M V Nadkarni: Invitation to Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri

Sri Aurobindo has taken up legend almost in its entirety without adding any upakhyanas, any sub-plots or stories to it, but he has made some significant alterations..."

I‘m like somebody who has gone to see the Madurai temple and keeps telling to whoever comes to look at this statue, that statue and the other. The chances are I may never get an opportunity to go into the temple myself and stand before the sanctum sanctorum, but my delight is to describe this, draw people’s attention to this. Ultimately, you have to get into the sanctum sanctorum and stand before the Divine. This is the invitation.

Just as the God of Death had an opportunity of teaching Savitri human history, Savitri takes her turn and shows to the God of Death another angle on human history. The facts are the same, but the way you look at these things can change.

The kingdom of heaven was always on the other side of death. Now, Sri Aurobindo discovered that this gap can be bridged, and he called this bridge between the highest level of the mind that man has ever reached, and a world of perfection, the supramental consciousness. Once this bridge is built, that world can be brought rolling down to our earth.

The God of Death tried to show earlier on to Savitri that all these ideals are meaningless dreams. But she says, my god that I cherish is not the God the Dream, my god is God the Fire: that which purifies, that which aspires, that which constantly burns upwards, the Agni of the Vedas, which always keeps mounting higher and higher!

"You don’t find any horse tragic, any animal tragic. Gods, of course, are beyond tragedy; they are a world of perfection. The only creature who is tragic is man. He has lost the innocence of the beasts, he is yet to achieve the perfection. Mind is what has made the human enterprise tragic. "

"There is no point in thinking of a better theory, a better social system, a better agenda, a better United Nations. As long as the human mind is what it is, it is fully capable of twisting and perverting even the highest truth when it comes. And that is why his [Sri Aurobindo's] one aim was to go beyond the mind such that this perverting path of the mind can be completely abolished."

"So the instructions given to Savitri have two main parts to it. The first part is to find your soul. This is a very widely accepted goal of all spiritual quest. But the second one is equally important in Savitri’s case: can mortal nature change to the divine? "

...the voice says, “In silence seek god’s meaning in thy depths,” and “Find out thy soul.” The first thing we have to do is to find out who we are. [...] without knowing who we are, there is no point in trying to say, “I want to be successful in life.”

"Narad has done all that he wanted to do. He has steeled Savitri’s will, he has explained to Savitri’s mother what he believes pain is and how God created this world."

"...to understand all the secrets of this universe, of this creation, you should be able to make your consciousness as vast as the consciousness of the Creator himself. This is what Sri Aurobindo calls knowledge by identity."

"Book VI, Canto 2 takes up the problem of pain. Sri Aurobindo doesn’t dismiss pain and evil as unreal; evil is real, but evil is not an inherent property characteristic of the supreme Reality. Evil begins at a certain stage in the evolutionary journey, and when its need is over, evil automatically gets eliminated. You can only drive evil away through the spiritual approach by rising to a level of consciousness above the mind."

God is supposed to be perfect and have created this world out of his joy, his great bliss. But the world of ignorance, death, misery―why did God create this world?