Savitri confronting the being of Death
The response of the Great in moments of adversity
In a general way, in her universal being the Divine Mother watches over all creation intervening where there is an intense call or a sudden need, since the play is turning too dangerous for humanity. But in her Presence as the Avatar She forms close and intimate relations with those who have turned to her and bound themselves to her with the chord of faith and devotion. With these souls She not only watches over but takes charge of the individual’s destiny. She fights their battles and leads their forward march and wins their victory. Let us give ourselves gladly and consciously and willfully to the Divine Mother and the eventual victory is certain.
She guarded him in her bosom and strove to soothe
His anguished brow and body with her hands.
All grief and fear were dead within her now
And a great calm had fallen. The wish to lessen
His suffering, the impulse that opposes pain
Were the one mortal feeling left. It passed:
Griefless and strong she waited like the gods. [564 – 565]
Then suddenly there came on her the change
Which in tremendous moments of our lives
Can overtake sometimes the human soul
And hold it up towards its luminous source. [571]
A Presence was there that filled the listening world;
A central All assumed her boundless life.
A sovereignty, a silence and a swiftness,
One brooded over abysses who was she.
As in a choric robe of unheard sounds
A Force descended trailing endless lights;
Linking Time’s seconds to infinity,
Illimitably it girt the earth and her:
It sank into her soul and she was changed.
Then like a thought fulfilled by some great word
That mightiness assumed a symbol form:
Her being’s spaces quivered with its touch,
It covered her as with immortal wings;
On its lips the curve of the unuttered Truth,
A halo of Wisdom’s lightnings for its crown,
It entered the mystic lotus in her head,
A thousand-petalled home of power and light.
Immortal leader of her mortality,
Doer of her works and fountain of her words,
Invulnerable by Time, omnipotent,
It stood above her calm, immobile, mute.
All in her mated with that mighty hour,
As if the last remnant had been slain by Death
Of the humanity that once was hers.
Assuming a spiritual wide control,
Making life’s sea a mirror of heaven’s sky,
The young divinity in her earthly limbs
Filled with celestial strength her mortal part.
Over was the haunted pain, the rending fear:
Her grief had passed away, her mind was still,
Her heart beat quietly with a sovereign force.
There came a freedom from the heart-strings’ clutch,
Now all her acts sprang from a godhead’s calm.
Calmly she laid upon the forest soil
The dead who still reposed upon her breast
And bore to turn away from the dead form:
Sole now she rose to meet the dreadful god. [572 – 573]
We have here a powerful description of the being of Savitri as it rises to confront Death. Out of her humanity there surges forth the Godhead whose divine radiance and power removes all fear and dread of Death. The mild and benevolent Deity now assumes a powerful form capable of slaying Death and turning the tide of Time by her look. She is now ready to confront the enigma of Death.
Savitri, the divine Warrior armed with the power of Love
The Word of Light refusing the blind law of Night
The world enveloped by darkness meekly submitting to the law of death knows her not. It turns to darker deities and erects a god in its own image. But She is there, even in the core of darkness She is there as a flaming warrior whose Light no darkness can quench. It is the radiance of divine Love that shines at the core of all things. It is this divine Love that shines even in the densest darkness that is the hope of all things and the promise and assurance of the ultimate victory over falsehood and darkness and suffering and death.
Unendingly there rose in Savitri,
Like moonlit ridges on a shuddering flood,
A stir of thoughts out of some silence born
Across the sea of her dumb fathomless heart.
At last she spoke; her voice was heard by Night:
“I bow not to thee, O huge mask of death,
Black lie of night to the cowed soul of man,
Unreal, inescapable end of things,
Thou grim jest played with the immortal spirit.
Conscious of immortality I walk.
A victor spirit conscious of my force,
Not as a suppliant to thy gates I came:
Unslain I have survived the clutch of Night.
My first strong grief moves not my seated mind;
My unwept tears have turned to pearls of strength:
I have transformed my ill-shaped brittle clay
Into the hardness of a statued soul.
Now in the wrestling of the splendid gods
My spirit shall be obstinate and strong
Against the vast refusal of the world.
I stoop not with the subject mob of minds
Who run to glean with eager satisfied hands
And pick from its mire mid many trampling feet
Its scornful small concessions to the weak.
Mine is the labour of the battling gods:
Imposing on the slow reluctant years
The flaming will that reigns beyond the stars,
They lay the law of Mind on Matter’s works
And win the soul’s wish from earth’s inconscient Force. [588]
“Who is this God imagined by thy night,
Contemptuously creating worlds disdained,
Who made for vanity the brilliant stars?
Not he who has reared his temple in my thoughts
And made his sacred floor my human heart.
My God is will and triumphs in his paths,
My God is love and sweetly suffers all.
To him I have offered hope for sacrifice
And gave my longings as a sacrament.
Who shall prohibit or hedge in his course,
The wonderful, the charioteer, the swift?
A traveller of the million roads of life,
His steps familiar with the lights of heaven
Tread without pain the sword-paved courts of hell;
There he descends to edge eternal joy.
Love’s golden wings have power to fan thy void:
The eyes of love gaze starlike through death’s night,
The feet of love tread naked hardest worlds.
He labours in the depths, exults on the heights;
He shall remake thy universe, O Death.” [591 – 592]
These passages give us a glimpse of the Divine Mother’s heart of violent Love that brooks no obstacle to the divine Work. These lines also reveal to us the nature of God, not the one we have erected by our thoughts and imaginations. Our vision clouded by death sees God with the eyes of ignorance. We have created an unbridgeable gulf between creation and the Creator. But Savitri reveals to us the true nature of the Divine that ever leans down to lift earth and the creation and man out of the darkness of the abyss.
The Love that can conquer death
As souls we share her kingdom of Truth and Love and Bliss. Together we are partners in the great game of life. Safe in her arms of Love no power can slay our souls and even the torments and tortures of hell become by her touch thrilling passages to greater heavens radiating with her Light and Delight. This is the first victory over death that She wins for us. The sting of death vanishes as we begin to see that this too is a mask behind which shines her Beauty and her Love.
Love in me knows the truth all changings mask.
I know that knowledge is a vast embrace:
I know that every being is myself,
In every heart is hidden the myriad One.
I know the calm Transcendent bears the world,
The veiled Inhabitant, the silent Lord:
I feel his secret act, his intimate fire;
I hear the murmur of the cosmic Voice.
I know my coming was a wave from God.
For all his suns were conscient in my birth,
And one who loves in us came veiled by death.
Then was man born among the monstrous stars
Dowered with a mind and heart to conquer thee.” [594 –595]
“O Death, I have triumphed over thee within;
I quiver no more with the assault of grief;
A mighty calmness seated deep within
Has occupied my body and my sense:
It takes the world’s grief and transmutes to strength,
It makes the world’s joy one with the joy of God.
My love eternal sits throned on God’s calm;
For Love must soar beyond the very heavens
And find its secret sense ineffable;
It must change its human ways to ways divine,
Yet keep its sovereignty of earthly bliss.
…
Our lives are God’s messengers beneath the stars;
To dwell under death’s shadow they have come
Tempting God’s light to earth for the ignorant race,
His love to fill the hollow in men’s hearts,
His bliss to heal the unhappiness of the world.
For I, the woman, am the force of God,
He the Eternal’s delegate soul in man.
My will is greater than thy law, O Death;
My love is stronger than the bonds of Fate:
Our love is the heavenly seal of the Supreme.
I guard that seal against thy rending hands.
Love must not cease to live upon the earth;
For Love is the bright link twixt earth and heaven,
Love is the far Transcendent’s angel here;
Love is man’s lien on the Absolute.” [633]
“Yes, I am human. Yet shall man by me,
Since in humanity waits his hour the God,
Trample thee down to reach the immortal heights,
Transcending grief and pain and fate and death.
Yes, my humanity is a mask of God:
He dwells in me, the mover of my acts,
Turning the great wheel of his cosmic work.
I am the living body of his light,
I am the thinking instrument of his power,
I incarnate Wisdom in an earthly breast,
I am his conquering and unslayable will.
The formless Spirit drew in me its shape;
In me are the Nameless and the secret Name.” [634]
Savitri has come armed with the power of divine Love. She is the transcendent Force, the divine Love that has plunged deep into the abyss to heal and lift creation out of darkness. But for that man must open to the divine Love and change this alchemist energy soiled by human ego and passions into a divine Force freed of desire and turbidity. Refined and purified and uplifted and divinised by her Love man will one day cross over the borders of mortality and live here conscious of his godhead. Even as being human She hides her divinity behind the mask of a form and name, so too we being identified with our human-ness hide the godhead that we inwardly are and can become. Savitri comes to show us the way to transmute our humanity into divinity.
Savitri as seen through the eyes of Death
The response of Darkness to the siege of Light
A day will come when even the most ignorant human being plunged into the densest darkness shall recognize her Truth and turn towards her with worshipping hands and surrendering himself to her find his goal and life’s true purpose.
Who then art thou hiding in human guise?
Thy voice carries the sound of infinity,
Knowledge is with thee, Truth speaks through thy words;
The light of things beyond shines in thy eyes.
But where is thy strength to conquer Time and Death?
Hast thou God’s force to build heaven’s values here?
For truth and knowledge are an idle gleam
If Knowledge brings not power to change the world,
If Might comes not to give to Truth her right.
A blind Force, not Truth has made this ignorant world,
A blind Force, not Truth orders the lives of men:
By Power, not Light, the great Gods rule the world;
Power is the arm of God, the seal of Fate.
O human claimant to immortality,
Reveal thy power, lay bare thy spirit’s force,
Then will I give back to thee Satyavan.
Or if the Mighty Mother is with thee,
Show me her face that I may worship her;
Let deathless eyes look into the eyes of Death,
An imperishable Force touching brute things
Transform earth’s death into immortal life.
Then can thy dead return to thee and live.
The prostrate earth perhaps shall lift her gaze
And feel near her the secret body of God
And love and joy overtake fleeing Time.” [663 – 664]
The being of Death was once a radiant god who has fallen from his once divine sphere just as our souls have fallen. But now the Darkness is face to face with the supreme Light and knows that the time has come for him to be freed from his dark robe and recover his lost divinity.
Savitri, the incarnate Divine Mother revealing herself to Death
The final battle and the great Victory
The moment has arrived for which the ages have waited. The being of Darkness is face to face with the radiance of the Light that kindles the fire of the suns. The knot of suffering confronts the very core of Delight. Unconsciousness meets the very fount of Consciousness and falsehood trembles before the sheer power and majesty of Truth. Let us not resist her advance. Her blows too are acts of Love that devour our ego and release the radiant Self within. Let us simply surrender ourselves to her with absolute trust and the joy and peace of the Eternal will be our share.
And Savitri looked on Death and answered not.
Almost it seemed as if in his symbol shape
The world’s darkness had consented to Heaven-light
And God needed no more the Inconscient’s screen.
A mighty transformation came on her.
A halo of the indwelling Deity,
The Immortal’s lustre that had lit her face
And tented its radiance in her body’s house,
Overflowing made the air a luminous sea.
In a flaming moment of apocalypse
The Incarnation thrust aside its veil.
A little figure in infinity
Yet stood and seemed the Eternal’s very house,
As if the world’s centre was her very soul
And all wide space was but its outer robe.
A curve of the calm hauteur of far heaven
Descending into earth’s humility,
Her forehead’s span vaulted the Omniscient’s gaze,
Her eyes were two stars that watched the universe.
The Power that from her being’s summit reigned,
The Presence chambered in lotus secrecy,
Came down and held the centre in her brow
Where the mind’s Lord in his control-room sits;
There throned on concentration’s native seat
He opens that third mysterious eye in man,
The Unseen’s eye that looks at the unseen,
When Light with a golden ecstasy fills his brain
And the Eternal’s wisdom drives his choice
And eternal Will seizes the mortal’s will.
It stirred in the lotus of her throat of song,
And in her speech throbbed the immortal Word,
Her life sounded with the steps of the world-soul
Moving in harmony with the cosmic Thought.
As glides God’s sun into the mystic cave
Where hides his light from the pursuing gods,
It glided into the lotus of her heart
And woke in it the Force that alters Fate.
It poured into her navel’s lotus depth,
Lodged in the little life-nature’s narrow home,
On the body’s longings grew heaven-rapture’s flower
And made desire a pure celestial flame,
Broke into the cave where coiled World-Energy sleeps
And smote the thousand-hooded serpent Force
That blazing towered and clasped the World-Self above,
Joined Matter’s dumbness to the Spirit’s hush
And filled earth’s acts with the Spirit’s silent power.
Thus changed she waited for the Word to speak.
Eternity looked into the eyes of Death
And Darkness saw God’s living Reality. [664 – 665]
In this wonderful passage, we see Savitri, the incarnate Divine Mother, casting aside her human robe and manifesting her divinity before Death.
The conquest over Death
Who can resist her mastering touch? Who can stand before her Truth-Light? All shadows crumble to dust before her gaze as non-existent realities that are mere illusions without any power. Death itself dies and life is reborn into a greater diviner existence. With her transmuting touch all becomes a wonder weft of her luminous Force and the unfolding of her limitless Grace and Love.
Although he knew refusing still to know,
Although he saw refusing still to see.
Unshakable he stood claiming his right.
His spirit bowed; his will obeyed the law
Of its own nature binding even on Gods.
The Two opposed each other face to face.
His being like a huge fort of darkness towered;
Around it her light grew, an ocean’s siege.
Awhile the Shade survived defying heaven:
Assailing in front, oppressing from above,
A concrete mass of conscious power, he bore
The tyranny of her divine desire.
A pressure of intolerable force
Weighed on his unbowed head and stubborn breast;
Light like a burning tongue licked up his thoughts,
Light was a luminous torture in his heart,
Light coursed, a splendid agony, through his nerves;
His darkness muttered perishing in her blaze.
Her mastering Word commanded every limb
And left no room for his enormous will
That seemed pushed out into some helpless space
And could no more re-enter but left him void.
He called to Night but she fell shuddering back,
He called to Hell but sullenly it retired:
He turned to the Inconscient for support,
From which he was born, his vast sustaining self;
It drew him back towards boundless vacancy
As if by himself to swallow up himself:
He called to his strength, but it refused his call.
His body was eaten by light, his spirit devoured.
At last he knew defeat inevitable
And left crumbling the shape that he had worn,
Abandoning hope to make man’s soul his prey
And force to be mortal the immortal spirit.
Afar he fled shunning her dreaded touch
And refuge took in the retreating Night.
In the dream twilight of that symbol world
The dire universal Shadow disappeared
Vanishing into the Void from which it came.
As if deprived of its original cause,
The twilight realm passed fading from their souls,
And Satyavan and Savitri were alone.
But neither stirred: between those figures rose
A mute invisible and translucent wall.
In the long blank moment’s pause nothing could move:
All waited on the unknown inscrutable Will. [667 – 668]
In this powerful passage, we witness the being of Death which is an embodiment of all that resists the human march towards a divine existence here upon earth melt and dissolve into the original Light. It is not just a poetic image but an event that is taking place even now in our very bodies. The victory of Love over Death is being progressively translated into man’s inner being and his body’s cells as he opens more and more to her divine Love. No amount of resistance can change the course of the divine Will even though our human stupidity can delay it. Yet the victory is certain for the ‘deed is done’.
The sacrifice of the Divine Mother
The lover and the liberator of man
Death has died. This is written in the record book of destiny that is bound to unfold upon earth with the passage of time. Her Work being over, the Divine Mother could have returned letting this new script unfold through a long passage of time. But She has stayed back, here, upon earth. She has chosen earth as her home and would never leave it for it is upon earth that the battle and the victory is to be won. In this tremendous task of terrestrial transformation, this Work of works of the divinisation of life and matter, we are her instruments and partners. To aspire for the divinisation of life is to be directly under her care. It is to tie ourselves with her Avataric Self indissolubly for all lives to come.
I climb not to thy everlasting Day,
Even as I have shunned thy eternal Night.
To me who turn not from thy terrestrial Way,
Give back the other self my nature asks.
Thy spaces need him not to help their joy;
Earth needs his beautiful spirit made by thee
To fling delight down like a net of gold.
Earth is the chosen place of mightiest souls;
Earth is the heroic spirit’s battlefield,
The forge where the Archmason shapes his works.
Thy servitudes on earth are greater, King,
Than all the glorious liberties of heaven.
…
There where the gods and demons battle in night
Or wrestle on the borders of the Sun,
Taught by the sweetness and the pain of life
To bear the uneven strenuous beat that throbs
Against the edge of some divinest hope,
To dare the impossible with these pangs of search,
In me the spirit of immortal love
Stretches its arms out to embrace mankind.
Too far thy heavens for me from suffering men.
Imperfect is the joy not shared by all.
O to spread forth, O to encircle and seize
More hearts till love in us has filled thy world!
O life, the life beneath the wheeling stars!
For victory in the tournament with death,
For bending of the fierce and difficult bow,
For flashing of the splendid sword of God!
…
I know that I can lift man’s soul to God,
I know that he can bring the Immortal down.
Our will labours permitted by thy will
And without thee an empty roar of storm,
A senseless whirlwind is the Titan’s force
And without thee a snare the strength of gods.
Let not the inconscient gulf swallow man’s race
That through earth’s ignorance struggles towards thy Light.
O Thunderer with the lightnings of the soul,
Give not to darkness and to death thy sun,
Achieve thy wisdom’s hidden firm decree
And the mandate of thy secret world-wide love.” [685 – 687]
“In vain thou temptst with solitary bliss
Two spirits saved out of a suffering world;
My soul and his indissolubly linked
In the one task for which our lives were born,
To raise the world to God in deathless Light,
To bring God down to the world on earth we came,
To change the earthly life to life divine.
I keep my will to save the world and man;
Even the charm of thy alluring voice,
O blissful Godhead, cannot seize and snare.
I sacrifice not earth to happier worlds. [692]
In this remarkable passage where Savitri is asked to return back to her highest heavens from where She has descended to do the work of transformation upon earth. But Savitri refuses to return. She renounces her heavenly home to live amongst us mortals and continue to work until each and every grain of dust is transformed into radiant particles of Delight. She has come to make earth equal and even greater than heaven. Towards this She must labour on. Let the seekers after Nirvana and solitary salvation turn away towards rest and peace in the arms of the Eternal. But for us, her children, the command is to work for her and with her, to be driven by her Force as channels and instruments of her Will, to fill our earthly existence with her Light and Might and Delight.
Savitri securing the gifts divine for earth and man
The boon of divinising life upon earth
It is done. She has come bringing with her the gifts divine. She brings with her the calm and peace of the Lord that is one with joy. She brings the truth of oneness and infinity that heals all division and suffering. She brings her energy and power that heal and harmonise and win the victory over darkness and falsehood and ignorance and death. She brings her sweetness and joy and love as the revitalising nectar that flows from her deep heart of Love.
“Choose, spirit, thy supreme choice not given again;
For now from my highest being looks at thee
The nameless formless peace where all things rest.
In a happy vast sublime cessation know,—
An immense extinction in eternity,
A point that disappears in the infinite,—
Felicity of the extinguished flame,
Last sinking of a wave in a boundless sea,
End of the trouble of thy wandering thoughts,
Close of the journeying of thy pilgrim soul.
Accept, O music, weariness of thy notes,
O stream, wide breaking of thy channel banks.”
The moments fell into eternity.
But someone yearned within a bosom unknown
And silently the woman’s heart replied:
“Thy peace, O Lord, a boon within to keep
Amid the roar and ruin of wild Time
For the magnificent soul of man on earth.
Thy calm, O Lord, that bears thy hands of joy.”
Limitless like ocean round a lonely isle
A second time the eternal cry arose:
“Wide open are the ineffable gates in front.
My spirit leans down to break the knot of earth,
Amorous of oneness without thought or sign
To cast down wall and fence, to strip heaven bare,
See with the large eye of infinity,
Unweave the stars and into silence pass.”
In an immense and world-destroying pause
She heard a million creatures cry to her.
Through the tremendous stillness of her thoughts
Immeasurably the woman’s nature spoke:
“Thy oneness, Lord, in many approaching hearts,
My sweet infinity of thy numberless souls.”
Mightily retreating like a sea in ebb
A third time swelled the great admonishing call:
“I spread abroad the refuge of my wings.
Out of its incommunicable deeps
My power looks forth of mightiest splendour, stilled
Into its majesty of sleep, withdrawn
Above the dreadful whirlings of the world.”
A sob of things was answer to the voice,
And passionately the woman’s heart replied:
“Thy energy, Lord, to seize on woman and man,
To take all things and creatures in their grief
And gather them into a mother’s arms.”
Solemn and distant like a seraph’s lyre
A last great time the warning sound was heard:
“I open the wide eye of solitude
To uncover the voiceless rapture of my bliss,
Where in a pure and exquisite hush it lies
Motionless in its slumber of ecstasy,
Resting from the sweet madness of the dance
Out of whose beat the throb of hearts was born.”
Breaking the Silence with appeal and cry
A hymn of adoration tireless climbed,
A music beat of winged uniting souls,
Then all the woman yearningly replied:
“Thy embrace which rends the living knot of pain,
Thy joy, O Lord, in which all creatures breathe,
Thy magic flowing waters of deep love,
Thy sweetness give to me for earth and men.” [696 – 697]
The victory over death is but one step towards the divinisation of life upon earth. The hollow occupied by death must be filled with the nectar of immortality. The soul of man must recover its portion of peace and joy even as it joins the dance of Time amidst earthly circumstances. The mind of man must recover the oneness lost and grow into a mind of Light. The life of man must discover its inexhaustible founts of energy in the bosom of the Divine Mother. The body of man must be freed from the knot of pain and dwell in her embrace even as our soul. We must breathe her joy and the soothing streams of her sweetness and love remake our life into the divine image. This passage describes these boons that the Divine Mother has secured for earth and humanity.
Savitri, the Sun-Word, the giver of the highest Light and Love and Truth
The Supreme Mother in her unique role as the beloved and the supreme servitor of the Supreme
The mandate to transform earthly life into the life divine is with her. For it is She who has gone forth into the world from the time of its inception with the sole will to uplift and transform matter into shapes conscious of divinity and this material life upon earth into a home for the Wonderful. From age to age She has borne the earth’s pain and suffering in many a form, struggled against the forces that oppose the divine Advent, fought our battles as the leader and queen of the evolutionary march so that the Light of Truth be brought down and established upon earthly life as firmly as it is established in the highest heavens. The hour of fulfilment has arrived for the seal and sanction of the Supreme has been given and nothing can now resist the advancing caravan of Light.
In the heart of my creation’s mystery
I will enact the drama of thy soul,
Inscribe the long romance of Thee and Me.
I will pursue thee across the centuries;
Thou shalt be hunted through the world by love,
Naked of ignorance’ protecting veil
And without covert from my radiant gods.
…
I will possess in thee my universe,
The universe find all I am in thee.
Thou shalt bear all things that all things may change,
Thou shalt fill all with my splendour and my bliss,
Thou shalt meet all with thy transmuting soul. [699]
By my outer pains and inner sweetnesses
Finding my joy in my opposite mysteries
Thou shalt respond to me from every nerve.
A vision shall compel thy coursing breath,
Thy heart shall drive thee on the wheel of works,
Thy mind shall urge thee through the flames of thought,
To meet me in the abyss and on the heights,
To feel me in the tempest and the calm,
And love me in the noble and the vile,
In beautiful things and terrible desire.
The pains of hell shall be to thee my kiss,
The flowers of heaven persuade thee with my touch.
My fiercest masks shall my attractions bring.
Music shall find thee in the voice of swords,
Beauty pursue thee through the core of flame.
Thou shalt know me in the rolling of the spheres
And cross me in the atoms of the whirl.
The wheeling forces of my universe
Shall cry to thee the summons of my name.
Delight shall drop down from my nectarous moon,
My fragrance seize thee in the jasmine’s snare,
My eye shall look upon thee from the sun.
Mirror of Nature’s secret spirit made,
Thou shalt reflect my hidden heart of joy,
Thou shalt drink down my sweetness unalloyed
In my pure lotus-cup of starry brim.
My dreadful hands laid on thy bosom shall force
Thy being bathed in fiercest longing’s streams.
Thou shalt discover the one and quivering note,
And cry, the harp of all my melodies,
And roll, my foaming wave in seas of love. [700]
My creatures shall demand me from thy heart.
Thou shalt not shrink from any brother soul.
Thou shalt be attracted helplessly to all.
Men seeing thee shall feel my hands of joy,
In sorrow’s pangs feel steps of the world’s delight,
Their life experience its tumultuous shock
In the mutual craving of two opposites.
Hearts touched by thy love shall answer to my call,
Discover the ancient music of the spheres
In the revealing accents of thy voice
And nearer draw to me because thou art:
Enamoured of thy spirit’s loveliness
They shall embrace my body in thy soul,
Hear in thy life the beauty of my laugh,
Know the thrilled bliss with which I made the worlds.
All that thou hast, shall be for others’ bliss,
All that thou art, shall to my hands belong.
I will pour delight from thee as from a jar,
I will whirl thee as my chariot through the ways,
I will use thee as my sword and as my lyre,
I will play on thee my minstrelsies of thought.
And when thou art vibrant with all ecstasy,
And when thou liv’st one spirit with all things,
Then will I spare thee not my living fires,
But make thee a channel for my timeless force.
My hidden presence led thee unknowing on
From thy beginning in earth’s voiceless bosom
Through life and pain and time and will and death,
Through outer shocks and inner silences
Along the mystic roads of Space and Time
To the experience which all Nature hides.
Who hunts and seizes me, my captive grows:
This shalt thou henceforth learn from thy heart-beats.
For ever love, O beautiful slave of God!
O lasso of my rapture’s widening noose,
Become my cord of universal love.
The spirit ensnared by thee force to delight
Of creation’s oneness sweet and fathomless,
Compelled to embrace my myriad unities
And all my endless forms and divine souls.
O Mind, grow full of the eternal peace;
O Word, cry out the immortal litany:
Built is the golden tower, the flame-child born. [701 – 702]
In this wonderful passage, Sri Aurobindo reveals to us that She is the beloved of the Supreme who has taken upon herself this tremendous task of divinising earth. For this She has struggled and suffered through many a life and now the hour of victory has come. The golden bridge between the higher worlds of Truth and this lower triple world has been built. The eternal Supermind has emerged out of the hidden depths of matter actively into the forefront of earthly life. Let all anguish be appeased, let our minds grow full of the eternal Peace. Let our hearts be full of joy and hope for the transformation has begun and the forces of a higher order are entering the earth through the golden bridge.
The Power of God labouring upon earth
The Spirit’s Power and the Face of Truth
A mother to our wants, a friend in our difficulties, a compassionate mentor whose wisdom exceeds the vision of Time, a benevolent Guide who never judges or condemns us even as She helps us move upon the pathways of Truth and Light and Right, She is our soul’s Beloved whom we have sought and missed through countless births. But She remembers and ever reminds us of her constant help spread over our life as the eternal sunshine. In our ignorance and impatience, in our revolt and anguish, we have left her heart and wandered away into gulfs of darkness and seas of sorrow and bitterness. But She never left us. Pursuing us through lives She has held our souls in her unshakable grasp of Love, cradled it with songs from her world of Truth, fed it upon her milk of sweetness and delight until we have grown and woken up to find that She was always there. It is we who felt alone straying in our dreams and feeling not her touch in the grossness of our sense-engrossed life. But her tremendous Love has leaned across seas of Light, entered into gulfs of darkness and rescued us. Now we shall never be alone. We shall walk through life held by her hands and living in her heart we shall see the world with her eyes.
“Descend to life with him thy heart desires.
O Satyavan, O luminous Savitri,
I sent you forth of old beneath the stars,
A dual power of God in an ignorant world,
In a hedged creation shut from limitless self,
Bringing down God to the insentient globe,
Lifting earth-beings to immortality.
In the world of my knowledge and my ignorance
Where God is unseen and only is heard a Name
And knowledge is trapped in the boundaries of mind
And life is hauled in the drag-net of desire
And Matter hides the soul from its own sight,
You are my Force at work to uplift earth’s fate,
My self that moves up the immense incline
Between the extremes of the spirit’s night and day.
He is my soul that climbs from nescient Night
Through life and mind and supernature’s Vast
To the supernal light of Timelessness
And my eternity hid in moving Time
And my boundlessness cut by the curve of Space.
It climbs to the greatness it has left behind
And to the beauty and joy from which it fell,
To the closeness and sweetness of all things divine,
To light without bounds and life illimitable,
Taste of the depths of the Ineffable’s bliss,
Touch of the immortal and the infinite.
He is my soul that gropes out of the beast
To reach humanity’s heights of lucent thought
And the vicinity of Truth’s sublime.
He is the godhead growing in human lives
And in the body of earth-being’s forms:
He is the soul of man climbing to God
In Nature’s surge out of earth’s ignorance.
O Savitri, thou art my spirit’s Power,
The revealing voice of my immortal Word,
The face of Truth upon the roads of Time
Pointing to the souls of men the routes to God.
While the dim light from the veiled Spirit’s peak
Falls upon Matter’s stark inconscient sleep
As if a pale moonbeam on a dense glade,
And Mind in a half-light moves amid half-truths
And the human heart knows only human love
And life is a stumbling and imperfect force
And the body counts out its precarious days,
You shall be born into man’s dubious hours
In forms that hide the soul’s divinity
And show through veils of the earth’s doubting air
My glory breaking as through clouds a sun,
Or burning like a rare and inward fire,
And with my nameless influence fill men’s lives.
Yet shall they look up as to peaks of God
And feel God like a circumambient air
And rest on God as on a motionless base. [702 – 703]
Savitri, the Divine Mother, and Satyavan, the soul of man rescued from the net of ignorance and pain, are back upon earth. A new act begins in the drama of earthly life. Heirs of her divinity we must now play the game divine consciously. The epic of our soul must find its fulfilment in the divine victory and the divine manifestation rather than in an escape into Nirvana with tired wings laden with suffering and pain.
The saviour Grace of the Supreme
The Power and Light and love that leans from the Beyond to help earth and man
She has come wearing a human shape and yet She is the same Divine Mother who has given birth to creation. She has been writing its story by the blood in her heart taking one human form after another. For the story of her soul and the story of creation are one in essence. This time and in this form She has come to give birth to the new creation and win the decisive victory crowning this earth with her Glory. She is at once human and divine embodying the great secret of the earthly descents of the Avatar. The soul that recognises the Divine in the human mask is already redeemed by this very act of faith. Its destiny is sealed and it is chosen forever to be her partner in the great and tremendous game of life.
“What high change is in thee, O Savitri? Bright
Ever thou wast, a goddess still and pure,
Yet dearer to me by thy sweet human parts
Earth gave thee making thee yet more divine. [718]
A heavenly queen consenting to his will,
She clasped his feet, by her enshrining hair
Enveloped in a velvet cloak of love,
And answered softly like a murmuring lute:
“All now is changed, yet all is still the same.
Lo, we have looked upon the face of God,
Our life has opened with divinity.
We have borne identity with the Supreme
And known his meaning in our mortal lives.
Our love has grown greater by that mighty touch
And learned its heavenly significance,
Yet nothing is lost of mortal love’s delight.
Heaven’s touch fulfils but cancels not our earth:
Our bodies need each other in the same last;
Still in our breasts repeat heavenly secret rhythm
Our human heart-beats passionately close.
Still am I she who came to thee mid the murmur
Of sunlit leaves upon this forest verge;
I am the Madran, I am Savitri.
All that I was before, I am to thee still,
Close comrade of thy thoughts and hopes and toils,
All happy contraries I would join for thee.
All sweet relations marry in our life;
I am thy kingdom even as thou art mine,
The sovereign and the slave of thy desire,
Thy prone possessor, sister of thy soul
And mother of thy wants; thou art my world,
The earth I need, the heaven my thoughts desire,
The world I inhabit and the god I adore.
Thy body is my body’s counterpart
Whose every limb my answering limb desires,
Whose heart is key to all my heart-beats,—this
I am and thou to me, O Satyavan.
Our wedded walk through life begins anew,
No gladness lost, no depth of mortal joy.
Let us go through this new world that is the same,
For it is given back, but it is known,
A playing-ground and dwelling-house of God
Who hides himself in bird and beast and man
Sweetly to find himself again by love,
By oneness. His presence leads the rhythms of life
That seek for mutual joy in spite of pain.
We have each other found, O Satyavan,
In the great light of the discovered soul.
Let us go back, for eve is in the skies.
Now grief is dead and serene bliss remains
The heart of all our days for evermore.
Lo, all these beings in this wonderful world!
Let us give joy to all, for joy is ours.
For not for ourselves alone our spirits came
Out of the veil of the Unmanifest,
Out of the deep immense Unknowable
Upon the ignorant breast of dubious earth,
Into the ways of labouring, seeking men,
Two fires that burn towards that parent Sun,
Two rays that travel to the original Light.
To lead man’s soul towards truth and God we are born,
To draw the chequered scheme of mortal life
Into some semblance of the Immortal’s plan,
To shape it closer to an image of God,
A little nearer to the Idea divine.” [719 – 720]
God becoming human is the great secret of terrestrial transformation. It also gives our body and mind to participate in the divine play consciously and thereby share the joy of a wonderful and unique relation with the Divine in flesh and blood. This unique joy of such a complete relation with the Divine right down to the very cells of our body is given only to man. Even the gods covet it and know it not. Such is the mystery of the Divine descents. Let us then wake up in us the will to collaborate in the divine Work upon earth for it is this for which our souls have descended and assumed forms of bird and beast and man.
The great secret
This, this is the greatest secret, — the mystery of God’s birth in Time and the soul’s redemption by a courageous act of complete surrender. It is the sunlit path opened for earth and man. The Light has come. The road has opened. We have only to walk with a complete trust and confidence in her Grace. Giving ourselves completely to her and her Work lets us be free from all anxieties and fear since wherever there is the human conscious of his soul filled with faith and surrender, and the Divine Mother holding it captive in her Love, there all efforts are crowned with the divine Victory.
“Lay all on her; she is the cause of all.
With her enchantments she has twined me round.
Behold, at noon leaving this house of clay
I wandered in far-off eternities,
Yet still, a captive in her golden hands,
I tread your little hillock called green earth
And in the moments of your transient sun
Live glad among the busy works of men.”
Then all eyes turned their wondering looks where stood,
A deepening redder gold upon her cheeks,
With lowered lids the noble lovely child,
And one consenting thought moved every breast.
“What gleaming marvel of the earth or skies
Stands silently by human Satyavan
To mark a brilliance in the dusk of eve?
If this is she of whom the world has heard,
Wonder no more at any happy change.
Each easy miracle of felicity
Of her transmuting heart the alchemy is.”
Then one spoke there who seemed a priest and sage:
“O woman soul, what light, what power revealed,
Working the rapid marvels of this day,
Opens for us by thee a happier age?”
Her lashes fluttering upwards gathered in
To a vision which had scanned immortal things,
Rejoicing, human forms for their delight.
They claimed for their deep childlike motherhood
The life of all these souls to be her life,
Then falling veiled the light. Low she replied,
“Awakened to the meaning of my heart
That to feel love and oneness is to live
And this the magic of our golden change,
Is all the truth I know or seek, O sage.” [723 – 724]
Savitri reveals to us the great secret. It is the secret of the Divine sacrifice in matter to redeem earth and humanity. On the one side it is a complete self-giving to the Divine and his Work and, on the other side, it is a bringing into our lives the law of her Oneness and Love, her Love that weaves the stars and works in the dust and the rose, her Love that labours in the dumb resisting Night to lift our soul and body and mind out of darkness and ignorance towards Light and Freedom and Immortality and Bliss.
Om Anandmayee, Chaitanyamayee, Satyamayee Parame