On Savitri
THEME/S
PART - TWO
SUMMARY OF BOOK ONE
BOOK one contains five Cantos. It opens with the Symbol-Night which turns into the Symbol-Dawn. It figures the very beginning of the Universe from the Night of Nescience to the awakening of the Dawn of the Spirit. In sublime and cosmic sweeps it covers the whole period of evolution and brings it up to the human stage. It focuses our attention on the fundamental problem of man in the situation of Sāvitrī, the main character of the poem, who is described here in short with her human-divine qualities. We yet know nothing about the life of Savitri on earth. Suddenly we find this human-divine heroine brought face to face with the central problem of man concentrated into "Earth, Love and Doom". Earth represents the masked Infinite that appears as original Nescience. It contains within it the upward drive and the downward drag of the evolutionary movement that has created the cosmos. Love represents in its origin and purity the Divine grace that sacrifices its perfection in order that creation may be saved from the prison of Inconscience. Love therefore is the immortal element in mortals. It maintains some of its original divine glow even when it manifests itself in human life and under human forms. It is a sign I from Heaven in man assuring him of his divine origin and destiny. When it comes from the Divine direct it is the Grace that saves. Doom is the present apparent determinism of Nature trying to perpetuate the rule of Ignorance in mankind. It denies and contradicts man's deepest aspirations and opposes any attempt at self- exceeding. Its chief fulcrum is ego in the human being and desire is its dynamic support. All these forces working in conjunction in the human being give rise to pain and suffering. Sāvitrī is faced with the apparently unchangeable determinism of cosmic nature. , The only support she has was that of the Spirit within her. The a second Canto traces the growth of Sāvitrī's personality, the circumstances that surrounded her and the necessary psychological readjustments and spiritual changes which must be carried out
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within herself if she is to solve the problem of man with which she is faced. In fact, her task amounts to finding out a "magic leverage" in the midst of this vast cosmic prison-house of Ignorance so that man can attain spiritual freedom. Savitri's labour is not so much for herself as for humanity, because her own calamity is to her only a "private sign" of man's general fate. The question she has to face was whether it is possible to break the bounds of human consciousness and go beyond to another state of consciousness higher than the mind. For, only so can man's problem be resolved. She found that she had within herself the Higher consciousness—in her the Divine Mother herself arose when she was preparing to face the danger.
The other three Cantos of the first book describing the Raja Yoga--the Yoga of the King,—contain the kernal of the methods and results of an integral yoga followed by Aswapathy. Man is not in reality what he appears to be,—a mere material phenomenon, — mentalised animal having a physical body. He has from the dawn of history a feeling of something imperishable within him. And there are hidden powers in man which can be awakened to make the realisation of that Self possible by following a certain path of inner discipline called Sādhanā in India.
The powers of his natural instruments—those of knowledge, will etc.—increased in proportion to his devotion to the pursuit of the Infinite, and the concentration of his nature on the task. Man, even in ordinary life, gets many glimpses of something higher than his ordinary self—he hears a voice, or feels a truth, or a sweetness, or a presence in or around him. Aswapathy gradually got acclimatised to higher states of being than the mind; only, he could not retain them for long as the lower parts of his nature were not ready to assimilate the new experience. He had to persuade them to aspire for a higher change. At times he found that a flood of Inspiration came flowing down into him from above. After having risen from the earthly state he not only glimpsed the Infinite but the eternal Light. He knew that there were parts of his nature wedded to the lower consciousness, but he equally knew by personal experience that there were parts in him that had kinship with the Divine. He felt the presence of a witness self within him that saw all, but was attached to nothing. But nothing of this experience
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appears m ordinary life. There only material appearance seems to rule. Man is subject to doubts, and difficulties of his own nature which are the products of a process of slow evolution from original Nescience to some spiritual perfection. His movement towards that perfection can begin by his refusing to accept as final the present limitations of his nature. The first effort at realising the spirit releases man from the ego and enlarges him so that he is able to identify himself with the World-Being. All things here on earth are really symbolic of the One who manifests himself as Many. In order to create a world of complex relations and harmony the One becomes Two and manifests the Many. The Two are the Self and Nature—Nature both lower and higher. Behind the external appearance of ignorance there is the Divine Presence that works in silence.
And yet evolution is not really a process that denies the Light or that intends to perpetuate ignorance. It is a gradual growth towards a supreme knowledge. It is because of this fact that evolution leads, as it is intended to lead, man towards self-transcendence. Aswapathy arrived at the frontiers of knowledge and saw vast realms of the spirit beyond. He knew that the world is an unfinished work,-- a process that is not yet complete. He also felt that the fulfilment of earth lay in her manifesting higher planes of consciousness upon her surface,—by realising perfect Knowledge unerring Will and unflagging Delight. Then he felt sure of a divine presence in and behind the world-process. His own will rose in union with the divine will to fulfil the world purpose. He could not, thereafter, rest content with ordinary life. As a result of his efforts his consciousness rose to higher planes of being. Occasionally he felt a descent of a Higher Power from above. He could then read .the secrets of Nature. He entered into the realm of the Spirit. He becomes by his yoga the representative of the upward aspiring and striving soul of man during aeons of evolution. He acquired all the available knowledge guarded by past traditions and cast his glance toward the future. Though Savitri is born to him as his daughter, yet the poet's affirmation "A world's desire compelled her mortal birth" becomes quite intelligible and clear when we realise the symbolic character of Aswapathy. He carries to the Divine Mother the intense aspiration of the earth and as its representative prays to Her to come down on earth.
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CANTO I
The first Canto is found to be a very difficult by many genuine lovers of poetry. It is so because Sāvitrī is not like ordinary poetry, an aesthetic creation either of the higher vital or refined intellectual being. It is psychic, mystic and spiritual poetry and in the first Canto the sublime dominates. The very concepts and symbols used by the seer are so unfamiliar to the ordinary present-day mentality that one has to acquire a capacity to appreciate this high poetry. It is a question of cultivating taste. It is advisable that the reader should not try to interpret this poetry in terms of its intellectual content. It would be better instead to allow the vision to grow in intensity and clarity in his consciousness. He might find that with the help of this faculty of vision he is able to enter into the spirit of the poem much better than through the doors of dry intellect.
The Symbol-Dawn here is related to the Vedic goddess Dawn— Usha. Some acquaintance with the Vedic Dawn might help the reader to form a correct conception of the Symbol-Dawn of Sāvitrī. The passage quoted here is the translation by Sri Aurobindo of a Vedic hymn.
"She follows to the goal of those that are passing on beyond, she is the first in the eternal succession of the dawns that are coming,— Usha widens bringing out that which lives, awakening someone who was dead. What is her scope when she harmonises with the dawns that shone out before and those that now must shine? She desires the ancient mornings and fulfils their light; projecting forwards her illumination she enters into communion with the rest that are to come."
Rig Veda, I. 113. 8-10.
Dawn here symbolises the continuity,—the ever fresh continuity of the process of Time. It is in effect Time-Eternity in contrast to Timeless-Eternity of the Absolute. In his poem "In horis Eternum" Sri Aurobindo calls the sun—"A blazing eye of Time watching the motionless day". For, in the sight of the sun the day is eternal. Ordinarily Dawn stands for life eternal—life ever fresh, life ever beautiful. In Sāvitrī it symbolises the perpetual awakening of the light of consciousness from the Night of Nescience which gives rise to the
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cosmos and awakens in man the aspiration for the Spirit from the normal state of ignorance.
The Night described in the beginning of the first Canto is also symbolic. The poet in a letter has written, "The attempt at mystic spiritual poetry of the kind I am at demands above all a spiritual objectivity, an intense psycho-physical concreteness. That darkness itself is described as a quietude which gives it a subjective spiritual character and brings out the thing symbolised, but the double epithet 'inert black'¹ gives it the needed concreteness so that the quietude ceases to be something abstract and becomes something concrete, objective but still spiritually subjective".
The Night that prevails before the outbreak of the Dawn is the night of darkness which is subjective and indicates the Nescience that reigned before cosmos was created. The condition of darkness described as Night here has a resemblance to the primordial condition described in the Rig Veda in a hymn generally called the Hymn of Creation.
"Then existence was not nor non-existence, the mid world was not nor the ether nor what is beyond. What covered all? Where was it? In whose refuge? What was that ocean dense and deep? Death was not nor immortality nor the knowledge of day and night. That One lived without breath by his self-law, there was nothing else nor aught beyond it. In the beginning Darkness was hidden by darkness, all this was an ocean of inconscience. When universal being was concealed by fragmentation, than by the greatness of its energy That One was born. That moved at first as desire within, which was the primal seed of mind. The seers of Truth discovered the building of being in non-being by will in the heart and by the thought; their ray was extended horizontally; but what was there below, what was there above? There were Casters of the seed, there were Greatnesses: there was self-law below, there was Will above."
Rig Veda X, 129.
The condition described here is pre-existent to Being as well as Non-being. Nor was there "day and night" i.e. time. "In the beginning
¹ "The persistent thrill of a transfiguring touch
Persuaded the inert black quietude
And beauty and wonder disturbed the fields of God."
Book I, Canto1
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darkness was hidden by darkness"—all this was an ocean of inconscience. That is the Night of Sāvitrī, a condition of Nescience in which nothing had yet emerged—not even matter—and yet everything was there from which the cosmos could emerge.
These quotations are given just to help the reader to enter into the spirit of the first Canto. There is no question of the symbol-Dawn or the Night being derived from the Vedic symbol. It is quoted here in order to bring something similar in spirit and form to help the reader to appreciate Sāvitrī. The creator of Sāvitrī like the Vedic sages sees his symbols and projects them as realities with as much authenticity as the ancient seers did when they embodied their visions and inspirations in the Mantras that came to them with their vibrations of thought, rhythm and language. There is a thread of correspondence and a correlation between the most ancient poets and their expression and the most modem seer and his expression.
"It was the hour before the Gods awake". The time when the poem opens is that when Gods who preside over the various functions of the cosmos had not yet awakened and begun their work. The universe we are living in is a cosmos. But it is so because the Gods carrying out the Fiat of the Omnipotent maintain the laws of the material, the vital and mental worlds. In place of awakened Gods there is seen an all-pervading figure of Night, a dark woman asleep in her "unlit temple of Eternity", who "lay stretched immobile upon Silence' marge". The idea of the temple suggests the presence of the Divine. The poet speaks of this Night as having a "huge foreboding mind". It was her mind that lay "across the path of the divine Event", obstructing the coming of the divine Dawn. The mind of this all-pervading Night seems subject to nightmare and the phenomenon of somnambulism. At first she has a nightmare and she shrinks from the very thought of embarking upon the adventure of "The insoluble mystery of birth and the tardy process of mortality". Even the subconscient mind of this Night is not willing to take up the "mystery of birth" and with it the slow and tedious process of evolution—"the process of mortality". The mind of this Night wanted even to end itself in mere nothingness rather than undertake the task. It is when her mind consents that cosmos can come into being. It is not the "power of fallen boundless self that can take up the task; it is the unfallen Transcendent with His power that can
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do it. Then something undefinable stirs in the depth of her nescience. As a result "repeating for ever the unconscious act" she brings into existence this vast material universe. In the wonderful words of the poet. She
"Cradled the cosmic drowse of ignorant Force
Whose moved creative slumber kindles the suns
And carries our lives in its somnambulist whirl."
Our material universe thus came into being by an 'act of somnambulism on the part of this sleeping Night of nescience. In this vast dark Night where only immobility and silence seem to dominate there is an unlimited extension of the sky and the earth is lost in its 'hollow gulfs'. Then all of a sudden a stir is felt; "A nameless movement, an unthought Idea" succeeds in teasing this inconscience of the Night to "wake Ignorance". As a result of the first stirring the subconscious memory is awakened in the mind of this Night. When the memory returned to her she saw that it was not the first awakening to the Dawn on her part. The impulse to wake to a Dawn amounted in her to a feeling that "something" that wished but knew not "how to be",—was active in her. The great stir did not know itself, nor did it find conditions propitious for its full emergence in the midst of this enormous Night. It only awoke in her mind the memory of her past efforts and when she tried to relate her subconscient memory to the stir she found that "There lurked in her an unremembering entity", that was the "Survivor of a slain and buried past".
This surviving entity added its own aspiration to the stirring that the Night was feeling within her. This past personality—if it can be so called—was almost compelled to renew the effort of Self-realization in the new surroundings. When the vast Night almost consented to the birth of the Dawn she felt compelled to fulfil her role of the mother by being "reminded of endless need in things".
The first thing to emerge was the outbreak of the light, a ray of life-consciousness. This outbreak of the light of life was the coming of a "a scout in a reconnaissance from the sun" "to seek for a spirit sole and desolate". This spirit which the light of life was seeking is the same that is spoken of in the beginning as the "fallen boundless self". In seeking for the fallen spirit the ray of light called upon the
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Night to take up "the adventure of consciousness and joy" and it "compelled renewed consent to see and feel". So far, the stir in the heart of the Night has succeeded in contacting the light of Life,— some ray from the Sun, which is the promise of the full awakening of the Dawn. This stir, this aspiration is not merely an ignorant wish or desire. It is also not a running after some phantom of unreality, for, there was a prescience that it would be fulfilled. The birth of this infant aspiration converts the unwitting and sleeping Night who at first is a careless mother into a careful mother of the Universe. It had to make the body, create the needs of life and needs of the soul. This was by no means an easy task. It was as it were re-building of the whole past under new conditions. And this could only be done if the superconscient Transcendent Divine would lead his touch: "All can be done if the God-touch is there". It is this "persistent thrill of a transfiguring touch" of the Divine from above that "persuades the inert black quietude" of this Night to manifest beauty and wonder of which it seemed quite incapable. In fact with the constant and persistent stirring from within there was all along "One lucent corner windowing hidden things" from where a constant stream of Light went on acting upon the impenetrable darkness of the Night. And it is the double action of this constant inflow of Light from above and the inner urge from below that ultimately "Forced the worlds' blind immensity to sight". It is then that the darkness like a robe slipped from the body of this unknown entity and revealed "the reclining body of a God". Behind the mask of the Nescience the body of a God is revealed. To an objection that the description was not applicable to the physical phenomenon of day and night Sri Aurobindo replied as follows:
"I am not writing a scientific treatise, I am selecting certain ideas and impressions to form a symbol of a partial temporary darkness of the Soul and Nature which seems to a temporary feeling of that which is caught in the Night as if it were universal and eternal. One who is lost in that Might does not think of the other half of the earth as full of light, to him all is Night and the earth a forsaken wanderer in an enduring darkness....In the poem I present constantly one partial view of life or another temporarily as if it were the whole in order to give full value to the experience of those who are bound by that view, but if any one charges me with philosophical inconsistency then it only means that he does not understand the technique of the overmind interpretation of life."
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Everything now seems ready for the outbreak of the Dawn. Dawn comes, "a glamour from the unreached transcendences iridescent with the glory of the Unseen". She is "a message from the unknown immortal Light". This passage about Dawn is one of the most vivid, poetically most satisfying and yet symbolically the most revealing passages of Sāvitrī. It is she who brings" the hope of fulfilment, the promise of realisation to the stir, to the struggling aspiration that has been born on earth. It is from the unreached transcendences of the Timeless Eternal that the Light of Dawn breaks through into the darkness of the Night of inconscience. The message is that the un- reached transcendence shall be reached, the glory of the Unseen now unfolded only in the mild ray will one day become the settled splendour of the Supreme, the unknown immortal Light will fulfil its work and establish here on earth the life divine. Dawn here is the beautiful Goddess coming from beyond the realms of darkness and her very first outbreak reveals the nature of the ultimate fulfilment. To a correspondent's criticism that the Dawn was not a continuous picture he wrote:
"I am not here building a long sustained single picture of the Dawn with a single continuous image. I am describing a rapid series of transitions, piling one suggestion upon another. There is first a black quietude, then the perisitent touch, then the first 'beauty and wonder' leading to the magical gate and the 'lucent corner'. Then comes the failing of darkness, the simile used suggesting the rapidity of the change. Thus as a result the change of what was once a rift into a wide luminous gap... Then all changes into a brief perpetual sign, the iridescence, then the blaze and the magnificent aura."
For a short while the full glory of the Divinity is manifested:
"Almost that day the epiphany was disclosed" and
"A lonely splendour from the' invisible goal
Almost was flung on the opaque Inane."
The goddess Dawn stood for a while revealing all the play of light and colours in her first appearance. Almost in the wake of her appearance "A form from far beatitudes seemed to near". The Omniscient Goddess who is "Ambassadress 'twixt eternity and change" found that the conditions in the cosmos were favourable: She "saw
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the spaces ready for her feet". This was the first leaning down of the Divine Grace upon earth for even when Dawn made her first appearance "Earth felt the Imperishable's passage close" and even
"The waking ear of Nature heard her steps
And wideness turned to her its limitless eye,
And, scattered on sealed depths, her luminous smile
Kindled to fire the silence of the worlds."
The expression of delight which all the elements of the earth felt at the approach of the Goddess clearly indicates the goal of earth existence. The poet says that even
"On this anguished and precarious field of toil
...the vision and the prophetic gleam
Lit into miracles common meaningless shapes".
The approach of the Divine Goddess is almost the precursor of her descent on earth as Sāvitrī. "The divine afflatus spent, withdrew"— the Omniscient goddess withdrew her steps because her presence and power was "Too perfect to be held by death-bound hearts". Just as the Dawn "buried its seed of grandeur in the hours", so this Divine power of the Imperishable also left behind her a "Sacred yearning lingering in its trace", and a devotion for her. These seeds of her presence would grow with the passage of time and when the conditions would be such that death-bound heart of men would want to be god-bound then the Divine Power would send down on earth one who would break the iron law of ignorance. The short- lived vision of the Divine Mother was, in fact, "the prescience of marvellous birth to come". Finding the conditions of earth incapable of supporting the full blaze of her Divine Glory the Divine Power puts on the mask of Matter and so works out the miracle that her eternity manifests itself "in a beat of time". Beauty, the mystery of the Divine, appears in life. "The excess of beauty natural to godkind" "could not uphold its claim on time-born eyes". Mankind would have to be prepared to look on "the excess of beauty" of god-kind. This slow and difficult work of preparing man for the reception of
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the Divine was left to the passage of time and to the intervention of the Divine Grace in the person of Savitri. As the cosmos came into being by the sacrifice by the Divine's perfection and His descent into the Nescience so the creation of divine life on earth would be possible by the descent of the Divine Power in man helping him to conquer the obstacles and transform his ignorant nature. So, when the Divine Power withdrew to some far off world of her own, there was only the common light of earthly day,—the matter of fact life of man. The slow process of tardy evolution intervened to pursue the ^great task of preparing man for receiving the Divine in life.
Savitri, the princess, also awoke with the rest of mankind, in one of the ordinary dawns in the midst of her own tribe. The appearance of Savitri, after the withdrawal of the Divine Goddess almost suggests the continuity of the work begun by the Goddess Dawn and the Imperishable ambassadress,—Omnipotent power of the Divine. The poet while describing Savitri says "The universal Mother's love was hers".
Even though Savitri was akin to the eternity from which she came and a stranger to the fields of human life she was human enough to feel desire not as ordinary people do, but "as a sweet alien note". All along, her heart was full of "the anguish of the gods". She found herself in human mould like one imprisoned and she wanted to break the limits that kept her in captivity. Besides this deep and powerful aspiration, this feeling of herself being akin to the divinity she had in her the divine love for all, a universal sympathy that went out constantly to help all men. She gave herself freely to men in an act of inner sympathy so "that heaven might native grow on mortal soil". This sympathy and this love were on her part an inner act and did not take a very dominant outer form. With innate sense of her own Divinity, love and sympathy for all men she found that human nature by which she was surrounded not only did not like to realise the divinity but it was averse to the action of the Divine on itself. The fallen human nature murmurs and protests against the operation of anything that savours of the Divine. In the words of the poet
"It trembles at its naked power of Truth"
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and the return it gives to those great souls that try to save it is the mud that it throws on them. "Its thorns of fallen nature" are its defence "against the saviour hands of grace". Humanity is intolerant of Divinity in its normal state. Savitri had thus the full share of her sorrow and her struggle. She hid her grief in the depths of her heart,—she did not allow her inner suffering to be seen outside. Savitri calm, silent, courageous,—"Apart, living within, all lives she bore". And yet "The Universal Mother's love was hers" and so when the determinism of nature proclaimed the doom of Satyavan it was not for the sake of her personal calamity only that she was moved. For "Her own calamity" was only a "private sign" which indicated the apparently unchangeable determinism of Nature. She took up "the load of an unwitting race". The poet quickly traces the growth of Savitri from childhood to young age and her becoming familiar with the great human problems with a constant and intense experience of pain in her heart. The central crisis of the poem is clearly stated in the very first Canto so that die reader gets interested in Savitri and the problem that faced her. The reader sees "her soul confronting Time and Fate" and is anxious to know the result of her struggle with the blind forces of evolution and Nature that wanted to bring about the predicted death of Satyavan. Is the determinism of Nature final, inevitable, absolute? Is it possible for the human being alone to change or modify the apparently inevitable or categorical determination of cosmic nature? The seer not only puts the problem before us but through his great epic works out the conditions under which it becomes possible for the human being not only to change but to overcome this apparent inevitable determinism of Nature. It is in this spirit that she remained outwardly immobile but gathered force for the great struggle because "This was the day when Satyavan must die".
SOME NOTES ON CANTO I.
I. The Mind of the Night of inconscience lay stretched athwart the path of the Divine Event, Dawn. Silence, immobility, nothingness, state of unlit eternity—these are some of the conditions of that Mind.
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2. "And longed to reach its end in vacant Nought."
end here means "destruction", "ending".
3. "The unconscious act" was repeated by the "Unknown". There was a "will" in it, but it was an "unseeing will";—remark, it is not blind but only "unseeing". There are two things here : (i) "A mute featureless semblance of the unknown", (2) An Ignorant force. Is this, one may ask, the faint beginning of subjectivity and objectivity?
4. This "Ignorant force" is a "Cosmic Drowse"—not an individual force. The very "Slumber" of this force is "creative", for it kindles the suns and "Carries our lives in its somnambulist whirl". The whirling of this force,—the Ignorant force which is slumbering, —is somnambulist. It works in its sleep and yet achieves the ends by adopting the right means.
5. "Its formless stupor without mind or life".
The stupor is the "stupor of space"—The space is in stupor. This "stupor" qualifies the "trance of space".
The earth was only "A shadow spinning through a soulless Void"
From the silence and immobility of the Mind of Night which were the beginning we have now an enormous space, the earth,—a spinning shadow, and the sky.
6. "Gave room for an old tired want unfilled"
Here old means "long standing",—something that was there long ago. It does not mean decrepit.
A stir in the inscrutable darkness awakened the memory of a long standing need.
Not merely a memory, but an "entity" which was "a Survivor of a slain and buried past".
This persistent entity was "Condemned to resume the effort and the pang"—of the movement of evolution from inconscient to consciousness,—from Matter to Spirit.
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In this great stir there was an aspiration for the Light, and Usha, the Dawn, comes in response to this aspiration.
This aspiration was not merely an ignorant wish, or running after a phantom.
7. "And a blank prescience yearned towards distant change",
In the aspiration for the Light by "unshaped consciousness" there was a prescience, but it was a "blank" prescience. That is to say, it was not an exact foreseeing of the future but a sort of feeling that a change would come.
8. The image of the Mother is very beautiful. This Mother- the universal Mother was before now the "heedless mother". But the newly born stir, the vague aspiration "clutched the heedless mother" and the maternal love vaguely awoke in her apparently unconscious breast. She was reminded of the "endless need" of the newly born aspiration.
9. "To seek for a spirit sole and desolate".
Desolate does not mean abandoned by every body, but the subjective feeling of being desolate.
10. "A thought was sown in the unsounded Void"
Unsounded here means "unfathomed, unplumbed".
11. "A hope stole in that hardly dared to be
Amid the Night's forlorn indifference"
Because of the Night's indifference the hope hardly dared to exist.
12. "An errant marvel with no place to live
Into a far-off nook of heaven there came
A slow miraculous gesture's dim appeal."
This errant marvel is something living, not an abstraction. Light
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of consciousness in the nook of heaven was trying to enter this world which was then "alien" to it.
13. "A wandering hand of pale enchanted light"
Enchanted has the double sense of "having beauty and being magical."
14. "One lucent corner windowing bidden things"
Here in the lucent comer the image of the sky is continued.
15. "Outpoured the revelation and the flame."
The revelation here is used in the ordinary sense of manifestation of something not yet manifested.
16. "Dawn built her aura of magnificent hues
And buried its seed of grandeur in the hours."
Here the idea of the Goddess Dawn is dominant, not merely— as some have thought,—that of mere "morning". The unconsciousness that was all over the cosmos was able to feel and see the presence of "A glamour from the unreached transcendences".
Buried the seed—Dawn comes with all the brilliant and vast possibilities from the Beyond, and then she goes away. But her departure is not an exit. She has sown the seeds of grandeur, (which she brought with her) "in the hours". So that they would grow up and fulfil themselves in course of Time. The words "unreached", "unseen", "unknown" suggest the possibility of its being reached, seen and known.
17. "Almost that day the epiphany was disclosed"
Epiphany means manifestation. It was "almost",—and not fully or actually, "disclosed" because the Inconscient was not yet ready. When the Divine omniscient Goddess bent down on the cosmos the ears that were plugged were opened and Nature heard Her
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steps. Even earth's silence was kindled to the fire of divine love and everywhere was felt a movement of consecration, as if a cosmic sacrificial rite was being performed: Earth that was merely "a shadow whirling in the hollow gulf of space"—now "felt the Imperishables' passage dose". There was light and joy everywhere. Everything became a "Consecration", i.e. something dedicated to God.
18. "That wrap the fated journeyings of the stars"
Wrap means "surround" not necessarily conceal.
19. "The high boughs prayed in a revealing sky"
Revealing does not mean only "Shining"—but full of things revealed.
20. "Outspread beneath some large indifferent gaze
Impartial witness to our joy and bale".
it is the indifferent gaze which is the "impartial witness".
Outspread goes with the "Field of toil" in the previous line,— "On this anguished and precarious field of toil".
21. "Here too the vision and prophetic gleam"
Here too emphasises the fact of the gleam producing results not only in the higher regions but down on this earth also where the conditions for its manifestation were not favourable.
22. "Only a little the God-light can stay".
A little means "for a short time or duration".
23. "Spiritual beauty illumining human sight
Lines with its passion and mystery Matter's mask".
Even while the Divine presence withdrew, this beauty in Matter which is his "mask" remained indicating the passion and mystery of spiritual beauty.
Lines means "gives a lining to" or "covers on the inside".
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24. "And squanders eternity on a beat of Time".
Compare Sri Aurobindo's "In horis Eternum".
25. "Too mystic-real for space-tenancy"
The presence of the Dawn and the glory that accompanied it was not unreal. It was mystic-real. This suggests different orders of Reality. The physical is not the only real.
26. "Fluttering-hued"—a fine expressive word coined by the poet. Fluttering indicates movement, a changing movement and hue suggests colour. The movement of "desire" is very nicely indicated by this word—an unsteady movement, constantly changing colour.
27. "Once more the rumour of the speed of Life".
Rumour means "sound", "noise" as in "rumour of the sea".
28. "Its thorns of fallen nature are the defence
It turns against the saviour hands of Grace"
Compare Francis Thomson's "The Hound of heaven".
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CANTO - I
"The gesture must be "Slow Miraculous"—.If it is merely miraculous or merely slow that does not create a picture of the thing as it is, but something quite abstract and ordinary or concrete and ordinary—it is the combination that renders the exact nature of the mystic movement, with the "dimly came" completing it, so that "gesture" is not here a metaphor but a thing actually done.
(Sri Aurobindo)
That darkness itself is described as a quietude which gives it a subjective spiritual character and brings out the thing symbolised, but the double epithet" "inert black "gives it the needed concreteness so that the quietude ceases to be something abstract and becomes something concrete, objective but still spiritually subjective.
Difference between inconscient and ignorance—One would say "even the inconscient stone" but one would not say, as one might, of a child, "the ignorant stone". One must be conscious before one can be ignorant.
Symbolic Vision of Night and Dawn in Savitri, in which there is recorded the conscious adoration of Nature when it feels the passage of the omniscient Goddess of eternal Light.
The epithet "Wide winged" then does not belong to the wind and is not transferred from it, but is proper to the voice of the wind which takes the form of a conscious hum of aspiration and rises ascending from the bosom of the great priest, as might a great winged bird released into the sky, and sinks and rises again, aspires and fails and aspires again on the "altar hills"
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But here the physical night and physical dawn are, as the title of the Canto clearly suggests, a symbol. Here it is a relapse into inconscience broken by a slow and difficult return to consciousness followed by a brief but splendid and prophetic outbreak of spiritual light leaving behind it the "day" of ordinary human consciousness in which the prophecy has to be worked out.
P. 33 L. S)
Ashwapathy's spiritual development consisted of two yogic movements; one a psycho-spiritual transformation and the other, a greater spiritual transformation with an ascent to a supreme power.
Ashwapathy's yoga falls into three parts, I. He is achieving his. own spiritual self-fulfilment as an individual, II. Next, he makes an ascent as a typical representative of the race to win the possibility of discovery and possession of all the planes of consciousness. (Yoga of the King) III. Finally, he aspires no longer for himself but for all, for a universal realisation and new creation. (Book of Divine Mother).
"As if a childlike finger"
"It is not intended that the two images "finger laid" and "clutch" should correspond exactly to each other; for the "void" and the "Mother of the universe" are not the same thing. The "void" is only a mask covering the mother's cheek or face. What the "Void" feels as a clutch is felt by the Mother only as a reminding finger laid on her cheek. It is intended to suggest without saying it that behind the sombre void is the face of a Mother. (P.44 L. S)
"Still dolorously nailed upon a cross
Lest all too soon should change again to bliss"
Book II Canto 8.
These have nothing to do with Christianity or Christ but only with the symbol of the Cross used here to represent a seemingly eternal world-pain. It is not Christ but world-soul which hangs here. (P. 44 L. S)
"as if solicited"—"Solicited" you take as past participle passive. The word "Solicited" is the past tense and the subject
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of this verb is "An errant Marvel"—fourth line—(by parenthesis "Orphaned etc."—)
He should know that "it is somebody who is soliciting with a timid grace and it can't be somebody who is being gracefully solicited.
The line "orphaned" ought to suggest to him at once that it is some orphan who is soliciting and not the other way round;
(1946 L. S. P.45)
In Sāvitrī we find passages which repeat the idea contained in the first Canto. Their repetition is necessary to remind the the reader in a different context about the beginning of the cosmos from apparent Nescience. We give here some passages bearing close resemblance:
"And carries our lives in its Somnambulist whirl."
Book I, Canto I.
"Caught in a blind stone-grip Force worked its plan
And made in sleep this huge mechanical world".
Book II, Canto I.
"Here where our half-lit ignorance skirts the gulfs
On the dumb bosom of the ambiguous earth,
On this anguished and precarious field of toil
Our prostrate soil bore the awakening ray."
"Thus fallen, inconscient, frustrate, dense, inert
Sunk into inanimate and torpid drowse
Earth lay, a drudge of sleep, forced to create"
Book II, Canto l.
"Straining closed eyes of vanished memory,
Like one who searches for a bygone self."
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"There lurked an unremembering entity"
"As if a soul long dead were moved to live"
Book I, Canto l.
"By the subconscient yearning memory
Left from a happiness dead before she was born."
Book II, Canto 2.
"An errant marvel with no place to live" .
"An alien wonder on her senseless breast."
"A fathomless zero occupied the world"
"And like a busy midwife the life-power
Deliver the zero carrier of the All."
Book II, Canto. I.
"A long line of hesitating hue
Like a vague smile tempting the desert heart
Troubled the far rim of life's obscure sleep."
"As in a dark beginning of all things"
"In the crude beginnings of this mortal world"
Book II, Canto 3.
"Athwart the vain enormous trance of Space,
Its formless stupor without mind or life,
A shadow spinning through a soulless Void,
Earth wheeled abandoned in the hollow gulfs"
"Life was not nor mind's play nor heart's desire.
When earth was built in the unconscious Void
And nothing was save a material scene,
Identified with sea and sky and stone"
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"A nameless movement, an unthought Idea."
"Teased the Inconscience to wake Ignorance."
An unshaped consciousness desired light
And a blank prescience yearned towards distant change."
"Her young gods yearned for the release of souls
Asleep in objects, vague, inanimate.
In that desolate grandeur, in that beauty bare,
In the deaf stillness, mid the unheeded sounds,
Heavy was the uncommunicated load
Of Godhead in a world that had no needs,"
"The intuitive silence trembling with a name,
They cried to Life to invade the senseless mould
And in brute forms awake divinity."
Book II Canto 3.
"The poised inconscience shaken with a touch,"
"Its message crept through the reluctant hush
Calling the adventure of consciousness and joy."
"Compelled renew ed consent to see and feel.
A thought was sown in the unsounded Void,
A sense was born within the darkness' depths,
A memory quivered in the heart of Time
As if a soul long dead were moved to live."
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"A voice was heard on the mute rolling globe,
A murmur moaned in the unlistening Void.
A being seemed to breathe where once was none:
Something pent up in dead insentient depths,
Denied conscious existence, lost to joy,
Turned as if one asleep since dateless time.
Aware of its own buried reality,
Remembering its forgotten self and right,
It yearned to know, to aspire, to enjoy, to live."
"In the enigma of the darkened Vasts,
In the passion and self-loss of the Infinite
When all was plunged in the negating Void,
Non-Being's night could never have been saved
If Being had not plunged into the dark
Carrying with it its triple mystic cross."
Book II, Canto 4.
"Being became the Void and Conscious-Force
Nescience and walk of blind Energy
And Ecstasy took the figure of world-pain."
"A mass phenomenon of visible shapes
Supported by the silence of the Void
Appeared in the eternal Consciousness
And seemed an outward and insensible world.
There was none there to see and none to feel;
Only the miraculous Inconscient,
A subtle wizard skilled, was at its task.
Inventing ways for magical results,
Managing creation's marvellous device,
Marking mechanically dumb wisdom's points,
Using the unthought inevitable Idea,
It did the works of God's intelligence
Or wrought the will of some supreme Unknown."
Book II, Canto 5.
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"Our life is a holocaust of the Supreme.
The great World-Mother by her sacrifice
Has made her soul the body of our state;
Accepting sorrow and unconsciousness
Divinity's lapse from its own splendours wove
The many-patterned ground of all we are."
Book II, Canto 1.
In an architecture of hieratic Space
Circling and mounting towards creation's tops,
At a blue height which never was too high
For warm communion between body and soul,
As far as heaven, as near as thought and hope,
Glimmered the kingdom of a griefless life.
Above him in a new celestial vault
Other than the heavens beheld by mortal eyes,
As on a fretted ceiling of the gods,
An archipelago of laughter and fire,
Swam stars apart in a rippled sea of sky.
On the trouble and the toil they could not share,
On the unhappiness they could not aid,
Impervious to life's suffering, struggle, grief,
Untarnished by its anger, gloom and hate,
Unmoved, untouched, looked down great visioned planes
Blissful forever in their timeless right.
Absorbed in their own beauty and content,
Of their immortal gladness they live sure.
Book II,, Canto 3.
"When nothing was save Matter without soul
And a spiritless hollow was the heart of Time,
Then life first touched the insensible Abyss;
Her pallid beam smote the unfathomed Night
In which God hid himself from his own view."
Book II, Canto 8.
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There is here a similarity to Book I, Canto I with the difference that here in Book II, Canto 8 the poet is giving this portion as a prelude to the rise of Ignorance. In effect, he is explaining how Ignorance and Hostility to the Divine originated.
He continues the description as under:
"In all things she sought their slumbering mystic truth,
The unspoken Word that inspires unconscious forms,
She groped in his deeps for an invisible Law,
Fumbled in the dim subconscient for his mind
And strove to find a way for spirit to be.
But from the Night another answer came.
A seed was in that nether matrix cast,
A dumb unprobed husk of perverted truth,
A cell of an insentien infinite.
A monstrous birth prepared its cosmic form
In Nature's titan embryo. Ignorance."
CANTO II
THE ISSUE
In this Canto Savitri is seen reviewing her past mapped on the canvas of her memory. She saw her childhood, and youth and her love and the doom that was pronounced. She sees the whole course of her evolution: as the poet puts it, "Her witness spirit stood reviewing Time" In her consciousness she especially went through the twelve passionate months she had lived with Satyavan that seemed to have passed almost like a day. This review of her past was necessitated by the impending crisis which created sufficient psychic pres- sure to awaken and call out to the surface the hidden Spirit in herself. But before she was able to do it she passed through a "Supernatural darkness",—which intervenes before man's soul draws nearer to God. "An hour comes when fail all Nature's means" and man's soul is thrown upon the help of God. Savitri was now passing through such an hour. She knew that only the power of the Spirit "can lift the yoke imposed by birth in time' and that her Nature's means comprising of the mind and the vital were impotent against the inexorable law of Death and Fate.
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She had to break up her past by her soul's force because it would only be "a block on the immortal's road". The outer personality of man which is the result of evolution of his soul in ignorance, and which is only a representative of his true Self should be dissolved in order to allow the Self to come forward and act. The Self, being Timeless, is able to act on time and snap the chain of the Law of Karma. The true Self being Eternal and Infinite has power to weigh itself against the Whole universe. Savitri has to face the doom: on one side there is the Law of Karma working in Ignorance, and against it the sovereign right of her Self. This issue in reality, is a world-issue. In trying to solve it Savitri was really solving a world-issue. Thus, "the world unknowing, for the world she stood". She has to meet and challenge "embodied Nothingness", and "Look into the lonely eyes of immortal Death".
The hours of the days during "these twelve months passed like mailed armies going to meet their doom. Savitri felt utterly alone in Spirit. The hills and the forest that surrounded her gave her "deep room for thought and God." It was here that "Love came to her hiding the shadow. Death". The God of Love found the inner make of Savitri's consciousness so pure and so sincere that "in her he met a vastness like his own", "and moved in her as in his natural home". Her nature was not narrow like that of other human beings whose love is egoistic and selfish. "A wide self-giving was her native act", she had a universal "kindly care" and a "deep compassion".
"So deep was her embrace of inmost help,
The whole world could take refuge in her single heart,"
because, "Love in her was wider than the universe". She had "a magnanimity as of sea or sky". She was "a continent of self-diffusing peace". The element of sympathy and universal helpfulness proceeded not so much from the human part of her nature as from the Godlike element which she brought with her:
"Although she leaned to bear the human load,
Her walk kept still the measure of the gods".
Ordinarily, such a sympathy takes the outer forms of altruism or,
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service, etc. But such efforts hardly succeed in removing or curing human suffering or ills. For that, a more radical and a more spiritual remedy is needed. Savitri wants to bring about a radical inner change in man's consciousness in order to cure his ills. She went to the root of man's malady. For her the question was:
"Whether to bear with Ignorance and Death
Or hew the ways of Immortality,
To win or lose the godlike game for man,
Was her soul's issue thrown with Destiny's dice."
Savitri's childhood was divinely protected and when she attained to age felicity was natural to her. But
"There is a darkness in terrestrial things,
That will not suffer long too glad a note."
Soon she found herself face to face with the problem of Satyavan's death. She was eminently fitted for the task because she was not like other men
"...one more pawn who comes destined to be pushed
One slow move forward on a measureless board
In the chess-play of the earth-soul with Doom".
In this material world man seems to be only a pawn in Nature's game, the cosmos appears like a vast prison wherein Ignorance rules with the karmic laws and pain and joy seem to be the inevitable results of its working. Death seems an inevitability and life seems to be under its sway. Thus we see in the world the working of an iron law. This law equally restrains "the Titan in us and the God". Savitri, conscious of her Divinity, defies the authority of this law of Ignorance and wants to assert the sovereign right of the Spirit. She neither brooked any compromise with the earth-law nor did she give way to despair. She would not allow the divine Light in her to be quenched nor would she consent to cancel her commerce with eternity. She felt in her not only the presence of the divine Light but also the drive of the evolutionary force from the
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earth consciousness towards the Supreme. She felt and knew that she had come to do a work, to give a message and the divine Fire that had entered the inconscience was the force with which she was equipped by nature to fulfil her mission.
The idea of a single individual will challenging the cosmic rule of Ignorance seems difficult to grasp. The mind naturally doubts if it is at all possible. How can the feeble individual stand against and overcome the operations of the gigantic cosmic machinery where enormous powers, irresistible forces seem to be working to their decreed ends? And yet, says the Master, it is possible. Even in this dark cosmic prison-house which seems to be hermetically sealed, wherein man seems to be fumbling in vain for a door, or seeking for some mysterious source of help without success, there
"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."
Even though externally man seems to be a helpless part of this great cosmic machine and a mere product of the inconscience, yet there is within him something that can change him from a mere instrument, a mere puppet into the Master, into the King. That something is the presence of the Divine in man. Then, the poet says,
"A Godhead stands behind the brute machine."
In the case of Savitri the World-Mother from whom she had descended arose in her and the whole working of the cosmic machine was reversed. She became "a flaming warrior" who
"Smote from Death's visage its dumb absolute
And burst the bounds of consciousness and Time."
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CANTO III
THE YOGA OF THE KING: THE YOGA OF THE SOUL'S RELEASE
"A world's desire compelled her mortal birth."
From the legend we know that Savitri was born to the queen of Aswapathy as the result of a boon by the Goddess Savitri. Here the poet introduces Aswapathy and while explaining the cause of Savitri's birth asserts that her birth was compelled by "a world's desire". Savitri had to take mortal birth in order to meet the intense desire of a whole world. The subsequent portion of the poem up to the end of the third book deals with the vast background which compelled her birth.
Aswapathy's character as a seeker of the Divine and as an adept of the great spiritual and mystic realisation of the past gives us a wonderful picture of man's growth from mental consciousness through various intermediate stages to the Supreme Divine Mother Consciousness.
"The Yoga of the Soul's Release" is the subject of this Canto. Here for the first time it becomes clear that this great epic deals with the spiritual odyssey of the soul. The poet here openly discloses himself as the poet of divine life by beginning in this Canto the song of the soul's liberation. The whole poem becomes the song par excellence of man's growth on earth from the inconscient through the vital and the mental stages to the realms of the Spirit, the realms of the Divine. It is the epic of man's ascent from level to level of consciousness rising from world to world, from peaks of mind to the peaks of the spirit till he reaches the supreme Divine and by his unfailing aspiration invokes the Divine to descend into himself so as to create divine life on earth. But this cannot be so long as human soul is tied like an animal with the triple cord of mental, vital and physical ignorance to the sacrificial post in the vast cosmic sacrifice to be offered as a victim. As long as human consciousness lives in the ego, lives subject to desire, conflict, dualities, suffering and pain, so long he cannot fulfil' the deepest longing and the highest aspiration of his being. He must liberate himself from the bondage of ignorance. The first release comes to man when he can go beyond
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his animal propensities, when he can free himself from the reign of desire and wake up to some ideals in his life. Therefore, we see Aswapathy,—who symbolises man as the Lord of Life,—waking to the higher potentialities of his nature: he is "a thinker and toiler in the ideal's air". It is in his conception and pursuit of higher intellectual, moral and spiritual ideals that man begins to fee! that he is not merely an animal driven by the goad of hunger and thirst and a slave of desires, but that he has come to this earth from some higher spiritual plane,—at least, that there is something in him which is free from the inertia, inconscience, grossness and coarseness of earth nature and is akin to the pure Spirit. Aswapathy felt that he was "a colonist from immortality", and as such he tended to grow towards, or into, the likeness of his spiritual Self. In this intense aspiration to grow into the likeness of spiritual being "his mind was like a fire assailing heaven".
Aswapathy's spiritual growth began by his realising that the external being of man is not the whole of himself. There are hidden "celestial powers" in man, immense spiritual potentialities lie dormant in the human being. There is an immortal ineffable Spirit in man that creates here the forms for his own manifestation. It is that spirit that "in the worm foresees the coming god". It sees the finite that is actual and knows the infinite that is potential and even' certain. It is when man accepts his higher possibilities of spiritual life that he is able to outgrow his present state of ignorance, leave behind him the limited planes of his mental, vital and physical consciousness and rise beyond them. Then, like Aswapathy, he "Arrive on the frontiers of eternity". He who has heard this call of the Beyond is unable to remain satisfied with the ordinary life of ignorance. His heart seems to be smitten by "a beam of the Eternal", and his mind wants to expand into Infinity. When he succeeds in realising his aspiration then the Divine begins to work overtly in him. Then,
"A static Oneness and dynamic Power
descend in him".
Then a different government of his nature begins for the individual. The divine power that descends in him begins to "turn
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this frail mud-engine to heaven-use". The insignificant human being is utilised by the divine for a divine purpose. Aswapathy found then that the whole movement of cosmic evolution which appears on the surface like a purposeless activity of the inconscient is in reality controlled by a secret Craftsman who works from behind the veil of ignorance to realise here "his dreamed magnificence of things to be". He saw that "a. mystery of married Earth and Heaven" was a part of the divine dream. He saw the vision of the divine life on earth and henceforth he became a seer, and he knew that he was here as "a shining Guest of Time" from Eternity. After the vision of the Truth to be realised here Aswapathy's limited mind became boundless, his little ego-self completely disappeared, "The island ego joined its continent". He was liberated from the yoke of the laws of Nature's ignorance,—from the limitations of the intellect. Before him "there gleamed the dawn of a spiritual day".
After this spiritual awakening "Humanity framed his movements less and less". It was no longer possible for him to allow the human elements in him to govern his life, and to accept as final the limitations of human nature. He awoke in himself latent powers, faculties that lay dormant in him—powers of pure perception, intimate vision, and also of spiritual experience. He could know the motives, ideas and wishes in other men and he felt also world thought-streams running into his own mind. He could hear secret voices and the "Word that knows". He came in contact with planes of consciousness other than the consciousness of the earth and contacted beings on occult planes. In fact, his consciousness ceased to be limited in the individual nature, and began to widen out into the cosmic. He voyaged from plane to plane till he came to the end of the world of symbols and signs.
From there he crossed beyond into the world of the Formless where there is no object cognizable either by the sense or by the thought. There he found that the whole world became a single Being which felt everything as its own Self. There
"The Supreme's gaze looked out through human eyes
And saw all things and creatures as itself".
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There "...oneness is the soul of multitude". It was a realm of knowledge in which eternal calm prevails. It is a realm where one experiences boundlessness;
"While there, one can be wider than the world;
While there, one is one's own infinity".
With this experience Aswapathy entered a still Consciousness that sustains all, and a peace that passes all understanding. There he found all contradictions of life resolved, sorrow, pain and conflict ceased, because there the Truth was living its own real life. He, thus, realised the origin of the spirit and established his being in the Infinite and his life upon the Eternal.
When he looked at the world from his new spiritual poise he saw that the world was only "A small result of a stupendous force". But the ordinary instruments of human nature are incapable of supporting these higher states of being. They hanker after their normal littleness, they want to go back to their petty activities. The gravitational pull of the lower consciousness brings down the consciousness from its height and, at times, man sinks even lower than the normal consciousness during such periods of downward movement. But even these periods of spiritual set-backs are utilised by the Divine within for his own work and are made to contribute to man's growth. The lower ignorant nature of man also has got to receive the divine in order to undergo a change, otherwise soul alone would reach its perfection and nature remain imperfect and earth unfulfilled. He found that, at times, the higher consciousness came down like rain from above, sometimes a flood of illumination descended and he could retain the Light for longer periods. During these periods of ascent and descent, his being was integrated in the process and attained complete equality, tranquil purity, serene strength and lasting peace. He also saw that this tranquillity, was not merely a static condition, but a dynamic power which helped the toiling world by its silent working. He saw from the height of his spiritual consciousness a new self-creation
"A transfiguration in the mystic depths,
A happier cosmic working could begin
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And fashion the world-shape in him anew,
God found in Nature, Nature fulfilled in God."
The light of this higher consciousness penetrated his lower consciousness, or the lower parts of his nature. And knowledge used to come to bun by an act of intuition.
Inspiration also came down into him often in silence. The closed Beyond was opened with "A stab of flame". When the light of intuition came, the mind overlapped itself and his spirit pursued knowledge like a hound. The sparks of intuition and lightnings of inspiration led him to and gave the knowledge of the various realms of the Infinite, and though he saw the play of ignorance and chance in the world, he saw also, through the veil, and comprehended, the world-design behind its outer appearance. He saw the logic of the infinite Intelligence working in. the finite ignorance. In fact, he saw the origin of the world as it is in the spirit— the Divine builder in sleep behind the world. Beyond his plane of inspiration, he could glimpse the Overmind.
When inspiration came down into him, it was like a divine messenger coming with its own rhythm. Sometimes like a bliss pouring down, or a wordless thought, an all-seeing ray, or at times the closed Beyond was opend with "a stab of flame". At other times it became an eye that awakes in trance, or he felt as if inspiration was plundering the vast estate of the Superconscient for him. It became a "gleaner of grains" or worked like a "sheaf-binder" gathering up parts of knowledge and making them into a whole. At times it worked as a reporter, or like a hound pursuing knowledge. It opened the vision of the Truth or brought the word of the Supreme. Its action made Aswapathy comprehend the world-design and behind the apparent working of chance he saw the unfolding of a world-idea.
In the light of his spiritual experience he saw the tree of cosmos supported by the Spirit. He knew the original divine Desire that gave rise to this creation. He could then understand the wisdom that permits this long game of evolution and even feel the Love that sanctions these workings. From his height he saw that the energies of the lower nature had many occult and spiritual powers hidden under their ignorant workings which, if awakened, would
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be a very precious acquisition for man. He felt a divine presence and greatness everywhere. This universe became
"...a living movement of the body of God."
The world was a conception and a birth of Spirit in matter from where rose
"The divine Dwarf towered unconquered worlds".
His spirit was the witness-spirit and—
"Existence a divine experiment
And cosmos the soul's opportunity."
All the suppressed powers of the subconscient and the ignorant instruments of Nature began to blossom into manifestation in him.
Thus, was he released from ignorance. Knowledge of the Divine poured upon him from above and world-knowledge welled out from within
"Lonely his days and splendid like the sun's."
All his actions sprang out of Light and all his thoughts referred to the True and the One. He saw other worlds, other forms, other gods, other beings and he deafly experienced that his life had emerged from the Divine. Now, his only work in life was to help mankind by raising it to this higher level and "Feeling earth's smallness with their boundless breadths," and for this
"He drew the energies that transmute an age."
CANTO IV
THE SECRET KNOWLEDGE
This is a long canto describing the climb of human consciousness to the Eternal by resorting to a method of mystic knowledge. It is
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true that here, in the outer aspect of our existence. Life and Mind seem to be the only powers that can and do create their structures of dreams including the ideals of individual and collective perfection. But if the Realty is to be built up here it cannot be done by these powers. It has to be built here by a power as yet unborn which, however, must be born in and must act on life. This can only be if man realises that he is not merely "A death bound littleness.... "There is an immortal Self in man awaiting discovery, there are widenesses and depths possible to man's consciousness of which his surface nature has no knowledge. These powers are there even when man is not conscious of them. There is in him the imperishable Light, Divine splendour, immutable Ecstasy. Man, though outwardly small and insignificant, can rise to those infinite regions of Light, Power and Bliss.
Instead of human consciousness ascending to those higher planes it is also possible that something from those higher planes can descend here into the human consciousness. In such a case man would feel himself possessed by a greater personality than the human, or he would feel the presence of the Master within him. It is then that man opens to a wider inner consciousness and doses himself from the outer and in the depths of his inner consciousness the mind is hushed "...to a bright Omniscient". In that silence of the mind one hears the voice of inspiration. Very often, he gets indications which assure him of an inner Presence unknown to his outer personality. These have been described by the poet as
"A Silence overhead, an inner Voice
A living image seated in the heart".
There is, at times, an unwalled wideness and delight present everywhere and there is even the perception of the shape of our unborn Divinity.
But all these things are not on the surfaces—they are "hidden, subliminal, mystical". The only means by which one comes to know or have true knowledge of them is "An inward turn". Without this inward turn, life, nature, and self seems only accidental, a work of chance without any significance. This world appears "A act of death in which by chance we live". The belief that "Out of the un-
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known we move to the unknown", —a kind of agnostic attitude leaves many questions unanswered in life. For instance, it would not explain why there bums the fire of aspiration in the human heart, why man feels a certainty within him about a Being that is to be known on earth. An observation of Nature shows that Nature seems to be wanting to reach some state of perfection of knowledge, of power, of bliss. She knows full well that she is pursued by Ignorance, Imperfection and Sorrow. But, she has been guarding "The inward urge" from the very dawn of human history. She wants to attain perfection—faith unshakable, love undying, truth based on certitude.
The state of ignorance in the earth consciousness is not altogether shut out from intimations of the Beyond. As already indicated, man has been dreaming of attaining a state of
"A Mind unvisited by illusion's gleams,
A Will expressive of soul's deity,
A Strength not forced to stumble by its speed,
A Joy that drags not sorrow as its shade."
Man is absorbed in the outer consciousness. He is busy with his little daily acts in which he finds himself a slave of circumstances; and whenever he makes a movement it is almost always through compulsion of necessity or emergency. We are prisoners of our mind, "slaves of our acts". It is because man completely identifies himself with the external being and die world around him that he remains confined to ignorance. But if he can take his stand on the Spirit, he can have the knowledge of the Reality and the Spirit's working in Time. It is possible for man to become a Prophet and a Seer. It is when man is so confined in his shell of ignorance that Divine begins to descend or gods come down from above and press upon the human consciousness with their full knowledge of world-purpose and the consciousness of their divine might. They drive the course of human events towards the intended purpose and in this process they do not care for the great commotion or disturbance which is caused in humanity. Their impact on the earth consciousness enables man to rise to a higher stage of evolution, and after having accomplished their purpose, leaving a permanent result of their work in life upon earth, they retire to their divine heights, as do
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lightning and thunder on the material plane. Even when their intervention seems to come from above, their action is often in response to the deepest need of the human being, to the most profound aspiration of the earth-consciousness. For
"Above the illusion of hopes that pass,
Behind the appearance and the overt act,
Behind the clock-work chance and vague surmise,
Amid the wrestle of force, the trampling feet,
Across the triumph, fighting and despair,
They watch the Bliss for which earth's heart has cried".
The transcendent Divine that is now masked in the Inconscient will one day mount his throne on earth. He will come unseen and the earth will become unexpectedly divine—"And earth grow un- expectedly divine". Man shall not be asked to believe in an unrealised Divine; because "...belief shall be not till the work is done".
The human consciousness "Moves here in a half-light that seems the whole". In fact, the present condition of man is really an inter- regnum. It is "Far from the original Dusk," and "the final Flame". He has advanced far from the original inconscience and he is yet far from the divine fulfilment. During this intermediate and ignorant stage, the meaning of creation is hidden from the human conscious- ness. It is to him like an unknown script. In the midst of this ignorant condition man feels the need of finding the solution, he feels an aspiration within him for perfection. And, in this task and search he is helped by the great gods who live in their higher planes unaffected by all the difficulties, oppositions, and conflicts of the human being
"Immaculate in self-knowledge and self-power,
Calm they repose on the eternal Will.
They are guardians of the silence of the Truth".
They derive their strength from their entire surrender to the Divine and all their knowledge is acquired by identity. They live beyond evil and good as conceived by man; for, their purpose is to embody and be "Alive to the truth that dwells in God's extremes". In fact, the vision of an Immortal being is not the same as the vision of man,
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for he sees things hidden from the mind of man. As he is in contact with the Eternal, and knows full well the trend of cosmic evolution in Time he waits for the Eternal's hour". Nature in the meantime goes through the process of slow evolution to reach "The crown of conscious Immortality". This she does with the help of the intervention of the Divine from above, for it cannot be done by unaided human effort.
Though, outwardly this world looks like a material world and seems to be governed by mere chance, still from a' more occult and spiritual point of view it would appear that there is a divine governance of the world behind this apparent reign of chaos or chance. And it is really this mighty guidance that can be relied upon to guide man to his highest destiny. All the chasms of ignorance shall be bridged by the gods and the Divine. In the meantime; Nature, the divine worker in the cosmos, carries "...clay images of unborn gods". All that we see here on this earth is really a figure of Transcendent Divine. All lives by Him, his unseen Presence moulds the unconscious clay. This Transcendent One who descended into the Inconscient was there even before the cosmos came into existence. When the process of evolution starts, it is He who creates his innumerable symbols and equates them to the Truth. He, in reality, is the Master and Nature is only his mould. He is the maker and the world he has made. He is the vision and the seer, the actor and the act, the knower and the known, the dreamer and the dream.
"There are Two who are One and play in many worlds".
Knowledge and ignorance, light and darkness, pleasure and pain are the dual appearance of that one Reality working out its common purpose through the apparent opposition. The universe is a masquerade and nothing here is utterly what it seems. Here in this world "A part is seen, we take it for the whole". The dual element in nature has divided the functions. On one side is the Soul, the Puruṣa, on the other, there is Nature, Prakṛti. In the actual play of the universe, the Puruṣa has forgotten himself and he consents to do what Nature wants him to do. It seems as if
"He knows her only, he has forgotten himself;
To her he abandons all to make her great."
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He has tried to wed
"...his infinity's peace
To her creative passion's ecstasy."
He, the Puruṣa, "...lies beneath her feet", inert and happy
and
"His breast he offers for her cosmic dance"
His is the strength that sustains as the basis the entire multiplicity of planes of cosmic nature....The Puruṣa is moved by Nature and seems to be ..."carried by her from Night to deathless Light". He identifies himself completely with Nature and becomes what she wants him to become. During this play of the dual aspect when the Puruṣa remembers his true Self, then. Nature reveals herself as his spiritual mate. But so long as he is not self-conscious. Nature rules him. He
"...gives consent to all that she can wish".
Thus, it comes about that the Transcendent who rules the cosmos after taking his plunge into the Nescience evolves into Matter, then into Life and then Mind; in the Mind he evolves into an ego-centre and becomes
"A luminous individual Power, alone".
"The Absolute, the Perfect, the Alone" has called cut his silent power from within himself and has entered into Space and Time and become many.1 He has taken up this mask of imperfection so that ultimately man may rise to the divine nature. Transformation of nature becomes possible because of the presence of the Divine behind the human. As the Divine accepts man's nature with all its imperfections, so is it possible for man to put on the divine nature. In fact, that is the inevitable destiny intended of man. For we are children of God and must become like Him. The key
Compare Chapter VI of "The Mother" by Sri Aurobindo.
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to this divine becoming is hidden, "...and by the Inconscient kept". The identification with Nature is complete in the beginning and continues as long as the Puruṣa does not succeed in establishing a witness-consciousness:
"...the thousandfold enigma has been solved
"In the single light of an all-witnessing Soul."
It is with this attainment of the Purusha-consciousness as the witness that the liberation of the human consciousness can begin.
It looks as if the Puruṣa has entered into an understanding with Prakṛti, Nature, from the very beginning "to follow the course of Time's eternity" with all the vicissitudes of cosmic manifestation. The Puruṣa seems to have a double role to play. He is the explorer, the mariner. He seeks to discover the uncharted ways of nature's will and sounds the depths of her hidden powers. But he also can enter upon the great adventure "to reach unknown harbour-lights in distant climes". He can cross the limits of Nature and go beyond to the unknown seas and lands "steering on the trade-routes of Ignorance"; he can cross over to the Unseen and enter the Unknown,— unseen realms where he sees himself and the world in a new vision. Man feels afterwards that "He is a spirit in an unfinished world",
"A sailor on the Inconscient's fathomless sea,
He voyages through a starry world of thought
On Matter's deck to a spiritual sun."
But till the very end of his journey he does not know the full purpose of his existence here. For "he carries her sealed orders in his breast." He will find out later on whether he goes to
"a blank port in the Unseen"
or "...armed with her fiat, to discover
"A new mind and body in the city of God
And make the finite one with Infinity."
This difficult task seems to be the labour of the whole creation and an unknown, unseen Power seems to have tied man to this destiny
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so that there seems to be no .escape for man from this Herculean labour.
"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."
As long as Nature lasts, the soul, the Puruṣa, is also there; for, ''he and she are one". Therefore, ''Her play is real; a Mystery he fulfils'". Why did the Absolute, the Perfect and the Alone tack up this seemingly meaningless venture of plunging Himself into the unfathomable depths of the Nescience it is difficult to say. In the words of the poet, it seems it was
"To evoke a person in the impersonal Void"
"Wake a dumb self in the inconscient depths"
"That the eyes of the Timeless might look out from Time."
"For this he left his white infinity
And laid on the Spirit the burden of the flesh,
That Godhead's seed might flower in mindless Space."
CANTO V
THE YOGA OF THE KING:
THE YOGA OF THE SPIRIT'S FREEDOM AND GREATNESS
Aswapathy acquired this secret knowledge that had come down by tradition and attained to the freedom of the spirit by cutting the cord of the mind which ties it to the earth. Under the pressure of a powerful aspiration he rose beyond the bounds of Nature so that
"When life had stopped its beats, death broke not in,"
He lived on
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"...when breath and thought were still."
It was then that he was able to get into the hidden chamber where all the secrets of Nature are revealed. He, then, recognised
"...as a just necessity,
Its hard conditions for the mighty work,—
Nature's impossible Herculean toil
The dumb great Mother, Nature,—
"Accepts indomitably to execute
The will to know in an inconscient world,
The will to live under a reign of death,
The thirst for rapture in a heart of flesh,"—
and works through creation
"The mystery of God's covenant with the Night."
He could see behind the outer appearances of Nature the active spiritual motive. God's imperative fiat working out its aim. He saw the divine sanction and
"...the signature and fiery seal
Of Wisdom on the dim Power's hooded work
Who builds in Ignorance the steps of Light."
He, then, could see the utility of reading this cosmic text from within. And, he saw,
"A purpose mingled with the whims of Time,
A meaning met the stumbling pace of Chance
And Fate revealed a chain of seeing will;
"In the Void he saw throned the Omniscience supreme."
When Aswapathy experienced this working of the divine governance he felt a great hope rise in his heart. He had an intense
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aspiration to bring down to earth this greater Divine and spiritual world. He wanted to station himself on the heights of Being and bring down the Light here. He contemplated an entire change in the life on earth when finite man should learn the logic of the Infinite. He could imagine the possibility of a conscious soul living in a conscious world. He saw the spiritual summits like the peaks of a mountain above him and, keeping himself firm on matter's base he looked upon the rest of the Nature as an incomplete and imperfect instrumentation of his spiritual self. After this realisation all the human attainments seemed to him limited, imperfect, and incapable of fulfilling the deepest hopes of man. To him man's thinking power seemed to climb the heights of mind in vain, for, it brings at best "a borrowed light". All human efforts appeared transitory, vain, uncertain. He could see man's sphere as "...a small- ness trying to be great". And yet there is behind man's outer being the Eternal Spirit which is his Truth. For the Self of man, his real spiritual Self, is above nature, above fate.
In order to realise this free Self and its greatness Aswapathy with- drew his consciousness from all that he had been and done and retired into a perfect inner silence, retaining only the consciousness of the witness soul. He felt, in the midst of this Silence, a great call upon him to exceed the limits of human consciousness; an experience of currents of Light, Power and Delight came down upon him from above. This gave him an assurance of the validity of his perception of occult planes of consciousness and also of his having gone beyond the limited earth-nature. He felt that he was "an arrow leaping through eternity"
"Suddenly shot from the tense bow of Time,
A ray returning to its parent sun."
Even though opposed by all the forces of the Inconscient, still, he flew with an intense aspiration
"Questing for God as for a splendid prey,
He mounted burning like a cone of fire."
At last he saw that
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"His spirit mingles with Eternity's heart
And bears the silence of the Infinite."
As he thus rose into the realms of higher consciousness beyond ordinary humanity, he found that a great and strong descent was coming suddenly upon him
"...a Might, a Flame,
A Beauty half-visible with deathless eyes".
This Power and Light penetrated into all the parts of his being and as a result, his soul "...was torn out from its mortality". And he was drawn back from seeking loneliness to a great spiritual Power which was wide and pure. Henceforth his mind became a blank to this Divine Spirit and opened to cosmic widenesses and the sweep of the Transcendent. This experience completely revolutionised his consciousness and its values. Henceforth he seemed to breathe a superhuman air. Thereafter
"The python coils of restricting Law
Could not restrain the swift arisen God".
His individual self became wide as the cosmos,—as the poet says
"The soul and cosmos faced as equal powers."
Henceforward the scope of his consciousness was widened without limits.
Hereafter everything was opened to his view in the vast field of cosmic operations. His natural instruments were heightened in their capacity and the occult powers working in the cosmos began to reveal their hidden processes to him so that they might serve him in the realisation of his divine work. The narrow limits of ordinary human instrumentation serve only to keep the little human being safe against the invasion of the forces of the universe. But man has to grow beyond his limitations if he is to fulfil his highest: destiny. An occult machinery is provided for this transition. The
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mind of man is itself only a "mediator divinity", it is not the final, the highest and the omnipotent instrument. Mind can release many occult forces and powers of matter and of life. It can eves develop many occult and miraculous powers of its own. For instance, it can mould events by its "bare silent will" and "Acts at a distance without hands or feet". Mind can go to the heights and "Call in the Omniscient and Omnipotent".
Mind can exercise its inventive faculty and .bring out all the suppressed possibilities of Matter and Life. It can also become aware of the future, and awaken faculties which appear abnormal in their operation. It is when Mind turns all its faculties to the service of the Spirit that mental movements find their proper place and justification and value in the total field of the divine governance.
There is an occult order which is behind the material and mental order known to man. And it is that unseen and unknown occult world which governs from behind this outer material, vital and mental life. Faculties of the inmost, i.e. subliminal mind disclose the knowledge of the world's mystery. An ascending and a descend- ing order of worlds from Eternity into Time and from Time back to Eternity was thus revealed to Aswapathy. Everything that is imperfect here is found there, behind in the occult, and has its perfect correspondence. Whatever life is seeking here is found there realised. A divine unity was seen, reconciling all the discords of multiplicity. From Matter the evolving cone rose to the peaks of the Spirit, to the supernal regions of the One. Aswapathy saw and entered,—
"Sunbelts of knowledge, moonbelts of delight
"Beyond our indigent corporeal range,
There he could enter, there awhile abide.
A voyager upon uncharted routes,
Fronting the viewless danger of the Unknown,
Adventuring across enormous realms,
He broke into another Space and Time."
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