Savitri Study Class with Dr Alok Pandey, Book 7 Canto 3
Our being is trapped as it were within a triple layer formed of the substance of corresponding worlds of Mind, Life and Matter. These keep the soul captive and do not allow easy access to the realm of the Soul. The seeker has to force his way through these to reach his soul. First among these is the very inertia of our physical nature, our most material base where all our energies and locked and tied by hard knots of Matter. The aspirant has to persist and persist against repeated denials until at last he is able to liberate his consciousness from the prison walls of Matter. This is the first obstacle that Savitri encounters and negotiates by sheer perseverance and will.
Canto Three. The Entry into the Inner Countries
At first out of the busy hum of mind
As if from a loud thronged market into a cave
By an inward moment’s magic she had come.
A stark hushed emptiness became her self:
Her mind unvisited by the voice of thought
Stared at a void deep’s dumb infinity.
Her heights receded, her depths behind her closed;
All fled away from her and left her blank.
But when she came back to her self of thought,
Once more she was a human thing on earth,
A lump of Matter, a house of closed sight,
A mind compelled to think out ignorance,
A life-force pressed into a camp of works
And the material world her limiting field.
Amazed like one unknowing she sought her way
Out of the tangle of man’s ignorant past
That took the surface person for the soul.
Then a Voice spoke that dwelt on secret heights:
“For man thou seekst, not for thyself alone.
Only if God assumes the human mind
And puts on mortal ignorance for his cloak
And makes himself the Dwarf with triple stride,
Can he help man to grow into the God.
As man disguised the cosmic Greatness works
And finds the mystic inaccessible gate
And opens the Immortal’s golden door.
Man, human, follows in God’s human steps.
Accepting his darkness thou must bring to him light,
Accepting his sorrow thou must bring to him bliss.
In Matter’s body find thy heaven-born soul.”
Then Savitri surged out of her body’s wall
And stood a little span outside herself
And looked into her subtle being’s depths
And in its heart as in a lotus-bud
Divined her secret and mysterious soul.
At the dim portal of the inner life
That bars out from our depths the body’s mind
And all that lives but by the body’s breath,
She knocked and pressed against the ebony gate.
The living portal groaned with sullen hinge:
Heavily reluctant it complained inert
Against the tyranny of the spirit’s touch.
A formidable voice cried from within:
“Back, creature of earth, lest tortured and torn thou die.”Savitri: 488 – 489
