Here, living centre of that vision of peace,
A Woman sat in clear and crystal light:
Heaven had unveiled its lustre in her eyes,
Her feet were moonbeams, her face was a bright sun,
Her smile could persuade a dead lacerated heart
To live again and feel the hands of calm.

Here sits another soul force, another Madonna, as if surrounded by clear sparkling ‘crystal light’. It is as if the light of heaven is shining out of her eyes without any veil. Her feet are like shining moonbeams; her face is bright like a sun and her smile is so beautiful that it could ‘persuade a dead lacerated heart / To live again’. ‘Lacerated’ means ‘torn with many wounds’. Even a heart that has been wounded so badly and so often that it has lost its capacity to feel, to live and love, would respond to that beautiful smile and agree ‘To live again and feel the hands of calm’, the soothing hands that heal all wounds.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 7]

A low music heard became her floating voice:
“O Savitri, I am thy secret soul.
I have come down to the wounded desolate earth
To heal her pangs and lull her heart to rest
And lay her head upon the Mother’s lap
That she may dream of God and know his peace
And draw the harmony of higher spheres
Into the rhythm of earth’s rude troubled days.

The Madonna speaks. Like each of the other goddesses, she claims to be Savitri’s secret soul and begins to reveal her mission and her function. This soul-power has come to heal this earth that is suffering, wounded and desolate, without help; she wants ‘To heal her pangs and lull her heart to rest’.  This goddess has come to heal earth’s sufferings and lull its  heart to rest. She wants to lay earth’s head in the lap of the  Supreme Divine Motherso that earth can ‘dream of God’ and experience the divine peace.

She wants to ‘draw the harmony of higher spheres’ into ‘earth’s rude troubled days’. The material realm is full of trouble and travail, hard labour and difficulties and oppositions of all kinds. We tend to think that earth’s days are particularly troubled and rude at the moment when we become aware of all the dreadful things that are happening all over our globe every day; but perhaps the earth has always been troubled and suffering. What this Madonna wants to do is to bring down the harmonies that are natural to higher realms, to the wonderful subtle planes beyond the earth, and make them a part of the rhythm of earth-life, here in the material universe. That is her mission, her aim and role.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 7]

I make even sin and error stepping-stones
And all experience a long march towards Light.
Out of the Inconscient I build consciousness,
And lead through death to reach immortal Life.

Because of the ‘anomalies of the human heart’, human beings cannot help making mistakes. To err is human. We are making mistakes, errors, all the time, and sometimes we feel very painfully that our mistakes separate us from God: they give us a feeling of having done something disastrously wrong – we feel that we have sinned. But here the Mother of Light very comfortingly says: ‘I make even sin and error stepping-stones / And all experience a long march towards Light’. All human beings are on a journey, ‘a long march’ towards the greater and higher light of the spiritual consciousness, and even our ‘sin and error’, the things that we do wrong and the mistakes that we make, are turned into stepping-stones on the long journey by the Madonna of Light, as she builds up more and more consciousness emerging from ‘the Inconscient’ and leads all creatures on their evolutionary journey from one life to the next to the next until all reach ‘immortal Life’. Our base here in the material world is the inconscient. So far as we know, this substance we call Matter does not have any conscious awareness; but out of this inconscient sea and sky and stone, she is building consciousness: first in very simple life forms and then in more and more complex ones, eventually achieving mental awareness and going beyond it to spiritual awareness. It is the Mother of Light who leads us ‘through death to reach immortal Life’. We ‘die’ again and again and again on our journey, leaving one body and moving into another one, but this journey and these many deaths and births are leading us towards immortal life.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 7]

He is the Good for which men fight and die,
He is the war of Right with Titan wrong;
He is Freedom rising deathless from her pyre;
He is Valour guarding still the desperate pass
Or lone and erect on the shattered barricade
Or a sentinel in the dangerous echoing Night.

The Madonna describes to Savitri some of the ways in which God expresses himself in the thoughts and actions of human beings and helps them to progress on their journey towards divinity. One way that human beings can grow in consciousness and divinity is by identifying something which they recognise as Good and being ready to sacrifice their lives for that ideal, being ready to fight and die for what they believe to be Good. Another form of that expression is the idea of fighting for what is true and Right against ‘Titan wrong’. A ‘Titan’ is a superhuman being, often with an enlarged ego which is ruthless and cruel. Sometimes there are forms of human behaviour which we feel have to be combated because they represent this ‘Titan wrong’. If we fight for the good and the true, we often tend to identify it with freedom. And there is something remarkable about freedom: often it seems to be defeated. We see terrible things happen so that human beings have to suffer all kinds of oppression; yet eventually the sacrifices that human beings make for the sake of freedom do triumph. Here Sri Aurobindo expresses that by referring to ‘Freedom rising deathless from her pyre’. The ‘pyre’ is the fire where we burn a dead body.

The divine also takes the form of ‘Valour’, of selfless courage, ‘guarding still the desperate pass’. This allusion reminds us for example of the few ancient Greek warriors who defended the narrow pass of Thermopylae against a huge Persian army. Though they were so few they went on resisting even when it seemed absolutely hopeless. There is an incident like that in Indian history too, the story of Baji Prabhou, about which Sri Aurobindo has written a wonderful poem.

This is one of the ways in which the Divine expresses himself in human beings, and those souls who become his instruments grow in stature and prepare their own evolutionary future. These are different forms of courage and determination, bravery in the war of good against evil, truth against falsehood, human dignity against oppression, and the Madonna says that they are coming from God; they are ways in which he expresses himself in human beings and helps them to grow greater in their souls and bodies.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, B00k 7]

But human mind clings to its ignorance
And to its littleness the human heart
And to its right to grief the earthly life.

The biggest difficulty is that we human beings cling to the obstructions that prevent us becoming constantly aware of the divine presence. Our mind clings to its ignorance and limitations; our heart clings to its petty self-centred emotions, only very rarely do we open our hearts to higher and nobler things; and our life part seems to cling to ‘its right to grief’, to sorrow and suffering. I don’t know whether you have noticed that sometimes when your are feeling very happy and enjoying life, a little voice inside you says, “but it cannot go on like this”; and when we are really very unhappy and distressed, if anyone tries to comfort us by taking a wider view, something in us simply refuses to look on the brighter side – it is enjoying its grief and clinging to it; it will not let it go without a struggle.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 7]

I shall save earth, if earth consents to be saved.
Then Love shall at last unwounded tread earth’s soil;
Man’s mind shall admit the sovereignty of Truth
And body bear the immense descent of God.”

The Mother of Light says, “If earth accepts, ‘consents to be saved’, ‘I shall save earth’. And when earth is saved, then at last divine Love will be able to walk here on earth without its feet being wounded.” When the feet of divine Love touch our earth, they cannot help getting wounded by all our imperfections here; but she says that a time will come when ‘Love shall at last unwounded tread earth’s soil’. Then the human mind too will be able to accept the rule of Truth: “Man’s mind shall admit the sovereignty of Truth’. ‘Sovereignty’ is the power that a ruler holds; human beings need to be able to accept the rule of Truth; then even these fragile, inert and unresponsive physical bodies of ours will become able to experience and bear ‘the immense descent of God’, which would shatter the bodies we have at present. The Madonna is looking forward to a great fulfilment and transformation of the whole earth nature. This is the end of her speech to Savitri.

We have seen how Savitri on her quest to discover her soul has gradually come nearer to its home; but before she actually finds it, she encounters these three complementary soul-forces, symbolically embodied as three goddesses. Each of them introduces herself, saying, ‘O Savitri, I am thy secret soul’. Each of them reveals her powers and mission but also her limitations. Then we have been shown a reflection of each of them in the lower human nature: a voice from below echoes a distorted, egoistic, perverted expression of the same divine power that each of the goddesses represents. Now we have met all the three goddesses, the Madonna of Sorrows, of Divine Pity and Compassion, the Madonna of Strength and Power shown in the form of Durga, trident in hand, with a lion beneath her feet, and the Madonna of Light. Next we shall hear the distorted echo of this last Madonna. Sri Aurobindo calls it the ‘voice of the sense-shackled human mind’. Mind is supposed to be a power of light; but when human mind fails to open to higher realities but instead chains itself to the senses, and the physical surfaces of things, then it is no longer a power of light: it is still a power, but a blinded and distorted one.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 7]

Imprisoned in his body and his brain
The mortal cannot see God’s mighty whole,
Or share in his vast and deep identity
Who stands unguessed within our ignorant hearts
And knows all things because he is one with all.

We are all potentially immortal beings because we have a divine soul within us, but until we reunite with that divine soul and feel and live our immortality, we are mortals, imprisoned in our bodies and brains. So we cannot see ‘God’s mighty whole’, his whole being and his huge plan for the creation. Above all we cannot feel the oneness that unites all the parts of this whole, we cannot ‘share in’ God’s ‘vast and deep identity’, God’s oneness with everything in the universe. The Divine is standing ‘unguessed within our ignorant hearts’; we do not guess or feel that he is there, but he is within each of us and everything, and he ‘knows all things because he is one with all.’ But in our present state we are not one with all. We are one with our limited being, very much constricted by our body, our body’s needs and our mortal thoughts, so we cannot see the whole.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 7]

Thus is he baulked, his splendid effort vain;
His knowledge scans bright pebbles on the shore
Of the huge oceans of his ignorance.
Yet grandiose were the accents of that cry,
A cosmic pathos trembled in its tone.

Because of this the ‘splendid effort’ of humanity to understand the universe around us is ‘baulked’, blocked, frustrated. All the splendid efforts of the human mind are in vain because we cannot go deep enough below the surface, deep into the heart of things. All the knowledge which humanity has accumulated over the centuries and millennia amount to a few ‘bright pebbles’ that man has gathered ‘on the shore / Of the huge oceans of his ignorance’. Here Sri Aurobindo is alluding to a remark made by the great scientist Isaac Newton. He made so many discoveries and carried the knowledge of science so much further, but towards the end of his life he is reported to have said, “I do not know how I may seem to others, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on a sea-shore and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before This statement shows the humility of a truly great scientist and at the same time is an accurate description of the state of human knowledge. But when the echo speaks, although it is the ‘voice of the sense-shackled human mind’, Sri Aurobindo says, ‘Yet grandiose were the accents of that cry’. There is some nobility and grandeur in this expression of the ‘godlike power’ of human mind; and there is also something sad, something pathetic: ‘A cosmic pathos trembled in its tone’. When somebody is speaking and their voice trembles, it is because there is some deep emotion behind. Here it is ‘A cosmic pathos’, a universal sadness, a sense of pity and waste and frustration, a lack of fulfilment.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 7]

Yet have I loosened the cord, enlarged my room.
I have mapped the heavens and analysed the stars,
Described their orbits through the grooves of Space
Measured the miles that separate the suns,
Computed their longevity in Time.

He says, “I am tied up. I am a beast of burden and I am tied up, but I have loosened the cord that binds me, at least a little bit. I have ‘enlarged my room’, the range of my movement. I am not so restricted as I was earlier. I have been able to look up to the skies, ‘I have mapped the heavens and analysed the stars’. It is really amazing that scientists can detect stars billions of miles away and tell us what they are made of. They have ‘Described their orbits through the grooves of Space,’ and ‘Measured the miles that separate the suns’. The cosmologists tell us that there are uncountable billions of suns and solar systems in our own Milky Way Galaxy alone, but they have found a way to measure the distances between them. They have also been able to calculate, compute, how long those suns have lived and how much longer they will live, ‘their longevity in Time’. ‘Longevity’ refers to the length of a lifetime.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 7]

I have detected plasm and cell and gene,
The protozoa traced, man’s ancestors,
The humble originals from whom he rose;
I know how he was born and how he dies:
Only what end he serves I know not yet
Or if there is aim at all or any end
Or push of rich creative purposeful joy
In the wide works of the terrestrial power.

‘I have detected plasm and cell and gene’: the word ‘plasm’ comes from ancient Greek where it meant something that is or can be moulded into shape. Sri Aurobindo uses it no less than ten times in Savitri, each time apparently referring to some original state of substance or living matter from which all forms have been shaped; cells and genes have become familiar biological terms over the last century. The word ‘protozoa’ is also of ancient Greek origin and refers to the simplest and most primitive life forms from which all animals and plants have evolved. These are our most distant ancestors, the ‘humble originals’ from which all human beings have descended. The human mind has discovered how we are born and how we die, but its representative voice has to admit that we have not yet found out what the purpose of Man is, ‘what end he serves’, or indeed whether there is any aim or purpose at all in human existence. Is there really any aim or purpose in universal nature? Is there any ‘push of rich creative purposeful joy / In the wide works of the terrestrial power’? The ‘terrestrial power’ is what we call Nature; she does seem to be extremely creative, but humanity is not yet sure whether there is any purpose or aim or intention in all her creativity.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 7]

If God is at work, his secrets I have found.
But still the Cause of things is left in doubt,
Their truth flees from pursuit into a void;
When all has been explained nothing is known.

If at all there is a God who is at work in the universe, this representative of the human mind claims to have found out all His secrets. But what he has not yet discovered is ‘the Cause of things’: why does all this exist? What is it all for? That is the question that Savitri’s Mother puts to Narad in Book Six: ‘Why is it all and wherefore are we here?’ That is the great unanswered question. As long as we do not have the answer to this question, we cannot find the underlying truth about anything: ‘When all has been explained nothing is known’. Even when the human mind has explained everything, still nothing is really known.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 7]

Perhaps the world is an error of our sight,
A trick repeated in each flash of sense,
An unreal mind hallucinates the soul
With a stress-vision of false reality,
Or a dance of Maya veils the void Unborn.

The human reason has to conclude that perhaps the way we perceive the world is just a mistake of our brain, an error of our way of seeing and perceiving. Nowadays we watch films which are actually made up of a series of still images, called ‘frames’; because the images follow each other more quickly than our brains can follow, we see a continuous movement. It is an error of our sight. So he says that when our senses receive sense impressions, our minds wrongly conclude that we are perceiving a solid persistent reality; but that is an illusion, a trick; there is nothing solid or continuous there. The world which we think that we are perceiving may not really exist. This trick, this illusion is repeated in a series of separate individual flashes giving us the impression of a reality which is not really there. Our mind too is not really real, and it convinces us of the existence of a soul by giving us a false vision, a ‘hallucination’. Or perhaps the way we see the world is like seeing a person moving very quickly, so that we have the illusion of many arms or many legs, the dance of Maya. All this movement is veiling an emptiness, a Void, an empty ‘Unborn’, which has never really been manifested, has never come into existence.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 7]

How can man grow immortal and divine
Transmuting the very stuff of which he is made?
This wizard gods may dream, not thinking men.”

What a crazy idea it is to think human beings can become ‘immortal and divine’ like gods! For that to happen, the very substance we are made of would have to be transmuted, transformed, to be changed completely. ‘Wizard gods’ who can do miracles and magic may dream that this might be possible, but not ‘thinking men’ like us. And indeed we do find it very difficult to believe that a divine life on earth might one day become possible for ‘thinking men’ like ourselves.

And Savitri heard the voice, the warped answer heard
And turning to her being of light she spoke:
“Madonna of light, Mother of Joy and peace,
Thou art a portion of my self put forth
To raise the spirit to its forgotten heights
And wake the soul by touches of the heavens.

Savitri has heard the voice of the Madonna and heard ‘the warped answer’ that comes up from the lower human nature. Now she speaks to her own being of light, her own soul- power, addressing her as ‘Madonna of light, Mother of Joy and peace’. As with the two other Madonnas she tells her, “‘Thou art a portion of my self’ whose mission is to raise the spirit hidden in humanity ‘to its forgotten heights’” – the higher levels of consciousness from which it has come – “and to ‘wake the soul by touches of the heavens’.” The soul that is sleeping in the material body needs to be woken up to its true nature through the experiences of life, and especially by ‘touches of the heavens’, stimulating influences from higher  levels of consciousness.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 7]

Because thou art, the soul draws near to God;
Because thou art, love grows in spite of hate
And knowledge walks unslain in the pit of Night.

She tells her: “ ‘Because thou art’, because you exist, the human soul does progress, does draw nearer to God; and because you exist, love continues to grow and spread in spite of all the powers of hatred that are in the world, and knowledge too spreads even ‘in the pit of Night’. Although this world is full of ignorance, darkness and falsehood, knowledge still ‘walks unslain’ here: it cannot be killed by the darkness and is gradually spreading its light. That is because of your influence, ‘Madonna of light, Mother of Joy and peace’.” Now Savitri tells her soul-force:

But not by showering heaven’s golden rain
Upon the intellect’s hard and rocky soil
Can the tree of Paradise flower on earthly ground
And the Bird of Paradise sit upon life’s boughs
And the winds of Paradise visit mortal air.

Savitri says that it is not by pouring down ‘heaven’s golden rain’, the light and knowledge of the higher level of consciousness, onto the ‘hard and rocky soil’ of the human intellect that the transformation can come about. She expresses the transformation in three beautiful images: first, the tree of Paradise’; the tree is the symbol of life: the tree of Paradise is the Divine Life that must one day ‘flower on earthly ground’, bringing about the blossoming of life; second, ‘the Bird of Paradise’, the soul who should sit in the tree of divine life and sing beautifully; and third ‘the winds of Paradise’ which must bring the atmosphere of the higher realms, to mingle with the earthly air of mortality. For that to happen, something else is needed:

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 7]

Even if thou rain down intuition’s rays,
The mind of man will think it earth’s own gleam,
His spirit by spiritual ego sink,
Or his soul dream shut in sainthood’s brilliant cell
Where only a bright shadow of God can come.

Savitri continues: “If you pour down intuition so that human beings become more and more intuitive, this egoistic man of knowledge will just think “Oh, that is natural, of course it is like that” and feel very superior and proud of himself.” Instead of opening him to the higher influence, it will weigh down his spirit with ‘spiritual ego’: that is the most dangerous form of ego, when we begin to think that we are very special and outstanding beings. Or something else might happen to him: his soul may fall asleep and dream ‘shut in sainthood’s brilliant cell’; aiming to be perfectly good and pure and becoming a saint, Sri Aurobindo says, is very limiting; it shuts you up in a narrow cell, a tiny room into which ‘only a bright shadow of God can come’, not the full illumination of the Divine Presence. Even the ‘shadow of God’ is bright and a person who reaches that state of sainthood may have wonderful experiences, but as far as the life of world and its evolution towards the Divine Life are concerned, his or her influence may be very limited. So what is the solution? Savitri says,

His hunger for the eternal thou must nurse
And fill his yearning heart with heaven’s fire
And bring God down into his body and life.

This is the mission which Savitri gives to her being of light: “You must nurse and nourish the human being’s hunger and thirst for what is eternal and real and infinite, and ‘fill his yearning heart with heaven’s fire’.” The heart of the human being is always yearning for something, but this soul-force can increase the heart’s longing for what is higher and truer and more lasting, and fill it with the heavenly fire of aspiration; she must help ‘bring God down into his body and life’. In this way the great change can be prepared.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 7]

One day I will return, His hand in mine,
And thou shall see the face of the Absolute.

Again Savitri makes a promise, saying, as she has said to each of the Madonnas, ‘One day I will return’ …. This time she says, “When I have fulfilled my mission, I will come back with ‘His hand in mine’; then you will be able to see ‘the face of the Absolute’.”

Then shall the holy marriage be achieved,
Then shall the divine family be born.
There shall be light and peace in all the worlds.”

This is the promise of the union of Spirit and Matter, Heaven and Earth, Nature and Soul. Then ‘the divine family’ shall be born here on earth, all the children of the divine, living the divine life on the earth, and the light and joy and peace which this Madonna represents will fill not only the earth, but ‘all the worlds’: the reign of ego and falsehood shall be ended.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 7]