On Savitri
THEME/S
AGNI IN THE RIG-VEDA AND
ASWAPATHY IN SAVITRI
(SOME REFLECTIONS APROPOS OF A TERM
COMMENTED UPON BY NOLINI KANTA GUPTA)
1
In the Mother India of August 15, 1976 Nolini Kanta Gupta has given a very pointed and appealing interpretation of a term in Savitri which had puzzled Huta and me and led us to consult him. The term occurs in the course of a description of the Yogic development which Aswapathy, Savitri's father, undergoes. The context runs:
A Seer was born, a shining Guest of Time.
For him mind's limiting firmament ceased above.
In the griffin forefront of the Night and Day
A gap was rent in the all-concealing vault;
The conscious ends of being went rolling back:
The landmarks of the little person fell,
The island ego joined its continent.
Overpassed was this world of rigid limiting forms:
Life's barriers opened into the Unknown. [p. 25]
Nolini, after reminding us that the Griffin is "Golden Hawk - Winged Lion", explained the symbol as standing for "The piercing eye of soaring aspiration + Upsurging energy of the pure vital" and asked us to remember "Vishnu's Garuda +
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Durga's Lion". Finally, he wrote: "With these twin powers you cross safely the borderland between the lower and the upper hemispheres - the twilight world (Night and Day) -Griffin is the guardian God of the passage - dvārapālaka."
All this strikes me as illuminatively correct in its central bearing. What I may venture to add are a number of ideas that have occurred to me while reading Sri Aurobindo's translations of the Rig-veda and his comments at a certain place. These ideas may call for a slight shift of perspective in the last part of Nolini's gloss but mostly they will serve to enrich that gloss with a few shades borrowed from an ancient symbology to mingle with Sri Aurobindo's own immediate esoteric vision. I wish to suggest that together with this vision Sri Aurobindo had in mind a group of Vedic associations. My thesis is that his "griffin" holds, fused in itself, some of the powers and functions and forms the Rig-veda ascribes to the Fire-god Agni.
2
To every reader of the Rig-veda the designation and image in the first line of our passage -
A Seer was born, a shining Guest of Time - [p. 25]
is bound to recall several verses in the hymns to Agni translated by Sri Aurobindo in their spiritual sense:
"O thou who shinest out with thy lustres; O great luminousness, O Seer..." (X.140.1).1
"I voice the Shining One..., the guest in whom is nothing hostile..." (X.122.1).2
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1Hymns to the Mystic Fire, Vol. 11 of the Birth Centenary Edition, p. 431.
2Ibid., p. 429.
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"...he is the seer and he lights up the sky..." (X.20.4).1
"Head of heaven and traveller of the earth a universal
Power was born to us in the Truth, a Guest of men, a
seer and absolute King..." (VI.7.1).2
The second line of our passage, with its sense of a breakthrough of the infinite - a sense linking up with all that follows the "griffin" line - has also affinities with what is said about Agni's work:
"Thou art he who breaks through, thou openest to us
the luminous impulsions; open to us the conquest of
the great Riches, O Fire" (VIII.23.29).3
"From thy place in the supreme region break through
to those who are below."... (VIII.75.15).4
That the true power of Agni should particularly manifest in Aswapathy is hinted pretty clearly in proximity to our passage, by the very designation given to him by Sri Aurobindo when, after recounting at some length the stages of man's spiritual ascent and liberation, he illustrates them in the case of that human aspirant:
This now was witnessed in that son of Force,
In him that high transition laid its base. [p. 24]
The Rig-veda brings us again and again the same expression for Agni as Sri Aurobindo uses here for Aswapathy. For example, III.14.1 has "Fire the son of force"; the 4th and 6th verses of this hymn have "son of Force"; while IV.2.2 reads "O Son of Force..."5 Agni in his
1Ibid., p. 397.
2Ibid., p. 259.
3Ibid., p. 334.
4Ibid., p. 368.
5Ibid., pp. 134,135,166.
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explicit aspect would thus naturally occur in the course of Aswapathy's progress.
But when we come to the line -
In the griffin forefront of the Night and Day - [p. 25]
can we still think of Agni acting a special role or do the words take us quite out of the Agni-universe of spiritual discourse? The last part of the phrase, commencing from "forefront", has a very strong echo of the Veda. We may begin with recollecting utterances like:
"Shine through the nights and the days... Thou art by
night and day inviolable" (VII.15.8 and 15).1
".. .thou art beloved of the great Dawns and thou shinest
in the dwelling places of the night" (VIII.19.31.).2
Then we may proceed to consider the opening hymn of the Fifth Mandala3 and one particular gloss by Sri Aurobindo on a passage there. As almost everywhere else, Agni in the hymn is called "the seer, manifold in his fixed knowledge" (verse 6) and "that illumined seer, who achieves perfection in the pilgrim-sacrifices" (7) as well as "our benignant guest" (8) and "wide of light...the beloved guest of human beings" (9). But most important for us is to note verses 4 and 5 and Sri Aurobindo's comments on them. The relevant portions of the verses are:
"...when two dawns of different forms give birth to
this Fire the white Horse is born in front of the days.
"He was born victorious in front of the days, established
in established things..."
_____________
1Ibid., pp. 312,313.
2Ibid., p. 328.
3Ibid., pp. 201-03.
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Sri Aurobindo's comments not only draw out the meaning of these statements within their own context but also exhibit through them the Veda's general sense as may be read from other passages of similar import. An instance of such analogues may be cited:
"Darkness and Dawn we desire, two mighty Mothers of
the Truth...increasers of our spacious being" (V.5.6.).1
Sri Aurobindo's comments go:
"Night and Dawn are the two unlike mothers who jointly give birth to Agni, Night, the avyakta, unmanifest state of knowledge and being, the power of Avidya, Dawn, the vyakta, manifest state of knowledge and being, the power of Vidya. They are the two Dawns, the two agencies which prepare the manifestation of God in us, Night fostering Agni in secret on the activities of Avidya, the activities of unillumined mind, life and body by which the god in us grows out of matter towards spirit, out of earth up to heaven, Dawn manifesting him again, more and more, until he is ready here for his continuous, pure and perfect activity. When this point of our journey towards perfection is reached he is born, śveta vāji ['white horse'] in the van of the days. We have here one of those great Vedic figures with a double sense in which the Rishis at once revealed and concealed their high knowledge, revealed it to the Aryan mind, concealed it from the un-Aryan. Agni is the white horse which appears galloping in front of the days, - the same image is used with a similar Vedantic sense in the opening verse of the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad; but the horse here is not, as in the Upanishad, aśva, the horse of vital and material being in the state of life-force, but vāji, the horse of Being generally, Being manifested in substance whether of mind, life, body or idea or the three higher streams proper to our spiritual being. Agni therefore manifests as the fullness, the infinity, the brhat of all this
1 The Secret of the Veda, pp. 376-77.
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sevenfold substantial being that is the world we are, but white, the colour of illumined purity. He manifests therefore at this stage primarily as that mighty wideness, purity and illumination of our being which is the true basis of the complete and unassailable siddhi in the yoga, the only basis on which right knowledge, right thinking, right living, right enjoyment can be firmly, vastly and perpetually seated. He appears therefore in the van of the days, a great increasing state of illumined force and being, - for that is the image of ahan, - which are the eternal future of the mortal when he has attained immortality...
"This divine force is born victorious by its very purity and infinity over all the hostile forces that prevent, obstruct, limit or strive to destroy our accomplished freedoms, powers, illuminations and widenesses; by his victory he ushers in the wide days of the siddha, for which these nights and dawns of our human life are the preparatory movements."1
We have here the picture of a divine Presence that establishes itself in the human consciousness, turning that consciousness into a figure of divinity. We have pointers to the light of a Seer-Guest being "born victorious" in one who was so far a mental creature. As a result, "fullness", "infinity", the vastness (brhat) of the spiritual existence are realised. And by the help of this light the realised "freedoms, powers, illuminations and widenesses" are guarded. Also, the light comes from both Night and Day and moves "in front of the days" in the symbolic shape of a supernatural animal - a White Horse of illumined power - by whom or in whom our Night and Day are transcended and a greater lustre of knowledge revealed beyond them.
We may add that the Veda, on more than one occasion, has even a couple of successive verses which unite the idea of a gap or passage or portal as in Nolini's remarks on the "griffin"-line as well as on the line
______________
1 Hymns to the Mystic Fire, pp. 498-99.
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A gap was rent in the all-concealing vault [p. 25]
and the idea of Agni's connection with and manifestation from both Night and Day. We have already quoted verse 6 of V.5. Now we may repeat it with the verse preceding it:
"Swing open, ye Doors divine, and give us easy passage
to our expanding...
"Darkness and Dawn we desire, two mighty
Mothers of the Truth,... increasers of our spacious
being" (V.5.5-6).1
A similar context has the very terms "Night and Day" employed in translation by Sri Aurobindo for the birth-givers of Agni:
"Widely expanding may they spring apart making
themselves beautiful for us as wives for their lords;
O divine doors, vast and all-pervading, be easy of
approach to the gods.
"Let night and day come gliding to us and, queens
of sacrifice, sit close together in their place of session..."
(X.110.5-6).2
In the lines from Savitri all these phenomena of spiritual progress appear to be projected and by the Vedic evidence on Agni, including the symbol of a supernatural animal, the "griffin forefront" should be the Seer-and-Guest's own position as part of a gap or passage or portal formed by Night and Day, those two "divine doors" seen by the occult eye of the inner sacrificer. What they lead to in the Vedic vision -"the wide days of the siddha", as Sri Aurobindo puts it - is reflected in some later Savitri-lines closing the account from which we have been quoting:
____________
1The Secret of the Veda, pp. 76-77.
2Hymns to the Mystic Fire, p. 425.
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Freedom and empire called to him from on high;
Above mind's twilight and life's star-led night
There gleamed the dawn of a spiritual day. [p. 26]
But here we are faced with the intriguing question: Can Agni Vedically lend himself to the "griffin"-image?
Agni, as we have observed, is pictured in the Veda as a White Horse. Sometimes he is called a Bull, as in "the bull of the thousand horns" (V.1.8.)1 and "the luminous Bull" (VIII.75.6).2 It is seldom realised that the ancient scripture can actually tend Sri Aurobindo to see him as a griffin.
Nolini has spoken of a Hawk as a component of the griffin. The Concise Oxford Dictionary (1964, p. 541, col. 2) describes the griffin as "Fabulous creature with eagle's head & wings & lion's body." This would suit Nolini quite well since he brings in "Vishnu's Garuda". Now, hawk and eagle and falcon are kin birds. If any one of them can be found Vedically associated with Agni, half of our case would be rendered credible. At the very start we may mention that, even when Agni is called the White Horse (named Dadhikravan), the horse's movement is linked to the sense of an eagle in flight. Sri Aurobindo translates IV.40.3 which continues the picture of Dadhikravan: "When he runs, when he speeds in his passage, as the wing of the Bird is a wind that blows about him in his greed of the gallop; as the wing that beats about the breast of the rushing Eagle, so about the breast of Dadhikravan when with the Force he carries us beyond."3 In X.11.4 Sri Aurobindo has the rendering about Agni: "Now the Bird, the missioned Hawk, has brought the draught of the great and seeing Wine to the pilgrim-sacrifice."4 In various hymns we have descriptions of Agni like: "Forth I
___________
1Ibid., p. 202.
2Ibid., p. 366.
3Ibid., pp. 197-8.
4Ibid., p. 393.
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flew, with rapid speed a Falcon" (IV.27.1)1 - "The Falcon took and brought the Soma" (IV.26.7)2 - "Agni, Falcon of the sky" (VII.15.4).3 Either an Eagle or a Hawk or a Falcon is conjured up in general terms in X.91.14: "Fire the nectar-drinker who bears on his beak the Soma-wine.".4 There is no doubt that one-half of the griffin-image is perfectly amenable.
What about the other half - the lion? Sri Aurobindo's translation of X.79.6 about Agni reads: "In his play unplaying a tawny lion, eating only to devour..."5 Nor is this the only instance. III.9.4 compares Agni to a lion couched in his lair,6 while III.2.11 tells us that he is "born as a lion."7 Then there is 1.95.5 where also the lion-image for Agni occurs: Tvashtar's two worlds are said to "turn to him and reverence the lion".8
If Agni is both lion and eagle or hawk or falcon, Sri Aurobindo could justifiably join the two creatures and set Agni as a griffin acting like the more frequent horse in the forefront of both Night and Day. Night and Day, with Agni in their van, would not be exclusively or altogether the worlds of Divine Knowledge and human ignorance. Nor would they constitute simply a twilight mid-world, with a griffin-guarded portal, across which one passes from the lower hemisphere of existence to the higher. Besides being, in an ultimate sense, the material inconscience or ignorance on the one hand and the Supreme Light on the other, they would be the dark and the bright sides of mental consciousness itself, within both of
________________
1The Hymns of the Rgveda, Translated with a Popular Commentary by Ralph T. H. Griffith (The Chowkhamba Sanskrit Series Office, Varanasi, 1974), Vol. I, p. 429.
2Ibid., p. 29
3Ibid., Vol. II. p. 14.
4Hymns to the Mystic Fire, p. 424.
5Ibid., p. 413.
6Griffith, Vol. I, p. 329.
7Ibid., p. 319.
8Ibid.,p. 124.
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which Agni, the ever-wakeful, functions and beyond both of which he goes as their leader towards the infinite and eternal. He serves, in the form of the griffin, as the new-born Seer in man, the shining Guest hailing from eternity into man's time-existence, through whom or in whom there comes about "a gap...rent in the all-concealing vault". The rending of this vault by means of Agni's established presence is pictured again a little later in the lines:
All the grey inhibitions were torn off
And broken the intellect's hard and lustrous lid. [p. 25]
The last phrase here indicates that the bright no less than the dark is a portion of the human intellectuality that has to be cloven with the help of the freshly arrived and established Fire-God who in the Rig-veda is simultaneously the mortal's visitor from heaven and his immortal in-dweller, purifier, guide, mediator, liberator.
As already suggested, Agni may himself be looked upon as the break, the gap, in the lid or vault formed by the human mind. In that aspect he is at once the portal and its guardian à la Nolini, poised between the two hemispheres. Further, since Vedically every god is also all the gods under this or that particular face and since Agni especially is the bringer or revealer or fashioner of all the gods in man - "in thee are all the gods" (V.3.1)1 - the identification of him with Vishnu's Garuda and with Durga's Lion is quite in order. Hence what Nolini has said stands substantially unchanged. Even his "twilight world" may be accepted in the sense that the bright and the dark of the human intellect, at play together in the same psychological domain, make a mixture of Day and Night. Has not Sri Aurobindo himself spoken of "mind's twilight" along with "life's star-led night"? If our vision is correct, only certain nuances of explanation undergo a change
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owing to the griffin, as well as the Seer and the Guest, being identified with Agni and recognised as in essence emergent from Vedic symbology.
It is even possible to discern Agni at work in the long passage preceding the one with which we are concerned. The Seer-Guest is born as the final expression of a number of moulding movements by a Divine Power upon and within Aswapathy. We may quote the lines between
In him that high transition laid its base
and
These lines run:
Original and supernal Immanence
Of which all Nature's process is the art,
The cosmic Worker set his secret hand
To turn this frail earth-engine to heaven-use.
A Presence wrought behind the ambiguous screen:
It beat his soil to bear a Titan's weight.
Refining half-hewn blocks of natural strength
It built his soul into a statued god.
The Craftsman of the magic stuff of self
Who labours at his high and difficult plan
In the wide workshop of the wonderful world,
Modelled in inward Time his rhythmic parts.
Then came the abrupt transcendent miracle:
The masked immaculate Grandeur could outline,
At travail in the occult womb of life,
His dreamed magnificence of things to be.
A crown of the architecture of the worlds,
A mystery of married Earth and Heaven
Annexed divinity to the mortal scheme. [pp. 24-25]
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As parallel to this picture of a masked cosmic Worker, Form-maker and Craftsman travailing with his mighty hands to prepare earthly mortality for perfection and joining it to heavenly divinity, we may cite a few verses about Agni from the Rig-veda:
"This is the universal godhead who by his
greatness labours in all the peoples" (I.59.7).1
"This is the one god who envelops with himself the
grandeurs of all the gods" (I.68.1).2
"...the satisfying fullness of thee becomes all-pervading
in its greatness along both the continents, Earth and
Heaven" (II.1.15).3
"The Flame is the head of heaven and the navel
of the earth and he is the power that moves at work in the
two worlds" (I.59.2).4
"He holds in his hands all mights: sitting in the secret
cave he upholds the gods in his strength" (I.6.72).5
"He forms within us the seer-wisdoms of the eternal
Creator holding in his hands many powers of the
godheads. May Fire become the treasure-master of the
riches, ever fashioning all immortal things" (I.72.1).6
"...come to be with us like a Form-Maker coming to the
forms he has to carve" (VIII.I02.8).7
"Thou art Twashtri and fashionest fullness of force for
thy worshipper" (II.1.5).8
_______
1Ibid., p. 51.
2Ibid., p. 55.
3Ibid., p. 84.
4Ibid., p. 50.
5Ibid., p. 54.
6Ibid., p. 61.
7Ibid., p. 371.
8Ibid., p. 82.
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"O Fire, thou art the craftsman Ribhu, near to us and to
be worshipped with obeisance of surrender" (II.1.10).1
"A skilled craftsman, a god knowing all the
manifestations of knowledge, he forms the beautiful
and desirable Name, the luminous seat of the being in
the movement of the peace..." (III.5.6).2
Summing up Agni's functions in the spiritual career of the aspirant, Sri Aurobindo writes:
"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.
"This he does as a cosmic worker labouring upon the rebellious human material... But it is in proportion as we learn to subjugate the ego and compel it to bow down in every act to the universal Being and to serve consciously in its least movements the supreme Will, that Agni himself takes form in us. The Divine Will becomes present and conscient in a human mind and enlightens it with the divine Knowledge."3
With these words we come back to the sense of Agni the Seer being born in Aswapathy as - to quote a phrase from Sri Aurobindo's Rose of God - "Guest of the marvellous Hour".4 And well indeed might Aswapathy be linked with Agni. He may be considered as Agni himself putting, forth a human vehicle out of his being for world-action. Not only is he called, like Agni, "Son of Force" but his very name "Aswapathy" means "Lord of the Horse", reminding us of Dadhikravan and of the Rig-vedic sloka:
1Ibid., p. 83.
2Ibid., p. 120.
3The Secret of the Veda, pp. 268-9.
4Collected Poems (Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, 1972), p. 584.
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"Increase for us, O Fire, the acquisition and the growth of those who are men that are illuminates and...who...have achieved the power of the horse" (V.10.1-2).1
3
At this juncture the objection might be raised: "The natural construing of the lines -
For him the limiting firmament ceased above - [p. 25]
would make the pronoun 'him' refer to 'Seer' and 'Guest'. If that is so, the 'Griffin-forefront' cannot be related to the Seer-Guest, for the line immediately after the one mentioning the Hawk-Lion -
A gap was rent in the all-concealing vault -[Ibid.]
merely elaborates the phenomenon of the limiting firmament's cessation and therefore must be understood to differentiate the Seer-Guest who experiences the gap from the strange creature who is located in the forefront of the Night and Day. Moreover, the forefront-position is observed rather than taken by whoever is 'him', whoever experiences the gap. The two cannot be the same being under different aspects. If 'him' connects with the Seer-Guest the griffin-forefront cannot stand for the latter entity. Your whole interpretation here misfires - unless you can justify what amounts to an identification by you of 'him' with Aswapathy. A straightforward reading of the syntax rules out such an identification completely, even though your study of the Agni-symbology in the Veda as well as in the passage concerned may strongly suggest it by
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relating the griffin to the Seer-Guest. Can you ever render conceivable a syntactic reference to Aswapathy in that 'him'?"
I believe that an answer can quite convincingly be given. We may commence with the simple remark that there is a full-stop after the line on the Seer-Guest. After this closure by the punctuation, a reference to Aswapathy, directly continuing the lengthy narration of his development, which precedes this line, is perfectly conceivable. All the more is it so because, in the context from which our quotation derives, the Divine Power, variously named "Original and supernal Immanence", "the cosmic Worker", "the Craftsman of the magic stuff of self" and "the masked immaculate Grandeur" - is not the only referent of a cognate to the word "him": the possessive pronoun "his". Aswapathy too is often denoted by the same vocable.
Let us briefly note the sequence of the human aspirant's progress. "His soil" is prepared and "his soul" is built into the statue of a god. "His rhythmic parts" are modelled "in inward time" by the World-Craftsman. Then suddenly divinity enters the human formation. There is the birth of a Seer, Time receives a shining Guest. It is the being of Aswapathy that holds the Seer's birth and acts host to that luminous visitor from beyond time. The phrase "in him" is inevitably to be understood when the Seer-Guest is born. The line about this deep-visioned heaven-sent Splendour is a link in the story of the spiritual growth taking place within Aswapathy and sums up the culmination of the process which starts with the verse:
In him that high transition laid its base.[p. 24]
So the line -
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can very naturally be regarded as picking up the thread of the account about Aswapathy and as opening a report of the consequences - for this human aspirant - of what has been recorded immediately before as having happened in his being.
This eminent possibility gains further strength from the verb "ceased" in the next line. "Ceased" is highly suggestive of a condition previously continuing for whoever is "him" and afterwards coming to a stop. But how could a just-actualised Seer-Guest from the Timeless have such a history? Only Aswapathy could earlier experience "mind's limiting firmament" and then its cessation due to his harbouring a recent Seer-Guest in himself. Again, the later line -
The landmarks of the little person fell -[Ibid.]
can scarcely agree with a "him" implying the new-born Seer-Guest. This entity was never "the little person". Aswapathy knew that state once, and subsequently found its landmarks falling because he had by then realised in himself something very far from it.
Such a view is supported by the fact that after nine lines from the end of our passage - lines in which the narration of the experiences begun in our passage is prolonged and completed - we have the statement:
His march now soared into an eagle's flight.
Out of apprenticeship to ignorance
Wisdom upraised him to her master craft
And made him an arch-mason of the soul... [pp. 25-26]
It is certain that "his" and "him" here refer to the same agent who is "him" in our passage. So we have to ask: "Who is it whose march now soared eagle-like?" It cannot be the Seer and the shining Guest. It must be someone who marched in the past differently from "now": in the past his marching was
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not "an eagle's flight". Surely, Aswapathy's new experience in contrast to his old one is being spoken of. The Seer, the shining Guest, who has just appeared cannot be this being with a past of another kind than his present. Nor could he have known "apprenticeship to ignorance". In that case "the griffin forefront of the Night and Day" would not be other than a position of the new-born Seer-Guest. Besides, the "eagle's flight" may join up with one half of the griffin-image: it is a state which can align that image with the great Advent into Aswapathy's being.
Both the aptness of the phrase about the Seer-Guest to Agni and the aptness of the phrase about the "forefront" to the same god may be considered amply supported. As a result, "For him" should belong to the same universe of discourse as the initial "In him": that is, it should denote Aswapathy. Of course, the Seer-Guest too is part of Aswapathy, his own freshly found divine reality and therefore himself as a deep-visioned heavenly Splendour; but he has another part also, which he transcends by discovering this reality. Simultaneously he is divine and human. Not the divine side but that double individuality, which still retains the human side, is intended by the locution we are interpreting.
A complete confirmation of our reading emerges when we go a little backward and examine the statements on man's general ascent and liberation, with which Sri Aurobindo prefaces the sequence of Aswapathy's inward and upward movements. The terminal transfiguring step in that ascent and liberation corresponding to what we have been discussing for Aswapathy is presented. There is a futile-seeming "endless spiral"
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.
Across our nature's border line we escape
Into supernature's arc of living light. [p. 24]
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Quite clearly, a distinction is suggested between the one whose "Glory shines" - "A Seer..., a shining Guest" -through a "giant point" of development - "a gap...rent in the all-concealing vault" - and us the human aspirants, like Aswapathy, who cross "over nature's border line" - "mind's limiting firmament" - and arise into "Supernature's arc of living light", a beyond which is figured in our context by the later lines:
Truth unpartitioned found immense sky-room,
An empyrean vision saw and knew;
The bounded mind became a boundless light... [p. 25]
The inference to be drawn is that what stands in our passage for the "Glory" must be distinguished in some sense from what stands for the "we" who break into super-nature's light by escaping from nature's constricting border-line. That "Glory" is indeed the fulfilment of our own being since "we were made" for Him to whom it belongs, it is the Seer, the Shining Guest, born in our temporal existence as our own divine self-realisation, yet it is a celestial entrant into us and we are also the all-too-human self which is now being exceeded. In short, "For him" applies to our composite being, the Aswapathy that we are, and not to the luminous Visitor who is the higher half of us.
(Mother India, August 1982, pp. 524-35)
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