Author’s Note: Part 3 introduces the story of Savitri and Satyavan as 'a parable for the dawning of the Supramental consciousness', and contrasts Savitri's yoga with the yoga of Aswapati.
There is another way of Knowledge revealed by Sri Aurobindo through the symbol of the love between Savitri and Satyavan. We know that their union represents the relationship between the divine love incarnate in Savitri and the human soul in Satyavan. This love, taking human nature into itself, alone has the power to liberate Mankind from suffering and death in a world of false appearances. Savitri's yoga is a search for the soul, or psychic being, hidden in each of us behind a veil, to bring it forward in its characteristic action of love as leader of the life and mind. Sri Aurobindo presents the coming forward of the soul as an essential preliminary to the advent of the supramental consciousness in Man. He says: “If the psychic entity had been from the beginning unveiled and known to its ministers, not a secluded King in a screened chamber, the human evolution would have been a rapid soul-outflowering, not the difficult, chequered and disfigured development it now is, but the veil is thick and we know not the secret light within us, the light in the hidden crypt of the heart's innermost sanctuary.”
It is as if, by dividing his poem into two parts, Sri Aurobindo had wished to compare a past and a future way of knowledge. Aswapati takes the traditional path, ascending through ranges of mind and then transcending them, to reach a consciousness bordering the supramental which he sees, but cannot bring down into the human world. Only the divine Shakti taking human birth in Savitri can do this. The story of her love for Satyavan can easily be read as a parable of the dawning of a supramental consciousness in Mankind and this was no doubt Sri Aurobindo's intention, using a sustained power of imagination to evoke “a supereminent revelation of that which is behind the image or symbol.” As we follow the story of Savitri from her birth and childhood, marriage to Satyavan and subsequent battle against the forces of suffering, death and dissolution, we can see that Sri Aurobindo is showing us at the same time a picture of the emergence of Supermind in its characteristic mode of action. Everything that happens to Savitri, and everything she does, is indicative of the action of supermind emerging in the context of a human life, beginning with the coming forward of the human soul from behind the veil to supplant the old instrumentation of Life and Mind: “as mind is established here on a basis of Ignorance seeking for Knowledge and growing into Knowledge, so supermind must be established here on a basis of Knowledge growing into its own greater light. But this cannot be, so long as the spiritual-mental being has not risen fully to supermind and brought down its powers into terrestrial existence. For the gulf between mind and supermind has to be bridged, the closed passages opened and roads of ascent and descent created where there is now a void and a silence.... There must first be the psychic change, the conversion of our whole present nature into a soul-instrumentation; on that or along with it there must be the spiritual change, the descent of a higher Light, Knowledge, Power, Force Bliss, Purity into the whole being, even into the lowest recesses of the life and body, even into the darkness of our subconscience; last, there must supervene the supramental transmutation – there must take place, as the crowning movement, the ascent into the supermind and the transforming descent of the supramental consciousness into our entire being and nature.”
Savitri's yoga offers a unique insight into the progress of a future evolution of consciousness. Her birth is a divine event comparable with the first awakening of life on Earth, as it was described in the opening canto of Book One. All Nature rejoices at this birth, and manifests the joy of being, the ananda, through the perfection of physical forms. A new light radiates from the natural world in anticipation of Savitri who “has made her soul the body of our state.” Through all the descriptive passages, like an undercurrent, runs the theme of Nature's yearning and response, reminding us once more that the 'divine event' will have its effect on every level of being, down to the Inconscient:
In this high signal moment of the gods
Answering earth's yearning and her cry for bliss
A greatness from our other countries came.
A silence in the noise of earthly things
Immutably revealed the secret word,
A mightier influx filled the oblivious clay;
A lamp was lit, a sacred image made,
A mediating ray has touched the earth
Bridging the gulf between man's mind and God's;
Translating heaven into a human shape
Its brightness linked our transience to the Unknown.
Just as Nature smiles upon the divine child, so Savitri is loved and cherished by the people who are close to her. And yet, ''although she longed to make them one with God and world and her” they could not fully embrace the wonder that they glimpsed:
For even the close partners of her thoughts
Who could have walked the nearest to her ray,
Worshipped the power and light they felt in her
But could not match the measure of her soul.
While he elaborates the ancient legend with all the skill of a master poet, Sri Aurobindo never loses track of its symbolic aspect. The Birth and Childhood of the Flame can be read as legend or seen as a picture of the divine Word and its reception by the world of men. A few respond with adoration and awe; others with the desire to harness this greatness to their own small needs and purposes; and there are those “inapt to meet divinity so close” by whom it is barely tolerated. At the same time Savitri's birth into the world and her growth into adulthood is an image of the emergence and growth of the supramental consciousness. Savitri comes as the bearer of this divine gift, but even in that “golden age'' of the past in which is the story is set “none could stand up her equal and her mate”. She must go out into the wider world to seek the pure soul capable of receiving her gift to Mankind.
Savitri and Satyavan meet for the first time in a forest setting that is supremely beautiful, and again the emphasis is on a change that all Nature awaits with joy:
There expectation beat wide sudden wings,
As if a soul had looked out from earth's face
And all that was in her felt a coming change
And forgetting obvious joys and common dreams,
Obedient to Time's call and the spirit's fate
Were lifted to a beauty calm and pure
That lived under the eyes of Eternity.
When Satyavan comes into view from among the trees it is as if he is one with earthly Nature “a brother of the sunshine and the sky”:
As might a soul on Nature's background limned
Stand out for a moment in a house of dream
Created by the ardent breath of life,
So he appeared against the forest verge
Inset twixt green relief and golden ray.
As if a weapon of the living Light.
Erect and lofty like a living God
His figure led the splendour of the morn.
Satyavan is presented in a two-fold role. He emerges from Nature as the leader of the evolution on earth, and he is also the forerunner who goes in front to usher in “the splendour of the morn” - the first dawning of the supramental knowledge. Savitri recognises him immediately as the one she has been looking for throughout the world. Just as, during her long quest, she seemed to recognise all the places she passed through as if they were already known to her, so now her first sight of Satyavan also took the form of a memory:
On the dumb bosom of this oblivious globe
Although as unknown beings we seem to meet,
Our lives are not aliens nor as strangers join,
Moved to each other by a causeless force.
The soul can recognise its answering soul
Across dividing Time and, on Life's roads
Absorbed wrapped traveller, turning it recovers
Familiar splendours in an unknown face
And touched by the warning finger of swift love
It thrills again to an immortal joy
Wearing a mortal body for delight.
Once again, Sri Aurobindo uses the story of the two lovers to tell us something about the supramental consciouness: “Especially on a certain level all knowledge presents itself as a remembering, because all is latent or inherent in the self of supermind. The future, like the past, presents itself to knowledge in the supermind as a memory of the pre-known.”
All the knowledge that Aswapati gained is available to Savitri and more, for she carries within her soul the immortal supermind, but until the experience of love for Satyavan and later the experience of grief and pain when Death takes him away come to her, her soul-consciousness remains behind the veil of her humanity. Afterwards, when Savitri's finds her soul, all her words and actions will be framed by a supramental Power and Will opening out from within, and expressing itself in its characteristic action.
How does Savitri discover her soul? Stricken by intolerable grief when the hour of Satyavan's death approaches, she desires only to follow him into the darkness. As Narad had foretold, pain forces her to look deeper into herself. At first the ignorance of her human mind resists, but then. in reply to a Voice heard within:
A Power within her answered the still Voice:
I am thy portion here charged with thy work,
As Thou myself seated forever above,
Speak to my depths, O great and deathless Voice,
Command, for I am here to do thy will.
The voice replied: remember why thou cam'st;
Find out thy soul, recover thy hid self,
In silence seek God's meaning in thy depths,
Then mortal nature change to the divine.
Open God's door, enter into his trance.
Cast Thought from thee, that nimble ape of light:
In his tremendous hush stilling thy brain
His vast Truth wake within and know and see.
(to be continued)
- Sonia Dyne
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