We are following King Aswapati in his exploration of the planes of existence which come into being through the evolution of Life in Matter. They are not involutionary worlds. In the involution there is a descent of all the higher principles and planes into Matter, from where they gradually emerge in the process of evolution. We read about this upward and downward ladder of planes at the end of Book One Canto Five, and again in Book Two Canto One on page 99 it is mentioned briefly. When life starts to emerge out of Matter then new universal levels of being are created. This canto describes three such levels. The first two sections introduced us to this evolutionary process, and the short third section described the first emergence of short-lived life- forms still dominated by the inertia of matter. The section concluded with the line ‘Nothing seemed worth the labour to become’: what use is such a helpless and petty world – this most material level of life? But now Sri Aurobindo will tell us that King Aswapati is able to see beyond the apparently worthless appearances the greater significance of this plane.

But judged not so his spirit’s wakened eye.
As shines a solitary witness star
That burns apart, Light’s lonely sentinel,
In the drift and teeming of a mindless Night,
A single thinker in an aimless world
Awaiting some tremendous dawn of God,
He saw the purpose in the works of Time.

Looking at the first very primitive forms of life which emerged in this early stage of the evolution of life on earth – one which lasted about three hundred and fifty million years, the biologists tell us – any visitor to earth from outer space during that time would not have seen anything very promising and might well have wondered whether the existence of these tiny helpless life-forms was really worthwhile. But King Aswapati’s ‘wakened eye’ sees these appearances differently. His spiritual consciousness is like a single star burning alone, a solitary representative guardian Light, awake and watching amidst ‘the drift and teeming of a mindless Night’. The only conscious being in a world that seems ‘aimless’, he is looking forward to a ‘tremendous dawn of God’ when the full light of higher consciousness will illumine this ‘mindless Night’; and from that perspective he can see ‘the purpose in the works of Time.’ For our mental consciousness it is very difficult to detect a ‘purpose in the works of Time’. We need Sri Aurobindo to see it for us and tell us about it. But Aswapati, with his awakened spiritual consciousness, and the knowledge that he has gained through his tapasya, is able to see a purpose and significance even in the first tentative manifestations of life in material forms.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 2]

This too he tracked along its hidden stream
And traced its acts to a miraculous fount.

With his power of spiritual vision Aswapati is able to trace the course of that ‘hidden stream’ of life-energy back to its source. He finds that it originates from ‘a miraculous fount’, a spring, like the source of a stream or river, which is described in the next sentence:

A mystic Presence none can probe nor rule,
Creator of this game of ray and shade
In this sweet and bitter paradoxical life,
Asks from the body the soul’s intimacies
And by the swift vibration of a nerve
Links its mechanic throbs to light and love.

He finds that the source of this flow of life-energy is ‘A mystic Presence’. Nobody can ‘probe’ or ‘rule’ that mysterious Presence which is the ‘Creator of this game of ray and shade’, the life of this world of dualities and contradictions in which sunlight and shadow alternate, which is both ‘sweet and bitter’, which is ‘paradoxical’, apparently self-contradictory. The ‘mystic Presence’ which is the source of all life wants physical bodies to become able to experience and express ‘the soul’s intimacies’: the subtle sensations and emotions that are characteristic of the soul. To make this possible, it develops a nervous system which links the mechanical movements of the body with conscious sense-perceptions and with emotions. Our scientists cannot really explain how ‘the swift vibration of a nerve’ does this; they say that electrical or chemical impulses carry sense impressions to the brain which interprets them as either pleasing or painful. But here Sri Aurobindo is giving a different explanation. He tells us that a divine observing Presence behind is asking the body to respond and giving it the means to do so. Through ‘the swift vibration of a nerve’, the body’s ‘mechanic throbs’ – the apparently automatic and unconscious movements of the physical body – are connected to experiences which are super-physical: spiritual light, consciousness and Love.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 2]

Impure, degraded though her motions are,
Always a heaven-truth broods in life’s deeps;
In her obscurest members burns that fire.

The ‘motions’ or movements of the Life-Force in matter are often ‘Impure’ and ‘degraded’ because of her fallen state under the domination of inconscience and ignorance. But nevertheless, Sri Aurobindo tells us, a divine truth is always brooding in her depths, and even in her darkest parts, ‘her obscurest members’, the fire of that ‘mystic Presence’ is burning. The ‘heaven-truth’ which is brooding in her depths will give birth to diviner things. The origin of life is divine and so all the expressions of life must also become divine. In the present stage of evolution the movements of the Life-Force may be impure and degraded but Sri Aurobindo does not want us to reject life. We may reject the impurities, but Life itself is a divine power which we should honour and treasure. This is one of the ways in which Sri Aurobindo’s view is different from that of many other spiritual paths. Many spiritual seekers feel that in order to reach a higher consciousness they must reject and exclude the ordinary movements of life; but Sri Aurobindo is repeatedly telling us that life itself is a divine power and is destined to become able to express itself divinely even here in the material world. We should not try to erase it or suppress it and deprive ourselves of that divine force of creativity and its power for positive change.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 2]

That rapture’s smile is secret everywhere;
It flows in the wind’s breath, in the tree’s sap,
Its hued magnificence blooms in leaves and flowers.

The ‘smile’ of that divine rapture is everywhere, in everything; but it is secret, hidden, lurking. We do not always see it or do not recognise that we are seeing it. That smile of creative rapture ‘flows in the wind’s breath, in the tree’s sap’. ‘Sap’ is the liquid which circulates in plants, the juice that carries their life-force. The ‘hued magnificence’ of that smile blooms and blossoms in the many colours of ‘leaves and flowers’.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 2]

Imperative, voiceless, ill-understood,
Too far from light, too close to being’s core,
Born strangely in Time from the eternal Bliss,
It presses on heart’s core and vibrant nerve;
Its sharp self-seeking tears our consciousness;
Our pain and pleasure have that sting for cause:
Instinct with it, but blind to its true joy
The soul’s desire leaps out towards passing things.

This refers to the life-force as we experience it on our present level of evolution. It has been born ‘from the eternal Bliss’, as Sri Aurobindo told us earlier,  but it has been ‘Born strangely in Time’: this expression of the divine Consciousness-Force has entered into this world of Time and become subject to the domination of Matter. Here it is ‘Too far from Light’, too far away from its original Light of pure Consciousness, and yet it is still ‘too close to being’s core’, too close to the very heart of our existence for us to ignore it: it is ‘voiceless’ and ‘ill-understood’: it does not speak clearly to our mental understanding, it is a mystery to us, but its mysterious urges and compulsions are ‘Imperative’: we cannot deny them. It presses on the ‘heart’s core’, the very centre of the heart, the seat of our emotions, and on the nerves as they vibrate with sensations. The Life-Force in us is seeking for its essence and its fulfilment and its ‘sharp self-seeking tears our consciousness’ waking us up to both pleasure and pain. The evolving soul identifies with the life movement. It becomes ‘Instinct with it’, pervaded by that awakening ‘sting’. As long as it identifies with the life movements the soul is ‘blind to its true joy’. Instead ‘The soul’s desire leaps out towards passing things’, things that are not eternal, which do not last. It is in love now with one thing and then another. It is only when the soul can detach itself from identification with the life movements that it begins to find true joy.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 2]

It turns in us to finite loves and lusts,
The will to conquer and have, to seize and keep,
To enlarge life’s room and scope and pleasure’s range,
To battle and overcome and make one’s own
The hope to mix one’s joy with others’ joy,
A yearning to possess and be possessed,
To enjoy and be enjoyed, to feel, to live.

First, ‘The will to conquer and have’, ‘to seize and keep’: to get hold of and hold onto. Then, the urge to widen: ‘To enlarge life’s room and scope and pleasure’s range’. It is the life-urge that opens us up to larger and wider experience, overcoming the tamas, the inertia that is characteristic of matter, and enlarging the range of our pleasures and pains. People who have this life-force very strongly in them do not even seem to mind whether it is pleasure or pain they are feeling: they want intensity of experience and lots of different experiences. That urge makes us ready to ‘battle and overcome and make one’s own’. People set themselves challenges or set out in search of them, to master difficulties. And then of course there is the drive towards oneness that makes us hope to mix our own joy with the joy of other people in relationships and the ‘yearning to possess and be possessed’, ‘To enjoy and be enjoyed, to feel’. This is life; this is what it means to live. The ‘ecstasy of the infinite’ expresses itself in these ways in our limited, separative personalities, making us grow, widen, expand, leading us ever further on our journey towards fulfilment.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 2]

This was the first cry of the awaking world.
It clings around us still and clamps the god.
Even when reason is born and soul takes form,
In beast and reptile and in thinking man
It lasts and is the fount of all their life.

What Aswapati is witnessing in these Kingdoms of the Little Life is ‘the first cry of the awaking world’: the cry of life being born. That first experience is still clinging around us, gripping us like a clamp. Carpenters use clamps when they want to keep their wood fixed so that it will not move. There is a god within us trying to emerge, but that growing divinity is clamped, held tight by these primitive life impulses. So ‘Even when reason is born and soul takes form’, still in the animals and the reptiles ‘and in thinking man’ that first cry of life persists. It is the ‘fount’ from which all earth-life flows. Even we mental beings still have our reptilian brain; we do not know much about what it is doing really but it dominates our physical life. We are still carrying our animal past in our DNA: ‘It lasts and is the fount of all [our] life’. Why did things have to take this form? Sri Aurobindo tells us:

 This too was needed that breath and living might be.

‘This too was needed’, this whole process was needed in order that ‘breath’, Prana, Life-Force, could become active here in the material universe.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 2]

The spirit in a finite ignorant world
Must rescue so its prisoned consciousness
Forced out in little jets at quivering points
From the Inconscient’s sealed infinitude.

Our world is not infinite. It is ‘a finite ignorant world’: a world of limitation, separation and ignorance. Under these conditions, this was the way in which universal spirit could begin to rescue its infinite consciousness ‘prisoned’ in matter. With the emergence of life, the consciousness imprisoned in matter gets ‘Forced out in little jets at quivering points’. These ‘quivering points’ are the first small individual beings in which consciousness begins to escape from ‘the Inconscient’s sealed infinitude’. There is this infinite mass of inconscient matter in which the Infinite Consciousness is imprisoned. How can it be released? We can say that all matter is absolutely packed with consciousness but has no means of expressing itself until life appears and begins to wake up in substance. It emerges in individual bodies: first in very, very simple life forms and then in more complex ones. These life-forms have all been born from matter, so they are all following the same law.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 2]

In the enigma of the darkened Vasts,
In the passion and self-loss of the Infinite
When all was plunged in the negating Void,
Non-Being’s night could never have been saved
If Being had not plunged into the dark
Carrying with it its triple mystic cross.

These are such mysterious and powerful lines! They are  among the lines that the Mother has recorded, and Sunil-da has composed wonderfully moving music to accompany  her reading of them. Let us try and understand them. ‘In the enigma of the darkened Vasts’: an ‘enigma’ is a riddle or mystery, a puzzle that is very difficult to understand. The existence of the material universe is an ‘enigma’: where has it come from and why? We believe, we are told, that the origin of everything is Sat-Chit-Ananda: pure and perfect Existence which is perfectly Conscious and full of power, and also full of perfect Bliss. But if that eternal and infinite state is the origin of everything, how could it possibly become or create or manifest this world that we live in? In these lines Sri Aurobindo seems to be speaking of some cosmic or super-cosmic disaster, in which the Infinite and Eternal has undergone a dark transformation: a ‘passion and self-loss of the Infinite’ in which all existence has been plunged into a ‘negating Void’ which is the very opposite of Sat-Chit-Ananda  (or ‘Sachchidananda’): an Asat, ‘Non-Being’, a state of non- existence. He does not tell us how or why such an event could  happen, but he tells us that in order to rescue that Non-Being from its dark state, its ‘night’, ‘Being’ – pure and absolute Existence – had to plunge after it into the darkness, ‘Carrying with it its triple mystic cross’. The word ‘passion’ has different shades of meaning but always implies intense feeling of some kind. In Christian terms we speak of ‘the passion of Christ’, meaning the suffering of Jesus at the time of his crucifixion. Here it is ‘the passion and self-loss of the Infinite’: in the process of involution the Supreme Consciousness, by a deliberate choice, loses awareness of its origin, loses awareness of its own true self: Super-Consciousness becomes the Inconscient. As a result ‘all was plunged in the negating Void’, falling down into a dark emptiness that says ‘No’ to all existence, to all consciousness, to all delight. It becomes, as it were, Non-Being. That night of Non-Being ‘could never have been saved’ if Being – conscious existence – ‘had not plunged into the dark / Carrying with it its triple mystic cross’. ‘Sachchidananda’ is the term coined by the ancient rishis to express the triple terms of being – Existence, Consciousness, Bliss. The cross symbolises the suffering of the Divine in the material universe: the straight path of the divine descent and ascent being opposed, barred by the resistance of the fallen world.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 2]

A contradiction founds the base of life:
The eternal, the divine Reality
Has faced itself with its own contraries;
Being became the Void and Conscious-Force
Nescience and walk of a blind Energy
And Ecstasy took the figure of world-pain.

As a result of this sacrifice of the higher to the lower through God’s plunge ‘into the dark’, life in the world is based on a ‘contradiction’. Sri Aurobindo states this very simply:

              The eternal, the divine Reality
              Has faced itself with its own contraries;

It is as if the supreme Reality has set itself an immense challenge: ‘Being’, Sat, pure existence, has become ‘the Void’ – emptiness, nothingness, non-existence, asat; ‘Conscious- Force’, Chit-Tapas, has turned its perfect consciousness and  omnipotence into ‘Nescience’ – absence of consciousness, a state of not-knowing, and the ‘walk of a blind Energy’: the unseeing movements of unconscious material force; and ‘Ecstasy’, the supreme inalienable Bliss, Ananda, ‘took the figure of world-pain’, turning into the suffering and sorrow that afflicts the evolving manifestation. Why would the One supreme Existence-Consciousness-Bliss allow that to happen?

              In a mysterious dispensation’s law
             A Wisdom that prepares its far-off ends
            Planned so to start her slow aeonic game.

Sri Aurobindo tells us that these are the starting conditions, the basic rules chosen by the supreme Wisdom for ‘her slow aeonic game’, which will be played out slowly through ‘aeons’, the immeasurably long periods of time required to achieve her aims, the ‘far-off ends’ of the evolution of divine life in the material universe. The word ‘dispensation’ refers to the way that the Creator has arranged the Creation, the laws or that have been chosen to rule it. It seems that the starting-point for the manifestation which we find ourselves part of has been a choice of the Supreme Reality to face itself with a play of ‘contraries’, of oppositions. As a result, the game of Life starts with the emergence we have been reading about:

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 2]

At last the struggling Energy can emerge
And meet the voiceless Being in wider fields;
Then can they see and speak and, breast to breast,
In a larger consciousness, a clearer light,
The Two embrace and strive and each know each
Regarding closer now the playmate’s face.

In the course of unfolding time and evolution their ‘hard and heavy romp’ of ‘blindfold search and wrestle and fumbling clasp’ becomes more conscious. The ‘struggling Energy’ of material Nature can meet her partner ‘the voiceless Being’ who is Soul and Spirit in ‘wider fields’ of consciousness than their original limited ‘nursery’. In the ‘clearer light’ of that ‘larger consciousness’ they can see each other better, and both Nature and Soul can recognise who their playmate is. That will lead to the fulfilment of the ‘slow aeonic game’ in their playfield of universal Space and Time and Multiplicity.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 2]

In Nature he saw the mighty Spirit concealed,
Watched the weak birth of a tremendous Force,
Pursued the riddle of Godhead’s tentative pace,
Heard the faint rhythms of a great unborn Muse.

What Aswapati is seeing in this Kingdom of the Little Life is ‘the weak birth of a tremendous Force’. He is able to see the ‘mighty Spirit’ that is ‘concealed’, hidden in apparently unconscious material Nature. He is able to trace ‘the riddle of Godhead’s tentative pace’, the mysterious appearance of the slow and hesitant first steps of developing Divinity, and to see where they are leading. He can faintly hear the rhythms of a glorious symphony which is in preparation by a great Muse, an inspiring creative Spirit who has not yet been born but who will inevitably emerge from these first stirrings of Life in Matter.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 2]