Emergence of the Psychic

Appendix

The following passages, extracted from Sri Aurobindo's epic, Savitri, are on topics related to the psychic being dealt with in this book — nature and function of the psychic, its action and influence, contact with the psychic, its growth, discovery of the psychic and its freedom, emergence of the psychic and psychic transformation. References pertain to the Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library edition of the epic.

This bodily appearance is not all;

The form deceives, the person is a mask;

Hid deep in man celestial powers can dwell.

His fragile ship conveys through the sea of years

An incognito of the Imperishable.

A spirit that is a flame of God abides,

A fiery portion of the Wonderful,

Artist of his own beauty and delight,

Immortal in our mortal poverty.

This sculptor of the forms of the Infinite,

This screened unrecognised Inhabitant,

Initiate of his own veiled mysteries,

Hides in a small dumb seed his cosmic thought.

In the mute strength of the occult Idea

Determining predestined shape and act,

Passenger from life to life, from scale to scale,

Changing his imaged self from form to form,

He regards the icon growing by his gaze

And in the worm foresees the coming god.

Book One, Canto Three, p. 23

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A Person persistent through the lapse of worlds,

Although the same for ever in many shapes

By the outward mind unrecognisable,

Assuming names unknown in unknown climes

Imprints through Time upon the earth's worn page

A growing figure of its secret self,

And learns by experience what the spirit knew,

Till it can see its truth alive and God.

Book Two, Canto Fourteen, p. 293

***

A conscious soul in the Inconscient's world,

Hidden behind our thoughts and hopes and dreams,

An indifferent Master signing Nature's acts

Leaves the vicegerent mind a seeming king.

In his floating house upon the sea of Time

The regent sits at work and never rests:

He is a puppet of the dance of Time;

He is driven by the hours, the moment's call

Compels him with the thronging of life's need

And the babel of the voices of the world.

Book Seven, Canto Two, p. 478

***

This seed-self sown in the Indeterminate

Forfeits its glory of divinity,

Concealing the omnipotence of its Force,

Concealing the omniscience of its Soul;

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An agent of its own transcendent Will,

It merges knowledge in the inconscient deep;

Accepting error, sorrow, death and pain,

It pays the ransom of the ignorant Night,

Redeeming by its substance Nature's fall.

Book Three, Canto Three, p. 331

***

As a mother feels and shares her children's lives,

She puts forth a small portion of herself,

A being no bigger than the thumb of man

Into a hidden region of the heart

To face the pang and to forget the bliss,

To share the suffering and endure earth's wounds

And labour mid the labour of the stars.

This in us laughs and weeps, suffers the stroke,

Exults in victory, struggles for the crown;

Identified with the mind and body and life,

It takes on itself their anguish and defeat,

Bleeds with Fate's whips and hangs upon the cross,

Yet is the unwounded and immortal self

Supporting the actor in the human scene.

Through this she sends us her glory and her powers,

Pushes to wisdom's heights, through misery's gulfs;

She gives us strength to do our daily task

And sympathy that partakes of others' grief

And the little strength we have to help our race,

We who must fill the role of the universe

Acting itself out in a slight human shape

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And on our shoulders carry the struggling world.

This is in us the godhead small and marred;

In this human portion of divinity

She seats the greatness of the Soul in Time

To uplift from light to light, from power to power,

Till on a heavenly peak it stands, a king.

In body weak, in its heart an invincible might,

It climbs stumbling, held up by an unseen hand,

A toiling spirit in a mortal shape.

Book Seven, Canto Five, pp. 526-27

***

Our soul from its mysterious chamber acts;

Its influence pressing on our heart and mind

Pushes them to exceed their mortal selves.

It seeks for Good and Beauty and for God;

We see beyond self's walls our limitless self,

We gaze through our world's glass at half-seen vasts.

We hunt for the Truth behind apparent things.

Book Seven, Canto Two, p. 485

***

In this investiture of fleshly life

A soul that is a spark of God survives

And sometimes it breaks through the sordid screen

And kindles a fire that makes us half-divine.

Book Two. Canto Five, p. 169

***

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Thus came his soul's release from Ignorance,

His mind and body's first spiritual change.

A wide God-knowledge poured down from above,

A new world-knowledge broadened from within:

His daily thoughts looked up to the True and One,

His commonest doings welled from an inner Light.

Awakened to the lines that Nature hides.

Attuned to her movements that exceed our ken,

He grew one with a covert universe.

His grasp surprised her mightiest energies' springs;

He spoke with the unknown Guardians of the worlds.

Forms he descried our mortal eyes see not.

His wide eyes bodied viewless entities,

He saw the cosmic forces at their work

And felt the occult impulse behind man's will.

Time's secrets were to him an oft-read book;

The records of the future and the past

Outlined their excerpts on the etheric page.

One and harmonious by the Maker's skill,

The human in him paced with the divine;

His acts betrayed not the interior flame.

This forged the greatness of his front to earth.

A genius heightened in his body's cells

That knew the meaning of his fate-hedged works

Akin to the march of unaccomplished Powers

Beyond life's arc in spirit's immensities.

Apart he lived in his mind's solitude.

A demigod shaping the lives of men:

One soul's ambition lifted up the race:

A Power worked, but none knew whence it came.

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The universal strengths were linked with his;

Filling earth's smallness with their boundless breadths,

He drew the energies that transmute an age.

Immeasurable by the common look,

He made great dreams a mould for coming things

And cast his deeds like bronze to front the years.

His walk through Time outstripped the human stride.

Book One, Canto Three, pp. 44-45

***

A stillness absolute, incommunicable,

Meets the sheer self-discovery of the soul;

A wall of stillness shuts it from the world,

A gulf of stillness swallows up the sense

And makes unreal all that mind has known,

All that the labouring senses still would weave

Prolonging an imaged unreality.

Self's vast spiritual silence occupies Space;

Only the Inconceivable is left,

Only the Nameless without space and time:

Abolished is the burdening need of life:

Thought falls from us, we cease from joy and grief;

The ego is dead; we are freed from being and care,

We have done with birth and death and work and fate.

O soul, it is too early to rejoice!

Thou hast reached the boundless silence of the Self,

Thou hast leaped into a glad divine abyss;

But where hast thou thrown Self's mission and Self's power':

On what dead bank on the Eternal's road?

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One was within thee who was self and world,

What hast thou done for his purpose in the stars?

Escape brings not the victory and the crown!

Something thou cam'st to do from the Unknown,

But nothing is finished and the world goes on

Because only half God's cosmic work is done.

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,

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.

A black veil has been lifted; we have seen

The mighty shadow of the omniscient Lord;

But who has lifted up the veil of light

And who has seen the body of the King?

The mystery of God's birth and acts remains

Leaving unbroken the last chapter's seal,

Unsolved the riddle of the unfinished Play;

The cosmic Player laughs within his mask,

And still the last inviolate secret hides

Behind the human glory of a Form,

Behind the gold eidolon of a Name.

A large white line has figured as a goal,

But far beyond the ineffable suntracks blaze:

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What seemed the source and end was a wide gate,

A last bare step into eternity.

An eye has opened upon timelessness,

Infinity takes back the forms it gave,

And through God's darkness or his naked light

His million rays return into the Sun.

There is a zero sign of the Supreme;

Nature left nude and still uncovers God.

But in her grandiose nothingness all is there:

When her strong garbs are torn away from us,

The soul's ignorance is slain but not the soul:

The zero covers an immortal face.

A high and blank negation is not all,

A huge extinction is not God's last word,

Life's ultimate sense, the close of being's course,

The meaning of this great mysterious world.

In absolute silence sleeps an absolute Power.

Awaking, it can wake the trance-bound soul

And in the ray reveal the parent sun:

It can make the world a vessel of Spirit's force,

It can fashion in the clay God's perfect shape.

To free the self is but one radiant pace;

Here to fulfil himself was God's desire.

Book Three, Canto Two, pp. 310-12

***

Earth must transform herself and equal Heaven

Or Heaven descend into earth's mortal state.

But for such vast spiritual change to be,

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Out of the mystic cavern in man's heart

The heavenly Psyche must put off her veil

And step into common nature's crowded rooms

And stand uncovered in that nature's front

And rule its thoughts and fill the body and life.

Book Seven, Canto Two, pp. 486-87

***

A secret soul behind supporting all

Is master and witness of our ignorant life,

Admits the Person's look and Nature's role.

But once the hidden doors are flung apart

Then the veiled king steps out in Nature's front;

A Light comes down into the Ignorance,

Its heavy painful knot loosens its grasp:

The mind becomes a mastered instrument

And life a hue and figure of the soul.

All happily grows towards knowledge and towards bliss.

A divine Puissance then takes Nature's place

And pushes the movements of our body and mind;

Possessor of our passionate hopes and dreams,

The beloved despot of our thoughts and acts,

She streams into us with her unbound force.

Into mortal limbs the Immortal's rapture and power.

An inner law of beauty shapes our lives;

Our words become the natural speech of Truth,

Each thought is a ripple on a sea of Light.

Then sin and virtue leave the cosmic lists;

They struggle no more in our delivered hearts:

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Our acts chime with God's simple natural good

Or serve the rule of a supernal Right.

All moods unlovely, evil and untrue

Forsake their stations in fierce disarray

And hide their shame in the subconscient's dusk.

Then lifts the mind a cry of victory:

"O soul, my soul, we have created Heaven,

Within we have found the kingdom here of God,

His fortress built in a loud ignorant world.

Our life is entrenched between two rivers of Light,

We have turned space into a gulf of peace

And made the body a Capitol of bliss.

What more, what more, if more must still be done?"

In the slow process of the evolving spirit,

In the brief stade between a death and birth

A first perfection's stage is reached at last;

Out of the wood and stone of our nature's stuff

A temple is shaped where the high gods could live.

Even if the struggling world is left outside

One man's perfection still can save the world.

There is won a new proximity to the skies,

A first betrothal of the Earth to Heaven,

A deep concordat between Truth and Life:

A camp of God is pitched in human time.

Book Seven, Canto Five, pp. 530-31

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