Above the imperfect reach of word and thought,
Beyond the sight that seeks support of form,
Lost in deep tracts of superconscient Light,
Or voyaging in blank featureless Nothingness,
Sole in the trackless Incommensurable,
Or past not-self and self and selflessness,
Transgressing the dream-shores of conscious mind
He reached at last his sempiternal base.

It seems as if he travels for a long time, through different kinds of experience: he is carried ‘Above the imperfect reach of word and thought’ – ‘reach’ means ‘scope’ or ‘range’; thought and words can carry us a certain distance, but he is going far above that, to experiences which cannot be expressed in words or thought. He is driven ‘Beyond the sight that seeks support of form’: our sight looks at forms, and understands the world around us in terms of form; Aswapati has gone beyond that kind of vision: he enters ‘deep tracts of superconscient Light’. ‘Tracts’ are areas or territories; he gets lost and absorbed in these ‘deep tracts of superconscient Light’: the higher Light above the reach of our consciousness. At times he finds himself travelling through ‘blank featureless Nothingness’, where there are no features, no landmarks, everything is blank and empty. There he feels himself all alone, ‘Sole in the trackless Incommensurable’: there are no paths or ways, no tracks or signs in the ‘Incommensurable’, a state or space which cannot be measured against anything or be compared with anything, because nothing else like that exists. He seems to travel past different modes of existence: ‘not-self’, ‘self’ and ‘selflessness’, as if he is going beyond these possible states of being. Eventually, ‘He reached at last his sempiternal base’: his foundation, which is ‘sempiternal’. We know the word ‘eternal’; this word is made more emphatic by the addition of the Latin word ‘semper’ which means ‘always’, so that ‘sempiternal’ means ‘forever eternal’. He reaches his ‘sempiternal base’ by  Transgressing the dream-shores of conscious mind’. This word ‘transgressing’ usually has a negative connotation, of doing something that should not be done; but if we look at the literal root of the word, it means simply ‘going beyond’. If we speak of someone ‘transgressing’ or committing a transgression, we mean that they have gone beyond some limit of acceptable behaviour, or what the law allows usto do. Here Aswapati’s soul is going beyond, crossing and leaving behind, ‘the dream-shores of conscious mind’: the dreamy borderlines of ‘conscious mind’. At last he reaches a state which is not a dream, which is ‘his sempiternal base’: his eternal foundation and source.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Volume 3]

There turns no keyed creation in the void,
No giant mechanism watched by a soul;
There creaks no fate-turned huge machinery;

These lines present our universe as something mechanical: a ‘keyed creation’, resembling a clockwork toy that has been wound up with a key and set off on its mechanical course. When Aswapati reaches the air of the spirit, he finds that there is ‘no keyed creation’ turning round and round ‘in the void’ – in the emptiness. If we could get outside it, the material universe might look like that; or it might look like a ‘giant mechanism’ that is being ‘watched’ – observed – ‘by a soul’: these words express the view of the universe as a mechanism of Prakriti which is being observed by Purusha, the conscious soul. In the air of the spirit, ‘There creaks no fate-turned huge machinery’: machinery which is kept going by karma, by the consequences of what has been done, kept turning by ‘fate’. ‘Creaking’ is the sound that an old, rusty machine makes. In the spirit’s air there is nothing like that. Now the poet is going to mention many other characteristics of our world and our life that are not found in the House of the Spirit.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Volume 3]

The marriage of evil with good within one breast,
The clash of strife in the very clasp of love,
The dangerous pain of life’s experiment
In the values of Inconsequence and Chance,

‘The marriage of evil with good within one breast’: we human beings are all mixed; there is falsehood and truth, good and evil, within each of us. In our world, even in ‘the very clasp of love’, when we are most at one with another human being, there is always some element of friction, some conflict, some ‘clash of strife’. Characteristic of our world is ‘the dangerous pain of life’s experiment’. The life-force is always seeking for and trying out new things, experimenting ‘In the values of Inconsequence and Chance’: testing what will happen, and apparently for no reason – inconsequentially – always taking the risk of playing with randomness and chance and the unexpected.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Volume 3]

The peril of mind’s gamble, throwing our lives
As stake in a wager of indifferent gods
And the shifting lights and shadows of the idea
Falling upon the surface consciousness,
And in the dream of a mute witness soul
Creating the error of a half-seen world
Where knowledge is a seeking ignorance,

‘The peril’ – the danger of this ‘gamble’, this game of chance, where mind seems to throw human lives as a ‘stake’, to be won or lost by ‘indifferent gods’ who are casting their bets as a ‘wager’: just as a game, not caring much about the outcome. Here too we are affected by ‘the shifting lights and shadows of the idea / Falling upon the surface consciousness’: an ‘idea’ may cast a certain amount of light, but the way that it falls on ‘the surface consciousness’ is like sunlight falling through leaves onto the forest floor, causing ‘shifting lights and shadows’ which create, for the silent ‘witness soul’, the dream of a ‘half-seen world’ which is full of ‘error’: the mistakeness, the falsehood of this world comes about because we only see halfof it, never the whole; and even what we call knowledge is only ‘a seeking ignorance’: the mind is always searching, trying to gain more knowledge, but although we may widen thescope of our ignorance, it is still not true knowledge, because it is incomplete.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Volume 3]

Thought clashes not with thought and truth with truth,
There is no war of right with rival right;
There are no stumbling and half-seeing lives
Passing from chance to unexpected chance,
No suffering of hearts compelled to beat
In bodies of the inert Inconscient’s make.

It is so difficult for us to imagine the ‘motionless power’ and ‘omniscient and omnipotent peace’ that Sri Aurobindo repeatedly has to give us examples from our own world, of what it is not like. In the House of the Spirit there is no clashing contradiction of thoughts and even truths. Here we often find that one person or one group of people are fixed on a particular truth which clashes with what other people believe to be true; and what one person or group of people believe to be right, clashes with what other people feel or claim is right. But there, in the House of the Spirit, ‘Thought clashes not with thought and truth with truth’, and ‘There is no war of right with rival right’. ‘There are no stumbling and half- seeing lives / Passing from chance to unexpected chance’, as ours do here. Because we cannot see properly, because our vision is imperfect, we are always stumbling, tripping and falling, making mistakes, and passing from one chance situation to another as unexpected things keep affecting our lives. In the realm of the spirit there is no suffering, while here we experience the ’suffering of hearts compelled to beat / In bodies of the inert Inconscient’s make.’ One of the things that cause us to suffer is that our hearts are limited by the inertia and insensitivity of our bodies: we have physical bodies, made out of matter – living matter of course, but still matter, ‘of the inert Inconscient’s make’, created and dominated by inertia and unconsciousness. Material things, inconscient things, are ‘inert’; they do not move unless they are pushed. Our bodies are like that: they only move when they are pushed by the will of our hearts or our minds. Our hearts suffer, because they would like to be able to move and act more freely. Our hearts, our wishes and desires and hopes are always moving ahead, and they suffer to be tied down by these heavy bodies with all their needs and demands and their unwillingness and incapacity to change. But none of that applies in the realm of the spirit, where the soul is not dependent on inconscient material bodies

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Volume 3]

A Mind too mighty to be bound by Thought,
A Life too boundless for the play in Space,
A Soul without borders unconvinced of Time,
He felt the extinction of the world’s long pain,
He became the unborn Self that never dies,
He joined the sessions of Infinity.

Aswapati has become ‘A Mind too mighty to be bound by Thought’: a Mind that is too powerful and large and wide to be confined within the limitations of Thought. His ‘Life’ has also become wide and vast, so that now it is ‘too boundless for the play in Space’: unlimited even to the vastness of universal Space. His ‘Soul’ too, is ‘without borders’, and now no longer convinced by the play of ‘Time’ in which events are rolled out in succession, things are spread out in space and separated into individuality. Free from all these limitations, he experiences ‘the extinction of the world’s long pain’. For him, all the ‘long pain’ caused by the sense of being a separate and limited being in the world comes to an end, because he Aswapati has become ‘A Mind too mighty to be bound by Thought’: a Mind that is too powerful and large and wide to be confined within the limitations of Thought. His ‘Life’ has also become wide and vast, so that now it is ‘too boundless for the play in Space’: unlimited even to the vastness of universal Space. His ‘Soul’ too, is ‘without borders’, and now no longer convinced by the play of ‘Time’ in which events are rolled out in succession, things are spread out in space and separated into individuality. Free from all these limitations, he experiences ‘the extinction of the world’s long pain’. For him, all the ‘long pain’ caused by the sense of being a separate and limited being in the world comes to an end, because he Aswapati has become ‘A Mind too mighty to be bound by Thought’: a Mind that is too powerful and large and wide to be confined within the limitations of Thought. His ‘Life’ has also become wide and vast, so that now it is ‘too boundless for the play in Space’: unlimited even to the vastness of universal Space. His ‘Soul’ too, is ‘without borders’, and nowno longer convinced by the play of ‘Time’ in which events are rolled out in succession, things are spread out in space and separated into individuality. Free from all these limitations, he experiences ‘the extinction of the world’s long pain’. For him, all the ‘long pain’ caused by the sense of being a separate and limited being in the world comes to an end, because he becomes one with ‘the unborn Self that never dies’. We read in the previous sentence that he was living ‘in his shoreless self’ and that he was ‘Companioned … by the … One’; but now he becomes the ‘unborn Self’; he becomes the One, unites with It, merges into It: ‘He joined the sessions of Infinity.’ Sri Aurobindo uses this word ‘sessions’ at several important places in the poem. It comes from a Latin verb that means ‘to sit’. There are times when a group of Judges will attend the court to hear and decide on the cases – these are called ‘sessions’. In the word there is the idea of holding a position which is your right, because you are competent and qualified to hold it. In some places in his writings, Sri Aurobindo uses the word as equivalent to ‘poise’. Now Aswapati has ‘joined the sessions of Infinity’: he has become fit and able to join the state or poise ‘of Infinity’ and participate in it.

[Shraddhavab’s English of Savitri, Volume 3]