On Savitri
THEME/S
LECTURE II
Well, yesterday we tried to cover some rough ground about poetry, the possibility of an epic in this age and the idea of an epic being more and more subjective. It is not the size of the event which gives inspiration for an epic, but the significance of the event which is seen and felt by the poet. We saw Aswapathy's history yesterday, and found that Aswapathy is not the childless king that he is in the legend of the Mahabharata, the Indian epic, but he is here a representative of the human race, engaged in the cultural activity of humanity trying to evolve higher and higher values of life. That is Aswapathy. He is a representative, he is a symbol of the human race, a symbol of humanity, a representative of mankind, and he is making an effort to embody higher and higher values of life so as to find out what is the goal of man -that is what Aswapathy is after. And Savitri is born to him as a gift from the Divine Mother because he pleaded in the House of the Spirit, in the house of the Divine, when he reached by his development the divine consciousness; "he prayed to the Divine for an emanation of the Divine to be sent down on earth so that man's problem would be solved. Man's problem of ignorance and subjection to death was to be solved, that was what he was seeking, and in his own effort he found that man, if left to himself, would not be able to solve his problem. So he appealed to the supreme Mother and asked for the boon that an emanation or a part of her, so to say, would be sent down to earth to help mankind overcome the limits of ignorance and death. That is the solution to the problem, and the story as we recounted it yesterday is that Savitri, the young princess in the legend who becomes the emanation of the supreme Mother sent down on earth, is here to help man to solve the problem of overcoming ignorance and the limitations of death. That is the character of Savitri
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What exactly is the problem that has been worked out, what does the poet want to tell us? First, is the universe a mechanical determinism? Is this universe run by inconscient laws in which no amount of interference from human will or any other consciousness is able to interfere and make a change? Is it a mechanical determinism set at work so as to bring about inevitable results which can be foreseen if you know the forces at work. That is what Narada's prediction comes to. Narada saw the forces that are at work in the life of Satyavan and said that after one year Satyavan, the young man selected by Savitri, the princess, will die; so then the problem is, is the working of the cosmos a blind mechanical determinism of forces in which no subjective element called will is able to interfere, or is it possible to change the determinism of Nature and avoid what appears to be inevitable? Is there at work in the universe a categorical imperative which cannot be set aside by intervention either of a human or a divine will?
That is one problem. And then, is the present determination of the world final? People say that it is human nature, and by saying it is human nature they think that they are explaining everything. It doesn't explain anything. It means that it is a mystery. You say that this is human nature, but why is it so? Is it final? The determinism at present obtaining in Nature, the process, the laws that are at work in the material world, in the vital world, in the human world, are they final? Are they such that you can say, they are for all eternity unchangeable? Savitri's answer to both of these problems is: It is not so. There is not a mechanical determinism at work; rather a conscious intervention is possible because you know that the universe is based upon a consciousness. That is why, the present laws obtaining are not a doom.
That is what Savitri is facing. The death of Satyavan is a doom - doom in the sense of an inevitable calamity, an
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inevitable unpleasant result against which you can do nothing: that is a doom. Can doom be avoided? Yes. That is what we said yesterday. It is not by human force that you can do it. It was very clear:
A magic leverage suddenly is caught
That moves the veiled Ineffable's timeless will:
A prayer, a master act, a king idea
Can link man's strength to a transcendent Force.
Then miracle is made the common rule,
One mighty deed can change the course of things;
A lonely thought becomes omnipotent.
That is what we quoted yesterday if you remember. There is a mechanism, there is a methodology which can upset this balance, which can change this present equation of forces at work in the universe, and this intervention man is capable of invoking. It is a divine intervention.
This leads to another problem: whether the dynamism of the world is only mechanical. Savitri answers: No, it is a conscious mechanism at work, a conscious dynamism. In this dynamism, it is possible to bring an intervention of a force of consciousness that can be called supreme or divine. This brings ultimately into the picture the function of a supreme consciousness. Is God or divinity or whatever is the ultimate reality only a static condition of consciousness or is it dynamic in its movement? Is a dynamic intervention of this consciousness possible? Savitri answers: Yes, it is possible, it works out the process of the evolution of the cosmic energy and shows that the present equation is only a working equation, a provisional order necessitated by a process of evolution which has to move towards a goal, and when an active movement is made towards the goal then it will be found that the present equation can be changed. It is not necessarily a
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categorical imperative, something that you cannot oppose, something that is so fixed that there is no way out of it.
In physics there is a component of forces, they say; a component of forces is the line of force in which when two forces are working you can predict the line along which the resultant will come, the resultant line of force. If two lines of force are working in physics, they will represent it something like that. One force is acting this way, another force is acting that way, so you know that the resultant most probably will be this way, it won't go this way or that way: the result will be this way. Now that is the resultant of forces. Narada says that now universal forces are working and the result is that Satyavan must die. Is it an equation which you cannot change? Savitri says you can change it. There is no inevitability about this result in life because the world or universe is a conscious movement, and being a conscious movement, consciousness can intervene in all the operations that are there provisional, necessary for the temporary order through which mankind is passing.
Indirectly, Aswapathy, the king, the character who is father of Savitri, shows that man's present constitution is only a constitution which is in movement. Is man only a sum total of mind, life and body? Is man only mind plus life plus vital force plus body, physical being? That is the question, and Aswapathy says, no, these are man's instruments, the ones that the soul uses; so if man realizes, on this side of the equation, his inner entity, then the present equation changes. At present there is ignorance and mortality, mortal consciousness: these are the results of the present equation; when this equation changes by the intervention or realization of the soul, this equation which is the present, what you call doom, is bound to change. If man is always and eternally equal only to mind and life and body, the movements of Nature which he is, then the present equation as a working
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order will go on. But it is not bound to go on. The point is that man can evoke from within himself his true entity, the soul, the divine spark and potentiality now hidden in him but capable of being awakened; if he makes an effort to awaken that hidden entity which he really is, then this equation which is here now and has the appearance of a binding law will change and must change. Otherwise we are in a scheme of mechanical determinism out of which we have no escape; otherwise the universe will be reduced to a mechanical scheme of determination in which there is no escape for the human individual.
Is everything predetermined? - that is what some of the philosophers are trying to bother their heads about just now in some of the symposia. Is there a determinism at work? The Gita said it hundreds of years ago, there is a determination of Nature at work today, but it is not the determinism of the spirit. The determinism at present that is working is the determinism of Nature. The Gita says that there is no freedom in the determinism of Nature. Nature, Prakriti, is the universal force which is working. What is working at present is the determinism of Nature, and this determinism is in bondage to the spirit so far as the human experience is concerned. It is an expression of a cosmic being, but to the human being it appears to be a bondage, and freedom consists in getting out of the determinism of Nature and getting into the determinism of the spirit; when the determinism of the spirit is evoked or brought into movement there is freedom, freedom even in action, not only in consciousness. So man is not only a mental, vital and physical being, but he is a spirit, a divine spark; he has a secret potentiality which can be evoked into a dynamic movement in life. So man has to start with the idea, with the concept that he is a spirit and then he can evoke that spirit into movement in his mental life, in his vital life and in his physical life; then the determinism of
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Nature will eventually change.
This means that the present constitution of man is not final, that man as at present constituted is a transitional being, and because he is transitional he has all the characteristics of an imperfect being, and that is why the galling sense of imperfection or inability is a sign that he is still in process, that he is only a provisional being. That to which man has to rise is what is pointed out by Aswapathy in the first five cantos of the first book. The first five cantos deal with the development of Aswapathy releasing himself from the bondage of mental, vital and physical nature, realizing his true self, and then finding out the nature and function of the true spirit or true self which man is; he finds that he is not confined to the individual formula of his being. You take this size of man that is a particle of the best representative of man. If he realizes his true self with this big mind of Nature inside, then he finds that this self is not only here in the individual, this self is also capable of an expansion in consciousness, it can go on expanding until this self that is here is also all and is behind all. What he does is that he expands when he realizes his true self here, he feels that it is not confined to this body and mind and life here, but that it is capable of an expansion to other levels of consciousness, that the self is in the body but the body is only" a small pedestal over which something very vast is standing and working, it is like a small foothold or support for the higher working.
Now man is ego-bound and therefore feels: "I am only matter, I am only a handful of dust;" that is what man ordinarily feels and it may be justified, because that is the determinism of Nature. So long as you are within the determinism of Nature you always feel that man is the most insignificant thing going in the world; quite right, but that is as far as Nature is concerned; as soon as you go to what man is essentially then you find that he is vast, he is equal to the
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cosmos, there is nothing in the cosmos which is not one with him. He is one with the whole universe and more than the universe, because the whole universe is not manifested.
You take another scheme (the author goes to the blackboard): this is vital world, then mental world and so on - you go on with the expansion of the world in the second book of Savitri, where Aswapathy's voyages are described. You take this as a manifested universe. This is supposed to be the limit of the manifested universe, earth is here - let us put earth somewhere in a very small corner because there would otherwise be too big a representation for earth. We will put earth here. Now man from here is expanding, and he has come here to the limit of manifested universe; this is the limit. Aswapathy has come here in the second book, he goes on discovering the levels one after another. This is the potential universe, the universe which can manifest itself but has not yet manifested in actuality, but it can be manifested here; so Aswapathy is here breaking the limit. Well! we have already broken the limit of space scientifically, is it not so? And we are trying to go to some other planet, material, physical. Well, here Aswapathy breaks the limits psychologically -there is not much difference. We break the sound barrier, here we break the barrier of ether. We can break the barrier of gravitation, nowadays; science is taking up the work, it is not as if it was somewhere in the air. Well, in the same way it is practical for man to take up the adventure of the spirit.
If he takes up the adventure of the spirit, he can break this barrier of the manifested universe, mental consciousness, intellectual consciousness, and go to the potential universe, called the House of the Spirit. This is the third book of Savitri, the House of the Spirit. Aswapathy enters there and meets the Supreme Mother of the universe, the creatrix, or simply the Mother - we shall call her the Mother of the universe - and he prays to her: "We want to solve the
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problem of man here and if you want man to succeed, kindly send down by your grace your own emanation here." So an emanation is asked for, from the potential universe, from the House of the Spirit, to be sent down to earth so that man may be able to solve his problem. Man is now confined to his mind, life and body, he is very much confined here, and if he is to be free, this ray must come down on earth. Savitri is that ray sent down on earth to help man to overcome the limits of the present universe in which he is living. That is the third book where Aswapathy reaches this House of the Spirit, meets the Supreme Mother, carries to her the whole aspiration of mankind for the earth, and asks for a boon - an emanation to be sent down to the earth.
The Supreme Mother grants the boon and Savitri is born. Savitri is not, therefore, only a princess born to a childless king but she is the result of the aspiration of the whole earth. This is why the second canto of the first book begins thus: "A world's desire compelled her mortal birth." Savitri took up birth on earth not as the result of the prayer of the childless king, but in response to the world's desire, which was carried by Aswapathy to the Supreme in a prayer, and the prayer was granted; therefore, "A world's desire compelled a mortal birth."
I am giving the lines so as to refer our minds to the text, for that is the background. Aswapathy tries to find out what man is; he finds that there are capacities lying dormant in man that can be awakened. We know. them, a little of them in hypnotism, telepathy, thought transference, faith cures and certain other phenomena; we know them as tricks of the occult, but in the deep spiritual process they are much more tangible and concrete facts of the inner world. So Aswapathy finds that potential powers, dormant capacities are there in man which can be awakened, capacities by which he can bridge the limit of his present natural constitution and evoke
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in himself other powers which will be adequate to express the divinity that is within him; so he awakens those powers within himself, realizes himself and when he realizes his self he says, "I am only standing on one atom of myself, really speaking. I am as wide as the cosmos." He widens and widens and the great realizations which come to him cannot be described in a small compass. What he finds is that the earth consciousness goes into the vital world and that this vital world has an opening right up to the limit of the absolute. Only the vital world can go up to there, almost to the limit of the absolute or out to the spirit. There is a height of the vital and there is a depth of the vital; the height of the life and the depth of the life. He finds, when he expands his consciousness from the physical human being to an inner being, that he is a vital being as well as the cosmos; this is the life-belt, the life-universe, which is independent of earth-life since all life is not confined to earth.
There is a big belt of life-force and life-universe in which vital forces and vital beings, independent of earth, remain with their own different constitution. They have different kinds of bodies, different kinds of movements, different kinds of laws governing their own plane of consciousness. And then he saw that that vital world expands .only to here (the author points to the blackboard), but if he allows this world to do so, then it can rise like a cone. This vital world is like a solid cone that can rise like that. I am putting a circle here, it is difficult to represent it, but it is like a solid cone, that can rise just like that, until only a thin veil divides it from the Absolute, from the Infinite; so each instrument of human nature is capable of contacting almost directly the supreme consciousness. That is why the mind cannot govern the vital being fully, cannot perfect it; the vital has its own right to approach the Supreme.
The life force in man would not submit permanently to the
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dictate of either ethics or reason because the life force has its own individual, independent fulfilment, and it wants it. It is because of this experience that Aswapathy realized that the vital can directly approach the Divine if it is turned towards the Divine; but the vital doesn't want to turn towards the Divine in ninety-nine per cent of the cases, therefore you find that life is not Divine. It is true, life doesn't want to turn to the Divine, but neither will it submit to mind, it will only submit if it turns to the Divine, because it can directly approach the Divine and have its own fulfilment. Its two great impulses are possession and delight or enjoyment: power and enjoyment; well, it will have them fully only when it reaches the Divine. Mind will always curb the vital, mind will always try to control the vital and the vital will always submit only temporarily, provisionally to the mind, but it will ultimately break away because it finds no fulfilment in it. Aswapathy found that the same thing happened when he went to the mental level.
Now this life has an upward movement and it has also a downward movement, so that there is a depth here which is negative; as there is a positive upward movement, there is also a depth which is a negative movement; there is a hell, so to say, in the# lower movement of life. Life can be anti-divine, not merely ignorant. Make a distinction between ignorant and anti-divine. Life when it is ignorant, well, it is simply ignorant, but when it is anti-divine it opposes any higher movement. When you go to these levels of life you find not only ignorance but anti-divinity, opposition to anything higher. As life has heights, like the Himalayas, it has depths also, into which it falls. Those depths of the vital are depths to which human consciousness is subject because they all have relation with the earth; so any human being opening to those vital forces will meet the operation of those forces on earth, and that is why we find perversity, the unnatural
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movement of life forces, or anti-divinity. There are people so constituted that they will never convert themselves to anything high. Do what you like, they will not, because they are not human. In the true sense of the term they are not human because it is not human ignorance that makes them bad. It is the lower forces that have been allowed to come into life and possess them. These people are not conscious of this possession, that's all. Most of the forces that come into men are not their own. Only the determinism of Nature is at work in the universe.
Nature is deciding everything in ninety cases out of a hundred. Man thinks he is free, but he is not free. Now if he is open to lower forces it is the lower forces that decide his movements, and in the lower forces there is definite anti-divinity. That is really the explanation of the permanence of pain and ignorance in life. Pain and ignorance are not constituted by a direct creation or direct will from above. They are the indirect result of the universe coming out of an inconscience. The inconscience has given rise to this universe and as a by-product of this inconscience, well, anti-divinity, or you can say, forces that are titanic, forces that are asuric, forces that embody the anti-divine element in life have come into existence.
Take for instance the case of a man like Hitler. Why go further? It's not very necessary to go back to mythology. Take an individual like Hitler: do what you like, you cannot convert him. It is impossible because he is not man. He is not man in the true sense of the word - in the sense of an ignorant human being. He has allowed himself to be governed by a vital force, he has allowed a mastery over his own vital nature by a force from below. And that force wants to replace and take the throne of the Divine. The ego is there inflated. It inflates and wants to govern everything by steamrollering all opposition. The Divine is omnipotent and there-
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fore He gives you full liberty to defer, to defy, to deny God. But when the ego is inflated and wants to replace the Divine and take the throne of the Divine, it steam-rollers everybody. That's what it does because it is not omnipotent, you see. It is only a huge power arrived at by organization and by domination over the will of the collectivity so as to carry an impress of something almost like omnipotence. The ego tries to feel omnipotent but it is not. It is enormous, but it is not omnipotent and infinite.
(The author goes to the blackboard.) So here Aswapathy expanded and saw that there were levels of consciousness which he was passing through, and that the universe was himself. World knowledge or universal knowledge he got from around himself and God-knowledge from above. These are the first three books of Savitri, roughly. The first five cantos in the first book deal with Self-knowledge, knowledge of the self, independent of mind, life and body. First, a divine entity that is possible to realize by evoking faculties which are dormant in men now. Second, when the self is realized the self is found to be, not limited to the egoistic unit or egoistic constitution in which it happens to function, but to be as wide as the cosmos. Third, there is a possibility of overcoming or breaking the limit of the manifested universe, or the universe as it is now functioning. There is also a universe that can be invoked into many manifestations - a potential universe that can be brought down here - Truth Consciousness, intuitional consciousness, inspirational consciousness, a revelatory power over mind, a supermind where one can open the human consciousness to the high levels and bring them down. That potential in us is waiting for manifestation here. Aswapathy realized this and carried the aspiration of the human consciousness to the supreme House of the Spirit and brought back Savitri's birth as a boon. That is the end of the third book.
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The supreme Mother grants a boon that a child will be born who will be an emanation of herself to help man conquer the ferment of ignorance and death. How far can the present formula of Nature or the determinism of Nature be changed? How far can it be changed and by what process? Here Aswapathy makes an inward turn. The knowledge that he acquires is gained by partaking in an inward turn of consciousness. By an inward turn Aswapathy is able to go through and acquire this knowledge. It is by an inward turn of consciousness that there awaken the potentialities that are lying dormant. But Savitri's work is much more difficult because she has actually to come down into the present form of that ignorance and change it. By what process does Savitri change it? She goes through a difficult process. (The author goes to the blackboard.) Now you take the manifested universe. Savitri is in the manifested universe on a small part of earth. She is there going into the constitution of this universe, and she finds that there are three powers. If you imagine it like a solid cone, then she is penetrating inside. So she goes into the first depth, then the second depth and then the third. First she meets one power - this is within. Now we may represent it like a half-cut (drawing). This is the limit -this circle is turned halfway. I cut it like a section. The section is cut and Savitri is here; this is the earth and she is moving inward, inward into the constitution of the universe by insight. She is not expanding outward like Aswapathy.
We saw Aswapathy work from here. From the earth he was expanding, expanding until he found he reaches the frontiers of eternity as it is called in the poem. He reaches the frontiers of eternity and enters the House of the Spirit. Savitri is penetrating inside the constitution of the universe. She is not expanding but going inside and here she meets the universal powers that are managing the cosmos today, and she finds that they are all imperfect. The cosmic powers
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which are at work in the universe are imperfect themselves. So she says, "I will bring in the divine power. I will bring the power from the Divine and you will be perfected." That is how she penetrates into the deepest constitution of the cosmos and sees how actually it will work out, and how it will be perfected by bringing from above, from the Divine, a greater power of perfection into the universal scheme itself. Savitri performs that function.
So the two Yogas are a little different. Aswapathy goes on expanding outward, Savitri goes on penetrating inward. She goes inside into the earth consciousness. Hers is not the cosmic movement, because since the earth itself is a "fragment and a residue" it contains everything that is here in the universe; the whole expansion, the mystic whole, is contained there in the fragment. In one of his poems Sri Aurobindo says - "in the fragment the mystic whole," the whole is contained in it. It is not necessary for her to expand out because whatever is there in the cosmos, is here in the earth. The earth is. therefore residue and a fragment of the whole, so if she penetrates into the constitution of the fragment, she also influences the constitution of the cosmos. The fragment and the whole are only symbols of the one Reality: one is connected with the other, there is no lack of relation.
Now the next problem is that of pain. Why pain at all? In the sixth book you find the answer to this problem. Savitri was to become a widow according to the prophecy of Narada, who came at the time when she selected Satyavan as her husband. She said she was going to marry Satyavan. Then the King and the Queen asked Narada, the divine sage, to cast a horoscope, find out the astrological position, and Narada, after casting the horoscope, said that Satyavan is a good man, but he will die after one year. Now this brings in the problem of pain. In the first book, we saw that the problem is whether there is any blind mechanical determi-
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nism at work or not. Now here the same problem is taking the shape of how the human being reacts to such a determinism. There is a determinism in Nature in which a young man who is innocent and has committed no fault of his own, is destined or condemned to die after one year of his marriage. What is this mechanism at work? Is it mechanical determinism? Secondly why is such an unmerited pain or suffering inflicted on an innocent human being? If a supreme consciousness and mercy is at work as the ultimate Reality, why should there even be the existence of pain? Subjectively, this determinism brings about reactions of ignorance and pain on the part of man; man feels the pain. Why should the mechanism be such as to cause pain at all? What is the place of pain in the scheme of things?
To that problem the sixth book gives an answer - the sixth and seventh books, particularly the sixth - and it indirectly answers this question: Is suffering a permanent element of the cosmic constitution? The epic says no, the last answer of the epic is that it is not permanent. Pain happens to be an element in the present working of the universe because it is necessary; there is a place for it in the economy of the universe, there is some utility of pain, therefore pain is there, but it is not as though there would be no universe if pain was not there. Pain could be eliminated from it and yet it would remain a universe. So that problem is answered in the sixth and seventh books. Savitri's yoga gives the answer. She finds that in the present constitution of the universe there is something lacking and the potential universe can supply that lacking element; when that element enters into the cosmic constitution, pain can then be eliminated because it will not be necessary anymore. Now it is necessary because man is living only in his mind, his vital and his physical being, but when he begins to live in his inner spirit, he will not require the pressure, the drive, the goad of pain to make him feel
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what is delight. Pain is indirectly a question put by the inner self: "I must be happy but why am I not happy?" That's all. Pain comes to that ultimately: "Why should I be what I am? And why am I not better than what I am?"
Ignorance and pain are therefore not necessarily the permanent elements of any cosmic scheme; at least of this one they are not permanent: that is the answer which Savitri gives. And then the question as to who created pain is answered there. Pain is the result of the choice of the soul, the choice, really, of the supreme eternity that is at work in us. The choice is that of the soul and self, it is not an imposition. It is not as if somebody came and said: "You will become subject to pain." No, the soul and the self, the essential divinity, selected a condition which the human being feels as pain. It did not say: "This is pain and I like it." But the spirit when it chooses, chooses out of quite a different consideration, a different view, a different way of looking at things; but it is the choice of the spirit, the choice not of pain as pain, but the choice of the process. It becomes pain when you go through it. It ceases to be pain when you look at it from above; from somewhere else, it is not pain at all.
You see, when a doctor operates on a patient, he always sees that this operation is the cure; he knows that in this way the patient will be cured. The patient only knows his pain, but the doctor knows that this operation must be done to get the pain out of him. Similarly the human soul has selected a situation which, because of the human limitations of mind, life and body, has become pain to its experience; but really speaking it was not for the sake of pain that the situation was chosen but as a passage through which it may arrive at something different from pain, something other than pain altogether. "Thou art thyself the author of thy pain", the poem says. The next question is: Can the divine act in life? Can the divine be made to act in situations in life? Savitri
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answers yes, that is the only solution for man's problems, to make the divine a dynamic element in one's life.
Now we take up Aswapathy's Yoga - a little bit of what he has been doing. What did he do? First, he released his own self and soul from the limitation of his mind, life and body, which are his instruments, and he became conscious of some element in him which was independent of his life, independent of his thoughts, independent of his desires, independent of his physical being. The poet puts it this way: "his heart was smitten by a beam of the eternal". When he saw into himself, he didn't see the full glory of the inner being, no, but a beam of the eternal struck his heart, and an inward turn was necessary. He also saw that if he was to remain permanently in the inner self then this inner turn must also become permanent; so he must always be turned inward, whatever he does outwardly must be the result of the dictation or the guidance of the inner being. An inward turn is necessary for this. And Aswapathy came to change the working of his own nature. He found that there was a static oneness and a dynamic power descending into him when he turned inwards, and then the ego limits were broken slowly.
"His island ego joined the continent" - that line of poetry-is inspiration, not mere mental statement. Then he broke into occult worlds and attained a stillness and a peace, but he found that he could not retain any higher state for a long time; it would not remain for very long, it would come and go. What Sri Aurobindo says is very finely put:
Only a while at first these heavenlier states,
These large wide-poised upliftings could endure.
The high and luminous tension breaks too soon.
The body's stone stillness and the life's hushed trance,
The breathless might and calm of silent mind;
Or slowly they fail as sets a golden day.
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The restless nether members tire of peace;
A nostalgia of old little worlds and joys,
A need to call back small familiar selves,
To tread the accustomed and inferior way,
The need to rest in a natural poise of fall,
As a child who learns to walk can walk not long,
Replace the titan will for ever to climb,
On the heart's altar dim the sacred fire.
That is why these experiences are brief and do not last very long in the beginning. Well, that is what Aswapathy found was happening with himself, and then he saw that a movement of ascent and descent was taking place. He goes up and comes down, sometimes he comes down with a gain, sometimes he is dull afterwards. Then he found pure perception growing, intuition coming, inspiration coming, an experience of the self coming, at least glimpses of it. And then he felt the double aspect in him - soul and Nature; what he found was that there was one being that was independent and another being that was bound to Nature. He could take up this position (the author points to his diagram on the blackboard) and he could also take up this position. A double being, soul and Nature, Nature imperfect, soul capable of perfection. He put himself more and more in the witness self, and he found that the more this Purusha, this witness self, went on remembering his true being, the greater was the extent to which Nature also responded to it. When his soul forgot his own true being and identified itself with mind, he was one with Nature and one with thoughts, impulses, movements of desire. When he separated himself from Nature he found that the soul could be impersonal, detached, capable of will, holding his consent. So gradually Aswapathy found that if his soul could go on changing its status from a mere witness to one who gives consent, to one who controls, to one who gives
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direction, then Nature would also feel obstructed in its natural flow of ignorance and would correspondingly undergo a change. What he found was a double aspect, and in this double aspect, when the Purusha knows his true self and remembers his true being, Nature also changes and reveals her powers that are lying dormant in her own constitution. Nature also shows: I am not dull, I am not always bound to be ignorant, I have also treasures of knowledge and power, but the Purusha must give the lead.
Then Aswapathy found the cause and aim of universal evolution. The Purusha is at present bound in Nature, as we saw, because he pursues Nature for the delight, the fulfilment, the will he finds in her, but when he finds that all this running is without any issue, he separates himself from her and puts his own consciousness on its true throne, so to say; then he is the transcendent one who can transcend Nature, because the true aim of evolution is to new-create life. The adventure of consciousness in the universe, the process of universal evolution, is meant to lead to a new creation of life, to create new life in terms of the spirit, not to continue this round of subjection to nature.
Then gradually the Divine began to change Aswapathy's nature so that it should begin to achieve divinity; that is why the Divine began to turn the human mud engine to heaven's use. Aswapathy found that this engine is indeed made of mud, but the Divine was taking it for heavenly use. And then he saw, in the light of this experience, that existence is a divine experiment and cosmos is the soul's opportunity. This is what Aswapathy found: existence is a divine experiment and cosmos is the soul's opportunity. This he realized when he put himself more and more in communication with his inner self; the problem for him was how to bring this higher consciousness and power more and more into life.
This knowledge he got, but how to bring the process into
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life? By maintaining the inward turn. And he found that in order to do that, humanity ought to mould his actions less and less. First, what he had to do was not to allow humanity to dictate to him what he was to do. So humanity moulded his actions less and less, number one. And because his own consciousness was wider than the world's, was it not necessary for him to go out to save mankind? Yes, it was. He did help to save mankind in his own way. Sri Aurobindo says: "His spirit's stillness helped the toiling world," so it was not necessary for him to go out and become philanthropic. It is not always necessary. "His spirit's stillness helped the toiling world." He felt that he was not of this earth but that he was a colonist from immortality. His mind, therefore, became like "a fire assailing heaven", charged with an aspiration for realizing the Divine. His mind was like a fire assailing heaven and he realized that this bodily appearance is not all. I am quoting some lines, from a passage of the first five cantos. This bodily appearance is not all: "A deathbound littleness is not all we are", says Sri Aurobindo, and again, "A spirit that is a flame of God abides... Immortal in our mortal poverty."
These are the words of Aswapathy when he first came into contact with his inner being; from the human realm of ideals he rose to this world of self, awaking higher powers in himself. He went to the frontiers of eternity, as we say, and then he was attracted by that world of the spirit, the Eternal. After realizing the static oneness and dynamic power, he found the power descending in him now and then, beginning to work in him and to change his constitution. Less and less he was moulded by humanity. The powers evoked were beyond form and went to the formless, and then he saw that he had in him the gaze of the Supreme: when he looked out it was not his body or his mind that was looking but the consciousness of the Supreme. He felt his consciousness wider than the world. Then he attained the still consciousness
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which sustains the whole world. Gradually he began to root his being and consciousness in the Infinite and to base his life upon the Eternal. There were ups and downs; a short while the higher conditions lasted and then the gravitational pull of lower life was there, which he had to overcome; but Nature was ever prepared to keep pace with him: if the soul in him demanded a height of Nature, if the soul became free, Nature also attempted to become free; if the soul was pure, Nature also became pure; if the soul was powerful, Nature also became powerful - so Nature followed the lead of the spirit in him.
How did the higher power now and then come down? The poet says it came down sometimes like the rain. That is one experience of Aswapathy and we have so many experiences of his! There is a world of achievement and even the ones in the first five cantos would take us five months to cover.
"A union of the Real with the unique, A gaze of the Alone from every face, The presence of the Eternal in the hours" -this "Made whole the fragment-being we are here." If our being has to be completely integrated, this is a necessary realization. Generally what happens is that the unique tends to become egoistic: every individual wants to be unique, unique in the sense of his egoism; but uniqueness consists in identity with the Real, union of the unique with the Real, the gaze of the Alone from every face. There are no two in the world, and therefore in every gaze one meets the gaze of the Alone, the one being. Multiplicity is not real, multiplicity is only for variation of expression in manifestation, so in fact one meets the gaze of the Alone, one being only, in every face. The realization of the one in all and the presence of the Eternal in the others becomes a reality. Life is not evanescent, it is not merely a passing on, with nothing permanent; the Eternal is constantly present in the hours, and it is thus that the fragmented being which man is be-
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comes integrated and whole.
Aswapathy attained tranquillity, serenity, purity, peace, steadiness and equality, and an occasional intervention of the higher powers to be. After his liberation he lived in the light of his realization and he saw that man is the growing image of God. Man is nothing but the growing image of God, and he can realize this by awakening the powers which are dormant in him now. Aswapathy saw that he was at the end of the manifested universe and a witness. And he saw the goal of this world which appears to be unconscious. He saw what this unconscious earth is moving towards. "The Earth Goddess toils across the sands of time." She is moving across the sands of time to what goal? He saw that goal and saw that it was not merely a movement in the sands of time: He saw the real goal for which she was waiting; she was waiting to grow unexpectedly divine. In the movement she wanted to realize the Divine, to become unexpectedly divine.
What is the nature of Aswapathy's realization when he first began Yoga?
The earth's uplook to a remote unknown
Is a preface only of the epic climb
Of human soul from its flat earthly state
To the discovery of a greater self
And the far gleam of an eternal Light.
This world is a beginning and a base
Where Life and Mind erect their structured dreams;
An unborn Power must build reality.
This world is a beginning and a base. Well, what is happening? Life and Mind erect their structure of dreams. Life has a dream, Mind has a dream and they are trying to create something here in keeping with their dreams. They want to realize their dreams on earth. This world is a beginning and a
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base from which life is doing something. It is a dream of perfection, power, strength, attainment, success, and it is time to create it here. Mind has some conception of what life must be; it is trying to create it here. But mind and life have merely a structure of dreams. An unborn Power must build reality. If you want to build reality, then a Power which is not yet born has to be brought in here: the power of truth, the power of the divine consciousness, the power of the soul, the power of the spirit in man. The essential divinity in man, an unborn Power, must build reality. If reality is to build something more than just a structure of dreams, then an unborn power must be brought into play.
Now you know that in India there is a tradition in which people give you a small sutra, a small epigrammatic expression in which the whole quintessence of philosophy is contained. They will say: "Satyam, shivam, sundaram": the true, the good, the beautiful. Or they will say: "Satyam, jnanam, anantam brahma": Truth, knowledge, infinite.
Question: Does that belong to the Truth?
"Truth, knowledge, infinite": it is from the Upanishad. That's how it is expressed sometimes. Or "Satyam, Ritam, Brihat." It means "Truth, Right, Vast." This contains sometimes a quintessence of a whole philosophical outlook. A whole philosophy can be brought into a small compass by putting all we want to say into three words: The true, good and beautiful: Satyam, shivam, sundaram - that's the ultimate functioning of some highest reality. If you ask one who has seen it, well, he would like to put it like that. Or Truth, Knowledge and Infinity: Satyam, Jnanam, Anantam Brahma - they say it like that in the Upanishadic language, or they will say: Satyam, Ritam, Brihat. It is a Vedic term - from which the word Brahman also comes.
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Now the poet of Savitri expresses here the quintessence of his philosophy. This is Sri Aurobindo's formula: the Absolute, the Perfect, the Alone. As soon as you say "the Perfect", the universe is already brought into existence, because perfection cannot exist if there is nothing else around it. Either less perfect or imperfect or at least some paraphernalia of perfection is necessary for perfection to really be perfection. So the Absolute, the Perfect, the Alone. There is no duality, it is alone - it is absolute, free from manifestation, free from the cosmos, and yet it is perfect.
"The Absolute, the Perfect, the Alone" he has fashioned. I am not giving you the full passage in which you will see the whole philosophy contained in a nutshell, but I will give the lines which are important.
The Absolute, the Perfect, the Alone
Has called out of the Silence his mute force
Where she lay in the featureless and formless hush
Guarding from Time by her immobile sleep
The ineffable puissance of his solitude.
Has entered with his silence into space:
He has fashioned these countless persons of one self;
He lives in all, who lived in his Vast alone;
Space is himself and Time is only he.
Now he makes a change in the text, you see. He says:
The Absolute, the Perfect, the Immune,
One who is in us as our secret Self,
Our mask of imperfection has assumed,
He has made this tenement of flesh his own,
His image in the human measure cast
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The Absolute, the Perfect, the Immune. Note the difference. He has exulted in the universe, He has entered with the silence into space. Yes, He has entered with the silence into space and He has become time. Yes. But has He therefore been touched by elements of ignorance, unconsciousness and materiality and the limitations of mind, life, body and matter? No. He is free. He is hot contaminated - He is immune. Because if He went through a transformation or a change, then there would be no possibility of coming out of it. So He is there, but immune. The Absolute and the Perfect, when He enters the universe, is immune. That explains the universe and its working and the presence of the Divine behind, because the Immune is there. In everyone the Immune is there. Quite immune from whatever is its appearance. In the most wicked there is also the Immune. The Upanishads said it differently. They said: "Not pierced by evil, not pierced by sin." That is a sentence. But here is the rendering in one word: "immune." You understand that the Divine is in everybody, yet immune from whatever is imperfect. And the One who is in us as our secret self is immune. Our mask of imperfection is assumed. He has made this tenement of flesh his own. His image in the human measure is cast. He has cast this image into the measure of Divinity - a small image of Divinity. So the next line is:
That to his divine measure we might rise;
Then in a figure of Divinity
The Maker shall recast us and impose
A plan of godhead on the mortal's mould
Sri Aurobindo has kept the image of casting throughout and you will see how marvellously it works out in perfect consonance with his highest philosophy. Now his philosophy is there, but it is marvellously poetic.
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Lifting our finite minds to his infinite,
That is the second part of the quotation. He has cast his image into the human mould so that we might rise to his divine measure. He has cast his substance into a small human image with the idea that the human must rise to the divine image - that to his divine measure we might rise. When we do that, then in a figure of Divinity the Maker recasts us and imposes a plan of godhead on the mortal's mould, lifting our finite minds to the infinite - to His infinite mind. What will happen then? The poet is giving the picture of the world.
Touching the moment with eternity
(eternity will not be aloof from the moment - the moment will be touched by eternity)
This transfiguration is earth's due to heaven:
A mutual debt binds man to the Supreme:
His nature we must put on as he put ours;
Now you get some idea of this sentence. That in a moment with eternity our mind links with His infinite mind, our finite mind with his infinite, touching the moment with eternity. This transfiguration from the human to the Divine is the earth's due to heaven; it is the debt which earth owes to heaven. A mutual debt binds man to the Supreme for as He has cast Himself into the human mould, so the human has to rise into the divine mould. "His nature we must put on as He put ours." He has put on the human nature as we are to put on his divine nature.
We are sons of God and must be even as he
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His human portion, we must grow divine.
Our life is a paradox with God for key.
Your life is a paradox with God for key. You get some central idea of Sri Aurobindo's outlook.
Now I'll read one or two passages just to finish with the subject of Aswapathy's Yoga and his attainment.
Oft inspiration with her lightning feet,
How does an inspiration come to a human being?
A sudden messenger from the all-seeing tops,
Traversed the soundless corridors of his mind
Bringing her rhythmic sense of hidden things.
Or how did it work sometimes?
A great nude arm of splendour suddenly rose;
It rent the gauze opaque of Nescience:
Her lifted finger's keen unthinkable tip
Bared with a stab of flame the closed Beyond.
"Bared" means "opened". That which is closed to the mind will open with a "stab of flame" by the inspiration when it comes.
An eye awake in voiceless heights of trance,
A mind plucking at the unimaginable,
Overleaping with a sole and perilous bound
The high black wall hiding superconscience,
She broke in with inspired speech for scythe
And plundered the Unknowable's vast estate.
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Plundered the estate of the Unknowable. Inspiration when it is mild - look at how Wordsworth has felt it: "That serene and blessed mood in which the affections gently lead us on until the breath of this corporeal frame and even the motion of our human blood are almost suspended - we are laid asleep in body and become a living soul. While with an T made quiet by the power of harmony and the deep power of joy, we see into the life of things." ("Tintern Abbey"). You see this same experience of inspiration in a mild degree in some other poets like that - the superconscious comes into the inspired and intuitive writings of many people. But you don't find it in one place like an electrical belt fixed in the sky of poetic empyrean as in Savitri. Listen to this passage:
The master of existence lurks in us
And plays at hide-and-seek with his own Force;
In Nature's instrument loiters secret God.
The Immanent lives in man as in his house;
He has made the universe his pastime's field,
A vast gymnasium of his works of might.
All-knowing he accepts our darkened state,
Divine, wears shapes of animal or man;
Eternal, he assents to Fate and Time,
Immortal, dallies with mortality.
This gives some idea of what Savitri is. There is a passage in which man is conceived as a sailor in time:
This is the sailor on the flow of Time,
This is World-Matter's slow discoverer,
Who, launched into this small corporeal birth,
Has learnt his craft in tiny bays of self,
But dares at last unplumbed infinitudes,
A voyager upon eternity's seas.
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The sailor begins with time and he is now trying to voyage to eternity.
At first he hugs the shore and shuns the breadths,
Dares not to affront the far-off perilous main.
He travels close to unfamiliar coasts
And finds new haven in storm-troubled isles,
Or, guided by a sure compass in his thought,
He plunges through a bright haze that hides the stars,
Steering on the trade-routes of Ignorance.
A seeker of the islands of the Blest,
He leaves the last lands, crosses the ultimate seas,
He turns to eternal things his symbol quest;
Life changes for him its time-constructed scenes,
Its images veiling infinity.
Earth's borders recede and the terrestrial air
Hangs round him no longer its translucent veil.
The eyes of mortal body plunge their gaze
Into Eyes that look upon eternity.
He crosses the boundaries of the unseen
And passes over the edge of mortal sight
To a new vision of himself and things.
His is a search of darkness for the light,
Of mortal life for immortality.
A sailor on the Inconscient's fathomless sea,
He voyages, through a starry world of thought
On Matter's deck to a spiritual sun.
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He carries her [the great Mother's] sealed orders in his breast.
Late will he know, opening the mystic script,
Whether to a blank port in the Unseen
He goes, or, armed with her fiat, to discover
A new mind and body in the city of God
And enshrined the Immortal in his glory's house
And make the finite one with Infinity.
Across the salt waste of the endless years
Her ocean winds impel his errant boat,
The cosmic waters plashing as he goes,
A rumour around him and danger and a call.
And never can the mighty Traveller rest
And never can the mystic voyage cease
Till the nescient dusk is lifted from man's soul
And the morns of God have overtaken his night.
There is a plan in the Mother's deep world-whim,
A purpose in her vast and random game.
This plan is to be fulfilled in life. This has a similarity to a passage in another poem of Sri Aurobindo called "Ahana".
.. .Something or Someone, a Force or a Spirit
Conscious, creative, wonderful shaped out a world to inherit
Sailing in Time through the straits of today to the sea of
tomorrow.
Worlds and their wonders, suns and their flamings, earth and
her nations,
Voyages endless of Mind through the surge of its fate-tossed
creations,
Star upon star throbbing out in the silence of infinite spaces,
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Species on species, bodies on bodies, faces on faces,
Souls without numbers crossing through Time towards
eternity, aeons
Crowding on aeons, loving and battle, dirges and paeans,
And the human march is going towards the morn of the
Divine.
This "human march" is the working out of the spirit, only let us remember that Nature is the power of the spirit. Nature is not an independent entity that can do what it likes. It does what it likes so long as the spirit wants it to be free. It is permitted ignorance because the spirit permits it and is enjoying the ignorance. That's all right. But as soon as Nature becomes conscious of its Divine origin - the moment the Divine withdraws his permission - then Nature will gradually tend to change. That is the process. And there is also a higher Nature. You see, in Sri Aurobindo's scheme you will always find this double strain. When you .say the Divine, people have no idea that there is a divine Nature also, a Nature which is divine and perfect. And that has a double aspect in this universal working. When it works in the universe it puts on a double aspect, Ignorance and Knowledge. So it is possible from here to transform this Nature.
The divine Nature is working in the universe; the one power that is divine divides into two - Ignorance and Knowledge - and from Ignorance it is possible to transform the Nature, to make it divine. Sri Aurobindo, for the first time, brought this idea definitely to a point, to make it clear, because it was very important for the earth evolution, that if Nature was left alone then spirit was always perfect; spirit has not to attain perfection, spirit is perfect by its very constitution. Essentially it is always perfect. If perfection has a meaning - well, perfection must be manifested in Nature.
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Otherwise spirit is playing at imperfection though perfection is its birthright. But Nature is also claimant to perfection and capable of transformation.
Sri Aurobindo for the first time put this concept into rational terms and also gave a process: you do the transformation of your own nature in three stages. You don't do the transformation in one stage. Human nature is mental nature, vital nature, physical nature. When it first changes, the first stage that it reaches is psychicization. The second stage it reaches is universalization or spiritualization. And the third stage it reaches is supramentalization or divine Nature. You see that from human nature to the divine the stages are one, two and three. The first stage is psychicization, the second is universalization or spiritualization, and the third is supramentalization or total transformation of the consciousness. So the transformation is done in three stages, not all at once. Sri Aurobindo gave the process and also a philosophical rationale of why it is necessary: because otherwise the problem won't be solved.
One's nature must be transformed, slowly or with speed, but it has to be done. And it is done by bringing in the higher power. It is not done by man. This transformation is not brought about by human power but by man opening to the higher consciousness, as Aswapathy opened himself and found that the descent of the higher power was taking place in him, and he was able to ascend and descend. With every descent some element of the divine power enters into human nature - more peace, more control, more detachment, more purity. Every time one goes to the higher consciousness, one comes down with some element of the divine Nature in the human nature, so the divine element goes on increasing. The process is not achieved by human endeavour, it is achieved by the aid of the Divine, the higher Nature of which we spoke. The higher Nature is there and it is to that that this
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human nature opens - the human nature opens to the higher Nature and goes through these three stages. So transformation cannot be attained by human effort alone. Man cannot say, "I will transform myself into the Divine." It is not possible. He must open to the spiritual consciousness, the Divine consciousness and allow it to transform him. The Divine consciousness will be able to transform because perfection is already present in it. It has not to attain perfection. Just as a man cannot put himself On his own shoulders, so he cannot create perfection by himself. Somebody else has to do it. The Divine has to give a man the perfection - but he has to want it and to open to it. Thus the two conditions are: wanting and opening. If he doesn't want and doesn't open, he is quite free to remain ignorant. There is no compulsion to freedom and knowledge.
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