An ineffectual beam of suffering light
Through the despairing darkness dogged their steps
Like the remembrance of a glory lost;
Even while it grew, it seemed unreal there,
Yet haunted Nihil’s chill stupendous realm,
Unquenchable, perpetual, lonely, null,
A pallid ghost of some dead eternity.

As they move onwards through ‘the despairing darkness’, this beam of light is constantly following them. When you are in despair, you are without hope, hopeless; the darkness of the Eternal Night will not allow hope to exist in it. That beam of light is not strong, it is ‘ineffectual’, without power, and it seems to be suffering in the midst of the dumb blackness; but it ‘dogged their steps’ – it kept following them. A good dog will always follow at his master’s heels, never leaving him – that is the origin of this phrase. This faint beam of light is constantly accompanying Savitri as she follows Satyavan and the dark god of Death; it will not leave them.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 10]

This most she must absolve with endless pangs,
Her deep original sin, the will to be
And the sin last, greatest, the spiritual pride,
That, made of dust, equalled itself with heaven,
Its scorn of the worm writhing in the mud,
Condemned ephemeral, born from Nature’s dream,
Refusal of the transient creature’s role,
The claim to be a living fire of God,
The will to be immortal and divine.

In the previous canto Savitri has defied Death, and told him, ‘I know my coming was a wave from God.’ Now Death is trying to convince her that she has to be punished for ever because of the great sins that she has committed: first ‘the will to be’, and even worse ‘The claim to be a living fire of God, / The will to be immortal and divine.’ In some religions there is the idea that we human beings, however good we may try to be, are always unavoidably sinful, imperfect, because of what is called ‘original sin’ – simply by being born; and unless we are absolved of our sins, we will have to suffer eternal punishment in Hell. ‘To absolve’ means ‘to wash away’. Those who are in a state of sin need to have their sinfulness ‘absolved’ or ‘washed away’. One way in which sins can be absolved is through ‘penance’, through suffering. Savitri’s first sin is ‘the will to be’: she has had the audacity, the ‘presumption’ ‘to exist and think’. But in addition to that first sin, she has also committed the last and the greatest sin of ‘spiritual pride’. According to Death, she is a human being, ‘made of dust’, ‘born from Nature’s dream’; she is condemned to be ‘ephemeral’, to live for only a short time, as a ‘transient creature’. But she has dared to refuse that role, to reject the position she has been given, of a ‘worm writhing in the mud’; instead she believes and claims that she is ‘a living fire of God’, that she is ‘immortal and divine’. Now, in Death’s realm she must pay, atone for, these terrible sins by suffering.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 10]

A great Negation was the Real’s face
Prohibiting the vain process of Time:
And when there is no world, no creature more,
When Time’s intrusion has been blotted out,
It shall last, unbodied, saved from thought, at peace.

According to Death, according to the suggestion he is throwing on Savitri now, ‘A great Negation’, a huge and all- powerful ‘No’ is the true Reality. Only that Negation is real, and it is ‘Prohibiting’, forbidding, even the movement of Time. That Negation is insisting that when all this material universe has dissolved, when no world is left, when there are no creatures any longer, when this unwelcome intrusion of Time has been blotted out, that ‘great Negation’ will still be there, the only Reality, the only thing that is really Real. It will last. When everything else has gone, it will remain, free from form, free from thought and at last in peace again.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 10]

But Maya is a veil of the Absolute;
A Truth occult has made this mighty world:
The Eternal’s wisdom and self-knowledge act
In ignorant Mind and in the body’s steps.
The Inconscient is the Superconscient’s sleep.

This is a completely different view: ‘Maya’ is not a power of illusion, but ‘a veil of the Absolute’, the Supreme. ‘This mighty world’, this material universe, is not a dream, an illusion born of Nothingness; on the contrary, it has been made and is constantly supported by a hidden Truth. Even in our ignorant minds and in our physical bodies, the wisdom and the self-knowledge of the Eternal are at work. ‘The Inconscient’, which seems to be the dark negative basis of everything, is in fact ‘the Superconscient’s sleep’, a deep indrawn state of what is superconscious to our minds, the supreme consciousness-force.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 10]

All here is a mystery of contraries:
Darkness a magic of self-hidden Light,
Suffering some secret rapture’s tragic mask
And death an instrument of perpetual life.

In this material universe everything ‘is a mystery of contraries’, a mystery of opposites. Sri Aurobindo tells us that darkness is ‘a magic of self-hidden Light’, as if Light becomes so densely concentrated that we experience it as darkness, or as if Light is the original and natural state and there can be darkness only when the Light hides itself for a while. ‘Suffering’ is a mask, a ‘tragic mask’ worn by ‘some secret rapture’ – some hidden delight. Even death, which seems to be the contradiction of life, is in fact ‘an instrument of perpetual life’, life that goes on and on forever, never-endingly. The death of the body allows the soul to move on to ever-new embodiments and Life-experiences.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 10]

Although Death walks beside us on Life’s road,
A dim bystander at the body’s start
And a last judgment on man’s futile works,
Other is the riddle of its ambiguous face:
Death is a stair, a door, a stumbling stride
The soul must take to cross from birth to birth,
A grey defeat pregnant with victory,
A whip to lash us towards our deathless state.

Death is always close to us, walking beside us ‘on Life’s road’. He is there when we are born, as ‘A dim bystander’, standing nearby and watching as the body starts its journey. When we die, it is as if he is passing a judgment on all we have done during our lifetime, making it all seem ‘futile’, in vain, for when life is over and we are dead and gone, what is the value of all we have done or attempted? That is how it may seem. But Sri Aurobindo says that in fact, ‘Other is the riddle of its ambiguous face’. Death may be giving us something other than what we assume: in fact ‘Death is a stair’ by which we can climb higher; it is ‘a door’ by which we can enter a new state; it is ‘a stumbling stride’, a big step forward, which may feel like a fall, but the soul needs to take that ‘stumbling stride’ in order to cross over from one life to the next one. It may seem like ‘A grey defeat’, when darkness and dissolution overcome the adventure of life, but in fact that apparent defeat is ‘pregnant with victory’: it is going to give birth to a great victory. Death is ‘A whip to lash us towards our deathless state’: a bullock cart driver uses a whip to make the bullock go faster or direct it the way he wants it to go. Similarly the fact that every one of us has to face the prospect of our own death, and the deaths of our loved-ones, drives us to find our own immortality, our deathless state. That does not mean that we will live in the same body for ever, that the body will never die, but rather that we can discover the element in ourselves which is free from Death, which is deathless, which can pass from one birth to the next without stumbling at all.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 10]

Night is not our beginning nor our end;
She is the dark Mother in whose womb we have hid
Safe from too swift a waking to world-pain.
We came to her from a supernal Light,
By Light we live and to the Light we go.

Death has been trying to convince Savitri that this whole universe has emerged from ‘Night’, an ultimate darkness and nothingness, and that it will inevitably collapse back into that state. Sri Aurobindo on the contrary assures us that ‘Night is not our beginning, nor our end’. That apparent darkness of total unconsciousness and nothingness is in fact ‘the dark Mother in whose womb we have hid’. She has kept us hidden in her dark womb of unconsciousness as a protection; she has been keeping us safe from ‘too swift a waking to world-pain’, not allowing us to wake up to full consciousness until we have become strong and ready enough to bear all the impacts of the world. We came to this Night of unconsciousness from ‘a supernal Light’ that prevails on the very highest level of consciousness. ‘By Light we live and to the Light we go’: we can only live because we are sustained and nourished by that ‘supernal Light’, and when we leave the physical body and this material world, naturally we shall return to the Light  from which we came.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 10]

A golden fire came in and burned Night’s heart;
Her dusky mindlessness began to dream;
The Inconscient conscious grew, Night felt and thought.

As a result of the infiltration of that faint light, ‘A golden fire’, a fire of truth and consciousness, ‘came in and burned Night’s heart’: some wish, some desire, wakes up in that unconscious darkness, and the ‘dusky mindlessness’, the shadowy unconsciousness, of the Night ‘began to dream’. She begins to become conscious: ‘The Inconscient conscious grew, Night felt and thought.’

Because of Savitri’s courage and her determination and the strength of her soul, the darkness of Eternal Night is being forced to give way. We should never believe that we are born from Night and that when we die we shall just sink back into the inconscient Night. We are born into the material world and the ignorance of the present level of evolution, but our souls, our true selves, have come from the supreme, supernal Light. We are carrying it within us throughout our life, and when we leave this material world, we shall return to that Light.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 10]