The Mother Reads Selections from Savitri by Sri Aurobindo
Book 7. The Book of Yoga
Canto 5. The Finding of the Soul
Onward she passed seeking the soul’s mystic cave.
At first she stepped into a night of God.
. . .
The face of Dawn out of mooned twilight grew.
Day came, priest of a sacrifice of joy
Into the worshipping silence of her world;
He carried a mortal lustre as his robe,
Trailed Heaven like a purple scarf and wore
As his vermilion caste-mark a red sun.
[pp. 522; 523]
* * *
An awful dimness wrapped the great rock-doors
Carved in the massive stone of Matter’s trance.
Two golden serpents round the lintel curled,
Enveloping it with their pure and dreadful strength,
Looked out with wisdom’s deep and luminous eyes.
An eagle covered it with wide conquering wings.
Flames of self-lost immobile reverie,
Doves crowded the grey musing cornices
Like sculptured postures of white-bosomed peace.
[pp. 523-524]
* * *
Across the threshold’s sleep she entered in
And found herself amid great figures of gods
Conscious in stone and living without breath,
Watching with fixed regard the soul of man,
Executive figures of the cosmic self,
World-symbols of immutable potency.
[p. 524]
* * *
There was no step of breathing men, no sound,
Only the living nearness of the soul.
. . .
As thus she passed in that mysterious place
Through room and room, through door and rock-hewn door,
She felt herself made one with all she saw.
A sealed identity within her woke;
She knew herself the Beloved of the Supreme:
These Gods and Goddesses were he and she:
. . .
The Adorer and Adored self-lost and one.
[pp. 524; 525]
* * *
In the last chamber on a golden seat
One sat whose shape no vision could define,
Only one felt the world’s unattainable fount,
A Power of which she was a straying Force,
An invisible Beauty, goal of the world’s desire,
A Sun of which all knowledge is a beam,
A Greatness without whom no life could be.
[p. 525]
* * *
Thence all departed into silent self,
And all became formless and pure and bare.
Then through a tunnel dug in the last rock
She came out where there shone a deathless sun.
A house was there all made of flame and light
And crossing a wall of doorless living fire
There suddenly she met her secret soul.
[pp. 525-526]
* * *
A being stood immortal in transience,
Deathless dallying with momentary things,
. . .
She had come into the mortal body’s room
. . .
But since she knows the toil of mind and life
As a mother feels and shares her children’s lives,
She puts forth a small portion of herself,
A being no bigger than the thumb of man
Into a hidden region of the heart
To face the pang and to forget the bliss,
To share the suffering and endure earth’s wounds
And labour mid the labour of the stars.
[p. 526]
* * *
Here in this chamber of flame and light they met;
They looked upon each other, knew themselves,
The secret deity and its human part,
The calm immortal and the struggling soul.
Then with a magic transformation’s speed
They rushed into each other and grew one.
[p. 527]
* * *
Once more she was human upon earthly soil
In the muttering night amid the rain-swept woods
And the rude cottage where she sat in trance:
. . .
But now the half-opened lotus bud of her heart
Had bloomed and stood disclosed to the earthly ray;
In an image shone revealed her secret soul.
. . .
In its deep lotus home her being sat
As if on concentration’s marble seat,
Calling the mighty Mother of the worlds
To make this earthly tenement her house.
[pp. 527; 528]
* * *
As in a flash from a supernal light,
A living image of the original Power,
A face, a form came down into her heart
And made of it its temple and pure abode.
. . .
Out of the Inconscient’s soulless mindless Night:
A flaming serpent rose released from sleep.
It rose billowing its coils and stood erect
And climbing mightily stormily on its way
It touched her centres with its flaming mouth:
As if a fiery kiss had broken their sleep,
They bloomed and laughed surcharged with light and bliss;
Then at the crown it joined the Eternal’s space.
[p. 528]
* * *
All underwent a high celestial change:
Breaking the black Inconscient’s blind mute wall,
. . .
Each part of the being trembling with delight
Lay overwhelmed with tides of happiness
. . .
In the country of the lotus of the head
. . .
In the castle of the lotus twixt the brows
. . .
In the passage of the lotus of the throat
. . .
In the kingdom of the lotus of the heart
. . .
In the navel lotus’s broad imperial range
. . .
In the narrow nether centres’ petty parts
. . .
In the deep place where once the Serpent slept,
. . .
A firm ground was made for Heaven’s descending might.
[pp. 529; 530]End of Book 7 Canto 5
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