Savitri

  On Savitri


      XIV

 

'The World-soul'

 

      To the anxiously seeking eyes of Aswapati there now appears, "in a far-shimmering background of Mind-Space a glowing mouth...a luminous shaft...a recluse-gate...a veiled retreat...a tunnel of the depths of God."128 This is a way out, this is an escape from the icy stare of immaculate Silence!

 

      As one drawn to his lost spiritual home...

      Into a passage dim and tremulous

      That clasped him in from day and night's pursuit,

      He travelled led by a mysterious sound.129

 

He is lured on and on by murmurs, voices and harmonies untranslatable—reminiscent of the "jingling silver laugh of anklet bells" or,

 

      ...a vast forest's hymn,

      The solemn reminder of a temple gong,

      A bee-croon honey-drunk in summer isles

      Ardent with ecstasy in a slumbrous noon,

      Or the far anthem of a pilgrim sea.130

 

He reaches at last "a wondrous bodiless realm"; it is earth's perfect antidote, with the "intimacy of God" everywhere. It is the utter region of the World-Soul. One treads there on soul-ground, one contacts soul-stuff, one rises in soul-space, one experiences soul-joy. Here "in voiceless internatal trance" club together the souls that have emancipated themselves from the chain of birth and death; or they await "the adventure of new life". It is clear to Aswapati


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that he has penetrated to creation's centre where the wandering spirit finds,

 

...the silence of its starting-point

In the formless force and the still fixity

And brooding passion of the world of Soul.131

 

 By sure instinct he passes on,

 

Along a road of pure interior light,

Alone between tremendous Presences,

Under the watching eyes of nameless Gods,...

To the source of all things human and divine.132

 

Here he beholds Purusha-Prakriti, the deathless Two-in-One,

 

A single being in two bodies clasped,

A diarchy of two united souls,

Seated absorbed in deep creative joy;...133

 

And behind them stands "the sole omnipotent Goddess ever-veiled", whose mask is the making of the world and whose footfalls are the rages of the ages. Aswapati folds his hands in prayer, and to him is vouchsafed a sudden half-glimpse of "the ravishing, enigma of her eyes". He is now finally overwhelmed by her "implacable light and bliss", and he is like an atom of her illimitable self, a drop of the ocean of her ecstasy:

 

      Drunk with a deep golden spiritual wine,

      He cast from the rent stillness of his soul

      A cry of adoration and desire

      And the surrender of his boundless mind

      And the self-giving of his silent heart.

      He fell down at her feet unconscious, prone.134


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