Let us rise to the Divine Level !

The Absolute, the Perfect, the Alone,
Our mask of imperfection has assumed
He has made this tenement of flesh his own

wrote the Master

We are all embodiments of the Divine Self. Existence - Consciousness - Beatitude, the eternal triad which is the Universe and which we are and the great secret which we must discover across our long evolutionary journey.

He has assumed our mask of imperfection and it is He who is dwelling in us all. Puram vasathi iti purushah - He who resides in the body is called Purusha !

He in his human measure has cast
That to his divine level we might rise !

Our life has only a symbolic value and it is good and necessary as a Becoming. All Becoming has Being as its Goal and fulfillment and He is the only Being !

Lord Krishna, the symbol of Universal Love !

At last I find a meaning to my soul's birth
Into this Universe terrible and sweet
I, who have felt the hungry heart of the earth,
Aspiring beyond Heaven to Krishna's feet !

At last the music draws
Life shudders with a strange felicity
All nature is a wide, enamoured pause
Hoping for her lord to touch, to clasp, to be !

wrote the Master.

Nature, the manifest Divinity or Saguna Brahman, hoping for her lord, the Absolute Self as Love Immortal, to touch Her !

The Seer-Poets who composed the Vedas, indulged in mystic symbolism. Karshana iti krishnaha - that which attracts is Krishna. The greatest attraction to them was the Absolute Self and the highest abstraction of Universal Love was symbolised as Krishna. Radha, was the personification of the absolute love for the Divine.

Both Krishna and Radha represent the male and female components of the Ultimate, Purusha and Prakriti

Our dark side, the negative aspect

The hidden foe lodged in the human breast

Man must overcome or miss his higher Fate
This is the inner war without escape.

wrote the Master

Many of us consider our dark side to be forbidden. We refuse to acknowledge its existence. The ancient Vedic Seers called our Negative Aspect as the dark form of Diti. This is ever at crossroads with our Positive Aspect, symbolised by the bright form of Aditi. The sons of Diti in Vedic Mythology became Daityas or Asuras and Aditi's sons became Adithyas.

Have you ever looked at the Moon ? You see the bright side. Even when the Moon is full and brightens up the sky with its luminence, there is a dark side to the Moon.

There is a dark side in us too, the dark form of Diti. We all experience Pride, sloth, jealousy, bitterness, envy, fears of the future, fear of failure, fear of success, fear of the Unknown. Dishonesty, anger, intolerance, disgust, hatred ... all these emotions we hide.

Our Positive Aspect which longs for Eternal Life is ever at war with our Dark Aspect ( the hidden foe lodged in the human breast ). Unless we subdue this monster, we cannot expect to get Self Actualisation ( Man must overcome or miss his higher fate ). This inner war is ineluctable !

The Redeemer's heavy task !

Yet till evil is slain in its own home
And Light invades the world's inconscient base
And perished is the Adversary Force
He must still labor on, his work half done

wrote the Master.

The inner war within the human bosom was known to the Seers and they depicted in such epics like Iliad and the Odyssey, Ramayana and the Mahabharata.

The Lust within man is the Duryodhana
The Anger within man is the Dussasana

The Five Positive Elements represent the Pancha Pandavas. Truth, Dharma, Peace, Love and the Discriminative Intellect are the Five Positive Elements.

The Discriminative Intellect is that which distinguishes the Real from the Non-Real, Being from Non_Being and is the Arjuna fighting with the background of Eternity, with the Self as the metaphysical ground.

In Man, the negative and positive elements are in conflict and the Seer-Poets wrote the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, just to depict this great battle within the human bosom.

Unless the aspirant removes the mortal dross from his being ( yet till evil is slain in its own home ), unless he erases his ego fully ( and perished is the adversary force ). he will have to labor on, his work half done. Only after the mortal dross is gone, will Light invade Inconscience, making it Light Absolute, Bliss Absolute !

O Mortal, bear the law of pain

O mortal, bear this great world’s law of pain,

In thy hard passage through a suffering world

Lean for thy soul’s support on Heaven’s strength,

Turn towards high Truth, aspire to love and peace.



A little bliss is lent thee from above,

A touch divine upon thy human days:

Make of thy daily way a pilgrimage,

For through small joys and griefs thou mov’st towards God.



Haste not towards Godhead on a dangerous road,

Open not thy doorways to a nameless Power,

Climb not to Godhead by the Titan’s road.



Against the Law he pits his single will,

Across its way he throws his pride of might.



Heavenward he clambers on a stair of storms

Aspiring to live near the deathless Sun.



He strives with a giant strength to wrest by force

From life and Nature the immortals’ right;

He takes by storm the world and fate and heaven.



He comes not to the high world-maker’s seat,

He waits not for the outstretched hand of God

To raise him out of his mortality.



All he would make his own, leave nothing free,

Stretching his small self to cope with the infinite.



Obstructing the gods’ open ways he makes

His own estate of the earth’s air and light;

A monopolist of the world-energy,

He dominates the life of common men.



His pain and others’ pain he makes his means:

On death and suffering he builds his throne.



In the hurry and clangour of his acts of might,

In a riot and excess of fame and shame,

By his magnitudes of hate and violence,

By the quaking of the world beneath his tread

He matches himself against the Eternal’s calm

And feels in himself the greatness of a god:

Power is his image of celestial self…



Cast not thy self into that night of God.




The soul suffering is not eternity’s key,

Or ransom by sorrow heaven’s demand on life.



O mortal, bear, but ask not for the stroke,

Too soon will grief and anguish find thee out.



Too enormous is that venture for thy will;

Only in limits can man's strength be safe;

Yet is infinity thy spirit’s goal;

Its bliss is there behind the world’s face of tears.



A power is in thee that thou knowest not;

Thou art a vessel of the imprisoned spark.



It seeks relief from Time’s envelopment,

And while thou shutst it in, the seal is pain:

Bliss is the Godhead’s crown, eternal, free,

Unburdened by life’s blind mystery of pain:

Pain is the signature of the Ignorance

Attesting the secret god denied by life:

Until life finds him pain can never end.



Calm is self’s victory overcoming fate.



Bear; thou shalt find at last thy road to bliss.

Bliss is the secret stuff of all that lives,

Even pain and grief are garbs of world-delight,

It hides behind thy sorrow and thy cry.



Because thy strength is a part and not God’s whole…

Thou criest out and sayst that there is pain…



Thy spirit’s strength shall make thee one with God,

Thy agony shall change to ecstasy,

Indifference deepen into infinity's calm

And joy laugh nude on the peaks of the Absolute.



O mortal who complainst of death and fate,

Accuse none of the harms thyself hast called;

This troubled world thou hast chosen for thy home,

Thou art thyself the author of thy pain.



Once in the immortal boundlessness of Self,

In a vast of Truth and Consciousness and Light

The soul looked out from its felicity.



It felt the Spirit’s interminable bliss,

It knew itself deathless, timeless, spaceless, one,

It saw the Eternal, lived in the Infinite.



Then, curious of a shadow thrown by Truth,

It strained towards some otherness of self,

It was drawn to an unknown Face peering through night.




It sensed a negative infinity,

A void supernal whose immense excess

Imitating God and everlasting Time

Offered a ground for Nature’s adverse birth…



As one drawn by the grandeur of the Void

The soul attracted leaned to the Abyss:

It longed for the adventure of Ignorance

And the marvel and surprise of the Unknown

And the endless possibility that lurked

In the womb of Chaos and in Nothing’s gulf

Or looked from the unfathomed eyes of Chance.



It tired of its unchanging happiness,

It turned away from immortality…



A world of hard endeavour and difficult toil

And battle on extinction’s perilous verge…

Called it from its too safe eternity.



A huge descent began, a giant fall:

For what the spirit sees, creates a truth

And what the soul imagines is made a world…



Thus came, born from a blind tremendous choice,

This great perplexed and discontented world,

This haunt of Ignorance, this home of Pain:

There are pitched desire’s tents, grief’s headquarters.

A vast disguise conceals the Eternal’s bliss.



Savitri, pp. 451-56

Source : http://www.sciy.org

Narad’s Five Songs and the Theme of Evolution in Savitri

by RY Deshpande on Sun 18 Nov 2007 09:01 PM PST



In the Book of Fate with which we are presently concerned, there is almost at its beginning a description of the evolutionary destiny of this creation. Narad is on his way from his home in Paradise and during the course of his journey to earth he sings five great sings, as to how things began, and about the cherished expectations of the divine glory and marvel taking birth here. We have already seen this theme in some details earlier, but let us have the complete passage for comparison with other passages connected with the concept of evolution that appears with different suggestions in different places in Savitri: (pp. 416-17)


He beheld the cosmic Being at his task,

His eyes measured the spaces, gauged the depths,

His inner gaze the movements of the soul,

He saw the eternal labour of the Gods,

And looked upon the life of beasts and men.



A change now fell upon the singer's mood,

A rapture and a pathos moved his voice;

He sang no more of light that never wanes,

And oneness and pure everlasting bliss,

He sang no more the deathless heart of love,

His chant was a hymn of Ignorance and Fate.



He sang the name of Vishnu and the birth

And joy and passion of the mystic world,

And how the stars were made and life began

And the mute regions stirred with the throb of a soul.



He sang the Inconscient and its secret self,

Its power omnipotent knowing not what it does,

All shaping without will or thought or sense,

Its blind unerring occult mystery,

And darkness yearning towards the eternal Light,

And Love that broods within the dim abyss

And waits the answer of the human heart,

And death that climbs to immortality.



He sang of the Truth that cries from Night’s blind deeps,

And the Mother Wisdom hid in Nature’s breast

And the Idea that through her dumbness works

And the miracle of her transforming hands,

Of life that slumbers in the stone and sun

And mind subliminal in mindless life,

And the consciousness that wakes in beasts and men.



He sang of the glory and marvel still to be born,

Of Godhead throwing off at last its veil,

Of bodies made divine and life made bliss,

Immortal sweetness clasping immortal might,

Heart sensing heart, thought looking straight at thought,

And the delight when every barrier falls,

And the transfiguration and the ecstasy.



And as he sang the demons wept with joy

Foreseeing the end of their long dreadful task

And the defeat for which they hoped in vain,

And glad release from their self-chosen doom

And return into the One from whom they came.



While Narad’s songs present the prospects of the ecstasy and the transfiguration, of the birth of the divine in this mortal creation, they do not trace the origins of this creation itself. Its beginning is in the Non-manifest turning towards manifestation, towards becoming many, towards Becoming. If there has to be a new manifestation, then some drastic action is required, a radical change has to take place in that absolute Nothingness, in that pure and perfect white Blank, in that genuine şūnya, cipher or zero, full of widening Possibilities. The Void has to be impregnated with the Will, the Will which has also in it the executive dynamism. There has to be the samkalpa. How is this going to happen? how the occult mystery of the great transition from the non-manifest Nothingness to Being to Becoming take place? It is here that the supreme Inventor is going to invent an inscrutable trick, the supreme Diplomat resort to the mechanism of Fall, he setting aside his triple sovereignty of bliss and truth and consciousness and accepting the dark ignorant conditions for growth. That is the sacrifice, the Yajna, the drastic change, and the radical action lies in acquiring in the body’s cells a capability to hold the Immortal’s flame. It is thus that (pp. 34-35)



…into the ignorant nature’s gusty field,

Into the half-ordered chaos of mortal life

The formless Power, the Self of eternal light

Follow in the shadow of the spirit's descent;

The twin duality for ever one

Chooses its home mid the tumults of the sense.

He comes unseen into our darker parts

And, curtained by the darkness, does his work,

A subtle and all-knowing guest and guide,

Till they too feel the need and will to change.

All here must learn to obey a higher law,

Our body’s cells must hold the Immortal’s flame.



Yes, even in the body’s cells there is the splendid, the Immortal’s possibility. (pp. 169-70)



In our body’s cells there sits a hidden Power

That sees the unseen and plans eternity,

Our smallest parts have room for deepest needs;

There too the golden Messengers can come:

A door is cut in the mud wall of self;

Across the lowly threshold with bowed heads

Angels of ecstasy and self-giving pass,

And lodged in an inner sanctuary of dream

The makers of the image of deity live.



The body’s cells holding the Immortal’s flame is the long-awaited evolutionary attainment which first should occur in the individual. And after a long and intense Yoga-Tapasya, after carrying out “a difficult and painful” work Aswapati has the experience: (p. 302)



His brain was wrapped in overwhelming Light,

An all-embracing knowledge seized his heart:

Thoughts rose in him no earthly mind can hold,

Mights played that never coursed through mortal nerves:

He scanned the secrets of the Overmind,

He bore the rapture of the Oversoul.



He has established remarkable perfection in the physical itself, it opening to the flood of brilliant light. “His brain was wrapped in overwhelming light”—that is the physical’s mind receiving the supramental, that is the Mind of Light, the Siddhi Sri Aurobindo received on 8 August 1938, as we might understand from his sonnet The Golden Light. The supramental was entering the physical but what could not be done until then was to fix it in it, it was coming and going and not remaining in it. The Golden Light announces that this was now done. It is in that splendid context that the line from Savitri—“His brain was wrapped in overwhelming light”—assumes great autobiographical significance. The draft in which it appears for the first time is dated 6 September 1942 and therefore this momentous period, these consequential four years between 1938 and 1942, could be taken as when the Mind of Light got established fully in him. In his sonnet The Golden Light we have a very clear statement of this most remarkable siddhi of the Mind of Light achieved by Sri Aurobindo. The sonnet was first written on 8 August 1938 and later revised on 3 March 1944. The revisions are of a few noteworthy verbal type. Here is the poem:



Thy golden Light came down into my brain

And the grey rooms of mind sun-touched became

A bright reply to Wisdom’s occult plane,

A calm illumination and a flame.



Thy golden Light came down into my throat,

And all my speech is now a tune divine,

A paean song of thee my single note;

My words are drunk with the Immortal’s wine.



Thy golden Light came down into my heart

Smiting my life with Thy eternity;

Now has it grown a temple where Thou art

And all its passions point towards only Thee.



Thy golden Light came down into my feet:

My earth is now thy playfield and thy seat.



“The earth” of 1938 in the last line became “My earth” in 1944, a significant revision that bears the specificity of achievement in his physical body. This must be considered as the first beginning of the process of physical transformation which started happening from 8 August 1938. On this day the supramental Light and Consciousness and Force appeared dynamically and luminously upon the earth’s playfield.



But let us get back to the theme of evolution in Savitri. In the following passage we have the entire modus operandi put mantrically, how the creation began and what is intended of it, and how out of one would come many. He wanted to be many: “I would be manifold for the birth of peoples—bahusyām prajāyéyéti”, says the Taittiriya Upanishad and here it is how he becomes many by the action of his Consciousness-Force: (p. 67)



The Absolute, the Perfect, the Alone

Has called out of the Silence his mute Force

Where she lay in the featureless and formless hush

Guarding from Time by her immobile sleep

The ineffable puissance of his solitude.

The Absolute, the Perfect, the Alone

Has entered with his silence into space:

He has fashioned these countless persons of one self;

He lives in all, who lived in his Vast alone;

Space is himself and Time is only he.

The Absolute, the Perfect, the Immune,

One who is in us as our secret self,

Our mask of imperfection has assumed,

He has made this tenement of flesh his own,

His image in the human measure cast

That to his divine measure we might rise;

Then in a figure of divinity

The Maker shall recast us and impose

A plan of godhead on the mortal's mould

Lifting our finite minds to his infinite,

Touching the moment with eternity.

This transfiguration is earth’s due to heaven:

A mutual debt binds man to the Supreme:

His nature we must put on as he put ours;

We are sons of God and must be even as he:

His human portion, we must grow divine.

Our life is a paradox with God for key.



Thus he has built a million figures of his power that, there might be divine measures in every respect and everywhere in this mortal world, each with its own expressive divinity, of light and truth and beauty and joy and wisdom and strength and harmony and perfection, they growing ever more and more. But how is this going to be accomplished, how effected? But that is the divine Force’s task; it is she who is going to do it, establish it here, she the supreme Executrix. The power to make a new world, that is the Mother’s power.



The step that precedes the beginning of this evolution is the step pertaining to cosmic manifestation. It is the story of creation narrated by the Mother on a number of occasions. It is the story that begins with four great powers separating themselves from their Origin; in the freedom they had, absolute freedom, they went very far away from the Supreme, so far that they lost contact with the Origin itself. The result was a glorious disaster, perhaps a fruitful disaster, perhaps the only way by which the Supreme could stand away from himself. What else can there be if not disaster when one stands away from the divine? And yet it is a creative disaster, with the possibilities emerging for things to happen. Had it not been so, it would have been impossible for him to bring out anything new, different, anything that is not him, so to say, the new that ever grows, widens, expands, deepens as much as heightens. It is his difficult Absence that provides the opportunity, to establish the Presence multiply. This is what the Mother tells: (Questions and Answers, 16 October 1956)



…we can choose from many stories that have been told, stories more or less true, more or less complete, more or less expressive. But if by interiorising or exteriorising oneself—which, from a certain point of view, is essentially the same thing—if one can relive this story, at least partially and in its broad outlines, it helps one to understand and hence to master the how and why of things. Some people have done that, they are the ones usually considered as initiates, occultists and prophets at the same time—and very beautiful stories have been told. I am going to tell you one, very succinctly. Don’t take it as a gospel! Take it rather... as a story.



When the Supreme decided to exteriorise Himself in order to be able to see Himself, the first thing in Himself which He exteriorised was the Knowledge of the world and the Power to create it. This Knowledge-Consciousness and Force began its work; and in the supreme Will there was a plan, and the first principle of this plan was the expression of both the essential Joy and the essential Freedom, which seemed to be the most interesting feature of this creation.



So intermediaries were needed to express this Joy and Freedom in forms. And at first four Beings were emanated to start this universal development which was to be the progressive objectivisation of all that is potentially contained in the Supreme. These Beings were, in the principle of their existence: Consciousness and Light, Life, Bliss and Love, and Truth.



You can easily imagine that they had a sense of great power, great strength, of something tremendous, for they were essentially the very principle of these things. Besides, they had full freedom of choice, for this creation was to be Freedom itself... As soon as they set to work—they had their own conception of how it had to be done—being totally free, they chose to do it independently. Instead of taking the attitude of servant and instrument of which Sri Aurobindo speaks, they naturally took the attitude of the master, and this mistake—as I may call it—was the first cause, the essential cause of all the disorder in the universe. As soon as there was separation—for that is the essential cause, separation—as soon as there was separation between the Supreme and what had been emanated, Consciousness changed into inconscience, Light into darkness, Love into hatred, Bliss into suffering, Life into death and Truth into falsehood. And they proceeded with their creations independently, in separation and disorder.



The result is the world as we see it. It was made progressively, stage by stage, and it would truly take a little too long to tell you all that, but finally, the consummation is Matter—obscure, inconscient, miserable... The creative Force which had emanated these four Beings, essentially for the creation of the world, witnessed what was happening, and turning to the Supreme she prayed for the remedy and the cure of the evil that had been done.



Then she was given the command to precipitate her Consciousness into this inconscience, her Love into this suffering, and her Truth into this falsehood. And a greater consciousness, a more total love, a more perfect truth than what had been emanated at first, plunged, so to say, into the horror of Matter in order to awaken in it consciousness, love and truth, and to begin the movement of Redemption which was to bring the material universe back to its supreme origin.



So, there have been what might be called “successive involutions” in Matter, and a history of these involutions. The present result of these involutions is the appearance of the Supermind emerging from the inconscience; but there is nothing to indicate that after this appearance there will be no others... for the Supreme is inexhaustible and will always create new worlds.



That is my story.



On another occasion: (2 December 1967)



The oldest tradition says that the first four emanations of the Mahashakti—Consciousness, Love, Truth and Life—cut themselves off (separated themselves) from their Supreme Origin and became Unconsciousness, Suffering, Falsehood and Death.



Then a second emanation was made to repair the damage. They are the Gods.



Naturally, this is a way of speaking which corresponds to a Reality that is difficult to put into words.



About this one of the most vivid descriptions we have in Savitri is as follows: (pp. 140-41)



In the enigma of the darkened Vasts,

In the passion and self-loss of the Infinite

When all was plunged in the negating Void,

Non-Being’s night could never have been saved

If Being had not plunged into the dark

Carrying with it its triple mystic cross.

Invoking in world-time the timeless truth,

Bliss changed to sorrow, knowledge made ignorant,

God's force turned into a child’s helplessness

Can bring down heaven by their sacrifice.

A contradiction founds the base of life:

The eternal, the divine Reality

Has faced itself with its own contraries;

Being became the Void and Conscious-Force

Nescience and walk of a blind Energy

And Ecstasy took the figure of world-pain.

In a mysterious dispensation’s law

A Wisdom that prepares its far-off ends

Planned so to start her slow aeonic game.

A blindfold search and wrestle and fumbling clasp

Of a half-seen Nature and a hidden Soul,

A game of hide and seek in twilit rooms,

A play of love and hate and fear and hope

Continues in the nursery of mind

Its hard and heavy romp of self-born twins.

At last the struggling Energy can emerge

And meet the voiceless Being in wider fields;

Then can they see and speak and, breast to breast,

In a larger consciousness, a clearer light,

The Two embrace and strive and each know each

Regarding closer now the playmate's face.

Even in these formless coilings he could feel

Matter's response to an infant stir of soul.

In Nature he saw the mighty Spirit concealed,

Watched the weak birth of a tremendous Force,

Pursued the riddle of Godhead's tentative pace,

Heard the faint rhythms of a great unborn Muse.



Earlier we had the “crude beginnings” giving rise to this mortal world, how Life entered the material scene and was stunned, and overpowered, by the presence of Death: (pp. 129-30)



In the crude beginnings of this mortal world

Life was not nor mind’s play nor heart’s desire.

When earth was built in the unconscious Void

And nothing was save a material scene,

Identified with sea and sky and stone

Her young gods yearned for the release of souls

Asleep in objects, vague, inanimate.

In that desolate grandeur, in that beauty bare,

In the deaf stillness, mid the unheeded sounds,

Heavy was the uncommunicated load

Of Godhead in a world that had no needs;

For none was there to feel or to receive.

This solid mass which brooked no throb of sense

Could not contain their vast creative urge:

Immersed no more in Matter’s harmony,

The Spirit lost its statuesque repose.

In the uncaring trance it groped for sight,

Passioned for the movements of a conscious heart,

Famishing for speech and thought and joy and love,

In the dumb insensitive wheeling day and night

Hungered for the beat of yearning and response.

The poised inconscience shaken with a touch,

The intuitive silence trembling with a name,

They cried to Life to invade the senseless mould

And in brute forms awake divinity.

A voice was heard on the mute rolling globe,

A murmur moaned in the unlistening Void.

A being seemed to breathe where once was none:

Something pent up in dead insentient depths,

Denied conscious existence, lost to joy,

Turned as if one asleep since dateless time.

Aware of its own buried reality,

Remembering its forgotten self and right,

It yearned to know, to aspire, to enjoy, to live.

Life heard the call and left her native light.

Overflowing from her bright magnificent plane

On the rigid coil and sprawl of mortal space,

Here too the gracious great-winged Angel poured

Her splendour and her sweetness and her bliss,

Hoping to fill a fair new world with joy.

As comes a goddess to a mortal’s breast

And fills his days with her celestial clasp,

She stooped to make her home in transient shapes;

In Matter’s womb she cast the Immortal’s fire,

In the unfeeling Vast woke thought and hope,

Smote with her charm and beauty flesh and nerve

And forced delight on earth’s insensible frame.

Alive and clad with trees and herbs and flowers

Earth’s great brown body smiled towards the skies,

Azure replied to azure in the sea’s laugh;

New sentient creatures filled the unseen depths,

Life’s glory and swiftness ran in the beauty of beasts,

Man dared and thought and met with his soul the world.

But while the magic breath was on its way,

Before her gifts could reach our prisoned hearts,

A dark ambiguous Presence questioned all.

The secret Will that robes itself with Night

And offers to spirit the ordeal of the flesh,

Imposed a mystic mask of death and pain.

Interned now in the slow and suffering years

Sojourns the winged and wonderful wayfarer

And can no more recall her happier state,

But must obey the inert Inconscient’s law,

Insensible foundation of a world

In which blind limits are on beauty laid

And sorrow and joy as struggling comrades live.

A dim and dreadful muteness fell on her.



This is a remarkable description which we can find only in Savitri and not in other prose works of Sri Aurobindo, for instance in The Life Divine or The Synthesis of Yoga where the presentation is essentially for the enlightened intuitive reason. There is a certain degree of informality available in the letters Sri Aurobindo wrote to his disciples and one can see in them that he is quite free from professional constraints which otherwise he has to observe in formal writings. But everywhere there is the tightness in the line of argument, if these are to be considered as arguments. In that sense in Savitri alone the occult comes out with its full luminous contents and force, with its unplumbable profundity, gold reaching yet deeper layers of gold, in Savitri where Sri Aurobindo the Yogi has complete freedom of expression, has no boundary conditions to be observed, where no horizons cut his view, where he can be, so to say, himself, absolutely himself. The Story of Creation narrated by him in Savitri belongs unmistakably to that category. In The Life Divine he had taken a position, in The Synthesis of Yoga he had taken a position; but in Savitri it is all unimpeded revelation, in it he had poured himself out in God’s great glory itself. So, I get puzzled when very knowledgeable people say that Savitri is The Life Divine in a verse form!



And yet there can be an essay in poetry, with its convincing logopoeia supported by image and music. The following description of the cosmic past and the future that awaits this creation is a wonderful example of the expository art carried out with utmost care and attention. Savitri is told by a deathless and mighty Voice to remember why she had taken the mortal birth and that she should get ready to house the divine Force in her soul in order to conquer Death. She has been initiated into Yoga and the review of the entire cosmic past is the first occult-spiritual experience she gets. The mystic-numinous origins of the shadowy beginnings are first disclosed to her: (pp. 477-86)



In the indeterminate formlessness of Self

Creation took its first mysterious steps,

It made the body’s shape a house of soul

And Matter learned to think and person grew;

She saw Space peopled with the seeds of life

And saw the human creature born in Time.

At first appeared a dim half-neutral tide

Of being emerging out of infinite Nought…

All was the deed of a blind World-Energy:

Unconscious of her own exploits she worked,

Shaping a universe out of the Inane…

On a dim ocean of subconscient life

A formless surface consciousness awoke:

A stream of thoughts and feelings came and went…

A conscious being was by this labour made;

It looked around it on its difficult field

In the green wonderful and perilous earth;

It hoped in a brief body to survive,

Relying on Matter’s false eternity…

This is the little surface of man's life.

He is this and he is all the universe;

He scales the Unseen, his depths dare the Abyss;

A whole mysterious world is locked within…

The immaculate Divine All-Wonderful

Casts into the argent purity of his soul

His splendour and his greatness and the light

Of self-creation in Time’s infinity

As into a sublimely mirroring glass.

Man in the world’s life works out the dreams of God.

But all is there, even God’s opposites…

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.

A careless guardian of his nature's powers,

Man harbours dangerous forces in his house…

Afflicting the daylight and alarming night,

Invading at will his outer tenement

The stark gloom's grisly dire inhabitants

Mounting into God's light all light perturb…

Man’s lower nature hides these awful guests.

Their vast contagion grips sometimes man’s world.

An awful insurgence overpowers man's soul…

An opposite potency contradicting God,

A momentary Evil’s almightiness

Has straddled the straight path of Nature’s acts.

It imitates the Godhead it denies,

Puts on his figure and assumes his face…

But there is a guardian power, there are Hands that save,

Calm eyes divine regard the human scene.

All the world’s possibilities in man

Are waiting as the tree waits in its seed:

His past lives in him; it drives his future's pace;

His present’s acts fashion his coming fate.

The unborn gods hide in his house of Life…

Only a little has will and purposed pace.

A vast subliminal is man’s measureless part.

The dim subconscient is his cavern base…

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.

Above us dwells a superconscient god

Hidden in the mystery of his own light:

Around us is a vast of ignorance

Lit by the uncertain ray of human mind,

Below us sleeps the Inconscient dark and mute.

But this is only Matter’s first self-view,

A scale and series in the Ignorance.

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.

Truth made the world, not a blind Nature-Force.

For here are not our large diviner heights;

Our summits in the superconscient’s blaze

Are glorious with the very face of God:

There is our aspect of eternity,

There is the figure of the god we are,

His young unaging look on deathless things,

His joy in our escape from death and Time,

His immortality and light and bliss…

Our soul from its mysterious chamber acts;

Its influence pressing on our heart and mind

Pushes them to exceed their mortal selves.

It seeks for Good and Beauty and for God…

In the prone obscure beginnings of the race

The human grew in the bowed apelike man.

He stood erect, a godlike form and force,

And a soul's thoughts looked out from earth-born eyes;

Man stood erect, he wore the thinker's brow:

He looked at heaven and saw his comrade stars;

A vision came of beauty and greater birth

Slowly emerging from the heart’s chapel of light

And moved in a white lucent air of dreams.

He saw his being’s unrealised vastnesses,

He aspired and housed the nascent demi-god.

Out of the dim recesses of the self

The occult seeker into the open came:

He heard the far and touched the intangible,

He gazed into the future and the unseen;

He used the powers earth-instruments cannot use,

A pastime made of the impossible;

He caught up fragments of the Omniscient's thought,

He scattered formulas of 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 a high roof of things

And saw the light of a spiritual sun…

All this the spirit concealed had done in her.



So the essay in poetry traces the entire past, the evolutionary history, leading to the arrival of man, the human who caused the appearance of an apelike creature, not from ape but from an independent species biologically resembling the ape, the mental being or the Upanishadic manomaya puruşa in his early animal-like form. And the prospects for him are, he shall grow into his higher spiritual self, humanity moulded in God’s shape; or else a new world shall be discovered, or there will be created a new world. This is inevitable, this cosmic future, because (p. 486)



Earth must transform herself and equal Heaven

Or Heaven descend into earth’s mortal state.



The prospects are kind of built into the scheme of things, but what path will be taken by the future, that knowledge is not available at the moment. The intuition is there but not knowledge with its process and its methodology; it will be available when the future becomes a part of the earthly realisable, when it comes into the operative domain.



But the half-grown man has in him titanic arrogance, with his ignorant and unregenerate past dominating, and determining, his will and thought and feeling. He thinks it is he who is going to shape the future, fix destiny and fortune, he the shaper of destiny and begetter of fortune. That is how he understands evolution in his own way, the long march of history meant for him, entirely sculpted by him. He proclaims: (pp. 518-20 )



I have mapped the heavens and analysed the stars,

Described the orbits through the grooves of Space,

Measured the miles that separate the suns,

Computed their longevity in Time.

I have delved into earth’s bowels and torn out

The riches guarded by her dull brown soil.

I have classed the changes of her stony crust

And of her biography discovered the dates,

Rescued the pages of all Nature’s plan.

The tree of evolution I have sketched,

Each branch and twig and leaf in its own place,

In the embryo tracked the history of forms,

And the genealogy framed of all that lives.

I have detected plasm and cell and gene,

The protozoa traced, man’s ancestors,

The humble originals from whom he rose;

I know how he was born and how he dies…

I have seen the ways of life, the paths of mind;

I have studied the methods of the ant and ape

And the behaviour learnt of man and worm.

If God is at work, his secrets I have found…

Even if a greater consciousness I could reach,

What profit is it then for Thought to win

A Real which is for ever ineffable

Or hunt to its lair the bodiless Self or make

The Unknowable the target of the soul?

Nay, let me work within my mortal bounds…

Human I am, human let me remain

Till in the Inconscient I fall dumb and sleep.

A high insanity, a chimera is this,

To think that God lives hidden in the clay

And that eternal Truth can dwell in Time,

And call to her to save our self and world.



That is where the human potential shuts itself off from its own manifold possibilities.



But here is Death himself as the creator of the worlds, a creator using the Sankhya which is fundamentally the same everywhere but which gives rise to different results in the hands of different users. This is how eternal Death the materialist sees the process: (pp. 617-18 )



I curbed the vacant ether into Space;

A huge expanding and contracting breath

Harboured the fires of the universe:

I struck out the supreme original spark

And spread its sparse ranked armies through the Inane,

Manufactured the stars from the occult radiances,

Marshalled the platoons of the invisible dance;

I formed earth’s beauty out of atom and gas,

And built from chemic plasm the living man.

Then Thought came in and spoilt the harmonious world:

Matter began to hope and think and feel,

Tissue and nerve bore joy and agony.

The inconscient cosmos strove to learn its task;

An ignorant personal god was born in Mind

And to understand invented reason’s law,

The impersonal Vast throbbed back to man’s desire,

A trouble rocked the great world’s blind still heart

And Nature lost her wide immortal calm.

Thus came this warped incomprehensible scene

Of souls emmeshed in life’s delight and pain

And Matter’s sleep and Mind’s mortality,

Of beings in Nature’s prison waiting death

And consciousness left in seeking ignorance.



And here is Savitri giving a tutorial to Yama the God of Death, telling him the purpose and aim of this vast creation, explaining its supernal Law: (pp. 632-33 )



This was the aim, this the supernal Law,

Nature’s allotted task when beauty-drenched

In dim mist waters of inconscient sleep,

Out of the Void this grand creation rose,—

For this the Spirit came into the Abyss

And charged with its power Matter’s unknowing Force,

In Night’s bare session to cathedral light,

In Death’s realm repatriate immortality.

A mystic slow transfiguration works.

All our earth starts from mud and ends in sky,

And Love that was once an animal's desire,

Then a sweet madness in the rapturous heart,

An ardent comradeship in the happy mind,

Becomes a wide spiritual yearning’s space.

A lonely soul passions for the Alone,

The heart that loved man thrills to the love of God,

A body is his chamber and his shrine.

Then is our being rescued from separateness;

All is itself, all is new-felt in God:

A Lover leaning from his cloister’s door

Gathers the whole world into his single breast.

Then shall the business fail of Night and Death.



When this unity is won, and when strife is lost, and all is known, and all is clasped by Love, there wouldn’t be the necessity of turning back to ignorance and pain, there wouldn’t be anymore Night and Death holding the soul of man back from truth and love and beauty and joy and strength. It might be a long and slow painful transfiguration but the result of this evolutionary manifestation is unity with God in every respect, even in the rigid physical.



If this world is a creation of God, then the concern is to find its meaning in God, the sense that is hid behind all appearances, of ignorance and death and pain and suffering. This world is an authentic creation and it cannot be dismissed as an illusion. Savitri affirms the great Truth behind it and wants Yama to see it: (pp. 658-63 )



A Truth supreme has forced the world to be;

It has wrapped itself in Matter as in a shroud,

A shroud of Death, a shroud of Ignorance.

It compelled the suns to burn through silent Space,

Flame-signs of its uncomprehended Thought

In a wide brooding ether’s formless muse:

It made of Knowledge a veiled and struggling light,

Of Being a substance nescient, dense and dumb,

Of Bliss the beauty of an insentient world.

In finite things the conscious Infinite dwells:

Involved it sleeps in Matter's helpless trance,

It rules the world from its sleeping senseless Void;

Dreaming it throws out mind and heart and soul

To labour crippled, bound, on the hard earth…

It starts from the mute mass in countless jets,

It fashions a being out of brain and nerve…

But the soul grows concealed within its house;

It gives to the body its strength and magnificence;

It follows aims in an ignorant aimless world,

It lends significance to earth’s meaningless life.

A demi-god animal, came thinking man…

He pores upon life’s book with student eyes.

Out of this tangle of intellect and sense,

Out of the narrow scope of finite thought

At last he wakes into spiritual mind;

A high liberty begins and luminous room:

He glimpses eternity, touches the infinite,

He meets the gods in great and sudden hours,

He feels the universe as his larger self,

Makes Space and Time his opportunity

To join the heights and depths of being in light,

In the heart’s cave speaks secretly with God…

On summit Mind are radiant altitudes

Exposed to the lustre of Infinity,

Outskirts and dependencies of the house of Truth,

Upraised estates of Mind and measureless.

There man can visit but there he cannot live.

A cosmic Thought spreads out its vastitudes…

A highest flight climbs to a deepest view…

Thought there has revelation's sun-bright eyes;

The Word, a mighty and inspiring Voice,

Enters Truth’s inmost cabin of privacy

And tears away the veil from God and life.

Then stretches the boundless finite’s last expanse,

The cosmic empire of the Overmind,

Time’s buffer state bordering Eternity,

Too vast for the experience of man’s soul…

In her glorious kingdom of eternal light

All-ruler, ruled by none, the Truth supreme,

Omnipotent, omniscient and alone,

In a golden country keeps her measureless house…

There is the image of our future’s hope;

There is the sun for which all darkness waits,

There is the imperishable harmony…

There in a world of everlasting Light,

In the realms of the immortal Supermind

Truth who hides here her head in mystery,

Her riddle deemed by reason impossible

In the stark structure of material form,

Unenigmaed lives, unmasked her face and there

Is Nature and the common law of things.

There in a body made of spirit stuff,

The hearth-stone of the everlasting Fire,

Action translates the movements of the soul,

Thought steps infallible and absolute

And life is a continual worship's rite,

A sacrifice of rapture to the One…

The Truth supreme, vast and impersonal

Fits faultlessly the hour and circumstance,

Its substance a pure gold ever the same

But shaped into vessels for the spirit’s use,

Its gold becomes the wine jar and the vase.

All there is a supreme epiphany:

The All-Wonderful makes a marvel of each event,

The All-Beautiful is a miracle in each shape.



Not only in her deep occult confrontation with the God of Death does Savitri affirm the great Truth as the sole cause of this creation; she asserts its reality, this creation’s, even while she meets transformed Death as the Besetter of the Worlds, the Supreme tempting our hearts with the lure of far happy heavens. If one makes this world an illusion and reposes everything in the beyond, the other asserts only the material reality and drives the spirit away; one de-spirits the creation and the other desubstantiates it, with its substantiality devoid of holding spirit in it. Savitri cannot accept this dichotomy. In spite of the bright red herring offered to her, she remains clear in her vision and firm in her work. There is that inner identity of her spirit with the spirit of the world and it is that which gives her the needed knowledge. She was offered boon after exceptional boon to get back to her transcendental home and live for ever there, live with her Satyavan; but she was fixed in her resolve and her one demand was, whatever has to come has to come for the soul of the earth. She makes herself bold to tell the giver of the supreme boons, that (pp. 692-93)



If earth can look up to the light of heaven

And hear an answer to her lonely cry,

Not vain their meeting, nor heaven’s touch a snare.

If thou and I are true, the world is true;

Although thou hide thyself behind thy works,

To be is not a senseless paradox;

Since God has made earth, earth must make in her God;

What hides within her breast she must reveal.

I claim thee for the world that thou hast made.

If man lives bound by his humanity,

If he is tied for ever to his pain,

Let a greater being then arise from man,

The superhuman with the Eternal mate

And the Immortal shine through earthly forms.

Else were creation vain and this great world

A nothing that in Time’s moments seems to be.



If evolution has any sense then a greater being or superman has to arrive on earth, he has to live on earth—and there cannot be any question about. The question is if man is going to remain bound to his humanity, to his kind, tied to his mortal lot. There is a true human potential for him, to grow into that status; but for this he has to do the necessary qualifying work. All the help is there, and there is the natural thrust of the evolutionary force to take him to that, but what is needed is his willing participation in it. If he fails in it he will be left by the wayside and a greater being will arise in another way. This is deeply consequential. It will be a pity if man fails to recognise these far-reaching implications. But Savitri’s deep commitment for the soul of the earth redeems the situation. It is only by her great and difficult yoga-tapasya that the great and difficult task can be accomplished. She has made her will one with the Will of the Supreme to receive the divine Boon for the death-afflicted mortal. In it alone is the possibility of a greater being arising from man.



Eventually Savitri receives the wonderful assurance; not only that,—the events are now set into motion. She has been marked as the centre of transformed activities: (pp. 705-710 )



You shall reveal to them the hidden eternities,

The breath of infinitudes not yet revealed,

Some rapture of the bliss that made the world,

Some rush of the force of God’s omnipotence,

Some beam of the omniscient Mystery.



Her work is to prepare the world to receive the divine Grace. She has to continue to take human birth—till things are ready for the Supreme to come down in a “supramental body made in a supramental way”.



But when the hour of the Divine draws near,

The Mighty Mother shall take birth in Time

And God be born into the human clay

In forms made ready by your human lives.

Then shall the Truth supreme be given to men.

There is a being beyond the being of mind,

An Immeasurable cast into many forms,

A miracle of the multitudinous One.

There is a consciousness mind cannot touch,

Its speech cannot utter nor its thought reveal.

It has no home on earth, no centre in man,

Yet is the source of all things thought and done,

The fount of the creation and its works.

It is the originer of all truth here,

The sun-orb of mind’s fragmentary rays,

Infinity's heaven that spills the rain of God,

The Immense that calls to man to expand the Spirit,

The wide Aim that justifies his narrow attempts,

A channel for the little he tastes of bliss…

The superman shall wake in mortal man

And manifest the hidden demi-god

Or grow into the God-Light and God-Force

Revealing the secret deity in the cave.

Then shall the earth be touched by the Supreme…

Then shall the embodied being live as one

Who is a thought, a will of the Divine,

A mask or robe of his divinity,

An instrument and partner of his Force,

A point or line drawn in the infinite,

A manifest of the Imperishable.

The supermind shall be his nature’s fount,

The Eternal’s truth shall mould his thoughts and acts,

The Eternal’s truth shall be his light and guide.

All then shall change, a magic order come

Overtopping this mechanical universe.

A mightier race shall inhabit the mortal's world…

Then in the process of evolving Time

All shall be drawn into a single plan,

A divine harmony shall be earth’s law,

Beauty and joy remould her way to live:

Even the body shall remember God…

All earth shall be the Spirit’s manifest home,

Hidden no more by the body and the life,

Hidden no more by the mind's ignorance;

An unerring Hand shall shape event and act…

This universe shall unseal its occult sense,

Creation's process change its antique front,

An ignorant evolution's hierarchy

Release the Wisdom chained below its base.

The Spirit shall be the master of his world…

Even there shall come as a high crown of all

The end of Death, the death of Ignorance.

But first high Truth must set her feet on earth

And man aspire to the Eternal’s light…

When superman is born as Nature's king

His presence shall transfigure Matter’s world:

He shall light up Truth’s fire in Nature’s night,

He shall lay upon the earth Truth's greater law;

Man too shall turn towards the Spirit’s call.

Awake to his hidden possibility,

Awake to all that slept within his heart

And all that Nature meant when earth was formed

And the Spirit made this ignorant world his home,

He shall aspire to Truth and God and Bliss…

Earth’s bodies shall be conscious of a soul;

Mortality’s bondslaves shall unloose their bonds,

Mere men into spiritual beings grow…

A divine force shall flow through tissue and cell

And take the charge of breath and speech and act

And all the thoughts shall be a glow of suns

And every feeling a celestial thrill…

Thus shall the earth open to divinity

And common natures feel the wide uplift,

Illumine common acts with the Spirit's ray

And meet the deity in common things.

Nature shall live to manifest secret God,

The Spirit shall take up the human play,

This earthly life become the life divine.



And where does this long evolutionary march finally lead to? The appearance of the supramental race upon earth means the play of Krishna and Kali in this creation, the enjoyment of the being of bliss in the truth-dynamism of his executive Force, his luminous Shakti. Even as “amidst a laughter of unearthly lyres” Savitri returns to earth, returns carrying the soul of Satyavan in her bosom, a “choir of laughing winds” greets her with a welcome song. And the marvel! (pp. 711-12)



Pursuing her in her fall, implacably sweet,

A face was over her which seemed a youth’s,

Symbol of all the beauty eyes see not,

Crowned as with peacock plumes of gorgeous hue

Framing a sapphire, whose heart-disturbing smile

Insatiably attracted to delight,

Voluptuous to the embraces of her soul.

Changed in its shape, yet rapturously the same,

It grew a woman’s dark and beautiful

Like a mooned night with drifting star-gemmed clouds,

A shadowy glory and a stormy depth,

Turbulent in will and terrible in love.

Eyes in which Nature’s blind ecstatic life

Sprang from some spirit’s passionate content,

Missioned her to the whirling dance of earth…

Then from a timeless plane that watches Time,

A Spirit gazed out upon destiny,

In its endless moment saw the ages pass.

All still was in a silence of the gods.

The prophet moment covered limitless Space

And cast into the heart of hurrying Time

A diamond light of the Eternal’s peace,

A crimson seed of God’s felicity;

A glance from the gaze fell of undying Love.

A wonderful face looked out with deathless eyes;

A hand was seen drawing the golden bars

That guard the imperishable secrecies.

A key turned in a mystic lock of Time.

But where the silence of the gods had passed,

A greater harmony from the stillness born

Surprised with joy and sweetness yearning hearts,

An ecstasy and a laughter and a cry.

A power leaned down, a happiness found its home.

Over wide earth brooded the infinite bliss.



Here is the fulfilment of Savitri, that a “crimson seed of God’s felicity” is cast in the earthly soil. It will flourish and grow in the stream of speedy time. Aswapati had received a magnificent boon from the divine Shakti, that she shall take mortal birth and meet the challenge of Death, that in “Death’s tremendous hour” a seed shall be sown. (p. 346) She came and did Shakti Yoga in the soul of the earth. Now here is the crimson seed in the rich soil and from it will sprout the Tree of eternal Time bearing the fruits of eternity.



About Krishna and Kali in the last passage, we could refer to an entry in the Record of Yoga,—in fact this Krishna-Kali theme appears in several places in the Record. In the context of the fourth Chatushtaya dealing with Krishna-Kali-Karma-Kama Sri Aurobindo writes that, Krishna is the Ishwara taking delight in the world and Kali is the Shakti carrying out the Lila according to the pleasure of the Ishwara. This is significant, in the sense that when Savitri is returning to earth Krishna and Kali are following her, pursuing her in her fall, revealing the beginning of the dynamism of new Time in the Joy of the Divine himself. This tapas-siddhi, of bringing down Krishna and Kali, is the entire purport of the yogic Savitri. That is the crimson seed of the new creation.

Keywords: SriAurobindo, Spirituality, Poetry, Mysticism, Evolution

Source : http://www.sciy.org

The Riddling Sphinx: Four passages from lSavitri

Whence arose evil? Does it constitute the proof for the presence or otherwise of God? Every theology has its own pet answer and every philosophy a way to escape it. It is only the Gita who can hold the bull by the horns, can speak of God the Terrible on the Battlefield, the gory Battle of Life. But let us see in Savitri how the origin is traced and how in its wake other issues arise, arise in a subsidiary way. The puzzle formulated in the Sphinx-myth is one such subsidiary description. We shall see the four mentioned in the epic. But here is first the dark origin: (Savitri, pp, 222-23)

When nothing was save Matter without soul
And a spiritless hollow was the heart of Time,
Then Life first touched the insensible Abyss;
Awaking the stark Void to hope and grief
Her palid beam smote the unfathomed Night
In which God hid himself from his own view.
In all things she sought their slumbering mystic truth,
The unspoken Word that inspires unconscious forms;
She groped in his deeps for an invisible Law,
Fumbled in the dim subconscient for his mind
And strove to find a way for spirit to be.
But from the Night another answer came.
A seed was in that nether matrix cast,
A dumb unprobed husk of perverted truth,
A cell of an insentient infinite.
A monstrous birth prepared its cosmic form
In Nature's titan embryo, Ignorance.
Then in a fatal and stupendous hour
Something that sprang from the stark Inconscient's sleep
Unwillingly begotten by the mute Void,
Lifted its ominous head against the stars;
Overshadowing earth with its huge body of Doom
It chilled the heavens with the menace of a face.
A nameless Power, a shadowy Will arose
Immense and alien to our universe.
In the inconceivable Purpose none can gauge
A vast Non-Being robed itself with shape,
The boundless Nescience of the unconscious depths
Covered eternity with Nothingness.
A seeking Mind replaced the seeing Soul:
Life grew into a huge and hungry death,
The Spirit's bliss was changed to cosmic pain.
Assuring God's self-cowled neutrality
A mighty opposition conquered Space.
A sovereign ruling falsehood, death and grief,
It pressed its fierce hegemony on earth;
Disharmonising the original style
Of the architecture of her fate's design,
It falsified the primal cosmic Will
And bound to struggle and dread vicissitudes
The long slow process of the patient Power.
Implanting error in the stuff of things
It made an Ignorance of the all-wise Law;
It baffled the sure touch of life's hid sense,
Kept dumb the intuitive guide in Matter's sleep,
Deformed the insect's instinct and the brute's,
Disfigured man's thought-born humanity.
A shadow fell across the simple Ray:
Obscured was the Truth-light in the cavern heart
That burns unwitnessed in the altar crypt
Behind the still velamen's secrecy
Companioning the Godhead of the shrine.
Thus was the dire antagonist Energy born.

The clue is in “God hid himself from his own view”. In it is his full faculty of omnipotence, the power to cover his total omniscience and the power to enjoy this wonderful state of omnipresent Non-existence. That is the primary theodicy of Savitri. God hid himself from his own view in order to bring out a new manifestation. No wonder, Savitri tells Yama, the Lord of Death that he is seeing only a half-finished world. We do not even see that. That is why we are puzzled, we are unable to solve the Sphinx’s Riddle.

pp. 188-91
Aswapati the explorer of the worlds has entered the domains of Life, she the unknown; but his is also a perilous adventure, an adventure that has no end to reach.

At first no aim appeared in those large steps:
Only the wide source he saw of all things here
Looking towards a wider source beyond…
As one who spells illumined characters,
The key-book of a crabbed magician text,
He scanned her subtle tangled weird designs
And the screened difficult theorem of her clues,
Traced in the monstrous sands of desert Time…
In the labyrinth pattern of her thoughts and hopes
And the byways of her intimate desires,
In the complex corners crowded with her dreams
And rounds crossed by an intrigue of irrelevant rounds,
A wanderer straying amid fugitive scenes,
He lost its signs and chased each failing guess…
The magnificent wrappings of her secrecy
That fold her desirable body out of sight,
The strange significant forms woven on her robe,
Her meaningful outlines of the souls of things
He saw, her false transparencies of thought-hue,
Her rich brocades with imaged fancies sewn
And mutable masks and broideries of disguise.
A thousand baffling faces of the Truth
Looked at him from her forms with unknown eyes…
In her thickets of joy where danger clasps delight,
He glimpsed the hidden wings of her songster hopes,
A glimmer of blue and gold and scarlet fire…
Identified in soul-vision and soul-sense,
Entering into her depths as into a house,
All he became that she was or longed to be…
But this too he saw, her soul that wept within,
Her seekings vain that clutch at fleeing truth…
Always he met a veiled and seeking Force,
An exiled goddess building mimic heavens,
A Sphinx whose eyes look up to a hidden Sun.



pp. 299-301
Aswapati is moving in the kingdoms of Greater Knowledge and it is his still heart that listens to the all-expressive Silence. There the truth-movements roll the worlds in its rhythms. Aswapati’s Yajna is the offering to the triple fire. There

Absolved from the ligaments of death and sleep
He rode the lightning seas of cosmic Mind
And crossed the ocean of original sound;
On the last step to the supernal birth
He trod along extinction's narrow edge
Near the high verges of eternity,
And mounted the gold ridge of the World-dream
Between the slayer and the saviour fires;
The belt he reached of the unchanging Truth,
Met borders of the inexpressible Light
And thrilled with the presence of the Ineffable.
Above him he saw the flaming Hierarchies,
The wings that fold around created Space,
The sun-eyed Guardians and the golden Sphinx
And the tiered planes and the immutable Lords.
A wisdom waiting on Omniscience
Sat voiceless in a vast passivity…
He had reached the top of all that can be known:
His sight surpassed creation's head and base;
Ablaze the triple heavens revealed their suns,
The obscure Abyss exposed its monstrous rule…
There consciousness was a close and single weft…
Sight was a flame-throw from identity;
Life was a marvelous journey of the spirit,
Feeling a wave from the universal Bliss…
He was a vast that soon became a Sun.


pp. 336-37
Aswapati was carrying with him the desire of this creation and is now standing in front of the Divine Mother, offering it to her. But she explains to him the present limitations and the practical aspects connected with it. Man is beleaguered from all the sides and against his spirit

A Titan influence stops his Godward gaze.
Around him hungers the unpitying Void,
The eternal Darkness seeks him with her hands,
Inscrutable Energies drive him and deceive,
Immense implacable deities oppose.
An inert Soul and a somnambulist Force
Have made a world estranged from life and thought;
The Dragon of the dark foundations keeps
Unalterable the law of Chance and Death;
On his long way through Time and Circumstance
The grey-hued riddling nether shadow-Sphinx,
Her dreadful paws upon the swallowing sands,
Awaits him armed with the soul-slaying word:
Across his path sits the dim camp of Night…
A strange antinomy is his nature's rule.
A riddle of opposites is made his field:
Freedom he asks but needs to live in bonds,
He has need of darkness to perceive some light
And need of grief to feel a little bliss;
He has need of death to find a greater life…
A giant Ignorance surrounds his lore.


pp. 448-50
Narad explicates in great detail the mystery of grief and pain to Savitri’s mother, Malawi. A great advance has already been made but more difficult is the future. It is that which makes heavy the task of the world-redeemer who takes it upon himself, takes it to help man progress.

A greater power must come, a larger light.
Although Light grows on earth and Night recedes,
Yet till the evil is slain in its own home
And Light invades the world's inconscient base
And perished has the adversary Force,
He still must labour on, his work half done…
Man turns aside or chooses easier paths;
He keeps to the one high and difficult road
That sole can climb to the Eternal's peaks;
The ineffable planes already have felt his tread…
In the dreadful passages, the fatal paths,
Invulnerable his soul, his heart unslain,
He lives through the opposition of earth's Powers
And Nature's ambushes and the world's attacks.
His spirit's stature transcending pain and bliss,
He fronts evil and good with calm and equal eyes.
He too must grapple with the riddling Sphinx
And plunge into her long obscurity.
He has broken into the Inconscient's depths
That veil themselves even from their own regard:
He has seen God's slumber shape these magic worlds.
He has watched the dumb God fashioning Matter's frame,
Dreaming the dreams of its unknowing sleep,
And watched the unconscious Force that built the stars…
Arisen from Nothingness and towards Nothingness turned…
It is the mother of our ignorance.
He must call light into its dark abysms,
Else never can Truth conquer Matter's sleep
And all earth look into the eyes of God.
All things obscure his knowledge must relume,
All things perverse his power must unknot:
He must pass to the other shore of falsehood's sea,
He must enter the world's dark to bring there light.

“It became both truth and falsehood. It became the Truth, even all that is,”—declares the Taittiriya Upanishad. Only a bold formulation of the simultaneous presence of both good and evil, truth and falsehood can first help us resolve the duality that haunts us everywhere.


RYD

Reply
Re: Re: God hid himself from his own view


by ronjon on Thu 29 Nov 2007 03:27 PM PST Profile Permanent Link

Savitri, Book III Canto IV S3, p. 343

Source - http://www.sciy.org

Sri Aurobindo unravels the Riddle in a letter to Maurice Magre

by RY Deshpande on Tue 27 Nov 2007 05:49 AM PST

Alexander Pope (1688-1744), poet and critic belonging to the Augustan period, wrote his famous Essay on Man during 1733-34. The opening part of the Essay is at times entitled as The Riddle of the World, a phrase from the piece which runs as follows:



Know then thyself, presume not God to scan

The proper study of Mankind is Man.

Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,

A Being darkly wise, and rudely great:

With too much knowledge for the Sceptic side,

With too much weakness for the Stoic's pride,

He hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest;

In doubt to deem himself a God, or Beast;

In doubt his mind and body to prefer;

Born but to die, and reas'ning but to err;

Alike in ignorance, his reason such,

Whether he thinks too little, or too much;

Chaos of Thought and Passion, all confus'd;

Still by himself, abus'd or disabus'd;

Created half to rise and half to fall;

Great Lord of all things, yet a prey to all,

Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurl'd;

The glory, jest and riddle of the world.



But further down his “Heav'n from all creatures hides the book of fate” continues not with a pleasing note. Either he was sloppily acquainted with India or else had prejudiced views. Byron thought Pope to be “the great moral poet of all times, of all climes, of all feelings, and all stages of existence,” but from the seventeenth century Roman Catholic background as he came, perhaps his great morals lived only in it. No wonder we have the following:



Lo! the poor Indian, whose untutor'd mind

Sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind;

His soul, proud science never taught to stray

Far as the solar walk, or milky way…

To be, contents his natural desire,

He asks no angel's wing, no seraph's fire.



Not to be aware that an Indian is a worshipper of the Mystic Fire, the Golden Agni with a golden body, hiraņya tanu, is to display lack of insight. And that is what makes Pope’s Essay on Man a flawed “centerpiece”, a system of ethics unconvincing in its contents and in its argument. Neither it justifies, à la Milton, the ways of God to Man,—it is more justifying the ways of Man to God,—nor does it provide a warning that man is imperfect and much is expected of him with the infinite potential in which he can grow, that he is just an isthmus joining Beast and God. Pope was more a Neoclassicist than the inheritor of the spirit of Renaissance which was in the Augustan period on the decline. The vibrant optimism had disappeared, its ardour in man’s intellectual-mystical-creative possibilities. What the Age saw was an imperfect being who always had been so but who had lost hope; the stress was on measured imagination and calculated philosophy, that which was in one way or the other utility-oriented. Not only that; its vocabulary essentially was burdened with words like “sad, pensive, anxious, trembling, at times purple with the Latin sense of very bright, etc.”



The problem is, with this kind of an approach Pope cannot even formulate the Riddle in its true sense, posing the challenge in a forceful questing manner, holding in its contents the basic issue, the intrinsic, the deeper centrality as far as this creation is concerned, in its penetrating essentiality striking at the roots, neither in its individual nor wide cosmic dimensionality. His formulation is at best the formulation of a satirical mind. Nothing much can be gained from its solution if at all it can offer a solution, lacking as it does in substance.


In fact, no solution is expected from it. The best phrase that we can apply to it is his own “Chaos of Thought and Passion, all confus'd”. For Pope man is



Created half to rise and half to fall;

Great Lord of all things, yet a prey to all,

Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurl'd;

The glory, jest and riddle of the world.




Man himself is the riddle of the world, but what about the world’s riddle, the great Riddle of the Creation, the presence of error and falsehood and sin and evil? Whence have they come? Is man their product or is it that he has given rise to them all? That is the deeper concern, the presence of the inescapable, the unsolvable conundrum.



It is in this background we must appreciate the care with which Savitri’s mother Malawai has formulated the issue, formulated in a coherent and logical manner, in its completeness. Even while she states the dilemma human mind faces, she is not in a hurry to state it, and she is careful to state it from several points of view. Although it looks as if it is God who is directly responsible for the evil in the world, she is also puzzled if this is true at all. How can a good God give rise to grief and pain? How can come out of something that which is not within it, as if ex nihilo? That is the real occult mystery. It is to that question Malawi demands an answer from Narad. Nothing is left ambiguous in it and it is a well-voiced question, well-framed, though it may appear that she was putting the question “badly”. A precise question can bring out a precise answer and this is exactly what we have in the Book of Fate. If the aim of life is the life divine, it becomes necessary to dispose of the metaphysical difficulty that faces particularly the modern mind and the Book does it fully.



The French poet-writer-dramatist Maurice Magre (1877-1941) asked to the Mother in 1933 more or less the same question—a bad question if it is God who made this evil world. The Mother showed it to Sri Aurobindo and Sri Aurobindo decided to answer it himself. This was in June 1933. His answer became the true centerpiece of a booklet entitled The Riddle of This World first published in November 1933. It is now included in his Letters on Yoga. (pp. 24-32) The full answer, patient and many-sided, in luminous calm of the seer-thinker, runs as follows:





It is not to be denied, no spiritual experience will deny that this is an unideal and unsatisfactory world, strongly marked with the stamp of inadequacy, suffering, evil. Indeed this perception is in a way the starting-point of the spiritual urge—except for the few to whom the greater experience comes spontaneously without being forced to it by the strong or overwhelming, the afflicting and detaching sense of the Shadow overhanging the whole range of this manifested existence. But still the question remains whether this is indeed, as is contended, the essential character of all manifestation or so long at least as there is a physical world it must be of this nature, so that the desire of birth, the will to manifest or create has to be regarded as the original sin and withdrawal from birth or manifestation as the sole possible way of salvation. For those who perceive it so or with some kindred look—and these have been the majority—there are well-known ways of issue, a straight-cut to spiritual deliverance. But equally it may not be so but only seem so to our ignorance or to a partial knowledge—the imperfection, the evil, the suffering may be a besetting circumstance or a dolorous passage, but not the very condition of manifestation, not the very essence of birth in Nature. And if so, the highest wisdom will lie not in escape, but in the urge towards a victory here, in a consenting association with the Will behind the world, in a discovery of the spiritual gate to perfection which will be at the same time an opening for the entire descent of the Divine Light, Knowledge, Power, Beatitude.



All spiritual experience affirms that there is a Permanent above the transience of this manifested world we live in and this limited consciousness in whose narrow borders we grope and struggle and that its characters are infinity, self-existence, freedom, absolute Light, absolute Beatitude. Is there then an unbridgeable gulf between that which is beyond and that which is here or are they two perpetual opposites and only by leaving this adventure in Time behind, by overleaping the gulf can men reach the Eternal? That is what seems to be at the end of one line of experience which has been followed to its rigorous conclusion by Buddhism and a little less rigorously by a certain type of Monistic spirituality which admits some connection of the world with the Divine, but still opposes them in the last resort to each other as truth and illusion. But there is also this other and indubitable experience that the Divine is here in everything as well as above and behind everything, that all is in That and is That when we go back from its appearance to its Reality. It is a significant and illumining fact that the Knower of Brahman even moving and acting in this world, even bearing all its shocks, can live in some absolute peace, light and beatitude of the Divine. There is then here something other than that mere trenchant opposition—there is a mystery, a problem which one would think must admit of some less desperate solution. This spiritual possibility points beyond itself and brings a ray of hope into the darkness of our fallen existence.



And at once a first question arises—is this world an unchanging succession of the same phenomena always or is there in it an evolutionary urge, an evolutionary fact, a ladder of ascension somewhere from an original apparent Inconscience to a more and more developed consciousness, from each development still ascending, emerging on highest heights not yet within our normal reach? If so, what is the sense, the fundamental principle, the logical issue of that progression? Everything seems to point to such a progression as a fact—to a spiritual and not merely a physical evolution. Here too there is a justifying line of spiritual experience in which we discover that the Inconscient from which all starts is apparent only, for in it there is an involved Consciousness with endless possibilities, a consciousness not limited but cosmic and infinite, a concealed and self-imprisoned Divine, imprisoned in Matter but with every potentiality held in its secret depths. Out of this apparent Inconscience each potentiality is revealed in its turn, first organised Matter concealing the indwelling Spirit, then Life emerging in the plant and associated in the animal with a growing Mind, then Mind itself evolved and organised in Man. This evolution, this spiritual progression—does it stop short here in the imperfect mental being called Man? Or is the secret of it simply a succession of rebirths whose only purpose of issue is to labour towards the point at which it can learn its own futility, renounce itself and take its leap into some original unborn Existence or Non-Existence? There is at least the possibility, there comes at a certain point the certitude, that there is a far greater consciousness than what we call Mind, and that by ascending the ladder still farther we can find a point at which the hold of the material Inconscience, the vital and mental Ignorance ceases; a principle of consciousness becomes capable of manifestation which liberates not partially, not imperfectly, but radically and wholly this imprisoned Divine. In this vision each stage of evolution appears as due to the descent of a higher and higher Power of consciousness, raising the terrestrial level, creating a new stratum, but the highest yet remain to descend and it is by their descent that the riddle of terrestrial existence will receive its solution and not only the soul but Nature herself find her deliverance. This is the Truth which has been seen in flashes, in more and more entirety of its terms by the line of seers whom the Tantra would call the hero-seekers and the divine-seekers and which may now be nearing the point of readiness for its full revelation and experience. Then whatever be the heavy weight of strife and suffering and darkness in the world, yet if there is this as its high result awaiting us, all that has gone before may not be counted too great a price by the strong and adventurous for the glory that is to come. At any rate the shadow lifts; there is a Divine Light that leans over the world and is not only a far-off incommunicable Lustre.



It is true that the problem still remains why all this that yet is should have been necessary—these crude beginnings, this long and stormy passage—why should the heavy and tedious price be demanded, why should evil and suffering ever have been there. For to the how of the fall into the Ignorance as opposed to the why, the effective cause, there is a substantial agreement in all spiritual experience. It is the division, the separation, the principle of isolation from the Permanent and One that brought it about; it is because the ego set up for itself in the world emphasising its own desire and self-affirmation in preference to its unity with the Divine and its oneness with all; it is because instead of the one supreme Force, Wisdom, Light determining the harmony of all forces each Idea, Force, Form of things was allowed to work itself out as far as it could in the mass of infinite possibilities by its separate will and inevitably in the end by conflict with others. Division, ego, the imperfect consciousness and groping and struggle of a separate self-affirmation are the efficient cause of the suffering and ignorance of this world. Once consciousnesses separated from the one consciousness, they fell inevitably into Ignorance and the last result of Ignorance was Inconscience; from a dark immense Inconscient this material world arises and out of it a soul that by evolution is struggling into consciousness, attracted towards the hidden Light, ascending but still blindly towards the lost Divinity from which it came.



But why should this have happened at all? One common way of putting the question and answering it ought to be eliminated from the first,—the human way and its ethical revolt and reprobation, its emotional outcry. For it is not, as some religions suppose, a supra-cosmic, arbitrary, personal Deity himself altogether uninvolved in the fall who has imposed evil and suffering on creatures made capriciously by his fiat. The Divine we know is an Infinite Being in whose infinite manifestation these things have come—it is the Divine itself that is here, behind us, pervading the manifestation, supporting the world with its oneness; it is the Divine that is in us upholding itself the burden of the fall and its dark consequence. If above It stands for ever in its perfect Light, Bliss and Peace, It is also here; its Light, Bliss and Peace are secretly here supporting all; in ourselves there is a spirit, a central presence greater than the series of surface personalities which, like the supreme Divine itself, is not overborne by the fate they endure. If we find out this Divine within us, if we know ourselves as this spirit which is of one essence and being with the Divine, that is our gate of deliverance and in it we can remain ourselves even in the midst of this world's disharmonies, luminous, blissful and free. That much is the age-old testimony of spiritual experience.



But still what is the purpose and origin of the disharmony—why came this division and ego, this world of painful evolution? Why must evil and sorrow enter into the divine Good, Bliss and Peace? It is hard to answer to the human intelligence on its own level, for the consciousness to which the origin of this phenomenon belongs and to which it stands as it were automatically justified in a supra-intellectual knowledge, is a cosmic and not an individualised human intelligence; it sees in larger spaces, it has another vision and cognition, other terms of consciousness than human reason and feeling. To the human mind one might answer that while in itself the Infinite might be free from those perturbations, yet once manifestation began infinite possibility also began and among the infinite possibilities which it is the function of the universal manifestation to work out, the negation, the apparent effective negation—with all its consequences—of the Power, Light, Peace, Bliss was very evidently one. If it is asked why even if possible it should have been accepted, the answer nearest to the Cosmic Truth which the human intelligence can make is that in the relations or in the transition of the Divine in the Oneness to the Divine in the Many, this ominous possible became at a certain point an inevitable. For once it appears it acquires for the Soul descending into evolutionary manifestation an irresistible attraction which creates the inevitability—an attraction which in human terms on the terrestrial level might be interpreted as the call of the unknown, the joy of danger and difficulty and adventure, the will to attempt the impossible, to work out the incalculable, the will to create the new and the uncreated with one's own self and life as the material, the fascination of contradictories and their difficult harmonisation—these things translated into another supraphysical, superhuman consciousness, higher and wider than the mental, were the temptation that led to the fall. For to the original being of light on the verge of the descent the one thing unknown was the depths of the abyss, the possibilities of the Divine in the Ignorance and Inconscience. On the other side from the Divine Oneness a vast acquiescence, compassionate, consenting, helpful, a supreme knowledge that this thing must be, that having appeared it must be worked out, that its appearance is in a certain sense part of an incalculable infinite wisdom, that if the plunge into Night was inevitable the emergence into a new unprecedented Day was also a certitude, and that only so could a certain manifestation of the Supreme Truth be effected—by a working out with its phenomenal opposites as the starting-point of the evolution, as the condition laid down for a transforming emergence. In this acquiescence was embraced too the will of the great Sacrifice, the descent of the Divine itself into the Inconsience to take up the burden of the Ignorance and its consequences, to intervene as the Avatar and the Vibhuti walking between the double sign of the Cross and the Victory towards the fulfilment and deliverance. A too imaged rendering of the inexpressible Truth? But without images how to present to the intellect a mystery far beyond it? It is only when one has crossed the barrier of the limited intelligence and shared in the cosmic experience and the knowledge which sees things from identity that the supreme realities which lie behind these images—images corresponding to the terrestrial fact—assume their divine forms and are felt as simple, natural, implied in the essence of things. It is by entering into that greater consciousness alone that one can grasp the inevitability of its self-creation and its purpose.



This is indeed only the Truth of the manifestation as it presents itself to the consciousness when it stands on the border line between Eternity and the descent into Time where the relation between the One and the Many in the evolution is self-determined, a zone where all that is to be is implied but not yet in action. But the liberated consciousness can rise higher where the problem exists no longer and from there see it in the light of a supreme identity where all is predetermined in the automatic self-existent truth of things and self-justified to an absolute consciousness and wisdom and absolute Delight which is behind all creation and non-creation and the affirmation and negation are both seen with the eyes of the ineffable Reality that delivers and reconciles them. But that knowledge is not expressible to the human mind; its language of light is too undecipherable, the light itself too bright for a consciousness accustomed to the stress and obscurity of the cosmic riddle and entangled in it to follow the clue or to grasp its secret. In any case, it is only when we rise in the spirit beyond the zone of the darkness and the struggle that we enter into the full significance of it and there is a deliverance of the soul from its enigma. To rise to that height of liberation is the true way out and the only means of the indubitable knowledge.



But the liberation and transcendence need not necessarily impose a disappearance, a sheer dissolving out from the manifestation; it can prepare a liberation into action of the highest Knowledge and an intensity of Power that can transform the world and fulfil the evolutionary urge. It is an ascent from which there is no longer a fall but a winged or self-sustained descent of light, force and Ananda.



It is what is inherent in force of being that manifests as becoming; but what the manifestation shall be, its terms, its balance of energies, its arrangement of principles depends on the consciousness which acts in the creative force, on the power of consciousness which Being delivers from itself for manifestation. It is in the nature of Being to be able to grade and vary its powers of consciousness and determine according to the grade and variation its world or its degree and scope of self-revelation. The manifested creation is limited by the power to which it belongs and sees and lives according to it and can only see more, live more powerfully, change its world by opening or moving towards or making descend a greater power of consciousness that was above it. This is what is happening in the evolution of consciousness in our world, a world of inanimate matter producing under the stress of this necessity a power of life, a power of mind which bring into it new forms of creation and still labouring to produce, to make descend into it some supramental power. It is further an operation of creative force which moves between two poles of consciousness. On one side there is a secret consciousness within and above which contains in it all potentialities—there eternally manifest, here awaiting delivery—of light, peace, power and bliss. On the other side there is another, outward on the surface and below, that starts from the apparent opposite of unconsciousness, inertia, blind stress, possibility of suffering and grows by receiving into itself higher and higher powers which make it always re-create its manifestation in larger terms, each new creation of this kind bringing out something of the inner potentiality, making it more and more possible to bring down the Perfection that waits above. As long as the outward personality we call ourselves is centred in the lower powers of consciousness, the riddle of its own existence, its purpose, its necessity is to it an insoluble enigma; if something of the truth is at all conveyed to this outward mental man, he but imperfectly grasps it and perhaps misinterprets and misuses and mislives it. His true staff of walking is made more of a fire of faith than any ascertained and indubitable light of knowledge. It is only by rising toward a higher consciousness beyond the mental line and therefore superconscient now to him that he can emerge from his inability and his ignorance. His full liberation and enlightenment will come when he crosses the line into the light of a new superconscient existence. That is the transcendence which was the object of aspiration of the mystics and the spiritual seekers.



But in itself this would change nothing in the creation here, the evasion of a liberated soul from the world makes to that world no difference. But this crossing of the line if turned not only to an ascending but to a descending purpose would mean the transformation of the line from what it now is, a lid, a barrier, into a passage for the higher powers of consciousness of the Being now above it. It would mean a new creation on earth, a bringing in of the ultimate powers which would reverse the conditions here, in as much as that would produce a creation raised into the full flood of spiritual and supramental light in place of one emerging into a half-light of mind out of a darkness of material inconscience. It is only in such a full flood of the realised spirit that the embodied being could know, in the sense of all that was involved in it, the meaning and temporary necessity of his descent into the darkness and its conditions and at the same time dissolve them by a luminous transmutation into a manifestation here of the revealed and no longer of the veiled and disguised or apparently deformed Divine.



The problem of grief and pain is fundamentally a cosmic problem and therefore it can be understood or comprehended only in the cosmic consciousness. It is a problem related to this creation’s process, a problem which has occurred on the way, a problem which need not have occurred. The individual’s central being was there in the Transcendent and it could have remained there for ever, in that heavenly transcendence, in that bliss or Ananda. But then there would not have been the manifestation of increasing delight, of the ever-growing Ananda, in the infinite possibilities of the Non-manifest. It is for this purpose of discovering new possibilities of Ananda that the central being plunged into the Inconscience, plunged to discover its own otherness by which it could bring about a new world full of light and love and beauty and joy and harmony and strength. It is for that that it accepted the unknown’s hazard, accepted “this long and stormy passage”. From the world of Truth it saw the abyss of Ignorance, the great inconvenient truth of the cosmic existence, the mysterious shadow cast by it in the darkness of the Spirit. It felt curious of it, its own otherness and, unmindful of the vulnerability, it plunged into it, rushing headlong in it. It plunged and with it all this began, began in a stiff inexorable way. It is thus that in the long and stormy way pain and grief became an opportunity to turn more and more towards the Divine, with the imperative that it must be sought. That was the happy decision of the Central Being, the Jivatman; so, because there is a purpose behind it, behind the plunge, the fall, it should be respected.



About grief and pain, here is a poignant eulogy from Kim Anastasia,—about her male cat Pookie‘s departure three days ago: “… Pookie also showed me that, during times of great pain or sorrow, there is the joyous opportunity to turn oneself over to the Divine and to allow the Divine resolution to flow through the human and manifest a hint of itself somewhere in matter. Perhaps Pookie gave of himself so the possibility of this might occur… I suppose we will be learning and resonating from the experience of Pookie’s passing for a long time, and healing too. The nature of grief is mystifying, the more so as it exists so powerfully over the passing of a cat. Pookie, Pookie, Pookie. You elegant creature. You have given us everything and in the peacefulness of your passing, reminded us once again that in the end there is only love… I love you, Pookie, always and forever, my big, elegant, adorable, beautiful white cat. May the hug of the Divine be ever upon you, and love always surround you…” The full golden cry rising from the warm and loving hush can be heard at

http://www.sciy.org/blog/_archives/2007/10/31/3324666.html#1045891


This is grief that got quintessenced, in such a way that grief itself has become mystifying; but what becomes psychicised becomes immortal and then there is no mystery, no grief either. It is true that “pain is the hammer of God to sculpt man” to greatness but it should not be that only because of pain or sorrow or grief one should turn towards him, turn towards the Divine. Happier are those who ever live in the Divine, Narad-like in the name of Vishnu. If pain and grief are going to sculpt us to that greatness, welcome are then pain and grief.

http://www.sciy.org/