Book 1 Canto 1
The Symbol Dawn

The hour of manifestation has not yet arrived. The Gods who preside over the manifestation have not yet awakened; they are still sleeping. Barring the path of the Divine Awakening, in the timelessness and silence lies the huge foreboding Mind of Night. It senses the approaching Dawn and dreads it. It longs to return to the original darkness and unconsciousness. But it is compelled to awaken. In the darkness and nothingness something stirs: an insistent urge that wants to come into existence but does not know how to do so. That tiny movement of aspiration arouses the Inconscient and awakens Ignorance. A Thought is sown in the nothingness, a Sense is born, a Memory moves. It is as if a Soul that has been dead for a long time wants to live again. But all traces of the previous cycle of manifestation have been wiped out. It has to start from nothing, to rebuild all its previous consciousness and achievements and all its earlier experiences have to be relived once again. All this is possible by the Grace of God. Hope arises in the Darkness and Unconsciousness. Slowly and gradually Dawn appears; the Darkness falls away like a cloak from the body of a God. Earth feels the coming of Light; its ear hears the steps of the Dawn Goddess, everything awakens and worships the new Light. But the Earth is not able to keep that glorious Divine Light; it fades away to the common light of day as all the earthly creatures awaken. Savitri too awakens, remembering that this is the day when her husband Satyavan must die.

[Text by Shraddhavan]

Book 1 Canto 1 – The Symbol Dawn

[From: A LUMINOUS FLAME – Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri by Dr. Prema Nandakumar]

The first canto, titled ‘The Symbol Dawn’ takes place in the forest hermitage, on the day foretold by Narad as the day Satyavan must die. ‘The Symbol Dawn’ opens with a description of night, reminding one of the Vedic ‘Ratri Sukta’; night that nurses in its womb the glorious dawn to come. The earth had no idea of the great victory that was promised on this day for mankind:

Athwart the vain enormous trance of Space,
Its formless stupor without mind or life,
A shadow spinning through a soulless Void,
Thrown back once more into unthinking dreams,
Earth wheeled abandoned in the hollow gulfs
Forgetful of her spirit and her fate.

Now slowly dawn begins to emerge as a very slight stir, “a nameless movement, an unthought idea.” Gradually the sky begins to glow and the east is all orange in sheen, as if it were the golden panel of a gate of dreams. And suddenly light is everywhere, and Nature itself seems to worship the Divine, as Sri Aurobindo envisions it through an epic simile:

All grew a consecration and a rite.
Air was a vibrant link between earth and heaven;
The wide-winged hymn of a great priestly wind
Arose and failed upon the altar hills;
The high boughs prayed in a revealing sky.

Thus did the Divine’s power touch earth briefly as Goddess Usha, and then withdrew, as earth’s children woke up to a new day, and “man lifted up the burden of his fate.”

On this day of crisis foretold by Rishi Narad to Savitri, we watch her in the hermitage, sitting beside the sleeping Satyavan. Sri Aurobindo sees her as an avatar who has chosen to put on this human form to help mankind step forward in the evolutionary ladder without being dragged down to nothingness by death. Like other avatars, she is not going to find the job of transforming mankind easy. We never recognize the manifestations of God even when they move amongst us. On the contrary we make fun of them as impractical visionaries, mad, helpless and hopeless prisoners of Time. Indeed, we even destroy the good performed by them. So the incarnations withdraw without achieving what they came for. “Only they leave behind a splendid Name.”

Not so Savitri. She had come ready to suffer and to confront death and free mankind of this terrible affliction for which there is no cure. To achieve victory, she had to accept the life of a human being and suffer like us, go through the terror of being in the shadow of death. Her struggle was greater because she had the foreknowledge about the exact time of Satyavan’s death. Should she accept it and be prepared to face it stoically, or should she go forth to battle and see to it that mankind is not afflicted any more by this dreadful fate?

Savitri’s decision is made. She had come with a purpose and will not back out. No human agency can help her in this supreme battle: “Unhelped she must foresee and dread and dare.” It is true Savitri’s heart was touched by fear but she did not allow others to see the turmoil within. She transformed her sorrow into a “mystic poignant sword”. Having taken stock of the context as the invincible incarnation, Savitri now gets up as the young wife of Satyavan living in the forest hermitage. Her life so far now opens up before her as on a television screen, her birth, growing up, the prophecy uttered by Rishi Narad, the wedding with Satyavan and the one year of agony and ecstasy. Agony because of the foreknowledge of Satyavan’s death and ecstasy because theirs is such a perfect marriage:

All came back to her: Earth and Love and Doom,
The ancient disputants, encircled her
Like giant figures wrestling in the night.

This was also the problem that Sri Aurobindo tried to solve by undertaking his yoga. While his philosophical writing goes to the origin oft his eternal struggle and seeks ways to solve it, his poetry dealt with the subject again and again. For instance, his Love and Death is a narrative based on the Ruru-Pramadvura legend in the Adi Parva of the Mahabharata. It was in Savitri that he found the perfect image to bring the tidings of man’s struggle with fate and the possibility of his victory over death. So ‘The Symbol Dawn’ concludes, stating the problem with a certain harsh directness:

Amid the trivial sounds, the unchanging scene
Her soul arose confronting Time and Fate.
Immobile in herself, she gathered force.
This was the day when Satyavan must die.

But then, this is also the day when Savitri will win. Her strength is the “conqueror’s sword.” Such has been the boon given by the Divine Mother to Aswapati.

Book 1 Canto 2
The Issue

As she awakens, Savitri’s whole life passes before her mind’s eye: her childhood, her youth, her fateful meeting with Satyavan, the last twelve months of love lived with him in the shadow of the Death. One year ago she was forewarned of the coming of this fateful day. She has not shared this knowledge with Satyavan or his family. Those around her know nothing of the inner burden that she is bearing. She, a divine being, has taken a human birth in order to save humanity from the grip of Ignorance and Death. With her she has brought her native heavenly Bliss, but here on earth she has to face what all human beings face: pain and grief and the death of their loved ones. But as the fateful day dawns Savitri calls on her inner strength to transform her grief and pain into a powerful weapon which she will use to change earth-destiny. She knows that the destiny of the body can be changed by the will of the Soul. As an incarnation of the Supreme Divine Mother, she is able to transform the existing world-order and claim the victory of Light over Darkness, of Life and Love over Death.

[Text by Shraddhavan]

Book 1 Canto 2 – The Issue

[From: A LUMINOUS FLAME – Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri by Dr. Prema Nandakumar]

Savitri is awake in the forest hermitage and finds that in a few hours the issue will be joined between herself and Death. This is testing time indeed. Her mind goes back to the day a year ago and how swiftly twelve passionate months had sped fast. Passionate because Savitri and Satyavan were very much in love. Living in the beautiful forest gave them the right background to savour the sweetness of life. The twelve months have been passionate for Savitri because she has also had to manage her turbulent heart that knew the dire fate and yet could not, would not share it with others. Not with the blind parents-in-law who would not bear the loss of Satyavan; not with Satyavan lest he feel sad that Savitri would have to face life-long loneliness.

But Savitri is calm for she has strengthened herself by yoga to face Death in the forest. Till now she had received all that is glorious and good from the Supreme; now she would receive with equanimity the trial imposed upon her by him. The moment called for a positive gesture from her. She would accept the challenge and definitely remove the hurdle that was now placed in her path in the form of Satyavan’s physical disintegration. She would challenge Fate:

The fixity of the cosmic sequences
Fastened with hidden inevitable links
She must disrupt, dislodge by her soul’s force
Her past, a block on the Immortal’s road,
Make a rased ground and shape anew her fate.

Nor can she expect any help from others for her in this struggle. Not from Aswapati, nor Dyumathsena, nor Satyavan. No, none of the world’s denizens can be of help to her. She is the Yogeswari who is now armed with her own real strength, and she must go to battle alone:

On the bare peak where Self is alone with Nought
And life has no sense and love no place to stand,
She must plead her case upon extinction’s verge,
In the world’s death-cave uphold life’s helpless claim
And vindicate her right to be and love.

But can she win? What sort of a presence is Savitri? The entire epic is about her personality. First we watch Aswapati’s yoga directed towards gaining from the Divine Mother the promise of an avatar to help mankind in its onward march in the evolutionary ladder. Savitri is born and Sri Aurobindo’s epic brilliantly captures the childhood and growth of the Madran princess; her meeting with Satyavan and their marriage are brought to us as the marriage of “the eternal Lord and Spouse” taking place in human terms on the earth; when she stands her ground despite Rishi Narad’s dire prophecy we realize that Savitri is no ordinary girl. Then there is the Book of Yoga when we watch her undergoing innumerable experiences, her wonderful meditational yoga and gaining of universal consciousness.

However, as yet we are in the beginning of the epic and hardly know anything about her personality. Though we may not know the long process of consecrating the idol of a goddess in a sanctum, we can watch her and receive some vibrations of her powers. Sri Aurobindo draws our attention to such a unique personality in Savitri. She who has come to save us is like Uma Haimavati performing tapasya circled by the five fires:

The world unknowing, for the world she stood;
No helper had she save the Strength within;
There was no witness of terrestrial eyes.
The Gods above and Nature sole below
Were the spectators of that mighty strife.

She is a force that had grown up in the majestic silences of the austere hills. And recently, in the last twelve months she had meditated deeply and gained god-consciousness. It was here that she had met Satyavan and “Love came to her hiding the shadow, Death”. The shaft of Love had struck her and gathered her to Satyavan, and Love must have exulted for he had struck an unequalled maiden. Death must have exulted too but ah! Savitri was no mere ordinary human being, she was not born to fail!

All in her pointed to a nobler kind.
Near to earth’s wideness, intimate with heaven,
Exalted and swift her young large-visioned spirit
Voyaging through worlds of splendour and of calm
Overflew the ways of Thought to unborn things.
Ardent was her self-poised unstumbling will;
Her mind, a sea of white sincerity,
Passionate in flow had not one turbid wave.

These lines describing Savitri are sublime with thought, language, imagery and versification coalescing into a perfect whole. Savitri was beautiful within; and beautiful without. Her body was like a “golden temple-door to things beyond”, her glance brought out the best in others. She seemed to pay individual attention to those with whom she came in contact and was an unfailing refuge for the maimed and the miserable.

A deep of compassion, a hushed sanctuary,
Her inward help unbarred a gate in heaven;
Love in her was wider than the universe,
The whole world could take refuge in her single heart.

“An ocean of untrembling virgin fire”, Savitri accepted pain because she had a work to do, she had to stay the wheels of Doom. Can she do it? She can, says Sri Aurobindo: “A prayer, a master-act, a king idea/ Can link man’s strength to a transcendent Force.” Savitri had done exactly this and the canto ends with her getting up to face the day:

The great World-Mother now in her arose …
A flaming warrior from the eternal peaks
Empowered to force the door denied and closed
Smote from Death’s visage its dumb absolute
And burst the bounds of consciousness and Time.

Book 1 Canto 3
The Yoga of the King: The Yoga of the Soul’s Release

Savitri has taken birth as a human being in response to the deep need and desire of the Earth, which has been embodied in Aswapati, her human father: a rishi-king who masters all his life-energies and offers them to the Supreme Divine Mother, Shakti of the Creator, Lord Brahma, Goddess of Truth. He worships her one-pointedly for eighteen years, hoping to win from her the boon of one hundred sons, who will be able to save the earth and humanity. This highly developed spiritual being has descended from higher realms to bring a greater light of knowledge and power to the earth. In the first stage of his Yoga, with the blessings of the Divine Mother in her aspects of Wisdom, Discernment, Intuition and Revelation his soul is liberated from Ignorance bringing about a first transformation of his mind and body which enables him to draw the energies that can transmute an entire age of humanity.

[Text by Shraddhavan]

Book 1 Canto 3 – The Yoga of the King: The Yoga of the Soul’s Release

[From: A LUMINOUS FLAME – Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri by Dr. Prema Nandakumar]

With this canto we go back in time to watch Aswapati, the king of Madra performing tapasya for gaining a progeny to continue his race. Significantly, Sri Aurobindo opens the canto with a thought-provoking statement: “A world’s desire compelled her mortal birth.” So it was not the tapasya of a single person but a yoga undertaken by a representative of the human race that is described in Savitri. Aswapati was the right person for this onerous job as he was an intellectual, a visionary, a spiritual personality.

Aswapati’s yoga begins with the realization that the physical body is not everything. Veiled away from us is the divine who resides in the body as “a static Oneness and dynamic Power”. By recognizing the presence of the Divine within him, Aswapati ceases to think in terms of himself and his dynasty and begins to seek a power to uplift the human race.

The landmarks of the little person fell,
The island ego joined its continent,
Overpassed was this world of rigid limiting forms:
Life’s barriers opened into the Unknown.

Aswapati is able to progress quickly in his yoga. Siddhis are obtained by him as a matter of course:

He caught up lightly like a giant’s bow
Left slumbering in a sealed and secret cave
The powers that sleep unused in man within.
He made of miracle a common act …

But Aswapati does not allow himself to be diverted from his goal and so he continues to dig deeper into yoga. Going beyond Reason and Mind, Aswapati finds the worlds within and gains rare visionary experiences. One of them is a hint that man’s evolutionary destiny is to take him to an unsurpassable world of universal harmony:

It voiced the unfulfilled demand of earth
And the song of promise of unrealized heavens
And all that hides in an omnipotent Sleep.

Even as he is having these inspirational scenes, he proceeds in yoga and plunges into the “nameless vast”. This is the primal stuff of the Cosmos, the Mula Prakriti. Even as he gazes upon it, he gets thrikaaladrishti: “As if a story long written but acted now / In his present he held his future and his past.”

As visionary states do not continue for ever, Aswapati now returns to the phenomenal world, strengthened by the knowledge of what he had seen and experienced in his yogic adventure. Though repeatedly this world of human affairs tries to drag him down to its own base, Aswapati pursues his yoga with single-minded determination and so the lower reaches of his being also get transformed by his conscious efforts at transformation:

As a sculptor chisels a deity out of stone
He slowly chipped off the dark envelope,
Line of defence of Nature’s ignorance,
The illusion and mystery of the Inconscient
In whose black pall the Eternal wraps his head
That he may act unknown in cosmic Time.

As he draws closer to perfection with the help of yoga, he gains several visionary experiences regarding creation. One is the Tree of Cosmos which reminds us of the Aswaththa Tree described in the Bhagavad Gita. Another vision is that of the Supreme Creator in his yoga nidra. Aswapati begins to think of the cause of creation, the way it is sustained, the maladies that afflict creation and the possibility of chasing away the maladies and making this creation perfect. Is creation nothing but the Lord’s play, leela? However, Aswapati realises that creation is not a mere game of chance, but “a living movement of the body of God.”

A glory and a rapture and a charm,
The All-Blissful sat unknown within the heart;
Earth’s pains were the ransom of its prisoned delight.

The Spirit had entered Matter, there had been a descent(involution) and now the ascent (evolution) had begun. With this understanding gained, Aswapati is at peace:

The world was a conception and a birth
Of Spirit in Matter into living forms,
And nature bore the Immortal in her womb,
That she might climb through him to eternal life.

marking the first spiritual change of Aswapati’s body and mind. Outwardly he was the same Aswapati, the ruler of Madra. But it was obvious that he was an illumined person since even the commonest action by him revealed that they were inspired by an inner light. He was now able to converse with the “unknown Guardians of the worlds’ and help mankind in various ways. He was able to see with ease, forms that remain veiled away from our ordinary eyes. Even his body’s cells were no mere automatons now. They were tuned to the sublime purpose for which Aswapati would be undertaking a tremendous yogic journey for he was determined to lift upthe human race that suffered no end now due to death and incapacity. Was this new world possible? Can man dare to think of a time when a transformed earth would be suffused with superconscient light? But Aswapati was a determined yogi with a desire to transform earthly life into a life divine, and so he would arm himself first with the necessary powers:

He drew the energies that transmute an age.
Immeasurable by the common look,
He made great dreams a mould for coming things
And cast his deeds like bronze to front the years.
His walk through Time outstripped the human stride.
Lonely his days and splendid like the sun’s.

Book 1 Canto 4
The Secret Knowledge

At this high level of development, Aswapati can see yet higher levels of achievement before him. He understands that human beings are not only mortal, bound by death and ignorance: a greater existence lives within each of us. The ‘peak experiences’ which come to us occasionally are indications of its presence within us, guarding our future destiny. That being does not die with the death of the body: it is our immortal Origin. But meanwhile earthly existence is dominated by unconsciousness and struggle. Only the Immortal beings living on higher levels of existence are able to see the great future which lies in store. From their heights they are guiding the Earth along the winding road of evolution to its great and blissful fulfilment, when the Supreme Transcendent Being will take possession of his material house and earth-matter shall grow unexpectedly divine. The Powers of the Spirit who inhabit the highest levels of existence and the Earth Nature ruling the manifested world are secretly collaborating to bring about this transformation. This whole world is the playground of the One supreme and his Conscious-Force, the Mother, the Two-in-One. They play out their drama here in the universe with us for roles. He moves here as Soul, she as Nature. The Lord has become the human soul, the Traveller through time. The Timeless One has consented to incarnate in Time so that this world may manifest the unveiled Divine, and the seed of Divinity may blossom throughout the material Universe.

[Text by Shraddhavan]

Book 1 Canto 4 – The Secret Knowledge

[From: A LUMINOUS FLAME – Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri by Dr. Prema Nandakumar]

Chosen by the Time Spirit to be the representative of mankind to prepare the ground for the coming of the avatar, Aswapati has gained intuitions about worlds beyond what is seen by the physical eye. Realising that he first needed to arm himself with the knowledge received from ancient sages, he now embarks upon a study of the Vedas. Sri Aurobindo says that “the secret knowledge of the Veda is the seed which is evolved on into the Vedanta.” So all structures of philosophy and spiritual recordations are actually grown out of this seed of the Veda and Aswapati’s poorna yoga can be understood in the light of what Sri Aurobindo says regarding the Agni Suktas:

“Our sacrifice is a journey, a pilgrimage and a battle, — a travel towards the Gods and we also make the journey with Agni, the inner Flame, as our path-finder and leader. Our human things are raised up by the mystic Fire into the immortal being, into the Great Heaven, and the things divine come down into us. As the doctrine of the Rig-Veda is the seed of the teaching of the Vedanta, so is its inner practice and discipline a seed of the later practice and discipline of yoga.”

Aswapati now begins to make an indepth study of the Vedas, “the sunrise splendours” which mark “our early approaches to the Infinite.” Though increasingly we have grown strangers to those spiritual immensities, and are now lost in soul-suffocating materialism, “a faint voice of ecstasy and prayer” does try to reach out to the Infinite which is our home. Occasionally, when we manage to turn inward, we glimpse the “still regions of imperishable Light.” However, it is nothing external. This region of Light too is within ourselves, and the Supreme is within, the master engaged in transforming common clay into burnished gold;

Always we bear in us a magic key
Concealed in life’s hermetic envelope.
A burning Witness in the sanctuary
Regards through Time and the blind walls of Form.

The Earth-Goddess who is the one who gives the external Form to us needs to have forces like our Mind, Will, Strength and Joy in good condition so that they can work from within us for our advancement. Unfortunately we tend to ignore them and remain lost in external things, using all these powers not for our advancement but for increasing our ephemeral joys. Fortunately for us, a few men who have advanced farthest in yoga have realized and seek to inspire the rest.:

A few shall see what none yet understands
God shall grow up while the wise men talk and sleep;
For man shall not know the coming till its hour
And belief shall be not till the work is done.

Meanwhile the gods watch what is happening, and from behind them the Supreme Power stands ready to come to man’s help to change life on earth into the life divine. For it is this Supreme Power alone that can guide man’s ascent and also choose to descend to meet aspiring humanity. The secret knowledge assures us that we have not been “abandoned to a task beyond our force.” Fate, Death, Pain: yes. But the divine’s hand is always stretched towards us in the shape of “conscious Immortality.” This consciousness that our soul is not subject to pain, death and the buffetings of fate and is immortal keeps us progressing towards the moment when the Avatar will come and all will be well.

This Supreme Power is Purusha-Prakriti, the ineffable Two-in-one. The Purusha is the Conscious Soul, Prakriti is the Nature Soul:

He leaves to her the cosmic management
And watches all, the Witness of her scene.
A supernumerary on her stage,
He speaks no words or hides behind the wings…
He makes the hours pivot around her will,
Makes all reflect her whims; all is their play;
This whole wide world is only he and she.

Aswapati’s close study of the Vedas and Vedanta give him this illumination that “this is the knot that ties together the stars.” For awhile Purusha is held in Prakriti’s leash by his consent but when the time is ripe, he wakes up and the two begin a new age. It is the Conscious Soul that has put the Nature Soul to work at creation and this Conscious Soul is very much within us:

The Absolute, the Perfect, the Immune,
One who is in us as our secret self,
Our mask of imperfection has assumed,
He has made this tenement of flesh his own,
His image in the human measure cast
That to his divine measure we might rise.

This truth we gain from the ‘secret knowledge’ though for the time being life appears more of a shadow cast by a dream. So much so there are not wanting people who even deny god himself! Aswapati has to search for the secret self within. This means he must be bold enough to venture out of himself and journey in the inner spaces of the mind. It is not a journey away from life but a travel within, a journey that has to be continued by Aswapati till man’s soul is cleared of the darkness of pain and death to usher in a divine life. The togetherness of Purusha and Prakriti indicates the new life, the new creation. It means the Supreme is Being and Becoming both, getting transformed when entwined with Prakriti and remaining as the one transcendent Reality when by himself. This secret recognized, Aswapati can now begin his travels through the many worlds that remain unseen by the naked eye and gain the needed experience to represent humanity’s need to the Supreme.

Book 1 Canto 5
The Yoga of the King: The Yoga of the Spirit’s Freedom and Greatness

Aswapati is the first human being to be granted this Secret Knowledge, which gives him a new understanding of the truths underlying earthly existence. In its light, he conceives a great Hope, a new intense Aspiration: the divine states he has glimpsed on higher levels of existence must become normal here on earth. The whole world must be transformed and become Divine. He consecrates himself entirely to bringing about this great change. In response to this intense aspiration comes a powerful descent which brings about a second transformation of his human nature. He becomes aware of a secret Nature which uses the power of Mind to rule the borderline to subtle inner worlds. She submits to Aswapati and shows him an image of the entire Creation as a golden ladder linking the highest levels of Spirit and the lowest levels of Matter, allowing the soul to move upwards and downwards between the Spirit’s extremes. Aswapati perceives a last highest world where all other worlds meet, harmonized and unified by a reconciling Wisdom which fulfils the hidden Truths of each of them. He perceives the continents and homelands of the subtle worlds and is able to enter and explore them. He crosses the border into another Space and Time.

[Text by Shraddhavan]

Book 1 Canto 5 – The Yoga of the King: The Yoga of the Spirit’s Freedom and Greatness

[From: A LUMINOUS FLAME – Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri by Dr. Prema Nandakumar]

Having gained release from Ignorance and gathered the essence of the Vedic scriptures, Aswapati readies himself to undertake the arduous path of yoga. Cutting away the cord of limited mind that keeps him attached to the world, he enters the occult worlds, the worlds of the Siddhas. Now he is able to read the laws of Nature and the world is no more a riddle for him.

There in a hidden chamber closed and mute
Are kept the record graphs of the cosmic scribe,
And there the tables of the sacred Law,
There is the Book of Being’s index page;
The text and glossary of the Vedic truth
Are there; the rhythms and metres of the stars
Significant of the movements of our fate.

Siddha purushas like Tirumoolar have been able to enter these occult worlds and gain a complete knowledge of man and nature. They have been able to pierce through the various contrary views and arrive at a clear and true picture. Such is the advance that Aswapati has gained but he is not satisfied. Earth is still far from perfect and is certainly not free from sorrow and death. So he withdraws into an absolute silence of the mind where no thought is allowed to seep in and disturb the atmosphere of pure aspiration for the Divine.

One-pointed to the immaculate Delight,
Questing for God as for a splendid prey,
He mounted burning like a cone of fire.
To a few is given that godlike rare release.

It is given to very few to be the advance guards of a new era in evolution. Aswapati is one such forerunner and his yogic strivings have not been in vain. His aspiration is met by an answering grace:… to meet him bare and pure

A strong Descent leaped down. A Might, a Flame,
A Beauty half-visible with deathless eyes,
A violent Ecstasy, a Sweetness dire,
Enveloped him with its stupendous limbs
And penetrated nerve and heart and brain
That thrilled and fainted with the epiphany:
His nature shuddered in the Unknown’s grasp.

A divine optimism seizes Aswapati now as he is endowed with a “spiritual will.” He is now able to see as in the clear light of day the many occult worlds that are not seen by our naked eye which is limited only to the phenomenal world that we see around us and experience. There does not seem to be any beginning or end to these worlds that seem like a cosmic ladder, not unlike the Mahameru of Sri Vidya Upasana.

A giant order was discovered here
Of which the tassel and extended fringe
Are the scant stuff of our material lives …
In this drop from consciousness to consciousness
Each leaned on the occult Inconscient’s power,
The fountain of its needed Ignorance,
Archmason of the limits by which it lives.
In this soar from consciousness to consciousness
Each lifted tops to That from which it came,
Origin of all that it had ever been
And home of all that it could still become.

Aswapati finds it exciting to explore these areas that seem to be ascending and descending constantly containing all the very best that we have known and we are yet to know. Sri Aurobindo’s pen is on the wing, creating a fertile imagery, comparing the riches found to the organ scale of music and to stadia placed on the way showing the gradual evolution of life on earth to the life divine.

Further up, is the world of Supreme Light, where not sun, nor moon, nor the stars give light but the self-illumed Trinity: A last high world was seen where all worlds meet;

In its summit gleam where Night is not nor Sleep,
The light began of the Trinity supreme.
All there discovered what it seeks for here.
It freed the finite into boundlessness
And rose into its own eternities.

Aswpati sees here the ideals and images that millions of aspirants have tried to envision and bring to our star-crossed lives on earth. Knowledge and experience were not fragmented in this vision and the mind’s questions were answered automatically. A rare Ananda sweeps over all this. If only life on earth could be so harmonious, its physical form as divine, and its nature such a unified Consciousness! Aswapati is overwhelmed and is transported so completely that he finds himself in an altogether different space and time: Sunbelts of knowledge, moonbelts of delight

Stretched out in an ecstasy of widenesses
Beyond our indigent corporeal range.
There he could enter, there awhile abide.
A voyager upon uncharted routes
Fronting the viewless danger of the Unknown,
Adventuring across enormous realms,
He broke into another Space and Time.

Book 2 Canto 1
The World-Stair

Entering the subtle universe of the Unknown, Aswapati is shown all its vastness and variety in a single view: all the symbols of the Spirit’s Reality offer themselves to his experience in all their marvel and multiplicity and all the intensity of their beautiful and terrible delight, becoming new portions of himself. Only one thing is missing there: ‘the sole timeless Word that carries eternity in its lonely sound … the absolute index to the Absolute.’

He sees that all the planes and worlds of existence are arranged in a huge hierarchy, mounting up from the base of Matter and ascending into the unknowable summits of the Spirit: the great World-Stair which the Spirit has descended in the course of Involution, up which the Soul has to ascend in the course of Evolution. All the worlds are interconnected in a great chain and influence each other. This stair of the gradations of Being and Consciousness is within each of us. It links the lowest levels of Inconscience with the highest levels of Superconscience and makes possible the return journey of our soul from its adventure of birth in the world of matter. Aswapati starts to mount the giant stair of Nature.

[Text by Shraddhavan]

Book 2 Canto 1 – The World-Stair

[From: A LUMINOUS FLAME – Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri by Dr. Prema Nandakumar]

Aswapati has made a strong effort to get away from all that binds him to these terrestrial regions and has entered the serried worlds of the occult. The mere sight is overwhelming. It is like the Maha Meru with world upon world so many! Which of them is eternal? Where is the way through this maze? Is there a way out at all? We must remember that the scenes described here are not mere imagination. They are real experiences, the yogic experiences of Sri Aurobindo when he went deeper into yoga after the experience of Siddhi in 1926. This is made clear by him in a letter to Nirodbaran written in 1936:

“In fact Savitri has not been regarded by me as a poem to be written and finished, but as a field of experimentation to see how far poetry could be written from one’s own yogic consciousness and how that could be made creative.

”So we move with Aswapati as he enters this field which is not far from the world we know and yet is quite distant in terms of apprehension, physically and mentally. But the very first experience is one of coming into direct contact with a continuous cosmic activity, a “self-creation without end or pause.” This is the treasury from which we draw our colours and movements and forms in the world we know!

It poured into the Ever-stable’s flux
A bacchic rapture and revel of Ideas,
A passion and motion of everlastingness.
There rose unborn into the Unchanging’s surge
Thoughts that abide in their deathless consequence,
Words that immortal last though fallen mute,
Acts that brought out from Silence its dumb sense,
Lines that convey the inexpressible.

Certainly a tantalizing scene as all this activity and colour were being witnessed by the originating power that was totally still. The contraries were contraries no more in this creative exuberance backed by the Eternal. Pain and delight were both part of the creative joy, “even pain, was the soul’s pleasure here.” What is the meaning of this reconcilement of the opposites? How find a place to hold on to in this “exhaustless seeings of the unsleeping Mind”? How to get at the core of this mystery?

Only was missing the sole timeless Word
That carries eternity in its lonely sound,
The Idea self-luminous key to all ideas,
The integer of the Spirit’s perfect sum
That equates the unequal All to the equal One,
The single sign interpreting every sign,
The absolute index to the Absolute.

It is at this juncture of self-questioning and anxious wonderment that Aswapati sees before him a structure like a temple chariot:

As if from Matter’s plinth and viewless base
To a top as viewless, a carved sea of worlds
Climbing with foam-maned waves to the Supreme
Ascended towards breadths immeasurable;
It hoped to soar into the Ineffable’s reign:
A hundred levels raised it to the Unknown.
So it towered up to heights intangible
And disappeared in the hushed conscious Vast
As climbs a storeyed temple-tower to heaven
Built by the aspiring soul of man to live
Near to his dream of the Invisible.

There is also a descending stair from the summits of the Spirit to Matter’s abysses. Again, all of this is not easily comprehensible even to the mind’s eye. They are but “a summary of the stages of the spirit”. This subtle compendium of universes is “within, below, without, above.” For the awakened soul, there are no limitations caused by the physical frame, as Indian Siddha literature has stated clearly through millennia of experience. This much becomes clear to Aswapati that man is not an abandoned creature buffeted by fate and that he can reach out to the high plateaus of the Spirit by his own strivings.

A Mystery’s process is the universe.
At first was laid a strange anomalous base,
A void, a cipher of some secret Whole,
Where zero held infinity in its sum
And All and Nothing were a single term,
An eternal Negative, a matrix Nought:
Into its forms the Child is ever born
Who lives for ever in the vasts of God.

When infinity decided to put on the garb of a finite soul, the seer came to dwell within the child, vast oceans were contained in a single drop, and this body which is bound by time yet became an illimitable store of infinite powers. There is a Seer within us, the inner Guide, the Atma Jyoti, the Jeevan Devata who “inspires our ascent to viewless heights”. The inspirational call of this Seer within had been heard by Aswapati who was now ready to make his journey into the innumerable worlds within to find out an answer for the riddle that faced man as pain, as death. When a Siddha sets out on his yogic path, does he wonder about the success or failure of his soul’s adventure?

Above him was the white immobile Ray,
Around him the eternal Silences.
No term was fixed to the high-pitched attempt;
World after world disclosed its guarded powers,
Heaven after heaven its deep beatitudes,
But still the invisible Magnet drew his soul.
A figure sole on Nature’s giant stair,
He mounted towards an indiscernible end
On the bare summit of created things.

Book 2 Canto 2
The Kingdom of Subtle Matter

Aswapati enters the World of Subtle Matter, the closest to our own. He finds it to be a realm of wonder and delight, of lovelier forms than those of our world and subtler senses. All that we dream of achieving here on earth is already mapped out in full detail there. Its lines form a protective shield for our world, intercepting the down-pouring of powerful higher energies and filtering them to us in doses that we can bear and assimilate. Those Powers from above are the origin of all creative movements of Beauty, Delight and Grace experienced here, the source of all true Art. The subtle physical embodiment is the radiant vehicle of the Soul after it has shed the grosser body. It becomes progressively finer and subtler to carry the soul to higher and higher worlds until at last only the eternal being’s first transparent robe is left. When the soul must return and resume its mortal load, then the subtle body becomes heavier and denser. The material universe has been manifested first in subtle substance. Earth-matter is packed with the essence of all higher worlds, and their powers must eventually emerge from it. But although delightful on its summits, its lower levels are dangerous. The unconsciousness of earth-matter has originated from there. It too is a physical world and cares only for form. It may offer deceptively beautiful forms to dangerous forces such the demon and the vital snake. And as a world of form and appearance, it is too limited to satisfy Aswapati’s seeking. He is impelled to move further in his quest.

[Text by Shraddhavan]

Book 2 Canto 2 – The Kingdom of Subtle Matter

[From: A LUMINOUS FLAME – Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri by Dr. Prema Nandakumar]

The odyssey into the occult worlds now takes Aswapati to the subtle material existence where “dwell earth-nature’s shining origins.”The gross material existence veils this world which is actually very close to us and carries the very essence of beauty.

A world of lovelier forms lies near to ours,
Where, undisguised by earth’s deforming sight,
All shapes are beautiful and all things true.
In that lucent ambience mystically clear
The eyes were doors to a celestial sense,
Hearing was music and the touch a charm,
And the heart drew a deeper breath of power.

Some stages in the Supreme’s descent into Matter can be noted. Existence (Sat) comes down as a Consciousness (Chit) and the Consciousness takes on the hue of Ananda. It descends further into the stage which we may call the Supermind (Vijnanamaya) and then enters the physical as the Mind, taking on the problems and perversities of gross material existence. But the Mind can envisage the Vijananamaya consciousness which is above it. The subtle plane exists somewhere in between the Supermind and Mind, forming “the brilliant roof of our descending plane”.

It shields our ceiling of terrestrial mind
From deathless suns and the streaming of God’s rain,
Yet canalises a strange irised glow,
And bright dews drip from the Immortal’s sky.
A passage for the Powers that move our days,
Occult behind this grosser Nature’s walls,
A gossamer marriage-hall of Mind with Form
Is hidden by a tapestry of dreams.

It is as well, for man is not yet ready to hold himself poised for the onrush of supramental consciousness. Like Shiva holding the Gangesin his matted hair to control the force, this subtle plane puts on hold the force of Supramental consciousness and allows a few beams to pass through as Shiva allowed a few thin streams of the Ganges through his tresses for Bhagiratha. Hence we can consider the kingdom of subtle matter as a kind of intermediate reservoir containing the world of archetypes:

Figures are there undreamed by mortal mind
Bodies that have no earthly counterpart
Traverse the inner eye’s illumined trance
And ravish the heart with their celestial tread
Persuading heaven to inhabit that wonder sphere.
The future’s marvels wander in its gulfs;
Things old and new are fashioned in those depths:
A carnival of beauty crowds the heights
In that magic kingdom of ideal sight.

This is the area from which creative artists draw their inspirations and ideas without realizing that the reservoir is a universal one. Having made the descent, the Supreme begins to ascend as well and that leads to a mighty partnership in the subtle realm when “Matter and soul inconscious union meet”.

As yet, the delight of existence remains a mystery for man since he is groveling in the shadow of Death. The “sacred orgy of delight’ always comes to an end for mortal man. All the time on earth we watch and experience the failure of love, power and even knowledge. But then this is not the end of our evolutionary adventure that really began with the Supreme’s descent into Matter. The best is yet to be and failures are sure to be transformed into successes before long. The kingdom of subtle matter will be the cradle of our future achievements on earth:

By a subconscient yearning memory
Left from a happiness dead before she was born,
An alien wonder on her senseless breast.
This mire must harbour the orchid and the rose,
From her blind unwilling substance must emerge
A beauty that belongs to happier spheres.
This is the destiny bequeathed to her,
As if a slain god left a golden trust
To a blind force and an imprisoned soul.

If we bring sincerity to our strivings inspired by the subtle plane of existence, we are bound to succeed for the occult worlds are no gossamer imaginings but existent realities. “The Light now distant shall grow native here”, is the promise given by Sri Aurobindo. After all, do not our yogis, saints and creative artists get intimations from the remote halls of Immortality? “A fourth dimension of aesthetic sense” can pierce through the obscuring veil of Matter and align us to the originating Beauty and Immortality.

As it is, the kingdom of subtle matter is all perfection for Aswapati’s eyes. It is compact of delight and beauty and love and sweetness, “a fantasy of perfect line and rule”. However, this is but a stage on Aswapati’s journey, not the destination where he hopes to meet the Home-of-all and gain the promise for world-transformation. And so he moves beyond this world:

Our spirit tires of being’s surfaces,
Transcended is the splendour of the form;
It turns to hidden powers and deeper states.
So now he looked beyond for greater light.
His soul’s peak-climb abandoning in its rear
This brilliant courtyard of the House of Days,
He left that fine material Paradise.
His destiny lay beyond in larger Space.

Book 2 Canto 3
The Glory and the Fall of Life

Aswapati enters the domains of Life on a level which corresponds to our own life-experience of doubt and endless seeking and a spirit of adventure which cares only for variety, regardless of danger, fall and pain. Life indulges all moods: self-pity, ambition, exultation, rapture, but is ever dissatisfied. She dreams of a lost happiness and beauty and strives to regain them; but though she is longing for bliss her steps lead her into a hell of grief and suffering. But Aswapati is shown that Life’s true native home is divine and full of Bliss. He is shown the beautiful worlds of griefless life: their heavenly joy and love, their innocent youthfulness, their dynamism and endless delight. He can see them but he is unable to enter them: his nature is still too close to our earth-nature, our unquiet life. Our nature and substance are unable to experience those higher worlds in their purity. How has the griefless life become the life we know? Aswapati sees that when earth was only sea and sky and stone, her young gods longed for the release of the souls that were sleeping immersed in matter, insentient, unable to express their divinity. In response to their aspiration, the great-winged Goddess of Life left her native light to pour out her beauty and bliss on the material universe, hoping to fill a fair new world with joy. The earth began to blossom, animals and human beings appeared. But while the magic gift was on its way a dark power intervened. Now in our world Life is no longer free and blissful, but subject to the domination of Matter and Death.

[Text by Shraddhavan]

Book 2 Canto 3 – The Glory and the Fall of Life

[From: A LUMINOUS FLAME – Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri by Dr. Prema Nandakumar]

From the world of subtle (sukshma) matter, Aswapati now enters the world of the life-realms. Here he finds the vital principle of life inaction everywhere. This life is no stranger to us as life here is one of birth, growth, decay and death. The appetite to enjoy alone marks the atmosphere so there is no fear of fall nor memory of past tribulations. Danger, pain, frustration and disappointment are all experienced realities. The life-force is seen blind here in her activities:

Careless of suffering, heedless of sin and fall,
She wrestles with danger and discovery
In the unexplored expanses of the soul.
To be seemed only a long experiment,
The hazard of a seeking ignorant Force
That tries all truths and, finding none supreme,
Moves on unsatisfied, unsure of its end.

Naturally, in this atmosphere people sit and hear to the worries and sorrows of others, not unlike such people in our own times who spend hours discussing their ailments and the remedies they have been trying. Or with all regrets for a (not unoften imagined) glorious past. Yet, this is not the whole truth about creation. It did not begin to lose itself in such self-pity. This is why the life force pierces through the greatest sorrow to begin life anew, for at the heart of pain and frustration, hope somehow manages to remain alive. The situation might appear hopeless, yet the life-force refuses to yield to darkness. This hope may be just a dream, a vision, an utopia, but that is the beginning of all action to achieve a better, sorrow-less, happy future!

As through a magic television’s glass
Outlined to some magnifying inner eye
They shone like images thrown from a far scene
Too high and glad for mortal lids to seize.
But near and real to the longing heart
And to the body’s passionate thought and sense
Are the hidden kingdoms of beatitude.
In some close unattained realm which yet we feel,
Immune from the harsh clutch of Death and Time,
Escaping the search of sorrow and desire,
In bright enchanted safe peripheries
For ever wallowing in bliss they lie.

Obviously a thick veil separates the world of appearances and the world of dream-visions. We cannot set aside the latter world as mere fireflies of imagination, bright for a moment and then gone into the limbo forever. If only we take into account the possibilities posited by our ancients and all the great thinkers, yogis and rishis who have been on earth, it would be clear that all these persons were no idle chatterers. Like the truth we ‘see’ around us, the other ‘truth’ is also around, though all of us may not have been gifted with the inner sight. We too can see when the veil that separates the true truths is brought down. That would happen when the vijnanamaya consciousness, the Supermind descends to help Mind pierce through the veil. Life on earth is mating with Death and giving rise to a certain hopelessness. What a fall for life that contains within itself tremendous possibilities! Yet Aswapati will not give into hopelessness for he sees the possibilities of a great future for mankind. Sri Aurobindo, always on the lookout to instill hope and strength in the human heart brings before us the ideal life:

Creation leaped straight from the hands of God;
Marvel and rapture wandered in the ways.
Only to be was a supreme delight,
Life was a happy laughter of the soul
And Joy was king with Love for minister.
The spirit’s luminousness was bodied there.
Life’s contraries were lovers or natural friends
And her extremes keen edges of harmony:
Indulgence with a tender purity came
And nursed the god on her maternal breast:
There none was weak, so falsehood could not live …

Strangthened with freedom and power, Life would “explore the measures of the rhythms of God.” Aswapati was astonished and delighted with the state of sorrow lessness in this life. This would be ideal for mankind! But though the king was himself an advanced thinker, he ha dnot yet the capacity to pass into this other world. His soul was still of the earth earthy. Indeed Aswapati, poised between earthly reality and visionary truth exemplifies our dual nature:

Although he once had felt the Eternal’s clasp,
Too near to suffering worlds his nature lived,
And where he stood were entrances of Night.
Hardly, too close beset by the world’s care,
Can the dense mould in which we have been made
Return sheer joy to joy, pure light to light.
For its tormented will to think and live
First to a mingled pain and pleasure woke
And still it keeps the habit of its birth:
A dire duality is our way to be.

From matter that seemed inconscient, life had emerged and mind too. However, with mind had come doubt leading to experiences of joy and sorrow, the “dire duality”. If it is an all-time truth, then our earthly life would be no more than “an episode in an eternal death”. In any case, for the present such is the ‘evil mystery’ of human life on earth. At the same time it may be remembered that these are the beginnings of the evolutionary spiral. Aswapati now turns to watch the upward spiral of evolution.

Book 2 Canto 4
The Kingdoms of the Little Life

Aswapati finds himself in an uncertain and unsure world which has been born from the meeting of Life with Matter. The original harmony of Matter is disturbed by Life’s seeking to escape from her imprisonment. That pressure compels an awakening of the unconscious force in matter. Aswapati witnesses the emergence of three levels of living beings: first tiny short-lived entities guided by sensation who seem hardly alive, hardly able to survive. Next, the much more energetic and dynamic animal creation ranging from huge forms to very small ones, from reptiles and insects to mammals and beings who have a human form but not yet a human consciousness, banding together for safety against a hostile environment and warring with their neighbours. Then he perceives the first appearance of a bodily mind which is able to form self-conscious individuals. Led by this earth-bound mind, Life’s play becomes limited and monotonous. Emerging from the Kingdoms of the Little Life, Aswapati sees the Stair of Existence like a huge bridge across the dark gulfs of unconsciousness, emerging from a formless emptiness and jutting out into an emptiness of Soul. He sees Life as a little light born in a great darkness, not knowing where it has come from and where it must go.

[Text by Shraddhavan]

Book 2 Canto 4 – The Kingdoms of the Little Life

[From: A LUMINOUS FLAME – Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri by Dr. Prema Nandakumar]

Having come down from its heavenly origins, life is propelled by “an instinct-driven Ignorance” for a while. In this world, the world of “little life”, instinct and sense-perception alone are active. However ‘mind’ comes forward now to take control of life and even direct it according to its wishes for it is a higher consciousness than mere instinct. Man is now not merely an animal but rich with a mind of his own which assures him of infinite possibilities to bring a transformation to his life.

This is an upward move that has been established by now which starts from matter, rises to life and from thence to mind. Mind cannot remain silent and would continue this upward journey towards even a self-exceeding. But the progression is not easy as man’s desires are cribbed by incapacity. For all the grandiose aspirations, he is able to achieve very little. Though there is some kind of progress, much of the mental movements end up in difficulties and exasperations, and man seems unhappier now! At the same time, he feels powerful enough to forge ahead as he considers mind to be a limitless force. Such is the divine drama that takes place on the earth:

The animal’s thoughtless joy is left behind,
Care and reflection burden his daily walk;
He has risen to greatness and to discontent,
He is awake to the Invisible.
Insatiate seeker, he has all to learn:
He has exhausted now life’s surface acts,
His being’s hidden realms remain to explore.
He becomes a mind, he becomes a spirit and self;
In his fragile tenement he grows Nature’s lord.
In him Matter wakes from its long obscure trance,
In him earth feels the Godhead drawing near.

Sri Aurobindo’s Aswapati now looks at this divine drama which really seems to begin from the “cabin of mud” where life had remained in a kind of cosmic hibernation. This beginning, though ugly and slimy, has its own structures of loveliness, for even “the world’s senseless beauty mirrors God’s delight”. The life found in cells, in micro-organisms, in worm, in reptile and in insect cannot be dismissed as meaningless. The Supreme is here too.

From this kingdom of little life Aswapati moves farther on to another kingdom of little life where there is constant movement. This is the mind-boggling “animal experiment”. Here are all the ages of Geologic time and the phantasmagoria of mastodons and giant lizards:

Huge armoured strengths shook a frail quaking ground,
Great puissant creatures with a dwarfish brain,
And pigmy tribes imposed their small life-drift.
In a dwarf model of humanity
Nature now launched the extreme experience
And master-point of her design’s caprice,
Luminous result of her half-conscious climb
On rungs twixt her sublimities and grotesques
To massive from infinitesimal shapes,
To a subtle balancing of body and soul,
To an order of intelligent littleness.

Having come up thus in nature’s evolutionary movement, man manages to set up his homes with the help of his mind, but the primitive instincts are too strong with him. He is quick to take offence, prefers to rule by his personal will and so mangles himself with killings, rape, plunder and destruction. Such was our “heroic age”.

Further progress brings forward the “intellectual man” who has been propelled from below and helped by the powers above. Man is still self-seeking but his desires now vault the sky. Must he die? Get killed? Can he transcend death? Can’t he overcome death and live for ever?

A finite movement of the Infinite
Came winging its way through a wide air of Time;
A march of knowledge moved in Nescience
Its right to be immortal it reserved,
But built a wall against the siege of death
And threw a hook to clutch eternity.
A thinking entity appeared in Space.
A little ordered world broke into view
Where being had prison-room for act and sight,
A floor to walk, a clear but scanty range.

But progress is not so easy. Something, somewhere denies man success in overcoming the definite end to an individual’s terrestrial life. Man has not the patience to pursue this goal and prefers his “dwarf lusts and brief desires”. The mind follows suit and the circle of “punarapijananam, punarapi maranam” moves on relentlessly, all the while allowing man to think that he is dispensing his own destiny:

Absorbed in the little works of its prison-house
It turned around the same unchanging points
But thought itself the master of its jail.

This is the crowning lesson taught to Aswapati by the Kingdom of the Little Life. Human civilisation may have reached the highest spires of achievement with the help of mind, but the core problem remained and man did not know from whither he came and whither he was going.

A little light in a great darkness born,
Life knew not where it went nor whence it came.
Around all floated still the nescient haze.

Book 2 Canto 5
The Godheads of the Little Life

Aswapati sees this restricted world of the Little Life as an unhappy corner in eternity. Wanting to understand more deeply the secret of its existence tries to discern the Power that has made it and to grasp the creative Idea which has brought into existence He plunges his powerful gaze of consciousness through the mist of obscurity which surrounds it. As if lit up by a searchlight, a multitude of tiny, uncouth entities appear moving about before his eyes: elves, imps, goblins, genii and the others, half-animal, half-god in their appearance and their nature. He sees them at work behind the veil, prompting, impelling, pushing, perverting. Their work only seems to spoil and vitiate, and they amuse themselves in the process.

Their activities are not confined to their own world but extend to other worlds also. Wherever there is narrowness, chaos and obscurity, these petty beings cast their influence. They lurk in the unconscious and half-conscious parts of man and lead him astray. The earth is not a closed system: it is open to the action of Powers from other worlds. Not a structured typal world like others, it is a field of Evolution and Progress. On Earth all powers have to move through strife and struggle towards an eventual Harmony and Perfection. The way is long leads through belts of Inconscience and Ignorance and Ill-will. But The One Divine inhabits every corner of his universe. His Will leads its movement and assures its eventual successful fulfilment in Freedom and Light.

[Text by Shraddhavan]

Book 2 Canto 5 – The Godheads of the Little Life

[From: A LUMINOUS FLAME – Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri by Dr. Prema Nandakumar]

Having seen the various kingdoms in the Empire of Little Life, Aswapati realizes that though they may seem to have advanced in creativity made possible by mind, still are they ignorant of the higher reaches to which mind can lead man. Is this all to life and its evolution? So he takes a hard and close look at the appearances and finds something totally unexpected:

He plunged his gaze into the siege of mist
That held this ill-lit straitened continent
Ringed with the skies and seas of ignorance
And kept it safe from Truth and Self and Light.
And dwellings and trees and figures of men appear
As if revealed to an eye in Nothingness,
All lurking things were torn out of their veils
And held up in his vision’s sun-white blaze.

These “lurking things” were the forces that pushed the little life to grow into a larger life, fallen godheads who would bring the world under their hegemony and dry it up, generally known as “kshudra devatas” in Indian parlance. Getting involved with them may at first appear profitable but the end is always fatal.

Astonished by the unaccustomed glow,
As if immanent in the shadows started up
Imps with wry limbs and carved beast visages,
Sprite-prompters goblin-wizened or faery-small,
And genii fairer but unsouled and poor
And fallen beings, their heavenly portion lost,
And errant divinities trapped in Time’s dust.
Ignorant and dangerous wills but armed with power,
Half-animal, half-god their mood, their shape.

Aswapati finds that they corrupt everything. At the same time the Aurobindonian view never rejects anything in toto. There must be something deep within these depraved powers that can lead to an ultimate triumph. After life exhausts all the poisons in its body, an immortal image is sure to come out of it.

Naturally, Aswapati, representing all mankind, stands wondering at the paradox of this creation which has been a result of the Supreme choosing to descend into the chaos by a self-impulsion. How did thi screation come about? First there was Space, which presently gave a place for force and energy.

An ocean of electric Energy
Formlessly formed its strange wave-particles
Constructing by their dance this solid scheme,
Its mightiness in the atom shut to rest;
Masses were forged or feigned and visible shapes;
Light flung the photon’s swift revealing spark
And showed, in the minuteness of its flash
Imaged, this cosmos of apparent things.
Thus has been made this real impossible world,
An obvious miracle or convincing show.

The fixed Laws of Nature took control of matter and energy and made way for an ordered material universe, and life appeared in it. But that is not the final word of life. Life is an evolving process, it is no static divinity. So upward it moves and man begins to act according to the processes of his thoughts. Having come up to the level of mind, it is not surprising that he should look beyond mind to get more powers to overcome death and rise into a higher consciousness. Through all this evolution, there is a Witness Spirit within man, guiding and helping him.

Unable to rise fast, mental man falls back on the routines of everyday life with a vengeance and spends his time in love and hate, suspicion and destruction. But the Witness Spirit does not reveal itself and remains in the shadows. Nor does it die with the body’s death, as it is not destroyed by arrows or burnt up by fire, naivam chindanti sastraaninaivam dahati pavakah. Meanwhile man is content with his trivial amusements and does not care to think and dare greatly:

A brief companionship with many jars,
A little love and jealousy and hate,
A touch of friendship mid indifferent crowds
Draw his heart-plan on life’s diminutive map.
If something great awakes, too frail his pitch
To reveal its zenith tension of delight,
His thought to eternise its ephemeral soar,
Art’s brilliant gleam is a pastime for his eyes.

However, Aswapati realizes that this is only a temporary scheme of things and soon a day will come when soul will speak to soul. All shall be captured by delight, transformed:

In waves of undreamed ecstasy shall roll
Our mind and life and sense and laugh in a light
Other than this hard limited human day,
The body’s tissues thrill apotheosised,
Its cells sustain bright metamorphosis.

Happy with this thought, Aswapati now moves forward through the dangerous mist thrown up by the “astral chaos” and hurries forward leaving behind the teeming hordes of the kshudra devatas. It is all darkness around but that could not hinder his progress as he had illumination from within that showed the path in clear terms. “His only sunlight was his spirit’s flame”, the Atma Jyoti of Aswapati.

Book 2 Canto 6
The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Greater Life

Leaving the realms of the Little Life, Aswapati moves on through the astral chaos, a dark and hostile region peopled with shadowy and misleading shapes, a realm of baseless and insignificant lives, in which the only sure Light he could find was his own Spirit’s flame. Eventually, as if passing through a dark tunnel, he emerges in the kingdom of the morning star, with its promise of a wider light. There follows the light of a Sun, an illumination in which Life is able to establish a world. Although fragmentary and incomplete, there is some outbreak there of secret Spirit and some response in Life and Matter. Aswapati sees that this realm of Greater Life inspires our vaster hopes, and its forces have made landings on our globe. All that we seek for is prefigured there, and all that we have not yet dreamed of seeking for, but must one day be born in human hearts in order for the Timeless to be fulfilled in matter. Aswapati sees all the great achievements of the Life Power realised there, a universe of truths and myths. But he also sees that Reality is hidden from her, she lacks eternity, misses the infinite. Her soul is weeping within her, ever unsatisfied, unable to capture her one Beloved. He tries to find a way out of her complex enchantments, but cannot find any way of escape. Life cannot offer him the solution he is seeking: the way for life on earth to become a divine life.

[Text by Shraddhavan]

Book 2 Canto 6 – The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Greater Life

[From: A LUMINOUS FLAME – Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri by Dr. Prema Nandakumar]

Travelling away from the regions of the surface mind, Aswapati is able to make progress towards a distant light through these regions of darkness. After all, man is endowed with the nectarean element called Love and that element helps his heart gain freedom from fear. From somewhere Truth gleams in the heart and with its glow, Aswapati moves forward and enters a world where spirits appeared to be veering around in circles of hope and hopelessness. Is this the goal of man’s strivings? No! Soon he is able to reach “the kingdom of the morning star”:

First came the kingdom of the morning star:
A twilight beauty trembled under its spear
And the throb of promise of a wider Life.

The area certainly gave staying ground for those brief moments touched by immortality and eternal ananda, not unlike what shoots forth from an artist’s vision and is caught in stone or metal or paint, possibly for ever. These achievements of man, by his strivings, tapasya and unceasing aspiration, do give hope of a greater dawn for the common man:

This realm inspires us with our vaster hopes;
Its forces have made landings on our globe,
Its signs have traced their pattern in our lives:
It lends a sovereign movement to our fate,
Its errant waves motive our life’s high surge.
All that we seek for is prefigured there
And all we have not known nor ever sought
Which yet one day must be born in human hearts
That the Timeless may fulfil itself in things.

This realm has not come out of nothing. Like everything else, this too has risen from matter. This is the earth-centred Higher Vital World which is eager to create. Also, it is not excluded from the intimations of immortality from the Supreme. Nature (Prakriti) is always finding ways to achieve manifestation of the Supreme and give a local habitation and a name to what is essentially beyond mind and thought.

This is her secret and impossible task
To catch the boundless in a net of birth,
To cast the spirit into physical form,
To lend speech and thought to the Ineffable;
She is pushed to reveal the ever Unmanifest.
Yet by her skill the impossible has been done:

At the same time, Prakriti’s work is not like turning out cars from an assembly line. There is no dead perfection in what she creates and hence there is a great amount of what we generally call “wastage” too. Millions upon millions of failures, yet Mother Nature goes on with her task of elevating and perfecting life, drawing it up the ladder of emergent evolution.

As he watches the scene, Aswapati is overwhelmed. It is clear to him that all this ceaseless striving of Nature is not actually meaningless. Obviously she is undergoing pains to bring forth some perfection on earth, at least the next rung in the upward spiral of evolution. Not that the ways of Prakriti are easily understood. Quite often it is darkness that has precedence. The asura becomes the leader and tries to drag down the upward movement of evolution. And yet, Nature will not admit defeat. Fallen, there is again an attempt to rise again and step forward with the morning sun on the face.

A strange enthusiasm has moved its heart;
It hungers for heights, it passions for the supreme.
It hunts for the perfect word, the perfect shape,
It leaps to the summit thought, the summit light.
For by the form the Formless is brought close
And all perfection fringes the Absolute.

We have only to fling back our memory’s doors to the beginnings. How long did it take for man to become a biped? The moment he locked his knee and freed his hands to work must have happened so long ago! And then the very slow development through millennia till he has become today what he is, not a mere animal any more but with a brain that can think and plan and execute tremendous works. Rome was certainly not built in a day! “Housed in the atom, buried in the clod,/Her quick creative passion cannot cease.” She may seem to be in a swoon at times, sometimes caught in the tamasic stranglehold of darkness. But these too are creative times, her periods of hibernation. “Inconscience is her gigantic pause”.

One thing is made clear by the works of Prakriti. Come defeat and darkness, she will never admit defeat as her aspiration is to bring the heavens down and transform earthly life into the life divine.

Nourished by hardship and calamity
And with pain for her body’s handmaid, masseuse, nurse,
Her tortured invisible spirit continues still
To toil though in darkness, to create though with pangs;
She carries crucified God upon her breast.

That is why the prayer to Mahasaraswati in the Devi Mahatmyam speaks of her as being universally present, not only as Intelligence, Power, Peace, Faith and Beauty, but also as slumber, hunger, shadow, thirst and error. Watching these godheads of greater life who preside over the higher vital world in creation, Aswapati seeks a clue in the “screened difficult theorem of her clues”. Sri Aurobindo’s poetry takes wings as Aswapati appears as a witness spirit of what is happening in the whole of creation. As the canto concludes, it is obvious that though failure seems to be decided even in the beginning of an enterprise, nature will not cease to work. At the same time a big question mark is also placed before us. When will this ceaseless toil lead to the promised future? For the time being, there is a sense of hopelessness as Aswapati realizes: ”Life has no issue, death brings no release”.

Book 2 Canto 7
The Descent into Night

If even the most sublime levels of Life do not provide the solution Aswapati is searching for, where is it to be found? In order to find the cause of the world-failure he has become aware of, with a calm mind and detached heart he turns his gaze away from the visible face of Nature towards the invisible vastnesses of the infinity from which our universe has been born. All the worlds have been built by its unconscious breath and our waking thoughts are the outputs of its dreams. Thus he is able to see the evil lurking at the roots of Life in the form of huge serpent which raises its head and looks into his eyes. He becomes aware of a hidden Power which seems to be giving birth to the world and at the same time destroying it. He feels a fatal Influence spreading everywhere and pursuing the immortal spirit, casting the haunting finger of death on all creatures and casting a dark shadow of error, grief and pain upon the soul’s spontaneous will for truth and joy and light. He sees the changed face of Life – her beauty and her yearning heart, but also the dreadful Powers that drive her moods and make her spread pain everywhere. He goes deeper and deeper. All alone in the all-swallowing Night, he loses all hope and feels the approach of a terrible fear, threatening him with an eternity of pain inhuman and intolerable. But he endures, stills the vain terror, the smothering coils of agony. Then peace returns. He succeeds in mastering the tides of Nature with a look. He met with his bare spirit naked Hell.

[Text by Shraddhavan]

Book 2 Canto 7 – The Descent into Night

[From: A LUMINOUS FLAME – Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri by Dr. Prema Nandakumar]

Granted life is not worth discussing as its efforts are doomed to failure, and that death is certain for the life that takes birth, the yogin in Aswapati is not prepared to accept it all as a permanent Reality. As one who had taken to yoga to help find a solvent to man’s distress, he proceeds now to enter even forbidding Night to see what exactly constitutes it that makes it inexorable. This is a dangerous adventure. But Sri Aurobindo has said that it is an avatar’s destiny to go through life with all its attendant troubles and death as any other human being:

He who would bring the heavens here
Must descend himself into clay
And the burden of earthly nature bear
And tread the dolorous way.
Coercing my godhead I have come down
Here on the sordid earth,
Ignorant, labouring, human grown
Twixt the gates of death and birth.

Aswapati, the world’s forerunner seeking to transform life on earth now courageously enters Night to locate the cause of the evil that plagues mankind as death, ignorance and nescience. Here is a world where all that he has known on earth like Power, Presence, Light and Love are perverted. He comes face to face with evil that deliberately desecrates all of creation’s experiments:

A hostile and perverting Mind at work
In every corner ensconced of conscious life
Corrupted Truth with her own formulas;
Interceptor of the listening of the soul,
Afflicting knowledge with the hue of doubt
It captured the oracles of the occult gods
Effaced the signposts of Life’s pilgrimage,
Cancelled the firm rock-edicts graved by Time,
And on the foundations of the cosmic Law
Erected its bronze pylons of misrule.

There is no peace anywhere in this world populated with “cities of ancient Ignorance” and terror is the ruler. Hypocrisy is a way of life and nothing is safe from these dictators. The outward form of religion is very much present but there is no sincerity in the rituals nor is any spiritual seeking allowed to flourish. Compulsion and corruption manage to impose a unity on the hapless populace. The ways are slippery with a million wrong-doings, transgressions, iniquities and misdemeanors. Aswapati moves through it all with great care, since he can reach heaven only by traversing past the cities of hell. His safety lies in prayer and namasmarana:

A lie was there the truth and truth a lie.
Here must the traveller of the upward Way—
For daring Hell’s kingdoms winds the heavenly route—
Pause or pass slowly through that perilous space,
A prayer upon his lips and the great Name.

Such is the power of reciting the Divine’s name that Aswapati is able to cross the murky No-man’s land, but keep himself safe when he has to go through an unashamedly vicious, lustful land. It could be a psychic description of the dens of iniquity that are called Night Clubs. Long, long before we turned our homes into receptacles of the violence and horror spewed by the television sets, Sri Aurobindo recorded this repulsive world with his visionary sight:

In booths of sin and night-repairs of vice
Styled infamies of the body’s concupiscence
And sordid imaginations etched in flesh,
Turned lust into a decorative art:
Abusing Nature’s gift her pervert skill
Immortalised the sown grain of living death,
In a mud goblet poured the bacchic wine,
To a satyr gave the thyrsus of a god.
Impure, sadistic, with grimacing mouths,
Grey foul inventions gruesome and macabre
Came televisioned from the gulfs of Night.

There is nothing human about such people. They are eloquent about the need for compassion, faith and love. But their action is totally inhuman. The rakshasic man, full of kinetic-ego, grabbing everything to himself and his family, is hailed as hero and god. In his turn, he and his cohorts use every available means of cruelty forcing people to acquiesce in his rule. Sri Aurobindo could have been reporting the political scenario in India today as the canto turns to conclude:

A bull-throat bellowed with its brazen tongue;
Its hard and shameless clamour filling Space
And threatening all who dared to listen to truth
Claimed the monopoly of the battered ear;
A deafened acquiescence gave its vote …

Book 2 Canto 8
The World of Falsehood, the Mother of Evil and the Sons of Darkness

Then Aswapati is able to see into the hidden heart of Night. It is a spiritless blank Infinity, a Nature denying Truth, wanting to abolish God. There is no Light, no divine Soul there; Evil and Pain are busy erecting their own hellish world where Titans, Demons and the rest of the nether host rule. Aswapati’s gaze pierces through the heavy gloom and sees a vague and limitless Shape seated on an all-swallowing Death, trident in hand: the Mother of Evil. This aspect of Life was born into a state of soulless Matter, when the heart of Time was a spiritless hollow. She wanted to awaken the mystic truth sleeping in all things, but from the darkness of bottomless Night a different response came: a seed of perversion gave rise to a monstrous birth of Ignorance. A nameless Power arose, immense and alien to our universe. Life became a huge and hungry Death, the Spirit’s Bliss was changed to cosmic pain, Death, Pain, and Falsehood distorted the original design of Creation. An antagonist Energy has seized the place of the eternal Mother and tries to hold humanity back at the animal level. But despite her opposition the One continues to grow in humanity. Carefully guarding the flame of his divine Spirit, Aswapati penetrates to the last locked subconscient’s floor, where he finds the secret key of Nature’s change. Hell dissolves. Soul lights up the conscious body with its ray, Matter and Spirit mingle and become one.

[Text by Shraddhavan]

Book 2 Canto 8 – The World of Falsehood, the Mother of Evil and the Sons of Darkness

[From: A LUMINOUS FLAME – Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri by Dr. Prema Nandakumar]

Now Aswapati has come to “naked Hell” and what he sees could terrorise him no end. For here evil sits unabashed giving vent to sacrilegious thoughts, speech and deeds, unimagined hitherto by man. Sri Aurobindo’s description of the citizens of this world is terrifying but this is the undeniable truth about man’s Ahankara. What is there which an egoistic mind will not do?

The Anarchs of the formless depths arose,
Great Titan beings and demoniac powers,
World-egos racked with lust and thought and will,
Vast minds and lives without a spirit within:
Impatient architects of error’s house,
Leaders of the cosmic ignorance and unrest
And sponsors of sorrow and mortality
Embodied the dark Ideas of the Abyss.

How did this happen? If God created the world, why did he allow the entry of evil into creation? There have been many explanations for the manner in which a human being gets corrupted so as to deliberately inflict torture on other human beings. The selfishness of man because of the presence of the ego in him, has no bounds. Even among brothers, not unoften such a difference is visible. One brother follows the path of dharma and works for the good of others. Another involves himself in nefarious activities to become rich and feeds his ego by acquiring lands, wealth and women in a big way. Why, selfishness even drives a brother kill his own brother. Ravana and Cain are examples of the evil that lurks in the hearts of children born to the same parents. Sri Aurobindo uses a story to describe the event that led to the birth of evil on earth.

At first it was all inconscient Matter and Time. The former had no soul; the latter had no spirit. The time came when Matter had to be kindled with Life to begin the upward journey of Evolution. So Life “smote the unfathomed Night / In which God hid himself from his own view.” At once an answer came from the Night in the form of ‘A vast Non-Being’. Swiftly it confounded the ways of Life and saw to it that the progress of evolution would be retarded for all time:

A shadow fell across the simple Ray:
Obscured was the Truth-light in the cavern heart
That burns unwitnessed in the altar crypt
Behind the still velamen’s secrecy
Companioning the Godhead of the shrine.
Thus was the dire antagonist Energy born
Who mimes the eternal Mother’s mighty shape
And mocks her luminous infinity
With a grey distorted silhouette in the Night.

This Shadow continues to thwart the efforts of man as he struggles to evolve into higher planes of consciousness. She is verily like Putana who tries to enter by stealth any residence of the Light, : ”and in the cradle slay the divine Child.” She is the one who throws the smog of depression around us and gives us a defeatist mentality. Naturally her sons are also such “haters of light” Somehow, anyhow they occupy even holy places and transform them into dens of terrorism:

Night is their refuge and strategic base.
Against the sword of Flame, the luminous Eye,
Bastioned they live in massive forts of gloom,
Calm and secure in sunless privacy:
No wandering ray of Heaven can enter there.
Armoured, protected by their lethal masks,
As in a studio of creative Death
The giant sons of Darkness sit and plan
The drama of the earth, their tragic stage.

After viewing the advances in science and technology and the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, of “the bombshell’s massacre”, one feels that Sri Aurobindo has not exaggerated even an iota of the elements in the civilisation of our times. But the ancient question also cannot be forgotten. Where was the necessity for Evil in this creation? An Evil that even blatantly took the name of God and made him its accomplice in crimes. How else can we explain away the countless religious wars inhuman civilisation?

But why think this Evil is different from Creation? The Supreme Intelligence must have had a reason in stationing it on the way of man as he tries to exceed himself. We never value things which we gain with ease. So would be the case with evolutionary advancement. Man must know what Evil is, come face to face with it and with a firm faith in the luminosity of his own soul, overcome Evil. As Aswapati recognizes “a mute wisdom in the unknowing Night”, hope is kindled in his breast. This element of hope gifted to man is a key to usher in “Nature’s change”.

A light was with him, an invisible hand
Was laid upon the error and the pain
Till it became a quivering ecstasy,
The shock of sweetness of an arm’s embrace.
He saw in Night the Eternal’s shadowy veil,
Knew death for a cellar of the house of life,
In destruction felt creation’s hasty pace,
Knew loss as the price of a celestial gain
And hell as a short cut to heaven’s gates.
Then in Illusion’s occult factory
And in the Inconscient’s magic printing-house
Torn were the formats of the primal Night
And shattered the stereotypes of Ignorance.

Worried no more by the hurdles in the path of evolution, Aswapati now leaves behind the Night which had crumbled like a pack of cards. The dawn has come and the path clear.

Book 2 Canto 9
The Paradise of the Life-Gods

Immediately and effortlessly Aswapati’s being is projected into the Paradise of the Life-Gods. Immersed in Light, perpetually divine, unmoved by fear and grief and the shocks of Fate, free from all adverse circumstance, it lived in a jewel-rhythm of the laughter of God and lay on the breast of universal love. After the anguish of his soul’s long strife Aswapati at last finds calm and heavenly rest. The wounds suffered by his warrior nature in the dark lower worlds are healed by the embraces of pure blissful divine Energies. He sees forms that can make the power of vision divine, listens to music that can immortalise the mind and make the heart as wide as infinity. There glorious subtle senses, able to respond to heights of unimagined happiness, transform his aura into a glow of joy which makes his body shine like a sunlit sky. Now the substance of his body can draw spiritual power from the experience of the senses. His earth-nature stands reborn, a comrade of heaven. He is bathed in a giant drop of the unknowable Bliss and bears the rapture which the gods experience. Immortal pleasure purifies him in its waves and turns his strength into an undying power. Now, for Aswapati, Immortality has conquered Time and is supporting his Life-force.

[Text by Shraddhavan]

Book 2 Canto 9 – The Paradise of the Life-Gods

[From: A LUMINOUS FLAME – Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri by Dr. Prema Nandakumar]

Aswapati coming out of the long journey into Night feels relaxed at last. The tension has been removed. Having understood that one cannot wish away the presence of evil, pain and death in this world, one becomes despondent. But then, when one realizes that this is a necessary evil which man must experience before he seeks to change the earth-nature, there is no more any tension. There is a significant poem by Sri Aurobindo titled ‘A God’s Labour’. It shows how even avatars who come to save mankind are not free of the sorrow cast by the Evil in nature.

This is the reason why avatars go through the travails of a human being, if the Supreme decides to incarnate as a human being. The classic instance is that of Rama. Where was the need for him to walk through the forests for fourteen long years? And why bear the columny of having done adharma? Till today, scholars have continued to debate on the killing of Vali. Was it just on the part of an incarnation? There is then the banishment of Sita. How could that happen? Why did he weep like a common man when the news of Dasarata’s death was conveyed to him? Or when he lost Sita? And Krishna! Beginning with Sisupala and Karna to contemporary authors, he has been put on the dock a million times!

But the avatars do not flinch. They go on their way, achieving what they have come for: to rid the earth of evil that springs up repeatedly. A Ravana in Treta Yuga. A Duryodhana in Dwapara Yuga. Sri Aurobindo writes:

He who would bring the heavens here
             Must descend himself into clay
And the burden of earthly nature bear
             And tread the dolorous way.

That is what Aswapati has been doing. Now from the Via Dolorosahe emerges into a “great felicitous Day”. He feels electrically free in this atmosphere of truth and beauty.

Assured of the bliss for which all forms were made,
Unmoved by fear and grief and the shocks of Fate
And unalarmed by the breath of fleeting Time
And unbesieged by adverse circumstance,
It breathed in a sweet secure unguarded ease
Free from our body’s frailty inviting death,
Far from our danger-zone of stumbling Will.

Sri Aurobindo helps us regain our composure by bringing in familiar concepts. All this dramatic journey is happening in the inner spaces of Aswapti’s soul and we get an idea of the powers that are latent is us, which like the power of hope, can turn us into great achievers. For instance, the fine arts which help us reach the Divine through music and, dance. These fine arts belong to the Gandharvas. Aswapati now sees the Gandharva world:

Below him lay like gleaming jewelled thoughts
Rapt dreaming cities of Gandharva kings.
Across the vibrant secrecies of Space
A dim and happy music sweetly stole,
Smitten by unseen hands he heard heart-close
The harps’ cry of the heavenly minstrels pass,
And voices of unearthly melody
Chanted the glory of eternal love
In the white-blue-moonbeam air of Paradise.

Music is the invocation of the Brahman as sound (Naada-brahma) and can take us “towards a greatness beyond life”. It is an oft-repeated experience how good music lifts us above the mundane commerce of the everyday world. Here is beauty, peace, love. Music gives us the instrument to indicate our aspirations. And the power of the Gandharva world of music is such that pain is changed to joy. The ability of music to chase away gloom and rest the soul need not be emphasized, for it is an everyday experience for us all.

After the anguish of the soul’s long strife
At length were found calm and celestial rest
And, lapped in a magic flood of sorrowless hours,
Healed were his warrior nature’s wounded limbs
In the encircling arms of Energies
That brooked no stain and feared not their own bliss.
In scenes forbidden to our pallid sense
Amid miraculous scents and wonder-hues
He met the forms that divinise the sight,
To music that can immortalise the mind
And make the heart wide as infinity
Listened …

Even as he loses himself in the heavenly music, Aswapati’s body acquires a heavenly glow. The body-mind compartmentalization is gone for music rips through to the soul directly and conveys messages from the Supreme. “Earth-nature stood reborn, comrade of heaven.” It is all Anandamaya.

A giant drop of the Bliss unknowable
Overwhelmed his limbs and round his soul became
A fiery ocean of felicity …

Book 2 Canto 10
The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Little Mind

The delights of this Life-Paradise could not detain the wideness of Aswapati’s soul, which now needs all infinity for its home. Above him he sees large lucent realms of Mind. But first he enters a twilight tract of dim and shifting rays which separates the sentient flow of Life from the equilibrium of Thought, a place where Knowledge and Ignorance meet. Above this level, Aswapati escapes into a realm of early Light, ruled by a half-risen sun from whose rays the full orb of human mind is born. That realm is served by a three-bodied trinity. First, a pygmy thought, needing to life in bounds, forever stooping to hammer fact and form: the Physical Mind. Next a rash Intelligence, the Vital Mind: though often carried away by wishful thinking and delusion, this energetic and enthusiastic power sometimes catches insights which calm intelligence misses. The third power is Reason, the strongest and wisest of the three, who uses her lens and measuring rod and probe, trying to understand the objective universe around her. Her toil is inconclusive but useful to us. But the little Mind is tied to little things, and cannot reveal the higher Truths. One day a greater Gnosis will look out on the world and illumine the deep heart of self and things, bringing a timeless knowledge to Mind, the true aim to Life, and a close to the Ignorance.

[Text by Shraddhavan]

Book 2 Canto 10 – The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Little Mind

[From: A LUMINOUS FLAME – Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri by Dr. Prema Nandakumar]

The Paradise in which Aswapati finds himself is very tempting but he is not interested in a happiness that just gets renewed periodically. There is no chance for progress at all! Aswapati must move onward in search of his nameless goal which is beckoning him from the beyond. Adventures await him here. He now finds himself in “a silver-grey expanse where Day and Night had wedded and were one.” As yet it is a region where only the insects are learning to crawl and exercise the sensory perceptions. He is not quite clear what this land is for it is all the grey of sandhya. He passes through a shining bridge and finds himself in a bright space. This is the phase of evolution when a principle of consciousness rises above man’s sensory perceptions. Growing confident of it selfconsciousness crystallizes into Mind:

Thus streamed down from the realm of early Light
Ethereal thinkings into Matter’s world;
Its gold-horned herds trooped into earth’s cave-heart.
Its morning rays illume our twilight’s eyes,
Its young formations move the mind of earth
To labour and to dream and new-create,
To feel beauty’s touch and know the world and self:
The Golden Child began to think and see.

Mind goes to work quickly and with the rise of intelligence, knowledge about this creation is accumulated and the universe itself is mapped as if the Mind is a know-all. In its hurry to get at all-knowledge without losing a moment, necessarily the instrument remained blind to the deeper truths. It only saw Matter, not the God within. Nor was the creative urge in a hurry to teach Mind the truth of things for “only a slow advance the earth can bear”. But Mind goes on merrily with her job:

Incapable of the soul’s direct inlook
She sees by spasms and solders knowledge-scrap,
Makes Truth the slave-girl of her indigence,
Expelling Nature’s mystic unity
Cuts into quantum and mass the moving All;
She takes for measuring-rod her ignorance.

In this tremendous job of acquiring knowledge, Mind has three loyal servants. The first of these:

A pigmy Thought needing to live in bounds
For ever stooped to hammer fact and form.
Absorbed and cabined in external sight,
It takes its stand on Nature’s solid base.
A technician admirable, a thinker crude,
A riveter of Life to habit’s grooves …

One cannot think of a more perfect assistant than one’s thought but it has no initiative of its own and simply does Mind’s bidding mechanically. The second servant is “a rash Intelligence”. If the Pigmy Thought has no initiative, this Rash Intelligence makes sudden guesses, deals in speculation and unclear generalization. The third and last servant is Reason, “the strongest, wisest of the troll-like Three”:

Armed with her lens and measuring-rod and probe,
She looked upon an object universe
And the multitudes that in it live and die
And the body of Space and the fleeing soul of Time,
And took the earth and stars into her hands
To try what she could make of these strange things…
Impatient of enigma and the unknown,
Intolerant of the lawless and the unique,
Imposing reflection on the march of Force,
Imposing clarity on the unfathomable,
She strove to reduce to rules the mystic world.

All this is admirable but her final word is never final. What is proved today is easily disproved tomorrow. Earth was flat and now earth is round! Our science which boasts of basing itself on the strong rock of Reason is actually never sure of its conclusions. And yet Reason will not easily admit defeat nor will it accept the presence of the soul of man. For Reason, “Matter is the admirable Reality”.

Fortunately the Mind as we know it is not all. There are other extensions to this Mind, other levels which go beyond Reason. The Cosmic Soul is not limited by any Fixed Fate:

A sudden turn can come, a road appear.
A greater Mind may see a greater Truth,
Or we may find when all the rest has failed
Hid in ourselves the key of perfect change.

Aswapati gets an inkling of these planes above the Mind when he sees two “sun-gaze Daemons”, spirits that have unusual drive and effectiveness and so he proceeds towards the Kingdoms of the Greater Mind.

Book 2 Canto 11
The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Greater Mind

Aswapati goes beyond the limits of human Mind into a space where Thought is supported by a Vision beyond thought. He sees high above him the splendours of ideal Mind, the origin of all that we are, pregnant with the endless more we must become. Those realms are far from our yearning and our labour and our call, but since our secret selves are closely related to them intimations and glimpses from there sometimes flash across the awakened soul. Aswapati enters their immortal air. From here he has descended on his mission to uplift earth. There he can drink again from his pure and mighty source. From there he can see great stairs of thought climbing up to heights where the last peaks of Time touch eternity’s skies and Nature speaks to the spirit’s absolute. First comes a triple realm of ordered thought, closely related to our human mind. He sees the master-builders, the arch-masons who have built our finite material world, the high architects of possibility whose vision has made figure and number a key to everything that exists and put each thing and movement in the manifestation into its appropriate place. Yet higher, the sovereign Kings of Thought are enthroned. They grasp the imperative commands of the creator Self and channel them to lower levels of existence. Here the mind’s wisdom ceases, but it is not the end of existence and creation. Aswapati still has further to go. The Truth he is seeking lies beyond.

[Text by Shraddhavan]

Book 2 Canto 11 – The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Greater Mind

[From: A LUMINOUS FLAME – Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri by Dr. Prema Nandakumar]

What a seemingly unending journey! But this attempt has to be made and Aswapati now goes to regions beyond the mental plane. There is an exhileration in him, for this is a release from Matter which pulls back Mind. There is a beautiful poem, ‘The Tree’, by Sri Aurobindo which describes this problem of man. He is pulled back by Matter but is inspired by the regions above the Mind.

A tree beside the sandy river-beach
Holds up its topmost boughs
Like fingers towards the skies they cannot reach,
Earth-bound, heaven-amorous.
This is the soul of man. Body and brain
Hungry for earth our heavenly flight detain.

Going into intense dhyana, he finds himself going upwards on “great stairs of thought”. There seems to be no end to the heights but he could glimpse “the splendours of ideal Mind”. In The Life Divine Sri Aurobindo gives four gradations in the beyond: Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuition and Overmind. They all lead to Supermind. However, these are but abstract ideas and one cannot compartmentalize the above-mental levels into strict categories. To help us comprehend the seemingly incomprehensible ideas, Sri Aurobindo has used the image of so many ‘worlds’, reminiscent of the several ‘avaranas’ in the Mahameru of Sri Vidya Upasana.

As he ascends this glorious staircase, the first he comes to is closest to earth. This is neither earth nor heaven but can be described as a temporary lounge which has powers and presences that still interact with the world. They help the world gather new facts and new formulations of Nature’s laws. Aswapati comes next to the world of “a subtle archangel race”; the inhabitants have a more integral vision of things. They are the great thinkers who can speculate and generalize boldly. But they reach a point when they think they have had the last word! Haven’t we seen many of them: Einstein, Rutherford, Planck and Freud? Given a chance, they would even dare to psycho-analyse the Cosmic Self!

The psycho-analysis of cosmic Self
Was traced, its secrets hunted down, and read
The unknown pathology of the Unique.
Assessed was the system of the probable,
The hazard of fleeing possibilities,
To account for the Actual’s unaccountable sum,
Necessity’s logarithmic tables drawn,
Cast into a scheme the triple act of the One.

Aswapati then reaches the third world of thought which has a consciousness closer to divine consciousness. There were but few inhabitants here but all of them had a “wide all-seeing gaze / Surveying the enormous work of Time”. One could feel the presence of an “all-containing Consciousness” that supported the Being, the Mula Prakruti. They are engaged in understanding the ultimate Truth, to gain the Para Shakti. Their aspiration is not in vain for she does respond to them. We are no strangers to the gain of such individual salvation achieved by individual Jnana Yogins:

She shaped her body to a mind’s embrace.
Into thought’s narrow limits she has come;
Her greatness she has suffered to be pressed
Into the little cabin of the Idea,
The closed room of a lonely thinker’s grasp:
She has lowered her heights to the stature of our souls
And dazzled our lids with her celestial gaze.
Thus each is satisfied with his high gain
And thinks himself beyond mortality blest,
A king of truth upon his separate throne.
To her possessor in the field of Time
A single splendour caught from her glory seems
The one true light, her beauty’s glowing whole.

But, as far as Aswapati is concerned, this is not going to be the end of the quest. The imprisonment of Para Shakti in the individual soul and enveloping oneself in bliss is not enough. This way we do not make creative use of her presence at all. Instead we categorise the Supreme in terms of the human mind and the Jnanin’s adventure turns out to be vain, after all. The human limits the divine and then where are we? The individual Jnani thinks he has caught the Mother, but actually he is left holding a negligible portion of her vastnesses. Of what use is his individual salvation? Indeed, of what use has been his long, persistent yoga? What was the point in striving to get beyond the limitations of the mind through tapasya? If man’s strivings should have a meaning, he must opt for the next rung of the evolutionary ladder. To do that we must learn to move out of our human cabin and look towards the vasts of divine-consciousness. Remember, the Divine Mother is illimitable!

Out of our thoughts we must leap up to sight,
Breathe her divine illimitable air,
Her simple vast supremacy confess,
Dare to surrender to her absolute.
Then the Unmanifest reflects his form
In the still mind as in a living glass;
The timeless Ray descends into our hearts
And we are rapt into eternity.
For Truth is wider, greater than her forms.
A thousand icons they have made of her
And find her in the idols they adore;
But she remains herself and infinite.

Book 2 Canto 12
The Heavens of the Ideal

Still the Ideal which Aswapati is searching for beckons him higher. Each step he takes reveals a new luminous world. Each stage of the soul’s ascent takes the form of a permanent heaven, a new rung in the mighty stairway of Existence. At each end of the steps he sees arrayed the heavens of ideal Mind. On one side glimmer the lovely kingdoms of the deathless Rose, embodying the ideal of Beauty and Bliss which lies behind our life. When its bud is born in our human hearts our souls open to felicity. On the other side of the eternal stairs the mighty kingdoms of the deathless Flame aspire to reach the Being’s absolutes, calling our souls into a vaster air of ascending Force and Might. Aswapati is able to move freely through all these kingdoms of the Ideal; he accepts their beauty and their greatness, but does not remain in any of them, for each one presents only an intense but partial light as the ultimate Truth, Perfection’s key, Passport to Paradise. Beyond are realms where these absolutes meet and embraced, but none are willing to sacrifice their separate identity in order to find their own soul in the world’s single soul. Aswapati passes on towards a diviner sphere where the radiant children of Eternity dwell in the immutable and inviolate Truth, for ever united and inseparable on the wide spirit height were all are one. That is the goal which he is aiming for.

[Text by Shraddhavan]

Book 2 Canto 12 – The Heavens of the Ideal

[From: A LUMINOUS FLAME – Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri by Dr. Prema Nandakumar]

It has been a marvelous journey so far except for the descent into Night. Marvellous, yes. But it has called for continuous absorption and meditation from Aswapati, so that he will not forget the aim of his spiritual adventure. Each new world, however great, yet promises only an individual success. But the “world’s forerunner” will not give up for his “lakshya” is world-redemption. Sri Aurobindo underlines here that this yoga of Aswapati is essentially dhyana. It is Thought which is moving upwards, while he sits in meditation:

Always the Ideal beckoned from afar.
Awakened by the touch of the Unseen,
Deserting the boundary of things achieved,
Aspired the strong discoverer, tireless Thought,
Revealing at each step a luminous world.
It left known summits for the unknown peaks:
Impassioned, it sought the lone unrealised Truth,
It longed for the Light that knows not death and birth.

We are told by scientists that man is yet to exploit to the full the reserves contained in the human brain. If he does, he will find unexplored fields as does Aswapati who now enters “the lovely kingdoms of the deathless Rose”. This kingdom which is midway between the heavens of superconciousness and the Inconscient below, is close to man. But he is caught in the everyday world of human affairs and so cannot experience it easily. When the sadhaka is able to get away from his material connections, even if it be just for a little while, he would be able to see a beautiful world within where the deathless Rose blossoms at the feet of God.

Sri Aurobindo says that this is not an impossible height to attainfor mortal man. With tapasya he can get the Rose to flower in him too. Once that happens, he finds that the entire world is charged with the glory of the Divine. It is all Ananda, everywhere and “the soul opens to felicity”. How explain this Ananda?

A bliss is felt that never can wholly cease,
A sudden mystery of secret Grace
Flowers goldening our earth of red desire.
All the high gods who hid their visages
From the soiled passionate ritual of our hopes,
Reveal their names and their undying powers.
A fiery stillness wakes the slumbering cells,
A passion of the flesh becoming spirit,
And marvellously is fulfilled at last
The miracle for which our life was made.

Sri Aurobindo has written a poem, ‘Rose of God’ in which he uses the image of a five-petalled rose to describe the sadhaka’s first experience of Ananda which is a fusion of bliss, light, power, life and love:

Rose of God, vermilion stain on the sapphires of heaven,
Rose of bliss, fire-sweet, seven-tinged with the ecstasies seven!
Leap up in our heart of humanhood, O miracle, O flame,
Passion-flower of the Nameless, bud of the mystical Name.

The aspirant Aswapati sees also a Flame there. While the Roses ymbolizes Ananda, the Flame represents Jnana. Realisation can come upon us as Brahma-ananda and as Brahma-jnana.

While the region of the deathless Rose leads us towards the Supreme in terms of ecstasy and colour, the region of the deathless Flame guides the aspirant through the stern processes of thought:

On their summits they bear up the sleepless Flame;
Dreaming of a mysterious Beyond,
Transcendent of the paths of Fate and Time,
They point above themselves with index peaks
Through a pale-sapphire ether of god-mind
Towards some gold Infinite’s apocalypse.

Deathless Rose or Deathless Flame? Bhakti yoga or Jnana yoga? Aswapati does not take much time to come to a decision. Not for him such divided, partial light. All the same, he feels at home in both these heavens of the Ideal and wanders in these kingdoms for a while, experiencing the bliss, light, power, life and love offered by them. The vision of the Supreme gained through sheer Jnana is also welcomed by him. Bhakti, the “Angel of the Way” makes the adventure of consciousness meaningful:

A glorious shining Angel of the Way
Presented to the seeking of the soul
The sweetness and the might of an idea,
Each deemed Truth’s intimate fount and summit force,
The heart of the meaning of the universe,
Perfection’s key, passport to Paradise.

But Aswapati’s s aim is something beyond the Rose and the Flameso he moves away from “their splendour’s rule” seeking the heaven where the Rose and the Flame, Bhakti and Jnana, The Pravritti and Nivrutti, the Many and the One form an integral organization:

Above the parting of the roads of Time,
Above the Silence and its thousandfold Word,
In the immutable and inviolate Truth
For ever united and inseparable,
The radiant children of Eternity dwell
On the wide spirit height where all are one.

Book 2 Canto 13
In the Self of Mind

At last Aswapati is faced with an empty sky where the climbing stair of the worlds seems to pause. There Silence listens to the Voice of the universe, but offers no response to the soul’s endless question, to its hopes. He stands alone with enormous Self of Mind which holds all life in a corner of its vastness. It does not pay any attention to or take any part in the movements in the world which has sprung from it. Aswapati has come in contact with the unmoving Cosmic Self on the level of Mind. His own mind reflects this vast quietness which is the secret base of thought. Silence is the mystic birthplace of the soul. He feels that he can remain forever in this Silence, for now he has won the ultimate Self, the ultimate Silence. His soul is at peace, it knows and is one with the cosmic whole.

But suddenly a luminous finger reveals to his mind that nothing can be known: he must reach the source from which all knowledge comes. All that mind sees is real, but its sight is untrue, unreliable and misleading. The whole universe becomes now appears unreal to him, a nothingness. His spirit’s quest seems to be barred from the infinite Self and Spirit, caught in a world where all beings must die to live and live only to die, a world revolving in issueless cycles: never progressing, never learning, never becoming more than when it first began. It seems as if existence is nothing but a prison, from which extinction is the only escape. Can this be the end of his quest?

[Text by Shraddhavan]

Book 2 Canto 13 – In the Self of Mind

[From: A LUMINOUS FLAME – Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri by Dr. Prema Nandakumar]

Unwearied, holding on to his intense desire for finding a solution to the world’s problems, Aswapati leaves behind the heights of the regions of Rose and Flame and goes further on, till he finds himself in what seems like the final summit. The lone wayfarer is curtained by an intense silence:

He stood on a wide arc of summit Space
Alone with an enormous Self of Mind
Which held all life in a corner of its vasts.
Omnipotent, immobile and aloof,
In the world which sprang from it, it took no part …

It seems to him for a moment that he has reached his aim and that he had arrived at the longed-for destination. It is all very peaceful and calm now, and he feels that there is no more any need for him to strive further. “Know thyself” is the classic injunction. Aswapati appears to have done just that. Perhaps, this is what humanity is striving for in its obscure way? A condition of being when you have no more needs nor questionings nor aim? Samatva is yoga but this Samatva is absolutely so!

It gave no heed to the paeans of victory,
It was indifferent to its own defeats,
It heard the cry of grief and made no sign;
Impartial fell its gaze on evil and good,
It saw destruction come and did not move.
An equal Cause of things, a lonely Seer
And Master of its multitude of forms,
It acted not but bore all thoughts and deeds,
The witness Lord of Nature’s myriad acts
Consenting to the movements of her Force.
His mind reflected this vast quietism.

Sri Aurobindo now explains that this entry into the Vast silence, the “Self of Mind” is necessary for formulating a plan for the future of man. It is in deep silence that strength, understanding and power can be cultivated well. Savitri is repeatedly described by Sri Aurobindo as carrying a deep silence within her all the time.

The genius of titanic silences
Steeping her soul in its wide loneliness
Had shown to her her self’s bare reality
And mated her with her environment. (Book I, canto 2)

It is the same with Aswapati as he enters the “Self of Mind”, fort his vast silence is “the Thinker’s base.” We cannot think clearly when caught in the cacophony of worldly affairs. We must needs make a space for ourselves in our daily living so that our mind can gain greater clarity in judging the world and our own action. If we are able to still the mind and free it of conflicting thoughts criss-crossing its horizon, it would become easy for speaking with clarity and planning with care all our actions. Hence Aswapati had not reached the end of his quest. Actually he was on the first rung of the ladder of a greater quest. Once this realization comes to him, he is freed from the brief swoon in Nirvanic silence. Once again he is in earth-consciousness which brings with it uncertainties, doubts and worries. With all this struggle and tapasya, he has not been able to change the fate of man on earth. No answer has been found to the limitations of man’s life on earth.

What price his yoga or for that matter, what is the use of all these strivings by man? What purpose all this thinking when the core problem remains unsolved?

All the ideas in its vast repertory
Were like the mutterings of a transient cloud
That spent itself in sound and left no trace.
A frail house hanging in uncertain air …

Aswapati realizes that the vasts of peace that assured the individual who has reached the “self of Mind” is no answer for the problem of humanity as a whole.

Deep peace was there, but not the nameless Force:
Our sweet and mighty Mother was not there
Who gathers to her bosom her children’s lives,
Her clasp that takes the world into her arms
In the fathomless rapture of the Infinite,
The Bliss that is creation’s splendid grain
Or the white passion of God-ecstasy
That laughs in the blaze of the boundless heart of Love.

For tackling the problem of man’s destiny, Aswapati would need “a greater Spirit than the Self of Mind” as this problem was nothing less than the imperturbable “huge creator Death”. Where could he find this Spirit, this Mother who alone can save her children? As yet, there seem to be only two realities. The vasts of Silence of the Self above and the medley of vices in the grip of Death below. Is this the whole truth about creation? What is this but a meaningless Joke on the part of the Creator, if this is all he has intended for man? Aswapati’s mind is a whirl within numerable questions and he feels stifled between the intense Silence of the Mind and the confounding Death-trap of Life. “To be was a prison, extinction the escape.”

Book 2 Canto 14
The World-Soul

A secret answer to Aswapati’s seeking appears: in a distant shimmering background of Mind-Space leading is seen a glowing mouth, an opening which seems to offer an escape into some hidden mystery, leading through many layers of formless voiceless self towards the last depth of the world’s heart. It seems to beckon him, promising a message from the world’s deep soul. He feels drawn to his lost spiritual home, feels the closeness of a waiting love and enters into a dim passage, travelling led by a mysterious sound, a hidden call to unforeseen delight he enters into the World of Soul. The silent Soul of all the world was there. This is the source of all finite life. There all was soul or made of sheer soul-stuff. There he is shown beings who once wore forms on earth, now sleeping in shining chambers, gathering back their bygone selves and planning the map of their future destiny, as they await the adventure of new birth. He passes on along a road of pure interior light to the source of all things, human and divine. There is revealed to him the sole omnipotent Goddess, ever-veiled: the supreme Mother. As soon as he glimpses her outline, his spirit is made a vessel of her force. He stretches out to her his folded hands of prayer. She responds by drawing aside her eternal veil for a moment: he sees the large and luminous depths of her mysterious eyes and the mystic outline of a face. Overwhelmed with bliss, his soul gives a cry of adoration and desire and surrender as he falls prone and unconscious at her feet.

[Text by Shraddhavan]

Book 2 Canto 14 – The World-Soul

[From: A LUMINOUS FLAME – Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri by Dr. Prema Nandakumar]

It is, of course, extremely difficult to follow Aswapati’s yoga that traverses planes of consciousness which still remain unknown to the common man. And yet, Indian yogis have taken up such traveling repeatedly. Patanjali and his parampara, for instance. The Siddhas of Tamil Nadu. They have done their best to record their findings. However, the very nature of the mystic journey within causes problems with the diction of a language. Unless one actually takes up these yogic pathways with high seriousness, he is apt to remain in the twilight shadow of knowledge. The added difficulty for Sri Aurobindo’s recordation is the language he chose. English language has had no history of a spiritual diction. Sri Aurobindo has to create his own terminology. It is astonishing to note how he has succeeded tremendously in this attempt.

Aswapati appears to have come to a point where all the ways seemed barred for him: “To be was a prison, extinction the escape.” Undaunted he goes into deeper meditation as he is not assailed by fear any more. There is now a way out and it is like a home-coming. He is not daunted by the strange new space for who would be afraid of one’s mother?

In a far shimmering background of Mind-Space
A glowing mouth was seen, a luminous shaft;
A recluse gate it seemed, musing on joy,
A veiled retreat and escape to mystery.
Away from the unsatisfied surface world
It fled into the bosom of the unknown,
A well, a tunnel of the depths of God.

The hyphen is a device Sri Aurobindo uses to focus our mind on spiritual concepts: “far-shimmering”, “Mind-Space”, “recluse-gate”. Visual and yet a psychic state of being, here is an opening at last for Aswapati a she moves inward and hears sounds as from a distance. The sounds are pleasant like bird song, the buzz of bees, the ringing of temple bells or the waves of an ocean. The heart aches and pains of earthly life do not have a place here and it is all a divine calm. One can almost touch divinity here! This is the region of the World-Soul. It is all Paramatma, Sarvamkhalu idam Brahma, All-Consciousness, the Purusha! The silent Soul of all the world was there:

A Being lived, a Presence and a Power,
A single Person who was himself and all
And cherished Nature’s sweet and dangerous throbs
Transfigured into beats divine and pure.
One who could love without return for love …

Here one felt totally healed from the wounds received in earthly life. What was dark till now became a luminous presence and all that was false was transformed into truth. The egoistic shell that separates man from man has no place here. One walks on soul-ground here, one gets into touch with soul-stuff, one rises in soul-space, one is immersed in soul-joy. This is akin to the experience of Brahmananda or Atmanubhava. The souls that remain scattered on earth separated by their bodies and results of karma find themselves in a happy togetherness within the World-soul. The emancipated souls as well as those who have to take up “the adventure of new life” because of residual karma are all here in joyous union. Aswapati is able to meet them all and converse with them as he is in his soul-state. This is indeed “creation’s centre” and Sri Aurobindo makes us understand that “death” is just a step in the constant movement of the souls reaching out to perfection.

There they remould their purpose and their drift
Recast their nature and re-form their shape.
Ever they change and changing ever grow,
And passing through a fruitful stage of death
And after long reconstituting sleep
Resume their place in the process of the Gods
Until their work in cosmic Time is done.

Having understood the movement of life to manifest as the phenomenal world, Aswapati now moves on in search of the Divinity that makes all this possible, including the “creation’s centre”. For the presence of the World-Soul alone cannot lead to creation. This all-soul or all-consciousness or “Conscious Soul” as Sri Aurobindo calls it, has to act through the Nature Soul and Aswapati now goes in search of this twin-power to state his prayer.

Along a road of pure interior light,
Alone between tremendous Presences,
Under the watching eyes of nameless Gods,
His soul passed on, a single conscious power,
Towards the end which ever begins again,
Approaching through a stillness dumb and calm
To the source of all things human and divine.

The cherished concept of Purusha-Prakriti from the ancient Yogic and Siddha experiences is stated with an utter adequacy in the English language, and how the twin-power itself is from the Supreme One:

There he beheld in their mighty union’s poise
The figure of the deathless Two-in-One,
A single being in two bodies clasped,
A diarchy of two united souls,
Seated absorbed in deep creative joy;
Their trance of bliss sustained the mobile world.
Behind them in a morning dusk One stood
Who brought them forth from the Unknowable …

There is just a hint of the Divine Mother’s eyes that flashes into his consciousness and he has no words to express this total joy thatover whelms him. He surrenders to the One completely and “fell down at her feet unconscious, prone.”

Book 2 Canto 15
The Kingdoms of the Greater Knowledge

After a timeless moment of the soul, Aswapati returns from the depths to awareness of the surface fields of existence and becomes aware of the passing of time. But everything he has ever perceived and lived seems very distant. He is aware only of himself, waiting to hear the Voice of the Mother. He has risen out of the sphere of Mind. He has left the realm of Nature. He is living in the colourless purity of his own self, a plane of undetermined spirit. Out of the neutral silence of his soul he moves into its fields of Power and of Calm, and sees the Powers that stand above the worlds. He passes through the realms of the supreme creative Idea, seeking the summit of created things and the almighty source of cosmic change. On the last step to the supernal birth, he walks along a narrow edge of extinction and thrills with the presence of the Ineffable. All but the ultimate Mystery becomes his field. He enters the high realm where no untruth can come. There, Beings of a wider consciousness are his friends, the Gods converse with him. Thoughts rise in him no earthly mind can hold; he is able to scan the secrets of the Overmind and bear the rapture of the Oversoul. Becoming a borderer of the supramental empire of the Sun, he links creation to the Eternal’s sphere. His actions frame the movements of the Gods, his will takes up the reins of cosmic Force. He has reached the summit of the World-Stair.

[Text by Shraddhavan]

Book 2 Canto 15 – The Kingdoms of the Greater Knowledge

[From: A LUMINOUS FLAME – Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri by Dr. Prema Nandakumar]

At last, to the living source of all creation, the One, the Parashakti, the Janani! Coming back from his brief swoon, Aswapati realizes that he has indeed come to the cutting edge of human endeavour, that henceforth he would be entirely in soul-space. Matter, life and mind had been left far, far behind:

Out of the sphere of Mind he had arisen,
He had left the reign of Nature’s hues and shades;
He dwelt in his self’s colourless purity.
It was a plane of undetermined spirit
That could be a zero or round sum of things,
A state in which all ceased and all began.

An unparalleled experience, it is the way of the yogi who has to bind himself with the Supreme. Before that is done, all other bonds must fall away. We have read in the Ramayana that Indrajit had bound Hanuman by the Brahmastra. When Hanuman was taken to Ravana’s court, the incensed king had ordered that his tail be disfigured. The Lankan people had immediately bound the tail of Hanuman with cloth and set it ablaze. But even as the new bonds were being made, the Brahmastra unwound itself. Such is the union with the Supreme, it will not bear to have other bonds like Matter, life and mind to come in its way. As he streams towards the heights, Aswapati feels very light, as if the burdens of the ages have fallen away, leaving him light and free: He has left behind all that he has known and is now poised to enter the spaces of the unknowable.

The splendours of the manifested world as we know it are innumerable. As Subramania Bharati sang, the Lord has created millions of joys by linking the chit with achit. However, the splendours of what is yet to be manifested are beyond our thinking. As yet, the manifested part is only a portion: paadosya viswaa bhutaani tripaadasya amruthaamdivi. The magnificence of the unmanifested part overwhelms Aswapati as he turns towards it.

Thence gazing with an immeasurable outlook
One with self’s inlook into its own pure vasts,
He saw the splendour of the spirit’s realms,
The greatness and wonder of its boundless works,
The power and passion leaping from its calm,
The rapture of its movement and its rest,
And its fire-sweet miracle of transcendent life,
The million-pointing undivided grasp
Of its vision of one same stupendous All,
Its inexhaustible acts in a timeless Time,
A space that is its own infinity.

This is the space of ‘greater knowledge’ where all contraries cease to be. Love is answered by love, for there is no place for the shadow of hate here. If there is a manifestation of joy, it is furthered by an answering joy; there is no place for sorrow. The One and the Many are seen together here, for there is no dichotomy in the concept itself. Since there is no chance for any pervert mind to create engines of destruction, here every act of creation becomes a source of light and delight. For Aswapati too, the difficulties of ascent cease to trouble him since movement is no struggle in this soul-space, in these “regions of transcendent Truth.”. He is not confused any more by “Time’s triple step” (through the lower worlds of Matter, Life and Mind, the link-world of Supermind and the divine world of Sat-Chit-Ananda), and crosses “the ocean of original sound.”

Yogic experiences at that high level cannot be transcribed into human language. One has to use symbols, metaphors, similes. Using the English language for describing the yogic experiences of Aswapati, Sri Aurobindo draws upon received tradition to help us understand the vastness and depth of the experiences:

Above him he saw the flaming Hierarchies,
The wings that fold around created Space,
The sun-eyed Guardians and the golden Sphinx
And the tiered planes and the immutable Lords.
A wisdom waiting on Omniscience
Sat voiceless in a vast passivity;
It judged not, measured not, nor strove to know,
But listened for the veiled all-seeing Thought
And the burden of a calm transcendent Voice.

The Egyptian Sphinx gives an idea, however vague and distant, of the kind of reaction Aswapati has in this divine space which is immense, and inexplicable. The Sphinx is considered to be the symbol of the Egyptian sun god and the presence of the word is enough to describe the inexplicable nature of Aswapati’s experience. For, he is now in the region of primal Energy, he is himself a portion of that Energy.

In the kingdom of the Spirit’s power and light,
As if one who arrived out of infinity’s womb
He came new-born, infant and limitless
And grew in the wisdom of the timeless Child;
He was a vast that soon became a Sun.

What remains for him now to do is to read the book of the Overmind and seek help from it to transform the earth below. He proceeds to do just that:

A borderer of the empire of the Sun,
Attuned to the supernal harmonies,
He linked creation to the Eternal’s sphere.
His finite parts approached their absolutes,
His actions framed the movements of the Gods,
His will took up the reins of cosmic Force.

Book 3 Canto 1
The Pursuit of the Unknowable

Aswapati has explored all the planes of existence and reached the summit of the World-Stair, but he has not yet found what he was looking for. He has glimpsed the Supreme Mother and surrendered himself to her, but now the world seems empty to him because he does not feel her Presence in it. His efforts for Knowledge now seem worthless, for all knowledge seems to end in the Unknowable. His efforts to rule well seem worthless, a trivial achievement which time will prove meaningless. A silence settles on his striving heart and he turns towards the call of the Ineffable, the Inexpressible. He is aware of a Being calling to him. Nothing can satisfy him but the delight of that Presence. Nevertheless he is carried forward, ascending without pause, aware of a signless vague Immensity. Then comes a pause. He is faced with a tremendous choice. He must either abandon everything he has been and has grown towards, or accept to be transformed into a self of That which has no name. The separate self must melt, or be reborn into a Truth which the mind cannot grasp. Aswapati perceives the Godhead of the whole. Without reaching any solution, the universal cycles are swallowed up into its invisible sea, to rise from it again and again. This stark Reality seems to be the last response to the passionate search of Aswapati’s soul: it has no kinship with the universe, no partner, no equal. It is simply a pure existence, one and unique, unutterably sole, immutably the same, Infinite, eternal, unthinkable, alone.

[Text by Shraddhavan]

Book 3 Canto 1 – The Pursuit of the Unknowable

[From: A LUMINOUS FLAME – Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri by Dr. Prema Nandakumar]

Aswapati’s journey into the inner countries of the mind through meditation has been long. Having acquired all the knowledge that is possible with the help of his mind, he now stands prepared to lead not only humanity’s ascent but also to press for the descent of the Supreme’s power for transforming earthly life. Yoga has perfected him and now he is able to move with facility into the past and also gain glimpses of the future to be. All the vidyas and occult siddhis have been drawn into him. So is there anything else that remains to be gained?

At the personal level, the perfect man has been sculpted. But is he freed from the clutch of mortality? And how about the rest of the struggling humanity? But then one man’s perfection can yet save the world! For this to happen, the perfect man has to strive and struggle and suffer with single-minded concentration, and this forms the third part of Aswapati’s yoga. He would now try to knock on the doors of the Infinite so that this supreme power can come down and save mankind from the grip of mortality and ignorance. But he has no idea of this Infinite except that it is the Unknowable! Ah, it is unknowable because it is unknown. So the adventure begins and the manner in which the unknown tantalizes the pilgrim is fascinating in its own way:

Near, it retreated; far, it called him still.
Nothing could satisfy but its delight:
Its absence left the greatest actions dull,
Its presence made the smallest seem divine.
When it was there, the heart’s abyss was filled;
But when the uplifting Deity withdrew,
Existence lost its aim in the Inane.

This is the experience we have repeatedly seen in the lives of mystics like Goda Devi. There are times when the Presence makes life all sunshine and nectar. But then comes the dark night of the soul when despair grips the heart about the present and the future. And yet, the heart will not give up the search! Even if this means sure annihilation, the aspiring heart will turn towards that bright memory of the past and find that the dark is light enough. Aswapati is in the same condition of mind. He boldly allows himself to step beyond the phenomenal world which comforts us by its colours and shapes. Would this plunge him into the Nirvana of non-existence? But he will not seek the comfort of known experiences and simply walks into the Unknown. A divine gamble!

Transcending every perishable support
And joining at last its mighty origin,
The separate self must melt or be reborn
Into a Truth beyond the mind’s appeal.
All glory of outline, sweetness of harmony,
Rejected like a grace of trivial notes,
Expunged from Being’s silence nude, austere,
Died into a fine and blissful Nothingness.

What is this “beyond” which Aswapati has entered? Human thought cannot conceive it nor verbalize its shape. There is no form here. Even the ‘self’ which had been the driving force till now has lost itself in the immense Unknowable. There is a vastness, there is a feeling of infinity, there is a timelessness. It is certainly “avangmanasagochara”!

If this description of the Unknowable is true, how then is Sri Aurobindo able to describe it in the voice of Aswapati? This is where mysticism comes in, and it is the prerogative of the poet to explain what is inexplicable through the instrument of symbolism, though the explanation can never be wholly satisfactory. As Sri Aurobindo wrote to a disciple with a touch of humour:

“The mystical poet can only describe what he has felt, seen in himself or others or in the world just as he has felt or seen it or experienced through exact vision, close contact or identity and leave it to the general reader to understand or not understand or misunderstand to his capacity.”

That Sri Aurobindo himself experienced the terror of this Unknown backed by the faith of a yogi can be inferred from one of his sonnets:

I made an assignation with the Night;
In the abyss was fixed our rendezvous :
In my breast carrying God’s deathless light
I came her dark and dangerous heart to woo.
I left the glory of the illumined Mind
And the calm rapture of the divinised soul
And travelled through a vastness dim and blind
To the grey shore where her ignorant waters roll.
I walk by the chill wave through the dull slime
And still that weary journeying knows no end;
Lost is the lustrous godhead beyond Time,
There comes no voice of the celestial Friend,
And yet I know my footprints’ track shall be
A pathway towards Immortality.

This is the exact situation in which Aswapati is seen confronting the Unknown which has been pronounced Unknowable as well. All the same, the yogi’s training and faith bear fruit at last. It is true that this Unknown has no form, no motion, no speech. But Aswapati is able to feel a Presence, as if the Supreme was answering his passionate cry.

A stark companionless Reality
Answered at last to his soul’s passionate search:
Passionless, wordless, absorbed in its fathomless hush,
Keeping the mystery none would ever pierce,
It brooded inscrutable and intangible
Facing him with its dumb tremendous calm.

The Unknown thus ceases to be the Unknowable for the Mahayogi.

Book 3 Canto 2
The Adoration of the Divine Mother

As the Soul moves close its self-Discovery there comes an Absolute Stillness; Sense is swallowed up; all that the Mind has known seems unreal. Only an Inconceivable is left. There is liberation from all appearances. But that is not the end. This escape is not the crown for the labours of the Soul; the Soul has a goal to fulfil, a mystery to solve. The Silence and the Release is only a gateway on the Journey. Behind the apparent Zero is the face of the Immortal, who is to be revealed in the forms of this material World. As Aswapati has this experience of extinction, the Presence he has yearned for draws close. He feels a being of Wisdom, Power and Delight embracing Nature, World and Soul. from this Being a beautiful lustre flows into Aswapati’s heart, touching through him all sentient beings. All turns felicitous and beautiful. It is the Mother of All, the mediatrix between Earth and the Supreme. All opposites are preparing her supreme harmony. She, the Divine Mother, stands at the head of Time, She is the bright heart of the Unknowable. All Nature calls to Her alone to heal with her touch all the pain and longing of life, and to kindle true aspiration in human hearts. Through her all our separate selves shall become one. She is the way and the goal. Her rapture fills the limbs of Aswapati. All his seekings are fulfilled in Her. But his freedom alone cannot satisfy him. He seeks her light and bliss for all Earth and Men.

[Text by Shraddhavan]

Book 3 Canto 2 – The Adoration of the Divine Mother

[From: A LUMINOUS FLAME – Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri by Dr. Prema Nandakumar]

One may not be able to have favourites among cantos in Savitri; all of them are very significant. However, the present canto is special to the sadhaks as it contains a very fine description of the Divine Mother as the mediatrix between earth and heaven. Having decided not to rest even after gaining personal illumination, Aswapati had proceeded to enter the Unknown region in search of the Unknowable. Just when it seemed as if all was lost in nothingness, Aswapati had felt a Presence. He need feel abandoned no more! He can feel safe, remain undisturbed, eternal, savouring the joy of a deep peace.

But this too is not enough for Aswapati as he is also a king, are presentative of mankind. Unless all of humanity gains this deep peace, what is the use of an individual’s escape? Again, even if all humanity gains such an eternal peace, what would be the purpose of life? Mankind must be on the road of an everlasting progression!

This too is Truth at the mystic fount of Life.
A black veil has been lifted; we have seen
The mighty shadow of the omniscient Lord;
But who has lifted up the veil of light
And who has seen the body of the King?
The mystery of God’s birth and acts remains
Leaving unbroken the last chapter’s seal,
Unsolved the riddle of the unfinished Play …

Aswapati’s unswerving faith to his chosen aim of world-transformation bears fruit at this moment when he has gained personal salvation. His tapasya has been directed towards the Divine Mother and she now appears very close to him.

Across the silence of the ultimate Calm,
Out of a marvellous Transcendence’ core,
A body of wonder and translucency
As if a sweet mystic summary of her self
Escaping into the original Bliss
Had come enlarged out of eternity,
Someone came infinite and absolute.
A being of wisdom, power and delight,
Even as a mother draws her child to her arms,
Took to her breast Nature and world and soul.

She whom we hail as Mahatripurasundari in Sri Vidya Upasana is brought to us in Aurobindonian diction. This is the Devi who is Jnana, Shakti, Ananda. How can words or symbols describe an experience which is starkly individual to each sadhaka? Here she is Matri-rupa who takes up Aswapati in the crook of her arm as gently as a mother. There is no shock of a sudden experience but only the calming effect of a guardian touch. The Presence is like “a surprising beam” from the Home-of-All flashing into his heart as a golden glow, “touching through him all long ingsentient things.” It is obvious this is a gesture from the Divine Mother that she is seized of the matter and recognizes the aspiration of humanity to transcend the present life of disease and death.

How does one describe such a presence that overwhelms us with new sights? How verbalize the “rapturous and unstumbling Force?” The vision of Mahasaraswati provokes Kalidasa to indite the dandaka, “Manikya veenaam”; the All-Beautiful Parvati inspires Adi Sankara to write “Saundarya Lahari”. In Savitri, this much is clear for Aswapati in his vision: “Alone her hands can change Time’s dragon base.” With the Divine Mother as one’s ally, Fate ceases to be incorrigible. There is a power higher than an ordained fate, there is enough space left for one’s free will to apply the necessary corrective. For this to happen, one must have total faith in the Supreme. Sri Aurobindo’s divine poesy produces with flawless clarity this image to whom we must surrender and offer:

She is the golden bridge, the wonderful fire.
The luminous heart of the Unknown is she,
A power of silence in the depths of God;
She is the Force, the inevitable Word,
The magnet of our difficult ascent,
The Sun from which we kindle all our suns,
The Light that leans from the unrealised Vasts,
The joy that beckons from the impossible,
The Might of all that never yet came down.
All Nature dumbly calls to her alone
To heal with her feet the aching throb of life
And break the seals on the dim soul of man
And kindle her fire in the closed heart of things.

To the new generation which has grown somewhat alien to the traditional chantings of the prayers in the Devi Mahatmyam, this passage is revelatory. The description and the prayer are the same, only the language is different. Such is the glory of India’s sanatana dharma. All the worship, recitations, disciplines and regulations in Tantra are undertaken by the sadhaks for generations so that the revelation may come to the chosen one. Aswapati had toiled for years, and he too came in a parampara of seekers. And when the moment comes, all is changed for all time:

This was a seed cast into endless Time.
A Word is spoken or a Light is shown,
A moment sees, the ages toil to express.
So flashing out of the Timeless leaped the worlds;
An eternal instant is the cause of the years.
All he had done was to prepare a field …

Aswapati is overwhelmed but feels refreshed to go forward and achieve his aim. This face-to-face meeting with the divine Mother for a moment is an end that marks the real beginning in his spiritual adventure. To her he will surrender and no mother would reject a selfless child. She will surely apply her healing touch to “the darkness of the suffering world”.

Book 3 Canto 3
The House of the Spirit and the New Creation

Suddenly a mystic Form embraces Aswapati’s earthly body, a boundless heart is near his heart. The One whom he has adored and worshipped enters into him. She tells him: ‘O strong son of Strength, you have reached the very peaks of Creation; all you have gained is yours to keep, but do not ask for more. Do not pray for my descent in a world that is still inconscient; man is too weak to bear weight of the Infinite. I am not asking you to merge into the Immobile. I know that you cannot rest satisfied also long as Death is still unconquered on the earth. So continue to live and work for my all-knowing purpose, however long it takes. The change you are asking for demands that human beings must change. Do not be impatient. My light will be with you. Ask only one boon: that your spirit may grow ever greater. Ask only one joy: to uplift humanity. All things shall change in God’s transfiguring hour”. But Aswapati’s heart replies to her, “How can I live content with human life, now that I have see your glory? You have set a hard task to your sons. How long must we go on toiling? If we are doing your work, why do we not see a gleam of your light? Where are the signs of your approaching Victory? I know that your creation cannot fail; I have seen a vision of a great destruction preparing the coming of a new race of your children. I know that their tread will one day change the suffering earth. Will you not incarnate your Force and send a living form of yourself to earth, and let one great act unlock the doors of Fate?” The Mother accepts Aswapati’s prayer, and he returns to earth.

[Text by Shraddhavan]

Book 3 Canto 3 – The House of the Spirit and the New Creation

[From: A LUMINOUS FLAME – Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri by Dr. Prema Nandakumar]

Overwhelmed by waves of bliss because of the prayer that had risen in his heart, Aswapati proceeds to meditate upon the future path he is to take. The golden term which has helped mankind move forward despite seemingly insuperable difficulties, frustrations and death is “hope”. If we want to move further in evolution and achieve life divine on earth, we must not give way to despair just because things are looking bleak now. Always there is the possibility of a great future. To make that future a reality, man needs the help of a superior strength. Now Aswapati is himself an image of hope as he prays to the Mother for such help:

In the unapproachable stillness of his soul,
Intense, one-pointed, monumental, lone,
Patient he sat like an incarnate hope
Motionless on a pedestal of prayer.
A strength he sought that was not yet on earth,
Help from a Power too great for mortal will,
The light of a Truth now only seen afar,
A sanction from his high omnipotent Source.

Of course, the answer does not come easily. It is a truism that whatever is gained easily is not honoured or cherished as it should be. While at the physical level it needs endless patience, skill and implements to structure greatly, at the spiritual level there is a need for even vaster and longer tapasya. And Aswapati has to tread very carefully. In his anxiety to storm the palace-gates of the higher planes of consciousness, he must not lose his link with the world. His tapasya has been undertaken for humanity, not for himself alone. That is why it had been important for him to gain a universal outlook so that all matter and all life remain ever present in his consciousness. He now succeeds in retaining his links with the world while himself becoming a vehicle for its transformation. He does this by plucking out any remaining roots of egotism in him, for the ego is not easily uprooted. In Tamil Siddha literature we hear of ‘ahandai-kizhangu’, the ego-root. Trying to dig out roots patiently, a time comes when we chance upon the tap-root and now one has to use all the strength possible to yank it out of the soil. Sri Aurobindo presents such a final movement in ego-destruction now:

For the Inconscient too is infinite;
The more its abysses we insist to sound,
The more it stretches, stretches endlessly.
Then lest a human cry should spoil the Truth
He tore desire up from its bleeding roots
And offered to the gods the vacant place.
Thus could he bear the touch immaculate.

He is now pure soul, all luminous and is able to transcend easily to see into the future of man as it would be once the ascent to an overmental consciousness gets achieved. When the egoistic shell of separativity that compartmentalizes mankind has been shattered, it would be a divine democracy where all are equal, happy and tuned to the ways of the Divine. Call it Sri Aurobindo’s Utopia or what you will, Aswapati’s vision of the future in stills hope in us in a big way, though the terrorists and a million other problems besiege humanity today. In that future that he envisions, evil and good will not hold hands, love will not be accompanied by suspicion, man will not take to crooked ways nor be tempted to plays takes in life’s journey. This is more than mere transformation: it is anew creation!

There was no sob of suffering anywhere;
Experience ran from point to point of joy:
Bliss was the pure undying truth of things.
All Nature was a conscious front of God:
A wisdom worked in all, self-moved, self-sure,
A plenitude of illimitable Light,
An authenticity of intuitive Truth,
A glory and passion of creative Force.

There is no specification about physical change, but Sri Aurobindo describes the change in Mind that is expected to take place. Here Mind not only dreams vastly but also makes the dreams come true. No shadow follows its great thoughts, nor is there any worry about fulfilment. No word is uttered in vain and hence all words are found to be scriptural truth.

The Word that ushers divine experience
And the Ideas that crowd the Infinite.
There was no gulf between the thought and fact,
Ever they replied like bird to calling bird;
The will obeyed the thought, the act the will.
There was a harmony woven twixt soul and soul.
A marriage with eternity divinised Time.

Such was life that one was never tired of it. If it were the same recurrence, it was enjoyed as much as if it was a frenzied change in experience. Everything was enjoyed: raso vai sah! Yet, even here one must needs take note of the possibilities of the two Negations: “the Materialist Denial” and “the refusal of the Ascetic”. These negations have always hindered man’s progress. That is why we have to eschew them both, seek the cooperation of matter and spirit to bring into being the new creation. The force of evolutionary change will see to it that these two negations will themselves be negated for ever.

A new creation from the old shall rise,
A Knowledge inarticulate find speech,
Beauty suppressed burst into paradise bloom,
Pleasure and pain dive into absolute bliss.
A tongueless oracle shall speak at last,
The Superconscient conscious grow on earth,
The Eternal’s wonders join the dance of Time.

As the representative of the race of mankind, as one who has reached the summit of a spiritual ascendancy, Aswapati now waits fort he Promise, the Word of the Supreme.

Book 3 Canto 4
The Vision and the Boon

Aswapati finds himself in an uncertain and unsure world which has been born from the meeting of Life with Matter. The original harmony of Matter is disturbed by Life’s seeking to escape from her imprisonment. That pressure compels an awakening of the unconscious force in matter. Aswapati witnesses the emergence of three levels of living beings: first tiny short-lived entities guided by sensation who seem hardly alive, hardly able to survive. Next, the much more energetic and dynamic animal creation ranging from huge forms to very small ones, from reptiles and insects to mammals and beings who have a human form but not yet a human consciousness, banding together for safety against a hostile environment and warring with their neighbours. Then he perceives the first appearance of a bodily mind which is able to form self-conscious individuals. Led by this earth-bound mind, Life’s play becomes limited and monotonous. Emerging from the Kingdoms of the Little Life, Aswapati sees the Stair of Existence like a huge bridge across the dark gulfs of unconsciousness, emerging from a formless emptiness and jutting out into an emptiness of Soul. He sees Life as a little light born in a great darkness, not knowing where it has come from and where it must go.

[Text by Shraddhavan]

Book 3 Canto 4 – The Vision and the Boon

[From: A LUMINOUS FLAME – Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri by Dr. Prema Nandakumar]

So have we arrived at last at the very summits where the devotee comes face to face with the deity in a personal encounter. The scene that now unfolds before us is utterly realistic for it has been experienced by devotees and representatives of humanity during all our yesterdays. One example should suffice. Ramanujacharya’s Saranagati Gadya is fondly recited by devotees as they are able to envision and enjoy the face-to-face encounter between the Divine Mother and Ramanuja on this bank and shoal of time. The love that draws the devotee to the Supreme (Para Bhakti), the Vision that is granted to the devotee (Para Jnana) and the inability to move away from the Vision (Parama Bhakti) are found here and Ramanuja prays that this togetherness be never sundered (avirathaasthume). The Mother looks at Ramanuja with affection and speaks: So be it. All your aspirations be fulfilled (asthu the. tayaiva sarvam sampasyathe). Further on, the Divine Mother assures him that he will gain all that he wants, and asks him to live happily in Srirangam (athaiva Srirangesukhamasva).

Such a fond and significant mother-child conversation is brought to us by Sri Aurobindo in the present canto. As with Ramanuja, it is Aswapati’s heart which is the auditorium, “the listening spaces of the soul”. There is a magnificent evocation of the Divine Mother without taking recourse to traditional images or physical iconisation: The One he worshipped was within him now:

Flame-pure, ethereal-tressed, a mighty Face
Appeared and lips moved by immortal words;
Lids, Wisdom’s leaves, drooped over rapture’s orbs.
A marble monument of ponderings, shone
A forehead, sight’s crypt, and large like ocean’s gaze
Towards Heaven, two tranquil eyes of boundless thought
Looked into man’s and saw the god to come.

The Divine Mother’s words are distinctly heard by Aswapati’s soul. Ah, she knows of his mission. He wants an end to pain and death in the world. He has come to speak on behalf of a mankind that is a prisoner in its own web of egoism and materialist pleasures. As man is now, he is too weak a vessel to receive the grace of the divine to conquer death. A few like Aswapati have moved forward by taking to tapasya, but that is not all. It is good to know man has realised the need for the next step forward. However, it is too early to think of annihilating death. Aswapati would do well to go on as he has, trying to cultivate his private garden as it were and allow the evolutionary urge to do the needful. Meanwhile his tapasya will not be in vain. He should ask for one boon for himself:

Only one boon, to greaten thy spirit, demand;
Only one joy, to raise thy kind, desire.
Above blind fate and the antagonist powers
Moveless there stands a high unchanging Will;
To its omnipotence leave thy work’s result.
All things shall change in God’s transfiguring hour.

But Aswapati is now not the same person who had started his tapasya with the aim of getting a child to continue his dynasty. His tapasya has turned universal. Now it is not a child for himself but an avatar for universal transformation that Aswapati is after. He had recognized the existence of other worlds and other possibilities of a great future for mankind. Man has suffered for millennia and it is time his sufferings are put to an end, and he is given this wonderful future. How long can he remain feeding on ‘hope’? Surely Aswapati has not simply dreamt of a great future, has he?

I saw the Omnipotent’s flaming pioneers
Over the heavenly verge which turns towards life
Come crowding down the amber stairs of birth;
Forerunners of a divine multitude,
Out of the paths of the morning star they came
Into the little room of mortal life.
I saw them cross the twilight of an age,
The sun-eyed children of a marvellous dawn,
The great creators with wide brows of calm,
The massive barrier-breakers of the world
And wrestlers with destiny in her lists of will,
The labourers in the quarries of the gods,
The messengers of the Incommunicable,
The architects of immortality.

It is a poet’s revelation, the Seer’s vision, Sri Aurobindo’s experience. If we carefully go back to all our yesterdays, we would know that it has been ‘vision’ that has announced the coming reality. An artist looks at a huge rock but instead of rock he sees the figure of a saint, and turns the vision into a reality. As a result, for more than a millennium we have been seeing the worshipful sixty-feet image of Gomateswara at Shravanabelagola. For thousands of years millions have been reading the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. But very few have had a lightning strike their intelligence to come out with a drama like Pratima Nataka (Bhasa) or an epic like Savitri (Sri Aurobindo). Aswapati’s prayer is that these “messengers of the Incommunicable” must become the rule and not remain mere exceptions. It is a magnificent dialogue and the Divine Mother relents and gives Aswapati the boon of an avatar: “One shall descend and break the iron Law …Fate shall be changed by an unchanging Will.”

Book 4 Canto 1
The Birth and Childhood of the Flame

The earth continues her dance of adoration around the journeying sun, and the six seasons play out their symbolic pageant of the year: Summer paces across the land with his torrid heat and light; then Rain tide bursts in with its storms and life-giving streams; Autumn arrives with her glorious moons and splendid lotus pools, Winter and Dew-time lay their calm cool hands on the bosom of half-sleeping Nature. Then at last Spring embraces the earth like a young god. At this high moment, when all Nature is at beauty’s festival, Savitri takes birth. Returning from the transcendent planes she takes up her divine unfinished task. Once more the Mother-wisdom constantly at work in Nature’s breast to make dumb Matter conscious of its God puts on a human shape. At first the infant lies passive in the protective arms of a guardian Power. Slowly the link with her Soul becomes sure and remembrance of her Origin takes shape within. Even in her childish movements can be felt the nearness of a higher light. As she grows the Power within her shapes her sense in a deeper mould, her thoughts reflect the Truth of her Soul; her gaze perceives all forms as shapes of living selves and she feels one with a greater Nature. As she grows, a lovelier body forms than earth has ever known before. When the passing years bring her to the fullness of her beauty and grace the body that holds this greatness seems like an image made of heaven’s transparent light.

[Text by Shraddhavan]

Book 4 Canto 1 – The Birth and Childhood of the Flame

[From: A LUMINOUS FLAME – Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri by Dr. Prema Nandakumar]

Portraying the birth and childhood of manifested divinities is not new to the Indian ethos. We have the circumstances attending the birth of Rama and his brothers; from Vishnu Purana onwards we have any number of epics and narratives on the childhood, boyhood and youth of Krishna. But we have none for Sita or Rukmini or Radha. It is indeed a paradox for it is in India that the classical heroines shine with power and glory. Sri Aurobindo has rectified this lacuna by giving us a wonderful picture of the coming of Savitri into the human mould and then growing up as a divine personality. Thereby Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy of evolution which presupposes an involution gets explained as well in poetic terms. A lover of Kalidasa, Sri Aurobindo unveils a wonderful ‘Ritu Samhara’ in the opening stages of the canto. Summer comes first, torrid and brilliant; the rainy season is imaged as a battlefront:

“Thick now the emissary javelins:
Enormous lightnings split the horizon’s rim
And, hurled from the quarters as from contending camps,
Married heaven’s edges steep and bare and blind.”

With the advent of autumn, “a calmness neared as of the approach of God” and presently winter is a period of hibernation. Now comes spring and it is all colour whether it is bush or plant or tree. The coil’s song, the pale mango-blossoms: “All Nature was at beauty’s festival”. The Descent is touched upon with deft strokes:

“Answering earth’s yearning and her cry for bliss,
A greatness from our other countries came.
A silence in the noise of earthly things
Immutably revealed the secret Word,
A mightier influx filled the oblivious clay.
A lamp was lit, a sacred image made.
A mediating ray had touched the earth
Bridging the gulf between man’s mind and God’s;
Its brightness linked our transcience to the Unknown.

Savitri is born. A child like any other child, and yet occasionally she seems withdrawn as if she is trying to recall the mighty spaces from which she has descended. Reading these passages in Savitri, we are reminded of the Mother of Sri Aurobindo Ashram who used to be pensive at times in her childhood.

“She used to sit quiet in a tiny upholstered armchair specially made for her, and as she meditated she would experience the descent of a great brilliant Light upon her head producing a turmoil inside her brain. She had the feeling that the Light was continually growing, and she wished it would possess her completely. Her propensity to such sessions of solitariness, her moods of taut intensity and edged concern, were a source of worry and anxiety to her rationalist mother.”

(K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar, On the Mother: the Chronicle of a Manifestation and Ministry, 1994 edition, p. 4.)

As Savitri grows up into a young maiden, it is obvious that she is a ray of brilliance. Beautiful, intelligent, mystic, she appears a unique person even as a young girl. Sri Aurobindo lavishes some of his finest imaginative descriptions in portraying this Savitri. The divinities in the occult worlds around her contribute to her growth by endowing her with universal thoughts that make her feel kin to all creation:

Nothing was alien or inanimate,
Nothing without its meaning or its call.
For with a great Nature she was one.
As from the soil sprang glory of branch and flower,
As from the animal’s life rose thinking man,
A new epiphany appeared in her.
A mind of light, a life of rhythmic force,
A body instinct with hidden divinity
Prepared an image of the coming god.

An observant child, Savitri is not unlike an observant commander of an armed force, she watches “her field”. There is a Buddha-like interregnum for the sights of the world could mean the joys as well as the sorrows of the world. Hence “sweet and solemn grew her musing gaze”. “Solemn” since Savitri not only noted the sorrows of the world but began thinking of ways to rid mankind of the infirmities of old age, disease and seemingly inviolable death. Buddha also did not weep helplessly on seeing the old man bent with age, the man ridden with pustules, the dead man being carried on a bier. He simply gave up the joys of household and walked out in search of an answer.

Book 4 Canto 2
The Growth of the Flame

The land where Savitri is born and grows up is full of the greatest works of God and Man, a land of majestic mountains and wide plains beneath the sun, of giant rivers flowing to vast seas, a field of great creations and spiritual hush, where Nature seemed a dream of the Divine and beauty and grace and grandeur had their home, where. great influences and ancient Godheads surround the growing child, whose presence seems to draw the powers of future divinities closer. There the knowledge of the thinker and the seer saw the unseen and thought the unthinkable, art and beauty sprang from the human depths and the harmony of a rich culture taught the soul to soar beyond things known, inspiring to greater achievements. Philosophy, sculpture and painting, architecture, music and dance, crafts and poetry: she takes in all these things to nourish her nature, but these alone cannot fill her wide Self: she looks to greater possibilities. She feels within her a boundless knowledge and a higher happiness still locked in the world and yearning to be expressed. She looks for natures strong enough to bear her greatness, her beauty and her bliss and her vast power to love. Only a few respond. Even the closest partners of her thoughts cannot match the measure of her soul. She is their leader and the queen of their hearts and souls, close to their lives and yet divine and far beyond their reach. Amongst these hearts that answered to her call, none can stand as her equal and her mate. Her spirit dwelt amongst those encircling lives, apart in herself, awaiting her hour of fate.

[Text by Shraddhavan]

Book 4 Canto 2 – The Growth of the Flame

[From: A LUMINOUS FLAME – Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri by Dr. Prema Nandakumar]

Reading Sri Aurobindo we must always keep in mind that the epic Savitri is an expansion of Vyasa’s upakhyana. All that we find in the epicis present in the upakhyana in a seed-form. We can only remain wondering at the tapasya of Sri Aurobindo in meditating upon each and every word in the original and then bringing out the varied significances in his English narrative. The growth of Savitri in the upakhyana is conveyed in a briefline: kaalena chaapi saa kanyaa yauvanasthaa babhuva ha (and, in course of time, the girl attained maidenhood”.)

Sri Aurobindo elaborates this line into a whole canto. It is an appropriate setting for the growth of the future vanquisher of Death. Like Sita being born to enlightened Janaka, Savitri has a father who is a Poorna Yogi. The palace atmosphere must have been tuned to his thinking and life. Even as Goda Devi grew under the fostering care of Perialwar, Savitri imbibes the yogic vibrations of the palace and her ways of thinking are not mundane at all. She “saw the unseen and thought the unthinkable”. And yet, she was firmly rooted in the Indian past. Sri Aurobindo has given us a brilliant account of our past achievements in Foundations of Indian Culture. Religion, spirituality, art, philosophy, architecture, literature, political administration …. Is there any area that the Indian had not mastered? Hence it is appropriate when we read about Savitri:

A shoreless sweep was lent to the mortal’s acts,
And art and beauty sprang from the human depths;
Nature and soul vied in nobility.
Ethics the human keyed to imitate heaven;
The harmony of a rich culture’s tones
Refined the sense and magnified its reach
To hear the unheard and glimpse the invisible
And taught the soul to soar beyond things known.

The learning process became a creative process too for Savitri, and her thoughts turned towards the possibilities of transforming what needed to be transformed. Thought, speech and action acted in tandem to make perfect what is already good and initiate change where it was needed:

Her acts became gestures of sacrifice,
Invested with a rhythm of higher spheres
The word was used as a hieratic means
For the release of the imprisoned spirit
Into communion with its comrade gods,
Or it helped to beat out new expressive forms
Of that which labours in the heart of life …

Evolution is not over; creation has not exhausted itself. Sri Aurobindo notes that Savitri realized this very well as she practiced the arts. For her sculpture and painting could be brilliant recordations of soulful imagination revealing “a figure of the invisible”; the uprising tiers of stone for a temple or building could be no less than an “architecture of the infinite”; music was a bridge to connect humanhood and godhood; so were the steps of the dance that echoed the rhythm of creation. When Sri Aurobindo speaks of Savitri and poetry, we get what sounds like a description of his poetic style!

Poems in largeness cast like moving worlds
And metres surging with the ocean’s voice
Translated by grandeurs locked in Nature’s heart
But thrown now into a crowded glory of speech
The beauty and sublimity of her forms …

The style is the man! But all this did not exhaust Savitri’s aspirations. For instance she was endowed with “a boundless knowledge greater than man’s thought”. Were there persons who could be companions to equal her in this matter? So full of yearnings, sweetness, love and Ananda, Savitri “dreamed of a transcendent action’s sphere”.There were a few who tried to approach her but found themselves unable to live in the heights, and so “fell back to life’s dull ordinary tone.”

Book 4 Canto 3
The Call to the Quest

On an exceptionally beautiful spring morning, King Aswapati, walking in his garden, feels again the mighty flame of aspiration for a perfect life on earth for men and shadowless bliss for suffering human hearts. A Voice seems to ask, ‘O human beings, how long will you continue to tread the circling tracks of mind around your little selves and petty things! You were not made for a changeless littleness. A greater destiny is awaiting you. You carry a strong creative power within you. You are meant to bring about a great change on earth, to make life the expression of the million-bodied Oneness. The earth is suffering, she longs to be delivered by the greatness of her sons. But the flame of aspiration is too dim in human hearts. The Gods are still too few in human forms.” Then, like a powerful answer from the gods Aswapati sees his daughter Savitri approaching. In a moment of revelation he sees through the familiar face and limbs the great spirit who has taken birth as his child. He is inspired to tell her, “Somewhere on the earth your unknown lover is waiting for you, the second self your nature needs. Your soul has strength and does not need any other guide than the One within you. Go, depart where love and destiny call you. Venture into the world to find your mate.” His words enter into Savitri like a Mantra and a seed of great change is sown in her. She turns to vastnesses not yet her own. The day sinks to evening, the moon rises, when dawn comes the palace wakes to her absence: Savitri has left to search the spacious world.

[Text by Shraddhavan]

Book 3 Canto 4 – The Call to the Quest

[From: A LUMINOUS FLAME – Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri by Dr. Prema Nandakumar]

From almost the beginning of creation, man seems to be suffering from a mind-set that a life’s companion who is better-endowed poses a threat to his own individuality and progress. It is so today and does not seem to have been any different in the age prior to the writing of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, which are themselves ancient texts. Vyasa’s upakhyana says simply that men are content by offering worship to Savitri but feel afraid to ask for her hand in marriage. Aswapati is distressed by the way things are since a daughter has to be given away in marriage to a worthy person at the appropriate time. How did Sri Aurobindo’s Aswapati take in the situation?

The poet has spent several cantos to describe the manner in which the king Aswapati had become a Mahayogi. A yogi’s reaction must needs be different. Used to living in long spells of meditative silence, he realizes that he should not worry like an ordinary father, for he can ‘hear’ the progression of the New Future for mankind.

Across this cyclic tramp of eager lives,
Across the deep urgency of present cares,
Earth’s wordless hymn to the Ineffable
Arose from the silent heart of the cosmic Void;
He heard the voice repressed of unborn Powers
Murmuring behind the luminous bars of Time.
Again the mighty yearning raised its flame
That asks a perfect life on earth for men
And prays for certainty in the uncertain mind
And shadowless bliss for suffering human hearts
And Truth embodied in an ignorant world
And godhead divinising mortal forms.

But how many are there in the world who are tapasya-rich like Aswapati? So they go on repeating the gestures of ordinary living, never daring to catch the great prize, always cooped up in their small selves and petty ways of attraction and repulsion. Veiled by the ‘great illusion’(call it Mahamaya or Vishnumaya, if you will), afraid that he may lose himself, man is not able to recognize the leader, the avatar. The light that comes down to lead mankind is disappointed, and goes back to its place of origin. When will mankind realize its great destiny? As Aswapati remains turned inward in this manner, listening to the voices within, an answer comes like a glowing icon of divinity.

But like a shining answer from the gods
Approached through sun-bright spaces Savitri.
Advancing amid tall heaven-pillaring trees,
Apparelled in her flickering-coloured robe
She seemed, burning towards the eternal realms,
A bright moved torch of incense and of flame
That from the sky-roofed temple-soil of earth
A pilgrim hand lifts in an invisible shrine.

The realisation comes upon Aswapati that he should not be worried about the future of not only his daughter Savitri, but even the future destiny of the human race. With such a presence on earth, what need is there for fear or doubt? As long as “this breathing Scripture of the Eternal’s joy” abides on earth, one can set aside doubts and learn to look at the future calmly, that all things shall be well for mankind.

For, Aswapati sees in Savitri not only his own darling daughter but a vessel of the immortal, “great unknown spirit”. It is like the vision Yasodha had when Krishna opened his mouth and she found the universes moving within. Surely this girl has not been created to wed a mortal and lead a humdrum life of “punarapi jananam, punarapi maranam, punarapijanani jatare sayanam”! The Mahayogi Aswapati’s words come out as a divine command to direct the immortal spirit towards its great destiny. He asks her to go out into the world and choose her husband. She need not worry whether the right choice could be made as the person is sure to be a total stranger. The One within her would have led her unerringly to the right person with whom she would be able to transcend the merely physical and the mental. She would “ascend from Nature to divinity’s heights”. His words to her conclude with an aseervachana that this person will be her life’s companion and never leave her alone, “he who shall walk until thy body’s end”:

The soft tones of the rishi are like the mantra given by a guru to the disciple at the time of initiation. How does the mantra work to transform a person? Sri Aurobindo has given a magnificent description of the process:

As when the mantra sinks in Yoga’s ear,
Its message enters stirring the blind brain
And keeps in the dim ignorant cells its sound;
The hearer understands a form of words
And, musing on the index thought it holds,
He strives to read it with the labouring mind,
But finds bright hints, not the embodied truth:
Then, falling silent in himself to know
He meets the deeper listening of his soul:
The Word repeats itself in rhythmic strains:
Thought, vision, feeling, sense, the body’s self
Are seized unutterably and he endures
An ecstasy and an immortal change.

Armed with the faith reposed in her by Aswapati and his blessings, Savitri leaves the Madran capital to journey through the spaces of Indiain search of her “greater God.”

Book 4 Canto 4
The Quest

The world ways open up before Savitri. At first her mind is absorbed by the strangeness of new scenes, but as she travels further a deeper consciousness wells up within her which takes all clans and peoples for her own, until the whole destiny of mankind becomes hers. The cities and rivers and plains she passes through come to her like memories from the past. Even she feels that the purpose of her journey is not new: she is tracing again a journey often made. The wheels of her chariot are being guided hooded divinities. She passes through the capitals of powerful city-states and slumbers in the palaces of kings, but during the day she passes through hamlets and villages and sees the peasants toiling in the fields. Leaving the populated lands she turns to free and griefless spaces not yet troubled by human joys and fears, the unspoiled childhood of the primeval earth, through wide wind-stirred grasslands and green woods, past rough-browed hills and long silver rivers, through lovely valleys and alongside ocean beaches. She halts in hermitages at night or rests in the open on the banks of rivers, in desert spaces or solitary tracts. The months pass, summer is approaching, but she has still not found the one predestined face which she is seeking.

[Text by Shraddhavan]

Book 4 Canto 4 – The Quest

[From: A LUMINOUS FLAME – Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri by Dr. Prema Nandakumar]

In a swift turn of events, Savitri had left the comforts of the Madran palace and launched on the unknown. How long did the quest take Savitri and what were the lands that she visited? All this is left to our imagination. Sri Aurobindo contents himself saying that this adventure into the unknown brought her dazzling experiences of the wider world-spaces beyond Madra. At first the novelty kept her busy. From the sheltered life in the palace to the city areas of light and darkness and from thence to the innumerable forests of ancient India marked a big change. Soon she felt perfectly at home everywhere for on this earth nothing is new under the sun nor are we new inhabitants. There is a constant movement through births and hence it is perfectly understandable that Savitri could even recognize old, forgotten faces in the crowds she met during her travels. Man reaps as he sows and hence this continuous tread through the vasts of earth-life.

Nothing we think or do is void or vain;
Each is an energy loosed and holds its course.
The shadowy keepers of our deathless past
Have made our fate the child of our own acts,
And from the furrows laboured by our will
We reap the fruit of our forgotten deeds.

Savitri recognizing people and places as her own and Sri Aurobindo’s statement that our own acts are the cause of the good and bad karmas in our life reminds one of the ancient Tamil Sangam poet who pronounced: “Every country is mine; all are my relations. The good and the bad accrue not from others but from ourselves.” Taking such a total view of existence, Savitri realizes that there is a meaning in this chain of births, memories and activities. She is able to do so for she is no ordinary young woman, but one who has been practicing yoga even as a princess:

Upon her silent heights she was aware
Of a calm Presence throned above her brows
Who saw the goal and chose each fateful curve;
It used the body for its pedestal;
The eyes that wandered were its searchlight fires,
The hands that held the reins its living tools;
All was the working of an ancient plan,
A way proposed by an unerring Guide.

Had not Aswapati told her that the One within her will be her guide in choosing the right person as her life’s companion? Sri Aurobindo brings before us the bala yogini Savitri:

Upon her silent heights she was aware
Of a calm Presence throned above her brows
Who saw the goal and chose each fateful curve;
It used the body for its pedestal;
The eyes that wandered were its searchlight fires,
The hands that held the reins its living tools;
All was the working of an ancient plan,
A way proposed by an unerring Guide.

Savitri was young but she had learnt to receive guidance from the powers within and her intelligence has become keen. Her eyes do not see idly; they take in everything with care and she finds the best of possibilities in the forest hermitages. Far from the madding crowds of cities, she drives her chariot into areas which do not have horses treading the silent spaces often. As daughter of Aswapati, meditative silence was dear to her in the crowded palace, but meditation was a way of life here where silence was the spoken message. Time seems to stand still in such forests. The mind had nothing to disturb its calm in that vast stillness. At the same time, occasionally she shared her joy with new acquaintances who were mostly sages or kings who had taken to vanaprastha-ashrama. While some of them conversed and compared mutual experiences, there were some who had chosen to withdraw themselves into advaitic bliss. There were also youngsters in these hermitages since the ashramas inforests were the educational institutions in the distant past. Princes and commoners came together here to learn all the subjects including marshal arts.

The Infants of the monarchy of the worlds,
The heroic leaders of a coming time,
King-children nurtured in that spacious air
Like lions gambolling in sky and sun
Received half-consciously their godlike stamp:
Formed in the type of the high thoughts they sang
They learned the wide magnificence of mood
That makes us comrades of the cosmic urge,
No longer chained to their small separate selves …

It was not surprising since their role models were Rishis androyal sages like Janaka. They were not confined to palatial buildings but were allowed to grow up one with Mother Nature who is herself an ideal teacher. Nature was not red in tooth and claw here, for the harmony of the place made even natural enemies like the tiger and the deer become firm friends. Where such harmony existed, it became easy for the teachers to shape the New Man by “sowing in young minds immortal thoughts.”

Savitri watched everyone as she tarried here and there and then moved forward in her great quest. Spring was over and “the sky was set like bronze.”

Book 5 Canto 1
The Destined Meeting-Place

But now the destined spot and hour are close. Unknowingly she has come near to her goal. Nothing truly happens by chance; what seem to be chance happenings are only appearances. Everything is lead by an Omniscience, and events take place at the appointed place and time. Her road leads her up into a highland world where the air is soft and delicate, her surroundings green and delightful. She feels a sense of expectation, of coming change. She is surrounded by high mountain peaks, below them emerald woods and pale rivers like threads of pearl. A gentle breeze stirs meadows of flowers. A white crane stands motionless, peacocks and parrots show their bright colours, the soft moan of a dove is heard, and vividly coloured drakes are seen swimming in silvery pools. Human beings have not come to disturb this lovely nature. At the head of the valley a matted forest-head pushes up to heaven, as if a blue-throated ascetic is peering out from his mountain cell. This is the scene which the Mother has chosen for Savitri’s hour of happiness. Here in this solitude, far from the world, she will begin to play her part in the world’s life of joy and strife. Here she will discover the mystic courts, the secret doors of beauty and surprise, the temple of sweetness and the fiery aisle. Savitri is a stranger on the sorrowful roads of Time, immortal, but wearing the human yoke of death and fate. Here Love will meet Savitri in the wilderness.

[Text by Shraddhavan]

Book 5 Canto 1 – The Destined Meeting-Place

[From: A LUMINOUS FLAME – Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri by Dr. Prema Nandakumar]

It may be remembered here that in Vyasa’s Upakhyana, there is no account of Savitri’s meeting Satyavan when she had gone out on her quest. We hear of her going and the next scene is her coming back to the palace and meeting king Aswapati and Rishi Narad. What was the inspiration for Sri Aurobindo to give us a whole Book of Love on the subject?

This question takes us back to the Tamil ethos of “kalavu-ozhukkam” (the meeting of lovers prior to their marriage) given in detail in ancient Sangam literature. The cultural concept which was a living experience to the Tamils was thus inserted even in the Ramayana by Kamban, when he chose to retell the epic of Valmiki. We have several charming cantos in the Tamil version which refer to Sita and Rama meeting for just a fleeting moment and spending the whole night thinking of each other. Both in Kamban’s version and Sri Aurobindo’s version of the Savitri story, it is emphasized that the hero and the heroine meet first before their wedding is decided upon. In Vyasa it is understood, of course, that Savitri and Satyavan must have conversed with each other before deciding to get married.

Living in Pondicherry from 1910 onwards, Sri Aurobindo had several Tamil friends who were also scholars in their language. One of them was V.V.S. Aiyar, the famous revolutionary. Aiyar was a confirmed Kamban addict and has translated several passages of the Tamil epic into powerful English blank verse. He has also written expertly on some of the major characters in the Tamil epic. Sri Aurobindo might have been inspired by Aiyar’s descriptions of Sita and Rama meeting before they got married. Whatever the reason, we have gained a wonderful ‘book of love’.

The scene opens directly and Sri Aurobindo hastens to assure us that such meetings are not the work of blind chance:

For though a dress of blind and devious chance
Is laid upon the work of all-wise Fate,
Our acts interpret an omniscient Force
That dwells in the compelling stuff of things,
And nothing happens in the cosmic play
But at its time and in its foreseen place.

After her wanderings through a variety of places, Savitri now finds herself in a beautiful place where Mother Nature is at her youthful best. Neither summer nor spring, it is a delightful season. The earth is rich with fresh greenery. There are mountain ranges, streams that have crystalline water revealing the stones beneath, a variety of birds, a mass of colourful flowers. And such quietude, the silence of the gods! One heard only the bird song and breathed in happily the scent swirling from the fresh blossoms.

The white crane stood, a vivid motionless streak,
Peacock and parrot jewelled soil and tree,
The dove’s soft moan enriched the enamoured air
And fire-winged wild-drakes swam in silvery pools.

Sri Aurobindo’s nature poetry is enchanting and his personification of nature as a centaur, a mythical monster having the head, arms, and trunk of a man and the body and legs of a horse is amazingly realistic. Nature appears to be leaping about like the swift-footed centaurs of myth, though at the same time there is an immoveable calm about it. A constant movement from the ruslting trees, grass, birds and butterflies and yet the unruffled presence of the bordering stony ranges!

In a luxurious ecstasy of joy
She squandered the love-music of her notes,
Wasting the passionate pattern of her blooms
And festival riot of her scents and hues.
A cry and leap and hurry was around,
The stealthy footfalls of her chasing things,
The shaggy emerald of her centaur mane,
The gold and sapphire of her warmth and blaze.

A perfect meeting-place for earth and heaven, an area for the sustenance and growth of love and beauty, a golden peace conducive to soulful meditation, a retreat for the exchange of thoughts in rhythmic oneness, a planet for setting up a new creation. A thick forest, and beyond it, a clearing,

Armoured, remote and desolately grand
Like the thought-screened infinities that lie
Behind the rapt smile of the Almighty’s dance.

We keep watching the Ananda Tandava of Nataraja who has a smile on his face, but do we know anything about the significances of that smile? Is he laughing at the poor mortals for waiting and hoping or is he giving us a blessing that all manner of things shall be well, a branch of heaven will definitely be transplanted upon the human soil, and the Next Future of man will see him rise to a higher consciousness? How can we analyse the Dance of Shiva, the Smile of the Creator? But this much is clear for us in Savitri. The quest of Savitri for a life’s companion is at an end. The entire legend of Savitri, the love, the marriage, the Doom and the Victory are all brought to us in Sri Aurobindo’s sublime poetry:

A stranger on the sorrowful roads of Time,
Immortal under the yoke of death and fate,
A sacrificant of the bliss and pain of the spheres,
Love in the wilderness met Savitri.

Book 5 Canto 2
Satyavan

The road which Savitri is following turns towards human habitations. In a sunlit recess upon the forest verge a single narrow path runs straight as an arrow amongst the giant trees. There Savitri gets her first sight of the one for whom she has come so far, standing against the dark background, lit by a golden ray, the joy of life in his face, his head that of a youthful rishi, his body that of a lover and a king. At first Savitri sees him simply as a part of the beautiful scene. She might have passed by on chance ignorant roads and missed Heaven’s call, the aim of her life. But suddenly her heart looked out at him, and recognised one nearer than her own heart-strings. Shocked awake, it moves in her breast and she cries out like a bird, reining in her horses: the chariot stops suddenly. Satyavan’s soul looks out, enchanted by the sound of her voice, the sight of her perfect face. He turns to this vision of beauty like the sea to the moon, and adores a new divinity in things. He approaches her across the lovely grass, and the two gaze at each other. Savitri’s inner vision recognises his eyes from her past, eyes that have claimed her soul, known through many lives. Satyavan sees in her look the promise of his future, the key of all his aims. In these great spirits Love brought down power out of eternity to make of life his new immortal base. A moment passed that was a ray of eternity. An hour began that was the matrix of a new age of the world.

[Text by Shraddhavan]

Book 5 Canto 2 – Satyavan

[From: A LUMINOUS FLAME – Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri by Dr. Prema Nandakumar]

Satyavan is seen in Vyasa’s Upakhyana as a personable, learned and ideal young man. Sri Aurobindo ponders over the significance of this Prince of Shalwa and says that he is “the soul carrying the divine truth of being within itself but descended into the grip of death and ignorance.” In effect, Satyavan represents us, the human beings who are actually “amrutasya putrah”, the children of immortality who carry Truth Consciousness, who are Vijnanamaya. And yet we have been caught in this trap of death and ignorance. The first sight of Satyavan reveals for Savitri and for us a child of immortality, amrutasyah putrah:

As if a weapon of the living Light,
Erect and lofty like a spear of God
His figure led the splendour of the morn.
Noble and clear as the broad peaceful heavens
A tablet of young wisdom was his brow;
Freedom’s imperious beauty curved his limbs,
The joy of life was on his open face.

So promising this image! Handsome, noble, a forehead proclaiming wisdom and above everything else, a personification of freedom. No wonder Savitri’s attention is immediately drawn to him. She has been traveling in her chariot for quite sometime, full of an aspiration to come face to face with her soul-mate and has now found “a single path, shotthin and arrowlike”. She guides her chariot on it and suddenly there he is on the forest verge, with all the greenery of the place as his background while the sun’s rays from above bathe his figure in a golden glow. Though city-born, he has grown up in the forest. The Nature around had been his teacher:

A Veda-knower of the unwritten book
Perusing the mystic scripture of her forms,
He had caught her hierophant significances,
Her sphered immense imaginations learned,
Taught by sublimities of stream and wood
And voices of the sun and star and flame
And chant of the magic singers on the boughs
And the dumb teaching of four-footed things.

Of the effectiveness of such direct teaching William Wordsworth says in the poem, ‘The Tables Turned”:

One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.

As she watches him intently for a moment, the alchemy of love takes place. “Her vision settled, caught and all was changed.” Inly she wonders. Is he “the genius of the spot”? Perhaps he is not of the earth? It cannot be for she feels a rare ecstasy and “her soul flung its doors to this new sun.” She reins the horses and at the same time Satyavan also looks at her keenly, “from his soul’s doors”. A divine force impels him forward and he walks towards the chariot and both recognize a union that has always been there through all their past births, a truth which applies to all friendships and unions on earth:

On the dumb bosom of this oblivious globe
Although as unknown beings we seem to meer,
Our lives are not aliens nor as strangers join,
Moved to each other by a cuseless force.
The soul can recognize its answering soul
Across dividing Time …

Sri Aurobindo uses this context for indicating the glory of love, which is divine, Baby Krishna himself!

The child-god is at play, he seeks himself
In many hearts and minds and living forms:
He lingers for a sign that he can know
And, when it comes, wakes blindly to a voice,
A look, a touch, the meaning of a face.

This is the truth about love though baser minds have dragged the divine emotion to mud.

Too far from the Divine, Love seeks his truth
And Life is blind and the instruments deceive
And Powers are there that labour to debase.

Not always, of course. Tempered by thousands of years of waiting and struggling and aspiring, a soul is readied at last and made capable of being a Descent. Two such souls meet in the forest signifying a new future:

Attracted as in heaven star by star,
They wondered at each other and rejoiced
And wove affinity in a silent gaze.
A moment passed that was eternity’s ray,
An hour began, the matrix of new Time.

Book 5 Canto 3
Savitri and Satyavan

Satyavan speaks first to Savitri and asks her name. He tells her that he has seen many magical images and voices in the forest, so he could imagine that she is an immortal being who has driven her horses from the heavenly realm of Lord Indra, but he hope that she is a mortal, and that she can enjoy the refreshment of earthly food and pure water from the fast-flowing torrent nearby. He invites to visit his simple hermit-home in the forest. In response she asks about his name and his family. He looks like a royal being – why is he here in the forest? Satyavan tells her about his father’s blindness and exile, and about his own life in the forest amongst the wild birds and animals. In Nature he felt a divine touch and a call, but was not able to embrace the body of the worshipped God, could not clasp in his hands the World-Mother’s feet. “Now”, he says, ”you have brought me that golden link. Descend from your chariot, enter my life: it will be your chamber and your shrine.” Savitri replies, “O Satyavan, I have heard you and I know; I know that you and only you are he.” She comes down from her chariot and gathers a load of flowers from the forest-verge with which she weaves a simple garland. Placing it around his neck she bows and touches his feet offering herself and her life to him alone. He bows and takes her joined hands in his. Before the sun, their witness and marriage-fire, the wedding of the eternal Lord and Spouse took place again on earth in human forms. In a new act of the drama of the world, the united Two began a greater age.

[Text by Shraddhavan]

Book 5 Canto 3 – Savitri and Satyavan

[From: A LUMINOUS FLAME – Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri by Dr. Prema Nandakumar]

A fulsome glance at each other and it is obvious Satyavan and Savitri have realized that they are no strangers. They must have known each other in the past. But where, oh, where and in which life? At the same time, they are bound by “the screen of external sense” and so the realization does not bring them the needed closeness. Not as yet. The words come out halting at first. Savitri, as is her nature, is silent. Perhaps she should hear more about him. For Satyavan she seems a divine vision. Astonished, he asks:

O thou who com’st to me out of Time’s silences,
Yet thy voice has wakened my heart to an unknown bliss,
Immortal or mortal only in thy frame,
For more than earth speaks to me from thy soul
And more than earth surrounds me in thy gaze,
How art thou named among the sons of men?

Without waiting for her answer, he proceeds to give his bio-data. There is a gentleness and artlessness about his words, a sincerity which like a polished glass, reveals his soul.

Earth could not hide from me the powers she veils:
Even though moving mid an earthly scene
And the common surfaces of terrestrial things,
My vision saw unblinded by her forms;
The Godhead looked at me from familiar scenes.

Is Savitri a power beyond the mortal frame she is in? Whether human or divine, surely she could tarry a while and speak to him. Though she does seem to be divine, he hopes that she is one like him:

Although to heaven thy beauty seems allied,
Much rather would my thoughts rejoice to know
That mortal sweetness smiles between thy lids
And thy heart can beat beneath a human gaze
And thy aureate bosom quiver with a look
And its tumult answer to an earth-born voice.

So natural, unaffected and frank! He invites her to come down and accept their hospitality. His father’s hermitage is very near, and is full of tall trees, flowering plants and singing birds. Of course they are living far away from the cities and “bare, simple is the sylvan hermit-life”. Yet, aren’t they rich in the gifts of Mother Nature? Savitri could rest for a while in their cottage. Savitri is deeply touched by this ingenuous young man whose words of welcome are transparent in their frankness. Her reply matches his queries perfectly. She begins: “I am Savitri, Princess of Madra.” That is all she has to say about herself. She directs a string of questions at him. Who is he? What is his name? Who are his people? Satyavan happily gives her the details. He is the son of Dymathsena, once the king of Shalwa country. But he became blind and so their woes began:

A living night enclosed the strong man’s paths,
Heaven’s brilliant gods recalled their careless gifts,
Took from blank eyes their glad and helping ray
And led the uncertain goddess from his side.
Outcast from empire of the outer light,
Lost to the comradeship of seeing men,
He sojourns in two solitudes, within
And in the solemn rustle of the woods.
Son of that king, I, Satyavan, have lived
Contented …

Satyavan’s long speech which reports his aspirations and experiences as a child of nature concludes that with the coming of Savitri he will definitely gain an accession of life. “It shall escape from Death and Ignorance.” Immediately Savitri requests him to keep on talking for she has recognized that she had been seeking him all these days. Satyavan is delighted and there is a burst of romantic poetry that is touched by divinity when he gives the call: “Enter my life.” Her reply is simple, firm, final:

O Satyavan, I have heard thee and I know;
I know that thou and only thou art he.

She speaks no more but speedily gathers some of the flowers growing nearby, makes a garland, a “flower-symbol of her offered life”. The traditional ritual is replayed as she garlands him, bows down at his feet and consecrates her entire being to Satyavan. He bends to her and takes her as his own. The mantric words of Sri Aurobindo say all:

On the high glowing cupola of the day
Fate tied a knot with morning’s halo threads
While by the ministry of an auspice-hour
Heart-bound before the sun, their marriage fire,
The wedding of the eternal Lord and Spouse
Took place again on earth in human forms:
In a new act of the drama of the world
The united Two began a greater age.

Book 6 Canto 1
The Word of Fate

As Satyavan returns to his parents in their hermitage and Savitri swiftly returns to Madra to inform her parents about her choice, Narad, the heavenly sage who can move freely between earth and heaven and is able to see into the Past, Present and Future, leaves Vishnu’s Paradise to visit earth. He descends to Aswapati’s palace in Madra, where the King and Queen welcome him. As they listen to the sage’s chant Savitri arrives, changed by the halo of her love. When she tells her father about Satyavan, Aswapati asks Narad’s blessing on their union. But some hesitation in the sage’s reply alarms her mother, who demands to be told the truth about her daughter’s choice. Pressed by her, Narad reveals that Satyavan is a marvel of the meeting earth and heavens, fully worthy to be Savitri’s mate, but that he has only one year to live: “This day returning, Satyavan must die.” Shocked, Savitri’s mother insists that her daughter must make another choice, but Savitri replies, “My spirit has glimpsed the glory for which it came. I shall walk with Satyavan like gods in Paradise. If only for a year, that year is all my life. But I know that is not all my fate, only to live and love awhile and die. I know now who I am, and who I love. I have seen God smile at me in Satyavan; I have seen the Eternal in a human face.” None of them can answer her. Silent they sit and look into the eyes of Fate.

[Text by Shraddhavan]

Book 6 Canto 1 – The Word of Fate

[From: A LUMINOUS FLAME – Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri by Dr. Prema Nandakumar]

There is something special about the Book of Fate. It may be considered as Sri Aurobindo’s final message to us. Some of the last passages of the epic he dictated belong to this Book. The subject-matter of the two cantos is also very grave and wrestles with the eternal problem confronted by man. Is he bound to a fate that has already been fixed? Is he merely an automaton whose actions are controlled by fate? Or does he have a free will to act as he wants? In short, is he a captive prisoner or is he free?

Leaving Savitri and Satyavan in the forest, we are back in Aswapati’s palace. Rishi Narad comes down from the heavens to meet him and as he descends, his ragas take on the hue of the planes he traverses.

He passed from the immortals’ happy paths
To a world of toil and quest and grief and hope,
To these rooms of the see-saw game of death with life.

He sings about this creation of Vishnu “and the birth and joy ofthe mystic world”, the world of bhakti. Aswapati is with his queen and they converse for a while when Savitri, “changed by the halo of her love”, enters the hall. Rishi Narad’s “vast immortal look” reveals everything to him, but he speaks as one who does not know anything:

Who is this that comes, the bride,
The flame-born, and round her illumined head
Pouring their lights her hymeneal pomps
Move flashing about her? From what green glimmer of glades
Retreating into dewy silences
Or half-seen verge of waters moon-betrayed
Bringst thou this glory of enchanted eyes?

There is a veritable shower of gracious poetry mingling romance and vision, which is brought to a close by a dubious ending: “If for all time doom could be left to sleep!” After all the fascinating description of Savitri as a great person which must have been a joy to hear for the parents, this must have seemed a bad omen. Aswapati’s listening ear has been alert. Being a realized soul, Aswapati covers up his anxiety and asks the Rishi to bless his child. As if he realized that Savitri was Aswapati’s daughter only now, Rishi Narad wishes to know what she had been doing. Her choice is revealed. Aswapati senses something is amiss, but simply says:

If this is all, then all is surely well;
If there is more, then all can still be well.
Whether it seem good or evil to men’s eyes,
Only for good the secret Will can work.

All the same, Rishi Narad’s face reveals enough for Aswapati that he would rather warn Savitri. The king requests him not to say anything for it is better not to know the future and then keep worrying about it. Meanwhile the mother’s heart has caught the nuances of worry in the words of Rishi Narad and Aswapati. She has been told that Satyavan’s parents live in a forest and her daughter will have to lead a harsh life. If that is what is worrying the men, she would show them that women are of sterner stuff.

Here is no cause for dread, no chance for grief
To raise her ominous head and stare at love.
A single spirit in a multitude,
Happy is Satyavan mid earthly men
Whom Savitri has chosen for her mate,
And fortunate the forest hermitage
Where leaving her palace and riches and a throne
My Savitri will dwell and bring in heaven.

It is a joy to watch her pride in her daughter’s ability to manage well under all circumstances. However, she wonders whether there is something more threatening than an impoverished house which her daughter would be entering if she marries Satyavan. Since Narad had understood Aswapati’s reluctance to know the truth, he avoids an answer saying, “a future knowledge is an added pain.” But she begs him and he speaks out at last. Satyavan is a perfect person in every way. There is only one drawback to this proposal:

Heaven’s greatness came, but was too great to stay.
Twelve swift-winged months are given to him and her;
This day returning Satyavan must die.

The queen is inconsolable, and asks Savitri to change her mind. Savitri’s reply is a memorable one which we should hold on to our hearts all our life:

Once my heart chose and chooses not again.
The word I have spoken can never be erased,
It is written in the record book of God….
Death’s grip can break our bodies, not our souls;
If death take him, I too know how to die.
Let Fate do with me what she will or can;
I am stronger than death and greater than my fate;
My love shall outlast the world, doom falls from me
Helpless against my immortality.
Fate’s law may change, but not my spirit’s will.

Book 6 Canto 2
The Way of Fate and the Problem of Pain

Savitri’s mother challenges Narad: “Is it your God who has made this cruel law of Time and Fate, of grief and pain? Why should my beautiful innocent daughter have to suffer like this? Why is there suffering in the world at all? Perhaps there is no God at all, no soul.” Narad replies, “The Eternal lives hidden in the soul of the mortal. You are not aware of him because your thought is a light of the Ignorance which hides from you the Immortal meaning in the world. Pain has a function. If the human heart is not forced to want and weep, it would never learn to climb towards the Sun of divine Truth. The spirit is doomed to pain until man is free. Especially the Great who come to save this suffering world must share its pain. They have to battle with an ancient adversary Force which is the origin of all suffering here. Until the world-redeemer’s task is done, life must carry its load of death and sorrow. Learn to bear this great world’s law of pain. You will find your way to Bliss at last.” Aswapati asks, “I believed that a mighty Power was born with Savitri. Is that Power not stronger than earthly Fate?” Narad answers: “There is a greatness in your daughter’s soul which can transform her and the whole world, but it can reach its goal only through suffering. The great are strongest when they stand alone. She alone can save the world. Leave her to her mighty self and Fate.” With these words, Narad leaves the earthly scene.

[Text by Shraddhavan]

Book 6 Canto 2 – The Way of Fate and the Problem of Pain

[From: A LUMINOUS FLAME – Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri by Dr. Prema Nandakumar]

Savitri is firm. She will not choose again. It is Satyavan for her and no other. Rishi Narad and the Mahayogi Aswapati are silent in their soul’s freedom, but Queen Malavi is trapped in human bondage and must needs verbalise her frustration. It is the mother’s heart that speaks, a mother who cannot watch her child suffer. This is a familiar, human emotion we encounter in our daily life. Why should this happen to me? Why should this happen to my child? Why should my family be singled out to bear this load of pain and death?

Voicing earth’s question to the inscrutable power
The queen now turned to the still immobile seer:
Assailed by the discontent in Nature’s depths,
Partner in the agony of dumb driven things
And all the misery, all the ignorant cry,
Passionate like sorrow questioning heaven she spoke.

Was it a god who created this beautiful earth and was there ademon that wrecked it? Apparently, at the very beginning a fatal seed was sown which has resulted in evil twining itself around the good for all time. The results of this unhappy marriage are there for all to see. Apart from the havoc caused by Fate, man is plagued by ills that rise from his own nature (desires, emotions) and manages to burn his house down himself, as it were. His mind will not leave alone Nature and ends up playing with fire.

This mortal creature is his own worst foe.
His science is an artificer of doom;
He ransacks earth for means to harm his kind;
He slays his happiness and others’ good.
Nothing has he learned from Time and its history.

Why should it be so, asks the Queen. Why cannot we have a peaceful and prosperous world? Why should there be always pain and death that makes a mockery of man’s life and achievements on earth? Perhaps this world is an illusion after all. Now she even speaks like a Nihilist:

Perhaps the soul we feel is only a dream,
Eternal self a fiction sensed in trance.

It is a long speech. If Aswapati is the representative of the world’s aspiration for a deliverer, his queen represents the questions of the entire human family, bewildered by life and death. He represents a higher consciousness, she the ordinary human plane. Rishi Narad gently begins: Was then the sun a dream because there is night?

Hidden in the mortal’s heart the Eternal lives:
He lives secret in the chamber of thy soul,
A Light shines there nor pain nor grief can cross.
A darkness stands between thyself and him,
Thou canst not hear or feel the marvellous Guest,
Thou canst not see the beatific sun.
O queen, thy thought is a light of the Ignorance,
Its brilliant curtain hides from thee God’s face.

This is how the sage assures her that one must seek the ‘complete’ truth and not a partial one. Because there is night in India, can we say there is no sun at all? He is shining elsewhere, and so it is with the Divine. But we rush to conclusions with partial knowledge. Alexander Pope rightly said:

A little learning is a dangerous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring;
There shall draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.

So the Rishi proceeds to tone down the queen’s hysteria. There is no denying the fact that the world is full of pain and death. That too is part of the truth about creation. But one cannot deny that the Divine glows in the recesses of our heart. If we feel the pain of a tragedy, it is entirely due to our own ignorance. This pain is a much needed instrument for man if he wants to become perfect. Indeed, pain is the causal instrument for the evolutionary states in creation. We have risen upto the mind. Now there are planes above the mind yet to evolve, and so pain, “the hammer of the Gods” would be there as long as it is needed. The Divine takes incarnations to show the way and experiences pain to reveal this truth to man. In an amazing passage, Rishi Narad places before the queen the example of Jesus on the Cross:

The Eternal suffers in a human form,
He has signed salvation’s testament with his blood …
It is finished, the dread mysterious sacrifice,
Offered by God’s martyred body for the world;
Gethsemane and Calvary are his lot,
He carries the cross on which man’s soul is nailed.

All this leads to further steps in evolution. The Rishi indicates that Savitri too would suffer but then triumph as well. He agrees with Aswapati that Savitri is the image of a great Force, and even if she has to face the challenge of death, she will triumph for the sake of humanity’s future. The Rishi takes leave after an assurance which is also a blessing:

For out of danger and pain heaven-bliss shall come,
Time’s unforeseen event, God’s secret plan.

This is also Sri Aurobindo’s assurance to us, caught as we are in an uncertain world of incomprehensible turbulence, terrorism and death.

Book 7 Canto 1
The Joy of Union; the Ordeal of the Foreknowledge of Death
and the Heart’s Grief and Pain

Savitri’s marriage-procession carries her from her home to forest hermitage where her parents give her into the care of the blind King Dyumatsena and his Queen and reluctantly leave her to her doom. With great happiness Savitri begins her life with Satyavan. Apart with love, she lives for love alone. But soon summer is followed by rain tide. Under darkened skies with storm and thunder raging, Savitri remembers the fatal date set by Narad, and the passing of the hours becomes dreadful to her. She feels each day a golden page torn out from her too slender book of love and joy. She sees those around her happily unconscious of the impending doom, but she can find no peace and stillness within. She has only her violent heart and passionate will to support her through her ordeal. But she reveals nothing on the surface. Those around her see the child they love – they cannot see the suffering woman within. She continues to serve Satyavan’s parents and will not allow any task to others that her woman’ strength might do. But within her grief and fear becomes the food of mighty love. In the dark night as the rainy season approaches its end Savitri’s intense grief overshadows her human heart.

[Text by Shraddhavan]

Book 7 Canto 1 – The Joy of Union; the Ordeal of the Foreknowledge of Death and the Heart’s Grief and Pain

[From: A LUMINOUS FLAME – Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri by Dr. Prema Nandakumar]

Now we enter the great debate. Fixed Fate or Free Will? Is everything in our life pre-ordained? Or, is there a means through which we can change the course of life? Man has a choice, of course but then is his preference itself pre-destined? Does it mean he has no real freewill? And yet, above all such hopes and dupes is one undeniable presence: God’s Grace. If Rishi Narad has mentioned the destined end of Satyavan after one year, it does not matter. Just as fate is inexhorable, Grace too is unstoppable. This is the message of Sri Aurobindo.

How does one invoke divine grace? How do we strengthen ourselves as vessels that may be fit to receive the outpouring of God’s blessing? The ‘Book of Yoga’ ponders over this subject. Savitri had married Satyavan and had come to live in the forest hermitage on the outskirts of the Shalwa kingdom. She does not speak of the forecast to anyone. Outwardly, no one knows the turbulence within her, as she leads the life of a perfect daughter-in-law of the house.

The sorrowing woman they saw not within.
No change was in her beautiful motions seen:
A worshipped empress all once vied to serve,
She made herself the diligent serf of all,
Nor spared the labour of broom and jar and well,
Or close gentle tending or to heap the fire
Of altar and kitchen, no slight task allowed
To others that her woman’s strength might do.
In all her acts a strange divinity shone:
Into a simplest movement she could bring
A oneness with earth’s glowing robe of light,
A lifting up of common acts by love.

With Satyavan she has been blessed with a beautiful married life. Though often she feels tempted to share the terrible burden within her, she suppresses the thought because she loves Satyavan and would not cause him any anguish. Even though she did not tell him, he did sense that something was not alright, for he may have noticed an occasional shadow in her face.

All of his speeding days that he could spare
From labour in the forest hewing wood
And hunting food in the wild sylvan glades
And service to his father’s sightless life.

When he was so full of love, how could Savitri cloud their joy of togetherness?

She realizes that he may not be terrified by death but would besurely distressed to leave his parents helpless and Savitri in sorrow. At the same time she begins to think of the future course of action. There is always the easy way out, the time-honoured if illogical custom of suttee. But she rejects that strange happiness of ‘sahagamana’, as her maternal heart knows that “those sad parents still would need her here”.

Sri Aurobindo gives a perfect picture of dharma-kaama, the loving togetherness of a married couple which is akin to the yoga of divine love, “the very essence of Yoga”. For the highest point of bhakti-yoga is that of a two-in-one experience, the Nayaka-Nayaki or Radha-Krishna bhava. As he points out in The Synthesis of Yoga:

“Here the one thing asked for is love, the one thing feared is the loss of love, the one sorrow is the sorrow of separation of love; for all other things either do not exist for the lover or come in only as incidentsor as results and not as objects or conditions of love … Love is a passion and it seeks for two things, eternity and intensity, and in the relation of the Lover and Beloved the seeking for eternity and for intensity is instinctive and self-born. Love is a seeking for mutual possession, and it is here that the demand for mutual possession becomes absolute.”

The conjugal love of Savitri and Satyavan comes in the great tradition illumined by Sita and Rama, Damayanti and Nala, Sukanya and Chyavana. It was as though Savitri and Satyavan could never be parted, so close they had come in body and soul:

For when he wandered in the forest, oft
Her conscious spirit walked with him and knew
His actions as if in herself he moved;
He, less aware, thrilled with her from afar.

In Vyasa’s Upakhyana it is mentioned that as the year drew to a close, Savitri performed a tri-rattra vrata. She fasted, prayed and stood unmoving like a log. When the third night of the vrata spends itself out, Savitri pours a libation to the Agni, completes the rites and bows to the elders in the forest hermitage. All of them bless her with a long married life. It is only after the completion of the vrata that Savitri accompanies Satyavan to the forest.

Sri Aurobindo has transformed the tri-ratra vrata into the Book of Yoga, pointing out some of the hidden significances of Savitri’s preparation to face the ordeal. We now turn to this rich, practical and time-tested yoga followed by Satyavan’s beloved.

Book 7 Canto 2
The Parable of the Search for the Soul

As Savitri sits awake next to sleeping Satyavan, repressing her grief through the silent hours, a mighty Voice speaks from her being’s summits: “Remember why you came on earth; find your soul, your hidden self. In silence seek God’s meaning in your depths, then change mortal nature into the divine nature. Cast away thought and sense; let God’s vast Truth awaken within you. Then you will see the Eternal embodied in the world, and recognise Him everywhere; everything shall fold you into his embrace. Conquer your heart’s throbs; let your heart beat in God. Then you shall embody my Force and vanquish Death.” Savitri continues to sit in her motionless posture. She looks into herself and seeks for her soul. The Cosmic Past is revealed to her in a series of dream images: the first steps of Creation, the Soul embodying itself in Matter, Matter slowly learning to think, Space filled with seeds of Life, and the human Creature being born in Time. She sees that the hidden spirit has done all this in her and marked her out as the centre of a vast scheme to mould humanity into God’s own shape. For this vast spiritual change to come about, the heavenly Psyche must be revealed in common nature, rule its thoughts and fill the body and life. She sees that the lower nature still occupies too large a place in her: it veils her self and must be pushed aside to find her soul.

[Text by Shraddhavan]

Book 7 Canto 2 – The Parable of the Search for the Soul

[From: A LUMINOUS FLAME – Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri by Dr. Prema Nandakumar]

The days pass by and Savitri notes the steady movement towards the destined day of fate. Her nights are sleepless and she wonders whether there was any purpose in her coming to this earth. Then a voice issuing out of her Ajna Chakra (the space above the brows) is heard which seems to prod her into action. “Arise, O soul, and vanquish Time and Death”. She was not born to lament, but lead and deliver the human family into freedom from pain and death! Savitri answers in her trance that she sees no purpose in trying to challenge destiny. Whatever will be will be! But the voice within makes it clear that she should act for she was born to make a big change in earth life:

Shall there be no new tables, no new Word,
No greater light come down upon the earth
Delivering her from her unconsciousness,
Man’s spirit from unalterable Fate?

The voice tells her: “Find out thy soul, recover thy hid self.” The questioning mind is silenced and Savitri takes up the challenge. She enters yogic silence, sitting “rigid in her gold motionless pose” beside the sleeping Satyavan. She would now find out what she, the human is capable of and the divine powers that have been imbedded in the human being. First she has an understanding of the evolutionary past:

In the indeterminate formlessness of Self
Creation took its first mysterious steps,
It made the body’s shape a house of soul
And Matter learned to think and person grew;
She saw Space peopled with the seeds of life
And saw the human creature born in Time.

Soon Mind became a powerful conqueror of the impossible. With the help of fancy and imagination, Mind has created enormous territories for Man to rule. What a glorious achievement! “Man in the world’s life works out the dreams of God”! Yet, the same Mind has produced indescribable evil too. This is how we see man capable of good as well as evil. Unfortunately, man readily turns to evil. He becomes a child of darkness and the result is seen everywhere. If we had Chenghiz Khans and Aurangazebs in the past, and Hitler and Mussolini in the last century, we have the army of terrorists destroying temples and hotels and innocent persons by thousands all over the world.

Hell’s companies are loosed to do their work,
Into the earth-ways they break out from all doors,
Invade with blood-lust and the will to slay
And fill with horror and carnage God’s fair world.
Death and his hunters stalk a victim earth.

We are able to map the past of man, all the yesterdays since life blossomed out of Matter. At present he is gifted with a mighty instrument called Mind with which he can build a glorious future. Unfortunately, the same Mind can also mislead him into the wrong path. As Tyagaraja asked: When there is the well-laid royal road, chakkani raja margamu, why should man take to bye ways that lead you nowhere but to filth? For man to take the right path, he must have a holistic view of life, its past, present and future:

Above us dwells a superconscient God
Hidden in the mystery of his own light:
Around us is a vast of ignorance
Lit by the uncertain ray of human mind,
Below us sleeps the Inconscient dark and mute.

However, this need not mean that we have no guidelines to mapour future. After all, it is not mere “blind Nature-Force” that has given birth to this creation but a divine consciousness with a blue-print in hand:

Our greater self of knowledge waits for us,
A supreme light in the truth-conscious Vast:
It sees from summits beyond thinking mind,
It moves in a splendid air transcending life.
It shall descend and make earth’s life divine.

The life divine cannot be achieved by stage-magic. Man has to aspire for it and strive for it consciously. The tapasya to achieve it must be there, one-pointed and unceasing. Certainly the deva prasaada wil lbe gifted by the Supreme. Going deep within the Mind and entering the deeper Mind which hold’s the divine spark, we will gain the needed light to undertake the future course of action.

Our inner Mind dwells in a larger light,
Its brightness looks at us through hidden doors;
Our members luminous grow and Wisdom’s face
Appears in the doorway of the mystic ward
When she enters into our house of outward sense,
Then we look up and see, above, her sun.

Sri Aurobindo thus gives a tremendous boost to us assuring us that in spite of a million setbacks, man has continued to evolve into the sunlight. Savitri realizes that she need not fear Death after all for it has no reality about it. It is now time for her to find her soul that has been imprisoned in man, and obscured by the curtain of Mind. So Savitri prepares to reach into a deeper meditation.

Book 7 Canto 3
The Entry into the Inner Countries

Savitri enters into a hushed stillness away from the busy hum of the Mind, everything disappears and leaves her consciousness blank; but when she returns to her conscious self, she finds herself unchanged, a lump of Matter, an ignorant mind, limited by the material world. She tries to find a way out of the tangle where the surface being seems to be the soul. Then again a Voice speaks to her from the secret heights saying: “You are not seeking the soul for yourself alone, but for the whole of humanity. Man, being human, follows in God’s human steps. You must accept the darkness and sorrow of humankind to bring them Light and Bliss. You must discover your heaven-born soul in the material body.” Savitri surges out of her physical body, stands a little outside of it, looks into the depths of her subtle being and there in its heart divines her secret Soul. She knocks and presses against the door that guards the inner Life but is opposed by threatening guardian powers; but by persisting she is able to enter the inner worlds, one by one: a realm of dense subtle Matter; then a chaotic space of where Life dips into subconscient darkness; then a flood of violent uncontrolled Life-Force. Further, a realm where the Life force is chained and controlled by Mind; then a country of fixed mind which claims to offer the single Truth, the eternal Law. She encounters a crowd of divine soul-messengers hurrying to save the world. One of them points to a deep background of the inner world, saying “There you will find the deep cavern of your secret soul.” She moves on.

[Text by Shraddhavan]

Book 7 Canto 3 – The Entry into the Inner Countries

[From: A LUMINOUS FLAME – Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri by Dr. Prema Nandakumar]

In this canto, we enter into a crucial movement in Savitri’s yoga which is directed towards her own true self. Essentially, it is the journey when one seeks to know oneself. Ramana Maharishi asked his disciples to seek answer to one vital question: “Who am I?” This is not done by merely studying the Vedas and Shastras but by using one-pointed concentration to find out from where the I-activity arises. Sri Vasishta Ganapati Muni’s Sri Ramana Gita gives a clear idea of a step-by-step progression in this Self-inquiry taught by Ramana Maharishi where one moves in the inner countries of the mind.

“Turning away with effort all the activities from the sensory objects one should take his stance in absolute deliberation, unchanging, without any motive whatsoever. That is in brief the means of knowledge of one’s true form. Only by that effort the great inward vision will be accomplished.”

In Vyasa’s Upakhyana we had seen Savitri performing the tri-rattra vrata during which she stood like a block of wood (kaashtabhuteva), which of course indicates the posture of a yogi sitting still. To turn away from the outer world completely is no easy task but Savitri accomplishes it with ease. Sri Aurobindo takes up this cue and presents a parable in his epic poem, an allegory giving visual forms to the various powers which are latent in us, the possibilities of growth in consciousness and the innumerable hurdles that block our way to know the truth about ourselves. The moment she turns away from the outer to the inner, she is met by a certain unnerving blankness. Suddenly a Voice tells her that she is engaged in the quest not merely for saving Satyavan from Death. She is actually an incarnation come down to suffer so that she can save man’s future:

Man, human, follows in God’s human steps.
Accepting his darkness thou must bring to him light,
Accepting his sorrow thou must bring to him bliss.
In Matter’s body find thy heaven-born soul.

Savitri is ready for the challenge. She is confronted first by a dark gate. A porter’s voice warns her: “Back, creature of earth, lest tortured and torn thou die.” Serpents and goblins appear before her but she is not frightened and walks in boldly. The moment she shows such firmness, all the figures and voices vanish. She now moves through various layers of the inner world, much like King Aswapati who went up the worlds-ladder. There is life where senses rule without any order or aim, leading to chaos. It is a world of confusion. There is no peace nor satisfaction. Pandering to our senses can never bring us lasting joy and calm of mind. To get out of the pull of the senses, and quieten the mind, Savitri seeks the help of nama-japa:

Hour after hour she trod without release
Holding by her will the senseless meute at bay;
Out of the dreadful press she dragged her will
And fixed her thought upon the saviour Name;
Then all grew still and empty; she was free.
A large deliverance came, a vast calm space.

Savitri now enters the world where the senses are controlled by certain ideals, like the ideal of the Samurai. This too can be overwhelming:

Its fiery towers of dream built on the winds,
Its sinkings towards the darkness and the abyss,
Its honey of tenderness, its sharp wine of hate,
Its changes of sun and cloud, of laughter and tears,
Its bottomless danger-pits and swallowing gulfs,
Its fear and joy and ecstasy and despair,
Its occult wizardries, its simple lines
And great communions and uplifting moves,
Its faith in heaven, its intercourse with hell.

This is man’s heroic age, the scenario of the Mahabharata.

There are people who follow dharma and those who are intent on adharmic acts and almost everyone is egoistic and look derisively at those who are cowardly. One can admire this world by parts. But life here is not reared on pure Truth. There are hesitations, half-truths, self-delusions. Reading Sri Aurobindo one cannot help thinking of Mahabharathan characters like Bhishma and Aswaththama. It is flawed valour, defective heroism, a faulty life-style. Here “Truth stares and does her works with bandaged eyes.” When Savitri refuses to be tempted by this pomp and colour and moves on, she comes to the region where Reason is the ruler. It is orderly but soul-less. She moves away from this self-satisfied world too, seeking her soul.

On her way to discover her innermost soul, she is met by “strange goddesses with deep-pooled magical eyes.” She calls out:

O happy company of luminous gods,
Reveal, who know, the road that I must tread,—
For surely that bright quarter is your home,—
To find the birthplace of the occult Fire
And the deep mansion of my secret soul.

One of them tells her that they have emerged from her own soul: “We are thy will and all men’s will towards Light.” It is man’s will-power that alone makes him move forward with conviction and helps him achieve success. Let Savitri move forward and she would surely gain what she is seeking. And so it comes to be when she meets the powers from her soul:

A few bright forms emerged from unknown depths
And looked at her with calm immortal eyes.

Book 7 Canto 4
The Triple Soul-Forces

As she ascends towards the dwelling-place of her soul, deep in inner mind Savitri meets three Mother figures, each claiming to be her secret soul. The first is the Mother of Divine Compassion, who bears and comforts the suffering of all living things, but lacks the strength to save them or change the world. From the lower levels of nature she is echoed by the Man of Sorrows, full of self-pity and hatred. Then Savitri encounters the Mother of Might whose task is to help the unfortunate, save the doomed, to reward the strong; and to battle against the hostile forces. Her echo is the arrogant Ego of this great world of desire, who claims earth and the wide heavens for the use of Man. Last she meets the Mother of Light, the power which works for God and leads humanity through death to reach immortal life. She is echoed from the depths by the ignorant mind which refuses to progress. Savitri listens to the Madonnas and their echoes. She promises each of the Mothers that when she has found her soul she will return and bring them what they are missing. To the Mother of Pity, she will bring Strength, so that her love shall become the powerful bond uniting all humankind. To the Mother of Strength, she will bring Wisdom and Light: fear and weakness will be abolished from human lives and the cry of the ego will fall silent. She tells the Mother of Light that she must nurse man’s aspiration for the eternal and bring God down into his body and life. When she returns, the divine family will be born on earth; then there shall be peace and joy, happy force and light in all the worlds.

[Text by Shraddhavan]

Book 7 Canto 4 – The Triple Soul-Forces

[From: A LUMINOUS FLAME – Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri by Dr. Prema Nandakumar]

Savitri has remained in one-pointed meditation, passing layer after layer of her inner being till she has reached the entry-point to her soul. One’s soul, a power, has many facets too. Sri Aurobindo reveals three major facets that are found in the human soul: Suffering (pity), Might (works and force) and Light (joy and peace).

As Savitri moves upwards in the inner countries of her mind, she is first met by a woman in “a pale lustrous robe.”

A rugged and ragged soil was her bare seat,
Beneath her feet a sharp and wounding stone.
A divine pity on the peaks of the world,
A spirit touched by the grief of all that lives,
She looked out far and saw from inner mind
This questionable world of outward things,
Of false appearances and plausible shapes,
This dubious cosmos stretched in the ignorant Void,
The pangs of earth, the toil and speed of the stars
And the difficult birth and dolorous end of life.

This is the very image of maternal love, karuna, quite often helpless in the face of evil that attacks humanity. The Mother of Sorrows tells Savitri that she is indeed her soul for how can humanity exist without the mother’s suffering, anxiety, pity and hope? Even as the Mother completes her submission, the Man of Sorrows cries out from the depths that there is no future for mankind for it looks as though “to enjoy my agony God built the earth.” Savitri assures the Mother of Sorrows that because of her, man continues to make his ascent towards higher realms and that she would come back with an accession of strength to help man in his journey.

As Savitri moves upwards, she is met by the Mother of Might, an image of Durga. The Mother assures Savitri that she scourges man so that he can attain his goal, while the Dwarf Titan, the rakshasa in man counters her saying that it is the demon in man which is succeeding and will one day supersede God too. Savitri tells them that strength is necessary, but it has to be tempered with pity and in any case the two powers are not enough for achieving the great future. There is a need for other powers too for a man’s soul to achieve supermanhood.

Now Savitri is met by the Mother of Light. It is all delight here and a great calm. This Mother encourages man with dreams and visions and with great virtues and ideals. The Mother is countered by the Mental Man who says Reason is all though he cannot spell out his aim either. All that he can say is that dreaming of future possibilities is simply a dream and no more. It is best to leave things as they are, and go through the circle of days as it has been laid down for man’s destiny:

Human I am, human let me remain
Till in the Inconscient I fall dumb and sleep.
A high insanity, a chimaera is this …
To think that God lives hidden in the clay
And that eternal Truth can dwell in Time,
And call to her to save our self and world.

But this tamasic listnessness is criminal! After all, Reason by itself cannot achieve anything worthwhile, if all the time it is drowned in facts and figures and hankers after scientific proof. Thus Sri Aurobindo presents each power of the soul, Pity, Strength and Peace as a thesis-antithesis pair so that we can go deeper into the problem on hand. Savitri, as she had given the assurance earlier to the Mother of Sorrows and Mother of Might, now guarantees the Mother of Light that she is very much needed for humanity:

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.
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.

This being the truth, generally purblind man continues to ignore her gifts and is impervious to the worth of love against hate. This only means that man’s soul has not integrated all its powers. When its streng this to the fore, it tends to forget the need for love and pity. When it is moved by pity, it remains helpless to save people in distress. When engaged in helping man dream, it lacks the willpower to make the dreams come true. So where lies the mystery of an integral power that can include all this and more and help man transcend his present limitations? Savitri is firm in her faith that this is indeed possible. So she moves further on in her spiritual adventure after assuring the Madonna of Light:

“One day I will return, His hand in mine,
And thou shalt 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.”

Book 7 Canto 5
The Finding of the Soul

As Savitri moves onward seeking the mystic cave where her soul dwells at first enters into a night of God. Her self was nothing, God alone was all. Returning to her inner space, she feels a blissful nearness to the goal. Dawn emerges from moonlit twilight and Day arrives. Savitri recognises the mystic cavern in the sacred hill, the dwelling of her secret soul. Entering its great rock doors she passes through room after room, past great figures of gods and symbolic scenes. She feels her identity with all these divine beings. Through a tunnel dug in the last rock she emerges into a house all made of flame and light. Crossing a wall of doorless living fire, there suddenly she meets her secret soul. That immortal being puts out a small portion of herself into each human being to face the ordeals of earthly life. Here in this chamber of flame and light the secret deity and its human part meet, recognise each other and become one.

Savitri finds herself once more human, seated beside sleeping Satyavan. In intense concentration she calls to the Mighty Mother to enter her body and make it Her home. A face and form, a living image of the original Power comes down into her heart and as its feet touch it a mighty movement rocks the inner space. A flaming Serpent rises up to the crown of her head touching each or her subtle centres with its mouth as it stands erect; they all awaken, laughing, full of light and bliss. Each contains an image of the Mighty Mother. Each takes on its divine function, transformed.

[Text by Shraddhavan]

Book 7 Canto 5 – The Finding of the Soul

[From: A LUMINOUS FLAME – Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri by Dr. Prema Nandakumar]

The authors of long philosophical poems, cast in the epic size, find it always difficult to sustain reader-interest, and hence they pile up the narrative with a lot of action. Dante’s Divine Comedy comes readily to mind. Though the poem is backed by the Christian theology of St. Thomas Aquinas, Dante sees to it that there are plenty of colourful events which happen in the three Parts of the poem: Hell, Purgatory and Paradise. Sri Aurobindo has no such external action brought in to his epic. As we have already seen, Aswapati’s has been essentially dhyana yoga. But by exteriorizing the thought-currents during Aswapati’s meditation, Sri Aurobindo has given a sense of continuous movement to the poem. The major image of a World-stair which is structured like a temple-chariot; the people who are found in the various worlds including in Night, and the image of Aswapati at prayer do give us solid foundations to hold onto, even as we try to understand the thought-movements of the yogi.

In the same way, Savitri’s yogic journey is also one of meditation. But figures like the Mothers of Sorrows, Might and Light do help us to station ourselves in certain segments of thought. Having recognized that our soul has many mansions which include karuna, shakti andsaundarya, we are now prepared to move onwards with Savitri as she quests for the “soul’s mystic cave.” What she encounters first is “a night of God”. She cannot see around her what has been familiar to her experience so far such as knowledge, wisdom, truth. Where is she? What is here that can assure her of the quest being valid? What is she? What is her soul? Is she the girl Savitri, or is she nowhere in this vast of God?

As might a shadow walk in a shadowy scene,
A small nought passing through a mightier Nought,
A night of person in a bare outline
Crossing a fathomless impersonal Night,
Silent she moved, empty and absolute.

This experience is brief. Soon she experiences a sweetness in the air, there is a glow around, the sky grows brilliant and she finds the mystic cave of her “secret soul”. The image Sri Aurobindo presents is breathtaking. Two golden serpents are wrapped around the lintel, a huge eagle, the Garuda, is seen above as if guarding the secret soul with its “conquering wings”. At the cornices there are doves. Inside the cavern are innumerable images of cosmic gods sculpted in stone. Sculptures or pictures, it is obvious to Savitri that each and every symbol is an image of reality, pronouncing and promoting the presence of God. Intuitively understanding floods upon her:

As thus she passed in that mysterious place
Through room and room, through door and rock-hewn door,
She felt herself made one with all she saw.
A sealed identity within her woke;
She knew herself the Beloved of the Supreme:
These Gods and Goddesses were he and she:
The Mother was she of Beauty and Delight,
The Word in Brahma’s vast creating clasp,
The World-Puissance on almighty Shiva’s lap,—
The Master and the Mother of all lives
Watching the worlds their twin regard had made,
And Krishna and Radha for ever entwined in bliss,
The Adorer and Adored self-lost and one.

In this vast oneness, a special kind of advaita where Savitri knows she is Savitri and yet recognizes herself as One with her Lord, it is all bliss. When the sense of separativity is gone, where then is the need for individual worry, sorrow or pain? The oneness becomes total when Savitri sees the Supreme Shakti, a Power, “a Sun of which all knowledge is abeam.” Beyond this presence of a Power, it is all “formless and pure and bare”.

She now easily glides thorugh a tunnel that appears before her where she comes to a hall of flame and light. Here she meets her secret soul, “a being no bigger than the thumb of man”. Our scriptures have given us this image too. Neela thoyada madhyasthaa, viddhullekhevabhasvaraa! This is “the unwounded and immortal self” with which Savitri becomes one. Now Sri Aurobindo presents a magnificent description oft he Kundalini at the base rising as “a flaming Serpent” to cross the chakras in Savitri’s body for meeting the Supreme Shakti at the sahasrara. The way of the Kundalini is shown to us too:

In the flower of the head, in the flower of Matter’s base,
In each divine stronghold and Nature-knot
It held together the mystic stream which joins
The viewless summits with the unseen depths,
The string of forts that make the frail defence
Safeguarding us against the enormous world,
Our lines of self-expression in its Vast.

Power now flows downward, enriching all the limbs of Savitri. With this, man’s future is assured for Savitri knows that she is no more a mortal body but a body that is the dwelling place of the immortal soul. This immortal brilliance within has the power to burn down Death! “One man’s perfection still can save the world” is the assurance with which we close this phase of Savitri’s yoga.

Book 7 Canto 6
Nirvana and the Discovery of the All-Negating Absolute

After finding her soul and uniting with it Savitri is serenely happy and her happiness seems to spread all around her. She no longer sees the dark shadow of Fate above Satyavan’s head, but a mystic sun, indicating a long and full life. But one night as she is feeling her joy in his embrace as a bridge connecting earth and heaven, a dark abyss suddenly opens up beneath her heart. A denser darkness than the Night envelops heaven and the earth and threatens to abolish her body and soul. Surging it her inner world laid waste. But the Voice of Night is followed by a greater Voice of Light after. It tells her “Accept to be small and human on earth so that humanity may discover its soul in God. Consent to be nothing and none; cast off your mind, step back from form and name. Annul your individual self so that only God may exist for you.” Savitri obeys the voice and looks deeply into herself, leaving everything to the play of nature, observing everything that rises up, but mostly the origin of her thoughts. Then she rises up out of mind and dedicates everything in her to God’s calm. Then everything grows silent. She becomes a silent spirit pervading silent Space. Everything she perceives seems unreal, but she is aware of a Reality which does not allow itself to be perceived. That only is Real. Her individual existence will be dissolved, or she will become whatever that Supreme Reality decides.

[Text by Shraddhavan]

Book 7 Canto 6 – Nirvana and the Discovery of the All-Negating Absolute

[From: A LUMINOUS FLAME – Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri by Dr. Prema Nandakumar]

With the showers from the Sahasrara’s nectar, a new glow suffuses Savitri both within and without. And yet, this is not enough. The first steps of yoga have been successfully completed but more remains to be done. A glorified body is needed to help the great transformation. Savitri’s soul which has gained the Supreme’s nectar has now a cosmic comprehension. She has a sense of being safe and proceeds with her life in the hermitage as before. It is a lovely scene that we watch, the domestic felicity of Savitri and Satyavan:

This bright perfection of her inner state
Poured overflowing into her outward scene,
Made beautiful dull common natural things
And action wonderful and time divine.
Even the smallest meanest work became
A sweet or glad and glorious sacrament,
An offering to the self of the great world
Or a service to the One in each and all.

However, one day she feels the invasion of an emptiness. It rises from her own thoughts and challenges her: “I am Death and the dark terrible Mother of life.” Despite her feeling of being one with the cosmos, she must needs end in a “blank Eternal”! For such is the finality of death. Suddenly she feels hollowed out, very weak. But her opening approaches in yoga are not in vain. From within her the soldiers of Light open up and silence the negation, at the same time reminding her that she has now to take on a greater role and must not be confined with her personal sorrow. She has to take on her hands the world’s pain as a whole. Sri Aurobindo describes the superhuman personality of such a yogin who wants to relieve the world from death and pain:

His soul must be wider than the universe
And feel eternity as its very stuff,
Rejecting the moment’s personality
Know itself older than the birth of Time,
Creation an incident in its consciousness,
Arcturus and Belphegor grains of fire
Circling in a corner of its boundless self,
The world’s destruction a small transient storm
In the calm infinity it has become.

Savitri is ready for her new role. In her meditation, she creates an absolute condition of silence of the mind. She does not allow thoughts to stray in and is able to watch herself as if she is another person. There are manifold revelations. She is able to go to the origins of thought itself:

In our unseen subtle body thought is born
Or there it enters from the cosmic field.
Oft from her soul stepped out a naked thought
Luminous with mysteried lips and wonderful eyes;
Or from her heart emerged some burning face
And looked for life and love and passionate truth,
Aspired to heaven or embraced the world
Or led the fancy like a fleeting moon …

There was nothing now that Savitri could not see easily, so swift, divine and unerring was her sight. What cannot be seen by the ordinary eye is now made visible to her at the spiritual level.

She felt the movements crossing unknown minds;
The past’s events occurred before her eyes.
The great world’s thoughts were part of her own thought,
The feelings dumb for ever and unshared,
The ideas that never found an utterance.

Savitri watches everything with care and recognizes the human mind to be a tremendous machine. However, it has but a brief life on earth and ceases its workings when the body dies. But the original thoughts live on to enrich creation by passing through the human mind down the centuries.

He listens for Inspiration’s postman knock
And takes delivery of the priceless gift
A little spoilt by the receiver mind
Or mixed with the manufacture of his brain;
When least defaced, then is it most divine.

Savitri makes a firm attempt to move away from her human mind with its limitations and dedicates herself “to God’s timeless calm”. She feels totally at peace with herself now. But then, is this calm but a speechless waiting for a total annihilation? It cannot be! This life on earth is not a Negative Calm but a creative Delight of Existence. Hence we look with hope towards the future:

Even now her splendid being might flame back
Out of the silence and the nullity,
A gleaming portion of the All-Wonderful.
A power of some all-affirming Absolute,
A shining mirror of the eternal Truth
To show to the One-in-all its manifest face,
To the souls of men their deep identity.

Book 7 Canto 7
The Discovery of the Cosmic Spirit and the Cosmic Consciousness

Inwardly Savitri has become a mighty nothingness, but outwardly no one notices any change in her: to everyone she is the same perfect Savitri, she did the things that she had always done, pouring out her sweetness and light on the world around, but her mortal ego has perished in God’s night, only a body is left, a figure of unreal reality. She feels that at any moment she could cease to exist, and the universe pass away. But this does not happen, her being does not travel towards nothingness but feels some high and hidden Secrecy and at night when she is alone with Satyavan she turns towards a veiled silent Truth high above. One night a voice speaks from her heart. As it speaks everything changes within her and around her. The world of unreality ceases to exist. All was conscious. That indecipherable Reality is no longer mysterious, unknowable, distant; it is her self, the self of all, the consciousness of everything that lives, it is Timelessness and Time, the Bliss of formlessness and form, it is all Love and the One Beloved’s arms. All becomes a single immensity. Her spirit sees the world as living God, one with herself and the foundation of everything here. Savitri feels all Nature’s happenings as events in her, all beings move and think in her, the superconscient is her native air, Infinity her movement’s natural space. Eternity looks out from her on Time.

[Text by Shraddhavan]

Book 7 Canto 7 – The Discovery of the Cosmic Spirit and the Cosmic Consciousness

[From: A LUMINOUS FLAME – Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri by Dr. Prema Nandakumar]

When Savitri was being revised in its present form (Forty-nine cantos divided into Twelve Books), Sri Aurobindo gave no title to Book VII, canto vii. When I began writing my thesis on Savitri under the guidance of my father, Prof. K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar, it was found that the epic poem might appear overwhelming for the examiners, since the epic was not yet known in the western world. Half a century ago, doctoral dissertations were submitted to scholars in England and a student of English literature chose a subject from English literature. Mine being the first attempt to study Savitri, my father decided that the thesis must include a canto-by-canto summary as well. This was exciting, welcome work, because Sri Aurobindo had given apposite titles for the cantos which gave an insight into the contents. When I came to this canto, I did not have the heart to leave the title-space blank, for this canto describes Savitri’s gaining universal consciousness. After what can only be termed as meditative silence, my father gave the title ‘Rose of God’ for the canto which I used for the dissertation. ‘Rose of God’ happens to be the title of a famous poem by Sri Aurobindo. Subsequently, a new edition of Savitri published by Sri Aurobindo Ashram gave the present title.

The meditations of Savitri which form the Book of Yoga do not impinge upon the day to day life she leads in the forest. As far as others were concerned, she is “the same perfect Savitri”. She does not speak much but when she does, she is admired by the sages of the forest. One day when she sits beside Satyavan who is sleeping, a voice rises in her assuring her that this world is not unreal nor is it meant to end in nothing. She finds all to be Real and this Real is her own self and the self of all, in a divine linkage:

It was her self, it was the self of all,
It was the reality of existing things,
It was the consciousness of all that lived
And felt and saw; it was Timelessness and Time,
It was the Bliss of formlessness and form.
It was all Love and the one Beloved’s arms,
It was sight and thought in one all-seeing Mind,
It was joy of Being on the peaks of God.

Life is not for mourning about death. One must recognize the joy of living on earth! People with an all-encompassing vision as Savitri’s would know that death is not all, nor is it permanent in the scheme of evolution. This creation was “one single immense reality”, and so too is time which is a seamless stretch. This Omnipresent Reality which indeed pulsates with the Delight of Existence has been explained in detail by Sri Aurobindo in his great book, The Life Divine. From the book we also gain an understanding of Savitri’s state at this juncture:

“For in the cosmic consciousness Mind and Life are intermediaries and no longer, as they seem in the ordinary egoistic mentality, agents of separation, fomenters of an artificial quarrel between the positive and negative principles of the same unknowable Reality. Attaining to the cosmic consciousness Mind, illuminated by a knowledge that perceives at once the truth of Unity and the truth of Multiplicity and seizes on the formulae of their interaction, finds its own discords at once explained and reconciled by the divine Harmony; satisfied, it consents to become the agent of that supreme union between God and Life towards which we tend.”

Such a person is a mahatma, one who has realized that all is God, Vasudeva sarvam iti, says the Gita. Savitri is seen as this mahatma now for she sees everything as the Supreme: “Her spirit saw the world as living God; It saw the One and knew that all was He.” There was nothing that was not God and this included herself. So how can one separate life from death, the body from the spirit? This creation is not moving towards an inevitable nothingness, a common feeling all of us have when we confront death in this life. We say it is an irretrievable situation for one steps into the unknown, nothingness, the Dark. But as Sri Aurobindo has clearly said: “The Unknown is not the Unknowable, it need not remain the unknown for us, unless we choose ignorance or persist in our first limitations.” Savitri refuses to be bound by ignorance. Her intense meditation has taught her this lesson that death is not all, nor is it the end. She had found her identity with God. If Vasudeva is ‘sarvam’, it does not exclude me from the ‘sarvam’! Sri Aurobindo concludes this canto with a magnificent evocation of Savitri’s cosmic consciousness and how she had found her identity with the universal Divine:

What seemed herself was an image of the Whole.
She was a subconscient life of tree and flower,
The outbreak of the honied buds of spring;
She burned in the passion and splendour of the rose,
She was the red heart of the passion-flower,
The dream-white of the lotus in its pool.

She had come as the golden ladder which would help man’s soul to climb up to God. Having attained this state, she was verily like the Goddess Mahasaraswati as she rises to slay the demons Sumbha and Nisumbha in Devi Mahatmyam:

From this she rose where Time and Space were not;
The superconscient was her native air,
Infinity was her movement’s natural space;
Eternity looked out from her on Time.

Book 8 Canto 1
Death in the Forest

On the fateful day, at dawn, Savitri looks back into her past and relieves all that she has been and done. She bows down to the Goddess Durga and prays. Then she approaches the Queen mother and obtains her consent to accompany Satyavan to the forest for the first time since she came to the hermitage. Satyavan and Savitri go into the forest, hand in hand, he happily showing her all the richness of the forest, calling out to the birds and speaking of all the things he loved there. Savitri, dreading his impending Fate, treasures every word he says. Satyavan starts his work, hewing food for the hermitage fires of altar and kitchen, happily singing snatches of a sage’s chant on the Conquest of Death and the Slaying of Evil. But as he works, he is overcome by terrible pain. He throws away the axe and cries out to Savitri. She takes him in her lap beneath a strong and shady tree, trying to relieve his pain. But his colour changes and he begs her to kiss him as he dies. She presses her lips upon his, but he cannot respond. She grows aware that they are no longer alone. An awful hush has fallen on the place; there is no cry of birds, no voice of beasts. A terror and anguish fills the world. Savitri sees dreadful eyes, and the Shadow of an uncaring god. She knows that visible Death is standing there and Satyavan has passed from her embrace

[Text by Shraddhavan]

Book 8 Canto 1 – Death in the Forest

[From: A LUMINOUS FLAME – Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri by Dr. Prema Nandakumar]

So far we have been proceeding steadily, Book after Book, canto after canto. There is a sudden break in Book Eight. At the start of this Book we had to take up the story from the second Canto of Book One. Sri Aurobindo had planned three cantos for this Book but only the third canto was completed by him “from an earlier version and rewritten at places.” We have already noted how the tri-rattra vrata by Vyasa’s Savitri had been transformed into the extended Book of Yoga by Sri Aurobindo and how Savitri’s meditational yoga brings her realizations of her secret self, of cosmic consciousness, and finally, of supracosmic or transcendent consciousness.

Nothing of vital importance in Vyasa’s upakhyana which describes Savitri and Satyavan going to the forest on the fateful day and the latter’s death, has been omitted by Sri Aurobindo in the third canto that we have. So what was it that he wanted to say in the first two cantos of Book Eight? It is vain to speculate about this point though it is quite possible Sri Aurobindo had wished to give an introduction to the coming of Death in philosophical and spiritual terms.

We had read in the first two cantos of Book One how Savitri had woken up in the hermitage on the dawn that heralded the day when Satyavan was to die. We get back to the same moment at the start of the present canto, as Sri Aurobindo recapitulates the opening of Savitri:

Now it was here in this great golden dawn.
By her still sleeping husband lain she gazed
Into her past as one about to die
Looks back upon the sunlit fields of life
Where he too ran and sported with the rest,
Lifting his head above the huge dark stream
Into whose depths he must for ever plunge.
All she had been and done she lived again.

So typical of an Indian wife, with a firm faith in the Divine seen in the arch a form, Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri salutes the Divine Mother first. Since she would be literally facing a terrible battle, Sri Aurobindo gives the form of Durga to this archa murti.

Then silently she rose and, service done,
Bowed down to the great goddess simply carved
By Satyavan upon a forest stone.
What prayer she breathed her soul and Durga knew.
Perhaps she felt in the dim forest huge
The infinite Mother watching over her child,
Perhaps the shrouded Voice spoke some still word.

For it is well known to us that Durga is the giver of victory in battle. At the start of the Kurukshetra war, even before Krishna delivers the Gita, he asks Arjuna to pray to Mother Durga. Arjuna gets down from his chariot, folds his hands and utters a wonderful Durga Stotra in thirteen verses:

Namasthe siddhasenaani aarye mandaravaasini
Kumaari kaali kaapaali kapile krishnapingale

Sri Aurobindo had immense faith in praying to Durga (there is one in Virata Parva also) and himself wrote a great Durga stotra in Bengali. With this silent prayer of Savitri, victory is assured for her also. Savitri then goes to her mother-in-law seeking permission to accompany Satyavan to the forest. The elderly lady blesses the couple and they wander in the forest happily holding hands.

Satyavan chatters happily for this is the first time when Savitri has come with him to the woods and he shows her the various trees and birds of the forest. All the time Savitri is worried that this might be the last word she would hear him speak. Even as Satyavan gets to his work, hewing a tree, he gets tired swiftly. He tells his wife that he should rest for a while as a great pain is tearing through him. She sits down and puts his head on her lap, so that he may sleep comfortably. Unable to bear the pain he cries out her name and she bends down to kiss him:

And even as her pallid lips pressed his,
His failed, losing last sweetness of response;
His cheek pressed down her golden arm. She sought
His mouth still with her living mouth, as if
She could persuade his soul back with her kiss;
Then grew aware they were no more alone.
Something had come there conscious, vast and dire.
Near her she felt a silent shade immense
Chilling the noon with darkness for its back.

There is bleak silence everywhere. Even the animals and birds have fallen silent. The earth is now veiled by a nameless terror and sorrow. What is going to happen? What is happening? Is this the final scene of the cosmic drama of evolution? Has all the life lived so far nothing but an empty dream? All that was seen, touched and enjoyed but a mere illusion? The reality about the horror of death is now conveyed in two lines:

She knew that visible Death was standing there
And Satyavan had passed from her embrace.

Book 9 Canto 1
Towards the Black Void

Savitri is left alone in the huge wood, Satyavan’s corpse on her breast. She does not yet stand up to face the dreadful god. Her soul leans out over the body she loved. Aware of his being still near to hers, she clasps the lifeless form as if to hold his spirit back within its frame. Suddenly a great change comes over her: she becomes aware of her high source and a great Force from it descends into her and sinks into her soul, taking the symbol form as of a great winged angel standing above her, silent and calm. She is filled with heavenly strength. Calmly she lays the dead body on the ground and stands up to meet the god. The two oppose each other with their eyes. Death orders Savitri to release her hold on Satyavan’s soul, but she does not respond, until he says, “Woman, thy husband suffers.” Then she withdraws her heart’s force and stands up, ready for whatever will come next. Death stoops down and touches the body. Another luminous Satyavan rises from it and stands between Savitri and the God. Satyavan moves away. Death follows and Savitri moves behind eternal Death into the perilous spaces beyond. At first she follows them in her body, but then feels that they will escape from her. She flames out of her body, leaving it on the ground. When she returns to awareness the three of them are still moving forward towards a gateway of dark rocks. When Satyavan reaches that borderline, he turns and looks back at Savitri. Death warns her to turn back but she does not respond. Her soul stands up like a shaft of fire and light against the midnight blackness piled in front of them.

[Text by Shraddhavan]

Book 9 Canto 1 – Towards the Black Void

[From: A LUMINOUS FLAME – Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri by Dr. Prema Nandakumar]

While Sri Aurobindo follows closely the upakhyana of Vyasa, there is a major shift in his approach to the presence of Yama in this legend. In Vyasa, Yama is Dharmaraja, a gracious God. The noose in his hand is no doubt frightening but he is described as divine, bright as the sun, adityasama tejasam. The conversation between them is actually very noble and full of gracious thoughts. Yama is increasingly pleased with Savitri’s words of wisdom and grants her boons. When giving back to her Satyavan’s life at last, he blesses the couple with a long and prosperous life. This approach is further reinforced by Sri Vishnu Purana and Sri Garuda Purana; in the Mahabharata itself we have Vidura as the codifier of law and is seen as an image of wisdom who is Yama’s progeny.

However, Sri Aurobindo has made a major change in the presentation of Yama. The two aspects of the Supreme, as Death-Ignorance and Life-Wisdom are presented as two separate entities. Lest we get confused by familiar usages, Sri Aurobindo does not use the term Yama at all. First we see the aspect of the Supreme as Death-Ignorance who takes away Satyavan’s life and argues with Savitri, and refuses to release Satyavan, “the soul of the world”. In this canto we watch Savitri pursuing Death who is carrying away the life of Satyavan.

As she clasps the body of Satyavan, the ajna chakra is opened:

“The veil is torn, the thinker is no more:
Only the spirit sees and all is known.
Then a calm Power seated above our brows
Is seen, unshaken by our thoughts and deeds,
Its stillness bears the voices of the world …
A Force descended trailing endless lights;
Linking Time’s seconds to infinity,
Illimitably it girt the earth and her:
It sank into her soul and she was changed.

Savitri gently lays Satyavan on the ground, looks at him, and then “like a tree recovering from a wind”, she gets ready for the battle with the unknown presence:

Something stood there, unearthly, sombre, grand,
A limitless denial of all being
That wore the terror and wonder of a shape.
In its appalling eyes the tenebrous Form
Bore the deep pity of destroying gods;
A sorrowful irony curved the dreadful lips
That speak the word of doom. Eternal Night
In the dire beauty of an immortal face
Pitying arose …

Sri Aurobindo says that Death’s shape was “nothingness made real” and now the Woman and Death faced each other unflinchingly. The voices of aeonic experience cry out to her to give up the dead, weep for a while and withdraw back into life and forget it all. Such is human life on earth, after all, nothing more than a water bubble! But she rejects the advice, refuses to accept that Satyavan is dead, and gets up as she had done everyday at dawn for one whole year, to get on with her daily chores. Today also she has a task to do and that is to struggle with Death and win the day.

She rose and stood gathered in lonely strength,
Like one who drops his mantle for a race
And waits the signal, motionlessly swift.

As she stands erect, death leans down, draws away Satyavan’s life. “Another luminous Satyavan” comes out of the body on the ground and moves forward, followed by Death. Savitri follows Death. All this is done in utter silence. For a while they keep moving, and seem to be close to the earth. But soon they cross the life-plane and Savitri is worried that Satyavan and Death may vanish from her vision. Hence her spirit, “outwinging like a mass of golden fire” soars at Satyavan, leaving behind her body on earth. She is now more than the mortal Savitri for she has become an image of Will-power.

Now they move in chill worlds bare of vegetation. Satyavan looks back at Savitri with his “wonderful eyes”, but Death lashes out at her:

O mortal, turn back to thy transient kind;
Aspire not to accompany Death to his home,
As if thy breath could live where Time must die…

The gods do not care for the brief loves of human beings which is necessarily limited by the time-span. It is best she goes back to her place and does not trespass into these dire areas. But Savitri does not answer Death, and just keeps on moving, never losing sight of Satyavan.

A statue of silence and mighty will,
Against midnight’s dumb abysses piled in front
A columned shaft of fire and light she rose.

Book 9 Canto 2
The Journey in the Eternal Night
and the Voice of the Darkness

Savitri first steps forward into the gloom. The three move on as if in dream, out of mortal time: present, past and future drown in nothingness as a world of shadows swallows them up. There Mind cannot think, breath cannot breathe, the soul cannot remember or feel itself. The immense refusal of the eternal No falls on Love and Knowledge and the heart’s delight. Savitri moves blindly through the gulfs, all alone in the terrible Vastness. She can no longer see the figure of Death nor her luminous Satyavan; a silent gulf falls between them and she falls into abysmal loneliness. For many long hours she endures, alone in the anguish of the void. But she is not vanquished. She becomes aware of a faint inextinguishable gleam, pale but immortal flickering in the gloom: the light of her own soul. Once more she can hear the footsteps of the god as Satyavan’s form grows into a luminous shadow. Death threatens Savitri but she, aware of her own immortality, does not respond. Then he tells her, “If you can still hope and still want to love, return to earth. Do not hope to win Satyavan back. But you deserve some reward. Choose a life’s hopes for your deceiving prize.” Savitri answers him: “Give if you must, or, if you can, refuse: give me whatever Satyavan wished for in his life but did not have.” Death bows his head in agreement, but then warns Savitri again to return to earth. But she will not turn back. The three figures move on through the dimness.

[Text by Shraddhavan]

Book 9 Canto 2 – The Journey in the Eternal Night and the Voice of the Darkness

[From: A LUMINOUS FLAME – Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri by Dr. Prema Nandakumar]

The frightful journey brings the three to the “chill dreadful edge of Night” where even heaven is like “a cloudy brow of menace”. It is absolutely silent everywhere. Satyavan’s spirit is being drawn away by Death, and so the real test is for Savitri. Dare she enter this space which is Nothing personified? If she does, she will have to give up all her earthly help, including her mind that can think and make her act. Sri Aurobindo uses a memorable image to convey the dread of the situation:

A curtain of impenetrable dread,
The darkness hung around her cage of sense
As, when the trees have turned to blotted shades
And the last friendly glimmer fades away,
Around a bullock in the forest tied
By hunters closes in no empty night.

But Savitri will not give up and her willpower compels back hope. Her soul is able to overcome the pain and even feel around for joy, while Satyavan’s steps become audible to her consciousness. This is a novel experience for Death and he immediately warns Savitri against trespassing into his territory. All the same his words are deceptively humble. Why should she get Satyavan back into earthlife which is one long pain? Anityam, asukham lokam! But she should not go back empty-handed, for her resolve has elicited his admiration. So he would like to give her some gifts in appreciation of her incandescent love. But Savitri is made of sterner stuff. She will not accept that Death is final. She calls him a “black lie” and will not give up her pursuit of Satyavan’s life. In the meantime death can please himself if he wants by granting what Satyavan had wished for in his life. Since Satyavan had wished for Dyumathsena’s eyesight and kingdom, Death grants them easily enough.

In the meantime, Savitri continues her pursuit. To Death’s remonstrance she answers firmly: “My will too is a law, my strength a god. I am immortal in my mortality.” She is not afraid, does not tremble nor shed tears in the presence of Death. They keep traveling in the dark spaces while Death speaks to her of the finality of death. Death is the real god, the Supreme! Once one crosses into the realm of Death, there is no Savitri nor Satyavan. All that she can now do is to get back and cling to these ideas of immortality that she seems to cherish. Savitri’s answer is a red badge of courage that we need when crisis strikes our lives:

O Death, who reasonest, I reason not,
Reason that scans and breaks, but cannot build
Or builds in vain because she doubts her work.
I am, I love, I see, I act, I will.

Now Death changes track and speaks to Savitri for the need of full and right knowledge. Love is impermanent. To know this is wisdom. But Savitri rejects this approach also. What is the point of talking about knowledge without having gone through the stage of love? Mere knowledge is but straw! In fact it is love that teaches one of the indwelling universal, it is love that makes one build bridges to the Supreme. Knowledge is very, very vast, but the loving heart can gain all knowledge in a trice. Love has taught her what she is, living with Satyavan has given her an idea of her true nature and the reason for her being born on earth.

Love in me knows the truth all changings mask.
I know that knowledge is a vast embrace:
I know that every being is myself,
In every heart is hidden the myriad One.
I know the calm Transcendent bears the world,
The veiled Inhabitant, the silent Lord:
I feel his secret act, his intimate fire;
I hear the murmur of the cosmic Voice.
I know my coming was a wave from God.

It is not surprising that even Death becomes speechless for awhile when faced with such impregnable will power of a mere mortal. But it is the body which is mortal, the Divine that resides in the body makes it immortal, and that ‘atma’ cannot be cut up by arrows nor burnt up by fire! Savitri also tells him that the Supreme who resides in all and makes the human being love humanity has actually come here “veiled by death”. Man is only veiled by death, not conquered. The Supreme has given man the gifts of mind and heart to conquer death. Yes, one needs both: knowledge and love to annihilate the incubus called death which is suffocating earth’s children.

Death, thinks his place is impregnable. He appears to think that Savitri’s words are no more but a child’s prattle and so keeps silent. Sri Aurobindo evokes the Rudra aspect in a brilliant passage:

He stood in silence and in darkness wrapped,
A figure motionless, a shadow vague,
Girt with the terrors of his secret sword.
Half-seen in clouds appeared a sombre face;
Night’s dusk tiara was his matted hair,
The ashes of the pyre his forehead’s sign.

But Savitri is not afraid of the figure. She keeps following “through the dumb unhoping vasts” armed by her incandescent love for Satyavan.

Book 10 Canto 1
The Dream Twilight of the Ideal

There is no change, no hope of change as they continue to drift through the despairing darkness and deepening gloom. An ineffectual gleam of suffering light dogs their steps like the remembrance of some lost glory. It grows, but seems unreal there; yet it continues to haunt that chill stupendous realm of Nothingness. But eventually Light conquers even by that feeble beam. It drills through the blind dead mass; a golden fire comes in and burns the heart of the Night. The intolerant Darkness draws apart until only a few black remnants stain that Ray. Still a great dragon body sullenly loomed, opposing the slow struggling Dawn, but soon it flees down a grey slope of time. Then all the sorrow of the night is dead and Savitri finds herself in a happy misty twilit world filled with exquisite suggestions and vague scenes, vague spirits, vague melodies, elusive forms; nothing remains fixed but everything breathes an unearthly appeal and sweetness. Satyavan, moving ahead of her, seems the centre of all this magical charm. Even the dreadful majesty of Death’s face does not darken the lustre of those skies but makes the delicate beauty of that world yet more imperative by contrast. Savitri passes through this realm besieged by delightful bodiless touches, like a thought amidst other floating thoughts. She enjoys its dream-happiness but remains in possession of her soul. Her spirit above sees all, but continues to live for its transcendent task, immutable like a fixed eternal star.

[Text by Shraddhavan]

Book 10 Canto 1 – The Dream Twilight of the Ideal

[From: A LUMINOUS FLAME – Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri by Dr. Prema Nandakumar]

It is now clear to us that Sri Aurobindo’s Death is the static God of ignorance, illusion and destruction. His Savitri is the human being evolved into the image of the transcendent divine. The first round of their confrontation is just now over as a draw. Death has not been able to frighten Savitri back to the earth; Savitri has not got back the life of Satyavan.

What is the basis of Sri Aurobindo’s conception of the Night giving place to a twilight period? The Veda speaks of the various phases of nature as day and night and a morning twilight and an evening twilight. According to Sri Aurobindo “the central conception of the Veda is the conquest of the Truth out of the darkness of Ignorance and by the conquest of the Truth the conquest also of Immortality.” But then, this conquest is done at a steady if unrelenting pace. That is the way of Nature’s action. Disturbing Prakriti in a violent manner will help only the evil forces. This is the reason why Sita Devi refused Hanuman’s offer of taking her to Rama from Lanka. If the thing were done in a flash, what use the victory? It would be one dark deed set against another, seeking victory by running away in stealth. Rama has to come with his forces, wage a bitter battle and win in the end, precisely because the darkness of Ignorance is a very difficult endeavour. Darkness is wily, its hidden agenda is not known. This is the logic behind Savitri journeying through Eternal Night and now through the Double Twilight.

As we open the canto we see Savitri, Death and Satyavan’s spirit journeying in a “house of void”, a world of nothingness. Sri Aurobindo’s English effortlessly invokes the movement from darkness to deeper darkness:

In this black dream which was a house of Void,
A walk to Nowhere in a land of Nought,
Ever they drifted without aim or goal;
Gloom led to worse gloom, depth to an emptier depth,
In some positive Non-being’s purposeless Vast
Through formless wastes dumb and unknowable.

Is this illusory Maya? Or Vishnu Maya which is yet no illusion, and is “a veil of the Absolute”? So it must be, and this is how the Superconscient looks when it is quiescent, asleep. If so, Death is not an end; it is a “stumbling stride” necessary to move from one birth to another. As Savitri’s immense faith like “a golden fire” rejects Night and Nothingness, the darkness around her begins to withdraw. The enemies of the dawn of knowledge flee. Sri Aurobindo’s description of the sandhya is marvelous: There is a morning twilight of the gods;

Miraculous from sleep their forms arise
And God’s long nights are justified by dawn.
There breaks a passion and splendour of new birth
And hue-winged visions stray across the lids,
Heaven’s chanting heralds waken dim-eyed Space.

This is a big change and most welcome for Savitri who had been contending with the directionless pathways of darkness. Now there is a constant change and she is “surprised by a blind joy”. Willingly she allows herself to glide in this world which reminds one of the Vedic scenario of brilliances that play a gentle hide-and-seek with one’s hopes.

A ripple of gleaming wings crossed the far sky;
Birds like pale-bosomed imaginations flew
With low disturbing voices of desire,
And half-heard lowings drew the listening ear,
As if the Sun-god’s brilliant kine were there
Hidden in mist and passing towards the sun.

But as Savitri moves on, the atmosphere becomes clearer and her faith gets firmed up. Interestingly enough, the very presence of Death here seemed to help her sustain her as the bright atmosphere seemed brighter because of the contrast offered by Death:

In this beauty as of mind made visible,
Dressed in its rays of wonder Satyavan
Before her seemed the centre of its charm,
Head of her loveliness of longing dreams
And captain of the fancies of her soul.
Even the dreadful majesty of Death’s face
And its sombre sadness could not darken nor slay
The intangible lustre of those fleeting skies.

Such is the full flowering of faith and surrendering which makes Tyagaraja exclaim: kapatamau maatalela kammanainadhi! Such is the blaze of faith that pain itself is now “a trembling undertone of bliss”. However, Savitri does not get lost in this pleasing feeling, her soul does not go into inaction. Her spirit bears it, overcomes it to move on boldly to face Death since her aim is the recovery of Satyavan to the world of living:

Above, her spirit in its mighty trance
Saw all, but lived for its transcendent task,
Immutable like a fixed eternal star.

Book 10 Canto 2
The Gospel of Death and
Vanity of the Ideal

Then the Voice of Death peals out, abolishing hope, making the lovely ideal world seem no longer like a morning twilight full of hope and promise but rather the last farewell gleam of a dying day. He tries to convince Savitri that all Ideals are nothing but misleading wishful thinking and can never be realised. He proclaims, “The Ideal cannot live either in heaven nor on earth; it is a bright delirium of human hope. You are worshipping ideal and eternal love, but that is only a myth: love is a yearning of your body, a glorious burning of your nerves. It soon passes and leaves two incompatible egos divided by their conflicting thoughts. Death saves you from this and saves Satyavan. He is safe now; do not call him back to the poor petty life of animal Man. Go back to your world. One day you too will experience my endless peace and happy Nothingness.” But Savitri replies, ”I will not allow your falsehoods to slay my soul. My love is not a hunger of the heart nor a craving of the flesh. It came to me from God and returns to him. Move on, O Death: I do not belong to this world. I cherish God the Fire, not God the Dream.” But he replies, “You are creature of earth and must obey the earthly law. Enjoy what joy Life allows you, suffer what you must of its toil and grief. You too will come at last to my long calm night of everlasting sleep.”

[Text by Shraddhavan]

Book 10 Canto 2 – The Gospel of Death and Vanity of the Ideal

[From: A LUMINOUS FLAME – Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri by Dr. Prema Nandakumar]

Even as Savitri remains single-minded in her pursuit of Death to get back Satyavan to life, Death seeks to confuse her by making use of the twilight zone through which they are traveling. Look, is this not an image of life on earth? Dreams, dreamy living, an Arial’s feast and no more! It is vain to talk of ideals, love and immortality for all this is mere imagination.

This angel in thy body thou callst love,
Who shapes his wings from thy emotion’s hues,
In a ferment of thy body has been born
And with the body that housed it it must die.
It is a passion of thy yearning cells,
It is flesh that calls to flesh to serve its lust;
It is thy mind that seeks an answering mind
And dreams awhile that it has found its mate;
It is thy life that asks a human prop
To uphold its weakness lonely in the world
Or feeds its hunger on another’s life.

The sophistries of Death are endless, pointing to the way our own minds work when confronted by the sudden death of a person known to us. Everything seems vain planning and daydreaming! Nothing more than words and words, thoughts and thoughts! What use invoking a God’s name? Is there a God at all! Bound by Time which changes every moment of earthly life, man has no sovereign space to offer for the residence of god, if indeed there is a god. There is no point in saying that God has come down as divine beings, incarnations that have been above the merely human existence. But, could they gain a permanent residence on earth? No! For earth-bound man has rejected them all in the course of time:

The Avatars have lived and died in vain,
Vain was the sage’s thought, the prophet’s voice;
In vain is seen the shining upward Way.
Earth lies unchanged beneath the circling sun;
She loves her fall and no omnipotence
Her mortal imperfections can erase,
Force on man’s crooked ignorance Heaven’s straight line
Or colonise a world of death with gods.

Man will not change, he does not have the will-power to change. As for Savitri’ professed love of Satyavan with which she tries to get him back to life, is this love immortal? Is she not mistaking a mere physical hunger for something divinely inevitable? No doubt physical togetherness looks rosy and joyous in the youth of life, but will Savitri have the same love for an aged Satyavan? Even in her, the passion would burn into ashes before long, such is the incorrigible nature of time. Death with a seemingly unassailable logic says that as far as Savitri is concerned, if Satyavan had lived, love for him would have died. So why lament Satyavan’s death? At least now her love for Satyavan would continue for a while and soon get replaced by other loves, other passions. She should know that a long married life with Satyavan would be a purposeless adventure into the inane. Time kills love:

Where once the seed of oneness had been cast
Into a semblance of spiritual ground
By a divine adventure of heavenly powers
Two strive, constant associates without joy,
Two egos straining in a single leash,
Two minds divided by their jarring thoughts,
Two spirits disjoined, for ever separate.
Thus is the ideal falsified in man’s world;
Trivial or sombre, disillusion comes,
Life’s harsh reality stares at the soul.

Well, Death has done a favour to Savitri and Satyavan by taking away the latter’s life, and thus saved them from this stultifying picture! How very gracious and generous of him! Pat comes Savitri’s reply which demolishes Death’s argument like a pack of cards.

But I forbid thy voice to slay my soul.
My love is not a hunger of the heart,
My love is not a craving of the flesh;
It came to me from God, to God returns.

Savitri’s answer is pointed, direct. It is specious reasoning to say that ideal love is not possible on earth. How about the gopis of Brindavan? Krishna keeps returning to the earth and makes ideal love-life possible again and again. As far as Savitri is concerned, Krishna has come to her wearing the shape of Satyavan. Death cannot accept this argument for he thunders that it is mind which has given rise to concepts like soul. Self-deception and no more! The creations on the earth have to return to earth and disintegrate as dust for he is Death, the Destroyer. He brings the canto to a stern conclusion glowering like an image of infernal arrogance:

Nay, is not all thou art and doest a dream?
Thy mind and life are tricks of Matter’s force.

Book 10 Canto 3
The Debate of Love and Death

Savitri replies “You are proclaiming misleading and destructive half-truths. I answer you with Truth that saves. This world of Matter has been made by the One, starting from Nothingness and Night. His creative Power made Matter into the body of the Bodiless. Now we are seeing an unfinished world. In a small seed is hidden a great tree; in a tiny gene, a thinking being is contained; dumb material Nature has become conscious. How can you say that there is no spirit, no God? I have claimed the living Satyavan from you for our work. Our lives are God’s messengers here on earth.” He replies, “You are human. Be the animal that Nature has made you.” But Savitri says, “My humanity is a mask of God, I am the thinking instrument of his power. My heart sees and feels the one Heart beat in everything. My heart can carry the grief of the universe and never lose its peace. It can drink all Delight and never lose the calm of the deep Infinite.” “Are you really so strong and free?” Death demands. “Then I will give you whatever brief earthly joys you ask; only Satyavan can never again be yours.” Savitri replies, “Give what you can, or what you must. I claim nothing but Satyavan’s life.” He promises her that she shall have whatever the living Satyavan desired in his heart for Savitri, then again asks her to return to earth. But she answers, “Your promise cannot be fulfilled and earth cannot flower if I return without Satyavan.” She moves on through the dimness, Death in front of her, and Satyavan in front of Death, his destiny still undecided.

[Text by Shraddhavan]

Book 10 Canto 3 – The Debate of Love and Death

[From: A LUMINOUS FLAME – Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri by Dr. Prema Nandakumar]

If Death had hoped to have given a final statement, he was soon proved wrong. As the present canto opens, Savitri decides to give him a simple lesson in evolution. All life is transitory, decay and death have been inevitable. But there has been a strong evolutionary movement upwards that cannot be denied either. This is an adventure of consciousness, no less. Where there had been an immense Nothingness, a spirit came to live and flower million-fold. After watching this creation, how can we say it came out of Nothing? What was the ‘something’ that was within this Nothing? If that ‘something’ has been the creative energy which has been progressively active, mayn’t we hope for a greater future as well? Savitri’s argument moves as keenly as that of a lawyer arguing out a case in the court:

Now through Mind’s windows stares the demigod
Hidden behind the curtains of man’s soul:
He has seen the Unknown, looked on Truth’s veilless face;
A ray has touched him from the eternal sun;
Motionless, voiceless in foreseeing depths,
He stands awake in Supernature’s light
And sees a glory of arisen wings
And sees the vast descending might of God.

If it is all so clear, why then is Death speaking so? It is because he is looking on a creation which is still unfinished. The evolutionary spiral is still moving upwards. After all, he knows that the huge banyan tree has its beginning in a tiny seed! It takes time but the “little element in a little sperm” does become a conqueror like Alexander and a sage like Vyasa in the course of time. And how silly to ask for the proof of God’s existence? The presence of Prakriti is enough to assure us of the presence of the Purusha at the back:

A glory is the gold and glimmering moon,
A glory is his dream of purple sky.
A march of his greatness are the wheeling stars.
His laughter of beauty breaks out in green trees,
His moments of beauty triumph in a flower;
The blue sea’s chant, the rivulet’s wandering voice
Are murmurs falling from the Eternal’s harp.
This world is God fulfilled in outwardness.

One is reminded of the famous line of Gerard Manley Hopkins, the Catholic poet: “The world is charged with the grandeur of God.” Savitri does not deny the existence of dark patches in this brilliant creation. The dark forces do prevent the emergence of light. There is a constant battle between good and evil, love and hate, life and death. If there is some good on the anvil, the malevolent forces pervert it immediately. Look at the idea of God as an image of love! If you have the magnificent Tantra approach, there comes in the vamachara approach to give a bad name to everything. All the same, the original push towards planes higher than the mind has not been lost.

A secret air of pure felicity
Deep like a sapphire heaven our spirits breathe;
Our hearts and bodies feel its obscure call,
Our senses grope for it and touch and lose.
If this withdrew, the world would sink in the Void;
If this were not, nothing could move or live.
A hidden Bliss is at the root of things.

This urge is one of Ananda and that is the nature of the Supreme. It is Ananda that creates, that hopes for a greater dawn, for a heaven on earth. This Ananda within refuses Death its triumph. Death! Be not proud! She and Satyavan have come down to the earth to transform it into a heaven by the sheer power of their love.

For Love is the bright link twixt earth and heaven,
Love is the far Transcendent’s angel here;
Love is man’s lien on the Absolute.

It is a tremendous passage, lengthy but vitaminising the aspirantin every line of it. However, Death is not prepared to give in, as yet. Once again Death accuses Savitri of building an imaginary world of the future. All this is sheer mystic mumbo-jumbo! Man is after all human, and must submit to death and disintegration. So is Savitri who is but a mortal. But she flings back:

Yes, I am human. Yet shall man by me
Since in humanity waits his hour the God,
Trample thee down to reach the immortal heights,
Transcending grief and pain and fate and death.

Death screams that man is made of Matter which disintegrates and can never be reconciled and become one with the Spirit. When Savitri replies that her heart is stronger than the power of Death, he challenges her: “Show me thy strength…” But it is now obvious to him that she has wrested the initiative. For as they proceed further in the twilight zone, he finds that she has now become the leader:

All still compelled went gliding on unchanged,
Still was the order of these worlds reversed:
The mortal led, the god and spirit obeyed
And she behind was leader of their march
And they in front were followers of her will.

Book 10 Canto 4
The Dream Twilight of the Earthly Real

The scene changes as they move into another symbol world, one which reflects the harsh realities of life on earth: dark industrial landscapes filled with toiling multitudes, a tramp of armoured life and the monotonous hum of unchanging thoughts and acts, ever recurring and repeated. Death’s voice again pursues the ignorant march of suffering Time. He proclaims, “Where Nature does not change, man cannot change. Mind is man, he cannot move beyond thought and Mind can never see the soul of God.” He tells Savitri, “Turn to God, forget love, forget Satyavan, annul yourself in God’s endless peace and bliss. You must die to yourself to reach God. I, Death, am the gate to Immortality.” She replies, “How shall I seek rest in endless peace? I am carrying in me the Force of the Mighty Mother and the flaming silence of her heart of love. A lonely freedom cannot satisfy a heart that has grown one with every heart. I represent the aspiring world. I ask my spirit’s freedom for earth and men.” Death answers Savitri, “Reveal your power, then I will give Satyavan back to you. Or if the Mighty Mother is with you, show me her face, so that I can worship her.”

Savitri does not reply. A mighty transformation comes over her. The Immortal’s lustre which had lit her face overflows making the air a bright sea. The Incarnation removes its veil. Savitri stands there, a little figure in infinity, yet seems the very house of the Eternal, as if the world’s centre was her very soul and all wide space its outer robe. The Power that reigns from her being’s summit, the divine Presence sheltered within her lotus secrecy, comes down into her, centre by centre, until the thousand-hooded Serpent Force blazes upwards and clasps the World-Self above. Eternity looks into the eyes of Death. A Voice is heard in the stillness: “I hail you, almighty Death, Darkness of the Infinite. You are my shadow and my instrument. Live a while longer as my instrument. But now stand aside and leave the path of my incarnate Force. Release the Soul of the World, Satyavan.” Unconvinced, Death continues to resist. The Mother’s intolerable Force weighs on him; His body is eaten by her Light, his Spirit devoured. Recognizing that defeat is inevitable, he flees from her dreaded touch. The dire universal shadow disappears. Savitri and Satyavan are alone, but neither stirs; an invisible translucent wall rises between them. Nothing moves. Everything waits for the inscrutable Will of God to be revealed.

[Text by Shraddhavan]

Book 10 Canto 4 – The Dream Twilight of the Earthly Real

[From: A LUMINOUS FLAME – Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri by Dr. Prema Nandakumar]

As mortals in daily contact with death and the destruction of the best in life by terrorists and power-mongers, we have not found it difficult to understand the arguments of Death. But it is Savitri’s stainless radiance that exudes faith and will power that holds us in thrall. Death has argued that what we consider reality in life is only the shadow of what we imagine to be the ideal in creation. However, he has not succeeded in disturbing the resolute Savitri who is determined to return to life only with Satyavan.

If Savitri does not accept that earthly life is no more than “the twilight of the ideal”, Death would now speak to her of “the twilight of the real.” As they move towards a downward slope, the atmosphere is all hopelessness and frustration, a repetition of achievements that come to nought. Death takes advantage of this situation to break down Savitri’s resistance for she wants a divine life on earth:

Forgetting love, forgetting Satyavan,
Annul thyself in his immobile peace.
O soul, drown in his still beatitude.
For thou must die to thyself to reach God’s height:
I, Death, am the gate of immortality.

Savitri tells Death that this world created by God may be “a language mispronounced, misspelt”. Yet one cannot deny its truth. It is no illusion. Patiently she explains to him that even he cannot deny the existence of God for such has been the reality of the evolutionary structure which is there for all to see. If creation has come so far, what prevents it from going further and conquering death as well?

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?

Death is non-plussed for a moment but soon renews his argument. Man as he is today is not worth the toil and sacrifice of Savitri. Why should she break the law imposed on mankind by the Supreme? Such a rebellious act could prove disastrous for everyone concerned. “Use not thy strength like the wild Titan souls!

Touch not the seated lines, the ancient laws,
Respect the calm of great established things.

Savitri says sharply that if such disturbance went against the dictat of the Supreme, there would have been no evolution at all! Man is not to be constrained by the “dull fixity that binds inanimate things”. Death makes one last stand. Man might have immortal longings, but the truth is he is still a beast with some powers of the mind added. Where is the “living body of truth”? Is it in Savitri?

Or if she dwells within thy mortal heart,
Show me the body of the living Truth
Or draw for me the outline of her face
That I too may obey and worship her.
Then will I give thee back thy Satyavan.
But here are only facts and steel-bound Law.
This truth I know that Satyavan is dead
And even thy sweetness cannot lure him back.

Savitri treats this pronouncement with the contumely it deserves and assures Death that she knows he is but the black shadow of the Supreme’s light. In a long passage, Sri Aurobindo explains minutely the importance of faith and the certainty of the divinization of earth. Even Death is a portion of the Supreme and this all-knowledge helps one to overcome death. Death throws down a challenge. Savitri is a frail mortal and yet speaks of man containing continents of strength to usher in the new world. Is it all verbal jugglery or can she demonstrate her force:

“But where is thy strength to conquer Time and Death?”

Savitri speaks no more. The time for action is come. Without taking the help of traditional imagery, Sri Aurobindo shows Savitri as a blaze of Truth-light in a brilliant evocation of the Divine’s cosmic form, viswarupa. The Princess, the young wife of Satyavan, “the little figure in infinity” is now seen as the Avatar:

Her forehead’s span vaulted the Omniscient’s gaze,
Her eyes were two stars that watched the universe.
The Power that from her being’s summit reigned,
The Presence chambered in lotus secrecy,
Came down and held the centre in her brow
Where the mind’s Lord in his control-room sits;
There throned on concentration’s native seat
He opens that third mysterious eye in man …

Before Death can pull himself up in the presence of this mighty blaze encased in Silence, he is devoured. Accepting his defeat, he flees vanishing into the Void. “And Satyavan and Savitri were alone.”

Book 11 Canto 1
The Eternal Day: The Soul’s Choice and the
Supreme Consummation

God’s everlasting day surrounds Savitri; she sees all Nature marvellous, without fault. Above her rise level after level of higher worlds; into those heights her soul went floating up like a bird in spiral flight. Drowned in a sea of splendour and bliss, she turns and sees the living source of their charm and delight, a glorious godhead, and recognises him as the One whom she has faced as Death and Night. The two look at each other, Soul seeing Soul. The divine Being invites her to heaven: “Ascend, O soul, into your blissful home! You are immortal: rise up to heavenly Bliss and lose yourself in infinite Satyavan.” But Savitri answers, “I know that I can lift man’s soul to God. I know that Satyavan can bring immortality to earth. Allow us to accomplish the task that you have given us.” The reply comes: “Savitri, you are my force, my vision, my will and my voice. If you will not wait for Time and God, arise on a ladder of greater worlds to the infinity where no world can be. There, stamp your will on Time.” The heaven-worlds vanish in spiritual light and she hears: “Choose, spirit, your supreme choice, not given again.” She is offered the Peace of extinction in Eternity; Oneness with Infinity; Refuge in supreme Power, withdrawn and still; the exquisite slumber of divine Bliss. Savitri instead asks for the divine Peace, Oneness, Power and Bliss for Earth and Men.

After a silence, a still blissful Voice is heard: “Your thoughts are mine, I have spoken with your voice. I give to earth and men everything you have asked for. And since you have refused my timeless Peace and Calm, since you have chosen to share earth’s struggle and pain and leaned in pity over earth-bound men, I join You to my Power of Work in Time. Thou shalt raise the Earth-Soul to Light and bring down God into the lives of men. For ever love, O beautiful slave of God. Descend to life with him your heart desires. O Satyavan, O luminous Savitri, I sent you forth of old. You are my Force at work to raise up earth’s fate. He is the soul of man climbing to God. When the hour of the Divine approaches, the Mighty Mother shall take birth in Time and God shall be born in human clay in forms made ready by your human lives. This earth shall be stirred with sublime impulses and humanity shall awaken to its deeper self. Nature shall fill with a mightier Presence, the Spirit shall take up the human play, this earthly life shall become the life divine.” The music of that voice ceases and the Soul of Savitri plunges down through unseen worlds amidst joyful voices and triumphant cries as she holds the Soul of Satyavan within her breast. Great wings close above her and she finds herself buried in the hospitable softness of the Earth-Mother’s breast. A Spirit looks upon Destiny; a gaze of undying Love falls, a key turns in a mystic lock of Time; a power leans down, a happiness finds its home: over wide earth broods the infinite Bliss.

[Text by Shraddhavan]

Book 11 Canto 1 – The Eternal Day: The Soul’s Choice and the Supreme Consummation

[From: A LUMINOUS FLAME – Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri by Dr. Prema Nandakumar]

“A marvelous sun looked down from ecstasy’s skies”, opens this canto. At once all pains, frustrations, disability and death flee from our heart. However, there is still a translucent veil that divides Satyavan and Savitri. But the conclusion for the epic action is not yet done. It is not as if Satyavan wakes up a living person and both of them get back to earth.

It is in this canto that Sri Aurobindo posits the most important part of the struggle. The struggle with oneself that is inevitable, the overcoming of the last temptation is yet to take place. Savitri finds herself in an atmosphere which is all light, felicitous, holy. Sri Aurobindo describes an ideal world where matter and spirit have come together in a perfect union.

Then on what seemed one crown of the ascent
Where finite and the infinite are one,
Immune she beheld the strong immortals’ seats
Who live for a celestial joy and rule,
The middle regions of the unfading Ray.

So totally divine is this world that even the god she faced as Death is now transfigured into “a secret splendour”. This “mystery of a nameless Name” is nevertheless recognized as a four-fold Being, Virat (sculptor), Hiranyagarbha (thinker), Chaitanya Ghana (creator) and Ananda (omnipotent repose). As Death in its present transformation meets Savitri’s gaze, “Soul sees soul in equality and understanding”. She now hears a voice. Would it not be wise to stay here for all time and reap the fruits of her struggle? Become a changeless god for all time!

Ascend, O soul, into thy blissful home.
Here in the playground of the eternal Child
Or in domains the wise Immortals tread
Roam with thy comrade splendour under skies
Spiritual lit by an unsetting sun,
As godheads live who care not for the world
And share not in the toil of Nature’s powers:
Absorbed in their self-ecstasy they dwell.

Immediately she rejects the thought. She has rejected eternal Night; she would decline the everlasting Day as well. The placement in heaven as a god is not attractive, after all, for that lacks the adventure of the spirit. In any case, would she abandon her children?

Earth is the chosen place of mightiest souls;
Earth is the heroic spirit’s battlefield,
The forge where the Archmason shapes his works.
Thy servitudes on earth are greater, King,
Than all the glorious liberties of heaven.

The God who has been Night earlier and Day now, who is Death as well as Life is pleased, of course that Savitri is not tempted nor is deterred by the magnitude of the task of divinizing earth. He directs her to arise to the infinitudes of the spirit which she does. Once again she is asked to choose between life on earth and an eternal stay in the heavens. Four times she is asked and repeatedly she chooses earthly existence. Instead of life in the eternal day, she would like to have the Lord’s peace, oneness, energy and Ananda. The Supreme now blesses her at length and says that her engagement with such a high ideal of a life divine on earth would receive his total backing.

Descend to life with him thy heart desires.
O Satyavan, O luminous Savitri,
I sent you forth of old beneath the stars,
A dual power of God in an ignorant world,
In a hedged creation shut from limitless self,
Bringing down God to the insentient globe,
Lifting earth-beings to immortality.

Savitri is to be the divine Force at work “to uplift earth’s fate” and Satyavan to be his soul that climbs from Night to ‘the supernal light of Timelessness.” A time will come in due course marking “the end of Death, the death of Ignorance”. Before that happens, Truth will have to be sown on earth and the evolution take its right course. The day of exceeding Mind also would come:

The Spirit shall look out through Matter’s gaze
And Matter shall reveal the Spirit’s face.
Then man and superman shall be at one
And all the earth become a single life.

The voice of the Supreme withdraws with the sanction: “this earthly life become the life divine”. Now Savitri’s soul comes down to the earth, drawing with her, “like a flower hidden in the heart of spring”, Satyavan’s soul as well.

A power leaned down, a happiness found its home.
Over wide earth brooded the infinite bliss.

Book 12 Canto 1
The Return to Earth

Savitri awakes from deep trance, lying under green branches on the calm breast of the earth-mother. Noon has passed, day is moving towards evening. She feels Satyavan’s living body on her bosom. Gently she wakes him. Vaguely remembering he asks her what has happened. She says: “We have seen the face of God, we have borne identity with the Supreme. Our love has grown greater by that touch, but nothing is lost of mortal love’s joy. I am still all that I have been to you before. Let us give joy to all in this marvellous world, for joy is ours: we have been born to lead man’s soul towards Truth and God, to bring earthly life a little closer to the divine Idea. Let us go home, for evening is approaching.” As hand in hand they turn towards the hermitage, dusk falls; they hear a sound of human voices and many feet. A great crowd arrives led by King Dyumatsena, his blindness cured, and his Queen. The King asks “Where have you been? Wonderful things have happened today but your absence has marred our joy with fear. Satyavan replies “Only because of her love I am still with you earth.” All eyes turn to the lovely girl. A priestly sage asks: “O woman soul, what light and power have brought about through you the marvels that have happened today?” Savitri softly replies, “Awakened to the meaning of my heart that to feel love and oneness is to live, and that this is the magic of our golden change, is all the truth I know or seek, O sage.” They can only wonder at her too-luminous words as they turn westward towards Shalwa. Night falls, splendid with the moon dreaming in heaven. The day began before Dawn in deep darkness; now at its end, Night nurses in her bosom the dawn of a new age for Earth and Men.

[Text by Shraddhavan]

Book 12 Canto 1 – The Return to Earth

[From: A LUMINOUS FLAME – Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri by Dr. Prema Nandakumar]

It has been an immense journey within. Satyavan and Savitri are still in the forest as we had left them at the end of the canto, ‘Death in the Forest’. Satyavan is still in deep slumber while Savitri awakes from her ‘abysmal trance” and looks around her:

Lain on the earth-mother’s calm inconscient breast
She saw the green-clad branches lean above
Guarding her sleep with their enchanted life,
And overhead a blue-winged ecstasy
Fluttered from bough to bough with high-pitched call.
Into the magic secrecy of the woods
Peering through an emerald lattice-window of leaves,
In indolent skies reclined, the thinning day
Turned to its slow fall into evening’s peace.

Evening has fallen and as she touches Satyavan, she knows that the struggle is over and victory has been achieved. For a while, she remains half-risen, savouring the peace, the Ananda. Then she holds Satyavan in a loving embrace while he opens his eyes and looks into hers. It is all inexplicably joyous and a mystic moment of spiritual togetherness. He also notices a gracious transformation in the familiar Savitri. Can she be the same Savitri, his darling wife? He marvels and his words summarise the entire content of the Books dealing with the struggle and victory of Savitri.:

Whence hast thou brought me captive back, love-chained,
To thee and sunlight’s walls, O golden beam
And casket of all sweetness, Savitri,
Godhead and woman, moonlight of my soul?
For surely I have travelled in strange worlds
By thee companioned, a pursuing spirit,
Together we have disdained the gates of night.
I have turned away from the celestials’ joy
And heaven’s insufficient without thee.

He had seen the terrifying form of Night which had risen to annihilate them saying Death is final and Nihil is the truth. Or, had he been dreaming, after all? Savitri’s answer is apt, reassuring: “Our parting was the dream; We are together, we live, O Satyavan.” Happy, feeling safe with each other’s presence, holding hands, they get up to go back to the hermitage. However, Satyavan realizes that something more than a dream has been present on this patch of green in the forest. His darling wife seems altogether transformed though she is also the same Savitri. He thinks she is now a goddess “too high and great for mortal worship”. It is a wonderful change but he would like to have her as his own dear wife. In answer, Savitri bows at his feet, assuring that she would always be the Savitri of this Satyavan:

A heavenly queen consenting to his will,
She clasped his feet, by her enshrining hair
Enveloped in a velvet cloak of love,
And answered softly like a murmuring lute:
“All now is changed, yet all is still the same.
Lo, we have looked upon the face of God,
Our life has opened with divinity.

None of the mortal joy will be denied to their lives and at the same time they would be poised in fulfilling the intent of the Divine. Together they would “lead man’s soul towards truth and God”. As they walk back in the darkening night, they are met by a huge group, tumultuous, people wearing rich dresses, warriors, rishis, women. Each one of the search party is looking for Savitri and Satyavan, and his mother finds them first. Dyumathsena who is not blind any more and has become king again of Shalwa cries out to the beautiful pair:

What danger kept thee for the darkening woods?
Or how could pleasure in her ways forget
That useless orbs without thee are my eyes
Which only for thy sake rejoice at light?
Not like thyself was this done, Savitri,
Who ledst not back thy husband to our arms,
Knowing with him beside me only is taste
In food and for his touch evening and morn
I live content with my remaining days.

Satyavan laughs and says that Savitri is indeed to blame for the delay in return for it is she who has brought him back to earth. They are surprised and the rishis question her. She simply says she has learnt that “to feel love and oneness is to live”. Are any more words needed? Having argued her case splendidly with both Death and the God of Everlasting Day, she now falls silent, as is her nature. Sri Aurobindo has opened his great epic with a canto on ‘the symbol dawn’. Now, as Savitri and Satyavan go with linked hands to return to the Shalwan Kingdom, Sri Aurobindo closes with yet another image of dawn giving us an assurance that all manner of things shall be well with humanity:

Night, splendid with the moon dreaming in heaven
In silver peace, possessed her luminous reign.
She brooded through her stillness on a thought
Deep-guarded by her mystic folds of light,
And in her bosom nursed a greater dawn.