The master of existence lurks in us
And plays at hide-and-seek with his own Force;
In Nature’s instrument loiters secret God.

‘The master of existence’ is hiding in us, because he is playing ‘hide-and-seek with his own Force’. This reminds us of Sri Aurobindo’s aphorism, about God and Nature being like a boy and a girl in love and at play who run away from each other in order to be caught and hide from each other in order to be found. ‘In Nature’s instrument loiters secret God’: each form in the manifestation is an instrument of Nature, one of the tools that she uses for her evolutionary game; but within each of them God is secretly loitering. ‘To loiter’ means to move slowly, or to take time; ‘Secret God’ is enjoying this game, he is hidden within Nature’s instruments and he is not in a hurry, he is loitering, taking his time; in his own good time he will reveal himself.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]

All-knowing he accepts our darkened state,
Divine, wears shapes of animal or man;
Eternal, he assents to Fate and Time,
Immortal, dallies with mortality.

The Divine is ‘All-knowing’, but he has accepted ‘our darkened state’, our state of limitation and ignorance; he is divine, but ‘wears shapes of animal or man’; he is eternal, but he accepts, ‘assents’ to experience ‘Fate and Time’; the Eternal is beyond Time and the determinisms which we call Fate, but by entering into the forms of the manifestation, he accepts the limitations of Time and the determinisms of Fate; he is immortal but he ‘dallies with mortality’. ‘To dally’ means to play or to do something without taking it seriously. Because he is immortal, he can play at being mortal, at having to die.

[ Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]

The All-Conscious ventured into Ignorance
The All-Blissful bore to be insensible.
Incarnate in a world of strife and pain,
He puts on joy and sorrow like a robe
And drinks experience like a strengthening wine.

The Divine is ‘All-Conscious’, but he has undertaken the adventure of ‘Ignorance’. ‘To venture’ means to dare, to take a risk, to do something although you do not know what the outcome will be. What is it like for the ‘All-Conscious’ to become so limited in consciousness? To become ignorant as we are, unconscious as the plants are? The Divine is also ‘All- Blissful’, he is Ananda itself, and yet he has accepted ‘to be insensible’, which means to have no senses, no capacity to feel, no sensitivity. He has put on a body and become ‘incarnate’ in this world of ‘strife and pain’, of struggle and suffering; he puts on ‘joy and sorrow like a robe’, wearing different moods like a child dressing up: now he puts on the joy robe and tomorrow the sorrow robe, and whatever experience comes he drinks it in like ‘a strengthening wine’. Wine symbolically represents delight, bliss, and some kinds of wine are supposed to make the body stronger; the immanent Divine drinks all experience ‘like a strengthening wine’.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]

The Absolute, the Perfect, the Alone
Has called out of the Silence his mute Force
Where she lay in the featureless and formless hush
Guarding from Time by her immobile sleep
The ineffable puissance of his solitude.

‘The Absolute, the Perfect, the Alone’ is the Supreme in his transcendent aspect, beyond manifestation; in order for the manifestation to happen, that absolute ineffable existence of consciousness, force and bliss ‘Has called out of the Silence his mute Force’. His aspect of creative force is within him; in the Silence, in the ‘featureless and formless hush’ before anything is manifested, she is lying asleep; as long as she is lying asleep, ‘immobile’, not moving, she is ‘Guarding … The ineffable puissance’, the inexpressible power, of his ‘solitude’. When he calls and wakes her, things begin to change. She is ‘his mute Force’: the Supreme Mother, the creative Force who will give birth to the creation. She is the dynamic aspect of the Supreme, his Shakti; as long as she is asleep in his indrawn Silence there are no forms, no qualities and no movement. There seems to be nothing in that Silence, but in fact all possibilities are sleeping there with her; but as long as she is sleeping, immobile, she is guarding his ‘solitude’, his aloneness, protecting the ‘ineffable puissance’, the inexpressible absolute power of the aloneness of the One.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]

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;

There was a beautiful rhythmic repetition of the mantric words, ‘The Absolute, the Perfect, the Alone’; this time it is changed slightly, to ‘The Absolute, the Perfect, the Immune’. Someone who is ‘immune’ cannot be harmed. When  the Absolute, the Perfect enters into the forms of the manifestation, he remains ‘immune’; he cannot be harmed or hurt in any way by anything. The ‘One who is in us as our secret self’ has put on ‘Our mask of imperfection’, disguising his true immunity. All of us, the many persons of the ‘one self’, are masks with which he disguises his perfection. The original meaning of the word ‘person’ is ‘a mask’, the mask that an actor in the ancient theatre used to wear to indicate which role he was playing.  Each of us wears a mask of the  One as we play our role in Nature’s drama.

‘He has made this tenement of flesh his own’. This refers to our body. ‘Flesh’ is our living tissue and a ‘tenement’ is a large house where you can rent a room to stay for a while. He has entered into the mortal body and made it his own. He has also ‘cast’ ‘His image in the human measure’. ‘To cast’ sometimes means ‘to throw’: we say that the farmer ‘casts his seeds’, spreading them on the field that he has prepared; but we also speak about casting a bronze statue. The sculptor prepares an image and then casts it in bronze. All forms in the manifestation are figures of the One; but we are told that God has made human beings ‘in his own image’, implying that the human form is an especially significant image of the Lord. Here Sri Aurobindo says that the One has cast his image ‘in the human measure’ with a purpose: so that ‘to his divine measure we might rise’: He has made these small human images of himself so that they shall grow and become vast and infinite and eternal like the Supreme himself. It is his intention that we should rise ‘to his divine measure’.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]

Then in a figure of divinity
The Maker shall recast us and impose
A plan of godhead on the mortal’s mould
Lifting our finite minds to his infinite,
Touching the moment with eternity.

When the right time comes the ‘Maker’, the one who has cast us, is going to ‘recast us’. He is going to cast us again, no longer in this figure of a limited separated human being but in ‘a figure of divinity’. On the ‘mortal’s mould’, this limited shape, he is going to impose his new plan, his ‘plan of Godhead’, of individualised divinity, which will mean ‘Lifting our finite minds to his infinite’. What is ‘infinite’ has no limits; ‘finite’ means that there are boundaries and limits; our limited minds will be widened to infinity, and he will touch ‘the moment with eternity’: it is possible to experience eternity, timelessness, freedom from time, in a moment; it is one of the ‘peak experiences’ that human beings can have: just for a moment we may experience what is eternal and our own eternity. When the Maker recasts us into his ‘plan of godhead’, that will become our normal experience.

Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]

This transfiguration is earth’s due to heaven:
A mutual debt binds man to the Supreme:
His nature we must put on as he put ours;
We are sons of God and must be even as he:
His human portion, we must grow divine.
Our life is a paradox with God for key.

A ‘transfiguration’ happens when an earthly form becomes glorious and divine. The Maker is going to change our forms from this little human mould to the divine mould, and Sri Aurobindo says that ‘This transfiguration is earth’s due to heaven’: earth owes this change to heaven, because ‘A mutual debt binds man to the Supreme’. The Supreme owes us something and we owe him something: there is a debt to be paid on both sides – that is what ‘mutual’ means. We must put on his divine nature in the same way that he has put on our limited human nature because ‘we are sons of God and must be even as he’: we must become like him. We are ‘His human portion’: each of us is a little human expression of God; so ‘we must grow divine’: that is the real meaning and purpose of our lives, and the ‘key’ to solving all our problems. ‘Our life is a paradox with God for key’. A ‘paradox’ is an apparent contradiction; what seems contradictory may really be true. For example Sri Aurobindo writes ‘The whole world yearns after freedom, yet each creature is in love with his chains’.He often writes in paradoxes, in order to wake up our minds and widen them out of the fixed and limited way of seeing things that thinks ‘Either this must be true or that – they can’t both be true’; for in fact, in life the most apparently contradictory things are true, and we should try to find out the truths which link them so that they make sense. ‘Our life is a paradox with God for key.’ If we know that we are a ‘human portion’ of the divine, that gives a new meaning to our lives; if we know that we are supposed to grow, evolve, and that this is the human journey, the purpose of our existence, this gives value to our life and changes our outlook on everything.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]

For the key is hid and by the Inconscient kept;
The secret God beneath the threshold dwells.

God is the key to the paradox and the tale; but God is hidden in ‘the Inconscient’. We remember that Sri Aurobindo wrote that God and Nature are like a boy and girl in love and at play; when the Mother read this aphorism with the children in the Ashram playground, one of them asked an intelligent question: ‘Where does God hide?’ The Mother replied ‘In the Inconscient, and Nature hides there too’. ‘Inconscient’ means ‘without consciousness’. The concept of the Inconscient is very important in Sri Aurobindo’s teaching. If we think of Matter, there seems to be no consciousness there; when we look at the whole process of evolution, our universe seems to have emerged from a state of total unconsciousness, the Inconscient. Sri Aurobindo says in The Life Divine that the Inconscient is infinite and eternal just as the Superconscient is, and everything that is in the Superconscient is also in the Inconscient; but the Inconscient has cut itself off from the memory of its Origin. The evolutionary journey is meant to recover that memory, so that the Creation can become fully conscious again. In our present state of ignorance, of partial consciousness, the secret God within us, who we are meant to become, is living ‘beneath the threshold’, deep down below the threshold of our consciousness.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]

As one forgetting he searches for himself;
As if he had lost an inner light he seeks:
As a sojourner lingering amid alien scenes
He journeys to a home he knows no more.

It is really as if he has forgotten who he is. That is the state the embodied soul is in, searching for himself, looking all the time for ‘an inner light’ that he seems to have lost. Here in our world, the Spirit is ‘a sojourner lingering amid alien scenes’. A ‘sojourner’ is a temporary visitor, visiting a place that is not his true home. Here he is ‘lingering’, spending time ‘amid alien scenes’, scenes that are foreign to him and quite different from, almost opposite to, his true nature. Here in us, in this world, he is journeying to his own home; but he no longer knows, he has forgotten where that home is.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]

This was his compact with his mighty mate,
For love of her and joined to her for ever
To follow the course of Time’s eternity,
Amid magic dramas of her sudden moods
And the surprises of her masked Idea
And the vicissitudes of her vast caprice.

The Lord has made an agreement, a ‘compact’ with ‘his mighty mate’, his Conscious-Force, the Mother who has created everything. He has promised that ‘For love of her and joined to her for ever’ he will ‘follow the course of Time’s eternity’, the eternal flow and recurrence of Time; he will follow the whole course of this manifestation in Time along with her; he will stay with her forever in this mighty adventure they have undertaken together. He will ‘follow the course of Time’s eternity’ surrounded by all that she offers him: ‘Amid magic dramas of her sudden moods / And the surprises of her masked Idea / And the vicissitudes of her vast caprice’. Her moods are ever-changing, but all part of the ‘magic dramas’ she is always playing and inventing; ‘her masked Idea’ is the original creative Idea which has given rise to the entire creation; that remains unchanged, but as it gets worked out in time and space there are all kind of surprises, unexpected things happen; and there are ‘the vicissitudes of her vast caprice’: ‘vicissitudes’ are unexpected changes, the ups and downs of life that happen apparently by chance, according to the ‘vast caprice’ of the creative force working in nature. We discussed this word ‘caprice’ earlier: it means a sudden change of idea or decision for no apparent reason; Nature seems to do that from time to time. The transcendent One, inhabiting the individual souls of the many, is experiencing and exploring himself in all these things in the play of time and space.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]

Two seem his goals, yet ever are they one
And gaze at each other over bourneless Time;
Spirit and Matter are their end and source.

The Soul in Nature seems to have two goals, two different things that he is moving towards; but these two goals are really one and the same. Although they seem to be separated in the manifestation, they are always gazing at each other ‘over bourneless Time’. ‘Bourneless’ means without borders and limits; there is no end to the eternity of Time. Spirit and Matter seem to be the two opposed aims of existence, but really they are always one – ‘yet ever are they one’. We can say ‘Spirit and Matter’ or we can say ‘Soul and Nature’. From one point of view, Spirit seems to be where we are going, our goal, our end; from another, it is the beginning. If we look at it in another way, Matter is the beginning and the end of everything. These seem to be contradictory goals, but Sri Aurobindo tells us that ‘ever are they one’.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]

A seeker of hidden meanings in life’s forms,
Of the great Mother’s wide uncharted will
And the rude enigma of her terrestrial ways
He is the explorer and the mariner
On a secret inner ocean without bourne:
He is the adventurer and cosmologist
Of a magic earth’s obscure geography.

The Divine, individualised as the soul in each of his creatures, is ‘A seeker’. He is seeking ‘hidden meanings’ in all the forms of life. He is ‘the explorer and the mariner’ trying to discover what the Mother wants: what is ‘the great Mother’s wide uncharted will’? With this word ‘uncharted’ Sri Aurobindo introduces the idea of a map; a ‘chart’ is a map, particularly the kind of map used by sailors, by ‘mariners’; ‘uncharted’ territory is an area which has never been mapped. The individual conscious being is exploring ‘the rude enigma of her terrestrial ways’, the mystery of the ways in which the Mother acts in the material world, which often seems to us to be ‘rude’, brutal and rough. The soul, the immanent Divine, is an explorer and a ‘mariner’, a sailor, exploring the ‘secret inner ocean without bourne’, the limitless inner ocean of consciousness. He is ‘the adventurer’ exploring the unknown, and the ‘cosmologist’. A ‘cosmologist’ studies the universe, trying to understand its history and how it works. The conscious being is discovering and trying to understand the manifested universe and the geography of ‘a magic earth’. From here onwards up to the end of the canto Sri Aurobindo will be following and developing this image of the immanent Divine as an explorer and a sailor.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]

A limit, a farness never wholly reached,
An unattained perfection calls to him
From distant boundaries in the Unseen:
A long beginning only has been made

On his journey, the conscious being sees something like a limit, a distant horizon; but as he travels towards it, it recedes: it is never fully reached, there is always something further on. There is also the sense of an always greater perfection; ‘An unattained perfection calls to him’; however perfectly we manage to do something, there is always the possibility of doing it better; real perfection, perfect perfection is always eluding us, always calling us further. That ‘unattained perfection’ calls to him ‘from distant boundaries in the Unseen’, from what is invisible, what is beyond the horizon, so that wherever he is on his journey, there is always the feeling that only a beginning has been made; however long he has been travelling it is only a beginning, he still has far to go.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]