This month’s newsletter edition catches a glimpse of Book 7, Canto 3 of Savitri, ‘The entry into the Inner Countries’. Savitri determined in the previous episode to pursue the finding of her Soul. In this canto, each line reveals something that will aid us, in our journey’s course as we search the inner countries for our now, ‘lost’ soul. Savitri’s initial entry onto the inner countries faces resistance, but resolute Savitri persists and pushes her entry inside and moves on discovering or encountering various parts and planes of her being.
Before proceeding on, it is useful to reckon why Savitri had decided to enter into her inner countries. It is to discover her soul as commanded by her inner voice in her moment of despair, in the dense and dark night, as she was sitting beside sleeping Satyavan. She first enters the world of subtle matter and then into the sense-driven life (or the Kingdom of Little Life). Then she ventures into the Kingdom of greater life. In all of these, there is no sign of the soul-presence and entities therein move on mechanically or chaotically in all randomness, amounting to wasteful energy with no fruitful culmination. Savitri then enters a brilliant and ordered space with a distinct touch of the organizing mind with its monarch at the helm, Reason. In this tight ordered space, there is no room for imagination to take flight into viewless vistas nor is there scope for the high leaps of thoughts that fashion new, unknown worlds. The presence of the soul is still lacking and Savitri moves on, politely declining that space, for she was seeking her Soul. At last she breaks into a new world of subtler breath where she watches beings moving, "strange goddesses with deep-pooled magical eyes" who seemed to hold in them more than any of the other beings she had met before. She resists the temptation to settle in this space and live with the goddesses. As determined earlier, resolute Savitri moves on the less trodden path pointed out by these goddesses, seeking for her Soul. On this path Savitri meets "a few bright forms" who look at her "with calm immortal eyes”. In this realm,
“There was no sound to break the brooding hush;
One felt the silent nearness of the soul.”
What is the inherent message in this for us, since Savitri is but a guide on our Spiritual journey? The answer to this question needs to be worked out by each one of us. No one journey will be exactly the same, one can presume, since each nature, although generically similar, comes with its special combination of hues, habits, tendencies to be looked into and worked out. This inward journey, we have been promised, if it brings us to the central truth of our being, would then launch us into another realm of existence, that exists only to express that truth of our being re-discovered. Between that and our current state of being appear an endless single path, winding most of the time, lost to the horizons far, far away. But a first step is needed and usually it will be a testing first step, which all the forces of the nether world would seek to hamper and hinder. It is a higher quality in us that would be eventually the saving grace, with blind faith, perhaps, that would enable that first move to be attempted, and later on, to stay on course. Let us allow the prayer above to urge us on to surge forward.
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