THE MOTHER’S SAVITRI: Book 1 Canto 5

The Mother Reads Selections from Savitri by Sri Aurobindo

Book 1. The Book of Beginnings

Canto 5. The Yoga of the King: The Yoga of the Spirit’s Freedom and Greatness

THIS knowledge first he had of time-born men.
Admitted through a curtain of bright mind
That hangs between our thought and absolute sight,
He found the occult cave, the mystic door
Near to the well of vision in the soul,
And entered where the Wings of Glory brood
In the sunlit space where all is for ever known.
[p. 74]
* * *
There in a hidden chamber closed and mute
Are kept the record graphs of the cosmic scribe,
And there the tables of the sacred Law,
. . .
The symbol powers of number and of form,
And the secret code of the history of the world
And Nature’s correspondence with the soul
Are written in the mystic heart of Life.
[p. 74]
* * *
In the glow of the Spirit’s room of memories
He could recover the luminous marginal notes
Dotting with light the crabbed ambiguous scroll
[p. 75]
* * *
He saw the unshaped thought in soulless forms,
Knew Matter pregnant with spiritual sense,
Mind dare the study of the Unknowable,
Life its gestation of the Golden Child.
[p. 76]
* * *
A larger lustre lit the mighty page.
A purpose mingled with the whims of Time,
A meaning met the stumbling pace of Chance
And Fate revealed a chain of seeing will;
A conscious wideness filled the old dumb Space.
In the Void he saw throned the Omniscience supreme.
[p. 76]
* * *
A Will, a hope immense now seized his heart,
And to discern the superhuman’s form
He raised his eyes to unseen spiritual heights,
Aspiring to bring down a greater world.
[p. 76]
* * *
A packed assemblage of crude tentative lives
Are pieced into a tessellated whole.
[p. 77]
* * *
An animal with some instincts of a god,
His life a story too common to be told,
His deeds a number summing up to nought,
His consciousness a torch lit to be quenched,
His hope a star above a cradle and grave.
[p. 78]
* * *
Impassive he lived immune from earthly hopes,
A figure in the ineffable Witness’ shrine
Pacing the vast cathedral of his thoughts
Under its arches dim with infinity
And heavenward brooding of invisible wings.
[p. 79]
* * *
A universal light was in his eyes,
A golden influx flowed through heart and brain;
A force came down into his mortal limbs,
A current from eternal seas of Bliss;
He felt the invasion and the nameless joy.
[p. 79]
* * *
One-pointed to the immaculate Delight,
Questing for God as for a splendid prey,
He mounted burning like a cone of fire.
[p. 79-80]
* * *
His spirit mingles with Eternity’s heart
And bears the silence of the Infinite.
[p. 80]
* * *
His nature shuddered in the Unknown’s grasp.
. . .
In a whirlwind circuit of delight and force
Hurried into unimaginable depths,
Upborne into immeasurable heights,
It was torn out from its mortality
And underwent a new and bourneless change.
[p. 81]
* * *
As when a timeless Eye annuls the hours
Abolishing the agent and the act,
So now his spirit shone out wide, blank, pure:
His wakened mind became an empty slate
On which the Universal and Sole could write.
[p. 81]
* * *
The little ego’s ring could join no more;
In the enormous spaces of the self
The body now seemed only a wandering shell,
His mind the many-frescoed outer court
Of an imperishable Inhabitant:
His spirit breathed a superhuman air.
[p. 82]
* * *
There was no small death-hunted creature more,
No fragile form of being to preserve
From an all-swallowing Immensity.
[p. 83]
* * *
A secret Nature stripped of her defence,
. . .
Lay bare to the burning splendour of his will.
. . .
Her diagrams of geometric force,
Her potencies of marvel-fraught design
Courted employment by an earth-nursed might.
[p. 83]
* * *
A border sovereign is the occult Force.
. . .
A magic porch of entry glimmering
Quivered in a penumbra of screened Light,
A court of the mystical traffic of the worlds,
A balcony and miraculous façade.
[p. 87-88]
* * *
Ascending and descending twixt life’s poles
The seried kingdoms of the graded Law
Plunged from the Everlasting into Time,
. . .
Climbed back from Time into undying Self,
Up a golden ladder carrying the soul,
Tying with diamond threads the Spirit’s extremes.
[p. 88-89]
* * *
Sunbelts of knowledge, moonbelts of delight
Stretched out in an ecstasy of widenesses
Beyond our indigent corporeal range.
[p. 91]

End of Book 1 Canto 5

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