The World as the Body of God, pp. 647-649 (SH 320)

Savitri Class in Hindi with Alok Pandey
Book Ten: The Book of the Double Twilight, Canto Four. The Dream Twilight of the Earthly Real.

Savitri now reveals to Death how Light has been growing despite all the resistances. She reveals how God is slowly manifesting Himself through the process of evolution.

The world is a spiritual paradox
Invented by a need in the Unseen,
A poor translation to the creature’s sense
Of That which for ever exceeds idea and speech,
A symbol of what can never be symbolised,
A language mispronounced, misspelt, yet true.

Its powers have come from the eternal heights
And plunged into the inconscient dim Abyss
And risen from it to do their marvellous work.

The soul is a figure of the Unmanifest,
The mind labours to think the Unthinkable,
The life to call the Immortal into birth,
The body to enshrine the Illimitable.

The world is not cut off from Truth and God.

In vain thou hast dug the dark unbridgeable gulf,
In vain thou hast built the blind and doorless wall:
Man’s soul crosses through thee to Paradise,
Heaven’s sun forces its way through death and night;
Its light is seen upon our being’s verge.

My mind is a torch lit from the eternal sun,
My life a breath drawn by the immortal Guest,
My mortal body is the Eternal’s house.
Already the torch becomes the undying ray,
Already the life is the Immortal’s force,
The house grows of the householder part and one.

How sayst thou Truth can never light the human mind
And Bliss can never invade the mortal’s heart
Or God descend into the world he made?
If in the meaningless Void creation rose,
If from a bodiless Force Matter was born,
If Life could climb in the unconscious tree,
Its green delight break into emerald leaves
And its laughter of beauty blossom in the flower,
If sense could wake in tissue, nerve and cell
And Thought seize the grey matter of the brain,
And soul peep from its secrecy through the flesh,
How shall the nameless Light not leap on men,
And unknown powers emerge from Nature’s sleep?

Even now hints of a luminous Truth like stars
Arise in the mind-mooned splendour of Ignorance;
Even now the deathless Lover’s touch we feel:
If the chamber’s door is even a little ajar,
What then can hinder God from stealing in
Or who forbid his kiss on the sleeping soul?

Already God is near, the Truth is close:
Because the dark atheist body knows him not,
Must the sage deny the Light, the seer his soul?

I am not bound by thought or sense or shape;
I live in the glory of the Infinite,
I am near to the Nameless and Unknowable,
The Ineffable is now my household mate.

But standing on Eternity’s luminous brink
I have discovered that the world was He;
I have met Spirit with spirit, Self with self,
But I have loved too the body of my God.

I have pursued him in his earthly form.

A lonely freedom cannot satisfy
A heart that has grown one with every heart:
I am a deputy of the aspiring world,
My spirit’s liberty I ask for all.”

[Savitri: 647 – 649]

(line breaks added to emphasize separate movements)