Arisen beneath a triple mystic heaven
The seven immortal earths were seen, sublime:
Homes of the blest released from death and sleep
Where grief can never come nor any pan
Arriving from self-lost and seeking worlds
Alter Heaven-nature’s changeless quietude
And mighty posture of eternal calm,
Its pose of ecstasy immutable.

Now, Savitri sees rising up ‘beneath a triple mystic heaven’ – a ‘heaven’ that is in a series of three – ‘The seven immortal earths’. We asked Dr. Alok Pandey whether he could cast any light on these lines, mentioning that a reference to ‘triple heavens’ also appears in Book Two, Canto Fifteen, The Kingdoms of the Greater Knowledge, on page 300. Here is his reply: The triple mystic heaven is the threefold worlds of Truth, Consciousness and Bliss, known as Satloka, Tapoloka or Chidghanaloka and Anandaloka. These are the three highest worlds of the triune Sacchidananda.

The seven immortal Earths refer to the Earth-principle that exists on all the seven planes of existence from the subtle physical to the world of Truth. Our Earth is a final condensation of these planes as they descend and crystallise for the sake of the play. The triple heavens referred to in ‘The Kingdom of Greater Knowledge’, however, suggest the triple higher worlds of the Greater Mind that climb towards the Supermind, the Swarloka of Vedic lore.

Q: But in Sat-chit-ananda does Sat mean existence or does it mean Truth?

Sat means pure existence. But what really exists is only truth. Truth is the only ultimate reality. Truth and Reality are inseparably connected. In our state of existence we are not always sure that what seems real is true. But on the highest level what is real is true. It is pure existence, and that existence is conscious and that consciousness is full of bliss; that consciousness is also full of the power of truth and reality: so Sat-Chit-Ananda includes also tapas: Sat-chit-tapas- Ananda.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 11]

A dancing chaos, an iridescent sea
Eternised to Heaven’s ever-wakeful sight
The crowding petal-glow of marvel’s tints
Which float across the curtained lids of dream.

See how he puts these words together! He is comparing the ‘crowding petal glow’ of the mass of flowers with a ‘sea’ whose dancing waves are ‘iridescent’: shining with all the colours of the rainbow; sometimes in the early morning the crystal inside the Matrimandir chamber gives out such an iridescent glow, each reflected ray of light containing all the rainbow colours. That ‘iridescent sea’ of colour is dancing for Heaven to watch. And Heaven does not close its ‘ever-wakeful’ eyes. This is the world of Everlasting Day: there is no night, no darkness. This ‘dancing’ is eternal, for ever. And it preservesfor ‘Heaven’s ever-wakeful sight’ all those wonderful ‘tints’ or shades of colour that ‘float across the curtained lids of dream’.‘Lids’ means ‘eye lids’. When we close our eyes and ‘dream’we may see marvellous colours that we cannot see with our eyes open; we imagine the marvellous colours that we cannot See.

Q: What world or plane of consciousness is being described here?

This plane was said to be the lowest of the seven immortal earths, but even this lowest earth is still a heaven. It is the closest one to us.

Q: He is describing material things…

Not material things, but the way in which, in that world, ‘beauty and brightness of terrestrial scenes’ get ‘translated’ into ‘the splendour of things divine’, into forms that are similar to the beauties of nature on our earth, but expressing divine splendour.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 11]

What would be suffering here, was fiery bliss.

In ordinary human bodies such intense sensations would be experienced as painful, as suffering, but Savitri is experiencing them as ‘fiery bliss’, intense delight.

All here but passionate hint and mystic shade
Divined by the inner prophet who perceives
The spirit of delight in sensuous things,
Turned to more sweetness than can now be dreamed.

For her, sensations which we might experience here only as a ‘passionate hint’ or a dim ‘mystic shade’ or shadow, only faintly perceived or ‘Divined’ by some intuitive ‘inner prophet’, who is able to feel more subtly than we normally can and perceives ‘The spirit of delight in sensuous things’, are ‘Turned to more sweetness than can now be dreamed.’

Divining is a kind of subtle sense. We talk about ‘water diviners’: people who can walk across a field and sense the right place to dig a well, a place where abundant water lies beneath the surface. How do they ‘divine’ that hidden water? They feel it through a subtle sense impression or intuition. That way of subtle feeling is called ‘divining’. The poet says here that within the being there is a ‘prophet’ who has that capacity of subtle sensing. That ‘prophet’ within divines what to us would be only a faint impression, if we became aware of it at all, and is able to perceive ‘The spirit of delight’ in these ‘sensuous things’ – these sense impressions.

Q: How can suffering be bliss?

Sri Aurobindo tells us at several places in the poem that what we experience as suffering, pain or grief, as well as what we experience as pleasure and what we find just boring and do not notice, are all different forms of bliss, and within us the soul experiences the ‘bliss’ of all those things: all these different tastes, the different rasas. Here he is giving a hint of that: what would be suffering here is experienced by Savitri as a very intense form of ‘bliss’.

We know that Sri Aurobindo himself had experiences like this. He has written a poem about it: when he was walking on the terrace one night, a scorpion came or God came in the form of a scorpion and stung his foot. He says, the body experienced pain but the soul within felt the divine touch and was delighted. And when he fell and broke his thigh in 1939 he said that his whole effort was to turn that intense pain into ananda, into bliss. He knew it could be done because when he was in prison in Alipore there were some particularly fierce ants in his cell and he said, “I know that pain can be turned into bliss.” It all depends on the consciousness level we are at: the way we accept things and circumstances that life brings.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 11]

The mighty signs of which earth fears the stress,
Trembling because she cannot understand,
And must keep obscure in forms strange and sublime,
Were here the first lexicon of an infinite mind
Translating the language of eternal bliss.

This carries on from what I was explaining just now. There is a language of eternal bliss which expresses itself sometimes in ‘mighty signs of which earth fears the stress’. Here when he says ‘earth’ he is not referring to the planet earth. He is referring to ‘earth’ as the principle of matter, prithvi. The substance of our physical bodies feels ‘the stress’ of those ‘mighty signs’. The body trembles ‘because’ it ‘cannot understand’ that they are expressions of intense bliss. It cannot respond to them with delight; it has to diminish or hide these ‘signs’ or to give them ‘strange’ or ‘sublime’ ‘forms’ because they are too much for it. But in the celestial realm which Savitri is now experiencing, these ‘signs’ are ‘the first lexicon of an infinite mind / Translating the language of eternal bliss’. A ‘lexicon’ is like a dictionary; it is a list of words with their meanings. Our brother Narad has collected a lot of vocabulary from Savitri and given explanations for all those words and published them in book form. He has given his book the title Lexicon of an Infinite Mind. Here the phrase seems to indicate that those ‘mighty signs’ which our physical being shrinks from are just a first vocabulary into which ‘the language of eternal bliss’ gets translated in that realm. All the different kinds of ‘signs’ that ‘earth’ might fear – disasters and catastrophes and terrible suffering – are in a way ‘Translating’ ‘eternal bliss’, but ‘in forms’ which our material substance cannot understand and cannot bear and therefore fears.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 11]

These were the first domains, the outer courts
Immense but least in range and least in price,
The slightest ecstasies of the undying gods.

This is the lowest of the ‘seven immortal earths’ mentioned earlier, and all these glorious things that Savitri is experiencing are happening in the first entrance, ‘the outer’ courtyards of that realm before the realm itself is entered. These ‘outer courts’ are already ‘Immense’ in themselves, but the ones that are further on will be even more ‘Immense’. These are the ‘least in range’, the ‘least’ in size and scope, and the ‘least in price’, the least in value. The ecstasies Savitri is experiencing are the slightest ones, the least intense, the faintest of the ecstasies enjoyed there by ‘the undying gods’.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 11]

Immortal figures and illumined brows,
Our great forefathers in those splendours moved;
Termless in power and satisfied of light,
They enjoyed the sense of all for which we strive.

In those heavens Savitri becomes aware of ‘Our great forefathers’ living and moving. These ‘forefathers’ are mentioned and honoured in the Vedas as the ones who have gone before, who have initiated the great tradition of spiritual knowledge. Savitri sees those early founders of humanity living and moving there, now ‘Immortal’. Their ‘brows’ are full of light, ‘illumined’, their ‘power’ is ‘Termless’ – unlimited, and they are fully ‘satisfied’ with the light, the consciousness and knowledge they have achieved. They are enjoying ‘the sense of all for which we strive’: the essence and significance of everything that we are labouring so hard to grasp and bring about, the sense of everything that ‘we strive’ and struggle for, they have achieved and are enjoying in this heavenly realm.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 11]

High seers, moved poets saw the eternal thoughts
That, travellers from on high, arrive to us
Deformed by our search, tricked by costuming mind,
Like gods disfigured by the pangs of birth,
Seized the great words which now are frail sounds caught
By difficult rapture on a mortal tongue.

Q: ‘Moved poets’ means that they moved up?

No, I think they are ‘moved’ emotionally rather than physically. They are ‘moved’ by the thoughts that come down to them from higher realms, and because they are emotionally ‘moved’ by those thoughts they can put them into beautiful ‘words’. ‘Poets’ should be ‘moved’ and they should be ‘seers’: they should have a power of vision. One cannot just manufacture poetry with the mind, although today many people try to do that. True poetry should be ‘moved’ and emerge from some intense emotion. The English poet Wordsworth said that the true source of poetic inspiration is “emotion recollected in tranquillity”: He would see some enchanting scene as he walked through the countryside, and then later, perhaps many years later, remembering that emotion a poem would come to him. Not all poets work like that, but that was his experience.

The rishis, the seers, receive their poetic inspiration from high above in the form of ‘eternal thoughts’ that come to them as ‘travellers from on high’. Such ‘thoughts’ may also ‘arrive to us’, to us human beings; but by the time they reach us they have been spoiled and become ‘Deformed’, twisted, ‘by our search’, our eagerness to get hold of them. They also get ‘tricked by costuming mind’. ‘Tricked’ normally means ‘to be misled’: somebody misleads you, tricks you; but here Sri Aurobindo uses the word in another sense, which means ‘dressed up’, ‘ornamented’: You can be ‘tricked’ out with jewellery. The mind gives clothes to those ‘eternal thoughts’: it dresses them up, puts fancy costumes on them. Those poor ‘Deformed’ ‘thoughts’ – all dressed up like that – appear to us ‘Like gods’, immortal beings, but their original divine beauty has been ‘disfigured’: Their whole appearance is spoiled ‘by the pangs of birth’ as they are born into our world in the form of human speech, expressed by ‘a mortal tongue’ – perhaps with great delight, but after great difficulty and effort: ‘Seized … By difficult rapture on a mortal tongue’. In that celestial realm ‘seers’ and ‘poets’ can seize ‘the great words’ expressing ‘eternal thoughts’ which will reach human beings only as very weak ‘frail sounds’, caught by a human poet in an earthly language, only with a ‘difficult rapture’.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 11]