Alarmed by the sorrow dragging at her feet
And conscious of the high things not yet won,
Ever she nurses in her sleepless breast
An inward urge that takes from her rest and peace.

Along with gladness comes its opposite: the Earth-Goddess feels all the sorrow which is like a weight around her ankles, ‘dragging at her feet’, holding her back in her journey across the sands of Time. She is ‘conscious of the high things not yet won’: she senses that there should be bliss, that this ‘trembling gladness’ is not yet bliss; she is aware of many such ‘high things’ that have not yet been won, that are waiting to be won in the course of the aeons still ahead of her on her journey. So she is always keeping in her breast ‘An inward urge’ that never sleeps: it is always urging her on, pushing her forward; it does not allow her any rest or any peace. And that is why we, her children, cannot have any rest or any peace either, because we are part of this journey of the Earth. We are children of Earth and part of the Earth-consciousness, so something is always driving us forward. We are part of that struggle of the earth to find the Being within, the Fate whose form we do not know. That ‘inward urge’ is always there: we can have moments of happiness, moments of relief and peace, but then something will always come to drive us further on our journey.

[ Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Volume 1]

A Voice ill-heard shall speak, the soul obey,
A Power into mind’s inner chamber steal,
A charm and sweetness open life’s closed doors
And beauty conquer the resisting world,
The Truth-Light capture Nature by surprise,
A stealth of God compel the heart to bliss
And earth grow unexpectedly divine. 

‘A Voice’, a divine voice will speak; that Voice will not be heard very clearly, but nevertheless the soul within will respond and ‘obey’. With the consent of the soul, a divine Power will ‘steal’ into the inner chamber of the mind.  Very secretly God will come in like a thief in the night and force the heart to overcome all its resistances and feel bliss, ananda. He will give us no choice, he will ‘compel the heart to bliss’. And when all these things happen, when the masked Transcendent mounts his throne and the soul and mind and heart and even the physical respond, earth shall ‘grow unexpectedly divine’. When we least expect it, when darkness deepens, strangling earth’s breast, and man’s corporeal mind is the only lamp, all this will happen. It is Sri Aurobindo’s wonderful assurance and promise to us. In the darkest hour, the Supreme, the Transcendent will enter his house and mount his throne, the Truth-Light will capture Nature by surprise, and earth shall grow unexpectedly Divine.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Volume 1]

A few shall see what none yet understands;
God shall grow up while the wise men talk and sleep;
For man shall not know the coming till its hour
And belief shall be not till the work is done. 

Nobody yet understands about this transformation; but Sri Aurobindo assures us that it will come, and that a few people will be aware of it happening, but only a few: ‘God shall grow up while the wise men talk and sleep’, the wise teachers and preachers will be busy teaching and preaching, or they will be sleeping, so that they do not even notice that God has revealed himself at last. Human beings will not know anything about this coming of the Transcendent to mount his throne until it actually happens; and until the work has been done and the change comes about, no one will believe in it; only when the transformation has happened, they will have to believe.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book  1]

In this dense field where nothing is plain or sure,
Our very being seems to us questionable,
Our life a vague experiment, the soul
A flickering light in a strange ignorant world,
The earth a brute mechanic accident,
A net of death in which by chance we live.

‘This dense field’ is the material universe. Matter is ‘dense’ in comparison with our inner world of thoughts and dreams and feelings; and in the material universe nothing is ‘plain or sure’: it is not clear what is going on and we cannot be sure about anything. Even our own being seems ‘questionable’: we may wonder ‘Do I really exist?’ If we look at our life, it seems like ‘a vague experiment’, as if something is being tried out, but not in a very clear and conscious way. Experiment lies at the very heart of the scientific method: scientists ask, ‘What happens if I do this?’ They might have an idea or a theory about the way that things work; but then they must set up experiments to see whether things work out in the way that their theory expects and predicts. Whether it works out as predicted or not, they have learned something. Our life seems to be some kind of experiment: trying this, trying that; but it is ‘a vague experiment’. It has not been set up to test a particular theory or to ask a particular question; we just try this and that and even the answers we get seem to be very vague, ‘nothing is plain or sure’. And if at all we feel that we have a soul, it seems like a ‘flickering light’. A candle flame will ‘flicker’ in the wind: it is not a steady, reliable light. Sometimes our soul seems to be there and at other times we cannot find it anywhere and it does not seem to light up much for us. If at all the soul is there, it seems like a ‘flickering light’ and the world around us is a ‘strange ignorant world’: there does not seem to be any real, reliable knowledge and light here. The earth itself just seems to have happened by accident. The scientists tell us how they think it might have happened: they think that our universe started with an immense explosion, and that over time matter as we know it has evolved, and that by gravity, clouds of gas have solidified and come together to form our solar system and this planet we call earth. They believe that none of that has been planned and that by pure chance this planet formed at just the right distance away from the sun so that here there is the right temperature and the right kind of chemical make-up to allow life and eventually conscious human beings to emerge. The existence of the earth seems to be the result of a ‘mechanic accident’; and when we look at its life aspect, the earth seems to be ‘A net of death in which by chance we live’. Everything dies eventually; everything in nature is subject to ‘entropy’: the tendency to disintegrate. For a time, by chance, there occurs this strange phenomenon of life, whose origin no one has yet succeeded in explaining. That is how it all appears to our reasoning mind when it first wakes up and starts to ask questions.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]

A Thought that can conceive but hardly knows
Arises slowly in her and creates
The idea, the speech that labels more than it lights;

Another achievement that has come about in the course of the earth’s evolutionary journey is the development of Mind. On earth, mind has evolved some power of Thought. With the power of thought we can shape ideas, we can ‘conceive’, we can imagine things, but still we know almost nothing: we know a little but only with great difficulty. We cannot really say that our mind has knowledge. That thought-power slowly arises in the earth and it creates ‘idea’ and ‘speech’; these are products of the power of Thought. But our ideas and our speech do not explain anything, we can only put labels on things. For example, in The Life Divine Sri Aurobindo points out that we have developed an idea and the word ‘evolution’, but that is just a label for an observed process or mechanism: it labels the mechanism but we do not know how or why it should happen. That is true of many of our ideas: we label something and feel satisfied. If you have one of those wonderful ‘peak-experiences’ which Sri Aurobindo referred to in the first section and you happen to mention it to a psychotherapist he is likely to say, ‘Oh, hallucination, hallucination’. The word is just a label, but he thinks that by giving it that label he has explained everything to you.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]

A light grows in her, she assumes a voice,
Her state she learns to read and the act she has done,
But the one needed truth eludes her grasp,
Herself and all of which she is the sign.

Now the Earth-Goddess reaches the human stage. In the Mother’s sketch, within the form of the earth there is depicted a human form. It is in and through human beings that the earth ‘assumes a voice’ and becomes able to express herself; through our human consciousness she ‘learns to read’ her state: in human minds she can look back and see how things have been done, how things have developed. This is not possible for animals; it is only possible at the human level. We can look around and become aware of the state of the earth at the moment. When we look around we see that things are pretty terrible, for the earth especially; and we can look back at what has been done by the evolutionary force, by this aspiration, this ‘lonely tongue of conscious fire’ that is driving the evolutionary process forward. But ‘the one needed truth’, the essential truth that the earth needs ‘eludes her grasp’: she tries to grasp it but she cannot, it is escaping. To ‘elude’ something means to avoid or escape from it. What is that ‘one needed truth’? She needs to know who she really is. She needs to know what she is the sign of, the symbol of, the meaning and significance of her existence. And that is exactly what we human beings need to know: who or what we really are and what is our significance in the whole cosmic scheme of things. The earth needs us to find that out for her, so that she can be saved, rescued, and fulfil her destiny.

Now we have seen part of the journey of the earth, the partial achievements of life, the beginnings of mind; but the higher truth which earth really needs in order to fulfil her destiny is yet to be realised. Human beings are in a very special position in this process: because we have learned to read our state and the act that we have done, we have the possibility of choice. We can choose to collaborate with the aspiration of the earth. Most of the time we choose to live unconsciously, without thinking or doing much about it. But if we decide that the discovery of this one needed truth is what we want to dedicate our life to, then our feet are on the first steps of the path of yoga, and all the methods of psychological self-discipline that have been developed here in India over thousands of years by great consciousness researchers are available to help us on that path, and especially all that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have shared with us. We can make a start by aiming to become the best human beings that we can be: that is a good start; but I think it is helpful to know that we are not doing this only for ourselves: we are part of the journey of the earth. The human journey is part of the journey of the earth. The most helpful thing will be if individually we can discover ‘the one needed Truth’ that has the power to lift our consciousness and the Earth-consciousness up to the next evolutionary level.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri: Book 1]

An inarticulate whisper drives her steps
Of which she feels the force but not the sense;
A few rare intimations come as guides,
Immense divining flashes cleave her brain,
And sometimes in her hours of dream and muse
The truth that she has missed looks out on her
As if far off and yet within her soul.

Impelling all this forward movement of earth is a whisper driving her and us. It is ‘An inarticulate whisper’, we cannot hear exactly what it is saying, but there is some urgency in it, something that will not allow us to rest for long. Human beings can never feel happy unless they are progressing in some way. The Earth-Goddess feels that, and all of us feel it because we are part of her. We cannot help feeling that we have to progress: we have to go forward, we cannot go back, we cannot let go. But we do not yet grasp the sense of it, the meaning of it. Why do we have to go on developing more and more? The earth feels the force of something pushing her forward but she does not know what it means. But through her human children ‘A few rare intimations come as guides’: those peak experiences that we read about in the first section. Those experiences come only occasionally, they are ‘rare’, but they are ‘intimations’, signs and messages to guide us. Sometimes these may be very strong experiences: ‘Immense divining flashes cleave her brain’. To ‘cleave’ means to cut deeply. Like lightning, into the physical brain comes some powerful flash of knowledge. ‘Divining’ means knowing something without being able to say how we know There are people called ‘water diviners’ who can walk across a field and tell you where to dig for water; they have a special sense, a direct knowledge which tells them where there is water. ‘Divining’ means having a true knowledge but without being able to say how it has come. Those ‘divining flashes’ of intuition come into the brain like lightning. Or sometimes, ‘in her hours of dream and muse’, when the mind is quiet, indrawn, some sense of the truth that she has missed, the one needed truth, ‘looks out on her’ as if it is far off ‘and yet within her soul’. That is an experience one can have, the sense of a very far-away realisation which in another sense feels very close and familiar. When individual human beings have these experiences, the earth is having them: this is the stage that the earth has reached now.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]

Outstretching arms to the unconscious Void,
Passionate she prays to invisible forms of Gods
Soliciting from dumb Fate and toiling Time
What most she needs, what most exceeds her scope,
A Mind unvisited by illusion’s gleams,
A Will expressive of soul’s deity,
A Strength not forced to stumble by its speed,
A Joy that drags not sorrow as its shade.

She ‘stretches arms to what was never hers’; but where does she stretch them out to? She stretches her arms out to the universe and the unconscious emptiness of space. With a great intensity of aspiration she addresses her prayers ‘to invisible forms of Gods’. She is ‘soliciting’, begging Fate and Time to give her what she needs. ‘Fate’ remains ‘dumb’, it does not speak, it does not reveal itself, it does not give any message. Time is ‘toiling’: all the moments seem to be filled with so much labour and effort. The earth is praying for ‘What most she needs’ and what she most needs seems to be beyond her reach: it ‘exceeds her scope’. ‘To exceed’ means to go or be beyond; your ‘scope’ is what you can reach and hold. What she needs seems to be far beyond her reach. She needs a mind that is not visited by these false gleams of illusion. In our human knowledge there is always an element of error; in whatever we think that we know something is always missing or not quite right. For the earth to fulfil her destiny, she needs a mind that is perfectly clear and pure and open to the truth, a mind that is not visited by false gleams of illusion. The picture that comes to me is of travellers in the old days who had to travel on foot and did not have maps. If at night if they had not reached their destination they might find themselves in a swamp where there was a lot of muddy water and gasses come up out of the water. In the darkness those gasses glow with phosphorescence or bio- luminescence. The poor traveller may think, ‘Oh, there is a house over there’ and he moves towards the light, but just lands up in a pool of mud. That is what illusions are: they are lights that attract us, we go towards them but we might be straying off our true track. Earth also needs a ‘Will’ that can express the divinity of the soul. What is the Will of the soul? If we do not have a clear mind our will cannot express the deity, the divinity of the soul. And she needs ‘A Strength’ that is ‘not forced to stumble by its speed’. We may have strength but if we try to go very fast, if we try to progress very quickly, we are very likely to fall, we are even ‘forced to stumble’: we will fall down. We may stand up and go on again, but earth needs a strength that is ‘not forced to stumble’ even if it moves needs a strength that is ‘not forced to stumble’ even if it moves very fast. The earth, and all of us, are longing for a joy that does not drag ‘sorrow as its shade’. In this world of dualities, where there is happiness there will also be unhappiness; but the earth is longing for pure ananda, the joy that does not have any shadow of sorrow following it.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri: Book 1]

Earth’s winged chimaeras are Truth’s steeds in Heaven,
The impossible God’s sign of things to be.

A ‘chimaera’ is an impossible animal, a fabulous fire-spouting creature with the head of a lion, the body of a goat and a serpent’s tail. The word comes from Greek and the ancient Greeks made images of that impossible animal; in English we use the word to mean something that is pure imagination and fancy, something unreal and impossible. But Sri Aurobindo tells us that these creatures which are unreal and impossible on the earth at present, are, on a higher plane, ‘in Heaven’, the ‘steeds’, the horses that carry the Truth. And then he says that ‘The impossible’, what we feel to be impossible, is ‘God’s sign of things to be’: of what will be in the future. The Mother explained one of Sri Aurobindo’s aphorisms where he says that ‘the sense of the impossible is the beginning of all possibility’. She said that when we feel that something is impossible, it means that we are reaching for it and it seems far out of reach; but the fact that we have become aware of it and are reaching for it is the beginning of the possibility of realising it, the sign that it will be realised. What we feel to be impossible is God’s sign to us that it will be realised in the future. Perhaps nothing is really impossible. There are things that we are not even aware of, so those things are impossible to us for the time being.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]

Our outward happenings have their seed within,
And even this random Fate that imitates Chance,
This mass of unintelligible results,
Are the dumb graph of truths that work unseen:
The laws of the Unknown create the known.

This is something we should always remember: that ‘Our outward happenings’, the small, apparently random things that happen to us, ‘have their seed within’. They have grown from some seed within us. That is why the Mother tells us never to complain about conditions or circumstances: because, she says, they reflect what you are in yourself and what you need to experience in order to reach your goal. That is true even for ‘this random Fate that imitates Chance’. About some things that happen, we think ‘Why did that have to happen? How could something like that happen?’ They seem completely random, unexpected and inexplicable; but here Sri Aurobindo says that these ‘outward happenings’ and ‘unintelligible results’ which our intelligence cannot make sense of, are a ‘graph of truths that work unseen’. A ‘graph’ is a diagram used for displaying and studying data: a point is placed here and a point there and a point there. Each of those points stands for something, but they will be intelligible to you only if you know how to read the graph, only if you know what those points represent. If you know that one dimension represents population and the other dimension indicates time, then you can read the graph and get an idea of its meaning. Sri Aurobindo is telling us that ‘This mass of unintelligible results’, everything that happens, is an indication of a truth that is working unseen behind the  veil. ‘The laws of the Unknown create the known.’ Whatever we know, whatever we have become aware of, makes sense only according to the laws of the Unknown.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]

Our range is fixed within the crowded arc
Of what we observe and touch and thought can guess
And rarely dawns the light of the Unknown
Waking in us the prophet and the seer.

‘Our range’ is what we can see, what we can feel: it is limited, fixed ‘within the crowded arc’ which our senses reveal to us. An ‘arc’ is part of the circumference of a circle. Our senses allow us a very limited range, a limited horizon; and within that limited horizon so much is going on. It is crowded with all the sense-impressions ‘of what we observe and touch and thought can guess’. We are so occupied with all that, ‘Absorbed’ as he says, in our ‘routine of daily acts’, that only very ‘rarely dawns’ some gleam of ‘the light of the Unknown’ which wakes up in us the capacity to be a prophet, to see what will happen, to be a seer, to know the future course of things.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]

Inheritor of the brief animal mind,
Man, still a child in Nature’s mighty hands,
In the succession of the moments lives;
To a changing present is his narrow right;
His memory stares back at a phantom past,
The future flees before him as he moves;
He sees imagined garments, not a face.

This is our human state: Man is still a child, he is not yet mature, he has to grow so much before he will become what he is meant to be. Nature is still moulding him. As human beings, we have inherited something from the ‘dead past’: ‘the brief animal mind’ has been passed on to us. Animals do not remember much, they have their experiences and their habits, they do not look at the future; the ‘brief animal mind’ keeps them safe in a way, and we are still carrying that mind in us. Because of that we live ‘in the succession of the moments’: one moment after another in time. Our consciousness has only a ‘narrow right’, a limited right to ‘a changing present’: here we are in this moment and the next moment we are a little bit further on. ‘Memory stares back at a phantom past’. We remember things, but cannot fully re-experience them; a ‘phantom’ is a ghost of something that has been, that is dead. The future is always running away from us; as we move forward in time, or as time moves past us, the future is always ahead. Man ‘sees imagined garments, not a face’. We do not see the face of the truth; we see different kinds of robes that we imagine are what truth looks like; we do not see the truth as it really is, only these ‘imagined garments’ that hide truth from us.

[Shraddhavan’s  English of Savitri, Book 1]

He is ignorant of the meaning of his life,
He is ignorant of his high and splendid fate.

We do not know the meaning of our life, why we are here, what we are supposed to do with our lives; and we have no idea at all about the ‘high and splendid fate’ that is intended for the human race, the role that the human race is really meant to play in the forward movement of evolution. Sri Aurobindo did his best to make us aware of the meaning of our lives and of our ‘high and splendid fate’, but humanity as a whole is still ignorant of these things.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]

When darkness deepens strangling the earth’s breast
And man’s corporeal mind is the only lamp,
As a thief’s in the night shall be the covert tread
Of one who steps unseen into his house.

This is Sri Aurobindo’s prophecy for the future of the earth. He says that this will happen when the darkness of ignorance gets even worse, when it ‘deepens’, becomes deeper, so deep that the earth is strangled by it and can hardly breathe, at a time when ‘man’s corporeal mind is the only lamp’, when there is no other form of light than the most physical mind. There are higher levels of mind and we can reach them sometimes, but in that darkest hour those higher levels are not available: the ‘corporeal mind is the only lamp’. Secretly, like a thief creeping in at night, the Transcendent will enter his house, this material world which is really his own home.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]