From the Editor’s Desk (Nov 2018)

In this November edition of our Newsletter, we continue on our journey with Savitri on the quest for the deepest, most resplendent in her. She is seeking for her soul and is well on the way, having met the triple soul forces and given them her word that she would return with the Force, Wisdom and Light so that they may manifest their true selves in the life of the now embodied being who knows not yet the truth of herself. 

So “Onward she passed seeking the soul’s mystic cave.” She was at the threshold where the next journey into the soul-space began. Here too there was a pitch darkness she encounters but the truth is that dawn breaks out only when the night is darkest. Here is a message for us, and the truth in the words that urge us to cling on, and that, it is only when all seems down, gone and finished that a ray of hope steals in, announcing its end and promising the light beyond that announces its end. Here too, she comes face to face with symbolic figures and motives, and divines the nearness of the Truth of her being, her Soul. The path to her soul is not easy, as made out by the imagery used by Sri Aurobindo. Rock after dense and hard rock has to be excavated as Savitri makes her way within, heading towards a ‘rock cave’ where probably the resplendent Light she is looking for is kept hidden, awaiting her arrival into that chamber of Light. And Savitri does arrive therein after a challenging journey, it seems, only because she bore in her a quiet resolution and probably knew at that point that it was this or nothing. The revelation spins forward in her being a transformative force which courses through her nerve and tissue and brings about a change in her fringing on divinity.

Reading the lines in, ‘The Finding of the Soul’ in its self offers golden opportunities of contemplation; Words, other than those from Savitri, will be poor conveyers of the protagonist’s experience as well as ours following the thread of the magnitude of what is presented. One could gain from the canto in any which way; one could take it as a wonderful poetic description of Savitri’s journey, an aesthetically pleasing experience, or in knowing all the inner elements not so obvious to the eye of our own experiences, or listen the lines speaking to our inner ear, urging and guiding one to look within too, and embark on such an immaculate journey. It could be that each of us will live the lines in that way which our own point in evolution dictates. 

Is there a Savitri in us too? And who is Savitri? She is after all the daughter of the Sun, the Light Supreme. Is this daughter of the Sun seeking her radiance out now, having forgotten her lineage through the shock of her re-birth in human time and form? Here we have Savitri set out on a journey to seek her Self, to know it as the raison d’etre so that she could exist in and from that Truth. Life had thrown her into this quest, it appears, at that juncture when she realised that she stood to lose everything that she cherished and gave meaning to her life till then – Satyavan. It is this supreme spirit in her that does not quit when faced with adversity, but looks for another truer platform to stand on and proclaim her divinity and act from that. Simply mind blowing and highly inspirational for any spiritual seeker, reading and re-reading the canto plunges one into oceans of ecstasy at the mere realization of all the possibilities that await one, if only one plunges within.