Leaving the three Madonnas
behind, Savitri presses on her quest to the "soul's mystic cave" and
first steps into "a night of God" where the familiar powers of the
world-knowledge, wisdom, truth—are held in a screened solution in the reigning
holy hush and dark:
In a simple purity of emptiness
Her mind knelt down before the
unknowable.
All was abolished save her naked self
And the prostrate yearning of her
surrendered heart:
It is somewhat like the mixing
and merging of a drop with the ocean,
A night of person in a bare outline
Crossing a fathomless impersonal
Night,...
Presently this general
immobility gives place to a new stir of life, the blossoming of "a rose of
splendour on a tree of dreams"; the "night of God" changes to
day, the air is sweet, the sky is lustrous, and the "mystic cavern... of
her secret soul" stands revealed:
And a holy stillness held that voiceless
space.
An awful dimness wrapped the great
rock-doors
Carved in the massive stone of Matter's
trance.
Two golden serpents round the
lintel, an eagle with massive wings above, doves at the cornices; inside the
court, as in a South Indian temple, sculptured gods snapping moments in the
cosmic play; on the walls, pictures conveying the "hieratic message of the
climbing planes": the whole a parable of the "extension of the self
of God/... And his passion and his birth and life and death/And his return to
immortality".297 Savitri seizes the meaning of it all, not through
ratiocination, but by her soul's identity with each symbol which is also an
order of reality:
A sealed identity within her woke;
She knew herself the Beloved of the
Supreme:...
She is Mother, Brahma's word,
Shiva's spouse, Krishna's Radha; and, indeed, she is the Adorer and Adored
self-lost and one". Savitri now comes to the last chamber where she espies
the formless fount of her "straying force", and passing beyond it
through a tunnel to a house of flame and light, there she meets her secret
soul:
Here in this chamber of flame and light
they met;
They looked upon each other, knew
themselves,
The secret deity and its human part,
The calm immortal and the struggling
soul.
Then with a magic transformation's speed
They rushed into each other and grew one.
The long night's journey into
day is over; Savitri has explored the inner countries of the spirit, much as a
modern visitor to one of the big temples in South India might explore
concentric courts, the prākārās, the numerous shrines within, the statues of
the minor gods and goddesses and the bhaktas and the god-intoxicated, the
paintings on the walls and the sculptured pillars and walls reproducing scenes
from epic and purana, the cosmic play and the tāndav dance, and moving from
sacred enclosure to another enclosure, always moving within, observing the
vāhanās, being enraptured by the ritual, the swaying of the lights and the
chanting of hymns, dazzled by the bejewelled gold-shaped outer manifestations
of the deity and his consort, and penetrating at long last to the ultimate
sanctum, the innermost home of the deity, and receiving the ineffable impact of
the 'mystical tremendum', the blaze of the total truth that blinds, the shower
of the Grace that cleanses; Savitri has at last seen and grown into her secret
Soul. She is now back in the world of man, the same yet different; she is
filled with the glory and power of God, and all in her have undergone a
"high celestial change"; and henceforth her every act will be
"an act of god". Head, brows, throat, heart, navel, all coiled petals
of the unfolding bud of this lotus flame have received the impress of new
divinity, and in the apparently human mould of Savitri "a first
perfection's stage is reached at last":
There is won a new proximity to
the skies,
A first betrothal of the Earth
to Heaven,
A deep concordat between Truth
and Life:
A camp
of God is pitched in human time.
(An excerpt from “Sri
Aurobindo’s Savitri – A study of the cosmic epic”, Dr. Premanandakumar, Sri
Aurobindo Ashram Trust, Puducherry)
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