Now we shall begin to follow the Traveller of the Worlds on the journey which Sri Aurobindo has depicted in the fifteen cantos of Book Two, giving us a map of the subtle planes and worlds of existence which lie beyond the material universe we inhabit, of which our human scientists have begun to give us some glimpses. He will show us how those subtle planes and worlds are connected to each other and how they influence our lives here in the human world. But first he gives to us and to Aswapati a vast overview of the many levels of the manifestation.

In a profound existence beyond earth’s
Parent or kin to our ideas and dreams
Where Space is a vast experiment of the soul,
In an immaterial substance linked to ours
In a deep oneness of all things that are,
The universe of the Unknown arose.

Aswapati is experiencing ‘a profound existence beyond earth’s’: he has entered a kind of existence which is quite different from the life which we experience here on our material earth. That existence is ‘profound’, which means ‘deep’, unlike the surface life we normally live. Yet that ‘profound existence’ is connected to us: it is ‘Parent or kin to our ideas and dreams’. A ‘parent’ is a mother or a father, somebody who gives birth to a child; ‘our ideas and dreams’ are born from that ‘profound existence’; or if it is not exactly their ‘parent’, their origin, at least it is their ‘kin’. ‘Kin’ are relations, cousins or uncles and aunts, people who are related to you. That ‘profound existence beyond earth’s’ is ‘Parent or kin to our ideas and dreams’. We do not live in a purely material world. Although we live in a world that is dominated by Matter and material forces, nevertheless all kinds of non-material movements come to us from beyond the material universe and give rise to ‘ideas and dreams’ here. If we were living in a purely material universe, we could not have ‘ideas and dreams’ at all; they come to us from other realms. And in that ‘profound existence’ beyond our earth and the whole material universe, ‘Space’ is not just an immense emptiness, but a ‘vast experiment of the soul’. The cosmic soul and spirit, instead of holding all its possibilities hidden within itself, projects itself outwards to create a world, a universe, a manifestation, extended in Space and in Time and individualised in uncountable individual forms. All its deep possibilities get spread out, projected. ‘Space is a vast experiment’, as if the cosmic soul wants to try out what will happen: “If I do this, if I extend myself like this, allow all my different possibilities to interact independently in Space and Time instead of holding them within myself, what will happen?”   

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 2]

All, even pain, was the soul’s pleasure here;
Here all experience was a single plan,
The thousandfold expression of the One.

For the soul, here in this universe of the ‘Unknown’, everything – ‘even pain’ – is a delight, and ‘all experience’ is part of one ‘single plan’: ‘The thousandfold expression of the One’. The ‘plan’ on which the universe is built is that it should express the uncountable thousands and millions of varied and contrasting aspects of the ‘One’, the supreme Origin. The ‘universal Power’ is the Shakti, the conscious Force of the Eternal, the Mother. It is her task to create and display all this ‘thousandfold expression of the One’.

[ Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 2]

The exhaustless seeings of the unsleeping Mind,
Letterings of its contact with the invisible,
Surrounded him with countless pointing signs;
The voices of a thousand realms of Life
Missioned to him her mighty messages.

One of those ‘Aspects of being’ is Mind, another is Life. Aswapati becomes aware of a vast ‘unsleeping Mind’ which is always awake and always seeing new forms, forces and possibilities. The power of creative vision is a capacity of the Mind. What that Mind sees, the ‘seeings’ of that ‘unsleeping Mind’, can never be exhausted, they are endless, they go on and on and on and on. They are all ‘Letterings’: each of these ‘seeings’ is like a letter or a series of letters which express the ‘contact’ which that unsleeping cosmic Mind has ‘with the invisible’. Its ‘contact with the invisible’ gets expressed, written down we could say, interpreted in ‘seeings’. Those ‘seeings’ surrounded Aswapati ‘with countless pointing signs’: each of those ‘seeings’ is pointing in a different direction, indicating a way to go, something to be explored, some creative possibility of ‘the invisible’ expressed in forms and movements that can be seen. He also becomes aware of ‘The voices of a thousand realms of Life’. The Life-power has a thousand different realms or aspects and each of them has a distinct voice, each of which is expressing, missioning, sending out, a mighty Message, which he hears.

Perhaps I should point out that everywhere in Savitri Sri Aurobindo is describing psychological states and experiences. The lines describe what is being experienced at a particular moment or in a particular state. That is important to remember. Sometimes we quote a particular line and say, “Sri Aurobindo says this”; but in Savitri whatever he describes relates to the state or experience which is being evoked in that particular passage. What we are being shown here relates to Aswapati’s experience when he first enters into the new Space and Time of the subtle universe. It is an entire creation which we do not normally experience because it lies behind all the physical appearances of our material world. Here, when we are told that Aswapati was surrounded by ‘The exhaustless seeings of the unsleeping Mind’ which he experiences as ‘countless pointing signs’, this refers to the cosmic mind of the subtle universe which he has entered into. There the contacts of that Mind with the invisible are expressed in concrete visions which point out new possibilities to him. Life in that universe has a thousand realms and aspects, each of which conveys a particular mighty message to him.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 2]

The heaven-hints that invade our earthly lives,
The dire imaginations dreamed by Hell,
Which if enacted and experienced here
Our dulled capacity soon would cease to feel
Or our mortal frailty could not long endure,
Were set in their sublime proportions there.

The intensity of what can be felt there in the subtle worlds is much greater than what we could possibly bear in our physical bodies; and it covers the whole range of experience from the ‘heaven-hints’ that sometimes ‘invade our earthly lives’ to the ‘dire imaginations dreamed by Hell’. At some special moments, as Sri Aurobindo described in the first section of Canto Four of Book One, human beings get hints of wonderful, high, blissful states. In the ‘profound existence beyond earth’s’ which Aswapati has now entered, those same experiences ‘Were set in their sublime proportions’. Here we get only little hints; there they are experienced directly, fully, to their highest extent. This is true not only for the ‘heaven-hints’ but also for those ‘imaginations’ that are ‘dreamed by Hell’, that come from the lowest perverted, distorted levels of consciousness where all kinds of terrible things are imagined. We get hints of those too in our life here, but if they were acted out – ‘enacted’ – ‘and experienced here’ the ‘dulled capacity’ of our physical being would soon stop feeling it: it would not be able to take in the intensity of those experiences; our mortal weakness would not be able to endure them long, it would become unconscious or die. But there, these things are ‘set in their sublime proportions’ and are experienced to their full extent and range, in their full power and intensity.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 2]

Q: What is meant by ‘spirit-sense’?

Just as we have physical senses through which we experience the material world around us, the spirit in its own way has senses with which it experiences the subtle contact of things.

This sentence refers to different ways of knowing: knowledge may come through thought, or by sight, and other things can be known by the heart’s feeling, and yet other things can be ‘felt by spirit-sense’.

These are different ways of perceiving and knowing things, and in that subtle universe Aswapati feels that he is offered an unlimited range of things to experience and know, and many possible ways of experiencing and knowing them.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 2]

Asking for entry at his nature’s gates
They crowded the widened spaces of his mind,
His self-discovery’s flaming witnesses,
Offering their marvel and their multitude.

He feels that a multitude of marvellous experiences are clamouring to enter his individual awareness and become part of him. They are ‘Asking for entry at his nature’s gates’. The Mandukya Upanishad speaks of nineteen doors or gates, nineteen different openings by which experiences enter awareness. Aswapati’s mind has become vast and wide, but all these possibilities of experience are also so unlimited that they crowd into his mind ‘Offering their marvel and their multitude’ to ‘the widened spaces of his mind’, which bear witness to the extent and variety of his expanding ‘self-discovery’. He is discovering his larger self through all these different experiences, which offer him ‘their marvel and their multitude’: the wonder and multiplicity of these endless experiences and possibilities.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 2]

Only was missing the sole timeless Word
That carries eternity in its lonely sound,
The Idea self-luminous key to all ideas,
The integer of the Spirit’s perfect sum
That equates the unequal All to the equal One,
The single sign interpreting every sign,
The absolute index to the Absolute.

In spite of all this opulent universal richness and all the powerful experiences it has to offer, something is missing, something very important: ‘the sole timeless Word / That carries eternity in its lonely sound’. This is perhaps the sound which we symbolise by the syllable ‘OM’, the origin of all other vibrations. That ‘timeless Word’ is expressing a timeless ‘Idea’, which in itself is the ‘key to all ideas’: it is the one original ‘Idea’ which has given birth to all possible ideas, and which, if caught, makes all other ideas understandable in themselves and in their relationships. That Word and that Idea express ‘The integer of the Spirit’s perfect sum’. An ‘integer’ is a whole number. When all the different expressions of the Spirit are added together, they sum up to a whole number, which ‘equates’ – makes an ‘equals’ sign between – ‘the unequal All’, the ‘All’ which is full of difference and variety, and ‘the equal One’, forever indivisible and unchanging. There is one ‘sole timeless Word / That carries eternity in its lonely sound’; there is one single Idea that is the ‘key to all ideas’; there is an ‘integer’, a whole number which brings all the variousness and differences of the universe together into ‘the Spirit’s perfect sum’; there is one ‘single sign’ which gives the meaning of all the other signs, all the symbolic forms, beings and movements that make up the manifestation, and it is the ‘index to the Absolute’. Our ‘index’ finger is the one we use to point at things; an ‘index’ can be anything that is used as a pointer, an indication or a guide. The word ‘index’ is also used for the alphabetical list of topics in a scholarly book, where we can find the page number of whatever topic we need to know about. The ‘Absolute’ is beyond all relativities, but Sri Aurobindo seems to say here that there exists a clue, a Word, an Idea, a linking sign which reveals how each of the innumerable relativities in the manifestation is connected ‘to the Absolute’, the Transcendent. But that ‘index’ is missing from the opulence and beauty of the subtle universe which Aswapati has now entered, just as it cannot be found here in our material world. To find it he will have to go further, beyond the boundaries of the manifestation. He will eventually find it in Book Three. Meanwhile we shall continue to follow him in his quest, which will lead him through all the planes of cosmic existence.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 2]