On The Mother

CHAPTER 27

Joint Adventure

I

During the seven years between 1931 and 1938, there was, as we have seen, a decisive progress in the sadhana, the lead of course being given by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, and the disciples too - most of them - were no slackers, and were reasonably responsive to the demands of the Yoga: some moved fast, some at a moderate but steady pace, and there were laggards as well, and even a few detractors. However in a collective sadhana involving so many sadhaks, - the number had increased from about 100 in 1931 to over 150 in 1938 - such inequalities couldn't be helped, and the crucial thing was the force imparted by the Engineers and the momentum of the whole. The Ashram was certainly in a fairly strong position, and it was growing wings of varied achievement, and attracting wide attention. Within and outside the Ashram, the old Arya numbers were the quarry of an increasing number of thinkers and sadhaks. While the many pored over books like The Mother, The Riddle of this World, Lights on Yoga, Bases of Yoga, Essays on the Gita, The Ideal of Human Unity, or read copies of Sri Aurobindo's innumerable letters to his disciples or the Mother's Conversations, life in the Ashram was marked calm, orderliness, efficiency and an inner richness of ardour, aspiration and realisation. The deviations from the norm only emphasised the normal reign of poise and purpose, light and love.

II

Aside from the letters to the disciples, Sri Aurobindo composed a number of sonnets, lyrics and epic fragments during these years of sustained sadhana punctuated by moments of high yogic realisation. These effusions were his reports on the way, musings, recapitulations, interim or intermediate poetic recordations. Thus in "In Horis Aeternum" composed on 19 April 1932:

Here or otherwhere, - poised on the unreachable abrupt snow­solitary ascent

Earth aspiring lifts to the illimitable Light .... ¹

"The Bird of Fire", written on 15 October 1933, was a mighty peal commemorating the triple living Fire of the Divine Consciousness, compact of Light, Tapas and Love:

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One strange leap of thy mystic stress breaking the barriers of mind and life, arrives at its luminous term thy flight;

Invading the secret clasp of the Silence and crimson Fire thou frontest eyes in a timeless Face. ²

And he affirmed in "Trance", written on the same day:

My mind is awake in stirless trance,

Hushed my heart, a burden of delight;

Dispelled is the senses' flicker-dance,

Mute the body aureate with light. ³

In "The Life Heavens", composed a month later, Sri Aurobindo put into Earth's mouth a challenging declaration:

I, Earth, have a deeper power than Heaven;

My lonely sorrow surpasses its rose-joys,

A red and bitter seed of the raptures seven; ­

My dumbness fills with echoes of a far Voice.

By me the last finite, yearning, strives

To reach the last infinity's unknown,

The Eternal is broken into fleeting lives

And Godhead pent in the mire and the stone. ⁴

A reference has already been made in the previous chapter to the two complementary pieces "Thought the Paraclete" and "Rose of God", both written on the last day of 1934. But earlier in the year, on 25 April, he had written the marvellous fragment in Alexandrines:

I walked beside the waters of a world of light

On a gold ridge guarding two seas of high-rayed night ....

I saw the spirit of the cosmic Ignorance;

I felt its power besiege my gloried fields of trance. ⁵

That was but a momentary discomfiture, for the mist presently lifted, and there was Light again. And so the metrical instruments constantly fashioned and refashioned to his purpose seem like the pointer-readings of Sri Aurobindo's spiritual odyssey during the years. In "Musa Spiritus", for example, he invoked the Descent from "the upper fire" to redeem and reclaim the "seals of Matter's sleep":

All make tranquil, all make free.

Let my heart-beats measure the footsteps of God

As He comes from His timeless infinity

To build in their rapture His burning abode. ⁶

Then came the series of sonnets, beginning with "The Kingdom

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Within" dated 14 March 1936, and including "The Pilgrim of the Night" written two years later -

I made an assignation with the Night;

In the abyss was fixed our rendezvous:

In my breast carrying God's deathless light

I came her dark and dangerous heart to woo ....

I walk by the chill wave through the dull slime

And still that weary journeying knows no end;

Lost is the lustrous godhead beyond Time,

There comes no voice of the celestial Friend,

And yet I know my footprints' track shall be

A pathway towards Immortality. ⁷ -

and several other pieces of the war period. These shorter poems and sonnets of this time were, however, no more than by-products, whereas Sri Aurobindo's major preoccupation in poetry at that time was the mystic symbolic epic, Savitri.

III

Sri Aurobindo is supposed to have made an early draft of Savitri at Baroda, as a companion-piece to his Urvasie and Love and Death. And the fact that the Savitri legend also relates to the theme of love and separation and death as in Uloupie and Chitrangada (the other narrative poems of the Baroda days), lends credence to this belief. However, the earliest manuscript we have is dated 1916. There is too the letter dated 31 October 1936, where he says: "Savitri was originally written many years ago before the Mother came, as a narrative poem in two parts .... " There are later drafts and revised versions, but the idea of a more drastic revision seems to have come to him after his withdrawal in November 1926, and from time to time he took up the old exercise books and made alterations and additions here and there. His indefatigable correspondent, K. D. Sethna, having by now come to know about this 'work in progress', started asking for information. In 1931, Sri Aurobindo wrote that he was then trying to turn the old legendary tale into a symbolic poem, but was able to give attention to it "once a month perhaps".⁸ Next year, Sri Aurobindo wrote to Sethna that in the new Savitri the blank verse would have an Upanishadic and Kalidasian movement of end-stopped lines. Two years later, he wrote again:

What you write about your inspiration is very interesting. There is no invariable how - except that I receive from above my head and receive changes and corrections from above without any initiation by myself or

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labour of the brain. Even if I change a hundred times, the mind does not work at that, it only receives. Formerly it used not to be so, the mind was always labouring at the stuff .... Savitri is a work by itself unlike all the others. I made some eight or ten recasts of it originally under the old insufficient inspiration. Afterwards I am altogether rewriting it, concentrating on the first Book and working on it over and over again with the hope that every line may be of a perfect perfection - but I have hardly any time now for such work. ⁹

In the meantime, a good deal of correspondence erupted between Sethna and Sri Aurobindo about 'overhead poetry', and particularly poetry from the highest 'overhead' the Overmind whence would come the specifically mantric poetry of the future. As Sethna recollected later:

One day ... I made a singular request. I wrote:

"I shall consider it a favour indeed if you will give me an instance in English of the inspiration of the pure Overmind. I don't mean just a line like Milton's

Those thoughts that wander through Eternity

or Wordsworth's

Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone,

which has a brief burst of it, but something sustained and plenary .... Please don't disappoint me by saying that, as no English writer has a passage of this kind, you cannot do anything for me."

He wrote back in his characteristic vein:

"Good Heavens! how am I to avoid saying that, when it is the only possible answer - at least so far as I can remember? Perhaps if I went through English poetry again with my present consciousness I might find more intimations like that line of Wordsworth, but a passage sustained and plenary? These surely are things yet to come - the 'future poetry' perhaps, but not the past."

With the familiarity - almost the impudence - he permitted us, I replied:

"I think the favour I asked was expressed in perfectly clear language. If no English poet has produced the passage I want, then who has done so in English? God alone knows. But who is capable of doing it? All of us know. Well, then why not be kind enough to grant this favour? If difficult metres could be illustrated on demand, is it impossible to illustrate in a satisfying measure something so naturally Aurobindonian as the Overmind? I am not asking for hundreds of lines - even eight will more than do - all pure gold to be treasured for ever. So please ... Perhaps it is possible only on Sunday ­ the day dedicated to golden Sūrya and rich for you with leisure from correspondence: I can wait answerless for twenty-four hours with a sweet samatā."

The answer came the very next morning:

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"I have to say Good Heavens again. Because difficult metres can be illustrated on demand, which is a matter of metrical skill, how does it follow that one can produce poetry from any blessed plane on demand? It would be easier to furnish you with hundreds of lines already written out of which you could select for yourself anything Overmindish if it exists (which I doubt) rather than produce 8 lines of warranted Overmind manufacture to order. All I can do is to give you from time to time some lines from Savitri, on condition you keep them to yourself for the present. It may be a poor substitute for the Overmental, but if you like the sample, the opening lines, I can give you more hereafter - and occasionally better." ¹⁰

And there followed in Sri Aurobindo's own hand the first sixteen lines of the Exordium to Savitri beginning with the grand mysterious line:

It was the hour before the Gods awake.

That day was 25 October 1936, and Sethna later described that day as "one of the most important, if not the most important, of my life here". ¹¹ Henceforth more and more excerpts from Savitri passed between the seer-Kavi and the neophyte-rasika, and the latter's abounding interest and perceptive comments were perhaps a catalytic that helped the progress of the poem during the next few years.

IV

That Savitri was the great upākhyāna or tale imbedded in the Mahabharata, now being rendered anew in the light of the Aurobindonian vision and packed in its every rift with the ore of his own spiritual experiences, made the poem important enough. Some had a shrewd notion that Savitri as yogic poetry was complementary to the spiritual philosophy of The Life Divine and the practical spirituality of The Synthesis of Yoga in the other harmony of prose; and in 1963, the Mother was to write on the top of a diary containing quotations from Savitri: " ... that marvellous prophetic poem which will be humanity's guide towards its future realisation". ¹²Back in the thirties, there were not wanting guesses either that in the scheme of the epic, if Aswapathy was Sri Aurobindo, then Savitri was the Mother hewrself. In fact, in a letter written in 1936, Sri Aurobindo said that in his poem Savitri was "an incarnation of the Divine Mother", and not just a paragon of chastity and symbol of the flaming power of love. ¹³

In another letter he said that he looked upon the composition of Savitri as a field of experimentation to see how far poetry could be written from one's own Yogic consciousness and how that could be made creative"; in fact, the poem itself was for him "a means of ascension".¹⁴ And the Mother too was to say in the course of a conversation in French with an ardent young disciple, on 18 January 1960 ¹⁵

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To read Savitri is indeed to practise Yoga, spiritual concentration; one can find there all that is needed to realise the Divine. Each step of Yoga is noted here, including the secret of all other Yogas. ¹⁶

Further she is reported to have stated to a professor of English:

For the opening of the psychic, for the growth of consciousness and even for the improvement of English it is good to read one or two pages of Savitri each day. ¹⁷

Sri Aurobindo was thinking besides of his aim to cram a whole cosmos into his poem, and not a static cosmos either, but a dynamic and an evolving one. As the Mother maintained in the conversation referred to above:

Yes, everything is there: mysticism, occultism, philosophy, the history of evolution, the history of man, of the gods, of creation, of Nature. How the universe was created, why, for what purpose, what destiny - all is there ¹⁸

V

When Sri Aurobindo took up Savitri again in the nineteen-thirties, the additions and alterations were in the first Part, notably in what is now "The Book of Beginnings", "The Book of the Traveller of the Worlds" and "The Book of the Divine Mother". Writing to Sethna in 1938, Sri Aurobindo said that "The 'Worlds' have fallen into a state of manuscript chaos, corrections upon corrections, additions upon additions, rearrangements on rearrangements out of which perhaps some cosmic beauty will emerge!" ¹⁹ It is mainly this long Book that is packed with the experiences of the occult World Stair: the worlds of Light above, the worlds of Darkness below, the worlds of subtle Matter, the Life-Force and the Mind in between, these together comprising the whole inner structure of the cosmos. In fact, all the three Books of Part I were retouched as often as the inspiration directed, and new passages were added as Sri Aurobindo's intimacy with the occult increased day by day; and there were the experiences of the Mother too.

Sri Aurobindo's Savitri has doubtless the bone-structure of the tale in the Mahabharata, but the tissues and the cells, the blood-streams and the pulse-beats, all derive from the Mother's and the Master's inner experiences and yogic realisations. In the Mother's prayer of 24 November 1931, she has admitted to touching with her finger "the horror of the falsehood and the inconscience", and Sri Aurobindo too has spoken in his "A God's Labour" of his digging mid "a horror of filth and mire", probing "the nether mysteries" and "the human abyss" and seeking "the inner reason of hell". The 7th and 8th Cantos ("The Descent into Night" and "The World of Falsehood, the Mother of Evil and the Sons of Darkness")

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on Book II could be read as an exhaustive report of the explorations hinted at in the Mother's prayer and Sri Aurobindo's poem:

He turned to find that wide world-failure's cause .....

The veil was rent that covers Nature's depths:

He saw the fount of the world's lasting pain

And the mouth of the black pit of Ignorance; ...

A tract he reached un built and owned by none:

There all could enter but none stay for long.

It was a no man's land of evil air,

A crowded neighbourhood without one home,

A borderland between the world and hell ....

A greater darkness waited, a worse reign,

If worse can be where all is evil's extreme;

Yet to the cloaked the uncloaked is naked worst ....

Armed with the aegis of tyrannic Power,

Signing the edicts of her dreadful rule

And using blood and torture as a seal,

Darkness proclaimed her slogans to the world ....

Mighty and mute the Godhead in him woke

And faced the pain and danger of the world.

He mastered the tides of Nature with a look:

He met with his bare spirit naked Hell. ²⁰

Nay, worse there is none; it is the heart of Hell ­

Then could he see the hidden heart of Night: ...

The Anarchs of the formless depths arose,

Great titan beings and demoniac powers, ...

Armoured, protected by their lethal masks,

As in a studio of creative Death

The giant sons of Darkness sit and plan

The drama of the earth, their tragic stage. ²¹

But however dismal the experience, the journey into the mud and the murkiness was not to be avoided, for "None can reach heaven who has not passed through hell." ²²

In this infernal realm he dared to press

Even into its deepest pit and darkest core,

Perturbed its tenebrous base, dared to contest

Its ancient privileged right and absolute force:

In Night he plunged to know her dreadful heart,

In Hell he sought the root and cause of Hell. ²³

Still undaunted, and unaffected still, the Traveller pursues his probe, and then the mystic Truth dawns upon him:

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He saw in Night the Eternal's shadowy veil,

Knew death for a cellar of the house of life, ...

Hell split across its huge abrupt facade

As if a magic building were undone,

Night opened and vanished like a gulf of dream.

Into being's gap scooped out as empty Space

In which she has filled the place of absent God,

There poured a wide intimate and blissful Dawn,

Healed were all things that Time's torn heart had made

And sorrow could live no more in Nature's breast:

Division ceased to be, for God was there.

The soul lit the conscious body with its ray,

Matter and Spirit mingled and were one. ²⁴

This was the miracle of transformation: at the very centre of Darkness was secreted the principle of Light, at the densest core of Matter veiled Spirit had its sovran shrine. And having thus found the root and cause and cure of Hell, the Traveller - who is it but Sri Aurobindo, who is it but the Mother herself? - comes out of the Abyss, and journeys through the Paradise of the Life-Gods, the Kingdoms of the Little and the Greater Mind, and so on, till at last he reaches "creation's centre" and the "still fixity and brooding passion of the world of Soul", and there is now the iridescence and ecstasy of a sheer apocalyptic experience:

There he beheld in their mighty union's poise

The figure of the deathless Two-in-One,

A single being in two bodies clasped,

A diarchy of two united souls,

Seated absorbed in deep creative joy;

Their trance of bliss sustained the mobile world. ²⁵

Another Vision still for the Traveller, "the mystic outline of a face"; and

Overwhelmed by her implacable light and bliss,

An atom of her illimitable self

Mastered by the honey and lightning of her power,

Tossed towards the shores of her ocean 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. ²⁶

There is little doubt, then that these and many of the epiphanies and evocations in Savitri were but the transcriptions of Sri Aurobindo's and the

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Mother's spiritual adventures and realisations. To the young sadhak she spoke to in 1960, the Mother had said, "It is my experiences he has presented at length and they were his experiences also. It is, moreover, the picture of our joint adventure into the unknown or rather into the Supermind." Sri Aurobindo's overhead consciousness was identical with the Mother's, that was how he had been able to tap uncannily from her immense store of past experiences and realisations as well. Theirs was the joint adventure into the Supermind and, in those high ranges of experience, what happened to her, what happened to him, had accordingly the same contours, the same colours, the same force of impulsion. Savitri thus became essentially the inner life-history of both Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. As the Mother has succinctly put it, Savitri is:

1) The daily record of the spiritual experiences of the individual who has written.

2) A complete system of yoga which can serve as a guide for those who want to follow the integral sadhana.

3) The yoga of the Earth in its ascension towards the Divine.

4) The experiences of the Divine Mother in her effort to adapt herself to the body she has taken and the ignorance and the falsity of the earth upon which she has incarnated. ²⁷

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