Savitri

 XV

      SAVITRI: ITS SYMBOLIC ACTION IN

      A COSMIC BACKGROUND

A comparison of the extended scheme of Savitri with that of the earlier narrative poem will make clear that the major additions are Aswapati's Yoga, Savitri's Yoga and the new accent or dimension given to the struggle between Savitri and Death in Book IX, X and XI. The intention behind these additions and changes is to impose on the simple austere ambrosial human drama a vast symbolic dimension so that what happens in an apparently obscure place on earth may be made to carry implications on a truly cosmic scale. The opening line in canto three of Book I: "A world's desire compelled her mortal birth," succinctly prepares us for this shift from the individual to the general or universal context. Aswapati sought an heir to his kingdom through tapasya, which extended over a period of eighteen years: thus the old legend.

      What does tapasya mean? Spiritual knowledge may be acquired from scriptures and from one's teachers; it comes also as the result of one's own turning inwards and seeking the light of the Infinite. Knowledge of the former kind can lead to the latter, and experienced knowledge can lead to the former. Aswapati turns from the first phase of his spiritual awakening to the Book of the Secret Knowledge; and this in turn equips him for a fresh spiritual quest. Aswapati's consciousness now ranges from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven, all planes of life are traversed, all possibilities are assessed. Of course, although Aswapati is the tapasvin of the story, what is recorded is really the vision of the poet which, like a searchlight, guides us through the World-Stair. Like a great Dragon stationed near the approaches to a beautiful house, this part of Savitri is apt to scare away the average reader. What is it all about, he may ask in exasperation, and turn away, without waiting for an answer which, in any case, can be neither easy nor short.

      A thinker who tries to take stock of the human and cosmic situation may very well pose the fundamental questions: Where do I stand? What is my goal? How may I reach it? These roughly correspond to the traditional Hindu categories of tattva, hita and purusārtha, and, again, to Kant's celebrated questions: What can I know? What ought I to do? What may I hope for? These primary questions have thus occurred to thinkers of the East as well as the West, and since Sri Aurobindo was in some respects a unique synthesis of what was

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best in the culture of India and the culture of the West, he could not but view these questions with a new integralised vision and creative purpose.

      "The tendency of Eastern thinkers", writes W.R. Inge, "is to try to gain a view of reality as a whole, complete and entire: the form under which it most readily pictures it is that of space. The West seeks rather to discover the universal laws... The form under which it most readily pictures reality is that of time."¹²⁸ It would, perhaps, be no over-simplification to say that Sri Aurobindo's philosophical thought was a fusion of the two approaches to Reality, for both space and time came into his calculations. He was less interested in losing himself in infinity than in realising, if possible here and now, an earthly paradise. He was no absolute monist enamoured of Nihil, but an evolutionist who thought that man could evolve into God. He sought in this pluralistic temporal world itself the inspiration to build the Life Divine. A poem entitled The Human Power by Elder Olson expresses this idea very well:

Not in God's image was man

First created, but in

Likeness of a beast;

Until that beast became man,

All travailed in death and pain

And shall travail still

Till man be the image of God...

And this I believe is God's will.¹²⁹

Beast to man, man to God; or average ordinary man to the evolved spiritually awakened saint: how is this progression started, how achieved? "Spiritual evolution as distinct from revolution", says Hugh I' Anson Fausset, "consists of this gradual dying to the old life of the divided senses and gradual growing of the new life of wholeness within the decaying body of the old. It is a growth, often imperceptible, in the knowledge of spiritual reality, at each stage of which the material world loses something of its delusive appearance

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as the veils of partial sense are withdrawn until at last its true spiritual form is perceived."¹³⁰ Spiritual growth is also growth in freedom, and freedom is power; the lower life is the life of the slave, the highest life is the life of the saint, and just as all art is said to aspire to the condition of music, all humanity must aspire to the condition of utter freedom which is the saint's prerogative.¹³¹ Since it is the privilege of civilised humanity to retain the memories of the race, it is often possible to achieve in a short time what took thousands of years for our ancestors to accomplish.

      It is, of course, understood that, whatever the materialists may say, the advance of the race is brought about as much by man's aspiration as by the answering response of God. John Elof Boodin says that, "God must be conceived as an energising spirit in the universe who furnishes the inspiration for creating an ideal realm of values—a kingdom of heaven—in a distressed and struggling world"; on the other hand, the individual also, "has a say in the comedies and tragedies enacted in the cosmos, whether the individuals be electrons or human beings or stars."¹³² Emergent evolution, in the sense that new things somehow come out of the old things, doesn't make sense; nothing can come out of anything unless it is there already, in however nascent a condition; it would thus be necessary to assume that all energy is, in the final analysis, "an expression of the universal mind...and it would then seem to be true that all development is of the nature of emergence. It contains from the first the 'promise and potency' of the higher forms of life."¹³³ Boodin also makes the same point, but even more emphatically, when he says that, "the higher level in the advance of life does not merely emerge from below, but implies a stimulus from beyond and the creative response of the finite to this stimulus... Best of all, the consciousness of the divine may come to us as a sense of communion with God and in rare moments as a beatific Vision.. ,"¹³⁴

       From the above religious insights it is clear that man has a dynamic destiny, he is in a field of forces with a cosmic range, his destiny and the destiny of the cosmos are together involved in a

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"general plan" projected by the Universal Mind;¹³⁵ it is clear too that freedom and power in a spiritual sense really mean the capacity to participate in the Plan and further it, and this can best be done if man, a creature of the 'natural order', makes himself the instrument of God, who is the source of the 'divine order'.¹³⁶

      When Sri Aurobindo describes Aswapati as journeying through the several occult realms in the World-Stair, he is not luxuriating in pseudo-romantic escapism but merely recording, with painstaking accuracy, in the light of his own visions and experiences, the various levels and gradations of consciousness which comprise the cosmos. Samuel Alexander says that, "within the all-embracing stuff of Space-Time, the universe exhibits an emergence in Time of successive levels of finite existences, each with its characteristic empirical quality."¹³⁷ Man to Deity is, according to Alexander, the next spurt in evolution, but he too doesn't relate the idea of evolution with the idea of the Divine being already involved in the lower forms of existences; an endless epic of emergent evolution can be played by a Force more akin to Kazantzakis' Combatant and Shaw's Life Force than a power like Sachchidananda, from which all involution emanates and towards which all evolution strives. The views of two Western spiritualists too may be give here; thus F.W.H. Myers:

I imagine that the continuity of the universe is complete; and

that therefore the hierarchy of intelligences between our minds

and the World-Soul is infinite, and that somewhere in that

ascent a point is reached where our conception of time loses its

accustomed meaning...¹³⁸

and Sir Oliver Lodge also speaks to the same effect:

.. .there must be grades of existence higher as well as lower than

man; and it is reasonable to suppose that such grades of existence

extend upward at least as far as they extend downward; they can

hardly have a limit short of infinity. The Infinite Being we call

God, and we seek after him...¹³⁹

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The universe is, first of all, a cosmos; secondly, it is a living, not a dead, cosmos. From these premises may be drawn other conclusions. Not only of humanity can it be said that we are members of one another; of the cosmos, too, it should be said. A living cosmos means, besides, a cosmos capable of change and growth; growth carrying the seeds of decay, decay and 'death' carrying the seeds of new life. The one may unfold as the many, the many may enclose as the one. In trying to explain this mystery—or this mystic truth at the heart of the cosmos—writers are obliged to resort to symbolism, as for example in the Chinese Book of Life, which speaks of the unity of hsing-ming or 'essence' and 'life', "inseparably mixed like the seeds of fire in the refining furnace", on which  C.G. Jung comments:

This symbolism refers to a sort of alchemic process of refining

and 'ennobling'; darkness gives birth to light; out of the 'lead'

of the water-region, grows the 'noble' gold; the unconscious

 becomes conscious in the form of a process of life and growth.

(Hindu Kundalinī Yoga affords a complete analogy.) In this way

the union of consciousness and life takes place.¹⁴⁰

With whatever variations in idea or symbol, seers both of the West and the East have thus seized the quintessential truth regarding the efflorescence of divinity out of the bud sprouting from the seeming ooze of the world. But the evolutionary advance asks for a sense of adventure, a readiness to dare all and lose all to be able to gain all. "The step to higher consciousness", says Jung again, "leads away from all shelter and safety. The person must give himself to the new way completely, for it is only by means of his integrity that he can go farther."¹⁴¹ Death itself may have to be faced; if the supreme encounter is avoided, it may prove to be a compromise, a retreat, not a victory and an advance. Christ was victorious in one way, Savitri in another; neither was afraid of death, nor wished to bypass it.¹⁴² If egoism denies more and more, retreats more and more into the stifling prison-house of the selfish life, love affirms more and more, advances further and further, embracing all the universe in its affectionate grasp.

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Egoism is the real prelude to death while love is the way of freedom and immortality. In Edward Carpenter's words,

Love indicates immortality. No sooner does the human being

perceive this divine nucleus within himself than he knows his

eternal destiny. Plunged in the matter and gross body he had

learned the lesson of identity and separateness. All that the devil

can teach him, he has faithfully absorbed. Now he has to expand

that identity, forever unique into ever vaster spheres of activity—

to become finally a complete and finished aspect of the One.¹⁴³

The Mother has recorded how, as a child of thirteen, every night she used to undergo an extraordinary experience; she saw herself coming out of her body and rising up above the house and the town, with a magnificent robe covering the town like an immense roof:

Then I would see coming out from all sides men, women,

children, old men, sick men, unhappy men; they gathered under

the outspread robe, imploring help, recounting their miseries,

their sufferings, their pains. In reply, the robe, supple and living,

stretched out to them individually, and as soon as they touched

it, they were consoled or healed.. .Nothing appeared to me more

beautiful, nothing made me more happy; and all the activities

of the day seemed to me dull and colourless, without real life, in

comparison with this activity of the night which was for me the

true life...¹⁴⁴

Her love had acquired vast dimensions, and this was one measure of the reality of her spiritual life. If love can thus extend from the narrow confines of a home and embrace a whole city, or all humanity, we need put no limits whatsoever to its full extension in space and time. Not the fact of such love alone, but the results of such love also, must beggar human calculation.

      Consider a building: the physical frame (itself made up of steel, cement, brick, stone, timber, etc.), the electrical wiring, the pipes conveying water, photographs and pictures on the walls, flower-vases,

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furniture, utensils, people (themselves built of or run by chemical, electrical and psychic systems), all co-exist, and various currents— material, intellectual, emotional, psychic—set up by this conjunction of elements, all together, in their diversity and change and control and unity, make the house, which is the home of a family Is it not so with the cosmos as well? "In the cosmos we must suppose", writes Boodin, "a far greater range of fields—electro-magnetic fields, gravitational field, chemical fields, organic fields, psychological fields, and, over and above them all, the supreme spiritual fields which prescribes the architecture of all the subordinate fields, which in turn make their variant individual adjustments according to their own relativity."¹⁴⁵

      The infinitely small and the infinitely vast, the infinitely near and the infinitely distant, are strangely enough related and poised in the cosmos. The fission of an atom releases energies sufficient to destroy a city. Why should not then the release of spiritual energy, which must be the ultimate source of all energy, be capable of effecting a revolution in our earth-nature and setting it in the direction of supernature? A house is sunk in darkness; a switch is put on, and the house is flooded with light. We know how it happens; there is the electrical system; and there is the power house from which energy flows to the house. Where are the power houses of the spirit? How is such power canalised? Are there worlds where spiritual energy is as freely current and for as manifold purposes as electrical energy is current in our modern cities? Further, as man is simultaneously a chemical, an electrical and a psychic system, and as the cosmos also is simultaneously several systems, cannot these be isolated for purposes of observation and study?

      Can we have, in short, a cosmic view that takes note both of the infinitely small and the infinitely great, of all grades of existence, all possible levels of evolved or evolving life; that takes note also of all recent scientific discoveries and technological achievements, and even future possibilities; and, above all, posits the enveloping reality of the Spirit, the overall spiritual control of the universe?

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Being a cosmos there is some order and harmony behind it all; but it is a still living and changing and evolving cosmos, and hence the order and the harmony do not preclude tensions and struggles, memories and regrets, dreams and hopes, aspirations and realisations. As Sri Aurobindo affirmed in one of his early poems:

      Time is a strong convention; future and present

      Were living in the past...

      And even from this veil of mind the spirit

      Looks out sometimes and sees

      The bygone aeons that our lives inherit,

      The unborn centuries...¹⁴⁶

Such is the vision behind the symbolic action unfolded in Savitri. It is no poetic fiction, no projection of the probable impossible; on the contrary, what is here dramatised is an actually developing and fulfilling action with man as protagonist and the Divine as the goal.

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