Even the nude sense of self grew pale and thin:
Impersonal, signless, featureless, void of forms
A blank pure consciousness had replaced the mind.

Even when we are convinced of the illusoriness of everything in the universe we may have some sense of our own existence, ‘the nude sense of self’, a feeling that we exist and are experiencing something. But to Savitri now even that sense of her own existence grew ‘pale and thin’, replaced by a ‘blank pure consciousness’ that was ‘Impersonal, signless, featureless, void of forms’. Most of our experience is personal. We relate the world around us to ourselves and we relate ourselves to other persons and beings; even when we think about the divine, we often conceive of it a personal form, as the Mother or Sri Aurobindo or Sri Krishna, and even if we do not give it a name, we have a feeling that there is ‘Someone’ to whom we can turn. But it is also possible to sense that the Supreme Reality is impersonal, that it is ‘signless’, that it does not make any sign, does not communicate with us in any way, that it is ‘featureless’, without any face or any qualities, and that it is formless, ‘void of forms’, without any form. This consciousness which Savitri is now experiencing is ‘blank’, bare and empty: ‘A blank pure consciousness had replaced the mind.’

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 7]

This was self-seeing; in that intolerant hush
No notion and no concept could take shape,
There was no sense to frame the figure of things,
A sheer self-sight was there, no thought arose.

‘This was self-seeing’. We might not realise it, but normally we experience everything indirectly: our senses constantly provide data to the brain which get interpreted by the sense- mind into forms and movements that give us a ‘figure’, an image of our surroundings. Here Sri Aurobindo is telling us that consciousness has another faculty, of direct perception or ‘self-seeing’. The absolute silence and stillness which Savitri is now experiencing is ‘intolerant’: it does not allow any activity of the mind, so ‘No notion and no concept could take shape’. It does not allow the senses, the tools of the mind, to function: ‘There was no sense to frame the figure of things’. It does not allow any thought to arise. So what Savitri is experiencing now is ‘A sheer self-sight’: a direct perception by identity.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 7]

Yet still her body saw and moved and spoke;
It understood without the aid of thought,
It said whatever needed to be said,
It did whatever needed to be done.

And yet despite this state of total inner stillness, Savitri’s body goes on functioning, it goes on doing or saying whatever is needed. When Sri Aurobindo had this experience, he was in the midst of the most active period of his political work. There were appointments to be kept: he had agreed to speak in Pune and Bombay and elsewhere, but he was experiencing this state of total silence. He asked Lele what was to be done. Lele told him to make Namaskar to the audience and wait: speech would come to him from some other source than the mind. That was what happened. He has written:

“In the condition of absolute inner silence I was making speeches and conducting a newspaper, but all that got itself done without any thought entering my mind or the silence being in the least disturbed or diminished.”1 “The force made the body do the work without any inner activity.”

Similarly for Savitri, the body ‘saw and moved and spoke’, ‘It understood without the aid of thought’, ‘It said whatever needed to be said’, ‘It did whatever needed to be done’.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 7]

As if continuing old habitual turns,
And pushed by an old unexhausted force
The engine did the work for which it was made:
Her consciousness looked on and took no part;
All it upheld, in nothing had a share.

It is as if there is an ‘old unexhausted force’ that is ‘continuing old habitual turns’. So the body-engine goes on doing ‘the work for which it was made’ and Savitri’s consciousness is not involved in the action but just observes it without identifying with it or participating in it. Her consciousness is supporting all this action, ‘All it upheld’ but it does not share in it at all.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 7]

A pure perception was the only power
That stood behind her action and her sight.
If that retired, all objects would be extinct,
Her private universe would cease to be,
The house she had built with bricks of thought and sense
In the beginning after the birth of Space

This is the only thing that Savitri is aware of: a ‘pure perception’, a ‘sheer self-sight’ or ‘self-seeing’ that is standing behind whatever she does, whatever she perceives. If that were to be withdrawn, then nothing would exist for her any more: ‘all objects would be extinct’. ‘Her private universe would cease to be’. That ‘pure perception’ is the only power which is upholding and holding together this ‘house’, this mental construction she has built up for herself using ‘bricks of thought and sense’, ‘In the beginning’ – at the very beginning of this manifestation, when Space and Time were born. That ‘house’ which she has inhabited since the beginning of the Creation would vanish if it were not sustained by this power of ‘pure perception’.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 7]

It watched the figure of the cosmic game,
But the thought and inner life in forms seemed dead,
Abolished by her own collapse of thought:
A hollow physical shell persisted still.
All seemed a brilliant shadow of itself,
A cosmic film of scenes and images:
The enduring mass and outline of the hills
Was a design sketched on a silent mind
And held to a tremulous false solidity
By constant beats of visionary sight. 

Sri Aurobindo is evoking an experience which is very difficult for us to conceive of or imagine. And yet this experience has been the goal of much spiritual aspiration and effort and tapasya through the ages. For many spiritual seekers this experience represents Moksha, liberation, the goal of yoga, because it is the liberation from the illusion of the senses, the illusion of the mind. Sri Aurobindo referred to it as his first major spiritual experience. Sometimes he called it his Nirvana experience and sometimes his experience of the silent Brahman. Here is one of his descriptions of it:

…my first major experience … came after and by the exclusion and silencing of all thought—there was, first, what might be called a spiritually substantial or concrete consciousness of stillness and silence, then the awareness of some sole and supreme Reality in whose presence things existed only as forms but forms not at all substantial or real or concrete; but this was all apparent to a spiritual perception and essential and impersonal sense and there was not the least concept or ideal of reality or unreality or any other notion, for all concept or idea was hushed or rather entirely absent in the absolute stillness. These things were known directly through the pure consciousness and not through the mind, so there was no need of concepts or words or names.

There was an entire silence of thought and feeling and all the ordinary movements of consciousness except the perception and recognition of things around without any accompanying concept or other reaction. The sense of ego disappeared and the movements of the ordinary life as well as speech and action were carried on by some habitual activity of Prakriti alone which was not felt as belonging to oneself. But the perception which remained saw all things as utterly unreal; this sense of unreality was overwhelming and universal. Only some undefinable Reality was perceived as true which was beyond space and time and unconnected with any cosmic activity but yet was met wherever one turned.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 7]

The brain’s vibrations that appear like thought,
The nerve’s brief answer to each contact’s knock,
The heart’s quiverings felt as joy and grief and love
Were twitchings of the body, their seeming self,
That body forged from atoms and from gas
A manufactured lie of Maya’s make,
Its life a dream seen by the sleeping Void.

Thought, sensation and emotion now also seem to be unreal, without significance, experienced by Savitri as purely physical movements: vibrations in the brain, nervous responses to contact, small movements, ‘quiverings’ of the physical heart; they all appear to be ‘twitchings’, slight involuntary movements of the body. What appear in the form of thoughts are vibrations in the brain; the nerves respond briefly to every contact; the heart quivers, makes small movements which are experienced as emotions, ‘joy and grief and love’. It appears as if the body is the essence or self of thought, sensation and emotion , ‘their seeming self’; but the body itself is just put together, ‘forged’, made up of atoms and gas: it too seems unreal, a false appearance, and a ‘manufactured lie’ that has been made by Maya, the power of illusion.

People who had the powerful experience described here concluded that this world and everything in it is in fact pure illusion, that the material world has no real existence. That is not Sri Aurobindo’s conclusion. He writes that this is what the mind feels when it falls silent and comes into contact with a higher reality which makes everything else seem unreal in comparison to it. This experience can last for quite a long time – in Sri Aurobindo’s case about six months. That is what Savitri is experiencing now.

[ Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 7]

It met her as the uncaught inaudible Voice
That speaks for ever from the Unknowable.
It met her like an omnipresent point
Pure of dimensions, unfixed, invisible,
The single oneness of its multiplied beat
Accentuating its sole eternity.

This is how Savitri perceives that mysterious Reality: as ‘the uncaught inaudible Voice’, a voice that she cannot hear, which is ‘inaudible’, it cannot be heard; and yet she feels that that Voice is always speaking, that it is the Voice of the Unknowable, a voice that cannot be heard by the mind. She is also aware of it as ‘an omnipresent point’. When we study geometry in school we are told that a ‘point’ has no dimensions – it cannot be measured. But this point is ‘omnipresent’: it is felt to be everywhere. It is ‘Pure of dimensions’, so it cannot be fixed anywhere; it is ‘unfixed’ and ‘invisible’. That one point repeats  itself over and over again in a ‘multiplied beat’, and by that repetition it accentuates or points out forcefully that it alone is eternal and everlasting.

[ Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 7]

A formless liberation came on her.
Once sepulchred alive in brain and flesh
She had risen up from body, mind and life;
She was no more a Person in a world,
She had escaped into infinity.

Since the perception of that Reality has dissolved the ‘convincing cheat’ of her own sense of self, Savitri experiences ‘A formless liberation’: she is set free from the limitations of form. Form implies limits, outlines; ‘liberation’ means being set free. Savitri is delivered from the illusion of separate self, of separate existence. She feels as if she had been buried alive, imprisoned in a tomb, a ‘sepulchre’ – the tomb of the limited brain and physical body; but now she is free: she has risen up out of that sepulchre of ‘body, mind and life’. She is no longer ‘a Person’, a distinct individual living in ‘a world’. Now she has ‘escaped into infinity’ and is free of all limits. This is one of the great realisations of Yoga: ‘Mukti’ or ‘Moksha’, which spiritual seekers have been aiming for since millennia.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 7]

Beings were not there, existence had no place,
There was no temptation of the joy to be.
Unutterably effaced, no one and null,
A vanishing vestige like a violet trace,
A faint record merely of a self now past,
She was a point in the unknowable.

When we think of Sachchidananda, we think of Existence, Conscious-Force and Bliss as one; but there are planes in which one or other of these states dominates. Savitri has reached a state of pure consciousness, where there are no beings, where ‘existence had no place’; there is no Ananda, there is ‘no temptation of the joy to be’. And in that state, she herself feels ‘Unutterably effaced’; ‘effaced’ means ‘removed’, ‘obliterated’, ‘wiped out of existence’. She has become ‘no one’, nothing, ‘null’. All that is left of her is ‘A vanishing vestige like a violet trace.’ A ‘vestige’ is what is left when something has vanished. Soon even that ‘vestige’ will have disappeared. All that is left of Savitri is a faint violet mark, a ‘trace’ that shows that she was there and has gone away; she becomes only a faint record of the self she used to be, which no longer exists. She has become ‘a point in the unknowable’.

The Mother asked Huta to make a painting illustrating these lines. It consists of a pale background and in the centre a faint line of violet paint, a single brushstroke, to indicate the ‘vanishing vestige like a violet trace’ which Savitri has become, now that her past self has been ‘Unutterably effaced’.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 7]

Even as the Unknowable decreed,
She might be nought or new-become the All,
Or if the omnipotent Nihil took a shape
Emerge as someone and redeem the world.

If the Unknowable so decrees, Savitri might even find out ‘what the mystic cipher held’, what is contained in this ‘stupendous lone reality’. ‘Cipher’ means ‘zero’. It seems to be an ‘exit’, a way out of existence, or a ‘closed end of all’ – not a way out, but a dead-end. But it might be ‘a blind tenebrous passage’, a dark tunnel full of shadows where nothing can be seen, and which is hidden, ‘screened from sight’. Or this state that Savitri is now experiencing might be ‘the eclipsing shell of a darkened sun’. An eclipse happens when the moon passes between the earth and the sun or when the earth passes between the sun and the moon. The effect of an eclipse is to darken a source of light. But this phrase might make us think of a black hole, which happens when a sun explodes and collapses in upon itself: its gravity becomes so strong that even light cannot escape, and all matter in the vicinity gets drawn into that black hole. But the physicists are not yet sure what happens to all that matter and energy; some think that it may emerge to form new stars, or even a new universe. Perhaps Savitri’s state might be like that: a sun that is eclipsed and darkened may be ‘On its secret way to the Ineffable’, secretly moving towards the inexpressible and undefinable ultimate Reality.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 7]

Even now her splendid being might flame back
Out of the silence and the nullity,
A gleaming portion of the All-Wonderful,
A power of some all-affirming Absolute,
A shining mirror of the eternal Truth
To show to the One-in-all its manifest face,
To the souls of men their deep identity.

Another possibility is that even now, when her sun-like identity has been eclipsed, it might flame back ‘Out of the silence and the nullity’ to reappear as ‘A gleaming portion of the All-Wonderful’ and ‘A power of some all-affirming Absolute’. Savitri has been experiencing ‘the All-Negating Absolute’, the eternal ‘No’; but that is not the only Reality – there is also the eternal ‘Yes’, the ‘all-affirming Absolute’. If that possibility were to be realised by the decree of the Unknowable, she could become ‘A shining mirror of the eternal Truth’, reflecting back to the ‘One-in-all’ its own divine presence manifested in the appearances of the universe, ‘its manifest face’; and that ‘shining mirror of the eternal Truth’ would at the same time reveal to ‘the souls of men their deep identity’, their divine oneness.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 7]

In infinite Nothingness was the ultimate sign
Or else the Real was the Unknowable.
A lonely Absolute negated all:
It effaced the ignorant world from its solitude
And drowned the soul in its everlasting peace.

At present it seems that ‘the ultimate sign’, the last thing that can be seen or experienced, is ‘infinite Nothingness’, or else that ‘the Real’, the only Reality is ‘the Unknowable’, forever beyond the grasp of Mind and Sense. To Savitri’s present. perception ‘A lonely Absolute negated all’: a single Absolute state negates or denies the reality of everything but itself. It effaces, abolishes or wipes out from its lonely solitude ‘the ignorant world’, the manifestation in which we live. In place of this ignorant and troubled world-existence, it drowns the soul ‘in its everlasting peace’. We can understand that this experience has had a very powerful appeal to spiritual seekers through millennia; but Savitri has a further step to take, which will be revealed to us in the next canto.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 7]