But none learns whither through the unknown he sails
Or what secret mission the great Mother gave.

On this journey we do not know where we are going. ‘Whither’ means ‘where to’; there are three words which go together: ‘where’, ‘whence’, meaning ‘from where’, and ‘whither’: ‘to where’. While we are on the journey, none of us knows where we are sailing to through the unknown; nobody knows ‘what secret mission the great Mother gave’: each soul has a secret mission, a task that he alone can do, but for a long time on our journey we do not know what it is.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Volume 1]

Late will he know, opening the mystic script,
Whether to a blank port in the Unseen
He goes or, armed with her fiat, to discover
A new mind and body in the city of God
And enshrine the Immortal in his glory’s house
And make the finite one with Infinity.

Only at a late stage, when we can open up ‘the mystic script’ and read our sealed orders, will we know what our goal is: whether our goal is to merge back into our unknown Origin, as if sailing to ‘a blank port in the Unseen’, or whether the Mother has empowered us with her command: a ‘fiat’ is a command, an order; the word is Latin, and it means ‘Let it be done’; it is similar to the Sanskrit phrase ‘tathastu’. Perhaps the supreme creative power has given us the command to discover ‘a new mind and body in the city of God’; perhaps our goal is a divine life in a divine society here on earth, so that the travelling soul can ‘enshrine the Immortal in his glory’s house’. The house is the body. The fully awakened psychic being can make the physical body a shrine for the Immortal, and re-establish its connection with the divine origin, so that ‘the finite’, the distinct individual form in the manifestation, can become ‘one with Infinity’. In the evolutionary process we shall not know the answer until we have reached the point where we can open ‘the mystic script’, read our ‘sealed orders’ and find out what the Mother has commanded us to do.

[Shraddhavans’ English of Savitri, Volume 1]

This is the sailor on the flow of Time,
This is World-Matter’s slow discoverer,
Who, launched into this small corporeal birth,
Has learned his craft in tiny bays of self,
But dares at last unplumbed infinitudes,
A voyager upon eternity’s seas.

The divine soul in man is ‘the sailor on the flow of Time’, the ocean of time; ‘This is World-Matter’s slow discoverer’; slowly, in the long course of evolution, he is discovering the world around him. He is ‘launched into this small corporeal birth’, as if he has been put into a small boat, a human body, and launched off on to the flow of time; ‘corporeal birth’ means birth into a body. First, he must learn how to manage the little boat which is his body. He has to learn ‘his craft in tiny bays of self’. When you are learning how to handle a boat for the first time, you do not go straight out into the ocean; you find some protected bay where you can learn the skill or ‘craft’ of dealing with your vessel, your boat, which is also known as a ‘craft’. To start with, the soul learns how to live in this material world ‘in tiny bays of self’, in very limited areas of experience and consciousness; but at last, when he is really well launched on his journey, he will dare to go out into the ‘unplumbed infinitudes’, into limitless spaces and depths that have never been ‘plumbed’, nobody has ever measured how vast and deep they are. Even in our earthly oceans there are ‘unplumbed’ depths which no one has ever been able to measure, but here Sri Aurobindo is referring to the ocean of time and the ocean of consciousness. In the ocean of consciousness there are infinite depths which have never been measured. Eventually he becomes ‘A voyager upon eternity’s seas’, a traveller through the infinite oceans of eternity. In this section Sri Aurobindo will describe for us the stages of this adventure.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]

An expert captain of a fragile craft,
A trafficker in small impermanent wares,
At first he hugs the shore and shuns the breadths,
Dares not to affront the far-off perilous main.

In the passage which follows, Sri Aurobindo is showing us two things: he is referring to developments that have happened in the history of the human race; when human beings first started to move off the land and onto the sea they did not travel across the oceans, they just rowed or sailed from one little bay to the next one, along the coast; at the same time, he is using this description from human history as an image of how the individual consciousness begins to develop. When the soul is first launched onto the sea of time and consciousness, the body is his ‘craft’, the ship he has to learn to manoeuvre. As he becomes good at using his body, he becomes ‘An expert captain of a fragile craft’: the body that is his ship is ‘fragile’, it can easily be broken. What does he do with his ship? He trades; he is ‘A trafficker’, a trader in ‘small impermanent wares’: not huge cargoes, but small things that do not last very long; perhaps he carries fruit and vegetables to the next village and in exchange brings back something else. ‘At first he hugs the shore’: he stays very close to land and will not go out into the open sea; he ‘shuns the breadths’: ‘to shun’ means ‘to avoid’, ‘to keep at a distance’. He does not have the courage or the strength ‘to affront the far-off perilous main’; the ‘main’ is the open sea, beyond the shelter of the land, out on the ocean, and that is too far away and too dangerous for him at first; ‘perilous’ means ‘dangerous’.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]

But now he hears the sound of larger seas.
A widening world calls him to distant scenes
And journeyings in a larger vision’s arc
And peoples unknown and still unvisited shores.

Now he gets a new impulse: ‘he hears the sound of larger seas’, and feels the attraction of ‘A widening world’ that is calling him ‘to distant scenes / And journeyings in a larger vision’s arc’. An ‘arc’ is part of the circumference of a circle: the horizon we see when we look out to sea is an arc. Now he begins to feel the call of wider horizons. This happens when the vital being starts to wake up: he becomes aware that there are countries and nations that he does not know, places that are waiting to be visited, and feels an urge to explore new possibilities and experience exciting new unknown things.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]

Or, guided by a sure compass in his thought,
He plunges through a bright haze that hides the stars,
Steering on the trade-routes of Ignorance.

Eventually there was somebody who had heard or guessed that the world is not a flat disk, but spherical like a ball; so Christopher Columbus set off westwards across the open ocean ‘guided by a sure compass in his thought’; he had the faith to leave the coast and start sailing across the unknown ocean because he was convinced that by sailing west, he would reach the Far East. In those days sailors navigated by the stars, but he could keep sailing westwards even when he could not see the stars because he had a ‘compass’, a small device that shows us where north is, so that we can know where east and west and south are; we can know which direction we are travelling in. In the development of our consciousness there comes a stage when we feel that we can rely on our reason; and once one explorer has done that and found a new continent others will follow him, so that the route he has taken becomes a trade-route: following Christopher Columbus, regular trade-routes were established across the Atlantic Ocean in both directions, linking Africa and Europe with the ‘New World’, the Americas. But as long as we are following our thoughts, we are still in the Ignorance: the routes we follow are ‘the trade-routes of Ignorance’. ‘To steer’ means to direct a ship to move in a particular direction.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]

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.

This sounds almost as if Sri Aurobindo is referring to space travel: ‘Earth’s borders recede’; the adventurer can go out into Space, where ‘the terrestrial air / Hangs round him no longer its translucent veil’. But it also means that a time comes when our quest is no longer for physical things, vital and mental things, when we realise that the real goal of our life lies beyond the range of this material world. Then the significance of life changes for us, we see that everything here is ‘time-constructed’, made in time and by time, and that all the appearances we see with our physical eyes are ‘images veiling infinity’.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]

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.

‘Time’s traveller’ is the soul exploring the evolutionary world. So far in this section Sri Aurobindo has been describing the stages of the evolution of consciousness mainly in the material world. But there comes a point where the consciousness has developed enough that ‘Time’s traveller’ has to go beyond this material world and move into a greater one. So at last ‘he hears a chanting on the heights’, perhaps the cosmic OM resounding on the higher levels of consciousness; and as he crosses over the boundary between the physical world and the subtle worlds he gains a new capacity of hearing and seeing: ‘the far speaks and the unknown grows near’. These experiences give him ‘a new vision of himself and of things’. In the next few lines Sri Aurobindo expresses the ‘new vision’, the new understanding of himself and of things which comes to the traveller at this stage:

[Shraddhavn’s English of Savitri, Book 1]

Across the noise and multitudinous cry,
Across the rapt unknowable silences,
Through a strange mid-world under supernal skies,
Beyond earth’s longitudes and latitudes,
His goal is fixed outside all present maps.

At present there are no maps to show us where our goal is – except the map that Sri Aurobindo has given us. The traveller passes through ‘the noise and multitudinous cry’ of all the many voices of the manifestation, the many voices which are part of the cry of earth life. He also experiences ‘the rapt unknowable silences’, the silences of higher realms where consciousness is as if in a trance, ‘rapt’. He is travelling through ‘a strange mid-world’: not earth, not heaven, but something in-between; above him are ‘supernal skies’, skies of higher consciousness; his goal is fixed ‘Beyond earth’s longitudes and latitudes’: the imaginary lines that are drawn on the globe to help us to locate ourselves and find our way, especially at sea, are of no use to him now, for ‘His goal is fixed outside all present maps.’

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]

In the hidden strength of her omnipotent Will,
Driven by her breath across life’s tossing deep,
Through the thunder’s roar and through the windless hush,
Through fog and mist where nothing more is seen,
He carries her sealed orders in his breast.

For so much of our journey we do not know where we are going, so how can we find the way? Earlier Sri Aurobindo told us that the soul’s paths ‘are found for him by silent fate’; but here he says that the soul is driven on its journey by the breath of the great Mother, at first in the form of Nature or Maya or Prakriti or Fate: we seem to be driven by something unconscious and inexorable; but in fact that apparently unconscious Nature or Fate is really being moved by the will of the supreme creative force, the divine Mother, and ‘the hidden strength of her omnipotent Will’. That is what is keeping us all going: we are being driven by her breath across the ocean of unconsciousness and time. On the way we have all kinds of adventures, as sailors do: we pass through storms, we pass through the ‘windless hush’, when our little boat hardly seems to move; we pass through a time of fog and mist when we cannot see where we are going; but all the time we are carrying within us the great Mother’s ‘sealed orders’. This is a military term: when someone is sent on such a secret mission that the superior officers who are sending him out do not even tell him where he is going or what he is supposed to do, they give him ‘sealed orders’; at a certain moment, when he reaches a particular place or receives a particular sign, he has to take out the sealed orders that he has been carrying and open them; only then will he find out what his mission is, where he is going and what he has to do. All of us have sealed orders in our hearts; we are carrying within us the great Mother’s instructions.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]

Always he follows in her force’s wake.
He sails through life and death and other life,
He travels on through waking and through sleep.

He is always following something. He is following in ‘her force’s wake’. The ‘wake’ is the track that a ship leaves behind it as it moves through the water. The Mother is driving our ship forward with her breath, with her ‘ocean winds’; but at the same time she is always ahead of us too, with the action of her force, and we are following in her wake. That makes it much easier for our boat to move forward: dolphins for example like to follow in the wake of ships, because there is less resistance from the water, so they can go quicker. The individual soul is always following in the wake of the Mother’s force; she is not only impelling him from behind but also attracting him from in front. The individualised spirit ‘sails through life and death and other life’, again and again and again. His journey continues ‘through waking and through sleep’. Even when we are asleep at night we are still travelling towards the goal; sometimes I feel that I travel much further during the nights than during the days. The journey continues through the days and through the nights, ‘through waking and through sleep’.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]

Sometimes it looks as if all this creation is just a play of Maya, an illusion, a game for the amusement of the soul, a ‘vast and random game’. But Sri Aurobindo tells us that ‘Her play is real’, and that the soul involved in the creation is fulfilling a Mystery, working out something with a deep significance. ‘There is a plan in the Mother’s deep world-whim’: there is a plan, a purpose; her game of creation may seem like a whim, a caprice, a ‘random game’ but in fact it has an aim, a purpose. What is her purpose?

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]

For this he left his white infinity
And laid on the spirit the burden of the flesh,
That Godhead’s seed might flower in mindless Space.

Why has the Lord left his white infinity, all his infinite integrality and perfection? Why has he become this material universe and inhabited all its forms and forces and beings, as the spirit in limited beings like us, in these material bodies? Why has he ‘laid on the spirit the burden of the flesh’? He has done all this so that eventually, when evolution has run its whole course, ‘Godhead’s seed might flower in mindless Space’: the seed of divinity that he has sown in the creation should flower throughout this whole vast material universe that seems to be made up of ‘mindless Space’, but is actually a habitation for the Lord, and full of veiled divinity. He has sown not just one ‘seed’: we speak of a farmer ‘sowing his seed’ – he casts and scatters many many seeds; similarly the Lord has sown ‘Godhead’s seed’ throughout the boundless manifestation, with the intention that it might flower and bear countless glorious blossoms of divinity.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]