by RY Deshpande on Sun 18 Nov 2007 09:01 PM PST
In the Book of Fate with which we are presently concerned, there is almost at its beginning a description of the evolutionary destiny of this creation. Narad is on his way from his home in Paradise and during the course of his journey to earth he sings five great sings, as to how things began, and about the cherished expectations of the divine glory and marvel taking birth here. We have already seen this theme in some details earlier, but let us have the complete passage for comparison with other passages connected with the concept of evolution that appears with different suggestions in different places in Savitri: (pp. 416-17)
He beheld the cosmic Being at his task,
His eyes measured the spaces, gauged the depths,
His inner gaze the movements of the soul,
He saw the eternal labour of the Gods,
And looked upon the life of beasts and men.
A change now fell upon the singer’s mood,
A rapture and a pathos moved his voice;
He sang no more of light that never wanes,
And oneness and pure everlasting bliss,
He sang no more the deathless heart of love,
His chant was a hymn of Ignorance and Fate.
He sang the name of Vishnu and the birth
And joy and passion of the mystic world,
And how the stars were made and life began
And the mute regions stirred with the throb of a soul.
He sang the Inconscient and its secret self,
Its power omnipotent knowing not what it does,
All shaping without will or thought or sense,
Its blind unerring occult mystery,
And darkness yearning towards the eternal Light,
And Love that broods within the dim abyss
And waits the answer of the human heart,
And death that climbs to immortality.
He sang of the Truth that cries from Night’s blind deeps,
And the Mother Wisdom hid in Nature’s breast
And the Idea that through her dumbness works
And the miracle of her transforming hands,
Of life that slumbers in the stone and sun
And mind subliminal in mindless life,
And the consciousness that wakes in beasts and men.
He sang of the glory and marvel still to be born,
Of Godhead throwing off at last its veil,
Of bodies made divine and life made bliss,
Immortal sweetness clasping immortal might,
Heart sensing heart, thought looking straight at thought,
And the delight when every barrier falls,
And the transfiguration and the ecstasy.
And as he sang the demons wept with joy
Foreseeing the end of their long dreadful task
And the defeat for which they hoped in vain,
And glad release from their self-chosen doom
And return into the One from whom they came.
While Narad’s songs present the prospects of the ecstasy and the transfiguration, of the birth of the divine in this mortal creation, they do not trace the origins of this creation itself. Its beginning is in the Non-manifest turning towards manifestation, towards becoming many, towards Becoming. If there has to be a new manifestation, then some drastic action is required, a radical change has to take place in that absolute Nothingness, in that pure and perfect white Blank, in that genuine şūnya, cipher or zero, full of widening Possibilities. The Void has to be impregnated with the Will, the Will which has also in it the executive dynamism. There has to be the samkalpa. How is this going to happen? how the occult mystery of the great transition from the non-manifest Nothingness to Being to Becoming take place? It is here that the supreme Inventor is going to invent an inscrutable trick, the supreme Diplomat resort to the mechanism of Fall, he setting aside his triple sovereignty of bliss and truth and consciousness and accepting the dark ignorant conditions for growth. That is the sacrifice, the Yajna, the drastic change, and the radical action lies in acquiring in the body’s cells a capability to hold the Immortal’s flame. It is thus that (pp. 34-35)
…into the ignorant nature’s gusty field,
Into the half-ordered chaos of mortal life
The formless Power, the Self of eternal light
Follow in the shadow of the spirit’s descent;
The twin duality for ever one
Chooses its home mid the tumults of the sense.
He comes unseen into our darker parts
And, curtained by the darkness, does his work,
A subtle and all-knowing guest and guide,
Till they too feel the need and will to change.
All here must learn to obey a higher law,
Our body’s cells must hold the Immortal’s flame.
Yes, even in the body’s cells there is the splendid, the Immortal’s possibility. (pp. 169-70)
In our body’s cells there sits a hidden Power
That sees the unseen and plans eternity,
Our smallest parts have room for deepest needs;
There too the golden Messengers can come:
A door is cut in the mud wall of self;
Across the lowly threshold with bowed heads
Angels of ecstasy and self-giving pass,
And lodged in an inner sanctuary of dream
The makers of the image of deity live.
The body’s cells holding the Immortal’s flame is the long-awaited evolutionary attainment which first should occur in the individual. And after a long and intense Yoga-Tapasya, after carrying out “a difficult and painful” work Aswapati has the experience: (p. 302)
His brain was wrapped in overwhelming Light,
An all-embracing knowledge seized his heart:
Thoughts rose in him no earthly mind can hold,
Mights played that never coursed through mortal nerves:
He scanned the secrets of the Overmind,
He bore the rapture of the Oversoul.
He has established remarkable perfection in the physical itself, it opening to the flood of brilliant light. “His brain was wrapped in overwhelming light”—that is the physical’s mind receiving the supramental, that is the Mind of Light, the Siddhi Sri Aurobindo received on 8 August 1938, as we might understand from his sonnet The Golden Light. The supramental was entering the physical but what could not be done until then was to fix it in it, it was coming and going and not remaining in it. The Golden Light announces that this was now done. It is in that splendid context that the line from Savitri—“His brain was wrapped in overwhelming light”—assumes great autobiographical significance. The draft in which it appears for the first time is dated 6 September 1942 and therefore this momentous period, these consequential four years between 1938 and 1942, could be taken as when the Mind of Light got established fully in him. In his sonnet The Golden Light we have a very clear statement of this most remarkable siddhi of the Mind of Light achieved by Sri Aurobindo. The sonnet was first written on 8 August 1938 and later revised on 3 March 1944. The revisions are of a few noteworthy verbal type. Here is the poem:
Thy golden Light came down into my brain
And the grey rooms of mind sun-touched became
A bright reply to Wisdom’s occult plane,
A calm illumination and a flame.
Thy golden Light came down into my throat,
And all my speech is now a tune divine,
A paean song of thee my single note;
My words are drunk with the Immortal’s wine.
Thy golden Light came down into my heart
Smiting my life with Thy eternity;
Now has it grown a temple where Thou art
And all its passions point towards only Thee.
Thy golden Light came down into my feet:
My earth is now thy playfield and thy seat.
“The earth” of 1938 in the last line became “My earth” in 1944, a significant revision that bears the specificity of achievement in his physical body. This must be considered as the first beginning of the process of physical transformation which started happening from 8 August 1938. On this day the supramental Light and Consciousness and Force appeared dynamically and luminously upon the earth’s playfield.
But let us get back to the theme of evolution in Savitri. In the following passage we have the entire modus operandi put mantrically, how the creation began and what is intended of it, and how out of one would come many. He wanted to be many: “I would be manifold for the birth of peoples—bahusyām prajāyéyéti”, says the Taittiriya Upanishad and here it is how he becomes many by the action of his Consciousness-Force: (p. 67)
The Absolute, the Perfect, the Alone
Has called out of the Silence his mute Force
Where she lay in the featureless and formless hush
Guarding from Time by her immobile sleep
The ineffable puissance of his solitude.
The Absolute, the Perfect, the Alone
Has entered with his silence into space:
He has fashioned these countless persons of one self;
He lives in all, who lived in his Vast alone;
Space is himself and Time is only he.
The Absolute, the Perfect, the Immune,
One who is in us as our secret self,
Our mask of imperfection has assumed,
He has made this tenement of flesh his own,
His image in the human measure cast
That to his divine measure we might rise;
Then in a figure of divinity
The Maker shall recast us and impose
A plan of godhead on the mortal’s mould
Lifting our finite minds to his infinite,
Touching the moment with eternity.
This transfiguration is earth’s due to heaven:
A mutual debt binds man to the Supreme:
His nature we must put on as he put ours;
We are sons of God and must be even as he:
His human portion, we must grow divine.
Our life is a paradox with God for key.
Thus he has built a million figures of his power that, there might be divine measures in every respect and everywhere in this mortal world, each with its own expressive divinity, of light and truth and beauty and joy and wisdom and strength and harmony and perfection, they growing ever more and more. But how is this going to be accomplished, how effected? But that is the divine Force’s task; it is she who is going to do it, establish it here, she the supreme Executrix. The power to make a new world, that is the Mother’s power.
The step that precedes the beginning of this evolution is the step pertaining to cosmic manifestation. It is the story of creation narrated by the Mother on a number of occasions. It is the story that begins with four great powers separating themselves from their Origin; in the freedom they had, absolute freedom, they went very far away from the Supreme, so far that they lost contact with the Origin itself. The result was a glorious disaster, perhaps a fruitful disaster, perhaps the only way by which the Supreme could stand away from himself. What else can there be if not disaster when one stands away from the divine? And yet it is a creative disaster, with the possibilities emerging for things to happen. Had it not been so, it would have been impossible for him to bring out anything new, different, anything that is not him, so to say, the new that ever grows, widens, expands, deepens as much as heightens. It is his difficult Absence that provides the opportunity, to establish the Presence multiply. This is what the Mother tells: (Questions and Answers, 16 October 1956)
…we can choose from many stories that have been told, stories more or less true, more or less complete, more or less expressive. But if by interiorising or exteriorising oneself—which, from a certain point of view, is essentially the same thing—if one can relive this story, at least partially and in its broad outlines, it helps one to understand and hence to master the how and why of things. Some people have done that, they are the ones usually considered as initiates, occultists and prophets at the same time—and very beautiful stories have been told. I am going to tell you one, very succinctly. Don’t take it as a gospel! Take it rather… as a story.
When the Supreme decided to exteriorise Himself in order to be able to see Himself, the first thing in Himself which He exteriorised was the Knowledge of the world and the Power to create it. This Knowledge-Consciousness and Force began its work; and in the supreme Will there was a plan, and the first principle of this plan was the expression of both the essential Joy and the essential Freedom, which seemed to be the most interesting feature of this creation.
So intermediaries were needed to express this Joy and Freedom in forms. And at first four Beings were emanated to start this universal development which was to be the progressive objectivisation of all that is potentially contained in the Supreme. These Beings were, in the principle of their existence: Consciousness and Light, Life, Bliss and Love, and Truth.
You can easily imagine that they had a sense of great power, great strength, of something tremendous, for they were essentially the very principle of these things. Besides, they had full freedom of choice, for this creation was to be Freedom itself… As soon as they set to work—they had their own conception of how it had to be done—being totally free, they chose to do it independently. Instead of taking the attitude of servant and instrument of which Sri Aurobindo speaks, they naturally took the attitude of the master, and this mistake—as I may call it—was the first cause, the essential cause of all the disorder in the universe. As soon as there was separation—for that is the essential cause, separation—as soon as there was separation between the Supreme and what had been emanated, Consciousness changed into inconscience, Light into darkness, Love into hatred, Bliss into suffering, Life into death and Truth into falsehood. And they proceeded with their creations independently, in separation and disorder.
The result is the world as we see it. It was made progressively, stage by stage, and it would truly take a little too long to tell you all that, but finally, the consummation is Matter—obscure, inconscient, miserable… The creative Force which had emanated these four Beings, essentially for the creation of the world, witnessed what was happening, and turning to the Supreme she prayed for the remedy and the cure of the evil that had been done.
Then she was given the command to precipitate her Consciousness into this inconscience, her Love into this suffering, and her Truth into this falsehood. And a greater consciousness, a more total love, a more perfect truth than what had been emanated at first, plunged, so to say, into the horror of Matter in order to awaken in it consciousness, love and truth, and to begin the movement of Redemption which was to bring the material universe back to its supreme origin.
So, there have been what might be called “successive involutions” in Matter, and a history of these involutions. The present result of these involutions is the appearance of the Supermind emerging from the inconscience; but there is nothing to indicate that after this appearance there will be no others… for the Supreme is inexhaustible and will always create new worlds.
That is my story.
On another occasion: (2 December 1967)
The oldest tradition says that the first four emanations of the Mahashakti—Consciousness, Love, Truth and Life—cut themselves off (separated themselves) from their Supreme Origin and became Unconsciousness, Suffering, Falsehood and Death.
Then a second emanation was made to repair the damage. They are the Gods.
Naturally, this is a way of speaking which corresponds to a Reality that is difficult to put into words.
About this one of the most vivid descriptions we have in Savitri is as follows: (pp. 140-41)
In the enigma of the darkened Vasts,
In the passion and self-loss of the Infinite
When all was plunged in the negating Void,
Non-Being’s night could never have been saved
If Being had not plunged into the dark
Carrying with it its triple mystic cross.
Invoking in world-time the timeless truth,
Bliss changed to sorrow, knowledge made ignorant,
God’s force turned into a child’s helplessness
Can bring down heaven by their sacrifice.
A contradiction founds the base of life:
The eternal, the divine Reality
Has faced itself with its own contraries;
Being became the Void and Conscious-Force
Nescience and walk of a blind Energy
And Ecstasy took the figure of world-pain.
In a mysterious dispensation’s law
A Wisdom that prepares its far-off ends
Planned so to start her slow aeonic game.
A blindfold search and wrestle and fumbling clasp
Of a half-seen Nature and a hidden Soul,
A game of hide and seek in twilit rooms,
A play of love and hate and fear and hope
Continues in the nursery of mind
Its hard and heavy romp of self-born twins.
At last the struggling Energy can emerge
And meet the voiceless Being in wider fields;
Then can they see and speak and, breast to breast,
In a larger consciousness, a clearer light,
The Two embrace and strive and each know each
Regarding closer now the playmate’s face.
Even in these formless coilings he could feel
Matter’s response to an infant stir of soul.
In Nature he saw the mighty Spirit concealed,
Watched the weak birth of a tremendous Force,
Pursued the riddle of Godhead’s tentative pace,
Heard the faint rhythms of a great unborn Muse.
Earlier we had the “crude beginnings” giving rise to this mortal world, how Life entered the material scene and was stunned, and overpowered, by the presence of Death: (pp. 129-30)
In the crude beginnings of this mortal world
Life was not nor mind’s play nor heart’s desire.
When earth was built in the unconscious Void
And nothing was save a material scene,
Identified with sea and sky and stone
Her young gods yearned for the release of souls
Asleep in objects, vague, inanimate.
In that desolate grandeur, in that beauty bare,
In the deaf stillness, mid the unheeded sounds,
Heavy was the uncommunicated load
Of Godhead in a world that had no needs;
For none was there to feel or to receive.
This solid mass which brooked no throb of sense
Could not contain their vast creative urge:
Immersed no more in Matter’s harmony,
The Spirit lost its statuesque repose.
In the uncaring trance it groped for sight,
Passioned for the movements of a conscious heart,
Famishing for speech and thought and joy and love,
In the dumb insensitive wheeling day and night
Hungered for the beat of yearning and response.
The poised inconscience shaken with a touch,
The intuitive silence trembling with a name,
They cried to Life to invade the senseless mould
And in brute forms awake divinity.
A voice was heard on the mute rolling globe,
A murmur moaned in the unlistening Void.
A being seemed to breathe where once was none:
Something pent up in dead insentient depths,
Denied conscious existence, lost to joy,
Turned as if one asleep since dateless time.
Aware of its own buried reality,
Remembering its forgotten self and right,
It yearned to know, to aspire, to enjoy, to live.
Life heard the call and left her native light.
Overflowing from her bright magnificent plane
On the rigid coil and sprawl of mortal space,
Here too the gracious great-winged Angel poured
Her splendour and her sweetness and her bliss,
Hoping to fill a fair new world with joy.
As comes a goddess to a mortal’s breast
And fills his days with her celestial clasp,
She stooped to make her home in transient shapes;
In Matter’s womb she cast the Immortal’s fire,
In the unfeeling Vast woke thought and hope,
Smote with her charm and beauty flesh and nerve
And forced delight on earth’s insensible frame.
Alive and clad with trees and herbs and flowers
Earth’s great brown body smiled towards the skies,
Azure replied to azure in the sea’s laugh;
New sentient creatures filled the unseen depths,
Life’s glory and swiftness ran in the beauty of beasts,
Man dared and thought and met with his soul the world.
But while the magic breath was on its way,
Before her gifts could reach our prisoned hearts,
A dark ambiguous Presence questioned all.
The secret Will that robes itself with Night
And offers to spirit the ordeal of the flesh,
Imposed a mystic mask of death and pain.
Interned now in the slow and suffering years
Sojourns the winged and wonderful wayfarer
And can no more recall her happier state,
But must obey the inert Inconscient’s law,
Insensible foundation of a world
In which blind limits are on beauty laid
And sorrow and joy as struggling comrades live.
A dim and dreadful muteness fell on her.
This is a remarkable description which we can find only in Savitri and not in other prose works of Sri Aurobindo, for instance in The Life Divine or The Synthesis of Yoga where the presentation is essentially for the enlightened intuitive reason. There is a certain degree of informality available in the letters Sri Aurobindo wrote to his disciples and one can see in them that he is quite free from professional constraints which otherwise he has to observe in formal writings. But everywhere there is the tightness in the line of argument, if these are to be considered as arguments. In that sense in Savitri alone the occult comes out with its full luminous contents and force, with its unplumbable profundity, gold reaching yet deeper layers of gold, in Savitri where Sri Aurobindo the Yogi has complete freedom of expression, has no boundary conditions to be observed, where no horizons cut his view, where he can be, so to say, himself, absolutely himself. The Story of Creation narrated by him in Savitri belongs unmistakably to that category. In The Life Divine he had taken a position, in The Synthesis of Yoga he had taken a position; but in Savitri it is all unimpeded revelation, in it he had poured himself out in God’s great glory itself. So, I get puzzled when very knowledgeable people say that Savitri is The Life Divine in a verse form!
And yet there can be an essay in poetry, with its convincing logopoeia supported by image and music. The following description of the cosmic past and the future that awaits this creation is a wonderful example of the expository art carried out with utmost care and attention. Savitri is told by a deathless and mighty Voice to remember why she had taken the mortal birth and that she should get ready to house the divine Force in her soul in order to conquer Death. She has been initiated into Yoga and the review of the entire cosmic past is the first occult-spiritual experience she gets. The mystic-numinous origins of the shadowy beginnings are first disclosed to her: (pp. 477-86)
In the indeterminate formlessness of Self
Creation took its first mysterious steps,
It made the body’s shape a house of soul
And Matter learned to think and person grew;
She saw Space peopled with the seeds of life
And saw the human creature born in Time.
At first appeared a dim half-neutral tide
Of being emerging out of infinite Nought…
All was the deed of a blind World-Energy:
Unconscious of her own exploits she worked,
Shaping a universe out of the Inane…
On a dim ocean of subconscient life
A formless surface consciousness awoke:
A stream of thoughts and feelings came and went…
A conscious being was by this labour made;
It looked around it on its difficult field
In the green wonderful and perilous earth;
It hoped in a brief body to survive,
Relying on Matter’s false eternity…
This is the little surface of man’s life.
He is this and he is all the universe;
He scales the Unseen, his depths dare the Abyss;
A whole mysterious world is locked within…
The immaculate Divine All-Wonderful
Casts into the argent purity of his soul
His splendour and his greatness and the light
Of self-creation in Time’s infinity
As into a sublimely mirroring glass.
Man in the world’s life works out the dreams of God.
But all is there, even God’s opposites…
Man’s house of life holds not the gods alone:
There are occult Shadows, there are tenebrous Powers,
Inhabitants of life’s ominous nether rooms,
A shadowy world’s stupendous denizens.
A careless guardian of his nature’s powers,
Man harbours dangerous forces in his house…
Afflicting the daylight and alarming night,
Invading at will his outer tenement
The stark gloom’s grisly dire inhabitants
Mounting into God’s light all light perturb…
Man’s lower nature hides these awful guests.
Their vast contagion grips sometimes man’s world.
An awful insurgence overpowers man’s soul…
An opposite potency contradicting God,
A momentary Evil’s almightiness
Has straddled the straight path of Nature’s acts.
It imitates the Godhead it denies,
Puts on his figure and assumes his face…
But there is a guardian power, there are Hands that save,
Calm eyes divine regard the human scene.
All the world’s possibilities in man
Are waiting as the tree waits in its seed:
His past lives in him; it drives his future’s pace;
His present’s acts fashion his coming fate.
The unborn gods hide in his house of Life…
Only a little has will and purposed pace.
A vast subliminal is man’s measureless part.
The dim subconscient is his cavern base…
A portion of us lives in present Time,
A secret mass in dim inconscience gropes;
Out of the inconscient and subliminal
Arisen, we live in mind’s uncertain light
And strive to know and master a dubious world
Whose purpose and meaning are hidden from our sight.
Above us dwells a superconscient god
Hidden in the mystery of his own light:
Around us is a vast of ignorance
Lit by the uncertain ray of human mind,
Below us sleeps the Inconscient dark and mute.
But this is only Matter’s first self-view,
A scale and series in the Ignorance.
This is not all we are or all our world.
Our greater self of knowledge waits for us,
A supreme light in the truth-conscious Vast:
It sees from summits beyond thinking mind,
It moves in a splendid air transcending life.
It shall descend and make earth’s life divine.
Truth made the world, not a blind Nature-Force.
For here are not our large diviner heights;
Our summits in the superconscient’s blaze
Are glorious with the very face of God:
There is our aspect of eternity,
There is the figure of the god we are,
His young unaging look on deathless things,
His joy in our escape from death and Time,
His immortality and light and bliss…
Our soul from its mysterious chamber acts;
Its influence pressing on our heart and mind
Pushes them to exceed their mortal selves.
It seeks for Good and Beauty and for God…
In the prone obscure beginnings of the race
The human grew in the bowed apelike man.
He stood erect, a godlike form and force,
And a soul’s thoughts looked out from earth-born eyes;
Man stood erect, he wore the thinker’s brow:
He looked at heaven and saw his comrade stars;
A vision came of beauty and greater birth
Slowly emerging from the heart’s chapel of light
And moved in a white lucent air of dreams.
He saw his being’s unrealised vastnesses,
He aspired and housed the nascent demi-god.
Out of the dim recesses of the self
The occult seeker into the open came:
He heard the far and touched the intangible,
He gazed into the future and the unseen;
He used the powers earth-instruments cannot use,
A pastime made of the impossible;
He caught up fragments of the Omniscient’s thought,
He scattered formulas of omnipotence.
Thus man in his little house made of earth’s dust
Grew towards an unseen heaven of thought and dream
Looking into the vast vistas of his mind
On a small globe dotting infinity.
At last climbing a long and narrow stair
He stood alone on a high roof of things
And saw the light of a spiritual sun…
All this the spirit concealed had done in her.
So the essay in poetry traces the entire past, the evolutionary history, leading to the arrival of man, the human who caused the appearance of an apelike creature, not from ape but from an independent species biologically resembling the ape, the mental being or the Upanishadic manomaya puruşa in his early animal-like form. And the prospects for him are, he shall grow into his higher spiritual self, humanity moulded in God’s shape; or else a new world shall be discovered, or there will be created a new world. This is inevitable, this cosmic future, because (p. 486)
Earth must transform herself and equal Heaven
Or Heaven descend into earth’s mortal state.
The prospects are kind of built into the scheme of things, but what path will be taken by the future, that knowledge is not available at the moment. The intuition is there but not knowledge with its process and its methodology; it will be available when the future becomes a part of the earthly realisable, when it comes into the operative domain.
But the half-grown man has in him titanic arrogance, with his ignorant and unregenerate past dominating, and determining, his will and thought and feeling. He thinks it is he who is going to shape the future, fix destiny and fortune, he the shaper of destiny and begetter of fortune. That is how he understands evolution in his own way, the long march of history meant for him, entirely sculpted by him. He proclaims: (pp. 518-20 )
I have mapped the heavens and analysed the stars,
Described the orbits through the grooves of Space,
Measured the miles that separate the suns,
Computed their longevity in Time.
I have delved into earth’s bowels and torn out
The riches guarded by her dull brown soil.
I have classed the changes of her stony crust
And of her biography discovered the dates,
Rescued the pages of all Nature’s plan.
The tree of evolution I have sketched,
Each branch and twig and leaf in its own place,
In the embryo tracked the history of forms,
And the genealogy framed of all that lives.
I have detected plasm and cell and gene,
The protozoa traced, man’s ancestors,
The humble originals from whom he rose;
I know how he was born and how he dies…
I have seen the ways of life, the paths of mind;
I have studied the methods of the ant and ape
And the behaviour learnt of man and worm.
If God is at work, his secrets I have found…
Even if a greater consciousness I could reach,
What profit is it then for Thought to win
A Real which is for ever ineffable
Or hunt to its lair the bodiless Self or make
The Unknowable the target of the soul?
Nay, let me work within my mortal bounds…
Human I am, human let me remain
Till in the Inconscient I fall dumb and sleep.
A high insanity, a chimera is this,
To think that God lives hidden in the clay
And that eternal Truth can dwell in Time,
And call to her to save our self and world.
That is where the human potential shuts itself off from its own manifold possibilities.
But here is Death himself as the creator of the worlds, a creator using the Sankhya which is fundamentally the same everywhere but which gives rise to different results in the hands of different users. This is how eternal Death the materialist sees the process: (pp. 617-18 )
I curbed the vacant ether into Space;
A huge expanding and contracting breath
Harboured the fires of the universe:
I struck out the supreme original spark
And spread its sparse ranked armies through the Inane,
Manufactured the stars from the occult radiances,
Marshalled the platoons of the invisible dance;
I formed earth’s beauty out of atom and gas,
And built from chemic plasm the living man.
Then Thought came in and spoilt the harmonious world:
Matter began to hope and think and feel,
Tissue and nerve bore joy and agony.
The inconscient cosmos strove to learn its task;
An ignorant personal god was born in Mind
And to understand invented reason’s law,
The impersonal Vast throbbed back to man’s desire,
A trouble rocked the great world’s blind still heart
And Nature lost her wide immortal calm.
Thus came this warped incomprehensible scene
Of souls emmeshed in life’s delight and pain
And Matter’s sleep and Mind’s mortality,
Of beings in Nature’s prison waiting death
And consciousness left in seeking ignorance.
And here is Savitri giving a tutorial to Yama the God of Death, telling him the purpose and aim of this vast creation, explaining its supernal Law: (pp. 632-33 )
This was the aim, this the supernal Law,
Nature’s allotted task when beauty-drenched
In dim mist waters of inconscient sleep,
Out of the Void this grand creation rose,—
For this the Spirit came into the Abyss
And charged with its power Matter’s unknowing Force,
In Night’s bare session to cathedral light,
In Death’s realm repatriate immortality.
A mystic slow transfiguration works.
All our earth starts from mud and ends in sky,
And Love that was once an animal’s desire,
Then a sweet madness in the rapturous heart,
An ardent comradeship in the happy mind,
Becomes a wide spiritual yearning’s space.
A lonely soul passions for the Alone,
The heart that loved man thrills to the love of God,
A body is his chamber and his shrine.
Then is our being rescued from separateness;
All is itself, all is new-felt in God:
A Lover leaning from his cloister’s door
Gathers the whole world into his single breast.
Then shall the business fail of Night and Death.
When this unity is won, and when strife is lost, and all is known, and all is clasped by Love, there wouldn’t be the necessity of turning back to ignorance and pain, there wouldn’t be anymore Night and Death holding the soul of man back from truth and love and beauty and joy and strength. It might be a long and slow painful transfiguration but the result of this evolutionary manifestation is unity with God in every respect, even in the rigid physical.
If this world is a creation of God, then the concern is to find its meaning in God, the sense that is hid behind all appearances, of ignorance and death and pain and suffering. This world is an authentic creation and it cannot be dismissed as an illusion. Savitri affirms the great Truth behind it and wants Yama to see it: (pp. 658-63 )
A Truth supreme has forced the world to be;
It has wrapped itself in Matter as in a shroud,
A shroud of Death, a shroud of Ignorance.
It compelled the suns to burn through silent Space,
Flame-signs of its uncomprehended Thought
In a wide brooding ether’s formless muse:
It made of Knowledge a veiled and struggling light,
Of Being a substance nescient, dense and dumb,
Of Bliss the beauty of an insentient world.
In finite things the conscious Infinite dwells:
Involved it sleeps in Matter’s helpless trance,
It rules the world from its sleeping senseless Void;
Dreaming it throws out mind and heart and soul
To labour crippled, bound, on the hard earth…
It starts from the mute mass in countless jets,
It fashions a being out of brain and nerve…
But the soul grows concealed within its house;
It gives to the body its strength and magnificence;
It follows aims in an ignorant aimless world,
It lends significance to earth’s meaningless life.
A demi-god animal, came thinking man…
He pores upon life’s book with student eyes.
Out of this tangle of intellect and sense,
Out of the narrow scope of finite thought
At last he wakes into spiritual mind;
A high liberty begins and luminous room:
He glimpses eternity, touches the infinite,
He meets the gods in great and sudden hours,
He feels the universe as his larger self,
Makes Space and Time his opportunity
To join the heights and depths of being in light,
In the heart’s cave speaks secretly with God…
On summit Mind are radiant altitudes
Exposed to the lustre of Infinity,
Outskirts and dependencies of the house of Truth,
Upraised estates of Mind and measureless.
There man can visit but there he cannot live.
A cosmic Thought spreads out its vastitudes…
A highest flight climbs to a deepest view…
Thought there has revelation’s sun-bright eyes;
The Word, a mighty and inspiring Voice,
Enters Truth’s inmost cabin of privacy
And tears away the veil from God and life.
Then stretches the boundless finite’s last expanse,
The cosmic empire of the Overmind,
Time’s buffer state bordering Eternity,
Too vast for the experience of man’s soul…
In her glorious kingdom of eternal light
All-ruler, ruled by none, the Truth supreme,
Omnipotent, omniscient and alone,
In a golden country keeps her measureless house…
There is the image of our future’s hope;
There is the sun for which all darkness waits,
There is the imperishable harmony…
There in a world of everlasting Light,
In the realms of the immortal Supermind
Truth who hides here her head in mystery,
Her riddle deemed by reason impossible
In the stark structure of material form,
Unenigmaed lives, unmasked her face and there
Is Nature and the common law of things.
There in a body made of spirit stuff,
The hearth-stone of the everlasting Fire,
Action translates the movements of the soul,
Thought steps infallible and absolute
And life is a continual worship’s rite,
A sacrifice of rapture to the One…
The Truth supreme, vast and impersonal
Fits faultlessly the hour and circumstance,
Its substance a pure gold ever the same
But shaped into vessels for the spirit’s use,
Its gold becomes the wine jar and the vase.
All there is a supreme epiphany:
The All-Wonderful makes a marvel of each event,
The All-Beautiful is a miracle in each shape.
Not only in her deep occult confrontation with the God of Death does Savitri affirm the great Truth as the sole cause of this creation; she asserts its reality, this creation’s, even while she meets transformed Death as the Besetter of the Worlds, the Supreme tempting our hearts with the lure of far happy heavens. If one makes this world an illusion and reposes everything in the beyond, the other asserts only the material reality and drives the spirit away; one de-spirits the creation and the other desubstantiates it, with its substantiality devoid of holding spirit in it. Savitri cannot accept this dichotomy. In spite of the bright red herring offered to her, she remains clear in her vision and firm in her work. There is that inner identity of her spirit with the spirit of the world and it is that which gives her the needed knowledge. She was offered boon after exceptional boon to get back to her transcendental home and live for ever there, live with her Satyavan; but she was fixed in her resolve and her one demand was, whatever has to come has to come for the soul of the earth. She makes herself bold to tell the giver of the supreme boons, that (pp. 692-93)
If earth can look up to the light of heaven
And hear an answer to her lonely cry,
Not vain their meeting, nor heaven’s touch a snare.
If thou and I are true, the world is true;
Although thou hide thyself behind thy works,
To be is not a senseless paradox;
Since God has made earth, earth must make in her God;
What hides within her breast she must reveal.
I claim thee for the world that thou hast made.
If man lives bound by his humanity,
If he is tied for ever to his pain,
Let a greater being then arise from man,
The superhuman with the Eternal mate
And the Immortal shine through earthly forms.
Else were creation vain and this great world
A nothing that in Time’s moments seems to be.
If evolution has any sense then a greater being or superman has to arrive on earth, he has to live on earth—and there cannot be any question about. The question is if man is going to remain bound to his humanity, to his kind, tied to his mortal lot. There is a true human potential for him, to grow into that status; but for this he has to do the necessary qualifying work. All the help is there, and there is the natural thrust of the evolutionary force to take him to that, but what is needed is his willing participation in it. If he fails in it he will be left by the wayside and a greater being will arise in another way. This is deeply consequential. It will be a pity if man fails to recognise these far-reaching implications. But Savitri’s deep commitment for the soul of the earth redeems the situation. It is only by her great and difficult yoga-tapasya that the great and difficult task can be accomplished. She has made her will one with the Will of the Supreme to receive the divine Boon for the death-afflicted mortal. In it alone is the possibility of a greater being arising from man.
Eventually Savitri receives the wonderful assurance; not only that,—the events are now set into motion. She has been marked as the centre of transformed activities: (pp. 705-710 )
You shall reveal to them the hidden eternities,
The breath of infinitudes not yet revealed,
Some rapture of the bliss that made the world,
Some rush of the force of God’s omnipotence,
Some beam of the omniscient Mystery.
Her work is to prepare the world to receive the divine Grace. She has to continue to take human birth—till things are ready for the Supreme to come down in a “supramental body made in a supramental way”.
But when the hour of the Divine draws near,
The Mighty Mother shall take birth in Time
And God be born into the human clay
In forms made ready by your human lives.
Then shall the Truth supreme be given to men.
There is a being beyond the being of mind,
An Immeasurable cast into many forms,
A miracle of the multitudinous One.
There is a consciousness mind cannot touch,
Its speech cannot utter nor its thought reveal.
It has no home on earth, no centre in man,
Yet is the source of all things thought and done,
The fount of the creation and its works.
It is the originer of all truth here,
The sun-orb of mind’s fragmentary rays,
Infinity’s heaven that spills the rain of God,
The Immense that calls to man to expand the Spirit,
The wide Aim that justifies his narrow attempts,
A channel for the little he tastes of bliss…
The superman shall wake in mortal man
And manifest the hidden demi-god
Or grow into the God-Light and God-Force
Revealing the secret deity in the cave.
Then shall the earth be touched by the Supreme…
Then shall the embodied being live as one
Who is a thought, a will of the Divine,
A mask or robe of his divinity,
An instrument and partner of his Force,
A point or line drawn in the infinite,
A manifest of the Imperishable.
The supermind shall be his nature’s fount,
The Eternal’s truth shall mould his thoughts and acts,
The Eternal’s truth shall be his light and guide.
All then shall change, a magic order come
Overtopping this mechanical universe.
A mightier race shall inhabit the mortal’s world…
Then in the process of evolving Time
All shall be drawn into a single plan,
A divine harmony shall be earth’s law,
Beauty and joy remould her way to live:
Even the body shall remember God…
All earth shall be the Spirit’s manifest home,
Hidden no more by the body and the life,
Hidden no more by the mind’s ignorance;
An unerring Hand shall shape event and act…
This universe shall unseal its occult sense,
Creation’s process change its antique front,
An ignorant evolution’s hierarchy
Release the Wisdom chained below its base.
The Spirit shall be the master of his world…
Even there shall come as a high crown of all
The end of Death, the death of Ignorance.
But first high Truth must set her feet on earth
And man aspire to the Eternal’s light…
When superman is born as Nature’s king
His presence shall transfigure Matter’s world:
He shall light up Truth’s fire in Nature’s night,
He shall lay upon the earth Truth’s greater law;
Man too shall turn towards the Spirit’s call.
Awake to his hidden possibility,
Awake to all that slept within his heart
And all that Nature meant when earth was formed
And the Spirit made this ignorant world his home,
He shall aspire to Truth and God and Bliss…
Earth’s bodies shall be conscious of a soul;
Mortality’s bondslaves shall unloose their bonds,
Mere men into spiritual beings grow…
A divine force shall flow through tissue and cell
And take the charge of breath and speech and act
And all the thoughts shall be a glow of suns
And every feeling a celestial thrill…
Thus shall the earth open to divinity
And common natures feel the wide uplift,
Illumine common acts with the Spirit’s ray
And meet the deity in common things.
Nature shall live to manifest secret God,
The Spirit shall take up the human play,
This earthly life become the life divine.
And where does this long evolutionary march finally lead to? The appearance of the supramental race upon earth means the play of Krishna and Kali in this creation, the enjoyment of the being of bliss in the truth-dynamism of his executive Force, his luminous Shakti. Even as “amidst a laughter of unearthly lyres” Savitri returns to earth, returns carrying the soul of Satyavan in her bosom, a “choir of laughing winds” greets her with a welcome song. And the marvel! (pp. 711-12)
Pursuing her in her fall, implacably sweet,
A face was over her which seemed a youth’s,
Symbol of all the beauty eyes see not,
Crowned as with peacock plumes of gorgeous hue
Framing a sapphire, whose heart-disturbing smile
Insatiably attracted to delight,
Voluptuous to the embraces of her soul.
Changed in its shape, yet rapturously the same,
It grew a woman’s dark and beautiful
Like a mooned night with drifting star-gemmed clouds,
A shadowy glory and a stormy depth,
Turbulent in will and terrible in love.
Eyes in which Nature’s blind ecstatic life
Sprang from some spirit’s passionate content,
Missioned her to the whirling dance of earth…
Then from a timeless plane that watches Time,
A Spirit gazed out upon destiny,
In its endless moment saw the ages pass.
All still was in a silence of the gods.
The prophet moment covered limitless Space
And cast into the heart of hurrying Time
A diamond light of the Eternal’s peace,
A crimson seed of God’s felicity;
A glance from the gaze fell of undying Love.
A wonderful face looked out with deathless eyes;
A hand was seen drawing the golden bars
That guard the imperishable secrecies.
A key turned in a mystic lock of Time.
But where the silence of the gods had passed,
A greater harmony from the stillness born
Surprised with joy and sweetness yearning hearts,
An ecstasy and a laughter and a cry.
A power leaned down, a happiness found its home.
Over wide earth brooded the infinite bliss.
Here is the fulfilment of Savitri, that a “crimson seed of God’s felicity” is cast in the earthly soil. It will flourish and grow in the stream of speedy time. Aswapati had received a magnificent boon from the divine Shakti, that she shall take mortal birth and meet the challenge of Death, that in “Death’s tremendous hour” a seed shall be sown. (p. 346) She came and did Shakti Yoga in the soul of the earth. Now here is the crimson seed in the rich soil and from it will sprout the Tree of eternal Time bearing the fruits of eternity.
About Krishna and Kali in the last passage, we could refer to an entry in the Record of Yoga,—in fact this Krishna-Kali theme appears in several places in the Record. In the context of the fourth Chatushtaya dealing with Krishna-Kali-Karma-Kama Sri Aurobindo writes that, Krishna is the Ishwara taking delight in the world and Kali is the Shakti carrying out the Lila according to the pleasure of the Ishwara. This is significant, in the sense that when Savitri is returning to earth Krishna and Kali are following her, pursuing her in her fall, revealing the beginning of the dynamism of new Time in the Joy of the Divine himself. This tapas-siddhi, of bringing down Krishna and Kali, is the entire purport of the yogic Savitri. That is the crimson seed of the new creation.
Keywords: SriAurobindo, Spirituality, Poetry, Mysticism, Evolution
Source : http://www.sciy.org
