The Rainbow Bridge – Part 1

We are pleased to include in this Newsletter a feature article by Mrs Sonia Dyne - The Rainbow Bridge. This is reproduced from a lecture that she delivered under the Dr M V Nadkarni Memorial Lecture at Savitri Bhavan, Auroville, on the 20^th of February 2011. This article inspired our theme for this month. The article will be presented to you in two parts. Part 2 of the article would appear in next month’s issue. Mrs. Dyne needs no introduction in the Sri Aurobindo circle of Singapore. She was a former Chairperson of the society and also the then editor of our Newsletter. Perhaps, Mrs. Dyne’s sentiments, echoed in the following quote, will be an apt prelude to the following article:

I am pleased that you wish to put 'The Rainbow Bridge' in the Newsletter. It was a great privilege to be invited to deliver the second lecture in memory of Professor Nadkarni, and I am sure that my memories of him and the 'old days' when we used to meet in a ramshackle old building at the corner of Balestier Rd will resonate with many of the older members of the Society who remember them too. – Sonia Dyne

The Rainbow Bridge – Part 1

We are here today to honour the memory of Professor Mangesh Nadkarni, a true disciple of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother and an outstanding exponent of their work. I had the great privilege and pleasure of knowing him during the years when he was teaching at the University of Singapore, and giving a great deal of his time in the evenings and at weekends to spend with the members of our Sri Aurobindo Society, taking part in our regular meetings and leisure activities.

In those days, we used to meet on the upper floor of a very old building, a former police station, which occupied one corner of a busy road junction. Traffic roared past without a pause, and the old timber-framed walls seemed to vibrate with every passing vehicle. Listening to Professor Nadkarni, we became oblivious to the dinginess of our surroundings and the relentless noise, aware only of the soft light shining on photographs of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother and a discourse that held us spellbound. It was not only the spoken words that held our attention, but the sheer enthusiasm and total conviction of the speaker himself. It often seemed to me then that the strident voice of a great city dedicated to commerce was trying in vain to drown out the mantric verses of Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri, and I used to fancy that the air itself would preserve their vibration and remember them, as water is said to remember. Much later I discovered that Sri Aurobindo had written, in a reference to certain schools of Vedic thought: ‘…that which we have created in our consciousness by the Word, we can fix there by the Word, to become part of ourselves and effective not only in our inner life, but upon the outer physical world.’

During the time that Dr Nadkarni was with us, membership of our small Society increased to include more people from outside the Indian community, so that for the first time we could see ourselves as part of a truly international family. This was largely due to the popularity of Dr Nadkarni himself, not only as an outstanding teacher but as someone who constantly inspired us with a new spirit of dedication to the Integral Yoga.

Speaking here in the Savitri Bhavan in 2002 he said: “Savitri is not great only as literature. It is a living book….. it is not only the manifestation of the new spiritual age that is about to dawn on humanity, but it is also a powerhouse. This power becomes dynamic when we receive it into ourselves and manifest it in our lives through our sadhana”. True to his word, he seemed to live the teaching he so eloquently proclaimed.

Among the passages Dr Nadkarni liked to read aloud, bringing them to life as only he could, many were prophetic in their revelation of humanity’s potential, the destiny Sri Aurobindo referred to when he wrote:

‘If mankind could but see, though in a glimpse of fleeting experience, what infinite enjoyments, what perfect forces, what luminous reaches of spontaneous knowledge, what wide calms of our being lie in wait for us in the tracts which our animal evolution has not yet conquered, they would leave all and never rest till they had gained these treasures.’

The tragedy is that we can’t see, even though these treasures are within us, as in a sealed room of our earthly habitation to which we have no access in the present stage of our evolution. But we can believe in our future.

Dr Nadkarni’s delivery was unmatchable: nevertheless, in tribute to him I would like to begin with a prophetic vision we often heard him read, adding the power of his own conviction to Sri Aurobindo’s evocative words, a passage which remains in my mind forever associated with his memory:

At the head she stands of birth and toil and fate,
In their slow round the cycles turn to her call;
Alone her hands can change Time’s dragon base.
Hers is the mystery the Night conceals;
The Spirit’s alchemist energy is hers;
She is the golden bridge, the wonderful fire.
The luminous heart of the unknown is she,
A power of silence in the depths of God;
She is the Force, the inevitable Word,
The magnet of our difficult ascent,
The sun from which we kindle all our suns,
The light that leans from the unrealized Vasts,
The joy that beckons from the impossible,
The might of all that never yet came down.
All nature dumbly calls to her alone
To heal with her feet the aching throb of life
And break the seals on the dim soul of man
And kindle her fire in the closed heart of things.
All here shall be one day her sweetness’ home
All contraries prepare her harmony;
Towards her our knowledge climbs, our passion gropes;
In her miraculous rapture we shall dwell,
Her clasp shall turn to ecstasy our pain.
Our self shall be one self with all through her.

It sometimes seems to us that the promised joy does indeed ‘beckon from the impossible. Yet nobody has ever been more poignantly aware of the painful uncertainties of human life than Sri Aurobindo himself:

A creature born to bend beneath the yoke
A chattel and a plaything of time’s Lords
Or one more pawn who comes destined to be pushed
One slow move forward on a measureless board
In the chess-play of the earth-soul with doom
Such is the human figure drawn by Time (1:2)

The very words labour: beneath the threshold of their surface sense, that grating sound ‘aw’ repeated seven times in four lines echoes the merciless scraping against the board of the pawn’s enforced progress - not lifted up and gently placed in position, but ruthlessly shoved into danger, an expendable piece: the human tragedy made real to us through this symbol by the intuitive language of Sri Aurobindo.

In complete contrast, there are the astonishing prophetic passages, in which the seer, seized by a power transcending space and time as we know them, rises beyond the range of human mind and from there looks down at an apocalypse heralding the end of Death and Hell. True to the long tradition of prophecy, they begin with the words: “I saw”. Sri Aurobindo puts these lines into the mouth of Aswapati - but the vision is his own:

I saw the Omnipotent’s flaming pioneers
Over the heavenly verge which turns towards life
Come crowding down the amber steps of birth;
Forerunners of a divine multitude
Out of the paths of the morning star they came
Into the little room of mortal life.
I saw them cross the twilight of an age,
The sun eyed children of a marvelous dawn,
The great creators with wide brows of calm,
The massive barrier breakers of the world
And wrestlers with destiny in her lists of will,
The labourers in the quarries of the gods,
The messengers of the Incommunicable,
The architects of immortality.
Into the fallen human sphere they came
Faces that wore the Immortal’s glory still,
Voices that communed still with the thoughts of God,
Bodies made beautiful by the Spirit’s light.
Carrying the magic word, the mystic fire,
Carrying the Dionysian cup of joy,
Approaching eyes of a diviner man,
Lips chanting an unknown anthem of the soul
Feet echoing in the corridors of Time. (3:4)

A commanding vision– but how is it possible? How do we make that leap from the “death-bound littleness” of our present existence, so clearly understood by Sri Aurobindo and so accurately described by him in line after line of Savitri? It has taken a few million years of Nature’s evolution to bring us to the point where we are now – at the end of “the curve of reason” to use Sri Aurobindo’s vivid phrase. What is the way forward, and how do we bridge the gulf between our present state and the future foreseen by Sri Aurobindo?

A radical transformation is called for - and it must begin now, with us. The Mother showed the way when she called 'Savitri' a "mantra for the transformation of the world." How well she understood what that means, the secret of its power:

"With the divine Love is the supreme power of transformation. It has this power because it is for the sake of transformation that it has given Itself to the world, and manifested everywhere. Not only has it infused itself into Man, but also into all the atoms of the most obscure matter in order to bring the world back to the original truth."

We may have reached already a dangerous stage of our human journey where, if we do not change, the Earth will no longer sustain us. We misuse our human freedom to pollute the fragile envelope of air surrounding our planet; air that is the universal sign of our oneness with all life. It was not around from the beginning. It was created by life evolving in the oceans and it is still the same air; air that was breathed by Socrates and the Buddha and flowed through the flute of Krishna.

And yet, the freedom we now misuse is the very essence of our humanity. It marks us out from other living creatures on our planet. Freedom is the most precious and at the same time the most terrible of divine gifts, for once given it can never be taken away. Sri Aurobindo understood the fundamental importance of freedom and proclaimed it on the first page of The Life Divine saying – “The earliest formula of wisdom promises to be its last – God, Light, Freedom, Immortality.” He was not a believer in evolution in the strict Darwinian sense, as he made clear in a document of 1914. In his view, man was a special creation – a divine soul in an animal body. That is why there are so many references in Savitri to a power that guides from within – the outstretched hand felt upon our lives. “All’s miracle here” he wrote, “and can by miracle change.” Should we then expect a miracle?

Neither Sri Aurobindo nor the Mother envisaged a ‘miraculous’ change, because it would deny to Mankind the God-given gift of his freedom to choose. Without that freedom, no ascent to the supramental consciousness would be even possible, for freedom is the hallmark of the supermind, just as it is of our human nature.

Thus the climax of Sri Aurobindo’s poem is not the moment when Savitri tears the mask from the face of Death and discovers the sole reality of Love, but the free choice she makes on behalf of the human race. By her surrender to the divine Will she has earned that right, but the divinity incarnate in her does not impose a choice, her human part alone must make it. Here is that dramatic moment in Book 11:

Around her some tremendous spirit lived,
Mysterious flame around a melting pearl,
And in the phantom of abolished Space
There was a voice unheard by human ears that cried:
“Choose, spirit thy supreme choice not given again;
For now from my highest being looks at thee
The nameless, formless peace where all things rest.
In a happy, vast sublime cessation know,
An immense extinction in eternity,
A point that disappears in the infinite, -
Felicity of the extinguished flame,
Last sinking of a wave in a boundless sea,
End of the trouble of thy wandering thoughts,
Close of the journeying of thy pilgrim soul.
Accept, O music, weariness of thy notes,
O stream, wide breaking of thy channel banks.”
The moments fell into eternity.
But someone yearned within a bosom unknown,
And silently the woman’s heart replied:
“Thy peace, O Lord, a boon within to keep
Amid the roar and ruin of wild Time
For the magnificent soul of man on earth
Thy calm, O Lord, that bears thy hands of joy. (11:1)

The choice has been made for us, and the way prepared for us by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. A ‘rainbow bridge’ was built in the unseen - the epic of Savitri records the building of it and becomes its counterpart in earthly time. The very language of Savitri marks it out, for it is the spontaneous utterance of an intuitive consciousness that we are only just able to grasp: it is the future poetry and its appeal is to the whole human person on levels above and below the surface mind.

The image of the rainbow bridge comes from A God’s Labour, one of Sri Aurobindo’s most loved poems. Written in 1935, at a time when he was actively engaged on the composition of Savitri, it describes in words that are clear and explicit the nature and purpose of the work he had undertaken in collaboration with the Mother:

I had hoped to build a rainbow bridge
Marrying the soil to the sky
And sow in this dancing planet midge
The moods of infinity.

The difficulties and dangers of the Sadhana, the discoveries and ultimate success of the great mission, are all contained in the 31 verses of A God’s labour - almost it seems, as a summary of their further elaboration in Savitri itself. Despite the unprecedented nature of the task, in the end the work was done:

The gulf twixt the depths and the heights is bridged
And the golden waters pour
Down the sapphire mountains rainbow ridged
And glimmer from shore to shore.

In speaking of his work as a ‘rainbow bridge’ Sri Aurobindo brings together two of the most ancient and potent symbols we know. A bridge connects the place where we are to the place where we want to go; by its very nature it spans the twin dimensions of space and time, carrying us from the known to the unknown, from the place where we are to the place where we will be. As a psychological symbol, it connects our hopes and dreams to their future realization. In its material reality, a bridge enables us to cross a dangerous place or an impossible chasm. Savitri is a living bridge created in the consciousness of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother and imbued with the power to effect a real change in the way we see ourselves and experience life.

As a sign of the connection between earth and intangible realm of the Spirit, the rainbow appears in myth and legend from earliest times. It has an important place in the oldest surviving culture we know, that of the Aboriginal inhabitants of Australia, dating back 15,000 years. They too have their rainbow bridge in the shape of a huge coloured snake, creator of the ancestors who roamed the primeval earth. From the rainbow snake when it rose up from the waterholes to span the sky, their ancestors learned songs of power to sing into existence each feature of the landscape, each animal and plant. In a later age, after the great flood, the rainbow became a symbol of hope, a sign in the heavens that a wrathful God would never again punish mankind by destroying the earth.

There is another, more profound aspect to Sri Aurobindo’s choice: a rainbow is visible light. Behind it is the spiritual light we do not see:

“Contrary to our ordinary conceptions,” he wrote, “light is not primarily a material creation …….light is primarily a spiritual manifestation of a divine reality illuminative and creative: material light is a subsequent representation or conversion of it into matter for the purposes of the material Energy.” (This description of the double nature of light was written long before we became familiar with the mysterious double life of the photon, simultaneously both wave and particle.)

A Spiritual light manifesting itself as poetry is the true source of Savitri’s power to lift our consciousness to a higher level than we normally experience; to lift it nearer to the plane of intuitive mind. In Indian tradition, the transforming power of the word is known as Mantra, and it is much more than just inspired writing. Sri Aurobindo has given many descriptions of Mantra, besides providing a sustained and consistent example of it in Savitri itself. From our point of view one of the most helpful explanations he has given is in the context of The Secret of the Veda:

“The Mantra, although it expresses thought in mind, is not in its essential part a creation of the intellect. To be the sacred and effective word, it must have come as an inspiration from the supramental plane, termed in Veda rtam, the Truth, and have been received into the superficial consciousness either through the heart or by the luminous intelligence.

The heart in Vedic psychology is not restricted to the seat of the emotions; it includes all that large tract of spontaneous mentality nearest to the subconscient in us, out of which rise the sensations, emotions, instincts, impulses and all those intuitions and inspirations that travel through these agencies before they arrive at form in the intelligence.”

“……..It is there that the inspirations of the Universal Soul can most easily enter in, and most swiftly take possession of the individual soul. It is therefore by the power of the heart that the mantra takes form. But it has to be received and held in the thought of the intelligence as well as in the perceptions of the heart; for not till the intelligence has accepted and even brooded upon it, can that truth of thought, which the truth of the Word expresses, be firmly possessed or normally effective. Fashioned by the heart, it is confirmed by the mind. But another approval is also needed. The individual mind has accepted; the effective powers of the Cosmos must also accept. The words of the hymn retained by the mind form a basis from which the future thought energies have to proceed.”

I draw your attention to the last sentence. In Savitri Sri Aurobindo has given us a new ‘hymn’ by which we may concentrate the thought energies of our own age. It is indeed a wedding hymn – to use an ancient Greek word for such a composition, it is an Epithalamion celebrating the marriage of the soil to the sky. In former times its verses would have been sung or chanted in celebration rather than read silently; but equally it was to be remembered and cherished and ‘brooded upon’. Reading Savitri may be our shortest, easiest and most direct way to develop the intuitive intelligence that is the first step towards a new consciousness.

This work is a beacon of fire, illuminating everything that is brought within the circle of its light. In that light all the achievements of the past, all our religions, all our philosophies, our sciences old and new – indeed all fields of human endeavour – appear renewed and connected to each other by a thousand subtle ties. Wherever they are deficient, too narrowly based or distorted by ignorance and ill-will, this light comes in to reveal the halo of hidden Truth and the potential of hidden perfection our mental eyes do not see. It is the light of the Supramental playing upon the human world, restoring the shattered original harmony of the higher spheres, a light so powerful that it can change the way we experience the world.

......to be continued