A Vast Impersonality, pp. 552-554 (SH 278)

Savitri Class in Hindi with Alok Pandey
Savitri Book Seven: The Book of Yoga, Canto Seven: The Discovery of the Cosmic Spirit and the Cosmic Consciousness

What could be said of the personality of one whose ego has been dissolved? Does the personality also dissolve, or is it transformed into something new? There is indeed a stage between the dissolution of the ego and this transformation of the personality. The person becomes a vast field, an illimitable centre for God’s Work. His speech and his silence help the toiling world. Such is the state of Savitri as described here.

Thus was she lost within to separate self;
Her mortal ego perished in God’s night.

Only a body was left, the ego’s shell
Afloat mid drift and foam of the world-sea,
A sea of dream watched by a motionless sense
In a figure of unreal reality.

An impersonal foresight could already see,—
In the unthinking knowledge of the spirit
Even now it seemed nigh done, inevitable,—
The individual die, the cosmos pass;
These gone, the transcendental grew a myth,
The Holy Ghost without the Father and Son,

Or, a substratum of what once had been,
Being that never willed to bear a world
Restored to its original loneliness,
Impassive, sole, silent, intangible.

Yet all was not extinct in this deep loss;
The being travelled not towards nothingness.
There was some high surpassing Secrecy,
And when she sat alone with Satyavan,
Her moveless mind with his that searched and strove,
In the hush of the profound and intimate night
She turned to the face of a veiled voiceless Truth
Hid in the dumb recesses of the heart
Or waiting beyond the last peak climbed by Thought,—
Unseen itself it sees the struggling world
And prompts our quest, but cares not to be found,—
Out of that distant Vast came a reply.

Something unknown, unreached, inscrutable
Sent down the messages of its bodiless Light,
Cast lightning flashes of a thought not ours
Crossing the immobile silence of her mind:
In its might of irresponsible sovereignty
It seized on speech to give those flamings shape,
Made beat the heart of wisdom in a word
And spoke immortal things through mortal lips.

Or, listening to the sages of the woods,
In question and in answer broke from her
High strange revealings impossible to men,
Something or someone secret and remote
Took hold of her body for his mystic use,
Her mouth was seized to channel ineffable truths,
Knowledge unthinkable found an utterance.

Astonished by a new enlightenment,
Invaded by a streak of the Absolute,
They marvelled at her, for she seemed to know
What they had only glimpsed at times afar.

These thoughts were formed not in her listening brain,
Her vacant heart was like a stringless harp;
Impassive the body claimed not its own voice,
But let the luminous greatness through it pass.

A dual Power at being’s occult poles
Still acted, nameless and invisible:
Her divine emptiness was their instrument.
Inconscient Nature dealt with the world it had made,
And using still the body’s instruments
Slipped through the conscious void she had become;
The superconscient Mystery through that Void
Missioned its word to touch the thoughts of men.

As yet this great impersonal speech was rare.

But now the unmoving wide spiritual space
In which her mind survived tranquil and bare,
Admitted a traveller from the cosmic breadths:
A thought came through draped as an outer voice.
It called not for the witness of the mind,
It spoke not to the hushed receiving heart;
It came direct to the pure perception’s seat,
An only centre now of consciousness,
If centre could be where all seemed only space;
No more shut in by body’s walls and gates
Her being, a circle without circumference,
Already now surpassed all cosmic bounds
And more and more spread into infinity.

[Savitri: 552 – 554]

(line breaks added to emphasize separate movements)