Savitri

         XI

      'THE KINGDOMS AND GODHEADS

OF THE GREATER MIND'

      Racing beyond the "circles of mortal mind" Aswapati heads towards "the far spiritual light". It is actually a glorious escape into freedom, for mortal mind, albeit it lords over its petty realms, is after all a prison. It may be that man's book of origins is in blissful Heaven, but his embroilment in Matter has been to his utter discomfiture:

Ourselves are citizens of that mother State,

Adventurers, we have colonized Matter's night.

But now our rights are barred, our passports void;

We live self-exiled from our heavenlier home.¹⁰⁴

Aswapati is determined to revisit his native place, and so he makes the supreme effort:

On meditation's mounting edge of trance

Great stairs of thought climbed up to unborn heights

Where Time's last ridges touch eternity's skies

And Nature speaks to the spirit's absolute.¹⁰⁵

Fust to meet Aswapati is "a triple realm of ordered thought", which is reached by "a triple flight", itself but "a small beginning of immense ascent". Even as Dante speaks of the descending circles of Hell and the ascending slopes of Purgatory, here in Savitri Sri Aurobindo views the cosmos symbolically as a descending and an ascending stair of worlds, the descent leading to the Abyss and the ascent to the Heights. A segment of the ascent comprises the passage from the limited human Mind to the all-knowing and all-powerful Supermind. In the chapter entitled "The Ascent towards Supermind' in The Life Divine Sri Aurobindo writes:

...the scrutiny of a given line of ascent may be expected to

throw light on the principle of all ascending possibilities; such a

Page 109

scrutiny of one line is all that can be attempted. This line is, as all

must be, governed by the natural configuration of the stair of

ascent: there are in it many steps, for it is an incessant gradation

and there is no gap anywhere; but, from the point of view of the

ascent of consciousness from our mind upwards through a rising

series of dynamic powers by which it can sublimate itself, the

gradation can be resolved into a stairway of four main ascents, each

with its high level of fulfilment. These gradations maybe summarily

described as a series of sublimations of the consciousness through

Higher Mind, Illumined Mind and Intuition into Overmind

and beyond it; there is a succession of self-transmutations at the

summit of which lies the Supermind or Divine Gnosis.¹⁰⁶

Whereas these gradations are described in vivid psychological terms in The Life Divine, in Savitri the gradations become so many distinct worlds—abstractions give place to imaginative constructions—and nobly articulate philosophical prose becomes the sovereign poetry of the Spirit. It is not the translation of one mode into another, but a veritable transmutation.

      Aswapati starts the immense ascent. The first of the triple realms of ordered thought is "close and kin" to the world of man. The deities of this realm are not indifferent to human aspirations and actually "shape our greater thinking's roads". This world may almost be called a "world-kindergarten of young souls", where the alphabet of the higher knowledge is laboriously learnt and the first theorems of the geometry of the cosmic body are mastered. Not Heaven, not quite earth, this is a transitionary rest-place, inhabited by powers and presences who maintain a fruitful commerce with the human world. Thanks to them, the elementary laws of causality are deduced, matter's movements are conned, and knowledge is "built from the cells of inference into a fixed body flasque and perishable". The observance of new facts leads to new formulations of the laws, and so,

A cage for the Infinite's great-eyed seraphim Thoughts

Was closed with a criss-cross of world-laws for bars

Page 110

      And hedged into a curt horizon's arc

      The irised vision of the Ineffable.¹⁰⁷

Second among the thought-realms is the world of "a subtle archangel race", associated powers endowed with a keener, a more integral, vision into the truth of things:

      A light of liberating knowledge shone

      Across the gulfs of silence in their eyes;...

      High architects of possibility

      And engineers of the impossible,

      Mathematicians of the infinitudes

      And theoricians of unknowable truths,...¹⁰⁸

This gifted race of imaginative thinkers are adepts in hypothesis, speculation and bold generalisation; they can reduce to an algebraic formula or an equation in Tensor Calculus the mysterious and manifold workings in four-dimensional Space-Time; and they can psycho-analyse the Cosmic-self itself! These are the symbol Einsteins, Plancks, Rutherfords and Freuds who draw Necessity's logarithmic tables and derive "the calculus of Destiny". Their massive insight— and their monumental effrontery!

      All was coerced by number, name and form;

      Nothing was left untold, incalculable.

      Yet was their wisdom circled with a nought:...¹⁰⁹

Third and highest among the thought-realms, to be reached in "a sublimer and more daring soar", is the habitation of the "sovereign Kings of Thought". Whereas in the first of the three realms of ordered thought, consciousness is "close and kin" to the human consciousness, here in the highest of the three realms, consciousness is more close and kin to the divine than to the human consciousness; all creatures here have a clear sense of infallible direction towards Truth; and they even dare to translate the unknown unthinkable into "a stripped imperative of conceptual phrase/Architectonic and inevitable."¹¹⁰ They are the infallible seers, who are also the

Page 111

 revealers through inspired utterance of the cosmic truths that they have seen:

      A single law simplessed the cosmic theme,

      Compressing Nature into a formula;

      Their titan labour made all knowledge one,

      A mental algebra of the Spirit's ways,

      An abstract of the living Divinity.

      Here the mind's wisdom stopped; it felt complete;...¹¹¹

 While these bright gods of Thought are engaged in the pursuit of the ultimate Truth, while they scheme and plan to snare and clasp her, she too—she the Power of Truth or Para Shakti—makes at last the appropriate response. As one knocks with persistent imaginative attention, one finds that the door opens at last; as one seeks without intermission, one finds what one is seeking for; and if one asks, the answer is given unto him. As the seers, the laureates of the Spirit, strain to see and hymn the splendours of what they see, the response comes from Above. The culminating human call is answered, Para Shakti responds, and man the seer and thinker finds wondrous vistas of new possibilities opening before him:

      A new beginning flowers in word and laugh,

      A new charm brings back the old extreme delight:.,.

      She has lowered her heights to the stature of our souls

      And dazzled our lids with her celestial gaze...¹¹²

Even so but a portion of the Infinite arrives and is recognised in the world of man; tying Truth down in human categories, we really crib and cabin it almost out of recognition:

Thus is it even with the seer and sage;

For still the human limits the divine:...¹¹³

 The proper thing would be, not to imprison her in our thought, but to leap out of the prison-house, and effect a total surrender to her:

Then the Unmanifest reflects his form

In the still mind as in a living glass;

The timeless Ray descends into our hearts

And we are rapt into eternity.¹¹⁴

Page 112