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
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
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