Alive in a dead rotating universe
We whirl not here upon a casual globe
Abandoned to a task beyond our force;
Even through the tangled anarchy called Fate
And through the bitterness of death and fall
An outstretched Hand is felt upon our lives.

We are ‘Alive’ but if we look around at the rest of the universe, most of it seems to be not alive; it seems to be purely material, inanimate, without life. This universe that is going round and round, ‘rotating’, seems to be dead. How is it that we are alive in this dead universe? It is a great mystery. Sri Aurobindo tells us that we are not whirling around here on ‘a casual globe’. Our globe is not ‘casual’, trivial and meaningless. It has a meaning and significance and purpose. It is not just an accident that we are alive here, and we have not been abandoned to a task that is ‘beyond ourforce’, a task that is too difficult for us.  Here Sri Aurobindo is telling us that we have not been ‘Abandoned’, rejected and forgotten: a divine help is always with us, ‘Even through the tangled anarchy called Fate’. Sometimes things go wrong, somebody has a terrible accident and we cannot find out any reason for it, it just seems to be what we call ‘Fate’: for some unknown reason it had to be like that. Here the poet refers to Fate as a ‘tangled anarchy’, a complex confusion of many different forces interacting without any governing many different forces interacting without any governing order. We go through bitter experiences: someone dies, something goes wrong, we do something wrong and feel, ‘Now I made a terrible mistake, I did not live up to myself, I have done something wrong, now what can I do?’ That is a very bitter experience. But here Sri Aurobindo tells us that ‘through the bitterness of death and fall / An outstretched Hand is felt upon our lives’. In the worst and darkest moments, we can turn to the Divine and ask for help, and feel a Hand stretched out to help us.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Volume 1]

It leaves two giant letters void of sense
While without sanction turns the middle sign
Carrying an enigmatic universe,
As if a present without future or past
Repeating the same revolution’s whirl
Turned on its axis in its own Inane.

There are three giant letters, A, U and M. The present earth- consciousness separates ‘the middle sign’, leaving the two others ‘void of sense’, without meaning. There are two giant letters representing the beginning and the end, and there is the middle one, turning around and around as if it had no connection with the other two. Because it is standing alone it has no ‘sanction’: there is no authority or support for its existence; and yet here it is, ‘Carrying an enigmatic universe’. This universe is ‘enigmatic’, like a riddle: we cannot understand its meaning. We do not know the future of the material universe or its past; we see it always turning and turning in the same way: ‘Repeating the same revolution’s whirl’, circling round and round, turning ‘on its axis in its own Inane’: its own meaninglessness. Sri Aurobindo is giving an image of the strange state of ignorance that the earth consciousness is in at the moment, this consciousness ‘that knows not its own truth’.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]

This is our deepest need to join once more
What now is parted, opposite and twain,
Remote in sovereign spheres that never meet
Or fronting like far poles of Night and Day.

Sri Aurobindo says that what we really need to do in order to understand the universe that we are part of is to bring together ‘What now is parted, opposite and twain’: we see things as separated, opposite to each other, and ‘twain’ which means ‘split in two’; we experience the duality, the separation and oppositeness of everything in our universe, as if there are always two poles that can never meet, never become one. Like Night and Day there are so many dualities: hot and cold, good and evil, truth and falsehood, left and right, pleasure and pain, life and death, Soul and Nature, Matter and Spirit … the list goes on and on. The way that we see and experience our environment is such that our minds can never say ‘yes’ to one thing without seeming to be saying ‘no’ to its opposite. Each is ruling in its own sphere but they never meet; or they are opposing each other like opposite poles of the same thing, like ‘Night and Day’. Sri Aurobindo says that it is ‘our deepest need’ to bring them together, make the connection, and rediscover the oneness that unites them.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]

We must fill the immense lacuna we have made,
Re-wed the closed finite’s lonely consonant
With the open vowels of Infinity,
A hyphen must connect Matter and Mind,
The narrow isthmus of the ascending soul:

A ‘lacuna’ is an empty space where something is missing. We need to fill up that gap that we have made with our consciousness by separating one element of the cosmic Word from the other two. We need to ‘Re-wed’, bring back together all the letters of the universal word, reuniting ‘the closed finite’s lonely consonant / With the open vowels of Infinity’. A ‘consonant’ is a sound in speech for which you need to close your lips: m, p, b …. The poet connects the consonant with what is finite, limited. To make a full word, the ‘lonely consonant’ of the finite needs to be brought together with ‘the open vowels’ – the ‘a’ and the ‘u’ – ‘of Infinity’. We have to bring these three symbolic sounds together again into one word, ‘A hyphen must connect Matter and Mind’. A ‘hyphen’ is the short line that we use to join two elements together to make them function as one word, as in ‘re-wed’. We need a hyphen to connect matter and mind, which for us are separate, to join them together to make a word like ‘matter-mind’ or ‘mind-matter’. That ‘hyphen’, he says, will be ‘The narrow isthmus of the ascending soul’. ‘Isthmus’ is a Greek word: it means a very narrow strip of land connecting two bigger land masses. So here we have got Matter on one side and Mind on the other, two ‘sovereign spheres’ which are separated. What can join them and make them one? An ‘isthmus’: a narrow connecting strip created by the soul as it moves on its journey from matter to mind and then on to spirit. The soul is the hyphen that can connect Matter and Mind as it moves on its upward journey.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]

We must renew the secret bond in things,
Our hearts recall the lost divine Idea,
Reconstitute the perfect word, unite
The Alpha and the Omega in one sound;
Then shall the Spirit and Nature be at one.

We must ‘renew’, make new, strong and conscious again ‘the secret bond in things’. Secretly everything is connected, bound together, only we do not usually experience it like that: everything in the universe is connected but we need to become aware of that again. Our hearts need to ‘recall’, remember, the ‘divine Idea’ that has been lost, the Idea and intention that connects everything. We need to ‘Reconstitute the perfect word’ by bringing together again the letters that have been separated, ‘The Alpha and the Omega’: these are the first and the last letters of the Greek alphabet and when they are used like this, together, with capital letters, they mean the beginning and the end of creation, the Origin and the Goal. If they are brought together in one sound ‘AUM’, OM, then ‘the Spirit and Nature’, which now seem to be ruling separate ‘sovereign spheres’, will again ‘be at one’, in accord, agreement, in harmony with each other. That is ‘our deepest need’.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]

Implacable in their timeless purity,
All barter or bribe of worship they refuse;
Unmoved by cry of revolt and ignorant prayer
They reckon not our virtue and our sin;

‘Implacable’ is usually a negative word, meaning harsh, merciless, unbending, like a strict judge for example, who says ‘This is the law. I cannot make any exceptions’. These ‘absolute potencies’ of the Spirit are ‘Implacable in their timeless purity’: so eternally pure that nothing can change them. Human beings may try to make bargains with them: to ‘barter’ means to bargain, to haggle about a price or an exchange. Sometimes people turn to the Lord like that. They pray ‘Lord, if you give me what I want, I will do this or that for you’. But these pure powers are not interested in that kind of bartering or bribing: ‘I will give you this; I will do this’. They refuse it. They are not in the least bit interested in any kind of worship that we may offer them; they are not moved either by our prayers or if we say ‘I curse you, you are heartless, you are cruel, you are wicked’. Human beings cannot help saying sometimes ‘O Lord, why are you doing this to me?’ But the powers of the Spirit are not affected by this kind of cry of revolt; it does not bother them at all, they just do not care. And when we pray, ‘Please, please!’ they do not listen; they do not care whether we are good or bad. We can be as good or as bad as we want, they are not interested: ‘They reckon not our virtue or our sin’. Sometimes our virtue is just an attempt to bribe the Lord; but these powers are so pure, they are beyond all forms of corruption, they do not pay any attention either to our revolt or to our ignorant prayers.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]

A deep surrender is their source of might,
A still identity their way to know,
Motionless is their action like a sleep.

Those powers are entirely surrendered to the Will of the Lord and that is ‘their source of might’, the origin of their strength. They do not use mind as we do; ‘A still identity’ is ‘their way to know’: their knowledge comes through silent oneness with the Will of the Lord. ‘Motionless is their action like a sleep’: whatever action they perform is done without any movement as if in sleep or trance.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]

Acquiescing in the wisdom that made hell
And the harsh utility of death and tears,
Acquiescing in the gradual steps of Time,
Careless they seem of the grief that stings the world’s heart,
Careless of the pain that rends its body and life;

‘Acquiescing’ means agreeing or accepting, saying ‘yes’ by keeping silent. If you keep silent and do not protest when you see something happening, actually you are agreeing to it, accepting it. Those powers accept and consent to ‘the wisdom that made hell’. How could the Lord make ‘hell’ with all its terrible suffering? But those powers of the spirit do not protest, they consent, they accept; they see that a wisdom has made hell and that ‘death and tears’ have a use; although we protest and revolt against them, they have a ‘harsh utility’. The powers of the Spirit accept and consent to the long slow process of evolution: ‘the gradual steps of Time’. It seems as if they do not care about the grief that is always stinging the heart of the world, that they do not care about the pain that tears our bodies and lives. ‘To rend’ means ‘to tear’.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]

Undriven by a brief life’s will to act,
Unharassed by the spur of pity and fear,
He makes no haste to untie the cosmic knot
Or the world’s torn jarring heart to reconcile.
In Time he waits for the Eternal’s hour.

Here are some more differences between the immortal and ourselves: we feel that we have only a short lifetime, ‘a brief life’ and so we are driven; in the short time that we have we want to fulfil certain aims, to get things done. ‘The immortal’ is not under that time pressure. He is ‘undriven’, not driven by the ‘will to act’ that drives our brief lives; he is not harassed, not troubled, ‘by the spur of pity and fear’. A ‘spur’ is a sharp piece of metal that a rider wears on his heel so that he can urge his horse to go faster: the pain of the spur in its side drives the horse to run faster; similarly we human beings feel the spur of certain things that drive us: we may feel pity, we may want to change things because we feel ‘Oh, it should not be like this’; or we may be driven by fear. But the immortal who sees how everything is supposed to develop does not feel that spur of pity and fear, that is not driving or harassing him; so he does not feel in any hurry: ‘He makes no haste to untie the cosmic knot’. He knows that this strange riddle of existence will all be sorted out in time, so he does not feel the same sense of urgency to set things right as we do when we become aware of the suffering caused by all the oppositions at play in life; he is not in a hurry to ‘reconcile’ them. ‘To reconcile’ means to bring things or people who are in conflict together in agreement and harmony. The world’s heart is ‘torn’, wounded and divided, and because it is divided there is a lot of pain. If you have a wound it is very painful when the two sides of the wound touch each other. The doctor will try and bind together the two parts that have been separated so that they can come together and heal quickly. Very often in our human relationships it is like that. We have been close to people, but then for some reason there is a quarrel and then it is like the two sides of an open wound: every contact is painful. That is what is implied by this word ‘jarring’: when a door is not fully closed, every little breath of wind makes the door ‘jar’ against the door frame with a disturbing repeated ‘jarring’ sound. Something like that is going on in the heart of our world, a continuous conflict, clash and pain, and we feel it should not be like that, we long to establish harmony everywhere. Of course there should be harmony everywhere; but the immortal sees that there is a long evolutionary process to be gone through to establish the harmony, so he is not in a hurry to heal everything and set it right immediately. Often we try to set things right on the surface but underneath they are not really set right. The immortal waits. He waits ‘In Time’ for the hour of the Eternal, the hour when the Eternal Will can be realised and fulfilled.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]

Yet a spiritual secret aid is there;
While a tardy Evolution’s coils wind on
And Nature hews her way through adamant
A divine intervention thrones above.

The immortal powers of the spirit are waiting for the right moment: they are not in a hurry; so it seems to us that the skies are indifferent, that the gods do not care, that the Lord is not taking any notice of what is happening here on earth; but here Sri Aurobindo tells us that despite these appearances ‘a spiritual secret aid is there’. Evolution goes winding slowly on its way; ‘tardy’ means that the process seems to be too slow and to be taking too long. It takes long because it is a very difficult process for the nature force that is driving the evolution: she has to hew ‘her way through adamant’. ‘To hew’ means to cut with great effort. An explorer pushing his way through a jungle has to ‘hew’ at the thick undergrowth to cut his path through; a miner or a sculptor will have to ‘hew’ rock with a lot of effort. Nature has to cut ‘her way through adamant’, the very hardest form of substance. The word is connected with ‘diamond’, the hardest substance. We use this word in a psychological sense when we say that somebody is ‘adamant’ meaning that they will not change their mind: you can say what you like, you can offer what you like, but they will refuse to change. The resistance that Nature has to cut through as she drives evolution forward is ‘adamant’, it refuses to change; Nature has to deal with that kind of resistance all the time. But while all this is going on, ‘A divine intervention thrones above.’ On a higher level there is a power of divine help, an ‘intervention’ that acts in the world. The unmoving powers of the Spirit are watching and waiting; but there is also a divine power always at work in our world to help it move forward: ‘a spiritual secret aid is there’.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]

One who has shaped this world is ever its lord:
Our errors are his steps upon the way;
He works through the fierce vicissitudes of our lives,
He works through the hard breath of battle and toil,
He works through our sins and sorrows and our tears,
His knowledge overrules our nescience;

‘One who has shaped this world is ever its lord’: the Lord has not just created the world and then left it to its own devices without caring what happens to it; the ‘One who has shaped this world’ is still and always in charge; even our mistakes are part of his path: ‘Our errors are his steps upon the way’. This is a poetic way of saying it; if we want to understand this in detail we shall have to read other books of Sri Aurobindo, but here he gives us these wonderful poetic suggestions. The Lord is working through everything, including ‘the fierce vicissitudes of our lives’. ‘Vicissitudes’ are all the ups and downs of life, the unexpected changes in circumstances; you may have everything planned out: ‘Tomorrow I will do this and that and the other’, but suddenly something unplanned and unprepared-for comes in the way, and sometimes these are very serious things. The Lord is working through all that. He is working through all our struggles: ‘the hard breath of battle and toil’, our conflicts and labours – everything here demands effort; he is working ‘through our sins’, the things that we do wrong, the things that we feel separate us from the Divine; he is working through our ‘sorrows and our tears’; ‘His knowledge overrules our nescience’: in our ignorance we take a decision, but the Lord decides differently. There is a proverb, ‘Man proposes, God disposes’: we can say, ‘Wouldn’t this be good, Lord?’ He may say, ‘No! Like this!’ or sometimes he may say, ‘Yes! Very good idea, let us do it like that’; but it is up to Him, because we do not know what is going on, we are ‘nescient’. We do not know, but the Lord is overruling our nescience and making sure that everything in the universe is always the best that it can be at every moment in the evolving process of his plan.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]

Whatever the appearance we must bear,
Whatever our strong ills and present fate,
When nothing we can see but drift and bale,
A mighty Guidance leads us still through all.

Here is one of the sentences in Savitri that we should learn by heart and remember in difficult times: ‘Whatever the appearance we must bear’, however bad things look and feel, ‘Whatever our strong ills…’ whatever seems to be wrong in our life at the moment, our ‘present fate’, whatever situation we are in, even when we cannot see anything but ‘drift and bale’ – ‘drift’ happens when there is a river with rubbish floating on it: the current carries along sticks and leaves and bits of paper, and all those bits and pieces have no choice, they just have to go where the current carries them; often in our lives we feel that we are just being carried along by forces that we have no control over; and ‘bale’ is ‘misfortune’: sometimes it really feels as if there is a bad will making everything go wrong for us. If you are angry with someone you may give them ‘a baleful look’ to let them know that you wish them ill. But even in those moments when we feel that we are being carried by forces we cannot control and some of them seem really hostile, still ‘A mighty Guidance’ is leading us through everything. ‘An outstretched Hand’ is keeping our ultimate destiny safe; and whatever happens, the Lord, the One who has shaped this world, is still looking after it and guiding everything so that what happens is the best possible in the present state of the universe. Through ‘drift and bale’ we may learn many wonderful life-lessons and later look back at that bad time and see what blessings it brought us.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]

A date is fixed in the calendar of the Unknown,
An anniversary of the Birth sublime:
Our soul shall justify its chequered walk,
All will come near that now is naught or far.

That date is already fixed ‘in the calendar of the Unknown’, already decided; it is ‘An anniversary of the Birth sublime’: it marks a miraculous birthday. The date of that anniversary is fixed ‘in the calendar of the Unknown’ although we have no idea when it will arrive according to our earthly calendars. On that day of fulfilment our individual soul ‘shall justify its chequered walk’. ‘Chequered’ means an alternation of black and white. The soul has passed through good times and bad ones, dark times and brighter ones; when that special day and time arrive everything will be justified, will make sense. The soul will see the whole course of its journey, its ‘chequered walk’ and say, ‘Oh yes, it had to be just like that.’ All the things that now seem to us unreal and non-existent or far away and unachievable will become near and real to us on that date which is already fixed ‘in the calendar of the Unknown’.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]