From January 1968 to August 1970, The Mother read selected passages from Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri, providing explanations that were tape-recorded. The presently offered videos contain Her commentary on the first four Cantos of Book One, accompanied by complete, unedited transcriptions. The editors have added subcaptions to the video and audio clips, which were not present in The Mother’s narrative or Huta’s book. Additionally, Huta’s text, apart from its preface and edits, includes an extra twelve pages at the end, for which audio recordings are not accessible.
Table of Contents
Canto One. The Symbol Dawn
It was the hour before the Gods awake.
1.1 The Story of Creation
An ancient tradition which describes the creation as been done by some first emanations of the Supreme Mother, which there were four emanations. Which in the sense and the feeling of their supreme Power, cut connection with their Origin and became independent. And then, these emanations, being separated from their Origin, entered into darkness.
The first one was the Consciousness, that Consciousness, Light, and by cutting Himself from His Origin He went down and down towards Unconsciousness.
The second was of Bliss and turned into Suffering.
The third was of Truth and turned into Falsehood.
And fourth was of Life and turned into Death.
This was after they came down like that to the vital level. When this was seen, it was decided that some second emanations would be made to repair the mistake of the first; and the second emanations were the Gods.
And then this first line refers to the condition of the world before the Gods were born.
He says, “It was the hour before the Gods awake.”
Across the path of the divine Event
The huge foreboding mind of Night, alone
In her unlit temple of eternity,
Lay stretched immobile upon Silence’ marge.
Almost one felt, opaque, impenetrable,
In the sombre symbol of her eyeless muse
The abysm of the unbodied Infinite;
A fathomless zero occupied the world.
(No record of Mother’s reading of these lines)
As a result of this separation between the first emanations and the Creator, the creation of these first emanations had become obscure, inconscient. And that is what He describes here. That is He says, “the divine Event”, is a creation, — the creation that will go on and on for eternity. And started by the what He called the Night — the Night of a foreboding mind. Unconscious, immobile, lifeless, blind also. All these things — and the obscurity and the unconsciousness, the immobility, lifelessness, the Infinite unbodied, and a fathomless zero — all these words are meant to express the Nothingness of the world.
A power of fallen boundless self awake
Between the first and the last Nothingness,
Recalling the tenebrous womb from which it came,
Turned from the insoluble mystery of birth
And the tardy process of mortality
And longed to reach its end in vacant Nought.
This is to say that Even in the darkest Unconscious, there was something like the remembrance of the Divine Origin, and it had a tendency to wake up to existence.
But all the habit of Inconscient was so strong that it had a natural tendency to go back to Nothingness. It is just what preceded the beginning of a conscious creation in the world.
1.2 Earth is a Special Formation
We saw last time that this emanation of Light and Consciousness had separated from its Origin and naturally fallen into Inconscience. Result was that the world created was the world of Unconsciousness — a world of Nothingness, of obscure Nothingness.
But in spite of everything the Divine Origin was inside that and had a tendency to bring up again a world of Consciousness. And this is like the first attempt of this waking up in the Nothingness of something that was a faint expression of consciousness — but “Recalling,” as He said, “the tenebrous womb from which it came”. It had a tendency of going back to Unconsciousness. It is like the origin of Death.
As in a dark beginning of all things,
A mute featureless semblance of the Unknown
Repeating for ever the unconscious act,
Prolonging for ever the unseeing will,
Cradled the cosmic drowse of ignorant Force
Whose moved creative slumber kindles the suns
And carries our lives in its somnambulist whirl.
For the sake of evolution and the ascension towards Consciousness, earth was formed. But it was formed naturally in the Unconscious, and then He says:
Athwart the vain enormous trance of Space,
Its formless stupor without mind or life,
A shadow spinning through a soulless Void,
Thrown back once more into unthinking dreams,
Earth wheeled abandoned in the hollow gulfs
Forgetful of her spirit and her fate.
That is when earth was created in the Unconscious and the Nothingness, in order to concentrate the effort and the working of evolution — that is the description of the beginning.
That Earth began — almost totally unconscious — as He says:
Forgetful of her spirit and her fate.
That is the beginning.
1.3 The Birth of Aspiration
The impassive skies were neutral, empty, still.
Then something in the inscrutable darkness stirred;
A nameless movement, an unthought Idea
Insistent, dissatisfied, without an aim,
Something that wished but knew not how to be,
Teased the Inconscient to wake Ignorance.
It is the description — a very wonderful description — of the beginning of Aspiration: how in the Nothingness, in the Inconscient, stirred the first movement of Aspiration.
There was no mind, so it did not think. Even the vital was not organised, so it did not know how to be.
But, It stirred slowly to wake up the Inconscient towards something — without knowing what it was.
It is the first vibration that preceded even form, the first beginning of Aspiration towards the possibility of knowing.
A throe that came and left a quivering trace,
Gave room for an old tired want unfilled,
At peace in its subconscient moonless cave
To raise its head and look for absent light,
Straining closed eyes of vanished memory,
Like one who searches for a bygone self
And only meets the corpse of his desire.
This is still the description of the world created by division and becoming conscious. It is to say that its Origin being the perfect Truth-Consciousness, in spite of its division, in spite of its obscurity, it still contains the seed of its Consciousness and something like “the want” to return to It.
It was as though even in this Nought’s profound,
Even in this ultimate dissolution’s core
There lurked an unremembering entity,
Survivor of a slain and buried past
Condemned to resume the effort and the pang,
Reviving in another frustrate world.
The Origin of Light and Consciousness which it carried in itself could not die — because it is the essence seed, the very essence of Immortality. And that began waking up.
An unshaped consciousness desired light
And a blank prescience yearned towards distant change.
It is the very beginning of the aspiration waking up in the Inconscient to return to its conscious Origin.
It is the starting-point, the first movement of evolution, — the evolution that is the turning back of the Inconscient to return to go back to the full Consciousness.
1.4 Awakening of Consciousness
As if a childlike finger laid on a cheek
Reminded of the endless need in things
The heedless Mother of the universe,
An infant longing clutched the sombre Vast.
Insensibly somewhere a breach began:
A long lone line of hesitating hue
Like a vague smile tempting a desert heart
Troubled the far rim of life’s obscure sleep.
Waking up of consciousness that He compares to a “smile”. He says “hesitating hue” — that is the first beginning of consciousness, that is like a very pale light and He compares to “a smile tempting a desert heart”.
It is like a very faint light at the border of the obscure sleep of life.
He says:
Arrived from the other side of boundlessness
An eye of deity pierced through the dumb deeps;
A scout in a reconnaissance from the sun,
It seemed amid a heavy cosmic rest,
The torpor of a sick and weary world,
To seek for a spirit sole and desolate
Too fallen to recollect forgotten bliss.
The first vision of Consciousness that He compares to the “An eye of deity” piercing “through the dumb deeps” and this look is like “A scout in a reconnaissance from the sun” — that is the symbol of Consciousness, in the “heavy cosmic rest, The torpor of a sick and weary world”. “Too fallen to recollect forgotten bliss” — that is, too unconscious to remember the Consciousness from which it came.
1.5 The Birth of Hope
Intervening in a mindless universe,
Its message crept through the reluctant hush
Calling the adventure of consciousness and joy
And, conquering Nature’s disillusioned breast,
Compelled renewed consent to see and feel.
That is just the coming out of he complete unconsciousness of the stone and mineral Nature towards the beginning of life, and this “Compelled renewed consent to see and feel”.
And then He says, “its message crept”: it is the first sending of the thought in the world.
And then,
A thought was sown in the unsounded Void,
A sense was born within the darkness’ depths,
A memory quivered in the heart of Time
That is the memory of the Origin.
As if a soul long dead were moved to live:
Then He describes the resistance:
But the oblivion that succeeds the fall,
Had blotted the crowded tablets of the past,
And all that was destroyed must be rebuilt
And old experience laboured out once more.
But then in front of all that seems to have been destroyed — it is only a seeming because it is latent behind the Unconsciousness.
And then the comforting assurance:
All can be done if the God-touch is there.
So, in short, He is giving all the process of rebuilding the Consciousness in the Unconscious.
He calls the separation “the fall”: that is truly a fall of the Consciousness in he Unconscious.
And now He describes how the message sent from the Supreme to repair the harm done as by a kind of imperative influence waken up again the Consciousness to begin to climb up, back to the Supreme Consciousness.
This ascent that is the evolution that will take so many thousands and thousands of years. But for a very long time it was not measured. It is only when Mind took form in man, that time began to be measured. And, before that, who can know how long It took to wake up from the complete Unconsciousness? He is speaking just of the starting-point of this evolution.
And then He says:
All can be done if the God-touch is there.
Beautiful!
A hope stole in that hardly dared to be
Amid the Night’s forlorn indifference.
As if solicited in an alien world
With timid and hazardous instinctive grace,
Orphaned and driven out to seek a home,
An errant marvel with no place to live,
Into a far-off nook of heaven there came
A slow miraculous gesture’s dim appeal.
The persistent thrill of a transfiguring touch
Persuaded the inert black quietude
And beauty and wonder disturbed the fields of God.
1.6 The Beginning of Manifestation
…remember that He puts Quietude, Beauty and Wonder — seems to be at the beginning of the manifestation of the Divine in the Inconscient.
It started like that: Quietude, Beauty and Wonder.
A wandering hand of pale enchanted light
That glowed along a fading moment’s brink,
Fixed with gold panel and opalescent hinge
A gate of dreams ajar on mystery’s verge.
One lucent corner windowing hidden things
Forced the world’s blind immensity to sight.
It is the most poetic way of describing the waking up of the Consciousness regarding the invisible things. And why this waking up, what has created or given birth to this waking up?
1.7 The First Avatar
Then He says:
The darkness failed and slipped like a falling cloak
From the reclining body of a god.
A god had come down upon earth to wake it up to the inner Consciousness. We could say that this was the first Avatar.
Then through the pallid rift that seemed at first
Hardly enough for a trickle from the suns,
Outpoured the revelation and the flame.
The brief perpetual sign recurred above.
It is the coming down of the first Avatar to wake up the earth to Consciousness — that is, to bring an intensity of Consciousness and Realisation in this inconscient world.
It is obviously the description of the appearance of the first Avatar. It starts from that — because He puts:
Then through the pallid rift that seemed at first
Hardly enough for a trickle from the suns,
Outpoured the revelation and the flame.
“The revelation and the flame.”
The brief perpetual sign recurred above.
That is the sign of the Avatar coming down upon earth. “The brief perpetual sign recurred above”.
A glamour from unreached transcendences
Iridescent with the glory of the Unseen,
A message from the unknown immortal Light
Ablaze upon creation’s quivering edge,
Dawn built her aura of magnificent hues
And buried its seed of grandeur in the hours.
This is the description of the first contact of the Light from above bringing an unknown message.
An instant’s visitor the godhead shone:
On life’s thin border awhile the Vision stood
And bent over earth’s pondering forehead curve.
It is the answer of the Divine to the condition in which had fallen the creation and the first contact of the Gods with the Matter.