Above her brows where will and knowledge meet
A mighty Voice invaded mortal space.
It seemed to come from inaccessible heights
And yet was intimate with all the world
And knew the meaning of the steps of Time
And saw eternal destiny’s changeless scene
Filling the far prospect of the cosmic gaze.

‘A mighty Voice’ comes down from above and is felt or received in the space above her eyebrows where ‘will and knowledge meet’. This is the place of the third eye, the power of subtle vision, and also the place where the power of will is seated, the Agni Chakra. That powerful Voice ‘invaded mortal space’, the space we humans are aware of. ‘To invade’ means ‘to enter and occupy a space which is not one’s own’. This Voice does not belong to our mortal material world: it ‘seemed to come from inaccessible heights’: levels that are so high and far away that we cannot reach them, and yet at the same time it ‘was intimate with all the world’: familiar, close, and aware of everything about this world. It even seems to know ‘the meaning of the steps of Time’. We are usually quite unaware of ‘the meaning of the steps of Time’, but the Voice seems to know that, and to see ‘eternal destiny’s changeless scene’ – what has been determined forever by eternal destiny and cannot be changed – ‘Filling the far prospect of the cosmic gaze’. A ‘prospect’ is a view into the distance; this Voice seems to see what the universal spirit can see: it sees far into the future, all the way to the fulfilment of the manifestation. That Voice seems to be filled with knowledge, an intimate knowledge of things as they are, as they will be, and as they are destined to be by the eternal Will.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 7]

“Why camest thou to this dumb deathbound earth
This ignorant life beneath indifferent skies
Tied like a sacrifice on the altar of Time,
O spirit, O immortal energy,
If ’twas to nurse grief in a helpless heart
Or with hard tearless eyes await thy doom?
Arise, O soul, and vanquish Time and Death.”

Here again we have the second-person singular pronouns ‘thou’ and ‘thy’, which are no longer used in ordinary speech or writing. This is an old form of the language, which is now used only rarely. Nowadays we would say ‘you’ and ‘your’. But in Savitri Sri Aurobindo uses this form whenever one person is speaking to another. The Voice addresses Savitri as “O spirit”. It is reminding her, “You are a spiritual being. You are an immortal energy, a deathless energy. Why have you come down to this earth, this earth which is dumb, which cannot express itself, which is in the grip of death? Why have you come down into ‘This ignorant life beneath indifferent skies’, material skies that cannot respond to in your sufferings or those of anyone else, this life which is ‘Tied like a sacrifice on the altar of Time?’ ” The idea is that the earth-life is a sacrifice to the gods, the cosmic powers, tied like an animal which is going to be sacrificed, slaughtered as an offering. The Voice challenges Savitri: “Why have you come into this earthly life, if you are only going to sit there and ‘nurse grief in a helpless heart’?” Here we have the poetic abbreviation‘ ’twas ’ which stands for ‘it was’; the apostrophe at the beginning indicates that a letter has been omitted. The Voice is asking her, “Did you take birth as a human being simply to nurse your grief as if it were a child? Is your heart so helpless that you are just going to wait for your doom, for the death of Satyavan, using all your strength only to suppress your tears? Is that what you came for?” And then it urges her: “Wake up, O soul and ‘vanquish’ – overcome, conquer – ‘Time and Death’. You are stronger than Time and Death. You are an immortal spirit and energy. Wake up and do what you have come on earth to do.”

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 7]

Why should I lift my hands to the shut heavens
Or struggle with mute inevitable Fate
Or hope in vain to uplift an ignorant race
Who hug their lot and mock the saviour Light
And see in Mind wisdom’s sole tabernacle,
In its harsh peak and its inconscient base
A rock of safety and an anchor of sleep?

She asks, “ ‘Why should I lift my hands to the shut heavens’? Why should I pray when there is no response from above, from those ‘indifferent skies’? Why should I struggle with Fate, which is inevitable? Why should I hope in vain? It is useless for me to try to uplift this ignorant race of human beings ‘Who hug their lot’, who cling to their mortality, who have no faith in any ‘saviour Light’? They mock it. They think that it has no power or that it does not exist. They think that wisdom can be found only by mind.” A ‘tabernacle’ is a temporary place of worship. “Human beings think that the only place where wisdom can be worshipped is the mind; but the ‘peak’ or summit of mind,” she says, “is ‘harsh’ – hard and unresponsive, and its ‘base’ or foundation is ‘inconscient’, without consciousness; nevertheless, human beings see mind as ‘A rock of safety’ that they can rely on and hold on to as ‘an anchor of sleep’: a safe base which they can fix themselves to and fall asleep. So why should I make that effort?”

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 7]

What need have I, What need has Satyavan
To avoid the black-meshed net, the dismal door,
Or call a mightier Light into life’s closed room,
A greater law into man’s little world?

Then Savitri asks the Voice, “Why would I need ‘to avoid’ this ‘black-meshed net’ of death, this ‘dismal door’ of death? Or why would Satyavan need to avoid that? If I am an immortal spirit, why would I need to avoid the door of death? Why should I try to call a greater light into this ‘closed room’ of human life, to call a ‘greater law into man’s little world?’ ” But of course that is precisely the mission that Savitri has come on earth to achieve: to ‘call a mightier Light’ into the ‘closed room’ of human life and to bring a ‘greater law’ into the human world. That is what the Voice is commanding her to do: “Wake up, conquer Time and Death.” But her human heart is replying, “Why do I need to do that? What is the use of even trying?”

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 7]

The Voice replied: “Is this enough, O spirit?
And what shall thy soul say when it wakes and knows
The work was left undone for which it came?

The Voice challenges her: “Is that enough for you, to follow Satyavan into death and be at peace? What will your soul say when it wakes up in the other world and realises that it has left the earth without doing the work which it came here to do? Your soul came here with a mission. Do you really want to leave without having done that work?”

Or is this all for thy being born on earth
Charged with a mandate from eternity,
A listener to the voices of years,
A follower of the footprints of the gods,
To pass and leave unchanged the old dusty laws?

“Is this all that you have taken birth on earth for? You have been born here ‘Charged with a mandate from eternity.’ ” A ‘mandate’ is a mission, a defined responsibility which has been given particularly to one person or a group of people. “You have been ‘Charged with a mandate from eternity’, given a very special mission. Your being is very highly developed. It can hear ‘the voices of years’, the significant messages that are being carried down through time. You are ‘A follower of the footprints of the gods’. You follow the ways of divine beings. Are you really going to go away like any other human being, leaving ‘unchanged the old dusty laws?’ ” The laws are dusty, outdated; it is time for them to change.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 7]

“I am thy portion here charged with thy work,
As thou myself seated for ever above,
Speak to my depths, O great and deathless Voice,
Command, for I am here to do thy will.”

This inner power replies to the ‘great and deathless Voice’, “I am part of you, I am that portion here in the human being which is ‘charged with thy work’: it is your work that I have been given to do. I am here to do your work and you, O Voice, you are myself. You are the voice of my higher self, the part of me which is ‘seated for ever above’ firm and unchanging. So ‘Speak to my depths’, to the deeper parts of me, ‘O great and deathless Voice’; ‘Command’, order me what to do, because that is why I am here. I am here to do what you want me to do: ‘to do thy will’.” Then the Voice gives Savitri a very important message, which we can take as a message for ourselves too.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 7]

The Voice replied: “Remember why thou cam’st:
Find out thy soul, recover thy hid self,
In silence seek God’s meaning in thy depths,
Then mortal nature change to the divine.

This is the command coming from the highest part of Savitri’s being to her human part, telling her that it is time to wake up and prepare herself for the mission that she has been mandated by the Eternal Lord to carry out on earth. It says, ‘Remember why thou cam’st’: “Remember why you came, why you left your wonderful heavens and came here to live as a human being on earth.” This is the command of her higher being to Savitri. But each of us can take it as a command to ourselves too. All of us should be trying to remember why we are here and where we have come from. We should be trying to find out our soul and rediscover our true self which is hidden from us at the moment. The Voice tells Savitri, ‘recover thy hid self’: “Find back your true self which is hidden from your surface consciousness.” And it tells her that in order to do that, she needs to be silent: ‘In silence seek God’s meaning in thy depths’, in the deeper parts of your being. We are always living on the surface; we do not often go into those deeper parts; but we should practice going deeper and deeper until we can come in touch with our hidden self and discover ‘God’s meaning’, God’s purpose in our depths. He has a different purpose for each of us. Each of us has a unique mission to fulfil. In silence we can look within our depths and find out why we are here. And when we have found out God’s meaning in our depths, then we can begin to change this ‘mortal nature’, the ordinary human nature we live in now, into our true divine nature.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 7]

Open God’s door, enter into his trance.
Cast Thought from thee, that nimble ape of Light:
In his tremendous hush stilling thy brain
His vast Truth wake within and know and see.

What must Savitri do to find God’s meaning in her depths? The Voice tells her, ‘Open God’s door, enter into his trance.’ In order to do that, she is told, “ ‘Cast Thought from thee, that nimble ape of Light’.” We are usually centred in our surface mind which is dominated by thought; but the Voice tells Savitri that this thinking which is going on all the time in us is just a ‘nimble ape of Light’: a clever monkey who is always leaping about and imitating, as monkeys do; it is imitating a higher light. Until we have found God’s meaning in our depths, perhaps that ‘nimble ape’ is the best light that we have; but if we really want to go into the silence and open God’s doors, we have to learn to put Thought at a distance: ‘Cast Thought from thee, that nimble ape of Light’. When Thought has been cast off, a ‘tremendous hush’ comes; in that divine hush, let the brain stop working. Even when we are not having any active thoughts, many currents and nervous movements are pulsing through the brain, and when thought stops we may become aware of all those activities. That too has to fall silent: the physical brain has to accept to be still, quiet, unmoving; then it will be possible to wake up to God’s ‘vast Truth’ which will give the power to ‘know and see’, not in the way we know and see now through the power of surface mind, but by identity, with the direct vision of what and how things really are. That is one step to be made. Then comes another:

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 7]

Cast from thee sense that veils thy spirit’s sight:
In the enormous emptiness of thy mind
Thou shalt see the Eternal’s body in the world,
Know him in every voice heard by thy soul,
In the world’s contacts meet his single touch;
All things shall fold thee into his embrace.

If you try to silence your mind, you will notice that sense impressions become very prominent. When we are thinking, we may not pay much attention to the many sense impressions we are receiving all the time from what is going on around us, but when thought falls silent, then the sense impressions become very dominant. All those sense impressions that are connecting us to the outside world are veiling, covering up, the power of vision that belongs to our spirit, to our true self. They veil the ‘spirit’s sight’. Only when the sense faculty has also been cast away will it be possible to experience an enormous emptiness of mind. “Then” the Voice tells Savitri, “ ‘Thou shalt see the Eternal’s body in the world.’ You will be able to perceive how the entire world is inhabited by the eternal divine presence, and see the Eternal Lord embodied in all these shapes and appearances which form the material body of the Eternal. Also you will be able to know and hear the Eternal speaking to you in every voice that your soul hears. ‘In the world’s contacts’, in everything that you touch and everything that touches you, you will feel ‘his single touch’: the touch of the Lord. ‘All things’, everything that is in the world will fold you ‘into his embrace’, the embrace of the Divine.” If we had this experience and could live in this consciousness then we would be Yogis. We would be seeing and experiencing the world very differently from the way we do now. We would be experiencing it from our soul, not from our surface personality. Finally the Voice tells Savitri:

Conquer thy heart’s throbs, let thy heart beat in God:
Thy nature shall be the engine of his works,
Thy voice shall house the mightiness of his Word:
Then shalt thou harbour my force and conquer Death.”

‘To conquer’, means ‘to gain control’ over something. The Voice tells Savitri that she has to gain control over her heart’s throbs. The heart throbs in a physical sense as it keeps the blood circulating, distributing oxygen to every part of the body; but we also experience the heart as the seat of our emotions, our feelings. Savitri has been feeling intense grief and pain and fear, and a passionate need to be with Satyavan all the time. The Voice tells her, “You have to become the master of your emotions so that you feel that your heart is beating within the Divine. When you have done this, you will perceive your human nature as ‘the engine of his works’, the dynamic force fulfilling what the Divine wants to be done in the world, and your voice ‘will house the mightiness of his Word’.” As an incarnation of the Divine Mother, Savitri represents the strength of the creative power of the divine Word and now she is being told, “You will be able to speak the divine truth. You will be able to say whatever needs to be said, and your words will carry a power of realisation.” Lastly, the great and deathless Voice from the summit of Savitri’s being tells her: ‘Then shalt thou harbour my force and conquer Death’: “Then you will be able to hold within you all the power of the Supreme Divine Mother and you will be able to overcome Death.” This is the promise that is made to Her.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 7]

Impassive mid the movement and the cry,
Witness of the thoughts of mind, the moods of life,
She looked into herself and sought for her soul.

‘Impassive’: one might be shocked and disturbed in one’s meditation by such loud noises and the rain pouring down, but Savitri does not react to the thunder and lightning; she remains ‘impassive’, undisturbed and concentrated, looking into herself and witnessing, observing, ‘the thoughts of mind’ and ‘the moods of life’, its emotions and the feelings. In obedience to the command of the mighty Voice, she begins to search ‘for her soul’.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 7]