O Death, thou speakest truth but truth that slays,
I answer to thee with the Truth that saves.

“O Death” she says, “you are speaking a kind of truth – ‘truth that slays’ – truths that are destructive. I am going to answer you with a higher Truth, ‘the Truth that saves’, that gives the Light of higher Knowledge.” These two lines give the key to this whole exchange between Savitri and Death. We have noticed how convincing Death’s arguments seem to us, because they correspond to the way we think. Death expresses our normal beliefs and convictions; these are ‘true’ in a way, but they correspond to a destructive truth. We should pay attention to what Death says and recognise that he is expressing our own ideas. What Savitri is saying, on the other hand, casts a new and saving light on Death’s assertions.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 10]

A traveller new-discovering himself,
One made of Matter’s world his starting-point,
He made of Nothingness his living-room
And Night a process of the eternal light
And death a spur towards immortality.

Now Savitri will give her view of the things which Death has called illusory or worthless or meaningless, Matter for example. Death told her that what we think of as solid Matter is only a misleading appearance produced by ‘Nihil’: Nothingness. Savitri on the contrary says that ‘One’, the divine One who has entered into this manifestation of Time and Space and multiplicity as a ‘traveller’ who is enjoying discovering his oneness in a new way, has made the unconsciousness of the material world ‘his starting-point’. That One has decided to inhabit the Nothingness, the Asat, the Non-Existence and make it his home. That One has made the Night of Inconscience into ‘a process of the eternal light’, a movement towards everlasting and total Consciousness. He has made of ‘death’, destruction and dissolution, a way of driving and encouraging his creatures to find their true immortal state. For human beings the awareness that our bodies are sure to disintegrate sooner or later can be ‘a spur’ that impels us to search for immortality. The One is travelling through the world disguised as all of these material appearances, experiencing and re-discovering himself in many different ways. All this is not meaningless and illusory: it is the great journey of the One who is endlessly and infinitely discovering himself in the world of Matter.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 10]

God wrapped his head from sight in Matter’s cowl,
His consciousness dived into inconscient depths,
All-Knowledge seemed a huge dark Nescience;
Infinity wore a boundless zero’s form.
His abysms of bliss became insensible deeps,
Eternity a blank spiritual Vast.

God, this traveller, this One has hidden himself from sight, wrapped up his head ‘in Matter’s cowl’ so that he cannot be recognised. A ‘cowl’ is a big hood that covers the head completely. He has wrapped himself up in the appearances of Matter. With his perfect eternal and infinite consciousness, he has ‘dived into the inconscient depths’ of Matter so that his ‘All-Knowledge’ seems to have become ‘a huge dark Nescience’, a state without knowledge. As a result of this dive into inconscience, in the material universe his quality of infinity seems to wear the form of a zero, a nothingness – but it is a boundless zero, without limits. In the inconscience, his ‘abysms of bliss became insensible deeps’: the immeasurable depths of God’s never-ending delight have become ‘insensible’, without feeling, inert and unresponsive; his Eternity, packed full of endless possibilities, powers and potentialities seems to have become ‘a blank spiritual Vast’, without qualities. Human beings who experience the eternal and infinite transcendent state encounter it as a limitless emptiness without qualities, nirguna. God, entering into his manifestation as a traveller to re-discover himself, has turned himself into all his opposites: his pure existence appears like an empty nothingness, his absolute consciousness-force has become the ‘inconscient depths’ of Matter, his perfect bliss has become ‘insensible’; he has undertaken the adventure of re-discovering himself in all that seems the very contradiction of himself.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 10]

Annulling an original nullity
The Timeless took its ground in emptiness
And drew the figure of a universe,
That the spirit might adventure into Time
And wrestle with adamant Necessity
And the soul pursue a cosmic pilgrimage.

Annuling  an original nullity’: ‘nullity’ is nothingness. If you annul something you wipe it out so that it no longer exists. Savitri says that this is what God has done. Originally, there was nothing. But ‘The Timeless took its ground in emptiness / And drew the figure of a universe’: the Eternal and Infinite One, dwelling beyond Time and Space, took that original emptiness, that ‘nullity’, as a base on which to produce the appearance of a universe. Why? To give ‘the spirit’ an opportunity to ‘adventure into Time’ and experience what it is like to ‘wrestle with adamant Necessity’. Beyond the manifestation, spirit is forever free; but in this material universe it has the opportunity to face and battle against ‘adamant Necessity’ – the fixed laws which rule matter and apparently cannot be changed. ‘Adamant’ is the hardest and most inflexible substance imaginable, and a person who is ‘adamant’ is very stubborn and determined and unwilling to change his mind. But in fact the spirit can change those fixed laws of ‘Necessity’. It enjoys struggling with them and overcoming them. That is part of the reason for creating ‘the figure of a universe’. Another purpose is to enable ‘the soul’ – the One Soul of all and all its individual souls – to undertake a pilgrimage: a journey towards a sacred destination, so that soul could travel through all the appearances of the universe to reach a wonderful divine fulfilment at the end.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 10]

In Nihil’s gulf his mighty Puissance wrought;
She swung her formless motion into shapes,
Made Matter the body of the Bodiless.

In ‘Nihil’s gulf’, the immense empty Nothingness which Death was claiming to be the ultimate Reality, God’s ‘mighty Puissance’, his great power, his miraculous Conscious-Force, was at work and ‘swung her formless motion into shapes’, manifesting material forms out of energy, creating bodies for ‘the Bodiless.’ Our senses do not perceive that Matter is in fact ever-moving energy, but that is what the physicists tell us and here Sri Aurobindo confirms it. Energy is formless, but all the forms we perceive around us are produced by the movement of that formless energy, God’s ‘mighty Puissance’, Shakti, as she makes Matter ‘the body of the Bodiless’ for the supreme existence which is not limited by any of the forms which it takes.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, B00k 10]

Infant and dim the eternal Mights awoke.
In inert Matter breathed a slumbering Life,
In a subconscient Life Mind lay asleep;
In waking Life it stretched its giant limbs
To shake from it the torpor of its drowse;
A senseless substance quivered into sense,
The world’s heart commenced to beat, its eyes to see,
In the crowded dumb vibrations of a brain
Thought fumbled in a ring to find itself,
Discovered speech and fed the new-born Word
That bridged with spans of light the world’s ignorance.

In this single sentence Sri Aurobindo covers the whole process of evolution. Once God’s ‘mighty Puissance’ created Matter to give bodies to the Bodiless ‘the eternal Mights awoke’, the eternal powers and principles of Life and Mind woke up. At first they were only ‘Infant and dim’ without much light, but Life began to breathe in the inertia of Matter. Matter is ‘inert’. It does not move by itself: something has to move it, otherwise it stays as and where it is. But asleep within ‘inert Matter’ lies the eternal Power of Life. The hallmark of life is breath, Prana, life-energy. When Life first begins to wake up in inconscient Matter it is still ‘subconscient’; but in that ‘subconscient Life’, ‘Mind lay asleep’; and as Life wakes up and develops, Mind too begins to stir and ‘stretched its giant limbs’. It starts to shake off ‘the torpor of its drowse’. ‘Torpor’ is very heavy sleep. Mind has been in deep sleep, as if drugged; but now it starts to awaken. The ‘senseless substance’ of the first material forms ‘quivered into sense’ in living bodies: ‘The world’s heart commenced to beat, its eyes to see’. Even the most primitive life-forms have sense-capacities which make them move towards light and warmth or away from substances that would be harmful to them. With the evolution of Life those capacities become more complex and form the basis of ‘Thought’. Living creatures developed something like a brain through the stimuli of sense impressions, and the power of ‘Thought’ began to emerge from ‘the crowded dumb vibrations of a brain.’ In the physical brain chemical reactions and electric impulses form vibrations which the eternal power of Thought could use to bring conscious awareness into living matter. At first Thought could only ‘fumble’, groping blindly and going around in circles trying to find itself, but eventually it discovered the power of speech, Vak, the power of the Word, which makes conscious Thought possible. This new-born faculty of the Word ‘bridged with spans of light the world’s ignorance’: Speech allows communication which can  build bridges, ‘spans of light’ linking conscious life-forms in Space and Time. In these ten beautiful lines, using the Powers of Thought and Speech, Sri Aurobindo has communicated with us the whole history of evolution.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 10]

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.

Perhaps we could say that this refers to the development of the spiritual mind. ‘The demigod’, the half divine being, the evolving soul personality which is ‘Hidden behind the curtains of man’s soul’ stares out ‘through Mind’s windows’ at the world and its happenings. That ‘demigod’ is in contact with the Truth of things: ‘He has seen the Unknown, looked on Truth’s veilless face’. For the mind, Truth is always veiled; but there is a part in us which has the capacity to see the Truth unveiled. That ‘demigod’ in us can be touched by ‘A ray … from the eternal sun’: the source of the Conscious-Force which is the origin of the manifestation. That demigod does not move, does not speak. He remains ‘Motionless, voiceless in foreseeing depths’: hidden and unnoticed in the depths of our being which are aware of the future and see what is to come, what is meant to come. He is also awake, aware, in ‘Supernature’s light’: the consciousness of the divine Nature. He sees or foresees ‘a glory of arisen wings’ – all the souls flying up towards the light of the Divine Nature; and he foresees ‘the vast descending might of God’: the future possibility of a totally transformed divine world. Sri Aurobindo describes that experience as something that has actually happened in human evolution. He could write that because it had happened in him. He had foreseen the inevitability of the Supramental Descent.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 10]

Savitri tells Death:

“O Death, thou lookst on an unfinished world
Assailed by thee and of its road unsure,
Peopled by imperfect minds and ignorant lives,
And sayest God is not and all is vain.

She tells him that he is taking a negative view of the world and human beings because he is looking at ‘an unfinished world’. It is like criticising an artist’s work before it has been completed, when you have no idea what it will look like when it is finished. This world is unfinished. In its present state, it is ‘Assailed’, under constant attack by Death. It is unsure of its road, it does not know which way it should go, because it is ‘Peopled by imperfect minds and ignorant lives’ – all of us. On this basis Death is saying that God does not exist and that all action and effort is ‘vain’, useless and meaningless.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 10]

In a small fragile seed a great tree lurks,
In a tiny gene a thinking being is shut;
A little element in a little sperm,
It grows and is a conqueror and a sage.

Just as ‘the child’, an ‘infant’ contains potentialities which we cannot foresee, similarly the potential of a great tree can be hidden in ‘a small fragile seed’. Looking at a seed most of us will have no idea what might sprout from it, but an experienced forester will be able to recognise the potential growth of a gigantic tree hidden in that insignificant seed. In small beginnings great possibilities may be lurking. All of us are carrying in our cells genes that have been transmitted to us by our parents: such a ‘tiny gene’, invisible to our normal sight, is only a ‘little element in a little sperm’ but it may be holding within it the potentialities of an adult ‘thinking being’ who may become a hero or a great wise man: ‘a conqueror and a sage’. By looking only at outer appearances we cannot see what possibilities are hidden within. Savitri tells Death, “You are looking at the world as it is in its present unfinished state and declaring that it is all useless, meaningless and in vain, instead of considering all the glorious possibilities it is holding within it and will develop into.”

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 10]

In God concealed the world began to be,
Tardily it travels towards manifest God:
Our imperfection towards perfection toils,
The body is the chrysalis of a soul:
The infinite holds the finite in its arms,
Time travels towards revealed eternity.

This world came into existence within God before he revealed any of it. In its first appearance, his presence within it was hidden. ‘Tardily’, slowly, gradually, the world is travelling towards the full manifestation of God unveiled, no longer hidden but fully revealed and expressed in his Creation. We are involved in this process. We are still imperfect, but we are compelled to work hard at becoming more and more perfect, to reach perfection. The physical body that nature has given us is ‘the chrysalis of a soul’. A ‘chrysalis’ is a stage in the development of an insect – a butterfly for example: adult butterflies lay eggs and the eggs develop into caterpillars; the caterpillars eat lots of leaves and put out silk and spin themselves a cocoon; inside that cocoon the caterpillar disappears; it dissolves into a liquid full of DNA which eventually becomes a new form; that new creature opens up the cocoon and emerges as a butterfly. The ‘chrysalis’ is the stage in between the caterpillar and the butterfly. It does not give any clue as to what is going to emerge: the full adult form which is so beautiful (Sri Aurobindo refers to butterflies as ‘conscious flowers of air’). Similarly the human body is only a transitional form which does not give much indication of the soul that inhabits it and will eventually emerge from it. ‘The infinite’, which is beyond time and space and limitation, is holding, protecting, embracing all these limited forms of the world in its arms and supporting their existence. What we experience as Time – one of the basic mysteries and conditions of our earthly existence – is, Savitri says, travelling ‘towards revealed eternity’: a transcendent state which our present consciousness cannot grasp.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 10]

A miracle structure of the eternal Mage,
Matter its mystery hides from its own eyes,
A scripture written out in cryptic signs,
An occult document of the All-Wonderful’s art.

First, ‘Matter’ itself, she says, is a ‘miracle structure’ which hides ‘its mystery … from its own eyes’: material eyes cannot see into the underlying structure and significance of Matter. But, she continues, Matter is in fact, a ‘scripture written out in cryptic signs’: a sacred text which has been written in a language that is like a code: the letters are ‘cryptic signs’. Anything that is ‘cryptic’ is mysterious and difficult to understand; its meaning has been hidden. The entire material universe is a wonderful sacred text, but we have difficulty in deciphering its meaning because we do not understand the signs, the letters of the text, all the forms and appearances of the world around us: we see them but do not understand what they are telling us. Matter, says Savitri, is an ‘occult document of the All-Wonderful’s art’. The ‘All-Wonderful’ is one of Sri Aurobindo’s expressions for the Divine: he is an artist who creates marvellous beauty and strangeness, and he has created Matter and the material universe as a ‘document’: an expression and record of his skill and power; but it is an ‘occult document’, strange and secret. The Lord is the All- Beautiful, he is the All-Powerful and the All-Wise. He is also the All-Wonderful: every wonder is contained in him and emerges from him. Whenever we feel wonder, we have been touched by his presence. He is an artist and he has created this amazing universe from his ‘miracle structure’: the magical web of Matter.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book10]

If mind is crippled, life untaught and crude,
If brutal masks are there and evil acts,
They are incidents of his vast and varied plot,
His great and dangerous drama’s needed steps;
He makes with these and all his passion-play,
A play and yet no play but the deep scheme
Of a transcendent Wisdom finding ways
To meet her Lord in the shadow and the Night:

Savitri says, “Yes, human mind is ‘crippled’: it is not powerful and free-moving; human life can be very ‘crude’, unrefined and undeveloped; and in the drama of life the Lord does put on ‘brutal masks’, cruel disguises and perform ‘evil acts’.” But, she adds, we have to see these as ‘incidents’ in the ‘vast and varied plot’, the complicated story which is being acted out in the universe, as steps which are necessary to his ‘great and dangerous drama’. He uses these happenings, and everything that happens, as part of his ‘passion-play’, his intensely moving and significant sacred drama. This is a ‘play’, a drama, and yet it is ‘no play’: it is not just an entertainment and a game: it is the ‘deep scheme’, the purposeful plan that has been worked out by ‘a transcendent Wisdom’, the supreme Conscious-Force, as ways to ‘meet her Lord in the shadow and the Night’. Beyond the Manifestation, in the transcendent state, the Lord and his Wisdom power are one. But in the Manifestation they have separated in order to play at hide-and-seek ‘in the shadow and the Night’ of ignorance and unconsciousness, of falsehood, even apparent non-existence.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 10]

Immortality assured itself by death;
The Eternal’s face was seen through drifts of Time.

Savitri continues giving examples of the contradictions that the Lord has faced himself with, which seem so paradoxical to us. Part of the fulfilment this manifestation is aiming at is ‘Immortality’: that we should all evolve to the consciousness of ‘Immortality’, if not to the full state of physical immortality. But at present, our ‘Immortality’ is ‘assured … by death’. We have to leave the body because it is not yet able to overcome the inertia of matter enough to respond to the higher truth that our soul is growing into; so we have to discard it, so that our immortal soul can put on a new robe for further experience and growth. Death of the body is essential to this progress. This process takes place by death, by leaving this body because it is not responsive enough to the higher truth and taking on another one again and again and again. Our immortality, our inner immortality assures itself through this process of dying and being reborn. Then, ‘The Eternal’s face was seen through drifts of Time.’ We make an opposition between Eternity and Time. We think of Eternity as being timeless, beyond Time; but the Eternal expresses himself through many different forms and figures in Time, and we time-bound creatures can glimpse his face, as if through moving clouds, ‘through drifts of Time’. Sri Aurobindo has written a poem called ‘In Horis Aeternum’, which means ‘Eternity in the Hours’. In it he describes some such glimpses which he has experienced, when ‘The Eternal’s face was seen through drifts of Time’.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 10]

His knowledge he disguised as Ignorance,
His Good he sowed in Evil’s monstrous bed,
Made error a door by which Truth could enter in,
His plant of bliss watered with Sorrow’s tears.

In the manifestation, the Supreme disguises his transcendent and eternal Omniscience with many forms of Ignorance; but there could be no Ignorance if there were not also the knowledge behind it in disguise. The Supreme intends Good for all, the best for all. But he finds ways to plant seeds of Goodness in a bed (like a flower-bed) that seems to be only full of Evil. He has made ‘error’, all our human mistakes, into ‘a door by which Truth could enter in’. ‘To err is human’: we are making mistakes all the time because in our ignorance we cannot see things as they really are and so we do not know how to make right choices; But the Lord has ‘Made error a door through which Truth can enter in’: even through our mistakes he leads us towards the Truth, allows the Truth to come to us.  Like a gardener, he is nurturing his ‘plant of bliss’, and to help it to grow in us, he waters it with Sorrow’s tears. The experience of pain, sorrow, grief, prepares us to enjoy God’s Bliss.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 10]

A thousand aspects point back to the One;
A dual Nature covered the Unique.

The One is the Source and goal of everything, but in the world he shows himself in ‘A thousand aspects’; not only a thousand but an uncountable number of contrasting and often apparently contradictory aspects all ‘point back to the One’. That One, the Unique, the Sole, the Alone, is covered up by ‘A dual Nature’: the earth nature which deals with dualities, opposites and contradictions. The nature of human mind is such that we can hardly escape from dualities: if we say ‘yes’ to one thing, we find that we are saying ‘no’ to something else. Nature is dual in another way too: there is the lower apparently unconsciousness and mechanical Nature we call Prakriti; but although it seems to be without consciousness the lower nature is very obviously being guided by perfect consciousness; and there is also the higher divine Nature which we are not so aware of. These are two aspects of one truth, one force, one power: Shakti, Ishwari, the Mighty Mother.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 10]

All stumbled on behind a stumbling Guide,
Yet every stumble is a needed pace
On unknown routes to an unknowable goal.
All blundered and straggled towards the One Divine.

Because the One, the Unique, covered himself by a ‘dual Nature’, the path of evolutionary development has not been a smooth one. As if treading a rough path in the dark, the world has ‘stumbled on behind a stumbling Guide’, moving forward blindly, ‘blundering’, with many mis-steps, following some sort of guidance; but that Guide was unreliable, for he was also stumbling like everything else. Perhaps this ‘stumbling Guide’ was the evolving earth-consciousness. It has not been a cohesive forward movement; the different creatures and forms moved at different speeds in different directions; a few may have been moving ahead faster than others, the rest ‘straggled’ behind in a disorderly way, getting lost as they moved with difficulty towards a diviner state. But Savitri reassures us that ‘every stumble is a needed pace’: every step is necessary, even if it is a mis-step and makes you fall, even if it seems to lead you astray. Every mistake that we make is in some way necessary for our progress. It is ‘a needed pace’, a step on these unknown routes, these million roads towards an unknowable goal. We cannot know the goal. It is not only unknown, it is unknowable. It is beyond the capacity of mind to discover. But nevertheless the entire manifestation has been and is unstoppably stumbling and blundering and straggling towards ‘the One Divine’.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 10]

Even wisdom, hewer of the roads of God,
Is a partner in the deep disastrous game:
Lost is the pilgrim’s wallet and the scrip,
She fails to read the map and watch the star.
A poor self-righteous virtue is her stock
And reason’s pragmatic grope or abstract sight,
Or the technique of a brief hour’s success
She teaches, an usher in utility’s school.

Among the eternal Powers who have been transmuted by that ‘titan spell’ is wisdom, whose true task is to open up ‘the roads of God’ for us. ‘To hew’ means ‘to cut’, like cutting a path through undergrowth in a forest. But even she has joined in this ‘deep disastrous game’ of distortion. She has ‘lost the pilgrim’s wallet and the scrip’. Here is an allusion to the The Pilgrim’s Progress, which used to be the most widely- read book in England apart from the Bible.

Under the influence of that ‘titan spell’, the eternal power of wisdom has lost her proper sustenance and true guide. ‘She fails to read the map and watch the star’. She gets lost. As a result, instead of true wisdom, all she has to offer is ‘A poor self-righteous virtue’. There are prescriptions for how to be good, how to behave correctly; if you follow them, then you tend to believe that you are really good and superior to other people who are not following the same prescription. Instead of being a true guide on the way to God, all she can do is to follow human reason, with its ‘pragmatic grope’, feeling around in the dark to find out by trial and error what works and seems to be useful, or reason’s ‘abstract sight’: there is a higher aspect of reason which follows abstract thought and may see more clearly, but if that is divorced from reality, it too is not a very helpful guide in dealing with the world. Or she may serve ‘in utility’s school’, teaching techniques for gaining ‘a brief hour’s success’, something that will work for a time. That is all the wisdom that many people ask for. Or perhaps she is not even a proper teacher. She is just an ‘usher’. Long ago in schools the teacher would have an assistant who was there to keep order, to make sure that the pupils did not disturb each other too much and did their homework properly. In this state wisdom is not sharing the higher light we really need, but only teaching how to avoid getting into trouble or perhaps gaining some small short-lived success. These are ways in which wisdom, which should be a guiding light on the road to higher consciousness, gets perverted and Distorted.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 10]

Our knowledge walks leaning on Error’s staff,
A worshipper of false dogmas and false gods,
Or fanatic of a fierce intolerant creed
Or a seeker doubting every truth he finds,
A sceptic facing Light with adamant No
Or chilling the heart with dry ironic smile,
A cynic stamping out the god in man;

Our human knowledge needs a stick, a ‘staff’, to lean on, to support itself as it explores the world. It uses the stick of ‘Error’. We advance in knowledge and understanding by making mistakes and learning from them. Also we often think that we know certain things but our knowledge may actually be false, untrue. We believe in ‘false dogmas and false gods’: teachings which are not true, powers that are not divine. A person may become a ‘fanatic of a fierce intolerant creed’: a fundamentalist who condemns and is ready to punish anyone who has a different world-view or belief from his own. Or he may be a seeker, apparently searching for the truth, but ‘doubting every truth he finds’; or a ‘sceptic’ who thinks he is very superior because he is not convinced by anything, denying any Light that is shown to him with an ‘adamant No’, simply refusing to accept it and chilling the heart of an enthusiastic believer with a ‘dry ironic smile’ that says “Are you such a fool as to believe something like that?” ‘A cynic stamping out the god in man’: brutally eradicating the gleam of the divine light. A ‘cynic’ is a person who will take nothing seriously and mocks at everything. People like that tend to think that they are superior to others and far more intelligent, but they are closed to the working of the divine Light, and their cleverness is violently destroying the divine spark in themselves and others.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 10]

As knowledge grows Light flames up from within:
It is a shining warrior in the mind,
An eagle of dreams in the divining heart,
An armour in the fight, a bow of God.

As knowledge grows in us, that Light becomes brighter and ‘flames up from within’. It expresses itself as ‘a shining warrior in the mind’: who protects and leads us, as an ‘eagle of dreams in the divining heart’. An eagle can fly extremely high and has very clear and powerful eyesight; traditionally we are told that the eagle can look directly at the sun without being dazzled. The light of knowledge within us can take the form of a powerful bird flying up towards the light, lifting ‘the divining heart’ with its high-flying dreams and intuitions, with its non-mental knowledge. That Light of knowledge will be our ‘armour’, our protection in the battle of life, and our weapon, ‘a bow of God’ which will carry our aspirations like arrows directly to their target. This is the Light of Consciousness.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 10]

Then larger dawns arrive and Wisdom’s pomps
Cross through the being’s dim half-lighted fields;
Philosophy climbs up Thought’s cloud-bank peaks
And Science tears out Nature’s occult powers,
Enormous djinns who serve a dwarf’s small needs,
Exposes the sealed minutiae of her art
And conquers her by her own captive force.

As we develop further the awakening light becomes wider and broader, and ‘Wisdom’s pomps’, no longer perverted and distorted, cross through the ‘dim half-lighted fields’ of our ignorance in a glorious procession. Then greater forms of knowledge develop: ‘Philosophy’, climbing to the high cloud- covered peaks of ‘Thought’. Philosophy is Thought which aims at a higher understanding of things. To get a higher and wider view it climbs up the mountain peaks of Thought. There are clouds up there of course, which are not very substantial – but nevertheless, it is aiming for a higher and wider view. ‘Science’ discovers the hidden powers of Nature. Those ‘occult powers’ of Nature are like ‘Enormous djinns’, powerful spirits. ‘Djinn’ is an Arabic word for a vital spirit. They are sometimes called ‘genies’. In The Thousand and One Nights there are several stories about djinns which have been captured by some magician and forced to live in a bottle or a lamp. If you rub the lamp, the djinn will do anything you ask. But in the stories, people often waste the great powers of the djinn by trivial and worthless wishes. If you open the bottle and set the djinn free you can no longer have any control over his great powers. Some of the discoveries that science has made are like that. They carry with them such tremendous powers that we may not be able to control them. But even when we do control them, we use them for our small purposes. Think what an enormous power electricity is. But we use it for all kinds of trivial purposes: to ‘serve a dwarf’s small needs’. Science also ‘Exposes the sealed minutiae’, reveals the tiny hidden details of Nature’s workings, and finds out how to use them. It conquers Nature by her own powers and processes, making her force captive to our human purposes.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 10]

It hears the Word to which our hearts were deaf,
It sees through the blaze in which our thoughts grew blind;
It drinks from the naked breasts of glorious Truth,
It learns the secrets of eternity.

Looking into ‘the Eternal’s eyes’, the spirit within hears the great ‘Word’ which our human hearts could not hear. It sees through the blazing borderline of light where ‘our thoughts’ got dazzled and ‘grew blind’. That spirit within is able to take nourishment directly ‘from the naked breasts of glorious Truth‘, the nourishing Mother of the universe, and ‘learns the secrets of eternity’. That is the culmination and fulfilment of the development from total inconscience and nescience to the realisation of eternal Truth. Savitri has described the whole process, from the plunge into darkness and then the upward return journey, step by step, level to level towards the light of full consciousness.

[ Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 10]

Thy mask has covered the Eternal’s face,
The Bliss that made the world has fallen asleep.
Abandoned in the Vast she slumbered on:
An evil transmutation overtook
Her members till she knew herself no more.

You are the ‘mask’ which has covered up the true face of the Eternal; as a result, because you could do that, ‘The Bliss that made the world has fallen asleep.’ The blissful Conscious-Force of the Eternal has fallen into a deep sleep of unconsciousness. As she slept, ‘Abandoned in the Vast’, in the emptiness of unconscious Space, her form, ‘Her members’ or limbs, were changed so much by an ‘evil transmutation’ that she could no longer recognise herself. Earth, the material principle, is one of the ‘eternal Powers’ whose divine form has been transmuted as if by a ‘titan spell’ so that she has become unrecognisable to herself: she no longer knows who or what she is.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri: Book 10]

Earth still has kept her early charm and grace,
The grandeur and the beauty still are hers,
But veiled is the divine Inhabitant.
The souls of men have wandered from the Light
And the great Mother turns away her face.

Nevertheless our Mother Earth has still kept ‘her early charm and grace’. Her ‘grandeur and beauty’ is still there in a surprising number of places: the grandeur of the great mountains and deserts, of the oceans and forests and polar regions, the beauty of flowers and trees and animals. But we see only the material appearances: the ‘divine Inhabitant’ dwelling within is veiled from us. We do not perceive that Presence clearly, although from time to time we might get some intimation of it, some faint glimpse through the veil. And because we are so preoccupied by surface appearances, ‘The souls of men have wandered from the Light’: from the Light of true knowledge and perception; and so it is as if ‘the great Mother’, not finding the needed receptivity, ‘turns away her face’ from us.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 10]

Our nature twisted by the abortive birth
Returns wry answers to life’s questioning shocks,
An acrid relish finds in the world’s pangs,
Drinks the sharp wine of grief’s perversity.

Our human nature has got twisted and deformed in the process of being born out of the unconsciousness; something has gone wrong at our birth and so we are not born whole and perfect the way we should be. As a result, our human nature cannot help returning ‘wry answers to life’s questioning shocks’. Many of the experiences we have in life come to test us, challenging us to find our true self, our inner strength, our true nature; but because our nature is deformed from birth, we cannot help responding to them in a twisted way. ‘Wry’ means ‘twisted’. If something you eat tastes very bitter, you may make a ‘wry face’, twisting up your face-muscles; but it also means ‘twisted’ in a psychological sense: ‘distorted’. Very often we respond in the worst possible way to the challenges and ‘questioning shocks’ which life gives us. We may even enjoy the suffering of the world and find an ‘acrid relish’ in its pain and grief. ‘Acrid’ means ‘bitter’ or ‘burning’; ‘Relish’ is something spicy that you take with your food to make it more interesting.  Our nature may feel a perverse delight in some of the things that go wrong in the world, and enjoy drinking ‘the sharp wine of grief’.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 10]

A curse is laid on the pure joy of life:
Delight, God’s sweetest sign and Beauty’s twin,
Dreaded by aspiring saint and austere sage,
Is shunned, a dangerous and ambiguous cheat,
A specious trick of an infernal Power
It tempts the soul to its self-hurt and fall.

Through this twistedness, this crookedness, a ‘curse’ has been laid ‘on the pure joy of life’. A ‘curse’ is the opposite of a blessing. In truth, Savitri says, ‘Delight’ is ‘God’s sweetest sign and Beauty’s twin’, the ‘sweetest sign’ of the divine presence, the twin to Beauty: the Divine manifesting himself in the physical. But because of the twistedness of our human nature, these lovely natural manifestations of the Lord have been dreaded by spiritual aspirants. The aspiring saints and the sages who go in for austerity feel that they must avoid delight and enjoyment and pleasure. They shun those things because they feel that they are very dangerous, misleading, ‘A specious trick’, a cheat that has been invented by ‘an infernal Power’, a hostile being from the lower vital levels, to tempt ‘the soul to its self-hurt and fall’, leading the soul away from its goal.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 10]

A puritan God made pleasure a poisonous fruit,
Or red drug in the market-place of Death,
And sin the child of Nature’s ecstasy.

We all know about this puritan God. In several religions there is this idea that the pleasure principle is a poisonous fruit that should be avoided. They see it as an addictive and destructive drug that is sold ‘in the market-place of Death’. They teach that the delight of Nature will give rise to ‘sin’, to wrongdoing that cuts the soul off from the divine.

Q: Why a ‘red drug’?

A ‘drug’ is a medicine, but it may be a medicine that poisons you. If it is a ‘red drug’, it seems to be connected with ‘sin’ precisely, with perverse vital enjoyment which will damage the soul.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 10]

Even joy itself becomes a poisonous draught;
Its hunger is made a dreadful hook of Fate.
All means are held good to catch a single beam,
Eternity sacrificed for a moment’s bliss:
Yet for joy and not for sorrow earth was made
And not as a dream in endless suffering Time.

‘Even joy itself’, what should be the pure joy of life, can become a ‘poisonous draught’ – a drink that can kill you. The hunger for joy becomes ‘a dreadful hook’ by which Fate will ensnare you, because human beings will make use of any means in order to ‘catch a single beam’ of delight. Human beings seem to have felt that it was worthwhile to sacrifice even their hope of eternal life just to experience ‘a moment’s bliss’. Yet Savitri insists that this is not the way that things were intended to be: Earth was made for joy and not for sorrow. And life on earth is not meant to be an illusory dream ‘in endless suffering Time’: that is not the meaning and intention of the earth. Nevertheless something does seem to have gone wrong:

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 10]

Although God made the world for his delight,
An ignorant Power took charge and seemed his Will
And Death’s deep falsity has mastered Life.

God has made the world for his delight. But ‘An ignorant Power’ has taken charge and seems to represent itself as the divine Will. The profound falsehood of Death seems to have conquered Life.

All grew a play of Chance simulating Fate.

As a result, things in this world seem to happen by chance, in a random unpredictable way, and yet this ‘play of Chance’ ‘simulates’ or gives the appearance of ‘Fate’, which seems to be fixed and determined so that it cannot be changed. This is not the real nature of things, but it may look like that to us, because of the wryness of our nature.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 10]