage and heavenly strength,

She menaced the triumph of the nether gods.⁵⁰

The passage naturally takes us to the creation of Mahalakshmi in Saptashati by the gods:

As all the gods gave arms and ornaments

Mahalakshmi roared with delight.

And the reverberation of her roar

rumbled in the firmament.

The oceans heaved, the worlds trembled, the earth

and its mountains shook unfirm.

Greeting her mounted on her lion, the gods

and sages cried 'Victory!'⁵¹

Indeed the very essence of Tantra's force is brought to us soon after by Sri Aurobindo, and possibly he had Sister Nivedita in his consciousness when he wrote the lines:

I am Durga, goddess of the proud and strong,

And Lakshmi, queen of the fair and fortunate;

I wear the face of Kali when I kill,

I trample the corpses of the demon hordes.

I am charged by God to do his mighty work.⁵²

Savitri moves on further saying that strength without wisdom cannot build eternal things. It can only give momentary succour. Last to meet Savitri is the Mother of Joy and Peace. The description of the Madonna of Light reminds one of Mrinalini Devi:

⁵⁰Ibid., p. 508. ⁵¹Translated by K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar.

⁵²Savitri, p. 509.

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Here, living centre of that vision of peace,

A Woman sat in clear and crystal light:

Heaven had unveiled its lustre in her eyes,

Her feet were moonbeams, her face was a bright sun,

Her smile could persuade a dead lacerated heart

To live again and feel the hands of calm.⁵³

This is verily the Maheshwari described by Sri Aurobindo in The Mother.

Imperial Maheshwari is seated in the wideness above the thinking mind and will and sublimates and greatens them into wisdom and largeness or floods with splendour beyond them. For she is the mighty and wise One who opens us to the supramental infinities and the cosmic vastness, to the grandeur of the supreme Light, to a treasure-house of miraculous knowledge, to the measureless movement of the Mother's eternal forces. Tranquil is she and wonderful, great and calm for ever.⁵⁴

Though the figure of Maheshwari has not had a particular image in the Saptashati, T.V. Kapali Sastri finds Sri Aurobindo's vision to have descended from a verse in the poem beginning, medhāsi devi vidhitākhila shastrasārā:

You are Saraswati, scripture's essence;

Sri, who abides with Vishnu;

Gauri, with the moon-crested Shiva, and

Durga, boat to the Beyond.⁵⁵

Savitri finds that this too is inadequate. Pooma Shakti needs to be incarnated on earth to help mankind. As she seeks her secret soul, it is suddenly revealed to her as a mystic cavern with two golden serpents round the lintel, an eagle with massive wings above and doves at the cornices. Within the cavern are deities innumerable each of whom has an identity with Savitri. She passes them all as she had earlier the three soul-forces. It is in the last chamber of this seemingly endless cavern that she finds her secret soul, "no bigger than the thumb of man." Yet, this is the power that keeps all our actions and thoughts going, itself remaining as an immoveable Witness. The two become one again now:

⁵³Ibid., p. 514. ⁵⁴ The Mother, SABCL, Vol. 25, p. 26.

⁵⁵ Translated by K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar.

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Here in this chamber of flame and light they met;

They looked upon each other, knew themselves,

The secret deity and its human part,

The calm immortal and the struggling soul.

Then with a magic transformation's speed

They rushed into each other and grew one.⁵⁶

An in-depth reading and recitation of Savitri's journey is itself the discipline of Tantra and the discipline (the meditation, the sincerity, the surrender) pays dividends. For we would be re-enacting the spiritual experience of Savitri when the latent power that had lain coiled at her base (the Muladhara) begins to climb upwards, undoing the knots (also centres imaged as lotuses), of Vishnu-granthi, Brahma-granthi and Rudra-granthi, and meets at the thousand-petalled Sahasrara at the crown, receive the nectarian powers there only to pour through the cleared channels of the body all these powers readied for the strike order. This movement of the Kundalini Yoga is brilliantly described in Sri Aurobindo's inimitable English style:

A flaming serpent rose released from sleep.

It rose billowing its coils and stood erect

And climbing mightily stormily on its way

It touched her centres with its flaming mouth:

As if a fiery kiss had broken their sleep,

They bloomed and laughed surcharged with light and bliss;

Then at the crown it joined the Eternal's space.

In the flower of the head, in the flower of Matter's base,

In each divine stronghold and Nature-knot

It held together the mystic stream which joins

The viewless summits with the unseen depths,

The string of forts that make the frail defence

Safeguarding us against the enormous world,

Our lines of self-expression in its Vast.

An image sat of the original Power

Wearing the mighty Mother's form and face.⁵⁷

Thus we are introduced to an important image of Tantra where the Divine Mother as Kameshwari joins Kameshwara Shiva in the thousand-petalled lotus flowing with nectar. The rays of the Divine Mother's feet direct the nectar downwards as a flood (sudhāsāra),

⁵⁶ Ibid., p. 527. ⁵⁷ Savitri, p. 528.

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joining "the viewless summits with the unseen depths." The individual aspirant is now totally transformed and is not restrained by the innumerable knots of our own making since

She streams into us with her unbound force,

Into mortal limbs the Immortal's rapture and power.⁵⁸

This background makes it easier to understand Savitri's cosmic consciousness described in the following cantos as also the images of Eternal Night, Double Twilight, Everlasting Day and the figure of Savitri when she takes her cosmic form to vanquish Death. There is, for instance, the tradition that one must recite the Ratri Sukta at the commencement of reciting Saptashati. The Eternal Night in Savitri is not something to be frightened of, since that is a part of the greater reality as the Vedic hymn testifies to us. As S. Sankaranarayanan says:

If the day is an image of divine light, it is night that retains the light in its breast and reveals it at the right time. Night is the primordial mother who keeps the entire creation, all light and consciousness within her womb, sustains them and reveals them at the proper moment... Sleep that precedes creation, mental confusion that kindles, darkness that illumes light, Yoganidra, Yogamaya, Kalaratri are all different names given to the Primordial Mother. She is the eldest, Jyeshtā of the Dasha Maha Vidyas. She is seen as a cloud who has light in her womb, Dhumavati.⁵⁹

The elements of Tantra continue to glimmer in the concluding Books also, but they do not have visual specificity since they are immerged in the total vision. Mahakali is very much a presence as Savitri answers Death point by point during their struggle in the Eternal Night and Double Twilight. It is not the Savitri of the earlier parts of the epic. The Princess had become the Devi after she had recognised her secret soul and Death realises that the ordinary rules that apply for death-bound mortal man will not apply to her:

Who then art thou hiding in human guise?

Thy voice carries the sound of infinity,

Knowledge is with thee, truth speaks through thy words;

The light of things beyond shines in thy eyes.

⁵⁸Ibid., p. 530.

⁵⁹Translated by Prema Nandakumar, Sri Devi Mahātmyam, p. 62.

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But where is thy strength to conquer Time and Death?

Hast thou God's force to build heaven's values here?⁶⁰

Without wasting any words, Savitri meets Death's challenge swiftly, thereby indicating that man, if he perfects himself by the self-discipline of Pooma Yoga can conquer Time, annihilate Death and build on earth the life divine.

There are none of the descriptions that one finds in the battles of Saptashati where the Mother destroys evil forces like Shumbha, Nishumbha, Raktabija and Mahishasura. And yet the battle is brought to us in the diction of Tantra. The uprising energy, the Power of Kundalini reaching the thousand-petalled lotus in the crown and encircling the Purusha (Shiva) there and holding its hood above him as an umbrella, is recorded exactly as it is in Aurobindonian style to delineate the cosmic image of the Divine Mother:

Her forehead's span vaulted the Omniscient's gaze,

Her eyes were two stars that watched the universe.

The Power that from her being's summit reigned,

The Presence chambered in lotus secrecy,

Came down and held the centre in her brow

Where the mind's Lord in his control-room sits.⁶¹

The Mother has thus entered the twin-petalled Anjna Chakra, in the Sushumna, between the brows. Thrusting through the Rudra-granthi to reach to the Sahasrara, the energy spreads all over the cosmic figure, indicating the triumphal movement of the Kundalini:

It poured into a navel's lotus depth,

Lodged in the little life-nature's narrow home,

On the body's longings grew heaven-rapture's flower

And made desire a pure celestial flame,

Broke into the cave where coiled World-Energy sleeps

And smote the thousand-hooded serpent Force

That blazing towered and clasped the World-Self above,

Joined Matter's dumbness to the Spirit's hush

And filled earth's acts with the Spirit's silent power.

Thus changed she waited for the Word to speak.⁶²

Of the innumerable names of the Devi, one is tadi-latā-samaruchih, she who is brilliant like a creeper of lightning. As she stands confronting Death like "a little figure in infinity," the Word comes

⁶⁰ Savitri, p. 663-64. ⁶¹Ibid., p. 665. ⁶²Ibid.

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from her, asking Death to release "the soul of the world called Satyavan." But he will not. To action, then! Savitri had stood exhibiting only a fraction of the Power of Mulashakti even as a lightning is but a fraction of the shoreless brilliance in the endless space. The tadi-latā-samaruchih now becomes a total blaze:

Light like a burning tongue licked up his thoughts,

Light was a luminous torture in his heart,

Light coursed, a splendid agony, through his nerves;

His darkness muttered perishing in her blaze.⁶³

After Savitri makes her choice to go back to the world as she cannot forget the cry of a million creatures nor ignore the "dreadful whirlings of the world," the Supreme assures her all support and blessings. We are reminded by Sri Aurobindo about the bases of the Yoga, through the images of the Shalwa Prince and the Madran Princess, a recurring image in the evolution of earth, the togetherness of the Conscious-Soul and the Nature-Soul, Purusha and Prakriti:

O Satyavan, O luminous Savitri,

Isent you forth of old beneath the stars,

A dual power of God in an ignorant world,

In a hedged creation shut from limitless self,

Bringing down God to the insentient globe,

Lifting earth-beings to immortality...

He is the soul of man climbing to God

In Nature's surge out of earth's ignorance.

O Savitri, thou art my spirit's Power,

The revealing voice of my immortal Word-

Nature shall live to manifest secret God,

The Spirit shall take up the human play,

This earthly life become the life divine.⁶⁴

Even as the entire Tantra Shastra has descended from the Vedic Devi Suktas, Sri Aurobindo's Savitri is also a direct child of the Vedas. Though the subtitle says the epic is a "legend and a symbol," Savitri is more than that. It is a living experience. Just as we recognise the deities of the Tantra as a living experience for us to grow in, the world of Savitri needs also to be seen as an experiential truth. Sri Aurobindo himself has indicated this by saying that the epic is a living force, that Savitri

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...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.

Salutations to Sri Aurobindo for this gift of Savitri, the Devi Kavyam that leads us from untruth to Truth, from darkness to Light, from death to Immortality:

Though abiding in the high pinnacles, it is capable of coming down; though lying on the terrestrial plane below, it is daring and persistent in its climb up—this Yoga bom of the gracious side-long glances of Bhagavan Sri Aurobindo reigns victorious as the vastness charged with the Play of the Force Immortal.⁶⁵

PREMA NANDAKUMAR

65T.V.Kapali Sastri

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