The body’s rules bound not the spirit’s powers:
When life had stopped its beats, death broke not in;
He dared to live when breath and thought were still.

If we are no longer bound by the law of Matter, this possibility comes. The rules of our physical body no longer bind the powers of our spirit; so even if the heart stops beating, it does not mean that the individual must die. It is possible to continue to live even when the brain stops working, the heart stops working. There are those who have proved this; scientists have examined yogis who could suspend their breathing, the action of the physical brain and heart. When she read these lines with Huta, the Mother commented that Sri Aurobindo has written this because he experienced it. The soul and spirit can continue to be in contact with the body and keep it alive, even when the normal life processes have been suspended.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Volume 1]

The dumb great Mother in her cosmic trance
Exploiting for creation’s joy and pain
Infinity’s sanction to the birth of form,
Accepts indomitably to execute
The will to know in an inconscient world,
The will to live under a reign of death,
The thirst for rapture in a heart of flesh,
And works out through the appearance of a soul
By a miraculous birth in plasm and gas
The mystery of God’s covenant with the Night.

Here is the Mother involved in inconscient matter: ‘The dumb great Mother in her cosmic trance’. In reality, the Mother is the supreme conscious Force of the Supreme, but when she manifests this material universe she involves herself into the apparent unconsciousness of the cosmos, the universe and loses her power of expression; she is ‘in her cosmic trance’, her consciousness indrawn into Matter and all the happenings of the universe. Sri Aurobindo says that in that state, ‘for creation’s joy and pain’, for the purpose of this creation of duality with its happiness and suffering, she exploits or makes use of the ‘sanction’ of ‘Infinity’. The infinite existence, infinite consciousness, infinite bliss has said ‘Yes’ to the ‘birth of form’, and for ‘form’ to be born, all these things have to happen. She makes use of ‘Infinity’s sanction to the birth of form’ to create all these many forms. Beyond the manifestation there is formlessness, pure existence and consciousness and bliss, but no individualised forms, so in response to the fiat of the Supreme, his creative Force ‘Accepts indomitably’ to ‘execute’ or work out, four different things: first, ‘The will to know in an inconscient world’: the world of matter seems to have no consciousness in it, but because the infinite consciousness is involved within it, even in the ‘inconscient world’ there is a ‘will to know’; she has accepted to work out ‘The will to know’ in the material universe through her evolutionary processes. Then secondly, ‘The will to live under a reign of death’: under the conditions of the material universe, forms have to die and be replaced by new ones; one of the rules of Matter is ‘entropy’, which means that everything must decay; but the Mother has accepted to work out in evolution ‘The will to live’ even under this ‘reign of death’, so living forms have evolved in Matter, first simple ones and then more and more complex ones. Thirdly, ‘The thirst for rapture in a heart of flesh’: how is it that in this living matter, in these physical bodies that we have, whose consciousness is hidden from us, amazingly and miraculously we can feel emotions, we can feel longings? We are all longing for bliss, thirsting for rapture. If somebody removes our heart, if there is a heart transplant, the heart is just something material, physical, it cannot live without the rest of the body; and yet, miraculously, in the physical form we can feel emotion and longing and aspiration. These are impossible miracles that the Mother is working out against all obstacles in this material world. Most miraculous of all, she is working out, through ‘the appearance of a soul / By a miraculous birth in plasm and gas’, ‘The mystery of God’s covenant with the Night.’ In material forms, a soul emerges; it has been emerging ever since Matter was only the primal, pre-atomic soup that is called ‘plasm’. ‘In plasm and gas’ a soul appears by the Mother’s ‘warlock-wisecraft’.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Volume 1]

Indifferent to doubt and to belief,
Avid of the naked real’s single shock
He shore the cord of mind that ties the earth-heart
And cast away the yoke of Matter’s law.

Aswapati is not interested in ‘belief’ or in ‘doubt’ – he is indifferent to them, for they are mental states. He is eager to experience what is real. ‘Avid’ means eager, even greedy. He wants to experience the ‘shock’ that only the ‘naked real’ can give, the contact of reality that is not covered or hidden by anything. In order to have that experience he is ready to cut ‘the cord of mind’. ‘Shore’ is the past tense of the verb ‘to shear’ meaning ‘to cut’; ‘shears’ are tools that are used for cutting. There is a ‘cord of mind that ties the earth-heart’ to the way things are here. Aswapati is ready to cut that cord; and he is ready to throw off the ‘yoke’. We have talked about this word ‘yoke’ before: we put a yoke on a bullock to link it to the plough or to the cart that it has to pull. Here we are all wearing the heavy yoke of the law of Matter, but Aswapati throws it off, he is not willing to go on wearing the yoke that keeps us bound to material existence, preventing our soul and our inner being from moving freely in the subtler and higher realms of consciousness. Here on earth we are yoked; we are bound to ‘Matter’s law’ like the bullock to the plough: the dominance of Matter rules everything that we do: our actions, our feelings, our thoughts. King Aswapati is able to free himself from the cord which is tying his being to the mental level of consciousness, and he is able to throw off the domination of matter. When he does that, a tremendous consequence follows:

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]

The symbol powers of number and of form,
And the secret code of the history of the world
And Nature’s correspondence with the soul
Are written in the mystic heart of Life.

Then there is another set of things that are very important for the manifestation of material form in the universe: ‘The symbol powers of number and of form’. There are scientists who explain the whole universe in terms of equations. There is some truth in that: mathematical relationships, quantities, geometrical relationships and forms all have deep significance. Also, the whole history of the world is written there in ‘secret code’, in special characters so that only a person who has the key to the code will be able to read those records. Not only is the history of the world written in code, but also a ‘correspondence’. This is another word with two meanings: there is a ‘correspondence’ when two things are connected in such a way that when one of them moves, the other one also moves; that is one kind of ‘correspondence’; but the word can also mean a collection of letters exchanged by two people. Perhaps messages have been going backwards and forwards between Nature and the soul, so that what Nature does corresponds to what is willed and intended by the soul. That correspondence between Nature and the soul, as well as the history of everything that has ever happened in the universe and the laws and rhythms governing the manifestation are all recorded there in ‘secret code’; they are all ‘written in the mystic heart of Life’, that magic space which Aswapati can now enter.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]

He could re-read now and interpret new
Its strange symbol letters, scattered abstruse signs,
Resolve its oracle and its paradox,
Its riddling phrases and its blindfold terms,
The deep oxymoron of its truth’s repliques,
And recognise as a just necessity
Its hard conditions for the mighty work,—
Nature’s impossible Herculean toil
Only her warlock-wisecraft could enforce,
Its law of the opposition of the gods,
Its list of inseparable contraries.

Let us go back to the beginning of the sentence and see what makes this Agreement so difficult to understand. First, the letters that it is written in: now, in this special light in the ‘spirit’s room of memories’ Aswapati is able to ‘re-read now and interpret new / Its strange symbol letters’. The letters on the scroll are symbols – perhaps like ancient Egyptian writing or Chinese writing; here and there are ‘scattered abstruse signs’, like mysterious mathematical signs; these signs are ‘abstruse’: almost nobody knows their meaning, but now Aswapati can understand them. He can also understand the ‘oracle’ contained in the agreement. An ‘oracle’ is a way of getting an answer from other worlds to a difficult question; you go to somebody who is in communication with other worlds and in response to your question they give you a message; but very often you cannot understand the message when it comes: it may be ambiguous or contradictory, its meaning is not clear. Now Aswapati is able to resolve the ‘oracle and its paradox’. A ‘paradox’ is the statement of a contradiction; if we can find out how to resolve the paradox, the contradiction, we gain a new and deeper knowledge. The scroll also contains ‘riddling phrases’. Often sacred texts were written in such a way that only an initiate could understand them, a person who had been taught the key to the secret meaning; they were written like a riddle; in a riddle you give a mysterious description and your partner or opponent is supposed to guess what you mean. There are also ‘blindfold terms’: words and expressions which are put in on purpose to mislead the reader, so that anyone who is not an initiate will not be able to understand; but Aswapati can now decipher all these devices. He can understand ‘the deep oxymoron of its truth’s repliques’. Similar to a paradox, an oxymoron is an apparently contradictory phrase, such as ‘cruel kindness’ or ‘hot ice’. In the Agreement there are also phrases in two parts: ‘replique’ is a French word meaning a reply or response. Here Sri Aurobindo seems to mean a statement that comes in two parts: the two parts belong together, and yet they seem to be contradictory, like an oxymoron or a paradox: in fact they have to be understood together for the truth to be fully expressed. All that makes for a very, very complicated text. Only when he sees all these hidden connections, all these hidden significances, can he understand this ‘dark Agreement’ by which everything in the material world is ruled. But when he understands it, he sees immediately that it has to be exactly like that, it could not be any different. He accepts it as ‘a just necessity’: this is the only way that the work can be done.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]

Once more was heard in the still cosmic Mind
The Eternal’s promise to his labouring Force
Inducing the world-passion to begin,
The cry of birth into mortality
And the opening verse of the tragedy of Time.

It as if he hears, again, in the silence of the ‘cosmic Mind’ the ‘promise’ which the Supreme Lord made at the very beginning ‘to his labouring Force’, to the Mother, the conscious Force who is working out all these hidden things. He made her a ‘promise’ which we read about at the end of Canto Four: ‘As long as Nature lasts, he too is there’ – he will not leave her. It was that ‘promise’ of the Supreme to his own Force that ‘induced’, stimulated, this whole ‘world-passion to begin’; ‘passion’ perhaps in the sense of a story or a drama of great suffering. Part of that drama is ‘The cry of birth into mortality’: when children are born, we expect them to give a cry as a first sign of life; this suggests that at the very beginning of the manifestation, when immortal beings accepted ‘birth into mortality’, there was a cry just as when a new baby is born, and this cry was ‘the opening verse’ of the long story of Time, which he says is a ‘tragedy’. There are two different types of literature, tragedies and comedies: tragedies usually end up badly, comedies make us laugh. When we look at everything that is happening and has ever happened in Time we are inclined to think that this drama we are involved in is a tragedy. It is only when we have the secret knowledge that we can say “Maybe it’s not a tragedy after all. Maybe it only looks like that now; perhaps something wonderful is going to happen in the end”.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]

A sleeping deity opened deathless eyes:
He saw the unshaped thought in soulless forms,
Knew Matter pregnant with spiritual sense,
Mind dare the study of the Unknowable,
Life its gestation of the Golden Child.

Here is a very suggestive and mysterious line: ‘A sleeping deity opened deathless eyes’. Who is that ‘sleeping deity’? It reminds me of something that the Mother has said in connection with a line in Canto One.There we read about the Dawn coming, as if the darkness fell away and revealed ‘the reclining body of a god’. In connection with that line, the Mother spoke about a vision that she had in 1906 or 1907 when she was studying occultism. As part of her studies of occultism, she went deep into the inconscient. When she was working with Huta on the Meditations on Savitri paintings and they came to this line, she told her about an experience she had there. She found herself going as if deep, deep down into the ocean and seeing there all kinds of wonderful forms; reaching the very bottom, she saw a light in the distance. Moving towards the light, she found that it was shining out of a deep dark cave. She looked inside and saw that at the back of the cave a Being was lying asleep; the Mother said it was neither a man nor a woman, and it did not look like any of the gods, Shiva or Vishnu or whoever. It was a wonderful divine being radiating a rainbow light. She has spoken of this experience on more than one occasion, and once she said that she thinks of it as the first avatar, the divine soul involved in matter; because that divine soul is there in a kind of trance, sleeping, radiating all his light and consciousness and bliss and force, evolution happens. Another time, I think when she spoke to Satprem about this experience, she said that as she stood there and looked at the being it opened its eyes, which signified that at that moment a new awareness was awakening in the evolutionary process. So here, when Sri Aurobindo says ‘A sleeping deity opened deathless eyes’ perhaps we can think of it like that: Aswapati sees a divine power hidden deep within matter opening its eyes and becoming aware. Another thing which he saw was ‘the unshaped thought in soulless forms’.We do not think of material forms such as stones and liquids, gases and stars as having a soul; but none of them could exist unless some divine thought had given birth to them. Aswapati now sees that ‘unshaped thought’ within the soulless forms and realises that matter is ‘pregnant’, preparing to give birth to the spiritual significance and meaning that it is carrying within itself. In that perspective, he can see that Mind will dare to study ‘the Unknowable’, which lies beyond reach at its present stage of development; and he sees that Life too is preparing to give birth to something: ‘gestation’ is the period of pregnancy. Life will give birth to ‘the Golden Child’, the ‘Hiranyagarbha’ or golden embryo, the Divine on the subtle levels of existence dreaming into existence the forms he will take in future in the world of matter; Life is preparing those forms within her.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]

A purpose mingled with the whims of Time,
A meaning met the stumbling pace of Chance
And Fate revealed a chain of seeing Will;
A conscious wideness filled the old dumb Space.
In the Void he saw throned the Omniscience supreme.

First let us look at the word ‘mingled’. When two rivers come together, it takes some time for their waters to mingle. We can see the colour of the water of one river and the colour of the water of the other and gradually they mix or mingle. Sometimes it may seem as if things happen without rhyme or reason, by chance, by the ‘whims’ or fancies of Time; but Aswapati now sees that there is a purpose mingling with the ‘whims of Time’, a direction, an intention. There is also a meaning, a significance that meets ‘the stumbling pace of Chance’. Materialists say that everything happens by chance, there is no purpose, no meaning; the universe has come into existence by chance, the laws of physics just happen to be as they are, and therefore things happen in the ways that they do, randomly and by chance. There is a certain truth in that view: on the surface, there is a random play of events and circumstances; but from behind, a veiled significance is guiding that play. ‘Chance’ moves at a ‘stumbling pace’, with many mis-steps and errors: many attempts have to be made before the right solution is found as if by chance; but behind that ‘stumbling pace’ there is a purpose and an intention which goes on driving Chance until the intended result is achieved. We think of ‘fate’ as something that just happens; it cannot be avoided; these bad things, they just happen; but Aswapati can see that whatever happens is the outcome of a chain of events; what actually happens has been prepared by a sequence of links that express a ‘seeing Will’. There is a Will behind and within which sees the thing that happens, the possible consequences of it, and chooses which consequences to accept, in preference to other possible consequences. So as Aswapati looks out at the universe, all that empty silent space, he no longer sees it as ‘the old dumb Space’, but as a ‘conscious wideness’: it is all full of consciousness. In what seems to be empty, the emptiness of the ‘Void’, he saw the all-knowing consciousness, the ‘Omniscience’, ‘throned’ there, ruling supreme over the entire universe and everything that happens in it.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]