Opening Remarks
The gods of these realms arrange the cosmic and individual events based on the Idea from Above that impels them to move and act.
Links of Fate
Inevitable their thoughts like links of Fate
Imposed on the leap and lightning race of mind
And on the frail fortuitous flux of life
And on the liberty of atomic things
Immutable cause and adamant consequence.
They act by releasing ‘thought-forces’ in humanity that create links in the chain of Fate and inevitable steps of Destiny. Not only humanity but also the flow of life and the atomic movements are influenced by these mind-forces creating fixed patterns and rigid links of cause and effect.
Knowledge was rebuilt
Idea gave up the plastic infinity
To which it was born and now traced out instead
Small separate steps of chain-work in a plot:
Immortal once, now tied to birth and end,
Torn from its immediacy of errorless sight,
Knowledge was rebuilt from cells of inference
Into a fixed body flasque and perishable;
Thus bound it grew, but could not last and broke
And to a new thinking’s body left its place.
Knowledge in its highest sense is born of oneness. It sees the entire panorama as a single whole. It beholds the entire play in a single glance. But the gods who must work out the scene unfolding upon earth through the agency of Time must do it part by part through steps and links. But each such step is a loss of oneness and the freedom with which the Divine works. The Idea that impelled the mental world becomes progressively narrow and fixed as it passes down the ladder of Mind-realms. The play in time creates limits and term to everything thereby bringing into play the forces of birth and death.
The spontaneous intuition is lost and replaced by indirect means of knowledge.
A cage for the Infinite
A cage for the Infinite’s great-eyed seraphim Thoughts
Was closed with a criss-cross of world-laws for bars
And hedged into a curt horizon’s arc
The irised vision of the Ineffable.
This higher Mind is the birthplace of religions. It clothes the vast illimitable Truth into rigid curves and lines. The Thought and Vision that gave birth to it in a spontaneous moment of the soul loses its freedom and becomes itself a slave of laws and rules and hedges and limits.
Slave of the hours
A timeless Spirit was made the slave of the hours;
The Unbound was cast into a prison of birth
To make a world that Mind could grasp and rule.
God Himself is then chained to the laws He made and the Unbound free Infinite is coerced into limits of form and name. thus alone the limited Mind could manage to grasp and rule the world.
Tied to date and norm
On an earth which looked towards a thousand suns,
That the created might grow Nature’s lord
And Matter’s depths be illumined with a soul
They tied to date and norm and finite scope
The million-mysteried movement of the One.
Our Earth and matter aspire towards this freedom and splendour and grandeur of the Supramental Truth so that one day the gulf created by thought between the Creator and Creation be filled. These worlds of Higher Mind however limited the scope and action of the Supramental truth which is a truth of the Infinite.
Closing Remarks
This is a vivid description of the Higher Mind which is the birthplace of ideologies and religions. An infinite Truth gave birth to it but entering this domain it becomes itself the slave of fixed processes and rituals and rigid dogmas. Its plastic body and freedom are lost and replaced by an external form that limits its working and its scope.
About Savitri | B1C2-13 The Godhead Behind Nature’s Machinery (pp.20-21)