Her nights are
sleepless, for still she hears and sees "the dumb tread of Time and the
approach of ever-nearing Fate". Then one night she is startled by a mighty
voice invading her mortal life; she is jerked into a trance and becomes "a
stone of God lit by an amethyst soul". What use Savitri—"O spirit, O
immortal energy"!—coming to "this dumb deathbound earth" if it
was merely to nurse a hopeless grief in a helpless heart? Not passive
sufferance but positive action is expected of her:
Arise, O soul, and vanquish Time and
Death.
Still in her
tranced state, Savitri replies: How can she strive when she has neither the
strength nor the will to fight? Feeble are her chances of success, feeble the
chances of the ignorant race of man responding to the "saviour Light"
from above. "Is there a God whom any cry can move?" Isn't he careless
of mankind, their dolour and their defeat?
What need have
I, what need has Satyavan
To avoid the
black-meshed net, the dismal door,
Or call a
mightier Light into life's closed room,
A greater Law
into man's little world?
For her own problem
there surely is cure enough; she can follow Satyavan to the far off bourne and
there "lie inarmed breast upon breast...forgetting eternity's call,
forgetting God". Almost a drowsy and pendant reply, hardly worthy of
Savitri; the voice therefore admonishes her: "Is this enough, O
spirit?" She has come down with a mightier intent, and it will not do to
shrink from the task:
Cam'st thou not
down to open the doors of Fate,
The iron doors
that seemed for ever closed,
And lead man to Truth's wide and golden road
That runs through finite things to
eternity?
The petulant
human rebel is silenced, and another power, the creator spirit within her,
makes a reply. Savitri is ready for action as a vessel of the immortal Spirit;
when she knows what she has to do, she will readily strive to do it. The voice
answers:
Find out thy soul, recover thy hid self,
In silence seek God's meaning in thy
depths,
Then mortal nature change to the divine.
Human thought
and human sense can be barriers checkmating the passage of the soul to the
Soul; casting away everything, everything has to be gained; and by this means
Savitri will be able to invoke the force of the Supreme and conquer Death.
The voice is withdrawn, and Savitri finds
herself sitting "rigid in her gold motionless pose" by sleeping
Satyavan's side. The sky lours, thunder rumbles, rain hisses; but Savitri sits
impassive still in self-absorbed concentration. She will look into herself, she
will go in quest of her soul (as earlier she had gone in quest of her spouse),
and she will not turn back till she sights and claims her hidden self.
Her first series of insights disclose to
her, "the cosmic past, the crypt-seed and the mystic origins,/The shadowy
beginnings of world fate". It is a vivid and breathless pageantry—from the
cosmic whirl of atomic space, the appearance of huddled masses of matter, the
emergence of life' in algae, plant and tree, in insect, bird and beast, to the
ultimate flowering of 'mind' in man:
Mind nascent laboured out a mutable form,
It built a mobile house on shifting
sands,
A floating isle upon a bottomless sea.
Restless and enterprising, Mind has made
conquests of all sorts and organised the "thousandfold commerce of the
world". Sometimes probing below, sometimes gazing above, Mind has extended
its inquiries into the lower as well as the higher regions of consciousness,
nether Hell as also .high Heaven. Mind has its handmaidens—fancy,
imagination—and they annex vast territories of experience for man to lord over.
In apprehension like a god, yet man can also solicit the dark and devalue
himself:
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...
The Titan and the Fury and the Djinn
Lie bound in the subconscient's cavern
pit
And the Beast grovels in his antre den...
They are best
kept caged and cribbed in the chambers of the underground, for once you start
negotiating with them, they seize you body and soul, pervert all instruments,
press their advantages without mercy, and deluge man's world with blood and
terror:
The terrible Angel smites at every door:
An awful laughter mocks at the world's
pain
And massacre and torture grin at
Heaven:...
Man has propensities both towards good and
evil; to give evil full and free play is to turn God's purposes upside down,
for,
It imitates the Godhead it denies,
Puts on his figure and assumes his face.
A Manichean creator and destroyer,
This can abolish man, annul his world.
Thus man finds
himself at the crossroads where meet opposing paths that show the way either to
the world of the blessed or to the condemned wastes of hell. Man has a past and
future, and the narrow isthmus of the present is his playground of trial and
striving. While his mind is his helper, he cannot wholly depend upon it; mind
too can mislead, unawares sometimes, and sometimes deliberately. There are
other forces, however, to redress the balance, at times also to tilt it to
dangerous consequence:
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.
But this is no
more than a first report or preliminary finding; deeper meanings, clearer
purposes, emerge on a closer look at the human drama that is being played on
the cosmic stage. Not out of a "blind Nature-Force" has life emerged,
and then mind; the sea of inconscience carries the potencies of life, mind, and
any powers that may be above mind, though all as yet held in suspension as it
were. What is 'involved', nascent or held in suspense comes out when the time
is ripe, and so the evolutionary march begins and continues.
There is a law that controls, yet
transcends, the wide ranges of consciousness, from inert matter to man and the
future superman. It may be that man has his "prone obscure beginnings"
in the jungle ape; but he has not ceased to grow, he has not ceased to hanker
after good and beauty and God, and he has been moving "in a white lucent
air of dreams". The setbacks have been many, the frustrations numberless,
but pioneering man has moved breast-forward, flirted with the omniscient, and
made vague approaches to 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 the high roof of things
And saw the light of a spiritual sun.
As Savitri sees
these vistas pass before her, the realisation comes to her that the mighty
Mother has made her,
.. .the centre of a wide-drawn scheme,...
To mould humanity into God's own shape
And lead this great blind struggling world to
light
Or a new world discover or create.
But for this to
be accomplished, the heavenly psyche hidden in Savitri should come out into the
open and "liberate the god imprisoned in the visionless mortal man".
(An excerpt from “Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri – A study of
the cosmic epic”, Dr. Premanandakumar, Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust, Puducherry)
