Savitri

III

'The House of the Spirit and the New Creation'

      Intent on achieving the conditions that will make possible world-transformation and a new creation, Aswapati retreats to the stillness of the soul and sits,

      ...like an incarnate hope

      Motionless on a pedestal of prayer.¹⁴³

He will not lose his links with the world, not even with the Inconscience; the Inconscient is infinite too and cannot be mocked! Not an escape but a total embrace, not an ignoration but a total comprehension of all matter and all life, is the way to the goal he has set before himself. From self-knowledge radiates world-knowledge, and the infinitesimal becomes the infinite:

      In this tremendous universality

      Not only his soul-nature and mind-sense

      Included every soul and mind in his,

      But even the life of flesh and nerve was changed

      And grew one flesh and nerve with all that lives;...

      His universal sympathy upbore,

      Immense like ocean, the creation's load...¹⁴⁴

In him are centred the world's strivings and hopes; he incarnates for the nonce the world's pathways to Possibility; he stands "fulfilled on the world's highest line". Beyond sense and feeling, beyond word and thought, comprehending everything but also transcending everything, carrying a world's plea but also implying the inevitable assent, Aswapati is now actor and witness, he is the child of time admitted to "the sessions of Infinity". Aswapati's culminating ascent and patient vigil amidst the desolate solitudes of the heights coerce the descent and the response. It is as though he has received a fresh accession of strength and a new extension of vision. He clearly catches glimpses of the great Possibility of world transformation:

      There was no sob of suffering anywhere;

      Experience ran from point to point of joy:

      Bliss was the pure undying truth of things...

      In these new worlds projected he became

      A portion of the universal gaze,

      A station of the all-inhabiting light,

      A ripple on a single sea of peace.¹⁴⁵

 He sees too "a hierarchy of lucent planes"—a hierarchy, not an anarchy, of lucent (not opaque) realms. The contours of limitation we see here on earth are not found there:

      The Powers that here betray our hearts and err,

      Were there sovereign in truth, perfect in joy,

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      Masters in a creation without flaw,

      Possessors of their own infinitude...

      The will obeyed the thought, the act the will.

      There was a harmony woven twixt soul and soul...

      A mystery drama of divine delight,

      A living poem of world-ecstasy,

      A kakemono of significant forms,... ¹⁴⁶

It is the vision of our heart's ultimate desire, it is the glimpse of the 'never-never-never realm' of absolute perfection, it is "Reality's summer-house on the beaches of the sea of Infinity".

      There are the "two vast negations", of course—'the Materialist Denial' and 'the Refusal of the Ascetic', as Sri Aurobindo calls them in The Life Divine. It is these negations that hinder the total marriage of matter and spirit and the emergence here of a new creation. But the negations shall be themselves denied:

      A new creation from the old shall rise,

      A Knowledge inarticulate find speech,

      Beauty suppressed burst into paradise bloom,

      Pleasure and pain dive into absolute bliss. ¹⁴⁷

Himself emancipated, Aswapati is nevertheless the bearer of the burden of the world's desire that climbs up to him "from the striving planes"; he is two beings now, "one wide and free above/One struggling, bound, intense, its portion here".¹⁴" He is the witness to the splendour above, he is also the voice of supplication from below. Defying the denials, he articulates earth's prayer to the Unknown, and listens for the answering footsteps,

... for the fiat of the Word

That comes through the still self from the Supreme. ^l49

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