A stillness absolute, incommunicable,
Meets the sheer self-discovery of the soul;
A wall of stillness shuts it from the world,
A gulf of stillness swallows up the sense
And makes unreal all that mind has known,
All that the labouring senses still would weave
Prolonging an imaged unreality.

This is another evocation of the experience of the absolute ‘stillness’ that was described in the previous canto: there is no movement, no sound, and there is nothing that the mind can grasp or share, because it is ‘incommunicable’: it cannot be communicated. Sri Aurobindo gives us some sense of it, but until we have experienced it for ourselves, it remains ‘incommunicable’. This is the experience that ‘Meets the sheer self-discovery of the soul’, when the soul discovers its essence. ‘Sheer’ means ‘pure’: there is nothing else but the soul discovering its own essential existence. There is a wall of ‘stillness’, of silence, separating the soul from the world around. There is ‘a gulf’: a deep empty space or sea of ‘stillness’ that ‘swallows up’ all the sense experiences of touch and sound and hearing. The soul feels surrounded by a deep silence which makes everything the mind has been aware of appear ‘unreal’. The senses would like to go on experiencing the world around; they are ‘labouring’ to go on feeling, but that would only mean ‘Prolonging an imaged unreality’. They may go on providing the sense data, but to the consciousness all that now seems like nothing more than ‘an imaged unreality’. Those who have this experience feel that everything which has been real to them up to then is only an illusion. This experience is the source and basis of the metaphysical theory that all existence is an illusion, ‘all that the mind has known’ feels ‘unreal’. In fact normally we only know things through our mind. We feel things with our senses, but it is the mind that interprets what the senses tell us and gives us an image of the world outside our skin. The senses are working all the time; and Sri Aurobindo tells us that they would still like to go on weaving their picture of the world, but it would be only ‘an imaged unreality’, a picture of something that is not real. In a letter Sri Aurobindo has said that when he had this experience in 1908 everything he saw around him seemed like flickering images on a cinema screen – and you can imagine what the cinema was like in those days. And here he is telling us what it is like for anyone who has this experience of ‘the sheer self-discovery of the soul’.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 3]

Self’s vast spiritual silence occupies Space;
Only the Inconceivable is left,
Only the Nameless without space and time:
Abolished is the burdening need of life:
Thought falls from us, we cease from joy and grief;
The ego is dead; we are freed from being and care,
We have done with birth and death and work and fate.

The ‘vast spiritual silence’ of the pure Self fills the whole of Space, giving just a bare sense of existence. Nothing else is left except ‘the Inconceivable’ – a reality which the mind cannot conceive or form any idea of. Our minds can conceive an idea or an image; but beyond all ideas and images there lies an inconceivable reality which the mind cannot grasp. In the ‘vast spiritual silence’ of the Self, all that is left is the sense of a bare reality which cannot be grasped or understood and of a Being that cannot be named, the ‘The Nameless without space and time’. The word ‘without’ is used here as the opposite of ‘within’, meaning ‘outside’ or ‘beyond’: this ‘Inconceivable’ and ‘Nameless’ Reality is beyond ‘space and time’. With this experience, all the needs of life are ‘abolished’, wiped out. ‘Thought falls from us’: there are no more thoughts; ‘we cease from joy and grief’: there are no more emotions. The ‘ego’, the sense of our small limited individuality, has disappeared; the soul is vast, identified with the Supreme Self; ‘we are freed from being and care’: we are liberated even from the sense of separate existence, and from all care and anxiety; we have finished with the whole business of ‘birth and death and workand fate’. Notice that the poet says ‘we’: this is a general experience, not just one that Sri Aurobindo or Aswapati had, but one which many mystics have spoken about; and one which potentially we can all have. This has been the goal of many yogas, of many spiritual paths – this is liberation; this is moksha; this is the goal. In The Synthesis of Yoga, Sri Aurobindo says this liberation is the first goal of all yoga.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri; Volume 3]

Only the everlasting No has neared
And stared into thy eyes and killed thy heart:
But where is the Lover’s everlasting Yes,
And immortality in the secret heart,
The voice that chants to the creator Fire,
The symbolled OM, the great assenting Word,
The bridge between the rapture and the calm,
The passion and the beauty of the Bride,
The chamber where the glorious enemies kiss,
The smile that saves, the golden peak of things?

These are very profoundly poetic, symbolic, suggestive lines which it is difficult to put into any other words. But anyway let us take them one by one and see what we can understand. The voice seems to say to Aswapati: “What has happened to you is that the ‘everlasting No’ has come close to you.” It is as if there are two powers or two aspects to the Supreme. There is a negative, a ‘No’ which dissolves things, which brings liberation; but there is also another side which is positive: the ‘everlasting Yes’. Aswapati remembers, or is reminded that “You have not experienced that yet. The ‘everlasting No’ has come close to you; it has stared into your eyes, and its look has killed all the emotions of your heart and left you feeling blank and pure and at peace. But what about the other side of things?” Sri Aurobindo has not put any quotation marks around these words and we do not know who is saying all this. Perhaps Aswapati is saying this to himself: “But what about all that we were aiming for? There must be more. This cannot be the ultimate experience. What about the ‘everlasting Yes’ of the Lover who loves everything in the universe? What about the dream of ‘immortality’ that is always being carried ‘in the secret heart’? What about the call, the voice, the aspiration that is constantly worshipping ‘the creator Fire’: the energy which brings things into existence? What about ‘the great assenting Word’ that says ‘Yes’ to creation?” That Word, the poet says, is symbolised by the syllable ‘OM’. In fact one version of the origin of this manifestation says that it began with a great resonating OM which carried in its vibrations the potentiality of everything that has ever existed and everything that is yet to come into existence. “There must be a ‘bridge’, a connection between the two aspects, between the all-swallowing stillness, the ‘calm’, and all the delight of the world. Isn’t there a partner, ‘the Bride’, with all her intensity and her beauty? There must be a place ‘where the glorious enemies kiss’: where the things that seem opposite – Soul and World, Spirit and Matter – come together and embrace and are one. What about the ‘smile that saves’, that gives salvation to everything and is ‘the golden peak of things’, the culmination of all this marvellous universe?”

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri; Volume 3]

A high and blank negation is not all,
A huge extinction is not God’s last word,
Life’s ultimate sense, the close of being’s course,
The meaning of this great mysterious world.

The ‘high and blank negation’ revealed by the ‘everlasting No’ is not the final realisation. Sri Aurobindo says that ‘A huge extinction is not God’s last word’ : the discovery that everything we thought was real turns out to be an ephemeral illusion is not the ultimate meaning of Life; it is not ‘the close of being’s course’, the end of the journey of existence. Very often in Savitri this word ‘sense’ refers to the senses, to the capacities and the experiences of the senses; but of course the word also has another meaning in English, of ‘significance’ or ‘meaning’; and that is how it is used here. That ‘huge extinction’ is not ‘God’s last word’, nor ‘the meaning of this great mysterious world’. This world is not random and purposeless: it has a meaning, and its meaning is not revealed by ‘extinction’ in the featureless Unknowable.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri; Volume 3]

To free the self is but one radiant pace;
Here to fulfil himself was God’s desire.

Here are two lines which we can always remember as a mantra that expresses an essential aspect of Sri Aurobindo’s vision. Moksha, liberation, is necessary ‘to free the self’ which is identified with the appearances of the world; but that is only ‘one radiant pace’. It is a step which is full of light and glory, but there is another step to be taken too, because ‘Here to fulfil himself was God’s desire’. Sri Aurobindo states authoritatively that the intention and wish of the Supreme when He started out on this adventure of manifestation through involution and evolution was ‘to fulfil himself’ here in the material universe by bringing about a divine life in Matter. That is the real purpose and meaning of our embodiment in the material World.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri: Volume 3]