Author’s Note: In Part Two, we continue to follow Aswapathi's progress through the undiscovered “inner countries” of consciousness. He explores the subtle physical plane and endures the turbulence of the Kingdoms of Life and the flat plains and high peaks of the Mind. In his pursuit of absolute knowledge he descends even into the nether darkness, from which he is projected suddenly into the paradise of the Gods. As his being widens with each new discovery, his longing for “our sweet and mighty Mother” increases and urges him on towards the surrender of his entire being to Her.
Part 1
The opening cantos of ‘Savitri, The Book of Beginnings’, contain some of the most beautiful poetry ever written in English, created by the need to put an inexpressible experience into words. The beauty of the language points to something wonderful that eludes our grasp like a dream half-remembered on waking, especially when the subject is Savitri herself as the embodiment of a spiritual Truth. A warm radiance emanates from the passages where Sri Aurobindo describes the glory of the natural world, pointing to the unique importance of the Earth in the cosmic scheme, for Man is the chosen vehicle of a great evolutionary leap culminating in the establishment of a divine Life on Earth. Aswapati undergoes a transformation which enables him to see and experience the cosmic forces at work. He feels a oneness with everything encountered on his path, the first manifestation of a new kind of knowledge, a promise of power to come - knowledge by identity. But human aspiration alone cannot take Aswapati into the inner countries, a sanction is needed from the heights:
His being towered into pathless heights,
Naked of its vesture of humanity.
As thus it rose, to meet him bare and pure
A srong Descent leapt down. A Might, a Flame.
A beauty half-visible with deathless eyes,
A violent ecstasy, a sweetness dire,
Enveloped him with its stupendous limbs
And penetrated nerve and heart and brain
That thrilled and fainted with the epiphany:
His nature shuddered in the Unknown's grasp.
In a moment shorter than Death, longer than Time
By a power more ruthless than Love, happier than Heaven,
Taken sovereignly into eternal arms,
Haled and coerced by a stark absolute bliss,
In a whirlwind circuit of delight and force
Hurried into unimaginable depths,
Upbourne into immeasurable heights,
It was torn out from its mortality
And underwent a new and bourneless change.
Thus it was that Aswapati “broke into another space and time”. Nearest to Earth in the hierarchy of planes is the world of subtle matter, where Knowledge sleeps in the perfection of form. It is a world of extraordinary beauty:
Whatever is here of visible charm and grace
Finds there its faultless and immortal lines;
All that is beautiful here is there divine.
That perfect world of crystal air is in many ways the template for our fallen Earth, but its very fixity, shutting out the possibility of error, also shuts out “the shadows of the immeasurable” and in this closed space Knowledge cannot build a house for limitless mind:
Assigned as force to a bound corner Mind
Attached to the safe paucity of her room,
She did her little works and played and slept
And thought not of a greater work undone.
The Seeker does not linger here. In his search for “hidden powers and other states” he will pass through the kingdoms of life and mind and even go down into the dark nether world of falsehood where true knowledge is twisted and deformed to serve the ends of hostile and non-human agencies. This darkness is presented in ‘Savitri’ as a terrible basement of the house of Life, the prototype of all the hells that Man has imagined or created.
The Kingdom of Life opens to him in all its turbulence and unrestrained creative power. There he encounters the archetypal energies and forces that have shaped the evolution of the Earth, and enters into other worlds bordering our own. The whole history of life on Earth is displayed to his witness eye; he understands the immense creative power of thought and its role; he uncovers the mystery of the fall of Life from its divine origin. Life was not meant to be a vale of tears, it was created to express an infinite delight and joy:
Smiling like a new-born child at love and hope,
In her nature housing the Immortal's power,
In her bosom bearing the eternal Will,
No guide she needed but her luminous heart:
No fall debased the godhead of her steps,
No alien Night had come to blind her eyes.
How then had mortal Life fallen under the influence of an alien Night? How had suffering and death found their way into the divine plan? In his need to know, Aswapati probes the depths of hell. Armed only with the light of his own divine soul, he is confronted by the dreadful inhabitants of that darkness: “Vast minds and lives without a spirit within”. He endures the attack of weapons designed to bring about an inner death more radical than physical mortality - the separation of life and mind from the soul:
Captured and trailed in Falsehood's lethal net
And often strangled in the noose of grief,
Or cast in the grim morass of swallowing doubt
Or shut into pits of error and despair,
He drank her poison draughts till none was left.
In a world where neither hope nor joy could come
The ordeal he suffered of evil's absolute reign
Yet kept intact his spirit's radiant truth.
Suddenly from the impenetrable blackness there comes a marvellous release: Aswapati understands the “secret key of Nature's change” - the darkness is revealed as a lie, having no right of existence in an ultimate Reality. Falsehood is the shadow cast by the divine freedom to exhaust all possibilities of existence, and by bringing the light of Truth down into those depths the terrible illusion is dispelled: ''Night opened and vanished like a gulf of dream''. Like Shiva, he has drained the ocean of poison and now he awakens as from a nightmare, opening his eyes to a paradise, an Overmind kingdom of the gods, where he tastes an immortal bliss that generates the worlds. This too must be left behind, for ahead the stair still climbs upwards and he must follow it until his work is done and the highest Knowledge gained. In the far distance, “large lucent realms of Mind from stillness shone.”
Aswapati finds himself in a borderland, where he is a witness to the dawning of knowledge and the slow emergence of Mind in Nature and evolving Man. He follows the progress of the instruments devised by Nature in those parts, the “dwarf three-bodied trilogy” of a limited power of thought, a chaotic unrestrained intelligence driven by desire and greed, and finally reason. This latest instrument of Knowledge, reason, attempts in vain to master and codify into ''word-webs of abstract thought'' the tumultuous phenomena of life. In this region of the mind-plane, which in many ways resembles our own world, there is hardly room for the greater Knowledge to come down:
There comes no breaking of the walls of Mind,
There leaps no flash of absolute power,
There dawns no light of heavenly certitude.
A million faces wears her knowledge here
And every face is turbanned with a doubt.
Something is always missing, something half glimpsed in the pauses of thought, or felt in the heart's deep core. Aswapati continues to search for this Truth that has no name, but always it eludes him. Even on the loftiest summits of the Self of Mind, where he first discovers the divine origin of thought, he finds a corrosive doubt that “smote at the very roots of thought and sense”. He prepares to put behind him these planes of Mind: “Our sweet and mighty Mother was not there”. He will find Her at last in the Soul of the World:
At the beginning of each far-spread plane
Pervading with her power the cosmic suns
She reigns, inspirer of its multiple works
And thinker of the symbol of its scene.
Above them all she stands supporting all,
The sole omnipotent Goddess ever-veiled
Of whom the world is the inscrutable mask;
The ages are the footfalls of her tread,
Their happenings the figure of her thoughts,
And all creation is her endless act.
His spirit was made a vessel of her force;
Mute in the fathomless passion of his will
He outstretched to her his folded hands of prayer.
Aswapati has reached the first goal of yoga, a vision of the Divine Mother to whom he surrenders his whole heart and mind. The long pilgrimage is almost over, the mission soon to be accomplished. He enters at last the Kingdom of the Greater Knowledge as one who has become the voice of aspiring Earth, in the full consciousness of his role as the human instrument of the Mother. He has passed the limits of human thought and has earned the right to access not only the most luminous heights of the plane of Knowledge, but also, as a corollary to this right, to unseal the hidden powers of Knowledge within his own soul:
His privilege regained of shadowless sight
The Thinker entered the immortals' air
And drank again his pure and mighty source.
Immutable in rhythmic calm and joy
He saw, sovereignly free in limitless light
The unfallen planes, the thought-created worlds
Where Knowledge is the leader of the act
And Matter is of thinking substance made.....
On the summits of this supreme Knowledge-world, he finds the sovereign Kings of Thought ''surveying the enormous work of time”. All knowledge that reaches us emanates from this ultimate source:
A great all-ruling consciousness is there
And Mind unwittingly serves a higher Power;
It is a channel, not the source of all.
The cosmos is no accident in Time;
There is a meaning in each play of Chance,
There is a freedom in each face of Fate.
A wisdom knows and guides the mysteried world;
A Truth-gaze shapes its beings and events;
A word self- born upon creation's heights,
Voice of the eternal in the temporal spheres,
Prophet of the seeings of the Absolute,
Sows the Idea's significance in Form
And from that seed the growths of Time arise”
Glimpses of the supramental plane dawn upon his sight; and he feels himself ''an equal of the first creator seers'' - the Rishis of Vedic times. The mystery of the descent of Knowledge has been opened to him; he has reached the end of all that can be known. Knowledge, no longer veiled, is revealed in an original plenitude of Oneness with the divine Love:
Here came the thought that passes beyond Thought,
Here the still voice which our listening cannot hear,
The Knowledge by which the Knower is the Known,
The Love in which Beloved and Lover are one.
But there is more to be done, for now Love imposes its own claim upon his heart, and his destiny calls him towards a supreme sacrifice of all that he has gained:
On a dizzy verge where all disguises fail
And human mind must abdicate in Light
Or die like a moth in the naked blaze of Truth,
He stood compelled to a tremendous choice.
All he had been and all towards which he grew
Must now be left behind or else transform
Into a self of That which has no name.
He can know all things created by identity with them, but the self-existent Divine “the One by whom all live, who lives by none” he cannot know while any remnant of separate self remains. At this critical point in the poem we recall the luminous opening lines of Sri Aurobindo's ‘The Mother’:
“There are two powers that alone can effect in their conjunction the great and difficult thing which is the aim of our endeavour, a fixed and unfailing aspiration that calls from below and a supreme Grace from above that answers. But the supreme Grace will act only in the conditions of the Light and the Truth; it will not act in conditions laid upon it by the Falsehood and the Ignorance. For if it were to yield to the demands of the falsehood, it would defeat its own purpose.”
In Aswapati the conditions have been fulfilled by his final surrender of all that he is to the Mother. He has passed unscathed through the ordeal of the descent into Night; he has torn away the last veil of Ignorance. A supreme Grace answers his appeal and the Mother reveals her face. Although in her presence all the knowledge he has gained seems insignificant, still the prayer he has carried in his heart for so long can be spoken: “Mission to earth some living form of Thee”.
But now his being was too wide for self;
His heart's demand had grown immeasurable:
His single freedom could not satisfy,
Her light, her bliss he asked for earth and men.
But vain are human life and human love
To break earth's seal of ignorance and death;
His nature's might seemed now an infants grasp;
Heaven is too high for outstretched hands to seize.
This light comes not by struggle or by thought;
In the mind's silence the transcendent acts
And the hushed heart hears the unuttered word.
A vast surrender was his only strength.
A power that lives upon the heights must act...”
All the wisdom that knowledge can bring is summed up in these last five lines. Yet the question, How do I know? With which this enquiry started, has not yet been fully answered. We have discovered only that the real answer is not to be found by any process of thought or feeling: both mind and heart must fall silent.
(to be continued)
- Sonia Dyne
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