Book One Canto I Summary

The very first Canto of the First Book has been aptly titled The Symbol Dawn. All new life begins with the advent of Light. The first touch of this Light that awakens us out of the state of Ignorance is the Dawn. But the law of ignorance and darkness has a strong grip upon our nature. We prefer our comfort zones and out littleness rather than opening to the Light and Truth that descend from a vaster world. We prefer our dull, soulless routine rather than making the needed effort to open ourselves to the New Light and undergo the needed transformation. This has been the story so far of all efforts to change earthly life into something truer and more beautiful. No doubt something is done but then soon it turns once again into the old pattern. Such is the heavy load of the Inconscient darkness that weighs upon and pulls at our hearts.

But now the Divine Mother Herself has come to change the scheme of things. She brings the New Dawn that would see the very end of Night, the death of Death. Though Her message and Her Work meets the same resistance as of all the Avataras that have gone before Her, yet She has come armed with the victorious power of Divine Love. She has consented to become human so that human nature can become divine. But first She must confront Death in its liar and go down into the bottomless pit of Ignorance with the surrendered soul of Satyavan, Her partner in this dangerous game.

We may remember Sri Aurobindo’s luminous words from “The Mother”:

The supramental change is a thing decreed and inevitable in the evolution of the earth-consciousness; for its upward ascent is not ended and mind is not its last summit. But that the change may arrive, take form and endure, there is needed the call from below with a will to recognise and not deny the Light when it comes, and there is needed the sanction of the Supreme from above. The power that mediates between the sanction and the call is the presence and power of the Divine Mother. The Mother’s power and not any human endeavour and tapasya can alone rend the lid and tear the covering and shape the vessel and bring down into this world of obscurity and falsehood and death and suffering Truth and Light and Life divine and the immortal’s Ananda.

[CWSA 32: 26]