Savitri

      VII

      'ROSE OF GOD'³¹⁰

      Meantime Savitri lives her routine in the forest, gracious to all, striking them as being no different from what she has always been. She is "the same perfect Savitri", apt in speech and action, although inhabiting a total silence of mind. The power behind her life is "the miraculous Nihil... a cipher of God". It is a trance, a somnambulistic play of life, not the life that we know; yet nothing is wrongly done or said, whether she is with Satyavan or with "the sages of the woods"; sometimes, indeed, her mouth becomes the channel of "ineffable truths", and the sages marvel at her,

      ...for she seemed to know

      What they had only glimpsed at times afar.³¹¹

She is seemingly a plastic instrument in the hands both of inconscient Nature and the superconscient mystery. Her being's scope seems to spread more and more into widening circles of infinity, "a world without form or feature or circumstance,/.. .no ground, no wall, no roof of thought."³¹²

      Sitting thus by sleeping Satyavan, a voice not hers begins to stir, and suddenly the world of unreality ceases to be. No, no, negation is not the ultimate truth; omnipresent Reality is other and more than the Nihil, more than "a cipher of vastness in unreal Thought"; Savitri sees that omnipresent Reality is her own self and the self of all:

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      ... it was Timelessness and Time,

      It was the Bliss of formlessness and form.

      It was all Love and the one Beloved's arms,

      It was sight and thought in one all-seeing Mind,

      It was joy of Being on the peaks of God.³¹³

Savitri sees "the world as living God", and she is herself both a single being and all beings, "their bodies her many bodies kin to her":

      Out of the infinitudes all came to her,

      Into the infinitudes sentient she spread,

      Infinity was her own natural home...

      The distant constellations wheeled round her,

      Earth saw her born, all worlds were her colonies,

      The greater worlds of life and mind were hers;...

      She was the single self of all these selves,...

      She burned in the passion and splendour of the rose,

      She was the red heart of the passion-flower,

      Tie dream-white of the lotus in its pool....

      She was the godhead hid in the heart of man,

      She was the climbing of his soul to God.³¹⁴

 Savitri is the link between man and God, time and Eternity, existence and Transcendence.

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