As it spoke all changed within her and without;
All was, all lived; she felt all being one;
The world of unreality ceased to be:
There was no more a universe built by mind,
Convicted as a structure or a sign;
A spirit, a being saw created things
And cast itself into unnumbered forms
And was what it saw and made; all now became
An evidence of one stupendous truth,
A Truth in which negation had no place,
A being and a living consciousness,
A stark and absolute Reality.

As the voice spoke, everything changed for Savitri, everything within her and everything around her. In the two previous sections we have been reading about her experience after the total silencing of her mind, which brought a sense of the utter unreality of all the appearances of the world, a perception that the entire universe was nothing but a meaningless illusion, an empty ‘structure or a sign’ ‘built by mind’, as well as a complete loss of her own personal individuality, and at the same time the awareness of the sole Reality of something Unknowable, beyond understanding, ungraspable, silent and unfathomable. This state of silent emptiness continued for quite a long time. But now, as this voice speaks to Savitri, everything changes within her and around her. Instead of that sense of an absolutely silent unmoving state and the perception of shadowy unreal figures moving in the world, she feels that everything really exists, that everything is alive and that all this is one: ‘All was, all lived; she felt all being one’. The ‘world of unreality’ that she was experiencing earlier ceases to exist, it is no longer there. It had felt unreal because the world was seen as an illusory construction of the mind. But now she knows that the world exists and is real because ‘A spirit, a being’ is watching all ‘created things’ and casting itself, projecting itself into all these ‘unnumbered forms’ and identifying with them. That spirit, that being ‘was what it saw and made’. Instead of appearing like unreal mental structures, each and every form is now seen as ‘An evidence of one stupendous truth’. ‘Stupendous’ means ‘overwhelmingly huge and powerful’. The overwhelming all-pervading Truth which Savitri now perceives has no room in it for ‘negation’, for denial or unreality. It is ‘A being and a living consciousness’, and it is utterly and absolutely Real: ‘A stark and absolute Reality’ which cancels out all unreality. Everything is real; everything exists; everything is living; and that one utterly Real consciousness is pervading everything. That is what is happening now to Savitri and it reflects Sri Aurobindo’s own experience while he was in Alipore jail. This sense of an omnipresent divine reality came to him some time after he was imprisoned. He was in prison for over a year and when he was released in May 1909, he wrote about this experience in Tales of Prison Life and spoke about it in his famous Uttarpara Speech. He said that the essence of the Indian tradition, the Sanatana Dharma, the eternal law, is that everything in the world is real because it is emanated from, consists of and is inhabited by the one absolute Reality. The experience of unknowableness and Maya and unreality comes to the mind which is going beyond itself and for some time it may live in that experience; but then it becomes aware of the indwelling Truth and Reality that casts itself into all these unnumbered forms and is what it sees and makes. The one supreme consciousness is observing everything in the universe and is identified with all that ‘it saw and made’. It inhabits all this. In that Truth, negation has no place. So now Savitri is experiencing the presence of this being, this living consciousness, this ‘stark and absolute Reality’. She knows that all this is real because the Real has conceived it, made it, seen it, and inhabited it.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 7]

It was the same but now no more seemed far
To the living clasp of her recovered soul.
It was her self, it was the self of all,
It was the reality of existing things,
It was the consciousness of all that lived
And felt and saw; it was Timelessness and Time,
It was the Bliss of formlessness and form.

Now that mysterious Indecipherable no longer feels distant and ungraspable, but is near to ‘the living clasp of her recovered soul’. Her soul which seemed to have been dissolved has now come back to her, her own living conscious soul with which she can embrace that spirit and being which is no longer far away from her. Now she feels that Being as her own self, and as ‘the self of all’, as ‘the reality of existing things’ and ‘the consciousness of all that lived / And felt and saw’. That Mystery is both ‘Timelessness and Time’. Time can only exist because of that ‘Timelessness’. It is ‘the Bliss’, the intense delight, of the formlessness beyond the manifestation, as well as ‘the Bliss’ of all forms within the manifestation.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 7]

It plunged into the unfathomable deeps
And found no end to the silent mystery
That held all world within one lonely breast,
Yet harboured all creation’s multitudes.

Her being also plunges ‘into the unfathomable deeps’, the bottomless depths, and however far it dives it does not come to an end or find any limit to ‘the silent mystery’ that she has now become aware of – this limitless impersonal- personal Self which holds ‘all world’ within its ‘one lonely breast’ and yet shelters and contains all the multitudinous forms of the creation: the ‘One without a second’ holds within it all the uncountable beings who inhabit the universe. To ‘harbour’ something means to hold it within oneself. A harbour is a safe place where ships are protected against the dangers of the open ocean. If we harbour something, we shelter or keep it within ourselves. That One Reality is holding all the ‘multitudes’, all the innumerable forms, beings, forces and movements of the creation in itself, in its own heart.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 7]

An individual, one with cosmic self
In the heart of the Transcendent’s miracle
And the secret of World-personality
Was the creator and the lord of all.
Mind was a single innumerable look
Upon himself and all that he became.
Life was his drama and the Vast a stage,
The universe was his body, God its soul.
All was one single immense reality,
All its innumerable phenomenon.

Savitri realises that ‘the creator and the lord of all’ is an individual, an individual who is ‘one with cosmic self’, with the universal spirit who is ‘the secret of World-personality’ and who dwells ‘In the heart of the Transcendent’s miracle’ – contained within the miraculous Transcendent who is beyond all definition and all limitation and yet pervades all that exists. Savitri perceives that all Mind is the awareness of that ‘cosmic self’, observing himself and everything that he becomes in the universe. She sees that the process which we call ‘Life’ is ‘his drama’, acted out on the stage of ‘the Vast’, of unlimited Space. She sees that the whole universe is the body of that ‘creator and the lord of all’: everything that exists is ‘one single immense reality’ and the ‘innumerable phenomenon’, the uncountable becomings of that one Reality.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 7]

Her spirit saw the world as living God;
It saw the One and knew that all was He

Earlier Savitri had experienced ‘the One only Real’ as Unknowable, unreachable and the world as unreal, illusory; but now ‘Her spirit saw the world as living God’ and realises that everything, all the appearances, forms and movements of the manifestation are all God.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 7]

She was a single being, yet all things;
The world was her spirit’s wide circumference,
The thoughts of others were her intimates,
Their feelings close to her universal heart,
Their bodies her many bodies kin to her;
She was no more herself but all the world.

She does not feel divided up into many different parts: she is a single being and yet that single being is containing within it all things. Earlier she was feeling her being as unlimited, without a circumference or outer limit. Now, identified with the material world, she experiences its limits as ‘her spirit’s wide circumference’. As a result of this identification, she is intimately aware of the thoughts of other people; their feelings are ‘close to her universal heart’, and she feels their bodies like her own many bodies which are ‘kin to her’, closely related to her. She is no longer the limited individual Savitri that she was before: she has widened to become the whole world.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 7]

She was a subconscient life of tree and flower,
The outbreak of the honied buds of spring;
She burned in the passion and splendour of the rose,
She was the red heart of the passion-flower,
The dream-white of the lotus in its pool.

Here is a beautiful description of one aspect of this ‘immense identity’: Savitri experiences her oneness with the ‘subconscient life of tree and flower’, which reminds us of one of the Mother’s Prayers and Meditations in which she speaks of her identification with a blossoming cherry tree in Japan. Savitri is one with the subconscient level of life which expresses itself in trees and flowers. Plants have a kind of consciousness which does not express itself in mental awareness but in spontaneous reactions, movements, growth. In this oneness, Savitri feels ‘The outbreak of the honied buds of spring’. In winter the plants may have been completely bare but when the warmth of spring comes, they respond by putting out new buds which will become twigs and leaves and flowers full of perfume and nectar to attract the insects that pollinate them. Some flowers especially seem to express a great intensity of the delight of life, such as the rose. Savitri experiences this intense delight, burning with ‘the passion and splendour of the rose’; ‘She was the red heart of the passion-flower’, a very strange and complex flower with a deep purple centre. Also, as if in contrast to the red heart of the passion flower Savitri also experiences ‘The dream-white of the lotus in its pool’, the coolness and peace and perfection of the white lotus.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 7]

Out of subconscient life she climbed to mind,
She was thought and the passion of the world’s heart,
She was the godhead hid in the heart of man,
She was the climbing of his soul to God.

Out of the ‘subconscient life’ of plants and animals Savitri ascends to the more conscious life of the mind and of man, the mental being, identified with the ‘thought and the passion of the world’s heart’, and then with the inner divinity, ‘the godhead hid in the heart of man’, the individual divine being growing deep within the human heart. She is identified with the aspiration of the human soul to the Divine and becomes ‘the climbing’ of man’s ‘soul to God’, towards the divine fulfillment.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 7]

The cosmos flowered in her, she was its bed.
She was Time and the dreams of God in Time;
She was Space and the wideness of his days.

What a wonderfully poetic way of expressing Savitri’s oneness with the entire universe, the cosmos! ‘The cosmos flowered in her, she was its bed’, as if the universe is like a wonderful blossom, and she is ‘its bed’: the flower bed, the ground which that flower is growing, from which it is emerging. She is identified with Time, which has flowed since the beginning of the manifestation and will go on flowing until its end, and she is one with ‘the dreams of God in Time’, all that has happened and will ever happen in the life of the universe. ‘She was Space and the wideness of his days’: the days of God as he extends himself in boundless Space. Savitri is deeply identified with the entire creation and everything in it.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 7]

From this she rose where Time and Space were not;
The superconscient was her native air,
Infinity was her movement’s natural space;
Eternity looked out from her on Time.

From the ‘first … immense identity’ evoked in the preceding lines, with the world as ‘living God’, Savitri now moves beyond the manifestation into the transcendent state ‘where Time and Space were not’. There she breathes the atmosphere of ‘The superconscient’ as ‘her native air’: the air that she was born to breathe, the air that she was born from. She experiences ‘Infinity’ as the ‘natural space’ for her movements. There ‘Eternity looked out from her on Time’: Eternity looks out through her eyes and sees everything that is happening in the manifestation, in Time and Space, in the world.

These lines, evoking Savitri’s identification with the Cosmic Spirit and the Cosmic Consciousness, bring to an end The Book of Yoga.

In this Book we have seen Savitri’s progression from her deeply distressed state at the end of Canto One through her search for her soul, finding of it and union with it; we have followed her through the devastating experience of the Force of Darkness and Negativity which she will later have to face as the god of Death; we have seen her complete silencing of mind and the experience of the All-Negating Absolute; and now in this final canto we have seen her realising Oneness with the Cosmic Spirit and the Cosmic Consciousness. Through these steps she has done what she was commanded to do by the Voice of her highest Being from above: she has become one with the world and wider than the universe, feeling eternity as the very stuff of her soul. All these experiences have prepared Savitri to face the death of Satyavan and fulfil her mission by confronting and overcoming the existing realities of the universe which decree that it is not possible for him to return to life.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 7]