(continued from February, March, April 2012)
Author’s Note: This concluding extract from 'The Descent of Knowledge in Savitri' introduces the idea that the poem itself is an example of the Supramental consciousness at work. From the beginning, the Earth is viewed as a planet moving in space, and the action takes place sometimes in an earthly time-frame and sometimes in the timelessness of eternity. An attempt is made to uncover the close relationship between the mantric poetry of 'Savitri' and Sri Aurobindo's more philosophical discourse on characteristic working of the Supermind that appear in 'The Life Divine' and 'The Synthesis of Yoga'.
The Supramental Knowledge will transform life on earth beyond our imagining, and it is unlike anything experienced before. The first opening often comes in the form a voice heard within, carrying with it the conviction of the divine adesh, or command. This is the Knowledge that was incarnate in Savitri, needing only the pressure of her will to reveal itself. Savitri accepts the authority of the inner voice without question. As in a dream, she is shown the whole cosmic past, the origin of form, the emergence of life. All the knowledge that Aswapati obtained in his ascent of the world-stair arises from within. The Supramental consciousness reveals to her the truth about our human past and the possibilities of the future:
This is not all we are or all our world.
Our greater self of knowledge waits for us,
A supreme light in the truth-conscious vast:
It sees from summits beyond thinking mind,
It moves in a splendid air transcending life.
It shall descend and make earth's life divine.
Savitri understands what is required of her – she has to push aside her human nature in order to discover her immortal soul. Using a language of images The Entry into the Inner Countries and subsequent cantos tell the story of that discovery, as Savitri forces her way “through body to the soul”. Each image perfectly conveys a many-sided truth which the abstract language of thought would struggle to express. These images do not arise from the thought mind. It seems that they themselves bear the stamp of an intuitive imagination raised almost to a Supramental power. As Sri Aurobindo writes in The Synthesis of Yoga “The imagination transformed in the Supermind acts on one side as a power of true image and symbol, always an image of some value or significance or other truth of being, - on the other as an inspiration or interpretative seeing of possibilities and potentialities not less true than actual or realised things.” It would be a mistake to see them as anything less.
The search for the soul is attended by dangers, for the human consciousness is like a house of many unentered rooms and hidden basements which may be home to unknown and unwanted guests. Savitri must pass through these and meet with the inhabitants of other planes that impinge upon our own. Finally, she encounters messengers from her own soul, helpful powers and energies who are portions of herself.
With their help she journeys on to find herself in the presence of three Powers who are active in the lives of men. One by one they recount to Savitri the meaning of their role in human affairs, but each time Savitri hears a deforming echo arising from the earth, the warped response of suffering humanity's ignorance and ill-will. She understands the cause: the Mother of Compassion, the Mother of Might, the Mother of divine Wisdom pour down their blessings and aid, but have not power to change the harsh conditions imposed by Falsehood and Death. Savitri recognises all three as divine forms of Herself. Knowing that the discovery of her soul will bring down the power to change everything, she leaves them with a promise:
One day I shall return, his hands in mine,
And thou shalt see the face of the Absolute.
Then shall the holy marriage be achieved,
Then shall the divine family be born.
The finding of the soul is an essential stage in the yoga of both Aswapati and Savitri. As Sri Aurobindo writes in The Life Divine: “The soul, the psychic entity, then manifests itself as the central being which upholds mind and life and body and supports all the other powers and functions of the spirit; it takes up its greater functions as the guide and ruler of the nature. A guidance, a governance then begins from within which exposes every movement to the light of Truth, repels what is false, obscure, opposed to the divine realization........all is purified, set right, the whole nature harmonized, modulated in the psychic key, put in spiritual order.”
Savitri's discovery of her soul is described in the fifth canto of Book Seven. A vision of the mighty Mother of the worlds, the Power of divine Creation, descends into her body and “all underwent a high celestial change.” Everything has changed for Savitri and she lives in a state of innocence and joy. Even the prospect of Satyavan's death had no more power to cause her grief, for she lives in a consciousness where even suffering is seen under the aspect of eternity, as a dark disguise of bliss. But this world is intolerant of too much happiness – a nameless dread assails her heart and “her kingdom of delight was there no more”. It is a first encounter with all-negating Death, claiming creation as his own:
I have created all, all I devour;
I am Death and the dark terrible Mother of life,
I am Kali black and naked in the world,
I am Maya and the universe is my cheat.
A second voice arises from the depths of Savitri's soul and she learns the meaning of her fate. She must renounce the bliss of Heaven to make herself an instrument of Heaven's Will:
Thou hast come down into a struggling world
To aid a blind and suffering mortal race,
To open to Light the eyes that could not see,
To bring down bliss into the heart of grief,
To make thy life a bridge twixt earth and heaven;
If thou wouldst save the toiling universe,
The vast universal suffering feel as thine:
The day-bringer must walk in darkest night,
He who would save the world must share its pain.
Savitri listens, falling silent in herself she turns an inward look upon the origin of these promptings that arise in her “but most her gaze pursued the birth of thought.” To Sri Aurobindo, thoughts become 'ours' only when they have been accepted by us, for we are not the sole authors of the thoughts that apparently come from within ourselves: they have their origin in a vast continuum of consciousness as wide as the universe. Sri Aurobindo identifies within this continuum ascending ranges of mind-existence: subliminal and subconscious behind and below, intuitive and illumined on the fringes of the heights above. The dream consciousness too receives influences from these self-existent planes; and there are in addition, centres of energy in the physical and subtle sheaths of the human body itself that may receive and respond to universal influences. These have been discovered by the science and practice of yoga. Now Savitri's inward look uncovers the sources of her thoughts in these centres of the subtle body, messages from a wider consciousness of which the outward-looking human mind is unaware:
But for the mortal prisoned in outward mind
All must present their passports at its door;
Disguised they must don the official cap and mask
Or pass as manufactures of the brain.
Unknown their secret truth and hidden source.
Understanding this, Savitri's human mind opens to vast new sources of knowledge as wide as the universe.Yet nothing Mankind creates is wholly his: “only his soul's acceptance is his own”. An absolute stillness invades her mind and imposes its blank pure consciousness. She experiences the all-negating void. “In her the Unseen, the Unknown waited his hour.”
As, in the forest, she keeps her vigil beside the sleeping Satyavan, a tremendous change takes place. The sense of unreality disappears and is replaced by a conviction of the essential oneness of all being, all substance: “all contraries were true in one huge spirit” and all things were in herself and in God. She becomes one with the Supramental consciousness that looks at the world through her eyes and knows itself in all it sees:
It was herself, it was the self of all,
It was the reality of existing things,
It was the consciousness of all that lived
And felt and saw; it was Timelessness and Time,
It was the bliss of formlessness and form.
It was all love and the one Beloved's arms,
It was sight and thought in one all-seeing Mind,
It was joy of being on the peaks of God.
The change that came upon Savitri apppears to be the Supramental transformation of which Sri Aurobindo speaks in The Life Divine: “the whole radical change in the evolution from a basis of ignorance to a basis of Knowledge can only come by the intervention of the Supramental Power and its direct action in earth-existence. This then must be the nature of the third and final transformation which finishes the passage of the soul through the ignorance and bases its consciousness, its life, its power and form of manifestation on a complete and completely effective self-knowledge. The Truth-consciousness, finding evolutionary Nature ready, has to descend into her and enable her to liberate the Supramental principle within her; so must be created the Ssupramental and spiritual being as the first unveiled manifestation of the truth of the Self and Spirit in the material universe.”
Armed with a supreme Truth, the human Savitri is ready to confront her formidable opponent, Death, as she follows the soul of Satyavan into his shadowy Kingdom. She feels neither fear nor grief, for these feelings belong to her former self. Although the contest as depicted by Sri Aurobindo takes the outward form of a long debate, the arguments put forward are the symbolic signs of a struggle which translated into the human context must be lived and endured with fortitude and faith. The human cost is real. The Persona of Death is represented as arrogant and cruel, an intellect without a heart. He is also a convincing liar. He first tries to bully Savitri and convince her of her own inferiority and helplessness, addressing her with a contemptuous command “Unclasp, O Slave...”. Then, becoming gradually aware of the unexpected strength of his opponent he throws upon her all the 'living moods' of his shadow-kingdom – self doubt, helplessness, despair, the impossibility of hope, the cold, implacable indifference of the Gods to human suffering. This is no intellectual game played out on a mental plane, but a real ordeal that the human nature of Savitri must pass through to fulfil the inescapable condition of victory: “He who would save the world must share its pain.” Victory over Death is the culmination of Savitri's yoga. Throughout the long struggle, in which she opposes her love for Satyavan to all the negative forces Death can summon, the Light she carries within herself slowly begins to dissolve the great lie:
Almost it seemed as if in his symbol shape
The world's darkness had consented to Heaven-light
And God needed no more the Inconscient's screen.
A mighty transformation came on her.
A halo of indwelling deity,
The immortal's lustre that had lit her face
And tented its radiance in her body's house
Overflowing made the air a luminous sea.
In a flaming moment of apocalypse
The Incarnation thrust aside its veil.
We have reached a critical point in the story of the descent of Knowledge. As soon as the Mother of the Worlds unveils herself in the kingdom of Death, his reign has to come to an end, and his contract with life, ratifying their mutual dependence on each other, is no longer valid. At last the Omniscient Goddess finds on Earth “the spaces for her feet” heralding the advent of a Supramental transformation. The closing books of Savitri are prophetic in their nature, foretelling the dawning of a new consciousness, a new way of being human in the world:
For knowledge shall pour down its radiant streams
And even darkened mind quiver with new life
And kindle and burn with the Ideal's fire
And turn to escape from mortal ignorance.
The frontiers of ignorance shall recede,
More and more souls shall enter into light,
Minds lit, inspired, the occult summoner shall hear
And lives blaze with a sudden inner flame
And hearts grow enamoured of divine delight
And human wills tune to the divine will,
These separate selves the Spirit's oneness feel,
These senses of heavenly sense grow capable,
The flesh and nerves of a strange ethereal joy
And mortal bodies of immortality.
The legend of Savitri and Satyavan ends with the restoration of Satyavan to life and their return to earth, but the symbolic aspect of the story will end only with the complete emergence of the Supramental Light. “If mankind could but see, though in a glimpse of fleeting experience, what infinite enjoyments, what perfect forces, what luminous reaches of spontaneous knowledge, what wide calms of our being lie waiting for us in the tracts which our animal evolution has not yet conquered, they would leave all and never rest till they had gained these treasures.” (Sri Aurobindo)
If only we knew.
(Concluded)
- Sonia Dyne
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