Aspects of Sri Aurobindo

Two lines from Sri Aurobindo's savitri

AN EXPLANATORY LETTER

May I proceed as in a classroom, taking nothing for granted?

The lines you wish me to explain in brief —

Akin to the march of unaccomplished Powers

Beyond life's arc in spirit's immensities¹ —

occur in a passage where the soul of Aswapati (Savitri's royal father) is released from Ignorance and his mind and body undergo their "first spiritual change" by a Knowledge drawn from above and within. What pours down from the overhead planes is called "a wide self-knowledge" and what broadens out from the subliminal and the psychic depths is termed "a new world-knowledge". With a combination of both, Aswa-pati faces the objective and subjective Nature that constitutes our common habitual experience, our life of Ignorance, the physical and psychological field of our works. These works are changed and surpassed by Aswapati's soul-release, as we learn from the two lines just preceding your quotation:

A genius heightened in his body's cells

That knew the meaning of his fate-hedged works...

Now it is the set process of embodied existence that ordinarily determines all the outer and inner activities of one's life: the activities are "fate-hedged". But behind this process are "cosmic forces", "occult impulse", "the unknown Guardians of the world". One who gets into touch with them can bring new energies into play — either the dynamism of "an inner Light" or the Shakti of "spirit's immensities" or both together. A cosmicity other than known Nature's is drawn forth into action, a deep universal Will and an archetypal Harmony from beyond even that Will,

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the Harmony of the Original Divine Ideas that have to be fulfilled on earth. Aswapati's consciousness of the secret creativity that can alter everything is pictured in the phrases:

Awakened to the lines that Nature hides,

Attuned to her movements that exceed our ken,

He grew one with a covert universe.²

These phrases anticipate the four verses from "A genius..." to "spirit's immensities". Within the "covert universe" are the "unaccomplished Powers" on their march in the Spirit-space transcending the limited arc of life: those Powers are the hidden lines and movements of a Super-nature, with significances and purposes pressing to be realised through the slow and restricted and seemingly deterministic works of the human individual in a small earth-pattern of evolution. When Aswapati won his soul's release from Ignorance and

His daily thoughts looked up to the True and One,

His commonest doings welled from an inner Light,³

there took place in his very physical substance — "his body's cells" — an extraordinary growth of consciousness, a supernormal intensification of perception and puissance, due to the unfoldment of the real being in him, the essential animating self of him, and resulting in a wide-awake sustained ascent to a visionary and intuitive plane. This is summed up in the words: "A genius heightened". "Genius" seems used in the ordinary connotation as well as in the connotation of "in-dwelling soul". From the high plane reached, Aswapati caught the concealed sense of all his embodied existence, a sense akin to or instinct with the drive of the Primal Truths of the Transcendent that have to become the Final Realities of the Individual in the life-terms of the physical universe.

Henceforth Aswapati's "walk through Time outstripped

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the human stride" and every step of his brought nearer to accomplishment the Powers of the immense Spirit from the Overworld. Part of the means towards that accomplishment was a join-up with cosmic forces:

The universal strengths were linked with his;

Filling earth's smallness with their boundless breadths,

He drew the energies that transmute an age.⁴

Notes and References

1.Book 1, Canto 3, p. 51 (One-volume Edition, 1954)

2.Ibid.

3.Ibid.

4.Ibid. Please note in the second line the word "filling". In the printed version it has got distorted into "feeling".

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