Perspectives of Savitri - Part 2

Savitri, the Mother

1

THE cup has to be emptied again and again if it is to be filled with ever-new riches. The vessel of the human consciousness has to be kept free and ready for the advent of the felicities of the higher altitudes of being. For what prevents the inflow of the Higher Consciousness into the Lower is precisely the spirit of holding, grabbing and egoistic appropriation. Such a spirit not only insulates the gifts of Grace and therefore shuts the personality from the Source but goes on distorting and corrupting them and therefore degrading itself in the process. This may lead to the denial and betrayal of the Grace, which becomes the iron curtain separating the being from That. The solution recommended in all spiritual disciplines to avoid this perilous rejection of Grace, brahma nirākaraṇa, is to offer the gifts of the Divine Mother to Herself for Her use and work. This keeps the being always in contact with the Divine, before, during and after the act of receiving. And the consciousness of the sadhaka begins to realise that the Divine is greater than all Her gifts and Her gifts are valuable because they embody Her Consciousness. So the true delight of the being is in communing with the Divine Consciousness in the gifts and not in the powers which accompany them. In fact, a gift from the Divine is a partial manifestation of the Divine Consciousness sent to the sadhaka to prepare him for receiving more and more complete manifestations till the whole and integral Divine Plenitude is established in him. This process is prevented or stopped only by the play of the separative individual consciousness with its ambitions in its ignorant and perverted state, and with its pride of knowledge and self-righteousness in its comparatively enlightened but none-fhe-less unregenerate state. The true fulfilment for the individual is in being a focal centre, one of the multitudinous centres for the manifestation of the Divine Consciousness. It is to be at the centre of the Cross for the manifestation of the Higher Part of the Transcendent both sideways and downwards in the universal consciousness around and below. This is possible only when the separate formation of the individual personality is dissolved and the separate limited functioning of the

---

instruments is made silent. The organs in man—his senses, vital being, heart, mind and the inner being—are so many concentrations and therefore limitations of consciousness meant and developed to cognise, express and execute very finite movements of the finite and finitising lower consciousness. These concentrations have to be released and the consciousnesses pent up in them soaked in the Divine substratum and its infinity if they are to manifest the Eternal. This twofold preparation of the individuality and the instrumental personality is achieved by the great discipline and experience of Nirvana. For, Nirvana ensures an eternal emptiness in the being and the becoming and therefore a permanent foundation for the manifestation of the Highest Superconscient. The Divine Consciousness is a paradoxical blending of Mastery and Servitude, Transcendence and Immanence, Lordship and Humility, Fullness and Emptiness. The sadhana of Nirvana establishes in Savitri, the Mother, this divine emptiness, the prelude to the Suprarnental Manifestation.

2

The profound inner revolutions and heightenings of consciousness in the Yoga of Savitri when she began the search for the soul, entered into the inner countries, contacted the Triple Soul-Forces, found the Soul, entered into Nirvana and discovered the All-Negating Absolute, are essentially experiences within and they have not yet begun to change her corporeal substance enough to make all the human beings recognise the mighty transformation in her. They are "accustomed only to read outward signs" and so "none saw aught new in her, none divined her state." They are engaged in their normal daily routine of sparing activities and plodding, small unchanging works in the atmosphere of the happy quiet of ascetic peace, and the characteristic smiling old beauty of the landscape. Nature, the Ancient Mother, continued to be passionately attached to Savitri and responded in a thousand different ways revealing her possessive love and ignorance of the changes within or the possible and inevitable mutations without.

She too was her old gracious self to men....

To all she was the same perfect Savitri:

A greatness and a sweetness and a light

Page 80

---

Poured out from her upon her little world.

Life showed to all the same familiar face,

Her acts followed the old unaltered round,

She spoke the words that she was wont to speak

And did the things she had always done.*

The glow and warmth of her psychicised personality manifesting the wideness of the higher consciousness have been the experience of all before and they feel the same even now. They are not aware of the inner transformation in her consciousness.

They saw a person where was only God's vast,

A still being or a mighty nothingness.

Savitri's experience of Nirvana "does not lose hold of Existence and the universe. This Nivarana, this self-extinction, while it gives an absolute peace and freedom to the soul within, is yet consistent in practice with a desireless but effective action without." She has realised "the possibility of an entire motionless impersonality and void Calm within doing outwardly the works of the eternal verities, Love, Truth and Righteousness." She is passing through the great experience of the Buddha, Sakyamuni, and the Seer of the Taittiriya Upanishad who spoke of the Asat, the Non-Existent, which "alone was in the beginning and out of which the existent was bom." The mind, heart, will and the senses register no movement, for there are no formations in them at all. And everything is done in and by the Void—all word, speech and act. An unknown unfelt energy kept the body intact or it was impelled by the momentum gathered in the past, by Nature.

Perhaps she bore made conscious in her breast

The miraculous Nihil, origin of our souls

And source and sum of the vast world's events,

The womb and grave of thought, a cipher of God,

A zero circle of being's totality.

It used her speech and acted in her acts,

It was beauty in her limbs, life in her breath;

The original Mystery wrote her human face.

*N.B. All Savitri quotations in this article are from The Book of Yoga, Canto Seven, pp. 551-57.

Page 81

---

The Absolute Non-Existence is "an absolute eternally unrealised Potentiality, an enigmatic zero of the Infinite out of which relative potentialities may at any time emerge, but only some actually succeed in emerging into phenomenal appearance." All the movements of the instrumental personality are now taking place without their instrumentation. This is an experience more profound than the one in which all the instruments make their movements because of the very presence and presiding influence, sannidhimātra, of a deeper consciousness. The Nihil contains all and so it does all including waking, speaking, breathing, maintenance of the cell-shape and cell-harmony. Savitri is passing through the great experience of the Tao.

3

Steeped in the womb of Nirvana, Savitri could well see the other possibility taken advantage of by the souls with the push to Nirvana as their elected and chosen destiny. It is the absolute withdrawal of the consciousness from all manifestation and the possibility of it at all and dissolution or laya in the Asat. Now the mortal ego perishes in God's night:

Only a body was left, the ego's shell

Afloat mid drift and foam of the world-sea,

A sea of dream watched by a motionless sense

In a figure of unreal reality.

The progressive dissolution of the separative consciousness seems to lead inevitably by the very momentum gathered by the annihilating power of Nirvana to the absolving of all individuality as well. One could foresee in one's impersonal consciousness with its peculiar non-mental mode the threatening abrogation of all individuality and even cosmic consciousness.

The individual die, the cosmos pass;

These gone, the transcendental grew a myth,

The Holy Ghost without the Father and Son,

Or, a substratum of what once had been,

Being that never willed to bear a world

Restored to its original loneliness,

Impassive, sole, silent, intangible.

Page 82

---

This is a state beyond all gradations of consciousness where hierarchy has no meaning and all fixation of boundaries and planes of being has become fluid and non-existent. Thus the Transcendent Divine Father and the Individual Immanent Divine Son have merged in their basic substratum of the enveloping and brooding consciousness of all so-called planes of being and becoming, the Holy Ghost. Each world is only a kind of concentration or crystallisation of the Original Consciousness delimiting itself and measuring itself in a special way and keeping to the particular rhythm or Dharma which holds all things, beings, forces and personalities in that plane. This power of finitising the Infinite, the Great Maya, is passed by and penetrated and the basic Asat is experienced. Or rather, the sole Original loneliness has withdrawn the Maya into itself and so Infinity remains Itself without any other. A complete plunge into this Original Immense Nude Consciousness is well-nigh possible and it is certainly the most powerful way of exit from the cosmos, Moksha. And there are souls with the definite push to Moksha as the deepest aspiration of their being and the path of exclusive Nirvana is the one quite valid and proper to them. Nirvana for them is an end in itself. The supreme and sublime Silence, Shanti, defying, denying, withdrawing and transcending all dynamism is all for them.

4

The Avyakta, Akshara or Shunya to which the experience of Nirvana leads is only an aspect of the Supreme Truth-Consciousness, which somehow includes it along with all mutable consciousness. The supreme Brahman, in the words of the ancient wisdom of the Upanishads, is at the same time the Quality-less and the All-Qualitied, nirguṇo guṇi The Great Purushottama, in the words of the Bhagavad Gita, transcends and includes the Immutable and the Mutable, Akshara and Kshara. The blending, and integration, of the two apparent opposites of Silence and Activity is made possible in the Infinite by a Higher effectuating Power, Para Prakriti, the Supramental Ishwari Shakti. And the road to the realisation of the Supramental is in and through the Silence. The poise in the Kshara and the lower Prakriti denies the static substratum and so becomes the field of contraries and dualities and therefore Ignorance—a Darkness. The stationing in the mere Akshara where Prakriti is held back denies all movement and so becomes the field of the One without any field. It is no doubt

Page 83

---

the realm of knowledge of the One but this knowledge, Vidya, excluded the Many and because of its apparent finality is, in the words of the Isha Upanishad, a greater Darkness —tato bhūya iva tamaḥ. If the Silence of the Nirvana is sought neither for its own sake nor as an end in itself and if one's aspiration is not limited by it, Nirvana points beyond itself to a Higher Superconscience, the plane of Integral Knowledge—vidyāṁ ca avidyāṁ ca ubhayaṁ veda. This makes the working on Prakriti by the Para Prakriti directly and with all its native dynamism and power for transformation a certainty and even inevitability. For this complex and complicated interconnectedness of the higher and the lower, the Divine and the Antidivine and Undivine, the Silence and the Activity, itself ensures and warrants the interplay of the Higher on the Lower and the consequent transformation when the highest is brought into touch with the lowest. The divine emptiness of the consciousness of Savitri has made the working of the Supramental on the lower triple world of Ignorance, where she has come, possible. So with Savitri the Silence of the Nirvana becomes the base, the necessary base, for the Transcendent Supermind to manifest in the world of Ignorance.

Yet all was not extinct in this deep loss;

The being travelled not towards nothingness.

There was some high surpassing Secrecy...

In the hush of the profound and intimate night

She turned to the face of a veiled voiceless Truth

Hid in the dumb recesses of the heart

Or waiting beyond the last peak climbed by Thought,—

Unseen itself it sees the struggling world

And prompts our quest, but cares not to be found,—

Out of that distant Vast came a reply.

This Supermind is contacted in two ways: by the method of vertical ascent of consciousness crossing the Overmental Cosmic or global awareness—the last peak climbed by Thoughts—or by the lateral inward penetration of consciousness leading to the identification with the Divine behind the Psychic Being who lifts the blazing lamp of Supramental Knowledge from within to the completely consecrated devotee; teṣamahaṁ samuddhartā jnānadipena bhāswatā. And this miracle happens in the depths and the heights of the being far removed from the daylight wakeful awareness, in the night of the surface consciousness, yā niśā sarvabhūtānāṁ tasyāṁ jāgarti saṁyamī. The

Page 84

---

immobile silence of Nirvana in which all the instruments have been steeped has stopped their finitising, delimiting and even at their very best only translating power. Mind, heart and body have become ready to manifest the Transcendent directly.

These thoughts were formed not in her listening brain,

Her vacant heart was like a stringless harp:

Impassive the body claimed not its own voice,

But let the luminous greatness through it pass.

Her consciousness has become the playground of the Infinite with its White Lightning Light, the All-Puissant Agni, the Omniscient Vidyashakti. What the sages had realised as far distant glimpses in a trance of the highest tapasya, she reveals naturally and spontaneously to their joy and surprise.

Something unknown, unreached, inscrutable

Sent down the messages of its bodiless Light,

Cast lightning flashes of a thought not ours,

Crossing the immobile silence of her mind:

In its might of irresponsible sovereignty

It seized on speech to give those flamings shape,

Made beat the heart of wisdom in a word

And spoke immoral things through mortal lips.

Or, listening to the sages of the woods,

In question and in answer broke from her

High strange revealings impossible to men,

Something or someone secret and remote

Took hold of her body for his mystic use,

Her mouth was seized to channel ineffable truths,

Knowledge unthinkable found an utterance.

Astonished by a new enlightenment,

Invaded by a streak of the Absolute,

They marvelled at her, for she seemed to know

What they had only glimpsed at times afar.

5

The sadhana of Savitri differs basically from the sadhana of most yogis and tapaswins. They start by forming a strong individual

Page 85

---

personality, an enlightened Purusha in some level of their being— Vital, Mental or Overmental or very rarely indeed Supramental. But the Purusha so formed however great and unique and full of Light and Plenitude of the Higher and sometimes even the Highest Truth-Consciousness remains an isolated miracle of creation, a Siddha or Perfect Man in a world of imperfect beings. For, even the formation of one Gnostic Individual does not solve the problem of earth-consciousness. But Savitri has offered even this very Gnostic individuality of hers to the Supreme Lord by passing through the experience of Nirvana, the extinction of all separative individuality and delimiting finitising movement of the instrumental members of the personality. She has "annulled herself so that God might be. So her divine emptiness has become now an instrument of the dual power at being's occult poles"—the supreme Superconscient above and the nethermost Inconscient below.

Inconscient Nature dealt with the world it had made,

And using still the body's instruments

Slipped through the conscious void she had become;

The superconscient Mystery through that Void

Missioned its word to touch the thoughts of men.

All the movements of this world with its Inconscient foundation are accepted and have their impact on her consciousness. But her consciousness on any level no longer gives the usual response of the finite members in ignorance. For there is now no witnessing mind in her, not the hushed receiving heart, nor the individualised separate person reacting with whatever great or small poise of her being.

A thought came through draped as an outer voice.

It called not for the witness of the mind,

It spoke not to the hushed receiving heart;

It came direct to the pure perception's seat,

An only centre now of consciousness,

If centre could be where all seemed only space;

No more shut in by body's walls and gates,

Her being a circle without circumference

Already now surpassed all cosmic bounds

And more and more spread into infinity.

This is the state of being the universalised individual, a conscious "nit not separative intermediary between the Inconscient and the

Page 86

---

Superconscient, the Lord and His universe.

This being was its own unbounded world,

A world without form or feature or circumstance,

It had no ground, no wall, no roof of thought,

Yet saw itself and looked on all around

In a silence motionless and illimitable.

There was no person there, no centred mind,

No seat of feeling on which beat events

Or objects wrought and shaped reactions's stress.

Her identification with the Lord is so complete that she no longer reacts in any sense of the word. All outer and inner response bom of a separate individual formation in personality or instrumentality has given place to an absolute stillness and immobility and therefore absolute readiness and passivity for the Supramental Shakti and the Divine's hour of manifestation. This integral readiness to embody and manifest is the whole and the only question now. And the readiness is all.

There was no motion in this inner world,

All was a still and even infinity.

In her the Unseen, the Unknown waited his hour.

6

All spiritual sadhana or cultivation of inner life involves the cleansing, enlarging, deepening and heightening of the instruments of perception in man's personality. Every instrument—the senses, the vital, the mental or the subliminal—is just a finite concentration of consciousness in one plane of Being, and that is the reason why its vision of the world outside is so partial and limited. The most intensive and extensive cultivation of any one of these instruments could give the vision of the corresponding element in its field of functioning— the outer forms of things for the senses, the dynamic feelings motivating things for the vital the Idea-Forces working behind for the mind and the occult Forces permeating these for the subliminal. But even the sadhana which does not neglect any one of these instruments but includes them all misses the basic substratum of the Spiritual Ether where all worlds have their being. Hence the need felt in the

Page 87

---

great spiritual adventure of negating all these in order to get at the Fundamental Spiritual Essence. The instrument which perceives this Essence is often the spiritualised mind which sees It as a Vast Impersonal Infinite Consciousness negating all worlds and when it is completely steeped in That sees only That and declares all worlds as non-existent and That as the sole Existent. The next step is to deny the Existence of the Existent and lose all consciousness or awareness in the All-negating Void, the Non-Being behind even the Being. Sometimes the Essence is approached through the spritualised heart and its vision of That is of a Supreme Person to whom all must raise their being, leaving aside all the worlds. Anyway, the gulf between the Ultimate Reality and the Manifestation remains unbridged and is pronounced unbridgeable. In fact, all such talk of bridging the gulf is looked upon as an indication of ignorant attachment to the Darkness and a lack of readiness for the plunge into the Great Light of the Supreme. But the yogic sadhana of Savitri, the Mother, shows a different road to the Essence which sees no gulf, because there is no gulf, between the Ultimate and the Manifestation. The gulf is the creation of the spiritualised mind or the spiritualised heart because of their inability to hold together what appear to be sharp opposites. For, in the language of the Isha Upanishad: "It is He that has gone abroad—That which is bright, bodiless, without scar of imperfection, without sinews, pure, unpierced by evil. The Seer, the Thinker, the One who becomes everywhere, the Self-existent has ordered objects perfectly according to their nature from years sempiternal." The problem arises because the Reality and the Manifestation are seen not as the Reality sees but as the faculties or the instruments in man's personality, however spiritualised, perceive. One has to pass beyond the spiritualised consciousness to the Spirit and partake of Its creative integral vision. The natural poise of the Supreme Spirit is the Supramental Truth-Consciousness, Rita-Chit, where all contraries are reconciled and realised as complementaries so necessary for the fulfilment of the complex destinies of the many-sided manifestation. To raise oneself to the Supramental is to realise immediately that Its Consciousness is a complete fulfilment of all that the faculties or instruments of perception in man have been aspiring for. In fact, there is a Divine Sense, a Divine Vital, a Divine Mind and a Divine Subliminal in the Supramental whose distortions or imperfect manifestations are these so-called instruments of perception. It is possible by opening all the instruments to the corresponding divine counterparts in the Supramental to divinise and transform these, and

Page 88

---

every individual who does this in himself free from any egoistic motive becomes himself the bridge between Eternity and Time.

7

The sadhana of Savitri hitherto has been precisely one of passing beyond all faculties or instruments of perception and her entry into Nirvana has served the purpose of liberating her simultaneously from the imprisonment in the separative ego or individuality and the finite faculties. She now waits on the threshold of the Transcendent Supramental in an integral readiness to receive and transmit to the world around whatever That chooses to reveal or manifest. In this trance in waiting and luminous tranquillity she hears the Word of the Silence, the supreme Anahata Nada. This trance is not indeed a hypnotic one of blissful non-awareness of the world around but one which combines with the complete wakeful awareness of the external world—with its sleeping Satyavan and the enormous Night—the awareness of all the ranges of consciousness between the surface and the superconscient, with the Unknowable's Vast.

A voice began to speak from her own heart

That was not hers, yet mastered thought and sense.

Now she listens to "a great Word bom from the mute unseen omniscient Ray. The Voice that only Silence' ear has heard leaps missioned from an eternal glory of Day." This voice is beyond all thought and feeling, the two major powers or instruments of man's personality—the reflecting, brooding or seeing part and the contacting, experiencing or emotive part. But the voice is the voice of the all-fulfilling Supramental and therefore it masters thought and sense. Human thought and human sense are now completely taken and transformed into the nature of Divine Thought and Divine Sense. The result is an instantaneous transvaluation of all values in the light of the Supramental Truth-Consciousness.

As it spoke all changed within her and without;

All was, all lived; she felt all being one.

It is the vision of the One omnipresent Reality affirming all, denying nothing, no, not even the nothing or non-being or the all-negating

Page 89

---

Absolute. All was. But everything not only exists but has a movement characteristically its own, a growth of consciousness according to its nature, Swabhava, and rhythm of self-development, Swadharma. All lived. The Ultimate Reality is not only the supporting consciousness of all but That is the moving dynamic consciousness of all. But all the multitudinous organisations of consciousness are still the One Supreme Being. She felt all being one. The vision of Oneness everywhere and always in all planes of being and rhythms of movement is the keynote of the Music of the Supramental. The deluded impression of the unreality of the world which is the product of looking at things from the standpoint of the spiritualised mind is no longer there. There is now no need for erecting a mental model of an external universe which is only a structure in the mind and at best an indicative symbol or sign. For now the Spirit sees all with its own characteristic supramental mode of Truth-Vision.

A spirit, a being saw created things

And cast itself into unnumbered forms

And was what it saw and made; all now became

An evidence of one stupendous truth,

A Truth in which negation had no place,

A being and a living consciousness,

A stark and absolute Reality.

All are seen as the Brahman, sarvam khalwidaṁ brahma, vāsudeavḥ sarvaṁ. The Reality is not only all being but also all becoming, purusha evedaṁ sarvaṁ.

There the unreal could not find a place,

The sense of unreality was slain:

There all was conscious, made of the Infinite,

All had a substance of Eternity.

The Finite is not the opposite of the Infinite but one mode of being of the very Infinite. Time is not the opposite of Eternity but one organisation in the Eternal's bosom. Space and Time are only the frontal manifestations of the Infinite and the Eternal.

Page 90

---

8

Reality is One whatever be the plane of manifestation and the same Sachchidananda is in the end as the Unmanifest Beyond. Even the Non-Being glimpsed and entered into in the experience of Nirvana is the same Reality:

Yet this was the same Indecipherable.

In fact, there is even a resemblance between the experience of the universe in the state of Nirvana and the present experience of the world in the Supramental Vision—the perception of the universe as a dream. Only, in Nirvana the dream is an unsubstantial pageant emerging from nowhere, existing in a void and dissolving into Nothing, leaving not a rack behind. The seer and the seen in Nirvana are negated and dissolved in the original Void. But in the Supramental Vision, the soul is recovered and made one with the world it sees in a tremendously real spiritual consciousness. The universe and the manifestation are the dynamic dreams of the Truth-Consciousness with a reality as concrete and more concrete than the wakeful reality. The solidity and substance of the dream get their strength from embodying the being or consciousness of the Eternal. The clasp of the world by the soul is a living experience of ecstatic oneness.

It was her self, it was the self of all,

It was the reality of existing things,

It was the consciousness of all that lived

And felt and saw; it was Timelessness and Time,

It was the Bliss of formlessness and form.

It was all Love and the one Beloved's arms,

It was sight and thought in one all-seeing Mind,

It was joy of being on the peaks of God.

The Supreme Lord is Sat, eternal Existence in all the levels of consciousness and organisations of consciousness in each level Chit, the consciousness which comprehends and feels in all, and the principle of Ananda which holds all together and in existence. Eternity and Time, Impersonality and Personality are one Divine Consciousness. The subject, the object and the contacting or enveloping or uniting medium of all experience of knowing and loving are the Lord's Being. The Supermind is the creator of all and organiser

Page 91

---

of all and once in tune with it one gets absolutely free from the cramping limitations of movement of the instruments of perception. One moves and ranges freely in all the planes of consciousness in the manifest and the unmanifest levels. One explores the infinites of the Infinite in the Superconscient above with as much freedom as one sounds the depths of the Inconscient below. Or one widens oneself to embrace the whole universe laterally or reduces one's consciousness to a point. All kinds of concentration of consciousness, inclusive, exclusive, transcendent, enveloping and encompassing are normal and natural and simultaneous to the Supramental Awareness.

She was all vastness and one measureless point,

She was a height beyond heights, a depth beyond depths,

She lived in the everlasting and was all

That harbours death and bears the wheeling hours.

It is precisely because of the limitations of the powers of awareness of the instruments of perception that the contraries appear as contraries. But in the Supramental Awareness

All contraries were true in one huge spirit

Surpassing measure, change and circumstance.

Thus the three poises of the Individual, Universal and the Transcendent usually perceived by even the spiritualised mind or heart as exclusive of each other and therefore capable of being experienced only separately are perceived simultaneously.

An individual, one with cosmic self

In the heart of the Transcendent's miracle

And the secret of World-personality

Was the creator and the lord of all.

Mind, Life and Body are not opposites of the Spirit but fields for the manifestation of endless powers of the higher consciousness.

Mind was a single innumerable look

Upon himself and all that he became,

Life was his drama and the Vast a stage,

The universe was his body, God its soul.

Page 92

---

All phenomenon are the self-deployings of the one Noumenon.

All was one single immense reality,

All its innumerable phenomenon.

9

The Supramental Vision "not only recognises eternal Spirit as the inhabitant of this bodily mansion, the wearer of this mutable robe, but accepts Matter of which it is made, as a fit and noble material out of which He weaves constantly His garbs, builds recurrently the unending series of His mansions. Perceiving behind their appearances the identity in essence of these two extreme terms of existence, it is able to say in the very language of the ancient Upanishads 'Matter also is Brahman,' and to give its full value to the vigorous figure by which the physical universe is described as the external body of the divine Being."

Her spirit saw the world as living God;

It saw the One and knew that all was He.

The ground of all manifestation, the space where all the creation is laid and the movements happen is the Absolute Consciousness. Ignorance and Knowledge, Light and Darkness are organised in the same Sachchidananda. Even all the movements in time are only the movements of the Divine Consciousness. Nature and the Self, Prakriti and Purusha are no longer separate but the whole of Nature is felt in the self.

All Nature's happenings were events in her,

The heart-beats of the cosmos were her own,

All beings, thought and felt and moved in her.

This identity with the universal consciousness and beings is not limited to the mental or the vital but extends and includes all the physical consciousness as well.

Her mind became familiar with its mind,

Its body was her body's larger frame

In which she lived and knew herself in it

Page 93

---

One, multitudinous in its multitudes.

She was a single being, yet all things.

"She is the world and of the world, but also exceeds it in her consciousness and lives in her self of transcendence above it; she is universal but free in the universe, individual but not limited by a separative individuality. Her true Person is not an isolated entity, her individuality is universal; for she individualised the universe: it is at the same time divinely emergent in a spiritual air of transcendent infinity, like a cloud-surpassing summit; for she individualises the divine Transcendence. All beings are to her her own selves, all ways and powers of consciousness are felt as the ways and powers of her own universality."

She was no more herself but all the world.

Out of the infinitudes all came to her,

Into the infinitudes sentient she spread,

Infinity was her own natural home.

Nowhere she dwelt, her spirit was everywhere,

The distant constellations wheeled round her,

Earth saw her bom, all worlds were her colonies,

The greater worlds of life and mind were hers;

All Nature reproduced her in its lines,

Its movements were large copies of her own.

She was the single self of all these selves,

She was in them and they were all in her.

10

The first experience of this complete identification with the cosmic consciousness in one of losing one's separate identity in the universal subconscient, material, vital, emotional and mental consciousness.

What seemed herself was an image of the Whole.

She was the subconscient life of tree the flower,

The outbreak of the honied buds of spring;

She burned in the passion and splendour of the rose,

She was the red heart of the passion-flower,

The dream-white of the lotus in its pool.

Out of subconscient life she climbed to mind,

Page 94

---

She was thought and the passion of the world's heart,

She was the godhead hid in the heart of man,

She was the climbing of his soul to God.

The cosmos flowered in her, she was its bed.

She was Time and the dreams of God in Time;

She was Space and the wideness of his days.

A deep concentration seized on me, and I perceived that I was identifying myself with a single cherry-blossom, then through it with all cherry-blossoms, and, as I descended deeper in the consciousness, following a stream of bluish force, I became suddenly the cherry-tree itself, stretching towards the sky like so many arms its innumerable branches laden with their sacrifice of flowers. Then I heard distinctly this sentence:

"Thus hast Thou made thyself one with the soul of cherry-trees and so Thou canst take not that it is the Divine who makes the offering of this flower-prayer to heaven."

When I had written it, all was effaced; but now the blood of the cherry-tree flows in my veins and with it flows an incomparable peace and force. What difference is there between the human body and the body of a tree? In truth, there is none, the consciousness which animates them is identically the same.

Then the cherry-tree whispered in my ear:

"It is in the cherry-blossom that lies the remedy for the disorders of the spring..."*

Having thus the whole of the cosmos in her consciousness she rises into the Transcendental and so becomes the conscious bridge between the Eternal and the Temporal, the Infinite and the Finite, the Superconscient and the Inconscient.

From this she rose where Time and Space were not;

The superconscient was her native air,

Infinity was her movement's natural space;

Eternity looked out from her on Time.

Within a few days the new conquest was established, affirmed. And what Thou expectest from the centre of consciousness represented at present upon earth by my whole being, grew clear before it: To be the life in all material forms, the thought organising and using this life in all forms, the love widening, enlightening,

* Prayers and Meditations. CWM, Vol. 1, p. 359.

Page 95

---

intensifying, uniting all the varied elements of this thought, and thus, through a total identification with the manifested world, to be able to intervene with full power in its transformations.

On the other hand, by a perfect surrender to the Supreme Principle, to become aware of the Truth and the eternal Will that manifests it. Through this identification having become the faithful servant and sure intermediary of the divine Will, and uniting this conscious identification with the Principle to the conscious identification with its becoming, to mould and model consciously the love, mind and life of the becoming in accordance with the Law of Truth of the Principle.

This is how the individual being can be the conscious mediator between the absolute Truth and the manifested universe and intervene in the slow, uncertain march of the Yoga of Nature in order to give it the swiftness, intensity and sureness of the divine Yoga.

This is how in certain periods the entire terrestrial life seems to cross miraculously over stages which at other times would require thousands of years to traverse.

At present, O Lord, the state of perfect and conscious surrender to Thy eternal will is, as far as I can tell, constant, invariable behind every act, every movement of the mind, the vital or the body. This imperturbable calm, this deep, peaceful, unchanging bliss, which never leave me—are they not a proof of this?

Passive or receptive identification with life, thought and love in all manifested forms is an accomplished fact, apparently inevitable consequence of surrender to pure Truth.

But the moments when consciousness becomes effectively the life animating and moulding all material forms, the intelligence organising life, and the love illuminating the intelligence, in an active and fully conscious way, at once in the totality and the least detail, with a sense of infinite plenitude and precise powers— these moments are still intermittent though growing more and more frequent and lasting.

It is in these movements that the two consciousnesses are simultaneous and fuse into a single, almost indescribable, ineffable consciousness in which are united Immutable Eternity and Eternal Movement. It is in these moments that the present work begins to be accomplished.*

M.V. SlTARAMAN

* Ibid .,pp. 300-01.

Page 96