Savitri

      XII

'The Heavens of the Ideal'

      The tireless traveller of the worlds, Aswapati continues the ascent, looking out for new worlds still:

      At each pace of the journey marvellous

      A new degree of wonder and of bliss,

      A new rung formed in Being's mighty stair,

      A great wide step trembling with jewelled fire.¹¹⁵

Beyond the triple realm of ordered thought are the "heavens of the ideal Mind.. ./The lovely kingdoms of the deathless Rose".¹¹⁶ Such an inspired poem, mantric in its efficacy, as Sri Aurobindo's Rose of God is uncannily appropriate to this region of the deathless Rose, where at the feet of God unfolds the mystic bud, and the spiritual aspirant has his first real taste of bliss, light, power, life and love:.

      All the high gods who hid their visages

      From the soiled passionate ritual of our hopes,

      Reveal their names and their undying powers.

      A fiery stillness wakes the slumbering cells,

      A passion of the flesh becoming spirit,...¹¹⁷

While one end of the effulgent stair leads to the regions of the deathless Rose, the other end leads to "the mighty kingdoms of the deathless Flame". The Rose is the symbol of bliss, while the Flame is the symbol of knowledge. Realisation could come both as the bliss of Brahman and as the knowledge of Brahman. In his poem Moon of the Two Hemispheres, Sri Aurobindo writes, using not the imagery of ascent but the imagery of the boat making for its port:

      A gold moon-ship sails or drifts ever

      In our spirit's skies and halts never, blue-keeled,

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      And it throws its white-blue fire on this grey field,

      Night's dragon loop,—speeding,

      The illumined star-thought sloops leading

      To the Dawn, their harbour home, to the Light unsealed,

      To the sun-face Infinite, the Untimed revealed.¹¹⁸

The Flame, on the other hand,

      .. .rises through the mortal's hemisphere,

      Till borne by runners of the Day and Dusk

      It enters the occult eternal Light

      And clambers whitening to the invisible Throne.¹¹⁹

 If the Rose guides the aspirant through world after coloured and ecstatic world towards "some far unseen epiphany", the Flame likewise guides him through "a pale-sapphire ether of God-mind/ Towards some gold Infinite's apocalypse."¹²⁰

      Aswapati is rather at home in both the kingdoms of the Ideal— the worlds of the Rose and the Flame.

      They offered to the Traveller at their gates

      A quenchless flame or an unfading flower,

      Emblem of a high kingdom's privilege.¹²¹

But he realises that even in these deathless kingdoms there is but the reign of partial—though intense—light; he therefore passes onto a "diviner sphere" where the Flame and the Rose are in perfect partnership:

There, joined in a common greatness, light and bliss,

All high and beautiful and desirable powers

Forgetting their difference and their separate reign

Become a single multitudinous whole.¹²²

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