On Savitri
THEME/S
There is an idea abroad that a Yogi or mystic is of a piece with the anchorite and as such has no message to deliver to humanity at large. What is contended in this view is something interesting because there is a modicum of truth, as Sri Aurobindo wrote to me once, in every intellectual conviction seriously cherished. What is true in this indictment against the mystic is that his contribution to human culture its not conterminous with that of the social man in his various, more or less, social moods, Art, poetry, music, the crafts, philosophy, — in fact every walk of life hitherto trod by men the world over — all fall more or less under the category of our social moods. It has indeed, been claimed by some poets, artists and thinkers that since their handiworks are inspired by their daemons and matured by their faculties in silence, therefore what they create cannot be counted, strictly speaking, as a social product. This contention is valid but only up to a point, since what the man in his creative impulse produces is usually a resultant of forces which sway him in his solitude, countered by those that sway him in his social setting. Even the argument of the highbrow, world-aloof scientist, living for his laboratory, cannot be fully valid when he claims that his findings have nothing to do with humanity and its aspirations. For man being bom from others, nurtured by others, living with others, sustained by others and, last though not least, often killed by others, cannot claim to be a perfect solitary in any of his moods on earth. That is why we are confronted almost daily with a paradox, namely, that the most abstract and even seemingly impossible of scientific theories (theories which once upon a time men could only gape at) have been fruitful in inventions which have profoundly modified not only the outer life of man but his thoughts and aspirations as well. Tout se tient (things lean upon one another and hold together,) Romain Rolland wrote to me once.
Consequently, we do somewhat look askance at mystics and Yogis even when something within us is impressed by something about them which defies our analysis and therefore offends us. It hurts our self-respect: Why must a rational man be led to kowtow to what his reason cannot label or docket? I recall a remark Tagore made years ago. He and Bertrand Russell had once gone out for a stroll in Cambridge. As they passed by King's College Chapel
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they heard a choral hymn being sung by the boys: lovely music! Tagore suggested to Russell that they step inside the Chapel. "Nothing doing," replied the rationalist mathematician, "I can't let myself be influenced by music and incense and coloured gleams trickling through the stained-glass windows and be made to feel what my reason holds suspect." And how Tagore laughed!
But it is not a laughing matter — not to the much-maligned mystic, anyway. For whatever the scientist and rationalist in man may say, the mystic knows what he feels not because he wishes to feel but because he cannot live without feeling it, because life becomes for him a blind alley without the lead of the mystic light, or, to put it in the words of Sri Aurobindo:
Impenetrable, a mystery recondite
Is the vast plan of which we are a part;
Its harmonies are discords to our view,
Because we know not the great theme they serve.1
Those who hold, with the rationalist, that such themes are "suspect" must, in their turn, be held suspect from the mystic's point of view. For the mystic knows that the sum total of spiritual emoluments are not all made up of the reason's findings any more than what the anatomist's eye sees by dissecting a dead body is the sum total of all that the body is in its full vital functioning. He knows this because he has peeped into something behind the veil and is not only delighted but overawed by what he has glimpsed. He is in fact profoundly impressed because he realises, from what little he has visioned, that
Inscrutable work the cosmic agencies.
Only the fringe of a wide surge we see;
Our instruments have not that greater light,
Our will tunes not with the eternal Will,
Our heart's sight is too blind and passionate.2
From the mystic's point of view — who knows that he has seen what most people have not — there can at best be a deep regret that what has been granted to him has been withheld from the rank and file, but never any question of agreeing with the verdict of those who have not seen what they might have if they had accepted to develop their powers of supraphysical perception. But this does
1 Savitri, p. 160. 2 Ibid., pp. 160-61.
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not mean that what he has seen is against reason. Dean Inge has put the mystic's case rather tellingly when he writes that "... at every step we can only see what we deserve to see. The world that we know changes for us, just as a landscape changes as we climb the mountain. It seems to follow that we have no right to dispute what the mystics tell us that they have seen, unless we have been there ourselves and not seen it."3
But here Dean Inge only touches the surface of the validity of mystic seeing. It is not only that the "landscape changes" as one rises higher and higher in the mystic knowledge of reality, but that something else happens simultaneously — at least with the greatest among them — namely, what they see imposes on them a corresponding responsibility if not obligation which Sri Aurobindo has described in his noble language as a "divine self-interest to bear the burden of others." This makes them plunge into ceaseless activity, not indeed of the blind or the semi-blind kind hailed by the merely restless activist but of a pure and selfless brand which they undertake because of a mandate they have received from on high to do what has to be done without an eye to the fruit of their action. "Today we all exist in a divided if not anarchic world society of men," says a thoughtful writer. "To follow the example of mystics would mean healing and orderliness, fratemalism and freedom and peace."4 Or, to put it in the language of Sri Aurobindo: "The greatest of the mystics have always given a luminous lead to men and never acquiesced in a mere passive enjoyment of their bliss, steeped in their solitary contemplation." Because, he asserts, accepting life "he... has to bear not only his own burden, but a great part of the world's burden too along with it, as a continuation of his own sufficiently heavy load. Therefore his Yoga has much more of the nature of a battle than others'; but this is not only an individual battle, it is a collective war waged over a considerable country. He has not only to conquer in himself the forces of egoistic falsehood and disorder, but to conquer them as representatives of the same adverse and inexhaustible forces in the world."5
It is obvious, that if what is claimed here is valid — that to win through to the Light is not to turn one's back on those who live in darkness but to help them come out into the sunshine, the sunshine
3 Mysticism in Religion, Chapter XI.
4Men Who Walked with God, Sheldon Cheney (p. 384).
5The Synthesis of Yoga, SABCL, Vol. 20, p. 71.
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invoked by the true vision — then the mystic's world cannot be dismissed as a world of selfish inaction, euphemistically called "contemplation". Anyone who has ever had the supreme good fortune of living under the aegis of a really great mystic must testify that the latter wants nothing so much as to share the boons he has earned with others, and who will dare deny that this aspiration itself is a living message of Light to the lacklustre?
For the sake of clarity one may perhaps be justified in admitting, provisionally, that the two exist side by side: the social man and the spiritual aspirant. But one must add, to make matters complete, that these are naturally interdependent: the social man needs the spiritual aspirant to enable him progressively to work in the Light the latter cannot help shedding, while the spiritual aspirant needs the other to promote in him the urge and vision to realise himself completely. The great Sage of the Upanishad did not mouth a mere platitude when he said: "One loves one's kin — one's children, consorts and parents — not because they are they but because they are indistinguishable from one's inmost self; he only uttered something the greatest mystics in all climes have proclaimed with one voice: that one must utilise whatever one is given to serve others. Or, to put it in the mantric words of the great Messiah of divine life, the mystic wins God not to rocket up to him leaving the earth to her fate, but to invoke His light here below for all.
But this does not mean that the lure is an imaginary one: the lure of escapism. It would be idle to deny that, human nature being what it is, man generally prefers to travel light. Also, the knot of egoism is fastened so tight in him that he cannot possibly cut it at one trenchant stroke even when he does aspire to Godliness. The anchorite is a real and impressive figure in spite of his unsatisfying gospel of a swift personal salvation because he does help the soul's evolution at a certain stage in life, when the answering Light that comes down seems too all-fulfilling to be missed; but as the soul wants to mount higher still, even the gods themselves, as legend has it, come to deflect him from the path of his highest fulfilment and Supreme Goal. Thus, to put it in the language of exhortation of the Master:6
Imagine not the way is easy; the way is long, arduous,
6 Words of the Master, Bulletin of Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Physical Education, Vol. Ill, No. 2.
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dangerous, difficult. At every step is an ambush, at every turn a pitfall. A thousand seen or unseen enemies will start up against thee, terrible in subtlety against thy ignorance, formidable in power against thy weakness. And when with pain thou hast destroyed them, other thousands will surge up and take their place. Hell will vomit its hordes to oppose and enring and wound and menace; Heaven will meet thee with its pitiless tests and its cold luminous denials.
Thou shalt find thyself alone in thy anguish, the demons furious in thy path, the Gods unwilling above thee. Ancient and powerful, cruel, unvanquished and close and innumerable are the dark and dreadful Powers that profit by the reign of Night and Ignorance and would have no change and are hostile. Aloof, slow to arrive, far-off and few and brief in their visits are the Bright Ones who are willing or permitted to succour. Each step forward is a battle. There are precipitous descents, there are unending ascensions and ever higher peaks upon peaks to conquer. Each plateau climbed is but a stage on the way and reveals endless heights beyond it. Each victory thou thinkest the last triumphant struggle proves to be but a prelude to a hundred fierce and perilous battles....
Sri Aurobindo chose the legend of Savitri to bring out not only the "fierceness" of these "perilous battles" but through these the "beautiful face of the Divine Mother" in Savitri, the "Daughter of Infinity" and Symbol of Light bom to be established in this our world of shadows and limitations.
But the Daughter is also the Mother of Mothers who comes to us, weaklings, to show that "Immortality" is not "a plaything to be given lightly to a child," nor "the divine life a prize without effort or the crown for a weakling."7
The legend is an old one, even older in age than the Ramayana since in this first epic of India Sita makes mention of Savitri and says to Rama: "Know me as flawlessly faithful to you even as Savitri was to Satyavan, the son of Dyumatsen."8
The famous legend as it has come down to us is as beautiful in its simplicity as it is pregnant in its implications. Princess Savitri,
7 Ibid.
8 Dyunuilsenusuiam viram satyavantum anuvratām.
Sāviirimiva mām viddhi twamāma vashavurtinim. (Ramayana: 2.30)
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the lovely daughter of King Aswapati, wants to marry Satyavan, the son of King Dyumatsen, who having lost his kingdom has been forced to live in a forest, a blind exile. But the Sage Narada tells her that Satyavan is fated to expire within a year, whereupon Savitri reaffirms her pledge to Satyavan saying that her die is cast since she can choose no other for her consort. So the marriage takes place and Savitri leaves her palace and luxury to do her duty by her lonely husband and his helpless parents living as exiles in the forest. The fateful day, however, cannot be stayed and Satyavan dies resting his head on the lap of Savitri. Yama, the Lord of Death, then comes to carry back with him Satyavan's life but Savitri, refusing to admit defeat to Death, follows him. A duologue, or rather an altercation, ensues on the way between the frail victim of Fate and the mighty all-powerful Lord of Destiny till, in the end, Savitri prevails upon the dread Dispenser of Doom to reverse the verdict of Time: Satyavan is at last restored to her.
This is the story. Sri Aurobindo has metamorphosed it into what may be fittingly called a marvellous epic, luminous with the message of Immortality. The argument, in brief, is as follows:
The advent of Savitri cannot be an accident. The earth has to aspire for her Descent. So Aswapati has to pave the way through his lordly aspiration — Aswapati, the "colonist form immortality" and the "treasurer of superhuman dreams" whose "soul lived as eternity's delegate."9
But the heart of flame of this doughty aspirant cannot rest content with a mere realisation. So when he meets the World-Mother face to face the first question he asks her is:
How long shall our spirits battle with the Night
And bear defeat and the brute yoke of Death,
We who are vessels of a deathless Force
And builders of the godhead of the race?10
He cannot help asking such a challenging question of the Great Mother because his mighty heart finds little consolation in the current philosophy that a human being must accept his human limitations. So he asks:
Or if it is thy work I do below
Amid the error and waste of human life
In the vague light of man's half-conscious mind,
9Savitri, p. 23. 10 Ibid., P. 341
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Why breaks not in some distant gleam of thee?
Ever the centuries and millenniums pass... .
All we have done is ever still to do.
All breaks and all renews and is the same.11
Not that he is a defeatist. How can he be after having seen
... the Omnipotent's flaming pioneers
Over the heavenly verge which turns towards life
Come crowding down the amber stairs of birth....
The massive barrier-breakers of the world....
The sun-eyed children of a marvellous dawn....
The architects of immortality...?12
Therefore even though he is eager to see the Kingdom of Heaven established on earth, here and now, and feels restless to have to stay a passive witness to human suffering, he says:
I know that thy creation cannot fail... .13
Because man as he is today — ruling at best by his mind and intellect — is not the final term of the Ascending Consciousness:
This strange irrational product of the mire,
This compromise between the beast and God,
Is not the crown of thy miraculous world....
Even as of old man came behind the beast
This high divine successor surely shall come
Behind man's inefficient mortal pace,
Behind his vain labour, sweat and blood and tears....14
And as a destined
Inheritor of the toil of human time
He shall take on him the burden of the gods.15
He knows all that. Yet the human mind's supine acceptance of the world makes the Divine in the human impatient — inevitably, because without his impatience the impossible cannot be translated into the possible. Burning aspiration orvyfkulatf: of the dauntless heart is necessary if the heart is to serve for a foothold of the Divine. So he cries out as it were frantic with the tardy pace of the ascent of Consciousness:
11 Ibid., pp. 341-42. 12 Ibid., pp. 343-44. 13 Ibid., p. 342.
14Ibid., pp. 343-44. 15 Ibid.
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Heavy unchanged weighs still the imperfect world;
The splendid youth of Time has passed and failed;
Heavy and long are the years our labour counts
And still the seals are firm upon man's soul
And weary is the ancient Mother's heart.16
So he appeals passionately:
O Truth defended in thy secret sun...
O radiant fountain of the world's delight....
O Bliss who ever dwellst deep hid within
While men seek thee outside and never find....
Mission to earth some living form of thee.
One moment fill with thy eternity,
Let thy infinity in one body live,
All-Knowledge wrap one mind in seas of light,
All-Love throb single in one human heart.
Immortal, treading the earth with mortal feet
All heaven's beauty crowd in earthly limbs!
Omnipotence, girdle with the power of God
Movements and moments of a mortal will,
Pack with the eternal might one human hour
And with one gesture change all future time.
Let a great word be spoken from the heights
And one great act unlock the doors of Fate.17
Then at long last, his Divine Interlocutor answers assuring him that she, Savitri, will be bom:
O strong forerunner, I have heard thy cry.
One shall descend and break the iron Law,
Change Nature's doom by the lone Spirit's power.
A limitless Mind that can contain the world,
A sweet and violent heart of ardent calms
Moved by the passions of the gods shall come.
All mights and greatnesses shall join in her;
Beauty shall walk celestial on the earth,
Delightrshall sleep in the cloud-net of her hair
And in her body as on his homing tree
Immortal Love shall beat his glorious wings.
A music of griefless things shall weave her charm;
16 Ibid., pp. 344-45. 17 Ibid., p. 345.
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The harps of the Perfect shall attune her voice,
The streams of Heaven shall murmur in her laugh,
Her lips shall be the honeycombs of God,
Her limbs his golden jars of ecstasy,
Her breasts the rapture-flowers of Paradise.
She shall bear Wisdom in her voiceless bosom,
Strength shall be with her like a conqueror's sword
And from her eyes the Eternal's bliss shall gaze.
A seed shall be sown in Death's tremendous hour,
A branch of heaven transplant to human soil;
Nature shall overleap her mortal step;
Fate shall be changed by an unchanging will.18
So the Great Sphinx reveals her secret: The incredible comes to pass: the unhoped for incarnation comes down to earth as Aswapati's daughter though none can guess her essential divinity because, although
Even her humanity was half divine,19
and
Apart, living within, all lives she bore,20
she is, intrinsically,
Too unlike the world she came to help and save.21
But all the same,
All in her pointed to a nobler kind....
Her mind, a sea of white sincerity,
Passionate in flow, had not one turbid wave...22
For the Vila of the Divine to be consummated, her human face has, perforce, to be a mask, but even so,
Immortal rhythms swayed in her time-bom steps;
Her look, her smile awoke celestial sense
Even in earth-stuff, and their intense delight
Poured a supernal beauty on men's lives....
A deep of compassion, a hushed sanctuary,
Her inward help unbarred a gate in heaven;
Love in her was wider than the universe,
18 Ibid., p. 346. 19 Ibid., p. 8. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid., p. 7. 22 Ibid., pp. 14-15.
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The whole world could take refuge in her single heart.23
Never was a woman bom of flesh limned with hues so ethereal — so incredible yet convincing, so all-embracing yet lonely, so powerful yet tender. It almost seems too dazzling to be true. That is why earthlings now fail to recognise the Incognito and so reject all that She comes to give to earth:
The proud and conscious wideness and the bliss...
The calm delight that weds one soul to all,
The key to the flaming doors of ecstasy.24
We call for the Divine but on our own terms: we know no better. That is why the light-bringers of the world are not accepted as they deserve to be. No wonder Savitri has to realise little by little, to her sorrow, that
There is a darkness in terrestrial things
That will not suffer long too glad a note.25
Consequently,
On her too closed the inescapable Hand:
The armed Immortal bore the snare of Time.26
She had to, because unless she accepts the cross of mortality she cannot induce cave-dwellers to welcome her crown of the Everliving. But though she has to accede to this compromise to start with — because otherwise she cannot prepare the ground — she knows that it is but a divine strategy — reculer pour mieux sauter—a drawing back to be able to invade the more effectively, because
To wrestle with the Shadow she had come,27
To lead, to deliver was her glorious part.28
But the nature of man as it is today cannot succeed even in imagining what supemature is like — not to mention welcoming the superhuman. So when Savitri chooses to forsake the protection and plenitude of her father's royal palace, a hue and cry arises. Her mother cannot possibly consent to such "madness" and essays
21 Ibid., p. 15. 24 Ibid., p. 6. 25 Ibid., p. 17. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid.
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frantically to dissuade her from marrying a poor exile, a nonentity who, besides, is going to die in twelve months. Were it not for exigencies of space, I would give long excerpts from the Book of Fate where Sri Aurobindo brings out forcefully this dramatic situation: Savitri is resolved to stake everything for her ideal; her mother, the queen, is afraid of disaster, fear making her pessimistic in the extreme; Narada admonishes the queen and, siding with Savitri, counsels her parents to let her marry Satyavan and, lastly, winds up with a revealing prophecy. But as all that is impossible to cite in full, I shall only quote a few lines from his oracular peroration:
Queen, strive no more to change the secret will;
Time's accidents are steps in its vast scheme.
Bring not thy brief and helpless human tears
Across the fathomless moments of a heart
That knows its single will and God's as one.29
For, Savitri is not human in the ordinary acceptation of the term but, being "an ambassadress twixt eternity and change," she can "sit apart with grief and facing death" front "adverse fate, armed and alone," because
Sometimes one life is charged with earth's destiny.30
Therefore, the Sage enjoins on the Queen Mother:
Intervene not in a strife too great for thee...
The great are strongest when they stand alone.31
Consequently, he proclaims prophetically, the day will come when she must stand unhelped —
On a dangerous brink of the world's doom and hers,
Carrying the world's future in her lonely breast,
Carrying the human hope in a heart left sole...
She must cross alone a perilous bridge in Time
And reach an apex of world-destiny
Where all is won or all is lost for man.32
In a word, her destiny of loneliness is meant to forge the last link which will complete the circuit. That is why
In that tremendous silence lone and lost
29 Ibid., p. 460. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid., 32Ibid., p. 461.
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Of a deciding hour in the world's fate...
Alone she must conquer or alone must fall,33
because
No human aid can reach her in that hour,
No armoured God stand shining at her side.34
Therefore the Queen is told:
Cry not to heaven, for she alone can save.
For this the silent Force came missioned down,35
inasmuch as it is preordained about Savitri that
She only can save herself and save the world.36
A tremendous prophecy, indeed! But then is not Savitri "missioned" to make the impossible possible?
Here was no fabric of terrestrial make...
An image fluttering on the screen of fate...
And tossed along the gulfs of Circumstance.37
That is why she has been destined to dare what no human could even contemplate:
Her single will opposed the cosmic rule.38
And she was justified in flinging this challenge because
The great World-Mother now in her arose.39
This is the stuff of which dramas are made. But Savitri's life, being the enactment of a divine drama, starts from scratch, that is, the human and culminates in the super-human. And this deepening drama (of lesser loves calling to the Soul but failing to grip because her lesser loves have, progressively, to give place to the higher and higher through an ascending aspiration — till she has to sacrifice everything to the highest call) has been achieved by the Seer-Poet in his epic drama in six movements of her Soul-evolution:
First, the human in Savitri seeks the Divine.
Second, she weds Satyavan in order to realise through their
33 Ibid. 34 Ibid. 35Ibid. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid. p. 17. 38 Ibid., p. 19.
39Ibid., p. 21.
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mutual adoration the Presence of the Divine in every heart of love.
Third, Satyavan dies and she prays to the Lord to give him back to her in order that they may now fulfil their joint mission together, — of uplifting the Earth to Heaven, counting no cost.
Fourth, the Divine tempts Savitri to leave such a futile endeavour and invites her to desert earthlings (as the earth is not yet ready for His light and bliss) to merge back in His primal Truth-Consciousness.
Fifth, Savitri declines and asks His boon for Earth and Humanity.
Sixth, the Divine is pleased and grants the Boon of Boons. This supreme message of Savitri to humanity (or rather of Dawn to Night) has been brought out in three progressive stages through the personality of Savitri who is the Incarnation of the All-transcendent Mother-Shakti, the Creative Dynamis of the Divine.
First, she wants to realise her highest self through a sense of kinship with all earthlings whom she embraces in her inmost being accepting unflinchingly their "load of Fate".
Secondly, she wants to induce in them as it were the Godhead that is born in her by the miracle-touch of her will which has achieved unison with the Divine Will.
And lastly, she insists on transforming their humanity into utter Divinity by the alchemy of her soul-force overriding Fate, staking her all for the All-in-All.
The whole history and drama of this evolution in and through her is the Leitmotif of this epic poem — the mighty theme, the vibrant symphony. I would have liked to quote copiously from the earlier cantos to trace the evolution of this mighty diapason. But as that is not possible I shall have to be content with quoting only a few cogent extracts from the Book of Everlasting Day to illustrate how Sri Aurobindo has depicted in his mantric epic the movement to which I have referred.
Savitri comes first to petition the Divine that Satyavan to whom death has come prematurely be restored to her:
I know that I can lift man's soul to God,
I know that he can bring the Immortal down... .
Give not to darkness and to death thy sun,
Achieve thy wisdom's hidden firm decree
And the mandate of thy secret world-wide love.40
40 Ibid., p. 687.
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His first answer comes almost as an admonition:
How shall earth-nature and man's nature rise
To the celestial levels, yet the earth abide?41
Then after telling her that the gulf between Heaven and Earth cannot be bridged here and now (because Earth is still too far from the Consciousness of Heaven) the Lord says that though Earth may indeed espy a few stray gleams from Heaven's starland,
They are a Light that fails, a Word soon hushed
And nothing they mean can stay for long on earth.
There are high glimpses, not the lasting sight.42
For though He admits that
A few can climb to an unperishing sun,
Or live on the edges of the mystic moon,43
yet it is a stark fact borne out by history that
The heroes and the demigods are few
To whom the close immortal voices speak.44
True, the Divine Voice is heard through silence, but then
Few are the silences in which Truth is heard,
Unveiling the timeless utterance in her deeps.45
And though the great seers can and do win through to something of the Light Divine which means so much to earth, yet
Few are the splendid moments of the seers.
Heaven's call is rare, rarer the heart that heeds;
The doors of light are sealed to common mind.46
And if
Men answer to the touch of greater things,47
quickly enough
They slide back to the mud from which they climbed.48
Thus after damping her widowed ardour with such unanswerable arguments, He enjoins on her:
41 Ibid., p. 688. 42 Ibid., p. 689. 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid. 45 Ibid.
46 Ibid. 47 Ibid. 48Ibid.
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Leave to its imperfect light the earthly race:
All shall be done by the long act of Time....
Break into eternity thy mortal mould;
Melt, Lightning, into thy invisible flame.
Clasp, Ocean, deep into thyself thy wave,
Happy for ever in the embosoming surge.49
This was the Divine lilf of testing her as it is to come out directly — in the denouement. But as Savitri does not know this yet, she has to follow the lead of the highest light in her and so answers the "radiant God", a sunbeam answering the Sun:
In vain thou temptst with solitary bliss
Two spirits saved out of a suffering world;
My soul and his indissolubly linked
In the one task for which our lives were bom,
To raise the world to God in deathless Light,
To bring God down to the world on earth we came,
To change the earthly life to life divine.
I keep my will to save the world and man;
Even the charm of thy alluring voice,
oblissful godhead, cannot seize and snare.
Isacrifice not earth to happier worlds.50
A great answer of a great soul which has definitely turned its back on defeatism even against desperate odds. For Sri Aurobindo is not earth-averse. Has he not heard Earth's moving song so vibrant in his marvellous poem, The Life Heavens:
I, Earth, have a deeper power than Heaven;
My lonely sorrow surpasses its rose-joys,
A red and bitter seed of the raptures seven; —
My dumbness fills with echoes of a far Voice.51
Whether those who have not heard this her great message believe him or not he does not care for he has heard it as he wrote to me in an explanatory letter (when I asked him in despair how could such an inglorious, disharmonious and creaturely thing as our earth be redeemed):
All the non-evolutionary worlds are worlds limited to their
49 Ibid., p. 691-92. 50 Ibid., p. 692. 51 Collected Poems, SABCL, Vol. 5, p.
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own harmony like the "life heavens". The Earth, on the other hand, is an evolutionary world, not at all glorious or harmonious even as a material world (except in certain appearances) but rather most sorrowful, disharmonious, imperfect. Yet in that imperfection is the urge towards a higher and more many-sided perfection. It contains the last finite which yet yearns to the Supreme Infinite, it is not satisfied by sense joys precisely because in the conditions of the earth it is able to see their limitations. God is pent in the mire — mire is not glorious, so there is no claim to glory or beauty here — but the very fact imposes a necessity to break through that prison to a consciousness which is ever rising towards the heights.52
It is true, as he admitted in the same letter, that at present, so long as the earth remains as supine as she is, there can be "no question of a divine life". Nevertheless, as he indicates in his poem A God's Labour,
Heaven's fire is lit in the breast of the earth
And the undying suns here bum;
Through a wonder cleft in the bounds of birth
The incarnate spirits yeam
Like flames to the kingdoms of Truth and Bliss:
Down a gold-red stair-way wend
The radiant children of Paradise
Clarioning darkness's end.53
No one can possibly understand Sri Aurobindo until he has learnt to take full account of his appreciation of the glorious divine potentiality lying latent in what he terms "the earth-consciousness." This we find in his Ideal of Human Unity, in his The Life Divine and lastly, in the constant emphasis in his The Synthesis of Yoga on the nature of the Divine that is sought, who is "not a remote extra-cosmic reality, but a half-veiled Manifestation present and near us here in the universe." And it is because he has known this through the sanction of the Supreme in his missioned soul that he asseverates again and again that it is "here, in life, on earth in the body that we have to unveil the Godhead."
52 From a letter to the author.
53 Collected Poems, SABCL, Vol. 5, p. 102.
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He has stressed this tirelessly to us in his various letters and messages till in Savitri he repeats it with the luminous accent of the inspired Word that is Poetry. So Savitri posits that the earth-life must translate a Divine Purpose, because —
If earth can look up to the light of heaven
And hear an answer to her lonely cry,
Not vain their meeting, nor heaven's touch a snare.54
And here is her reason dictated not by her brain but her heart:
If thou and I are true, the world is true;
Although thou hide thyself behind thy works,
To be is not a senseless paradox;
Since God has made earth, earth must make in her God;
What hides within her breast she must reveal.
I claim thee for the world that thou hast made.55
To which the propitiated Godhead answers, beginning to relent:
Thou art my vision and my will and voice... .56
But impatience is still to be deprecated:
Lead not the spirit in an ignorant world
To dare too soon the adventure of the Light.57
The same note of warning was sounded, in a previous Book, to Savitri's father, Aswapati:
Awake not the immeasurable descent,
Let not the impatient Titan drive thy heart... .58
Truth bom too soon might break the imperfect earth.59
But what Aswapati could not afford to disobey, Savitri can, because her soul is the last perfection of the aspiring Incarnation:
Bearing the burden of universal love,
A wonderful mother of unnumbered souls.60
Therefore when she is invited — or rather tempted — for the last
54 Savitri, pp. 692-93. 55 Ibid., p. 693. 56 Ibid., p. 693. 57 Ibid.
58 Ibid., p. 335-41. 59 Ibid., p. 335. 60 Ibid., p. 695.
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time by the assaying Godhead who offers her a quick exit out of the dismal world still unready for "the Immeasurable Descent":
Choose, spirit, thy supreme choice not given again,61
as there is still time to choose Nirvana bringing in its train an
End of the trouble of thy wandering thoughts,
Close of the journeying of thy pilgrim soul.
Accept, O music, weariness of thy notes,
O stream, wide breaking of thy channel banks.62
But the indomitable spirit of Savitri obstinately declines to accept a merely "personal salvation". She, indeed, craves His boon but for the whole world:
Thy peace, O Lord, a boon within to keep
Amid the roar and ruin of wild Time
For the magnificent soul of man on earth.
Thy calm, O Lord, that bears thy hands of joy...
Thy oneness, Lord, in many approaching hearts.63
But — as Sri Aurobindo wrote to me once in a letter — the Divine subjects His Incarnations to the fieriest of ordeals; so He asks her once again to reconsider her refusal to comply with His invitation:
A third time swelled the great admonishing call:
"I spread abroad the refuge of my wings."64
In other words, He asks her to seek final asylum under His wings where there is only peace and silence.
But Savitri is not to be deflected from the Goal: what is offered to her must be offered to all. So
... passionately the woman's heart replied:
"Thy energy, Lord, to seize on woman and man,
To take all things and creatures in their grief
And gather them into a mother's arms."65
Still God insists, for the last time:
A last great time the warning sound was heard:
"I open the wide eye of solitude
61Ibid., p. 696. 62Ibid. 63 Ibid., 696-97. 64 Ibid., p. 697. 65 Ibid.
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To uncover the voiceless rapture of my bliss...
Motionless in its slumber of ecstasy,
Resting from the sweet madness of the dance
Out of whose beat the throb of hearts was bom."66
But Savitri declines again and appeals to Him to deliver all, as against the elect, from the pain of life — to vouchsafe to all
Thy embrace which rends the living knot of pain,
Thy joy, O Lord, in which all creatures breathe,
Thy magic flowing waters of deep love,
Thy sweetness give to me for earth and men.67
Every authentic mystic knows that the Godhead's injunction to his devotee evolves with the latter's inner evolution. Everyone receives but in the measure of his receptivity. That is why Dhruva was first offered a kingdom and only when he refused it was he deemed eligible for the Boon of Vaikuntha. The lesser mystics are often content with inferior boons but, as they evolve, their aspiration too becomes greatened. That is, the lesser boons are offered to comparatively lesser hungers. Sri Aurobindo himself, as he said to us explicitly, had come to the Yoga to liberate his country but as he delved deeper, his lesser loves gave place to greater till he wanted the Divine Bliss and Light for all, not for himself and his countrymen only. That is why he heard the Voice also ascending in pitch and deepening in timbre as he progressed more and more in his Sadhana, till he compelled as it were the last sanction of the Supreme to his summit prayer voiced through Savitri:
Thy sweetness give to me for earth and men.68
"Seek and thou shalt find." He sought and found and, as he turned progressively deaf to the lesser appeals, he heard the answering Music also mount higher and higher in harmony and grandeur. This he has expressed in the final answer of the Godhead given to Savitri who is at long last granted the one boon she has sought:
O beautiful body of the incarnate Word,
Thy thoughts are mine, I have spoken with thy voice.
My will is thine, what thou hast chosen I choose.
All thou hast asked I give to earth and men... .
66Ibid. 67Ibid. 68Ibid.
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I lay my hands upon thy soul of flame,
I lay my hands upon thy heart of love,
I yoke thee to my power of work in Time.69
And this He concedes because He has assayed Savitri and not found her wanting —
Because thou hast obeyed my timeless will,
Because thou hast chosen to share earth's struggle and fate
And leaned in pity over earth-bound men
And turned aside to help and yearned to save,
I bind by thy heart's passion thy heart to mine
And lay my splendid yoke upon thy soul.70
And not content with a mere reassurance, He cries out apocalyptically:
oSun-Word, thou shalt raise the earth-soul to Light
And bring down God into the lives of men;
Earth shall be my work-chamber and my house,
My garden of life to plant a seed divine.
When all thy work in human time is done,
The mind of earth shall be a home of light,
The life of earth a tree growing towards heaven,
The body of earth a tabernacle of God.71
And therefore she acting as the divine intermediary, will bring to the earth the Boon of boons — the Divine Grace and Love acting in its native power of bliss and light. For this to be possible the Divine must use her as His radiant Representative, the Avatar:
I will pour delight from thee as from ajar,
I will whirl thee as my chariot through the ways,
I will use thee as my sword and as my lyre,
I will play on thee my minstrelsies of thought.72
And then she with Satyavan will be doing His Will:
You shall reveal to them the hidden eternities,
The breath of infinitudes not yet revealed,
Some rapture of the bliss that made the world,
Some rush of the force of God's omnipotence,
69 Ibid., p. 698. 70 Ibid. 71 Ibid., p. 699. 72 Ibid., p. 701.
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Some beam of the omniscient Mystery.73
And at that fateful hour
The Mighty Mother shall take birth in Time
And God be bom into the human clay
In forms made ready by your human lives.
Then shall the Truth supreme be given to men... .
The superman shall wake in mortal man
And manifest the hidden demigod
Or grow into the God-Light and God-Force
Revealing the secret deity in the cave....
Annulling the decree of death and pain,
Erasing the formulas of the Ignorance....
Ruling earth-nature by Eternity's law... 74
When
Life's tops shall flame with the Immortal's thoughts,
Light shall invade the darkness of its base,75
When superman is bom as Nature's king
His presence shall transfigure Matter's world:
He shall light up Truth's fire in Nature's night,
He shall lay upon the earth Troth's greater law;
Man too shall turn towards the Spirit's call.76
And then
A divine force shall flow through tissue and cell
And take the charge of breath and speech and act
And all the thoughts shall be a glow of suns
And every feeling a celestial thrill....
Nature shall live to manifest secret God,
The Spirit shall take up the human play,
This earthly life become the life divine.77
DILIP KUMAR ROY
73 Ibid., p. 705. 74 Ibid., p. 709. 75Ibid., p.707
76 Ibid., pp. 705- 06. 77 Ibid., p. 707. 11
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