Savitri

IX

      PLANES OF CONSCIOUSNESS:

      STAIR OF WORLDS

The experience of, or should we rather say, disappearance in the unmanifest utter calm of the Spirit thus preceded the experience of the manifest God. Then came the vision of the possibility of man becoming God, of Nature becoming supernature. Last came the realisation of the Overmind, the important first step to the supramentalisation of man and Nature. These experiences, although apparently unconnected, were actually interlinked. The 'earthly paradise' was no mere dream now, but a sure, even if a distant, possibility. The world was to be accepted and transformed, that is, supramentalised, by stages:

I am seeking to bring some principle of inner Truth, Light,

Harmony, Peace into the earth-consciousness.¹⁰⁷

My Yoga can include indeed a full experience of the other worlds,

the plane of the Supreme Spirit and the other planes in between

and their possible effects upon our life and the material world... It

is this view and experience of things and of the truth of existence

that enabled me to write The Life Divine, and Savitri.¹⁰⁸

Since the realisation, transformation or supramentalisation is to take place in stages, the ascending (and descending) planes, the world-stair, the receding inner countries, acquire a necessary importance in the yoga. Ever since his arrival in India from England in 1893, Sri Aurobindo had experiences of a sort—he had become vaguely conscious of "supraphysical worlds and planes with influences and an effect from them upon the material plane",¹⁰⁹ and later he made the "interpenetration of the planes...a capital and fundamental part of spiritual experience."¹¹⁰ Now this was by no means peculiar to Sri Aurobindo. Planes, ascents, descents, explorations, although they evoke physical realities, have also corresponding non-

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physical parallels.¹¹¹ It is thus not at all surprising that the imagery of ascent-descent and planes is employed purposively with regard to the mystic experiences as well. As Rufus M.Jones writes,

The 'mystic way', 'this flight of the alone to the Alone', is described

as steep and hard, lonely and arduous, a way of 'ladders' and

'steps' and 'ascents'. The historic 'grades' which divide the 'way'

into well-marked levels, or heights of ascents, are the 'purgative',

the 'illuminative' and the 'unitive' stages...the carefully labelled

stages of the 'mystic way' only loosely sum up and recapitulate the

unfolding processes of the soul on its way to God.¹¹²

In visualising Aswapati as the traveller of the worlds, Sri Aurobindo had not only such mystic or occult stairs or ladders or slopes in view, but he had also examples such as Dante's progress through Hell, Purgatory and Paradise in his Divina Commedia, Hanuman's passage through Brahmaloka, Rajatalaya, Shakralaya, Brahmashiras, Vahnyalaya, Vaishravanalaya, Suryaprabha-Suryanibhandana, Brahmalaya and Vrisha in the Ramayana,¹¹³ and Gilgamesh's voyage through darkness in quest of immortality.¹¹⁴ More recently, the Greek poet, Nikos Kazantzakis, in his colossal epic, The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel, has made his hero's travels symbolic of an upward movement spiralling towards increasing perfectibility. The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Little Life and of the Greater Life, the Paradise of the Life-Gods, the Kingdoms and Godheads of the Little Mind, of the Greater Mind and of the Greater Knowledge that cross Aswapati's path are no verbal abstractions but occult realities, and Sri Aurobindo has but tried to describe what he has himself seen or experienced. As Sir John Woodroffe writes,

In the sensible world are a great variety of beings who form a

number of orders and grades. These grades form a series, at one

extremity of which lies that order of beings whose experiences

are the most limited. From this grade upwards to man there is an

ascending series, each successive order of which has experiences

wider in range than those of the beings of the preceding order.

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Man stands at the head of this series. But there is no reason to

suppose that he is the absolutely highest order. In fact he is limited

and helped by Unseen Powers, Beings more powerful than he who

exist in unseen forms. If what is supersensible in man can exist in

an unseen form after death, why not other Beings who habitually

exist in such forms? And if these Beings exist in unseen or super

sensible forms, then there are also states of existence or worlds

which are also super-sensible and quite as real, if not in a sense

more so than the gross world of ordinary experience. Experience

reaches up to that of the Cosmic Mind which apprehends the

world of universals as they exist in themselves.¹¹⁵

From 'inanimate' matter to the Overmind (and beyond): such is the cosmic range, and the human consciousness holds within itself the possibility of extension, above as well as below; there are verily more worlds above and below than are dreamt of in our normal consciousness! The idea of a journey, a climbing of planes, a quest after the Holy Grail of Truth or Love or Immortality, is really no more than a formalisation of an evolutionary process in which human beings are anyhow involved. For, as W. R. Inge says,

Every one of us, in his short span of life, recapitulates and hurries

through the whole gamut of creation. In the nine months before

we see the light, we pass through the stages of evolution which

in the race were spread over tens of millions of years. And in

our upward progress may there not be some dim anticipations

of another long period of growth, which the slow mills of God

are grinding out without haste and without rest?...We can only

know what is akin to ourselves, but there is that in us which is

akin to God Himself.¹¹⁶

Out of this seeming mire must sprout forth the lotus plant of our evolving destiny, and the mystic bud of the lotus and its full blossoming in response to the sun's rays must be the destination of our journey. Alfred Noyes has sung:

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      Out of this earth, this dust,

      Out of this flesh, this blood, this living tomb;

      Out of these cosmic throes of wrath and lust,

      Breaks the lost splendour from the world's blind womb.¹¹⁷

And A.E. asks wistfully:

      Is there still in us

      A heaven-descended ray

      Of that which built the palaces

      Of night and day?

      Do our first works, sun, moon, and stars,

      Shine on our clay?¹¹⁸

There is an evolving consciousness, we are acutely aware of it, we are ourselves participants in this drama of evolution; all this necessarily presupposes the involution of Consciousness—the highest imaginable —in mind, life, matter. Often the Truth is veiled. Consciousness is in a swoon; we see and do not see, or are afraid to recognise what we see; as R.W. Emerson once wrote, "Heaven walks among us ordinarily muffled in such triple or tenfold disguises that the wisest are deceived and no one suspects the days to be gods."¹¹⁹ But the mystics are able to pierce the veil, terminate the swoon, tear away the disguises, and proclaim the truth:

      I saw Eternity the other night,

      Like a great Ring of pure and endless light.¹²⁰

      Eternity shut in a span!

      Summer in winter! Day in night!

      Heaven on earth! and God in man !¹²¹

Pico Delia Mirandola tells an interesting fable: God took man as a creature indeterminate though of infinite possibility and, locating him in the middle of the world, told him that he had his future largely in his own hands; he could survey from earth to heaven, from heaven to earth; he would have the freedom alike to degenerate into the brutish

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lower forms of life and to ascend, out of his soul's judgement, to the higher forms which are divine.¹²²

      There is the natural order which we perceive through the senses and deduce through reason, and there is also the eternal order of the Spirit which we infer in the secrecies of our heart and soul. Worldly-wise people keep these 'orders' apart, but the mystic increasingly runs them together, and by jumbling the categories holds like Blake infinity in the palm of his hand and eternity in a second. To leap over the barriers of the material order, to storm the gates of eternity, to bring God to our midst: these are the mystic's, the yogin's, preoccupations. Some mystics are content with losing themselves in God; others, like Sri Aurobindo, go further—they would bring the heavens down, realise the "Kingdom of Heaven on earth—-'On Earth as it is in Heaven.'"¹²³

 It is implied, of course, that always there is a meeting of God's response and man's striving, for without this double movement no creative advance is possible. As Jacob Boehme has declared,

I did not climb up into the Godhead, neither can so mean a man

as I am do it; but the Godhead climbed up in me, and revealed

such to me out of his Love, which otherwise I would have had to

leave it quite alone in my half-dead fleshly birth.¹²⁴

Sri Aurobindo clinches the point in a sentence: "He who chooses the Infinite has been chosen by the Infinite."¹²⁵ It is the Hound of Heaven, and Love is another name of this celestial Hound, that runs the quarry to its ultimate cave of awakening and acceptance. It was this Hound that drove Dante on and on till he came to the immediate presence of God. Such spiritual yearning, such Love, says C. G. Osgood, "is a reciprocal attraction, mutual between Infinite and Finite.. .As a sense of that love dawns in us by grace, and by the light of our best love for each other, so it increases in us, drawing us upward into a clearer vision of God."¹²⁶ Grace is the name of God's love, and a readiness to sacrifice is the proof of man's love, and when the two meet, there is an integration, a spiritual transformation.

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           In Savitri we have a double demonstration of the dynamics of spiritual awakening: Aswapati's odyssey of the occult worlds and Savitri's exploration of the countries of the soul, and the latter is as important as the former. Aswapati's occult and spiritual itinerary is at least remotely paralleled by Dante s, but Savitri's voyage of self discovery is almost unique. Of course, 'upward' and inward' are but physical terms to convey experiences that are supra-physical; 'The Kingdom of Heaven is within you', says the Scripture; and Browning says in Paracelsus:

      There is an inmost centre in us all,

      Where truth abides in fullness;

 and F.W.H. Myers says in A Cosmic Outlook:

      Inward! aye deeper far than love or scorn,

      Deeper than bloom of virtue, stain of sin,

      Rend thou the veil and pass alone within

      Stand naked there and feel thyself forlorn!

Not forlorn, really, but accepting and being accepted in a transfiguring moment by Reality, becoming that Reality. "The first part of our journey towards reality," says J.J. Van Der Leeuw, "is the surrendering of our world-image and the turning inwards until we reach the centre of consciousness the second is to pierce through that centre and find the reality which, acting on that centre, produces the world-image in the cave of our consciousness."¹²⁷ In essence, this is what happens to Savitri when she journeys into the "inner countries". She discovers her secret soul, and she shares "the Superconscient's high retreat".¹²⁸

      Aswapati's tapasya and Savitri's vrata have undergone a tremendous extension in scope and significance at Sri Aurobindo's hands and become respectively an epic climb comprising divers occult worlds and a dramatic dive or entry into the inner countries of the spirit. While writing the relevant Books in Savitri, Sri Aurobindo must have (as already pointed out earlier) drawn largely from his own yoga and also from the spiritual experiences and realisations of his great collaborator, the Mother of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram at Pondicherry.

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