Savitri

  VI

      'NIRVANA AND THE DISCOVERY OF

       THE ALL-NEGATING ABSOLUTE'

      Even the self-finding of her secret soul and the joy, power and peace that well up in her as a result are but the first decisive stage in Savitri's Yoga. Two more trials, two more realisations, await her. She is yet to be shocked into—or seized of—the realisation that her sovereign secret soul has really a cosmic compenetration and comprehension, and also that it is at the same time supracosmic, beyond space and time, beyond all imaginable beyonds. Her secret soul is infinity, it is all infinities; lost in the transcendent, it is lost, and is still functioning here in phenomenal space-time; of the secret soul it can indeed be said, infinity minus infinity is infinity still.

      After her first realisation, her life with Satyavan is a round of serene fulfilment:

      And Savitri's life was glad, fulfilled like earth's;

      She had found herself, she knew her beings aim.

      Although her kingdom of marvellous change within

      Remained unspoken in her secret breast,

      All that lived round her felt its magic's charm:...

      Even the smallest meanest work became

      A sweet or glad and glorious sacrament,

      An offering to the self of the great world

      Or a service to the One in each and all.³⁰¹

She sees Satyavan now, not as one condemned, but as the gate of a rich new possibility; they are together always in "love's unseen atmosphere, /Inseparable like earth and sky". It is the sun's hour of meridian glory before the slowly approaching threat of "abysmal Night".

      Then one day, at the very moment of sweet fulfilment, she is suddenly invaded by a nameless new force. An utter void seems to seize and swallow her "and end the fable of the joy of life"; it is a black

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infinity stretched across the space of a dark eternity; it is superlative emptiness, it is the zero of all zeros, it is the ultimate Nihil. This all negating featureless spectre taunts Savitri that she is but hugging the illusion of her secret soul's sovereign identity:

I have created all, all I devour;

I am Death and the dark terrible Mother of life,

I am Kali black and naked in the world,

I am Maya and the universe is my cheat.³⁰²

 For a while Savitri is drained of all her strength, but presently another voice comes from the heights, the squadrons of light decisively vacating the aggression of dark. But the voice also reminds Savitri that the task that lies ahead of her is of cosmic, rather than of a limited, significance; to be effective at that level, she should share the world's multitudinous pain and achieve a cosmic consciousness, know herself,

.. .older than the birth of Time,

Creation an incident in its consciousness,

Arcturus and Belphegor grains of fire

Circling in a corner of its boundless self,

The world's destruction a small transient storm

In the calm infinity it has become.³⁰³

Savitri should for a time "banish all thought...and be God's void"; in the absolute condition of silence of the mind so created she will see the true origins of things and also the shape of the desired transfiguration of earth into heaven, human life into the Life Divine.

      Archimedes is said to have remarked that he could lift the earth with a lever if only he could himself be detached from the earth and find a place outside to stand on. Our efforts to observe and understand the operations of the cosmos are frustrated because we are ourselves intimately implicated in it. In the strictly material world, one cannot be both within and without, the observed and the observer; in the realms of the spirit, however, nothing is impossible. Savitri stands back,

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       .. .detached and calm,

      A witness of the drama of herself,

      A student of her own interior scene ³⁰⁴

and "watches the passion and the toil of life" and hears "in the crowded thoroughfares of mind/The unceasing tread and passage of her thoughts". It is as though she is looking beneath the polished surface of a delicate instrument, and scrutinising the wires, the springs, the complicated machinery. She sees the processes of sensory and vital activity, the surges of passion, the frenzied agitation of the nerves, the grapple of opposing forces; but more particularly her gaze pursues the "birth of thought". Does thought take shape in the brain? Does it issue from the subtle body? Does it come from outside, from somewhere in the unmapped cosmos? Does it well up from the heart or does it crystallise in the soul? As she views the field of thought and ponders over thought's variety, life grows "marvellous with transfiguring hope":

      Thoughts, glistening Angels, stood behind the brain

      In flashing armour, folding hands of prayer,

      And poured heaven's rays into the earthly form.

      Imaginations flamed up from her breast,

      Unearthly beauty, touches of surpassing joy

      And plans of miracle, dreams of delight:...³⁰⁵

It is as though each part of her body has thoughts appropriate to it, and carries its yearnings to the point of complete expression. But average humanity cannot achieve such quick or perfect translation of yearning or impulse into thought or idea. What's opaque to others is transparent to Savitri, and thus she sees clearly the happenings in the spirit's house:

      Eyes looked through crevices in the invisible wall

      And through the secrecy of the unseen doors

      There came into mind's little frontal room

      Thoughts that enlarged our limited human range,

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       Lifted the ideal's half-quenched or sinking torch

       Or peered through the finite at the infinite.³⁰⁶

 With an expansive range of consciousness, Savitri receives thought-intimations from far and near, from the dim inconscient as well as the overhead planes:

      Thoughts leaped down from a superconscient field

      Like eagles swooping from a viewless peak,

      Thoughts gleamed up from the screened

      subliminal depths

      Like golden fishes from a hidden sea.³⁰⁷

And beholding these varied "births of thought", Savitri realises that the human mind itself is but a small machine that quickly wears out, whereas,

The word, the form, the charm, the glory and grace

 Are missioned sparks from a stupendous Fire;...³⁰⁸

 The receiving, transmitting mind but defaces or corrupts the purity of the original thought, and thereby often becomes the vehicle of error and ignorance.

      Savitri now rises out of her human mind to escape its law of limitation and force of perversion, and from a vantage height dedicates her "sovereign will...to God's timeless calm". Her mind itself is calm, as if a dynamo has ceased to work, and it is this condition that "men call quietude and prize as peace". Presently, mental activity is not only stilled but wholly ceases; the body is like a stone, although still excluding "eternity's hush", for now and then a stray thought, like a leaf floating from afar, falls on the surface of the immense calm and recoils, receiving no response. Soon these too cease, and all is "immobile, self-rapt, timeless, solitary". In this absolute hush of her mind,

      Emotion slept deep down in the still heart

      Or lay buried in a cemetery of peace:...³⁰⁹

There is the utter collapse of thought, but her body sees and moves and speaks, always to the right purpose though without a specific mental push; she is no more a particular individual, she is a vessel of the Supreme; there is "no frame of things, no figure of soul", but delivered from the tyranny of the dualities, Savitri now shares the "Superconscient's high retreat". Yet a giant doubt assails her: Has she come to the very end of things, only waiting for annihilation's final act, or can she hope for an affirmation that can annul annihilation itself? Can the all-negating Absolute and the all-Delight of Existence, in other words Nihil and ananda, be themselves reconciled?

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