In its motion-parable of human life
Here thou canst trace the outcome Nature gives
To the sin of being and the error in things
And the desire that compels to live
And man’s incurable malady of hope.

He continues: “If you trace what is shown here in this ’motion-parable of human life’, this symbolic representation of what human life is really like, you will see ‘the outcome’ that ‘Nature gives’ to all human effort and existence”. A ‘parable’ is a story with a message; what Death is showing Savitri now is not simply a story, but an actual moving and living four-dimensional film presented before her eyes in that symbol world to illustrate his view of earthly life. It is not a very inspiring and hopeful way of looking at the world, but quite a large portion of humanity is in the grip of this kind of attitude, which makes it difficult for us to progress as a race. Death’s words imply that the outcome Nature gives to all human effort is a punishment, as if by simply existing we are committing an offence, a ‘sin’, ‘The sin of being’ which will inevitably be punished by Nature, by the laws of the universe. He tells Savitri that an ‘error’ is built into everything in the world, which is kept going by the ‘desire’ that compels beings to be born and to live, and by ‘man’s incurable malady of hope’. A ‘malady’ is a disease, a sickness. He implies that mankind cannot be cured of this terrible disease of ‘hope’ which keeps all this fruitless effort and existence going on and on and round and round for ever. Let us emphasise again that this is not Sri Aurobindo’s view of things at all but the very opposite of it.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 10]

His mind is pent in circling boundaries:
For mind is man, beyond thought he cannot soar.
If he could leave his limits he would be safe:
He sees but cannot mount to his greater heavens;
Even winged, he sinks back to his native soil.
He is a captive in his net of mind
And beats soul-wings against the walls of life.

We are mental beings and our existence is determined by our ignorant mind which is ‘pent’, closely limited within ‘circling boundaries’, which also go round and round without fundamentally changing. ‘Mind is man’, says Death, and man ‘cannot soar’, cannot fly any higher than the boundaries set by human mind. This is not true at all, but that is what he says and what many human beings believe. Death seems to make it worse by saying that if it were possible for us to go beyond the limits set by mind, then we ‘would be safe’, we could be saved, but that is something impossible for the human race: He admits the possibility that human beings can see ‘greater heavens’, higher levels of consciousness, but declares that we cannot mount up to them. Even if our mind has wings to fly higher, we are still compelled to sink back to our ‘native soil’, the earth-matter we have been born from. Our mind is like a net, in which our winged soul has been caught and cannot escape. The ‘soul’ does have the power of higher flight, but it is caught in the net of mind and limited by the solid ‘walls of life’, trapped in the body, like a little bird caught in a net or even inside a room; it beats its wings against the ‘walls of life’, but cannot escape to soar up to ‘greater heavens’.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 10]

In vain his heart lifts up its yearning prayer,
Peopling with brilliant Gods the formless Void;
Then disappointed to the Void he turns
And in its happy nothingness asks release,
The calm Nirvana of his dream of self:
The Word in silence ends, in Nought the name.

Because of the soul’s impulse to fly higher, the human heart does lift up a ‘yearning prayer’, longing to be free, and imagines that the ‘the formless Void’ above is full of ‘brilliant Gods’ who will grant protection and help. But then it gets disillusioned and ‘disappointed’ and stops believing in beneficent higher powers. Thinking that God does not exist, it concludes that the only solution will be to dissolve into the ‘happy nothingness’ of the Void, believing that its futile and illusory existence can be ended with ‘The calm Nirvana of his dream of self’. That becomes its highest aim: for the creative ‘Word’ to end ‘in silence’ and the ‘name’, the individual existence, to dissolve into ‘Nought’, nothingness.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 10]

Or he finds his copy in the impartial All;
He imparts to the Immobile his own will,
Attributes to the Eternal wrath and love
And to the Ineffable lends a thousand names.

Or, Death says, human beings imagine that the universal spirit, ‘the impartial All’, is like themselves and that ‘the Immobile’, the silent unmoving Brahman, has a will like their own; that ‘the Eternal’ feels ‘wrath and love’, anger and affection, just as human beings themselves do. They give ‘a thousand names’ to ‘the Ineffable’, the Supreme Being beyond all description and expression.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 10]

All walk by Nature bound for ever the same.

He says that in the material universe all beings are compelled to move according to the rules of Nature which can never change. He tells her:

Look on these forms that stay awhile and pass,
These lives that long and strive, then are no more,
These structures that have no abiding truth,
The saviour creeds that cannot save themselves,
But perish in the strangling hands of the years,
Discarded from man’s thought, proved false by Time,
Philosophies that strip all problems bare
But nothing ever have solved since earth began,
And sciences omnipotent in vain
By which men learn of what the suns are made,
Transform all forms to serve their outward needs,
Ride through the sky and sail beneath the sea,
But learn not what they are or why they came;

This is the longest sentence in Savitri, covering 35 lines and containing 280 words,so we shall pause here in the middle. Death tells Savitri to look at the human condition and life on earth, which is fleeting and impermanent. Material forms come into existence, they ‘stay awhile and pass’; living beings feel longings and struggle to achieve them, or at least to survive awhile, but then they cease and disappear. The mind creates structures which it finds satisfactory for a time, but then they fail because they have ‘no abiding truth’, no permanent value or reality. Then he gives examples of such ‘structures’: first, the ‘saviour creeds’, the beliefs and gospels which human beings have found convincing and helpful for a while, but which have perished in the course of time, as if strangled by the passing years, and then been ‘Discarded from man’s thought, proved false by Time’. ‘Strangling’ is when something gets you by the throat and will not let you breathe. The passage of Time is like that, he declares: sooner or later it strangles us and all our beliefs and ideas and achievements. Then he speaks of ‘Philosophies’, profound in-depth explorations of the nature of existence, which ‘strip all problems bare’ and offer explanations for them, but which have never solved anything ‘since earth began’. Then he mentions the ‘sciences’ by which men have learned what the suns are made of and how to ‘Transform all forms’ to serve human needs and wishes, how to ‘Ride through the sky and sail beneath the sea’, but which are all ‘in vain’ because they have not been able to tell us what we really are and why we are here on earth.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 10]

Why is it all, the labour and the din,
The transient joys, the timeless sea of tears,
The longing and the hoping and the cry,
The battle and the victory and the fall,
The aimless journey that can never pause,
The waking toil, the incoherent sleep,
Song, shouts and weeping, wisdom and idle words,
The laughter of men, the irony of the gods?

That is where this long sentence ends, and it ends with a question: ‘Why is it all’? Why does all this happen? What is it all for? What is the meaning of it all? Does all this ‘labour’ and ‘din’, the tremendous effort and noise of human life, have any meaning at all? There are some ‘joys’ but they are ‘transient’ and pass very quickly, whereas the ‘timeless sea of tears’ is always there. Throughout all human history there has been the same repetitive pattern of ‘The longing and the hoping and the cry’, the call, the appeal, and of ‘The battle and the victory and the fall’. Life is like a journey, but it seems to be an ‘aimless’ one which leads nowhere; and yet it ‘can never pause’ – it just goes on and on. Awake, life involves us in a great deal of hard effort: ‘waking toil’. When we sleep, what meaningless ‘incoherent’ dreams we experience! There are songs, there are ‘shouts’ of triumph perhaps or excitement, there is ‘weeping’, there is even ‘wisdom’, but there are also all the many ‘idle words’ – so much foolish and careless chatter and gossip. Human beings somehow manage to laugh, but, Death says, ‘the gods’ are laughing at us, making fun of us.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 10]

Mind is the author, spectator, actor, stage:
Mind only is and what it thinks is seen.

This is another theory that people have considered and sometimes accepted: that there is only ‘Mind’. ‘Mind only is’ – nothing else: only Mind exists, and everything we see and experience through our senses is a product of ‘Mind’. ‘Mind is the author’ of the universal drama; Mind is also the one who is watching and enjoying it, the spectator; Mind is the ‘actor’ who is playing the parts, all the roles and characters; Mind is even the stage on which everything is worked out. Mind is the only thing which really exists ‘and what it thinks is seen’: that is what we see around us and take for reality.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 10]

Each thought is a gold coin with bright alloy
And error and truth are its obverse and reverse:
This is the imperial mintage of the brain
And of this kind is all its currency.

This is the unavoidable characteristic of ‘Mind’, Death says: every thought is like a ‘coin’ made of a mixture of ‘gold’ and a less valuable metal, a ‘bright alloy’, mingling ‘error and truth’. This is the kind of mixed ‘currency’ produced by the human brain, its ‘imperial mintage’. A government ‘mints’ the money which is legally valid in that state. Nowadays this is often paper money but in earlier times money usually consisted of metal coins. A factory where money is produced is called a ‘mint’. What comes out of a mint is a ‘mintage’ – a particular set of coins or notes. Death is saying that the currency minted by the brain is made of a mixture: some ‘gold’, some ‘truth’, and some ‘alloy’, a less valuable mixture of metals, some ‘falsehood’; some ‘right’ and some ‘wrong’; some ‘joy’ and some ‘pain’; some ‘light’ and some ‘shade’.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 10]

But Savitri answered to the sophist God:
“Once more wilt thou call Light to blind Truth’s eyes,
Make Knowledge a catch of the snare of Ignorance
And the Word a dart to slay my living soul?

Savitri in her turn is mocking ‘the sophist God’, Death; a sophist is a person who reasons with clever but false arguments: she asks him “Are you really trying yet again to call the ‘Light’ of higher consciousness ‘to blind’ the ‘eyes’ of Truth, to dazzle and mislead me? Do you really think that you can use the higher ‘Knowledge’ as ‘a catch of the snare of Ignorance’?” A hunter will set a trap by tying a wire across the path so that as an animal passes, it will trip the ‘catch’ of the trap, and ‘the snare’ will hold it tight. She says, “Are you still trying to trick me and to use the power of the ‘Word’ as a weapon, ‘a dart’ or arrow to kill ‘my living soul’?” She is not deceived by him at all. She can see through all his misleading arguments because she has the living Knowledge, the wisdom and discernment which she has gained by direct experience through her yoga. Death is saying all these things to make her abandon her mission. He himself does not believe them – he is ready to contradict himself at any time.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 10]

Offer, O King, thy boons to tired spirits
And hearts that could not bear the wounds of Time,
Let those who were tied to body and to mind,
Tear off those bonds and flee into white calm
Crying for a refuge from the play of God.

Death was offering her peace and release from all the toil and pain of life. Many seekers have accepted this offer. They have accepted that the way to find eternal peace is to dissolve their individuality, to merge back into the origin. But Savitri replies, “ ‘O King’, offer your gifts to spirits that are ‘tired’, weary of the effort of life, and to hearts that have not been strong or courageous enough to ‘bear the wounds of Time’. Those people feel tied to the limitations of their bodies and their minds and want to be liberated from that bondage; they can ‘Tear off those bonds’ and run away from the world into your ‘white calm’, your peace; they are ‘Crying for a refuge from the play of God’. They want to escape to a safe place away from ‘the play of God’ in the world, which is too difficult for them to bear.” A ‘refuge ’ is a safe place, a sanctuary.

Surely thy boons are great since thou art He!

‘Boons’ are gifts. Savitri says, “Yes, surely you have great gifts to offer since you yourself are the Lord.” She is speaking ironically of course, but what she is saying is also true, for this God of Death is indeed a form of the Supreme.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 10]

The world is a spiritual paradox
Invented by a need in the Unseen,
A poor translation to the creature’s sense
Of That which for ever exceeds idea and speech,
A symbol of what can never be symbolised,
A language mispronounced, misspelt, yet true.

Now Savitri again shares some of her Knowledge, born from the Mother’s Wisdom. The world that we live in is a riddle, an enigma, a ‘spiritual paradox’ which seems mysterious and self-contradictory. Savitri explains that this puzzling opposition, this apparent self-contradiction, has been ‘Invented by a need in the Unseen’, in the invisible worlds. We do not know what that ‘need’ is. The world that we perceive and experience is puzzling and enigmatic, difficult for us to understand, because it is a ‘poor translation to the creature’s sense / Of That which for ever exceeds idea and speech’. If we do not know French, we may try to read the Mother’s words as they have been translated into English. Fortunately we have quite good translations of the Mother’s talks; but not all translations are good, many are ‘poor’: they do not succeed in giving a clear and accurate expression of the original words and ideas. This material world, says Savitri, is a ‘poor translation’ into the language of our senses, of a truth which is beyond ideas and words: the paradoxical enigmatic Truth which lies behind the world we perceive around us ‘for ever exceeds idea and speech’ – it can never be fully translated in the language of ideas and words. It has been translated for us into the language of our physical senses of touch, sight, hearing, taste and smell. No wonder that it is difficult for us to grasp! This material world is a ‘symbol’ of a reality that ‘can never be symbolised’. A ‘symbol’ is a figure, a shape, a picture or image which stands for something much more complex. Sri Aurobindo’s Symbol represents in pictorial form a profound truth about him, just as the Mother’s Symbol expresses something beautiful and true about her which we can understand tsome extent when the symbolism has been explained to Savitri is telling us that this whole mysterious world around us is an inadequate ‘translation’ into the language of physical sensations, and a ‘symbol’ of some great Reality and Truth which can never be expressed in words and ideas. The forms, the movements, the energies of this world are like a ‘language’ which is being ‘mispronounced’ because we do not know that language nor how to pronounce it correctly; it is also being ‘misspelt’ for we do not know how to write it correctly; but nevertheless, she says, the ‘language’ itself is ‘true’. It is a ‘poor translation’, but it is expressing a wonderful divine Truth and Reality.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 10]

The world is not cut off from Truth and God.
In vain thou hast dug the dark unbridgeable gulf,
In vain thou hast built the blind and doorless wall:
Man’s soul crosses through thee to Paradise,
Heaven’s sun forces its way through death and night;
Its light is seen upon our being’s verge.

Death has been trying to convince Savitri, and us, that there is an ‘unbridgeable gulf’ between the supreme consciousness and ‘The world’; but here she is contradicting him, saying, “ ‘The world is not cut off from Truth and God’. ‘Truth and God’ are active here in the material world. You have tried to dig this ‘dark unbridgeable gulf’ between God and his world, and you have built a ‘blind and doorless wall’ between them; but your attempts are in vain, because still ‘Man’s soul’ crosses ‘through thee’, through you, Death, ‘to Paradise’ “: to perfect worlds of divine delight. ‘Heaven’s Sun’ of Truth can force ‘its way through death and night’ so that ‘Its light is seen upon our being’s verge’ as if just rising above the horizon of our being, heralding a new dawn. A ‘verge’ is an edge, a borderline. Then Savitri speaks about herself:

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 10]

My mind is a torch lit from the eternal sun,
My life a breath drawn by the immortal Guest,
My mortal body is the Eternal’s house.
Already the torch becomes the undying ray,
Already the life is the Immortal’s force,
The house grows of the householder part and one.

We should remember these words. They are true of Savitri in a special sense since she has become aware of her true self and is united with the cosmic self and spirit, but in the light of Truth they apply to each of us. She says, “ ‘My mind is a torch’ that has been ‘lit from the eternal sun’ of perfect Consciousness.” That is true for us too: how could we have a mind, or consciousness at all, had it not been ‘lit from the eternal sun’? She says, “ ‘My life [is] a breath drawn by the immortal Guest’.” For us too it is true that our every life-breath is being ‘drawn by the immortal Guest’: the Lord, ‘the immortal Guest’ within us is breathing in and out for us, keeping us alive and enjoying our lives. Savitri says, “ ‘My mortal body’, this material body that is subject to decay and death, is nevertheless a ‘house’ in which the eternal Divine Presence dwells.” And then she says “ ‘Already’ the ‘torch’ of mind is becoming ‘the undying ray’ of the eternal consciousness; ‘Already’ the life-force in me is the ‘force’ of the Immortal being; and this ‘house’, the ‘body’, is becoming united with the one who is inhabiting it: ‘The householder’, ‘the immortal Guest’, the Lord Himself.”

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 10]

If in the meaningless Void creation rose,
If from a bodiless Force Matter was born,
If Life could climb in the unconscious tree,
Its green delight break into emerald leaves
And its laughter of beauty blossom in the flower,
If sense could wake in tissue, nerve and cell
And Thought seize the grey matter of the brain,
And soul peep from its secrecy through the flesh,
How shall the nameless Light not leap on men,
And unknown powers emerge from Nature’s sleep?

All these miracles have already happened: from the apparently ‘meaningless’ emptiness of space this ‘creation’ has emerged, this manifestation. In the beginning there was only a ‘bodiless Force’, formless energy; but from it has emerged the material universe of individual forms that we inhabit. From unconscious Matter, Life has emerged in the form of plants and trees: ‘Life could climb in the unconscious tree,’ and ‘Its green delight break into emerald leaves’ ‘And its laughter of beauty blossom in the flower’ – miraculous expressions of the delight and consciousness of the life force. The capacity for ‘sense’ has woken up in the ‘tissue, nerve and cell’ of animal bodies, enabling them to become aware of the world around them. The capacity of ‘Thought’ has taken hold of the ‘grey matter’ of the physical ‘brain’ in conscious creatures like ourselves, and ‘soul’, the next step in this divine series, begins to ‘peep’, to look out ‘through the flesh’, from its secret hiding place in conscious bodies. If all these miraculous things have happened, how can even more miraculous things not happen? ‘How shall the nameless Light not leap on men’? Of course it will, and even more ‘powers’ which are so far unknown are sure to ‘emerge from Nature’s sleep’, as earth-Nature awakens more and more from its trance of unconsciousness.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 10]

Already God is near, the Truth is close:
Because the dark atheist body knows him not,
Must the sage deny the Light, the seer his soul?

This is Savitri’s affirmation: ‘Already God is near, the Truth is close’. The ‘body’ is still dark and unconscious, an ‘atheist’ who does not believe in God, but that does not mean that a ‘sage’, a human being who has gained wisdom, must ‘deny the Light’ – as you, Death are doing – or that one who has become a ‘seer’ and gained the higher vision should ‘deny … his soul’. The sage and seer have reached a higher level of development than the purely physical being, so they can experience the higher Light and Truth – they do not have to ‘deny’ them just because the human body is still relatively unconscious.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 10]

But standing on Eternity’s luminous brink
I have discovered that the world was He;
I have met Spirit with spirit, Self with self,
But I have loved too the body of my God.
I have pursued him in his earthly form.

Savitri is able to state, “ ‘I live in the glory of the infinite’ and ‘The Ineffable is now my household mate’ ” but more than that, “ ‘standing on Eternity’s luminous brink’, on the frontier of the transcendent state, ‘I have discovered that the world was He’: that the world of time and space and matter and form, ‘was He’, the Eternal Lord himself. I have had the experience of meeting ‘Spirit with spirit, Self with self’, but in addition I have fallen in love with ‘the body of my God’, in all his material shapes. I have looked for him ‘in his earthly form’: the forms in which he has manifested himself in the world.”

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 10]

A lonely freedom cannot satisfy
A heart that has grown one with every heart:
I am a deputy of the aspiring world,
My spirit’s liberty I ask for all.”

Savitri says, “Because my ‘heart’ has widened and identified with all the hearts in the whole manifestation, I cannot be satisfied with ‘freedom’ from Ignorance and the bondage of earth-nature for myself alone”: ‘A lonely freedom cannot satisfy / A heart that has grown one with every heart’. “I am here as ‘a deputy’, a representative, ‘of the aspiring world’, and I want the whole world to enjoy the ‘liberty’ that my spirit has achieved.”

We saw earlier Sri Aurobindo’s aphorism which says, ‘If God draw me towards Heaven, then, even if His other hand strive to keep me in Hell, yet must I struggle upward. That is what is exemplified here. This is a problem for us in our ignorant state because we cannot see clearly whether the Lord is challenging us to help us grow, or some adverse force is trying to lead us astray. That is why, if we want to progress further, it is very important for us to achieve the clear knowledge which is not of the mind but of the spirit. The world is in the process of emerging from the spontaneous harmony of inconscient nature towards a greater spontaneous harmony that is fully conscious. On the way to that fulfilment, we human beings are passing through what Sri Aurobindo calls ‘the pregnant  confusion of the mind and life’ which is bound to give birth to a higher state. Aswapati was the first protagonist of this great labour, and now the Mother herself has taken up the work in her emanation, Savitri.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 10]