The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo - Part 4

READINGS IN "SAVITRI"

(2)

Savitri, the Divine Grace in human form, is upon earth. The Divine Consciousness has abandoned its own supreme transcendental status to enter into the human consciousness and partake of the earthly life: it has taken up a mortal frame, to Jive and dwell here below. Only thus she can transform the lower animal nature into the divine nature, raise man to godhead, make of earth heaven itself.

A prodigal of her rich divinity,

Her self and all she was she had lent to men,

Hoping her greater being to implant

That heaven might native grow in mortal soil.

But the task is not easy. The flesh is weak: it is incapable of holding or receiving the breath of immortality. Not only so, it has a positive aversion, a bad will: it is refractory, antipathetic to the touch of the spirit. Matter is dull and dumb, dark and obdurate: mortality loves and clings jealously and exclusively to its mortal home. The earthly being does not know, cannot appreciate the gift, the boon that is brought to him, to his very door: he has only

Page 77

to receive and accept in order to be saved out of all ignorance and grief, impotence and death. The Divine Mother has forgotten herself, has made herself as small and as close and native to earth as any earthly creature, like any one of us, taken upon herself all limitations and indignities, the entire burden of an earthly life, graced with her presence this mortal atmosphere. But

Hard is it to persuade earth-nature's change;

Mortality bears ill the eternal's touch:

It fears the pure divine intolerance

Of its assault of ether and of fire;

It murmurs at its sorrowless happiness.

Almost with hate repels the light it brings...

As, however, "mortality bears ill the eternal's touch", the eternal too is intolerant of the mortal nature—only it is intolerant not in the ignorant blind squeamish weak human way, but in a divine way, for it is armed with weapons of light and knowledge, it assaults with its luminous force, the energy of ether and fire, the higher and nobler elements as against the dense dark dumb earth, the lowest element that clothes the human consciousness. Indeed,

Page 78

mortality is enamoured of the tangled beam of joy and sorrow, of laughter and tears, of light and shadow and cannot contemplate the unalloyed sheer delight in Eternity. It is out of breath in the serene rarefied air of immortality; it pines for the terra firma, the mud and slime. The human consciousness has been fleeing the Hound of Heaven down the corridors of Time, and yet it will be caught in the end and wholly transmuted in the divine embrace into the substance of the Divine Himself. All the unwillingness and protestation and revolt are meant to forge and hammer the final union into something perfect, faultless, absolute.

Page 79