Savitri

  X

      THE KINGDOMS AND GODHEADS OF THE LITTLE MIND'

      The Life-Gods' paradisal felicity is complete and final; there is no further progress, nor any possible regress. This "breath of hundred hued felicity" renews eternally, and flawless happiness forever prevails. This is the Life-Heavens, whose inhabitants cherish their happiness on the mid-way peaks of ascent, nor wish to mount to the ultimate heights. Not so Aswapati. He still must respond to "a greater adventure's call" and scale the climb to Timelessness. Be the hazard what it may, Aswapati must march on, and stop not till the goal is reached.

      First he meets "a silver-grey expanse where Day and Night had wedded and were one". This is the territory where the obscured animal being dimly awakes into its basic sensory perceptions. The insect crawl is no end but the beginning of glorious things to come; the roads of frailty converge to triumphant strength; and the tunnels of infectious obscurity remotely point to sunrise splendours and seas of light. As yet it is but an ambiguous terrain:

      A coalition of uncertainties

      There exercised uneasy government

      On a ground reserved for doubt and reasoned guess,

      A rendezvous of Knowledge with Ignorance.⁹⁴

Next Aswapati notices a higher slope in this steep ascent "where dawn-sheen gamboled with the native dusk". The region of twilight recedes, and morning beckons the Traveller of the Worlds:

      He came into a realm of early Light

      And the regency of a half-risen sun.⁹⁵

Here mind in its first hazy manifestations emerges as a principle of consciousness and starts its snail-like operations; then it acquires a certain puissance and self-confidence, studies matter's constitution, and deduces Nature's laws; and in course of time Mind waxes into "a master Magician of measure and device". Man's "prototypal deft intelligence" structures the marvels of theoretical and inventive science and fabricates audacious systems of equivalence and association. The maya of the material and sensory universe yields its secrets one by one:

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      A bodiless energy put on Matter's robe;...

      And the invisible appeared as shape

      And the impalpable was felt as mass:...

      Idea was disguised in a body's artistry,

      And by a strange atomic law's mystique

      A frame was made in which the sense could put

      Its symbol picture of the universe. ⁹⁶

Although all this load of knowledge has some value, man is still unable to ford or canter across the stream of the last Ignorance that divides us from integral Truth. The million bits of truth isolated or analysed in the laboratories do not complete the sum; there is an exasperating insufficiency in even the most ambitious of mental operations.

      In her tireless strivings to pluck the heart of the mystery, Mind has three divers deputies—three loyal serfs—to advance her cause and promote her work. The first of these is,

      A pigmy Thought...

      A technician admirable, a thinker crude,

      A riveter of Life to habit's grooves,

      Obedient to gross Matter's tyranny,...⁹⁷

It is the perfect servant, but lacks adventure and initiative; weights and measures it can handle with competence, but it shies away from the subtler engines of the mind. It can foot the well-trodden path, but turns away from trackless jungles and strange seas of thought. Although content thus to feed on "scraps of life and Matter's bones in its kennel of objective certitude", even this pigmy figure plays an allotted role in the cosmic play.

      The second of Mind's deputies is "a rash Intelligence" with its thousand shapes and numerous names:

      It licked at knowledge with a smoky tongue.

      A whirlpool sucking in an empty air,

      It based on vacancy stupendous claims,

      In Nothingness born to Nothingness returned,

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      Yet all the time unwittingly it drove

      Towards the hidden Something that is All. ⁹⁸

It makes sudden, strange, startling guesses, achieves "wild-ass" feats of speculation and generalisation, and makes "flash-images of half-seen verities". Like the pigmy, this hunchback too—albeit he is rash and his findings are tentative—nurses "a portion of infinity's strength".

      The last and greatest of Mind's henchmen is Reason, "the squat godhead artisan.. .The strongest, wisest of the troll-like Three."⁹⁹ It is the philosophic schematising power that seeks to "reduce to rules the mystic world"; although not quite knowing yet, she "ferrets out Nature's process, substance cause" and hopes to force "a pattern of eternal fixity". In her characteristic attitudes, in the sum of her achievements, she seems a wonder, and the mother of many civilisations. Abstract thought makes impressive conquests, and Reason, with an insatiable hunger, makes further conquests still:

      For the world seen she weaves a world conceived:

      She spins in stiff but unsubstantial lines

      Her gossamer word-webs of abstract thought,

      Her segment systems of the Infinite,

      Her theodicies and cosmogonic charts

      And myths by which she explains the inexplicable...

      Her sciences precise and absolute...

      The vast encyclopaedia of her thoughts;

      An algebra of her mathematics' signs... ¹⁰⁰

Breathtaking though these achievements are, Reason's manifold toil is in the last analysis but "an inconclusive play"; what is gained today is lost or superseded tomorrow. Science, having made absolute claims for a while, now wisely acknowledges her limitations:

      But now is lost her ancient sovereign claim

      To rule mind's high realm in her absolute right,

      Bind thought with logic's forged infallible chain

      Or see truth nude in a bright abstract haze.¹⁰¹

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Science or philosophy, politics or ethics, Reason-erected edifices have unsure foundations, and cannot stand the shocks of adverse circumstance. What a stupendous ado for achieving "a million purposes with purpose none!"

Ideals, ethics, systems had no base

And soon collapsed or without sanction lived;

All grew a chaos, a heave and clash and strife...

All reeled into a world of Kali's dance.¹⁰²

Can mere meaningless chaos be the final meaning of the universe? No; some other power must there surely be that can render Mind's handiwork far from futile:

Then science and reason careless of the soul

Could iron out a tranquil uniform world,...

A reasonable animal make of man

And a symmetrical fabric of his life.¹⁰³

But this too is no consummation to be wished, for who would care to stifle the promptings of the soul and make the human body a perfect machine? There is no room for despair, however; "many-visaged is the cosmic Soul" and "a greater Mind may see a greater Truth". Either this way is open, or all is a total defeat.

      The hazy twilight of Instinct and Sensory Perception; the dawn of Mind, and her minions, Thought, Intelligence and Reason; what next? Aswapati reaches now "the bright kingdoms of the rising Sun" where "all is a birth into a power of light". The mere Mind's laborious constructions are but "interim reports"; the final reports are still a-drafting, they are still to come. Mind's knowledge has to be followed by a "greater Gnosis". Aswapati marks two new powers overshadowing the "dwarfish trinity" and perched in a "high breathless stratosphere". These two "sun-gaze Daemons" are "a huge high-winged Life-Thought" and "a pure Thought-Mind"; these powers hold the key to the higher Gnosis; these are the godheads of the Kingdoms of the Greater Mind.

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