On Savitri
THEME/S
PART II
The Book of Beginnings:
Our journey starts in the morning, the hour of the "symbol dawn". Turn the first page of Savitri and a door opens within. On this threshold pause, while Sri Aurobindo's vision unfolds to the inner eye. Around us the star-field stretches to infinity, but now look down to where, far below, a dark planet moves ponderously in its orbit around the sun. Sri Aurobindo is showing us our earth "abandoned in the hollow gulfs". He calls upon all the resources of the English language as if to counterbalance with the weight of his words the sullen inertia of the circling globe. It is heavy, dull, opaque, impassive, soulless—with more than a score of adjectives Sri Aurobindo underlines the impression of matter impervious to light. If we do not immediately recognise in this powerful symbol the image of our mortal state, our "ignorance", the physical mind's perpetual revolution in the same worn groove of thought, it is because we are accustomed to look outward and upward, away from the inner darkness. The contemplation of this darkness however, is the point at which our journey begins. For it is the hour before the gods awake.
Who are these gods? Where and when will they awake? These questions are crucial to our understanding of Savitri as a way of initiation. Sri Aurobindo describes the gods as "universal powers descended from the Truth-Consciousness which build up the harmony of the worlds and in man his progressive perfection." 1 These powers are psychological. The first light of dawn touching the earth is Sri Aurobindo's symbol of their awakening within the individual seeker, just as, in the poem, it heralds the awakening of the evolutionary urge in nature. The Vedic Agni, coming first, rises in us as a fire of aspiration, for it is he who "speaks for us the true thought of Earth and Heaven" and "makes perfect the Rite of the Path."2 These powers are delegates of the divine Mother presiding over all manifestation who "has made her soul the body of our state."
In the darkness that precedes the awakening of the gods, a child's hand reaches out blindly towards something, "someone", without a name. That child is man the seeker. In such a work as Savitri we may
1The Secret of the Veda.
2Hymns to the Mystic Fire.
expect the outer scene as described by Sri Aurobindo to have its exact counterpart in an inner state. This is one of the secrets of Savitri and the reason why it speaks to us so intimately. The vision his words evoke for us—the new-bom infant searching the darkness—is a symbol of the divine consciousness "asleep" in a material universe and waiting "as the tree waits in the seed"; but it is no less, for the individual, an expression of the yearning in the deepest part of his being that calls the seeker to this path:
An unshaped consciousness desired light
And a blank prescience yearned toward distant change.
As if a childlike finger laid on a cheek
Reminded of the endless need in things
The heedless Mother of the universe
An infant longing clutched the sombre vast.3
We are about to begin our journey: Sri Aurobindo himself, as Aswapati, will be our guide. Savitri, with its luminous images and powerful music that speak directly to our innermost being, is the supreme travel-guide to what we may encounter on the way. We have only to consent to listen—and see—in the mind's silence. Everything we need will be provided, so we will travel more swiftly if we bring nothing of our own but an ardent longing for this Truth we cannot yet name.
Our journey has many stages, each one culminating in an initiation, a change of consciousness or illumination making further progress possible. It is a journey of twenty-four steps lasting one lifetime or several (time and distance have no relevance here) through Part One of Savitri. The last step brings us home with one bound. But for now, let us experience the darkness of our own physical consciousness. We are about to leave behind the sightless spinning globe and when Sri Aurobindo shows it to us again, much later, we will see it with different eyes.
Becoming conscious of our ignorance, we have taken the first step. Now Sri Aurobindo begins to unveil for us the cosmic plan. Matter and Spirit are one substance: the Mother of the Universe has fallen asleep in matter and it is She herself who is bom of earth as the divine soul in us. Hers is "the infant longing" reaching out in us towards her Cosmic Self. Sri Aurobindo now sets before us a dazzling vision of divine love incarnate. In all Savitri there is no more perfect poetry
3 Savitri, p. 2.
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than the description of the radiant goddess in Book 1, Canto 2. Later she will appear in celestial splendour, but here, at the beginning, she is fully human. We recognise her as the one who from ancient times has exerted the most lasting hold on the imagination of mankind, and most powerfully drawn all peoples to her worship. Yet, as Savitri, she is more beautiful than the imagination of antiquity could conceive, more beautiful than the vision described by Apuleius4 which so captivated the Romans, or "the woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars" of the Book of Revelation. If Sri Aurobindo has thus unveiled her face to us so early in our quest, it is because without some glimpse of this divine potential in human nature, without some intimation of the love that only She inspires, we might lack the courage and motivating force to face the "darkness in terrestrial things," and the unknown beyond them.
Savitri, "bom among these tribes," is the Divine Word—a creative power, a saving grace. A conscious surrender to her Light is the indispensable condition of progress, for the individual as for the human race, for she alone "can link man's strength to a transcendent Force."5 Meditating on this light, extending its influence in our lives so that we act always from the summit of our consciousness, we prepare to take the next step: the yoga of the soul's release.
Our companion on the way is Aswapati the father of Savitri in this earthly life. It is not by chance that Sri Aurobindo portrays him as a "traveller of the worlds" and "a shining guest of time" whose mind is "like a fire assailing heaven". The same litany of titles was used by the seer-poets of the Veda to invoke the presence of Agni: "Crown must thou the guest shining with light... who makes perfect the rite of the path. Crown with your acts of purification the Seer whose speech has its home in the Light, the Carrier of offerings, the Traveller, the
4Apuleius describes his vision of a woman rising from the sea "with so lovely a face that the gods themselves would have fallen down in adoration of it" The vision speaks to him: "I am nature, universal Mother, mistress of all the elements, primordial child of time, sovereign of all things spiritual, Queen of the dead, Queen also of the immortals, the single manifestation of all gods and goddesses that are. My rod governs the shining heights of heaven, the wholesome sea breezes, the lamentable silences of the world below. Though I am worshipped in many aspects, known by countless names, and propitiated by all manner of different rites, yet the whole round earth venerates me." (Metamorphosis XI translated by Robert Graves)
5Savitri, p. 20.
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Godhead of Fire.6 His light in the mind enables "the strong discoverer, tireless thought" to force a passage through the lid of mind and tear open the veil behind the heart:
Thus came his soul's release from Ignorance,
His mind and body's first spiritual change.7
For the traveller on this path, Agni signifies the fire in the heart impelling him towards this first realisation. Everywhere in Savitri the psychological powers identified and named by the Seers are invoked by the power of Sri Aurobindo's language and vision. They, unseen companions, accompany us at every step of Aswapati's journey: Varuna active within is a remover of limits, Saraswati a bringer of revelation, Sarama the power of intuitive mind to search out Truth. In the mind's silence they interpret for us the images that rise and change before our eyes as Sri Aurobindo, as if by some magical process, conjures them line by line. These are images charged with a profound truth and significance beyond the capacity of language to express. Often we feel the nearness of
All-Knowledge packed into great wordless thoughts.8
and we begin to understand why the Mother declared "it is not in the mind or through the mind, it is in meditation that Savitri is revealed."
To the extent that we succeed in awakening these powers of perception lying dormant in our nature, we will be able to follow the initial stages of Aswapati's Yoga. Everything is revealed that the mind can know of Nature, and Man, and God. The Mother pointed out long ago: "He has shown the path, the way to liberate oneself from the ignorance and climb right up to the superconscience: each stage, each plane of consciousness, how they can be scaled, how one can cross even the barrier of death and reach immortality. You will find the whole journey in detail, and as you go forward you can discover things altogether unknown to man."9 How is this knowledge imparted to the seeker who turns to Savitri?
Through Sri Aurobindo's supreme mastery of the resources of language—yes, but even more so by living pictures that continue to unfold their infinity of meaning long after the book has been laid down. We may forget theories of evolution but who could forget the
6 Hymns to the MysticFire. 7 Savitri, p. 44.
8 Ibid., p. 38. 9 Extract from a conversation with the Mother on Savitri.
See also Perspectives of Savitri, Vol. I, p. 46
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image of the Earth-Goddess as "with sorrow dragging at her feet" she toils across the sands of time?
A Being is in her whom she hopes to know,
A Word speaks to her heart she cannot hear,
A Fate compels whose form she cannot see.
In her unconscious orbit through the Void
Out of her mindless depths she strives to rise,
A perilous life her gain, a struggling joy-
Ignorant and weary and invincible
She seeks through the soul's war and quivering pain
The pure perfection her marred nature needs,
A breath of Godhead on her stone and mire.10
We think we understand the human condition well enough, and have speculated about the existence of a Divine Creator, yet how narrow, insufficient and unsatisfactory all our speculations now appear when we experience Sri Aurobindo's magnificent sustained metaphor of the divine soul in man as "the sailor on the flow of Time", voyaging from the obscure ports of our origin to a destination in Eternity:
He leaves the last lands, crosses the ultimate seas,
He rums to eternal things his symbol quest;
Life changes for him its time-constructed scenes,
Its images veiling infinity.
Earth's borders recede and the terrestrial air
Hangs round him no longer its translucent veil.
He has crossed the limit of human thought and hope,
He has reached the world's end and stares beyond;
The eyes of mortal body plunge their gaze
Into Eyes that look upon eternity.
A greater world Time's traveller must explore.
At last he hears a chanting on the heights
And the far speaks and the unknown grows near:
He crosses the boundaries of the unseen
And passes over the edge of mortal sight
To a new vision of himself and things.11
But is it really possible to follow in the steps of Aswapati? We know, after all, that Sri Aurobindo is describing his own yogic
10 Savitri, pp. 50-51. 11Ibid, pp. 70-71.
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experience and that of the Mother. Can we really expect that their experience will be renewed in us? The obvious answer must be "No", followed after a certain amount of soul-searching by a qualified "Yes". The openers of the path have gone in front, and their labour is vain if there are none to follow. The experience may be renewed in us to the extent that past preparation has been made—in this life or other lives— and to the extent that we are open to what the Mother has called "the true vibrations of each stage of consciousness." There is no doubt that we are brought into direct contact with these true vibations through the medium of Savitri: "Savitri has an extraordinary power, it gives out vibrations for him who can receive them, the true vibrations of each stage of consciousness. It is incomparable, it is truth in its plenitude, the Truth Sri Aurobindo brought down on the earth. My child, one must try to find the secret that Savitri represents."12
The Mother's words give away part of that secret. As Aswapati climbs the World Stair, he experiences successively all the planes of consciousness that influence or impinge upon our own inner and outer being. These influences, for the most part undetected by our waking mental consciousness, are explored by Aswapati through the power of his Yoga. Their essence or their vibration as the Mother puts it, is captured and held by Sri Aurobindo before it has passed through the distorting filter of the analytic mind. It comes to us clothed in "Truth's form-robes by the Seers woven from spirit-threads"13 and charged with the initiatory power of a Mantra. The intellect retreats in silence from its vain attempt to analyse this miracle. So it is, that the experience may indeed be renewed for us, not only by the action in us of Sri Aurobindo's wonderful commentaries which satisfy the mind, but even more perfectly by his amazing defining insights instantly recognised as Truth.
Thus we may think we know what instinct is, but when Sri Aurobindo calls instinct the "chrysalis of Truth"14 the image opens a window in the mind onto vistas of meaning beyond the power of three common words to express. We may think we can distinguish faith from belief, until he reveals to us in a picture what faith really is:
To the celestial beauty of faith gave form
As if at flower-prints in a dingy room
Laughed in a golden vase one living rose.15
12 Perspectives of Savitri, Vol. 1, p. 49.
13Collected Poems, SABCL, Vol. 5, p. 599.
14 Savitri, p. 134. 15Ibid, p. 539.
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This is indeed "truth in its plenitude". Words we have used carelessly all our lives suddenly appear haloed with light in which the eye of meditation perceives an infinity of meaning. Images arise, beckoning the mind to follow them back to the plane of consciousness where they were bom. A phrase that seems quite ordinary is suddenly transported by the rhythm of a line or the momentum of a thought and carries the reader to a new level of understanding. This is part of the "extraordinary power" of which the Mother speaks. We do not then need to be clairvoyant or gifted with supernatural powers or fall into a trance to ascend the World-Stair with Aswapati. Each step corresponds to something deep within ourselves.
The fifteen steps of the World-Stair begin with the Kingdom of Subtle Matter and end with Aswapati's attainment of the Greater Knowledge. On the way he discovers the splendour of Life on its own plane and the "fall" of Life into material existence. To find out the cause of the fall he descends to the realm of Falsehood and Evil, then seeks in the Paradise of the Life Gods a remedy for the suffering of Earth under the rule of Night. He enters the vastness of the Mind planes and rises from them into the Heavens of the Ideal. Beyond the highest peaks of Illumined Mind, where "the Thinker sleeps in too much light"16 he discovers the World Soul. At last, surrendering his separate self at the feet of the Divine Mother, he reaches the end of his journey and the light of the Greater Knowledge.
The path of initiation also ends here. The consummation of Aswapati's Yoga is his integral surrender to the Divine. It is integral because he has become conscious in every part of his being, "has taken possession" of every part, and thus is able to make a perfect offering. Uniting his will with the Divine Will he makes an impassioned plea for an end to Earth's suffering, knowing that only the Divine Love incarnate in the world can end the reign of Falsehood and Death. His prayer is granted: Savitri will be bom on earth and thereafter she will take up the Yoga. All that can be done by Man's strength and courage and the divine soul in him is accomplished by Aswapati: What more needs to be done for earth and men is the work of the Divine Shakti. The remaining twenty-four steps of the Yoga belong to Savitri alone. This story is told in Parts Two and Three.
We who are at the beginning of the path have far to go. The world-plane of Subtle Matter lies closest te our own. Its perfect forms are the original template for our marred and contorted pirate copies.
16Ibid., p. 343.
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Leaving this plane with the memory of a lovely garden where a happy child sits laughing on a golden swing, Aswapati moves onward to explore the lavish extravagance of the Life plane, source of the heart's passions and all Man's vital longings.
He seeks the answer to a question: What power intervened to cause the fall of Life from its own perfection when it entered the world of Matter? The answer provides a key to the nature of the mission Savitri will later undertake out of love for Satyavan, who in the poem at the level of symbol represents "the soul carrying the divine truth of being within itself but descended into the grip of death and ignorance":17
The secret Will that robes itself with Night
And offers to spirit the ordeal of the flesh,
Imposed a mystic mask of death and pain.18
As we know, Savitri will one day tear away that mask. Life, free on its own plane to follow every imaginable line of development, on earth becomes a prey to Death. The constraints suffered by Life in the course of a painful evolution with its culmination in Man unroll before the witness eye of Aswapati. In the Kingdom of Little Life, Man is a "conscious doll pushed a hundred ways" by outer necessity and elemental forces that arise from the subconscious self disguised as his own impulse and desire. Mind, on its own plane "archangel of a white transcending realm" emerges in man as a "dwarf three-bodied trinity"—and who but Sri Aurobindo could flesh out such abstract concepts as physical mind, desire mind and reasoning mind, giving each a body, an appearance and human characteristics that are immediately recognisable? We know these manifestations of mind; they are people we have met and spoken to. They are also a part of our own being to be recognised and transcended.
The "Little Kingdoms" of life and mind reveal to us our lowly place on the World Stair. All our pretensions to knowledge are held up to the mirror of Truth. In a brilliant display of his mastery of language Sri Aurobindo translates the complex formulae of modem physics effortlessly into words and adds the wry comment:
Or so it seems to man's audacious mind
Who seats his thought as the arbiter of truth,
His personal vision as impersonal fact.19
17 Sri Aurobindo, Letters.
18Savitri, p. 130. 19Ibid., p. 155.
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There will be time to hold up the mirror and see ourselves reflected in it before taking the next step.
The planes of consciousness described by Sri Aurobindo are worlds, and not dependent on our own world for their existence. "That we are not conscious of them is no proof that they are not conscious. It is too late in the day to question the correctness and veracity of the utterances of the seers who have experienced these truths."20 In so far as these intangible realms impinge upon our world we can sometimes discern their influence, but for the most part they exist unrecognised above or below or behind the life we know. Those who undertake to use Savitri as a guide in their own sadhana will become more and more alert to the role they play in our lives and free to accept or reject it.
A "reversal of consciousness" takes place so that where once it was difficult to believe in the existence of such parallel worlds, it soon becomes impossible to conceive of reality in any other way. By the power of the consciousness that created them, the pictures Sri Aurobindo paints for us and the wisdom they contain become part of our own interior landscape. This phenomenon, repeated at every stage of the journey, justifies the claim that Savitri can indeed be considered as a path of initiation—though the use of this word here is not intended provoke comparison with initiation rites in other cultures or contexts.
The path is not without danger. Aswapati's right of passage is often challenged by the guardian spirits of the threshold and he must pass the test of their scrutiny before he is allowed to proceed. There is always an indication of the strengths or the knowledge required:
A mind absolved from life, made calm to know,
A heart divorced from the blindness and the pang,
The seal of tears, the bond of ignorance,
He turned to find that wide world-failure's cause.21
These are the conditions of entry into the Darkness: A perfect equality of mind first, and then immunity from all the influences arising out of the vital world. The lesson of the Descent into Night seems to be this—sooner or later all those who seek the truth of the spirit will be compelled by the necessities of the path to confront the powers of Darkness face to face. This confrontation is the "dark right" of forces opposed to human evolution, whose presence and influence is confirmed by Sri Aurobindo in numerous letters and poems as well
20 T.V. Kapali Shastri, Lights on the Tantra. 21Savitri, p. 202.
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as here. Sri Aurobindo did not have to search history or mythology for images of hell. Our own time has provided them in abundance. The gas chambers, the concentration camps, the killing fields, the "crowded grey and squalid huts /Neighbouring proud palaces of perverted Power"22 conceived in that Darkness are a terrible reminder of how easily our frail defences against the World of Falsehood can be breached, and how easily the Mother of Evil can take possession of human nature.
Only were safe who kept God in their hearts:
Courage their armour, faith their sword...
The hostile powers are terrible when their attack takes an outward form and tragedy strikes on a personal or collective level. They are even more dangerous when they strike unseen from within. Fear, doubt and depression or despair are their chosen weapons; the seeker is
Captured and trailed in Falsehood's lethal net
And often strangled in the noose of grief,
Or cast on the grim morass of swallowing doubt,
Or shut into pits of error and despair.24
When the conscious mind sleeps, he faces something far worse than a bodily death, for the demonic powers attack with the speed of striking snake, and if in a doomed attempt to escape from the horror of that encounter, he is tempted to complicity with them, the loss of his own soul may result:
This is the tragedy of the inner death
When forfeited is the divine element
And only a mind and body live to die.25
Aswapati is deprived of the protection of the body's material envelope, the native strength of the human vital and the light of the human mind: "Thought ceased, sense failed, his soul still saw and knew."26 The Darkness has enveloped all that to our superficial regard makes up the human person. The indestructible divine soul that the ground of all the rest cannot be conquered; but the seeker must know how to take refuge there. Aswapati passes this test. Divinity wakes in him, and hell stands revealed a lie: "Night opened and vanished like
22 Ibid., p. 211. 25Ibid., p. 225.
23Ibid 26Ibid, p. 230.
24Ibid, p. 230.
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a gulf of dream."27 From now on the darkness has no power over him. He steps out of the shadow into Paradise.
Does the seeker now repose in bliss? Not yet. His human nature must be reborn to sustain a delight that is more than the body can bear. This Paradise of the Life Gods is familiar in appearance to our world, but wondrously changed; transposed to a higher key. Even pain is not abolished but "transformed to potent joy."28 Aswapati, however, turns his steps away from the wonders of this glorious creation of the gods, just as Sri Aurobindo did when he told the Mother: "This is not what we want." Between him and his goal lie the immense plains and towering peaks of Mind.
We are approaching the end of our journey with Aswapati. Once again, and for the last time, we may invoke the Vedic powers to guide us on the ascent to a summit so high we cannot see it. They now appear in the guise of helpful presences radiantly fronting the sun of knowledge:
Holding the thousand keys of the Beyond
They proffered their knowledge to the climbing mind
And filled the life with Thought's immensities.
The prophet hierophants of the occult Law
The flame-bright hierarchs of the divine Truth,
Interpreters between man's mind and God's,
They bring the immortal fire to mortal men.29
In the final cantos of Book II, Sri Aurobindo's poetry becomes like a shining barrier erected on the extreme boundaries of human understanding. From this point on, "out of our thoughts we must leap up to sight"30 and sight itself become the seer-vision "a flame-throw from identity."31
We are close to the consciousness in which the knower and the known are one.
Aswapati has brought us to the limits of Mind. In the Heavens of the Ideal the stairs are newly created beneath his feet as he climbs. He meditates upon the beauty of the Deathless Rose, symbol of an unattainable perfection—unattainable because even here the illusion of separate identity is preserved as each idea strives to possess its own absolute. From the Heavens of the Ideal, and from the Self of
27Ibid, p. 232. 30Ibid, p. 276.
28Ibid, p. 235 31Ibid, p. 301.
29Ibid, p. 265.
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Mind, he turns away because:
Our sweet and mighty Mother was not there.12
At last the World-Soul opens to him. In line after line of magical poetry Sri Aurobindo evokes the images of our deepest yearning, the beauty that ever calls us home. In answer to his wordless prayer the veil is partly drawn and once again the face of Divine Love is revealed, not cast in a human mould as it was in the beginning of the path, but now an overwhelming splendour of implacable light and bliss. Aswapati surrenders his human nature at the feet of the Divine Mother and becomes a vessel of her force, passing into the "inexpressible light" of the Greater Knowledge.
Aspiring not for himself but for the world, he wins for mankind the boon of Love incarnate in a human body. This Love, as Savitri, will guide us now. The path is no longer a path of knowledge; it is a path of action and will. In the individual as in the world, the divine work is done behind a veil. The story of Savitri's Yoga and her ultimate conquest of death, fulfilling the promise of a divine life on earth, is told in the form of a legend, but its essential meaning is to be found by opening ourselves to the consciousness that transformed the legend into a symbol:
This Light comes not by struggle or by thought;
In the mind's silence the Transcendent acts
And the hushed heart hears the unuttered Word.
A vast surrender was his only strength.
A Power that lives upon the heights must act,
Bring into life's closed room the Immortal's air
And fill the finite with the Infinite.
All that denies must be torn out and slain
And crushed the many longings for whose sake
We lose the One for whom our lives were made.
Now other claims had hushed in him their cry:
Only he longed to draw her presence and power
Into his heart and mind and breathing frame;
Only he yearned to call forever down
Her healing touch of love and truth and joy
Into the darkness of the suffering world.
His soul was freed and given to her alone.33
32lbid., p. 286. 33Ibid, pp. 315-16.
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The path of initiation ends when the human soul accepts union with its divine origin. The path is long, because the mind's assent or even the heart's assent is not enough. So the first necessity is the discovery of the soul. The path we have to trace in the steps of Aswapati goes far beyond an individual fulfilment. Its consummation is reached at the end of The Book of the Divine Mother when Aswapati's prayer for Earth's release from the grip of Death rises to heights where the Divine Consciousness unites will and creative power to bring about infallibly what is seen. The prayer turns into a prophetic vision of the future: a new creation and a new humanity.
Now obeying the ādesh once heard by Sri Aurobindo, "Act in the world with thy being beyond it,"34 the seeker returns to take up the work the Mother gave:
The eternal seeker in the aeonic field
Besieged by the intolerant press of hours
Again was strong for great swift-footed deeds.35
S. M. DYNE
34Collected Poems, SABCL, Vol. 5, p. 568. 35Savitri, p. 347.
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