Apart he lived in his mind’s solitude,
A demigod shaping the lives of men:
One soul’s ambition lifted up the race
A Power worked, but none knew whence it came.

As we are reading this last section of Canto Three, especially from these lines onwards, we cannot help being reminded of Sri Aurobindo himself. ‘Apart he lived in his mind’s solitude’: there he was, secluded in his room, ‘a demigod’, divine in his consciousness, human in his form, ‘shaping the lives of men’. Sri Aurobindo lived upstairs in his room, seeing all the significant events that were going on in the world; when he applied his spiritual force to them, things would change. Above all, the ‘ambition’ of his individual soul was to lift up the whole of humanity. The other day I was reading some of his letters about his efforts to reach the Supermind, where he said something like this: ‘For myself I do not need anything; I am doing this because I want the Supermind to bring a whole new order and possibility into the earth life. That is why I am doing it’: ‘One soul’s ambition lifted up the race’. ‘A power’ was working, miraculous things were happening, but nobody knew how or why. He was living ‘Apart … in his mind’s solitude’: only very few people had any idea what he was doing, and even they did not really know what was going on.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Volume 1]

Thus came his soul’s release from Ignorance,
His mind and body’s first spiritual change.
A wide God-knowledge poured down from above,
A new world-knowledge broadened from within:
His daily thoughts looked up to the True and One,
His commonest doings welled from an inner Light.

‘Thus’: in the way that Sri Aurobindo has described throughout this canto, by the stages which he has shown us, the soul of King Aswapati has been released from ‘Ignorance’. This ‘Ignorance’ with a capital ‘I’ is not simply ignorance in the sense of not being well-educated or not having much knowledge about the world; the Ignorance from which Yoga releases the soul is the fundamental sevenfold ignorance that all human beings suffer from: we do not know who we truly are, we do not know why we are here, we do not understand our universe, and we do not understand our own psychology because our view is so limited. It is limited by the fact that we have a physical body and brain; physically, we are evolutionary animals that have emerged from the inconscience of material Nature and we are limited for the purposes of the evolution. For the time being we are caught in a narrow egoistic viewpoint: each of us sees ourselves as the centre of the universe, we see the world around us, we try to create whatever harmony we can in our own being and in our own life, but we do not have the larger view that true Knowledge brings. The soul within us is also limited in its expression by these limitations of our nature, identified with the way that we are now. To go beyond this ego-centred way of seeing and experiencing things the soul has to become free. That is what has happened to Aswapati through all the experiences that we have been reading about: his soul has been released from Ignorance. This release brings about his ‘first spiritual change’. When his soul is no longer identified with all the limitations of the present human nature, a ‘first spiritual change’ comes about which affects both mind and the body. The mind receives ‘a wide God-knowledge’ pouring down from above, and ‘a new world-knowledge’ widening out, ‘broadened’ from within; as a result, ‘His daily thoughts looked up to the True and One’, towards what is True, towards the One in whom everything and everyone exists; and because his daily thoughts are doing that, even his ‘commonest actions’, all the everyday things he has to do, eating and brushing the teeth and getting dressed and dealing with people, are welling ‘from an inner Light’, spontaneously flowing from the Light within.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1}

His wide eyes bodied viewless entities,
He saw the cosmic forces at their work
And felt the occult impulse behind man’s will.

When Sri Aurobindo says ‘wide eyes’, it might mean ‘open eyes’, implying that Aswapati could descry subtle forms even with his physical eyes open, giving forms to ‘entities’ which are ‘viewless’ or invisible; it can also mean – and it is good to be aware of both the shades of meaning at the same time – that his eyes have such a wide range of vision that they can see not only physical objects but also those ‘entities’ and forms that are normally ‘viewless’ to us. He can also see ‘the cosmic forces at their work’; this is the conscious vision that can discern how things work in the universe; and he ‘felt the occult impulse behind man’s will’. We use the will to decide that something must be done; if we are asked why it should be done we may give all kinds of reasons, but very often it is because something from the hidden worlds has given us a little push, an ‘occult impulse’ that makes us think ‘Oh, it has to be like that!’ and we may even be ready to fight for it, without realising that our will has been influenced by an ‘occult impulse’ from behind. If we could see where that impulse came from we would be much wiser. Aswapati can now clearly observe the hidden ‘impulse behind man’s will’.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]

One and harmonious by the Maker’s skill,
The human in him paced with the divine;
His acts betrayed not the interior flame.

Because of the process of this ‘first spiritual change’ which we have been reading about in this canto, Aswapati’s whole being has become ‘One and harmonious by the Maker’s skill’. That is not yet true of us. The first thing that we notice if we begin to try improve ourselves, is that we have many different parts and they all want different things. One part of us can say, ‘Yes, I choose the way of aspiration, I want to follow Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’, but there will be other parts that say, ‘No, I am not interested in that; I want to rest, I want to eat, I want to enjoy, I want to spend time with my friends; all this is very boring, it is too hard for me.’ The Mother has told us that when we really want to make progress the first thing is learn to observe all the different parts of ourself, and then begin to educate them all to follow our highest will, our psychic will if we can contact that. Aswapati has done all that work, his whole being is now ‘One and harmonious’ because he has had help from the Supreme, the ‘Maker’. We read earlier that the ‘Maker’ was shaping Aswapati’s nature out of ‘half-hewn blocks of natural strength’, like a sculptor. ‘The Maker’s skill’ has made him completely ‘One and harmonious’. All the human parts, the body, the sensations and emotions, the mind and the way the brain works, the nerves, can move at the same speed as his divine parts and can keep up with his inner divinity: ‘The human in him paced with the divine’. That is a really great change. For us, at the moment, our divine being is behind the veil; it is trying to guide us, protect us, lead us in the right way; but it has to deal with all the human parts and what they want and how they behave. If they come to the point that they can keep up the same pace, move with the same speed, as the divine parts, then much more can be done. As a result of this great change, ‘His acts betrayed not the interior flame’: Aswapati’s actions do not betray ‘the interior flame’: the inner flame of aspiration and will. Because all the parts of his being are in harmony with that inner flame, his actions do not betray it. Our human parts often betray our psychic aspiration, act in opposition to it instead of supporting it, because they are not attuned with it.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]

The universal strengths were linked with his;
Filling earth’s smallness with their boundless breadths,
He drew the energies that transmute an age.

Here is Aswapati, an individual in a human body but with a universal consciousness through which he is ‘linked’ with the mighty ‘universal strengths’ as well as with our human sphere. He is able to fill the ‘smallness’ of the earth and our human life with the ‘boundless breadths’ of those ‘universal strengths’. He can draw ‘the energies that transmute an age’. To ‘transmute’ means to change into another form. An entire age of human history has been changed by the ‘energies’ that Sri Aurobindo has drawn.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri: Book 1]

His walk through Time outstripped the human stride.
Lonely his days and splendid like the sun’s.

‘Outstripped’: when several people are running a race, one of them will go ahead, he ‘outstrips’ the others, he runs faster than they do. Aswapati is not running, he is walking, pacing majestically ‘through Time’, but that pace of his goes far beyond the ordinary ‘human stride’. A ‘stride’ is the longest step you can take; but our human stride is very limited compared with that wonderful pacing: ‘His walk through Time outstripped the human stride’. ‘Lonely his days and splendid like the sun’s’: The sun is ‘lonely’ in the sense that it stands alone in the solar system; it supports itself, all its energies come from within itself and flow out and affect all the little bodies circling around it; and of course the sun is the symbol of the full and free divine Consciousness and Presence and Action. Aswapati’s days were ‘lonely and splendid like the sun’s’.

While these lines remind us of Sri Aurobindo’s majestic presence and action, we should be clear that they were not written about himself. He is telling the symbolic story of Aswapati and Savitri and Satyavan and Death, which is supposed to have happened in some far-back time near the beginnings of human history. He shows Aswapati as a great developed soul, a great rishi. The experiences which he describes Aswapati having are of course based on his own experiences; and just as when Sri Aurobindo describes Savitri in the poem we are often reminded of our beloved Mother, in the same way, and especially here, when he describes Aswapati’s achievements and their significance, we cannot help being reminded of the Master himself, and feel that we can apply these lines to him. All gratitude to Sri Aurobindo!

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]