M Nadkarni The Golden Bridge

Savitri
The Golden Bridge, the Wonderful Fire
An Introduction to Sri Aurobindo’s epic
By
Mangesh V. Nadkarni
Dr. Mangesh V. Nadkarni (1933-2007) was a Professor of Linguistics in
Hyderabad and Singapore. After his retirement he devoted himself to
sharing his enjoyment and understanding of the writings of Sri Aurobindo
and the Mother with appreciative audiences all over the world. From 1995
onwards he used to hold regular Study Camps on Sri Aurobindo’s
revelatory epic poem Savitri each February and August at the Beach
Offices of the Sri Aurobindo Society in Pondicherry. The essays gathered
in this collection first appeared in the e-journal of the Sri Aurobindo
Society Next Future and are now offered in book form for the benefit of a
wider audience. They cover the whole of Savitri and will be of interest and
assistance to all who aspire for a deeper understanding and appreciation
of Sri Aurobindo’s unique poetic masterwork.
ISBN: 9789382474036
This publication has been funded by SAIIER
(Sri Aurobindo International Institute of Educational Research)
Published by Savitri Bhavan, a unit of SAIIER, Auroville
August 2012
This e-book has been prepared by Auro e-Books, an international
website dedicated to e-books on Well-Being and Spirituality.
Discover more e-books and other activities on our website:
www.auro-ebooks.com
Ebook Edition 2015

This volume is dedicated to the loving memory
of my late husband
Dr. Mangesh V. Nadkarni
for whom the only passion and joy in life was
reading, writing and talking about
Sri Aurobindo and the Mother
and their Grace and Love for humanity.
To the person who inspires me every day
through memories of his exemplary life.

Table of Contents
Acknowledgements.............................................................................1
Compiler’s Note....................................................................................3
Foreword................................................................................................6
Introduction .........................................................................................8
Part One...............................................................................................15
1: The Wonder that is Savitri – How to read Savitri.............16
2: The Mahabharata Story – Savitri Book I, Canto 2.............25
3: Aswapati’s Yoga – Book I Cantos 3-5, Book II, Book III..37
Part Two...............................................................................................53
4: Book V – The Book of Love...................................................54
5: Book VI, Canto 2......................................................................71
6: Book VII – The Book of Yoga................................................89
7: Book VII, Canto 2..................................................................104
8: Book VII, Canto 3 – The Psychic Being.............................119
9: Book VII, Canto 4 – Spiritual Evolution...........................133
10: Book VII, Canto 5................................................................152
11: Book VII, Canto 6 (Lines 1–220)........................................167
12: Book VII, Canto 6 (Lines 221–378)....................................179
13: Book VII, Canto 6 (lines 379–645).....................................190
14: Book VII, Canto 7................................................................204
15: Book VIII...............................................................................217
16: Sri Aurobindo and the Mother on Death........................226
Part Three...........................................................................................236
17: Book IX, Canto 1 – Towards the Black Void..................237
18: Book IX, Canto 2 – The Journey
in Eternal Night (lines 1–251)............................................249
19: Book IX, Canto 2 (lines 252–482).......................................259
20: Book X, Canto 1 – The Dream Twilight of the Ideal.....266
21: Book X, Canto 2 (lines 1–164)............................................275
22: Book X, Canto 2 (Lines 165–280).......................................283
23: Book X, Canto 2 (lines 281–471)........................................292
24: Materialism, the Gospel of Death....................................300
25: Book X, Canto 3 (lines 1–312)............................................314
27: Book X, Canto 3 (lines 416–461) – Love............................336
30: Book X Canto 4 – The Earthly Real..................................366
32: Book X Canto 4 – Evolution...............................................390
33: Book X Canto 4 – Evolution (2).........................................405
35: Book X, Canto 4 – The Reality
and Value of the World......................................................426
36: Book X Canto 4 – The Higher Levels of Mind...............436
37: Book X, Canto 4 – Supermind,
the Truth-Consciousness....................................................447
39: The Victory over Death......................................................468
40: Book XI – The Everlasting Day.........................................480
41: Book XI – The Fourfold Being...........................................490
42: Book XI – The Fourfold Being 2........................................501
43: Book XI (lines 392–516).......................................................513
44: Book XI (lines 517–687).......................................................524
45: Book XI (lines 607–755).......................................................535
46: Book XI (lines 756–800).......................................................545
47: Book XI (lines 801–958).......................................................556
48: Book XI – The Soul’s Choice ............................................567
49: Book XII – Epilogue, and an Overall Review ...............595
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My most sincere thanks go

To the Sri Aurobindo Society for providing a platform to my
husband from 1986 to 2007 and enabling him to make the Savitri
Study Camps which were conducted at their Beach Office premises
in Pondicherry into a joyous celebration shared by many.
To Vijaybhai Poddar and and Pradeepbhai Narang of the Sri
Aurobindo Society, who valued his vision and supported and
implemented his every idea and project, with special thanks to
Vijaybhai for contributing a Foreword to this book.
To the hundreds of people who attended his talks with great
love and admiration.
To my daughters Nandita and Sucheta for their support in my
endeavour to get his writings published.
To Dr. Prema Nandakumar, who generously agreed to provide
the Introduction as a mark of esteem to my husband.
To Ranga Ranganath for his valuable moral support.
And mainly to Shraddhavan who from day one was supportive
to the idea of bringing out this book and who undertook the task of
going through all the different stages needed to publish it. This
book would not have seen the light of day without her systematic
and meticulous work.
Also to the whole Savitri Bhavan team for hosting the
Concluding Sessions of the Savitri Study Camps each year and
making them a ‘must attend’ occasion. These happy events have
1
now been perpetuated as a series of annual Memorial Lectures in
my husband’s name.
Finally and most importantly, my immense gratitude goes to Sri
Aurobindo and the Mother for Their abundant Grace and Their
Guidance to us all at every step.
Meera Nadkarni
June 25, 2012
2
COMPILER’S NOTE
Almost all of the essays collected in this volume were written for
and first published as monthly instalments in Next Future, the e-
journal of the Sri Aurobindo Society Pondicherry. The 47
instalments ended with the passing of Dr. Nadkarni in September
2007, and cover Savitri Book by Book, Canto by Canto, from the
beginning up to the climactic point in the middle of Book Eleven,
where Savitri is offered four boons of merger with the Supreme, and
asks instead for the Supreme Peace, Oneness, Energy and Bliss ‘for
Earth and Men’. Dr. Nadkarni has written other essays on Savitri as
well as giving many other talks, but this collection represents a
masterly ‘Introduction’ (as he modestly called it) to the revelatory
poem which he loved so much and understood so well. It has been
compiled and published at the request of his family, and we feel
sure that it will be welcomed by Savitri readers and students all
over the world, and to a certain extent make up for the great loss
that his many admirers experienced when he passed away in
September 2007 at the age of 74.
This compilation has been created on the basis of digital texts
supplied from Dr. Nadkarni’s own archives by his family, and
edited so as to bring them together into book form. This editing
involved checking and standardising references (which varied in
the original instalment texts). We have also taken the liberty of re-
numbering some Chapter headings (for example, giving
consecutive numbers to the 3 instalments originally numbered 11,
11B and 11C) and of giving elucidatory titles to instalments which
originally shared the same name..
In this series of essays Dr. Nadkarni has done several remarkable
things. First, he has encouraged his readers to share his own delight
in the poetic beauty and mantric power of Sri Aurobindo’s
3
masterwork. Second, while progressing through the text of Savitri,
he has interwoven an account of the traditional version of the tale as
recounted by Vyasa in the Mahabharata, to highlight the departures
which Sri Aurobindo has made from that legend in order to bring
out its deeper symbolic significance. Third, he has provided
illuminating sidelights, drawn from the writings of Sri Aurobindo
and the Mother, on some of the great themes that form an integral
part of Sri Aurobindo’s vision and teachings and are explored in the
course of the poem.
As a glance at the Contents pages will indicate, Nadkarni-ji’s
exploration of the poem became more detailed as it progressed.
While Part One of the poem is covered in only 2 articles and 13 are
dedicated to Part Two, the confrontation between Savitri and Death
takes up all the remaining 32 essays. While dealing with Part Two
he has already brought in additional materials on the Psychic Being,
Spiritual Evolution and Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s view of
death; but it is in the section on Part Three that we find extended
examinations of Sri Aurobindo’s unique understanding, not only of
Idealism, of Love and of Death, but also of Evolution, Materialism
and Spirituality. The voice of Death is very convincing to our
ignorant ears and minds. In answer to his ‘truth that slays’, Sri
Aurobindo has provided us, through the mouth of Savitri, with ‘the
Truth that saves’. Dr. Nadkarni has surely done a great service to
the Divine Work by making these Truths more accessible to a
receptive audience, while spreading his own delight and
enthusiasm at this revelation of Sri Aurobindo’s vision.
It is tragic that Dr. Nadkarni was unable to complete the series,
which breaks off at the climax of Book XI, with Savitri’s plea for all
the boons of divine liberation and union which are offered to her, to
be granted ‘for Earth and Men’. We can only imagine how he might
have treated the second part of the Book, ‘The Supreme
Consummation’, where the Sanction of the Supreme is bestowed
upon Savitri’s quest (which completes and fulfils that of her father
4
Aswapati) in some of Sri Aurobindo’s most powerfully mantric
lines, followed by a long and detailed prophecy about what this
fulfilment will mean for earth and humanity until ‘the earthly life
becomes the life divine.’
To complete Dr. Nadkarni’s coverage of Sri Aurobindo’s epic,
we have added here transcripts of two talks given by him at Savitri
Bhavan. The first supplies a summary of the whole of Book XI,
including the important second half with its prophecy of the Earth’s
future. The second covers Book XII, ‘The Return to Earth’, as well as
giving a masterly and succinct overview of the entire poem.
It has been a privilege for me to undertake the task of going
through all these texts and preparing them for publication. In the
course of this work I was again deeply impressed by Dr. Nadkarni’s
depth of understanding and his capacity of clear expression. He was
a true friend of Savitri Bhavan and we feel fortunate to be offered
the opportunity to publish these writings of his which will surely be
of lasting value and assistance to students and lovers of Sri
Aurobindo’s epic.
Shraddhavan
June 2012
5
FOREWORD
I first heard Dr. Nadkarni speak when I was a student. He was

giving a talk on ‘Languages’ at the Sri Aurobindo International
Centre of Education and I was charmed. It was always a joy to listen
to him as he expounded the Aurobindonean vision and how it
manifested in different fields. But his great love was always ‘Savitri’
and no one could escape the spell as he shared his love and passion
with the listeners.
When Dr. Nadkarni became a Member of the Executive
Committee of Sri Aurobindo Society and settled at Pondicherry, we
worked together closely on many projects – publications on a wide
range of themes, organization of seminars, conferences, study
camps, and talks on various subjects.
One of these was a series of introductory talks on Savitri, which
was listened to with rapt attention by an over flowing audience.
Even Nirodda, who was on personal service to Sri Aurobindo and
was the scribe when Sri Aurobindo was dictating Savitri in the
1940s, used to come everyday to listen to Dr. Nadkarni.These talks
were later released as a set of Audio CDs and received a very good
response.
In 2003 we launched our e-journal ‘Next Future’, a name given
by the Mother. I asked Dr. Nadkarni if he could contribute one
article on Savitri every month to which he agreed willingly and
happily. This column was loved by the readers, many of whom
wrote back to say that they were able to understand, appreciate and
enjoy Savitri better, thanks to the articles. It is these articles which
are now being brought together in this book.
We had also discussed and planned to record Dr. Nadkarni’s
reading of Savitri but that was not to be. He left too early. What has
remained are happy memoriesand the spontaneous love and
6
affection I received from him.
It has indeed been a joy and a privilege to have known and
worked so closely and for such a long time with a person who
dedicated his entire life to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother and the
realization of their vision.
Vijay Poddar, July 2012
7
INTRODUCTION
REFLECTIONS ON SAVITRI
Mangesh Nadkarni was born to recite. I have heard many eminent

personalities read the epic, but the resounding voice of Nadkarniji
was unique. It mesmerized us and made us understand why the
Mother said reading is yoga. You had a feeling of being part of a
flowing stream, sometimes so soft, sometimes rumbling, sometimes
explosive with the waves throwing up huge balloons of spray. You
came out of the experience a happier, wiser person with a sense of
fulfilment. When he turned the focus on a particular passage, it was
complete. The contours of the lines and phrases could be seen
clearly. He avoided critical jargon and flowery expressions. No,
there was never any need to explain Nadkarniji’s explanation.
I am glad this book comes in a format that re-lives his lecturing
style. That was the way of the Upanishadic teacher. There was no
question of using educational technology. The disciple sat in front
of the master who followed closely the reactions in the face of the
disciple, and taught him about the eternal verities of existence step
by step.
Of course even the best-equipped mind cannot understand . But
what use is intellectual understanding? Aren’t we gathered in a
study camp to experience the poem?
“We hope to achieve our objective in this series by inviting you
to appreciate certain selected excerpts from the poem. Each excerpt
will be presented together with some aids to appreciation, namely,
an introduction and a brief exegesis. These passages will mark for
you the important milestones in your progress through Savitri.…”
A brief history of Savitri’s creation is followed by the recital of
two passages and Nadkarniji’s interrogation:
8
“As you read this passage aloud, don’t you hear the
thunder of the clouds and the cloudburst and the
downpour of torrential rain and rain drops dripping
from the roof and don’t you see all around you
overcast skies and quagmire and small streams of
water rushing in all directions with a hissing sound?”
We do, we do! With Nadkarniji, explanation often became poetry

too, an experience we go through in each of the forty nine records in
this magnificently titled book on Savitri. Leaving ‘The Symbol
Dawn’ to stand by itself till one could take it up at a later date,
Nadkarniji brings before us the entire story-matter of Sri
Aurobindo’s epic concerning Princess Savitri in the course of 49
chapters. Though the epic also contains 49 cantos, these chapters are
not meant to parallel them as separate summaries. Nadkarniji flings
his scholarly and emotionally-charged look on the twelve Books as
a whole and indicates briefly the changes instituted by Sri
Aurobindo in the original upakhyana of Vyasa. The volume does
not deal with Aswapati’s yoga. That is a world by itself and must be
tackled as a separate unit. For the rest, it is the same old ancient tale
told long, long ago by Rishi Markandeya to the Pandava brothers
and Draupadi during their exile in the forest.
The meeting of Satyavan and Savitri seems to be a favourite with
Nadkarniji. Can there be a divine romance? Yes, watch it here!
“Then we come to a glorious description of a

gandharva marriage (a marriage solemnised with
Nature and the gods as its witnesses) which unites
Satyavan and Savitri in matrimony. Savitri weaves ‘a
candid garland’ with the flowers she has picked up from
9
the clustering swarms that she finds around her and
she puts it on the bosom of Satyavan.”
Whenever Nadkarniji began reciting from Savitri the passage

describing Satyavan’s response, he himself vanished from our sight
and we only saw the two young people in deep love, smiling like
the many fresh flowers on the plants dancing in the breeze around
them. Such was the Professor’s voice woven with dramatic fibres.
When we move over to Rishi Narad’s speeches or Savitri’s
tapasya, we are warned well in advance that we enter a complex
terrain. It is the contours of poetry, recognition of a movement
thorough darkness to light, the personality of the divine sage who is
a ‘tri-kaal jnaani’ (how well he describes the Passion of Jesus Christ!),
the determined Savitri and the illogical logic of Death that are
brought to us in the explanations. Philosophical disquisition is laid
aside with a firm hand. There are other books like The Life Divine to
deal with it. So we remain ensconced in the divine drama before us,
allowing it unconsciously to seep into our consciousness and raise it
higher, even if the progress is ever so little. But there is no clinical
isolation of the epic characters. Where the audience needs it,
Nadkarniji chips in with a brief elucidation of what the characters
do personify. Thus when dealing with Death Nadkarniji touches the
drk-drsya viveka in Vedanta:
“But if it is true that this world is perceived, who

perceives it? Since Brahman is the only reality, then
Brahman must be also the percipient of Maya. This
would imply that maya is a power of Brahman
consciousness. If so, then there must be a dual status of
consciousness in Brahman, one consciousness of the
reality, and the other conscious of maya. Thus we are
forced into duality in order to maintain the illusory
10
character of what Maya produces, together with the
reality of Brahman itself. This is an argument which Sri
Aurobindo has used in The Life Divine to show that
conceiving Brahman as the percipient of maya leads to
the conclusion that maya is more likely a real
manifestation of the real Brahman. We will not pursue
this philosophical inquiry any further. My point here is
that the God of Death is making use of the Shankarite
position on Illusionism as a weapon in his dialectical
struggle against Savitri, not necessarily because he
believes in this position.”
Nadkarniji dissuades students of Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy and

poetry from approaching Savitri as a philosophical poem. unlike the
dialectics of Vedanta, here we have recordations of experience, and
it would be folly not to remain drenched by the poetic lines, images,
epic similes and metaphors which have poured down from the
overmental planes into a Mahayogi’s nectar-epic.
“But although Savitri and The Life Divine were both

written by Sri Aurobindo, the latter is metaphysical in
its nature while the former is poetry from beginning to
end, and even when high philosophy is presented in it,
it takes on flesh and blood and comes out as lived
experience. So there is no place for philosophical
argument in Savitri.”
Though we tend to speak of evolution in the Aurobindonian canon,

we would do well not to equate it with physical evolution, warns
the Professor. What is it that is evolving? This is a question that
Darwin and others did not bother about. Sri Aurobindo does, and
11
“believes that it is primarily consciousness that is evolving here,
from a lower level to a higher one.” With the same straightforward
simplicity, he explains to the listener terms like Virat and
Hiranyagarbha to avoid confusion when presenting the Fourfold
Being whom Savitri encounters in Book XI. Having explained the
chosen passages, making a clear pathway to the aspirants,
Nadkarniji was proceeding steadily towards the conclusion with
these recordings for the e-journal Next Future. The Supreme had
offered Savitri peace, oneness, energy and bliss. Savitri, however,
wants no such nirvanic bliss but turn these spiritual facilities “to
good use in ushering in an age of new consciousness or what Sri
Aurobindo called the Supramental consciousness.”
The conclusion was not far off when the series of articles had to
stop suddenly due to Nadkarniji’s withdrawal from the physical.
Yet the work is complete by itself. All the same, to help the Savitri
community, this volume carries with it two earlier lectures on the
last two Books of Savitri. They give a rounded perfection to the
introduction and lessen the sorrow of having lost a wonderful
sahridaya from our midst. The conclusion puts the last touches on
The Golden Bridge, the Wonderful Fire.
“Savitri is not great only as literature. It is a living

book, a book that can give you the force that is needed
to walk on the path that the Mother and Sri Aurobindo
have laid out for us. They have done all that is needed
to make sure that the path is secure and sure. As a
living book, Savitri vibrates with the consciousness of
Sri Aurobindo and therefore also of the Mother.”
Golden words! And so much in keeping with the eminent Professor

who was a personification of humility. All the same, we need
Nadkarniji’s crystalline commentary. In the Ramanuja Darsana of
12
the Visishtadvaita School of Vedanta, the Tamil hymns of the
twelve Alvars have a prime place. They are recited every day and
the sheer poetry, nature descriptions and the subject (the Jivatman
turned always towards the Paramatman) keeps the devotee in
thrall. Of equal importance are the brilliant commentaries on the
hymns by the great Acharyas of the Darsana like Tirukurukai Piran
Pillan and Periavachan Pillai. These commentaries are referred to as
svaapadesa vyakhyana as they reveal the inner contours of the hymns.
The hymns themselves are upadesa, initiation for spiritual striving!
When we are stalled with an image or a metaphor that seems
strange in a particular hymn, the commentator makes a pathway
into the poem. This is not literary criticism as it is understood in
academic circles. It is intuitive exposition of a seemingly
imponderable line or phrase. The commentator has to be a widely-
read scholar to get at the inlaid brilliances but glide along with the
poem, not dissect it. We have such an acharya in Nadkarniji, who
keeps us tethered to the Savitri-Satyavan legend as retold by Sri
Aurobindo, making it appear that the poem is the Acharya, not he.
Nadkarniji was considered as their elder son by my parents who
were lovers of the epic. When advancing age and loss of vision
made it difficult for my father to travel around and speak on Savitri,
Nadkarniji took over the mantle with ease and father was delighted.
For more than two decades Nadkarniji carried Savitri all over India
and abroad. I admired Nadkarniji for his scholarship and the
manner in which he brought Savitri alive on the stage. It was a joy to
watch him at seminars and speak when he presided over the
session. His generosity of understanding put us all at ease.
Whenever I met him it was not politics, nor the contemporary
academic scene in India, nor the problems of established institutions
that was the subject. It was always Sri Aurobindo and the Mother,
phrases, passages, the epic Savitri. I still remember vividly those
two mornings a decade ago when at dawn a few of us went for a
walk in Warangal where we were attending a convention. Laughter,
13
the mastery of English prosody by Sri Aurobindo, the gymnastics of
linguistics, and the themes of the day’s seminarial sessions were the
topics and Nadkarniji walked in the lead like a flaming pioneer of
the Omnipotent. He proved that spirituality need not be a distant
dream for a complete family man. Did he not draw infinite strength
from his wife Meera, who followed him like Sita followed Rama, a
saha dharma chari appreciated by us all for looking after him with
infinite devotion?
This introduction, cast like the ancient Upanishadic scene of an
Acharya personally interacting with his disciples, is timely. Fifty
five years ago, when I chose Savitri as my doctoral subject, few
outside the Ashram community had heard of the epic. Today there
is an explosion of Savitri readership in many languages. The Golden
Bridge, the Wonderful Fire is an amrutha-kalasa for them. Let us quaff
it and create our own private space of the life divine.
I am grateful to Shraddhavan and Meeraji for giving me this
marvellous opportunity to associate my name with this publication.
Prema Nandakumar
25.6.2012
14
PART ONE
15
1: The Wonder that is Savitri – How to read Savitri
Savitri has come to occupy a special place among Sri Aurobindo’s

works, which include such highly acclaimed books as The Life
Divine, The Foundations of Indian Culture, The Human Cycle, Essays on
the Gita and On the Veda. The Mother has called it ‘the supreme
revelation of Sri Aurobindo’s vision’. She once recommended the study
of Savitri to one of her disciples in these words:
Indeed Savitri is something concrete, living, it is all

replete, packed with consciousness, it is the supreme
knowledge above all human philosophies and
religions. It is the spiritual path, it is Yoga, tapasya,
sadhana, everything, in its single body. Savitri has an
extraordinary power, it gives out vibrations for him
who can receive them, the true vibrations of each stage
of consciousness. It is incomparable, it is truth in its
plenitude, the truth that Sri Aurobindo brought down
on the earth. My child, one must try to find the secret
that Savitri represents, the prophetic message Sri
Aurobindo reveals there for us. This is the work before
you, it is hard but it is worth the trouble.
This is the first of a series of articles on Savitri. The main purpose of

this series is not to deal directly either with the spiritual vision of Sri
Aurobindo, or to discuss the exquisite quality of its poetry which
often reaches the grandeur of a mantra – a unique achievement in
the English language. In other words, our aim is not to “explain”
Savitri to you; that is beyond our capacity. Our purpose is to try to
create in you enough confidence to start reading Savitri and enough
interest in it to want to read it. There is a teacher present in every
16
line of Savitri – the consciousness of Sri Aurobindo himself. And
once you establish contact with it, you need no other teacher. Savitri
will then directly begin to speak to you and open for you all the
spiritual treasures it contains. With its help alone, as the Mother has
assured us, you will be able to climb to the highest step of the
ladder of yoga.
Savitri cannot be understood by the mind alone, no matter how
well-equipped it is. It is too refined and subtle for that. There must
be a new extension of consciousness and aesthesis to appreciate the
new kind of poetry which Savitri is. Savitri is essentially the poetry
of tomorrow, what Sri Aurobindo called “future poetry”. It is in
meditation that Savitri can be best received.
We hope to achieve our objective in this series by inviting you to
appreciate certain selected excerpts from the poem. Each excerpt
will be presented together with some aids to appreciation, namely,
an introduction and a brief exegesis. These passages will mark for
you the important milestones in your progress through Savitri. The
introductory material will include a reference to the context in
which the excerpt occurs in the poem, and other material which you
will find useful in understanding the excerpt. An attempt will also
be made to sensitise you to the occult vision and to some of the
spiritual experiences contained in these excerpts. The exegesis will
take you through the passage step by step. The mantric quality of its
poetry will certainly be felt by you when you read the passages
repeatedly in the manner indicated above. If you are at all sensitive
to such things, you cannot miss this magic. This is a matter of
experience.
There is something very special about the composition of Savitri.
Sri Aurobindo completed the first draft of this poem between 1916
and 1920 and at that point in time it was a narrative poem 1637 lines
long. The second phase of its composition extended from 1930 to
1945, although he seems to have taken the decision to do so after 24
November 1926 when he had a major and decisive spiritual siddhi.
17
Prior to this for six years he had put a stop to all writing and
devoted all his time to intense sadhana. During this second phase, he
began to consider Savitri as his major literary work. During these
years he concentrated on what has now become Part One of Savitri.
Here you see a new Aswapati and the emphasis now is on the Yogic
experiences of Aswapati and on his spiritual and philosophic vision.
This was an aspect not much in evidence in the first draft of Savitri.
Then during the third phase, which extends from 1945 to 1950, he
returned to the later parts of the epic, and revised what he had
already written and added much new material, including several
cantos on Savitri’s Yoga (Book VII). The work in this last phase was
largely done through dictation.
We must remember that Sri Aurobindo had written between
1914 and 1920, within just six years and a half, almost all of his
major works, now occupying about 25 volumes of the 36 volumes of
his Collected Works, currently under print, a feat unheard-of in the
world’s literary history. All these major works were serialised in the
pages of the monthly journal Arya. It looked as though he
commanded a Niagara of inspiration. Why then did he take more
than thirty years to finish Savitri?
He himself has answered this question. One of the reasons was
that during all the time he worked on Savitri, he was listening for
the true inspiration and rejecting all that fell short of it, however
good it might seem from a lower standard, until he got that which
he felt to be absolutely right 1 . He has explained this more clearly in
another letter of his:
I used Savitri as a means of ascension. I began with it

on a certain mental level, each time I could reach a
higher level I rewrote from that level. Moreover I was
particular – if part seemed to me to come from any
1
Savitri (Letters) 1993, p. 801
18
lower levels I was not satisfied to leave it because it
was good poetry. All had to be as far as possible from
the same mint. In fact Savitri has not been regarded by
me as a poem to be written and finished, but as field of
experimentation to see how far poetry can be written
from one’s own yogic consciousness and how that
could be made creative.2
Sri Aurobindo describes here the standards he set for himself in

writing Savitri. He wanted to write not what would amount to just
good poetry; what he wrote had to be good from the highest
spiritual plane possible. The spiritual plane had to be reflected in
what he wrote in terms of poetic values. That is, it should carry in it
the vibrations and the power of the peak consciousness reached by
Sri Aurobindo in his yogic journey. Through its truth, its power and
its beauty it should help the sensitive reader to ascend to the
spiritual heights which Sri Aurobindo had scaled.
He has further identified the precise spiritual plane from which
much of Savitri has come:
As [Savitri] now stands there is a general overmental

influence, I believe, sometimes coming fully through,
sometimes colouring the poetry of other higher planes
fused together, sometimes lifting any one of these
higher planes to its highest or the psychic, poetic
intelligence or vital towards them.”3
Amal Kiran has reminded us that the mention of Overmind aligns

Savitri to the top reach of the Vedas, the Upanishads and the Gita,
2
ibid. p.728
3
ibid, p. 730
19
and the enormous mass of it, nearly 24000 lines, renders it a super-
scripture, an unparalleled store-house of spiritual wisdom.4
In Savitri this wisdom comes at its best in the form of what the
ancients called the Mantra. We will take up the subject of poetry as
mantra in one of our later articles.
The general reader may find quite a few sections of Savitri
difficult to comprehend. This is not because there is anywhere here
an attempt at a dark or vague profundity or at an escape from
thought but because the truths it expresses are unfamiliar to the
ordinary mind or belong to an untrodden domain or domains or
enter into a field of occult experience. The thinking here is not
intellectual but intuitive or more than intuitive, always expressing a
vision, a spiritual contact which has come by entering into the thing
itself, by identity. It is for this reason that Savitri is worth reading.
As a Western philosopher critic, Raymond Frank Piper, has said;
“Savitri is perhaps the most powerful artistic work in the world for
expanding man’s mind towards the Absolute.”
Our parting gift to you today comes in the form of two passages
from Savitri, both of which are reproduced below. Passage No. 1 is
probably the most memorable description of the monsoon in world
literature. The second passage is an equally exquisite description of
another season equally cherished by our poet, namely, Spring. Both
these passages occur in Book IV Canto I of the poem. They set the
stage and prepare the reader for the birth of Savitri.
Now before you begin to read these passages, a word about how
to read Savitri. The Mother once explained this as follows:
My child, everyday you are going to read Savitri; read

properly, with the right attitude, concentrating a little
before opening the pages and trying to keep the mind
4
Mother India, January-February 1987
20
as empty as possible, absolutely without a thought.
Amal Kiran, a well-known student of Savitri, also advises the reader

to “practise a dedicated silence in the mind” to be able to be
receptive to the mantric quality of the poetry. Then he advises the
reader who wishes to make the reading of Savitri his mode of
sadhana to read it not with the eyes alone but also with the ear. We
have to hear and not just see the lines. In a slow subdued voice we
have to communicate Savitri to ourselves; only then will we be able
to capture something of the wonderful rhythmic properties and the
life-throb of the poetry in Savitri.
Passage 1
Next through its fiery swoon or clotted knot
Rain-tide burst in upon torn wings of heat,
Startled with lightnings air’s unquiet drowse,
Lashed with life-giving streams the torpid soil,
Overcast with flare and sound and storm-winged dark
The star-defended doors of heaven’s dim sleep,
Or from the gold eye of her paramour
Covered with packed cloud-veils the earth’s brown face.
Armies of revolution crossed the time-field,
The clouds’ unending march besieged the world,
Tempests’ pronunciamentos claimed the sky
And thunder drums announced the embattled gods.
A traveller from unquiet neighbouring seas,
The dense-maned monsoon rode neighing through earth’s hours:
Thick now the emissary javelins:
Enormous lightnings split the horizon’s rim
And, hurled from the quarters as from contending camps,
Married heaven’s edges steep and bare and blind:
A surge and hiss and onset of huge rain,
21
The long straight sleet-drift, clamours of winged storm-charge,
Throngs of wind-faces, rushing of wind-feet
Hurrying swept through the prone afflicted plains:
Heaven’s waters trailed and dribbled through the drowned land.
Then all was a swift stride, a sibilant race,
Or all was tempest’s shout and water’s fall.
A dimness sagged on the grey floor of day,
Its dingy sprawling length joined morn to eve,
Wallowing in sludge and shower it reached black dark.
Day a half darkness wore as its dull dress.
Light looked into dawn’s tarnished glass and met
Its own face there, twin to a half-lit night’s:
Downpour and drip and seeping mist swayed all
And turned dry soil to bog and reeking mud:
Earth was a quagmire, heaven a dismal block.
None saw through dank drenched weeks the dungeon sun.
Even when no turmoil vexed air’s sombre rest,
Or a faint ray glimmered through weeping clouds
As a sad smile gleams veiled by returning tears,
All promised brightness failed at once denied
Or, soon condemned, died like a brief-lived hope.
Then a last massive deluge thrashed dead mire
And a subsiding mutter left all still,
Or only the muddy creep of sinking floods
Or only a whisper and green toss of trees.
pp. 349-350 lines 24-66
As you read this passage aloud, don’t you hear the thunder of the
clouds and the cloudburst and the downpour of torrential rain and
rain drops dripping from the roof and don’t you see all around you
overcast skies and quagmire and small streams of water rushing in
all directions with a hissing sound?
22
Passage 2
Then Spring, an ardent lover, leaped through leaves
And caught the earth-bride in his eager clasp;
His advent was a fire of irised hues,
His arms were a circle of the arrival of joy.
His voice was a call to the Transcendent’s sphere
Whose secret touch upon our mortal lives
Keeps ever new the thrill that made the world,
Remoulds an ancient sweetness to new shapes
And guards intact unchanged by death and Time
The answer of our hearts to Nature’s charm
And keeps for ever new, yet still the same,
The throb that ever wakes to the old delight
And beauty and rapture and the joy to live.
His coming brought the magic and the spell;
At his touch life’s tired heart grew glad and young;
He made joy a willing prisoner in her breast.
His grasp was a young god’s upon earth’s limbs:
Changed by the passion of his divine outbreak
He made her body beautiful with his kiss.
Impatient for felicity he came,
High-fluting with the coïl’s happy voice,
His peacock turban trailing on the trees;
His breath was a warm summons to delight,
The dense voluptuous azure was his gaze.
A soft celestial urge surprised the blood
Rich with the instinct of God’s sensuous joys;
Revealed in beauty, a cadence was abroad
Insistent on the rapture-thrill in life:
Immortal movements touched the fleeting hours.
A godlike packed intensity of sense
Made it a passionate pleasure even to breathe;
All sights and voices wove a single charm.
23
The life of the enchanted globe became
A storm of sweetness and of light and song,
A revel of colour and of ecstasy,
A hymn of rays, a litany of cries:
A strain of choral priestly music sang
And, swung on the swaying censer of the trees,
A sacrifice of perfume filled the hours.
Asocas burned in crimson spots of flame,
Pure like the breath of an unstained desire
White jasmines haunted the enamoured air,
Pale mango-blossoms fed the liquid voice
Of the love-maddened coïl, and the brown bee
Muttered in fragrance mid the honey-buds.
The sunlight was a great god’s golden smile.
All Nature was at beauty’s festival.
pp. 351–352 lines 92-138
24
2: The Mahabharata Story – Savitri Book I, Canto 2
Sri Aurobindo gave to his epic Savitri the subtitle ‘a legend and a
symbol’. The legend that is narrated here is the story of Satyavan and
Savitri, which occurs as an upakhyana (a minor episode) in the Vana
Parvam (The Book of the Forest) in the Mahabharata. Sri Aurobindo
uses the framework of this legend to give a mantric expression to
his yogic experiences and spiritual vision. In this process it becomes
a symbolic narrative describing the conquest of death on earth and
all that death stands for – the imperfections, suffering and
incapacity which now have human life in their grip. We will take up
the symbolic aspect of this epic in one of the later chapters.
It is believed that the legend itself had its origin in one of the
spiritually charged Vedic myths. The Mahabharata legend of
Satyavan and Savitri is also known as ‘Pativrata Mahatmya’. It is so
called because it describes the heroic deeds of a married woman,
Savitri, who is faithful and chaste, and who through her austerities
and sacrifices acquires such dynamism of Dharma (righteousness)
that through it she is able to free her husband from the clutches of
the Lord of Death. Although the story seems to extol the ideal of
womanhood, the manner in which it is narrated suggests that it is
not merely a holy tale told for the edification of the pious.
Markandeya is the Rishi who narrates this story to Yudhisthira in
the Mahabharata, and Markandeya was a Rishi of great spiritual
achievements and is counted among the immortals (chiranjeevi).
This legend as narrated in the Mahabharata has a certain spiritual
charge to it which must have been one of the reasons that prompted
Sri Aurobindo to choose this legend as a vehicle for his greatest
work of poetry.
This legend is narrated in the Mahabharata in exactly 300 slokas
or 600 hemistichs. Sri Aurobindo takes this legend and develops it
25
into an epic poem of nearly 24000 lines. What exactly did Sri
Aurobindo do to give to this story such a massive expansion? Did
he add more characters or incidents to the original story line? No,
Sri Aurobindo in fact has kept the story more or less intact. He has,
however, made some changes to make it an effective framework for
the great load of symbolic meaning he wove into it. Before we take
up this issue of what changes Sri Aurobindo makes in the original
story, let us take a brief look at the story as narrated in the
Mahabharata legend.
The Mahabharata Story of Savitri and Satyavan

A long long time ago, King Aswapati ruled over the Madra
kingdom. He was a virtuous and high-souled King but was sorrow-
stricken since he was childless. For eighteen years he underwent
austerities and performed daily a yajna (sacrifice) in honour of the
goddess Savitri. This goddess is pleased with his devotions and
appears before him in a resplendent form and promises him that a
daughter of great beauty will soon be born to him. The daughter is
born and, being the gift of the great goddess, she too was named
Savitri. She grew up into a maiden of great beauty and incandescent
inner splendour. Everybody admired her, but because of her great
beauty and fiery splendour of youth, no suitor dared approach her
seeking her hand in marriage. Aswapati reproached himself on his
failure to fulfil his obligation to find a suitable husband for his
daughter. One day when she was visiting Aswapati after offering
flowers and worship at a temple, he spoke to her about this and
asked her to go out into the world to seek and choose a husband for
herself. Savitri obeyed her father’s command.
She sets out on her search and travels through different
kingdoms and lands. She returns to her father’s court after one year
and finds him in the company of the heavenly sage Narad. When
asked to report on her mission, she informs them that she has met
26
Satyavan, the son of the now blind and exiled king Dyumatsena
living in a forest, and declares that Satyavan alone is worthy to be
her lord and husband. Narad describes this choice as a great
mistake, although he is all praise for Satyavan whom he describes
as handsome, truthful, noble, self-controlled and righteous. Pressed
by Aswapati to name his fault, Narad answers: “One fault, and one
only; his race run, Satyavan will die a year hence!” The King is
shocked and tries to persuade Savitri to choose again, but she
answers with a firm resolve: “These are things done but once; I have
chosen and cannot choose again”. Narad is impressed by Savitri’s
defiant resolution and advises the King to act according to Savitri’s
desires, and gives the assurance that all shall still be well.
Aswapati now sets out to meet the exiled king Dyumatsena and
seek the hand of Satyavan in marriage for his daughter Savitri.
Dyumatsena demurs at first because he wonders whether Savitri
will be able to put up with the rigours of life in a forest. Aswapati
assures him that life in a forest can have no terrors for Savitri, since
she knows very well that happiness and sorrow are impermanent.
The marriage is now performed and Satyavan and Savitri are both
happy in having secured their heart’s desire.
Savitri, although blissful to be able to live with Satyavan, has no
inner peace because she cannot forget the fateful word spoken by
Narad. Hardly four days away from the threatened day, Savitri
undertakes the triratra vow, which involves austerities like fasting,
praying and standing night and day. On the fated day, when
Satyavan is about to set out for the forest, Savitri approaches his
parents and seeks their permission to accompany him because she
says she is eager to see the forest in bloom. The permission is
granted.
The young couple sets out happily for the forest. Satyavan first
gathers fruits and then starts chopping wood. Soon he begins to
perspire profusely and is overcome by fatigue and his head begins
to ache. He comes down the tree and tells Savitri of his splitting
27
headache and a desire to sleep. She makes him sit by her side, and
lays his head on her lap. She realises that this is the hour foretold by
Narad, and indeed it was. Soon she sees in front of her Yama, the
God of Death, a bright-robed and majestic and altogether terrifying
figure.
Yama now walks away with Satyavan’s soul in his noose, and
Savitri follows him, to the utter consternation of Yama. Now begins
the great debate between fixed fate, symbolised by Yama, and the
power of love, symbolised by Savitri. Yama asks Savitri to return to
earth and attend to her husband’s funeral rites. She replies that
wherever her husband goes or is taken, she must follow him in
accordance with the marriage vows she had taken. During their
conversations, Savitri reveals a great understanding of Dharma and
this pleases Yama and he bestows on her a boon by which
Dyumatsena’s eyesight is restored. The debate continues and Yama
is impressed with Savitri’s speech, its flawless diction and syntax,
its logic and prosodic structure and bestows upon her boon after
boon. These boons restore his kingdom to Dyumatsena and
Aswapati is blessed with a hundred sons. Savitri still goes on
arguing with Yama and tries to convince him that according to
dharmic injunctions her place is always with her husband. Finally,
Yama restores Satyavan back to her and blesses her heartily.
Savitri then returns to earth with the soul of Satyavan. They
come back to the place on earth where Satyavan’s dead body was
lying. Satyavan soon regains consciousness and wakes up as if from
some deep sleep. Satyavan vaguely remembers having seen a dark
and terrifying figure in his sleep. Savitri tells him that it was Yama
himself but that he had now gone away. She stalls further questions
from Satyavan and promises to answer them on another day.
Satyavan suddenly realises that they have not yet returned to the
hermitage and is quite worried on account of his parents. Satyavan
insists on returning to the hermitage forthwith. Savitri is a little
anxious because she can see that Satyavan had become a little weak.
28
She holds his hands and slowly starts walking with him towards
the hermitage.
In the meanwhile Dyumatsena has regained his sight but is very
distressed that Satyavan and Savitri had not yet returned home. The
great Rishis living in the neighbourhood reassure him that nothing
harmful would have befallen Satyavan because he is accompanied
by Savitri, who is endowed with noble and exceptional qualities
and is very advanced in her tapasya. Not too long after this,
Satyavan and Savitri reach the hermitage. There is great jubilation
among all those present. They all want to know why Satyavan and
Savitri were late in returning, and they also want to know all that
transpired. Savitri narrates everything in detail right from Narad’s
prediction, the reason why she had undertaken the triratra vow, and
why she had accompanied her husband to the forest on that
morning. Then she tells them all about Yama and his attempt to take
away Satyavan’s soul and her long confrontation with Yama, and
how Yama was mightily pleased with her and gave her boon after
boon and how finally she was able to obtain from him Satyavan’s
life too as a gift.
The following day, a group of citizens of the Shalwa kingdom
arrive at the hermitage. They inform Dyumatsena that his enemy
who had usurped his throne had been killed by one of his own
ministers. They also convey to them the decision of the citizens that
Dyumatsena should return to the capital and mount the throne as
the king once again.
Sri Aurobindo’s version

This then is the story of Savitri and Satyavan. We are now ready to
examine what changes Sri Aurobindo has made in this legend when
he adapts it to his purposes in the epic. But before we take up this
important topic in the next chapter, let us savour here one more
sample of the exquisite poetry of Savitri.
29
At this stage in our study, we can take up only those passages
for the appreciation of which one does not need much by way of
background information. Let us take a look at the following
wonderful passage which occurs very early in the poem – in Canto
2 of Book I. This canto has the title “The Issue”. The very first canto
of Savitri gives a description of the dawn of the day on which
Satyavan was destined to die; it also describes how Savitri too
awoke that morning. Then in Canto 2 we have our first full view of
Savitri as she looked on that fateful morning.
Savitri knew that it was the most fateful day of her life. So
naturally she casts a rapid glance on her life so far, and reminds
herself of the primary issue of her life; ‘Altered must be Nature’s harsh
economy;’ (line 67, p.12). She was destined to ‘Look into the lonely eyes
of immortal Death / And with her nude spirit measure the Infinite’s night.’
(p. 13 lines 77 & 78) This issue gets crystallised later in the canto in
these lines:
Whether to bear with Ignorance and death

Or hew the ways of Immortality,
To win or lose the godlike game for man,
Was her soul’s issue thrown with Destiny’s dice.
p. 17 lines 233–236
In the long passage presented above, Savitri remembers how ‘Love

came to her hiding the shadow, Death’ on the fringe of this very forest
in which she is living now. That was in fact where she first
encountered Satyavan. And how did love come to her? – ‘With the
suddenness divine advents have’ (line 124). She had met Satyavan on
the verge of the forest and the god of Love had done the rest.
At this point the poet observes that since man’s evolutionary
progress towards a higher level of being began, and through the
long ordeal of this journey, Love had never found a ‘rarer creature’
30
to bear his shaft. The reference here is to the poetic convention that
one falls in love when the God of Love strikes a human being with
his flowery arrow. It is not easy to be worthy of the fiery ordeal of
love. But Savitri was certainly the fittest creature ever to have been
struck by Love’s shaft. This gives the poet an opportunity to present
us with a portrait of Savitri.
Ego and love cannot live together, and Savitri’s heart was
consecrated solely to love since it had been vacated by ego. The
following lines contain a wonderful portrait of Savitri, the golden
princess, now a wife, who had acquired through her tapasya the
power to heal the aching throb of life. One must remember that this
is what Savitri looked like on the morning of that fateful day, a few
hours before she was to confront the God of Death. This is a portrait
of Savitri the tapasvini.
All in her pointed to a nobler kind.

Near to earth’s wideness, intimate with heaven,
Exalted and swift her young large-visioned spirit
Voyaging through worlds of splendour and of calm
Overflew the ways of Thought to unborn things.
Ardent was her self-poised unstumbling will;
Her mind, a sea of white sincerity,
Passionate in flow, had not one turbid wave.
As in a mystic and dynamic dance
A priestess of immaculate ecstasies
Inspired and ruled from Truth’s revealing vault
Moves in some prophet cavern of the gods,
A heart of silence in the hands of joy
Inhabited with rich creative beats
A body like a parable of dawn
That seemed a niche for veiled divinity
Or golden temple-door to things beyond.
Immortal rhythms swayed in her time-born steps;
31
Her look, her smile awoke celestial sense
Even in earth-stuff, and their intense delight
Poured a supernal beauty on men’s lives.
A wide self-giving was her native act;
A magnanimity as of sea or sky
Enveloped with its greatness all that came
And gave a sense as of a greatened world:
Her kindly care was a sweet temperate sun,
Her high passion a blue heaven’s equipoise.
As might a soul fly like a hunted bird,
Escaping with tired wings from a world of storms,
And a quiet reach like a remembered breast,
In a haven of safety and splendid soft repose
One could drink life back in streams of honey-fire,
Recover the lost habit of happiness,
Feel her bright nature’s glorious ambience,
And preen joy in her warmth and colour’s rule.
A deep of compassion, a hushed sanctuary,
Her inward help unbarred a gate in heaven;
Love in her was wider than the universe,
The whole world could take refuge in her single heart.
The great unsatisfied godhead here could dwell:
Vacant of the dwarf self’s imprisoned air,
Her mood could harbour his sublimer breath
Spiritual that can make all things divine.
For even her gulfs were secrecies of light.
At once she was the stillness and the word,
A continent of self-diffusing peace,
An ocean of untrembling virgin fire;
The strength, the silence of the gods were hers.
In her he found a vastness like his own,
His high warm subtle ether he refound
And moved in her as in his natural home.
32
In her he met his own eternity.
pp. 14–15 lines 134-185
Notice that the passage begins with a precise one-line sentence (line
134). This is a device which Sri Aurobindo often uses to sum up
briefly and pointedly the theme of what has gone before or what is
to follow. In this case, it is the latter; the focus is on the heightened
and large nobility of Savitri’s being. The next 4 lines (135-138)
describe the peculiar charm of Savitri’s being; it is intimate with
both the best on earth as well as with the best in heaven. She is
heavenly without losing the earthly touch. Her spirit was young
and yet it was uplifted by a largeness of vision; it was swift in
movement and happy and noble and it moved through realms of
splendour and of calm. The rigidities of human thought did not
limit her; she soared beyond the ways of thought to realms yet to be
born. Her mind was passionate in its flow but did not have in it one
turbid wave (lines 139-141).
As you read aloud the lines, pay attention to their rhythm; you
will find yourself quickly uplifted in spirit. The sound, the sense
and the rhythm together give you this lift. These are undoubtedly
some of the most magic lines in the poem. Lines 135 to 150 are truly
mantric, and the entire passage if read out properly can bring to the
reader a great feeling of calm and inner felicity. Consider the
description of Savitri’s mind – passionate in flow but without a
single turbid wave.
Lines 142 to 150 present to the reader a complex yet unified
image charged with powerful spiritual vibrations; Savitri looks like
a priestess of immaculate ecstasies in a mystic and dynamic dance
in some prophet cavern of the gods, and the dance is inspired by the
revelations from the high vault of Truth; she is like the heart of
silence in the hands of joy; her body is like a parable of dawn, which
seemed a special alcove of veiled divinity, or like a golden temple-
33
door to the glories of the transcendental world. These figures give
rise in the mind of the hearer to wave after wave of delight and this
rasa of sublimity is very rare in modern poetry. One is either baffled
by such lines because the modern mind is not used to sublimity in
poetry and mistakes it for bombast or syrupy verse. These lines are
neither; one has to learn to receive these lines in a mind made calm
and let them work their magic on one’s inner being.
When Savitri walked, it looked as though she was moving to the
beat of some immortal rhythms. Savitri’s smile and look are
described as awaking celestial sense even in earth-stuff, and their
intense delight poured a supernal beauty on the lives of earthly
men. The poet effortlessly conveys to us through these lines the
divinity of Savitri’s being. Then there is reference to her
magnanimity in self-giving; her magnanimity was as vast as that of
the sky or the sea and it made all the recipients feel great by its
touch. This is very finely put, because there are certain kinds of
magnanimity which make the receiver feel small, but Savitri’s
magnanimity greatened the spirit of the receiver (lines 151–158).
The warmth and kindness of her caring are compared to the
warmth and brightness which we receive from ‘a sweet temperate
sun’. The ardour of Savitri’s being was always calm like ‘a blue
heaven’s equipoise’. There was nothing dry or cold about Savitri (lines
159–160).
Then comes the wonderful image of a hunted bird flying to
escape from a world of storms to a quiet spot, warm and safe like a
loving heart. The tired human soul sought refuge in Savitri and
found there a haven of safety and repose of splendid softness; there
it could regain the lost habit of happiness and drink back life in
streams of honey-fire. Her being is a hushed sanctuary (meaning
either a temple/shrine or a safe resort), an ocean of compassion.
Savitri’s nature had a bright ambience in which one could preen
(trim one’s feathers – this refers back to the image of the hunted
bird) and adorn oneself and feel warm and colourful. The spiritual
34
healing Savitri was capable of imparting is highlighted in these lines
(lines 161–168).
She was like an ocean of compassion, a temple bathed in silence;
her inward help opened a spiritual gate to whosoever sought such
help from her (lines 169–170).
The secret of her being was that love in her was wider than the
universe, and the whole world could take refuge in her single heart.
Love, the godhead who normally finds most hearts cramped and
too narrow for his residence because of the encroachments of the
aggressive human ego, found immense space in Savitri’s heart
because it had been vacated by the dwarf self of the ego. Ego is self-
love, love directed to oneself, while true love is Divine love and
tries to embrace the whole world. It is because of this that
everything about Savitri became spiritual and had the power to
make divine whatever it touched (lines 171–176).
She had realms of being not easily accessible to all, but even
these were sanctuaries of light. And finally we are told that she was
both the stillness, a monument of peace and silence which spread all
around her, and also the creative word that originates from this
stillness (the Vedic etymological meaning of the word “Savitri”).
She is described also as the virgin fire which is steady and
untrembling. She had the strength and also the silence of the gods
(lines 177–181).
The God of Love found in Savitri a vastness like his own, and he
moved in her as in his natural home. He met in her his own eternity
(lines 182–185).
I have tried in the foregoing lines to identify some of the main
strands of the “sense” of this passage. No further comments are
necessary. Each image is rich with vibrations of the Vedic lore but I
have not explored that aspect of the meaning here. Nor is it
necessary to say anything about the magic created by the sound and
the rhythm of these lines. It is there waiting for you.
35
Read the lines slowly aloud to yourself a couple of times, paying
attention to the quality of each vowel and to their deeply
enchanting rhythm. That should be enough to blow away any
tension you may have in your head or heart.
36
3: Aswapati’s Yoga – Book I Cantos 3-5, Book II, Book III
We have now acquainted ourselves with the legend of Satyavan and

Savitri as it is found in the Mahabharata. The first draft of Savitri
that Sri Aurobindo wrote between 1916 and 1918 was primarily a
re-telling of this legend. But as he gradually discovered its potential
to be the central vehicle of his spiritual message, he began recasting
this first draft from about 1928, more systematically from about
1930, and continued working on it until a few weeks before he left
his body in December 1950. He has himself explained in a letter
why he took so long to finish Savitri:
…if I have not poetical genius, at least I can claim a

sufficient, if not an infinite capacity for painstaking:
that I have sufficiently shown by my long labour on
Savitri. Or rather, since it was not labour in the
ordinary sense, not a labour of painstaking
construction, I may describe it as an infinite capacity
for waiting and listening for the true inspiration and
rejecting all that fell short of it, however good it might
seem from a lower standard, until I got that which I felt
to be absolutely right.
Letters on Savitri in Savitri, p.37
The final version of Savitri that thus emerged shows some

departures that Sri Aurobindo has made from the original
Mahabharata story. These departures are mostly of the nature of
giving a great deal of expansion to some parts of the story and
dealing with some other parts rather briefly. I do not think that the
great Vyasa would have disapproved of any of these departures,
37
because in almost all cases they bring out what was implicit in
Vyasa’s legend. Sri Aurobindo breathes a new life and power into
this Vedic myth. Besides, these adaptations enhance the symbolic
meaning of the story.
We will take up the issue of symbolism at a later point in our
study. Here I would like to take a close look at some of the
departures from the Mahabharata legend that we find in Savitri.
Together with this I would also try to indicate how the entire epic is
structured – what Books of the epic poem deal with what part of the
story. This will provide you with a good road-map of Savitri and
enable you to open the poem at any canto of any Book and
immediately grasp what part of the story is being dealt with in that
canto. We may not be able to complete the discussion of these topics
in one article; it will have to be continued in one or more of those to
follow. We will, however, conclude this one as usual with an
excerpt from the epic poem presented for your appreciation.
The Mahabharata Legend:

Aswapati is an ideal king firmly established in dharma. He has all
the blessings of life but he is issueless. So with the intention of
getting a son he engages himself in arduous austerities for eighteen
years. He thus worships goddess Savitri with all devotion. Pleased
with his austerities and devotion, goddess Savitri emerges out of
the sacrificial fire and grants him the boon of a daughter. She
assures him that a beautiful and effulgent daughter will be born to
him and that this boon is being bestowed upon him at the instance
of Brahma, the Creator, himself. This part of the story is narrated in
about 20 slokas in the Mahabharata legend. The description of
Aswapati’s austerities or penance, however, takes actually no more
than six lines.
38
Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri
Aswapati’s yajna or penance of eighteen years becomes in Sri
Aurobindo’s epic “Aswapati’s Yoga”. Yajna or sacrifice is a Vedic
concept which is often misunderstood. Its primary objective is not,
as is generally believed, to obtain material prosperity during one’s
life time and the blessings of heaven after death. Nor does its
performance entail observance of certain rituals. It is basically a
profound psychological or spiritual practice or discipline which
enables man to pass from the world of mortal existence to the vast
world of the immortal spirit. It is a path that leads to life immortal
(amritatatwaya gatum), says the Rig Veda. Sacrifice in the Veda thus
represents a symbolic process which enables man to rise into the
highest spiritual status. In Savitri, this is the kind of sacrifice,
sacrifice in the Vedic sense, that Aswapati undertakes.
The description of this yoga takes 10,974 lines, spread over
twenty-two cantos: Cantos 3, 4 and 5 of Book I, all the fifteen cantos
of Book II, and all the four cantos of Book III. It is worth examining
why Sri Aurobindo needs such a vast canvas (10,974 lines) to
describe what Vyasa manages to do in about 40 lines.
Very early in Canto 3 of Book I we begin to see that Sri
Aurobindo’s Aswapati is ‘a thinker and toiler in the ideal’s air’ and that
he is ‘A colonist from immortality’. Further details about him reveal to
us that although he is described as King Aswapati in this epic poem
too, he personifies in many ways the sensitive modern man in
search of a perfect life for himself and his fellowmen here on earth.
In his concerns and in his aspirations, he is almost our
contemporary. He seems to be familiar with what the East and the
West have so far contributed to make the human legacy so rich and
varied – religion, spirituality, liberal arts, culture, science and
technology. He too, like his counterpart in Vyasa’s legend, performs
austerities, not external rites and rituals, but he follows an inner
spiritual discipline, a yoga. Why does he perform this Yoga? In spite
of what mankind has achieved through its long and difficult
39
struggle, man’s life here on earth is still riddled with suffering, evil,
limitations of various kinds and finally death. Man has tried in vain
to change this situation through science and technology, through
effecting changes in his social and economic institutions, through
political revolutions. Nor have traditional religions and spiritual
practices helped change this situation in any radical and permanent
way. A realisation of this prompts Aswapati to seek a creative
power, a Truth which will transform human life and bring to it an
integral perfection, so far only dreamt of but not realised in reality.
Towards this end he undertakes a triple yoga. Sri Aurobindo has
explained in one of his letters the nature of this yoga:
Aswapati’s Yoga falls into three parts. First, he is

achieving his own spiritual self-fulfilment as the
individual and this is described as the Yoga of the
King. Next, he makes the ascent as a typical
representative of the race to win the possibility of
discovery and possession of all the planes of
consciousness and this is described in the Second Book:
but this is also yet only an individual victory. Finally,
he aspires no longer for himself but for all, for a
universal realisation and new creation. This is
described in the Book of the Divine Mother.
Letters on Savitri in Savitri p.778
Cantos 3 (“The Yoga of the King; The Yoga of the Soul’s Release”)
and 5 (“The Yoga of the King: The Yoga of the Spirit’s Freedom and
Greatness”) of Book I describe Aswapati’s yoga through which he
attains his psycho-spiritual transformation. Canto 4 (“The Secret
Knowledge”) describes the deeper knowledge which the yoga
reveals to him. The world around us is to a large extent a creation of
our ego and therefore as long as we remain closed within the
40
cocoon of our ego, we cannot see the world as it is. For that one
needs to rise above one’s ego and take one’s stand in the
consciousness of one’s soul. This is what Aswapati achieves during
the first phase of his yoga. And then he realises that this world is as
yet an imperfect manifestation of the Supreme Reality and it is
destined to evolve further towards a great fulfilment, and a perfect
manifestation of the Divine Reality. He also realised that for this to
happen the Truth-Light must be found and with it “earth’s massive
roots” must be struck so that the world may “manifest the unveiled
Divine”.
This realisation prompts him to become a “Traveller of the
Worlds”. He wishes to explore the various worlds; these are worlds
made of substances other than the gross-physical substance of
which our world is made. Until modern enlightenment put blinkers
on our eyes and made us blind to all non-physical reality, religions
and spiritual traditions in all parts of the world assumed the
existence of these non-physical worlds. Aswapati’s experiences of
this travel through all the worlds from the subtle physical to the
highest manifested spiritual worlds are described in Book II. Canto
1 (“The World-Stair”) of Book II describes the varied worlds which
Aswapati sees as a world-pile, a huge column of worlds rising from
the plinth of Matter. It also describes how this macrocosm is
reflected in the microcosm of our inner being. Thus Aswapati
becomes a traveller basically of the inner worlds. He travels through
four kinds of worlds – physical worlds (Canto 2), vital worlds
(Cantos 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9), mental worlds (Cantos 9, 10 and 11) and
spiritual worlds (Cantos 12, 13, 14 and 15). It should, however, be
noted that descriptions of Aswapati’s experience of the spiritual
worlds are also found in Books I and III of the epic as well.
As he reaches the apex of the spiritual worlds, he feels strongly
pushed into the world of Nirvanic experience. This is the theme of
Canto 1 of Book III (“The Pursuit of the Unknowable”). Aswapati
refuses to regard the Nirvanic state as the highest possible state
41
attainable by man because that state takes him out of this world and
leads him towards a dissolution of his being and merger with the
static Brahman. This amounts basically to an escape from this world
and undoubtedly the escape brings a tremendous liberation from all
that plagues man here in his earthly life – dualities of pleasure and
pain, sense of being finite and limited etc. But Aswapati had
undertaken this arduous route to find ways of bringing fulfilment
and perfection to life in this world, not to escape from it. So he
deliberately retraces his steps from the Nirvanic region and takes a
leap into the Transcendental world. He has to take this step because
so far whatever he has done, and all the worlds he has explored,
have not revealed to him the secret of bringing perfection to life on
earth. Here on the topmost verge of the Overmental world he feels
the presence of the Supreme Divine Mother, the Creatrix of this
world. All this is described in Canto 2 of Book III (“The Adoration
of the Divine Mother”).
Here I would like to draw your attention to a glorious passage
which you will find on pages 314 and 315 of Savitri. This passage is
a mantric invocation, a veritable stuti or ‘laud’ – ‘a hymn of praise’
offered to the Divine Mother. Sanskrit literature contains many
wonderful examples of such hymns, and Sri Aurobindo has now
created a few of these in English as well. The passage I am referring
to begins thus (line 151):
At the head she stands of birth and toil and fate,
And concludes thus (line 179):
Below, the wonder of the embrace divine.
At last in this transcendental realm Aswapati sees the world of
42
perfection he has been looking for – the Supramental world. In
sections 3 and 4 of Canto 3 of Book III (“The House of the Spirit and
the New Creation”) is a description of what we can take to be the
future supramental creation. Nowhere in Book III does Sri
Aurobindo use the word “supermind”; it is referred to as a “vast
Truth-Consciousness”. Consider these lines which describe this new
world:
A new and marvellous creation rose.

Incalculable out flowing infinitudes
Laughing out an unmeasured happiness
Lived their innumerable unity;
p. 323 lines 224–227
In Canto 4 of Book III (“The Vision and the Boon”), Aswapati prays
to the Divine Mother to send on earth an emanation of hers who
alone would be able to bring down to earth this new consciousness
he has found in the transcendental world. The Supreme Divine
Mother advises Aswapati to be patient because in her view man is
not yet ready for the descent of this new consciousness. But
Aswapati is disconsolate, and strongly urges the Divine Mother to
grant him his request for the sake of long-suffering humanity.
Finally, the Divine Mother accedes to his request and assures him
that an incarnation of hers will be born on earth who will make it
possible for man to conquer death and all the inadequacies it
represents so that the Life Divine blossoms on earth. And the
passage in which this assurance is given is once again one of the
magic passages in Savitri. It occurs on page 346 and begins (on line
429) thus:
“O strong forerunner, I have heard thy cry,
And concludes (on line 452) thus:
43
Fate shall be changed by an unchanging will.”
This brings us to the end of Book III and also of Part One of Savitri.
Please note that the description of Aswapati’s yoga begins with
Canto 3 of Book I and concludes with Canto 4 of Book III. This
makes up almost the whole of Part One of Savitri. The description
of Aswapati’s yoga thus accounts for the whole Part One of the epic
except Cantos 1 and 2 of Book I. How are these two cantos related to
the rest of this epic? Canto 1 of Book I (“The Symbol Dawn”)
describes the dawn of the day on which Satyavan was fated to die.
Since the death and the resuscitation of Satyavan are the two central
events of this story, we can say that epic begins ‘in media res’, right
in the middle of the action. Such a beginning is in keeping with the
Western tradition. “The Symbol Dawn” is a description not only of
the dawn of that fateful day, but it also evokes in a sensitive reader
images of several other dawns as well. Then in the second section of
this Canto we are told how Savitri too awoke on that morning as
well. Then in Canto 2 (“The Issue”), we are given the first full view
of Savitri as she looked on that fateful morning. An excerpt from
this canto was presented for your appreciation at the end of Chapter
2. The issue of Savitri’s life is:

Was her soul’s issue with destiny’s dice.
p. 17 lines 233-236
Then suddenly the narration freezes at the end of Canto 2, around

the forenoon of the fateful day. And then there is a flashback to
44
Savitri’s antecedents. ‘A world’s desire compelled her mortal birth’ says
the very first line of Canto 3 of Book I. To understand this line –
what was the world’s desire, and how it compelled Savitri’s birth,
etc. – we need to know about Aswapati and his triple yoga. And
this is described as we have seen in Cantos 3, 4 and 5 of Book I and
in Books II and III. The narration of the story which freezes at the
end of Canto 2 of Book I is picked up again in Book VIII. In the
meanwhile the flashback keeps us busy with that part of the story
which deals with Aswapati and his yoga, Savitri’s birth, her
growing up into a beautiful maiden, her going into the world to
seek a partner for life, her meeting with Satyavan and falling in love
with him, Narad’s prophecy and the problems it creates for Savitri.
All this brings us to Book VII, which describes what happened four
days before the fateful day – Savitri takes up a very difficult yoga to
prepare herself for the fateful day prophesied by Narad. Book VIII
then picks up the story from where it was left in Canto 2 of Book I
and what happened after the forenoon of that day elapsed and the
noon arrived. Satyavan died in the forest around noon that day.
Vyasa’s Legend
The Mahabharata story then goes on to report that when the child
was born she was called Savitri, since she had been given by the
goddess of that name. There is no reference at all here to the notion
of Savitri being a divine incarnation, even if it was present in the
Vedic origins of the myth. Here we are told how Savitri grew up
into a fair and beautiful young girl like the Goddess of Fortune
herself incarnate.

In Sri Aurobindo’s epic, the birth of Savitri is clearly the birth of an
Avatar, of a divine incarnation. Aswapati had undertaken the
arduous yoga to free humanity from the clutches of the forces of
45
obscurity, inconscience, inertia and negation. This can be achieved
only if the Supramental consciousness is brought down on earth.
This is a stupendous task beyond the capacities of any normal
human being. That is why he prays to the Supreme Divine Mother
for an incarnation of hers on earth. ‘Mission to earth some living form
of thee’ says Aswapati. Savitri’s birth is this birth of the Divine into a
human body. This and her childhood, which shows clearly the
stamp of greatness of her spirit, are described in Book IV Canto 1
(“The Birth and Childhood of the Flame”). As Savitri grows into a
young maiden of exquisite inner and outer beauty, she also acquires
a varied knowledge of many philosophies and sciences, of arts and
crafts. Her eminence is recognised by all around her, and because of
this no prince dares to come forward to seek her hand in marriage.
All this is the theme of Canto 2 of Book IV (“The Growth of the
Flame”).
Vyasa’s Legend
Savitri grows up into a radiantly beautiful young woman and looks
like a goddess (devarupini). One auspicious day Savitri pays a visit
to the temple, offers prayers and oblations to the gods, and goes to
see her father. When she approaches him, she touches his feet in
obeisance and offers him the prasad and flowers she has brought
from the temple. Aswapati sees that his daughter has grown to full
youth and is beautiful like a goddess but feels distressed that she is
yet unmarried. He deems it a failure on his part not to have found
for her a suitable husband. Because of her great beauty and
radiance, no prince has dared to approach her, seeking her hand in
marriage. Aswapati therefore asks her to go out into the world to
seek a young man who would be her companion for life.

The way that Sri Aurobindo describes this event is somewhat
46
different. Aswapati in Sri Aurobindo’s epic is a great and
accomplished yogi. Therefore he is in communion with the spiritual
planes and forces that constantly act on the human plane and
mould the happenings and movements here. He has a strong feeling
that man’s aspiration for a perfect life on earth is going to be
fulfilled. Suddenly one day he hears a heavenly voice which says
that a great destiny awaits mankind but man is unable to rise to it
since ‘The Gods are still too few in mortal forms’. As the Voice
withdraws, he sees Savitri in front of him. This occasions another
glorious description of Savitri, this time as seen by her father. (We
will study this passage at the end of this article.) He sees her as a
‘shining answer from the gods’ to all his perplexity about man’s future.
Then suddenly his lips open up and there come out of his mouth
‘words from Fate’. He tells her that her spirit has not come down like
a star alone. There must be someone who is on earth, ‘the second self
her nature asks’. He asks her to venture through the deep world to
find her companion for life. She must find this person who will give
voice to what is yet mute in her. This command of her father sinks
deep into Savitri’s consciousness and works like a mantra. She
departs on her quest. All this is described in Canto 3 (“The Call to
the Quest”) of Book IV. This is followed by Canto 4 (“The Quest”) of
Book IV. In this canto we have a travelogue of sorts, describing
what Savitri saw during her year-long journey across the whole of
Bharatvarsha (India of that time) – the urban scene as well as the
rural scene and the scene in the forests where lived Rishis, and
seekers of truth of various kinds. Almost a whole year has gone by
on this journey, and on a bright day in summer she happens to
come to a forest grove, which proves to be her journey’s end. We
will continue this study of the points of departure that Sri
Aurobindo has made in the story of Savitri and Satyavan in our next
article.
Before concluding this one, as usual we will take a close look at a
passage from Savitri. The passage I have chosen gives us another
47
portrait of Savitri. In the previous article we saw Savitri as she
looked on the morning of the fateful day of Satyavan’s death. The
passage I am presenting below shows Savitri as seen by her father at
the peak of her maidenly beauty and radiance. I have just
mentioned in the foregoing paragraph how one day Savitri comes to
meet her father. As we have noted, her flaming beauty keeps all
would-be suitors away from her; they adore her from a distance.
That morning she had gone to the temple to offer worship to the
deity there. (This is a detail we learn from Vyasa.) And immediately
after offering the worship she comes to see Aswapati, her father. He
has just heard a voice which prophesies a great future for mankind
but says that this glorious future remains unrealised because ‘The
Gods are still too few in human form.’ As soon as the voice stops,
Aswapati sees young and radiant Savitri approaching him. This is
how he sees Savitri at that moment.
The Voice withdrew into its hidden skies.

But like a shining answer from the gods
Approached through sun-bright spaces Savitri.
Advancing amid tall heaven-pillaring trees,
Apparelled in her flickering-coloured robe
She seemed, burning towards the eternal realms,
A bright moved torch of incense and of flame
That from the sky-roofed temple-soil of earth
A pilgrim hand lifts in an invisible shrine.
There came the gift of a revealing hour:
He saw through depths that reinterpret all,
Limited not now by the dull body’s eyes,
New-found through an arch of clear discovery,
This intimation of the world’s delight,
This wonder of the divine Artist’s make
Carved like a nectar-cup for thirsty gods,
This breathing Scripture of the Eternal’s joy,
48
This net of sweetness woven of aureate fire.
Transformed the delicate image-face became
A deeper Nature’s self-revealing sign,
A gold-leaf palimpsest of sacred births,
A grave world-symbol chiselled out of life.
Her brow, a copy of clear unstained heavens,
Was meditation’s pedestal and defence,
The very room and smile of musing Space,
Its brooding line infinity’s symbol curve.
Amid her tresses’ cloudy multitude
Her long eyes shadowed as by wings of Night
Under that moon-gold forehead’s dreaming breadth
Were seas of love and thought that held the world;
Marvelling at life and earth they saw truths far.
A deathless meaning filled her mortal limbs;
As in a golden vase’s poignant line
They seemed to carry the rhythmic sob of bliss
Of earth’s mute adoration towards heaven
Released in beauty’s cry of living form
Towards the perfection of eternal things.
Transparent grown the ephemeral living dress
Bared the expressive deity to his view.
Escaped from surface sight and mortal sense
The seizing harmony of its shapes became
The strange significant icon of a Power
Renewing its inscrutable descent
Into a human figure of its works
That stood out in life’s bold abrupt relief
On the soil of the evolving universe,
A godhead sculptured on a wall of thought,
Mirrored in the flowing hours and dimly shrined
In Matter as in a cathedral cave.
Annulled were the transient values of the mind,
49
The body’s sense renounced its earthly look;
Immortal met immortal in their gaze.
Awaked from the close spell of daily use
That hides soul-truth with the outward form’s disguise,
He saw through the familiar cherished limbs
The great and unknown spirit born his child.
pp. 372–373, lines 109-164
‘The Voice’ in line 109 refers to the voice just heard by Aswapati.
This Voice now recedes into its unseen source. As if as an answer
from the gods to what the Voice had said, Savitri, bright, and
resplendent with the glory of youth, appeared on the scene. The
Voice had spoken about a glorious future for man and mentioned
what had thwarted the coming of this future so far: there are not
enough Gods on earth yet. You can see the clear suggestion here –
Savitri is born to make good this inadequacy in man. Her life’s
mission is to transform the half animal and half divine human race
into a fully divine one (lines 110–111).
Savitri came advancing through a column of tall trees; she was
wearing a colourful robe. What did she look like? She looked like a
moving torch of incense and flame burning towards the eternal
realms above held aloft by a pilgrim’s hand in an invisible shrine
which had the sky as its roof and the earth as its ground soil (lines
112–117).
The appropriateness of this comparison of Savitri to a torch of
incense and flame held aloft by a pilgrim hardly needs any
comments. But notice that the poet is taking us with every such deft
stroke closer and closer to the inner being of Savitri. He doesn’t
seem particularly interested in portraying for us a clear image of the
outward form of Savitri.
This sight of Savitri brings to Aswapati a sudden revelation. He
now begins to see with a deeper sight and this sight enables him to
50
see more truly than the mere superficial physical sight. He now
suddenly sees Savitri as the embodiment of the delight behind this
world. Then in four lines the poet raises this description step by a
step to a height where our understanding and imagination feel
almost breathless in wonder. Savitri is a wonderful creation of the
Divine artist who has carved her like a nectar cup for thirsty gods.
She is described as the breathing Scripture of the Eternal’s joy and a
net of sweetness woven out of golden fire (lines 118–126).
Now the poet describes Savitri’s delicate face, her brow, her
long, dark and thick hair and her eyes and then her limbs. Each one
of these brings to the transformed sight of Aswapati intimations of
her inner nature. Her delicate face is like a parchment made of gold-
leaf on which are seen letters which remind us of her several sacred
births in the past; she looks like a serene world-symbol chiselled out
of life (lines 127–130). Her eyebrows and the forehead which
together make her facial expression give one the impression of clear,
stainless heavens; her forehead in particular looks like a powerful
and secure seat of meditation. The curve of her eyebrows looks like
the brooding line of infinity (lines 131–134). Then comes the
description of her eyes under the brooding breadth of her forehead
amid her thick dark tresses of hair; they were like seas of love and
deep contemplation; it seemed as though they looked at the world
around them and marvelled at it and saw the distant truths (lines
135–139).
Her limbs seemed to suggest a deathless meaning. Like the
contours of a golden vase they seem to carry the rhythmic cry of
bliss of the silent adoration of the things manifested on earth for the
perfection their heavenly counterparts manifest (lines 140–145). The
outer physical form of Savitri had grown transparent to Aswapati’s
vision and he could see through it the manifesting deity within
(lines 146–147). The external sight and sense could not capture the
full significance of the harmony of the outlines of her form since it
seemed to be a symbol of a Power. This is the power that is born
51
again and again through a mysterious descent into a human figure.
This line brings to mind the great lines in the Gita in which the
Lord explains the mystery of Avatarhood: ‘Though I am the Lord of all
existences, yet I stand upon my own Nature and I come into birth by my
self-Maya’ (Gita IV: 6). Each time the Avatar stands in bold relief in
this evolving universe. He is a veritable godhead who leaves a
permanent mark on the thought of the race like a sculpture
mounted on the wall of thought, and his influence is reflected in the
flowing stream of time and permanently enshrined in the temple-
cave of matter (lines 148–155).
Aswapati now experiences that the ephemeral values of the
mind undergo a change: the body’s sense gave up its limited earthly
range, and the immortal in him met the immortal in Savitri (lines
156–160). He is now awakened from the limiting spell of the
ordinary consciousness which is incapable of seeing the soul-truth
because of the disguise of the outward form; he now saw, through
the loved and familiar figure, the great and unknown spirit who
was born as his daughter (lines 161–164).
52
PART TWO
53
4: Book V – The Book of Love
In the preceding chapter we took a bird’s eye-view of Books I, II, III

and IV of Savitri, and noted the departures made by Sri Aurobindo
in this part of the epic from the legend as narrated in the
Mahabaharata. We now continue with our review of the Books that
follow.
The Mahabharata Legend

In the Mahabharata story there is no description of the journey
Savitri undertook in compliance with her father’s wishes. We are
told only that Savitri, as advised by her father, set out on a golden
chariot and travelled through several distant lands. The next event
in the story is the return of Savitri to her father’s court after
completing her journey. Between these two events a most
interesting event has taken place. Savitri meets Satyavan and finds
him an “agreeably proper husband” and chooses him so in her
mind. This is all that we are told in the Mahabharata story. Where
exactly Satyavan and Savitri met and what must have happened
between them – all this is left to our imagination.

In Sri Aurobindo’s epic one of the most enchanting of all Books is
Book V: The Book of Love, and in Vyasa’s narration of the legend,
as we just saw, there is nothing corresponding to this Book at all. In
this Book we see how after Savitri’s chariot had passed through
several kingdoms and lands, Savitri suddenly finds herself in the
sylvan surroundings of an opening in a forest and this is where
Savitri and Satyavan first see each other. They meet in this
wilderness and fall in love with each other.
54
Sri Aurobindo is in no hurry when he reaches this point in the
story. First, he devotes a whole canto (Canto One of Book V) to
describe ‘The Destined Meeting-Place’. He describes the place as:
…a sanctuary of youth and joy,

A highland world of free and green delight
Where spring and summer lay together and strove
In indolent and amicable debate,
Inarmed5 , disputing with laughter who should rule.
p. 389 lines 10-14
Through his description of this place the poet creates a wonderful

atmosphere of expectancy, as if Nature in this wilderness was
waiting for Love to meet Savitri.
Then in Canto 2 of Book V we see Satyavan entering this sylvan
spot. He is described in these words:
As if a weapon of living Light,

Erect and lofty like a spear of God
His figure led the splendour of the morn.
p. 393 lines 40-42
He had the glow of a Rishi on his face and seemed a good student of
the mystic lore of the unwritten book of Nature. His mind was open
to the infinite mind of Nature and the mastery of free natures was
his. ‘His body was a lover’s and a king’s’. On that morning it looked as
though someone had laid the spell of destiny on his feet and drawn
him to the forest’s flowering verge, since this place did not lie on
one of his accustomed paths.
As noted earlier, Savitri’s chariot had just reached this spot. Here
5
Inarmed = ‘arm in arm’
55
Satyavan and Savitri meet. The rest of this canto (Canto 2 of Book V)
gives a most wonderful description of the occult process of what is
called ‘falling in love’. The poet manages to bring out the magic of
this almost mystical event with such sensitivity and refinement that
the reader feels that he is going through a spiritual experience. And
added to this, the poetic brilliance of these lines is such that if Sri
Aurobindo had written nothing else save this canto of the Book of
Love, he still would have made a unique and priceless contribution
to English literature. This whole Book is probably unexcelled
anywhere in world literature. No poet has sung of love in this
exalted vein without hiding its unpleasant manifestations. Look at
these lines, for example:
To live, to love are signs of infinite things,

Love is a glory from eternity’s spheres.
Abased, disfigured, mocked by baser mights
That steal his name and shape and ecstasy,
He is still the godhead by which all can change.
p. 397, lines 206-10
Again consider these lines later in the same canto:
Rare is the cup fit for love’s nectar wine,

As rare the vessel that can hold God’s birth;
A soul made ready through a thousand years
Is the living mould of a supreme Descent.
p. 398, lines 241-44
Not only do Satyavan and Savitri fall in love with each other, they
also realise why Destiny has brought them together. (Book V Canto
3) Satyavan is so much enraptured by the joy and beauty that Savitri
56
seems to have brought into his world that he makes the first
advances and entreats her to step down from the chariot. Satyavan
had until now received a great deal from his communion with the
Nature all around him; he had often felt oneness with all through
his oneness with Nature. But often he had felt this joy being
overshadowed by the fact that so far in life the body and the soul
have remained disunited, and he had always hoped that one day
the body too would be able to share in the glorious destiny of the
soul. Now he begins to feel that Savitri is coming into his life to
make this miracle possible.
Then we come to a glorious description of a gandharva marriage
(a marriage solemnised with Nature and the gods as its witnesses)
which unites Satyavan and Savitri in matrimony. Savitri weaves ‘a
candid garland’ with the flowers she has picked up from the
clustering swarms that she finds around her and she puts it on the
bosom of Satyavan. And this is how Satyavan responds to her
gesture:
He bent to her and took into his own

Their married yearning joined like folded hopes;
As if a whole rich world suddenly possessed,
Wedded to all he had been, became himself,
An inexhaustible joy made his alone,
He gathered all Savitri into his clasp.
Around her his embrace became the sign
Of a locked closeness through slow intimate years,
A first sweet summary of delight to come,
One brevity intense of all long life.
In a wide moment of two souls that meet
She felt her being flow into him as in waves
A river pours into a mighty sea.
As when a soul is merging into God
To live in Him for ever and know His joy,
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Her consciousness grew aware of him alone
And all her separate self was lost in his.
As a starry heaven encircles happy earth,
He shut her into himself in a circle of bliss
And shut the world into himself and her.
p. 410, lines 362-81
The poet now elevates this union of Satyavan and Savitri by

investing it with a vaster, almost a cosmic significance.
Each now was a part of the other’s unity,

The world was but their twin self-finding’s scene
Or their own wedded being’s vaster frame.
On the high glowing cupola of the day
Fate tied a knot with morning’s halo threads
While by the ministry of an auspice-hour
Heart-bound before the sun, their marriage fire,
The wedding of the eternal Lord and Spouse
Took place again on earth in human forms:
In a new act of the drama of the world
The united Two began a greater age.
p. 411, lines 391-400
After this, Savitri takes leave of Satyavan to go to her father to

inform him of her choice of Satyavan as her husband and promises
to return to him soon and never to part from him again.
This entire Book (The Book of Love) is a departure from the
Mahabharata story. There is no reference whatsoever in Sri
Aurobindo’s epic to any traditional, ritualistic marriage of the kind
referred to in the Mahabharata legend.
58
When Savitri returns to her father’s palace from the journey, she
finds her father in the company of Narad, the heavenly sage. She
bows respectfully at the feet of both these elders. Narad at this point
asks Aswapati where his daughter had gone and from where she
was returning. He also asks him why he had not yet given her in
marriage to a suitable husband. Aswapati explains that she had
gone out at his bidding with the intent of finding a suitable husband
for herself and that she is just returning from that journey. He then
asks Savitri whom she had chosen for her lord and husband. Savitri
is brief in her reply and tells them about the just warrior king of
Shalwa, renowned by the name of Dyumatsena, and how when he
became blind, an old enemy of his attacked him and seized his
kingdom. Then accompanied by his wife and their child still of a
very tender age, Dyumatsena retired to a forest and began to spend
his time in austere tapasya. Their son Satyavan was brought up in
the penance-grove and is now grown up; and in him, Savitri
announces, she saw an agreeably proper husband and had chosen
him so in her mind. This is followed by Narad’s alarming statement
that Savitri has done something “accursed that forebodes a great
evil”. But Narad also has high praise for Satyavan. He describes him
as bright like the Sun-god, and quick and sharp in intelligence like
Brihaspati6 and valiant as Indra7 , and forbearing like the earth,
strong in build and handsome as one of the Aswinikumars 8 . He
goes on to describe the excellence of Satyavan’s character and
describes him as exceedingly munificent and large-hearted, soft-
natured, full of truth, friendly with everybody, and radiant.
Aswapati asks what then was the blemish in him. Narad answers
that in spite of all his high merits and virtues, there is one blemish
6
The preceptor of the Gods
7
The leader of the Gods
8
The twin Vedic deities, known for their handsomeness, who symbolise powers
of Truth, of intelligent action and of right enjoyment.
59
in him and that is, one year from that day he is destined to die. On
hearing this, Aswapati gets alarmed and asks Savitri to proceed
again on another journey since her choice of Satyavan has proved to
be a flawed one. But Savitri is unshaken in her resolve to get
married to Satyavan and refuses to go out and choose a second
time. Narad then intervenes and strongly supports Savitri’s decision
to stick to her choice of Satyavan, because he thinks it is in
conformity with dharma in every respect. He further adds that since
no one else possesses the qualities that Satyavan does, in his
opinion it would be proper to give Savitri in marriage to him.
Aswapati agrees to accept Narad’s advice since he feels that
whatever has to be will be. Narad then blesses the proposed
marriage with the words “Let always noble and propitious things
be to all” and takes leave of the assembly.
Vyasa narrates this part of the story very briskly in about 32
stanzas (about 64 lines). We have already seen that in Sri
Aurobindo’s epic Book V (“The Book of Love’) is entirely new and
this part of the story is narrated in Sri Aurobindo’s epic in two
Books – Books V and VI comprising 5 cantos (nearly 75 pages or
2462 lines). There is no reference in Vyasa’s narration to Malawi,
Aswapati’s wife and Savitri’s mother. We shall see that, as Sri
Aurobindo narrates the story, she has an important part to play in
this meeting with Narad in Aswapati’s court.
After it becomes clear that Savitri is firm in her resolve to marry
Satyavan, Aswapati begins preparations for her wedding. On an
auspicious day, accompanied by the elderly Brahmins, he visits the
hermitage of Dyumatsena. After the exchange of courtesies
Aswapati tells Dyumatsena that the purpose of his visit was to
request him to accept Savitri as his daughter-in-law. Dyumatsena
says he has reservations about her only on one count – whether the
fair princess would be able to bear the hardships associated with life
in a hermitage. Aswapati assures him that Savitri should have no
problem with this, since she knows that both happiness and sorrow
60
are transient in life. Dyumatsena then happily accepts Aswapati’s
proposal, and declares that it had been a long-cherished desire of
his to have Savitri as his daughter-in-law. This is followed by a brief
description of the formal marriage ceremony.
After the marriage Savitri begins to live in the hermitage with
Satyavan and happily adjusts to the forest life by donning bark
garments and red-dyed clothes. She looks after Satyavan’s parents
with loving care, and Satyavan and Savitri are happy in each other’s
company. But her heart is heavy with the burden of Narad’s dire
prophecy about Satyavan’s death; she just can’t forget this
prophecy. We will see that Sri Aurobindo’s epic does not talk about
the formal, ritual wedding at all, but devotes a whole canto (Canto 1
of Book VII) to describe Savitri’s state of mind during the one year
she spends with Satyavan in the hermitage, all the time tormented
by the dire words of Narad’s prophecy.

In Sri Aurobindo’s epic we are now at the beginning of Canto 1 of
Book VI, “The Book of Fate” This canto begins with a description of
how Narad, ‘the heavenly sage from Paradise’, slowly descends to
earth. Savitri has now known of Love but she must also know of
Death because it is her life’s mission to conquer Death by the power
of Love. The purpose of Narad’s visit is to steel Savitri’s will to
accept the challenge of Death which threatens the life of the man
she loves, namely, Satyavan. As he comes down from his paradisal
home, Narad sings songs about the glory and marvel still to be born
on earth. He eventually arrives at Aswapati’s palace, where he is
welcomed with full honours by King Aswapati and his wife. Even
as he was exchanging greetings with his hosts, Savitri arrives there
from her one-year long journey. She looks radiant and transformed
by the halo of the love that she has found in the wilderness. Then
there follows another portrait of Savitri, this time of Savitri the bride
61
as seen by Narad. This is an unusual description of Savitri, too rich
and subtle in the literary devices used in it for us to be able to talk
about it in any detail here. These words of Narad also give us the
feeling that the sage’s inner vision has seen much more about this
young bride than he is willing to reveal at the moment, because
what he has seen is not all equally auspicious. This description
begins on line 126 (page 418) with the following words:
He cried to her, “Who is this that comes, the bride…?”
And concludes on line 201 (page 420) with the words:
If for all time doom could be left to sleep.
Sri Aurobindo’s Aswapati, as we know, is also a great yogi; he has

himself caught more than a glimpse of what Narad has seen in his
yogic vision, namely the dark shadow of death hovering over
Satyavan, and so he implores Narad to let Savitri pass her mortal
life unwounded. Realising that words are vain where Fate is lord,
Narad changes the subject and asks Savitri on what mission she had
gone out and what God, what face supreme, she met suddenly?
As she does in Vyasa’s legend, Savitri briefly mentions
Dyumatsena, ‘blind, exiled, outcast, once a mighty king’ and reveals
that she has met Dyumatsena’s son, Satyavan, ‘on the wild forest’s
lonely verge’. She then concludes with the words: ‘My father, I have
chosen. This is done’. Aswapati immediately responds and tells her
that he approves her choice, and adds that he is sure that all will be
well since the secret will in things only works for good, although
appearances might be contrary. He also requests Narad not to
reveal the destiny he has foreseen for Satyavan since ordinary
mortals cannot cope with prevision. But listening to this exchange
62
Savitri’s mother (Malawi, her name is not mentioned in Sri
Aurobindo’s epic) gets alarmed and requests Narad to assure them
that Satyavan in fact will prove to be a happy choice for Savitri. She
says further that, ‘if wings of Evil brood’ above Satyavan, then Narad
should say so, because then they will be able to take measures to
rescue themselves from the hazard of this entanglement with
Satyavan. In reply, Narad says that future knowledge is a torturing
burden and a fruitless light because our steps in life are compelled
by a mysterious Power. But Savitri’s mother is insistent and wants
to know from Narad what destiny has decreed for Satyavan. Narad
begins by praising Satyavan; he describes him as ‘a star of splendour
or a rose of bliss’, as ‘a godhead quarried from the stones of life’, ‘a being so
rare, of so divine a make’. But then he concludes by saying:
Heaven’s greatness came, but was too great to stay.

Twelve swift-winged months are given to him and her;
This day returning Satyavan must die.
p. 431, lines 586-88
When she hears this, Savitri’s mother declares that whatever be the
excellent qualities of Satyavan, his choice by Savitri has been proved
erroneous, for ‘Death is the cupbearer of the wine’. She therefore rejects
the grace and the mockery. She now entreats Savitri to mount her
chariot and to travel once more through the peopled lands and
choose once again. She asks Savitri not to insist on her choice of
Satyavan because death has made it vain. But Savitri is adamant
and declares that once her heart has chosen and it will not choose
again. Her heart has pledged itself to Satyavan and nothing can
break this pledge, neither Time nor Death. The intuition that comes
from true Love is hers now and she declares that she is stronger
than her fate and that her love for Satyavan remains unshaken and
has the strength to triumph over Death. Savitri’s mother is
63
desperate and doesn’t give up easily. She tries to reason with her,
she tries to coax her to change her mind about Satyavan. She asks
her to remember that she is no more than a mortal and not to think
like a god. She begs of her to use her reason and not leave the path
of vigilant light to follow a beautiful face. But Savitri remains
resolute and declares:
“This, this is first, last joy and to its throb

The riches of a thousand fortunate years
Are poverty. Nothing to me are death and grief
Or ordinary lives and happy days.
And what to me are common souls of men
Or eyes and lips that are not Satyavan’s?
I have no need to draw back from his arms
And the discovered paradise of his love
And journey into a still infinity.
Only now for my soul in Satyavan
I treasure the rich occasion of my birth:
In sunlight and a dream of emerald ways
I shall walk with him like gods in Paradise.
If for a year, that year is all my life.
And yet I know this is not all my fate
Only to live and love awhile and die.
For I know now why my spirit came on earth
And who I am and who he is I love.
I have looked at him from my immortal Self,
I have seen God smile at me in Satyavan;
I have seen the Eternal in a human face.”
p. 435, lines 735-55
What do you say to someone who can declare her love in such
words? So, as the poet says, none could answer to her words.
64
‘Silent, they sat and looked into the eyes of Fate’; and the pronoun
“they” refers to Narad, Aswapati and his Queen.
We have now reviewed all the three cantos of Book V, “The Book
of Love” and also Canto 1 (“The Word of Fate”) of Book VI, “The
Book of Fate”. We will continue this discussion in the next article. In
the following section, as usual we bring to you a passage from
Savitri for your study and enjoyment.
In this section, we will take a closer look at one of the passages in
Book VI, Canto 1. This passage once again contains a description of
Savitri, of Savitri the bride, as seen by Narad. We have already
examined two passages describing Savitri – Savitri as she looked on
the morning of the day on which Satyavan was destined to die
(Chapter 2) and Savitri as a young woman through the eyes of her
father (Chapter 3). The passage given below gives you one more
portrait of Savitri, this time describing her as she was returning
after meeting Satyavan. She has discovered love in the wilderness
and married Satyavan with nature and the Gods as witnesses, and
her entire being is rendered resplendent by this deep experience of
love. Narad’s yogic vision unmistakably notices this transformation
in Savitri. This is a fairly long passage, and consists of 75 lines. I will
not attempt to comment on it in detail. It is enough to note the
peculiar literary device the poet is using throughout this passage.
For example, he does not describe directly Savitri’s eyes or hands;
he describes them in terms of the enchanting scenes of nature’s
beauty which remind him of some aspect of her being.
“Who is this that comes, the bride,

The flame-born, and round her illumined head
Pouring their lights her hymeneal pomps
Move flashing about her? From what green glimmer of glades
Retreating into dewy silences
Or half-seen verge of waters moon-betrayed
65
Bringst thou this glory of enchanted eyes?
Earth has gold-hued expanses, shadowy hills
That cowl their dreaming phantom heads in night,
And, guarded in a cloistral joy of woods,
Screened banks sink down into felicity
Seized by the curved incessant yearning hands
And ripple-passion of the upgazing stream:
Amid cool-lipped murmurs of its pure embrace
They lose their souls on beds of trembling reeds.
And all these are mysterious presences
In which some spirit’s immortal bliss is felt,
And they betray the earth-born heart to joy.
There hast thou paused, and marvelling borne eyes
Unknown, or heard a voice that forced thy life
To strain its rapture through thy listening soul?
Or, if my thought could trust this shimmering gaze,
It would say thou hast not drunk from an earthly cup,
But stepping through azure curtains of the noon
Thou wast surrounded on a magic verge
In brighter countries than man’s eyes can bear.
Assailed by trooping voices of delight
And seized mid a sunlit glamour of the boughs
In faery woods, led down the gleaming slopes
Of Gandhamadan where the Apsaras roam,
Thy limbs have shared the sports which none has seen,
And in god-haunts thy human footsteps strayed,
Thy mortal bosom quivered with god-speech
And thy soul answered to a Word unknown
What feet of gods, what ravishing flutes of heaven
Have thrilled high melodies round, from near and far
Approaching through the soft and revelling air,
Which still surprised thou hearest? They have fed
Thy silence on some red strange-ecstasied fruit
66
And thou hast trod the dim moon-peaks of bliss.
Reveal, O winged with light, whence thou hast flown
Hastening bright-hued through the green tangled earth,
Thy body rhythmical with the spring-bird’s call.
The empty roses of thy hands are filled
Only with their own beauty and the thrill
Of a remembered clasp, and in thee glows
A heavenly jar, thy firm deep-honied heart,
New-brimming with a sweet and nectarous wine.
Thou hast not spoken with the kings of pain.
Life’s perilous music rings yet to thy ear
Far-melodied, rapid and grand, a Centaur’s song,
Or soft as water plashing mid the hills,
Or mighty as a great chant of many winds.
Moon-bright thou livest in thy inner bliss.
Thou comest like a silver deer through groves
Of coral flowers and buds of glowing dreams,
Or fleest like a wind-goddess through leaves,
Or roamst, O ruby-eyed and snow-winged dove,
Flitting through thickets of thy pure desires
In the unwounded beauty of thy soul.
These things are only images to thy earth,
But truest truth of that which in thee sleeps.
For such is thy spirit, a sister of the gods,
Thy earthly body lovely to the eyes
And thou art kin in joy to heaven’s sons.
O thou who hast come to this great perilous world
Now only seen through the splendour of thy dreams,
Where hardly love and beauty can live safe,
Thyself a being dangerously great,
A soul alone in a golden house of thought
Has lived walled in by the safety of thy dreams.
On heights of happiness leaving doom asleep
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Who hunts unseen the unconscious lives of men,
If thy heart could live locked in the ideal’s gold,
As high, as happy might thy waking be!
If for all time doom could be left to sleep!”
pp. 418-420, lines 126-201
Notice that the first thing Narad sees about Savitri are the festive
flashes of the ‘hymeneal pomps’ around her. (“hymeneal” =
pertaining to marriage). She has just got married and the sense of
fulfilment she has from this is writ large on her face. Then he goes
on to describe her eyes, but not directly: the glory of the
enchantment of her eyes reminds him of the ‘green glimmer of glades’
(open spaces in a forest) retreating into dewy silences, and of half-
seen river banks which would have remained unseen if they were
not moon-lit. So the poet first describes the green glimmer of glades
and half-seen verge of waters moon-betrayed and then relates these
to Savitri’s eyes. This is the technique he uses through most of this
passage (lines 126–132).
There is something about Savitri’s expression that reminds
Narad of the golden-hued expanses of the earth, of shadowy hills
that cover their dreaming hazy, indistinct peaks in night, and of
wood-screened banks which swoon with delight as they are
ravished by the yearning ripples of the streams which amid cool-
lipped murmur of their pure embrace lose themselves on beds of
trembling reeds. These are all mysterious presences in which one
can feel the immortal bliss of some spirit as it is seen filling its earth-
born heart with joy. Narad says to Savitri: “It looks as though you
have paused in all these wonderful places and your eyes carry
something of the enchantment of them and the expression on your
face shows that you have heard with your soul’s listening a voice
that has enraptured your entire being.” Narad says further to
Savitri: “If I can trust the lustre of your eyes, I would say that the
bliss you have tasted is not of the earthly kind; you have certainly
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drunk fulfilment but not from an earthly cup, you must have
stepped through the blue curtains of the morning into a magic
world in countries too bright for mortal eyes to bear.” This kind of
massing of sensuous nature imagery to describe a person in a
particular mood is an unusual feat in English poetry. And if you
dwell on these lines you will appreciate how aptly they succeed in
describing the glow of marital bliss reflected in Savitri’s entire
person (lines 133–151).
The description continues. “Surely, assailed by voices of delight
and seized in the sun-lit glamour of boughs in faery woods as on
the gleaming slopes of Gundhamadan (a mountain and forest
described in Hindu mythology, renowned for its fragrance) where
the Apsaras (celestial damsels of joy) roam, your limbs must have
shared the sports which none has seen, and in god-haunts your
footsteps must have strayed, and your mortal bosom must have
vibrated with god-speech and your soul must have responded to it”
(lines 152–159).
“You still seem to be hearing in great surprise the footsteps of
gods and the ravishing flutes of heavenly melodies approaching
you from far and near through the soft air.” The description is put
in the mode of a question: ‘The footsteps of what gods and what
ravishing heavenly melodies are you listening to?’ “These seem to
have fed your silence with some red strange-ecstasied fruit and you
seem to have trodden the moon-peaks of bliss.” In other words,
Narad says to her that her face has the rapt look of happiness of
someone who is having these wonderful experiences. That is the
import (lines 160–165).
“Tell us, o bird with the wings of light, from where you have
flown to us, hastening bright-hued through the green forest, with
your body rhythmical with the call of the spring-bird? The now
empty roses of your palms are filled with their own beauty and the
thrill of a remembered clasp, and you are glowing like a heavenly
jar, your heart recently rendered brim-full with a sweet and
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nectarous wine” (lines 166 – 173).
“Until now you have been a stranger to pain. Life’s hazardous
music yet rings to your ears far-melodied, rapid and grand, and
enchanting like the Centaur’s song, or soft as water mid the hills, or
mighty as the great chant of many winds. Moon-bright you live in
the inner bliss. You have come like a silver deer through groves of
coral flowers and buds of glowing dreams, and you run like a wind-
goddess through leaves, or roam like a snow-winged dove flitting
through the thickets of your pure desires with the beauty of your
soul unwounded” (lines 174–185).
“These felicities within you, I have described in terms of the
images of this earth but they are meant only to capture the truth of
what you are within. For such is your spirit, a sister of the gods,
your earthly body is lovely to the eyes, and you are akin in joy to
heaven’ sons” (lines 186–190).
“You have come to this great perilous world which you have so
far seen only through the splendour of your dreams, but this is a
world in which love and beauty can hardly live safe. You, O Savitri,
are dangerously great, but you have lived safe so far in the golden
house of thought walled in by the safety of your dreams. You can
continue to live on these heights of happiness, if your heart can live
locked in the golden realm of the ideal; you may then be able to live
leaving Doom asleep who hunts unseen the unconscious lives of
men.” Notice that Narad gives some hint of the impending disaster
but is discreet about it in holding the knowledge he has back from
words (lines 191–201).
The opulence of sensuous imagery from nature which the poet
has used in this passage is truly oriental and classical and many a
modern reader may need to get used to the literary devices used so
deftly by the poet here, which remind one of the classical poet
Kalidas rather than of Keats, probably the most sensuous of the
English romantic poets.
70
5: Book VI, Canto 2
At the end of the previous chapter, we saw how the grim prophecy
of Narad that Satyavan had only one more year to live had the
effect of steeling Savitri’s resolve to marry Satyavan. At that point
we had reached the end of Canto 1 of Book VI of Savitri. We now
move on to Canto 2 of Book VI (‘The Way of Fate and the Problem
of Pain’). Because of the important matters it deals with, this entire
chapter will be devoted to this canto.

In the Mahabharata legend, as soon Savitri reveals that she has
chosen Satyavan for her husband, Narad immediately bursts out
saying that Savitri has done “something accursed, that forebodes a
great evil”, although he does not spell out the nature of this evil
until a little later. He then goes on to say some excellent things
about Satyavan. At this point, Aswapati asks what then was the
blemish in Satyavan about which Narad was so concerned as soon
as he had heard the name of Satyavan from Savitri. In reply, Narad
makes the prophecy about Satyavan’s death at the end of that year.
We have seen how Aswapati then tries to persuade Savitri to go out
again and choose a second time, but she is adamant. At this point
Narad resolves the issue in Savitri’s favour and advises Aswapati to
accept her choice and Aswapati bows to Narad’s sage advice.

We have already seen that in Sri Aurobindo’s epic, it is Savitri’s
mother (Malawi), who gets very upset when she hears Narad’s
prophecy, and we have seen how hard she tries to persuade Savitri
to go out and choose again, and we have also seen how Savitri
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makes everyone speechless by the great declaration of her love to
Satyavan. She sticks to her resolve here depending entirely on her
own inner strength: Narad does not come to her help as he does in
the Mahabharata legend. Secondly, Sri Aurobindo must have
introduced Savitri’s mother in this part of the story to represent the
purely human reaction to the situation. Aswapati in Sri Aurobindo’s
epic, as we have already seen, is a very great Yogi and knows
probably as much as Narad does of what the future holds for
Satyavan and Savitri. Therefore, in Sri Aurobindo’s epic, the role of
trying to persuade Savitri to choose a second time has been
assigned to Savitri’s mother.
When finally Savitri’s mother is convinced that it is futile to
persuade her to change her mind about Satyavan, Sri Aurobindo
uses Malawi for another important purpose. She now feels totally
frustrated at the turn of events and reacts to them in a totally
human way. She raises some fundamental questions which have
always baffled human understanding, and seeks Narad’s answers
to them. These also happen to be some of the questions which have
baffled most philosophical systems. This canto – ‘The Way of Fate
and the Problem of Pain’ – which takes up 26 pages (909 lines), is
totally new in Sri Aurobindo’s epic. There is nothing corresponding
to it in Vyasa’s version of the legend.
When Savitri refuses to change her mind about Satyavan in spite
of several entreaties from her mother, the latter naturally feels angry
and frustrated that the one person dearest to her, namely Savitri, is
getting ready to enter a trap set for her by Fate. But although she is
her mother, she is totally helpless and can do nothing about it.
When she looks into the future she sees nothing but a life-time of
pain and suffering ahead for Savitri once Satyavan is dead at the
end of that very year, as predicted by Narad. Why was Savitri being
punished in this manner when she has done nothing to deserve it?
She is so young, so gifted, so full of love and grace, why is she not
being allowed to live a normal life of fulfilment? Why did her
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chariot have to bring her face to face with the one young man who
had this accursed fate and why did she lose her heart to him when
there were countless other young people whom Savitri could have
met? The questions that Savitri’s mother now asks Narad are
prompted by this puzzlement of hers at the turn of events in
Savitri’s life. This leads her to raise some fairly general questions:
Why is there pain and suffering in life? Did God really create such
an imperfect world or did some other force interfere and God was
helpless to prevent the imposition of pain and suffering on human
life? And then what is this that is called ‘Fate’? Is it just random
chance, or are the accidental events of which it is made governed by
some intelligence? What about evil? How could it have arisen when
God who is all-good, all-compassion, all-powerful is the creator of
this world? How could he allow such a thing?
Savitri’s mother describes life as it is experienced by man here on
earth in these words:
Mind suffers lamed by the world’s disharmony

And the unloveliness of human things.
A treasure misspent or cheaply, fruitlessly sold
In the bazaar of a blind destiny,
A gift of priceless value from Time’s gods
Lost or mislaid in an uncaring world,
Life is a marvel missed, an art gone wry;
A seeker in a dark and obscure place,
An ill-armed warrior facing dreadful odds,
An imperfect worker given a baffling task,
An ignorant judge of problems Ignorance made,
Its heavenward flights reach closed and keyless gates,
Its glorious outbursts peter out in mire.
On Nature’s gifts to man a curse was laid:
All walks inarmed by its own opposites,
Error is the comrade of our mortal thought
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And falsehood lurks in the deep bosom of truth,
Sin poisons with its vivid flowers of joy
Or leaves a red scar burnt across the soul;
Virtue is a grey bondage and a gaol.
pp. 439-440 lines 90-109
This is a very brilliant summing up of life as seen by the human

mind. This analysis naturally leads her to the inevitable conclusion
that there is no meaning to life, and all this talk of an omnipresent,
omniscient and omnipotent creator and of a deathless soul in us is
just an illusion. As Savitri’s mother puts it:
Perhaps the soul we feel is only a dream,

Eternal self a fiction sensed in trance.
p. 442 lines 188-189
Savitri’s mother raises here some of the most difficult problems

which philosophers everywhere have grappled with, but without
complete success. These are not merely philosophers’ questions.
Most of us are forced to ask similar questions when in life we feel
betrayed by treachery, when our friends turn false, when we find
that our gods have clay feet, and our dreams and ideals begin to
look like a mockery.
Savitri’s mother’s critique is devastating and almost irrefutable,
particularly if one believes in the concept of an omniscient,
omnipotent God who is extra-cosmic, who stands outside this
creation and has full control over it. The hypothesis of an extra-
cosmic God assumes that God is outside his creation and he works
out his purpose in the world through the intense sorrow and
sufferings of those created by him. If God imposes on his creation
pain, evil and suffering from which he is immune, we then have a
God who is even morally reprehensible. If God is indeed all-kind
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and all-powerful, how is it that he has created this world where
pain and suffering are so rampant, where evil triumphs over good
most of the time and God stands helpless? Is it either because he
does not care or because he is not strong enough to prevent what is
happening in the world? Thus Savitri’s mother makes here a case
against the existence of God more or less along the lines adopted by
the modern age of enlightenment.
Narad does not take up these questions as so many metaphysical
problems that need to be answered. Sri Aurobindo has done this in
his metaphysical magnum opus, The Life Divine. The perception of the
Western philosophers is that by and large Hindu philosophers are
rather cavalier in their treatment of evil. This perception is based on
a wrong reading of the Indian point of view. But this is not the right
forum for discussing these matters. Sri Aurobindo is unlike most
Hindu philosophers in several ways, particularly in his treatment of
evil. For him evil is not just a problem for an individual which gets
dissolved when he rises above the ignorance in which he lives.
There is also the problem of cosmic evil and before evil can
disappear from this world, the problem of cosmic evil has to be
dealt with.
Sri Aurobindo offers an evolutionary perspective on this cluster
of problems and provides probably the best solution to them. He
does not regard either physical evil, in the shape of pain and
suffering, or moral evil, as an inseparable part of life or as a
permanent feature of the world. In the course of evolution, the
former enters the world with the emergence of life just as moral evil
enters with the emergence of the finite rational will. Sri Aurobindo
believes that the solution to these problems lies in a radical
transformation of the world, which will take this creation to the next
stage in evolution. An individual may be able to find freedom from
evil and pain by attaining spiritual maturity and by being lifted into
the full freedom of the self. But this will not solve the cosmic
problem of evil. For that we need the descent of a greater power of
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intensity and purity which Sri Aurobindo has called the Gnostic or
the Supramental Consciousness. This, in brief, is Sri Aurobindo’s
metaphysical solution to this problem.
Narad’s reply is not couched in metaphysical terms. He first
reiterates that the Eternal, whose real nature is bliss, lives in the
human heart but we are not aware of him because the darkness of
the ignorance which stands between us and him. He tells Savitri’s
mother that since she sees the world in the light of the ignorance she
cannot see God’s meaning in the world. Our desires and hopes hide
it from us. Our craving for earth’s joys hides from us the Immortal’s
bliss.
He does not deny the existence of pain in our lives, but he points
out that ‘Where Ignorance is, there suffering too must come’. We in our
ignorance feel that we have a right to be happy and we have our
own idea of happiness. But the inner truth about our life is that we
are here on earth to grow in consciousness, to evolve from a lower
to a higher consciousness through all kinds of experiences, some
pleasant, some unpleasant. Both these are needed for us to grow in
life. Pain often comes to shake us out of our complacency and to
persuade us to climb towards the sun of perfect consciousness
shining on the summits of our being. This is how Narad puts this
idea:
Pain is the hammer of the Gods to break

A dead resistance in the mortal’s heart,
His slow inertia as of living stone.
If the heart were not forced to want and weep,
His soul would have lain down content, at ease,
And never thought to exceed the human start
And never learned to climb towards the Sun.
p. 443 lines 239-245
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From pain in individual beings, Narad goes on to speak of the
cosmic role of pain. Pain was the first-born of the inconscience from
which this creation has evolved. Pain is what has stirred Matter
from its sleep in the inconscience and made the evolution of spirit
possible. The great world-redeemers take this pain on themselves
and help this world to evolve towards a higher consciousness. This
is the will of God and it must be worked out in human life against
the evil that rises from the gulfs of the inconscience, against man’s
ignorance and against the deep folly of the human heart. Man’s
spirit is doomed to pain until man is freed from ignorance and its
result, evil. Through all the tragic spectacle of blood, sweat, toil and
tears, the evolutionary effort moves on, and men suffer and die that
Man may live and God be born in him. Pain is the hand sculpturing
men to greatness. This is what we find in the lives of ‘the Great who
came to save this suffering world’. The poet cites here as an example
Jesus Christ and his crucifixion (lines 290–320). This is the lot of all
those who come to help the world and lead the soul of earth to
higher things. Their life is a constant combat with evil which they
have to conquer in order to help free mankind from the hold of the
inconscience and its forces.
But when God’s messenger comes to help the world

And lead the soul of earth to higher things,
He too must carry the yoke he came to unloose;
He too must bear the pang that he would heal:
Exempt and unafflicted by earth’s fate,
How shall he cure the ills he never felt?…
He carries the suffering world in his own breast;
Its sins weigh on his thoughts, its grief is his:
Earth’s ancient load lies heavy on his soul;
Night and its powers beleaguer his tardy steps,
The Titan adversary’s clutch he bears;
His march is a battle and a pilgrimage.
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Life’s evil smites, he is stricken with the world’s pain:
A million wounds gape in his secret heart.
He journeys sleepless through an unending night;
Antagonist forces crowd across his path;
A siege, a combat is his inner life.
p. 446 lines 324-345
In this part of his reply, Narad gives expression to Sri Aurobindo’s

occult view of evil. In several places in Savitri Sri Aurobindo has
referred to the four powers of Inconscience which constantly resist
the evolutionary effort to rise progressively to higher levels of
spiritual consciousness and manifest here in Matter the perfection of
the Divine. These four powers are the attack of obscurity, the
resistance of universal inconscience, the refusal of the universal
inertia, and the obstruction and conservatism of the material
negation, as identified by Sri Aurobindo in some of his other
writings9 .
A dark concealed hostility is lodged

In the human depths, in the hidden heart of Time
That claims the right to change and mar God’s work.
A secret enmity ambushes the world’s march;
It leaves a mark on thought and speech and act:
It stamps stain and defect on all things done;
Till it is slain peace is forbidden on earth.
There is no visible foe, but the unseen
Is round us, forces intangible besiege,
Touches from alien realms, thoughts not our own
Overtake us and compel the erring heart;
Our lives are caught in an ambiguous net.
An adversary Force was born of old:
9
Sri Aurobindo: Archives and Research, December 1994, pp. 149-50
78
Invader of the life of mortal man,
It hides from him the straight immortal path.
A power came in to veil the eternal Light,
A power opposed to the eternal will
Diverts the messages of the infallible Word,
Contorts the contours of the cosmic plan:
A whisper lures to evil the human heart,
It seals up wisdom’s eyes, the soul’s regard,
It is the origin of our suffering here,
It binds earth to calamity and pain.
This all must conquer who would bring down God’s peace.
This hidden foe lodged in the human breast
Man must overcome or miss his higher fate.
This is the inner war without escape.
pp. 447-48 lines 373-399
That is why the world-redeemer’s task becomes so difficult. This

world is in love with its own ignorance, and whoever comes to
remove this ignorance is perceived as the enemy, and therefore it
rewards with the cross those who come to save it from ignorance.
There are some who enable you to liberate yourself from the
ignorance but in the process also to escape from this world. Of
course these lucky few find fulfilment for themselves, but how can
the ignorance which afflicts the world be removed just by a few
escaping from the world? Running away from the world is trying to
evade the hold of ignorance and suffering – this is what all the
world’s great spiritual teachers have taught so far. They offer this
solution because of their belief that the evil, suffering and pain
which pursue life in this world at every step cannot be shaken off.
So the best solution to them is to abandon the world to its own fate
and seek one’s own personal salvation.
What then is the solution to the problem of evil, and pain? Narad
says that the work of bringing real freedom to this world cannot be
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achieved fully
…till the evil is slain in its own home

And Light invades the world’s inconscient base
And perished the adversary Force,
p. 448 lines 423-425
Narad then talks about a world-redeemer who may yet come and
take up this challenge and go down into the abysm of the
Inconscient and slay evil in its own house. This saviour will have to
grapple with the riddling Sphinx of obscurity and plunge into the
deep darkness of the Inconscient. He will have to call the light of
consciousness into these dark caves. He will have to make Truth-
Light conquer Matter’s sleep of inertia and make all earth look into
the eyes of God. For this he will have to bring light to all things that
are perverse, to explore the very heart of evil and see how deep its
roots are in nature’s soil. He will have to enter the eternity of Night
and know God’s darkness as he knows his Sun. In other words, this
saviour will have to enter the dolorous vasts and travel through
Hell to be able to save the world. He will not be able to do all this
with the mental light alone; he will need the more powerful light of
the Truth-Consciousness (or the Supramental Consciousness) to be
able to perform this great feat. And then from the bottom of the
inconscience he will be able to break into the eternal Light of the
Truth-consciousness on the other side. This world will then get
totally transformed:
There meet and clasp the eternal opposites,

There pain becomes a violent fiery joy;
Evil turns back to its original good,
And sorrow lies upon the breasts of Bliss:
Her gaze is charged with a wistful ecstasy.
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Then shall be ended here the Law of Pain.
Earth shall be made a home of Heaven’s light,
A seer heaven-born shall lodge in human breasts;
The superconscient beam shall touch men’s eyes
And the truth-conscious world come down to earth
Invading Matter with the Spirit’s ray,
Awaking its silence to immortal thoughts,
Awaking the dumb heart to the living Word.
This mortal life shall house Eternity’s bliss,
The body’s self taste immortality.
Then shall the world-redeemer’s task be done.
p. 451 lines 500-516
Until this happens, until the Truth-conscious world comes down to

earth, life will continue to be troubled by pain and death, and man
will have to put up with these things and bear them, leaning on his
faith in God for his support. ‘Make of thy daily way a pilgrimage,/ For
through small joys and griefs thou mov’st towards God.’ That is his
advice to man for now.
There is, however, the Titan’s way which strives to wrest by
force what belongs to the Immortals. This way is not good for man,
because it seeks to storm the heavens by force and brings a great
deal of suffering all around. The Asura resorts to hurry, riot, excess,
hate and violence in order to be equal to the Divine; he sees his little
self as very God and wants to stamp his single figure on the world.
Narad asks man not to take that road.
Narad re-affirms that infinity is man’s real goal and man carries
within himself a spark of the Divine. It is man’s refusal to recognise
the Divinity within himself that is the real cause of pain and
suffering.
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Pain is the signature of the Ignorance
Attesting the secret God denied by life:
Until life finds him pain can never end.
p. 453 lines 599-601
In fact, it is Bliss that is the secret of all that lives, ‘even pain and grief
are garbs of world-delight’. It is the limitation of our ego, the little
separated self, that cannot bear ‘the world’s tremendous touch’, and
this failure results in pain. Indifference, pain and joy are a triple
disguise of bliss. Only by the strength of the Spirit within will man
be able to convert all the agony he now feels into ecstasy.
Then Narad takes up the problem of the origin of pain and says
‘Thou art thyself the author of thy pain.’ ‘Thou’ here is not the human
you which is now complaining, but the central being in us who
accepted or even invited the adventure of the Ignorance. Sorrow
and struggle are a necessary consequence of the plunge into the
Inconscience and the evolutionary emergence out of it. The
Supreme Reality, whose nature is Consciousness and Bliss, became
curious of a shadow thrown by Itself, and sensed a negative infinity.
This became the ground for Nature’s ignorance, unconsciousness
and inertia. This led to the lure of the adventure of manifestation, of
the silent One manifesting as the Many in terms of ignorance and
inertia. Then began a huge descent, a giant fall.
As one drawn by the grandeur of the Void

The soul attracted leaned to the Abyss:
It longed for the adventure of Ignorance
And the marvel and surprise of the Unknown
And the endless possibility that lurked
In the womb of Chaos and in Nothing’s gulf
Or looked from the unfathomed eyes of Chance.
It tired of its unchanging happiness,
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It turned away from immortality:
It was drawn to hazard’s call and danger’s charm,
It yearned to the pathos of grief, the drama of pain,
Perdition’s peril, the wounded bare escape,
The music of ruin and its glamour and crash,
The savour of pity and the gamble of love
And passion and the ambiguous face of Fate.
p. 455 lines 653-667
Thus came, born from a blind tremendous choice,

This great perplexed and discontented world,
This haunt of Ignorance, this home of Pain.
p. 456 lines 684-686
Sri Aurobindo has pointed out elsewhere 10 that the origin of pain
and suffering is fundamentally a cosmic problem and needs a
cosmic consciousness to understand it; the perspective of the human
consciousness is too narrow to understand this. This is not the place
for us to discuss this problem in all its details. Suffice it to say here
that Sri Aurobindo’s solution to the problem of pain and suffering is
metaphysically probably the soundest so far presented.
At this point, Aswapati asks Narad, “Is the Spirit then ruled by
an outward physical world? Is there no remedy within for this
problem of fate? What is Fate after all, if not the will of the spirit
which is fulfilled by the cosmic forces after a protracted period of
time? At least in Savitri’s case I had thought a mighty power is
housed in her which has the capacity to deal with the vagaries of
Fate”. To this question Narad does not give a straight reply.
He says that although Fate seems to walk with random steps
there is nothing casual or accidental in this world; our least
stumblings are foreseen above. There is a sublime meaning to the
10
Nirodbaran’s Correspondence with Sri Aurobindo, p. 277
83
seemingly meandering steps of Time, but the human mind is
incapable of understanding it. Often some of our prayers are
rejected by the wisdom of Heaven because its love is wiser. And this
wisdom has kept for Savitri her privilege of pain. There certainly is
a greatness in Savitri’s soul that can transform her and all around
her; and yet she must walk on hard and painful stones to reach her
goal. She too must share the human need of pain.
The mind of man is led by words; he cannot see the integral
Truth; he has to cut it into strips and can see only one strip at a time.
Man sees this as a dead, mechanical universe, driven by chance or
necessity. He misses the heavings of the Mother’s heart, he feels
here only her rigid cold limbs. Matter’s laws seem rigid and all
seem to be bound by them, but the spirit’s consent is needed for
each act. Freedom and law walks step in step here. All here can
change if human will could be made one with God’s Will. By doing
that, man can become all-knowing and omniscient. If man’s mind
can receive God’s light, and his force be driven by God’s force, then
man himself becomes a miracle doing miracles.
It is decreed that Satyavan must die; the hour is fixed and chosen
also is the fatal stroke. But what else shall transpire after that is
written in Savitri’s soul. The power that is in Savitri will decide this;
but this writing will remain illegible until the hour comes for this
future to unfold itself. Fate is Truth which works itself out through
our Ignorance. Man can accept his fate or refuse it. Even death is not
a close; the events of life, happy or otherwise, are not our fate. The
goal, the road that we choose are our fate. Fate is a mechanism that
keeps working through ignorance until it has made us one with our
indwelling God. Since the path we now walk is the path of
Ignorance, it is full of strange happenings whose significance man
always misreads. Fate will keep chasing man through peril and
through triumph and follow him until he goes beyond the last post
of Ignorance and ‘stands upon the splendour-peaks of God’.
“In vain”, Narad says to Savitri’s mother, “do you mourn that
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Satyavan must die.” Death is the spirit’s opportunity, and for
Satyavan it will be a beginning of a greater life. A vast intention has
brought Satyavan and Savitri together, and love and death conspire
in their lives to bring about a great end. Out of danger and pain
heaven-bliss shall come. That is God’s secret plan. Many great souls
in the past have contributed to make this plan a reality, and of its
master-builders Savitri is one. Then come the following most
reassuring lines:
This world was not built with random bricks of Chance,

A blind god is not destiny’s architect;
A conscious power has drawn the plan of life,
There is a meaning in each curve and line.
It is an architecture high and grand
By many named and nameless masons built
In which unseeing hands obey the Unseen,
And of its master-builders she is one.
p. 459–60, lines 818-825
I have dealt with this canto in detail because most of us are

interested in the questions Savitri’s mother asks Narad and in the
answers Narad gives. As I pointed out earlier, these problems are
treated in great detail by Sri Aurobindo in The Life Divine. Here
Narad puts some of these thoughts most succinctly. What is
particularly worth noting here is how Sri Aurobindo takes abstract
philosophical thought and transforms it into poetic utterance of
great lyrical intensity. You will see many instances of this in Part III
of Savitri. Sri Aurobindo is probably the world’s greatest poet for
transforming mental thought into wonderful poetry.
In all the earlier articles of this series, I always gave you one or
more passages from Savitri with some comments for your
enjoyment. This one has already become more than sufficiently
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long. So this time I have decided to present to you a most glorious
passage which in fact concludes Narad’s reply to Savitri’s mother’s
questions. It is undoubtedly one of the poetic peaks in this epic. It is
a fairly long passage but I am sure you will love reading it aloud.
Read it aloud slowly and deliberately giving each vowel sound its
full value and paying full attention to the rhythm of the lines. And
after all the preceding discussion as the background, you should be
able to understand the passage and enjoy it without any detailed
commentary from me.
In these lines Narad advises Savitri’s mother not to try to change
the secret will and not to let purely human concerns stand between
Savitri and her fate. Savitri has the strength to confront Fate all by
herself because her will has been made one with God’s will. Her life
seems to be charged with the earth’s destiny but she is equal to her
mighty task. “O Queen, leave her to her mighty self and Fate,”
urges Narad.
“Queen, strive no more to change the secret will;

Time’s accidents are steps in its vast scheme.
Bring not thy brief and helpless human tears
Across the fathomless moments of a heart
That knows its single will and God’s as one:
It can embrace its hostile destiny;
It sits apart with grief and facing death,
Affronting adverse fate armed and alone.
In this enormous world standing apart
In the mightiness of her silent spirit’s will,
In the passion of her soul of sacrifice
Her lonely strength facing the universe,
Affronting fate, asks not man’s help nor god’s:
Sometimes one life is charged with earth’s destiny,
It cries not for succour from the time-bound powers.
Alone she is equal to her mighty task.
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Intervene not in a strife too great for thee,
A struggle too deep for mortal thought to sound,
Its question to this Nature’s rigid bounds
When the soul fronts nude of garbs the infinite,
Its too vast theme of a lonely mortal will
Pacing the silence of eternity.
As a star, uncompanioned, moves in heaven
Unastonished by the immensities of Space,
Travelling infinity by its own light,
The great are strongest when they stand alone.
A God-given might of being is their force,
A ray from self’s solitude of light the guide;
The soul that can live alone with itself meets God;
Its lonely universe is their rendezvous.
A day may come when she must stand unhelped
On a dangerous brink of the world’s doom and hers,
Carrying the world’s future on her lonely breast,
Carrying the human hope in a heart left sole
To conquer or fail on a last desperate verge,
Alone with death and close to extinction’s edge.
Her single greatness in that last dire scene
Must cross alone a perilous bridge in Time
And reach an apex of world-destiny
Where all is won or all is lost for man.
In that tremendous silence lone and lost
Of a deciding hour in the world’s fate,
In her soul’s climbing beyond mortal time
When she stands sole with Death or sole with God
Apart upon a silent desperate brink,
Alone with her self and death and destiny
As on some verge between Time and Timelessness
When being must end or life rebuild its base,
Alone she must conquer or alone must fall.
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No human aid can reach her in that hour,
No armoured god stand shining at her side.
Cry not to heaven, for she alone can save.
For this the silent Force came missioned down;
In her the conscious Will took human shape:
She only can save herself and save the world.
O queen, stand back from that stupendous scene,
Come not between her and her hour of Fate.
Her hour must come and none can intervene:
Think not to turn her from her heaven-sent task,
Strive not to save her from her own high will.
Thou hast no place in that tremendous strife;
Thy love and longing are not arbiters there;
Leave the world’s fate and her to God’s sole guard.
Even if he seems to leave her to her lone strength,
Even though all falters and falls and sees an end
And the heart fails and only are death and night,
God-given her strength can battle against doom
Even on a brink where Death alone seems close
And no human strength can hinder or can help.
Think not to intercede with the hidden Will,
Intrude not twixt her spirit and its force
But leave her to her mighty self and Fate.”
pp. 460-462, lines 826-897
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6: Book VII – The Book of Yoga
In our preliminary exploration of Savitri, we have now reached the

end of Book VI.
Book VII “The Book of Yoga” is another Book wholly devoted to
the description of Yoga. This time it is Savitri’s yoga, as Books I, II
and III primarily dealt with Aswapati’s yoga. We hope to deal with
these yogas – Aswapati’s and also Savitri’s – in some detail a little
later in this study. Here we will present only a general outline of
Savitri’s yogic journey as we did earlier with respect to Aswapati’s
yoga. As in earlier articles, we will continue noting the departures
from the Mahabharata legend that we find in Sri Aurobindo’s epic.

As already mentioned earlier, Aswapati performs the marriage of
Satyavan and Savitri following the prescribed rites and ceremonies.
Savitri is now settled in the hermitage as Satyavan’s wife. Satyavan
is very happy to have such a beautiful and virtuous wife, and
Savitri too is joyous that her heart’s desire to have Satyavan as her
husband has been fulfilled. Savitri puts aside all the rich ornaments
and robes which she used to wear when she lived in her father’s
palace and begins wearing bark clothes and clothes dyed in red.
With great inner composure and humility, she now takes charge of
all the household chores. She looks after the physical needs of her
mother-in-law and father-in-law. With sweet and loving speech, she
attends on her husband and makes sure that he is happy. But Savitri
has a great anguish in her heart and is languishing inside as she
remembers the dire prophecy of Narad. All this is narrated in about
ten verses (20 lines) in the Mahabharata legend.
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Sri Aurobindo covers this part of the Mahabharata story in about
320 lines in Canto 1 of Book VII. This canto is appropriately called,
‘The Joy of Union; the Ordeal of the Foreknowledge of Death, and
the Heart’s Grief and Pain’. This is one of the most poignant cantos
in the entire epic.
The first 16 lines of this canto are of a prefatory nature and make
some profound observations about how fate works in our lives. In
the case of most people, fate seems to lead them blindly to an
unknown goal, since in their lives it journeys on the wheels built by
their hopes and longings. In the case of these people, Matter seems
to mould the body’s life and the soul looks as if it is driven by
nature. But greater spirits can reverse this balance and make the
soul the artist of one’s fate. This is the mystic truth about fate which
our ignorance hides. Even when one has to face an ordeal, it is
because one’s soul has chosen that route. Ananke (Destiny, Fate) is
the mandate of our own soul. The appropriateness of these
observations must be seen in the context of the great ordeal that
Savitri is about to face now.
The poet then briefly describes Savitri’s journey from Aswapati’s
palace in Madra to Satyavan’s hermitage on the borders of the
forest. She notes the difference between her past and the future she
has embraced. This was the past which she was now leaving behind
her:
Far now behind lay Madra’s spacious halls,

The white carved pillars, the cool dim alcoves,
The tinged mosaic of the crystal floors,
The towered pavilions, the wind-rippled pools
And gardens humming with the murmur of bees,
Forgotten soon or a pale memory
The fountain’s plash in the white stone-bound pool,
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The thoughtful noontide’s brooding solemn trance,
The colonnade’s dream grey in the quiet eve,
The slow moonrise gliding in front of Night.
Left far behind were now the faces known,
The happy silken babble on laughter’s lips
And the close-clinging clasp of intimate hands
And adoration’s light in cherished eyes
Offered to the one sovereign of their life.
p. 466 lines 41-55
The Future she has chosen to embrace is described in these words:
Here only was the voice of bird and beast,—

The ascetic’s exile in the dim-souled huge
Inhuman forest far from cheerful sound
Of man’s blithe converse and his crowded days.
p. 466 lines 56-60
Sri Aurobindo does not forget the sadness in the hearts of the
people who had escorted Savitri from her father’s palace. They
knew what an opulent life Savitri had left behind and probably also
knew something of the dire fate that awaited Satyavan. So they take
leave of Savitri with a heavy heart.
Lingering some days upon the forest verge

Like men who lengthen out departure’s pain,
Unwilling to separate sorrowful clinging hands,
Unwilling to see for the last time a face,
Heavy with the sorrow of a coming day
And wondering at the carelessness of Fate
Who breaks with idle hands her supreme works,
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They parted from her with pain-fraught burdened hearts
As forced by inescapable fate we part
From one whom we shall never see again;
Driven by the singularity of her fate,
Helpless against the choice of Savitri’s heart
They left her to her rapture and her doom
In the tremendous forest’s savage charge.
p. 467 lines 87-100
Sri Aurobindo is not the poet only of spiritual illuminations and

mystical visions. Even when it comes to portraying the vital range
of human life, he can reach rare poetic heights. This is how he
portrays the ecstatic life of fulfilled love which Savitri and Satyavan
were now living in their forest hermitage:
At first to her beneath the sapphire heavens

The sylvan solitude was a gorgeous dream,
An altar of the summer’s splendour and fire,
A sky-topped flower-hung palace of the gods
And all its scenes a smile on rapture’s lips
And all its voices bards of happiness.
There was a chanting in the casual wind,
There was a glory in the least sunbeam;
Night was a chrysoprase11 on velvet cloth,
A nestling darkness or a moonlit deep;
Day was a purple pageant and a hymn,
A wave of the laughter of light from morn to eve.
His absence was a dream of memory,
His presence was the empire of a god.
A fusing of the joys of earth and heaven,
11
Chrysoprase = the ancient name of a golden-green precious stone which shines
in the dark.
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A tremulous blaze of nuptial rapture passed,
A rushing of two spirits to be one,
A burning of two bodies in one flame.
Opened were gates of unforgettable bliss:
Two lives were locked within an earthly heaven
And fate and grief fled from that fiery hour.
p. 468 lines 111-132
But then, Savitri could not forget the dire prophecy of Narad, and
that opened for her the grief of all the world. And the poet describes
the poignancy of this grief with equal felicity in these lines:
The shadow of her lover’s doom arose

And fear laid hands upon her mortal heart.
The moments swift and ruthless raced; alarmed
Her thoughts, her mind remembered Narad’s date.
A trembling moved accountant of her riches,
She reckoned the insufficient days between:
A dire expectancy knocked at her breast;
Dreadful to her were the footsteps of the hours:
Grief came, a passionate stranger to her gate:
Banished when in his arms, out of her sleep
It rose at morn to look into her face.
Vainly she fled into abysms of bliss
From her pursuing foresight of the end.
The more she plunged into love that anguish grew;
Her deepest grief from sweetest gulfs arose.
Remembrance was a poignant pang, she felt
Each day a golden leaf torn cruelly out
From her too slender book of love and joy.
Thus swaying in strong gusts of happiness
And swimming in foreboding’s sombre waves
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And feeding sorrow and terror with her heart,—
For now they sat among her bosom’s guests
Or in her inner chamber paced apart,—
Her eyes stared blind into the future’s night.
p. 469 lines 143-166
Savitri’s suffering became all the more oppressive because she could
not share it with any one else. As the poet says, ‘She in her dreadful
knowledge was alone.’ She tried in vain to find a ground of stillness
and the spirit’s peace within herself. But she controlled this inner
turmoil and nothing was shown outside. For those around her she
was still the loving and serene Savitri they knew.
She was still to them the child they knew and loved;
The sorrowing woman they saw not within.
No change was in her beautiful motions seen:
A worshipped empress all once vied to serve,
She made herself the diligent serf of all,
Nor spared the labour of broom and jar and well,
Or close gentle tending or to heap the fire
Of altar and kitchen, no slight task allowed
To others that her woman’s strength might do.
In all her acts a strange divinity shone:
Into a simplest movement she could bring
A oneness with earth’s glowing robe of light,
A lifting up of common acts by love.
p. 470 lines 198-210
The poet has portrayed in the following lines in a masterly fashion

Savitri as she is torn between love and grief. Such an intensity as we
see here projected in the portrayal of Savitri is possible only for
poets of the very first order. The picture of Savitri desperately
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seeking relief from her intense suffering in the strong embrace of
Satyavan’s love is a great triumph of Sri Aurobindo’s poetic craft.
Always behind this strange divided life

Her spirit like a sea of living fire
Possessed her lover and to his body clung,
One locked embrace to guard its threatened mate.
At night she woke through the slow silent hours
Brooding on the treasure of his bosom and face,
Hung o’er the sleep-bound beauty of his brow
Or laid her burning cheek upon his feet.
Waking at morn her lips endlessly clung to his,
Unwilling ever to separate again
Or lose that honeyed drain of lingering joy,
Unwilling to loose his body from her breast,
The warm inadequate signs that love must use.
Intolerant of the poverty of Time
Her passion catching at the fugitive hours
Willed the expense of centuries in one day
Of prodigal love and the surf of ecstasy;
Or else she strove even in mortal time
To build a little room for timelessness
By the deep union of two human lives,
Her soul secluded shut into his soul.
After all was given she demanded still;
Even by his strong embrace unsatisfied,
She longed to cry, “O tender Satyavan,
O lover of my soul, give more, give more
Of love while yet thou can’st, to her thou lov’st.
Imprint thyself for every nerve to keep
That thrills to thee the message of my heart.
For soon we part and who shall know how long
Before the great wheel in its monstrous round
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Restore us to each other and our love?”
Too well she loved to speak a fateful word
And lay her burden on his happy head;
She pressed the outsurging grief back into her breast
To dwell within silent, unhelped, alone.
pp. 471 -72 lines 218-252
The poet says that Satyavan sometimes half understood ‘the

unplumbed abyss of her deep passionate want’ and tried to spend with
her as much time as he could spare from his usual daily labour. But
‘all was too little for her bottomless need.’ Any separation from
Satyavan became unbearable to her, and sometimes thinking of the
day she must part from Satyavan as prophesied by Narad, she even
thought of a fiery union with him through death’s door of escape.
But she would dismiss that idea for the sake of Satyavan’s old
parents who would need her by their side after Satyavan was gone.
Thus grief and love occupied the whole of her world. The poet
describes this state of mind in these wonderful lines:
Often it seemed to her the ages’ pain

Had pressed their quintessence into her single woe,
Concentrating in her a tortured world.
Thus in the silent chamber of her soul
Cloistering her love to live with secret grief
She dwelt like a dumb priest with hidden gods
Unappeased by the wordless offering of her days,
Lifting to them her sorrow like frankincense,
Her life the altar, herself the sacrifice.
pp.472–73 lines 279-287
Yet through all this tapasya of love and grief, Savitri and Satyavan
‘grew into each other more’. This inner identity became so intense that
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even when Satyavan wandered in the forest alone, Savitri felt that
her spirit walked with him and knew every movement of his as
though he moved in her inner space.
Grief and fear became the food of the great love in Savitri.
Increased by their torment, her love became the whole of her life,
her whole earth and heaven. It gave her a strength so divine that
she could now bear the blows of Time and Fate unflinchingly. She
now became from within calm and resolute, awaiting some
outcome of this fiery struggle.
By now a whole year had passed, one cycle of seasons had
passed since she came to live with Satyavan in this hermitage. She
was waiting patiently for some guidance from within.
We are now ready to move on to Canto 2 of Book VII, with
which begins the description of Savitri’s yoga. Canto 1 of Book VII
is preparatory to this yoga, since such grief, great soul-searing grief,
can sometimes prepare one for yoga. Normally when one is
confronted with such intense grief, one tries to run away from it by
burying oneself deeper than ever before in work, or by seeking
diversions from it in various kinds of self-amusement. But neither
of these can really enable one to come to terms with one’s grief, it
only makes one’s situation more desperate until one somehow
allows Time to heal it in some fashion. But there is another way of
handling grief of this kind. as shown here by Savitri. She does not
run away from grief, she faces it boldly, and by using all the
resources at her command she confronts it. It is not a pleasant or an
easy way, but when one does this sincerely, something happens to
one’s being. The consciousness of such a person takes a leap and
from its new perch it looks at the cause of grief and finds that one
has risen above the hurt. The event or the circumstances which had
caused the grief probably remain more or less unchanged, but they
do not have any more the power to hurt. This happens to Savitri at
the conclusion of this Canto. The yoga of Savitri described in the
remaining six cantos of Book VII is the leap her consciousness takes.
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How high such a leap will land depends upon the inner resources
of the person facing the crisis. We will take this up this subject in the
next chapter.
In this one I have tried to present to you the development in the
story-line in this Canto largely in the poet’s own words. This is
because I wish to demonstrate to you that it is not true that Sri
Aurobindo is always abstruse and mystical and hard to
comprehend. It is true that when he writes about experiences that
belong to higher domains of consciousness, we may find it difficult
to comprehend him, since these experiences are out of our range. In
fact, in such situations listening carefully with an inner silence to
the flow of his words itself becomes a way of coming into contact
with these experiences. But then when he writes about domains of
experience familiar to us, he is most lucid and the poetry takes us
instantly captive by its magic.
We will now take a close look at a brief excerpt from Savitri
which will make you aware of another facet of Savitri: it is also a
gold-mine of insights into yogic practices. The passage I bring to
you this time occurs early in the description of Aswapati’s yoga and
describes very succinctly a most important practice of yogic
sadhana, namely, meditation.
The precise context in which this passage occurs is not crucial to
its understanding. By yoga or spiritual sadhana we mean certain
practices which induce in us the process of inner growth by which
we progressively become aware of the inner and higher states of our
being, or by which our normal being transforms itself into a higher
and diviner being. There are several yogic paths that can lead us to
this goal. But common to all these yogic paths is an in-gathered
attitude, a state of inner concentration. The practice of meditation is
the method most widely used to inculcate this inner concentration.
That is why most people think of meditation as synonymous with
the spiritual life. But this would be reducing spirituality to a set of
practices, and can give rise to a false understanding of spirituality.
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Spiritual life is not ordinary life plus certain practices of meditation.
True spirituality is a matter of living in a certain state of
consciousness, no matter what activities we are engaged in. Such a
state of consciousness can also be arrived at through action and
work done as an offering to the Divine, and through devotion and
an inner surrender to the Divine.
Sri Aurobindo has spoken basically of four kinds of meditation.
He points out that by the Indian concept of dhyana is meant mental
concentration, whether in thought, vision or knowledge. It can be
rendered into English by the two English words: meditation and
contemplation. By meditation is meant the concentration of mind on
a single chain of ideas arising out of a single object. Contemplation
means holding in the mind a single image or idea so that the
knowledge about it may naturally arise by force of concentration.
There are two other forms of dhyana. One is a form of meditation in
which you stand back from your thoughts and simply observe
them. This is concentration for self-observation. A more difficult
form of this is the emptying of all thought out of our mind and
leaving in it a sort of vigilant blank. This may be called the dhyana of
liberation since it frees the mind from slavery to the mechanical
action of thinking.
Of these four forms of dhyana, meditation, contemplation, self-
observation and liberation, one can choose whichever suits one’s
bent and capacity or use them all according to one’s inner need.
The conditions that are most essential for meditation, the
essentials of the process, and the highest results one can hope to
obtain from it are beautifully presented by Sri Aurobindo in these
lines:
In moments when the inner lamps are lit

And the life’s cherished guests are left outside,
Our spirit sits alone and speaks to its gulfs.
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A wider consciousness opens then its doors;
Invading from spiritual silences
A ray of the timeless Glory stoops awhile
To commune with our seized illumined clay
And leaves its huge white stamp upon our lives.
In the oblivious field of mortal mind,
Revealed to the closed prophet eyes of trance
Or in some deep internal solitude
Witnessed by a strange immaterial sense,
The signals of eternity appear.
The truth mind could not know unveils its face,
We hear what mortal ears have never heard,
We feel what earthly sense has never felt,
We love what common hearts repel and dread;
Our minds hush to a bright Omniscient;
A Voice calls from the chambers of the soul;
We meet the ecstasy of the Godhead’s touch
In golden privacies of immortal fire.
pp. 47-48 lines 65-85
There are really no essential external conditions for meditation,

although for the beginner solitude and seclusion and stillness of the
body are necessary in most cases. But once the habit of meditation is
formed, one should be able to meditate in all circumstances. The
first internal condition necessary is the withdrawal of our
consciousness which is ordinarily dispersed, running after one
object or another, running in this direction now and in that a little
later. As a result, it is in a state of continual disquiet and agitation.
This is because our normal consciousness has the sense of being
separate, an individual, an ego, separate from the rest of the
universe. This dispersed consciousness has to be drawn back,
gathered together and concentrated within ourselves. Such a
concentration of consciousness is needed for any serious pursuit,
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whether you are a poet working on a poem, or a botanist studying a
flower. The yogic concentration is an extension and intensification
of this. Thus the poet says that during meditation, ‘the inner lamps
are lit’. The light of our consciousness illumines our inner being; this
is concentration within ourselves. This is the first condition. The
second helpful internal condition is freedom from all the cherished
guests. Normally our consciousness is preoccupied with several
guests, namely our projects, desires, longings, and thoughts and
misgivings about their fulfilment. Now all these guests have to be
left behind. This brings about a purity and calm to the inner
consciousness. And then our consciousness sits alone and begins to
communicate with its own depths (lines 65–68).
The object of one’s meditation would depend upon one’s nature
and highest aspirations. According to Sri Aurobindo, Brahman is
the best object of meditation – the idea of God in all, all in God and
all as God.
While meditating, one can concentrate either in the heart-centre
or above the head or between the eyebrows. Concentration in the
heart centre opens that centre and one gains in aspiration, love,
bhakti and surrender. Concentration above the head brings peace,
silence and a sense of liberation from the body sense, mind and life.
Concentration between the eyebrows opens the centre there and
liberates the inner mind and vision.
The most difficult problem one faces for quite a long time during
meditation is that of the distracting buzz of mental activity.
Thoughts of all kinds come in and distract one. Sri Aurobindo has
recommended three principal methods for getting rid of this
problem. One is to look at the thoughts and give no sanction to
them; this will gradually bring them to a stand-still. The second
method is to look upon the thoughts as not your own, as things
coming from outside, from Prakriti (from Nature), and take no
interest in them. The third method he recommends is perhaps the
most difficult, but also perhaps the most effective; this is to be
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vigilant from within and watch the thoughts as they come in, and to
throw them out before they enter your mental space.
When the meditation is successful, a consciousness wider than
our normal consciousness opens its doors; we begin to realise that
our consciousness has many dimensions. A ray of the timeless
Glory, which our innermost or highest or true being is, invades our
consciousness from across the spaces of spiritual silence. As this ray
stoops down for a while, it imparts something of its glory to our
material existence which is normally inert and placid because of the
inertia of Matter to which it is so close. In this process, something of
the Force and Light of the higher consciousness is imparted to it.
This contact, however fleeing it may be, leaves a permanent effect
upon our lives. After such an experience our life is never the same
again (lines 68-72).
During meditation, our consciousness becomes concentrated and
inwardly absorbed; now, in this field, signals heralding Eternity
begin to appear. These are revealed to the consciousness in us
which sees them with its prophetic eyes of trance as we are plunged
into a deep inner silence. The senses which take note of these signs
of Eternity are the subtle senses of our Inner Being, not the external
senses (lines 73-77).
When this happens, the truth which our mind could not grasp
earlier becomes accessible to us because it reveals itself. We hear the
inspired utterances which our mortal ears have never heard before,
and we feel what earthly senses have never felt before. We become
capable of loving even that which the common hearts dread and
avoid, since we now sense the intrinsic truth behind their surface.
Our mind which is normally full of chatter and routine mechanical
activity now falls entirely silent, and in this hush it begins to feel the
presence of a bright and omniscient consciousness. A voice hails us
from the secret chamber of our soul. Then in these golden moments
of privacy, we are flooded with the ecstasy brought about by the
touch of the psychic flame in us, and through it we experience the
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blissful touch of the Divine (lines 78-85).
This experience, as it deepens, brings us in intimate contact with
our psychic being, which alone knows ‘the secret grandiose meaning of
our lives’. This section has these wonderful lines describing the
psychic being in the concluding part of this section
A treasure of honey in the combs of God,

A Splendour burning in a tenebrous cloak,
It is our glory of the flame of God,
Our golden fountain of the world’s delight,
An immortality cowled in the cape of death,
The shape of our unborn divinity.
p. 49 lines 111-116
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7: Book VII, Canto 2
Having explored Canto 1 of Book VII, we are now ready to step into
the charged field of Savitri’s yoga, to the description of which are
devoted the next six cantos of Book VII. As before, I will begin by
noting how Vyasa deals with this part of the story in the
Mahabharata before I turn to Sri Aurobindo’s handling of it.

Vyasa also talks about Savitri’s inner anguish during her first year
in the hermitage spent with her husband and his parents. Narad’s
words about the impending doom were fixed in her heart; and she
counts down the days with each day lost. When she sees that only
four days were left before that dreaded event, she decides to
undertake the triratra vow, the most arduous vow of standing night
and day at one single place. When Dyumatsena, Satyavan’s father,
hears about this difficult vow, he tries to dissuade Savitri from
going ahead with it. He entreats her with kind words to give up her
resolve of undertaking such a hard and severe vow. Savitri begs of
Dyumatsena not to be disturbed about this, since she is confident of
being able to perform this penance without much difficulty.
Dyumatsena gracefully relents and says, “How can it be proper for
me to tell you to break the vow? All that a person in my position
can do is to give you his blessings for a successful performance of
this vow.” He blesses her and retires.
Savitri then proceeds with the performance of her vow – of
standing erect on a fixed spot as though she were a wooden post.
What gives her the strength to go through this hard penance is the
thought that her husband is to die the following day, and it is her
grief that strengthens her resolve and she remains standing until the
vow is successfully concluded. The day following the completion of
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the vow is the fateful day foretold by Narad.

Vyasa takes nine verses (about 18 lines) of Sanskrit poetry to narrate
this episode of the triratra vow. Sri Aurobindo in his epic transforms
this performance of a vow into Savitri’s yoga and devotes 2584 lines
(83 pages) spread over six cantos (Cantos 2 to 7 of Book VII) to the
description of this yoga.
This will probably bring to your mind Aswapati’s Yoga
described in the first three Books of Savitri. There too Sri Aurobindo
takes up Vyasa’s brief description of Aswapati’s yajna and turns it
into Aswapati’s yoga spread over several thousand lines and
twenty-two cantos. Just as Aswapati’s yoga in Savitri is supposed to
be based on Sri Aurobindo’s own yoga, Savitri’s yoga is supposed
to be based similarly on the Mother’s yoga. The Mother was Sri
Aurobindo’s collaborator and she contributed in important ways to
Sri Aurobindo’s mission and to the dynamics of his yoga. Her
relationship to Savitri, to its conception and its expansion and
elaboration after 1926 was also very unique. We will deal with these
subjects later in this study. At the moment we will focus our
attention on giving you a brief overview of each of the six cantos
describing Savitri’s yoga.
It is somewhat difficult to give a straightforward description of
Savitri’s yoga for several reasons; one is that in the earlier cantos the
poet is describing some of the important features of Savitri’s yoga as
they would apply also to an average sadhak doing the yoga. This
intertwining of the yoga of a normal sadhak with the progress of
such an extraordinary person as Savitri in this yoga makes the
narration very complex. Secondly, some of the features of Savitri’s
yoga are very unique and such a yoga was never practised on earth
before. Furthermore, Savitri breaks new ground in the course of her
yoga and reaches heights of consciousness which for most of us are
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difficult to comprehend. Yogic experience is a field which it is
difficult to comprehend fully unless one has been there or anywhere
near there oneself. Sri Aurobindo’s charged poetry may at times
give us just a clue to this experience.
It is generally believed that Aswapati, like Sri Aurobindo,
followed the Vedantic path at least during the earlier stages of his
yoga, while Savitri followed the path of the psychic right from the
beginning. The yoga of the psychic is believed to be the Mother’s
special contribution to the Integral Yoga. Once again, we will
merely note here that the concepts needed to understand what the
yoga of the psychic is exactly will have to be explained at some later
stage in our study, and proceed to give you an overview of Canto 2
of Book VII. Our progress through these cantos is bound to be slow
since the terrain is new to all of us, and also new to the English
language itself, which Sri Aurobindo had to stretch and mould to
adapt it to this new use.
‘The Parable of the Search for the Soul’, is the title of this canto.
A parable is a narration or short story or episode which teaches or
sets forth indirectly a moral or religious lesson. Savitri’s search for
the soul is being described to suggest the typical experiences most
human beings undergo in their search for their soul. As we have
already seen, Sri Aurobindo has made it amply clear that Savitri is
no mere mortal; she is an Avatar, an incarnation of the Supreme
Mother herself. So when such an exceptional person begins a search
for her soul, that search is bound to be different in many ways from
the search in the case of ordinary human beings. The poet is
describing the beginning of Savitri’s search as it would be
applicable to the case of ordinary people starting on a similar quest.
We have already seen in the previous canto that Savitri’s
immense anguish gradually drives her inwards; she is unable to free
herself from it in her outer life, so she now turns within. As she is
seated fully concentrated within herself, holding her body as if in
motionless trance, her mind renouncing thought, she hears a voice
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speaking to her. The Voice says to her, “Why did you come down to
the ignorant and death-bound earth if all you are going to do here is
to nurse your grief quietly and wait for your end and for fate’s
decree?” It says to her, ‘Arise, O soul, and vanquish Time and Death.’ If
one wants to meet the soul, one has to vanquish Time. The soul is
not something formed by the mind; it is unborn and therefore
timeless. So as long as one is caught up in time, one cannot have an
experience of one’s soul. Savitri is sulking, as most of us tend to do
when the first summons comes to us from our inner being. She
complains that the heavens are shut and God is uncaring, fate is
blind and the human race is ignorant and prefers to live in
ignorance, why should she struggle against ‘earth’s unyielding laws’?
She would rather make a pact with death and seek union with
Satyavan through the dark door of her own death. Then the Voice
within asks her whether this is all she is going to do even though
she has come down here on earth ‘charged with a mandate from
eternity’? Shouldn’t she challenge the old and dusty laws of Nature,
and bring down to earth a new light and deliver life here from
unconsciousness and death? “Should I conclude”, asks the Voice,
“that a power which was sent by the Eternal on earth has failed and
‘His labourer returns, her task undone?’“ Savitri’s surface being falls
mute, but a Power within her answers: “I am thy portion here on
earth, command, and I will do thy will.”
Then the Voice gives Savitri a programme which, it assures her,
if followed should enable her to receive God’s Force and to conquer
Death. This programme is conveyed in 18 lines beginning with
‘Remember why thou cam’st’ (Line No. 86) and concluding with the
line ‘Then shalt thou harbour my force and conquer Death’ (line 104).
The Yoga spelt out by the Voice can be stated in brief as follows:
“Begin by asking yourself why you are here on earth. You will be
able to find an answer to this question only when you recover your
hid self. When you are in touch with your soul, do not get lost in the
bliss and peace which this state brings. Use its power instead to
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change your nature from the human to Divine. The discipline you
need to follow is the following: Clear your mind of all thoughts, get
over the spell cast on you by the senses, and conquer all desires.
Identify yourself with the will of the Divine. Know the Divine in
every voice and in all contacts meet his single touch. Then you will
be able to receive the divine force and conquer Death.”
It is clear that this yoga given to Savitri by her inner Voce is in all
respects the same as the Integral Yoga developed by Sri Aurobindo
and the Mother. Suffice it to note here the twin aims of the yoga,
which uniquely characterise Sri Aurobindo’s yoga as well, namely:
to find union with one’s soul and ‘Then mortal nature change to the
divine’. This brings us to the end of section 1 of this canto (line 112).
Section 2 begins. Savitri continues to sit motionless and look into
herself. The cosmic past is revealed to her as in a dream. She sees
how out of the formlessness of Self, creation began to take its first
mysterious steps, how the whole of space came to be filled with
seeds of life, how the soul began to be housed in a body, and how
gradually the human creature was born in time. She sees how out of
the indefinable chaos creation slowly emerged and how a
consciousness began to look out of the vast Inconscient and how
pleasure and pain began to vibrate in a neutral Void.
She saw all this as the work of a blind World-Energy,
unconscious of her own vast exploits, and yet shaping a creation.
The World-Energy became conscious of itself in fragmentary beings,
until all the chaos of sensibilities gathered round a small ego’s pin-
point head and a sentient being thus got formed, a being living and
thinking as a whole unit. Memories of such a breathing and
thinking unit become covered with a crust of habit and thus some
sense of permanency and continuity are given to a conscious form.
An infant mind began to form itself.
All this labour resulted in the making of a conscious being.
Survival was the first concern at this stage in evolution. As Nature
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was working through our thoughts, hopes and dreams, the
conscious Soul was giving its tacit consent, leaving the mind to
function as its vicegerent (a person appointed by the ruler or king to
act on his behalf). The mind felt itself like a godhead and dreamt of
immortality (line 152).
(A new subsection begins with line 153.) This mind does not
know that it is a puppet in the hands of the life force; it is therefore
constantly disturbed. The poet describes this mind in these
memorable words:
This mind no silence knows nor dreamless sleep

In the incessant circling of its steps
Thoughts tread for ever through the listening brain;
It toils like a machine and cannot stop.
p. 478 lines 163-166
Into this body’s many-storeyed rooms messages originating from

different sources come. There is a constant haste of movement. The
senses are busy all the time attending to this thousand-fold
commerce of the world. Even in sleep, there is hardly any rest
(‘scant repose’). Impressions stored in the subconscient come up in a
distorted form, mixed with transcripts of experiences from the
supra-physical worlds, like the vital, mental, psychic and so on. In
imagination we cross this world and journey beneath the stars,
dream of great ideals, and sometimes we even become aware of the
beings of Heaven and Hell.
All this is the little surface of man’s life. But this is not all he is. A
whole mysterious world is locked within him – planes of
consciousness below, behind, above his surface consciousness.
Unknown to himself there lives within him a hidden king. He
lives on the honey of solitude in the secret and innermost part of his
being. This is the ‘immaculate Divine Wonderful’ who casts the glory
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of his self-creation into the soul of man. That is how man works out
the dreams of God.
But there lodge in man, not only God but even his opposites.
Man is a little front through which Nature works. Nature’s glories
walk in him and so do their opposites. In his unconscious and
subconscious regions are lodged all the dangerous forces which
sometimes invade his bodily house and infest his thought and life.
These dark forces seek to dislodge the soul. Then a veritable inferno
surges into the human air threatening God’s creation. This has often
happened in human history. These dark forces can even try to
abolish man and annul his world. But there is a guardian power,
there are hands that save. ‘Calm divine eyes regard the human scene.’
(p. 482 line 299)
(Line 300 begins a new section.) All the world’s possibilities are
waiting in man as the tree waits in a seed. His past lives in him and
his present is preparing his future. Within him are gods and
malignant powers that create the mould in which he builds out his
world. Our surface being is aware of very little of what is
happening to us. There is the dim subconscient and a vast
subliminal and these influences are overpowering. Our past is not
really dead; it clings to us and holds us back. Our old self lurks in
the new self we think we are. Our dead selves come to slay our
living soul. Above us dwells a superconscient God and around us is
a vast Ignorance and below us sleeps the Inconscient dark and
mute. (p. 484 line 372)
But this is only the first appearance of our material world. This is
not all we are. On the summits of our being, beyond the thinking
mind our greater self of knowledge waits for us; it is a supreme
light in the truth-conscious Vast (Supramental consciousness). It
shall descend and make earth’s life divine. This world was created
by this Truth and not by a blind Nature-force.
The summits of our being are ablaze in the light of the
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superconscient. There dwell the aspects of our eternity; there is the
immortality and light and bliss of the god that we are in reality.
There are greatnesses hidden in our unseen parts that wait their
hour to step into life’s front. They impel us to move forward. Our
soul acts from the mysterious inner chamber and seeks for Good
and Beauty and for God. Beyond the walls of our surface self lies
our subliminal being; there is an inner mind, an inner life-self and
the subtle physical and they all can help us by grafting wings upon
our surface crawl.
Man grew from the bowed ape-like figure, stood erect and
became the thinker. He saw visions of becoming a still greater being
and slowly grew in his stature. He is now almost ready to ascend to
the highest ladder of his being. There he will be able to call the
Godhead into his mortal life.
This was in fact what had happened in Savitri. A portion of the
mighty Mother came into her. She becomes the centre of a vast
scheme
To mould humanity into God’s own shape

And lead this great blind struggling world to light
Or a new world discover or create.
p. 486 lines 455–57
Savitri now understands what the destiny of man on earth is.
Earth must transform herself and equal Heaven

Or Heaven descend into earth’s mortal state.
But for such vast spiritual change to be,
Out of the mystic cavern in man’s heart
The heavenly psyche must put off her veil
And step into common nature’s crowded rooms
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And stand uncovered in that nature’s front
And rule the thoughts and fill the body and life.
p. 486-487 lines 458–465
Savitri sat obedient to the command she had received. She now
perceives Time, life and death as passing incidents that obstruct
from our view the soul in man. She realises that her lower nature
still took too large a space in her being and veiled her self. She must
now push this aside and go on to find her soul.
This time I will introduce you to one of my favourite passages in
Savitri. One of the great attractions of Savitri is that if you are
depressed and gloomy, you can read a passage of this epic poem
and it will cheer you up. There seems to be something magical in
the very rhythm of these verses that brightens you up. It must be
remembered that Sri Aurobindo was writing Savitri during the ‘30s
and ‘40s of the last century when Europe was either threatened by
World War II, or was actually fighting the war or was recovering
from that devastating experience. This was a period of gloom for
the whole world, especially for the West. This was the period when
the West was moving from dogmatic materialism to stark nihilism.
It saw mankind as a species “swept from darkness to darkness, like
a straw on a torrent by a ruthless, mysterious and ignoble force”.
That was an age of loss of faith, of spiritual desolation and
intellectual despair, of T. S. Eliot’s “Waste Land”. During those
years mankind was passing through a very critical phase of
evolution when humanity had reached great depths of despair. The
scientific and philosophical revolutions of the preceding three
centuries had created an impression that man was no more than an
accidental creation, just a pawn in the play of the vast forces entirely
beyond his control.
Sri Aurobindo did not share this despair and gloom. For him this
creation and man in it were neither a purposeless illusion nor a
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fortuitous accident. He proclaimed through his writings that this
world was not an unfortunate accident but rather a miracle that was
gradually unfolding itself. In writing Savitri, he seems to have done
something much more tangible and concrete; he seems to have
inundated the earth atmosphere with vibrations of hope and
optimism about man and his terrestrial future. He seems to have
done this to counter the dark forces of suggestion that were
engulfing mankind everywhere else. This has had its effect on his
verse. It is vibrant with hope, sunshine and optimism.
The passage which I am presenting to you is one such passage. It
occurs in Book I Canto 4. The poet is talking about the great gods
who know the purpose of evolution and intervene only a divine
way in the affairs of this world. All this probably happens on the
cosmic stage. But do you and I matter to them? Or, are we too
insignificant to matter? Suddenly, the poet turns to us, holds our
hand as it were, and assures us with these mantric lines that we do
matter.
Alive in a dead rotating universe

We whirl not here upon a casual globe
Abandoned to a task beyond our force;
Even through the tangled anarchy called Fate
And through the bitterness of death and fall
An outstretched Hand is felt upon our lives.
It is near us in unnumbered bodies and births;
In its unslackening grasp it keeps for us safe
The one inevitable supreme result
No will can take away and no doom change,
The crown of conscious Immortality,
The godhead promised to our struggling souls
When first man’s heart dared death and suffered life.
One who has shaped this world is ever its lord:
Our errors are his steps upon the way;
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He works through the fierce vicissitudes of our lives,
He works through the hard breath of battle and toil,
He works through our sins and sorrows and our tears,
His knowledge overrules our nescience;
Whatever the appearance we must bear,
Whatever our strong ills and present fate,
When nothing we can see but drift and bale,
A mighty Guidance leads us still through all.
After we have served this great divided world
God’s bliss and oneness are our inborn right.
A date is fixed in the calendar of the Unknown,
An anniversary of the Birth sublime:
Our soul shall justify its chequered walk,
All will come near that now is naught or far.
p. 59 lines 462-490
This earth, which the scientists describe as a globe that rotates

around itself as it circles round the sun, is not part of a mechanical,
clock-work universe. Neither is it dead, nor is it inconscient. We are
not whirling on a globe that has no purpose and we are not left here
to ourselves to accomplish tasks beyond our capacities. In other
words, when God gives us a task he always gives us also the
capacities needed to accomplish the task. It is true that the life we
live here is often made up of confused and disorderly events and
happenings and since we do not see any coherence or purpose in all
this, we call the power that governs our life “fate”. Life is often very
harsh; we face very bitter experiences in life, such as of betrayal of
faith and treachery, bitterness of death, etc. The poet does not deny
any of these; he readily grants this ugly and painful aspect of life.
Life is a grim struggle, most of the time. In spite of this, he assures
us in no uncertain terms that behind all this, behind fate and its
vagaries, there is a Hand extended to protect us and guide us (lines
462-467).
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This Hand has been close to us and guiding us through all the
countless births and lives we have been through. Suddenly the poet
lifts us and enables us to have a wider perspective on life. The more
one narrows one’s focus, the more exaggerated in their importance
and impact appear the passing events in our life. But then if we look
at events in our life as so many episodes in one stage of a long
pilgrimage that began several lives ago and which will continue for
many more lives to come, the perspective changes and we seem to
be capable of more detachment, a more balanced approach to the
events in our life, both the happy ones and the unhappy ones. There
is no event or experience in life which can be understood entirely in
local terms, in terms of that life alone. The causes and effects of
many an event in our life cannot be found in that very life in which
they happen. The causes may have to be traced to our previous lives
and in their effects they may extend even to our future lives. When
we become aware of this vastness of the saga of our existence, we
are less likely to exaggerate our seeming tragedies in life or the
importance of our little victories.
In its firm grasp this outstretched Hand keeps for us safe the
supreme goal of all our efforts, not only of this life but of all our
lives, the one result no power can deny and no disaster can deprive
us of – the crown of Conscious Immortality. This is the ultimate goal
of our long and seemingly tortured pilgrimage through several
lives, the siddhi of our evolutionary effort. What is this goal of
Conscious Immortality? Our true being, our soul, is immortal, but
we are not aware of this because we are immersed in ignorance. The
aim of the evolutionary journey is to manifest in each human form
here on earth the plenitude, the glory of the Supreme Divine
Consciousness, which is often described as Sat-Chit-Ananda. We are
all destined to realise even in our surface consciousness that we are
amritasya putrah, the children of immortality. That is our destiny,
however puny, weak and miserable we may appear now. And
notice the confidence in the poet’s tone. He assures us that nobody
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or nothing on earth or heaven can cheat us of this crown of
conscious immortality.
What does the crown of conscious immortality signify? It
signifies the realisation that we are not the pathetic creatures we
now think we are, as we get helplessly sucked into the vortex of
illness, physical disintegration and death; it signifies the awareness
that we are not beggars, as we now seem to be as we wander from
one supermarket to another, trying to acquire a little happiness.
However much we shop, however bulging our shopping bags with
the wares we have bought, happiness, an inner felicity still seems to
elude us except for a brief passing moment. The realisation that we
are in fact the children of immortality, and that happiness is our
very nature, as much as bliss and consciousness and power are –
this is known in popular terms as the realisation of the Godhead
veiled in us.
The poet then goes on to say that this fulfilment was promised to
our souls before they agreed to undertake the arduous evolutionary
journey through life and death in ignorance. He is almost implying
that since this promise was made by the Lord, he is bound to rescue
us from our bondage to death, ignorance and incapacity. He does
not forget his part of the bargain. That is why he pursues us down
the corridors of time like the hound of heaven. Unfortunately, we
forget our origin, our true nature, since we have fallen in love with
our bondage to body, life and mind.
Then in one short line, he removes all our misgivings and fears
that after creating this world, God might have lost control over it.
Don’t we often feel like this when we see so many outrageous
things happenings all around us? We feel as if this world is
spinning out of the control of the creator. When we see the great
tragedies that strike men and countries, the great catastrophes that
devastate this earth, we wonder whether anybody is in control of
this creation. The poet assures us that he who created this world is
always its Lord, he is always in control of it.
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If we make what appear like errors, it is because he allows us to
make them, since these often create openings through which he can
enter our lives, which are otherwise closed to him. Normally we
judge our actions by the material success they bring to us. All that
brings material success – money, fame, etc. we consider ‘good’ and
all that brings us material failure, we regard ‘bad’. Such success
often shuts God out of our lives; it makes us complacent with our
finiteness. Often the so-called failures which bring us material losses
make us pause in our tracks and take a fresh look at ourselves and
where we are headed. These can be moments of great awakening
when we feel the breath of God on our backs.
God is ever present in our lives whether we are aware of it or
not. Particularly when the path we are treading is fierce and trying,
he is present with us guiding us. When we are engaged in a battle
against great odds, he is present with us. His ways of working are
mighty strange. He may sometimes lead us through what may look
like pathways of sin and suffering. He does this to wean us from
our arrogance in our virtues and goodness and from our ego-based
sense of separateness and self-sufficiency. When we shed our lonely
tears on our pillows in the middle of the night, defeated and forlorn,
the Lord is there beside us. He never forsakes us. He may not
always answer our prayers because we often do not ask for the right
things. When he rejects our prayers, it is often a greater act of grace
than when he grants them.
Even after listening to the poet’s assurance that God is always
with us guiding us through life, some of us may still feel their lot in
life has been exceptionally hard and unfortunate and it is not easy
to reconcile God with all that has happened to them. As if to soothe
such protests, the poet says, no matter how strong somebody’s
present ills and how accursed his lot – and he does not deny that
sometimes one feels like a traveller by a ship suddenly thrown out
into the open sea in the middle of the night – we should not forget
that there is still a mighty guidance working behind everything that
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happens to us in life, and this guidance is only pushing us closer to
the crown of conscious immortality (lines 481–484).
After we have gone through all the circumstances that beset our
life here in this great and difficult world, God’s bliss and oneness
are our inborn right. That is the assurance given to us by the Lord,
and he is bound to fulfil it. Our main problem is that our private
agenda does not correspond with what God wants for us. We seek
finite pleasures, although we know that these pleasures are
transient and are often immediately followed by their shadow,
namely, by pain, unhappiness, frustration in some form or the
other. Our inner being is never satisfied with the finite. It hungers
after the Infinite. To realise this is the great awakening. Until we
wake up to this realisation, the vicissitudes in our life are only a
preparation for this great realisation, and happiness and sorrow
both play a role in our lives (lines 485–486).
The poet in giving us this assurance leaves us in no uncertainty.
He tells us that a date is already fixed in the calendar of the Lord for
the supreme fulfilment of each one of us. On that day will come our
Birth sublime. Then will our soul feel justified in walking the
chequered course through life. And when we reach our goal and
look back on what looked like our chequered path in life, we will
see that every fall that we suffered along our path has had a
salutary effect on our subsequent journey. Life therefore is all good
or a preparation for a future good (lines 485–490).
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8: Book VII, Canto 3 – The Psychic Being
Now we take up Canto 3 of Book VII of Savitri. This canto has the
title ‘The Entry into the Inner Countries’ and describes Savitri’s
entry into her inner being and her exploration of the various regions
within it. Quite a bit of it is probably known to past spiritual
experience in general terms, but it is presented in such detail and in
poetic form for the first time in Sri Aurobindo’s poem.
As we have already seen, in the Mahabharata story, Savitri
performs the triratra vow just before the dreaded day prophesied by
Narad, and we have seen that Sri Aurobindo develops this event
into Savitri’s Yoga, described in Cantos 2 through Canto 7 of Book
VII in his epic. We have already reviewed Canto 2, at the end of
which Savitri learns that for bringing about the great change she
wishes to bring about, she must discover the heavenly psyche
present in the mystic cavern of her heart and bring it to the front
and enable it to take control of her entire being (lines 458–465 of
Canto 2, pages 486–487).
This concept of the Psyche or of the Psychic Being is a crucial one
in Savitri’s yoga as well as in the yoga developed by Sri Aurobindo
and the Mother. I shall therefore present a note on this concept in
the second part of this article. But before we come to that, let us try
to get an overview of Canto 3.
Section 1
Since Savitri has received the inner call to discover her psyche (her
true being or soul) she must now enter the inner regions of her own
being. As she tries to do that, she felt like one going from the busy
hum of a thronged market into a cave. Her mind became emptied of
all thoughts and she experienced a stark hush of emptiness all
around her. This going within is often accompanied by a stillness, a
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pleasant numbness and stiffness in the limbs. But whenever she
returned to her thinking state, once more she found herself to be a
human being, a lump of Matter, a house with all the windows
closed, a mind compelled to think out ignorance and a life-energy
forced into a whirl of activities. Without establishing this emptiness
in the thinking mind, it is not possible to gain entrance to our inner
being (lines 1–17).
As she sought her way to the inner regions past the surface
regions of her being, a voice said to her; “Your seeking is not for
yourself alone, but for humanity as well. Man can be helped to
grow into God only if God assumes the human mould, and accepts
the darkness of the human mind so that he can like Vamana (God as
the Dwarf Avatar) take the triple stride, covering the three worlds,
namely, the physical, vital and the mental realms 12 . It is necessary
to take these three strides before one can take the next stride into the
world of Bliss. The Divine disguised as a human being finds the
inaccessible mystic gate to Immortality, and opens it so that man
can follow in the footsteps of God and become Divine.”
This is a succinct characterization of the mission of an Avatar, of
an incarnation of God on earth.
“O Savitri, you must accept the darkness in which man labours
and bring to him light, you must accept his sorrow and convert it
into bliss. You must find your heaven-born soul in the body made
of Matter.”
Notice that Savitri is once again being told by her inner voice
that she is on earth as an incarnation of the Divine Mother. She
12
In the original story (as in Shatapatha Brahmana) Vamana, the dwarf, (Vishnu in
disguise) obtains from the Demon King Bali the gift of enough land to cover his
three steps (strides). Vamama, the dwarf then becomes larger and larger and
becomes Trivikrama: with the first stride he covers the earth, with the second the
heavens, and when he has no space left for the third stride, Bali offers his own
head. Bali is then pushed to patala loka and the world is thus saved from the
domination of the Asuras. That is the legend of Vamana.
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therefore may have to traverse the path of yoga in a way suited to
the human aspirant, for she as an Avatar has to show him the way
(lines 18–30).
Savitri now surged out of her body consciousness and stood at a
little distance from it and looked into her body. She expected to see
her mysterious soul in the lotus bud of her heart. But she found at
the entrance of the inner regions a gate, which refuses entrance to
the physical mind and everything physical. Savitri knocked at this
ebony (black) gate but the door groaned at her touch, and was
reluctant to open (lines 31–42).
Just then a dreadful voice cried from within; “O creature of
earth, turn back. If you don’t, you will be torn and tortured until
you die.” The guardian Power of the inner regions, a deadly serpent
with huge coils, rose hissing; all the little subtler entities (trolls,
gnomes and goblins) growled and protested against this intrusion
by Savitri. The wild beast in the subconscient roared and there was
an audible menace and danger all around.
When the body’s protection is withdrawn, the vital powers
awake and spread fear, which spoils the inner movement. It is well-
known to past spiritual experience that unless one has purity and
sincerity, one can get lost in this region; one is either intimidated,
misled, or beguiled by various subliminal and cosmic forces. But
Savitri persisted and her will pressed on the rigid bars until the
dark gate swung wide open with a protesting jar. The dreadful
guard of the opposing forces was withdrawn and Savitri was able to
enter the inner worlds. She negotiated the narrow passage with
some difficulty (lines 43–58).
She now entered the realm of subtle Matter and found that to be
a pit filled with a mass of blind power. She saw here misleading
gleams and somehow forced herself through it all towards the inner
regions (lines 59–63).
She entered a region where life was struggling to emerge from
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Matter. This region was aswarm with elemental entities, and vague
universal movements – those of the universal mind, the universal
vital and the universal physical. This was the beginning of the
world of finiteness – a world recognisable by the senses. Savitri was
now in the world of the senses, where there was only the clamour of
the senses. There was no light of mind to organise the experiences
in this region and the subconscient sought to perpetuate itself.
There was a rush of feelings, each forcing its own separate way
driven by the impulse of the ego. The senses normally chafe at the
control being exercised on them by the mind. They would rather the
mind were cast away in a wayside drain so that this sentinel of the
soul will lie forgotten in nature’s mud. When the senses do not get
the guidance of the soul through the mind, the vital wakes up and
offers to guide. But if the mind is cast away into the abyss, how
shall the ‘the glory and the flame’, the enlightened flame of aspiring
life, come? There is always the danger of everything slipping back
into the subconscient and then into the Inconscient if the guidance
of the mind is not available. That situation threatened to overtake
Savitri at this stage. There was a chaos of disordered impulses in
which no light or joy, or peace could come. Savitri somehow was
able to hold this senseless crowd at bay. With a great effort of her
will, and with the saviour’s name on her lips, she moved into a
blank and tranquil region. This was for her deliverance from the
congested and oppressive world of the senses and from the pulls
and pleasures of the physical mind (lines 64–126).
Now ahead of her loomed the vast Vital world, controlled
neither by the mind or the soul. We have a wonderful description of
the power and the ecstasy of the world of the vital:
A spate, a torrent of the speed of Life

Broke like a wind-lashed driven mob of waves
Racing on a pale floor of summer sand;
It drowned its banks, a mountain of climbing waves.
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Enormous was its vast and passionate voice.
It cried to her listening spirit as it ran,
Demanding God’s submission to chainless Force.
pp. 491–492 lines 136-142
This force is so mighty that it seems to demand even God’s

submission. In its lust for power it claims to have the support of the
witnessing soul. Its torrent carries the world’s hopes and fears, and
its restless hunger is a longing which even eternity cannot fill. This
Life-Force seeks to reach the unseen soul and its mystic fire of
aspiration. It carries us to the ineffable ecstasy hidden in the creative
beat of Life. It tears the nether depths of our life and serves life with
the chaotic bliss these depths contain – the intoxicating wine of the
primitive joy of Nature, the forbidden delight of our biological
urges. All this is sweet but it is nevertheless the honey sweet
poison-wine of lust and death.
The vital seeks a glory and a fulfilment in this world. It invests
the unseen worlds with the mystique of desire and makes us always
long for them. It dreams of that which has never been known and
grasps at things which have never been possessed. It searches for
the glory of the impossible. It searches for the glory of the
impossible even when it knows such joys can hurt.
It dreamed of that which never has been known,

It grasped at that which never has been won,
It chased into an Elysian memory
The charms that flee from the heart’s soon lost delight;
It dared the force that slays, the joys that hurt,
The imaged shape of unaccomplished things
And the summons to a Circean transmuting dance
And passion’s tenancy of the courts of love
And the wild Beast’s ramp and romp with Beauty and Life.
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pp. 492-93 lines 175-183
The vital embraces the contraries, ‘the cry and surge of opposite
powers’. One moment it rises to touch the luminous planes above
and the next it plunges into the nether dark regions. This endless
engagement with contraries, with tenderness and the sting of
hatred, cheerfulness and depression, fear and joy and ecstasy and
despair, is the normal routine for the vital. They give it ambrosia’s
taste as well as poison’s sting.
Then come the fast-moving thoughts of the vital mind which
appear deceptively like flashes of intuition. They try to pass off as
inspiration with its stress of infallibility. They have a certain
sharpness which cuts across all doubts. And yet it is a borrowed
light and its source is questionable. It very often is a clever mixture
of falsehood with the inspiring truth of the Divine. Therefore the
poet describes this in these words: ‘Truth lay in delight in error’s
passionate arms /Gliding downstream in a blithe gilded barge’
In these nether realms of Life, Truth stares with bandaged eyes
and ignorance is wisdom’s patron. Here the speeding energies of
Life can mislead one into the intermediate zone where Death stalks
under the guise of immortal life. Or they may mislead one into the
Valley of the false gleam where souls are trapped as slaves of desire.
Some souls, however, negotiate through these dangerous regions
because they carry some image of the Truth in their heart.
For a while Savitri felt as if her being was like an island flooded
by a violent upsurge of water surrounding it. It was as if she was
surrounded by wave after wave of gleaming foam; then it ebbed
away like a roar receding into a distance. Now the clamour of Life-
energies fled and her spirit was free from their onrush and she felt
she was entering once again a tranquil region with blue heaven
above and the green earth below, and the world’s heart once again
laughed with the joy of life (lines 127–255).
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Section 2
Then Savitri came into a space ordered and controlled by Reason.
Here Life (the vital energies) was parked in an armed tranquillity; a
chain was put on her strong rebellious spirit. Life was tamed and
her vehement stride was held under check. Her squanderings in the
desire’s bazaar were cut down. Her imperious will was reined in
and so also the play of her fancy. Reason’s balanced reign kept
order and peace. The spirit’s freedom was not found here. Life was
still sovereign but she had no freedom of action. The monarch had
to obey the ministers. Imagination, which is the favourite of the
vital, was imprisoned as in a fort. The soul itself was put on a
narrow bench of law. The wisdom of the ages was reduced to the
codification of a textbook.
The spirit’s almighty freedom was at the mercy of the small
mind addicted to system and orderliness. Life was restrained ‘like a
highbred maiden with chaste eyes, /Forbidden to walk unveiled the public
ways’; she must move in secluded chambers and her feelings must
live in cloisters. Safety receives the highest consideration here; the
dangers of the precipice as well as the adventures of the waves of
the sea were avoided. Life did not seek any more the
companionship of any flaming god. No forays were permitted into
realms that were considered too high or too vast for her assigned
role. Elegance, discipline and harmony were the reigning gods of
this realm. The movements of life were not spontaneous. Ideas were
cut into systems. Reality was not allowed to live in its dreams. Life
was now a managed empire. Even meditation mused on a narrow
seat and worship turned to an exclusive God.
A rational religion dried the heart.

It planned a smooth life’s acts with ethics’ rule
Or offered a cold and flameless sacrifice.
The sacred Book lay on its sanctified desk
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Wrapped in interpretation’s silken strings:
A credo sealed up its spiritual sense.
pp.497-498 lines 353-358
A rational religion dries out the heart. A credo all sealed up into
beliefs and opinion was the substance of its spirituality (lines 256–
358).
Section 3
Now Savitri entered the region of the Thought-Mind. Life and its
passions were not dominant here; the senses also had a very feeble
effect here. Nor was this a domain where the soul or the spirit ruled
supreme. Here mind claimed to be the sole reality, claimed itself to
be the soul and the spirit. The spirit itself was seen here as a form of
the mind. The light of this thought-mind covered the true source of
knowledge.
Savitri now found herself in a region where everything is settled,
and where everything finds what it seeks and knows its aim. All
had the look of a final look of stability.
Someone was standing there who seemed to have an air of
authority and he now spoke to Savitri as though his words had the
finality of those of an oracle. He said to her:
“Welcome, O pilgrim of the inner world, you are fortunate to
have reached our brilliant world where thought has reached the
final certitude. If you are searching for a perfect way of life, you will
find it here. Ours is the home of cosmic certainty. Here is the truth,
and God’s harmony is also here. Register your name in our book of
the elite; only very few are admitted here. Thank your fate, which
has made you one of us. Everything here is labelled and neatly
organised. This is the end of all that God permits to life. There is no
beyond. Here is the safety of the ultimate wall, the clarity of
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knowledge. A single Truth is triumphant here and here burns the
diamond of perfect bliss. Live here with us as a favourite of heaven
and Nature.”
Savitri replied to the too satisfied and confident sage who
presided over this world of intellect, limiting, cold and precise,
“Happy are they who can live in this world undisturbed by hope,
doubt and fear. Happy are they who have found spiritual certitude
here. But I cannot stay in this world of ordered knowledge of
apparent things, for I am seeking my soul” (lines 359–414).
All around were astonished that someone should question the
finality of things in that world and that someone still conceived of a
Beyond. Some of them murmured to themselves: “Who is this
person that does not know that the soul is only a tiny gland or a
secretion’s fault that creates useless disquiet in the mind and a
yearning in the heart and thus prolongs our unhappy existence?”
Some others said, “No, it is her spirit which she seeks, which is only
a splendid shadow of the name of God. Our mind is the only reality,
the rest is all imagination. Our minds have made the world in
which we live”. There was among them one with mystic and
unsatisfied eyes who said, “Is there still some one left who seeks a
Beyond? Can still the path be found and the gate to it opened?”
(lines 415–443).
Section 4
Thus she proceeded on towards her silent self. She came to a road
where she found an eager crowd rushing at a great speed, their feet
glowing with fire and their eyes bright with sunlight. They had
come from the secret cavern of the soul, pressing on to get into the
outer mind. They symbolised idealists of various kinds keen on
saving the world. Their enthusiasm made Savitri feel like joining
them, but she controlled herself since now she had realised that
only those who save themselves can save others. While these people
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were keen on carrying the light to suffering men, Savitri was intent
on reaching her soul (lines 444–470).
Savitri asked them to reveal to her the road to the deep mansion
of her secret soul. They replied that they had come from her hidden
soul. They had set out to help the dull and drab human lives and to
light the lamp of good amidst evil. They asked her to follow the
world’s winding highway to its source, and there she would see the
fire burning in the deep cavern of her heart. Then Savitri followed
the great winding road which was getting narrower as she
proceeded (lines 471–501).
This brings us to the end of Canto 3. The descriptions of the vital
world, of the domain controlled by Reason, of the region of the
Thought-Mind, and after that of the higher reaches of the mental
consciousness, are very graphic. The poet’s observations on idealists
who bring a mental formula to save the world are most interesting.
In almost all the previous articles we brought you in the second
part an excerpt from Savitri with a few comments on it. As
mentioned earlier, in the second part of this one we bring you a note
on the Psychic, mostly in the words of Sri Aurobindo and the
Mother.
The Psyche or the Psychic Being:

At this point in our study, I think that it is necessary to say
something about the concept of the Psyche or the Psychic Being,
which is an important concept in Savitri’s yoga as well as in the
yoga developed by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. In the West, this
term means some psychological or other phenomena of an
abnormal or supernormal character. The concept that plays a very
central role in the spiritual literature in India is that of the Atman,
the Self, the soul. Is the Psychic Being the same as this? This is not a
question that can be answered with a simple “yes” or “no” as we
shall see.
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Nothing substantial or abiding can be achieved in our Yoga
without the opening of the psychic and its infusion into the parts of
our nature. The psychicisation of our being is regarded as the first
solid achievement upon which the later achievements can be based.
Whenever there is an aspiration for the Infinite, for a transcendence
of our limited, ego-bound being, whenever the heart aches for the
bliss and knowledge of the Divine, it is because the psychic in us is
astir. Those in whom the psychic is still asleep are people who are
satisfied with the materialistic life they live and are hardly awake to
the perception of any higher values or to refined sensibilities in art
and culture. The psychic being is like a sunflower with a natural
leaning towards the sun of the Divine or His manifestation here in
terms of goodness, purity, beauty, harmony and love.
In our individual composition, we seem to have formations of
every cosmic principle. Thus we have a gross physical body and a
subtle physical body, a life-force or vital working in our gross body
and a subliminal vital, which is larger and more flexible, a surface
mind of aspiring ignorance, chained to the ego and its desires, as
well as a subliminal mind which is wider and more open to the
universal mind and its movements. Similarly we have a double soul
– the egoistic desire soul in the front, living in the disquieting
illusion of a separate existence, and the delight-soul of the Psyche,
which dwells in the inmost sanctuary of our being, the immortal
inhabitant of our mortal tenement.
Our psychic or delight-soul is our eternal and essential
individuality in Nature. It is made of love and bliss. In the
beginning of our terrestrial evolution, the psychic remains veiled
behind the turbid working of our surface nature. It exerts its
influence from behind and prepares the instruments of
manifestation. The psychic is the one thing imperishable in us and
nothing that enters our experience can pollute its purity or
extinguish the flame. This veiled psychic entity in us is a flame born
out of the Divine. It is that which endures and is imperishable in us
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and comes with us from birth to birth, untouched by death, decay
or corruption.
According to the Upanishad, when the Divine Spirit, non-
manifest and formless, decided to manifest, several million sparks
sprang out of the central Fire. Each spark contained a truth-idea to
be realised along its own line of fulfilment. Each of these millions of
sparks chose their own line of fulfilment. The central portion of the
divinity that presides over each line of development is called the
Jivatman. It is the Divine Self indeed, but the Self individualised for
the purpose of manifestation. Thus the Self remains one although
there are millions of individualised forms of it as Jivatmans.
A Jivatman stands at the head of each line of manifestation. It is
not directly involved in the manifestation. Its concern is the
evolution of the truth-idea in it. The Jivatman, however, projects a
small portion of itself in the form of an emanation in the world of
evolution. This projection of the Jivatman is called the psychic
essence in a being. It is this that travels from life to life, from one life
to the next and in this process gathers the sap of experience. As this
psychic essence develops, it becomes a psychic element and then
gradually grows into a psychic being. This evolution of the psychic
being is a fundamental part of human evolution.
The psychic being is not the unborn Self or Atman or the
Jivatman; for the Self, even in presiding as Jivatman over the
existence of an individual, is always aware of its universality and
transcendence. The psychic being is a deputy of the individual soul
in the forms of Nature and is sometimes referred to as chaitya
purusha in Sanskrit. It stands behind the mental, vital and physical
beings in us. It watches them and profits by their development and
experience.
What then is the difference between the soul and the psychic
being? That part of the soul which participates in evolution is the
psychic being. That part which does not involve itself in evolution
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but merely witnesses it and holds itself aloof is not the psychic.
What is the mission of the psychic? The answer to this question
is related to our understanding of why we are born on earth. There
are some philosophies like Buddhism which do not believe in the
existence of a soul. For them, life has no meaning or purpose. Their
main concern is with the fact that we are miserable on earth and this
is so because we are caught up in a web of desires. Buddhism seeks
a way of getting rid of this acute misery. Therefore it teaches us how
to do away with desires and to dissolve the constituent elements of
the fictitious ego-self. The aim of the Buddhist spiritual discipline is
to attain to the status of Nirvana. Christianity regards life as a long
preparation, and counsels its adherents to prepare themselves for
the kingdom of God: to seek “treasures in heaven, where neither
moth nor rust doth corrupt, and whence thieves do not break
through nor steal”. The life in this world should be spent in piety
and charity, the rewards of which will await us in heaven. The
ascetic schools of Vedanta regard this life as a snare from which we
should escape into the state of Brahman. They do not raise the
question why the soul at all should come down and get enmeshed
in this life if its only aim is to run away from it. For the Vaishnava,
the world is a lila (a sport) of the All-Beautiful and the All-Beloved,
but a lila that is mysterious and without any definite meaning or
purpose.
Sri Aurobindo and the Mother do not by-pass this important
question. According to them, the soul is here to manifest the Divine
in one of His innumerable individual aspects. The world is not an
illusion or an amorphous flux of chaotic possibilities, but a
progressive self-manifestation of the One Omnipresent Reality. The
very presence of the psychic being in the world is not only an
indubitable proof of the Divine presence here but also of his will for
an eventual perfection of this self-manifestation.
Bringing the psychic to the front and making it the guide and
leader of our spiritual sadhana or practice has one great advantage.
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It can put a check on the tendency strong in most spiritual traditions
to swerve towards the immutable Self and merge in its vast freedom
and impersonality. But this is an escape from the God-given mission
of bringing to this material world God’s perfect manifestation. The
psychic has an innate, an unquenchable thirst aspiration for union
with the Divine, through love and self-giving. The union that gives
it the highest fulfilment and satisfaction is not a passive and partial
union, but a dynamic and integral union. Such a union is self-
revealing and world-illumining, it is a union in the body in all its
activities as much as in the heart and the mind and the inner depths.
It is to achieve this integral union and become a thrilled channel of
the divine splendour that the soul descends into darkness and death
of this material manifestation.
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9: Book VII, Canto 4 – Spiritual Evolution
We are now ready to explore Canto 4 of Book VII of Savitri, and like
most of the other cantos in this book, this canto too does not have a
parallel in Vyasa’s narration of the legend in the Mahabharata. In
Canto 3 we followed Savitri as she pierces the veil between the
outer consciousness and her inner being and explores the physical,
vital, mental and spiritual worlds. She begins with the subtle
physical world: ‘Into a dense subtle Matter packed…’ (line 59) and then
moves on to the vital world: ‘The cycles of the infinity of desire…’ (line
166), then to the mental world: ‘Then journeying through the self’s
wide hush…’, she begins to explore a still higher world where ‘The
spirit saw itself as a form of mind…’ (line 364). ‘Then she fared on across
her silent self.’ These are the higher, spiritual regions of the mind,
where she meets many bright beings from whom she seeks
directions for her further journey: ‘O happy company of luminous
gods, / Reveal, who know, the road I must tread…’ (lines 472–473).
After this we see Savitri reaching a still higher world of
consciousness, probably the Overmental 13 region, which is the
world in which the various Gods identified by the religions are to
be found. Savitri meets here the “Triple Soul-Forces”, three
goddesses of the overmental world, namely the Madonna of
compassion and love, the Madonna of might, and the Madonna of
light and wisdom. (“Madonna” is a word normally used in English
for a statue or picture of Virgin Mary, but used here as a term of
respectful address.) This encounter with the Madonnas, who appear
before her one after the other, turns out to be most dramatic. Each
Madonna claims to be Savitri’s soul, but then immediately after
each Madonna finishes what she has to say to Savitri, we meet a
perversion, or an egoistic deformation, of what the Madonna stands
13
There will be a note in the second half of this article describing this and other
related terms.
133
for, protesting to Savitri and saying things very different from what
the Madonna had to say.
Let us first get some sense of what the Madonnas and their
disgruntled counterparts have to say; this may enable us to
determine what they represent.
First, Savitri comes across the Madonna of ‘divine pity’, a ‘spirit
touched by the grief of all that lives’. She begins by saying:
O Savitri, I am thy secret soul.

To share the suffering of the world I came.
p. 503 lines 25–26
Then she recounts the various ways in which she works in the
world:
I am woman, nurse and slave and beaten beast:

I tend the hands that gave me cruel blows.
The hearts that spurned my love and zeal I serve;
I am the courted queen, the pampered doll,
I am the giver of the bowl of rice,
I am the worshipped Angel of the House.
I am in all that suffers and that cries.
pp. 503-504 lines 32-38
She has been a witness to all the suffering of humanity:
I have seen the peasant burning in his hut,

I have seen the slashed corpse of the slaughtered child,
Heard woman’s cry ravished and stripped and haled
Amid the bayings of the hell-hound mob,
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I have looked on, I had no power to save.
p. 504 lines 45–49
She has sympathy for the suffering of even animals:
I have shared the toil of the yoked animal drudge

Pushed by the goad, encouraged by the whip;
I have shared the fear-filled life of bird and beast,
Its long hunt for the day’s precarious food,
Its covert slink and crouch and hungry prowl,
Its pain and terror seized by beak and claw.
p. 504 lines 52–57
But she confesses that she has ‘brought no arm of strength to aid or
slay; / God gave me love, he gave me not his force.’ She admits that
heaven has been indifferent and Nature cruel but yet she has not
complained. She hopes that one day this great hard world of pain
will change; her God has assured her that this will happen, and she
is confident that one day this will indeed happen.
As she stopped speaking, a voice of wrath, the voice of a
tortured Titan, was heard and it felt like the roar of an angry beast
hidden in the depths of man. On the one hand this voice was
complaining bitterly against the suffering of humanity and yet at
the same time seemed to take a perverse delight in his suffering. It
describes itself as follows:
I am the Man of Sorrows, I am he

Who is nailed on the wide cross of the universe;
To enjoy my agony God built the earth,
My passion he has made his drama’s theme.
p. 505 lines 97–100
135
He is bitter against God and voices his defiance of him. He speaks
for all those in this world who toil like the animal and like the
animal die, for man the rebel, the helpless serf. As he gets rid of
‘servitude’s seal’, he finds new tyrants on his back. He is forever
obliged to labour while others enjoy the fruits of his labour. He is
envious of the riches that he cannot share and of happiness that
cannot be his. He is therefore left alone with his bitterness and with
his evil thoughts and his quarrel with God and man. He is
convinced that his fate will not change.
God, he thinks, has made this world harsh and dreadful and
made the heart of man petty. Man can survive here only through
trickery and deceit. He does not believe in goodness. One is good
either because he is weak or because he regards it as an investment
for return. He can’t revolt any more because God has taken away
from him his ancient force, so he has to consent to his sufferings. He
concludes his defiant speech with these words:
I am the victim of titanic ills,

I am the doer of demoniac deeds;
I was made for evil, evil is my lot;
Evil I must be and by evil live;
Nought other can I do but be myself;
What Nature made me, that I must remain.
I suffer and toil and weep, I moan and hate.
p. 507 lines 152–158
This is the voice of the tamasic ego. Its very nature is to accept and
support despondency, weakness, inertia, self-depreciation. It is so
weak, so obscure, so miserable, so oppressed, and ill-used that it
feels it has no hope. This perverted being seems to take delight in
venting his bitterness and hatred and refuses to be transformed.
136
Savitri listens to this being but chooses to respond only to the
Madonna of Suffering. She tells her that she is indeed ‘a portion of
her soul put forth/ To bear the unbearable sorrow of the world’ and that
because of her man does not give in to despair and lives in hope.
She also points to her that ‘thine is the power to solace, not to save’.
This is something that the Madonna herself is conscious of as shown
in her admission that ‘God gave me love, he gave me not his force.’
Savitri leaves her with the promise that one day she will return with
the strength that will free the world from all the ills of the kind
which bring out the anger of the beast and the cruelty and pain of
the Titan in man. This will rid the world of the tamasic ego and
bring to it peace and joy for ever more.
Savitri presses on in her journey, and very soon she meets
another Madonna, who sat in her gold and purple lustre, ‘Armed
with the trident and the thunderbolt/ Her feet upon a couchant lion’s back’.
She looked majestic and victorious. This was the Mother of Might.
When she spoke, her voice sounded like a luminous command. She
too begins by saying to Savitri:
O Savitri, I am thy secret soul…

I stand upon the earth’s paths of danger and grief
And help the unfortunate and save the doomed.
p. 509 lines 213–219
She keeps a watch in the human world over the battle of the bright
and the dark forces. She topples down the thrones of tyrant kings
and smites the Titan who bestrides the world. She goes on to say:
I am Durga, goddess of the proud and strong,

And Lakshmi, queen of the fair and unfortunate;
I wear the face of Kali when I kill,
I trample the corpses of the demon hordes.
137
p. 509 lines 236–239
But she finds that the obstinate world resists her, and the
crookedness and evil in man’s heart is stronger than reason, and
that the hostile forces are very crafty and constantly try to put back
the clock of human progress and destiny. She admits,
The cosmic evil is too deep to unroot,

The cosmic suffering is too vast to heal.
p. 510 lines 267–268
She is, however, able to help a few but the mass falls back unsaved.
She too like the Madonna of Suffering is hopeful that her work will
not fail because God’s seal is on it.
Hardly has this Madonna stopped speaking, when the dwarf-
Titan, the Ego of the great world of Desire, the Rajasic ego, begins to
pour out his heart. His complains that his constant struggle has
enabled nature on her journey of evolution but his wages have been
death and pain. He believes that Nature is his slave and tool and
does not realise that in reality he himself is the slave and tool of
Nature. He believes that the world was made for him and for his
use. He believes:
The sun and moon are lights upon my path;

Air was invented for my lungs to breathe,
Conditioned as a wide and wall-less space
For my winged chariot’s wheels to cleave a road,
The sea was made for me to swim and sail
And bear my golden commerce on its back:
p. 511 lines 320–324
138
He was born weak and small and ignorant, but with time he has
grown greater than Nature, wiser than God and he is quite boastful
of his achievements:
I have made real what she never dreamed,

I have seized her powers and harnessed for my work,
I have shaped her metals and new metals made;
I will make glass and raiment out of milk,
Make iron velvet, water unbreakable stone,
Like God in his astuce of artist skill,
Mould from one primal plasm protean forms,
In single Nature multitudinous lives,
All that imagination can conceive
In mind intangible, remould anew
In Matter’s plastic solid and concrete.
No magic can surpass my magic’s skill.
There is no miracle I shall not achieve.
What God imperfect left, I will complete,
Out of a tangled mind and half-made soul
His sin and error I will eliminate;
What he invented not, I shall invent:
He was the first creator, I am the last.
p. 512 lines 336 –352
Here we hear the voice of the ego of the scientist and the technician
proud of his achievements and arrogating to himself the role of
God. He goes on to boast how he discovered the atomic energy and
with it he can now ‘Expunge a nation or abolish a race’ and leave
Death’s silence where there was laughter and joy.
He is confident that he has grown a master of the arts of life and
harnessed the secrets of Nature to cater to his comforts. Soon, he
hopes to know all the secrets of the Mind and then he will be able to
139
play with knowledge and ignorance and sin and virtue. Soon, he
hopes to be able to read the hidden thoughts of others and slay his
enemies with a look or a thought.
All this egoistic boast reminds one of the great Titans of our
mythologies who enslaved the humans and aspired to enslave the
Gods in their heavens. This is exactly what this voice says:
When earth is mastered, I shall conquer heaven;

The gods shall be my aides or menial folk,
No wish I harbour unfulfilled shall die:
Omnipotence and omniscience shall be mine.”
p. 513 lines 381–384
Savitri has heard all that this warped Vital ego had to say but she
now turns to the Madonna of Might and responds to her. She tells
her that she undoubtedly is one of her cosmic powers put forth to
help mankind. Man is able to dare and to hope because of her, and
because of her he has made all this god-like progress. But she lacks
wisdom, and power without wisdom is like a wind, it cannot build
‘the extreme eternal things’ here on earth. One day she will return
with wisdom so that the Madonna’s wisdom will be as vast as is her
power now. Then the cry of the ego which now claims the world as
its food shall be hushed, and all shall be light and bliss.
Savitri proceeds further along the spirit’s upward route. She
now finds herself in a high and happy space, a wide tower of vision
from where all could be seen. Here her spirit was thrilled by
nearness to its source; Savitri is now moving closer and closer to her
soul. And here she encounters the third Madonna with the lustre of
heaven in her eyes; her face had the brightness of the sun, and her
smile could heal a torn and wounded heart. She now speaks to
Savitri and says:
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O Savitri, I am thy secret soul.
I have come down to the wounded desolate earth
To heal her pangs and lull her heart to rest
And lay her head upon the Mother’s lap
That she may dream of God and know his peace
And draw the harmony of higher spheres
Into the rhythm of earth’s rude troubled days.
p. 515 lines 426–432
She gives ideals to man which he finds worth struggling to achieve.

She is peace that steals into man’s war-worn breast. She is ‘charity
with the kindly hands that bless’. She is ‘silence mid the noisy tramp of
life’, and ‘Knowledge poring on her cosmic map’. When man is confused
as to what is good and what is evil, she is the one who guides him
along the pathways to God. Out of the Inconscient, she builds
consciousness. She comes to man in the forms of goodness, of
courage, valour, martyrdom, Wisdom, Beauty, and through them
she lifts man’s soul nearer to the Light.
But human mind clings to its ignorance

And to its littleness the human heart
And to its right to grief the earthly life.
p. 516 lines 481–483
She concludes by declaring:
I bring meanwhile the gods upon the earth;

I bring back hope to the despairing heart;
I give peace to the humble and the great,
And shed my grace on the foolish and the wise.
I shall save earth, if earth consents to be saved.
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p. 516 lines 487–491
As soon the Madonna stopped speaking, Savitri heard the cry, the
stark and protesting voice of the sense-shackled Mental ego. He is
conscious of the godlike power he has, but he is bound in the chains
of earthly ignorance. When he dominates human beings, they
cannot see the whole of God’s Reality but see only the cosmic
surfaces. Even when he sees the physical body of the Truth, he
cannot probe deep enough and reach its soul. He misses the
crowding riches of infinity and mistakes them for a giant waste. He
probes into nature’s secrets but his ‘eyes miss the unseen behind’. He is
often visited by intuitive light and inspiration but he does not trust
them. He trusts only reason and sense-knowledge. Because of this,
his splendid efforts at knowing the Truth meet with frustration. As
he speaks Savitri can hear the cosmic pathos behind his grandiose
utterances.
He introduces himself as ‘the mind of God’s great ignorant world’,
‘the all-discovering Thought of man’. But he is a god chained to Matter
and sense like an animal imprisoned in a fence of thorns. Although
he has not been able to set himself free, he has managed to loosen
the cord and enlarge his scope. He boasts of what he has already
achieved:
I have mapped the heavens and analysed the stars,

Described their orbits through the grooves of Space,
Measured the miles that separate the suns,
Computed their longevity in Time.
p. 518 lines 544–547
He goes to describe how he has discovered the secrets of this earth

by delving into its bowels. He has also sketched the tree of
evolution and traced man’s descent all the way down to the
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protozoa from which his ancestors rose. He also has studied how
man is born and how he dies, but
Only what end he serves I know not yet

Or if there is aim at all or any end
Or push of rich creative purposeful joy
In the wide works of the terrestrial power.
p. 518 lines 561–564
He is confident that he has studied in detail the entire book of

Matter, ‘Only some pages are left to read’. He has also studied the ways
of life of humans as well as of apes and ants and the paths of the
mind of men and women. He feels pretty confident that if there is a
God who is at work, he has found most of his secrets. But, as he
confesses:
But still the Cause of things is left in doubt,

Their truth flees from pursuit into a void;
When all has been explained nothing is known.
p. 519 lines 576–578
It is still a mystery to him how this mighty Nature was born and
how the mind arose and how life assumed these different forms.
Whenever he feels confident of what he has discovered, Chance and
Fate often call in doubt what he tries to establish as the truth of
things. He thinks all the great philosophies he has built are but a
reasoned guess. But he thinks that that the mystic heavens and all
talk of the human soul are pure charlatanism. All this is a mere
speculation. In the end the world itself becomes a doubt, a joke of
some kind perpetrated by the Infinite. Perhaps the world is no more
than an illusion.
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It is said that there is a greater consciousness but it is supposed
to lead you to a bodiless Self. What use is such a consciousness? He
prefers to work within his human limitations. He is human and
hopes to remain human. To think that God lives hidden in Matter is
no more than a fantasy. How can man ever grow divine? No
thinking men would ever accept such an illogical proposition.
Savitri listens to the outburst of this warped voice, but she turns
to the Madonna of Light and addresses her. She tells her that she is
indeed a portion of her soul put forth to help human beings to rise
to the forgotten spiritual heights. Because of her, the soul draws
near to God, and there is still love left in the world. But the human
intellect is a hard and rocky thing on which the tree of Paradise can
never flower. Even if intuition comes to its help, it will not be of
much use since at best it will still remain a prisoner of the ego of
sainthood. Mind can at best receive only a bright shadow of God
but not God himself. Savitri asks the Madonna to nurse the hunger
for the eternal in man. One day, she promises, she will return with
God’s hand in hers and then there shall be perfection of earth and
light and peace in all the worlds.
We have now heard the three Madonnas, the triple cosmic soul-
forces. These are three aspects of the World-Mother and they have
already been at work in the world. But much of their work is
vitiated by the perversions these powers suffer on earth. The fair
work done by the soul-forces is defaced to a considerable extent by
the triple aspects of the ego, Tamasic, Rajasic and Sattwik. It must
be noted that the soul-forces are triple and not triune; each lacks the
powers of the others. The Madonna of Compassion does not have
power, and the Madonna of Might does not have wisdom, and the
Madonna of Light is a prisoner of her own smugness. In other
words, each Madonna has as it were her own separate domain.
Savitri feels that all this is not enough to bring perfection to this
world. Compassion, power and wisdom should be triune powers
acting on the world in unison and not separately as they do now.
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Savitri therefore moves on in search of her soul. This episode is rich
in significance and reveals what is really wrong with this world and
with human consciousness as now constituted. It is not necessary at
this stage to go further into the significance of this episode.
Spiritual Evolution
One of the major themes of Savitri is spiritual evolution. We need to
clarify this notion at this stage because it is crucial to the
understanding of Savitri. Here I will present to you only an
overview of this important concept. We will have occasions to come
back to it again as we proceed with your study. This will also help
us to understand the term “Overmental” used earlier, when
indicating where exactly Savitri must have encountered the three
Madonnas.
The concept of evolution as it was developed in the West is
fundamentally Darwinian and it is concerned with the study of the
evolution of form: how, progressively, more complex forms evolved
out of less complex ones. It does not concern itself with the question
what is evolving and why – for example, why Mind should evolve
out of Life and Life out of Matter. Sri Aurobindo regards evolution
primarily as the evolution of consciousness. For Darwinians and
other materialists, matter is the fundamental reality of this world
and consciousness is only a phenomenon of reactions of Matter to
Matter, of energy in Matter to energy is Matter. For Sri Aurobindo
consciousness is the fundamental thing. Everything else, the energy,
the motion, the movement of consciousness that creates the
universe – the microcosm as well as the macrocosm – is nothing but
consciousness arranging itself. Consciousness is not only the power
of awareness of self and things, it is also a dynamic or creative
energy. It can not only respond to forces but can create forces out of
itself.
Evolution, says Sri Aurobindo, presupposes a prior involution.
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What evolves does so because it already existed involved. This
creation is a manifestation of the Supreme Divine consciousness. In
a manner of speaking the Supreme took a plunge into the Ignorance
and became its very opposite. He became the Inconscient and out of
this Inconscient evolved Matter, and out of Matter came Life and
out of Life Mind; and this progressive evolution will gradually
unfold itself further and from mind will evolve higher levels of
consciousness and finally the Supreme Divine. This progressive
development is inevitable because the Supreme Divine had taken a
plunge into the Ignorance and Darkness, and therefore will be
manifested here. This creation is the story of the gradual and
progressive manifestation of God in Matter. When that happens,
every form created here on earth will be able to manifest one aspect
or facet of the Supreme’s infinite glories.
Why did the Supreme take a plunge into its opposite or what is
called the Ignorance? These are not matters easy to explain, and
even when explained, easy to comprehend, for we are talking here
of the movements of an Infinite Consciousness and the finite human
intelligence will not be able to comprehend it unless it acquires
something of the vastness of this Infinite Consciousness. Suffice it to
say here, that the Supreme Divine Consciousness chose to take a
plunge into the abyss of Ignorance for the thrill of the adventure, for
lila (the joy or excitement of a sport), as it is said.
The first to evolve out of the Inconscient was the Subconscient,
and then Matter. The Subconscient and the Inconscient constitute
the nether being below the physical consciousness. All upon earth is
based on the Inconscient, which is not really devoid of
consciousness, as the term would imply. It is the deepest level
reached during the plunge of involution, and the evolution of
consciousness starts from this level. Matter is under the control of
the subconscient out of which it comes. That is why we are not
aware of what is going on in our body most of the time. Out of
Matter have evolved material forms with a higher manifestation of
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consciousness we call Life, and out of Life has come the still higher
level of manifestation we call Mind.
The levels of consciousness are like a flight of steps, and the
evolution of consciousness that has taken place so far looks like an
ascent up this ladder or vertical system of levels. It has already
reached the level of Mind and, as Sri Aurobindo sees it, it is certain
to climb further until it reaches the level of Satchidananda or the
Supreme Divine Consciousness.
The Supreme Consciousness was formless and unmanifest
before the plunge into the Inconscient was taken. The first phase of
evolution through the levels of the Subconscient, Matter, Life and
Mind has served the purpose of manifesting here a multitude of
forms, each distinct from all the others. From Mind onwards it is a
conscious, spiritual evolution. All these rungs of consciousness,
already scaled and yet to be scaled, can be represented as a ladder,
as shown below:
11. SATCHIDANANDA
10. SUPERMIND
9. OVERMIND
8. INTUITION
7. ILLUMINED MIND
6. HIGHER MIND
5. MIND
4. VITAL
3. PHYSICAL (MATTER)
2. THE SUBCONSCIENT
1. THE INCONSCIENT
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Evolution so far has climbed the first five rungs, and man lives
primarily at the mental level. Sri Aurobindo has contended that, at
the moment, man seems to be arrested at this level. Most of our
problems, the various crises humanity has been facing today, can be
traced to this single cause. Through yoga, it is possible for man to
climb higher levels of consciousness. The aim of Sri Aurobindo’s
yoga is to enable man to ascend to level ten – to the level of the
Supermind. The Supermind is in its very essence a Truth-
Consciousness, a consciousness always free from the Ignorance
which is the foundation of our present natural existence. It is not a
superior level of the mind, but an altogether new facet of
consciousness. Satchidananda is the supracosmic Reality, the
Divine, the Supreme Being who manifests himself as infinite
existence (SAT) of which the essentiality is consciousness (CHIT), of
which again the essentiality is bliss (ANANDA).
Supermind lies between SATCHIDANANDA, the One who is
above all manifestation, and this flux of the many in the manifested
universe. Traditional yoga aims at taking a leap from the mind
straight into Satchidananda, and this is sometimes described as
attaining Nirvana. Sri Aurobindo maintains that it is necessary to
attain the Supermind during the climb beyond the mind so that we
can possess this world, this manifested universe like a God,
untroubled by death, pain or ignorance as we now are. Taking a
direct leap into Satchidananda would mean abandoning the created
world to its own fate and seeking the eternity, peace and bliss of the
Divine for our individual selves. Only the Supermind has the power
to change human nature and to bring perfection to this troubled
world of ours. The Supermind, we are told in the story as narrated
by Sri Aurobindo in this epic, was discovered by Aswapati beyond
this manifested world in the Transcendental realm.
The physical world which we see around us is not the only
world created by the consciousness. It has created many other
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worlds. But these are not material worlds. There are vital worlds,
mental worlds, psychic worlds, and other higher worlds with which
we have little contact. In each of us there is a mental plane of
consciousness, a psychic, a vital, a subtle physical as well as the
gross physical plane. The same planes are repeated in the
consciousness of general Nature. The microcosm is identical in
structure with the macrocosm. In other words, the gradations of
consciousness we find in the world outside are mirrored also in the
being of man.
It is these worlds that Aswapati explored in search of a power
which would enable him to bring perfection to this world. His
exploration of these worlds is described in the 15 cantos of Book II
of Savitri. Aswapati was unable to find this power in any of the
created worlds. So he takes a leap into the Transcendental world,
which is beyond the manifested world. Aswapati’s journey is an
inner journey through his own consciousness.
Savitri too took a plunge into her inner being and explored first
the physical, vital and mental realms, and then began to ascend to
levels of consciousness above the rational mind. That is where she
meets the glorious crowd who longed to save God’s world. (In the
last section of Book VII, Canto 3)
Just as there is the subconscient which lies below the physical
consciousness, there is also the superconscient, consisting of levels
of consciousness higher than the normal mind. A spiritual seeker
has to be conscious of the subconscient levels because things or
influences come from them into the physical, vital and mental levels
which are an impediment to his spiritual progress. Similarly he has
to open himself to the superconscient levels whose role is to evolve
the spiritual man out of the mental half-animal that man is today.
Each of these various levels teems with forces and influences which
can assume forms and act as powers.
Sri Aurobindo distinguishes various distinct levels of
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consciousness among these superconscient planes which lie above
the ordinary mind. This gradation can be seen as a stairway of four
main ascents. These have been designated by Sri Aurobindo as the
Higher Mind, the Illumined Mind, Intuition or the Intuitive Mind
and the Overmind. Beyond Overmind, at the summit lies
Supermind. At this stage it is not necessary for us to go into a
precise characterisation of these higher levels of consciousness. A
brief glance at each one of them should suffice for our present
purposes.
Sri Aurobindo has described the Higher Mind as a ‘luminous
thought-mind’. It does not depend on a process of deductions and
inferences in arriving at the truth about things. Its most
characteristic movement is a totality of truth-seeing at a single view.
The Illumined Mind does not primarily work by thought but by
vision. It is more of an inner sight. It is a Mind not so much of
thought but of spiritual light. The perceptual power of this inner
sight is greater than the perceptual power of thought. The Intuitive
Mind comes very close to what may be called knowledge-by-
identity. It should not be mistaken for what is normally known as
intuitive knowledge, the understanding that comes without the
need for conscious reasoning. “Intuition” here is used in a much
deeper sense to refer to a certain gradation of consciousness. The
Intuitive Mind sees the truth of things by a direct inner contact, not
like the mental intelligence indirectly by indirect contact through
the senses. The limitation of this mind compared with the
Supermind is that it sees things by flashes, point by point, not as a
whole. Besides, its perceptions tend to get mixed up with those of
the mental movement. It marks a transitional stage between the
mental seeking and the direct perception characteristic of the
Supermind.
The Overmind is the passage through which one passes from
Mind to Supermind. This is a consciousness in which the substance
and the movements of mind become more and more illumined,
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powerful and wide. It is the highest of the ranges of the mental
consciousness. Although it draws from the highest Truth, it is here
that the separation of different aspects of the Truth begins, and each
aspect is worked out as though it is an independent Truth. This is
the process which. as we descend to ordinary Mind, Life and
Matter, culminates in a complete division, fragmentation,
separation from the indivisible Truth above.
The Supermind is radically different from all the levels of
consciousness described so far. In its very essence it is a truth-
consciousness, always free from the Ignorance whose shadow falls
on all the lower levels of consciousness in some degree or the other.
It does not have to seek knowledge because its very nature is
knowledge. On its summits it possesses the divine omniscience and
omnipotence.
It is believed that the Supermind had not yet descended into this
creation until Sri Aurobindo and the Mother brought it down
through their long and arduous tapasya of many decades. The
Mother has declared that this consciousness manifested on earth on
29 February 1956.
I would just like to add that it is believed that the gods and
goddesses, who are the emanations of the creative consciousness of
the Supreme, preside over the material universe and the earth. And
the place which is the seat of existence of these gods and goddesses
is what Sri Aurobindo has called the Overmind. This it would seem
reasonable to assume that the plane of consciousness on which
Savitri met the three Madonnas was the Overmental plane.
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We will be studying “The Finding of the Soul”, Canto 5 of Book VII,

in this chapter. This is one of the most climactic points in our story.
Savitri is pushing ahead, seeking the soul’s mystic cave. As we
have already noted, there is nothing in the original legend of the
Mahabharata that corresponds to such an elaborate description of
Savitri’s yoga. The original story gives only a brief description of the
triratra vow that Savitri undertakes.
Before you proceed any further, please review the section on
“The Psychic Being”, which you will find in Chapter 8. Note in
particular the distinction we have made between the Jivatman and
the Psychic Being. You will need all this at the back of your mind in
dealing with Section 2 of the canto under discussion.
Section 1 (lines 1–141)

Savitri has just encountered the triple soul-forces, the three
Goddesses, and each of these claims to be her secret soul. Savitri
listens to them and also to each of the titanic forces that follow each
Goddess. She tells these Goddesses that they have come from her
soul and that she has decided to go still further to find her soul. The
realm of consciousness in which the gods dwell is the Overmental
world. This Savitri has thus already reached the Overmental world.
For most spiritual pilgrims this itself is a far enough stage and very
few get even this far. The spiritual aspirant has to pass through
many trying and difficult phases along the way. But Savitri is
spared most of these because the path she follows is the sunlit path
of the psychic. Through an inner aspiration and concentration, she
gains entry into the Inner countries of her being (Book Seven, Canto
3) and then pushes ahead through various regions of her inner
being.
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Most spiritual seekers are looking for peace or bliss as the goal of
their sadhana (spiritual effort or practices). The spiritual practices
that they follow involve emptying the instruments of their being
(body, life and mind) and bringing into them a certain degree of
purity. This enables them to reflect in their heart and mind the light
of the higher levels of the mind, namely, the Higher Mind, the
Illumined Mind, and the Intuitive Mind. This in itself is a
tremendous experience; but a systematic ascent of the mind to these
levels is rare. Most people who get this far tend to disregard these
illuminations coming from the higher levels because they are
focussed on merging with the Transcendent. Their one aim is
separation from Nature. This is called variously ‘Nirvana’,
‘liberation’, ‘Moksha’, etc.
Savitri is different. She has no personal need for salvation or for
merging in the Transcendent or in what is called the ‘Beyond’. She
has come ‘to wrestle with the shadow’ (whatever limits and perverts
human life), and to ‘hew the ways of immortality’. She is therefore
seeking for the Truth, the Light and the Power which can
victoriously handle earth-nature and bring to life here the higher
Light, Truth and Bliss. We have surmised that the realm in which
she meets the three Madonnas is the world of the Overmental
consciousness. She has not met her soul yet because it dwells in the
Transcendent. Savitri, we have seen, is an Avatar of the Divine
Mother, the Chit-Shakti (Consciousness-Power) of the Supreme and
her Jivatman is the Divine Mother herself. Savitri has now to break
through another barrier to reach the Transcendental world.
To be able to do this, Savitri has to empty herself of all that now
defines and limits her consciousness. Without such a process of
emptying oneself, it is not possible to receive into oneself the riches
of a higher illumination. And to achieve this she enters into what
the poet calls ‘a night of God’. This is somewhat akin to what is
described is Christian literature as the Dark Night of the Soul.
This is a state of silent and intense aspiration. She becomes
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thoughtless, wordless, desireless and free from all other willing. ‘In
a simple purity of emptiness/ Her mind knelt down before the unknowable’.
Everything in her was abolished save her naked self and the
yearning of her surrendered heart. Even to be aware of her separate
self seemed to her like a vanity; she asked for nothing, not even for
salvation. Her condition is described by the poet in these words:
A sacred darkness brooded now within,

The world was a deep darkness great and nude.
p. 522 ines 26–27
At last a change approached, the emptiness broke. She felt ‘a blissful

nearness to the goal’. It was as though heaven leaned down to kiss the
sacred hill. The poet is suggesting the descent of a new and
wonderful consciousness in Savitri. The very air all around
trembled with the power of the advent of this consciousness. It was
now a new dawn. And here we have the description of a wonderful
dawn. No prose can do justice to what the poet has described in
these magic words:
A rose of splendour on a tree of dreams,

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 immortal lustre as his robe,
Trailed heaven like a purple scarf and wore
As his vermilion caste-mark a red sun.
p. 523 lines 45–51
This Day is the priest or officiator and preceptor of the great yajna
(sacrifice) of joy. A silence sanctified this world. The new Day
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covered the whole world with his immortal lustre and in his
forehead he wore the Sun.
This place somehow looked familiar to Savitri, because it was
indeed the home of her soul. This is the region of Light, beyond the
empire of the Ignorance. This is Savitri’s first experience of the
world of the Supramental consciousness in the transcendental
world.
We have now the description of the sanctuary of the new
consciousness, which she is now entering. It looked as though she
was entering the occult depths of some land of Bliss. This is the
retreat of the Truth-Consciousness whose heights the human mind
cannot reach. It was hidden as though in the solitude of a rock-
temple, a refuge far away from the reach of an ignorant
worshipping world. The entrance to this realm was hidden in an
awful dimness and a holy stillness with a marvellous brooding
light. The door was carved in blocks of immobility of concentrated
peace. Round the lintel on both sides there were golden serpents
curled enveloping it with their pure strength and looking out with
wisdom’s deep and luminous eyes. These symbolise the divine
energies of this upper hemisphere. The eagle hovering over the
door with its wide wings is the Supramental Mind-force. There was
also a screen of trance of peace which covered the door like a fire-
screen. In the cornices were found the doves, the divine
counterparts of the psychic aspiration, signifying peace, sweetness
and purity. The doves, serpents and the eagle signifying the divine
psychic, the divine vital and the divine mental respectively, lived in
perfect harmony here.
The threshold of this temple can be crossed only in what is called
sushupti (in sleep consciousness) when the consciousness is free
from all distorting influences. As Savitri crossed the threshold she
sees the Archetypes of all the movements, things and planes below.
This is what is described in our sacred literature as the karana jagat,
where all happenings and creations in time are seen in their seed-
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state. She sees the great figures of gods, great executive figures of
the cosmic self, as they would look if carved in stone. On the walls,
covered with significant symbol shapes she found the life scenes of
man and beast, and now she could understand the meaning of the
life of gods and the power and purpose of the numberless worlds.
She saw there the whole plan of creation, as also the ladder of
existence from the Inconscient below to the Superconscient
Satchidananda above, and the entire movement of involution and
evolution.
There was no sound there, one felt only the living nearness of the
soul. Yet all the worlds and God himself were there, for every
symbol was a reality and brought the presence that had given it life.
All this she saw inly (within herself) and felt and knew, not by
some thought of mind, but by the self. There is a light not born of
sun, or of moon or of fire, it is the light of the Atman, which shines
and illumines where no other light can reach. It dwells within and
sheds an intimate visibility and reveals the meanings of all things
which are secret. Our normal sight and sense are a fallible gaze and
touch, and only the spirit’s vision is wholly true.
As she passed in that mysterious place from room to room,
through door and rock-hewn door, suddenly an identity of which
she was not aware until now woke within her. She felt herself made
one with all she saw. She knew herself with all the powers of the
Supramental powers. She knew herself as the beloved of the
Supreme, his creative, executive counterpart. She was the Mother of
Beauty and Delight, she was the creative word of Brahma, she was
the infinite might of Shiva, she was Vishnu, the sustainer and
preserver of this creation. She was Krishna and Radha eternally
entwined in bliss (the eternal’s aspect of Ananda and delight in
creation). She was the adorer and the adored lost in one.
In the last chamber on a golden seat one sat whose shape no
vision could define; only one felt this was the world’s source or
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fountainhead of this entire creation.
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 lines 127–134
Savitri felt that she was a wandering Force of this Power. This was
the goal of the world’s desire, a Sun of which all knowledge is only
a beam, a Greatness without which no life could exist. This was the
Divine Supramental Gnosis.14
From there all departed into the silent Self, and all became
formless and pure and bare. Then through a tunnel 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.
14
The reader may please note that here we are talking of things and experiences
which are beyond our ken, and it is difficult to be confident about one’s
understanding of what has been described here. I am inclined to believe that here
Savitri has the first experience of the Supramental or Gnostic Consciousness in
the transcendental world. But most of the scholars with whom I have discussed
this passage do not agree with me. They are not sure exactly where Savitri is at
this point. All agree that Savitri is very close to her soul. But Savitri is the
incarnation of the Supreme Divine Mother, who represents the Supramental
Consciousness. Therefore, it seems to me reasonable to assume, among other
reasons we won’t go into here, that the sentence which reads, ‘In the last chamber
on a golden seat/ …A greatness without whom no life could be.’ (lines 128–134)
describes the the Divine Supramental gnosis
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Section 2 (lines 142–201)
There stood a being there which was deathless although it looked
transient because it played with momentary things and took part in
the Divine Comedy of this life. The poet is now speaking of the
spirit or the Jivatman which is behind the individual soul or the
psychic being. What is described in most of this section does not
refer to Savitri alone; the description is general.
This being is the Spirit’s conscious representative and God’s
delegate in our humanity. This is the being which presides over our
destiny and guides us as we travel from life to life. Her wide eyes
which bore a tranquil happiness which could not be revoked by the
pity and sorrow had the gaze of infinity looking at finite shapes. She
had come into the mortal world to play at ball with Time and
Circumstance. A joy in world-existence was her master-movement
here and the passion of the game lighted her eyes. She welcomed
earth’s bliss and grief with a smile; she saw all things as a
masquerade of Truth disguised in the costumes of ignorance,
crossing the years to Immortality. She could face all with the strong
spirit’s peace.
Since she knows how hard the mind has to toil here, she puts
forth a small portion of herself into the hidden region of the heart to
enable it to face the pang and to forget the bliss, to share the
suffering and to endure life’s wounds and to labour here under the
labour of the stars. This is the individual soul in us, a being no
bigger than the thumb of man (this is the Upanishadic
characterisation of the soul in us). This refers to the projection of the
Jivatman in this world, and that projection is the psychic. It is this in
us that laughs and weeps, suffers the strokes, exults in victory,
struggles for the crown. Identified with mind, body and life, it takes
on itself their anguish and defeat, bleeds with Fate’s whips, and
hangs upon the cross, yet is it the unwounded and immortal self
supporting the actor on the human scene. This in us is the godhead
small and marred, the human portion of divinity, the soul in Time,
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and gives us the strength to do our daily task. It fills us with
sympathy for the grief in others and the little strength we have to
help the race. It is weak in body but has an invincible might in its
heart, and it climbs stumbling, held by an unseen hand, a toiling
spirit in a mortal shape. Here the poet is describing how the human
soul is a projection of the divine spark or the Jivatman, which
stands behind and does not come down into this evolutionary
world. It sends this projection, which is the psychic element in us
which gradually acquires a form and becomes the psychic being in
us. Its function is to support us on our Godward journey through all
the vicissitudes of our earthly existence. Because of its presence in
us we rise from light to light, from power to power. The individual
soul climbs stumbling through life but it has all the time the support
of an unseen hand of the Jivatman of which it is a projection here.
We now resume the story line. Here in this chamber of flame and
light they met – the secret deity, which is a spark of the Divine, and
her projection, our individual soul involved in this earthly life. In
Savitri’s case, it is Savitri’s inner being and the Supreme Divine
Mother of whom Savitri is a delegate or an incarnation here. Then
with a magic transformation’s speed, they rushed into each other
and grew one.
Section Three (lines 202–345)

This subtle world experienced by Savitri withdrew deep within her
and a veil was cast over her inner sight. Savitri comes back to
normal human wakefulness after realising in her inner being the
Gnostic Godhead, who is her own secret soul. But she holds this
vision of the Superconscient in her luminous inner vision and
gradually begins to take possession of her surface consciousness.
Once more she was human Savitri upon earthly soil in the
muttering night in the rain-swept woods and the simple cottage
where she was sitting in trance. But now the half-opened bud of her
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heart has blossomed, and stood disclosed to the earthly ray.
Savitri’s soul, until now secret and hid behind veils, now shone
revealed as an image. No more was there a wall separating the soul
and the mind, nor was there any mystic fence guarding the soul
from the claims of life. In its deep lotus home Savitri’s soul sat as if
on concentration’s marble seat, calling the mighty Mother of the
worlds to make this earthly tenement of her being her house.
Now as in a flash from a celestial light, a face, a living form of
the original Power, came down into her heart and made of it its
temple and pure abode. The Transcendental Adya Shakti sends an
emanation of Herself into Savitri’s being. But when its feet touch the
quivering bloom of the lotus of her heart, it brings about a radical
reversal of consciousness. The effect of this tremendous event is
described in these lines:
But when its feet had touched the quivering bloom

A mighty movement rocked the inner space
As if a world were shaken and found its soul:
p. 528 lines 220–222
The result of this is that all the powers hitherto latent begin to
emerge and the entire human vehicle becomes an illumined divine
tenement. This is referred to in Tantric literature as the rising of the
Kundalini, the consciousness-force locked up in the physical
consciousness. This Kundalini energy, hitherto oblivious to all
higher light, now wakes up and rises through the various centres
energising them as it passes though them 15 . This rising of the
Kundalini in Savitri is powerfully described in the following lines:
15
There is an entire distinct Yogic path called the tantric way, which regards the
raising of the Kundalini as its principal objective. I shall present a brief note in a
subsequent article on the way of the Tantra and how it is related to the Yoga of Sri
Aurobindo and the Mother.
160
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 lines 223–230
The consciousness-force lying in a state of coiled sleep is often

described as a serpent. This serpent-power now is fully awakened,
and it rises to its full height, and erect. Its tail-end is at the bottom of
the spine and its hood touches the crown of the head. This is
graphically described in the lines given above. As it rises, it touches
each of the centres or chakras (circles), as they are called, from the
Muladhara, situated at the bottom of the spinal chord to the Ajna,
situated between the two eyebrows, and beyond it to the Sahasrara,
situated just above the head. (The other chakras are the Svadhisthana
situated above the Muladhara, and the Manipura, situated at the
centre of the navel region, the Anahata, situated in the heart region,
and the Vishuddha, at the base of the throat.)
The movement does not stop there. After striking the bottom of
the crown, it breaks through and passes beyond like a flash of
lightening. Now this serpent power, pure and free, enters the body
again, this time with its head down and its tail up. It enters the
human being transforming the being with its superconscient light.
This awakened power becomes a channel of communication
between the ‘viewless summits’, the superconscient heights, and ‘the
unseen depths’, the inconscient depths. ‘The string of forts’, the chain
of chakras which constitute man’s frail defence against the enormous
161
world, now get charged with divine powers. All parts and planes of
a man’s being feel fulfilled. Not only the powers of the Adya Shakti,
the Supreme Mother, but also the vehicle, the Vahana, needed to
carry these powers, accompany her and descend into Savitri. This
vehicular force is known as ‘Garuda’ in the Vedic terminology and
Simha (the lion) in the Tantric terminology. These powers also
descend into Savitri to enable her to receive and bear the powers of
Light, Love and Ananda.
An image sat of the original Power

Wearing the mighty Mother’s form and face
Armed, bearer of the weapon and the sign
Whose occult might no magic can imitate,
Manifold yet one she sat, a guardian force:
A saviour gesture stretched her lifted arm,
And symbol of some native cosmic strength,
A sacred beast lay prone below her feet,
A silent flame-eyed mass of living force.
p. 528–529 lines 238–246
The mute walls of the black Inconscient were broken and the circles
of ignorance were effaced, and then powers and divinities burst
flaming forth and each part of Savitri’s being trembled with delight
as it lay overwhelmed with waves of happiness; she now saw Her
(the Adya Shakti’s) hand in every circumstance and felt Her touch
in every limb and cell of her body. Every part and plane of her
being gets connected with its divine counterpart above and the
latent powers in her subliminal mental, vital and physical now
receive divine powers from above and undergo an endlessly rich
fulfilment.
All underwent a high celestial change:
162
Breaking the black Inconscient’s blind mute wall,
Effacing the circles of the Ignorance,
Powers and divinities burst flaming forth;
Each part of the being trembling with delight
Lay overwhelmed with tides of happiness
And saw her hand in every circumstance
And felt her touch in every limb and cell.
p. 529 lines 247–254
As the power of the Supreme Mother descends into Savitri, it first

enters the thousand-petalled lotus above the head (sahasrara) which
commands the higher thinking mind and the illumined mind and
opens towards the intuition and overmind. Then it descends into
the two-petalled white lotus in the Ajna chakra of the forehead,
located between the eye-brows, which commands thought, will and
vision and also receives supernal illumination. Then the force comes
down to the sixteen-petalled Visuddha Chakra in the throat, which
commands expression and all externalising of the mind movements
and mental forces. It further comes down into the twelve-petalled
heart centre commanding the higher emotional parts with the
psychic deep behind it.
In the country of the lotus of the head

Which thinking mind has made its busy space,
In the castle of the lotus twixt the brows
Whence it shoots the arrows of its sight and will,
In the passage of the lotus of the throat
Where speech must rise and the expressing mind
And the heart’s impulse run towards word and act,
A glad uplift and a new working came.
p. 529 lines 255–262
163
The happy result of these changes is then described. The Immortal’s
thoughts displaced the bounded view of the mortals; all things were
now seen in a new light, in their deeper, heavenlier sense. A glad
and clear harmony now embraced all the truths and reset the
balance and measure of the world. Each shape revealed its occult
design, and unveiled God’s meaning in it, for which it was made.
This revealed the vivid splendour of the creator’s great art with
which he has fabricated this creation.
The normal human life is a loosely governed or misgoverned
republic of wants and lusts. All this changes as the human being
becomes a channel of the Mother’s force; his will becomes one with
her calm will and that begins to govern human life now. Life which
is normally wayward now obeys a divine rule and every act
becomes an act of God. In the kingdom of the lotus of the heart love
chants its marriage hymn to its Lord and makes of life and body
mirrors of sacred joy and surrenders all its emotions to God.
A channel of the mighty Mother’s choice,

The immortal’s will took into its calm control
Our blind or erring government of life;
A loose republic once of wants and needs,
Then bowed to the uncertain sovereign mind,
Life now obeyed to a diviner rule
And every act became an act of God.
In the kingdom of the lotus of the heart
Love chanting its pure hymeneal hymn
Made life and body mirrors of sacred joy
And all the emotions gave themselves to God.
p. 529 lines 271–281
As the descending power touches the Manipura, the navel centre

(the lotus with ten petals), the proud ambitions and its master lusts
164
which rise from this region come under the calm sway of this new
power and get ready to do God’s work on earthly soil. Lower than
this is the Svadhisthana, from which rise daily dwarf desires, and
when the descending power touches this centre they are all changed
into ‘a sweet and boisterous play, a romp of little gods with life in Time’.
Even below this is the Muladhara, where the Kundalini power
originally lay in coiled sleep. There came a grip on Matter’s giant
powers now to be used for larger purposes. Thus ‘a firm ground was
made for Heaven’s descending might’.
Thus as the Divine Power and Light descend stage by stage into
the being of Savitri, her entire nature (Prakriti) is yoked to
Paraprakriti (the higher Nature) and the Purusha (consciousness) in
her is completely illumined. Now the poet is speaking in general
terms of the effects of the descent of the Kundalini power. Man’s
normal consciousness is subject to the play of the Gunas and is a
faithful slave of the ego. This is because the consciousness has
allowed the play of the modes of Nature on the surface of the being.
But this consciousness is in reality not just a passive slave of the
modes of nature; it can also be a witness and then it can also be the
secret master of all these movements of nature. Once the walls of
ignorance surrounding it are brought down, this consciousness
becomes the inner sovereign, the Lord of the lower Prakriti as well.
Then this consciousness is allied to gods and cosmic beings and
powers and imposes a harmony on the entire being. It is now
surrendered into the hands of the World-Mother (Para Prakriti) and
obeys only her command. Once the wall separating the inner being
and the surface consciousness is brought down, the soul, until now
under a veil, steps out in the front, and the painful knot of
ignorance is loosened, and all instruments of the being, namely,
body, life and mind become faithful instruments of the soul. All
grow happily towards knowledge and bliss. The limbs of a mortal
being are infused with the Immortal’s power and rapture. An inner
law of beauty begins to shape his life. His speech becomes a natural
165
expression of Truth. Then each thought becomes a ripple on a sea of
Light. The dualities of sin and virtue, pleasure and pain, knowledge
and ignorance leave the transformed human consciousness and take
refuge in the universal subconscient.
When one reaches such a supreme consummation the mind
raises a cry of victory and declares:
“O soul, my soul, we have created Heaven,

Within we have found the kingdom here of God,
His fortress built in a loud ignorant world.
Our life is entrenched between two rivers of Light,
We have turned space into a gulf of peace
And made the body a Capitol of bliss.
What more, what more, if more must still be done?”
p. 531 lines 327–334
This is the cry of victory raised by the soul when it reaches this high
state. It feels as though it has created a heaven, and has established
a kingdom of God in this world and built a fortress of peace and
bliss. It feels as though it has achieved everything.
In the slow of process of the evolution of consciousness, and in
the brief stretch of time between birth and death, a first perfection is
reached when somebody reaches the stage described above. Out of
the wood and stone of which our Nature is made, a temple has been
built in which the high gods could live. Although the world itself is
not redeemed by this achievement of one individual, one man’s
perfection can still save the world. A new closeness to perfection is
reached and earth gets more closely allied the heaven’s perfection. It
looks as though a camp of God has been pitched in human time,
heralding a glorious fulfilment for all mankind.
166
11: Book VII, Canto 6 (Lines 1–220)
We now move on to Canto 6 of Book VII. This canto has the self-
explanatory title “Nirvana and the Discovery of the All-Negating
Absolute”. The term “Nirvana” means “extinguishing” (the flame of
the individual being); it means “to rest in the highest Non-
Existence” for the Buddhists. But by and large this term is used to
mean liberation yet upon earth into an unspeakable peace and
gladness. It practically meant the extinction of all suffering through
the disappearance of all egoistic idea or sensation, and it the
ultimate goal of many lines of yoga. Sri Aurobindo’s Yoga does not
look upon Nirvana of this kind as its ultimate objective, and
therefore we can infer that the experience of Nirvana Savitri
undergoes in this canto is of a different nature, as we shall see later
in this chapter.
As we have seen, in Canto 5 Savitri undergoes one of the peak
experiences of her inner journey. Savitri’s inner being, her
individual soul, meets in its inmost chamber of flame and light, the
Supreme Divine Mother of whom Savitri is a delegate here on earth.
Savitri’s individual soul is a projection of the Divine Mother and
that is what makes her an Avatar, an incarnation. When they meet,
they rush into each other with a magic transformation’s speed, and
become one. Thus Savitri has the experience of the Gnostic Godhead
in her inmost being. Then we see that as she returns to her surface
consciousness, Savitri experiences the tremendous transformation
of her being which is the result of the rising of the Kundalini power
to the crown of the head and its descent through the various
chakras. Her mind then raises a cry of victory:
O soul, my soul, we have created Heaven,

Within we have found the kingdom here of God,
167
His fortress built in a loud ignorant world.
p. 531 ines 328-30
Section 1A (lines 1–65)

Canto 6 begins with a description of nature which shows that an
experience such as the one undergone by Savitri has always a
cosmic bearing and importance, particularly since Savitri is an
Avatar. As Savitri was undergoing the tremendous experience
described in Canto 5, Nature too responded to it in its own way.
Earlier, as Savitri embarked on the discovery of her soul, there were
thunder-showers; now these rains have just abated as we begin this
canto. ‘The last rains had fled murmuring across the woods’ says the
poet.
The great spiritual experience Savitri has just been through is
reflected by the calm, mellow sun looking down from tranquil
heavens and the great blue enchantment of the sky. Savitri herself
was different now: the poet describes the spiritual maturity and the
tranquillity of her intense self-delight in these words:
And Savitri’s life was glad, fulfilled like earth’s;

She had found herself, she knew her being’s aim.
Although her kingdom of marvellous change within
Remained unspoken in her secret breast,
All that lived round her felt its magic’s charm:
p. 532 lines 11-15
Savitri has now achieved a total transformation of her inmost being

and Nature seems to recognise this and respond to her in many
ways:
The trees’ rustling voices told it to the winds,
168
Flowers spoke in ardent hues an unknown joy,
The birds’ carolling became a canticle,
The beasts forgot their strife and lived at ease.
p. 532 lines 16-19
And Savitri’s new inner poise gave an upward and forward push to
the yogins living in the forest pursuing the higher life. Light and
Bliss radiated from her to all around her.
Absorbed in wide communion with the Unseen

The mild ascetics of the wood received
A sudden greatening of their lonely muse.
This bright perfection of her inner state
Poured overflowing into her outward scene,
Made beautiful dull common natural things
And action wonderful and time divine.
Even the smallest meanest work became
A sweet or glad and glorious sacrament,
An offering to the self of the great world
Or a service to the One in each and all.
p. 532 lines 20-30
The new consciousness in Savitri does not abrogate but lifts up all
true relationships to their highest intensities. It thus gives a new
dimension and perfection to her love for Satyavan. She now sees
above Satyavan’s cherished head not ‘Fate’s dark and lethal orb’ but a
golden circle, ‘the cyclic rondure of a sovereign life’. In other words, she
sees on Satyavan’s head not the gloom of death but the imperial
light of life. Besides, her love for Satyavan becomes more integral
and embraces all levels of her being.
169
Always he was with her, a living soul
That met her eyes with close enamoured eyes,
A living body near to her body’s joy….
Even in distance closer than her thoughts,
Body to body near, soul near to soul,
Moving as if by a common breath and will
They were tied in the single circling of their days
Together by love’s unseen atmosphere,
Inseparable like the earth and sky.
p. 533 lines 47-62
Section 1B (lines 65–220)

In the lives of many saints, we come across episodes in which as the
spiritual pilgrim is about to step into the world of liberation or
Moksha, he is assailed by Mara, or some adversary force which tries
to mislead him or block his progress. Savitri has already in her own
individual life reached a spiritual goal which is other than that of
liberation or Mukti or Nirvana of the traditional kind. She has
entered the Gnostic or the Supramental world, where dwells the
Supreme Divine Mother, and she has returned to earth after
realising her oneness with this Supreme Mother. She possesses
potentially now the creative powers of this new consciousness
which are capable of abolishing all imperfections from our
terrestrial existence and of bringing perfection to it. Savitri now, as
it were, has the key to this golden world of terrestrial perfection.
This is a siddhi beyond those who escape into Nirvanic state that
traditional yoga aspires to reach.
Sri Aurobindo has often spoken of a dark concealed hostility that
is concealed in the human depths that claims the right to change
and mar God’s work. There is a secret enemy that constantly seeks
to keep man chained to his ignorance. This secret Adversary may
occasionally allow a really determined spiritual aspirant to escape
170
from this world of ignorance into the world of Nirvana or liberation
or of bliss, because that does not in any way diminish his hold or
sovereignty on this world. But this Adversary now feels threatened
by Savitri because she has found the key to terrestrial perfection,
which means the world may soon slip out of his control. The
majority of the spiritual explorers do not even hear the voice of this
terrible adversary force because they escape into some luminous
Beyond. Only those who rise to the highest peaks of consciousness
command the view of the bottom-most level of the Inconscient.
Savitri has climbed these heights of the Gnostic consciousness. If
Savitri’s progress is not blocked, she may force the Inconscient to
abdicate her throne, and consequently her control over this world.
This, the Adversary Force would like to prevent at any cost.
In one of his letters to a disciple of his Sri Aurobindo has
described what effect the supramental principle will have on our
life on earth when it is established here and begins to work here. He
has said:
It is likely that as the supramental principle evolved

itself the evolution would more and more take another
aspect – the Daivic nature would predominate, the
Asuro-Rakshaso-Pishachic prakriti which now holds so
large a place would more and more recede and lose its
power. A principle of greater unity, harmony and light
would emerge everywhere. It is not that the creation in
the Ignorance would be altogether abolished, but it
would begin to lose much of its elements of pain and
falsehood and would be more a progression from
lesser to higher Truth, from a lesser to a higher
harmony, from a lesser to a higher Light, than the reign
of chaos and struggle, of darkness and error that we
171
now perceive.16
Savitri of course has still a long way to go before she can bring to
our earth this supreme consummation, but she has the key to this
perfection and the Adversary knows this. So he mounts on her a
vicious attack. This Adversary, as we have seen, is none other than
the Inconscient from which this creation has arisen, and therefore it
believes that this world should be for ever under its control. Savitri
has come to redeem this world. And therefore the fury of the
Inconscient is understandable. And now Savitri is smitten by this
fury.
As Savitri sat in a deep felicitous mood, savouring her joy which
is a bridge between heaven and earth,
An abyss yawned suddenly beneath her heart.

A vast and nameless fear dragged at her nerves
As drags a wild beast its half-slaughtered prey;
It seemed to have no den from which it sprang:
It was not hers, but hid its unseen cause.
p. 534 lines 68-72
The felicitous mood that had settled in Savitri disappeared all of a

sudden giving way to a darkness that made her feel helpless like a
prey in the grip of a wild beast. It came upon her like ‘a rolling surge
of silent death’ and choked her with the threat to end ‘the fable of the
joy of life’. This was the result of the seizure of Savitri’s being by the
Inconscient, which appeared to her now as ‘an ocean of terror and
sovereign might’. For the Inconscient, the ultimate Reality is the dark
eternity – a formless, stark impersonal consciousness, from which
16
The Integral Yoga: Sri Aurobindo’s Teaching and Method of Practice, (Selected Letters
of Sri Aurobindo), pp. 73 -74
172
this creation has come. Savitri was trying to change the very nature
of this creation. She was determined to bring to the finite the glory
and the bliss of the Infinite. If she is allowed to do her will, this
world will not remain any more anityam and asukham (transient and
sorrowful). The Inconscient cannot tolerate this. And so it says to
Savitri:
“Who art thou who claimst thy crown of separate birth,

The illusion of thy soul’s reality
And personal godhead on an ignorant globe
In the animal body of imperfect man?
Hope not to be happy in a world of pain
And dream not, listening to the unspoken Word
And dazzled by the inexpressible Ray,
Transcending the mute Superconscient’s realm,
To give a body to the Unknowable,
Or for a sanction to thy heart’s delight
To burden with bliss the silent still Supreme
Profaning its bare and formless sanctity,
Or call into thy chamber the Divine
And sit with God tasting a human joy.
p. 534-35 lines 102-114
The only truth the Inconscient recognises is the truth of Nihilism

and Illusionism, of the featureless Eternal. She (the Inconscient as
the Mother of this universe) cannot understand Savitri’s aim of
bringing to human life the perfection of a divine life here on earth.
That for her is a profanity. The universe is her creation and her
fiefdom, she is the dark terrible Mother of life. She declares this to
Savitri in unmistakable words:
I have created all, all I devour;
173
I am Death and the dark terrible Mother of life,
I am Kali black and naked in the world,
I am Maya and the universe is my cheat.
p. 535 lines 116-119
For the Inconscient, this creation is an illusion created and

maintained by Maya; only the Supreme beyond this creation, in the
transcendent is real. Therefore, she proclaims:
For only the blank Eternal can be true.

All else is shadow and flash in Mind’s bright glass,
Mind, hollow mirror in which Ignorance sees
A splendid figure of its own false self
And dreams it sees a glorious solid world.
O soul, inventor of man’s thoughts and hopes,
Thyself the invention of the moments’ stream,
Illusion’s centre or subtle apex point,
At last know thyself, from vain existence cease.
p. 535 lines 124-132
This outburst of the Inconscient threatened to devastate Savitri’s

inner world; a barren silence weighed upon her heart, and her
kingdom of delight was there no more. Savitri waited to know the
will of the Supreme.
Then, just as suddenly, Savitri hears a greater Voice: it touches
her heart and brings hope and certitude to it. This was the voice of
Light, Heaven’s reply to the voice of the Abyss that was threatening
to sweep Savitri off her feet. What the voice of Light says to Savitri
is very significant. It asks Savitri to hide her royalty of bliss, her new
siddhis, because for now it remains the accomplishment of one
single individual. Although it is the highest power of consciousness
that Savitri has now realised in her inner being, it will not be able to
174
change earth consciousness until it gets established in the collective
consciousness. Till that happens Savitri must treasure her wealth of
the new consciousness in the sanctuary of her inner being.
O soul, bare not thy kingdom to the foe;

Consent to hide thy royalty of bliss
Lest Time and Fate find out its avenues
And beat with thunderous knock upon thy gates.
p. 536 lines 146-49
The Voice of Light then explains why this is necessary. It points out
that the new siddhi that Savitri has gained is yet her personal
accomplishment.
Hide whilst thou canst thy treasure of separate self

Behind the luminous rampart of thy depths
Till of a vaster empire it grows part.
p. 536 lines 150-52
What Savitri has achieved so far is not enough; the Supramental

Consciousness is now a realisation of her inmost being; it must now
be extended through all the levels of her being, and she should then
make herself a perfect channel for the dissemination of this
consciousness into the world around her. For this she is asked to
undergo a further tapasya. Savitri is being asked to empty herself of
everything that obstructs such a process.
But not for self alone the Self is won:

Content abide not with one conquered realm;
Adventure all to make the whole world thine,
To break into greater kingdoms turn thy force.
175
p. 536 lines 153-156
Then a second step of the tapasya is recommended to Savitri. She is

asked to enlarge her consciousness so that it becomes one with the
universal consciousness:
Fear not to be nothing that thou mayst be all;

Assent to the emptiness of the Supreme
That all in thee may reach its absolute.
Accept to be small and human on the earth,
Interrupting thy new-born divinity,
That man may find his utter self in God.
p. 536 lines 157-162
Savitri is being asked to ‘be small and human on earth’, to identify

herself completely with the human lot. At the same time, she is
being asked to become God’s void so that she can become a
completely effective channel of the Divine. She is being reminded
once again that she is an Avatar who has come down into a
struggling world to found God’s luminous kingdom not only in her
own inner world but also in this toiling universe. She is not here to
shine as a lone shining star in the Inconscient’s realm. She is here to
help a struggling world to realise its destiny. Her role is to be a
bridge between earth and heaven.
Sri Aurobindo has spoken about the unique role of the Divine
Mother in establishing the supramental consciousness of this earth.
In his book The Mother, he describes the Divine Mother as the power
‘that mediates between the sanction and the call’ – the sanction of
heaven and the call or aspiration of the earth for perfection.
If for thy own sake only thou hast come,
176
An immortal spirit into the mortal’s world,
To found thy luminous kingdom in God’s dark,
In the Inconscient’s realm one shining star,
One door in the Ignorance opened upon light,
Why hadst thou any need to come at all?
Thou hast come down into a struggling world
To aid a blind and suffering mortal race,
To open to Light the eyes that could not see,
To bring down bliss into the heart of grief,
To make thy life a bridge twixt earth and heaven;
If thou wouldst save the toiling universe,
The vast universal suffering feel as thine:
Thou must bear the sorrow that thou claimst to heal;
The day-bringer must walk in darkest night.
He who would save the world must share its pain.
If he knows not grief, how shall he find grief’s cure?
If far he walks above mortality’s head,
How shall the mortal reach that too high path?
pp. 536-37 lines 163-181
Then in the following wonderful lines the poet once again reiterates
his concept of the Avatar. Unless an Avatar takes on all the
limitations and inadequacies of normal human beings, his example
would lose all meaning for us. Therefore god must be born on earth
and be as man.
If one of theirs they see scale heaven’s peaks,

Men then can hope to learn that titan climb.
God must be born on earth and be as man
That man being human may grow even as God.
He who would save the world must be one with the world,
All suffering things contain in his heart’s space
177
And bear the grief and joy of all that lives.
p. 537 lines 182-188
At this stage we are going through a very complex part of Savitri,

the part that deals with the tapasya of Savitri, the Avatar. There is
no parallel to tapasya of this kind in spiritual literature. Therefore I
have chosen to go through this part slowly and with a certain
deliberation.
178
12: Book VII, Canto 6 (Lines 221–378)
Let us begin by recapitulating briefly the important stages of

Savitri’s inner journey that we have already examined. In Canto 5 of
Book VII, we saw her going through the experience of meeting her
own soul, which brought in its train a tremendous transformation of
her being. This, as we noted, was the result of the rising of the
Kundalini power to the crown of her head and its descent through
the various chakras in her subtle body. This brought us to Canto 6.
Before Savitri has had time to savour this tremendous victory,
the felicitous mood that had settled in her suddenly disappears
giving way to a darkness that made her feel as helpless as a prey in
the grip of a wild beast. This was the result of the seizure of Savitri’s
being by the Inconscient – the formless, stark impersonal
consciousness from which this creation has arisen. The Inconscient
is opposed to Savitri’s attempt to free this creation from its clutches.
The only truth the Inconscient recognises is the truth of Nihilism
and Illusionism. For the Inconscient, this world is an illusion created
and maintained by Maya; only the Supreme beyond this creation, in
the Transcendent, is real. This outburst of the Inconscient (Book VII
Canto 6 lines 102–132) weighs heavily on Savitri’s heart until she
hears a greater voice from within which brings her hope and
certitude.
This is the Voice of Light which fills Savitri once again with hope
by explaining the significance of this unexpected seizure by the
Inconscient. It asks Savitri not to remain satisfied with the siddhis
(spiritual victories) she has already gained. As of now, they are no
more than her individual accomplishments; they are not yet
established in the collective consciousness. It is Savitri’s life’s
mission to bring this about, and until that happens, she is asked to
hide the treasure of her siddhis within the sanctuary of her own
179
heart. To quote again some of the lines already quoted in the
preceding chapter,
If for thy own sake only thou hast come,

An immortal spirit into the mortal’s world,
To found thy luminous kingdom in God’s dark,
In the Inconscient’s realm one shining star,
One door in the Ignorance opened upon light,
Why hadst thou any need to come at all?
Thou hast come down into a struggling world
To aid a blind and suffering mortal race,
To open to Light the eyes that could not see,
To bring down bliss into the heart of grief,
To make thy life a bridge twixt earth and heaven;
p. 536 lines 164–174
The Voice of Light reminds Savitri that she is no ordinary mortal.

Savitri is an Avatar, who has come to aid a blind and suffering
world. The Avatar has to act like ‘a bridge twixt earth and heaven’. To
be able to do this, the Avatar must begin as an ordinary mortal,
subject to the same limitations of ignorance, such as pain and
suffering. In fact, the Avatar shares in the world’s pain because
unless he knows first hand what pain is, how will he able to find a
cure for all grief and pain, and therefore to ignorance itself?
Savitri’s achievements in establishing a contact with the Gnostic
or Supramental Consciousness, even if it is only at the level of her
soul, is undoubtedly a heroic achievement, never accomplished on
earth before. But if it remains restricted to her as her individual
attainment, her Avataric mission would remain unfulfilled. The
problem now is for Savitri to be able to transmit the power of this
new consciousness to the world at large, to spread it in the cosmic
consciousness. Only when this happens, will the world be able to
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escape from the hold of the Inconscient. What does Savitri have to
do to achieve this?
Adventure all to make the whole world thine,

To break into greater kingdoms turn thy force.
Fear not to be nothing that thou mayst be all;
Assent to the emptiness of the Supreme
That all in thee may reach its absolute.
Accept to be small and human on the earth,
Interrupting thy new-born divinity,
That man may find his utter self in God.
p. 536 lines 155–162
But that is only one step. The Voice of Light then goes on to
recommend to Savitri a related process. This is for Savitri to reject
her present personality and enlarge herself and become as vast as
the universe, so much so that this creation itself will be seen as no
more than a tiny incident in its vast consciousness. This is the way
by which she will be able to step into the universal consciousness.
She should then be able to see the secret origin of all. She will be
able see this universe itself as an Overmental version (or translation)
of the Infinite on which the mind and the senses have put their
gloss.
His soul must be wider than the universe

And feel eternity as its very stuff,
Rejecting the moment’s personality,
Know itself older than the birth of Time,
Creation an incident in its consciousness,
Arcturus17 and Belphegor grains of fire
17
Arcturus: the name given by the ancients to the brightest star in the
constellation Bootes.
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Circling in a corner of its boundless self,
The world’s destruction a small transient storm
In the calm infinity it has become.
If thou wouldst a little loosen the vast chain,
Draw back from the world that the Idea has made,
Thy mind’s selection from the Infinite,
Thy sense’s gloss on the Infinitesimal’s dance,
Then shalt thou know how the great bondage came.
p. 537 lines 189–202
Savitri is therefore being asked to ‘banish all thought from thee and be
God’s void.’ This is the way of becoming ‘one with God’s bare reality /
And the miraculous world he has become/And the diviner miracle still to
be.’ Nature, which is now unconscious God, will become
transparent to the Eternal’s light and be able to reflect God’s
perfection. Then, ‘life is filled with a spiritual joy/ and Matter is the
Spirit’s willing bride.’ Therefore, the Voice of Light instructs Savitri:
Consent to be nothing and none, dissolve Time’s work,

Cast off thy mind, step back from form and name.
Annul thyself that only God may be.
p. 538 lines: 218–220
This brings us to the end of our recapitulation of Savitri’s

experiences described in Section 1 of Canto 6 of Book VII.
Section 2
As instructed by the Voice of Light, Savitri now prepares herself for
the experience of Nirvana. By Nirvana is meant the extinction or the
dissolution of individuality. It can have two different objectives:
one, to pass beyond all manifestation and dissolve oneself in the
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static poise of Brahman, into the transcendental; the other, to go
beyond the present manifestation of consciousness into the not yet
manifest dynamic levels of consciousness of Brahman. The first was
the traditional path followed by the Adwaitins and the Indian
Buddhists. This is the path recommended for those who realise the
futility of all worldly enterprise and find this world transient and
unhappy; this is the way by which one puts a stop to all willing and
desiring and one is released into a consciousness of peace of bliss.
This has traditionally been regarded as the highest goal of all
spiritual effort. But for Sri Aurobindo, this world is not a permanent
abode of misery and imperfection, these constitute only a phase
through which the evolving consciousness is passing. As the
consciousness rises to the more dynamic levels not yet manifest
here on earth, it should be possible to put an end to all the pain,
ignorance and death that torment us so much now. The preparation
to rise to these levels of consciousness also involves the emptying of
all oneself. This is the Nirvana Savitri is aiming at.
In obedience to the Voice of Light that has been guiding her,
Savitri takes a plunge into herself and tries to dissociate herself from
the movements of Nature within her. She stands back from the
movements within her.
Aloof and standing back detached and calm,

A witness of the drama of herself,
A student of her own interior scene,
She watched the passion and the toil of life
And heard in the crowded thoroughfares of mind
The unceasing tread and passage of her thoughts.
p. 538 lines 225-230
She allowed all the processes and movements within her to rise to
the surface as they wished; she left everything to the ‘free initiative of
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Nature’s will’. As she did this, she saw ‘the animal instincts prowling
mid life’s trees’ and she also saw the Powers that stare from the lower
regions, as well as wordless light that liberates the soul. Thus was
her attention focussed first on the vital region of her being. Human
life on the surface is no more than an arena in which there is an
interplay between the forces emerging from the subconscient below
and the superconscient above.
Savitri was then attracted by the mysteries of the origin of
thought. When she looked at the mental consciousness, she realised
that Mind is a vast region of consciousness, not limited to the
activities of the brain. She saw that our brain is like an office that
registers thoughts that arise elsewhere, gives them its stamp as in a
mint and stores them. Thoughts are not born in the brain, they are
only registered there. The function of the brain is described by the
poet in these lines:
The issue of forms from the office of the brain,

Its factory of thought-sounds and soundless words
And voices stored within unheard by men,
Its mint and treasury of shining coin.
These were but counters in mind’s symbol game,
A gramophone’s discs, a reproduction’s film,
A list of signs, a cipher and a code.
p. 539 lines 248-254
Thoughts, as Savitri begins to see, arise from the depths and the
heights of the mind and the brain only registers them, and each
thought is thus no more than a symbol, a sign, a cipher or a code. Its
full significance is therefore not understood except when we trace
its origin.
Thoughts have various origins; most thoughts are born as
vibrations or impulses at various levels of consciousness, deeper,
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wider and higher than the mind itself. Some are born in our subtle
body, and some enter there from the cosmic field. Often from our
soul (the psychic being) steps out a vibration ‘luminous with
mysteried lips and wonderful eyes’. These vibrations come to purify
man’s outer life and establish there the ideal of love and truth. To
put this in the words of the poet,
Oft from her soul stepped out a naked thought

Luminous with mysteried lips and wonderful eyes;
Or from her heart emerged some burning face
And looked for life and love and passionate truth,
Aspired to heaven or embraced the world
Or led the fancy like a fleeting moon
Across the dull sky of man’s common days,
Amidst the doubtful certitudes of earth’s lore,
To the celestial beauty of faith gave form
As if at flower-prints in a dingy room
Laughed in a golden vase one living rose.
p. 539 lines 257-267
Such vibrations from the psychic being can pervade all the parts
and planes of our being and lift them to greater heights. More
importantly, they can give to man faith and certitude in the midst of
doubt which often clouds the mental horizon – like a living rose in a
golden vase laughing at flower-prints in a dingy room. Then the
poet describes how such vibrations from the psychic being can
touch the various centres (chakras) in human beings and inspire
them to manifest new perfections on earth. They touch the centre of
‘seeing will’ situated between the brows and inspire the dynamic
will. They can touch the centre of thought behind the brain and
inspire thoughts, which are like ‘glistening angels’ that seek to make
this earth, a region of light. When they touch the upper regions of
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Savitri’s heart
Imaginations flamed up from her breast,

Unearthly beauty, touches of surpassing joy
And plans of miracle, dreams of delight:
p. 539 lines 276-279
When they touch the lotus located at the navel, large sensations
inspired by new visions of the world begin to crowd the mind.
When the centre of the externalising mind at the throat centre is
touched, figures of a heavenly speech begin to crowd the mind.
Even the centre of the physical-vital below the vital responds to the
touch of the psychic vibrations and fills the being with longings for
physical sweetness and ecstasy. But the outer mind mistakes all
these responses as the productions of the brain because they bear
the stamp and wear the cap of the brain. Only the inner mind can
recognise where they come from and understand their import.
Savitri was able to see how there come into the mind’s frontal
room thoughts that enlarge our limited human range and see the
shapes mortal eyes cannot normally see, the sounds that mortal
listening cannot hear and feel the blissful sweetness of the
intangible’s touch. These thoughts encourage man to aspire higher
and infuse him with a new courage and make him look to the
Infinite through the finite. Some of these thoughts also come from a
source in the Superconscient and also in the subtle worlds of the
Subliminal.
Thoughts leaped down from a superconscient field

Like eagles swooping from a viewless peak,
Thoughts gleamed up from the screened subliminal depths
Like golden fishes from a hidden sea.
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p. 541 lines 333-336
Besides the Superconscient and the Subliminal, some thoughts are

inspired by the subconscient as well.
The dim subconscient’s incoherent hints

Laid bare a meaning twisted deep and strange,
The bizarre secret of their grumbling speech,
Their links with underlying reality.
p. 541 lines 328-331
Thus human beings receive influences and vibrations coming from

diverse sources – from the psychic and the subliminal, from the
Superconscient and from the subconscient. This is what makes man
a playground of contrary powers and makes man an enigma. While
God’s summits beckon him to evolve to higher heights, the
influences of the animal and the Djinn from his subconscient
regions tend to hold him back or pull him down.
This world is a vast unbroken totality,

A deep solidarity joins its contrary powers.
God’s summits look back on the mute Abyss.
So man evolving to divinest heights
Colloques still with the animal and the Djinn;
The human godhead with star-gazer eyes
Lives still in one house with the primal beast.
The high meets the low, all is a single plan.
p. 541 lines 337-344
Savitri has been looking at the ways thoughts are born in the human
mind and what she sees is fascinating indeed. Our mind, Savitri
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discovers, is “a dynamic small machine” which keeps producing
‘thoughts’ from the raw material drawn from outside and a pattern
is imposed on this material by the mind. Sometimes they enter the
human mind as “finished cosmic wares” admitted quietly into the
human being where a special trick makes them his own.
This mind is a dynamic small machine

Producing ceaselessly till it wears out,
With raw material drawn from the outside world,
The patterns sketched out by an artist God.
Often our thoughts are finished cosmic wares
Admitted by a silent office gate
And passed through the subconscient’s galleries,
Then issued in Time’s mart as private make.
For now they bear the living person’s stamp;
A trick, a special hue claims them his own.
All else is Nature’s craft and this too hers.
p. 541-542 lines 352-362
It should be remembered that Savitri makes this discovery as she

tries to detach herself from the bondage of Nature or Prakriti. What
one thinks, imagines, wills, senses etc. are all impulsions that really
come from universal Nature and the individual receives them, he is
not their originator. They all bear the stamp of the receiver because
of the trick played by our ego. This is a difficult truth for most to
see. We are slaves of Nature but a still deeper truth is that we have
willingly accepted this bondage and are comfortable with it most of
the time.
For now they bear the living person’s stamp;

A trick, a special hue claims them his own.
All else is Nature’s craft and this too hers.
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Our tasks are given, we are but instruments;
Nothing is all our own that we create:
The Power that acts in us is not our force:
p. 542 lines 360-365
This is true not only of ordinary human beings, it is true also of men
known for their exceptional gifts, great artists, thinkers, visionaries,
people known as geniuses. The inspiration for the great idea, the
mantric word, the artistic form, comes from a universal source and
inspiration plays the role of the postman. Most minds cannot even
receive them properly without soiling them with their impure
touch. It is the ego of the artist, the poet, etc. that defaces the pure
gifts brought to him by inspiration.
The genius too receives from some high fount

Concealed in a supernal secrecy
The work that gives him an immortal name.
The word, the form, the charm, the glory and grace
Are missioned sparks from a stupendous Fire;
A sample from the laboratory of God
Of which he holds the patent upon earth,
Comes to him wrapped in golden coverings;
He listens for Inspiration’s postman knock
And takes delivery of the priceless gift
A little spoilt by the receiver mind
Or mixed with the manufacture of his brain;
When least defaced, then is it most divine.
p. 542 lines 366-378
189
13: Book VII, Canto 6 (lines 379–645)
Savitri, as we saw in the preceding chapter, has been doing the

intense tapasya of emptying herself. The technique she follows for
this purpose is self-observation. She is trying to liberate the
manomaya (the mental) Purusha from the workings of Nature or
Prakriti in the mind. As she does this, she realises that our mind is
no more than a dynamic small machine, which produces ceaselessly
what we call thoughts by receiving material from the outside world.
This material comes into us in the form of vibrations or impulses
from our inner being (from the subliminal), from below conscious
levels of our mind (the subconscious) and from above the levels of
the mind (from the Superconscient) as well as from sources outside
us. But they all get the stamp of our individual mind before they
come to the surface where we recognise them as our thoughts.
This shows us that normally we are slaves of Nature or Prakriti.
Our thoughts, imagination, emotional reactions, etc. all are initiated
and controlled by Nature in us, and we are for the most part not
initiators but simply the location, the scene for all that happens in
us. This brings to Savitri the realisation that we are but instruments.
Although his ego claims the world for its use,

Man is a dynamo for the cosmic work;
Nature does most in him, God the high rest:
Only his soul’s acceptance is his own.
p. 542 lines 379–382
There is a still deeper truth and it is that our soul becomes a slave of
Nature or Prakriti of its own choice. It is not imposed on the soul
from the outside. Our soul is a sovereign power. It has been here
since even before this creation came into existence. The soul is
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eternal and unborn. It does not depend on anything. But then the
question arises, why does the soul accept this slavery to Nature?
This is a profound philosophical question and we cannot even begin
to address it here. But Sri Aurobindo suggests, in passing as it were,
an answer to this question in these four lines:
This independent, once a power supreme,

Self-born before the universe was made,
Accepting cosmos, binds himself Nature’s serf
Till he becomes her freedman — or God’s slave.
p. 542 lines 383–386
The soul chooses to be the serf or slave of Nature so that it can bring
perfection to this universe, which is a manifestation of Nature.
This liberation of the consciousness (Purusha) from its bondage
to Nature (Prakriti) applies to that part of our consciousness which
has been contaminated by the ego. The sadhana of dissociation of
the Purusha from the Prakriti results in the liberation of the
individual from the limited awareness of the egoistic life on the
surface. But when one pushes beyond the Manomaya (Mental)
Purusha, one enters the realm of spiritual consciousness above the
Mind. Savitri now rises to these levels.
This is the appearance in our mortal front;

Our greater truth of being lies behind:
Our consciousness is cosmic and immense,
But only when we break through Matter’s wall
In that spiritual vastness can we stand
Where we can live the masters of our world
And mind is only a means and body a tool.
p. 542-543 lines 387–393
191
Savitri now rises to these heights of the realm of the Spirit. There
either one falls asleep in some deep shadow of the Self, or falls silent
in the silence of the spiritual realm. In traditional yogas, spiritual
aspirants rise to this height because it gives them an escape from
any contact with the world of manifestation, and this is glorified as
the state of samadhi, which is considered the ultimate goal of all
spiritual effort. But Savitri’s yoga has an entirely different objective.
What she is seeking is not an escape from this world but a way of
bringing perfection to it. She rises to these spiritual heights because
from these heights she can have a better look at this world and act
on it. She is not seeking the laya or absorption of her individual
consciousness into this silence. She is not only awake but is quite
focused on the world. From this height she takes up the whole of
this created world and dedicates it to the Divine to take it up and
spiritualise it completely.
Out of the mind she rose to escape its law

That it might sleep in some deep shadow of self
Or fall silent in the silence of the Unseen.
High she attained and stood from Nature free
And saw creation’s life from far above,
Thence upon all she laid her sovereign will
To dedicate it to God’s timeless calm:
p. 543 lines 397–403
Now that the factory of the mind has ceased to work, the entire
being of Savitri is filled with a profound peace. There arose
occasionally small thoughts but they vanished soon like the quiet
waves upon a silent sea, or ripples passing over a lonely pool when
a stray stone disturbs its dreaming waters. There was no sound
from the throbbing of the dynamo of the mind and there came no
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calls from the fields of life now made completely still.
Her mind now seemed like a vast empty room

Or like a peaceful landscape without sound.
This men call quietude and prize as peace.
p. 543 lines 413–415
Notice that the poet describes this as a state which ‘seemed like a vast
empty room’; it is the same state which most people prize as a great
siddhi (achievement). But as Savitri’s deeper mind sees it, everything
from which she had tried to disassociate herself was all still there
‘effervescing like a chaos under a lid’. Feelings and thoughts cried out
for expression and action even though they no longer found any
response in the silenced brain. Savitri felt that all was suppressed
and nothing was really wiped out of her being, and she feared that
at any time an explosion might come shattering this façade of peace.
The reason why Savitri has such misgivings about the state of peace
she has reached now is that nothing in the Nature really gets
changed or transformed just because we withdraw ourselves from
it. Nature has been left unredeemed. It is still a field at the mercy of
the three Gunas (Sattwa, Rajas and Tamas). We can intensify our
detachment and make the body like an insensitive stone. This brings
us closer to a greater vacancy, a profounder silence; but we are still
far from the silence of Infinity, from ‘the repose of the Absolute’.
Even now some thoughts crossed the silence that had pervaded
her; but these did not come from within nor were they seeking any
form; nor did they represent any need of her body or of the vital
being. They did not seem to have been either born or made in
human time. These were thoughts that originated in the cosmic
Mind and they came clothed in words. Since they come from the
universal or cosmic Mind and since an individual’s mind is a part of
the cosmic Mind, they assume that they will get an easy access to
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the ear and mind of the individual. Savitri was quietly observing
these intruders. There was now an embargo and blockade which
Savitri had put up against all such intruders. And when these
thoughts came across this blockade, they had to retreat only to
vanish into the vastness of the cosmic Mind from which they had
come. These thoughts came one after another like far-off sails upon
a lonely sea. But soon even this stopped.
But soon that commerce failed, none reached mind’s coast.

Then all grew still, nothing moved any more:
Immobile, self-rapt, timeless, solitary
A silent spirit pervaded silent Space.
p. 544 lines 457–460
Section 3
Savitri is now ready for a direct experience of the Absolute in one of
its aspects. The path she has followed is that of rejection and
detachment – rejection of the effervescence of the lower Nature and
detachment from the play of Prakriti. Her consciousness is now
totally free from any distraction from the world of name and form.
It is now ready to receive the experience of the Absolute as silence
and peace. And this is what she receives.
In that absolute stillness bare and formidable

There was glimpsed an all-negating Void Supreme
That claimed its mystic Nihil’s sovereign right
To cancel Nature and deny the soul.
Even the nude sense of self grew pale and thin:
Impersonal, signless, featureless, void of forms
A blank pure consciousness had replaced the mind.
p. 545 lines 461–467
194
What Savitri experiences now is an absolute, bare stillness; this is a
glimpse of an ‘all-negating Void Supreme’. This is the experience of
the mystic Nihil which claims the right to deny not only the world
but also the soul. It is difficult to understand this experience for
minds like ours which have not seen anything other than this world
of name and form. But in Savitri’s consciousness now, the
distinction between the seer and the seen has been obliterated, and
even the bare sense of the Self has become so pale and thin that her
consciousness has now become ‘impersonal, signless, featureless, void
of forms’. The poet describes this state further in these words:
Her spirit seemed the substance of a name,

The world a pictured symbol drawn on self,
A dream of images, a dream of sounds
Built up the semblance of a universe
Or lent to spirit the appearance of a world.
This was self-seeing; in that intolerant hush
No notion and no concept could take shape,
There was no sense to frame the figure of things,
A sheer self-sight was there, no thought arose.
p. 545 lines 467–476
The world appeared no more substantial than ‘a dream of images’ and

‘a dream of sounds’. The world did not seem to have any existence
separate from her. It was as much an appearance bereft of any
substance as her own being was. There was no frame of reference by
which she could figure out notions, concepts or shapes. This state is
described as follows by the poet:
Emotion slept deep down in the still heart

Or lay buried in a cemetery of peace:
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All feelings seemed quiescent, calm or dead,
As if the heart-strings rent could work no more
And joy and grief could never rise again.
The heart beat on with an unconscious rhythm
But no response came from it and no cry.
Vain was the provocation of events;
Nothing within answered an outside touch,
No nerve was stirred and no reaction rose.
p. 545 lines 477–486
These lines are simple enough and need no elucidation. No

emotions arise in this state; feelings are either quiet or dead; there
was no feeling of either joy or grief. Nothing from the outside world
affected Savitri in any way. Not a nerve of hers responded to any
outside touch. And yet, ‘her body saw and moved and spoke’. It said
what needed to be said and did what needed to be done. There was
no mind to choose or to find the fitting word because there was no
person or individual left behind. Everything worked as in the case
of an unerring machine pushed by an old un-exhausted power. This
is the power of Prakriti that still drove the engine that did the work
for which it was made. Her consciousness now looked on all around
her but took no part. It supported all but it did not have a share in
anything.
All wrought like an unerring apt machine.

As if continuing old habitual turns,
And pushed by an old unexhausted force
The engine did the work for which it was made:
Her consciousness looked on and took no part;
All it upheld, in nothing had a share.
p. 545-546 lines 493–498)
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What was left in Savitri now was a pure perception which stood
behind everything she did and gave a coherence to what she saw. If
this perception were to withdraw, all the objects of this world
would cease to exist for her. After all, the universe that we see
around us is the universe that we ourselves build in terms of our
thoughts and then clothe with forms and shapes perceptible to our
senses. Now in Savitri the distinction between the seer and the seen
(between the subjective consciousness of the seer and the objective
world) had disappeared. The seer, the act of seeing and the object
seen were all one. This perception knows all without the aid of any
conceptualisation.
It saw the world go by, but this world itself seemed so utterly
unreal. The world looked like a cosmic puppet-show where no
figure showed any sign of life, everything was just a hollow
physical shell.
All seemed a brilliant shadow of itself,

A cosmic film of scenes and images:
The enduring mass and outline of the hills
Was a design sketched on a silent mind
And held to a tremulous false solidity
By constant beats of visionary sight.
The forest with its emerald multitudes
Clothed with its show of hues vague empty Space,
A painting’s colours hiding a surface void
That flickered upon dissolution’s edge;
The blue heavens, an illusion of the eyes,
Roofed in the mind’s illusion of a world.
The men who walked beneath an unreal sky
Seemed mobile puppets out of cardboard cut
And pushed by unseen hands across the soil
Or moving pictures upon Fancy’s film:
There was no soul within, no power of life.
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p. 546 lines 517–533
This is a rare description of the Nirvanic experience. You are

unlikely to come across such a graphic description of this
experience anywhere in the literature of any language in the world.
The whole world looked like ‘a cosmic film of scenes and images’ and
this included the solid mass of the hills around her. Even the hills
looked like a two-dimensional sketch without any depth or tone.
The green foliage of the forest looked like a blob of green colour
occupying some empty space. The blue of the sky, which is an
illusion of the eyes, looked like the roof of an illusory world. The
sky looked unreal and the men who walked underneath this sky
looked like moving puppets cut out of cardboard and moved
around like puppets by an unseen hand. The world Savitri saw now
contained ‘moving pictures upon Fancy’s film’. Nothing showed any
sign of life or of a soul.
What in normal experience are regarded as thoughts were now
seen by Savitri as no more than vibrations in the brain, and what are
normally regarded as joy, sorrow and love are now perceived to be
no more than twitching of nerves in response to the touches of the
world. The body itself, which is made of matter, looked like ‘a
manufactured lie of Maya’s make’. The whole of this life looked like a
dream seen by the Void in its sleep. The animals on the hillside and
in the glades of the forests, whether single or in troops, looked like
‘a passing vision of beauty and grace imagined by some all-creating Eye.’
The brain’s vibrations that appear like thought,

The nerve’s brief answer to each contact’s knock,
The heart’s quiverings felt as joy and grief and love
Were twitchings of the body, their seeming self,
That body forged from atoms and from gas
A manufactured lie of Maya’s make,
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Its life a dream seen by the sleeping Void.
The animals lone or trooping through the glades
Fled like a passing vision of beauty and grace
Imagined by some all-creating Eye.
p. 547 lines 535–543
Savitri’s experience of Nirvana does not end in mere negation of the

kind that has been described in the preceding paragraphs. Although
the world looks to her like a pure illusion and although this
experience lingers for quite a while, she gradually begins to
perceive a Reality behind this illusion. This confronted her
wherever she turned, from behind whatever she was looking at. But
this presence hid itself from mind and sight. This Reality stood aloof
from space and time and its truth could not be captured in shape,
line or colour. Everything else other than this Reality looked
insubstantial and unreal. Only this Reality seemed everlasting and
true.
Yet something was there behind the fading scene;

Wherever she turned, at whatsoever she looked,
It was perceived, yet hid from mind and sight.
The One only real shut itself from Space
And stood aloof from the idea of Time.
Its truth escaped from shape and line and hue.
All else grew unsubstantial, self-annulled,
This only everlasting seemed and true,
Yet nowhere dwelt, it was outside the hours.
p. 547 lines 544–552
This Reality gave to her sight the power to see but sight could not
define its form; similarly, although it enabled the ear to hear, the ear
could not hear its voice. The sense could not grasp it nor the mind
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comprehend it. An experience such as this is difficult to catch in
words, but the poet tries to make it easy for us to grasp something
of its nature, when he describes it in these words.
It met her as the uncaught inaudible Voice

That speaks for ever from the Unknowable.
It met her like an omnipresent point
Pure of dimensions, unfixed, invisible,
The single oneness of its multiplied beat
Accentuating its sole eternity.
It faced her as some vast Nought’s immensity,
An endless No to all that seems to be,
An endless Yes to things ever unconceived
And all that is unimagined and unthought,
An eternal zero or untotalled Aught,
A spaceless and a placeless Infinite.
p. 547-548 lines 558–569
Savitri perceived it as ‘the inaudible Voice that speaks for ever from the
Unknowable’. She experienced it as a point present everywhere, of
pure dimensions, unfixed, invisible. The single oneness of this
Reality was also present in multiplicity and this emphasized its
eternity to Savitri’s perception. It is difficult for the human mind to
conceptualise such a Reality. So when thought of in the context of
things already manifested, the Reality seems to be none of them and
therefore a “Not this”. “Not this” would seem to be a best
description of it. But when we think of it in the context of things so
far not manifest, nor conceived of, unimagined and unthought of, it
could be “yes, that too”. “Yes, that too” seems to be an equally apt
description of the same Reality. One can think of it as an eternal
zero or as a sum of things whose total cannot be caught in numbers
or words. Finally the poet ends up describing this Reality as ‘A
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spaceless and a placeless Infinite’. And yet the very words ‘eternity’
and ‘infinity’ seemed but empty words merely signifying the
mind’s total incompetence to comprehend this ‘stupendous sole
reality’.
The world we experience here is just a spark-burst from the light
that this Reality is, and every object in our world is merely a
glimmering of this Bodiless Reality, and these things seem to vanish
from the Mind when that Reality is seen. This Reality held before its
face like a shield a consciousness that could see without there being
a seer the Truth ‘where knowledge is not, nor knower nor known’. The
same consciousness was Love enamoured of its own delight; it did
not need the lover or the beloved. This was also a consciousness of
bliss that is beyond anybody’s capacity to experience.
It held, as if a shield before its face,

A consciousness that saw without a seer,
The Truth where knowledge is not nor knower nor known,
The Love enamoured of its own delight
In which the Lover is not nor the Beloved
Bringing their personal passion into the Vast,
The Force omnipotent in quietude,
The Bliss that none can ever hope to taste.
p. 548 lines 577–584
The consciousness we are now talking about is beyond the capacity

of any individual to experience. To experience that all formation, all
individuality, has to be transcended. A clue to the truth of this
experience lies in surrendering the whole of one’s being and in
being nothing, in the experience of non-being.
This state of consciousness is a state beyond the Nirvanic state. It
is a consciousness beyond Being and Non-Being. It can identify with
everything and therefore it manifests first as the Ananda of identity
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and then as Love.
It cancelled the convincing cheat of self;

A truth in nothingness was its mighty clue.
If all existence could renounce to be
And Being take refuge in Non-being’s arms
And Non-being could strike out its ciphered round,
Some lustre of that Reality might appear.
p. 548 lines 585–590
A great formless liberation had now come upon Savitri. She was
once imprisoned in her body, mind and life, like all human beings.
She had arisen very high from that state. She had dropped all the
conditioning that comes from being a Person in the world. She had
escaped into the consciousness of infinity. She was now free from
Knowledge and from Ignorance, from the true and the untrue. She
had reached a high retreat in the Superconscient. She stood on the
bare ground of consciousness that is the foundation of all creation
and manifestation. There was not even the temptation to manifest.
She was now a point in this unknowable. There remained one more
annulment and if she underwent that annulment too, there would
not be any vestige of Savitri left. She would be dissolved in that vast
Nothingness.
Savitri waits in the stillness and silence. There are a number of
possibilities open to her at this point. The unknowable has to guide
her from this point and she would gladly obey its decree. One
possibility is that she may be led to dissolve herself into the ultimate
Nothingness; or she may ‘new become the All’.
Even now her splendid being might flame back

Out of the silence and the nullity,
A gleaming portion of the All-Wonderful,
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A power of some all-affirming Absolute,
A shining mirror of the eternal Truth
To show to the One-in-all its manifest face,
To the souls of men their deep identity.
Or she might wake into God’s quietude
Beyond the cosmic day and cosmic night
And rest appeased in his white eternity.
p. 549 lines 629–638
The two possibilities are that even now her splendid being might
return from this silence and Nothingness as a shining power of the
All-Wonderful Supreme and affirm the eternal truth of the Absolute
and manifest the perfection of the eternal in the world below; or,
she ‘might wake into God’s quietude’ and rest appeased in his white
and blank eternity. The latter is the way of the traditional Nirvana.
Savitri now sees a possibility beyond Nirvana – that of being able to
bring Love, Light and Truth to all human beings.
In the absolute immobility and peace of the consciousness of the
Absolute, Savitri waits for the Divine to choose for her the way she
is supposed to follow.
A lonely Absolute negated all:

It effaced the ignorant world from its solitude
And drowned the soul in its everlasting peace.
p. 550 lines 643–645
203
You must have noticed that in our progress through Savitri we have
suddenly slowed down our pace. We explored just one canto,
namely, Canto 6 of Book VII, in three articles and once again we are
going to devote this entire chapter to just one canto, namely, to
Canto 7 of the same Book. This is because these two cantos deal
with concepts and spiritual experiences one hardly ever comes
across outside the writings of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. This is
true particularly of the notion of Nirvana used in these two cantos.
It is also true of the notion of a Supreme Consciousness which
dwells beyond the Nirvanic experience. The other reason is that
these cantos have not yet received the close attention they deserve.
So, please bear with us a little longer.
We have now arrived at Canto 7, the final canto of Book VII of
Savitri, with the title “The Discovery of the Cosmic Spirit and the
Cosmic Consciousness”. In Canto 6 we saw how under instructions
from her inner voice Savitri empties her entire being and offers it to
the Supreme Mother to do Her will in her. She is waiting at the
threshold of the Nirvanic state. We have already seen in what
respect this state of Nirvana is different from the Nirvana that is the
avowed goal of most traditional yogic paths. Savitri has now
become like a completely empty vessel, empty of all including her
rare spiritual siddhis. This keeps her vigilant and ready to receive
the further plenitudes of the Divine and be an effective channel for
their establishment on earth.
Section 1
We have seen in Book VII how Savitri enters and explores the
countries of her inner being, meets the Triple Soul-Forces, finds her
soul, and enters the All-Negating Nirvanic state. These have been
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stupendous spiritual achievements, but they are all experiences
pertaining to the inner realm and have not yet begun showing their
effect on her outer being. Therefore the poet remarks, ‘None saw
aught new in her, none divined her state’. She still looked like the old
Savitri to those amidst whom she lived.
She too was her old gracious self to men.

The Ancient Mother clutched her child to her breast
Pressing her close in her environing arms,
As if earth ever the same could for ever keep
The living spirit and body in her clasp,
As if death were not there nor end nor change.
Accustomed only to read outward signs
None saw aught new in her, none divined her state;
They saw a person where was only God’s vast,
A still being or a mighty nothingness.
To all she was the same perfect Savitri:
p. 551 lines 8-15
People around her saw the same Savitri, while from within she had
become God’s vast, a mighty Nothingness. As before, the same
greatness, sweetness and light, the glow and warmth of her
psychicised person poured out from her upon the world around
her. Savitri’s Nirvanic state did not render her ineffectual in the
outer world, as it does to those who strive for and attain the
Nirvana of self-extinction. She continued to act effectively in the
world around her as before. She spoke the words she was ‘wont to
speak’ and ‘did the things she had always done’.
What Savitri has achieved now is a tremendous spiritual
experience in which the individual experiences an entire motionless
impersonality and void Calm within and from this centre gets done
all the works that need to be done in the outer world. This action
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emanates from a vacant consciousness ‘empty of all but bare Reality’.
The mind, heart, will and the senses in her register no movements
and what seems to keep the body going is probably the energy of
Nature gathered in the past.
There was no will behind the word and act, No thought formed
in her brain to guide the speech: An impersonal emptiness walked
and spoke in her. ‘Something perhaps unfelt, unseen, unknown /
Guarded the body for its future work, / Or Nature moved in her old stream
of force’ (lines: 29-34)
This is the experience of the Absolute Non-Existence. It is a state
of eternally unrealised Potentiality, out of which some potentialities
emerge at some time and emerge into the phenomenal appearance.
The poet describes this state as ‘a cipher of God’, ‘a zero circle of being’s
totality’. This Nihil contains All.
Perhaps she bore made conscious in her breast

The miraculous Nihil, origin of our souls
And source and sum of the vast world’s events,
The womb and grave of thought, a cipher of God,
A zero circle of being’s totality.
p. 552 lines 35-39
Savitri’s experience of Nirvana is very close in many respects to the

traditionally recognised Nirvanic experience in which there is
dissolution of all individuality in the Nihil.
Thus was she lost within to separate self;

Her mortal ego perished in God’s night.
Only a body was left, the ego’s shell
Afloat mid drift and foam of the world-sea,
A sea of dream watched by a motionless sense
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In a figure of unreal reality.
p. 552 lines 43-48
She totally lost the sense of having or being a separate self; her
mortal ego got extinguished in ‘God’s night’ or in the experience of
Asat18 . The body was felt as no more than an empty shell floating
and drifting in the foam of the world-sea.
This is a state of consciousness in which even the boundaries
between the various planes disappear – the individual, cosmic and
transcendental. The transcendental itself appeared like a myth and
there was a universality in which the individual and the
transcendental both lost their distinctiveness. It was a consciousness
from which Maya, the power to will or bear a world, also seemed to
have withdrawn itself. It was a consciousness impassive, sole, silent,
intangible.
It saw the individual die, the cosmos pass;

These gone, the transcendental grew a myth,
The Holy Ghost without the Father and Son,
Or, a substratum of what once had been,
Being that never willed to bear a world
Restored to its original loneliness,
Impassive, sole, silent, intangible.
p. 552 lines 52-58
Although Savitri had now reached a state of consciousness that had

a close resemblance to the traditionally recognised Nirvanic state,
this was not the Nirvana that culminates in the Nihil or the Shunya
(the Zero), but a consciousness that led to some greater
consciousness which transcended the Mutable and the Immutable,
18
Asat as used here is not as the opposite of Sat but as what exceeds or goes
beyond Sat.
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the Kshara and the Akshara. It was this ‘surpassing Secrecy’ to which
she was now gradually opening herself.
Some of the Upanishads such as the Ishavasya have spoken of
this state of consciousness as one that is beyond vidya and avidya.
Yet all was not extinct in this deep loss;

The being travelled not towards nothingness.
There was some high surpassing Secrecy.
p. 552 lines 59-61
The power of this consciousness which lives in the distant Vast now
responded to Savitri. It is described as “something unknown,
unreached, inscrutable”. It is the power of the Paraprakriti (the
Supreme Mother), and it sent down messages of its bodiless Light.
It sent flashes of thought that belong to regions of consciousness far
beyond our own, and these came like flares crossing the immobile
silence of Savitri’s mind and possessed her with a supreme
sovereignty.
Out of that distant Vast came a reply.

Something unknown, unreached, inscrutable
Sent down the messages of its bodiless Light,
Cast lightning flashes of a thought not ours
Crossing the immobile silence of her mind:
In its might of irresponsible sovereignty
It seized on speech to give those flamings shape,
Made beat the heart of wisdom in a word
And spoke immortal things through mortal lips.
p. 553 lines 70-78
These vibrations emanating from the high source seized Savitri’s
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speech and gave a form to it. Savitri’s words now conveyed a
wisdom that hardly comes out of mortal or human lips. She was
now speaking of immortal things through her mortal lips. When she
conversed with the sages dwelling in the forest neighbourhood, she
often divulged through her speech ‘high strange revelations impossible
to men’. It appeared as though someone or some power, secret and
remote, took hold of her body and made use of it as an instrument.
Her mouth was seized to channel ineffable truths,

Knowledge unthinkable found an utterance.
Astonished by a new enlightenment,
Invaded by a streak of the Absolute,
They marvelled at her, for she seemed to know
What they had only glimpsed at times afar.
p. 553 lines 84-89
Those who listened to her were astonished by the new

enlightenment revealed by her words and they wondered how such
unthinkable knowledge found utterance in her. It was as though a
lightening streak of the Absolute was seeking expression through
her. All her listeners marvelled at her, for she seemed to know
intimately what these sages had glimpsed from afar occasionally in
the rare moments of highest enlightenment. It was clear that these
thoughts, such enlightenment, did not come from her brain. Her
entire being was now like a stringless harp. Her body was now too
blank and inert to claim its own voice. It just allowed the power of
the luminous consciousness to pass through her.
These thoughts were formed not in her listening brain,

Her vacant heart was like a stringless harp;
Impassive the body claimed not its own voice,
But let the luminous greatness through it pass.
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p. 553 lines 90-93
Savitri did not undertake her yoga, it must be remembered, for

gaining any siddhi for herself. The Nirvana she entered was
boundless. Although she did not regard it as an end in itself; she
emptied herself of everything, including her highest siddhi, the
identity with the Gnostic Consciousness she had found when she
became one with her jivatman, her soul19 . The entire purpose of her
sadhana was to be the most uncluttered channel for the Supreme
Divine to manifest its perfection in this created world. Therefore by
thus becoming completely empty, she had acquired great power –
of becoming an instrument of the Superconscient above and the
Inconscient below – ‘A dual power at being’s occult poles’, as the poet
puts it.
A dual Power at being’s occult poles

Still acted, nameless and invisible:
Her divine emptiness was their instrument.
p. 553 lines 94-96
The Inconscient acted on the world through Savitri’s body, and so

did the Superconscient. The Superconscient sent its impulsions to
touch the thoughts of men through Savitri’s being, although this
communication was still rather infrequent. Savitri’s being received
everything that came from these two occult sources but made no
response to them herself. These impulses came like a voice coming
from outside her, but her mind made no response to them, nor her
heart. It came directly to the point of her central perception. She had
now become the centre of a consciousness but it is difficult to speak
of a centre when there is no space surrounding it on all sides, with
no limits or boundaries, no walls or gates defining its shape. Her
19
Cf. Canto 5 of Book VII
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being was now a circle without a circumference. It had surpassed all
cosmic bounds and was still spreading into infinity.
A thought came through draped as an outer voice.

It called not for the witness of the mind,
It spoke not to the hushed receiving heart;
It came direct to the pure perception’s seat,
An only centre now of consciousness,
If centre could be where all seemed only space;
No more shut in by body’s walls and gates
Her being, a circle without circumference,
Already now surpassed all cosmic bounds
And more and more spread into infinity.
p. 554 lines 106-115
This is a description of Savitri who had now become universal in

her consciousness. She was able to be such an effective channel of
both the dual Powers because she had retained her individuality
but was able to free herself from all separativeness. The poet
describes the state of Savitri’s being further in these words:
This being was its own unbounded world,

A world without form or feature or circumstance;
It had no ground, no wall, no roof of thought,
Yet saw itself and looked on all around
In a silence motionless and illimitable.
There was no person there, no centred mind,
No seat of feeling on which beat events
Or objects wrought and shaped reaction’s stress.
p. 554 lines 116-123
211
Savitri’s being was not extinguished in the Nihil of Nirvana. Her
individuality remained intact, but it had no limiting circumstances
or features. It had no ground, no wall, no roof of thought. There was
no person there, no centred mind. There was nothing in her which
reacted to any of the events or objects; there was no reaction’s stress
of any kind. There was no motion in this inner world.
There was no motion in this inner world,

All was a still and even infinity.
In her the Unseen, the Unknown waited his hour.
p. 554 lines 124-126
Savitri was now ready as a channel waiting for whatever the Infinite
Divine willed to manifest.
Section 2
Savitri is now waiting in the supreme silence of the Nirvanic
experience, ready to receive and to broadcast to the manifested
world whatever the Supreme seeks to channel through her. Awake
within, she is sitting by the side of sleeping Satyavan. In this spell of
waiting she hears a voice that begins to speak to her from her own
heart. It was not her own voice but a voice that ‘mastered thought and
sense’ because it is the voice of the true and vast consciousness from
the Transcendent. It seems to be clearly aware of the external world.
As this voice spoke, all changed within her and without. Everything
now appeared in a different light. She now saw everything as part
of an omnipresent Reality. All was and all lived according its own
law of existence. The unreality of the world so palpable to Savitri
until now just vanished. There was no more a universe created by
the mind. Whatever the mind creates can never be anything more
than a sign or a structure given by it to the Reality.
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Now a spirit cast itself into unnumbered forms and was what it
saw and made. Everything created was now true. There was no
untruth anywhere. A being and a consciousness pervaded
everything. All had a substance of the Eternal and the Infinite. But
this Infinite was not the opposite of the finite, and this eternal was
not the opposite of the time-bound. Space and Time were
manifestations of this Infinite and Eternal consciousness.
Reality is one and manifests differently on different planes: the
Nihil, the Sachchidananda, and the Unmanifest Beyond are all
different faces of the same Reality. Savitri’s soul was now captured
by a living experience of this oneness, which is the hallmark of the
Supramental Consciousness.
It was her self, it was the self of all,

It was the reality of existing things,
It was the consciousness of all that lived
And felt and saw; it was Timelessness and Time,
It was the Bliss of formlessness and form.
It was all Love and the one Beloved’s arms,
It was sight and thought in one all-seeing Mind,
It was joy of Being on the peaks of God.
p. 555 lines 155-162
It was the experience which saw the Sat everywhere at all levels. It
was the reality of everything that existed. It was the consciousness
of all that lived, felt and saw. It was Timelessness as well as Time. It
was the Bliss that pervaded the formless as well as form. It was
Love which caught everything in its embrace. All thought and sight
emanated from one all-perceiving Mind. It was the supreme ecstasy
that one experiences on the peaks of God.
Savitri now passed beyond Time into eternity. She went beyond
Space and became the Infinite. Her being rose to great heights and
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yet found greater heights to climb; she took a plunge into the
unfathomable deeps and found no end to the silent mystery that
held the worlds in its breast and yet dwelt in everything that was
created.
She was all vastness and one measureless point,

She was a height beyond heights, a depth beyond depths,
She lived in the everlasting and was all
That harbours death and bears the wheeling hours.
p. 555-556 lines 171-174
This was a stupendous experience of a complete oneness with this

Vast Cosmic consciousness of oneness and cannot be described
except in the poet’s own words:
All contraries were true in one huge spirit

Surpassing measure, change and circumstance.
An individual, one with cosmic self
In the heart of the Transcendent’s miracle
And the secret of World-personality
Was the creator and the lord of all.
Mind was a single innumerable look
Upon himself and all that he became.
Life was his drama and the Vast a stage,
The universe was his body, God its soul.
All was one single immense reality,
All its innumerable phenomenon.
p. 556 lines 175-186
The highest mental consciousness, the spiritualised mind, sees the

three poises of the Supreme Reality as three separate truths, namely,
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the individual, the universal and the transcendental. Savitri now
sees them simultaneously. The whole of life was the drama enacted
by this consciousness on the stage of its own being, and it is the
essence of everything that is projected on this vast stage. The entire
universe was the body of this consciousness and God its soul. It was
itself the One and the Many.
Beginning from line 187 to the end of this canto, we have a most
wonderful and poetic subsection describing the cosmic
consciousness that Savitri had now acquired.
The world was very real to this consciousness; it was ‘the world
as living God’, as the becoming of God. All that happened in Nature
she experienced as events in her. She felt one with this cosmos as if
she inhabited the whole of it. She felt as though she was extended as
far as the consciousness extended. She was one with the cosmos and
yet knew herself in each of the multitudinous things it contained.
She was a single being, yet all things;

The world was her spirit’s wide circumference,
The thoughts of others were her intimates,
Their feelings close to her universal heart,
Their bodies her many bodies kin to her;
She was no more herself but all the world.
p. 556 lines 204-209
She felt everything came to her out of the infinitudes, and she
herself was spread as the consciousness in this infinitude. She felt as
though her consciousness was everywhere and as though the
distant constellations wheeled around her. She felt as though she
was already here even before the earth was born and all the various
worlds were the colonies of her being. Everything in Nature echoed
what was in her. There was an immense identity in which her own
identity was lost. Her sense of oneness with everything is most
215
poetically described in these words:
She was a subconscient life of tree and flower,

The outbreak of the honied buds of spring;
She burned in the passion and splendour of the rose,
She was the red heart of the passion-flower,
The dream-white of the lotus in its pool.
Out of subconscient life she climbed to mind,
She was thought and the passion of the world’s heart,
She was the godhead hid in the heart of man,
She was the climbing of his soul to God.
p. 557 lines 224-232
Savitri now felt as though the entire cosmos was grounded in her
consciousness and flowered in her being. She felt as though Space
and Time were manifestations of her consciousness. The
Supramental Consciousness now became her native, normal
consciousness, Infinity was natural to her and Eternity looked from
her being on Time.
216
15: Book VIII
We have now completed our review of Book VII, “The Book of

Yoga”, which deals with certain stages of Savitri’s yoga. In some
sense, this yoga continues even in Part Three of the epic. The yogic
path traversed by Savitri is new in many ways and so I slowed
down our pace quite a bit to make sure we get as clear a picture of
Savitri’s yoga as possible. Savitri is now ready to face the great
challenge of her life, the death of Satyavan as foretold by Narad.
The death of Satyavan is the climacteric event of our story, and now
we move on to this very event, as we take up Book VIII, “The Book
of Death.”
The Legend
Let us briefly look at the way the original Mahabharata legend deals
with the event. You will remember that in the Mahabharata legend
Savitri undertakes the strict austerities of the triratra vow just a few
days before the day prophesied by Narad on which Satyavan was
destined to die. In fact, that day was to be the first day after the
conclusion of the triratra austerities. On that day Savitri got ready
well before sunrise and offered worship to the gods and then went
and paid her respects to her parents-in-law. They blessed her and
entreated her to break her three-day long fast, but she replied that
she would do so only in the evening. Next, she went to the various
hermitages in the neighbourhood and offered her obeisance to the
Rishis dwelling in them. They showered blessings on her wishing
for her all auspicious things dear to a devout and young wife,
saying “May you never be a widow.”
When she returned to her cottage, she saw Satyavan getting
ready to go the forest for his daily work of collecting fruits and
roots, flowers and firewood. She begged of him not to go alone on
217
that day and to permit her to accompany him. He tried to dissuade
her but did not succeed. So he asked her to get permission from his
parents for accompanying him to the forest. She approached her
father-in-law and sought his permission to accompany Satyavan to
the forest. The reasons she gave for this request were that she also
wanted to see the forest and enjoy its beauty and also that she felt
uneasy about being separated from Satyavan on that day.
Dyumatsena, Satyavan’s father, remembered that during the past
one year Savitri had never asked any thing for herself and gave her
permission to accompany her husband to the forest on that day with
the advice that she should be attentive to duty even while following
Satyavan to the forest.
After this the young couple set out happily. Satyavan showed
Savitri various streams and rivers flowing through that forest, the
trees laden with flower and fruit, and the lush green meadows. He
showed her the peacocks dancing and they heard all around them
the delightful songs of birds. Savitri was delighted to have these
wonderful moments in the forest in the company of Satyavan, and
she responded with equal sweetness to his inquiries about her. But
she was watchful since she knew that this was the fateful day, and
she did not let him go out of her sight. Narad’s dire prophecy was
ringing in her ears, and she knew that Satyavan’s life was now
going to be a matter of hours and minutes. She was in agony within,
but the discipline she had acquired in life did not let her betray
openly the anxiety that was tormenting her from within.
Satyavan was in high spirits and looked particularly lustrous
that morning in the forest. Savitri and he had collected a basketful
of fruit. He now wished to collect some firewood, so he climbed up
a tree, and began chopping the branches of the tree vigorously,
hoping to complete this task quickly so that he could spend the rest
of his time in the forest undisturbed in the company of Savitri. But
suddenly he felt exhausted and started perspiring profusely. He felt
that his head was splitting with pain and felt as though shafts of
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pain were piercing through his head. He began to feel an intense
pain in his limbs and in his heart there was a burning sensation.
Savitri was watching him closely and she went to him as he climbed
down from the tree. She then sat down underneath the tree with
Satyavan’s head in her lap. She knew now that the hour foretold by
Narad had struck and looked around her expecting to see the Kala-
Purusha, the Time-Person.
Presently, she saw a bright Being standing in front of her. He
looked luminous and wore red attire and a splendid crown on his
head. He looked resplendent, although dark in hue and with red
eyes. He had a noose in his hand. His presence inspired great dread,
and he was staring at Satyavan’s prone body. This was the God of
Death, come to take away Satyavan’s life.
Sri Aurobindo’s version

Now let us examine briefly how this part of the legend is handled
by Sri Aurobindo in Book VIII of his Savitri. It may please be noted
that Book VIII of Savitri has only one canto, and it is called Canto 3.
We will have one or two things to say later about this unusual
numbering. We will now look at the development of the legend in
this canto called “The Death in the Forest”
At the end of Canto 7 of Book VII, we had seen Savitri was
seated by the side of her sleeping husband but with her
consciousness merged with the cosmic consciousness, described by
the poet in these words:
From this she rose where Time and Space were not;
The superconscient was her native air,
Infinity was her movement’s natural space;
Eternity looked out from her on Time.
p. 557, lines 236–239
219
Savitri gradually came out of this state as a golden dawn was
breaking in the skies. Lying down by the side of her sleeping
husband she reviewed the whole year she had just lived through, as
one who is about to die would review his entire life. A whole host
of memories arose and swept through her and became an
irrevocable past.
Then Savitri rose and worshipped the great goddess Durga
whose form Satyavan had carved upon a forest stone. In answer to
Savitri’s prayer, the Divine Mother must have responded to her
with a quiet word. Then Savitri went to Satyavan’s mother and
spoke to her with a great composure. She was most careful to see
that not one word coming out of her mouth should reveal anything
of the great anxiety and dread about Satyavan that was tormenting
her, because that would have slain all the happiness of Satyavan’s
mother and even taken away her desire to live. In a quiet voice and
with a tranquil demeanour she mentioned that she had been living
for a whole year now on the verge of the green forest but had not
yet gone into the silences of the forest. She was on that day seized
with a great desire to go out into the forest with Satyavan.
Satyavan’s mother responded lovingly and said she had been to
them as a strong goddess who had taken pity on them and come to
serve them. And she readily consented to her request by saying, ‘Do
as thy wise mind desires’.
Then Satyavan and Savitri set out hand in hand to explore the
forest. They walked through the grandeur and majestic silence of
the forest. Satyavan walked beside Savitri, both full of joy. Satyavan
was exhilarated by the presence of Savitri at his side and spoke to
her excitedly and showed to her all the riches of the forest – flowers,
creepers and birds and streams and rivulets. He spoke of all these as
one does of old friends and playmates. The trees and birds and
waterfronts were his childhood’s comrades. Savitri was listening
intently not so much to what Satyavan was saying, as to the sound
220
of his beloved voice. But with each step she was looking round to
see if the dim and dreadful god of Death was anywhere near them.
She was very much conscious of the fact that the voice she was
hearing now was going to cease speaking soon and she dreaded the
time when the ‘beloved voice could speak no more’. So she dwelt little
on the sense of what Satyavan was saying.
Love on her bosom hurt with the jagged edges

Of anguish moaned with every step with pain
Crying, “Now, perhaps his voice will cease
For ever.” Ever by some vague touch oppressed
Sometimes her eyes looked round as if their orbs
Might see the dim and dreadful god’s approach.
p. 563 lines 77–82
Satyavan stopped now; he wanted to finish the job of cutting wood

first so that he could devote the rest of the time to wandering freely
with Savitri. He chose a mighty tree, climbed up it, and began to cut
one of its branches. Savitri was close by; she watched him wordless,
always kept him in her view. But Satyavan looked to be in high
spirits. He wielded a joyous axe and sang ‘high snatches of a sage’s
chant’ that spoke of conquered death and demons slain. Sometimes
he would stop briefly and speak sweet and mocking words to
Savitri.
As he worked, his doom came upon him.

The violent and hungry wounds of pain
Travelled through his body biting as they passed
Silently, and all his suffering breath besieged
Strove to rend life’s strong heart-cords and be free.
p. 564 lines 105-109
221
For a while he felt some relief from this pain, and resumed his
confident toil. But then again the great Woodsman, Death, hewed at
him and his labour ceased. He threw away his axe and came down
the tree. He called out to Savitri and she came to him and clasped
him. He complained to Savitri of the great pain that rent him as the
tree must have felt when its branches were being sundered. He says
to her:
Awhile let me lay my head upon thy lap

And guard me with thy hands from evil fate:
Perhaps because thou touchest, death may pass.
p. 564 lines 124–126
Savitri sat under the branches of a different, kingly-looking tree and

tried to soothe his pain with her hands. All grief and fear in her had
disappeared. A great calm had settled on her. The only feeling
uppermost in her was how to bring him relief from the pain he was
feeling. She waited griefless and strong like the gods. But soon
Satyavan’s face lost its brightness and turned to a tarnished grey
and his eyes became dim. Only the dull physical mind in him
functioned. And before that too faded entirely, Satyavan cried out
in a clinging last despair:
“Savitri, Savitri, O Savitri,

Lean down, my soul, and kiss me while I die.”
p. 565 lines 145–146
But even as Savitri bent down to kiss him, Satyavan died.

Then she found that they were no longer alone: ‘Something had
come there, conscious, vast and dire.’
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Near her she felt a silent shade immense
Chilling the noon with darkness at its back.
An awful hush had fallen upon the place:
There was no cry of birds, no voice of beasts.
A terror and an anguish filled the world,
As if annihilation’s mystery
Had taken a sensible form.
p. 565 lines 154-160
She knew that it was Death standing there in visible form, and soon
Satyavan had passed from her embrace.
This brings us to the end of Part II of Savitri, which consists of
Books IV, V, VI, VII and VIII. At this point in the story, the stage has
been set for the confrontation of Savitri with Death. The actual
confrontation itself and Savitri’s ultimate victory constitute the
theme of Part III, the concluding part of Savitri.
You will notice that Sri Aurobindo’s thinking on Death is in
many ways different from what is popularly understood by Death.
We will discuss these issues in later chapters. But here I will leave
you with a few words from Sri Aurobindo on the God of Death,
known to the Indian tradition as Yama.
In the later ideas Yama is the god of Death and has his
own special world; but in the Rig-Veda he seems to
have been originally a form of the Sun, – even as late as
the Isha Upanishad we find the name used as an
appellation of the Sun, – and then one of the twin
children of the wide-shining Lord of Truth. He is the
guardian of the Dharma, the law of the Truth,
satyadharma, which is a condition of immortality, and
therefore himself the guardian of immortality. His
world is Swar, the world of immortality, where is the
indestructible Light. The Rig-veda hymn X.14 (known
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as the “funeral hymn”) is not a hymn of Death but of
Life and Immortality.
SABCL 10: 213
Before I conclude this chapter, I would like to say a few words

about the actual composition of Book VIII. We will also consider
here why the only canto in this Book came to be called Canto 3,
instead of Canto 1.
Sri Aurobindo seems to have drafted the first version of Savitri in
1916, and at that point the poem consisted of 1670 lines. He took up
Savitri again in the late 1920’s and early 1930’s and continued
working on it almost until the end of his life. What made him take
up the poem again, and at that particular point in time, are
interesting matters into which, however, it is not necessary to go at
the moment. In the revision, different parts of the original draft
received different degrees of expansion. While what now
constitutes Part I (Books I, II and III) is the result of an expansion of
120 times (from 980 lines in 1916 draft to 11,683 lines in the present
version), the Book of Death is only about one third longer that what
it was in the first version – 133 lines in the 1916 draft and 177 lines
in the current version. And of these 133 lines, 108 are identical to
what they are now. This means that Sri Aurobindo changed about
25 lines and added 44. In other words, this part is remarkably
similar to what it was in 1916.
This does not mean that he was so happy with the original 1916
version of what is now Book VIII that he did not feel that it needed
extensive revision. Probably he did not have the time to take it up
for a careful revision. This is something we know from
Nirodbaran’s reminiscences about the last year of the work on
Savitri. Nirodbaran was the writer who took down Savitri as it was
dictated by Sri Aurobindo. After he had dictated what came to be
the last passage dictated (the tremendous passage comprising lines
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826 to 897 of Book VI, Canto 2), he asked Nirodbaran what parts of
the poem were yet to receive revision, Nirodbaran said, “The Book
of Death and the Epilogue”, and Sri Aurobindo replied, “We will
see about that later”. But he never came back to them. He left his
body on 5 December 1950. So we have no idea what he intended to
do with the Book of Death. He simply left it much as it was in the
1916 draft.
Now just a word or two about why the only Canto in Book Eight
came to be called Canto 3 and not Canto 1. Various people have
hazarded different guesses about this. I shall give my own simple-
minded explanation: the canto probably had that number in some
early version of the poem.
It must be remembered that in spite of its vast compass and
length, Savitri is the narration of events that took place within the
span of 24 hours, from the dawn of one day to the next. The dawn
of this day is described in Canto I, Book 1. The events of the first
part of the morning of that day (say from 6.00 in the morning to
about 9.00) are described in Canto 2 of Book I. And from Canto 3 of
Book I all the way to the end of Book VII, we have a narration that
takes place in a flashback, of the story of Aswapati’s yoga, Savitri’s
birth, her growing up, her meeting with Satyavan and her marriage
to him, and the one year they spent together in the hermitage in the
forest. It is as if time had stood still around 9.00 a.m. at the end of
Canto 2 of Book I. Chronologically, Book VIII Canto 3 comes after
that. It describes the events that take place between say, 9.00 a.m.
and 12.30 noon of that day. So, in one sense, it is appropriate to call
this Canto 3.
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16: Sri Aurobindo and the Mother on Death
With this chapter we move on to Part Three of Savitri, which

consists of Books IX, X and XI and the Epilogue. The Epilogue is
brief, only eight pages in length. The three Books (IX, X and XI),
which consist of six cantos and run into one hundred pages of
incandescent poetry, deal with that part of the story in which Savitri
confronts the God of Death and finally succeeds in rescuing
Satyavan from his hold. As has been our practice, we shall take a
brief look at how this part of the story is developed in the
Mahabharata legend before we turn to Sri Aurobindo’s narration of
this important part of the story.
But even before we do that, we need to talk briefly about the
concept of Death and the God of Death as they are perceived by Sri
Aurobindo. This is important because, after all, the story of Savitri
and Satyavan is the story of Love and Death. Thus Death is one of
the main protagonists in this story. Sri Aurobindo’s understanding
of death and its place in life has certain unique aspects to it, and we
need to bear these in mind as we go through the part of Savitri we
are dealing with at the moment. Therefore I am presenting here a
note on some aspects of Sri Aurobindo’s perspective on Death.
While men of science regard death as a predictable consequence
of an increase in entropy (the degradation of the matter and energy
in the universe to an ultimate state of inert uniformity), men of
religion look upon it as a resting place in the passage to a higher
world beyond the terrestrial. The spiritual work of Sri Aurobindo
and the Mother has for its goal the establishment of a race of gnostic
beings consequent upon the full manifestation of the supramental
consciousness here on earth, and they regard victory over death in
the conditions of earthly life as a consequence of the fulfilment of
their Integral Yoga. Thus Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have been
226
as revolutionary in their thinking on death as they have been in
everything else. Let me begin by presenting to you an excerpt from
Sri Aurobindo:
This then is the necessity and justification of Death, not

as a denial of Life, but as a process of Life: death is
necessary because eternal change of form is the sole
immortality to which the finite living substance can
aspire and eternal change of experience the sole
infinity to which the finite mind involved in living
body can attain. This change of form cannot be allowed
to remain merely a constant renewal of the same form-
type such as constitutes our bodily life between birth
and death; for unless the form-type is changed and the
experiencing mind is thrown into new forms in new
circumstances of time, place and environment, the
necessary variation of experience which the very
nature of existence in Time and Space demands, cannot
be effectuated. And it is only the process of Death by
dissolution and by the devouring of life by life, it is
only the absence of freedom, the compulsion, the
struggle, the pain, the subjection to something that
appears to be Not-Self, which makes the necessary and
salutary change appear terrible and undesirable to our
mortal mentality. It is the sense of being devoured,
broken up, destroyed or forced away which is the sting
of Death and which even the belief in personal survival
of death cannot wholly abrogate.
SABCL 18:193-194
The first point Sri Aurobindo makes here is that Death has no
separate or intrinsic reality; it exists for the sole purpose of serving
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life. Death is a process and phase of life itself. This is also the
perception of the Gita when it says, ‘As the soul passes physically
through childhood and youth and age, so it passes on to the changing of the
body.’ (Ch.2:13) According to Sri Aurobindo, life and not death is the
fundamental all-pervading truth of existence.
The death of the body really serves the interests of perpetually
evolving life. Thus he points in the passage quoted above that the
eternal change of form is the only immortality to which the finite
living substance can aspire, and eternal change of experience in
terms of new circumstances of time, place and pace the sole infinity
to which the finite mind involved in time can attain. All life is a
journey from the Inconscient to the Superconscient (Divinity). Such
a long journey cannot be completed within the span of one brief
lifetime of seventy to one hundred years. The soul has to be born
again and again to complete this journey. By the time an individual
attains to what is called old age, say eighty years or so, most of his
physical faculties lose their keenness and capacity to experience life.
If he continues this way much longer, in most cases he is reduced to
a vegetable existence. In such a situation, death comes as a great
gateway through which one enters to come back again with a new
and young body full of verve and enthusiasm to experience life.
Besides, when an individual is reborn, he takes birth in new
circumstances of time, place and space. This gives the soul scope for
ever wider and diversified experiences of life, best suited for its
growth. This then is the utility of death: not as a denial but as an
essential process of evolving life.
Sri Aurobindo and the Mother look upon the victory over death
as one of the important ultimate goals of their Integral Yoga. This
might appear like a most materialistic ideal for a spiritual
enterprise, unless the phrase ‘victory over death’ is understood
properly. This seeking after physical immortality does not arise out
of a blind and egoistic attachment to body and physical life. As long
as we remain attached to our body and its vital and mental
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domains, we cannot even be said to have launched on our spiritual
journey. Secondly, it is incumbent upon every sadhak of integral
yoga that he give up fear of death and the disgust for bodily
cessation. The Mother has written most insightfully on how to get
rid of the fear of death. I suggest that you read this most
illuminating piece of writing by the Mother on ways of conquering
the fear. This is found in Volume Five of The Collected Works of the
Mother, on pages 316–320.
The principle way of getting rid of the fear of death completely,
as suggested by the Mother, is to grow in the consciousness of the
immortality of our soul or our psychic being.
By immortality, spiritual adepts do not mean some of kind of
personal survival after the dissolution of the body; they mean by it
the consciousness of that inner Reality in us which the Gita
describes as follows:
Na jaayate mriyate vaa kadaachit naayam bhuutvaa bhavitaa

vaa na bhuuyah
Ajo nityah shashvatoyam puraano na hanyate hanyamaane
shariire (2.20)
This is not born, nor does it die, nor is it a thing that

comes into being once and passing away will never
come into being again. It is unborn, ancient,
sempiternal; it is not slain with the slaying of the body.
The Gita also describes it as:
avinaashinam, nityam, ajam avyayam
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Indestructible, immutable and imperishable,
‘which weapons cannot cleave, nor the fire burn, nor do the
waters drench nor the wind dry’.
This is a consciousness which is beyond all bondage and limitation,

free, blissful, self-existent in conscious being, the consciousness of
the Lord, the supreme Purusha, of Satchidananda. This experience
of the soul needs no external proof to anyone who has experienced
it. It can only be acquired as a result of the elevation and widening
of our consciousness through spiritual sadhana.
The sadhak of the Integral Yoga does not stop with this. For him
immortality is not merely something to be attained by the soul
alone, it is also the ultimate destiny of the human body. He does not
despise the body nor does he entertain an attitude of world-disgust;
he aspires to transcend death in order that life may be divinely
fulfilled. This Becoming of the Divine which we call creation, is
progressive and evolutionary. It began with the Big Bang and is
gradually evolving towards Superconscience. The present condition
of life cannot be the last act of the evolutionary drama since it is
afflicted with the load suffering and death. Death has to be
conquered as a sign of the Being’s victory in the field of Becoming.
It means, as Sri Aurobindo has explained in a letter, that:
[the body] would no longer be subject to decay and

disease. That would mean it would not be subject to
the ordinary processes by which death comes. If a
change of body had to be made , it would have to be by
the will of the inhabitant. This (not the obligation to
live 3000 years, for that too would be bondage) would
be the essence of physical immortality.
Letters on Yoga: 1231
230
But for this to happen, Sri Aurobindo mentions in the same letter, a
dynamic action of the Truth is necessary in mind, vital and body
and for such a dynamic action, the supramental descent is
necessary.
We cannot enter here into a discussion of why the descent of the
supramental consciousness is necessary, and of why Sri Aurobindo
thinks that such a descent is inevitable. It is indeed as a result of our
transformation that we arrive at a higher and higher manifestation
of consciousness in our evolutionary journey.
As Nature has evolved beyond Matter and manifested

Life, beyond Life and manifested Mind, so she must
evolve beyond Mind and manifest a consciousness and
power of our existence free from the imperfection and
limitation of our mental existence, a supramental or
truth-consciousness and able to develop the power and
perfection of the spirit…. Light and bliss and beauty
and a perfection of the spontaneous right action of all
the being are there as native powers of the supramental
truth-consciousness and these will in their very nature
transform mind and life and body even here upon
earth into a manifestation of the truth-conscious spirit.
The obscuration of earth will not prevail against the
supramental truth-consciousness, for even into the
earth it can bring enough of the omniscient light and
omnipotent force of the spirit to conquer. All may not
open to the fullness of its light and power, but
whatever does open must to that extent undergo the
change. That will be the principle of transformation.
The Supramental Manifestation Upon Earth, SABCL 16:20-21
231
Many people, including yogis of repute, have observed that people
taking up the pursuit of yoga happen to suffer from some
disabilities and ailments of the body which would not have befallen
them under normal circumstances. On the other hand, it is also true
that we have testimony from Yogis that they have cured themselves
of illnesses and have even succeeded in repelling a predestined
death for a long period. The Mother has shed a flood of light on this
entire phenomenon. She has identified the factors which ordinarily
lead to progressive breakdown in health and ultimately to its
dissolution in death.
According to her, the whole creation is evolving towards
perfection. Now if one takes up yoga, this force which is pushing
towards perfection gets accelerated in him. But it is only his inner
consciousness that obeys this accelerating impulse because the
higher parts of one’s being are subtler, and therefore more
responsive to this force and much more easily adapt themselves and
adjust themselves to the demands of this force than the body, which
is pathetic in its ineptness in this respect. Material nature is rigid by
nature and there the transformation at the level of the body is slow,
too slow for the human consciousness to be able to perceive it. The
body thus gets left behind and this creates a disharmony in the
nature, between the inner and the outer and the system translates it
into illness. That is why people who take up yoga tend to fall ill
frequently. When this lack of balance goes beyond a point, the
disintegration and change of form becomes necessary. This is the
real cause of death.
But according to the Mother, this necessity is not an abiding one,
nor is its nature intrinsic and irrevocable. In fact, she thinks that it is
wholly fortuitous and may very well be remedied. If the whole
being could simultaneously advance in the progressive
transformation, there would be no illness, no death. But it will have
to be the whole being, from the highest to the most material – which
is by nature rigid and averse to any change. We should be able to
232
infuse into this matter sufficient consciousness so that it can fall in
line with the subtler parts and become plastic enough to follow the
inner progress. When this happens, death would no more be
necessary.
Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have assured us that if proper
conditions for it can be created death can be done away with. The
Mother has even said that death is a habit we need to break out of.
This does not seem to be such a fanciful idea if one were to examine
this issue in the light of the scientific evidence currently available.
There is already enough biological evidence which suggests that:
“…neither senescence nor natural death is a necessary,

inevitable consequence or attribute of life. Natural
death is biologically a relatively new thing, which
made its appearance only after the living organism had
advanced a long way on the path of evolution.”
Encyclopaedia Britannica Vol. 7. p. 111
It is not necessary to go into this biological evidence in any more

detail for our purposes here. There is enough evidence in
contemporary science which suggests that death has not been the
primary phenomenon; it is rather a late-comer on the scene. It came
through a process of progressive selection in the adaptation to the
welfare of the species.
A hideous and dreadful evil for the individual, death

has proved salutary for the species, since, thanks to its
agency, the species can continually renovate and
revitalise itself through the introduction of younger
and more robust individuals replacing the worn-out
ones.
233
From the standpoint of the survival of the species, it is desirable for
the individuals of today to give place eventually to those of
tomorrow, since environing conditions keep changing over
extensive periods, and it is only by giving the reproductive variants
a chance that new fitness may be established and prolonged
survival of the species made possible.
It would seem that the life span is determined by the

interplay of two effects – the necessity of living long
enough to start off the new generation and, having
performed the task, the fact that a further lifetime is
unnecessary, and, in many respects, harmful to the
well-being and development of the species. It is quite
possible that mechanisms exist in organisms which
bring about this limitation of the life period, when the
biologically the useful period is over, but we do not
know what these mechanisms are20 .
Although the aforesaid biological conclusion is probably valid in

the case of all infra-human species, it is not at all so in the case of
man. For, as has been noted by many observers, man is unique
among living beings in having a disproportionately long, and from
one point of biological view biologically useless, post-productive
period of the life-cycle. The implication is obvious; the individual
man is not here solely to fulfil the interests of the race. Man is
intended to be a medium of a conscious evolution to a higher level
of consciousness.
If, as we have seen above, death is not the fundamental truth and
if it is to be regarded as a process of life itself in the latter’s still
20
J.A.V. Butler
234
imperfect status of unfolding, the next question to ask is: does not
man possess the capacity of outgrowing the imperfect status and
eliminate the process of death altogether?
conditions are created it may no longer be necessary to destroy the
human body in order for man to progress. Death can be done away
with.
I will now leave you with two quotations from Sri Aurobindo to
ponder over:
The physical being could only endure, if by some
means its physical causes of decay and disruption
could be overcome and at the same time it could be
made so plastic and progressive in its structure and its
functioning that it would answer to each change
demanded of it by the progress of the inner Person; it
must be able to keep pace with the soul in its formation
of self-expressive personality, its long unfolding of a
secret spiritual divinity and the slow transformation of
the mental into the divine mental or spiritual existence.
The Life Divine: p. 822
Even if Science – physical Science or occult Science –
were to discover the necessary condition or means for
an infinite survival of he body, still, if the body could
not adapt itself so as to become a fit instrument of
expression for the inner growth, the soul would find
some way to abandon it and pass on to a new
incarnation. The material or physical causes of death
are not its sole or its true cause; its true inmost reason
is the spiritual necessity for the evolution of a new
being.
The Life Divine fn. p. 822
235
PART THREE
236
17: Book IX, Canto 1 – Towards the Black Void
We are now ready to begin our review of Part III of Savitri. Most of
Part III is taken up by the long colloquy between Savitri and the
God of Death. The God of Death from this point on becomes an
important character in Savitri, and, as we have already seen in the
preceding chapter, Sri Aurobindo has a perspective of his own on
the phenomenon of death and its place in life. But before we begin
our review of Books IX, X and XI of Savitri, which deal with this
exchange with Death, it would be instructive to see how this part of
the legend has been handled by Vyasa in the Mahabharata. This will
enable us to appreciate better the changes which Sri Aurobindo has
introduced while dealing with this part of the story of Savitri and
Satyavan.
The long conversation between Savitri and the God of Death, as

found in the Mahabharata legend:
As soon as Satyavan breathes his last, Savitri sees in front of her a
bright and luminous Being in red attire and with a splendid crown
over his head. There is a noose in the hand of this person and he is
staring at Satyavan’s prone body. On seeing him, Savitri transfers
Satyavan’s head from her lap to the ground and stands up with
folded hands. When asked by Savitri who he was, this luminous
being introduces himself as Yama. He tells her that he was
conversing with her because she is a devout and chaste woman. He
further states that since Satyavan was a virtuous soul with several
fine qualities, he has come himself to take away his soul, instead of
sending his subordinates. He then casts his noose and captures
Satyavan’s soul in it and pulls the soul behind him as he starts
walking away from that spot. Savitri, afflicted with grief, follows
Yama in his tracks. This she was able to do because of the great
237
powers she had acquired by observing several vows.
When Yama looks back after a while, he sees Savitri following
him. He stops and advises her not to follow him, since she already
had accompanied her husband after his death over the permitted
distance and paid her debt to him. He advises her to attend to the
funeral rites of the dead. Savitri refuses to accept Yama’s advice and
instead keeps talking to him. Since she has walked with him for
more than ten steps, she claims that she has earned the right of
friendship with him. She then begins to argue with him extensively
on certain fundamental dharmic issues. She appeals to his sense of
justice and obligation to be fair, since Yama is known as Dharmaraj
(the king of righteousness).
Savitri’s speech is perfect in grammar, well-structured in
prosody and flawless in reasoning. She argues that as a wife her
place is always with her husband and she cannot go back without
him; in following him she is only being true to her dharma as a
wife. She further declares that there is nothing a woman cannot
achieve through austerity, devotion to the preceptor, love for the
husband, observance of the sacred vows and through the grace of
Yama himself. She then speaks of holy people and how they abide
in virtuous conduct and how therefore they never face any sorrow
or affliction. She observes further that the company of holy people
is always rewarding and therefore that one should always be close
to them. Then she declares that it is by the Truth that the saints lead
the sun, and through their tapasya (askesis) that they uphold the
earth and therefore noble people who are in the midst of such
saintly people have never any grief. In the conduct of the dharma,
illustrious people help each other and do not hurt others. They are
therefore the protectors of the whole world.
These soulful utterances of Savitri charm Yama immensely, and
he bestows on her several boons. The more she speaks of the lofty
things of dharma, the more his admiration for her grows. By the
first two boons bestowed upon her by Yama, Savitri is able to get
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for her father-in-law, who had gone blind, his eye-sight restored,
and also his kingdom restored to him. Through a third boon she
asks for a hundred sons for her father, Aswapati. When offered a
fourth boon by Yama, she replies that she would have asked for a
hundred sons for herself, but that this boon would remain
unfulfilled without Satyavan, whom Yama was insisting on taking
with him. She points out to him the strange anomaly now
confronting them. “You are willing to give me the boon of having a
hundred sons and yet you yourself are taking away my husband.;
for that reason I again ask the boon of the life of Satyavan. Only
thus shall your words come true.”
Yama is so exceedingly gladdened by Savitri’s discourse on
Dharma that he accedes to her request and releases Satyavan’s soul
from the noose in which it was captured. He tells her that Satyavan
has now been restored to good health and is fit to return to earth
with her. Besides this, he grants to her a life of four hundred years
with Satyavan, and advises her to perform holy yajnas for the
welfare of mankind. Yama blesses Savitri and sends her back with
the soul of Satyavan; he then returns to his own abode.
Savitri’s Dialogue with Death in Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri

Savitri’s dialogue with Death in Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri deals with
issues of a totally different kind from those that figure in Savitri’s
exchanges with Yama in the Mahabharata legend.
In Sri Aurobindo’s epic, Savitri follows Satyavan’s soul into the
kingdom of Death because she loves Satyavan and she wants to take
him back to earth where together they are going to prepare for the
advent of a new age on earth. Their love and its fulfilment on earth
symbolise Sri Aurobindo’s quest for the perfection of life on earth
for humanity as a whole. The God of Death is cast here in the role of
an adversary of this ideal. He tries various strategies to dissuade
Savitri from pursuing him and from laying a claim on Satyavan’s
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soul.
First he tries to scare her by demonstrating how helpless and
miniscule she is in comparison with this vast universe and its
majestic march through time. When this fails, he tries to argue
against the feasibility and likelihood of the ideal she holds so dear.
He also tries to show that ideologically she really has no ground to
stand on. In this protracted debate, he takes on the positions of the
various philosophies and ideologies that can be pitted against what
may be called Sri Aurobindo’s Adwaitic Integralism. In this debate
almost all the major philosophies and ideologies of today figure in
some form. Savitri is pitted against all these as the protagonist of Sri
Aurobindo’s vision of a perfect life here on earth.
What is most fascinating here is the way that these various
ideologies take on flesh and blood and come out as glowing poetry
and not as dry arguments. Let us now take up Books IX, X and XI
canto by canto. We begin with Book IX, Canto 1.
Section 1
The poet begins by capturing in a few lines the scene in the huge
wood: Savitri was all alone surrounded by the forest, and she had
‘her husband’s corpse on her forsaken breast’. She was too benumbed by
the event of her husband’s passing either to measure her loss or to
bewail it. She even ignored the presence of the ‘dreadful god’ (the
God of Death), standing in front of her. It was as though her mind
had died with Satyavan. Only her heart was still active in her. She
held close to her the lifeless form of Satyavan as though she could
thereby guard their oneness and help Satyavan keep his spirit in his
body.
And then came on her a change that comes over human beings
in great and climactic moments of their life, when the veil over the
soul is torn and there is no intervention from the mind. The spirit
sees directly and all is known at once. Such a moment had now
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come in Savitri’s life. The poet describes in some detail the nature of
this change. It is as if one’s doors of perception suddenly get
cleansed and one sees the world around differently. There is a
power above our eyebrows which is calm and immobile. It remains
unaffected by the vicissitudes of life with its pain and error and is
able to control the whirl of things around us. In such great moments
the spirit experiences the Glory which is truly its own. The mind of
earth then receives in flashes godlike thoughts. A series of profound
changes take place in the individual; the soul itself feels reborn to
new glory. One feels bathed in a celestial music. The will becomes
intensely gathered into an ecstasy. Such a miraculous birth now
took place in Savitri. The Spirit in her, so far hidden in Nature, now
soared out of its dwelling and ascended like a fire in the skies of
night.
The cords of her self-oblivion were torn apart and at the summit
of her being she sees the source of all that she had seemed to be and
all that she had worked out through her sadhana. She saw herself as
an instrument of an immutable power. A force descended into her
which seemed to connect her to Infinity. As this force sank into her,
it entered the mystic lotus of thousand petals at the crown of her
head. Savitri was now guided by this omnipotent power standing
above her, calm and unmoving.
Section 2
As Savitri was being filled with this great inrush, the last vestige of
any human frailty vanished from her. It is as though a young
divinity filled her life-energies with a vast spiritual power. She was
now entirely free from the pain and the fear that haunted her often
and the grief that lashed her from time to time. Her mind was now
still and beat quietly with an imperious force. Savitri was now free
from all attachment and her acts proceeded from a godlike calm.
Calmly, she placed Satyavan’s body until now lying on her breast
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upon the ground and firmly turned her gaze away from it. All
alone, she now rose to meet the dreadful God of Death.
The poet comments on the significance of this event, namely,
Savitri’s resolve to confront Death. The mighty spirit that Savitri
embodied now is returning to a task she had left unfinished so far
because until now the mind was the highest power manifested on
earth and under its rule the human instrument was too crude for
the task of confronting Death. Now in Savitri this human limitation
is transcended and she commands a mightier power than that of
mind and also a godlike will.
She looked for a lingering moment on Satyavan’s body lying at
her feet and then she raised her head ‘like a tree recovering from a
wind’ to turn her gaze on the being standing in front of her. Then in
a few lines the poet gives us a portrait of the spiritual truth of Death
(I shall use the expressions “god of Death” and “Death”, with a
capital D, interchangeably here):
Something stood there, unearthly, sombre, grand,

A limitless denial of all being
That wore the terror and wonder of a shape.
In its appalling eyes the tenebrous Form
Bore the deep pity of destroying gods;
A sorrowful irony curved the dreadful lips
That speak the word of doom. Eternal Night
In the dire beauty of an immortal face
Pitying arose, receiving all that lives
For ever into its fathomless heart, refuge
Of creatures from their anguish and world-pain.
His shape was nothingness made real, his limbs
Were monuments of transience and beneath
Brows of unwearying calm large godlike lids
Silent beheld the writhing serpent, life.
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Unmoved their timeless wide unchanging gaze
Had seen the unprofitable cycles pass,
Survived the passing of unnumbered stars
And sheltered still the same immutable orbs.
p. 574 lines 111-129
The God of Death stood there, the poet says, ‘unearthly, sombre,
grand’. He describes him as ‘A limitless denial of all being’. There
cannot be a better description of Death and the role he plays in this
confrontation with Savitri. Death, as he is portrayed here, does not
merely represent the force that brings about the physical
disintegration of all living beings; it is also a power that denies and
tries to thwart this very creation as it evolves to its perfection. That
is why he is described as ‘A limitless denial of all being’. Death is a
destroying god who bears deep pity for all creatures. His lips are
curved in ‘a sorrowful irony’. He gives refuge in his heart to all
creatures from their life of anguish and world-pain on earth. The
poet describes his shape as ‘nothingness made real’ and his limbs as
‘monuments of transience’. His eyes are focussed silently on life, ‘the
writhing serpent’. The eyes of Death have seen the passing away of
unnumbered stars.
The woman and the universal God of Death faced each other.
Savitri’s loneliness was almost palpable. And, silencing all earthly
sounds, Death spoke to her in a voice that is sad and formidable at
the same time.
Death says, “O slave of Nature, you are but a changing tool of a
rigid, unchanging Law. Why do you vainly rebel against my yoke?
Loosen your crude grip on Satyavan. Weep and forget Satyavan.
Bury your passion. Leave now the body forsaken by the spirit of
Satyavan. Return to your vain life on earth.”
Savitri made no response. The voice of Death spoke again, but
this time lowering its formidable voice so that it sounded like a
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moan of hungry far sweeping waves, echoing the sadness and scorn
of the gods.
“O Savitri, you are yourself a creature doomed like him to die
some day. Do you hope to be able to hold his soul a captive of your
passionate heart and deny it death’s calm, and silent rest? Loosen
your grip on him. Woman, your husband is suffering in this tug-of-
war between you and me. The body of Satyavan belongs to earth
and therefore it is yours, but not his spirit, which now belongs to a
greater power.”
Savitri relaxed her hold on Satyavan’s body that lay on the
smooth grass. She now remembered his face as it looked when he
was in sleep and she rose from their couch at dawn to attend to her
daily tasks. Now too she rose with all her strength gathered like a
runner who drops his mantle and gets ready for the race and waits
for the signal. But she did not know on what course she was going
to be called upon to run. Her spirit watched vigilantly waiting to
see what far-ranging impulse was going to rise out of the eternal
depths of her being.
Then Death leaned down to gather Satyavan’s soul, as Night
leans down over the tired lands as the evening pales and the moon
is yet to rise. As he stood erect, another luminous Satyavan arose
from the lifeless body, as though he had emerged from another
world. This silent wonder, the luminous Satyavan, stood between
Savitri and the god of Death. This new figure looked as if ‘one
departed came wearing the light of a celestial shape, splendidly alien to the
mortal air.’ The mind that looks for things familiar and loved in this
new figure would fall back foiled from the strangeness that
surrounds it. The phantasm, the new figure representing Satyavan’s
being, looked too strange to fit into the grasp of this earth. Only the
spirit of Savitri recognised the spirit of Satyavan in this being, and
her heart felt in it the heart which she had loved. This figure
standing between Death and Savitri was not wavering but steady
and expectant like someone blind listening for a word of command.
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So these three stood there, none of them powers of this earth, but
one of them (Savitri) in a human form.
On either side of this figure of Satyavan, the two spirits strove,
Love and Death: ‘silence battled with silence, vast with vast’. Soon the
impulse to move took over. The luminous figure of Satyavan moved
in the front; behind him walked Death like a herdsman following a
stray member of his heard. Behind these two walked Savitri.
Although mortal, she walked at an equal pace with the God of
Death. She walked into the perilous regions of death, planting her
feet in Satyavan’s footsteps.
Section 3
Savitri was now walking through a strange region in which the road
was hardly seen, and she felt as though she was walking through a
screen of forests, surrounded by the murmur of the green leaves.
But gradually this sound seemed alien to her. She began to feel her
own physical body far from her, a distant load that she bore. She felt
that she was in some high region where she saw in a trance the
luminous spirit of Satyavan being followed by the great dark figure,
Death.
She felt that the earth stood aloof and yet near her. She still felt
close to its sweetness, greenness and delight, the brilliance of the
vivid colours, the golden sunlight, the blue skies and the soft warm
soil. But now her body seemed to be slowing her down. She felt that
the two spirits walking in front of her were speeding along a
grander road beyond some intangible boundary. Death now looked
mightier and more distant as he advanced in those spaces and she
feared that she might lose contact with Satyavan’s soul. He and
Death were moving ahead swiftly as if pulled away from the hold
of earth and she is left far behind. She feared she might lose them.
Alarmed, she suddenly soared out of her body and rushed
towards Satyavan. She was now like a she-eagle whose little ones
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are threatened by danger. Her spirit surged up in terror and a
divine fury through the rocky expanses in that space, against the
ascending god of Death and his weapon of death. She rose like a
mass of golden fire on the wings of power and grief. Thus she
crossed the borders of this tangible world on the flaming wings of
her spirit. Her mortal parts dropped from her like so many sheaths
discarded, and she entered her subtle body. This resulted in a
momentary loss of consciousness; she forgot the sun, earth and the
world; she was no more conscious of thought, time or death. She
was not aware even of her own self. She forgot who she was.
In this desperate situation what sustained Savitri and gave her
strength to push ahead was her supreme identity with Satyavan, the
sovereign of her life who is like her heartbeat. He was herself, she
felt, yet different, a veritable treasure clasped by her. All that
remained with her in this collapsing of space was this treasure.
Savitri’s consciousness now surged around Satyavan, her spirit
fulfilled in his spirit as though the immortal moment of love had
been found.
This enabled her to come out of the trance and she became once
more aware of Time and began to notice the world around her.
Satyavan, Death and she herself, she felt, were moving as though in
her own soul-space. She saw vague memories passing before her as
scenes toward their goals. This was a totally new experience for her,
of a world where there were no soul entities but only living moods.
She saw around her a strange, hushed, weird country. Even the
skies above had a strange look about them. The poet describes this
unearthly scene in the following words:
Weird were the grasses, weird the treeless plains;

Weird ran the road which like fear hastening
Towards that of which it has most terror, passed
Phantasmal between pillared conscious rocks
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Sombre and high, gates brooding, whose stone thoughts
Lost their huge sense beyond in giant night.
pp. 579–580 lines 315-320
It would seem as though the God of Death was leading Savitri

through this weird place to create fear in her. The rocky terrain, the
dismal, high and brooding gates led them on to an abysmal night
beyond them. The night to which these gates led them was the night
of the Inconscient, waiting for them like the fearsome jaws of an
ogre on a haunted path.
As they reached the chill and scorched boundary, the luminous
form of Satyavan stood arrested for a moment and cast a backward
glance at Savitri with his wonderful eyes. It would seem that they
had reached a point beyond which mortals like Savitri would have
no access. Death made this clear and cried out to Savitri in a
forbidding voice.
“O mortal, return to your transient world which abides in time.
Do not hope to trespass into the homeland of Death. You cannot
breathe and be alive in that land. The passion that drives you is a
mind-born strength and it cannot lift you beyond the earth and free
you from your material cage. It will not be able to sustain you in
this region of Nought and support you through the pathless infinite.
It is best for man to live within human limits. Do not trust the
misleading voices that make you imagine that you are immortal.
That is just an unreal dream built on a floating ground. Do not be
persuaded by those false gods to trespass into a world where you
will perish like an alien unsubstantial thought. Know the limits
within which it is safe for you to hope and dream. Do not try to
achieve what is beyond human powers.
“Man is an ignorant creature and his steps are stumbling even
within the brief boundaries within which it is safe for him to
operate. But he fancies himself the world’s king; it is his mind that
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keeps tormenting his nature. Man can only dream of divinity in his
sleep. When he wakes up from this sleep, he starts trembling,
realising how weak and fragile he is in the immensity of this space.
Do not expect to bind the eternal gods with the force of your love,
which is so transient and brittle.”
Savitri refused to give an answer. She shed the trappings of
mortality and stood up in the primal force of her soul. Fixed destiny
and the rigidity of old laws did not daunt her. Alone like a statue on
a pedestal in that vast silence, she rose like a column of flame and
light against the mute abysses of the Inconscient massed against
her.
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18: Book IX, Canto 2 – The Journey in Eternal Night
(lines 1–251)
We saw the bright phantom-like figure of Satyavan, followed by the

God of Death, just cross the boundary that separates the world of
death from the world of the living at the end of Canto 1 of Book IX.
Death has sternly cautioned Savitri not to try to follow them and
trespass into the world of death lest she ‘perish like a helpless thought’.
But Savitri is equally determined. She drops her mantle of mortality
and rises like ‘a columned shaft of fire and light’ into this forbidden
land. This takes us Canto 2 of Book IX.
The first 140 lines of this canto create the atmosphere of the scene
through which the trio is now passing. The impression of fear and
oppression which was so far created mainly by the words and the
tone of Death is now exuded by the surroundings through which
they are now passing. The scene is described as it appeared to
Savitri.
They all stood there in silence staring into the chill and bleak
edge of Night, and felt as though the world was doomed to die.
Even the sky looked menacing. They stood there like thoughts lost
on the brink of nothingness and despair. Behind them was the pale
lifeless gaze of the evening; the darkness ahead of them looked as if
it was hungry for Savitri’s soul, was eager to swallow it. But
Savitri’s spirit continued to burn bright like a flame, a lambent glow
against the dark breast of the night. It was finally Savitri who first
defiantly pushed ahead into the darkness and emptiness of the
eternal Night. The immortal spirit in her faced up to the menace
represented by that ‘ruthless eyeless waste’. Now the poet describes
the new kind of gait that Savitri had to learn to be able to move
about in this region. Her movement now was a combination of ‘a
swimming action’ and ‘a drifting movement’ resembling the movement
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of figures we see when we close our eyelids.
Here the divisions of Time also begin to collapse, the past,
present and future all sink into a blur of nothingness. Satyavan,
Death and Savitri now appeared to be moving and yet to be still,
passing and yet not advancing. What they see around them are
more like mute forms in a framed picture than living forms in a real
world.
Savitri now found herself surrounded by a huge pitiless void
breathing unbounded terror. It looked hungry for her and Savitri
felt as though the cave-like, monstrous throat of this Void wanted to
swallow her. She felt the oppression of a fierce spiritual agony. The
poet gives an apt analogy to give a vivid idea of the dread that she
was made to live through. She was made to feel like a pathetic
bullock tied to a tree in a forest by the hunters hoping to lure a tiger.
The night has already begun to crawl in and a ferocious tiger or
some other predator is bound to make its appearance at any
moment. The night is falling thick, the trees around it are no more
than blotted shades, and the last glimmer of light is fading away.
This was how Savitri was made to feel. Death sought to smother
Savitri in a blanket of fear of a similar magnitude.
The poet describes the suffocating effect of this psychological
terror in these words:
In the smothering stress of this stupendous Nought

Mind could not think, breath could not breathe, the soul
Could not remember or feel itself; it seemed
A hollow gulf of sterile emptiness,
A zero oblivious of the sum it closed,
An abnegation of the Maker’s joy
Saved by no wide repose, no depth of peace.
On all that claims here to be Truth and God
And conscious self and the revealing Word
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And the creative rapture of the Mind
And Love and Knowledge and heart’s delight, there fell
The immense refusal of the eternal No.
pp. 583 lines 55–66
Thought disintegrates in such an environment of terror. The mind is

unable to think, even breath finds it hard to breathe and the soul is
almost lost in self-oblivion. All looks like a vacant gulf of barren
emptiness. The joy of the world-creator is blotted out. There is no
repose of peace anywhere. An immense refusal and the eternal No
fall on everything here on all that claimed to be Truth and God.
Presently Savitri disappears completely into the shadows of this
world of darkness like a golden lamp disappearing in a gloom. She
was now thrown into one of the recesses of this Void where she sees
no path, no goal; she was driven into some great, black,
unknowable Waste, was tossed about by the whirling winds. She
was all alone in this terrible hour. She could not see any more the
vague figure of the God of Death nor the luminous figure of
Satyavan. But while her senses failed, her spirit kept its grip and
held on to the objects it loved. The senses can get hold of things only
from the outside and lose their hold on them often but the spirit’s
hold is stronger
The poet then gives an exquisite example of what it means to say
that Savitri’s spirit held on to Satyavan while her senses lost their
contact with him. When Savitri and Satyavan lived together on
earth, there was such a close spiritual identity between them that
she often used to feel Satyavan entering her spirit inwardly as one
would explore a glade, and when this happened, she would gladly
reveal her secrets to his search and joy. Wherever Satyavan’s feet
advanced in this manner into her spirit, it rushed to welcome him
and embrace him.
But now Savitri finds herself in a bottomless gulf, lonely, cast out
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even from her own being. She travelled for a long time in this
darkness, empty and drear, and felt as though she was walking on
the corpse of life with the light of the soul put out. This torture
continued for a long time but, through it all Savitri, lived on
unconquered.
At last, a faint gleam appeared in this boundless darkness, like
memory returning to dead spirits. This gleam showed how dreadful
the night was; it was like a serpent with a mystic glow on its black
hoods. And this serpent was sliding away as though it felt
threatened by the gleam of light and the hope that was advancing.
Night felt that her dark reign was under attack from this bright
gleam. She was unwilling to yield her sovereignty because she felt
that it alone was true. She tried to smother that frail ray of light
because she knew how dangerous it was for her. She raised her
huge head of Nothingness and tried to swallow all that she saw
around her. She saw herself as the dark in its absolute form.
And still the gleam of light prevailed against the monstrous
attack and it grew in strength. Savitri felt revived and woke up to
herself. Her limbs had refused the cold embrace of death; her
heartbeats triumphed over all the pain that was heaped on her, and
her soul persisted in claiming for its joy the soul of beloved
Satyavan, although he was visible to her no more.
Then in that stillness she began to hear once more the footsteps
of Death, and out of the darkness Satyavan appeared again in the
form of a luminous shade. Then through that dead monstrous realm
a sound pealed out like the sea roaring into the ears of a tired
swimmer. Death speaks out:
“O Savitri, what you see around you is the everlasting Night, the
dark immensity of my kingdom. This holds the mystery of
Nothingness in which ends the vanity of all the desires of life. You
are but a transient bubble. Can’t you see that this is where you come
from and that out of this nothingness you are made? How can you
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even hope to continue to live and hope in this stark emptiness?”
Savitri refuses to answer. She rejects the Death’s claim to truth
and refuses even to pay any heed to him and to what he is saying.
But still Death is relentless and continues to try to hold Savitri in his
formidable gaze. He addresses her as follows:
“You have survived for now the impact of this eternal Void, but
it shall never forgive you. It can not forget the original violence
done to it by whatever is responsible for engendering thought and
bringing life and with it suffering into its immobile vastness. You
have won this brief episode of victory; you have lived here for a
while without Satyavan. No ancient goddess can do anything for
you here except to enable you to live for a while until you are
drawn into the eternal sleep in the silence of death.
After all, you are a fragile human, mere clay fashioned into a
thinking being. You have no defence against Time except your
illusions. Man dreads the void around him, the void from which he
has come and into which he is surely going to be dissolved. He has
no help available from anywhere, so he turns to his own self and
magnifies it and calls it God. He prays to the heavens to help him
and fulfil his hopes and remove his suffering. With longing in his
heart he looks up to the heavens for help, but these heavens are
nothing but empty spaces, more unconscious than himself; they do
not have even the privilege of mind which he has. The heavens are
empty except for their blue colour and this too is a visual error not a
reality. Man peoples these heavens with bright and merciful
powers, his gods.”
The irony and sarcasm Death uses here are chilling, as can be
seen in the following passage:
A fragile miracle of thinking clay,

Armed with illusions walks the child of Time.
To fill the void around he feels and dreads,
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The void he came from and to which he goes,
He magnifies his self and names it God.
He calls the heavens to help his suffering hopes.
He sees above him with a longing heart
Bare spaces more unconscious than himself
That have not even his privilege of mind,
And empty of all but their unreal blue,
And peoples them with bright and merciful powers.
pp. 586–587, lines 166–176
Death says:
“Man lives a precarious existence surrounded by threats of disaster
from all sides – the sea roars around him, the earth quakes beneath
him, fire is at his door and death is ever on the prowl barking and
pursuing him through the woods of life. But then he is nurtured by
certain supernatural Powers which move him to hope and to yearn
and dream of beauty and happiness, and so he offers his soul to
these Powers.
“The gods watch over the earth and guide its giant movements.
But they have given man the burdensome mind. In his heart they
have lit their fires of hope and have thus sown in him a perennial
unrest and discontent. His mind is like a hunter on unknown tracks
and discovers things which prove inconsequential in the long run.
He builds philosophical thought in an attempt to unravel the
mystery of his fate, and learns to turn his laughter and tears into
songs. Man’s mortality is constantly vexed with dreams of
immortality, his transience is teased by hopes of infinity. The gods
have given man hungers which no food can satisfy. He is indeed the
dumb cattle driven by the gods. He is tied to the rope of his body,
and for fodder they throw at him grief, hope and joy, and they have
enclosed his pasture ground with the fence of ignorance. The gods
have been playing a cruel game with man. They have given him
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courage and a faith in himself, but all this ends in death. They have
given him a wisdom which is mocked by the darkness around him,
they have traced for him a journey with no prospect of a
destination. Therefore man toils in an uncertain world, besieged by
pain with occasional intervals intended to make him feel secure; he
is constantly tormented like a beast by endless desire and he finds
himself bound helplessly to the chariot of these dreadful gods.
“But in spite of all this, if you can still entertain hope and love,
you should return to the shell of your body which is tied to the
earth by the gods. You can live there with whatever is left of love in
your heart. Do not hope to get back Satyavan for yourself.
“Yet, since you have shown uncommon courage and strength in
following me so far, you deserve to be richly rewarded. I can
bestow upon you gifts which can soothe your wounds. These gifts
are like a bargain which transient beings make with fate. They are
like the wayside sweetness which those who belong to this earth
would gladly pluck. If you like, I can give you many such gifts.
Choose these gifts as your prize, although they may all prove
deceptive.”
Then Savitri responded to Death in these words. Note that this is
the first time that Savitri condescends to speak to Death. Her words
come out from some deep regions of her heart.
“O Death, I refuse to submit to you. You are only a black lie, a
huge mask, worn by the Darkness to destroy the courage of the
human soul. You are unreal, although you appear to be the end of
all things here. You are no more than a grim jest played with the
immortal spirit. I live and move in full consciousness of my
immortality. I am not standing at your gate as a petitioner; I am
here as a conquering spirit, conscious of my force. I have already
survived, as you see, the suffocation of your darkness.
“My grief for what has happened to Satyavan has not rendered
me weak in my mind. My unshed tears have become pearls of
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strength. I have transformed the brittle ill-formed substance of my
nature into a strong substance that can stand like a statue of my
soul. My spirit shall prove itself strong and tenacious in the combat
of the gods against the forces of denial and prevail against them. I
am not one of those miserable people who rush to gather with eager
hands the petty and contemptuous concessions thrown at the weak,
in the mire caused by the trampling feet of the milling crowd.
“I labour here like the battling gods, and like them, I seek to
impose on the slow and unwilling cycles of time the flaming will of
the Supreme. The gods try to establish the law of a higher
consciousness in the field of Matter and make the earth’s
Inconscient forces respond to the wish of the soul. First, I demand
whatever Satyavan must have wanted during his childhood to
make his life beautiful but could not get. Give that if you are so keen
on giving, or refuse, if you are able to refuse.”
Before we proceed with the rest of Canto 1 of Book IX, this
probably may be a good point to pause and review briefly the
beginning of this crucial point in the encounter between Savitri and
Death. What appears very striking at the beginning of this
encounter is the unperturbed calm in Savitri and her supreme
confidence in herself. She has no fear of Death. Most people are
terribly afraid of death because they are totally ignorant of what it
is, and one fears the unknown. Right from the beginning, Savitri
shows no sign of fear. She knows what Death is. She calls him ‘Black
lie of night to the cowed soul of man’. As we saw in Canto 1 of Book IX,
she does not even take note of his presence when he first arrives on
the scene. Death asks her to give up her hold on Satyavan’s soul so
that he can take it away with him; it would seem as though Savitri’s
love had the first claim on Satyavan’s soul, and then came Death.
Nothing in the path traced by Death can stop Savitri and prevent
her from following him.
Death tries to strike terror in Savitri and to convince her that he
is vast and infinite, while she is no more than ‘an insect crawling
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among other ephemeral insects on a speck of surface mud and water which
has managed to form itself amid the appalling immensities of the physical
universe.21 ’ He tries to create this impression on her by showing to
her the enormous Void which is his realm. Any mortal would feel
totally helpless and lost in this eternity of the Inconscient. We have
already considered the impact of lines like these and the sense of
terror they succeed in conveying:
A curtain of impenetrable dread,

The darkness hung around her cage of sense
As, when the trees have turned to blotted shades
And the last friendly glimmer fades away,
Around a bullock in the forest tied
By hunters closes in no empty night.
p. 583 lines 44-49
But Savitri is not cowed down. Instead, as we have seen, she calls
Death a ‘black lie of the night’, a ‘grim jest played with the immortal
spirit’ and declares, ‘Conscious of immortality I walk’. What makes a
human being great is his spirit, which is a spark of the Divine, and
shares with the Divine its omnipresence, omniscience and
omnipotence. It is deathless as well. Without the soul, man is just a
speck of dust in the infinity of space.
We have already marked the irony and sarcasm which Death
uses so effectively as when he ridicules man as ‘a fragile miracle of
thinking clay’ and his gods as imaginary.
When Death offers Savitri gifts to soothe her wounded life,
Savitri tells him that she is no petitioner at his doors. She is not
looking for gifts, the transient things that amuse tired human hearts
for a while. She asks for Satyavan all that he wanted but was unable
to get in his childhood. Even there she does not care whether he can
21
The Life Divine, p. 43
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give these gifts or not, she says, ‘Give if you must, or if thou canst
refuse’, almost implying that these things are governed by a greater
law to which Death himself is subject.
At this stage I shall make just one more comment. Notice what
Savitri pursues with such great courage, without caring one bit for
her own safety and even survival, is Satyavan. And what gives her
the strength to face the terror imposed on her by Death is her love
for Satyavan. There are moments during her journey when she is
totally lost, when she can not see either Death or Satyavan around
her. During these perilous stages it is her spirit’s hold on Satyavan
that helps her to find her way through all those difficult tracks. The
needle of the compass of her soul is forever directed towards
Satyavan. At one stage the poet makes an explicit comment on this.
He says the hold of the senses on things is never as strong and
lasting as the hold of the spirit.
Savitri is the story of the love between Savitri and Satyavan. The
original legend in Mahabharata has been traditionally regarded as
the story glorifying conjugal love, in particular, the wife’s devotion
and loyalty to her husband (pativrata mahaatmya). That is what the
average Indian mind has seen in the story. As Sri Aurobindo sees it,
it is the story of a perfect and fulfilled love, and the basis of such
love can only be spiritual.
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19: Book IX, Canto 2 (lines 252–482)
At the end of the previous chapter, we were on page 589 (Book IX,
Canto 2). We broke off at line 251. Death is unnerved in some
measure by what Savitri has shown of her inner strength and
determination. He now tries another strategy; he tries to get rid of
her by offering boons to her – ‘gifts to soothe a wounded life’ as he puts
it. Savitri replies, not in the tone of a suppliant, but almost defiantly:
“I demand whatever Satyavan desired and had not for his beautiful
life. Give if you must, or if you can, refuse.” Savitri distances herself
from what Death proposes to give her. “Whether you give any of
these gifts or not is up to you”, that is what she is implying.
Death bows his head in scornful cold assent. In his disastrous
voice he replies:
“When he lived on earth what Satyavan had desired most was
for his blind father to regain his lost kingdom: Power and friends
and greatness lost and royal trappings for his peaceful declining
days of old age. I also restore to Satyavan’s father’s eyes ‘the
sensuous solace of light’. But I do not know how much he would
value them now, because adversity has given him wisdom and
blindness has enabled him to gain a deeper vision. Now at least, O
mortal, go back from this world, which might prove perilous for
you, to your small permitted sphere on earth. Hasten back lest you
provoke the great laws that you have violated by your trespass into
this world to slay and end your life.”
But Savitri responds:
“O Death, World-Spirit. I was born your equal in spirit. My will
too is a law, and I have the strength of a god. There is also
something immortal behind my mortal appearance. I do not tremble
before the immobile gaze of the stone eyes of Law and Fate. My soul
has enough strength to defy them. Release Satyavan from your
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shadows. I need him on earth in the sweet transience of his human
limbs so that we can together achieve our great purpose, which is to
bear with him the ancient Mother’s load of ignorance and suffering
and take earth on a path which leads to God. If not, I shall follow
him into the eternal spaces and I am prepared to face whatever
night or stupendous dawns we might have to encounter in the
untrodden Beyond. No matter where you take his soul, I will follow
him.”
But Death remained unappeased and his opposition to her
resolve became stronger. For him, all created things such as human
lives were insignificant. He stood for the unbending and
unchanging laws of Nature, which it was Savitri’s intention to
break. And so his voice rose in anger and scorn like the voice of a
titanic gale lashing at a swimmer in the sea, remembering all the
joys its waves have drowned. So from the darkness of the sovereign
night an almighty cry arose challenging Savitri:
“Do you have god-wings or feet that can tread my stars? The
orbits of this universe were coiled before you were born. I, Death,
created them out of my void. All things I have built in them and I
destroy them as I please. You are caught in a net that I have cast,
and each joy is a mesh in this net. Life is a hunger that devours
everything. Savitri, you are no more than a wandering breath of
mine; you are made to be transient and will live at my pleasure.
Run with whatever poor gifts you can take with you, otherwise my
pangs will begin torment you. You are a blind slave of my deaf
force; I compel you to sin so that I may punish you, to desire so that
I may afflict you with despair and grief. You will finally come to me
at last bleeding, recognising my greatness and your nothingness. Do
not try to trespass into places forbidden to mortals and meant for
only those who obey my law. Your tread may awake the sleeping
furies who avenge every fulfilled desire. You may start in the skies
under which you hope to live the lightening of the Unknown, and
then, terrified, alone, sobbing and hunted by the hounds of heaven,
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you will start running through the long torture of the centuries. You
will be a wounded and forsaken soul and you will not be able to
appease these furies which even hell cannot satisfy nor heaven’s
mercy assuage (temper down). I shall free you from the grip of this
dark fate, Clutching to your heart the scanty dole fate has meted out
to you, depart in peace, even though you do not deserve even this
peace.”
Thus Death is trying to instil into Savitri a dread, the fear of the
unknown. The bottom line for him is that Savitri should leave. She
has no business in this forbidden kingdom of death. But Savitri is
made of a different mettle. So she responds to Death meeting scorn
with scorn:
“Who is this God imagined by your dark mind? He seems to be
creating contemptuously all these despicable worlds you have been
describing. It would look as though your God made these brilliant
stars just to satisfy your vanity. My God is different. He is will and
triumphs in his paths no matter what the hurdles. He is love and
sweetly suffers all. To such a God I have offered my hope as
sacrifice and my aspirations as a sacrament. My God is the
Wonderful, the swift, the charioteer. Who shall prohibit or restrict
his course when he is the charioteer? He travels on the million roads
of life; his steps are used to walking in the light of heaven and can
tread without pain the sword-paved courts of hell as well. He even
descends into them to bring them something of the eternal joy.
Love’s golden wings have power to fan your Void. The eyes of love
gaze star-like through death’s night and the feet of love can walk
naked on the hardest of worlds. He labours in the depths and also
on the heights, and he shall remake your universe, O Death.”
After Savitri stopped speaking, there was silence for a while
until once again Death confronted Savitri with the following words:
“What is this hope that is driving you? What do you aspire to
achieve? What you call your hope is only your body’s enticement
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for its bliss. You hope to please for a few years your faltering senses
with the honey of physical longings, seeking to embrace with the
heart’s fire in a vain attempt at oneness with the brilliant idol of a
fugitive hour. And you, yourself, what are you, what do you call
your soul? It is just a glorious dream made of brief emotions and
glittering thoughts, a thin dance of fireflies spreading through the
night, a sparkling ferment in life’s sunlit mire.
“Does your heart wish to claim immortality? You have been
loudly protesting to the eternal witnesses that Satyavan and you are
eternal powers and that you will last! Death only lasts and the
Inconscient Void. I, Death, am the only eternal and I last. I am the
shapeless and formidable Vast, and I am the emptiness that men
call space, I am timeless Nothingness carrying all. I am the
illimitable, the mute Alone. I, Death, am He, there is no other God. I
have made this world out of my Inconscient Force. Nature is my
Force and it creates and slays the hearts that hope and limbs that
long to live longer. I have made man Nature’s instrument and slave;
I have made his body my banquet and his life my food. Man has no
one he can turn to but Death. He comes to me at the end of it all for
rest and peace. I, Death, am the sole refuge of your soul.
“The gods that men pray to for help cannot really help him,
because they are my imaginations and my moods reflected in him
by the power of my imagination. That which you see as your
immortal God is a shadowy icon of my infinite, it is Death dreaming
of eternity in you. I am the Immobile in which all things move, the
vast emptiness in which they cease. I have no body and no tongue
to speak. The human eye can not see me, nor the ear hear me.
Because your thought gave a form to my emptiness, and you have
called me to wrestle with your soul, I have assumed a face, a form, a
voice.
“But if there is a Being witnessing all this, how would he help
you in fulfilling your desire? Aloof from everything, he would
watch, calm and totally indifferent to your cry for help. His is a
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being pure and motionless, uninvolved with anything. That one
lives for ever. There is no Satyavan there, nor Savitri claims there for
her brief life her bribe of joy. Love never can come there with tears
in his eyes. Neither Time is there, nor Space. That Reality wears no
face and has no name. It has no heart that throbs. It has no one else
to share its joys with. It is delight alone for all time.
“If you desire immortality, then learn to be sufficient unto
yourself. Live by yourself. Forget the man you love. Wait in that
grand aloofness until my death comes to you to liberate you from
life. Then you will rise to your unmoved source.”
Savitri responded calmly to the God of Death in these words:
“O Death, you reason. I reason not. Your reason scrutinizes
things and breaks them in the process, but it cannot rebuild them or
even when it does try to build, it suspects her work. I am, I love, I
see, I act, I will.”
Savitri is telling Death that there are many things about our life
which reason cannot figure out. Reason cannot repudiate, nor
explain the fact that Savitri exists, that she is no figment of
anybody’s imagination. In the same manner love is a domain totally
beyond the comprehension of reason. All that reason can see about
love is that it is another name for the body’s craving for physical
bliss. Reason has no clue to love. Then Savitri adds also that she acts
and she wills. She has the capacity to change the present and bring
about another future. All these seem to be beyond the purview of
reason. Life has come out of the chaos of the inconscience. No
reason could have foreseen this, nor can it explain it away. Love and
hope are the verities of life which are beyond reason’s
comprehension.
But Death answered back in a resounding cry:
“Know also. And if you know (how transient all this show you
see around you is, and in which you are participating), you shall
cease to love and cease to will and hope. And delivered from your
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heart, you will rest for ever and be still recognising the
impermanence of things.”
Savitri replied to Death on behalf of man:
”Only when I have loved enough and shall I truly know. Love in
me knows the truth which all the changing appearances hide. I
know that knowledge is a vast embrace. I know that everything is
myself. In every heart is hidden the One in myriad forms. I know
the calm Transcendent who bears this world. I also know him as the
veiled inhabitant of this visible world. I sense his secret act, His
intimate fire. I hear the murmur of His cosmic voice. I know that I
have come as a wave from God. All the great truths have lived in
me since my birth. The one who loves in us, the soul, the spark of
the Divine, has come down into this world in a form that is veiled
by death. Thus was man born among the huge stars endowed with
a mind and heart to conquer you, O Death.”
Savitri makes clear her intentions in following Death into his
kingdom. She hopes to conquer Death. There is something immortal
in man, the divine spark he essentially is, his soul. But it is veiled
here by death. Whatever the necessity of death at one time, man’s
destiny is not to remain for ever its prey.
It must be noticed that all the attempts made by Death to scare
Savitri, first through his physical immensity and then by putting
psychological pressure on her, have failed. Not only has she
fearlessly lived through all these experiences, she seems to have
emerged stronger and more determined. She is quite certain of one
great truth. The unborn and the undying reality about man is his
soul. This world in which he takes birth and the elements which
have given him his body, vital energies and his mind are also a
becoming of the Divine. Therefore there is no place for death in
such a world.
Death is baffled by Savitri. He knows that his eternal will is
ruthless and he is sure of his empire and confident of his might. So
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whatever he has heard so far from Savitri are nothing but violent
words from a helpless being, from a victim he has firmly under
control. All that Savitri has been saying is so disdainful to his ears
that for a while he just decides to ignore her and says nothing. He
stood there in silence, wrapped in darkness, like a figure
motionless, a shadow vague, surrounded by the terrors he can use
against all his adversaries. He looked like Rudra as his sombre face
appeared among the clouds, the crown of the night’s darkness
appeared like his matted hair, and on his forehead were the ashes of
the pyre.
Once more Savitri felt like a wanderer in the unending Night
facing the forbidding eyes of Death. She kept travelling through the
vasts which looked hopeless. Around her rolled the shuddering
wastes of gloom; its emptiness threatened to swallow her. This was
the kingdom of death which was hostile to her thought, her life and
her love. Through the long fading night, gliding half-seen on their
unearthly path, phantasmal in the dimness moved the three, Death,
Satyavan’s spirit and Savitri. But already the initiative seems to
have come to Savitri and she seems to be guiding the group through
this night.
This brings us to the end of Book IX. We have seen in this Book
the first round of the confrontation between Savitri and Death, and,
on the whole, Savitri seems to have held her ground. Her resolve to
retrieve Satyavan from the grip of Death has become stronger. No
terror Death subjects her to can daunt her spirit. In fact, as the poet
has subtly suggested in the line, ‘Through the long fading night by her
compelled,’ the initiative seems now to have come into the hands of
Savitri.
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20: Book X, Canto 1 – The Dream Twilight of the Ideal
We concluded our survey of Book IX of Savitri in the preceding

chapter. If you take a look a the contents of Part Three of this epic
poem, you will notice that the journey which begins with Death
leading Satyavan’s soul and Savitri through the realm of the Eternal
Night proceeds then through two realms of twilight – the Twilight
of the Ideal and the Twilight of the Earthly Real – before it arrives
and concludes in the Eternal Day of Savitri’s victory over death.
When Death realises that Savitri’s spirit is dauntless and cannot
be subdued through terror, psychological or physical, he changes
his strategy and tries to convince her that the ideals she cherishes in
her heart are empty of any real significance and hardly worth
realising. You will see in the rest of this interchange between Savitri
and Death, the latter changing his philosophical position, his one
aim being to convince Savitri that nothing is to be gained by
following Satyavan’s soul. But Savitri is relentless in her pursuit,
and as their interchange proceeds Death realises the truth behind
Savitri’s position. But that is jumping ahead in our story.
Section 1
In this canto, (Canto 1 of Book X) we have a description of the realm
through which the trio is now travelling. It was still dark all around
them, which made everything look dreadful and desolate. It looked
as if there was not going to be any change in this scene. Savitri felt
as though she was living through a black dream where every thing
was emptiness, and she was walking towards nowhere in this land
of emptiness. They seemed to be drifting for ever without aim or
goal. Gloom led to worse gloom, death to an emptier death, in some
positive Non-being’s purposeless Vast, through formless wastes,
dumb and unknowable. The poet makes here the emptiness and the
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sense of purposelessness almost palpable.
Through the despairing darkness a beam of suffering light, now
looking totally futile in this formless and dumb Vast, dogged their
steps. Even as this light grew it seemed almost unreal and out of
place there, and like a pale ghost it haunted this chill, stupendous
realm of the Nihil.
Why was Savitri being subjected to all this suffering? It was as
though she was being required to atone for her presumption to exist
and think in this Nihil’s realm. She must absolve now with endless
pangs of suffering her deep original sin. And what was her original
sin? – The will to be, and the spiritual pride she exhibited. What did
Death see as an “exhibition of pride” in her? How could she, who
was made of dust, aspire to equal heaven and claim to be immortal
and divine? Shouldn’t she realise that she was no more than a worm
writhing in the mud, condemned to be ephemeral for ever. How
then could she refuse to remain ephemeral, just a casual dream of
nature, and instead claim to be a spark of the divine insisting on her
right to be immortal and divine?
This most she must absolve with endless pangs,

Her deep original sin, the will to be
And the sin last, greatest, the spiritual pride,
That, made of dust, equalled itself with heaven,
Its scorn of the worm writhing in the mud,
Condemned ephemeral, born from Nature’s dream,
Refusal of the transient creature’s role,
The claim to be a living fire of God,
The will to be immortal and divine.
p. 599 lines 19–27
Savitri atoned in that heavy and empty darkness for all has
happened since the first act from which sprang the error of
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consciousness in time, the tearing of the Inconscient’s seal of sleep.
This was the original and unpardonable revolt that broke the peace
and silence of the Nothingness. In the beginning all that existed was
Nothingness before an apparent universe appeared in the vanity of
imagined space, and life arose in it nursing grief and pain. A great
Negation was the face of the Real and it prohibited even the process
of Time as something vain. This Nothingness will be the one thing
that will last when there will be no world, no creature, and when
the intrusion of Time would have been blotted out. This
Nothingness will then be at peace – without any form and any
thought. Savitri was accursed in her godhead source and was
condemned to live for ever empty of bliss. Her spirit was held
guilty of coming into existence and it wandered around moving in
this eternal Night.
The poet now intervenes and assures us that Maya, this outward
appearance of emptiness and darkness, is only a veil on the face of
the Absolute. A great occult Truth has made this vast world. The
Eternal’s wisdom and self-knowledge act even in the ignorant mind
and in all the movements of the body. What looks like the
Inconscient is in fact the sleep of the Superconscient; it is as if the
Superconscient has fallen into a coma. An intelligence, too vast for
our present understanding, has created this profoundly paradoxical
universe. In all the forms of nature, the Spirit is hidden; although
unseen it throws out an energy and works miraculously like a
machine (whose source of power we do not see).
All here is a mystery woven out of contraries; darkness is, in fact,
Light self-hidden, and suffering is only a tragic mask of some secret
rapture, and death itself is an instrument of perpetual life. Then the
poet presents to us this altogether different perspective on death,
not the usual one as the denial of life.
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Although Death walks beside us on Life’s road,
A dim bystander at the body’s start
And a last judgment on man’s futile works,
Other is the riddle of its ambiguous face:
Death is a stair, a door, a stumbling stride
The soul must take to cross from birth to birth,
A grey defeat pregnant with victory,
A whip to lash us towards our deathless state.
pp. 600-601, lines 61-68
Death is our companion and walks alongside of us throughout our

life. At the beginning of the bodily life, it is there as an unnoticed
spectator, and at the end of this bodily life it comes like a judgment
on man’s futile efforts all through life. On its ambiguous face there
is a riddle writ large. Death is in fact like a stair or a door; it is a
stumble we must take to cross from one birth to the next, from one
life to the next. It may look like a defeat since it ends one life, but it
also heralds a victory because one who dies is certain to be reborn.
It is like a painful lash of a whip which constantly keeps reminding
us of the deathless state which is our destiny. Stung by death, man
strives to transcend death.
The Inconscient world is but a self-projection of the spirit. What
looks like eternal Night is no more than the shadow of Eternal Day.
Night is neither our beginning nor our end. She is only the dark
Mother in whose womb we hide ourselves so that we remain safe
until we are ready to face world-pain. We come to this dark Mother
from a supernal Light, and by that light we live and ultimately we
go to it as our destination.
One important aspect of Sri Aurobindo’s vision is that he notices
the darkness around as much as any one else, but he sees beyond it
and finds a reason even for the interim darkness. This spirit of hope
and optimism keeps throbbing throughout Savitri and that is one of
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the reasons why we always feel refreshed and at peace when we
read a passage or two from this great epic poem.
We now return to our story. Here in this land of darkness
through which Savitri is now moving, in the heart of this seemingly
everlasting Nothingness, Light conquered now as the feeble beam
(mentioned earlier in lines 9-14 of this canto) infiltrated into the
blind and deaf mass of darkness. Almost the scene changed into a
glimmering sight. A golden fire came in and burned the heart of
this Darkness. Her mindlessness began to dream. The Inconscient
began to grow conscious, even this Night seems to have feelings
and thoughts. The intolerant Darkness paled and began to
withdraw and only a few remnants of it stained the bright light.
Then on the distant horizon, the great dragon body of the
Inconscient suddenly loomed. This is the adversary of the slow
struggling dawn. The dragon of the Inconscient keeps trying to
defend itself. This dragon was seen fleeing down a grey slope of
Time.
Section 2
The scene has entirely changed now. There was now what
resembled a morning twilight of the gods, when the forms of the
gods arise from sleep looking miraculous, as if God’s long nights
are justified by the brilliance of the dawns that follow them. There
breaks out a passion and splendour of new birth, and multi-
coloured visions appear before the eyes. Dim-eyed space wakes up
to a heavenly chanting, and the dreaming deities fashion in their
thoughts ideal worlds. These are like concrete shapes taken by
desires that were once housed in some deep heart. (This creation
itself is believed to be a manifestation of the desire that arose in the
heart of the Transcendent Supreme.)
Now the heaviness of the blind darkness had lifted and the
oppressive sorrow of the Night was no more. Savitri slipped into a
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happy, misty twilit world where all seemed to be running after light
and joy and love. This too was a strange world in which one felt as
though things anticipated to bring delight and rapture to one’s
heart were moving closer to one all the time, and yet they always
remained beyond one’s reach. And yet they brought a strange
feeling of ecstasy. There was a pearly indistinctness all around and
it looked as though this world could not allow too much light. The
predominant note of this realm was vagueness or indistinctness
which the poet describes in these words:
Vague fields were there, vague pastures gleamed, vague trees,

Vague scenes dim-hearted in a drifting haze;
Vague cattle white roamed glimmering through the mist;
Vague spirits wandered with a bodiless cry,
Vague melodies touched the soul and fled pursued
Into harmonious distances unseized;
Forms subtly elusive and half-luminous powers
Wishing no goal for their unearthly course
Strayed happily through vague ideal lands,
Or floated without footing or their walk
Left steps of reverie on sweet memory’s ground;
Or they paced to the mighty measure of their thoughts
Led by a low far chanting of the gods.
p. 602, lines 117–129
These fugitive beings, these elusive shapes were all that met the eye
and delighted the soul and these were the inhabitants of this world.
Subtle, half-luminous, elusive forms and powers wandered
happily though these vague ideal lands; they floated or walked as in
a reverie; they seemed to be pacing to the great rhythms of their
thoughts, led by a low and distant intoning of the gods.
A wave of shining wings crossed the far sky like pale
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imaginations. Their indistinct lowings were like the disturbing
voices of desire. It was as though one heard the brilliant herds of the
Sun-god hidden in mist and moving towards the sun.
But nothing there was fixed or stayed for long. No embodiment
could linger there, no mortal feet could rest upon that soil. In that
world neither joy nor beauty could stay for long in one place since
they kept fleeing all the time. And yet since the same glad note was
repeated often, it gave the feeling of an enduring world. There was
a strange consistency of shapes and of thoughts that passed by, and
all renewed its charm alluring the expectant heart like music that
one always waits to hear, like the recurrence of a haunting rhyme.
One touched always things one could never seize. It was as though
one was in a world skirting an invisible divine world. There
showered upon the floating atmosphere colours and lights that
made this world look like a magical heaven, and each cry that fell
on the ear there was the voice of an unrealised bliss.
One felt there an elusive presence of unearthly beauty and
ungrasped delight whose thrill, however brief and vague, seemed
much more sweet than any rapture known to us either on earth or
heaven. In this twilight world all is shadowy, nothing is clearly
outlined – like figures dancing on a sheet of fire or wonderful forms
in a hued blur, or fleeting landscapes appearing as paintings on
silvery mists. All things in this fair world were strange in a
heavenly way; and there was a fleeting gladness of untired delight.
Savitri journeyed past vanishing hedges and glimpses of fields,
rapidly passing amidst lanes that seemed to flee beneath her feet;
she did not feel like ending this journey through this enchanting
realm. She felt as though she was walking through mystic space – as
though she was walking through clouds upon a mountain slope,
hearing the sound of unseen streams. She felt the charm of formless
touches upon herself and heard the sweet and melodious cry of the
winds.
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In this twilit world, everything was a sweet promise but nothing
substantial was ever grasped. Everything was tantalisingly sweet
yet always fleeting, nothing was fixed and steady. One felt desires
which did not hurt but these desires did not get any fulfilment
either. Everything seemed to last for ever but nothing stayed the
same for long.
The poet piles up details to create the feeling one would get if
one stood in such a world watching it – everything enchantingly,
seductively beautiful and soft and comforting, but nothing steady
or firm.
In this beauty as of mind made visible,

Dressed in its rays of wonder Satyavan
Before her seemed the centre of its charm,
Head of her loveliness of longing dreams
And captain of the fancies of her soul.
Even the dreadful majesty of Death’s face
And its sombre sadness could not darken nor slay
The intangible lustre of those fleeting skies.
p. 605, lines 227–234
As Savitri watched this enchanting world, Satyavan dressed in

wondrous rays appeared to be the very centre of this charm, the
source of all the loveliness of her longing dreams and the captain of
the fancies of her soul. Even the dreadful majesty of the face of
Death and its sadness could not mar the lustre and enchantment of
this world. In fact the sombre presence of Death rendered the
beauty and happiness of this world seemingly indispensable. It
made the air of this place look brighter and happier.
Even Savitri looked intangible in this world. Partly conquered by
the dream-like happiness of this world, Savitri moved about in that
world of enchantment for a while, but she was ever in possession of
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her soul and therefore did not feel lost in that world. Like an eternal
star her spirit stood above everything, saw everything but lived
aloof, focussed on its high task.
We have now the physical and psychological backdrop for the
remaining three cantos of Book Ten which follow this canto. The
argument which death can now present is that all ideals like the
ones that Savitri is pursuing now, come from this insubstantial
world and are therefore bound to remain vague, insubstantial and
therefore unrealisable in practice.
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21: Book X, Canto 2 (lines 1–164)

Vague melodies touched the soul and fled pursued
Into harmonious distances unseized;
Forms subtly elusive and half-luminous powers
Wishing no goal for their unearthly course
Strayed happily through vague ideal lands,
Or floated without footing or their walk
Left steps of reverie on sweet memory’s ground;
Or they paced to the mighty measure of their thoughts
Led by a low far chanting of the gods.
p. 602 lines 117–129
This, as we saw in Canto 1 of Book X, is a description of the land of

twilight Savitri is now passing through, along with Death and the
soul of Satyavan. This is indeed a land of vague enchantment,
where nothing is substantial.
So far, there has been silence all around them. Then was heard
the booming voice, calm but relentless, of the God of Death. There
was something about that voice which seemed to abolish all hope
and cancel all the golden truths one would like to believe in. It also
made the delightful world through which they were passing appear
frail and thin. Death spoke to Savitri thus:
“O prisoner of Nature, dreamer of visions, every thing around
you is unsubstantial; you are yourself a creature of thought enjoying
an insubstantial immortality in the realm of ideals. Look at these
fleeing light-tasselled shapes; these are like unbodied images
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painted by man’s illusions on some ethereal raiment. These shapes
figure a rapture of things that can never take birth on earth. Here
hope builds on hope, cloud satisfies cloud, one phantom breeds
another. All this is sweet. This is the stuff from which your ideals
are made. The real fabricator is thought and the motivation comes
from the heart’s desire. The ideal has no place to dwell; it can dwell
neither in heaven nor on earth. Drunk with the wine of his own
fantasy, man has created all these images in a frenzied excitement of
hope. The blue of the sky is a creation of the vision’s error, so is the
arch of the rainbow. These are all the tricks caused by the error in
the viewer’s vision. What you call the soul is indeed your mortal
longing.
“This angel in your body that you call love has wings which take
the colour of your emotions and it is born in a ferment of your body.
With the death of the body which houses it, love too must die. It is a
passion of your yearning cells; it is flesh that calls to flesh to serve
its lust. It is your mind that seeks an answering mind and dreams
awhile that it has found its mate. It is your life that seeks a human
prop to sustain its weakness, lonely in the world. Love is a hunger
that feeds on another life. It is a beast of prey that pauses in its
prowl; it crouches under a bush in splendid flower to seize a heart
and body for its food. It is this beast which you call love and you
dream that it is immortal and a god.
“O human mind, love is at best an hour’s delight, but you vainly
torture it and try to stretch through the long void of your entire life
its passionless gulfs. You are trying to lend eternity to something as
fleeting as love. You trick yourself into casting the fragile
movements of your heart into the spirit’s pattern of immortality. All
here is born out of Nothingness and is encircled by the emptiness of
space as long as it lasts; it is held aloft for awhile by some Force we
do not even understand and it relapses into the Nought from which
it has come. Only the mute Alone can exist for ever and in that
Alone, there is no room for love.
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“You clothe love’s perishable mud with the ideal’s gorgeous and
unfading robe which you have woven on the Immortal’s borrowed
loom. The ideal always remains an ideal, it is never made real here.
When you try to imprison it in a body, it doesn’t live any more;
when shut in a body, it ceases to breathe. Intangible, remote, and for
ever pure, it is a sovereign of its own brilliant void. It descends
reluctantly to earth and inhabits a white temple in man’s heart
where it shines but is rejected by his life. Immutable, bodiless,
beautiful, grand and dumb (in the sense of not having the capacity
to propel itself into realisation), the ideal sits immobile on its
shining throne; it receives man’s offerings and his prayer but is too
dumb to act. It has no voice to respond to his call, no feet on which
it can move, no hands to take his gifts. The ideal is a fanciful and
unsubstantial statue of the bare idea; its light stirs man the thinker
to create an earthly semblance of diviner things. Its coloured
reflections fall upon man’s acts. His institutions are its tombs
(‘cenotaph’ = a tomb or a monument erected in honour of a person
whose remains are elsewhere); he signs his dead conventions with
its name and clothes his virtues with the ideal’s ethereal robes,
hiding their littleness with the Divine Name. The ideal has for its
face only an outline covered by a luminous vapour. Yet the bright
pretence of ideals is insufficient to hide their impoverished and
earthly make.
“All we have is the earth and not a heavenly source for the
ideals. If heavens there are, they are veiled in their own light. If a
Truth eternal somewhere reigns unknown it burns in a tremendous
void of God, for Truth shines far from the falsehoods of the world.
How can the heavens come down to unhappy earth, or the Eternal
lodge in drifting time? How do you expect the Ideal to come down
and walk on the miserable earth, where life is only hard labour
done hoping in vain for better things? Life is a child of Matter and is
sustained by Matter, a low-burning fire in the furnace of Nature,
just a brief wave that rises only to break upon a shore in Time. It is a
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toilsome and laborious march with death as its only goal.
“Even the Avatars have lived and died in vain (without being
able to change life’s basic nature or quality); vain was the sage’s
thought, the prophet’s voice; in vain is seen the shining Upward
Way. Earth lies unchanged beneath the circling sun – she loves her
fall and no omnipotence can erase her mortal imperfections, or force
upon man’s crooked ignorance Heaven’s straight line, or colonise a
world of death with gods.”
This is quite a damning indictment of all ideals and idealists. The
God of Death now speaks like a philosopher criticising idealism. As
this encounter continues, you will see him changing his position,
but whatever position he takes, from that position he mounts a
ferocious attack on the stand taken by Savitri. He combines
effectively common wisdom, philosophic acumen and sarcasm, and
tries to make an effective case against Savitri’s idealist position. And
here he attacks the very heart of her enterprise, namely, love. Savitri
has persisted in following him and Satyavan in the forbidden land
of death in pursuit of the man she loves – Satyavan. The aim of her
heroic effort is to get back Satyavan because she loves him. Death
tries to impress on her how unsubstantial this ideal of love is, like
all ideals. Like all ideals it feeds on human fancy and never gets
realised on earth. The world from which all ideals come is an
unsubstantial world built by man’s thought, which projects human
desires into this world. Since these have no contact with the earth,
the ideals can live only in their ethereal world. Just as there is no
physical reality to the blue of the sky or to the arch of the rainbow,
so also there is no reality to any of the ideals. Ideals are mute, lame
and inert; they have no will in them to propel themselves into
realisation. The institutions raised to house the ideals end as their
cenotaphs, empty tombs, because the ideals can never live on earth,
never get realised on earth; they are too insubstantial to have
bodies. Ideals can not descend on earth which is such an unhappy
place full of falsehood and corruption.
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Then he comes out with a severe indictment on all idealists,
which stings but it is not entirely untrue:
The Avatars have lived and died in vain,

Vain was the sage’s thought, the prophet’s voice;
In vain is seen the shining upward Way.
Earth lies unchanged beneath the circling sun;
She loves her fall and no omnipotence
Her mortal imperfections can erase,
Force on man’s crooked ignorance Heaven’s straight line
Or colonise a world of death with gods.
pp. 609–610 lines 101–109
It cannot be denied that in spite of the appearance on earth of

prophets and men of God from time to time, great souls who appear
to be Avatars, the load of suffering on the back of man is still
crushing. Man is still being lashed by falsehood, ignorance, ego, and
death. The shining upward way shown by these great souls remains
untravelled after some time and earth lies unchanged. This is
because we seem to love the fetters of ignorance which hold us
down here. The omnipotence, or the power that is needed to erase
the imperfections of man, has not yet descended on earth. Human
nature continues to be crooked like the tail of a dog: it cannot yet be
transformed and made straight, therefore we have not been able to
colonise this world of death with immortal gods, which, we believe,
is our secret destiny.
The God of Death now mounts almost a frontal attack on Love,
his “bête noire”. Love is his favourite target, because Savitri puts it at
the apex of the spiritual values to be pursued in life. He does this by
presenting a cameo portraying the transience of love among
humans. Its sarcasm is biting and cynicism chilling. It reads like an
outline of one of the modern novels.
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Let us listen to the God of Death.
“O high priestess in the holy fancy’s shrine, who with a magic
ritual in earth’s house worships the ideal of Love, what is this love
your thought has deified? It is only a conscious yearning of your
flesh, it is glorious burning of your nerves:
What is this love thy thought has deified,

This sacred legend and immortal myth?
It is a conscious yearning of thy flesh,
It is a glorious burning of thy nerves,
A rose of dream-splendour petalling thy mind,
A great red rapture and torture of thy heart.
A sudden transfiguration of thy days,
It passes and the world is as before.
p. 610 lines 113–120
“However rosy love may appear, however magical its breath, it

passes as suddenly as it comes, and then the world looks as dull as
it always looked. But as long as it is alive, it gives a ravishing edge
of sweetness and pain to life, a thrill in its yearning makes it seem
divine, a golden bridge across the expanse of years, a cord tying you
with eternity. And yet how brief and frail! How soon is spent this
treasure wasted by the gods on man, this happy closeness of soul to
soul, this honey of the body’s companionship, this heightened joy,
this ecstasy in the veins, this strange illumination of the sense!”
Consider these lines which give a telling comment on normal
human love, and see how simply and yet cunningly they are
crafted:
If Satyavan had lived, love would have died;

But Satyavan is dead and love shall live
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A little while in thy sad breast, until
His face and body fade on memory’s wall
Where other bodies, other faces come.
p. 610, lines: 131–135
When the poet says, ‘But Satyavan is dead and love shall live’, we
expect him to say something less biting about love than what he
actually says. First he says it shall live only for a short while in
Savitri’s memory, until even this is obliterated by the tangible
reality of other bodies, faces. In five short lines, the poet arrests the
short-lived character of all vital love in a memorable way. Let us
now continue with what the God of death has to say:
“When love breaks suddenly into his life, man steps first into a
world of the sun. In his passion he feels the heavenly element
hidden in himself. But only a small sunlit patch of earth has caught
the marvel of heaven’s sunburst. The snake is there, and the worm
in the heart of the rose. A word, a moment’s act, can slay this god of
love. His immortality is indeed very precarious – depending
entirely on uncertain circumstances. This god of love has thousand
ways to suffer and die; he cannot live by heavenly food alone; he
can survive only on earthly sustenance.
“You must realise that your passion is a sensual want refined, it
is no more than a hunger of your body and heart. Your want can
tire and cease, or turn elsewhere; or love can meet a dire and pitiless
end by bitter treason, or wrath inflicting cruel wounds and thus
separate the lovers. Or your unsatisfied will may depart to others
when love’s joy lies stripped and slain. Then a dull indifference
replaces the original fire of love, or an endearing habit imitates love.
An outward and uneasy union lasts, or the routine of a life’s
compromise. Where once the seed of oneness had been cast, two
strive, constant associates without joy, two egos straining in a single
leash, two minds divided by their jarring thoughts, two spirits
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disjoined, for ever separate. Thus is the Ideal falsified in man’s
world. Trivial or sombre, disillusion comes; life’s harsh reality stares
at the soul.
“Death saves you from all this disenchantment and frustration,
and saves Satyavan too. He now is safe, delivered from himself. He
travels to silence and felicity. Call him not back to the treacheries of
earth and to the poor petty life of animal man. In my vast tranquil
spaces let him sleep in harmony with the mighty hush of death,
where love lies slumbering on the breast of peace.”
This indeed is a most impressive case that Death builds against
love. You cannot hold him guilty of either misrepresentation or of
indulging in too much exaggeration. Nor is he spreading a
falsehood. What he says is in fact true of all vital love.
He catches the magical moment when two people fall in love
and graphically describes the precariousness of the whole thing. As
he says, there are a thousand ways in which love can suffer and die.
He correctly diagnoses the nature of this love. It is a ‘sensual want
refined’, ‘a hunger of the body and the heart’. And like everything that
originates in the vital, it is short-lived; and when love dies, for
whatever reason, ‘an endearing habit imitates love’, or ‘the routine of a
life’s compromise’. Love is an attempt to find one’s identity in
someone else; it is ‘an adventure of heavenly powers’. It fails because
the vital is not the locus of true love; it can only reflect true love.
True love belongs to the soul. When one fails to use the vital love as
a ladder to reach its true source, and wallows in it, it gets spent
soon. And when that happens, the lovers begin to resemble two
egos tied to a single leash, each growling against the other and
trying to pull in the way it chooses. It reminds one of the ruckus
created by two dogs tied to a single leash.
At this point we can only note that the God of Death has seen
only a very limited aspect of love. Savitri will slowly show him the
other, more divine aspects of love.
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22: Book X, Canto 2 (Lines 165–280)
Death tries to convince Savitri that love which she claims she is
pursuing in following Satyavan’s soul into the kingdom of death is
a precarious thing and has ‘a thousand ways to suffer and die’. Since it
is no more than ‘a sensual want refined/ A hunger of the body and the
heart’, this want can tire and cease or turn elsewhere. He predicts
that her love for Satyavan would have gone the way of all such
love. He predicts the dire end of this love in these words:
Two strive, constant associates without joy,

Two egos straining in a single leash,
Two minds divided by their jarring thoughts,
Two spirits disjoined, for ever separate.
p. 611 lines 161–164
Then he triumphantly concludes that he has saved her and

Satyavan from this disaster by taking away Satyavan’s life. He
urges her not to ‘Call him back to the treacheries of earth’, since he is
now resting in tranquillity in the world of death.
He asks her to go back alone to her frail world. He advises her to
chasten her heart with the knowledge of the real. “Discard the veil
of idealism,” he admonishes her, “that has prevented you from
seeing the reality of love.” All delight in this world must end sooner
or later. When one is given to dreaming, hard necessity smites one
awake. “You will be able to see clearly and recognise the truth of
what I am saying when your heart is freed from all attachments.
Vain are the spiralling thoughts of your brilliant mind. Renounce
everything, your joy, hope and tears, in the bosom of my profound
Nothingness and silent calm. Forget this vain waste of your spirit’s
force. Forget the vague spiritual quest that first started when these
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worlds burst forth like so many clusters of fire-flowers, and great
and intense thoughts passed through the mind, and time rolled
across the vasts and souls emerged into this state of mortality.”
But Savitri was unmoved and replied to the dark Power:
“What you have now played to me, O Death, is dangerous
music. You have fluted it alluringly to tired hopes. You have
mingled your falsehoods with sad strains of truth. But I forbid your
voice to slay my soul.”
Then she declares the great truth of love that governs her life:
“My love is not a hunger of the heart,

My love is not a craving of the flesh;
It came to me from God, to God returns.
Even in all that life and man have marred,
A whisper of divinity still is heard,
A breath is felt from the eternal spheres.”
p. 612–613 lines 206–211
For Savitri, love is not something that is primarily a matter of ‘heart

or flesh’, not based in the vital but coming from a much deeper
source: it comes from God, or that which reflects God in us, our
soul. Such a love is given back to the soul of the person we love, to
the God in the beloved.
“Even in all that life and man have marred, a whisper of divinity
still is heard in love, a breath is felt from the eternal spheres. Even
when love is reflected by the vital in man, in that sweet fire-rhythm
of love, we can feel something of the eternal spheres of the soul to
which it belongs. That is what makes vital love so wonderful,
although if not properly nurtured, it can show all perversions. Even
in the wild cry of this mundane love, there is infinite hope. It brings
us intimations from the forgotten heights of our soul. And its strains
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reach the high-winged souls in their empyrean and reach even
beyond as a voice of the eternal Ecstasy.
“One day I shall behold my great sweet world put off the
dreadful disguises forced upon it by the gods, see it step out of the
veil of terror cast on it and cast off the robe of sin. When this
happens, we shall draw near the face of the Divine Mother and
repose our candid souls upon her lap. Then will we be able to
embrace the ecstasy that we have till now unsuccessfully chased;
only then will we thrill with the long-sought God of Love; then will
we find in it the unexpected felicities of heaven.
“Because of love, there is hope not only for the godheads that are
pure but also for the violent and darkened deities that leaped down
in rage from the breast of the Supreme to find what the white gods
(the pure ones) have missed. They (the Asuric forces) too are safe,
because the Mother’s eyes are on them and her arms are stretched
out in love and she wants to claim these rebel sons of hers.”
Please note that there is a belief that when the Supreme decided
to manifest himself, he sent out four emanations from himself.
These were Light or Consciousness, Ananda, Truth, and Life. But
these forces got separated from the Divine and changed into
falsehood: Light or Consciousness became Darkness and
Inconscience, Ananda became hatred and suffering, Truth became
Falsehood, and Life became Death. Thus the first four emanations
sent out by the Divine ended up by becoming hostile or adverse
forces, Asuras. Their aim is to prevent this creation from
manifesting the perfection of the divine. Now to bring them back
into the fold of the Divine, the Supreme had to do something, and
so he sent down into creation a strong vibration of Divine Love.
This is intended to transform the Asuras into powers serving the
Divine. I shall give here a quotation from the Mother on this subject:
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Love is a supreme force which the Eternal
Consciousness sent down from itself into an obscure
and darkened world that it might bring back that
world and its beings to the Divine. Love came into the
darkness; it awakened all that lay there asleep; it
whispered, opening the ears that were sealed, “There is
something that is worth waking to, worth living for,
and it is love.” And with the awakening of love there
entered into the world the possibility of coming back to
the Divine. The creation moves upwards through love
towards the Divine and in answer there leans
downward to meet the creation divine Love and Grace.
MCW 3: 73-74.
Now we return to the text of Savitri:

“The Eternal, who is at once the lover, the beloved and the love,
came and built himself a wondrous world and wove the measures
of a marvellous dance. There into its magic circles and turns he
comes when he feels attracted and when he is repelled, he runs
away. In the wild and winding movements of his mind, he enjoys
the honey (the rasa) of tears, putting aside joy in repentance; he goes
through the experience of anger and merriment since both are
derived from the broken notes of the music of his soul, which when
reconciled is really a seeking for the celestial rhythms. The eternal
comes to us again and again, each time with a new face, which is a
sweet recast of the old. His bliss laughs to us bewitchingly or calls
us from its secret place, like the magic notes of a flute from far-off
throbbing forests in the moonlight, making us to search for it
impatiently and in passionate anguish. This is how the disguised
Lover seeks and draws our soul.
“He named himself for me and became Satyavan. For we have
been man and woman from the first, like the twin souls born of one
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undying fire. Has he not met me in other worlds? Through the maze
of the world he has pursued me like a lion in the night, descending
upon me suddenly and seizing me with his glorious golden leap.
He was never satisfied with what he got of me; he longed for me
across the ages, some times angrily and impatiently and some times
with sweetness and in peace, desiring me always since the birth of
the world. From out of the veiled past his arms have come feeling
for me; they have touched me with the softness of a gentle wind;
they have plucked me like a glad and fulfilled flower, thrilled and
happy to be plucked. When they clasp me, I have always been
happy to be consumed in the relentless flame of love. I too have
found him charming me in many lovely forms. I have run in delight
chasing his voice coming from afar. I have pushed myself towards
him past many dreadful obstructions. If there is a happier and
greater god, let him first wear the face of Satyavan and let his soul
be one with the soul of Satyavan’s whom I love, and then let him
seek me if he wishes me to desire him. For in my breast beats only
one heart and that is given to Satyavan; only one god sits there
enthroned and that is Satyavan.
“O Death, advance beyond the phantom beauty of this
insubstantial world around you, for I am not one of its citizens. I
cherish love in the form of the flaming fire not in the form of a
phantom dream.”
I wonder whether anywhere in world literature we have
anything like this great declaration and affirmation of love that we
have just heard from Savitri. This is no apologetic defence of love
against Death’s tirade against love and its transience. It totally
demolishes all cynicism about love. We have seen earlier in this
canto how Death ridicules even the idea of love. He calls it a mere
physical want, a hunger of the flesh, a hunger that is transient and
fleeting. He even asks Savitri to be grateful to him because by taking
away Satyavan from her, he has spared the experience of the
collapse and death of her love.
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Where other bodies and other faces come.
p. 610 lines 131-135
This passage contains a most biting tirade against love; Death says
that it is always short-lived and the eternal love to which lovers
swear each other is a sham. As against this, Savitri’s declaration
contained in this passage (beginning from line 201) is a triumphal
declaration of love, its sweetness, and transforming power. Savitri is
lyrical in pointing out that this world is the creation of a God who is
essentially a lover and that the love between Savitri and Satyavan
began when life on this world began. Satyavan and Savitri have
pursued each other through several lives and sought each other
passionately. The intensity of love and its pursuit by Satyavan and
Savitri across several lives is expressed in the following memorable
lines:
Did he not dawn on me in other stars?

How has he through the thickets of the world
Pursued me like a lion in the night
And come upon me suddenly in the ways
And seized me with his glorious golden leap!
Unsatisfied he yearned for me through time,
Sometimes with wrath and sometimes with sweet peace
Desiring me since first the world began.
p. 612 lines 255–262
The following lines are a celebration of a great love fulfilled again
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and again in the lives of Satyavan and Savitri. Love for Savitri is not
a phantom of her imagination. It is something intensely real which
she has experienced.
He rose like a wild wave out of the floods

And dragged me helpless into seas of bliss.
Out of my curtained past his arms arrive;
They have touched me like the soft persuading wind,
They have plucked me like a glad and trembling flower,
And clasped me happily burned in ruthless flame.
p. 614 lines 263–268
Death had described human love as fickle and evanescent, saying

that for it, one pretty face is as good as any other. Savitri has given
in the following lines a most fitting reply to this charge and she
does it in a poetically most delightful manner with a declaration of
the eternity of her love for Satyavan.
I too have found him charmed in lovely forms

And run delighted to his distant voice
And pressed to him past many dreadful bars.
If there is a yet happier greater god,
Let him first wear the face of Satyavan
And let his soul be one with him I love;
So let him seek me that I may desire.
For only one heart beats within my breast
And one god sits there throned.
p. 614 lines 269–277
It should be noted here that Savitri does not deny the truth of what
the God of Death has been saying. There is a love which does not
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last because it belongs to the vital nature of man. But that is not the
whole truth about love. The God of Death has not seen the integral
truth about love – that there is a love which lasts, and this is the love
which has its roots in the human soul or spirit. Vital love has
glamour but it falls away when one gets to a higher level. I would
like you to reflect carefully on one of the letters of Sri Aurobindo on
this subject. The letter reads as follows:
It is the ordinary nature of vital love not to last or, if it

tries to last, not to satisfy, because it is a passion which
Nature has thrown in in order to serve a temporary
purpose; it is good enough therefore for a temporary
purpose and its normal tendency is to wane when it
has sufficiently served Nature’s purpose. In mankind,
as man is a more complex being, she calls in the aid of
imagination and idealism to help her push, gives a
sense of ardour, of beauty and fire and glory, but all
that wanes after a time. It cannot last, because it is all a
borrowed light and power, borrowed in the sense of
being a reflection caught from something beyond and
not native to the reflecting vital medium which
imagination uses for the purpose. Moreover, nothing
lasts in the mind and vital, all is a flux there. The one
thing that endures is the soul, the spirit. Therefore love
can last or satisfy only if it bases itself on the soul and
spirit, if it has its roots there. But that means living no
longer in the vital but in the soul and spirit.
The difficulty of the vital giving up is because the vital
is not governed by reason or knowledge, but by
instinct and impulse and the desire of pleasure. It
draws back because it is disappointed, because it
realises that the disappointment will always repeat
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itself, but it does not realise that the whole thing is
itself a glamour or, if it does, it repines that it should be
so. Where the vairagya is sattwic, born not of
disappointment but of the sense of greater and truer
things to be attained, this difficulty does not arise.
However, the vital can learn by experience, can learn
so much as to turn away from its regret of the beauty of
the will-o’-the-wisp. Its vairagya can become sattwic
and decisive.
Letters on Yoga, p. 761
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The God of Death is not yet ready to give up the campaign he has
mounted against idealism and idealists. According to him, Savitri
has been pursuing one of the flimsiest of these ideals, namely, love.
We have seen that Savitri does not completely reject his
condemnation of love as something transient and no more than a
physical want which the human imagination recasts into rainbow
colours. Savitri explains to Death that this is only one facet of love
among humans but it is not the entire truth about love. Love is born
in the soul and is reflected at a certain stage by the vital parts of our
being. If it remains restricted to that level, it certainly turns out to be
transient and a matter of the nerves and the flesh. She then declares
that the bond between her and Satyavan is a closeness woven
through several lives in each of which they have sought each other
passionately. Satyavan is the God that she has cherished and
pursued and if there is a happier God, he should first wear the face
of Satyavan and be one in soul with Satyavan.
The God of Death now directs his attack on idealism itself; he
dismisses all idealism as no more than a hallucination, a self-
deception. He continues his tirade against all idealism as follows:
“Savitri, you are only a slave of your own sensuous will. You
idealists send words coloured by the passion of your heart soaring
like eagles to meet the sun. But knowledge does not dwell in the
human heart. The heart has no true knowledge and the heart’s
words fall back unheard from the high throne of wisdom.
“Your longing to build a heaven on earth is in vain. The human
mind is good at inventing Ideals and it crafts beautiful ideas, but the
Mind itself is a child of Matter and Life. The mind tries to persuade
its parents – Matter and Life – to move upwards to higher levels of
existence; but they are not fit for this and can hardly follow in the
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footsteps of their daring guide. Though the Mind is a splendid
voyager in the sky, it walks lamely on the earth with slow and
faltering steps. The Mind finds it difficult to manage unruly life-
energies and to control the galloping footsteps of the senses. Man’s
thoughts look straight into the very high heavens and they draw
their gold from a celestial mine, but his acts work painfully at the
common ore of ordinary existence of material life.
“All your high ideals are but mere dreams fabricated by the
Mind, which is only the child of Matter, in order to comfort itself as
it works at its dull routine in the prison-house of Matter. This prison
is the only reality on this earth, and everything else is unreal. Matter
is the first-born among created things. It will alone remain when
mind and life are gone. If matter ended, all else would end. All else
here is a only an epiphenomenon, a secondary phenomenon
accompanying Matter and caused by it. What you call the soul is a
short-lived flower created by the Mind, who is only the gardener of
the Matter’s terrain plot. It too perishes when the plant on which it
grows (namely, the body) dies. The heavenly colour on the face of
the soul is drawn from the sap of the earth. Your thoughts are
flashes that move on the borders of Matter. Your life itself is but a
passing wave on the sea of Matter.
“Matter is a careful custodian of the limited means of Truth. It
guards its limited resources from being squandered wastefully by
Nature. It ties down mind to the tent-posts of sense. It fastens the
whims and fancies of Life to a dull, hard routine and ties all
creatures to the rule of Law. Matter is the vessel containing many
transforming alchemies that transmute the very nature of things. It
is the glue that holds Mind and Life together. If Matter fails, all else
crumples and falls. Matter is the veritable rock on which all stands
firm.
“Yet this security and guarantor of everything (all forms and
beings), turns out to be an impostor (a fraud) when you examine it
closely for its truth. It is found to be a cheat of substance, for there is
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no real substance; it is just an appearance, a symbol, a mere nothing.
Its forms have no intrinsic existence. What appears as a fixed
stability is in fact only a cover, a surface appearance of what is in
fact a whirl of an imprisoned energy in motion, a sequence in the
dance movements of an energy whose footprints always leave the
same impressions. It is the substantial appearance of something that
is itself unsubstantial. It is a trickle dotting empty space. It only
appears to be stationary but it is in reality a constantly changing
movement. Change comes, and the final change is death.
“What appears most real thus turns out to be a nihil’s show, a
show of Nothing. It throws up figures which trap and capture the
senses. An eternal Void is its fabricator. Look carefully behind the
appearances and you will see that there is nothing except some
aspects sketched out by Chance and some seeming shapes of an
Energy that is itself a mere seeming, not a reality.
“All things breathe here by the mercy of Death and live for
awhile; they even think and act by the grace of the Inconscient. But
then you get addicted to the luxury of your thoughts and you turn
your gaze within yourself to look at the visions in the gleaming
crystal of your mind; you even shut those eyes and think that you
see the forms of Gods in your reverie. But I would urge you to
consent to open your eyes to the reality that surrounds you and the
reality about you and your world. In the still, Inconscient Void, an
Inconscient world sprang up inexplicably. This world was secure
for some time, happy and undisturbed in its insensibility. But it
could not stay content for long with its own truth.
“This is because something was born on its Inconscient breast
which was compelled to see and know, to feel and to love. This was
a self-observant consciousness that watched its acts and imagined
that there was a soul within; it started searching for the truth behind
things and dreamed of Self and God. When all was unconscious, all
was well. I, Death, was the king and I kept my royal state. I
designed a plan of my own without even willing consciously, and it
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worked unerringly since all worked with a calm, unfeeling heart.
“Exercising my sovereign power of unreality, I obliged
nothingness to take a form. My blind, mechanical force acted
infallibly and created by chance a fixed order – as fixed as the
determinism of fate – and by its whims, it created the formulas of
Necessity. Thus was crated the concrete fantasy of nature’s scheme
on the hollow ground of the unfeeling Void.
“I created the five elements. I pressed ether and made from it
Space and the vibrating air, and this expanded and contracted to
provide the basis for fire. It was I who lighted the first spark and
made the stars out of the occult radiances, and marshalled platoons
of these stars into empty space and set them on their dance. Out of
atoms and gas I built the earth in its beauty and from the chemical
plasm I formed the living man.
“All this was harmonious and free from any pangs of suffering
or any touch of evil. Then Thought came in and spoiled everything.
Matter began to hope and think and feel; tissue and nerve began to
respond in terms of joy and agony. The Inconscient cosmos strove
to learn its task. An ignorant power took shape in the Mind and in
order to understand things, reason and its laws were invented. The
impersonal Vast of the Universe seemed to respond to man’s desire.
and the result was the great world which until then was peaceful
but was now thrown into agitation. Nature lost her wide immortal
calm.
“This is how this distorted, perplexing world came about, in
which the souls are enmeshed in the dualities of happiness and
sorrow, and caught up in the sleep of Matter and the mortality of
Mind. That is why we see around us beings imprisoned by Nature,
and awaiting death. Consciousness here is in the embrace of an
ignorance which seeks to know the slow-moving and often arrested
plan of evolution.
“This is the world in which you live, and move, O Savitri. You
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go astray in the confused ways and byways of the human mind;
you get absorbed in the pointless rounds of your life, vainly looking
for a soul and imagining there is a God somewhere here.
This is the world in which thou mov’st, astray

In the tangled pathways of the human mind,
In the issueless circling of thy human life,
Searching for thy soul and thinking God is here.
But where is room for soul or place for God
In the brute immensity of a machine?
A transient Breath thou takest for thy soul,
Born from a gas, a plasm, a sperm, a gene,
A magnified image of man’s mind for God,
A shadow of thyself thrown upon Space.
p. 618 lines 396–405
“But where is there room for soul or God in this brute immensity of
the machine that this world is? You take your transient breath for
your soul. How can there be a God here in this world born of gas,
and created entirely by Nature’s machinery and agencies, such as a
plasm, a sperm and a gene? You take a magnified image of man’s
mind for God, but your God is no more than a shadow of yourself
thrown on the vast screen of Space.
“Your consciousness is like a distorting mirror of ignorance that
reflects the world around it and there is a Void above it and a Void
below it. Your consciousness soars upwards as though to grasp the
stars but there is only a Void above you, filled, at best, with the
products of your own imagination. If there is even a partial Truth
that is at play with this earth, it only casts its faint light on the dark
shadowy ground, and so even if touches the earth, it leaves behind
it only a shining spot.
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Immortality thou claimest for thy spirit,
But immortality for imperfect man,
A god who hurts himself at every step,
Would be a cycle of eternal pain.
Wisdom and love thou claimest as thy right;
But knowledge in this world is error’s mate,
A brilliant procuress of Nescience,
And human love a posturer on earth-stage
Who imitates with verve a faery dance.
p. 618 lines 413–421
“You demand immortality for your spirit, but immortality would be

a cycle of eternal pain for man who is so imperfect that he hurts
himself at every step. You also demand wisdom and love as your
right, but in this world knowledge always has error as its
inseparable companion, and error is the means by which Nescience
manages to acquire knowledge. And human love is a fake on the
earth-stage, imitating the faery dance of true love with great verve.
“What is human knowledge after all? It is an extract processed
from hard experience and stored away in vats of memory, and it has
always the taste of a drink of human origin. And what is love? It is a
sweet secretion from the erotic glands, now exhilarating and then
again painful to the nerves; it is a sweet poison in the breast drunk
as if it were a nectar of the gods. Earth’s human wisdom is not by
any means an exalted power, nor is human love an angel from the
skies. If they aspire to rise beyond the dull air of earth, and to soar
towards the sun, how high would they be able to fly and what
height would they reach on their wings made of wax?
But not on earth can divine wisdom reign

And not on earth can divine love be found;
Heaven-born, only in heaven can they live;
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Or else there too perhaps they are shining dreams.
p. 619 lines 434–437
“Divine wisdom cannot reign on earth, nor can divine love be found
on earth. They are heaven-born and can therefore only live in
heaven. Or perhaps, they cannot be found even there and are but
glittering dreams.
“Come to think of it, is this not all a dream, all you are and all
you do here? Your mind and life are but just tricks played by
Matter’s force; they do not have any independent existence or truth
of their own. If your mind appears to you a bright sun of
illumination and your life a swift and grand dream, it is because of
the illusion of your mortal heart, which is dazzled by a mere ray of
happiness or knowledge, that comes its way.
“Mind and Life cannot live by their own right; they know that
they have no existence of their own and that they are only a
secondary phenomenon, although a brilliant epiphenomenon.
When their supporting base is cut away, these children of Matter
die and get absorbed once again into Matter. Even Matter has no
claims to being the primordial reality, because it vanishes into
Energy and Energy itself turns out to be a motion of the ancient
Nothing.
“How can you paint the unsubstantial and ethereal colours of
the ideal on the brilliant red blur of the earth? How can a dream
within a dream come doubly true? Man himself is an unsubstantial
dream of Matter, and how can his dreams, that is, his Ideals, ever
come true? How can such elusive and delusive things like ideals
ever become true like shining stars?
“The Ideal is a disease of your mind, a bright frenzy created by
your thought and speech, a heady wine of beauty raising you to a
false sight. It is only a noble fiction concocted by your intense
desires and therefore it must share your human imperfection. The
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actual forms the ideals take in the real world are always
disappointing to our heart, because they can never appear here in
their heavenly form, and never can they be fulfilled here in Time.
“O soul, you are misled by the splendour of your own thoughts,
O earthly creature, you dream of a heaven that can never be
reached. Be resigned and calmly accept your earthly lot. Accept the
little light that falls upon your days; take what you can from Life’s
permitted joy. Submit to the whip of Fate, and accept you share of
suffering, toil and anxiety. At long last, my long, calm night of
endless sleep in the form of death will come to you and wrap you
up in the silence from which you came and from which you will
never be able to escape.”
One must admire the skilful way in which Death here presents
its case against all idealism. It is comprehensive, based on an appeal
to the findings of modern science and common sense. A more
cogent case against idealism and in favour of Realism has never
been made, and that too in such wonderful poetry, anywhere in
world’s literature. In our next chapter, we will make a few
observations on this impassioned plea made for Realism by Death.
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24: Materialism, the Gospel of Death
Canto 2 of Book X of Savitri has the title “The Gospel of Death and
the Vanity of the Ideal”. We have seen that the God of Death
mounts a bitter attack on love in the first part of this canto, which
Savitri counters with a glorious defence of love. We still hear lines
like the following from Savitri reverberating through the corridors
of our mind:
My love is not a hunger of the heart,

A breath is felt from the eternal spheres.
Allowed by Heaven and wonderful to man
A sweet fire-rhythm of passion chants to love.
There is a hope in its wild infinite cry;
It rings with callings from forgotten heights,
And when its strains are hushed to high-winged souls
In their empyrean, its burning breath
Survives beyond, the rapturous core of suns
That flame for ever pure in skies unseen,
A voice of the eternal Ecstasy.
p. 612 lines 206–220
The second part of this canto consists of a very forceful

denunciation of all idealism as ‘a bright hallucination’, impossible to
realise on earth. Even here, as at the end of the long tirade against
love, what is preached is the gospel of death. Savitri is being offered
the ‘calm night of everlasting sleep’. Now, before we go on to the next
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canto (Canto 3 of Book X), it would be very interesting to examine
how exactly Death builds his case against all idealism.
The God of Death begins by denouncing the ‘longing to build
heaven on earth’ as a vain enterprise never likely to succeed in the
real world. The reason given is that this world is basically a world
of Matter. He goes on to claim that nothing can be allowed here
which challenges the sovereignty of Matter. Whoever refuses to
acknowledge that Matter is the supreme lord of all here does so at
his own peril. Death invites Savitri to meditate on this fundamental
reality of Matter.
All thy high dreams were made by Matter’s mind

To solace its dull work in Matter’s jail,
Its only house where it alone seems true.
A solid image of reality
Carved out of being to prop the works of Time,
Matter on the firm earth sits strong and sure.
It is the first-born of created things,
It stands the last when mind and life are slain,
And if it ended all would cease to be.
p. 615 lines 302–310
All the dreams of idealists are formed by their minds, which are
made of Matter. For the God of Death, Mind and Life are but
complex formations of Matter. Matter existed when there was no
life or mind, and Matter will continue to exist when Mind and Life
will cease to be. So Matter alone is real.
A vessel of transmuting alchemies,

A glue that sticks together mind and life,
If Matter fails, all crumbling cracks and falls.
All upon Matter stands as on a rock.
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p. 616 lines 323–326
Matter is the reality out of which all things are formed and upon
which all things are dependent for their continued existence. Matter
is a great truth, and this must be accepted by a seeker of integral
truth.
But Death goes beyond this when he declares that Matter is the
only truth of this creation, that it is the Absolute truth. To say that
Matter is a great truth does not necessarily mean that there are no
other truths, and that Life, Mind and Soul are but shadows of the
splendour of Matter. But this is what Death is claiming here. As for
thoughts, he describes them as ‘gleams that pass on Matter’s verge’,
and this in his view applies to all ideas and to the ideals that Savitri
has been trying to uphold. As for Life, he describes it as ‘a lapsing
wave on Matter’s sea’. Thus for him Life is no more than an accident
in the flux of the undirected motion of Matter.
This gospel of the monism of Matter too does not stand close
scrutiny, and falls apart into some sort of nihilism, because even
Matter turns out to be ‘a cheat of substance where no substance is’. The
fixed stability of Matter is in fact the cover of a captive motion’s
swirl – a fixed pattern of the movement of particles of energy, ‘a
stable-seeming movement without change’. Death puts the truth as he
sees it in these words:
Nothing is there but aspects limned by Chance

And seeming shapes of seeming Energy.
All by Death’s mercy breathe and live awhile,
All think and act by the Inconscient’s grace.
Addict of the roseate luxury of thy thoughts,
Turn not thy gaze within thyself to look
At visions in the gleaming crystal, Mind,
Close not thy lids to dream the forms of Gods.
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At last to open thy eyes consent and see
The stuff of which thou and the world are made.
p. 616 lines 343–352
Death tries to convince Savitri that all that she stands for and for
which she has been waging this struggle has no meaning and her
efforts are going to be in vain.
The world sprang forth inexplicably from the Inconscient into
the dumb Void of this universe. It looked secure and happy for
some time and everything worked according to Matter’s mechanical
law. With the aid of Death everything was carried out as form
changed into another form. But this peace was disturbed by
something which condemned this creation ‘to see and know, to feel
and love’; it groped for a truth and dreamed of Self and God, And
with that, all its troubles and anguish began. Death remembers the
old days before the trouble began:
I, Death, was king and kept my regal state,

Designing my unwilled, unerring plan,
Creating with a calm insentient heart.
In my sovereign power of unreality
Obliging nothingness to take a form,
Infallibly my blind unthinking force
Making by chance a fixity like fate’s,
By whim the formulas of Necessity,
Founded on the hollow ground of the Inane
The sure bizarrerie of Nature’s scheme.
p. 617 lines 362–371
But then this peaceful state was disturbed when man appeared and
with him came thought. In the mind of man are seeds of dissent and
disharmony. Man’s mind asks questions which have no answers
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and worries about meaning in a world which has no meaning. It
demands justice from the mechanical process governing this
creation.
I formed earth’s beauty out of atom and gas,

And built from chemic plasm the living man.
Then Thought came in and spoiled the harmonious world:
Matter began to hope and think and feel,
Tissue and nerve bore joy and agony.
The inconscient cosmos strove to learn its task;
An ignorant personal God was born in Mind
And to understand invented reason’s law,
The impersonal Vast throbbed back to man’s desire,
A trouble rocked the great world’s blind still heart
And Nature lost her wide immortal calm.
Thus came this warped incomprehensible scene
Of souls emmeshed in life’s delight and pain
And Matter’s sleep and Mind’s mortality,
Of beings in Nature’s prison waiting death
And consciousness left in seeking ignorance
p. 617 lines 379–394
Death built this earth and on earth he built man out of ‘chemic
plasm’. But then at some stage thought was born and it spoilt the
harmonious world. Man began to think and feel and his nerve and
tissue bore pain and happiness. Man wanted to know the universe
in which he lived and he began to understand how reason worked.
With all these developments, a trouble rocked the still heart of this
world. Thus came to be this incomprehensible scene of souls
enmeshed in life’s delight and pain, in mind’s mortality and
matter’s sleep. All beings are caught up in nature’s prison house
waiting for death.
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The argument of Death here is that life, mind and soul are all
impotent and besides, no good has come out of them. Only Matter
is real because in Matter alone is there secure truth, and death is the
only faithful ally of Matter. So Savitri should embrace the truth of
Matter and welcome death as the home of peace.
The absolute monism of Matter hardly provides a basis for any
of the ideals which Savitri hopes to realise. In The Life Divine, Sri
Aurobindo has discussed some of the fundamental characteristics of
Matter. One of them is its concreteness, its solidity and tangibility.
Concrete substance is the touchstone of reality for man, and
whatever is not concrete and tangible is to that extent less real to
him. While this renders Matter available to our senses to perceive, it
also brings with it a principle of division, separation, and individual
isolation. For Matter operates either by uniting or by separating.
Fundamental units of Matter combine to form larger and more
complex units. In this process smaller units are inevitably lost in the
new form. Or we observe the opposite process, in which a complex
aggregation is broken into smaller units. In either case, the identity
of material forms is always under threat. This seems to be the
inexorable law under which Matter works. The material world is
also a world in which the ultimate destruction and loss of identity
seems to be inevitable.
If man is fundamentally an individual formation of concrete
Matter and nothing more, he must also accept this law of division
and conflict and his ultimate destruction as the inescapable law of
his existence.
Many people regard themselves primarily as a physical body
and spend all their time and energy trying to increase its value and
duration of existence. This was true of humanity in general,
particularly before technology developed and man could live in a
relatively safe environment. This has also been described by Sri
Aurobindo in an earlier section of Savitri.
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Absorbed they lived in the passion of the scene,
But knew not who they were or why they lived:
Content to breathe, to feel, to sense, to act,
Life had for them no aim save Nature’s joy
And the stimulus and delight of outer things;
Identified with the spirit’s outward shell,
They worked for the body’s wants, they craved no more.
p. 143 lines 397–403
This predominance of the physical mind may not be evident today

in the same degree as it was at an earlier stage in human evolution.
But it is found even today in the emphasis we place on sensual
experience and pleasure. Even today for many, they are primarily
their physical bodies.
Nothing that is physical can be immortal. As we have seen, the
solidity and concreteness of Matter gives us something to hold on
to, but this advantage is taken away by another characteristic of
Matter, namely, its enslavement to the laws of mechanical motion.
All Matter is in constant motion. Even what appears to us solid is in
fact a swirl of perpetual change. At every moment, even the human
body sheds innumerable old cells and acquires a more or less equal
number of new ones. Matter is surrounded and overwhelmed and
finally consumed by change. Matter may be immortal but material
forms are not.
For one who accepts Matter as the sole truth or the sole reality,
no human achievement, ideals or values would appear really
worthwhile because nothing is stable here, nothing lasts long
enough here. Nothing is worth striving for here, nothing is worth
achieving because everything gets destroyed sooner or later.
Anyone who accepts this truth about Matter is bound to look
upon human love as an illusion. It is not that the God of Death
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alone dismisses human love as a transient feeling, ‘a yearning of thy
flesh’. Even Savitri’s mother asks Savitri not to be blinded by the
passion of love. She says this to Savitri when after hearing Narad’s
dire prophecy about Satyavan’s death, Savitri refuses to go out once
again to look for a more suitable companion for life. Savitri’s
argument is that it is her love for Satyavan that is the supreme value
in her life. And Savitri’s mother tries to dismiss love exactly like the
God of Death does. Now compare the two denunciations and notice
how close they are in their underlying philosophies. This is Savitri’s
mother speaking to Savitri:
Thou lendst eternity to a mortal hope.

Here on this mutable and ignorant earth
Who is the lover and who is the friend?
All passes here, nothing remains the same.
None is for any on this transient globe.
He whom thou lovest now, a stranger came
And into a far strangeness shall depart:
His moment’s part once done upon life’s stage
Which for a time was given him from within,
To other scenes he moves and other players
And laughs and weeps mid faces new, unknown.
The body thou hast loved is cast away
Amidst the brute unchanging stuff of worlds
To indifferent mighty Nature and becomes
Crude matter for the joy of others’ lives.
p. 432 lines 641–655
This is what, as we saw in Canto 2 of Book X, the God of Death says

to Savitri when she gives her love for Satyavan as the reason why
she is pursuing him even in the kingdom of death:
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And yet how brief and frail! how soon is spent
This treasure wasted by the gods on man,
This happy closeness as of soul to soul,
This honey of the body’s companionship,
This heightened joy, this ecstasy in the veins,
This strange illumination of the sense!
Where other bodies, other faces come.
When love breaks suddenly into the life
At first man steps into a world of the sun;
In his passion he feels his heavenly element:
But only a fine sunlit patch of earth
The marvellous aspect took of heaven’s outburst;
The snake is there and the worm in the heart of the rose.
A word, a moment’s act can slay the god;
Precarious is his immortality,
He has a thousand ways to suffer and die.
p. 610-611 lines 125-144
The argument here is that love cannot endure because it is the

product of life and mind immersed in Matter and therefore it is
subject to the laws of change by which Matter is bound. And what
is true of love is true of all ideals, whether it is truth, beauty, faith,
justice, etc. All these vaunted ideals to which men dedicate
themselves are insubstantial as much as love is.
That is why Death takes Savitri to a place where everything is
vague22 and shows her how all ideals are vain:
22
308
“Prisoner of Nature, many-visioned spirit,
Thought’s creature in the ideal’s realm enjoying
Thy unsubstantial immortality
The subtle marvellous mind of man has feigned,
This is the world from which thy yearnings came.
When it would build eternity from the dust,
Man’s thought paints images illusion rounds;
Prophesying glories it shall never see,
It labours delicately among its dreams.
Behold this fleeing of light-tasselled shapes,
Aerial raiment of unbodied gods;
A rapture of things that never can be born,
Hope chants to hope a bright immortal choir;
Cloud satisfies cloud, phantom to longing phantom
Leans sweetly, sweetly is clasped or sweetly chased.
This is the stuff from which the ideal is formed:
Its builder is thought, its base the heart’s desire,
But nothing real answers to their call.
The ideal dwells not in heaven, nor on the earth,
A bright delirium of man’s ardour of hope
Drunk with the wine of its own fantasy.
p. 607 lines 7–27
This then is the nature of all that derives from man’s heart and mind
– of all his ideals.
The perception that there is no real escape from the mechanical
laws which bind Matter is gloomy enough because it gives no
chance here for any of our ideals to be realised. But there is a further
point made by the God of Death which leads to utter despair –
Vague melodies touched the soul and fled…
p. 602, lines 117 onwards
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namely, that there is nothing we can do to alter this predicament. If
there are mechanical laws that operate here, man can try to
understand them and still learn to use them in a way that would
enrich his life. If these laws are rigid, that would still suggest that
there is some order, some reason directing this colossal machine
called Nature. So there is still a silver lining here. But no, even this
is obliterated by the third characteristic of Matters, namely, its
ultimate ignorance.
There seems to be no purpose behind the mechanical laws that
Matter follows; the direction in which they move the world is not
guided by any purpose. It is all chance movement, not guided by
any preconceived plan of progress or purpose. If there is a cosmic
will behind all this, matter is incapable of understanding it, nor can
it understand the thoughts and feelings of its products, life and
mind. Matter is thus ignorant of its own action and is indifferent to
the hopes and desires of the products of those actions. The creation
or destruction of any one form or of a group of forms has for Matter
the same value as the creation and destruction of any other form or
group of forms. This is the Ignorance to which Matter is inexorably
bound.
This then is the nature and truth of Matter and Sri Aurobindo
seems to have fully experienced this aspect of Matter. (We shall say
more about his struggle in the heart of Matter’s Night on some other
occasion.) If this were the only truth operating in our world, the
spiritual quest of man would be in vain. Then it would be wise to
heed to the advice the God of Death gives to Savitri towards the
very close of Canto 2, Book X:
O soul misled by the splendour of thy thoughts,

O earthly creature with thy dream of heaven,
Obey, resigned and still, the earthly law.
Accept the brief light that falls upon thy days;
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Take what thou canst of Life’s permitted joy;
Submitting to the ordeal of fate’s scourge
Suffer what thou must of toil and grief and care.
There shall approach silencing thy passionate heart
My long calm night of everlasting sleep:
There into the hush from which thou cam’st retire.”
p. 619-620 lines 462-471
But Savitri is unfazed by this onslaught by the God of Death

because she knows that there is a more integral truth beyond this
truth of Matter. She responds to the God of Death. She reveals this
in her very first words at the beginning of the following canto,
Canto 3 of Book X:
But Savitri answered to almighty Death:

“O dark-browed sophist of the universe
Who veilst the Real with its own Idea,
Hiding with brute objects Nature’s living face,
Masking eternity with thy dance of death,
Thou hast woven the ignorant mind into a screen
And made of Thought error’s purveyor and scribe,
And a false witness of mind’s servant sense.
An aesthete of the sorrow of the world,
Champion of a harsh and sad philosophy
Thou hast used words to shutter out the Light
And called in Truth to vindicate a lie.
A lying reality is falsehood’s crown
And a perverted truth her richest gem.
O Death, thou speakest truth but truth that slays,
I answer to thee with the Truth that saves.
p. 621 lines 4-19
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Before we go on to Canto 3 of Book X, I would like to remind the
reader that there are many passages in Savitri which describe the
mechanical nature of the laws of Matter from which man has no
escape. Man does not seem to have any freedom; he seems to be a
helpless pawn in a game in which every move is predetermined.
Man himself is made like a machine, and like a machine he lives
and disintegrates like one. To give you only one example of this:
All now seems Nature’s massed machinery;

An endless servitude to material rule
And long determination’s rigid chain,
Her firm and changeless habits aping Law,
Her empire of unconscious deft device
Annul the claim of man’s free human will.
He too is a machine amid machines;
A piston brain pumps out the shapes of thought,
A beating heart cuts out emotion’s modes;
An insentient energy fabricates a soul.
Or the figure of the world reveals the signs
Of a tied Chance repeating her old steps
In circles around Matter’s binding-posts.
A random series of inept events
To which reason lends illusive sense, is here,
Or the empiric Life’s instinctive search,
Or a vast ignorant mind’s colossal work.
p. 20 lines 334–350
This passage comes from an early part of Savitri. It occurs in Canto 2

of Book I, where the poet is describing the central “issue” of
Savitri’s life. And what is this issue of Savitri’s life?
For this she had accepted mortal breath;
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To wrestle with the Shadow she had come
And must confront the riddle of man’s birth
And life’s brief struggle in dumb Matter’s night.
p. 17 lines 229–234
Thus Matter and its refusal to accommodate any higher truth is one
of the many themes of Savitri; but more about this on some other
occasion.
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The God of Death has been trying to convince Savitri that in the
brute immensity of a machine which this creation obviously looks
like, there cannot be any room for soul or place for God. Similarly it
would be an error to look on earth for divine wisdom and divine
love. These are all but dreams, like Savitri’s being itself and all that
she does here. The only reality here is Matter, and Mind and life are
but tricks of Matter’s force. As we have seen in the previous
chapter, Death draws from all this the following conclusion:
How shall the Ideal’s unsubstantial hues

Be painted stiff on earth’s vermilion blur,
A dream within a dream come doubly true?
How shall the will-o’-the-wisp become a star?
The Ideal is a malady of thy mind,
A bright delirium of thy speech and thought,
A strange wine of beauty lifting thee to false sight.
A noble fiction of thy yearnings made,
Thy human imperfection it must share:
Its forms in Nature disappoint the heart,
And never shall it find its heavenly shape
And never can it be fulfilled in Time.
p. 619 lines 450–461
Death’s advice to Savitri is that she should submit to what has

befallen her, namely, Satyavan’s death, accept the earth’s law, and
wait for her own final lapse into the final night of everlasting sleep.
“The Debate of Love and Death”, Canto 3 of Book X, begins with
Savitri’s reply to this long sermon on the vanity of the ideal given to
her by Death. Savitri breaks the spell of gloom cast by Death’s
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dismal pronouncements by sizing him up as ‘an aesthete of the sorrow
of the world’, and as ‘a champion of a harsh and sad philosophy’. She tells
him that he has ‘called in Truth to vindicate a lie’. She tells him:
O Death, thou speakest truth but truth that slays,

I answer to thee with the Truth that saves.
p. 621 lines 18–19
She does not deny that there is an element of truth in what he has
said about the fundamental reality of Matter, and also about the
difficulties all ideals have to face here on earth. To say that Matter is
a truth does not mean that whatever has come out of Matter,
namely Life and Mind, are either not truths or are secondary truths.
Man is a traveller new-discovering himself, evolving gradually.
Matter is certainly his starting-point. God begins his manifestation
here by making Nothingness his living-room and Night a process of
the eternal Night, and death a spur towards immortality. The
Divine has wrapped his head in Matter’s cloak and hidden himself
in it; His consciousness has taken a plunge into the depths of the
Inconscient. His Knowledge has taken on the appearance of a huge
dark Nescience. Infinity wore a form of a boundless zero. God’s
abysms of bliss became the insensible deeps and his Eternity
became a blank spiritual vast.
The Eternal took its ground in emptiness and manifested itself in
the figure of a universe. Thus began the Spirit’s mighty adventure
into Time in constant struggle with the adamant mechanical laws of
Necessity. Thus began the soul’s cosmic pilgrimage. A mighty
Power laboured in the black immensities of the Inconscient and
built a Mind and its creations in the primeval Nothingness; a soul
was built in God’s tremendous Void, and this was the fire that
glowed secretly in the heart of this Void. This set in motion the
process which gave the body of Matter to the bodiless energy. A
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slumbering Life was found breathing in inert Matter, and in
subconscient Life Mind was found lying asleep. When Life awoke, it
stretched its giant limbs and shook off the torpor which had
subdued it. Sense began to quiver in the senseless substance. The
world’s heart commenced to beat, its eyes to see. In the crowded
vibrations of the brain thought fumbled and found itself. Speech
was discovered and the Word bridged with spans of light, the
world’s ignorance. Thus Mind woke up and man the thinker
arrived, The reasoning animal willed, planned and sought. Man
stood erect among his brute compeers. He began to remould his life,
measured the universe, took cudgels against his fate and wrestled
with unseen Powers. He conquered Nature and used his mastery of
its laws to rule the world. He hopes to ride the heavens and reach
the stars, a master of his huge environment.
Now through the window of the Mind stares the demigod
hidden behind the curtain of man’s soul. He has seen the Unknown,
has looked on Truth’s face; a ray of the eternal Truth has touched
him. Motionless and voiceless, he is standing awake in
Supernature’s light and sees the glory of the wings that have arisen;
he has seen the vast descending might of God.
Thus Savitri gives the God of Death an important lesson in
integral Truth, which comprehends Matter and Spirit, and all the
grades of evolutionary manifestation that connect them. She speaks
to him of Involution – of how the Supreme Reality or God took a
plunge into the Inconscient and how evolution is the gradual
evolution of the Divine consciousness out of Matter. She then goes
on to address the God of Death as follows:
“O Death, you are looking but on an unfinished world that is
constantly attacked by you and not very sure at the moment of the
road it should take. At the moment it is peopled by imperfect minds
and ignorant and unhappy lives. But from this how can you
conclude that there is no God and all is vain? What you see is
something that is transitional, a work in progress; because what you
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see today is a child, will he never grow into an adult? Man is just
now an infant, he has so much growth ahead of him. Please do not
conclude that because he is ignorant today, he will never grow wise
and perfect. You know that in a fragile seed a great tree lies in wait.
In a tiny gene, a thinking being is shut. It may be a little element in a
little sperm; but who knows, when it grows, out of this sperm may
come out a mighty conqueror or a sage! Then will you throw out
God’s mystic truth, and deny the occult spiritual miracle? Will you
still maintain that there is no spirit, no God?
“Nature, which was at one time mute and entirely made up of
Matter, has now woken up and begun to see; she has invented
speech and unveiled in herself a will. She has realised that there is
something yet beyond her towards which she strives. She is trying
to grow into something that surrounds her. She is striving to
uncover the spirit in her, to change back into God (from which she
descended in the first place). She is trying to exceed herself, and that
is her inspiring task.”
Savitri now puts this all very succinctly in the following
memorable words:
In God concealed the world began to be,

Tardily it travels towards manifest God:
Our imperfection towards perfection toils,
The body is the chrysalis of a soul:
The infinite holds the finite in its arms,
Time travels towards revealed eternity.
p. 623 lines 91–96
“The world began to manifest as an act of concealment by God (God

concealed himself in the primordial material creation). Slowly, it
travels towards manifest God (God’s perfection manifested in this
world). All our imperfections toil towards their perfections. The
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body is a sheltered state or stage of being or growth of the soul. The
Infinite holds the finite in its arms. Time travels towards revealed
eternity (What was hidden is revealed gradually as Time travels).
This is an idea which finds expression in many places in Savitri
and is basic to Sri Aurobindo’s concept of how the creation came to
be. It also explains why the manifestation of God’s perfection here
on earth has to be the inevitable goal of this evolutionary adventure.
In Canto 1 of Book II, the poet expresses this basic concept
succinctly in the following words;
Our life is a holocaust of the Supreme.

The great World-Mother by her sacrifice
Has made her soul the body of our state;
Accepting sorrow and unconsciousness
Divinity’s lapse from its own splendours wove
The many-patterned ground of all we are.
An idol of self is our mortality.
Our earth is a fragment and a residue;
Her power is packed with the stuff of greater worlds
And steeped in their colour-lustres dimmed by her drowse;
An atavism of higher births is hers,
Her sleep is stirred by their buried memories
Recalling the lost spheres from which they fell.
pp. 99–100 lines 166–178
Sri Aurobindo describes this plunge of the Divine into the

Inconscient as the holocaust of the great World-Mother, whereas the
Veda describes it as the holocaust of the Supreme Purusha.
“Matter has the miracle structure given to it by the eternal
Magician, and this hides its mystery from its own eyes. It is like a
scripture written out in cryptic23 signs; it is an occult document of
23
Cryptic = having or seeming to have a hidden or ambiguous meaning.
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the All-Wonderful’s art. Everything here bears witness to the secret
might of this wonderful Magician; in all we feel his presence and his
power”.
Listen to these wonderful lines which describe the glory of this
wonderful Magician:
A blaze of his sovereign glory is the sun,

A glory is the gold and glimmering moon,
A glory is his dream of purple sky.
A march of his greatness are the wheeling stars.
His laughter of beauty breaks out in green trees,
His moments of beauty triumph in a flower;
The blue sea’s chant, the rivulet’s wandering voice
Are murmurs falling from the Eternal’s harp.
This world is God fulfilled in outwardness.
pp. 623 – 624 lines 103–111
“The sun himself is the blaze of His sovereign glory; so also is the
gold and glimmering moon another manifestation of His glory. The
purple sky, and the wheeling stars also manifest His glory. His
laughter of beauty can be seen in the green foliage on the trees and
His moments of beauty triumph in the blossoming of a flower. The
chant of the blue sea and the wandering voice of the rivulet are like
sounds emanating from His harp. This world itself is God fulfilled
in outwardness.
“His ways are baffling to our reason and also to our senses. By
what appears like the blind brute movements of an ignorant Force
and by means which we tend to dismiss as small, obscure and base,
He has built this world in the unknowing Void. Often He builds
greatness founded upon little things. He has built forms massive
and small from infinitesimal (immeasurably or incalculably small)
particles of dust. He has built marvels out of insignificant things.
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“If at this point in time mind looks crippled and life untaught
and crude, if there are brutal masks and evil acts, these are but
incidents of His vast and varied plot, the needed steps of His great
drama which often goes through its dangerous phases. He
constructs with these and other things His often painful but
nonetheless passionate drama of this creation. Although this has
many elements of a play, it is not just a pure lila (a sport or a play
without any goal or purpose), since there is behind all this apparent
play a deep scheme that is being unfolded by the transcendent
Wisdom of the Divine. This scheme works out ways by which the
Shakti (the Force) at work here is able to meet her Lord (the
Supreme Divine) in the shadow and the Night of ignorance. Above
her, the stars keep the vigil; watched by a solitary Infinitude she
embodies the Divine in dumb Matter, and manifests the Absolute in
symbol minds and lives. Her mechanical craft works out miracles;
she makes Matter’s machine master and implement the laws of
thought and life’s engines serve the labour of a soul. This is how the
Mighty Mother has fashioned this creation. She has made it look
like a huge whim (a sudden, impulsive, and seemingly unmotivated
action, what many rationalists have called a series of blind
accidents) bound by iron laws and shut God into an inscrutable
world. She has lulled the Omniscient into Inconscient sleep; she has
persuaded the Omniscient to ride on the back of Inertia and has
made the Divine tread perfectly with unconscious steps. This is the
enormous domain of her wonder-works.”
This is an important notion which is once again basic to Sri
Aurobindo’s integral philosophy. One does not apologise for God
because at the moment his creation is full of imperfections and
suffering and evil. Traditionally Vedantic philosophy has been at
pains to explain this paradox of a perfect God creating such an
imperfect world. So it denies absolute reality to this world and
regards it as an illusion. Sri Aurobindo avoids this trap.
“She is using death as a way of ensuring immortality.”
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Death gives each embodied soul an opportunity to continue its
adventure of consciousness in a new body and under totally new
conditions. The pilgrimage of the soul from the inconscience of
Matter to the Superconscience of the Divine is too long a journey to
be competed in one life. Therefore rebirth is an important aspect of
Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy. What makes rebirth possible is death.
Thus death is a process and not an end of life.
“The face of the Eternal was seen through the flow of Time. His
knowledge he has disguised as Ignorance “
The world tends to look upon true knowledge as ignorance.
“His good he has sowed in the monstrous bed of Evil and made
error a door by which Truth could enter in. He waters his tree of
bliss with tears of sorrow.”
Sorrow often stings us to the quick and enables us to dissolve a
knot of ignorance. As our knots of ignorance are dissolved, we
discover the bliss that is the very nature of our soul and of this
creation.
“A thousand aspects of this creation point back to their origin in
the One. The Unique was concealed by a two-fold Nature. This
world is an intermingling of the Eternal’s many disguises; it is a
dance in which each passionate dancer tries to entangle the other;
they often look like lovers trying to resolve the quarrel of their lost
identity in a forbidden embrace. This is seen here as the wrestle and
struggle of the extremes of Power (Purusha and Prakriti) and this
struggle is what we see happening all along earth’s million roads
towards the Supreme.
“All here seems to follow a stumbling gait behind a guide who
too seems to be stumbling, and yet every stumble turns out to be a
needed stride on roads which are unknown to a goal which is
unknowable. All here blunder and struggle towards the one Divine.
This idea too is very basic to Sri Aurobindo’s thinking and has
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found expression in other places too in Savitri. Take for example, the
following lines from Canto 2 in Book VI:
This world was not built with random bricks of Chance,

A blind god is not destiny’s architect;
A conscious power has drawn the plan of life,
There is a meaning in each curve and line.
pp. 459–460 lines 818–821
“The eternal powers, as if transformed by a titan’s spell, took on a

dubious appearance. Forms of an obscure divinity, they wore the
visage of animal or dwarf, put on the ears of the fawn or the hoof of
the horse or the goat or harboured a demoniac look in their eyes.
They turned the thinking mind into a crooked maze, their hearts
underwent a complete change as they were assailed by the
uncontrolled impulses from the nether world pouring into their
chamber of delight, like drunken revellers joining in a wild masked
ball.”
There are dark periods in human history when titanic forces too
upset the even flow of life and bring about great catastrophes and
cause much political and social upheaval. The forces of good seem
to be in retreat everywhere and evil seems to be in the ascendant.
There is a reference to such dark phases of human history in these
lines.
“On the highways and in the gardens of the world, these
powers, forgetting their divine functions, reeled like those who
have drunk an intoxicating magical wine or were like children who
sprawl and play in nature’s mud. Even wisdom, whose function it is
to build the paths to God, joined in this deep and calamitous game.
She behaved as though she had failed to benefit from the traveller’s
bag of provisions and to consult the map and follow the directions
for the journey that she has been given. Wisdom, when entangled in
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this unfortunate game, had only a self-righteous virtue as its stock;
she uses the pragmatic gropings of reason or the powers of
abstraction not in the search for truth but to serve the cause of
technology, and thus becomes an escort in utility’s school.”
The reference to the misuse of religion and of science very often
in human history is hinted at here. Religion is intended basically to
build pathways to God; instead very often we find it becoming one
of the temporal powers and failing to serve its intended purpose
and. Similarly science, whose primary aim is the discovery of truth
about the phenomenal world, ends up as a purveyor of human
comforts through technology.
“On the ocean surface of a vast Consciousness, the Mind ends up
catching in its net only shoals of small fish, but the great truths
escape her narrow cast; These great truths are safe from sight in the
depths of consciousness; unknown they swim in the dark huge
gulfs of the ocean where the Mind cannot easily fathom them; they
are too far down, beyond the reach of the shallow plunge of the
weak diver.
“This is the condition of our human vision; it tries to see but with
ignorant eyes, and naturally, it cannot look into the heart of things.
Our knowledge walks leaning on Error for a walking stick;
therefore it ends up choosing false gods and false dogmas for
worship. Or it becomes the votary of a fierce intolerant creed. Or
sometimes it becomes a dilettante of a seeker doubting every truth it
finds. Then it becomes a sceptic obstinately denying the Light it
finds or chilling the heart with a dry ironic smile; thus the human
mind becomes a sceptic stamping out the god in man. Thus there
are spells of darkness that beset the paths of Time. This darkness
sometimes lifts its head so high as to blot the stars; it often turns the
interpreting mind into a cloud and blocks the intimations coming
from the sun of Truth.”
This is an apt description of our own age, for example. There is a
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groping for truth undoubtedly and often it is serious in purpose.
But the spirituality such an age spawns is often spurious; people
seem to be running after false gods. And then there are sections of
the society which become fundamentalist and narrow and
intolerant. We also have the non-believers who obstinately refuse to
see the Light even when they chance upon it.
“Yet there is Light here; it stands at Nature’s doors like a torch to
lead the traveller in. This light waits to be kindled even in our cells.
It is like a star lighting up the sea of ignorance all around. It is like a
lamp on the stern of our ship, piercing the darkness of the night and
showing the way. As knowledge grows, this Light flares up from
within. It is like a shining warrior in the mind and harbours soaring
dreams in the intuitive heart; it is our armour of protection in our
fight against the adversary forces. Then the effulgent dawns arrive
and wisdom in its magnificence breaks through the obscurely lit
fields of our being. Then philosophy soars on the cloud-bank peaks
of thought, and science unveils the secret powers of Nature.
Enormous powers are released that serve the small needs of the
puny creature that man in his ignorance is. Science conquers Nature
and makes her its prisoner.
“On the heights unreached by mind in its normal reach, on the
borders where Time fades into Timelessness, the soul draws back
into its own immortal Self. Man’s knowledge now becomes a ray of
God’s heavenly wisdom. There is a mystic region of consciousness
from where descends the power which shines in the eyes of the seer
and the sage; it is a lightening flash of visionary sight and plays
upon the inner borders of the mind. That silences the mind and
makes it gaze into a luminous Void.
“From those mystic peaks which remain unseen, a voice comes
down like a cry of splendour from a mouth of a storm. It is the voice
that speaks to the depths of silence of the night. It is like a thunder
and a flaming call addressed to the soul.
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“Above the planes that climb from the Inconscient earth, a hand
is lifted towards the realm of the Invisible beyond the dazzling
borders of the superconscient and it pushes away the screen that
veils the face of the Unknown. This enables the soul within to look
into the eyes of the Eternal. The soul then hears the great word our
human hearts cannot hear, because it can pierce through the blaze
in which our thoughts grow blind. It drinks from the naked breasts
of the glorious truth and learns the secrets of eternity.
“Thus, although at one time all was plunged into the mysterious
darkness and obscurity of Nescience, all is raised to meet the
glorious Sun. O Death, this is the mystery of your reign. In the
paradoxical and tragic field of earth, as it was whirling in its aimless
journey around the sun, amidst the vast landscape of the great
dumb stars, a gigantic darkness settled in the fields of God and the
world of Matter came to be governed by your form, O Death. You
have covered the face of the Eternal on earth with your dark mask.
Consequently the bliss that created the world has fallen asleep.
Abandoned to her fate, this world continued to be in its deep
slumber. An evil transformation came on all her parts until she
knew herself no more. In her creative slumber, there still flit across
vague memories – of the joy and beauty that were meant to
manifest here under the laugh of the blue sky, in the green-scarfed
trees and in the happy profusion of scents and colours, in the
promenades gleaming in the sun, and in the vigil of the dreamy
light of the stars, and amid the tall meditating peaks of hills, on the
bosom of the rain-kissed earth and the sapphire tumblings of the
waves of the sea.
“But now the original innocence is lost. Death and ignorance
govern this mortal world and nature’s face wears a gloomy colour.
The earth has still retained her early physical charm and grace; the
grander and beauty of nature are still there but the divine in-
dweller is veiled. The souls of men have strayed away from the
Light and the Supreme Mother seems to have withdrawn herself,
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since her face is not visible any more. The eyes of Bliss of the
Mother who created this world are closed and sorrow’s touch has
found her even in her dreams.
“The creatrix (the feminine form of ‘creator’) of the world tosses
restlessly on her bed of Void because she is unable to wake up and
find herself and to build again the perfection in this creation she
intended. She has forgotten her true nature and state of being. She
has forgotten how to create a world of felicity. Therefore she weeps
and makes her creatures too weep. She tests her children with the
sharp edge of sorrow and spends on life’s vain waste of hope and
toil the poignant luxury of grief and tears. In the nightmare of her
half-awake dream, which is a torture to her own self besides being a
torture for us, her creatures, she comes to our hearts and bodies and
into our lives wearing a hard and cruel mask of pain.
“Our nature, perverted because of its birth through pain, returns
dry and cynical answers to life’s questioning shocks; it finds a
pungent and bitter taste in the world’s pangs and drinks with relish
the sharp wine of grief’s perversity. A curse seems to have been laid
on the pure joy of life. Delight, which is the sweetest sign of the
presence of God and which is born as a twin with Beauty, is
dreaded and avoided by the saint and the austere sage because they
think it is a dangerous and uncertain cheat. They look upon it as a
clever trick of a dark power created to tempt the soul to its fall.
They look upon God as a puritan who has made of pleasure a
poisonous fruit or a deadly drug in the market-place of death. For
them sin is born out nature’s natural joy.
“Yet every creature hunts for happiness here and pays for it with
hard suffering. Or it is something they tear by violence from the
dull breast of the indifferent world and they get at most some
fragment or broken piece of the bliss. Even joy has become here a
poisonous drink. The hunger for joy is turned into a dreadful hook
of Fate. All means are considered justified if they can catch even a
single ray of happiness and a whole eternity is sacrificed for a
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moment’s bliss. Yet it is an undeniable truth it was for joy and not
for sorrow that the world was created, and certainly not as a dream
in endless suffering. Although God made the world for his delight,
an ignorant Power seems to have taken charge of it and imposed its
will on it as though it were God’s own Will. Thus the falsehood
called death has mastered life, and thus all came to appear as
chance wearing the appearance of fate.”
Savitri has not yet finished what she has to say to the God of
Death. For the rest of her statement we will have to see in the next
chapter.
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Savitri’s answer to the God of Death, which we examined in

previous chapter, is a very clear exposition of the integral truth she
stands for as against the partial truth which he espouses. She does
not deny that the world as it is today is riddled with imperfections
of various kinds. But that is no reason to take this as an unchanging
or permanent feature of the world and to conclude that there is no
God, and that nothing much will ever come out of this world, and
therefore to conclude all ideals are false, etc. Her reply is best
summarised in these lines:
In God concealed the world began to be,

Tardily it travels towards manifest God:
Our imperfection towards perfection toils,
The body is the chrysalis of a soul:
The infinite holds the finite in its arms,
Time travels towards revealed eternity.
A miracle structure of the eternal Mage,
Matter its mystery hides from its own eyes,
A scripture written out in cryptic signs,
An occult document of the All-Wonderful’s art.
p. 623 lines 91–100
She describes the various vicissitudes through which man has

moved towards the Divine: there was plenty of the animal nature in
his early approaches to wisdom, virtue and other things. He used
his reason to sound only the shallow waters and to catch small fish,
missing the great truths that live in the depths. Man’s mortal vision
peers with ignorant eyes; he often worships false Gods. In spite of
all this, the ‘Light is there’. It slowly grows. From beyond the regions
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of the Mind, inspirations come to man.
The mask of death ‘has covered the Eternal’s face’ and ‘The Bliss
that made the world has fallen asleep’. It has forgotten itself completely
and it looks as though death and Ignorance govern this world. But
the bliss is still there in Nature, ‘The grandeur and the beauty still are
hers, / But veiled is the divine Inhabitant.’ The eyes of the creatrix Bliss
are closed and sorrow has found her even in her dreams. Man often
takes a perverse delight in suffering. Even sages have dreaded the
experience of Bliss, which is ‘God’s sweetest sign’. And yet every
living being hunts for happiness and works hard for some ‘broken
shard of bliss’. This was where we were at the end of the previous
chapter.
Savitri’s reply to Death is not concluded yet. She goes on to say:
“A hidden bliss is at the root of things. Our spirits breathe an air
of pure felicity on their heights. Our hearts and bodies feel its
obscure call, and our senses grope for it. If this Bliss were not to
exist, our world would sink in the Void; if this were not, nothing
could move or live here.”
Then we have these wonderful lines, to which no prose
explication can do adequate justice. Bliss exudes from the very
diction and rhythm of these lines:
A hidden Bliss is at the root of things.

A mute Delight regards Time’s countless works:
To house God’s joy in things Space gave wide room,
To house God’s joy in self our souls were born.
This universe an old enchantment guards;
Its objects are carved cups of World-Delight
Whose charmed wine is some deep soul’s rapture-drink:
The All-Wonderful has packed heaven with his dreams,
He has made blank ancient Space his marvel-house;
He spilled his spirit into Matter’s signs:
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His fires of grandeur burn in the great sun,
He glides through heaven shimmering in the moon;
He is beauty carolling in the fields of sound;
He chants the stanzas of the odes of Wind;
He is silence watching in the stars at night;
He wakes at dawn and calls from every bough,
Lies stunned in the stone and dreams in flower and tree.
p. 630 lines 319–335
“There is a bliss that is hidden behind everything. A quiet delight

regards everything that takes place in time. Our souls were born to
house God’s joy in self; Space was created to give ample space to
God’s joy in things. This universe is charged with an enchantment
and every object in it is a carved cup meant to hold World-delight.
The blank space is a house of marvels. God’s fires of grandeur burn
in the great sun; God glides in the heaven in the shimmering moon.
He is silence watching in the stars at night. It is He who wakes at
dawn and calls from every bough. He lies stunned in the stone and
dreams in flower and tree.
“A will to live, a joy to be, persists here even in this labour and
misery of Ignorance, on the hard and perilous ground of this
difficult earth, in spite of death which seems to be triumphant here.
There is a joy in all that meets the sense, a joy in every experience of
the soul, a joy in good as well as in evil, a joy in virtue and a joy in
sin. It defies the karmic law and dares to grow even on forbidden
soil. Its sap runs through the plant and flower of pain. It thrills with
the drama of fate and of tragic doom; it tears food even from sorrow
as well as from ecstasy, and it whets its strength on danger and
difficult challenges. It wallows even with the worm and the reptile
and raises its head as an equal with the stars. This bliss is present
when the faeries dance as well as when the gnomes dine. It basks in
the light and heat of many suns. The suns of Beauty and the suns of
Power flatter and foster it with their golden beams. This bliss can
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grow towards the Titan as well as towards the God.
“Bliss lingers on earth drinking its deep fill through pleasure as
well as pain. It feeds on the grapes of Heaven and also on the
flowers of the Abyss, on the torment-craft and flame-stabs of Hell
and on the dim fragments of the glory of Paradise. It soaks itself
with the small and paltry pleasures of man’s life and finds a taste in
its petty passions and joys; it finds a taste even in tears and in the
torture of broken hearts, in the crown of gold as well as in the
crown of thorns, in life’s nectar-like sweetness as well in its bitter
wine. It explores all levels and aspects of being for an unknown
bliss and sounds all experience for things new and strange.
“Life often brings into the common days of the earthly creature a
tongue of glory from a higher and brighter sphere. It gives a depth
to his philosophy and to his Art. It leaps at the splendour of some
perfect word as in poetry. It also exults in man’s high resolves and
noble dreams. It wanders with him when he errs and dares the
brink of the abyss. It soars when he climbs and wallows in his fall.
He shares his bedchamber with angelic as well as with demonic
brides, for both kinds of brides compete for his heart. There is a
delight which enjoys every moment of the cosmic unfolding of life;
it enjoys man’s greatness as well as his littleness; for it his
magnanimity and meanness are but colours cast on some neutral
background created by the gods; there is plenty to admire in the
skills of the Artist who has planned it all.”
Some of these lines bring to mind an early poem of Sri
Aurobindo, written in 1908, the poem entitled “Who”. You will
enjoy reading this poem. Please refer to Collected Poems, Volume
Five of Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library. Here I can only
quote only a couple of stanzas from this poem.
In the blue of the sky, in the green of the forest,

Whose is the hand that painted the glow?
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When the winds were asleep in the womb of the ether,
Who was it roused them and bade them to blow?...
In the strength of a man, in the beauty of woman,

In the laugh of a boy, in the blush of a girl;
The hand that sent Jupiter spinning through heaven,
Spends all its cunning to fashion a curl. …
We will tell the whole world of His ways and cunning:

He has pleasure of torture and passion and pain;
He delights in our sorrow and drives us to weeping,
Then lures with His joy and His beauty again.
All music is only the sound of His laughter

All beauty the smile of his passionate bliss;
Our lives are His heart-beats, our rapture the bridal
Of Radha and Krishna, our love is their kiss.
SABCL 5:40.
Now to return to Savitri:

“But this danger game does not endure for ever. Beyond earth,
but meant for earth delivered from Ignorance, wisdom and joy
prepare their perfect crown. The superhuman Truth calls to
thinking man, the slow transfiguration takes place and at last, the
human soul turns to eternal things. It makes man look for the clasp
of God in every experience and in every contact with the world.
Then there is achieved the longed-for miracle.
“Immortal bliss opens her wide, celestial eyes and gazes upon
the world, upon the stars. Through her mighty limbs flows the
stream of bliss. Time thrills to the sapphics 24 of her love song, and
24
A verse type popularised by the Greek poetess Sappho; it normally has four
lines with a rigid metrical pattern.
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Space is filled with a wide beatitude. Immortal bliss at last climbs to
the summits of consciousness, leaving the human heart to its
accustomed grief, withdrawing totally from this field of
manifestation in word and form. It soars far beyond the words, the
mental skies of thought, and there in the happy ardour of her
creative joy, like ‘a great heaven-bird on a motionless sea’ she is poised
on the still deep of the Eternal’s peace.
“It is for this great delight that the world was created, and it is
for this the spirit descended into the Inconscient and charged
Matter’s Inconscient force with its power. This is how it gradually
hopes to repatriate immortality in death’s realm. This is how the
slow mystic transformation works.”
This perception, that bliss is the true nature of this creation, that
it was born out of bliss and exists in bliss, and is moving towards
bliss – this is the Vedic and Upanishadic explanation of the genesis
of this creation. This was how early Hinduism viewed life, a vision
entirely different from the cosmic sorrow of Buddhism and also
from the cosmic disillusionment of Mayavada. The highest wisdom
realised by Bhrigu is described in the Taittariya Upanishad as
follows:
“He knew Bliss for the Eternal. From Bliss alone, it
appears these creatures are born and being born they
live by Bliss and to Bliss they go hence and return.”
Taittariya Upanishad, Ch. 6
Sri Aurobindo in his Essays Divine and Human (p. 215) explains this
perception in these words:
The world lives in and by Ananda. From Ananda, says

the Veda, we were born, by Ananda we live, to Ananda
we return, and it adds that no man could even have the
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strength to draw in his breath and throw it out again if
there were not this heaven of Bliss embracing our
existence as ether embraces our bodies, nourishing us
with its eternal substance and strength and supporting
the life and the activity. A world which is essentially a
world of bliss—this was the ancient Vedantic vision,
the drishti of the Vedic drashta, which differentiates
Hinduism in its early virility from the cosmic sorrow of
Buddhism and the cosmic disillusionment of
Mayavada. But it is possible to fall from this Bliss, not
to realise it with the lower nature, in the Apara
Prakriti, not to be able to grasp and possess it.
But is this really true, that bliss predominates in our life over pain
and suffering? Does not this world appear to us rather as a world of
suffering than as a world of the delight of existence? This problem is
discussed by Sri Aurobindo in The Life Divine (Part I, Chapters 11
and 12). The treatment there is metaphysical. For our present
purposes, it should suffice to look at a letter of his on the same
subject:
It is fundamentally true for most people that the

pleasure of life, of existence in itself, predominates over
the troubles of life; otherwise most people would want
to die whereas the fact is that everybody wants to live
— and if you proposed to them an easy means of
eternal extinction they would decline without thanks.
That is what X is saying and it is undeniable. It is also
true that this comes from the Ananda of existence
which is behind everything and is reflected in the
instinctive pleasure of existence. Naturally, this
instinctive essential pleasure is not the Ananda, — it is
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only a pale and dim reflection of it in an inferior life-
consciousness — but it is enough for its purpose.
Letters on Yoga p. 1235
Before I conclude, I would like to add that one of the glories of

Savitri is that it expresses the Vedic vision in incomparably beautiful
English poetry. We have just seen an instance of this.
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27: Book X, Canto 3 (lines 416–461) – Love
Savitri continues her grand exposition of the integral truth and

holds it against the one-sided truth that the God of Death has
presented to her. She now proceeds to summarise very succinctly
the philosophy of evolution. And for this she uses love as an
example. It is this love that the God of Death has dismissed as no
more than ‘a conscious yearning of the flesh, a glorious burning of the
nerves’. Savitri does not deny this but points out that that this is a
description of only one stage in the evolution of love.
All our earth starts from mud and ends in sky,

And Love that was once an animal’s desire,
Then a sweet madness in the rapturous heart,
An ardent comradeship in the happy mind,
Becomes a wide spiritual yearning’s space.
A lonely soul passions for the Alone,
The heart that loved man thrills to the love of God,
A body is his chamber and his shrine.
Then is our being rescued from separateness;
All is itself, all is new-felt in God:
A Lover leaning from his cloister’s door
Gathers the whole world into his single breast.
Then shall the business fail of Night and Death:
When unity is won, when strife is lost
And all is known and all is clasped by Love
Who would turn back to ignorance and pain?
p. 632 lines 416-431
Savitri explains:
“There are many things here on earth which have an humble
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origin; they start as it were from mud, but they all undergo a
gradual transformation and finally end up exalted and elevated at
the level of the sky. So does love. It often begins as animal desire,
but can change into a sweet intoxication in the ecstatic heart. This by
itself is a great spiritual change, since its total dependence on the
physical aspects gets reduced and sublimated to a great extent. If
refined further, this love blossoms into an ardent companionship in
the happy mind, and then if still further refined, it becomes a wide
spiritual yearning. So what was once largely physical, then takes on
the emotional tone, and becomes a largely mental companionship
and finally turns into an intense spiritual yearning. It then reveals
its real nature. Love is in fact the passionate yearning of a lonely
soul caught up in the prison house of the ego for oneness with the
Divine. Thus the heart that loves a man thrills to the love of God.
The body itself transcends its carnality and becomes sacred,
becomes the home and the shrine of the Beloved.
“This is the great secret power of love; it releases us from our
separateness, the root-cause of all our anxiety, insecurity and fear.
When we discover and experience this true love, we begin to see
God in everything, the world looks new in the consciousness of
God. Thus a lover leaning out of his lonely cloistered existence is
able to gather the whole world into his single heart. When this
happens, the business of the Night of Ignorance and Death is
finished. Love establishes this unity and with this, strife vanishes.
When all is known and all is clasped by Love who would turn back
to the rule of ignorance and pain?”
Savitri reveals here the great secret of love which was first
announced to the world by the Upanishadic Rishi Yajnavalkya in
the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad (2.4.5.). There he declares to his
wife:
“Maitreyi, lo, verily not for the love of the husband is a
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husband dear, but for the love of the Atman (the
Divine in us) a husband is dear. Not for the love of a
wife is the wife dear, but for the love of the Atman in
her is the wife dear. Not for the love of the sons are
sons dear but for the love of the Atman in them are the
sons dear. ... Not for the love of the beings are the
beings dear but for the love of the Atman in them are
they dear.”
The real basis of love is the Atman or the soul. When we feel we
love somebody, it is because unknown to us the soul in us has
found some affiliation with the soul of the other person. All souls
are kindred sparks from the Divine. That is the true source of love.
In other words, when we love someone or something, we in fact
love the Atman (the Divine) in them. Whatever appears beautiful or
dear to us is so because of the presence of the Divine in it. So the
origin of all love is the Divine. The Divine is what makes things in
this world dear to one another.
Savitri continues:
“O Death, I have conquered you within myself. I tremble no
more when grief attacks me. A great calm seated deep within me
fills my body and my senses. This calm has given me the strength to
take the grief of the world and change it into strength. It makes the
joy of the world one with the joy of God. My eternal love is seated
on God’s calm. Love must rise beyond the very heavens and find its
secret sense that is beyond words. Only then will it be able to
change its human ways to ways divine without foregoing its
sovereignty of earthly bliss.
“O Death, if I have claimed the living Satyavan from you, it is
not solely for my own heart’s sweet fulfilment, nor is it for my
body’s bliss alone. I want him back also for the work he and I have
to do here, for the sacred mission of our lives. We have to live our
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lives here on earth as God’s messengers; we have come here and
chosen to live under the shadow of death so that we can draw
God’s light to earth and awaken the ignorant human race and fill
the empty human hearts with God’s love and to heal the
unhappiness of the world with God’s bliss.
“I would urge you to bear in mind that I the woman am the
shakti (the force) of God, and he, Satyavan, is the Eternal’s delegate
soul in man. He represents the evolving Godhood in humanity and
I am the Divine’s shakti that has the mission to uphold this
adventure of the growing Divine in man. My will, O Death, is
greater than your law, and my love is stronger than the bonds of
Fate. Our love (the love between me and Satyavan) has on it the
heavenly seal of the Supreme. It is my responsibility to guard that
seal against your efforts to break it and tear it apart.”
It should be noted here that poet reveals what Savitri and
Satyavan symbolise. Savitri symbolises the Divine’s grace and
power, which comes down to earth to support the adventure of
consciousness which Satyavan undertakes. Satyavan symbolises the
soul carrying the aspiration to evolve towards Godhood. There is
something of Satyavan in all of us. There is a time in our lives when
we are idealistic, when we want to change the world, leave this
world a better place, when we fall in love, when we write poetry
and dream of greatness on earth. But unfortunately, this Satyavan in
us dies young and most of us lose our idealism and become stark
realists or even cynics before we step into our forties. Wherever we
find an exception to this, and the aspiration for perfection continues
throughout one’s life, it is because of the Divine Grace supporting
such a person. Please look at Sri Aurobindo’s ‘Author’s Note’,
which you will find given immediately after the Contents pages in
any recent edition of Savitri. This Author’s Note gives what Sri
Aurobindo himself had to say about each of the major characters in
the Savitri legend. He says there, ‘Satyavan is the soul carrying the
divine truth of being within itself but descended into the grip of death and
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ignorance; Savitri is the divine Word, daughter of the Sun, goddess of the
supreme Truth who comes down and is born to save;…’ He concludes his
Note with this significant observation:
Still this is not a mere allegory, the characters are not

personified qualities, but incarnations or emanations of
living and conscious Forces with whom we can enter
into concrete touch and they take human bodies in
order to help man and show him the way from his
mortal state to a divine consciousness and immortal
life.
What is being hinted at here is that the drama of Savitri and

Satyavan is being enacted in each age in some form or the other,
and our own lives may be the theatres for this drama.
Then Savitri reveals one more glory of love and its role in
creation in these most memorable words:
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.
p. 633 lines 458-461
“Love must not be allowed to disappear from the earth. For it is the
bright link between earth and heaven. Love is the far
Transcendent’s angel here. Love is man’s lien on the absolute. In
other words, it is the guarantee that one day the Absolute, the
Supreme Divine, will redeem and fill it with his manifest glory and
perfection.”
340
All spiritual teachers have lauded the supreme importance of
love not only for the redemption of individuals but also for the
redemption of the human collectivity. If the Christian scripture tells
us ‘love thy neighbour as thyself’, the Hindu scriptures remind us that
the so-called neighbour is not an alien, but that he is yourself in
another form and with a different face, and therefore he should
receive from you the same consideration that you receive from
yourself. Love the other as much as you love yourself, that is the
teaching, formulated in another form.
The Mother has emphasised the importance of divine love
through a parable about the genesis of this creation and has
explained how evil, falsehood, suffering and death came to catch
hold of it. When the Supreme Divine decided to manifest in this
world, four divine forces, Bliss, Light or Consciousness, Truth and
Life, emanated from the Divine. But in the process of manifestation
something went wrong. These divine forces lost their connection
with the divine and consequently, they got transformed into their
opposites. Light or Consciousness became Darkness and
Inconscience, Love became Hatred, Delight became Suffering, and
Life became Death. Then, realising that His creation has been misled
into Inconscience, Hatred, Suffering and Death, the Supreme Divine
decided to send a special emanation of himself into this creation
which had the power to redeem these misguided emanations and
bring them to the Divine, and this special emanation was Love.
In one of her Prayers and Meditations (page 161), we find the
following prayer:
O victorious power of divine love, Thou art the

sovereign Master of this universe, Thou art its creator
and its saviour, who hast permitted it to emerge from
chaos, and now leadest it to its eternal goal.
341
Once we recognise that love is nothing but the Self in one
recognising the Self in the other or in others dimly or clearly and
therefore a seeking for oneness and the bliss of oneness, we can
understand why love is recognised as the saviour. We pass through
different stages of physical, vital, emotional, mental and spiritual
love. But none of these can ever give a permanent or complete
satisfaction to human beings until one arrives at the point where all
these outer forms of love culminate in the divine Love.
Then one realises that love is one of the great universal forces
and its movement is free and independent of the objects in which
and through which it manifests. It manifests wherever there is
receptivity, wherever there is some opening for it. Love in its real
nature is not a personal or individual thing; what makes it appear
so is only the individual’s capacity to receive and manifest this
universal force. It is a supremely conscious power. It chooses its
instruments consciously, and endeavours to realise in them that
which is its eternal aim. And when the instrument is found
wanting, it drops it and turns to look for others. Men think that they
have suddenly fallen in love; they see their love come and grow and
then they see it fade away. But their sense in this of a personal
experience all their own is an illusion. It is a wave from the
everlasting sea of universal love.
It is a divine Force; and the distortions we see in its apparent
workings belong to its instruments. Love manifests everywhere, not
in human beings alone. Its movement is there in plants as well. In
the animals it is easy to detect its presence. All that distorts and
deforms this great and divine power comes from the obscurity and
ignorance and selfishness of the limited instrument. Love, the
eternal force, has no clinging, no desire, no hunger for possession,
no self-regarding attachment. It is, in its pure movement, the
seeking for union of the self with the Divine. Love divine gives itself
and asks for nothing. Although humans have turned it into such an
ugly and repulsive thing, the first touch of love even in human
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beings shows something of its purer substance. They become
capable for a moment of forgetting themselves; for a moment its
divine touch awakens and magnifies all that is fine and beautiful.
One can manifest the divine love to the extent one is capable of
receiving it. Only a few have the capacity to receive and manifest
love in its original purity. Love is a mighty vibration coming
straight from the One, and only the very pure and very strong are
capable of receiving and manifesting it. In this same epic poem, in
Savitri itself, we have these wonderful lines explaining why pure
love is such a rare thing in this world:
Too far from the Divine, Love seeks his truth

And Life is blind and the instruments deceive
And Powers are there that labour to debase.
Rare is the cup fit for love’s nectar wine,
As rare the vessel that can hold God’s birth;
A soul made ready through a thousand years
Is the living mould of a supreme Descent.
p. 398 lines 237-244
One who is not open to love in its essence and in its truth cannot
approach the Divine. Even the seekers through knowledge come to
a point beyond which if they want to progress, they are bound to
find themselves entering at the same time into love and to feel the
two as one, knowledge the light of the divine union, love the very
heart of knowledge.
The Mother, on whose writings much of this discussion of the
importance of love is based25 , has this to say about how love
figured in the genesis of this creation and how love alone will be
able to claim this world for God and make here on earth the
manifestation of the perfection of God possible:
25
See Collected Works of the Mother, Vol. 3, pp. 69–72
343
The manifestation of the love of the Divine in the
world was the great holocaust, the supreme self-giving.
The Perfect Consciousness accepted to be merged and
absorbed into the unconsciousness of matter, so that
consciousness might be awakened in the depths of its
obscurity and little by little a Divine Power might rise
in it and make the whole of this manifested universe a
highest expression of the Divine Consciousness and the
Divine love. This was the supreme love, to accept the
loss of the perfect condition of supreme divinity, its
absolute consciousness, its infinite knowledge, to unite
with the unconsciousness, to dwell in the world with
ignorance and darkness. And yet perhaps none would
call it love; for it does not clothe itself in a superficial
sentiment, it makes no demand in exchange for what it
has done, no show of its sacrifice. The force of love in
the world is to trying to find consciousnesses that are
capable of receiving this divine movement in its purity
and expressing it. This race of all beings towards love,
this irresistible push and seeking out in the world’s
heart and in all hearts, is the impulse given by a Divine
love behind the human longing and seeking. It touches
millions of instruments, trying always, always failing;
but this constant touch prepares these instruments and
suddenly one day there will awake in them the
capacity of self-giving, the capacity of loving.
Collected Works of the Mother Vol. 3 p. 71
The love that has triggered off this discussion is the love between
Savitri and Satyavan. This love is called ‘conjugal love’ because in
our story Savitri and Satyavan are married and the word ‘conjugal’
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connotes the married state or the relations between married
persons. It was because of this that in the Puranic lore the story of
Satyavan and Savitri came to enjoy a celebrated status, and Savitri
came to be looked upon as a model wife. But merely viewing this
love as conjugal love or love between man and woman diminishes
the value of what this symbolises. It is symbolic of all human love.
And if human love were just that, an attraction between two human
beings or an ardent devotion for each other, it would cease to have
the universal significance with which all great spiritual leaders have
invested it.
When the God of Death ridicules love as something physical and
vital, therefore transient and fleeting, he was only looking at one
kind of love, and that too at its manifestation at a fairly lower end of
the scale. Savitri reveals to him the real secret of love, which she
herself has put in these most memorable lines, which we have
already once quoted above:

Love is man’s lien on the Absolute.
p. 633 lines 458-461
345
We have now heard from Savitri a most convincing and inspiring

description of love in this canto (Book X, Canto 3) so far. She has
explained why it has been regarded as ‘the bright link between earth
and heaven’ and as ‘the far Transcendent’s angel here’. But the God of
Death is not moved or convinced yet. His cynicism is not yet
overcome. So with an ironic laughter in his voice, showing a total
disbelief in what Savitri has so far said about the great role love has
played in the evolution of this creation, he responds to her as
follows:
“Savitri, I must admit that you have, like all human beings, used
splendid thoughts to cheat the Truth by giving a false ring to it. You
have hired the services of the swindler called Mind, and with its
help you have woven a fine garment out of the ethereal fabric of
idealism to hide the real nature of your naked desires. You have
dressed up your heart’s greedy passion and made it look
presentable and even respectable. But please do not paint the web
of life with such magic colours. Make your thought a plain and
faithful mirror so that it can reflect in itself Matter and mortality as
they really are. When you see them for what they really are, you
will come to know that your soul is a product of the flesh, that it is a
fancifully conceived thing belonging to a world fabricated by the
fancies of the mind. Your words are like murmurs in a mystic
dream. For how can the pure grandeur of your dream-built God live
in the soiled heart of man? Or, who can see a face and form divine
in the naked two-legged worm you call ‘man’? O human face, put
off the mind-painted masks you are wearing. Just be the animal, the
worm that Nature intended you to be. Accept your futile birth, the
narrow life. For truth is bare like stone and hard (inescapable) like
death. Live the bare life which is also hard like Truth.”
346
The God of Death is still haughty and dismissive of everything
that Savitri is saying. It would look as though the integral truth that
Savitri is trying to present to him is too vast for his limited
understanding. Savitri notes how he tried to belittle her by referring
repeatedly to her human status – ‘the naked two-legged worm thou
callest man’.
Therefore she responds to him in these words:
“Yes, I am human. Yet in my humanity the god awaits his hour.
Mankind through me will trample you down to reach the immortal
heights, transcending grief and pain, fate and death. Yes. My
humanity is a mask of God. He dwells in me, and he is the mover of
my acts. It is God who turns the great wheel of his cosmic work. I
am the living body of his light, and I am the thinking instrument of
his power. I incarnate his Wisdom and I am his conquering and
unslayable Will. The formless spirit drew in me its shape. In me are
the Nameless and the secret Name.”
Savitri is making the point that man is not the limited being his
physical size may suggest. He carries in him the Infinite Spirit and
that gives value to his finite form. Man has already reached a high
rung on the ladder of the evolution of consciousness; and what has
been evolving all along, unrecognised by most, is the Supreme
Divine consciousness. So it is only a question of time before the
evolution reaches a point at which not only grief and pain, but also
fate and death are transcended, because these cannot have a place in
the divine consciousness which has risen beyond Mind. When that
happens, the rule of Death would end.
The God of Death is exasperated; Savitri seems to have an
explanation for every inconvenient point that he brings up to make
her see his point of view. So he now throws at her another intricate
and difficult problem. He says to her:
“O Savitri, you are still speaking like a high priestess of the
shrine of imagination. Nature has fixed laws which brook (allow) no
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change, and you will have to persuade Nature to change these laws.
And then you will see that you have a whole string of these laws.
Will you be able to change these laws? Besides, you will have to
bring about a close union between two eternal foes – Matter and
Spirit. In this creation, these two irreconcilables find themselves in
each other’s embrace. They are joined together in an unhappy
wedlock in which they only manage to cancel out the glory of each
other. You describe yourself as the Will of the Spirit, but how will
you be able to make one of them true and the other false through
the exercise of your will? The Real and the unreal cannot co-exist.
Where Matter is real, there Spirit can only be a dream, and if Spirit
is the reality then Matter must be false, unreal. From this it would
follow that he who would turn to God must leave the world, and he
who would live in the Spirit must give up life. He who has met the
Self (the Spiritual Being) in himself has been able to do so because
he has renounced his individual ego-self. This has been the
experience of all the voyagers of the many routes of the spiritual
path, of all those who have travelled through Existence to its end, of
all the sages who have explored the vast spaces of the world-ocean.
They have found extinction or Nirvana the only safe harbour. Man
can find an escape from his miserable predicament in life only
through one of these two doors – the death of his body is Matter’s
gate to peace, and the extinction of his soul in the Brahman or the
Shunya is the last felicity of his soul. Whichever way one looks at it,
all take refuge in me. I, Death, am the final God, the ultimate
liberator.”
The God of Death regards Savitri as the votary of the Spirit, but
he cannot understand why then she cares for this world and why
she is so concerned about bringing perfection to life here on earth.
That would seem to be a purely materialistic goal. Consider some of
her statements:
The formless Spirit drew in me its shape;
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In me are the Nameless and the secret Name.
p. 634 lines 497-98
and again,
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.
p. 633 lines 447–451
The God of Death finds Savitri’s position a jumble of contraries.

Either the Spirit is true or Matter is true, both can not be true at the
same time. That is the wisdom of most philosophical thinking of a
certain kind. It would seem that the God of Death is arguing here in
the manner of Shankara, the great exponent of Illusionism, and of
Buddha. According to the classical theory of Illusionism (or
Mayavada, as it is called) there is only one Reality, and that is the
absolute transcendent Brahman or the Spirit, and the universe is not
a genuine creation. Those of us who are afflicted by Ignorance see
the Supreme Spirit in the figure of this creation as a man might see a
rope in the figure of a snake. The entire apparent world, in which
good and evil seem to co-exist, and which we want to change and
bring to perfection, is a mere illusion, and does not exist in reality.
Action in an illusory world is, of course, of no significance, except
possibly as an exercise to purify the mind in preparation for union
with the Absolute. Whether one renounces all action or whether one
practises only pious actions, the intention is the same – to escape the
world. This is essentially the claim of all those who believe in the
truth of the Spirit. They draw a mental support for this belief in the
perception about this world at which the thinking mind arrives:
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…that there is an illusion behind all human effort and
terrestrial endeavour, the illusion of his political and
social gospels, the illusion of his ethical efforts at
perfection, the illusion of philanthropy and service, the
illusion of works, the illusion of fame, power, success,
the illusion of all achievement. Human, social and
political endeavour turns always in a circle and leads
nowhere; man’s life and nature remain always the
same, always imperfect, and neither laws nor
institutions nor education nor philosophy nor morality
nor religious teachings have succeeded in producing
the perfect man, still less a perfect humanity,—
straighten the tail of the dog as you will, it has been
said, it always resumes its natural curve of
crookedness. Altruism, philanthropy and service,
Christian love or Buddhist compassion have not made
the world a whit happier, they only give infinitesimal
bits of momentary relief here and there, throw drops
on the fire of the world’s suffering. All aims are in the
end transitory and futile, all achievements unsatisfying
or evanescent; all works are so much labour of effort
and success and failure which consummate nothing
definitive: whatever changes are made in human life
are of the form only and these forms pursue each other
in a futile circle; for the essence of life, its general
character remains the same for ever.26
That is what the God of Death proclaims – that he is God, the

ultimate refuge of all, the ultimate end of the body and also of the
illusory self that is born in ignorance in this world of multiplicity.
26
The Life Divine, p. 416
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That is why the God of Death cannot understand Savitri: she swears
by the Spirit but seems to be equally committed to this material
world that is regarded as unreal and illusory. That is why he says:
If all are the Spirit, Matter is a lie,

And who was the liar who forged the universe?
The Real with the unreal cannot mate.
He who would turn to God, must leave the world;
He who would live in the Spirit, must give up life;
He who has met the Self, renounces self.
p. 635 lines 509-514.
If the Spirit (Brahman-Atman) alone is real, then no reality can be

ascribed either to Savitri or to Satyavan and the love between them
which Savitri values so highly would seem to have no significance
at all.
From this, it should not be concluded that the philosophical
position of the God of Death is the same as Shankara’s or Buddha’s.
He represents here basically the Nihil, the Inconscient from which
the world has evolved. He is here to guard the empire of the
Inconscient. He does not want the world to evolve towards the
Divine and manifest here the Divine’s glory and fullness and
perfection. He makes use of different philosophic positions as
weapons against Savitri in order to dissuade her from pursuing him
further and from getting Satyavan back from him and from thus
conquering death on behalf of mankind. As we have already seen,
Death takes a position against what he feels is the idealistic position
of Savitri. Now when it does not work he shifts his stand and
argues like a Shankara or a Buddha. But it is clear that he is not an
enthusiastic believer in Shankara’s position either. He hints at when
he says:
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Where Matter is all, there Spirit is a dream:
If all are the Spirit, matter is a lie,
And who was the liar who forged the universe?
p. 635 lines 508–510
The theory of Illusionism states that there is only one Reality, the
absolute Transcendent Brahman, and that we falsely see the
Brahman in the figure of the cosmic, as a man might see a rope. The
universe, they state, is a “superimposition” made by Maya on the
Brahman and so the multiple cosmos is seen where only the unitary
Brahman exists. We do see this universe for a time, and we are able
to operate in this illusory cosmos. So it is not entirely unreal.
But if it is true that this world is perceived, who perceives it?
Since Brahman is the only reality, then Brahman must be also the
percipient of Maya. This would imply that maya is a power of
Brahman consciousness. If so, then there must be a dual status of
consciousness in Brahman, one consciousness of the reality, and the
other conscious of maya. Thus we are forced into duality in order to
maintain the illusory character of what Maya produces, together
with the reality of Brahman itself. This is an argument which Sri
Aurobindo has used in The Life Divine to show that conceiving
Brahman as the percipient of maya leads to the conclusion that
maya is more likely a real manifestation of the real Brahman. We
will not pursue this philosophical inquiry any further. My point
here is that the God of Death is making use of the Shankarite
position on Illusionism as a weapon in his dialectical struggle
against Savitri, not necessarily because he believes in this position.
Savitri is not interested in giving a philosophical reply to the
problems raised by the God of Death. She could have pointed out,
as Sri Aurobindo has in The Life Divine (p. 420), that this world is a
manifestation of a divine Truth or a divine possibility in which
under certain conditions an initiating Ignorance must intervene as a
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necessary factor, and that the arrangement of this universe contains
in it a compulsion of the Ignorance to move towards Knowledge, of
the imperfect manifestation to grow into perfection, of the
frustration to serve as a step towards a final victory, of the suffering
to prepare an emergence of the divine Delight of Being. In that case
the sense of disappointment, frustration, illusion and the vanity of
all things would not be valid; for the aspects that seem to justify it
would be only the natural circumstances of a difficult evolution: all
the stress of struggle and effort, success and failure, joy and
suffering, the mixture of ignorance and knowledge would be the
experience needed for the soul, mind, life and physical part to grow
into the full light of a spiritual perfected being. It would reveal itself
as the process of an evolutionary manifestation; there would be no
need to bring in the fiat of an arbitrary Omnipotence or a cosmic
Illusion, a phantasy of meaningless Maya.
But although Savitri and The Life Divine were both written by Sri
Aurobindo, the latter is metaphysical in its nature while the former
is poetry from beginning to end, and even when high philosophy is
presented in it, it takes on flesh and blood and comes out as lived
experience. So there is no place of philosophical argument in Savitri.
Savitri replies to Death as follows:
“O Death, I do not act on the basis of what Reason dictates to
me, but on the basis of what my heart, the love I carry in my heart,
prompts me, since that love is wiser than all your reason. The love
in me is stronger than all the laws by which you try to hold this
world captive. It sees and feels the one Heart throb in all, – the
undeniable presence of the Divine in all. Because of it I can sense the
warm hands of the Transcendent at work here; I can see also the
cosmic spirit at work here, and even in the ignorance of the dim
Night here on earth. It can see the Divine supporting the struggling
individual being. The love in my heart has enough strength to bear
all the grief of this universe and never falter on its luminous
evolutionary way in the vast orbit through God’s peace. It can at the
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same time drink up the sea of All-Delight and never lose the
spiritual presence, the calm that broods in the deep Infinite.”
The God of Death is baffled by what Savitri has just said about
herself, about the power of her love, about its wisdom and also
power. So he asks her:
“Savitri, are you really so strong and so free as you have just
now declared yourself to be? Can you really gather pleasure from
the wayside flowering boughs of your way and yet not falter on
your difficult path to a difficult goal? Can you really get involved in
this world and yet not forget the goal which you have to reach?
Show me then your strength and freedom from my laws.”
Savitri has now turned the tables on the God of Death. Initially
he sounded confident and treated Savitri with a certain
condescension. Now that confidence in him has just evaporated.
Savitri has got the better of him now. And he is now anxious to
know where she draws all her power and wisdom from. Savitri
replies:
“I find enough pleasures among the green and whispering
woods of life. But mine are close-bosomed pleasures. They are mine
since they are Satyavan’s in the first place, or they are mine for him
because our joys are one. And if I seem to linger anywhere it does
not matter because Time is ours and God’s. And I have no fear of
falling because if I fall, his hand is always near mine to support me.
All is a single plan, each wayside act, however casual, deepens the
soul’s response, brings us closer to each other and to God.”
Savitri says that she does not scorn the pleasures of this world so
long as they are Satyavan’s too. For her this world is not a mere
phantasy, an illusion. This for her is a real world.
The God of Death had assumed that for Savitri this world held
no charms and that she was all ethereal and spiritual. He now sees
that although she takes her stand on the Spirit, she also seeks a
fulfilment which is really of the world. So almost mockingly he says
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to her,
“Then why not prove to the gods your supreme force by
choosing earthly joy. For your own self demand what you desire,
and at the same time be free from the desire self and its gross
masks. If you can show me that you can do this, I shall give all that
your soul desires – every mortal and finite joy that the earth keeps
for human hearts. But the hard laws that operate in the world and
your own ironic fate forbid the granting of the one wish that is
dearest to you and outweighs all your other wishes. My will once
exerted will remain unchanged for ever; Satyavan can never return
to you again.”
It now becomes clear to Savitri that the God of Death has not
recognised her, has not seen through her human mask, so he is
speaking in a language that suits the human world of ignorance.
And so she says to him:
“O Death, you have not yet been able to understand who I am.
Your eyes of Darkness cannot look straight at the Truth I embody in
my human form. Look deep into me, and try to see what I am, know
the Truth that I embody. Then decide what you can give me and
what you must give me. I am not here as a supplicant; I am here to
claim Satyavan. I shall be satisfied with nothing less.”
355
We are now approaching gradually the climacteric point in this

confrontation between Savitri and the God of Death. We have
already seen how the God of Death uses different strategies to
dissuade Savitri from pursuing her single objective of getting back
Satyavan from the clutches of death. Psychological pressure he has
tried but that had little effect on Savitri. Then he subjects her
idealism to a scathing criticism and tries to show that love is no
more than animal lust disguised in colourful words and sentiments.
He tries to demoralise her by questioning and denying the very
foundations on which her idealism is built. He directs Savitri to
realise the actual reality of love among humans and animals. For
him that is a reality which is well-grounded in actualities, and
which represents something already accomplished. As against such
a reality, Savitri’s idealism, he claims, is nebulous and
unsubstantial, a thing more of words and thoughts than of live
actualities. Savitri does not deny that idealism is ineffective so long
it remains a mental thing in us. She declares that her attempt is to
convert her idealism into a spiritual realism which sublimates the
lower reality of our sensational, vital and physical nature with a
strong touch of the higher reality of the spirit.
The argument from the Illusionists also does not deter Savitri.
For her the Supreme Reality is true and so is the world which has
issued from it. She finds no need to reject the world and life in it
because it is still imperfect. She has seen the Supreme at work even
in the abysms of Matter’s night. She never holds herself back from
the dangerous touch of the world because she has the strength to
bear it without faltering. The world and the experiences one gathers
in it are all parts of one plan and each experience brings us nearer to
God.
356
Then the God of Death throws a challenge at her. He offers to
give her all that she has ever wanted of the joys of this earth on
condition that she remains free from the desire self and its
deformations. But there is one thing, he says, he cannot give her
because the hard laws of nature and her ironic fate forbid it. He
cannot grant her the one wish that is dearest to her heart – Satyavan
can never return to earth.
Savitri answers:
“If the eyes of Darkness can look straight at Truth,

Look in my heart and, knowing what I am,
Give what thou wilt or what thou must, O Death.
Nothing I claim but Satyavan alone.”
p. 636 lines 561-564
This is the point which we had reached in our previous chapter.

Savitri makes it clear that she wants nothing but Satyavan to go
back with her to life on earth. When Savitri says this, there is a hush
as though Fate itself is doubtful and hesitating how to respond to
Savitri. The God of Death can see the power of conviction and faith
behind Savitri’s words. He has to yield to her something of
Satyavan. He then responds to her as follows:
“I shall give you, reclaimed from death and painful fate,
whatever Satyavan keenly desired for you when he was alive.
Bright noons I give thee and unwounded dawns,

Daughters of thy own shape in heart and mind,
Fair hero sons and sweetness undisturbed
Of union with thy husband dear and true.
And thou shalt harvest in thy joyful house
Felicity of thy surrounded eves.
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Love shall bind by thee many gathered hearts.
The opposite sweetness in thy days shall meet
Of tender service to thy life’s desired
And loving empire over all thy loved,
Two poles of bliss made one, O Savitri.
Return, O child, to thy forsaken earth.”
p. 637 lines 571-582
“I give to you, O Savitri, wonderful days consisting of bright noons

and happy dawns. I shall give you daughters resembling you in
heart and mind, and fair and valiant sons, and undisturbed
sweetness of union with your husband, who will be true and dear to
you always. In your joyous house you will have the satisfaction of
passing your days surrounded by all your loved ones. You will bind
with your love the hearts of many people gathered around you. You
will live to enjoy the double bliss of being able to serve those you
love and also hold a loving empire over their hearts. Now Savitri,
my child, return to earth which you have forsaken.”
Notice that the God of Death paints for her a perfect life of
domestic bliss, and this is what he is offering her. Daughters very
much like her in looks and in character, and sons, handsome and
valiant. To top it all he offers her the love of a husband true and
dear. and a long undisturbed life with him. Savitri will always be
surrounded by those she loves and she will always find her love
reciprocated.
In making this offer to her, the God of Death shows how
insensitive he is to what Savitri has been aspiring for. After all, what
is Satyavan to Savitri? According to the God of Death, he is just the
male member of the conjugal unit of husband and wife, or man and
woman. Savitri is given the assurance that he will be true to her and
love her dearly. They will together be able to raise a loving family
consisting of wonderful sons and daughters. And on top of it all,
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her companionship with her husband will be a long-lasting one this
time.
It looks as though the God of Death has either forgotten or never
understood what love means to Savitri. For Savitri has already
declared to him:
My love is not a hunger of the heart,

A breath is felt from the eternal spheres.
Allowed by Heaven and wonderful to man
A sweet fire-rhythm of passion chants to love.
There is a hope in its wild infinite cry;
It rings with callings from forgotten heights,
And when its strains are hushed to high-winged souls
In their empyrean, its burning breath
Survives beyond, the rapturous core of suns
That flame for ever pure in skies unseen,
A voice of the eternal Ecstasy.
pp. 612–613 lines 203–220
The God of Death shows himself totally incapable of understanding

such an elevated and divine notion of love. Again, Savitri has told
him that the love that binds Satyavan and her is a bond that has
bound them together over many lives. And any other male person
cannot be for Savitri a husband, true and dear. Savitri has already
said all this clearly to the God of Death:
For we were man and woman from the first,

The twin souls born from one undying fire.
359
Did he not dawn on me in other stars?
How has he through the thickets of the world
Pursued me like a lion in the night
And come upon me suddenly in the ways
And seized me with his glorious golden leap!
Unsatisfied he yearned for me through time,
Sometimes with wrath and sometimes with sweet peace
Desiring me since first the world began.
He rose like a wild wave out of the floods
And dragged me helpless into seas of bliss.
Out of my curtained past his arms arrive;
They have touched me like the soft persuading wind,
They have plucked me like a glad and trembling flower,
And clasped me happily burned in ruthless flame.
I too have found him charmed in lovely forms
And run delighted to his distant voice
And pressed to him past many dreadful bars.
If there is a yet happier greater god,
Let him first wear the face of Satyavan
And let his soul be one with him I love;
So let him seek me that I may desire.
For only one heart beats within my breast
And one god sits there throned. Advance, O Death,
Beyond the phantom beauty of this world;
For of its citizens I am not one.
I cherish God the Fire, not God the Dream.”
p. 614 lines 253–280
The God of Death in total disregard of these high sentiments of

Savitri is now trying to appease her by offering her a most
materialistic paradise of domestic bliss – a loving husband and a
house full of bright children.
Understandably, Savitri is abrupt in response to this offer. She
360
says:
“Please hold back your gifts. Earth cannot flower if I return to it
alone, without Satyavan.”
This abrupt reply infuriates the God of Death. He felt like a lion
when it sees its prey escaping. After all the trouble he has taken to
rebuff Savitri and shake her challenge to his dominance, she
gradually seems to be getting the better of him. He seems to have
lost all his power over her.
“O Savitri, you do not seem to know much about the rich and
constantly changing life of earth. Why do you imagine that with one
man’s death all the joy of earth will cease? Do you think you will be
able to remain unhappy like this for long, until the end of your life
because Satyavan is dead? For human hearts get tired of grief soon
and the ache of separation passes away and soon other guests fill
the vacant chamber of the heart.
Of course, there is something called love. But it is like the
passing moment of beauty; it is like an ephemeral painting drawn
on the floor to amuse oneself on a holiday. Or, if you look upon love
from the point of view of a traveller on an eternal course, then the
lover is like a swimmer and those he loves are like the waves in his
embrace which keep changing as he proceeds on the infinite sea of
life.”
But Savitri impatiently intervened and said the following:
“Give me back my Satyavan; he is my only Lord. None can take
his place in my life. All your thoughts and arguments and musings
are meaningless to my soul which perceives the deep eternal truth
that lives even in transient things.”
The God of Death replied:
“O Savitri, why not give yourself a real chance. Go back to earth
and see what happens. Very soon you will notice that there are
other men on this earth who have beauty, strength and truth, and
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this will change your perspective on love and life. One of these men
will wind himself around your heart once you have half-forgotten
Satyavan. After all, your heart needs an answering heart. Who in
this mortal world can live alone and yet be happy? Soon even the
memory of Satyavan will drift into the past, he will become a gentle
memory pushed away from you by a new love and the tender
hands of your children. Then you will begin to wonder whether you
ever really loved Satyavan at all. This is the way it always goes in
life; it is a flowing stream that changes from moment to moment.”
Savitri gives the following reply to the God of Death:
“O dark and sarcastic critic of the work of God, You are making
fun of the faltering and slow attempts of the mind and the body of
man to catch up with what his heart is certain of achieving at a
certain destined hour and what his immortal spirit shall one day
make its own. My heart has worshipped the image of the god its
love has adored, although I have been left here separated from him.
I have indeed burned myself in the flame of that love to follow in
his footsteps. He and I have shared the vast solitude on the hill-tops
alone with God. Why do you engage yourself in this vain strife with
me? My mind is free from vague and uncertain thoughts. The
secrets of the gods are plain to my mind. I know now that the fire
which burns unceasingly in the great stars burns in me as well. Life
and death are the fuel of this fire.
“My life is totally dedicated to love, undistracted by anything
else. Earthly eyes may have seen my struggle but the eyes of heaven
have seen the victory of my love. My love will overcome all
difficulties and obstructions on the way. I am certain that through
us the eternal bridegroom (Purusha = the Spirit) and the eternal
bride (Prakriti = Nature) will cast off their veils before the marriage
fire and exchange kisses. The heavens accept our attempts to fly
beyond the limits of this earth although our flights are at times
broken. On our life’s prow that ploughs through the waters of life,
no light of hope has ever gleamed in vain.”
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Notice how elevated Savitri’s conception of her union and
oneness with Satyavan is; she feels that through her union with
Satyavan the eternal bridegroom and the eternal bride will be
united. Notice the contrast between this concept of love and that
assumed by the god of Death – love as a mere union of man and
woman which produces conjugal bliss, and the domestic felicity of a
happy brood of sons and daughters.
In one sense, the destiny of all idealistic tendencies and
endeavours is to fail, because idealism by its very nature is a light
that gleams above what is already realised and has become
practicable. It therefore represents something which at the moment
looks beyond reach. But its very function is to open up the
doorways to an unrealised future, to kindle aspirations for what has
not yet been achieved so far, to set for humanity a goal one step
higher than what it has ascended so far. The love that Savitri and
Satyavan have found in each other may now seem too far from the
reach of ordinary mortals. But it is, nevertheless, a light on the
prow, a light of hope that illumines the still turbid waters of life.
As Savitri made this declaration above (in lines 615 to 637),
something unexpected happened: the vast limbs of the God of
Death trembled, as if overcome by a secret ecstasy; they heaved as
do the waters of the ocean under the influence of the moon. In other
words, the poet is suggesting here that something within the God of
Death is awaiting the hour when the God of Death himself will be
freed from the harsh task which now has befallen him. It is hints
like these that suggest to us that even the God of Death is a
functionary of the Divine, keeping a strict vigil to ensure that
nobody who does not deserve it is allowed into the kingdom of the
Divine.
Then the twilight around them, the dim and glimmering
surrounding atmosphere, lifted up as though by a sudden waft of
wind and trembled like a veil that is getting ready to part.
363
Thus the two great antagonists strove with each other with
potent speech as their weapon. Around them in the glittering mist, a
deepening half-light fled away on pearly wings as if to reach some
ideal morning. Savitri’s thoughts flew through the gleaming haze,
mingling with its lights and veils. Like dazzling jewels they glowed
in that mysterious realm before fading off into distant echoes. In
this realm, all speech, all moods become an enduring tissue used by
the mind to construct an ethereal robe for bringing about a
charming change. Intent upon her silent will, Savitri walked on the
grass of the dim, hazy, none-too-real plains. In front of her there
was a floating veil of visions; behind her was a trailing robe of
dreams, all vague and constantly changing.
Now Savitri withdrew her consciousness from the surroundings
and gathered it into the depths of her meditative being. For the
unshakeable truth of the soul can dwell only in this deep chamber
of the being. It burns there like a flame in the centre of the hearth,
like a sacrificial fire. This fire serves as the sentinel and witness for
the Lord of the house and his companion.
The three – Savitri, the God of Death and the soul of Satyavan –
continue to glide through that space as if compelled by some force.
The physical order is still the same – the God of Death in the front,
followed by Satyavan’s spirit, followed by Savitri. But this is only in
appearance. In fact, the leadership of the march has now come to
Savitri. She leads and the God and the spirit of Satyavan follow her
directions. So now the leader was at the back and those in the front
of the line were the followers. Onward they journeyed on the
drifting paths through the vague, gleaming mists. But now
everything seemed to be moving faster, as if there was an attempt to
escape from being caught in the clear light of Savitri’s soul. Her soul
moved on through that enchanted dim realm, a celestial bird upon
jewelled wings of the wind. Her soul moved on through the
enchanted dimness like a colourful flame carried aloft by the spirits
of that realm.
364
Death walked in front of Savitri and Satyavan walked in front of
Death looking like a failing star. Above them hung in an unseen
balance Satyavan’s fate still to be decided.
365
30: Book X Canto 4 – The Earthly Real
The God of Death has now taken Savitri through the Dream
Twilight of the Ideal and she comes through it all unfazed. This
undermines considerably the confidence of the God of Death, and
he begins to sense the great power working behind her and through
her. Now he takes her through another Dream Twilight world – that
of the Earthly Real. The landscape through which they are
travelling also indicates this change.
The marvel of the ideal world was slowly getting lost, and so
was its crowding wonder of delicate dreams and vague half-etched
sublimities. Thought itself seemed to have fallen to a lower level; it
had now become hard and tense as if it longed for the touch of some
crude reality. The twilight floated as before but its symbol colours
were pale and enwrapped a much less delightful dream than before
and resembled the dull, greyish mist of a sombre day. Savitri heard
louder and sadder sounds and her eyes caught vast stretches of
planes and cloudy mountains and tawny streams. She saw cities
with minarets and towers, long quays, ghats and harbours white
with sails. These scenes lingered before her for a while and were
gone. In between these scenes, she saw toiling multitudes in ever-
changing groups. All these were shadowy shapes as if projected on
a screen in a cinema.
The tedium of the repetitiousness of life and its machine-like
thoughts and acts is also felt. The poet describes this in these words:
A savage din of labour and a tramp

Of armoured life and the monotonous hum
Of thoughts and acts that ever were the same,
As if the dull reiterated drone
Of a great brute machine, beset her soul,—
366
A grey dissatisfied rumour like a ghost
Of the moaning of a loud unquiet sea.
pp. 641- 642 lines 30-36
These were all the creations of an ignorant mind, all these

philosophies, disciplines and laws created by man. The messages of
the evangelists, of the prophets, the ideals, systems, poems and
crafts were like dreams crossing an empty vast. On the whole, it
was a dismal spectacle which reinforced the pessimism of the God
of Death.
Once more was heard the great destroying voice of the God of
Death, rising above the spectacle of the fruitless labour of the
worlds. His huge denial seems to have pursued the ignorant march
of Time. He says to Savitri:
“Behold, Savitri, this futile spectacle man is for ever engaged in
creating on earth. Look at these great deeds accomplished on earth
and the ultimate outcome that nature gives to these human efforts.
Everything is devoured here by time and everything gets destroyed.
“Man’s primary sin is the sin of being, of existence, and his great
error is his desire to live, nursing the incurable malady of hope.
Since nature cannot change, man too will not be able to change. He
seems to be obeying nature’s fixed law, which allows a change in
form but only ends up creating newer versions of her often-
repeated old forms. He thinks that he is creating something new,
but ends simply creating a newer version of the old. Man’s mind is
confined within circling boundaries. For Mind is man, and beyond
it he cannot rise. If only he could rise beyond his mind and
thoughts, he would be safe; but even when he sees this, he cannot
mount to greater heights. He is a captive in the net of his mind, and
even when he rises with wings it is only to fall back to his native
soil. He beats his wings in vain against the walls of life.
“In vain his heart lifts up its yearning prayer to Gods, who, he
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believes, live in the formless Void. But he is disappointed, because
nobody in the Void responds to his prayers. This disappointment
drives him to seek his release in Nothingness. He seeks the Nirvana
(the extinction) of the dream of his self. The Word, all that is
created, thus ends in silence. In Nought is there release for
everything and everybody.
“When he finds himself lonely among the human multitudes,
man calls upon God to be the lover of his lonely soul and casts his
spirit into the empty embrace of this imagined God. He projects his
own copy onto the impartial, impersonal All, and imparts to it his
will and attributes to it his own anger and love, and thus gives to
the Ineffable a thousand forms and names. Do not, O Savitri, hope
to call God down into this life. How will the Eternal and the Infinite
live in this finite and time-bound world?
“Savitri, you are making a mistake in believing that that there
can be an aim to this world of Matter. There is no aim here, but only
a will to be. Everything is bound by Nature and is for ever the
same.”
As an illustration of what he has been saying, the God of Death
unveils before Savitri a fleeting panorama of the history of this
world. This is one of the most memorable passages in this epic
poem, depicting the human drama.
Look on these forms that stay awhile and pass,

These lives that long and strive, then are no more,
These structures that have no abiding truth,
The saviour creeds that cannot save themselves,
But perish in the strangling hands of the years,
Discarded from man’s thought, proved false by Time,
Philosophies that strip all problems bare
But nothing ever have solved since earth began,
And sciences omnipotent in vain
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By which men learn of what the suns are made,
Transform all forms to serve their outward needs,
Ride through the sky and sail beneath the sea,
But learn not what they are or why they came;
These polities, architectures of man’s brain,
That, bricked with evil and good, wall in man’s spirit
And, fissured houses, palace at once and jail,
Rot while they reign and crumble before they crash;
These revolutions, demon or drunken god,
Convulsing the wounded body of mankind
Only to paint in new colours an old face;
These wars, carnage triumphant, ruin gone mad,
The work of centuries vanishing in an hour,
The blood of the vanquished and the victor’s crown
Which men to be born must pay for with their pain,
The hero’s face divine on satyr’s limbs,
The demon’s grandeur mixed with the demigod’s,
The glory and the beasthood and the shame;
Why is it all, the labour and the din,
The transient joys, the timeless sea of tears,
The longing and the hoping and the cry,
The battle and the victory and the fall,
The aimless journey that can never pause,
The waking toil, the incoherent sleep,
Song, shouts and weeping, wisdom and idle words,
The laughter of men, the irony of the gods?
Where leads the march, whither the pilgrimage?
Who keeps the map of the route or planned each stage?
pp. 644–45 lines 127-163
Incidentally, this passage apart from the last two lines consists of
280 words and is probably the longest single sentence in the whole
of Savitri. If you come across a sentence longer than this in this
369
poem, please let me know.
The God of Death shows to Savitri scenes of the ever-changing
drama of human history. They all flourish for a while and then just
disappear. They do not seem to have any abiding truth about them.
Nothing here lives for ever. There are some which appear as saving
creeds but these do not seem to be able even to save themselves.
They perish at the strangling hands of time, discarded from men’s
thought, or proved false by Time. Then there are philosophies
which seem to be able strip all problems bare but which have not
solved any real problem facing man since the time the world began.
The same is true of sciences as well. They seem to have made man
omnipotent, but in vain. Man has learnt from them what the suns
are made of, and can transform almost anything to make it
serviceable to man. They have taught him how to ride through the
sky and sail underneath the sea, but they give no clue to what
human beings are made of and why they are here on earth.
“Look at these varied political organisations that man has built
one after the other; each of them contains as many bricks of good as
of evil; they are all attempts to wall in the human spirit and yet each
of them has cracks in them, and they can serve as palaces as well as
jails. Even when they reign, they degenerate and become corrupt,
and finally start disintegrating before they crash.
“These are the much-vaunted revolutions during which men
behave violently like demons or drunken gods. They shake
violently the wounded body of mankind, only to paint new colours
on an old face, without achieving anything worthwhile for all the
drama and turmoil.
“Then look at these wars during which carnage becomes
triumphant and there is mad ruin everywhere. These wars destroy
in a brief hour what took centuries to build. The blood of the
vanquished as well as the crown of the victor take a heavy toll on
generations to come. Generations to come pay for the victory of the
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victorious as much as for the defeat of the vanquished. The glory of
a war is like a heroic face on the limbs of a Satyr 27 . It is like bringing
together the demon’s grandeur with that of a demi-god. You have
there glory, beasthood and shame all put together.
“One often wonders why does all this keep happening, all this
labour and all this discordant welter of sounds? What is the
meaning of all these transient joys? Why should there be this
endless sea of tears? This constant longing, and the hoping and the
cry, the battle, this victory and the defeat, and this aimless journey
that has gone on without a pause! All the endless toil during
waking hours followed by an incoherent sleep! All the song, shouts
and all the weeping, and all the wisdom and all the idle words man
uses so glibly, this laughter of men and the irony of the gods –
where leads this march, and to which place is this pilgrimage? Is
any one planning this pilgrimage or is this world of ours self-moved
and goes its own way?
“Or is there no final truth behind all these things, but all this is
only a play of the Mind that dreams? Is the world then a mere myth,
something wholly imaginary that happened to come true? Is it a
legend told by a conscious Mind to itself and imaged and enacted
on the false ground of Matter in an unsubstantial Vast? Mind then is
the author, the spectator, the actor and the stage of this entire
drama. If so, Mind must be the only reality, and what it thinks, we
see around us.
“But if Mind is all that is, then renounce the hope of bliss, and
the hope of finding the truth, for Mind can never touch the body of
Truth and Mind can never see the soul of God. It can only grasp his
shadow or his laugh since its tendency is to turn away from him to
the unreal appearance of things. Mind is a tissue woven of light and
shade; it is as often right as it is wrong. Or Mind is Nature’s
marriage of convenience between truth and falsehood, between joy
27
A woodland deity in Greek mythology represented as part man part goat; a
very lecherous person.
371
and pain, this struggling pair no court can separate.
“Each thought that issues out of Mind is like a gold coin covered
with a bright alloy, and error and truth are its obverse and reverse.
It comes from the royal mintage of the brain and all the currency
that issues out of this mint is of the same kind.”
The human mind, as Sri Aurobindo has explained in The Life
Divine, is in its essence a consciousness which measures, limits, cuts
forms of things from the indivisible whole and contains them as if
each were separate integer. It cannot see the Truth as a whole. There
are many places in his writings where he has discussed the
strengths and limitations of the human mind. I shall quote one brief
passage below:
Mind is not sufficient to explain existence in the

universe. Infinite Consciousness must first translate
itself into infinite faculty of Knowledge or, as we call it
from our point of view, omniscience. But Mind is not a
faculty of knowledge nor an instrument of
omniscience; it is a faculty for the seeking of
knowledge, for expressing as much as it can gain of it
in certain forms of a relative thought and for using it
towards certain capacities of action. Even when it
finds, it does not possess; it only keeps a certain fund
of current coin of Truth — not Truth itself — in the
bank of Memory to draw upon according to its needs.
For Mind is that which does not know, which tries to
know and which never knows except as in a glass
darkly. It is the power which interprets truth of
universal existence for the practical uses of a certain
order of things; it is not the power which knows and
guides that existence and therefore it cannot be the
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power which created or manifested it28 .
Death continues:
“Do not hope to plant the living Truth on earth, do not try to
make Matter’s world the home of God. There is no God or he exists
only in name. And if there is a Self, it is bodiless and is never born.
It cannot be identified with any one and it is nobody’s possession.
On what shall you then build your happy world here? Be ready to
cast off your mind and life, be the stark Self. An all-seeing
Omnipresence alone, and all by itself, exists; even if there is a God,
he does not seem to care for the world. He sees everything with an
indifferent gaze. He has doomed all hearts to sorrow and to desire
and he has bound all of life with pitiless laws. He does not respond
to the ignorant voice of prayer.
“He is eternal while the word he made toils below through time;
but he is unmoved and untouched by whatever happens here in the
world he created. He sees the agony of his animal creatures as also
the fate of man as just minute details of his vast creation. Being
immeasurably wise, he exceeds your thought. He takes joy in his
solitariness and does not need your love. Human thinking cannot
hold God’s truth. If you desire truth, then stop all your thinking and
still your mind for ever, and then the unseen Light of God’s truth
will dawn on you. Immortal bliss cannot live within any finite
human mould. The mighty Mother will not consent to keep her
calm delight in the narrow fragile vessel of the human mind, or to
lodge her sweet unbroken delight in human hearts which earthly
sorrow can overwhelm and in human bodies which careless death
can slay at will.
“It is futile to try to change the world which God has planned so
carefully.”
Then the God of Death tries to clinch his argument by what
28
The Life Divine SABCL 18:118.
373
seems to be an unassailable argument, which he puts in these
words:
Dream not to change the world that God has planned,

Strive not to alter his eternal law.
If heavens there are whose gates are shut to grief,
There seek the joy thou couldst not find on earth;
Or in the imperishable hemisphere
Where Light is native and Delight is king
And Spirit is the deathless ground of things,
Choose thy high station, child of Eternity.
If thou art Spirit and Nature is thy robe,
Cast off thy garb and be thy naked self
Immutable in its undying truth,
Alone for ever in the mute Alone.
Turn then to God, for him leave all behind;
Forgetting love, forgetting Satyavan,
Annul thyself in his immobile peace.
O soul, drown in his still beatitude.
For thou must die to thyself to reach God’s height:
I, Death, am the gate of immortality.”
p. 647 lines 216-233
“This world is governed by certain eternal laws which God has

made, and since they cannot be changed, the world cannot be
changed. If there are heavens whose gates are shut to human
sorrows, you can seek there the joys you could not find on earth. Or
choose your eternal station in the deathless hemisphere where
knowledge is native and delight rules supreme and undisturbed.
This will be the world of the Spirit.
“But then if you really are the Spirit and nature is only a garb
which you are wearing, cast off your garb and be your naked self.
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This self is changeless and deathless, and it lives in its loneliness
(kaivalya). Turn then entirely to God and for him leave everything
behind. Forget Love and forget also Satyavan. Seek your
annulment; seek to dissolve yourself in the immobile peace of that
realm. O soul, if that is what you are seeking, drown yourself in this
still beatitude. But you must die to yourself, abandon all that you
are, your individuality, your dreams of a perfect love on a perfect
earth with Satyavan as your companion, etc. to reach this height. I,
death, am the gate of this immortality”.
The God of Death is now using the central argument of a certain
variety of Indian spirituality. It says that you cannot find either
truth or bliss or perfection of any kind on this earth. Generations
have tried for these ends over millennia but of no avail. Therefore
wise men have rightly concluded that this world is going to remain
for ever imperfect, a home of inadequacy, incapacity, frustration,
sorrow and death. And therefore the wise man rejects this world,
turns his attention within and tries to find peace, bliss and
fulfilment in the kingdom of God that dwells within us.
Thus negation of life becomes the most favoured path of
spirituality. Even today, the Indian mind understands spirituality to
mean renunciation of life. Sri Aurobindo has put it trenchantly:
All voices are joined in one great consensus that not in

this world of dualities can there be our kingdom of
heaven, but beyond, whether in the joys of the eternal
Brindavan or the high beatitudes of Brahmaloka,
beyond all in the featureless unity of the indefinable
existence. And through many centuries a great army of
shining witnesses, saints, teachers, names sacred to
Indian memory and dominant in Indian imagination,
have borne always the same witness and swelled
always the same lofty and distant appeal:…
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renunciation the sole path of knowledge, the
acceptance of physical life the act of the ignorant,
cessation of birth the right use of human birth, the call
of the Spirit, the recoil from Matter.29
It is interesting that the God of Death takes this very position

against Savitri. A moment’s reflection will show you that this
canker of world negation is found at the heart of all religions in
some form or the other.
29
The Life Divine SABCL 18:23.
376
In the first few pages of Book X, Canto 4, which we reviewed in the

preceding chapter, the God of Death mounts an assault on Savitri’s
ideological position from a new flank. He begins by pointing out
that nature is immutable, unchanging and ‘Where nature changes not,
man cannot change’. Secondly, since man is ‘a captive in his net of mind’
he cannot rise beyond thought. All his prayers prove to be vain
yearnings. He imparts to his God his own will and his own wrath
and love
Then comes his long and shattering indictment on the drama of
human history, which concludes with these lines:
These wars, carnage triumphant, ruin gone mad,

The work of centuries vanishing in an hour,
The blood of the vanquished and the victor’s crown
Which men to be born must pay for with their pain,
The hero’s face divine on satyr’s limbs,
The demon’s grandeur mixed with the demigod’s,
The glory and the beasthood and the shame;
Why is it all, the labour and the din,
The transient joys, the timeless sea of tears,
The longing and the hoping and the cry,
The battle and the victory and the fall,
The aimless journey that can never pause,
The waking toil, the incoherent sleep,
Song, shouts and weeping, wisdom and idle words,
The laughter of men, the irony of the gods?
p. 645 lines 147-161
Then he goes on to argue that even if there is a God, thee is no home
377
for him on this earth. He concludes by declaring:
Dream not to change the world that God has planned,

Strive not to alter his eternal law.
p. 647 lines 216-217
He then goes on to show two possible resolutions for man’s

problems: If you think that there are heavens shut to grief, then seek
your fulfilment in such a heaven. Or, if you think that you are Spirit,
and nature is only your garb, then ‘cast off thy garb and be thy naked
self’. In either case, I, Death, am the gate of immortality.
Now as was remarked earlier, this is the solution which has been
most widely accepted by almost all religious and spiritual
traditions, and by the Indian tradition as well, particularly after the
Buddha gave it the stamp of his strong personality. Thus
renunciation came to be looked upon the sole path of knowledge,
the acceptance of physical life as the act of the ignorant, cessation of
birth the right use of human birth. The call of the Spirit came to
signify the recoil from Matter.
It is against such a recoil from life in Matter that, in Part One of
Savitri, Aswapati protested in these words as he stood on the
threshold of Nirvana.
O soul, it is too early to rejoice!

Thou hast reached the boundless silence of the Self,
Thou hast leaped into a glad divine abyss;
But where hast thou thrown Self’s mission and Self’s power?
On what dead bank on the Eternal’s road?
One was within thee who was self and world,
What hast thou done for his purpose in the stars?
Escape brings not the victory and the crown!
378
Something thou cam’st to do from the Unknown,
But nothing is finished and the world goes on
Because only half God’s cosmic work is done.
p. 310 lines 15-25
The importance of this revolution in Indian spirituality which Sri

Aurobindo brought about cannot emphasised enough. One of his
principal contributions to Indian spirituality is a new view of
existence which is based on a synthesis of the spiritual realisations
of the Indian tradition with a full, active life in the world. This gives
our life in this world a new, enlarged spiritual significance and
character. Sri Aurobindo has emphasised enough the importance of
the realisation of the Self or Atman, which is the goal of most
traditional yogas. But as the Mother has pointed out, Sri
Aurobindo’s yoga begins where the others leave off. This does not
take away anything from the primary importance of the realisation
of the true Self, but it also emphasises that there is plenty to realise
even after the nirvanic realisation.
The realisation of the Self is looked upon in Sri Aurobindo’s
yoga as a crucial step, but there are others with which it must be
integrated. This inner harmonisation must enable us to achieve
harmony with the whole world and all the experiences which it
throws at us. The realisation of the true Self comes about with the
dissolution of the ego which makes us identify ourselves with a
particular mind, life and body. To quote from Sri Aurobindo’s
Synthesis of Yoga (p. 341):
The formation of a mental and vital ego tied to body-

sense was the first great labour of the cosmic Life in its
progressive evolution; for this was the means it found
for creating out of matter a conscious individual. The
dissolution of this limiting ego is the one condition, the
379
necessary means for the very cosmic Life to arrive at its
divine fruition: for only so can the conscious individual
find either his transcendent self or his true person.
Our journey is from the inconscience to omniscience, and in this

evolutionary journey, breaking out of the temporary construction
called the ego is the first step. We should go on from there to the
divine fruition of life in the cosmos. Instead of this, the traditional
yogas aim at the immersion of self and its disappearance in the
transcendent Self.
Savitri takes this new position in her debate with Death. So this
is what she says in reply to the God of Death:
“Once again, O Death, you are making use of light to blind with
it Truth’s eyes. You are making use of knowledge as a catch of the
snare of Ignorance, and are using the power of the sacred word as
an arrow to slay my soul.”
The God of Death has used some bits of what is considered as
accepted knowledge to shut out greater truths. All that he has been
saying has an appearance of truth. It is true that there is no home for
God in this world. But isn’t there a possibility of this world itself
undergoing fundamental changes which will make it a proper home
for God? This is after all an evolutionary world, and what we see
here is a progressive manifestation of the truth about this world.
Similarly, it is true that the drama of human history has been a long
aimless journey. But through all this the human consciousness is
slowly advancing, however falteringly, towards a higher
consummation. Again, it is true that if Mind is all, we will have to
renounce the hope of bliss and truth. But what if Mind is only a
temporary halting station of the long journey of consciousness from
inconscience to the omniscience?
“If there are those who feel the bondage of body and mind too
heavy for them to bear, let then tear off these bonds that can not
380
bear the wounds inflicted by Time, and let them seek refuge from
the play of Gods and seek the boons of peace and joy. But I cannot
rest in such endless peace because I have in me the dynamic force of
the Divine Mother. I read the enigma of this world through Her
eyes. I carry within me Her will tempered in the blaze of Wisdom’s
sun, and her flaming silence of her heart of love.
“This world is not easy to understand because it represents a
spiritual paradox invented by some need in the unseen. Our senses
can make only a poor translation of it. It is a symbol of that which
always exceeds the capacity of thought and speech; thought cannot
fully comprehend it and speech cannot express it adequately. It is a
truth for which no symbolisation is adequate. It is like an expression
in a language which is mis-pronounced and even mis-spelt but
which for that reason is not untrue. The powers that have created
this world have come from the eternal heights but they have
plunged into the Inconscient dim Abyss and are slowly rising to do
their marvellous work.
“Our soul is a representative of the Unmanifest. Our mind
struggles to think the Unthinkable, our life to call the immortal into
birth, and the body to enshrine the Illimitable. This world is not
totally cut off from Truth and God. You, Death, have dug the
seemingly unbridgeable dark gulf of death to separate it from God;
in vain have you tried to build a blind and doorless wall around
life. But man’s soul can cross all your barriers to reach the happier
realms of Paradise. The radiant light from heaven forces its way
through death and darkness and its light is seen on the edges of our
being. My mind is a torch lit from the eternal sun; my life is a breath
of the immortal Guest seated in me, and my mortal body is yet the
Eternal’s house. Already what looked like a torch is looking more
like an undying ray, already life looks like the force of the Immortal;
it is as though the house is taking on more and more of the
characteristics of the inhabitant of the house. Nature, out of which
the human body, vital and mind have been fabricated to house a
381
soul, has started reflecting many features of the soul.”
Then come some of the most memorable lines in this epic poem,
which capture the essence of the evolutionary movement and its
progressive manifestation of the qualities of the Divine:
How say’st thou Truth can never light the human mind
And Bliss can never invade the mortal’s heart
Or God descend into the world he made?
If in the meaningless Void creation rose,
If from a bodiless Force Matter was born,
If Life could climb in the unconscious tree,
Its green delight break into emerald leaves
And its laughter of beauty blossom in the flower,
If sense could wake in tissue, nerve and cell
And Thought seize the grey matter of the brain,
And soul peep from its secrecy through the flesh,
How shall the nameless Light not leap on men,
And unknown powers emerge from Nature’s sleep?
Even now hints of a luminous Truth like stars
Arise in the mind-mooned splendour of Ignorance;
Even now the deathless Lover’s touch we feel:
If the chamber’s door is even a little ajar,
What then can hinder God from stealing in
Or who forbid his kiss on the sleeping soul?
Already God is near, the Truth is close:
Because the dark atheist body knows him not,
Must the sage deny the Light, the seer his soul?
p. 648-649 lines 274-295
Savitri continues:
“It is true that at the moment the mind in man is incapable of
seeing the whole truth; but how can you be sure that it will for that
382
reason remain so limited for all time to come? Similarly, human
existence is now beset with pain, suffering and evil and death, but
how can you be sure that this condition will remain unchanged for
ever? How can you be sure that because the human heart is now
often tortured by unhappiness, it will and can never be a receptacle
of bliss? God has not yet descended on earth and he has not yet
started working here. But how can you be sure that this will be the
situation of this world for all time to come?
“Look at this bustling creation. It has evolved out of chaos. We
learn from science that after the Big Bang, there was a tremendous
whirl of energy in what looked like a meaningless Void. It took
many billions of years for the chaos to settle down into the creation
we see around us today. Out of what was once a bodiless Force, a
blind, mechanical energy, Matter evolved gradually. And there was
a time a few billion years ago when there was no life here on earth.
It looked like a dead universe. That must have been the situation for
several billion years. But then slowly and gradually out of this
seemingly dead and lifeless universe, life emerged. There came life
in the form of vegetation. There were creepers, bushes, plants and
trees and forests.
“A tree or a plant is all Matter except for this difference – life has
learnt to climb from the roots to the top of the tree; the roots suck
the energy needed for the sustenance of the tree and then this is
transported all along its trunk, branches and twigs, and leaves,
flowers and fruit. The tree can propagate itself. From one tree there
come about a number of trees and the parent tree itself will die
some day. All this in itself is a miracle. This is what Matter evolved
into Life is capable of achieving. The green leaves on a tree manifest
this delight of life just as the blossoms on its branches constitute its
laughter. There are further evolutionary miracles that have taken
place subsequently. From plant life evolved the life of the animal
world and with it slowly sense became active in tissue, nerve and
cell. Then came man, in the grey cells of whose brain thought began
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to form itself. Thus out of chaos came this creation, from Matter
evolved Life, and from Life came the Mental Man. With the advent
of man, slowly the spiritual being in man began to peep from the
secrecy of the flesh.
“If these miracles have actually taken place in this world of ours,
how can you be so confident that further miracles of this kind will
not happen? For example, how can you be sure that the Light of the
Spirit will not leap down on men and powers hitherto latent will
not emerge from Nature’s sleep? Even now if you look around
carefully, you will see the early hints of a greater light of
consciousness adding to the splendour of the human mind. Even
now, we can feel the touch of the divine Lover if only we kept the
doors of the prison of our ego a little ajar.
“Who or what then will be able hinder God from stealing in, and
who can forbid his kiss on the sleeping soul? Already God is very
close to us; we are very near the truth. It is our physical being that
still fails to feel the presence of the divine within itself. This does
not mean that the seer and the sage in us also should go along with
the body and deny the existence of the Light of the Spirit in us.
“I know that I am the Spirit although I have a body, the senses
and the mind with its thoughts. I experience and live in the glory of
the Infinite. I am very close to the Nameless and the Unknowable
parts of my being. The ineffable glory of my spirit is an inalienable
part of me. But standing on the brink of Eternity, I have discovered
that this world is also the Becoming of the Divine. I know myself as
the Spirit and the Self, but I have also loved the body of my God. I
have come down on earth seeking him in his earthly form.
“I have identified myself with the entire world, with the whole
of humanity. My heart has become one with every heart. Therefore
a lonely freedom, exclusive to my being alone, does not satisfy me. I
represent aspiring humanity; I ask for the liberation given to me to
be given to the whole of humanity.”
384
In this reply to the God of Death Savitri brings into focus two
important concepts of Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy of Integralism.
One is that this is an evolutionary world, which began with the
Inconscience of Matter and is evolving towards the omniscience of
the Superconscience or the Divine. The second important concept is
that the dichotomy between the Self and the non-Self, although
useful at a certain stage and for certain purposes, is fundamentally
erroneous. Everything here, including Nature, is divine and
therefore has to have a divine fulfilment. These issues are of great
importance to the understanding of Savitri, and therefore I propose
to spend some time looking at both of them briefly in subsequent
chapters.
For now let me leave with you a few quotations from Sri
Aurobindo and one from the Mother pertaining to the first of these
important concepts, namely. evolution:
The Western idea of evolution is the statement of a

process of formation, not an explanation of our being.
Limited to the physical and biological data of Nature, it
does not attempt except in a summary or a superficial
fashion to discover its own meaning, but is content to
announce itself as the general law of a quite mysterious
and inexplicable energy. Evolution becomes a problem
in motion which is satisfied to work up with an
automatic regularity its own puzzle, but not to work it
out, because, since it is only a process, it has no
understanding of itself, and, since it is a blind
perpetual automatism of mechanical energy, it has
neither an origin nor an issue. It began perhaps or is
always beginning; it will stop perhaps in time or is
always somewhere stopping and going back to its
385
beginnings, but there is no why, only a great turmoil
and fuss of a how to its beginning and its cessation; for
there is in its acts no fountain of spiritual intention, but
only the force of an unresting material necessity. The
ancient idea of evolution was the fruit of a
philosophical intuition, the modern is an effort of
scientific observation. Each as anounced misses
something, but the ancient got at the spirit of the
movement where the modern is content with a form
and the most external machinery… The modern
scientist strives to make a complete scheme and
institution of the physical method which he has
detected in its minute workings, but is blind to the
miracle each step involves or content to lose the sense
of it in the satisfied observation of a vast ordered
phenomenon.”30
We speak of the evolution of Life in Matter, the

evolution of Mind in Matter; but evolution is a word
which merely states the phenomenon without
explaining it. For there seems to be no reason why Life
should evolve out of material elements or Mind out of
living form, unless we accept the Vedantic solution
that Life is already involved in Matter and Mind in Life
because in essence Matter is a form of veiled Life, Life a
form of veiled Consciousness. And then there seems to
be little objection to a farther step in the series and the
admission that mental consciousness may itself be only
a form and a veil of higher states which are beyond
Mind. In that case, the unconquerable impulse of man
30
Essays in Philosophy and Yoga CWSA 13:317
386
towards God, Light, Bliss, Freedom, Immortality
presents itself in its right place in the chain as simply
the imperative impulse by which Nature is seeking to
evolve beyond Mind, and appears to be as natural, true
and just as the impulse towards Life which she has
planted in certain forms of Matter or the impulse
towards Mind which she has planted in certain forms
of Life…the animal is a living laboratory in which
Nature has, it is said, worked out man. Man himself
may well be a thinking and living laboratory in whom
and with whose conscious co-operation she wills to
work out the superman, the god. Or shall we not say,
rather, to manifest God?”31
Avatarhood would have little meaning if it were not

connected with the evolution. The Hindu procession of
the ten Avatars is itself, as it were, a parable of
evolution. First the Fish Avatar, then the amphibious
animal between land and water, then the land animal,
then the Man-Lion Avatar, bridging man and animal,
then man as dwarf, small and undeveloped and
physical but containing in himself the godhead and
taking possession of existence, then the rajasic, sattwic,
nirguna Avatars, leading the human development
from the vital rajasic to the sattwic mental man and
again the overmental superman. Krishna, Buddha and
Kalki depict the last three stages, the stages of the
spiritual development — Krishna opens the possibility
of overmind, Buddha tries to shoot beyond to the
supreme liberation but that liberation is still negative,
31
The Life Divine SABCL 18-19:3
387
not returning upon earth to complete positively the
evolution; Kalki is to correct this by bringing the
Kingdom of the Divine upon earth, destroying the
opposing Asura forces. The progression is striking and
unmistakable.”32
This evolution, this spiritual progression—does it stop

short here in the imperfect mental being called Man?
There is at least the possibility, there comes at a certain
point the certitude, that there is a far greater
consciousness than what we call Mind, and that by
ascending the ladder still farther we can find a point at
which the hold of the material Inconscience, the vital
and mental Ignorance ceases; a principle of
consciousness becomes capable of manifestation which
liberates not partially, not imperfectly, but radically
and wholly this imprisoned Divine. In this vision each
stage of evolution appears as due to the descent of a
higher and higher Power of consciousness, raising the
terrestrial level, creating a new stratum, but the highest
yet remain to descend and it is by their descent that the
riddle of terrestrial existence will receive its solution
and not only the soul but Nature herself find her
deliverance…”33
Man is a transitional being; he is not final. For in man
32
Letters on Yoga SABCL 22-23-24:401
33
Ibid. p.25
388
and high beyond him ascend the radiant degrees that
climb to a divine superhumanhood. There lies our
destiny and the liberating key to our aspiring but
troubled and limited mundane existence....The step
from man to superman is the next approaching
achievement of earth’s evolution. It is inevitable
because it is at once the intention of the inner spirit and
the logic of Nature’s process.
The following quotation comes from the Mother:
There is an ascending evolution in nature which goes

from the stone to the plant, from the plant to the
animal, from animal to man. Because man is, for the
moment, at the summit of the ascending evolution, he
considers himself as the final stage in this ascension
and believes that there can be nothing on earth
superior to him. In this he is mistaken. In his physical
nature he is yet almost wholly an animal, a thinking
and speaking animal, but still an animal in his material
habits and instincts. Undoubtedly nature cannot be
satisfied with such an imperfect result; she brings out a
being which will be to man what man is to the animal,
a being who will remain a man in its external form, and
yet whose consciousness will rise far above the mental
and its slavery to ignorance.
389
32: Book X Canto 4 – Evolution
In this chapter, we shall discuss briefly the concept of evolution as it

is understood in the philosophy of Integralism of Sri Aurobindo. It
is one of the key-concepts we need to understand Savitri’s stand in
her colloquy with the God of Death. The Webster Dictionary defines
evolution as “a process of change in a certain direction; a process of
continuous change from a lower, simpler, or worse to a higher,
more complex, or better state”. Since Charles Darwin brought this
concept to the Western world with the publication of his The Origin
of Species, evolution has been very influential not only in the
physical sciences but also in sociology, politics and literary
criticism. It has influenced decisively the moral temperament of the
last two centuries.
Evolution asks the fundamental questions which have always
fascinated us, namely: “How have we as a species become what we
are?” and “Does the past of our species hold any clue to our
future?” All human cultures have their own theories to explain the
origin of the world, of man and other creatures. Most religions have
their own creation myths and through them explain the origin of all
living beings as the creation of an omniscient God.
The modern theory of evolution was first propounded by
Charles Darwin in his 1859 publication entitled On the Origin of
Species by Means of Natural Selection. Along with Copernicus, Galileo
and Newton, Darwin is regarded as one of the revolutionary
thinkers who ushered in the modern era of scientific thinking on all
matters concerning man and his life here on earth. They gave
several severe jolts to medieval Christian beliefs about God and his
place in human life. All these new ideas had the effect of making
God suddenly redundant! Physical phenomena such as tides and
eclipses had now an explanation in terms of natural laws. To
390
Darwin goes the credit of showing on the basis of detailed evidence
that evolution had occurred, that diverse organisms share common
ancestors, and that living beings have changed drastically over the
course of the earth’s history. In an important sense, he extended to
the living world the idea of nature as a system of matter in motion
governed by natural laws.
Darwin was amazed by the diversity of the beaks of certain birds
in the Galápagos Islands, a group of islands in the Pacific Ocean
constituting a province of Ecuador, about 1,050 km (about 650
miles) off the western coast of South America. This is where he did
his basic research as a natural scientist. He found that each species
had a unique beak tailored to its specific diet. From this he theorised
that the dozen or so variations arose from a single ancestor whose
descendants spread out and adapted to different conditions,
eventually evolving into different species. This idea became the
cornerstone of his theory of evolution. Did God, the supreme
intelligence, condescend to design different beaks to these birds
according to their diet?
Darwin’s great achievement was that he suggested a plausible
mechanism for evolution. To a world brought up to see the hand of
God in every part of Nature, he suggested a different creative force
altogether – an undirected, morally neutral process called natural
selection. Others characterised it as “survival of the fittest”. He was
very much aware of the fact that in the animal world there is a
continuous struggle to survive and reproduce against the
prevalence of predators, disease, and a finite food supply. The
winners in this struggle must have some small advantage over
those who fall behind and perish. Darwin’s critical insight was that
organisms which by chance are better adapted to their
environments – a faster fox or deer – have a better chance of
surviving and passing those characteristics on to the next
generation. The latter is now known as “the passing on the genes”.
Better adaptation to circumstances may mean different things
391
according to the context of environment. These small changes
passed on from generation to the next culminate in the emergence
of an entirely new species. Darwin wrote: “From the war of nature,
from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are
capable of conceiving, namely, the production of higher animals,
directly follows”.
This theory had a more troubling implication. Until then it was a
general belief among Christians that man was made by God in his
own image. In a later publication entitled The Descent of Man,
Darwin explicitly linked human beings to the rest of the animal
kingdom by way of the apes. Darwin put man at the very summit of
the original scale, he also said that “man with all his noble qualities
still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly
origin”. This makes it clear that Darwin not only contradicted the
Biblical account of a six-day creation, but also undercut the very
basis of most theistic religions. Darwin thus made it possible, as
pointed out by a fellow biologist, for one to be an intellectually
honest atheist.
According to Darwin, a process called natural selection accounts
for the variations in living forms. In nature, many more individuals
are created than can survive to maturity. Certain individuals
survive because they have some advantage over the others; they are
more successful in reproducing and in passing on their particular
advantages to succeeding generations. It is in this way that living
forms change over time.
Darwin’s theory created a virtual storm in scientific and social
circles of his time. Christians who believed in a literal interpretation
of the Genesis aggressively denied Darwin’s theory for the simple
reason that it was incompatible with the gradual evolution of
humans and other organisms by natural processes. The Biblical
account of genesis maintains that all kinds of organisms abruptly
came into existence at the Creation, that the world is only a few
thousand years old, and that the Noachian Flood was an actual
392
event in which only one pair of each animal species survived. These
and other related Christian beliefs are contrary to the evolutionary
origin of man from nonhuman animals.
In fact, this issue is still simmering in the United States of
America. In the 1920s four states in the U.S., namely Arkansas,
Mississippi, Oklahoma and Tennessee, prohibited the teaching of
evolution in their public schools. It was as late as 1968 that the
Supreme Court of the United States declared unconstitutional any
law banning the teaching of evolution in public schools. Since that
time Christian Fundamentalists have been trying to find ways of
introducing into schools the intelligent-design theory of the creation
of this universe. In the 1980s Arkansas and Louisiana passed acts
requiring the balanced treatment of evolution-science and creation-
science in the schools.
Modern science, following Darwin in the main, has tried with
considerable success to explain the process of evolution. Natural
selection, and later studies in genetics, appear to confirm that on the
outside, evolution is governed by changes in the environment.
However, the origin of life itself remains hazy in biology and takes
recourse to chance and probability far more often then it should.
Moreover, science does not offer us any clues as to the future. It also
states that there is no visible end towards which evolution is
moving. There is, in other words, no intention, aim or purpose in
the process of evolution. In effect, it does not answer the key
questions we started out with. As Sri Aurobindo has pointed out,
the Western idea of evolution is the statement of a process of
formation, not an explanation of our being. It is limited to the
physical and biological data of Nature, and does not attempt except
in a summary or a superficial fashion to discover its own meaning,
but is content to announce itself as the general law of a quite
mysterious and inexplicable energy.
The Darwinian theory of evolution starts with assumption that
everything has evolved out of indeterminate matter. “Hence it
393
conceives the world as a sort of automatic machine which has
somehow happened. No intelligent cause, no aim, no raison d’être,
but simply an automatic deployment, combination, chance self-
adaptation of means to end without any knowledge or intention in
the adaptation. This is the first paradox of the theory and its
justification must be crushing and conclusive if it is to be finally
accepted by the human mind.”34
Just as Copernicus proved that we did not need a God to put the
sun up in the sky every morning, Darwin showed that we did not
need a God to create this world and that too in six days as described
in the Bible. This world is the result of a slow process of evolution
which has taken billions of years.
Sri Aurobindo has no quarrel with Darwin except that he thinks
that his scientific theory explains only form-evolution and physical
life-evolution and does not explain the cardinal fact of spiritual
evolution, which Sri Aurobindo regards as the meaning of our
existence here. If evolution is a truth, it has to account not only for
the physical evolution of species, but also for the evolution of
consciousness, because the evolution of consciousness is as much a
fact of life as the evolution of forms. Evolution has also taken the
form of a series of ascents, from the physical to the vital, and thence
to the mental being. The physical theory of evolution does not
bother to answer the question what it is that is evolving. Sri
Aurobindo believes that it is primarily consciousness that is
evolving here, from a lower level to a higher one. Mind cannot be
the last manifestation of this evolving consciousness because mind
is fundamentally an ignorance seeking for knowledge. It is only the
Supramental Truth-Consciousness that can bring us the true and
whole knowledge of the Self and the world. It is only through that
we can get to our true being and the fulfilment of our spiritual
evolution.35
34
Essays in Philosophy and Yoga, CWSA 13:171
35
The Life Divine, p. 47.
394
In other words, evolution is the path the Divine has chosen to
unveil himself in the world in which he has manifested. Evolution is
the yoga which this creation is going through, and we who are born
here in this evolutionary world are the carriers of the evolutionary
baton. In other words, we are all yogis. Some are conscious yogis in
the sense that they try to accelerate their evolution, and others are
also yogis who have left it to Nature to lead them along the
evolutionary path. Since it is the individual who evolves and grows
into a more and more developed and perfect consciousness,
obviously this cannot be done in the course of brief span of a single
human lifetime. The evolving consciousness must come back to this
evolutionary world again and again through what is called rebirth.
The great composer and director Gustav Mahler once wrote, “We
all return; it is this certainty that gives meaning to life and it does
not make the slightest difference whether in a later incarnation we
remember the former life. What counts is not the individual and his
well-being, but the great aspiration towards the Perfect and the
Pure which goes on in each incarnation.”36
This, in brief, is Sri Aurobindo’s theory of spiritual evolution.
Evolution has been perceived in the west as a phenomenon which
masks the face of God, while for Sri Aurobindo it is a process by
which the face of God behind and within this creation is gradually
unveiled. So for Sri Aurobindo evolution is no reason to dispense
with God. It in fact establishes God on a much firmer basis. Let us
now look at Sri Aurobindo’s theory in some detail.
What we call evolution may be described as a journey which
begins from the fundamental Reality or the Pure Existent or Sat.
Another aspect of this fundamental reality is movement. This
movement is a movement of the Sat, and this aspect of the Sat is
called Consciousness-Force or Chit. The stability of the Sat and the
movement of the Chit are our psychological representations of the
36
Quoted in Georges Van Vrekhem: From Man to Superman, Paragon House,
Minnesota 1998.p. 90.
395
Absolute, which is beyond stability and movement. Sri Aurobindo
has expressed this basic insight of Indian spirituality in this
beautiful sentence: “World-existence is the ecstatic dance of Shiva
which multiplies the body of the god numberlessly to the view: it
leaves that white existence precisely where and what it was, ever is
and ever will be; its sole object is the joy of the dancing.”37
This journey of the Consciousness-Force begins from the eternal
Centre, in the Divine, and takes place in Him. In fact the whole
movement may be said to be He: “Himself the play, Himself the
player, Himself the playground.”38 He is outside space, outside
time, pure Being, pure Consciousness, where all is in a state of
involution, contained yet formless. When he ‘becomes’ Force, we
call it “She”. This is Force separated from Consciousness, She from
Him, and the voyage begins. Shakti or Force flings herself forth in
an outburst of joy, to play at finding Him again in Time. But it is a
perpetual beginning, not fixed anywhere in time; when we say
‘first’ the Being and ‘then’ the Becoming, we fall into the illusion of
a spatio-temporal language, just as when we say ‘high’ and ‘low’,
because like our vision of the world, our language is limited and
false. In reality Being and Becoming are two simultaneous faces of
the same eternal fact – the universe is a perpetual phenomenon, as
perpetual as the Silence beyond Time. The perpetual passage from
Being to Becoming, we may call a devolution. The Supreme
Consciousness ultimately devolves into matter.
This happens gradually, as a result of an incessant fragmentation
of consciousness worked through successive planes. Once the Play
starts at the summit, it will not stop until the single Consciousness-
Force has realised all the possibilities, even those which seem to be
the absolute opposite of the eternal Player. At the other end of the
spectrum, consciousness is obscured, and hidden in the densest
inconscience. When the devolution is complete we have Matter. In
37
The Life Divine SABCL 18-19:78.
38
Ibid p.122;
396
Savitri, Sri Aurobindo has talked about the various aspects of
spiritual evolution in glorious poetic language. I quote one such
passage below:
As one drawn by the grandeur of the Void

The soul attracted leaned to the Abyss:
It longed for the adventure of Ignorance
And the marvel and surprise of the Unknown
And the endless possibility that lurked
In the womb of Chaos and in Nothing’s gulf
Or looked from the unfathomed eyes of Chance.
It tired of its unchanging happiness,
It turned away from immortality:
It was drawn to hazard’s call and danger’s charm,
It yearned to the pathos of grief, the drama of pain,
Perdition’s peril, the wounded bare escape,
The music of ruin and its glamour and crash,
The savour of pity and the gamble of love
And passion and the ambiguous face of Fate.
A world of hard endeavour and difficult toil,
And battle on extinction’s perilous verge,
A clash of forces, a vast incertitude,
The joy of creation out of Nothingness,
Strange meetings on the roads of Ignorance
And the companionship of half-known souls
Or the solitary greatness and lonely force
Of a separate being conquering its world,
Called it from its too safe eternity.
A huge descent began, a giant fall:
For what the spirit sees, creates a truth
And what the soul imagines is made a world.
A Thought that leaped from the Timeless can become,
Indicator of cosmic consequence
397
And the itinerary of the gods,
A cyclic movement in eternal Time.
Thus came, born from a blind tremendous choice,
This great perplexed and discontented world,
This haunt of Ignorance, this home of Pain:
There are pitched desire’s tents, grief’s headquarters.
A vast disguise conceals the Eternal’s bliss.
p. 455-456 lines 653-688
Sri Aurobindo has stated succinctly in one of his letters what

evolution is and what it is all about:
“The creation has descended all the degrees of being

from the Supermind to Matter and in each degree it has
created a world, reign, plane or order proper to that
degree. In the creating of the material world there was
a plunge of this descending Consciousness into an
apparent Inconscience and an emergence of it out of
that Inconscience, degree by degree, until it recovers its
highest spiritual and supramental summits and
manifests their powers here in Matter.” 39
The manifestation of Being in our universe takes the
shape of an involution which is the starting-point of an
evolution, with Matter as the nethermost stage, Spirit
the summit. In the descent into involution there can be
distinguished seven principles of manifested being,
seven gradations of the manifesting Consciousness of
which we can get a perception or a concrete realisation
of their presence and immanence here or a reflected
39
Letters on Yoga, SABCL 22:1
398
experience.40
Seven gradations of the manifesting consciousness
Everything seems to point… to a spiritual and not

merely a physical evolution. We discover that the
Inconscient from which all starts is apparent only, for
in it there is an involved Consciousness with endless
possibilities, a consciousness not limited but cosmic
and infinite, a concealed and self-imprisoned Divine,
imprisoned in Matter but with every potentiality held
in its secret depths. Out of this apparent Inconscience
each potentiality is revealed in its turn, first organised
Matter concealing the indwelling Spirit, then Life
emerging in the plant and associated in the animal
with a growing Mind, then Mind itself evolved and
organised in Man.41
With man, we come to a very crucial point in our evolutionary

story. Now She (Force) has the possibility of finding Him
(Consciousness). Our humanity is the conscious meeting place of
the finite and the infinite, and to grow more and more towards the
Infinite even in this physical birth is our privilege. A special
phenomenon is also seen in physical nature: at the preceding stages,
the profusion of plant life seems to subside once the animal stage is
reached, and the profusion of the animal type subsides when man
arrives on the scene. It does not seem that Nature has created any
new animal or plant since man has come. In other words, these
other species have become stationery and have achieved a static
40
The Life Divine SABCL 18-19:662
41
Letters on Yoga SABCL 22-23-24 :25
399
perfection in their own types. Now man, even though he is now set
in his type is far from satisfied, far from perfect – he has not the joy
or the harmony.
Man is an abnormal who has not found his own

normality,—he may imagine he has, he may appear to
be normal in his own kind, but that normality is only a
sort of provisional order; therefore, though man is
infinitely greater than the plant or the animal, he is not
perfect in his own nature like the plant and the animal.
This imperfection is not a thing to be at all deplored,
but rather a privilege and a promise, for it opens out to
us an immense vista of self-development and self-
exceeding.42
Indeed, if we were ‘perfect’ and without error, we would be a

stationary species, just like bacteria or the chimpanzee.
So the journey of evolution is not yet over. In a

beautiful letter Sri Aurobindo writes: “This evolution,
this spiritual progression—does it stop short here in
the imperfect mental being called Man? … There is at
least the possibility, there comes at a certain point the
certitude, that there is a far greater consciousness than
what we call Mind, and that by ascending the ladder
still farther we can find a point at which the hold of the
material Inconscience, the vital and mental Ignorance
ceases; a principle of consciousness becomes capable of
manifestation which liberates not partially, not
imperfectly, but radically and wholly this imprisoned
42
The Human Cycle CWSA 25:234
400
Divine. In this vision each stage of evolution appears as
due to the descent of a higher and higher Power of
consciousness, raising the terrestrial level, creating a
new stratum, but the highest yet remain to descend
and it is by their descent that the riddle of terrestrial
existence will receive its solution and not only the soul
but Nature herself find her deliverance.43
And again, with regard to evolution and the glorious future which
awaits us, Sri Aurobindo has said:
We speak of the evolution of Life in Matter, the

evolution of Mind in Matter; but evolution is a word
which merely states the phenomenon without
explaining it. For there seems to be no reason why Life
should evolve out of material elements or Mind out of
living form, unless we accept the Vedantic solution
that Life is already involved in Matter and Mind in Life
because in essence Matter is a form of veiled Life, Life a
form of veiled Consciousness. And then there seems to
be little objection to a farther step in the series and the
admission that mental consciousness may itself be only
a form and a veil of higher states which are beyond
Mind. In that case, the unconquerable impulse of man
towards God, Light, Bliss, Freedom, Immortality
presents itself in its right place in the chain as simply
the imperative impulse by which Nature is seeking to
evolve beyond Mind, and appears to be as natural, true
and just as the impulse towards Life which she has
planted in certain forms of Matter or the impulse
towards Mind which she has planted in certain forms
43
Letters on Yoga, SABCL 22-23-24 : 25
401
of Life …. The animal is a living laboratory in which
Nature has, it is said, worked out man. Man himself
may well be a thinking and living laboratory in whom
and with whose conscious co-operation she wills to
work out the superman, the god. Or shall we not say,
rather, to manifest God?44
The Mother has made this point most lucidly in the following
passage:
There is an ascending evolution in nature which goes

from the stone to the plant, from the plant to the
animal, from animal to man. Because man is, for the
moment, at the summit of the ascending evolution, he
considers himself as the final stage in this ascension
and believes that there can be nothing on earth
superior to him. In this he is mistaken. In his physical
nature he is yet almost wholly an animal, a thinking
and speaking animal, but still an animal in his material
habits and instincts. Undoubtedly nature cannot be
satisfied with such an imperfect result; she brings out a
being which will be to man what man is to the animal,
a being who will remain a man in its external form, and
yet whose consciousness will rise far above the mental
and its slavery to ignorance.
Man is indeed a transitional being, and in spite of our terrible

condition today, we are assured of a better tomorrow, or at least a
day after. At the moment, we turn and toss in our beds of misery
and suffering, one is search of his heaven, the other in search of his
44
The Life Divine, SABCL 18-19 : 3
402
earth, unable to join the two ends. But the time is now to seize the
day and take on the burden, or the joyful adventure, of evolution in
our own hands and to seek to fulfil consciously the evolutionary
intention in the universe.
But is such a consummation possible? Listen to this reassurance
from Sri Aurobindo:
“…whatever be the heavy weight of strife and

suffering and darkness in the world, yet if there is this
as its high result awaiting us, all that has gone before
may not be counted too great a price by the strong and
adventurous for the glory that is to come. At any rate
the shadow lifts; there is a Divine Light that leans over
the world and is not only a far-off incommunicable
Lustre.”45
The following reply that Savitri gives to the God of Death and the
optimistic note in it can now be better understood in the light of Sri
Aurobindo’s concept of evolution.
How sayst thou Truth can never light the human mind
45
Letters on Yoga, SABCL 22-23-24 : 25
403
Already God is near, the Truth is close:
Because the dark atheist body knows him not,
Must the sage deny the Light, the seer his soul?
p. 648-649 lines 274-295
404
33: Book X Canto 4 – Evolution (2)
We have now looked at Sri Aurobindo’s concept of evolution in

some essential details. Savitri relates this notion to the evolution of
man so far and to his future evolution as well; she is also able to
explain why there is no need to be discouraged by the appearance
of the world as it exists today. If anything, we have every reason to
be optimistic about the eventual manifestation of the divine in all its
glory in this world of ours. The world appears like an eternal
paradox which contains within itself an eternal truth, says Sri
Aurobindo in The Life Divine (p. 4)
Thus the eternal paradox and eternal truth of a divine

life in an animal body, an immortal aspiration or
reality inhabiting a mortal tenement, a single and
universal consciousness representing itself in limited
minds and divided egos, a transcendent, indefinable,
timeless and spaceless Being who alone renders time
and space and cosmos possible, and in all these the
higher truth realisable by the lower term, justify
themselves to the deliberate reason as well as to the
persistent instinct or intuition of mankind.
There is one more aspect to the truth that Savitri represents in her
philosophical encounter with the God of Death, and it is that here in
the course of evolution liberation or perfection is intended not only
for the soul but also for the instruments that embody the soul in
matter – to the human body, vital and mental. This world is not
something essentially non-divine; it is the becoming of the divine,
and it too has its place in the eventual divinisation of the manifested
world.
405
But standing on Eternity’s luminous brink
I have discovered that the world was He;
I have met Spirit with spirit, Self with self,
But I have loved too the body of my God.
I have pursued him in his earthly form.
p. 649 lines 300-304
This theme keeps occurring throughout the poem, and we shall

explore it in some detail here.
In the Indian philosophical tradition, philosophy is called
‘darshan’, which means something ‘seen’ or directly experienced and
not something established only through reasoning and logic. Indian
philosophy is based primarily on spiritual perceptions obtained in
higher states of consciousness, although sensory observation and
rational argumentation also play an important part in it. For
example, there are states of consciousness in which one realises the
unreality of this world. Then careful logic and perceptive
psychological analyses are brought in to build intricate
metaphysical systems around this experience. Therefore in Indian
philosophy the nature of the spiritual experience, not logic, is the
final arbiter of all philosophical debates.
Since Savitri is a mouthpiece of Sri Aurobindo, we need to
glance briefly at Sri Aurobindo’s spiritual biography to arrive at an
estimate of his great spiritual authority. He has himself stated that
his philosophy is an attempt to set down in philosophical terms his
spiritual experiences. There are four distinct spiritual experiences in
Sri Aurobindo’s life which have shaped the intellectual exposition
of his philosophy. Sri Aurobindo himself speaks of the four
following great realisations as the foundations of his yoga and
spiritual philosophy46 .
46
SABCL 26:64
406
i) The realisation of the silent, spaceless, timeless Brahman,
attended in the beginning by a feeling and perception of the total
unreality of the world: this tremendous experience came to him in
Baroda at the end of a 3-day meditation session with Lele, his yogic
mentor. This was akin to the experience of nirvana. It brought to
him a series of powerful experiences and a radical change of
consciousness that made him see the world as a cinematographic
play of vacant forms in the impersonal universality of the absolute
Brahman
ii) The realisation of the cosmic consciousness and of the Divine
as all beings: this is the experience he had in the Alipore jail and he
has described his vision of Sri Krishna as the all-pervading Lord of
creation in his Uttarapara speech. This is the experience of the living
Lord to whom he surrenders his whole being.
iii) The realisation of the supreme Reality with the static and
dynamic Brahman as its two aspects: This realisation was in a way a
synthesis of the preceding two. It was a vision of the supreme
Reality as a multiform unity, simultaneously static and dynamic,
characterised by silence and expression, emptiness and creativity,
infinite and yet composed of manifold forms. This vision occurred
when Sri Aurobindo was in Chandernagore in 1910.
iv) The realisation of the higher planes of consciousness leading
to the supermind. This experience of Sri Aurobindo’s sadhana came
to him on November 24, 1926.
After settling down in Pondicherry, Sri Aurobindo was trying to
transform the lower levels of the being by the descent of the higher
planes. From the time of his confinement in Alipore jail, he had
been aware of these levels of consciousness above the ordinary
mind, to which he later gave these names: Higher Mind, Illumined
Mind, Intuitive Mind, Overmind. These are the principle gradations
of consciousness which lead to the Supermind, the real source of
Consciousness-Force. These are not mere modes of knowing but
407
realms of being, fields of existence.
The third and the fourth realisations mentioned above constitute
the bases of much that is new in Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy. In
Chandernagore he realised that the dark half of the reality we see
around us is not meant to be rejected but to be illumined and
transformed. He also found out that as one rises up in one’s
consciousness, one acquires also the capacity to go down into the
nether levels. Normally the dark levels of our consciousness as well
as the bright upper ranges are out of our sight.
In his own yogic sadhana, Sri Aurobindo descended from the
rational consciousness through the vital consciousness first into the
consciousness of the body which organises the tissues and cells of
our body. Below this level he found that there is a physical
consciousness (the subconscious) which contains the experiences of
our evolutionary past – our fears, deceptions and a tendency to
cling on to repetitive activities. As he descended further, he came to
a vast region, in which life itself is embedded. This is a realm of
inexorable universal law and Sri Aurobindo experienced it as a
blind rejection of life’s upward evolutionary thrust. In the heart of
this Inconscient Sri Aurobindo found himself precipitated into the
Supreme Light.
This was the beginning of his realisation that this Inconscient too
was a manifestation of the Divine. He realised that Night, Evil,
Death were not the ultimate truth; they were only a mask on the
face of the Divine. There is only the one Divine Consciousness in the
very heart of Matter. In Savitri, Aswapati (who in many ways
represents the persona of Sri Aurobindo) enters the world of
Darkness, Night and Evil in his exploration of the various worlds.
This is described in Cantos 7 and 8 of Book II of Savitri. When he
enters these nether levels, he sees the face of evil and darkness in
many forms. But he doesn’t give up.
408
He saw in Night the Eternal’s shadowy veil,
Knew death for a cellar of the house of life,
In destruction felt creation’s hasty pace,
Knew loss as the price of a celestial gain
And hell as a short cut to heaven’s gates.
Then in Illusion’s occult factory
And in the Inconscient’s magic printing-house
Torn were the formats of the primal Night
And shattered the stereotypes of Ignorance.
p. 231 lines 416-424
He realised that the Night was only a veil drawn on the face of the
Eternal, and understood death as a stage of transition and hell as a
shortcut to heaven’s gates. This is a very crucial experience because
here we have the basis of Sri Aurobindo’s affirmation of the Divine
in the world and the setting of his goal as the transformation of the
mental, the vital and the material into fully worthy instrumentalities
of the Divine. We don’t to have to turn our face away from the earth
to be holy, or fight the flesh with its spiritual opposites. Sri
Aurobindo proposed to utilise the very qualities of the earth and the
flesh. God is already here; he does not have to be brought in but
only to be liberated. This needed the descent of a consciousness he
called the Supramental consciousness..
As we go up the ladder of consciousness from mind, each
ascending stage brings about an integrating transformation in the
person. We also begin to realise our closeness to the other members
of the human community. There is an increase in the sense of quiet,
peace, light, and harmony with others, as we go up from one level
to the next. But it is not easy to transform the lower levels of our
being. Nature resists the attempts at transformation and clings to its
fixed old habits of operating within its old grooves. This tendency
of our lower levels of being, namely our physical, vital and mental
consciousness, to persist in order to cling to their accustomed ways
409
of being is so strong that this effort is generally regarded as
hopeless and most spiritual luminaries think it a waste of effort.
They regard it as an attempt as vain as that which tries to straighten
the tail of a dog, which for ever remains crooked no matter how
hard you try. If, after all the heroic efforts to change this world, it
remains ‘anityam’ and ‘asukham’ in the language of the Gita, it is best
to take the stand that the Brahman alone is the truth and this jagat,
the moving terrestrial world is an illusion, maya. But Sri Aurobindo,
based on his spiritual experiences, believes that the lower planes of
our being can be transformed. He also believes that the key to this
transformation lies in bringing down into the lower planes the
power of the original creative consciousness, of what he calls the
Supermind. Even Overmind, the highest range of consciousness
already manifested on earth, does not have this power of
transformation. It can only come from a level of consciousness
which Sri Aurobindo has called the Supermind.
Here lies the crux of the problem and the issue on which Sri
Aurobindo has views which distinguish him from all other thinkers
belonging to the Indian spiritual tradition. Man has always had an
intuition of a perfect world beyond the world of imperfection we
see around us. But this world of perfection has always been seen as
belonging exclusively to the supracosmic or transcendental world –
a chinmaya loka, or a Vaikunth or a Kailas. This has encouraged the
spiritual aspirants in their ardour for the transcendental world and
their intolerance with man’s terrestrial existence. Therefore most
spiritual thinkers regard the worldly existence as an unreality, a
vanity. Man’s mind finds that the senses often trick it, the vital mind
finds that its appetite for novelty and excitement always exceeds the
satisfaction this world can give it, the thinking mind finds that there
can be no certitudes here, and the soul exclaims in its frustration
that everything here is relative and valueless. Then the next step is
to conclude that only the Absolute and the Eternal is real, and this
world is an immense delirium, an immense cosmic illusion. The
410
Absolute Brahman is the only reality and this world is a maya, an
illusion, a falsehood.
In The Life Divine, where Sri Aurobindo deals with this issue at
some length, he has pointed out that in India this philosophy of
world negation has been given formulations of supreme power by
two of her greatest thinkers, Buddha and Shankara – although he
also makes it clear that this was not the attitude of the Vedic Rishis.
He also points out further that
…all voices are joined in one great consensus that not

in this world of dualities can there be our kingdom of
heaven, but beyond, whether in the joys of the eternal
Brindavan or the high beatitudes of Brahmaloka,
beyond all in the featureless unity of the indefinable
existence. And through many centuries a great army of
shining witnesses, saints, teachers, names sacred to
Indian memory and dominant in Indian imagination,
have borne always the same witness and swelled
always the same lofty and distant appeal …
renunciation the sole path of knowledge, the
acceptance of physical life the act of the ignorant,
cessation of birth the right use of human birth, the call
of the Spirit, the recoil from Matter.47
It is undoubtedly true that the spirituality which Sri Aurobindo

aims at is very difficult. Perfecting the inner being of man is easier.
To transform the outer being of man and with it the outer world is
an extremely difficult undertaking, and no body so far even has
claimed that it is possible to achieve such an ideal, except Sri
Aurobindo. He knew how difficult it is to change particularly the
vital and the physical beings of man. But he was confident that this
47
The Life Divine SABCL 18 : 23
411
could be done. In a letter he wrote to the Mother in 1916 he referred
to this problem:
It is this to which our nature is most recalcitrant. It

persists in the division, in the dualities, in the sorrow
and unsatisfied passion and labour, it finds it difficult
to accustom itself to the divine largeness, joy and
equipoise – especially the vital and physical parts of
our nature; it is they that pull down the mind which
has accepted and even when it has long lived in the joy
and peace and oneness. That, I suppose, is why the
religions and philosophies have had so strong a
leaning to the condemnation of Life and Matter and
aimed at an escape instead of a victory. But the victory
has to be won; the rebellious elements have to be
redeemed and transformed, not rejected and excised.
It must be clearly understood here that Sri Aurobindo had no doubt

about either the value or the validity of the experience of Nirvana.
Without the experience of Nirvana, it is difficult to rise beyond the
ignorance of the mind-constructed world and to realise our freedom
from the determinations of Nature. Only in this way can the
fundamental self recover its position as pure consciousness. And
when the spiritual aspirant falls suddenly into a state of oneness
with the timeless, immobile self in the experience of Nirvana, the
difference between the world he has so far taken as the only reality
and the reality revealed by the experience of Nirvana is so striking
that he is moved to believe that the world of multiplicity he saw
was unreal and the silent self alone is real. Sri Aurobindo himself
was no stranger to the state of Nirvana. He knew exactly what the
experience was and has described it in his letters48 .
48
Letters on Yoga pp. 48–51
412
The question that is relevant here is whether the Nirvana
experience is one of the experiences of approaching the Supreme
Reality, or is it the only experience or the culminating experience,
the ultimate experience? Sri Aurobindo’s answer to this is that
beyond the Nirvana experience is a still higher and more inclusive
spiritual realisation which grants a place of validity to both the
Nirvanic experience and to the world-consciousness of which it is
the negation.
The normal tendency to identify oneself with an individual
body, life and mind leads to an illusion. This is the view given to us
by our mind as long as it is unenlightened. The reality is that there
is a Self, a pure existence of which all things here are becomings. At
some point the spiritual seeker has to discover that the finite is one
self-representation of the manifestation of the Infinite. A spiritual
seeker begins in the negative way, saying, “I am not the body, not
the life and not the mind”. From there he must go on to the
realisation, “I am That, the pure, the blissful”. The truth is that our
reality is that of a Self, a pure existence of which all these things are
becomings. In other words, he should be able to say “This body is
also potentially divine, so is this vital being and the mind”. This is
the truth which we have to realise, to make operative in our outer
and inner life. And in arriving at this truth the Nirvana experience
is certainly most valuable. But our seeking should not end with the
transcendent Reality. We must repossess the outer world with this
spiritual consciousness, because the world of multiplicity is the
Absolute’s dynamic nature and aspect.
What Sri Aurobindo finds unsatisfactory in traditional Indian
spirituality is not its strong leaning towards the experience of
Nirvana, but its tendency to get stuck with it, stopping half-way. It
is the pressing problem of evil that drives many spiritual aspirants
to this extreme. How to reconcile the ever-pure, blissful, perfect
Infinite with this world of impurity, falsehood, evil and suffering?
The best solution seems to be to deny any reality to the world
413
outside and to withdraw into the glories of the transcendent within
ourselves. But this, says Sri Aurobindo, is an escape rather than a
solution.
With this escape, we become petrified in our present
imperfections, weaknesses and suffering, and deny to ourselves the
opportunity of participating in the divine action. Evolution, we
have seen, is the way the divine has chosen of progressively
manifesting himself in this creation. God is liberating himself here
from falsehood into truth, from ugliness into the good and the
beautiful, from suffering into delight. And man has to be the leader
of this great effort for in him Nature has an instrument in man who
can understand her purpose and co-operate with her.
The Nirvanic solution to the problem of life is that it is
destructive of values at all levels. We make that an excuse for not
striving to elevate the whole race to the highest possible level of
perfection, by changing the material life of the race into fresh forms,
religious, intellectual, social or political. Sri Aurobindo does not
accept the common idea that a man leading a spiritual life is
expected to be lost to the rest of the community and its pressing
concerns. In his view God gave man life on earth precisely in order
that the higher might be expressed in terms of the lower. To refuse
this vocation is neither to serve God not to fulfil one’s own
manhood. To reject the world altogether is to miss ‘the Divine
Being’s larger joy in cosmic existence … the total sense of creation and the
entire will of God.’
414
In the last two chapters, we strayed away from the text of Savitri in
order to review briefly Sri Aurobindo’s basic concept of evolution as
the evolution of consciousness and also his concept of the perfection
of the entire being of man – his body, life and mind as well as the
liberation of his soul – as the goal of his yoga. We now return to our
study of Canto 4 of Book X of Savitri.
Savitri uses the logic of evolution to answer the God of Death’s
contention that this earth is a hopeless enterprise and so it is foolish
to try to bring down God here. There is no home for him here. He
shows to her the panorama of human history and its futile round of
civilisations built and destroyed, of wars and the ruination of all
that man builds carefully over centuries of hard labour and destroys
in an instant of frenzy. The human mind dreams, but in vain –
because the world is a myth that happens to come true. If Mind is
all, the God of Death declares, there is no hope of Truth – for Mind
can never see the body of Truth. He asks her to cast off her mind.
Even if God is there, he cares not for this world. He sees everything
with a calm indifferent gaze. In any case, man cannot hold in his
mind God’s truth. He tells Savitri that it is foolish to try to change
the world that God has made.
He asks Savitri to cast off life and mind so that she can realise
herself as the soul. If she is Spirit, and Nature is only the garb of
Spirit, he says “Cast off your garb and be your naked self. That is
the only truth of life. Turn to God, O Savitri, leave everything
behind. You must die to yourself and seek the immobile peace of
the spirit. I am the gate to immortality.” This standpoint, it must be
remembered, has the sanction of various spiritual traditions. Not
here on earth can there be any fulfilment for man, but only in the
other worlds, or in the world within, can man find the kingdom of
415
God. In certain schools of Indian philosophy, this is known as the
Mayavada. It takes the position that the world is an illusion (maya)
and the solitary Self, designated Atman-Brahman, is alone real.
Action in an illusory world, of course, can have no significance
except possibly as an exercise for the purification of the mind as a
preparation for its union with the Absolute. The implication here is
that the greatest wisdom lies in escaping from this world.
We have now also examined briefly the philosophical
implications of what the God of Death has been claiming as the
truth about this world and how Savitri confronts him with the
integral truth that evolution of consciousness shows him.
Furthermore Savitri now begins to emphasise that she is a deputy of
the aspiring world and that she seeks liberty not only for her spirit
but for all. The aim of the yoga pursued by Sri Aurobindo and the
Mother did not have the salvation of the individual as its supreme
goal but the redemption of the whole of humanity. One can see a
growing insistence on this in Savitri’s struggle with the God of
Death from now on.
Then once again, a deep cry was heard from Death. But this time
his voice sounded different. It continued to be disdainful but did
not have the same ring of confidence it had earlier. It sounded
weary and compassionate, as though oppressed by its own
obstinacy. It now sounded more like the voice of life, somewhat
tired and bewildered by traversing countless paths. His form of
dread was also altered, as though he admitted our transient human
effort to attain eternity. But he still had doubts about anything good
and beautiful ever emerging on this earth from its long and
seemingly unavailing struggle with Fate, chance and Time.
The voice of Death cried out to Savitri:
“You, O Savitri, know the wisdom that goes beyond both the
acceptance and the rejection of forms; that is why you are delivered
by the seeing gods. If only you had kept your mind aloof from the
416
fierce pressure of the struggle of life, you too would have been
omniscient and calm like the gods. But your heart is passionate and
it refuses to dwell in calm aloofness; it is like the storm-wing of an
anarchic power. It seeks to tear up the decree of Fate, overthrow the
rule of Death and the governing law and Will that maintains all.
Such great spirits like you who are fired with excessive love for all
in this creation hasten to action and tend to violate the laws of God.
They are like you; they come into the narrow bounds of life with
natures too large for life. These worshippers of force do not know
how life recoils with unexpected results as they compel the troubled
years to move in the direction of their choice.
“But those who are wise are tranquil; they are not like the
imperious ones. Like the great hills they are seated on their
unchanging base trying ceaselessly to rise towards the unreached
sky, with their heads dreamless in the immutable domain in the
heavens. These mighty mediators, who are sublime and still, are
content to watch the movements of the stars. They may look
motionless but they are the might of the earth; they see the ages
pass, but they themselves are ever the same.
“The wise think largely, in terms of the cycles of time; they
foresee things that are yet to happen, far ahead in the future; they
hear the tread of far-off things; patient and unmoved, they keep
their dangerous wisdom restrained in their depths to prevent the
possibility of man’s fragile ship foundering and sinking in the abyss
of the stupendous seas, dragged down by some leviathan (sea-
monster) chained and kept captive there.
“Lo, how everything shakes when the gods come too near! All
moves, all is in danger, all is in anguish and everything is torn and
thrown up. If heaven’s strength were to surprise this imperfect
earth, and knowledge without any veils over it were to strike these
unfit souls on earth, the speeding ages would plunge chaotically
into some abyss. That is why the gods veil their frightful powers.
God seems to hide his thought, and at times he even seems to err. In
417
this world always be calm and slow in your reactions. You, Savitri,
are filled with the might of the powerful goddess (Durga) to whom
you offered worship this morning. Do not use that strength as the
wild Titans do. Do not disturb the fixed and well laid-out lines.
These are ancient laws. Respect the serene calm of great established
things.”
We can clearly see here that the God of Death has once again
changed his strategy. He is not any more haughty and imperious.
He cannot just ignore Savitri or pretend that what she is trying to do
is of no consequence to him. So now he uses the technique of
‘damning her with faint praise’. He recognises the great power she
has within her, but in the interest of the world and in her own
interest he advises her to be calm and wise. He says, “Please do not
disturb the peace of settled things. Please respect the wisdom of the
creator who has made this world what it is. Leave it to him to
initiate what changes he might like to make in it and when he might
to like to make them.”
Savitri now replies to the huge God: “O Death, what is this calm
you have suddenly started praising so much? Is it not just the
mechanical and inert tread of huge, inhuman energies chained to an
unchanging round that is entirely soulless? If unchanging law is the
supreme reality, then the soul’s hope is all in vain. But, on the
contrary, the speeding ages ever move on ceaselessly to the new
and unknown and justify the purpose of God in this creation. Look
at the great ages of the earth and the progress they have brought
about; how could they have come about if not by breaking the chain
of all fixed laws? It is only through such a free and open adventure
into the new that life has leaped onto the hurried paths it has taken.
In this, the earth was encouraged by the inspiring divine words
which human gods have left behind. Do not impose on sentient
minds and hearts the dull fixity that is appropriate only to
inanimate things. The rule you admire so much is only for the
animal species which are content to live beneath the unchanging
418
yoke of Nature. But it is not meant for man, who aspires to a higher
walk and seeks to master all.
“With my living feet I trample upon your law, O Death, for I was
born to live in freedom. If I am mighty, let my force be unveiled,
and you will see that it is the equal companion of the dateless
power. Or else, let my frustrated soul sink down in the original
sleep, if it is unworthy. I claim from Time my will’s eternity and I
claim God in his Becomings in the moments of Time.”
Savitri has no respect for the counsel of inertia; she does not feel
like sticking to the old laws and not daring anything new – the line
which the God of Death tries to hold up before her as a great ideal.
She reacts against such an ideal almost vehemently and denounces
the attempts of Death to imprison her in the past. Evolution would
not have come so far if it had not shown the daring to leave old
ways and try out new modes of being.
Death now uses very subtle arguments to try to confuse Savitri:
“Why should the noble and immortal will

Stoop to the petty works of transient earth,
Freedom forgotten and the Eternal’s path?
Or is this the high use of strength and thought,
To struggle with the bonds of death and time
And spend the labour that might earn the gods
And battle and bear agony of wounds
To grasp the trivial joys that earth can guard
In her small treasure-chest of passing things?
Child, hast thou trodden the gods beneath thy feet
Only to win poor shreds of earthly life
For him thou lov’st cancelling the grand release,
Keeping from early rapture of the heavens
His soul the lenient deities have called?
Are thy arms sweeter than the courts of God?”
419
p. 652 lines 409-423
The God of Death asks Savitri in effect whether it is the best use of
her great capacities and talents to use them to fight death here on
earth. After all what does earth have to offer but disappointment,
suffering, struggle and death? Death brings to the being who is
released from the nightmare of life great relief and peace. So he asks
her:
“Why should you let your noble and immortal will stoop to the
petty works of transient earth, forgetting its own high freedom and
its proper path to the eternal? Or is this the right and high use of
your strength and creativity to struggle on earth with the bonds of
death and time, and waste the effort that might earn you godhood if
employed elsewhere? Why do you fight and bear the agony of
wounds, only to grasp the trivial joys that earth can guard in her
small treasure-chest of passing things? O child, have you risen even
beyond the gods to win only poor shreds of earthly life for him
whom you love (Satyavan) cancelling the great release the lenient
gods have granted him by taking him away from the earthly life?
Are your arms then sweeter than death?
Savitri answered:
“I walk unhesitatingly on the road that has been hewn for me by
the mighty hand of God who has planned all for us. I run where the
sweet and imperious voice of God commands me and where I am
driven by the reins in his hands. If all this creation is futile, why did
God draw such a wide scheme of the great worlds and why did he
fill all infinity with his passionate, intense fervour? Or why did he
build my human form and sow in me his bright and high desires, if
not to achieve something through them, to see them blossom in me
and enable me to grow in love? Has he not carved in me his human
image richly shaped in thoughts, his largeness and his golden
powers?
420
“Heaven can wait our coming in its calm. The heavens were easy
for God to build. Earth was difficult to build, for in building the
earth he had glory and he had problems to face, and he had strife to
contend with. There on earth are the foreboding masks, the terrible
powers to conquer. To create the gods on earth is the real
challenge.”
Far Heaven can wait our coming in its calm.

Easy the heavens were to build for God.
Earth was his difficult matter, earth the glory
Gave of the problem and the race and strife.
There are the ominous masks, the terrible powers;
There it is greatness to create the gods.
p. 653 lines 435-440
These lines remind us of a very famous declaration of Sri

Aurobindo which goes as follows:
“The heavens we have always possessed, it is the earth

that we have yet to possess, and the aim of my yoga is,
in the language of the Vedas, to make heaven and earth
equal and one.”
This is central to the entire thinking of Sri Aurobindo. True

spirituality should help in the manifestation of the perfection of
God here on earth. It does not seek to escape from the problems of
this world to some distant heavens or Nirvana, or chid-loka, or
Kailasa. Savitri is reiterating here this central idea of Sri
Aurobindo’s spiritual thought.
And then in the following lines, she clinches the issue:
421
Is not the spirit immortal and absolved
Always, delivered from the grasp of Time?
Why came it down into the mortal’s Space?
p. 653 lines 441-443
Savitri is asking Death, “What is the point of running away with

one’s soul to a world of liberation, or Nirvana? Isn’t the soul always
immortal and free, always delivered from Time?” The Bhagavad
Gita describes it as that ‘which is not born, does not die’, as ‘unborn,
immutable, eternal, imperishable and ancient’, as something that is
‘eternally stable, immobile, all-pervading, and is for ever and
ever.’49
If the whole purpose of this life is that we should use it to find
the quickest way to run away from it, why did God create it then? Is
it being suggested that God made a mistake in creating this world,
and that we should try to correct him by running away from it? If
the immortal spirit came down and wrapped itself in ignorance
here, that must be for a purpose. What is that purpose?
Savitri declares that God has given a noble mission to man when
he sent his high spirit to this earth, and he has stamped his decree
on Nature’s forehead.
A charge he gave to his high spirit in man

And wrote a hidden decree on Nature’s tops.
p. 653 lines 444-445
What is this charge given to man’s high spirit by God?
49
Bhagavad Gita 2: 20-25
422
Freedom is this with ever seated soul,
Large in life’s limits, strong in Matter’s knots,
Building great stuff of action from the worlds
To make fine wisdom from coarse, scattered strands
And love and beauty out of war and night,
The wager wonderful, the game divine.
p. 653 lines 446-451
When the Divine sent the soul of man to be engulfed in the limiting
and suffocating world of matter and life, he gave it inner freedom,
and set up a divine game. What was the aim of that game? ‘To make
fine wisdom from coarse, scattered strands’ – to weave fine wisdom out
of the coarse strands of life’s experiences in matter and the vital and
the early ranges of the mind. And second? To create ‘love and beauty
out of war and night.’ There is so much strife and darkness here on
earth, but to create love and beauty out of all this – that is the divine
game, that is the ‘wager wonderful, the game divine’, Sri Aurobindo
puts this very beautifully at the very beginning of his philosophical
magnum opus The Life Divine (pp. 1-2):
To know, possess and be the divine being in an animal

and egoistic consciousness, to convert our twilit or
obscure physical mentality into the plenary
supramental illumination, to build peace and a self-
existent bliss where there is only a stress of transitory
satisfactions besieged by physical pain and emotional
suffering, to establish an infinite freedom in a world
which presents itself as a group of mechanical
necessities, to discover and realise the immortal life in
a body subjected to death and constant mutation,—this
is offered to us as the manifestation of God in Matter
and the goal of Nature in her terrestrial evolution.
423
Now Savitri takes up the challenge thrown at her by the God of
Death when he asked her, “You are trying to call him back to earth
and its miserable life from the great peace and relief that death has
given him.” He had asked her: ‘Are thy arms sweeter than the courts of
God?’ Are your arms then sweeter than the courts of God to which
death has sent him? Her answer is contained in the following lines:
What liberty has the soul which feels not free

Unless stripped bare and cannot kiss the bonds
The Lover winds around his playmate’s limbs,
Choosing his tyranny, crushed in his embrace?
To seize him better with her boundless heart
She accepts the limiting circle of his arms,
Bows full of bliss beneath his mastering hands
And laughs in his rich constraints, most bound, most free.
This is my answer to thy lures, O Death.”
p. 653 lines 452-460
What kind of liberty does the soul enjoy then if he is not free to strip
himself bare and kiss the bonds of the Beloved which wind around
his limbs, choosing her tyranny, crushed in her embrace? In order to
seize her more effectively with his unbounded heart, the soul
accepts the limiting circle of her arms, abandons himself entirely
under her masterful hands and takes immense delight in her rich
constraints. He is most free when he is thus most bound.
This is not only a most wonderful poetic statement of the basic
mystery of this life but it also makes philosophically a most
profound statement. The Brahman is in the grip of the tight embrace
of maya; does a lover suffer when he is embraced tightly by his
beloved? Does it show he is helpless? The Supreme Brahman allows
himself to be bound by Ignorance, by Maya, not because he is
424
helpless and Maya is too strong for him and he has no choice but to
submit to her, This would be tantamount to admitting that Maya is
a greater truth than the Supreme Brahman. This would mean
admitting another reality that is as powerful as the Supreme
Brahman. To avoid getting caught into this trap Shankara and his
followers claim that Ignorance or Maya is not real, except in its
pragmatic effect. They are bound to describe Ignorance as unreal
and this world created by the Ignorance also as unreal, as a mirage.
Sri Aurobindo, on the other hand, proclaims that the so-called Maya
is also real and real also this world it creates. The world is
imperfect, but this self-limitation is not imposed on the Supreme by
any force outside of himself. Rather it is a voluntary self-limitation
he gladly submits himself to. As he says in The Life Divine (Vol. II,
Part 1, p. 280), this self-limitation which the Ignorance represents, is
accepted for a particular working. Instead of being incompatible
with the absolute conscious force of the Divine Being, it is precisely
one of its powers which exists among the manifold energies of the
Infinite. The Supreme binds himself because he is free to bind
himself. That is a sign of his omnipotence and absolute freedom and
not of any limitation on his freedom.
Savitri has now given the God of Death a fitting reply to his
question to her: “Are your arms then sweeter than death?”
425
35: Book X, Canto 4 – The Reality and Value of the
World
Before we proceed, we should review briefly the main issues that

have emerged out of this debate between Savitri and her adversary
in the previous chapter. Savitri has now declared in the following
words the value of this world:
Far Heaven can wait our coming in its calm.

Easy the heavens were to build for God.
Earth was his difficult matter, earth the glory
Gave of the problem and the race and strife.
There are the ominous masks, the terrible powers;
There it is greatness to create the gods.
p. 653 lines 435-440
To create perfection here on earth is the real challenge. To create the

gods in heavens is comparatively an easy matter; but earth offers
real problems; it is still in the grip of the Inconscient, and to release
life here from the hold of the adversary forces, is a glorious
challenge.
In fact, there can be two different ways of looking at the world –
in terms of its value for God and in terms its value for us. When we
ask what its value to us is we tend to dismiss the world as ‘anityam,
asukham’ (transient and unhappy) and therefore we are tempted to
try to escape from it or at best to use it as an instrument to
strengthen our souls so that we get an entrance into an
extraterrestrial heaven. When we regard it in terms of its value for
Divine, we find it to be a challenging field for the fullest
manifestation of his glory. Can the world be redeemed from its
present state of imperfection and corruption and subjection to death
426
and ignorance? Most spiritual philosophies have tended to answer
this question in the negative. But here Savitri gives what is basically
Sri Aurobindo’s answer to this question. Not to escape from the
world because of its imperfections but to live in it and to transform
life on earth as we transform ourselves is the real challenge our
humanhood is supposed to take up.
Savitri’s question to the God of Death is very interesting:
Is not the spirit immortal and absolved

Always, delivered from the grasp of Time?
Why came it down into the mortal’s Space?
p.653 lines 441-443
The spirit is always immortal and is always free from death,

imperfection, and sin and corruption. Why did it descend into the
grip of time and space and consent to be bound by ignorance? What
does it wish to achieve through such an act? Or should we conclude
that the Divine’s decision to manifest himself as this manifold world
was a mistake and we should correct the Divine by trying to cop out
of this world through the escape route of Nirvana?
Sri Aurobindo does not believe that it is the creator’s intention
that we should escape this world in order to escape misery and evil.
He believes that it is the intention of Nature to conquer all
imperfections, and that the pain we experience here is but a spur to
our efforts to achieve this victory. As Kapali Sastry puts it in his
Lights on the Fundamentals (Madras, Sri Aurobindo Library, 1950, p.
78.), the divine potentialities of the Infinite Self are latent in the
finite and it is the revelation of the divine nature and of the
infinitude hidden in the finite that is the purpose of the limitless Self
discovering himself in the limitations of the finite.
The second major problem a monistic philosophy has to answer
is, ‘How does the Divine get entangled in this bondage to
427
ignorance? Is it because he is under some kind of determination,
necessity or need to create?’ Sri Aurobindo very clearly states that
God’s creation of the world is undertaken deliberately and in
freedom. If the divine does not have freedom to bind himself in the
net of Ignorance for the joy of the play, lila, we will have to conceive
that the divine is not entirely free. Savitri refers to this freedom the
Divine feels in choosing to be bound:
“What liberty has the soul which feels not free

Unless stripped bare and cannot kiss the bonds
The Lover winds around his playmate’s limbs,
Choosing his tyranny, crushed in his embrace?
To seize him better with her boundless heart
She accepts the limiting circle of his arms,
Bows full of bliss beneath his mastering hands
And laughs in his rich constraints, most bound, most free.
This is my answer to thy lures, O Death.”
p. 653 lines 452-460
The God of Death is rendered speechless by Savitri’s replies to his

questions about the reality and the value of the world. Notice that
she adheres to the advaitic monism of Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy.
So Death now takes up another line altogether. He says to her:
“Whoever you may really be, and however powerful you may be
behind your human mask, O Savitri, your heart’s passion cannot
overrule the firm, established laws of the Gods that operate here.
Satyavan is dead and will remain dead, that is the established rule
of the Gods here. It is so firmly established here that you cannot
hope to change it. Even if you are the Mother of the Worlds behind
your human mask, you will not be able to impose your will on the
cosmic law which, you will find, is greater than your will. Even God
obeys the laws he has made. The law abides, it cannot be changed.
428
An individual person is after all only a temporary bubble on the sea
of Time.
“You claim to be a forerunner of a greater Truth that is to come,
and your soul is trying to create a freer law of its own. In doing so,
you seem to be leaning on a Force and a Light no one but you have
seen. And you are claiming the first fruits of this victory of this new
power. But what is Truth? And when was her footfall last heard
amid the endless clamour in the mart of time? And which is her
voice amidst the thousand cries that crowd and pass through the
listening brain and deceive the soul? Perhaps Truth is nothing but a
high name, remote like a star. Or is it a vague and impressive word
which serves to justify and rationalise man’s desires? Maybe it is
just a cloak man uses to hide his heart’s wish, maybe it is a
preferred idea, most elected among the elect; may be it is the
favourite thought among the many children born of the mind’s half-
light crowding the playground of the mind with their loud voices
and filling its dormitories in their infant sleep!
“All things move here between God’s Yes and No, two Powers
that are both real but untrue to each other. They are like two stars in
the moonlit night of the mind gazing in two opposite horizons.
They are like the white head and the black tail of the mystic drake
(male duck) signifying the earth soul. They are the swift foot and
the lame foot, the strong wing and the broken wing sustaining the
body of this multidimensional dragon that is this uncertain world.
“Your high proud truth must live too dangerously in this world
because it is entangled in the mortal littleness of Matter. All in this
world that appears to be true turns out in the end to be false.
Ultimately, all the thoughts of this world culminate in an eternal
zero, all deeds come to nothing in Time.
“For man is at once an animal and a god, a disparate 50 enigma of
50
Disparate = containing or made up of fundamentally different and often
incongruous elements
429
God’s make. There is a form of Godhead within but he is unable to
liberate it from its imprisonment. Man is an aspiring animal, the
frustrate god (a potential god, but in actuality something less than
himself). But he is neither wholly a beast not yet wholly a god; he is
man but man bound to the labour of the earth to exceed herself, to
climb the higher stairs of consciousness towards god’s
consciousness.
“In this world there are only appearances and no one knows
what the truth about them is. Man’s ideas are just so many guesses
of a fallible god. Truth has no home on the irrational breast of earth.
Without reason, life will become a tangle of dreams. But this reason
is poised precariously above a dim abyss and stands at last upon a
plank of doubt. Eternal truth cannot live in mortal beings. Or if it
lives within your heart, show me the body of living truth, or draw
for me at least the outline of her face so that I too may obey and
worship her. If you can do that, I shall give back Satyavan to you.
“But here are only facts and the laws hard like steel. I know this
truth – that Satyavan is dead and nothing can bring him back, not
even your sweetness. There is no magic that can bring back the
dead to life. There is no power on earth that can do this. Nothing,
no joy of the heart, no bliss can persuade the past to live again.
“Life alone can comfort and fill the mute Void created by death
and fill with thought the emptiness of Time. Leave your dead
behind, and live a full life.”
Savitri, the great World-Mother incarnate in a human body,
answers to the mighty Shade, the dark figure of Death. And as she
speaks her mortality disappears; the Goddess in her becomes visible
in her eyes, like a dream of heaven Light glows on her face. And she
says to the God of Death:
“O Death, you too are God and yet you are not quite that. You
are his black shadow clinging to him as he leaves the Night of
Nescience and takes the way upward, dragging with him the still
430
clinging Inconscient force of the Night.
This description of the God of Death as just now given by Savitri
is very close to the spirit which he represents, or the Force he
embodies in Sri Aurobindo’s conception of him. In the traditional
Indian system, Death is primarily Yama, the God who annihilates
finite forms when their span of life on earth is over. In Sri
Aurobindo’s Savitri, he is the representative of the Nescience from
which this creation has evolved. He is interested in pulling this
creation back towards the Nescience from which it was born.
“O Death, you are the dark head of the unconsciousness of this
creation; you are the unrepentant sign of the ignorance of this
world, and the natural child of the dark womb of Ignorance, and
you are therefore an unlucky bar on immortality.
“All contraries are aspects of God’s face. The Many here are only
the One showing itself innumerably. The One supreme Divine
carries the multitude in His breast; He is the Impersonal,
inscrutable, and sole; He is the one infinite Person seeing the world
He has manifested. The Silence bears the Eternal’s great dumb seal,
and the eternal word is also inspired by His Light. The deep and
deathless hush of the Immutable with its pure, featureless blank all-
negating calm is He. And yet He Himself is the creator Self, the
almighty Lord who watches His will executed by the gods who are
His own forms. He watches the compelling desire goading the half-
conscious man and also goading the reluctant and blind Night into
movement.
“These wide divine extremes, these inverse powers, are the right
and left side of the body of God. It is one Existence poised between
two mighty arms that confronts the mind with unsolved
profundities of thought. Below there is darkness, and above there is
endless Light. The two contraries are joined in Light but the
dividing Mind tears them asunder and they stand facing each other
as opposites, ever in confrontation. The two contraries are
431
indispensable for the great World-task of the Divine. They are the
two poles whose opposite currents in their interaction awake the
mighty immense World-Force.
“He stands above the world in the mighty secrecy of his Self and
broods in concentration with equal wings; he assumes both the
contraries in himself, and is without beginning or end.
Transcending both of the contraries, he enters the state of Absolute.
God’s being is a mystery beyond mind, his ways bewilder mortal
ignorance. The finite is parked in its little sections and is amazed by
God’s audacity and cannot believe that what it sees is true – that the
Self can become the All and yet see and act as the one Infinite
would.
“This seems to be the Absolute’s offence against human reason –
being known to be for ever unknowable, to be all and yet to
transcend the mystic whole, to be the Absolute and yet dwell in a
relative world of Time; to be the Eternal and all-knowing and yet to
suffer birth as finite beings and things, to be omnipotent and yet
appear to be sporting with Chance and Fate, to be the Spirit and yet
to be matter and the Void, to be the illimitable, beyond form and
name, yet to dwell within a body, to be the one and the supreme
and yet to be animal, human and divine. The Supreme is still like
the deep sea and yet he laughs in rolling waves, he is Universal, he
is all and yet he is the transcendent, he is none.”
The Supreme Divine baffles the human intellect because He does
not fit into its neat categories and is not bound to its logic of the
finite. How is the Divine to be understood? Is He universal,
transcendental or immanent and individual? How can He be all
these three at the same time? Is he the Formless or does he always
wear a form? If He is infinite, then why does he take birth only in
finite things and beings? If He is omnipotent, why does He look so
helpless in his finite individual forms? How can he be an animal,
man and the divine at the same time? Is He the quiet, immobile
depths of the ocean, or is He the ever-active waves on the surface of
432
the ocean?
“To man’s sense of righteousness this seems to be God’s cosmic
crime – that although Almighty, he chooses to dwell beyond good
and evil leaving the good to their fate in this wicked world and
letting evil rule the immense scene. To those who see only a part
and miss the whole, all this creation appears to be a vast, aimless
labour with but scanty result, everywhere there seems to be
opposition, strife and chance. People scan only the surfaces, the
depths do not yield to their search. The world confronts and
challenges us either as a hybrid mystery or as a sordid miracle.”
There are two kinds of people who are baffled by the Divine. We
have just seen how he baffles those who depend on their reason and
intellect to make sense of this world. The second category of people
are those who are committed to righteousness. They expect God to
be at least as moral as they are. How can God the Almighty let evil
triumph more often than the good in this world? Why does he not
do anything about it? Does he not hold the same moral values that
we hold, or is he totally indifferent to the good and the evil? Why is
there so much strife and suffering in a world controlled by a kind
and benevolent God? Does he not care enough, or is he too weak to
help even if he cared? These are some of the grounds which built up
the case for atheism and the denial of God, particularly in the West
in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
As we have already seen, Sri Aurobindo has an entirely different
notion of the Divine and how and why the Divine created this
universe. He did not create this universe outside of himself, with a
substance which is also outside of himself. He became the world. If
there is imperfection and suffering and death in this world, it is god
himself who is undergoing this experience. He is not sending these
experiences to the inhabitants of the world while he is exempt from
them. So Sri Aurobindo’s God is not morally culpable on that
account. The real question then is, why does the Divine choose to go
through this experienced of pain, suffering and death? So while an
433
answer to this question has still to be found – and Sri Aurobindo
has answered this question in The Life Divine – the fact that there is
evil and imperfection in the world, or the fact that God is beyond
our rationality, are not arguments that can be used to dismiss his
very existence.
“Yet in this seeming exactness of the workings of the
Inconscient, in the careless error of the world’s ignorance, one sees a
plan, a hidden intelligence. There is a purpose in each stumble and
fall. Even in what looks like the most careless, lazy movement of
Nature is only an appearance, a posturing preparing behind it some
forward step, some significant result.
“Individual events and happenings are like cleverly designed
notes woven into a purposive composition – they may look
discordant but they are in fact the tiny notes of a harmonious whole,
which is a huge orchestral dance of Nature’s evolution.
“A supreme Truth has brought this world into being; it has
wrapped itself in Matter as in a shroud – a shroud of Death, a
shroud of Ignorance. It compelled the suns to burn through silent
space; they are like the flame-signs of its uncomprehended Thought
in a wide brooding ether’s formless muse. It made of Knowledge an
obscured and struggling light, of luminous being an inconscient,
dense and dumb substance, turned Bliss into the beauty of an
insentient world.
“The conscious infinite lives in finite things. When it gets
involved (the process of involution, which precedes evolution), it
sleeps in Matter’s helpless trance. It rules the world even when it is
asleep in Matter’s senseless Void. From its dreaming state, it throws
out mind and heart and soul which struggle and labour in their
crippled and bound conditions on the hard earth, inhospitable to
them. This fragmented whole works through many scattered points.
Its broken pieces are the thoughts of wisdom which glisten like
diamonds and its shadowy reflex is our ignorance here.
434
“The Infinite starts its evolutionary journey from dumb
Inconscient Matter in numberless jets at innumerable points, and
throws itself out in countless forms; out of physical brain and nerve,
it shapes a conscient being and from the pleasures and pain of life it
develops a sentient creature. The physical form is a bundle of
obscure feelings, a sensitive bundle of matter; it survives the various
shocks to its existence. Either by being crushed or getting exhausted
or otherwise, it dies and departs from the huge universe in which it
lives but only as an insignificant, inconsequential guest. But all the
while, the soul grows concealed within its house. It gives to the
body its strength and its greatness. In this ignorant and aimless
world, the soul follows its own aims and lends significance to
earth’s otherwise meaningless life.”
We have now reached the mid-point in Savitri’s long discourse
on integral philosophy which is intended to answer all the
questions the God of Death might have for her.
435
36: Book X Canto 4 – The Higher Levels of Mind
Savitri has been explaining to the God of Death the seeming

paradox of life. She tells him that a supreme Truth has created this
world by wrapping itself in matter and in a shroud of Death. It has
organised the physical world as we see it today. To create this
universe as we see it now, Knowledge had to be veiled and turned
into a struggling light, the Supreme Being had to be converted into
a substance nescient, dense and dumb, and the divine’s Bliss had to
be made into the beauty of the insentient world. In finite things,
dwells the Infinite. The finite human mind cannot grasp the logic of
the Infinite. It is baffled at every step by what it sees as a sordid
miracle.
His being is a mystery beyond mind,

His ways bewilder mortal ignorance;
The finite in its little sections parked,
Amazed, credits not God’s audacity
Who dares to be the unimagined All
And see and act as might one Infinite.
Against human reason this is his offence,
Being known to be for ever unknowable,
To be all and yet transcend the mystic whole,
Absolute, to lodge in a relative world of Time,
Eternal and all-knowing, to suffer birth,
Omnipotent, to sport with Chance and Fate,
Spirit, yet to be Matter and the Void,
Illimitable, beyond form or name,
To dwell within a body, one and supreme
To be animal and human and divine:
A still deep sea, he laughs in rolling waves;
436
Universal, he is all,—transcendent, none.
To man’s righteousness this is his cosmic crime,
Almighty beyond good and evil to dwell
Leaving the good to their fate in a wicked world
And evil to reign in this enormous scene.
All opposition seems and strife and chance,
An aimless labour with but scanty sense,
To eyes that see a part and miss the whole;
The surface men scan, the depths refuse their search:
A hybrid mystery challenges the view,
Or a discouraging sordid miracle.
p. 657 lines 577-604
Yet in what look like the workings of the Inconscient, one sees a
plan, a secret intelligence at work. The careless, lazy movement of
Nature is only an appearance behind which some significant
forward steps are planned. The conscious Infinite dwells in finite
things. It is not only a physical evolution that is taking place here. In
this ignorant-looking and apparently aimless world, the soul or
consciousness is also growing and it is that which gives a meaning
to earth’s seemingly meaningless life.
Savitri continues her discourse to the God of Death on the
Integral truth about this life on earth:
A demigod animal, came thinking man;

He wallows in mud, yet heavenward soars in thought;
He plays and ponders, laughs and weeps and dreams,
Satisfies his little longings like the beast;
He pores upon life’s book with student eyes.
Out of this tangle of intellect and sense,
Out of the narrow scope of finite thought
At last he wakes into spiritual mind;
437
A high liberty begins and luminous room:
He glimpses eternity, touches the infinite,
He meets the gods in great and sudden hours,
He feels the universe as his larger self,
Makes Space and Time his opportunity
To join the heights and depths of being in light,
In the heart’s cave speaks secretly with God.
p. 659 lines 643-657
Savitri continues;
“Just look at the thinking man. He is both an animal and a half-
god at the same time. Like an animal he wallows in the mud of life
but in his thoughts he soars high heavenwards. He plays and
ponders, laughs and weeps and yet also dreams. He is like the beast
in satisfying his petty desires, but he is also capable of poring upon
the book of life most diligently. He struggles through the confusion
created by the rigidness of the intellect and the confident senses and
gradually rises into the higher regions of his mind. Here he begins
to experience a wide freedom and a radiant afflatus.
“Here in the regions of the spiritual mind, he gets a glimpse of
eternity, and has even some contact with the infinite consciousness,
however faint and fleeting it may be to begin with. In great and
unexpected hours he even encounters the gods. He begins to feel
that the universe is his own wider self. He uses Space and Time as
opportunities to infuse the heights and depths of his being with the
supernal light. He even becomes capable of communicating with
God in the secrecies of his heart.
“But these are only touches, fleeting experiences of his high
moments in life. At this stage only a few fragments of the supreme
Truth have touched and illumined his soul, like reflections of the
sun in still waters. They are not yet his normal life, not a permanent
state of his soul. Only a few have dared to climb beyond this state
438
and have achieved the supreme ascent. They have broken through
the borders of the blinding light which is above them and breathed
a mightier air and received intimations of a vaster existence and
bathed their being in the immense intuitive light. On the highest
planes of the mind are planes open to the radiance of Infinity; they
are the outskirts and dependencies of the home of the Absolute
Truth; therefore these estates of the mind are most exalted and
measureless.
“Man can visit these heights but he cannot live there. It is the
realm of cosmic Thought spread out in its vastness. Small portions
of this consciousness take form here as great philosophies, immense
in their details. Each such philosophy has its own scheme of the
universe.
“The ascending light can climb to still higher regions, where can
be found vast spaces of vision under eternal suns and oceans of
immortal luminousness and flame-hills assaulting heaven with their
peaks. There everything turns into a blaze of light. A burning head
of vision dominates the mind there and thought follows the lead of
vision. Here the mind sees the truth while the heart also feels it. The
heart becomes an illuminate and a seer. And all this intimate
knowledge comes through an identity with the object of knowledge.
“In this ascent, the higher we rise, the deeper can we see. From
the illumined mental consciousness descried just now, one can
climb still higher and enter the still wider horizons of the Intuitive
Mind. Intuition flashes here in clusters and hunts out hidden truths
from their hideouts. The fiery edge of intuition cuts through closed
and unexplored regions of the self, delves into the high recesses of
the brain and lights up the secret chambers of the heart. Intuition
has great powers of penetration and it breaks through the veil of
name and form and reveals the secret soul of everything.
“Thought here has the sun-bright eyes of revelation. The Word
becomes a mighty voice of inspiration and enters the inmost cabin
439
of privacy and tears away the veil that covers the reality of God and
of life. Then beyond the heights of the Intuitive Mind, we come to
the last rung of the ladder of the mental consciousness, namely, to
the Overmind. The Overmind is cosmic in its range; it is as it were a
buffer state between Time and Eternity, the belt at which the Eternal
crosses into the temporal. This realm is too vast for the normal
experience of most people.
“Here all is gathered below one golden sky. The Powers that
build the cosmos in this field of unbounded possibilities take their
respective positions here.” (These Powers are called the Gods.)
“Each God operates from here and builds his own world
according to his nature. Real-Ideas are arranged here in deep ranks
and files like an army formation and are held together by the regard
of one God or Power. Here Time is one frame, and all space is one
single extension. There in the Overmental region is the universal
gaze of the Godhead. That is where the boundaries of the immortal
mind lie, and that is the boundary that separates the upper and the
lower hemispheres of creation. It fences Eternity from the finite
fields where the Gods labour in Time.”
Here the poet is describing the higher levels of the mental
consciousness which Sri Aurobindo has written about in some
detail in The Life Divine and other writings of his. Above our
thought-mind and below the Supermind, he has recognised four
distinct levels of mental consciousness. These are the Higher Mind,
the Illumined Mind, the Intuitive Mind and the Overmind. We shall
review very briefly here in his own words how he has described
each of these levels51 :
51
The following passages describing the different levels of the mind are taken
mainly from The Life Divine pp. 939–962 and one from The Synthesis of Yoga p. 447
440
The Higher Mind
Our first decisive step out of our human intelligence,

our normal mentality, is an ascent into a higher Mind,
a mind no longer of mingled light and obscurity or
half-light, but a large clarity of the Spirit. While our
thought-mind deals with one thing at a time; it divides,
segments, analyses and discriminates. The Higher
Mind takes many things at the same time, multiple
thoughts without going piecemeal. Knowledge here is
spontaneously inherent, not arrived at through the
labour of reasoning. There is a clarity of the spirit, as if
daylight brings so many things into view. This mind is
nevertheless dominated by thought, by luminous
thought.
The Illumined Mind
The Illumined Mind is a greater force than the Higher

Mind; it is a Mind no longer of higher Thought, but of
spiritual light. Here the clarity of the spiritual
intelligence gives place or subordinates itself to an
intense lustre, a splendour and illumination of the
Spirit. It is a lightening-like play of spiritual truth and
power that breaks from above into the consciousness. It
adds to the calm and wide enlightenment and the vast
descent of peace which characterise the action of the
larger conceptual-spiritual principle, a fiery ardour of
realisation and a rapturous ecstasy of knowledge. A
downpour of inwardly visible Light very usually
envelops this action. The Illumined Mind does not
work primarily by thought, but by vision; thought is
here only a subordinate movement expressive of sight.
441
The human mind, which relies mainly on thought,
conceives that to be the highest or the main process of
knowledge, but in the spiritual order thought is a
secondary and a not indispensable process. In its form
of verbal thought, it can almost be described as a
concession made by Knowledge to the Ignorance,
because that Ignorance is incapable of making truth
wholly lucid and intelligible to itself in all its extent
and manifold implications except through the
clarifying precision of significant sounds. It cannot do
without this device to give to ideas an exact outline
and an expressive body. But it is evident that this is a
device, a machinery. Thought in itself, in its origin on
the higher levels of consciousness, is a perception, a
cognitive seizing of the object or of some truth of
things which is a powerful but still a minor and
secondary result of spiritual vision. It is a
comparatively external and superficial regard of the
self upon the self, the subject upon itself or something
of itself as object: for all there is a diversity and
multiplicity of the self. In mind there is a surface
response of perception to the contact of an observed or
discovered object, fact or truth and a consequent
conceptual formulation of it; but in the spiritual light
there is a deeper perceptive response from the very
substance of consciousness and a comprehending
formulation in that substance, an exact figure or
revelatory ideograph in the stuff of the being —
nothing more, no verbal representation is needed for
the precision and completeness of this thought-
knowledge. Thought creates a representative image of
Truth. It offers that to the mind as a means of holding
Truth and making it an object of knowledge. But the
442
body itself of Truth is caught and exactly held in the
sunlight of a deeper spiritual sight to which the
representative figure created by thought is secondary
and derivative, powerful for communication of
knowledge, but not indispensable for reception or
possession of knowledge.
A consciousness that proceeds by sight, the
consciousness of the seer, is a greater power for
knowledge than the consciousness of the thinker. The
perceptual power of the inner sight is greater and more
direct than the perceptual power of thought. It is a
spiritual sense that seizes something of the substance
of Truth and not only her figure. But it outlines the
figure also and at the same time catches the
significance of the figure, and it can embody her with a
finer and bolder revealing outline and a larger
comprehension and power of totality than thought-
conception can manage. As the Higher Mind brings a
greater consciousness into the being through the
spiritual idea and its power of truth, so the Illumined
Mind brings in a still greater consciousness through a
Truth-sight and Truth-light and its seeing and seizing
power. It can effect a more powerful and dynamic
integration.
The Intuitive Mind
There is, indeed, a higher form of the buddhi that can be

called the intuitive mind or intuitive reason, and this
by its intuitions, its inspirations, its swift revelatory
vision, its luminous insight and discrimination can do
the work of the reason with a higher power, a swifter
action, a greater and spontaneous certitude. It acts in a
443
self-light of the truth which does not depend upon the
torch-flares of the sense-mind and its limited uncertain
percepts; it proceeds not by intelligent but by visional
concepts: it is a kind of truth-vision, truth-hearing,
truth-memory, direct truth-discernment. This true and
authentic intuition must be distinguished from a
power of the ordinary mental reason which is too
easily confused with it, the power of involved
reasoning that reaches its conclusion by a bound and
does not need the ordinary steps of the logical mind.
Intuition has a fourfold power. A power of revelatory
truth-seeing, a power of inspiration or truth-hearing, a
power of truth-touch or immediate seizing of
significance, which is akin to the ordinary nature of its
intervention in our mental intelligence, a power of true
and automatic discrimination of the orderly and exact
relation of truth to truth, — these are the fourfold
potencies of Intuition. Intuition can therefore perform
all the action of reason, — including the function of
logical intelligence, which is to work out the right
relation of things and the right relation of idea with
idea,—but by its own superior process and with steps
that do not fail or falter. It takes up also and transforms
into its own substance not only the mind of thought,
but the heart and life and the sense and physical
consciousness. Already all these have their own
peculiar powers of intuition derivative from the hidden
Light; the pure power descending from above can
assume them all into itself and impart to these deeper
heart-perceptions and life-perceptions and the
divinations of the body a greater integrality and
perfection. It can thus change the whole consciousness
into the stuff of Intuition; for it brings its own greater
444
radiant movement into the will, into the feelings and
emotions, the life-impulses, the action of sense and
sensation the very workings of the body-consciousness;
it recasts them in the light and power of truth and
illumines their knowledge and their ignorance.
The Overmind
This is the faculty containing all the powers of Intuition and also of
the other preceding stages but it is also capable of receiving the light
from above. Sri Aurobindo describes it as a superconscient cosmic
Mind which is in direct contact with the supramental consciousness.
The Overmind is the last step of the stair of the lower hemisphere. It
is the highest peak of the mind and therefore belongs to the lower
hemisphere. It may be the highest rung but still it has the shadow of
the Ignorance.
The overmind is a power of the cosmic consciousness.
It is therefore only by an opening into the cosmic
consciousness that the overmind ascent and descent
can be made wholly possible. The preceding stages are
not cosmic in nature, but in the Overmind
consciousness expands and widens itself. A high and
intense individual opening upwards is not sufficient; to
that vertical ascent towards summit light must be
added a vast horizontal expansion of consciousness
into some totality of the Spirit. When the Overmind
descends, the predominance of the centralising ego-
sense is entirely subordinated, lost in largeness of
being and finally abolished. A wide cosmic perception
and feeling of a boundless universal self and
movement replaces it: many motions that were
formerly egocentric may still continue but they occur
as currents or ripples in the cosmic wideness.
445
In its nature and law the overmind is a sort of
delegation of the Supermind, it is the passage through
which one passes from mind to Supermind. It has the
vision of the truth and yet it is the first parent of
Ignorance; ignorance in the sense of divided
knowledge, knowledge of parts and aspects of the
truth, not the integral unifying knowledge superior to
all mental substance and movements.
The Overmind can unite the individual mind with the
cosmic mind, but it cannot lead it beyond itself, it
cannot dynamise the Transcendent, for it is only the
Supermind that has the direct power of manifestation
of the Transcendence. Besides, the Overmind is not
able wholly to transform the Inconscient, for even as
this higher power enters the inconscient it is subject to
the diminishing law of the nescient substance, and as
long as the basis of nescience remains untransformed it
can re-invade the gnostic being at any time.
446
37: Book X, Canto 4 – Supermind,
the Truth-Consciousness
As we saw in the previous chapter, Savitri is giving the God of

Death an overview of the evolutionary future of man. She is giving
him a brief description of the levels of consciousness that are above
the thinking mind. These spiritual levels of the mental
consciousness begin with the Higher Mind, and above it is the
Illumined Mind; then after that comes the Intuitive Mind and after
that we have the Overmind. The lower hemisphere of this
evolutionary creation ends with the Overmind. What comes after
the Overmind?
In her glorious kingdom of eternal light

All-ruler, ruled by none, the Truth supreme,
Omnipotent, omniscient and alone,
In a golden country keeps her measureless house;
In its corridor she hears the tread that comes
Out of the Unmanifest never to return
Till the Unknown is known and seen by men.
p. 661 lines 716-722
“Above the overmind is the glorious kingdom of eternal light where

the supreme Truth, which Sri Aurobindo calls the Supramental
consciousness, dwells in the gold-bright country of the Spirit. This
consciousness is the ruler of all and it is ruled by none; it is all-
powerful, all-knowing and alone. It is in the corridors of this realm
that the tread of the eternal coming out of the Unmanifest can first
be heard. When the unmanifest Spirit moves into manifestation, this
is where it first appears. From here it enters the lower hemisphere
until it is seen by all.”
447
The distinction between the Overmind and the Supermind is
brought out very clearly in the following paragraph by Sri
Aurobindo:
The overmind is a sort of delegation from the

supermind (this is a metaphor only) which supports
the present evolutionary universe in which we live
here in Matter. If supermind were to start here from
the beginning as the direct creative Power, a world of
the kind we see now would be impossible; it would
have been full of the divine Light from the beginning,
there would be no involution in the inconscience of
Matter, consequently no gradual striving evolution of
consciousness in Matter. A line is therefore drawn
between the higher half of the universe of
consciousness, parārdha, and the lower half, aparārdha.
The higher half is constituted of Sat, Chit, Ananda,
Mahas (the supramental) - the lower half of mind, life,
Matter. This line is the intermediary overmind which,
though luminous itself, keeps from us the full
indivisible supramental Light, depends on it indeed,
but in receiving it, divides, distributes, breaks it up into
separated aspects, powers, multiplicities of all kinds,
each of which it is possible by a further diminution of
consciousness, such as we reach in Mind, to regard as
the sole or the chief Truth and all the rest as
subordinate or contradictory to it. To this action of the
overmind may be applied the words of the Upanishad,
"The face of the Truth is covered by a golden Lid", or
those of the Vedic rtena rtam apihitam. Here there is the
working of a sort of vidyā-avidyāmayī māyā which
makes possible the predominance of avidyā. It is by this
primitive divisional principle that the Mind is enabled
448
to regard, for example; the Impersonal as the Truth, the
Personal as only a mask or the personal Divine as the
greatest Truth and impersonality as only an aspect; it is
so too that all the conflicting philosophies and religions
arise, each exalting one aspect or potentiality of Truth
presented to Mind as the whole sufficient explanation
of things or exalting one of the Divine's Godheads
above all others as the true God than whom there can
be no other or none so high or higher. This divisional
principle pursues man's mental knowledge
everywhere and even when he thinks he has arrived at
the final unity, it is only a constructed unity, based on
an Aspect. It is so that the scientist seeks to found the
unity of knowledge on some original physical aspect of
things, Energy or Matter, Electricity or Ether, or the
Mayavadin thinks he has arrived at the absolute
Adwaita by cutting existence into two, calling the
upper side Brahman and the lower side Maya. It is the
reason why mental knowledge can never arrive at a
final solution of anything, for the aspects of Existence
as distributed by overmind are numberless and one
can go on multiplying philosophies and religions for
ever.
SABCL 22: 243–244
Savitri describes this transcendental Supramental world, which is

the home of the Supreme Mother, in these words:
Above the stretch and blaze of cosmic Sight,

Above the silence of the wordless Thought,
Formless creator of immortal forms,
Nameless, investitured with the name divine,
449
Transcending Time’s hours, transcending Timelessness,
The Mighty Mother sits in lucent calm
And holds the eternal Child upon her knees
Attending the day when he shall speak to Fate.
There is the image of our future’s hope;
There is the sun for which all darkness waits,
There is the imperishable harmony;
The world’s contradictions climb to her and are one:
There is the Truth of which the world’s truths are shreds,
The Light of which the world’s ignorance is the shade
Till Truth draws back the shade that it has cast,
The Love our hearts call down to heal all strife,
The Bliss for which the world’s derelict sorrows yearn:
Thence comes the glory sometimes seen on earth,
The visits of Godhead to the human soul,
The Beauty and the dream on Nature’s face.
There the perfection born from eternity
Calls to it the perfection born in Time,
The truth of God surprising human life,
The image of God overtaking finite shapes.
p. 661 lines 724-746
“This is the transcendental world beyond the realm of the cosmic

consciousness and above the silent stretches of wordless thought.
This is the abode of the formless creatrix of immortal forms, of the
nameless who ratifies every divine name by which she is known,
and who transcends both Time and Timelessness. This is where the
Supreme creatrix, conceived as the Mother of the universe sits
holding the eternal child (this creation) on her knees, waiting
patiently for the child to grow up and realise the Destiny for which
he has been brought into being.
“This is the full figure of our hope for the future; this is the
radiant sun for which all the darkness of the world below waits.
450
There in that world we have the undying harmony for which the
world yearns. This is the home of the Mighty Mother. All the
contradictions in our world climb to this realm and find there their
resolution in her.
“There in this realm is the Truth of Truths of which the truths of
our world are little fragments; there is a Light there of which the
world’s ignorance is the shade which lasts till the Truth that casts it
draws back. There is the Love which our hearts pine for and want to
call down to heal all the strife and conflict of our world. There exists
too the Bliss which all the world’s sorrows are longing for.
“From this world comes the glory that we sometimes see on
earth as God descends into the human soul in the form of special
beauty and there is the glory of a dream on nature’s face.
“There, in that realm, the perfection born from Eternity calls to it
the perfection born in Time. Then the truth of God surprises human
life, and the image of God overtakes finite shapes and invests them
with a divine significance.
“There in the realms of the immortal Supermind is a world of
everlasting Light. In this world of Light, Truth, which here in our
world hides her head in mystery and which in the stark structure of
its material form looks like a riddle that is impossible for human
reason to unravel, lives freely and without any ambiguity. The face
of the Truth is unmasked there. There Truth is the nature and the
common law of things.
“There in a body made of spirit substance, the everlasting Fire
burns as in a hearth. Actions in such a body are expressions of the
soul impulses and thought takes infallible and absolute steps. Life is
a continual worship’s rite there, a joyous sacrifice of rapture offered
to the One.
“A cosmic vision and a spiritual sense enable one to feel the
Infinite lodged in finite forms and it sees through a quivering
ecstasy of light the bright face of the Bodiless in the truth of a
451
moment; one can sip the honey-wine of eternity in the momentary
movements of the soul.
“A Spirit who is no one in particular stands supporting the
innumerable many. The one mystic Person of this world multiplies
and becomes the multiple personalities; He puts his divinity’s
stamp on all his innumerable bodies and sits in each rendering it
immortal and unique.
“Behind each daily act the Immobile stands supporting it,
forming the background of the movement and the scene. On the
foundation of its might and calm the Immobile upholds the
creation, and all changes take place on the unchanging, deathless
poise of the immutable.
“That which is Eternal looks out through the moving hours of
time. That which is incapable of being expressed in words puts on a
robe of speech, in which the words are woven like magic threads;
they evoke beauty and inspire us with their glow.
“The Truth supreme, although vast and impersonal, adjusts itself
faultlessly to the hour and circumstance; its substance is always the
same pure gold but it is shaped into vessels of different shapes for
the spirit’s use; its gold becomes the wine jar of bliss and the vase of
beauty.
“All in that world is a supreme epiphany (divine manifestation).
The All-Wonderful makes a marvel of each event, the All-Beautiful
makes a miracle of each shape. The All-Blissful fills each heart-throb
with rapture unspeakable. The use of the senses there is a pure
heavenly joy and wonder.
“Each being there is a member of the Self (is a manifestation of
the Self), a portion of the million-thoughted All. Each claims to have
the unity of the timeless. The sweetness of each unique thing is its
difference from everything else; and yet each has the intimate
flavour of the One.
“But who can show you Truth’s glorious face? Our human
452
words can only throw a shadow on her and hide her. Thought
despairs of capturing her unthinkable rapture of light, to speech she
is a marvel of the inexpressible.
“O Death, if you could only feel a touch of this Truth supreme,
you will suddenly grow wise and cast off your present shape and
form and thus cease to be. If our souls could see and love and clasp
God’s Truth , its infinite radiance would seize our hearts and our
being would be remade in God’s image and this earthly life would
become the life divine.”
In the long passage we have just been through we have Savitri’s
first description of the supramental world. In its main features, her
description of the Supramental world is very similar to the
description in Aswapati’s experience of this same world. In Book III
Canto 3, we have Aswapati’s experience of this world. Compare the
following lines with what we have just read about the Supramental
world from Savitri’s description of it:
A Bliss, a Light, a Power, a flame-white Love

Caught all into a sole immense embrace;
Existence found its truth on Oneness’ breast
And each became the self and space of all.
The great world-rhythms were heart-beats of one Soul,
To feel was a flame-discovery of God,
All mind was a single harp of many strings,
All life a song of many meeting lives;
For worlds were many, but the Self was one.
p. 322 lines 209-217
Please read sections 3 and 4 of Canto 3 of Book III to find further

similarities between the two descriptions.
The Supermind is not some kind of a magnified mind; it is
beyond the mental level altogether. It involves a radical change of
453
consciousness, in the mind, in the heart, in the life-regions. What is
the fundamental nature of the supermind if it has to replace our
evolving mind and function as the leader of evolution? Now that
we have seen a poetic description of the main features of the
Supramental world, it would be useful to take a look at the
following passage from The Synthesis of Yoga, in which Sri
Aurobindo describes the nature of the Supermind:
The fundamental nature of this supermind is that all its

knowledge is originally a knowledge by identity and
oneness and even when it makes numberless apparent
divisions and discriminating modifications in itself,
still all the knowledge that operates in its workings,
even in these divisions, is founded upon and sustained
and lit and guided by this perfect knowledge by
identity and oneness. The Spirit is one everywhere and
it knows all things as itself and in itself, so sees them
always and therefore knows them intimately,
completely, in their reality as well as their appearance,
in their truth, their law, the entire spirit and sense and
figure of their nature and their workings. ... The mental
awareness we have of our own subjective existence and
its movements, though it may point to, is not the same
thing as this identity and self-knowledge, because what
it sees are mental figures of our being and not the
inmost or the whole and it is only a partial, derivative
and superficial action of our self that appears to us
while the largest and most secretly determining parts
of our own existence are occult to our mentality. The
supramental Spirit has, unlike the mental being, the
real because the inmost and total knowledge of itself
and of all its universe and of all things that are its
454
creations and self-figurings in the universe. 52
CWSA 22:787
The second characteristic of the Supermind is that its knowledge is

real because it is total. The mind collects bits of knowledge,
fragments of knowledge, and can know only one thing at a time.
What it knows it may know thoroughly, but of other things it is not
aware. The Supermind has a total knowledge. The totality of which
the supermind is in possession is the reality of the individual, the
reality of the universal, the reality of the transcendental. It has the
vision of the transcendental and sees the universe not only in its
own terms but in relation to the transcendent from which it
proceeds and of which it is an expression. It also sees the individual
in terms of its relation to the universal. The mind is incapable of this
totality of knowledge. The mind cannot grasp the universal and the
transcendental, at best it can have a mental idea of these things.
The third characteristic of the supermind is that it is directly
truth-conscious, a divine power of immediate, inherent and
spontaneous knowledge. It does not use logical steps to lead it from
the known to the unknown. The supermind contains all knowledge
in itself. The background of mind is ignorance, since it is not fully
evolved, mental knowledge is always troubled by error, restriction
and limitation.
The supermind is not only the knower but also the creator. What
it knows it wields the power to manifest that knowledge in form, in
movement. Even when the mind knows, it does not always have the
power to render what it knows in terms of manifestation.
Let us also take a look at a comparatively more recent
formulation of the concept of the Supramental as found in Sri
Aurobindo’s The Supramental Manifestation Upon Earth.
52
For this whole passage cf. The Synthesis of Yoga CWSA 22:787-92
455
The Supermind is in its very essence a truth-
consciousness, a consciousness always free from the
Ignorance which is the foundation of our present
natural or evolutionary existence and from which
nature in us is trying to arrive at self-knowledge and
world-knowledge and a right consciousness and the
right use of our existence in the universe. The
Supermind, because it is a truth-consciousness, has this
knowledge inherent in it and this power of true
existence; its course is straight and can go direct to its
aim, its field is wide and can even be made illimitable.
This is because its very nature is knowledge: it has not
to acquire knowledge but possesses it in its own right;
its steps are not from nescience or ignorance into some
imperfect light, but from truth to greater truth, from
right perception to deeper perception, from intuition to
intuition, from illumination to utter and boundless
luminousness, from growing widenesses to the utter
vasts and to very infinitude. On its summits it
possesses the divine omniscience and omnipotence, but
even in an evolutionary movement of its own graded
self-manifestation by which it would eventually reveal
its own highest heights, it must be in its very nature
essentially free from ignorance and error: it starts from
truth and light and moves always in truth and light. As
its knowledge is always true, so too its will is always
true; it does not fumble in its handling of things or
stumble in its paces. In the Supermind feeling and
emotion do not depart from their truth, make no slips
or mistakes, do not swerve from the right and the real,
cannot misuse beauty and delight or twist away from a
divine rectitude. In the Supermind sense cannot
456
mislead or deviate into the grossnesses which are here
its natural imperfections and the cause of reproach,
distrust and misuse by our ignorance. Even an
incomplete statement made by the Supermind is a
truth leading to a further truth, its incomplete action a
step towards completeness. All the life and action and
leading of the Supermind is guarded in its very nature
from the falsehoods and uncertainties that are our lot;
it moves in safety towards its perfection. Once the
truth-consciousness was established here on its own
sure foundation, the evolution of divine life would be a
progress in felicity, a march through light to Ananda.
CWSA 13:558
Let us now return to our study of Savitri from where we left off.
Now the God of Death answers to Savitri one last time:
“If the Supreme Truth transcends everything here and if it is

separated by the supreme Knowledge and by such vast ranges of
consciousness from this nether world, what bridge can span the gulf
between that truth and this dream-world of creation? Who can ever
hope to bring down that supreme truth to men and persuade that
Truth to walk on this harsh world with feet that are sure to be
wounded? If this Truth is not brought down, all that will then
happen is that this unreachable glory will be in our world only an
aspiration, its splendour will never sanctify this pale and weak
earth. Do you have you that strength, O Savitri, O beauty made of
mortal limbs, to fly away from my net and bring down this truth to
man and earth?
“Who then are you hiding in this human disguise? Your voice
has the ring of the sound of infinity. Knowledge seems to be with
you; Truth speaks through your words. You have the light of the
457
worlds beyond in your eyes. But where is your strength to conquer
Time and Death? Do you possess God’s force which is needed to
build heaven’s truths here on earth?
“For truth and knowledge by themselves are a futile gleam if
Knowedge does not bring with it the Power needed to change the
world, if Might does not come and ensure that Truth gets her rights.
A Force, a blind Power and not Truth seems to have made this
ignorant world, and it is such a Power that governs the lives of men.
If the great Gods rule this world, they do so with a Power and not
Knowledge. This Power is the arm of God and it alone can put the
final seal of fate.
“O Savitri, O human claimant to immortality, reveal thy power
to me, lay bare the spirit’s force. Only when I see your power and
how strong it is, will I give you back Satyavan. Or if the Mighty
Mother is with you, show me her face, so that I too can worship her.
Let her immortal eyes look into my eyes, the eyes of Death. Let an
imperishable Force touch brute things here and transform earth’s
death into an immortal fire.
“Then alone can your dead Satyavan return to you and live with
you. Once that is accomplished, then will this prostrate earth be able
to lift her gaze and feel near her the secret body of God, and Love
and Bliss will overtake fleeting Time.
458
The God of Death has now exhausted all the arguments he could
muster to convince Savitri that her quest is not worth all the effort
and zeal with which she has been pursuing it, nor is the goal she is
seeking feasible or natural. At the beginning he haughtily dismissed
her as a two-legged animal not worth his attention. This arrogance
of the God of Death gradually vanished and he now shows a
genuine admiration for Savitri. What she is seeking is the release of
Satyavan from the hold of death and his return to earth with her.
The God of Death has tried to convince Savitri what she adores as
love is no more than a biological hunger and like all vital urges it is
but a fleeting passion. Secondly, it is the law of nature that once
death has claimed someone, he cannot be retrieved. The hold of
death is impregnable, no one and nothing can escape from its iron
grip. Thirdly, death is the inevitable end of all life. Satyavan’s soul
may be immortal, but a similar immortality is not obtainable to
Satyavan in a human body. Spirit and Matter are at odds in this
world, and therefore what she is seeking is unfeasible and
impractical.
We have seen how Savitri refutes each of the arguments the God
of Death advances. Her refutation is directed at showing not so
much that his arguments are erroneous in themselves as in showing
that each one of them is based not on an integral truth but on a
partial truth. Savitri explains to him the truth of a manifestation
which is constantly evolving and which has yet to evolve further.
The human mind which is now the apex of the evolutionary world
is not by any means the final stage of evolution. It is only an
intermediate stage, for beyond the thinking lie the spiritual levels of
the mental consciousness beginning with the Higher Mind. Above it
is the Illumined Mind; then after that comes the Intuitive Mind and
after that we have the Overmind. She also gives a brief description
459
of the crown of terrestrial evolution, the Supramental
consciousness:
Above the stretch and blaze of cosmic Sight,

Above the silence of the wordless Thought,
Formless creator of immortal forms,
Nameless, investitured with the name divine,
Transcending Time’s hours, transcending Timelessness,
The Mighty Mother sits in lucent calm
And holds the eternal Child upon her knees
Attending the day when he shall speak to Fate.
There is the image of our future’s hope;
There is the sun for which all darkness waits,
There is the imperishable harmony;
The world’s contradictions climb to her and are one:
There is the Truth of which the world’s truths are shreds,
The Light of which the world’s ignorance is the shade
Till Truth draws back the shade that it has cast,
The Love our hearts call down to heal all strife,
The Bliss for which the world’s derelict sorrows yearn:
Thence comes the glory sometimes seen on earth,
The visits of Godhead to the human soul,
The Beauty and the dream on Nature’s face.
There the perfection born from eternity
Calls to it the perfection born in Time,
The truth of God surprising human life,
The image of God overtaking finite shapes.
p. 661 lines 723-746
Here we have Savitri’s first description of the supramental world

that is waiting in the transcendental to come down on earth. This
will be the key to the transformation of the world as it is today into
460
a veritable manifestation of the glory and perfection of the Supreme
consciousness which has created it.
The God of Death seems to be impressed by Savitri’s description
of the glories of the Supramental consciousness. His question now
is: “Who can hope ever to bring down that supreme truth to men
and persuade that truth to walk on this harsh world with feet that
are sure to be wounded? If it is not brought down, it will remain for
ever an aspiration in the heart of the earth. He then pointedly asks
Savitri: “Do you have you that strength, O Savitri, to bring down
this truth to man and earth?”
He continues: “If you can do this I would like to know who you
really are, hiding in this human disguise. Your very look and voice
and your words suggest you have some special power in you. Do
you then have the power needed to bring down this glorious
power, the Supramental consciousness down on earth? Where is
your strength? Where is your strength to conquer Time and Death?
Do you possess God’s force which is needed to build heaven’s
truths here on earth?
“If you do have this strength, O Savitri, reveal your power to me;
only when I see your power and understand its nature and source,
will I give you back Satyavan. Or if the Mighty Mother is with you,
show me Her face, so that I too can worship Her. Let Her immortal
eyes look into my eyes, the eyes of Death. Let an imperishable Force
touch brute things here and transform earth’s death into an
immortal fire”.
This is how the long colloquy between the God of Death and
Savitri ends.
Savitri looks on the God of Death in silence. It is as though she is
looking at Death and sees him as the symbol of the world’s
darkness which has finally yielded to heaven-light and God and
doesn’t need any more to hide itself behind the veil of the
Inconscient. It is as though Savitri has made the God of Death
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realise his limitations.
Then a great transformation comes over Savitri. The aura of
glory of the Divinity dwelling in her, the radiance of the Immortal
that has always lit her face and shone through her body overflows
from her being and turns the air around her into a sea of light. In a
flaming moment of revelation the Incarnation that Savitri is pushes
aside its human veil. The little human figure that Savitri was is now
seen as holding in her the immensity of the Infinite; she is seen as
the very source and home of the Eternal. Her soul is now seen as the
centre of the world and all wide Space as the outer robe of her soul.
Her gaze now acquires the calm and incomparably high dignity of
the highest heavens looking at the meekness of the earth; the gaze of
the Omniscient shines across her forehead; her two eyes are like two
stars watching over the whole universe.
Then we have a powerful description of the descent of the
Mahakundalini in Savitri through the seven chakras which are
located in the subtle body, sukshma deha. The Light and Power
which Savitri has so far held in check within her now descends into
her through the various chakras. The topmost chakra is the
sahasrara or the thousand-petalled lotus which commands the
higher thinking mind and the illumined mind and it is open
upwards to the consciousness of the intuitive mind, intuition,
overmind and beyond. This Power enters the secret chamber of the
thousand-petalled Lotus chakra at the crown of her head, and from
there comes down and occupies the centre of the ajna chakra,
situated at the junction of the eye-brows, from where the mind’s
Lord functions as if from his control-room. The Ajna chakra
commands thought, will and vision. The Lord of the Mind
(symbolised in the Vedas by Indra, the King of Gods, as the
foremost of the agencies responsible for the descent of the
Supramental light) sits there in his natural seat of concentration and
becomes the controlling will-power. He opens the third eye in man,
the subtle eye that is able to see all that is unseen by our physical
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eyes. It opens when a spiritual Light which brings with it a golden
ecstasy fills the brain. When this happens, the wisdom of the Eternal
compels the mortal’s choice and the Eternal Will replaces the mortal
will.
This Power now enters the vishuddha chakra, the mystic lotus of
the throat, and her speech throbs with inspired and immortal
words. The throat centre or the vishuddha chakra commands
expression and all externalisation of mind movements and mental
forces. Her life now gets in tune with the World-soul and her
thoughts move in harmony with the cosmic thought.
The descending power now moves smoothly into the lotus of the
heart, the anahata chakra that commands the emotional being of
man and has the psychic deep behind it. In this cave it hides its light
from the lesser powers which are in pursuit of it. It wakes up in this
centre the irresistible Force that can change even Fate.
This Power now pours into lotus of the navel, the manipura
chakra, which commands the larger life-forces and the passions and
larger desire-movements. From there it goes further down into the
centre of the lower-vital desires, the svadhisthana chakra, which
commands the small vital movements: the little greeds, lusts and
desires, and the small sense-movements. Owing to the impact of the
descending Power, a heavenly rapture begins to flow even from the
grosser physical longings and desire itself turns into a pure celestial
flame.
The Power now breaks into the cave at the base of the spine, the
muladhara chakra, where the World-Energy sleeps. This is normally
visualised as a multiple headed serpent power, Kundalini. As the
descending Power strikes the serpent-force, it rises and thrusts its
way upwards till it meets and joins the World-Self seated in the
thousand-petalled lotus (the sahasrara chakra) at the crown of the
head. Thus takes place the momentous event of the meeting of the
Force from below with the Self seated above – the union of Shakti
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and Shiva. The dumbness of Matter is joined to the vast silence and
the infinite Power of the Spirit.
This is the tremendous change that comes over Savitri. She is
now waiting for the Word (the inspired, mantric Word) to speak
through her. Through her, Eternity looks into the eyes of the God of
Death, and the darkness of death in turn saw the living Reality of
the Godhead facing it.
This brings to mind a somewhat analogous situation known as
the vishvarupa darshan – the Vision of the World-Spirit in the Gita
(Chapter 11). There Arjuna, who knows that the imperishable
greatness of the divine conscious soul is the secret of all that
happens in the universe, desires to see the very form and body of
this Godhead. But the human eye can see only the outward
appearances of things; it cannot grasp the universal form of the
Lord; so the Lord now gives him the eye which can see the divine’s
universal form. Arjuna then is able to see the wondrous form of the
Supreme divine – God magnificent and beautiful and terrible. But in
the greatness of this vision is too the terrific image of God the
destroyer. Arjuna can hardly bear to see this aspect of the Lord and
cries to the dreadful Godhead to show his auspicious form.
But here the context is entirely different: Arjuna was a devotee,
but the God of Death here begins as an adversary contemptuous of
Savitri. Gradually, as he carries on the colloquy with her, he begins
to feel that she is probably the Mighty Mother herself, but he wants
to be sure about this. And therefore asks her to reveal to him the
power that is behind her.
Then is heard a Voice that seems to be the very self of stillness; it
sounds like the low, calm voice of infinity when it speaks to the
silence which reigns in the sleep consciousness. (One of the three
kinds of consciousness spoken of by the Upanishads, the two others
being the waking Consciousness and the Dream consciousness.)
“I hail you, almighty and victorious Death, You are the
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ostentatious Darkness of the Infinite. You are the Void that creates
room for all to exist. (Death creates room for the new to live by
consuming the old.) You are the hunger that nibbles at the universe
and chews it and thus consumes the remnants of what were once
upon a time the suns, which once burned and then died and became
cold. You eat the entire world with your jaws of fire, and try to
weaken the energy that made the stars.”
“You are the Inconscience but you carry the seeds of all thought
(all Real-Ideas) in your bosom. You are the Nescience in which all
Knowledge is dormant and from which it emerges slowly wearing
the mask of the bright ignorance of the mind.”
“But you are only my shadow and my instrument. It is I who has
given you the awful shape of dread and your sharp sword of terror
and grief and pain so that you can force the soul of man to struggle
for light to illumine his short span of life which he lives half-
consciously.“
“You drive and force man to achieve greatness in his otherwise
drab, mechanical life. You act like the whip which makes him yearn
for eternal bliss and makes him agonizingly aware of the need of
conscious immortality. O Death, live for some more time and
continue to be my instrument. One day man too shall come to
understand your fathomless heart of silence, your brooding peace of
Night, and your solemn obedience to the eternal law that governs
all, and the calm pity in your gaze.”
“But right now, O timeless Mightiness, step aside and leave the
path of Savitri, who is my incarnate Force.”
Please note that here is a clear indication that the Being that is
now addressing the God of Death is not the human Savitri but the
Supreme Divine Mother who has now descended into her.
“Free the radiant god, Satyavan, from the black mask you have
put on him; release the soul of the world called Satyavan so that
freed from your clasp of pain and ignorance, he may stand as the
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master of life and fate, as man’s representative in the house of God,
the eternal bridegroom of the eternal bride that is Savitri.”
This is an extraordinary passage which explains the role of death
in life. Sri Aurobindo has always looked upon death not as a denial
of life but as a process of life. Besides, at this moment when Savitri
completely vanquishes the God of Death, she hails him as ‘almighty
and victorious Death’53 Furthermore, Savitri appeals to Death ‘Live,
Death, awhile, be still my instrument’54 . These are some of the
questions about this passage which we need to answer, and we
shall do so in the next chapter.
Savitri has now spoken (or rather, the Supreme Divine Mother
herself has spoken through Savitri.) But still the God of Death is not
fully convinced and tries to resist her. He now knows the truth
about Savitri but he still refuses to accept it. He has now seen who
she really is but refuses to acknowledge what he has seen. He
stands there unshakeable, still claiming his right to be. His spirit
bows down but his will obeys the law of his own nature which is
binding even on the Gods.
The two antagonists stand there face to face opposing each other.
The being of the God of Death towers like a huge fortress of
darkness. Around this fortress Savitri’s power of life grows until it
besieges and engulfs it from all sides like an ocean. Death continues
to defy the spirit of Savitri. He bears this concrete mass of conscious
power as it assaults him from the front and from above. He
withstands the divine desire to be. The God of Death represents the
Nihil, the total negation of being. A pressure of force hard to bear
weighs on his unbowed head and obstinate heart. Light emanating
from Savitri licks up all his thoughts and he feels lt like a torture in
his heart. It courses throughout his being like a splendid agony and
runs through his nerves. His darkness mutters in protest as it
perishes in the blaze. Savitri’s mastering Power dominates every
53
p. 666 line 893
54
p. 666 line 912
466
limb of his and the God of Death finds that his enormous will has
no power left in it and he feels left altogether empty and bereft of
any force.
The God of Death then calls in Night to aid him but that too
shudders and retreats; he then calls to Hell but that too sullenly
retreats. Finally he turns to the Inconscient for support, since he
himself was born out of it and owes his vast being to its sustaining
power; but the Inconscient draws him back towards the boundless
vacancy of itself as if it wants one vacancy to swallow up another
vacancy. He then calls up his own strength to support him but it too
refuses to respond.
His body is now eaten up by light, his very spirit is devoured by
it. At last, the God of Death realises that his defeat is inevitable and
leaves the crumbling shape that he had worn all along. Thus he
abandons his hope of making man’s soul his prey and of forcing
mortality even on the immortal spirit.
The God of Death now flees from the dreaded touch of luminous
Savitri and takes refuge in the Night that is in retreat. In the dream
twilight of that symbol world the fearful universal shadow, Death,
disappears, thus vanishing in the Void from which it had come.
And as though the very reason for its existence is now no more with
the disappearance of Death, the twilight also fades and disappears
from the souls of Savitri and Satyavan.
Now at last Savitri and Satyavan find themselves alone, but
neither of them stirs. Between the two of them arises a mute,
invisible and luminous wall. In that long bank moment of pause,
nothing is able to move. All waits upon the unknown and
inscrutable Will of God.
This brings us to the end of Book X, Canto 4.
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39: The Victory over Death
In our preliminary study of Savitri, we have reached the end of

Canto 4 of Book X and are now ready to move on to Book XI. But
before we do so, it may be useful to take a closer look at the last
speech of Savitri addressed to the God of Death. This is a
remarkable speech in many respects and gives us an opportunity to
understand Sri Aurobindo’s perspective on death and what is
beyond it.
This is in one sense Savitri’s victory speech. Her triumph over
the God of Death is now complete. Savitri has shown to her
redoubtable adversary that all his disdain and contempt for her
came from his ignorance of who she is; all the veils of intellectual
obscuration by which he has been trying to protect his realm of half-
truth have been ineffective in the presence of the integral truth that
Savitri stands for. Finally, he has now all seen the halo of the deity
indwelling her. And yet, notice how Savitri begins what I have
called her ‘victory speech’. She begins by hailing the god of Death
as ‘almighty and victorious Death’.
I hail thee, almighty and victorious Death,

Thou grandiose Darkness of the Infinite.
O Void that makest room for all to be,
Hunger that gnawest at the universe
Consuming the cold remnants of the suns
And eatst the whole world with thy jaws of fire,
Waster of the energy that has made the stars,
Inconscience, carrier of the seeds of thought,
Nescience in which All-Knowledge sleeps entombed
And slowly emerges in its hollow breast
Wearing the mind’s mask of bright Ignorance.
468
Thou art my shadow and my instrument.
I have given thee thy awful shape of dread
And thy sharp sword of terror and grief and pain
To force the soul of man to struggle for light
On the brevity of his half-conscious days.
Thou art his spur to greatness in his works,
The whip to his yearning for eternal bliss,
His poignant need of immortality.
Live, Death, awhile, be still my instrument.
One day man too shall know thy fathomless heart
Of silence and the brooding peace of Night
And grave obedience to eternal Law
And the calm inflexible pity in thy gaze.
But now, O timeless Mightiness, stand aside
And leave the path of my incarnate Force.
Relieve the radiant God from thy black mask:
Release the soul of the world called Satyavan
Freed from thy clutch of pain and ignorance
That he may stand master of life and fate,
Man’s representative in the house of God,
The mate of Wisdom and the spouse of Light,
The eternal bridegroom of the eternal bride.”
p. 666 lines 894-924
To understand this speech, we need to understand how Sri

Aurobindo and the Mother look upon Death. So we begin with a
brief review of their perspective on death.
While men of science have regarded Death as a predictable
consequence of an increase in entropy (the degradation of matter
and energy in the universe to an ultimate state of inert uniformity),
men of religion have generally looked upon it as a resting place in
the passage to a higher world beyond the terrestrial. The spiritual
work of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother has for its goal the
469
establishment of a race of gnostic beings consequent upon the full
manifestation of the supramental consciousness here on earth, and
they regard victory over death in the conditions of earthly life as the
goal of their integral yoga. Thus Sri Aurobindo and the Mother
have been revolutionary even in their thinking on Death as they
have been in everything else. Let me begin by presenting to you an
excerpt from Sri Aurobindo’s The Life Divine:
This then is the necessity and justification of Death, not

as a denial of Life, but as a process of Life: death is
necessary because eternal change of form is the sole
immortality to which the finite living substance can
aspire and eternal change of experience the sole
infinity to which the finite mind involved in living
body can attain. This change of form cannot be allowed
to remain merely a constant renewal of the same form-
type such as constitutes our bodily life between birth
and death; for unless the form-type is changed and the
experiencing mind is thrown into new forms in new
circumstances of time, place and environment, the
necessary variation of experience which the very
nature of existence in Time and Space demands, cannot
be effectuated. And it is only the process of Death by
dissolution and by the devouring of life by life, it is
only the absence of freedom, the compulsion, the
struggle, the pain, the subjection to something that
appears to be Not-Self which makes the necessary and
salutary change appear terrible and undesirable to our
mortal mentality. It is the sense of being devoured,
broken up, destroyed or forced away which is the sting
of Death and which even the belief in personal survival
of death cannot wholly abrogate.
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SABCL: 18:193-194
The first point Sri Aurobindo makes here is that Death has no
separate or intrinsic reality; it exists for the sole purpose of serving
life. Death is a process and phase of life itself and, as he says
elsewhere, life and not death is the fundamental all-pervading truth
of existence. In Thoughts and Aphorisms, he casts the same insight in
another form:
This world was built by Death that he might live. Wilt

thou abolish Death? Then life too will perish. Thou
canst not abolish death, but thou mayst transform it
into a greater living.
If Life alone were and not death, there would be no
immortality … Death transformed becomes Life that is
Immortality.55
The death of the body is really an instrument which serves the

interests of perpetually evolving life. Then he goes on to point out
that the eternal change of form is the only immortality to which the
finite living substance can aspire, and eternal change of experience
in terms of new circumstance of time, place and Space the sole
infinity to which the finite mind involved in time can attain. All life
is a journey from the Inconscient to the Superconscient (Divinity).
Such a long journey cannot be completed within the span of one life.
By the time an individual attains to what is called old age, say
eighty-five or ninety years or so, most of his physical faculties lose
their keenness and capacity to experience life. If he continues this
way much longer, in most cases he is reduced to a vegetable
existence. In such a situation death comes as a gateway which the
55
Thoughts and Aphorisms CWSA 12 : 433
471
soul enters to come back again in a new and young body full of
verve and the enthusiasm to experience life. Besides, when the
individual is reborn, he takes birth in new circumstances of time,
place and space. This gives the soul scope for a wider and more
diversified experience of life, best suited for its further growth. This
then is the utility of death; it is not a denial but a process of life.
In his great epic poem Savitri too, Death is seen not as an eternal
opposite of the Light, but as an instrument of evolution:
Although Death walks beside us on Life’s road,

A dim bystander at the body’s start
And a last judgment on man’s futile works,
Other is the riddle of its ambiguous face:
Death is a stair, a door, a stumbling stride
The soul must take to cross from birth to birth,
A grey defeat pregnant with victory,
A whip to lash us towards our deathless state.
pp. 600-601 lines 61-68
Thus in Sri Aurobindo’s vision Death has a meaning and purpose

and Savitri calls him God:
O Death, thou are God and yet not He,

But only his own black shadow on his path
As leaving the Night he takes the upward Way
And drags with him its clinging inconscient Force.
p. 656 lines 543-546
In Thoughts and Glimpses, the service that death performs to life is

succinctly put in these words:
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Death is the question Nature puts continually to Life
and her reminder to her that it has not yet found itself.
If there were no siege of death, the creature would be
bound for ever in the form of an imperfect living.
Pursued by death he awakes to the idea of perfect life
and seeks out its means and its possibility.56
Savitri hails Death as ‘victorious Death’ at the beginning of her final

speech because death has succeeded in awakening man to the
possibility of a perfect life and spurring him to seek out its means
and its possibility. Death’s success lies in ultimately making human
beings so perfect that death itself would have no place in such a life.
Savitri has now incarnated that possibility in her own life, and since
an Avatar comes to set an example for others to follow, other
human beings also will now begin to realise this possibility in their
lives.
But there is a catch here. Victory over death, which is the
ultimate goal of the Integral Yoga, might look like a most
materialistic ideal for a spiritual enterprise, unless the phrase is
understood properly. This seeking after physical immortality is in
no way related to our blind and egoistic attachment to body and
physical life.
As for immortality, it cannot come if there is

attachment to the body, for it is only by living in the
immortal part of oneself which is unidentified with the
body and bringing down its consciousness and force
into the cells that it can come.
56
CWSA 13 : 205
473
Secondly, it is incumbent upon every sadhak of integral yoga that
he gives up the fear of death and the disgust for bodily cessation.
The Mother has written most insightfully on how to get rid of the
fear of death. The principle way of getting rid of the fear of death
completely is to grow in the consciousness of the immortality of the
soul.
By immortality, spiritual adepts do not mean some of kind of
personal survival after the dissolution of the body; they mean by it
the consciousness which the Gita describes as follows:
Na jaayate mriyate vaa kadaachit naayam bhuutvaa bhavitaa

vaa na bhuuyah
Ajo nityah shashvatoyam puraano na hanyate hanyamaane
shariire (2.20)
This is not born, nor does it die, nor is it a thing that
comes into being once and passing away will never
come into being again. It is unborn, ancient,
sempiternal; it is not slain with the slaying of the body.
The Gita also describes it as:
avinaashinam. nityam, ajam avyayam

Indestructable, immutable and imperishable, ‘which
weapons cannot cleave, nor fire burn, nor do the waters
drench nor the wind dry.’
This is a consciousness which is beyond all bondage and limitation,

free, blissful. self-existent in conscious being, the consciousness of
the Lord, the supreme Purusha, of Satchidananda. This experience
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of the soul needs no external proof to anyone who has experienced
it. It can only be acquired as a result of the elevation and widening
of our consciousness through spiritual sadhana.
In The Life Divine, Sri Aurobindo speaks of two kinds of
immortality, the timeless immortality of the soul, and time-
immortality. By the latter is meant the knowledge of self in the birth
and becoming, and a sense of persistent identity of the soul through
all the changes of mind, life and body. In almost all spiritual
disciplines, the double realisation of timeless immortality and time-
immortality leads the sadhak to withdraw from the field of
terrestrial becoming. He seeks the Nirvanic extinction from what he
regards as the vain cycle of births and death.
The sadhak of the Integral Yoga does not entertain an attitude of
world-disgust; he aspires to transcend death in order that life may
be divinely fulfilled. This Becoming, which we call creation, is
progressive and evolutionary. It began with the big bang and is
gradually evolving towards the Super-conscience. The present
condition of life cannot be the last act of the evolutionary drama
since it is afflicted with the load of suffering and death. Death has to
be conquered as a sign of Being’s victory in the field of Becoming. It
means, as Sri Aurobindo explained in a letter, that the body …
…would no longer be subject to decay and disease.

That would mean it would not be subject to the
ordinary processes by which death comes. If a change
of body had to be made, it would have to be by the will
of the inhabitant. This (not the obligation to live 3000
years, for that too would be bondage) would be the
essence of physical immortality.
475
But for this to happen, Sri Aurobindo mentions in the same letter, a
dynamic action of the Truth is necessary in mind, vital and body,
and for such a dynamic action, the supramental descent is
necessary.
We cannot enter here into a discussion of why the descent of the
supramental consciousness is necessary, and of why Sri Aurobindo
thinks that such a descent is inevitable. It is indeed as a result of our
transformation that we arrive at a higher and higher manifestation
of consciousness in our evolutionary journey.
As Nature has evolved beyond Matter and manifested

Life, beyond Life and manifested Mind, so she must
evolve beyond Mind and manifest a consciousness and
power of our existence free from the imperfection and
limitation of our mental existence, a supramental or
truth-consciousness and able to develop the power and
perfection of the spirit. .. . Light and bliss and beauty
and a perfection of the spontaneous right action of all
the being are there as native powers of the supramental
truth-consciousness and these will in their very nature
transform mind and life and body even here upon
earth into a manifestation of the truth-conscious spirit.
The obscuration of earth will not prevail against the
supramental truth-consciousness, for even into the
earth it can bring enough of the omniscient light and
omnipotent force of the spirit to conquer. All may not
open to the fullness of its light and power, but
whatever does open must to that extent undergo the
change. That will be the principle of transformation.
The Supramental Manifestation Upon Earth SABCL 16: 20-21
Many people, including some spiritual adepts, have observed that
476
people undertaking the pursuit of yoga happen to suffer from some
disabilities of the body which would not have befallen them under
normal circumstances. It is also true that we have testimony from
Yogis who have cured themselves of illnesses and have even
succeeded in repelling a predestined death for a long period. The
Mother has shed a flood of light on this entire phenomenon. She has
explained the factors which ordinarily lead to progressive
breakdown in health and ultimately to its dissolution in death.
According to her the whole creation is evolving towards
perfection. Now if one takes up yoga, this force gets accelerated in
him. But it is only his inner consciousness that obeys this
accelerating impulse because the higher parts of one’s being are
subtler, and therefore more responsive to this force and much more
easily adapt themselves and adjust themselves to the demands of
this force than the body, which is pathetic in its ineptness in this
respect. The material nature is rigid by nature and there the
transformation is slow, too slow for the human consciousness to be
able to perceive it. The body thus gets left behind and this creates a
disharmony in the nature, between the inner and the outer, and the
system translates this into illness. That is why people who take up
yoga tend to fall ill frequently. When this lack of balance goes
beyond a certain point, the disintegration and change of form
become necessary.
But according to the Mother, this necessity is not an abiding one,
nor is its nature intrinsic and irrevocable. In fact, she thinks that it is
wholly fortuitous and may very well be remedied. If the whole
being could simultaneously advance in the progressive
transformation, there would be no illness, no death. But it will have
to be the whole being, from the highest to the most material, which
is by nature rigid and averse to any change. We should be able to
infuse into this matter sufficient consciousness so that it can fall in
line with the subtler parts and become plastic enough to follow the
inner progress. When this happens, death would no more be
477
necessary.
conditions for it can be created death can be done away with. This
does not seem to be such a fanciful idea if one were to examine this
issue even in the light of the scientific evidence currently available.
In his book The Destiny of the Body, Jugal Kishore Mukherjee
presents enough biological evidence which suggests that “neither
senescence nor natural death is a necessary, inevitable consequence
or attribute of life. Natural death is biologically a relatively new
thing, which made its appearance only after the living organism
had advanced a long way on the path of evolution.” (Quotation
from Encyclopaedia Britannica).
Undoubtedly death has served life well in many ways. Death has
spurred life to persuade her to evolve progressively towards higher
and higher forms of existence. From a practical point of view, the
dispensation of a natural death comes as a boon to individuals who
live in an ego-bound consciousness. It saves us from the tedium of
living in a never-ending now. Without death, there would have
been no secure permanence for any species, because then there
would have been no opportunity for a species to renovate and
vitalise itself through the introduction of younger and more robust
individuals replacing the worn-out ones.
I would like to close with a few observations on this problem
made by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. The real cause of death is
not physical. Sri Aurobindo observes in an interesting footnote in
The Life Divine (page 822) as follows:
Even if Science – physical Science or occult Science –

were to discover the necessary condition or means for
an infinite survival of the body, still, if the body could
not adapt itself to so as to become a fit instrument of
expression for the inner growth, the soul would find
478
some way to abandon it and pass on to a new
incarnation. The material or physical causes of death
are not its sole or its true cause; its true inmost reason
is the spiritual necessity for the evolution of a new
being.
In Integral Yoga, the aim is not to keep the same physical body for
ever. What is sought to be achieved is the elimination of the
elements of inevitability and forceful dissolution in the process of
death, a complete freedom from the attacks of illness and the power
to prolong life at will. But this can be achieved through the power of
yoga. The Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother aims at
the supramental transformation of our limited and rigid existence
down to the very cells of the material body and this alone will
abrogate the law of death that is at present inevitable, and enable
our earthly life to flower into the immortal Life Divine.
Before I conclude this discussion, I would like to draw your
attention to another interesting line in this speech of Savitri to the
God of Death. The first several lines of this passage describe the
several roles Death has played in the evolutionary saga of this
creation; we are told that death has been given its various forms to
hasten man’s evolution towards ‘greatness in his works, the whip to his
yearning for eternal bliss, his poignant need of immortality’. But then
comes a most puzzling line. Savitri has defeated death, and yet she
says, ‘Live, Death, awhile, be still my instrument.’ Is it possible that
Savitri suggests that although she individually has triumphed over
death, she would like death to continue to do the evolutionary work
of preparing the whole of mankind for immortality?
479
40: Book XI – The Everlasting Day
We are now ready to begin our exploration of Book XI of Savitri,

The Book of Everlasting Day, which consists of only one Canto,
with the title “The Eternal Day: The Soul’s Choice and the Supreme
Consciousness”. Incidentally this is the longest single canto among
the 49 cantos of this epic poem.
We have seen that the long colloquy between Savitri and the
God of Death, which takes up the two cantos of Book IX and the
four cantos of Book X, ends with Savitri’s triumph over Death.
Savitri answers all the questions and problems raised by the God of
Death against her plea to him to release Satyavan’s soul from the
clutches of death and take him back with her to earth. She also
effectively meets the challenge thrown by the God of Death at her in
these words:
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,
480
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.
p. 664 lines 821-841
On hearing this, Savitri felt that the world’s darkness which had
worn the symbol shape of the God of Death was now ready for
Heaven-light and revealed to him her real form. Then came upon
Savitri a transformation described in these lines:
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.
p. 664-665 lines 845-856
With this transformation, a descent comes over Savitri. In a flaming

moment of apocalypse the Incarnation thrust aside its veil. The
Powers that she had so far kept back came down and descended
into her being all the way from the sahasrara to the muladhara.
Eternity looked into the eyes of Death and darkness saw God’s
living reality.
481
Then a voice was heard, which sounded like the calm utterance
of Infinity. We have already analysed the content of this speech of
Savitri. She hails him as ‘victorious Death’ for constantly prompting
man to seek the immortal being in him. The God of Death is asked
to live a while and still be the instrument of the Divine, until one
day man will understand his real nature. She concludes the speech
with these words:
But now, O timeless Mightiness, stand aside

And leave the path of my incarnate Force.
Relieve the radiant God from thy black mask:
Release the soul of the world called Satyavan
Freed from thy clutch of pain and ignorance
That he may stand master of life and fate,
Man’s representative in the house of God,
The mate of Wisdom and the spouse of Light,
The eternal bridegroom of the eternal bride.
p.666 lines 918-926
Death knew that he was defeated and yet he stood there defiant. A
pressure of intolerable force weighed down on him from all sides.
Light surrounded him from all sides. He called to Night and Hell
and none came to his aid. Even the Inconscient from which he was
born was unable to help him. At last he knew his defeat was
inevitable. His shape began to crumble and finally the universal
Shadow (the God of Death) disappeared into void of the dream
twilight.
With that the twilight realm passed and faded from the souls of
Savitri and Satyavan and they were alone. Neither of them stirred.
Between them arose a mute, invisible and translucent wall. ‘All
waited on the unknown inscrutable Will.’
Now we are at the very beginning of Book XI. The first section of
482
this canto which consists of 267 lines begins with a description of
the Eternal Day. The God of Death has already taken Savitri
through several worlds, namely, the world of Eternal Night, the
worlds of the Dream Twilight of the Ideal and of the Dream twilight
of the Earthly Real. The poet graphically and very aptly describes
these worlds, and so he does with this world of God’s Everlasting
Day.
The opening section of this Canto is a splendid poetic attempt to
describe God’s everlasting day. From the description, it would
appear that this is not an entirely imaginary scene described by the
poet. The several details suggest that this is based on a direct
experience of something of God’s everlasting day. Everything seen,
heard and experienced here seems to come from the eternal source
and from the Eternal’s own substance without any diminution or
dilution. A cosmic rapture seems to manifest here in an endless
figuring of the spirit. All the occult planes are seen and are found
active. Even the earth nature seems to have changed here; air and
matter were transformed, other earths are seen and also other
beings. Savitri sees here the children of God’s day living in a
happiness never lost. All sounds here are musical, with birds with
coloured feathers singing, a breeze full of fragrance, flowers with
laughing eyes. One felt the embrace of God in every touch. There
was no suffering of any kind here, only bliss. On this plane rapture
was a common incident. There were also seen great forms of deities,
with bright bodies exuding delight. Apsaras and Gandharvas were
there. The great forefathers of mankind were also seen there moving
in splendour. It must be remembered that this is a description of
something actually seen and experienced by the poet and not
something woven out of his imagination.
From the skies of ecstasy a marvellous sun shone on worlds of
deathless bliss; these worlds looked like the home of perfection, like
the magical revelations of the Eternal’s smile. Savitri’s body
quivered with eternity’s touch; she felt as though her soul stood
483
close to the springs of the infinite. Savitri was surrounded by God’s
everlasting day.
She felt that she lived in the finite projections of the Infinite,
which looked ever new. Infinity multiplied its vast self-look and
translated its mightiness and joy into delight which souls living in
the realm of Time could share, in ever-new vistas, in grandeurs ever
newborn from the unknown depths, in powers that leaped
immortal from unknown heights, in passionate heart-beats of an
undying love, in scenes of a sweetness that could never fade.
Thoughts sublimely born in the still beauty of creative joy came as
answers to the deep demand of an infinite sense and its need for
forms to house its bodiless thrill. Plains were there that looked like
the expanse of God’s wide sleep. Even the very air seemed an ocean
of felicity. A vast and calm serenity swallowed all sound into a
voicelessness of utter bliss. Even in Matter there was an intimate
spiritual touch. Twilight and mist were banished from this air.
Where there is such radiance, there cannot be a night.
The divine Artist who had dreamed these worlds into existence
created in a cosmic rapture a pageant of universal power in Time, a
harmonious order of the vasts of the self in cyclic patterns and
rhythmic planes. Eternity was the source and the substance of the
beauty and the marvel here. They were not moulded from the mist
of Matter; they showed the great power from whose depths they
had emerged.
A march of universal powers in Time,

The harmonic order of self’s vastitudes
In cyclic symmetries and metric planes
Harboured a cosmic rapture’s revelry,
An endless figuring of the spirit in things
Planned by the artist who has dreamed the worlds;
Of all the beauty and the marvel here,
484
Of all Time’s intricate variety
Eternity was the substance and the source;
Not from a plastic mist of Matter made,
They offered the suggestion of their depths
And opened the great series of their powers.
p. 672 lines 34-45
A spirit wandered happily in the wind, and it brooded in the leaf

and the stone. There were eternal mountains rising ridge on
gleaming ridge, like lines engraved on a sapphire plate. From the
secrecies of blue mountains, there descended murmuring rivers
which slipped past trees with branches fragrant with flowers; there
were ripples and eddies of delight in these rivers which gradually
widened and acquired and flowed into many estuaries of dream
until they formed themselves into the whispering lakes of peace.
Since she was delivered from our narrowing limits of thought
and from the narrowness of our hearts, Savitri saw all Nature as
something marvellous and without any fault. Around her lived the
children of God’s day in an indescribable felicity, a glad eternity’s
blissful multitude. There were souls of radiant celestial joy, faces of
sheer beauty, limbs of the divine Ray of Light moulded in form. In
cities cut like gems of conscious stone were seen bright forms, the
luminous tribes of eternity. Ecstatic voices assailed the ears, there
each movement had a music of its own. Birds, the colour of whose
plumage had been caught from the rainbow, sang thrilled from the
unfading branches. Immortal fragrance wafted with the quivering
breeze. The million flowers of the undying spring, sheltered in the
green of the grass, bloomed like so many stars of delightful hues;
these flower-masses looked like fairies with laughter in their eyes.
This is how the poet describes ‘the dancing chaos’, the iridescence of
the colourful flowers:
485
A dancing chaos, an iridescent sea
Eternised to Heaven’s ever-wakeful sight
The crowding petal-glow of marvel’s tints
Which float across the curtained lids of dream.
p. 674 lines 112-115
This is how he describes the immortal harmonies that fill Savitri’s

ears:
Immortal harmonies filled her listening ear;

A great spontaneous utterance of the heights
On Titan wings of rhythmic grandeur borne
Poured from some deep spiritual heart of sound,
Strains trembling with the secrets of the gods.
p. 674 lines 116-120
Savitri’s experience of oneness with all other forms is described

vividly in these lines:
Invaded by beauty’s universal revel

Her being’s fibre reached out vibrating
And claimed deep union with its outer selves,
And on the heart’s chords made pure to seize all tones
Heaven’s subtleties of touch unwearying forced
More vivid raptures than earth’s life can bear.
What would be suffering here, was fiery bliss.
p. 675 lines 153-159
What Savitri had so far seen were the initial domains, the outer
courts; they were immense but least in their range and value. Now
Savitri’s vision soared higher and she was admitted through large
486
sapphire gates into the wideness of a light beyond to worlds nobler
and more felicitously fair. These heavens too kept climbing
endlessly. Then in what looked like one summit of ascent, where the
finite and the infinite join, she beheld the seats of the immortal gods
who live for a celestial joy and preside over the middle regions of
the unfading Ray. The deities with their magnificent forms were
seen here in deathless tiers; they all looked at Savitri through a
transparency of crystal fire.
In the beauty of bodies wrought from rapture’s lines,

Shapes of entrancing sweetness spilling bliss,
Feet glimmering upon the sunstone courts of mind,
Heaven’s cupbearers bore round the Eternal’s wine.
A tangle of bright bodies, of moved souls
Tracing the close and intertwined delight,
The harmonious tread of lives for ever joined
In the passionate oneness of a mystic joy
As if sunbeams made living and divine,
The golden-bosomed Apsara goddesses,
In groves flooded from an argent disk of bliss
That floated through a luminous sapphire dream,
In a cloud of raiment lit with golden limbs
And gleaming footfalls treading faery swards,
Virgin motions of bacchant innocences
Who know their riot for a dance of God,
Whirled linked in moonlit revels of the heart.
pp. 676-77 lines 196-213
Heaven’s cup-bearers went round bearing the Eternal’s celestial

wine. Like sun-beams made living and divine, the golden-bosomed
Apsaras (heavenly nymphs) whirled, linked in the passionate
oneness of a mystic joy. These Apsaras circle arm in arm in groves
487
flooded with the silver light of the moon of bliss that floated
through a luminous sapphire dream. Then there were the
Gandharvas, the celestial musicians, magic builders of sound and
harmonic words; these heavenly minstrels had wind-like hair, and
their songs gave rise to and shaped the universal thought. There
were also seen our great ancestors moving in that splendour,
immortal figures with illumined brows. They had great power but
they were satisfied with knowledge. They seemed to enjoy the
essence of all that for which we mortals try. There were high seers
and inspired poets who saw the eternal thoughts coming from the
higher regions and arriving into our world deformed because of our
restless search for them. She saw how mind disfigures them. The
great words of these saints and seers become feeble sounds when
they are caught by the mortal tongue for their rapture is too difficult
for us express.
Savitri’s human nature was overwhelmed by the delight of this
world. Her nature was filled with flashes of glory; it melted in
waves of sympathy and sight. She was like a harp and responded to
the throbs of bliss from everywhere. She saw and bore the touch
and clasp of the unveiled love denied to earth. Worlds after worlds
revealed themselves to her on the ever-soaring heights, beyond the
reach of mind. They spread out infinitely on the rising stair of
Nature.
A greater tranquil sweetness reigned there. It was a subtler and a
profounder ether’s field, a scheme mightier than the most heavenly
scheme one can imagine. There, breath carried a stream of seeing
mind, form was a tenuous (thin), fragile covering of the soul instead
of being an obscuring veil; colour was significant, visual tone
ecstasy. There shapes that seemed half immaterial to the eye were
yet sensuously palpable (easily perceptible) to the touch. Each
feeling here was a mighty wave of the Infinite, each thought
vibrated with a sweet flame of god.
The very air was vibrant with luminous soul-feeling; every
488
sound carried a soul-voice; sunlight was a vision of the soul and
moonlight its dream. All was pervaded by a lucid joy accompanied
by a calm. Savitri’s soul went floating high into the summit of the
worlds of this plane, like a soaring bird who mounts unseen,
voicing as it soars the throbbing heart of melody until a pause
comes when the wings are closed with a last contented cry, and the
soul is silent because it has delivered the entire burden of delight it
carried. Savitri has arrived at a place where Time companions
Eternity and a vast felicity is one with a self-rapt repose.
489
41: Book XI – The Fourfold Being
Book XI of Savitri begins with a description of the Eternal Day,

which we examined in some detail in the preceding chapter. Savitri
feels in this world close to the founts of the Infinite. A marvellous
sun looks down from ecstasy’s skies. She sees immortal earths and
griefless heavens. They all thrill with the immanence of the one
Divine. She sees nature around her marvellously faultless,
rapturous and beautiful. She sees realms after realms of felicity
which are the homes of gods, nymphs, Gandharvas and noble seers.
There is a lucent joy everywhere. We now move on to section two of
this canto – you must have noticed that Book XI has only one canto.
Savitri feels virtually drowned in a sea of splendour and bliss;
she is mute with wonder and awe as she finds herself in the
complex and intricate network of these astonishing worlds. Savitri
wonders what could be the source of this charm and the fount of all
this delight. She turns and sees the living knot and source of all this
charm and delight. And what does she see?
She sees that the source of all this delight is the same Being who
traps our lives through his attractions in this creation and makes the
universe our prison camp. It is the same being who makes the stars
circle in vain in his immense and vacant vasts, and makes death the
end of every road, and grief and pain the wages of man’s toil. She
then realises that this Being is none other than he whom her soul
had faced as Death and Night, and she finds him again now but
entirely transformed into an epitome of sweetness. His formidable
and awe-striking figure is transformed completely and he now
appears as one whose limbs have gathered all sweetness and who
blinds her heart to the beauty of the suns. Where once the vast
embodied Void (Death) had stood, a secret splendour rises,
abolishing forever his darkness and his all-negating and all-
490
destroying Night and revealing the mystery of his high and
powerful deeds.
It now looked as though Night, the dim mask, had grown a
wonderful face. The vague infinity whose gloom had outlined the
terrible and obscure figure of the God of Death was now completely
wiped out. The error that had given strength to the hands of grief
had fled, and the ignorant gulf, whose hollow deeps had given to
Nothingness a dreadful voice, was now lighted up. Now a
marvellous form responded to her sight, whose sweetness justified
life’s blindest pain. All the struggle of Nature now seemed
worthwhile before the sweetness of this marvellous form. It was as
though somebody woke up from sleep and saw the dark and
gloomy binding of a book suddenly opening to reveal an illumined
script containing a golden blaze of thought.
There was no more the torment under the stars. There was no
more the dark evil sheltered behind Nature’s mask. There was no
more the dark pretence of hate, the cruel grimace on the face of love.
Hate is only a tenacious hold in love’s fearful strife. The original
God of Love is always intent on giving, but this God is displaced by
the impostor love, which wants only to possess. It forgets the will to
love which gave it birth; it forgets its passion to merge itself and
become one with the beloved and instead wants to swallow
everything into its one single self, to devour the soul that it has
loved and made its own. When it cannot have its way, it is angry
with the refusals of the world to submit to its demands. It is
passionately eager to take but does not know how to give.
Death’s depressing and serious look was removed from Nature’s
brow. Instead, there lighted on her the lurking delight of the laugh
of God. Then the poet describes a very wonderful revelation of this
divine form:
491
All grace and glory and all divinity
Were here collected in a single form;
All worshipped eyes looked through his from one face;
He bore all godheads in his grandiose limbs.
An oceanic spirit dwelt within;
Intolerant and invincible in joy
A flood of freedom and transcendent bliss
Into immortal lines of beauty rose.
p. 680 lines 324-331
All grace and glory and all divinity were here collected in a single
form. In the grandiose limbs of this divine figure, he bore all
godheads. The eyes of all the adored and worshipped figures
looked out from the eyes of this figure. An oceanic figure surged
within him. A flood of freedom and supreme transcendent bliss
surged out from this figure with an intensity too great for anyone to
bear.
In this transformed form which Savitri sees before her now, she
also sees the Divine Consciousness in its four poises. The concept of
the four poises of the Divine Consciousness or Brahman is
prominently introduced by the Mandukya Upanishad, although
there is reference to it in some other Upanishads such as the
Chhandogya Upanishad as well.
The Mandukya introduces some of the fundamental ideas of
Vedantic philosophy in the following verse:
Sarvam hi etad brahma / ayam aatmaa brahma / sah ayam

aatmaa catushpaat.
All this Universe is the Eternal Brahman, this Self is the
Eternal, and the Self is fourfold.
492
According to Sri Aurobindo the four grand truths proclaimed by
the Upanishads are the following:
a) They proclaim that all this Universe is the eternal Brahman.
The Upanishads regard the phenomenal Universe as a
manifestation of the Brahman – nityo anityanaam (the One Eternal in
many transient).
b) Then they go on to declare that the central reality about us, the
Atman, the Self in living beings, the Self too of man, is also the
Brahman – chetanaschetanaanaam.
c) The Upanishads then proclaim the notion that the Self in the
individual is as complete as the Self of the universe – so’ham (He am
I).
d) Finally the Upanishads say that he who knows the whole Self
knows the whole universe – aham brahmaasmi (I am Brahman, the
eternal.)
For more on this, please refer to Chapter One of Sri Aurobindo’s
“Philosophy of the Upanishads” in his book The Upanishads, SABCL
Vol. 12.
In the formula quoted from the Mandukya Upanishad above, we
have some very seminal notions about the Brahman. To quote Sri
Aurobindo:
The Upanishads regard the phenomenal Universe as a

manifestation of the Brahman, and if we know this
phenomenal world completely we know the Brahman
to a certain extent and in a certain way – not as
absolute Existence but under the conditions of the
phenomenal existence. This is where the European
scientist stops but the Yogin goes farther. He has
discovered the universe of subtle matter penetrating
and surrounding the gross; it is this universe to which
493
the spirit withdraws partially and for a brief time in
sleep but more entirely and for a longer time through
the gates of death. This is also the source of all psychic
processes, and the link which connects this universe
with the gross material world is to be found in the
phenomena of life and mind. The Yogin goes even
further than this and declares that there is a third
universe of causal matter, penetrating both the subtle
and gross. This is the universe to which the spirit
withdraws in the deepest and most abysmal states of
sleep and trance and also in a remote condition beyond
the state of man after death. This is the source from
which all phenomena arise. Now Brahman manifests
Himself in each of these Universes: in the universe of
causal matter as the Cause, Self, inspirer, poetically
styled Prajna, the Wise One; in the universe of subtle
matter as the Creator, Self and Container, styled
Hiranyagarbha the Golden Embryo of life and form,
and in the universe of gross matter as the Ruler, Guide,
Self and Helper, styled Virat the Shining and mighty
One. And in each of these manifestations He can be
known and realised by the spirit of man.
The Upanishads SABCL 12:11
Thus the Mandukya Upanishad recognised four states of

consciousness in the individual–wakefulness, dream, sleep, and
Superconciousness or Self-consciousness; and the names given to
them are Vaishvanara, Taijasa, Prajnaa and Atman. These have
played a very large part in the later more systematised Vedanta. But
it must be noted that the Upanishad does not make mention of the
corresponding four states of the consciousness of the Cosmic Self. In
later Vedanta, these four states of the cosmic consciousness came to
be called Viraat (Viraaj), Hiranyagarbha, Isa, and Brahman
494
respectively. These are in the macrocosm and the states described in
the Mandukya are in the microcosm. The basis for this
representation of correspondence between the microcosm and the
macrocosm can be found in the Chandogya Upanishad.
Ancient psychology in India distinguished three strata of the
conscient self – the waking (the superficial), the dream (the
subconscient or subliminal) and the sleep (the superconscient)
selves of man. The superconscient seems the inconscient to us
because its state of consciousness is the reverse of ours: for ours is
limited and based on division and multiplicity, but this is “that
which becomes a unity”; ours is dispersed in knowledge, but in this
other self conscious knowledge is self-collected and concentrated;
ours is balanced between dual experiences, but this is all delight. It
is that in us which fronts everything and enjoys the delight of
existence. Therefore, although its seat is that stratum of our
consciousness which to us is deep sleep (for the mind there cannot
maintain its accustomed functioning and becomes inconscient), yet
its name is ‘He who knows’, ‘the Wise One’, Prajna. The Mandukya
Upanishad describes it thus:
This is omniscient, omnipotent, the inner control, the

womb of all that from which creatures are born and
into which they depart.
The Supramental Manifestation SABCL 16:262
As we have seen, the Upanishads talk about the identity between

the objective and the subjective, the Brahman and the Atman. Tat
twam asi (Thou art That) and sarvam khalvidam brahma (All here is the
Brahman) are the great mystic truths proclaimed by the
Chhandogya Upanishad long before Plato was born.
In his Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1, Dr. S. Radhakrishnan explains
495
these basic concepts as follows, using a slightly different
terminology. The different conceptions of Brahman described above
correspond to the different ideas of the Atman and vice versa. The
highest Brahman which is Ananda is just Atman, as realised in the
fourth of the Turiya state. There the object and the subject are one.
When we identify the Atman as the self-conscious individual,
Brahman is viewed as the self-conscious Ishwara. When the Atman
is identified with the mental and vital self of man, Brahman is
reduced to the Hiranyagarbha or the cosmic soul. This
Hiranyagarbha is looked upon as related to the universe in the same
way as the individual soul is related to its body. The world in which
we live has its own mind, and this mind is Hiranyagarbha. This
conception of the world soul appears in the Upanishads under
various names and forms. It is called Karya Brahma, or the effect
God, as distinguished from the Karana Brahman, the Causal God of
Ishwara. This effect God is the totality of created existences of which
all finite objects are parts. The conscious totality of all effects is
Brahma or Hiranyagarbha. It is not radically different from
Brahman. Brahman is One, without a second. Once he is looked on
as the creator or Isvara, again as the created or Hiranyagarbha.
When we identify the Atman with the body, Brahman becomes the
Cosmos or the Virat. Virat is the all, the hypostatisation of the
conception of the world as a whole. The body of the Virat is made of
the material objects in their aggregate. In the form of Virat,
Hiranyagarbha becomes visible. The Virat is the universal self
manifested in the gross physical matter of the universe, Brahman is
the same manifested in the subtle matter of he universe. The
Sutratman is Hiranyagarbha. The supreme self beyond cause and
effect is the Brahman, but when it becomes self-conscious with a
non-ego opposed to it, we have the Ishwara. In the sushupti state we
have the subject self with the object self world suppressed, not
abolished. The following table suggests the scheme:
496
Subject (Atman) Object (Brahman)
1. The bodily self 1. Cosmos
(visva) (Virat or Vaishvanara)
2. The Vital self 2. The soul of the world
(Taijasa) (Hiranyagarbha)
3. The Intellectual self 3. Self-Conscious
(Prajna) (Ishwara)
4. The Intuitive self 4. Ananda
(Turiya) (Brahman)
This note should suffice as a background for you to follow the

description in Savitri of the Divine Being in its four poises – Waking,
Dream, Sleep, and the Transcendent.
The Divine Being whom Savitri was facing now symbolised like
the word the inexhaustible meaning of the whole universe. The poet
begins with the description of the Virat, the waking consciousness,
which the Upanishad characterises as bahihprajnah – the
consciousness of what is outside.
In him the architect of the visible world,

At once the art and artist of his works,
Spirit and seer and thinker of things seen,
Virat, who lights his camp-fires in the suns
And the star-entangled ether is his hold,
Expressed himself with Matter for his speech:
Objects are his letters, forces are his words,
Events are the crowded history of his life,
And sea and land are the pages for his tale.
Matter is his means and his spiritual sign;
He hangs the thought upon a lash’s lift,
497
In the current of the blood makes flow the soul.
His is the dumb will of atom and of clod;
A Will that without sense or motive acts,
An Intelligence needing not to think or plan,
The world creates itself invincibly;
For its body is the body of the Lord
And in its heart stands Virat, King of Kings.
p. 680 lines 336-353
He is Virat, architect of the visible world, the Self in the Waking

state. The Mandukya Upanishad describes him as follows:
Jaagritasthaanah bahishprajnah saptaangam

ekonavimshatimukhah sthuulabhuk vaishvaanarah
prathmam paadah.
He whose place is wakefulness, who is wise of the
outward, who has seven limbs, to whom there are
nineteen doors, who feels and enjoys gross objects,
Vaishwanara, the Universal Male, He is the first.
He presides over the wakeful state of consciousness. He is the
great designer of the gross world; he is the seer of things seen
physically. He lights his camp fire in the suns, and the star-
entangled ether is his base. Matter is the medium of his expression.
In his speech which uses Matter as the medium, material objects
are his letters and active forces are his words, and the sea and land
are the pages of his tale. Matter is his means and also his spiritual
mark. He hangs the thought with the support of the vital’s drive
and makes the soul flow along the movement of the blood.
He is the dumb will in the atom and the clod. It is the will of the
Virat which acts without apparent motive or sense. There is an
implicit intelligence in the material world which is his and which
498
does not have to think or plan. This world creates itself invincibly.
For its body is the body of the Lord in whose heart stands the Virat,
the King of Kings.
This is the poise of an individual’s consciousness called the
waking consciousness, and it is regarded as the first foot of the
Atman in the individual being. The waking consciousness has its
abode in the wakeful condition of the individual. It is, as we have
seen, bahihprajnah – conscious of only what is outside. This
consciousness is concerned primarily with ‘other’ things not with
ourselves. It is focussed on the external world. It is also described as
saptaanga, ‘seven-limbed’, and ekonavimshatimukhah as having had
nineteen mouths, and it is sthulabhug – it eats the gross.
In the analysis of this waking self, an attempt is made to bring
about the harmony between ourselves and the world, between the
Jiva and the Ishwara. The seven limbs in the definition belong to the
cosmic Self, while the 19 mouths to an individual. In both, the
waking consciousness is aware only of the external aspect, although
there is a subtle difference between them in this respect. The
Mundaka Upanishad describes the Virat as the seven limbed Virat
Purusha, the Universal man – the shining regions of the heaven as
his head, the sun and the moon as his eyes, the four quarters as his
ears, the revealed Vedas as his speech, the air of the cosmos as his
breath, the whole universe as his heart and the earth as his feet. This
is the Virat as also described in the Purusha Sukta, the Virat as seen
by Arjuna on the battlefield, the Virat Krishna who showed himself
in the Kaurava court, and the Virat whom Yashoda saw in the
mouth of the baby Krishna. He is called Vaishvanara.
Virat is the name we give to the Consciousness animating the
physical universe, this vast cosmos, with all its stellar and planetary
systems, with all its milky ways. He is immanent in all things,
secretly present in everything whether conscious or not. As
described in Savitri, ‘He is the dumb will of atom and clod.’ He is
present in the animate as well as in the inanimate by means of the
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gunas – sattva, rajas, tamas. When he is totally tamasic, he is
inanimate as in stones and rocks. When Prana begins to operate we
have the world of plants and vegetation: ‘In the current of the blood
makes flow the soul.’ When the higher Pranas begin to operate we
have the animals. There is a still higher degree of the manifestation
of Reality when we reach the human level. This is an approximation
to Sattva. The higher functions of ratiocination, understanding and
reasoning approximate to vijnaana. There is a still higher step we
have to take beyond the Vijnaana, and that will take us to the realm
of Ananda or divine Delight.
While the Cosmic Person is the universal aspect of the waking
consciousness, he has also an individual aspect. It is here that he is
supposed to have 19 mouths. By mouth is meant the organ by
which we take in things. There are 19 functional apparatuses of this
wakeful consciousness by which it receives experiences of the
external world – the 5 senses of knowledge, 5 of action (speech,
hands, feet, organs of regeneration and ejection) the 5 pranas
‘universal Life-Forces’ (praana, which introduces in the individual
universal vitality and actuates him towards more abundant living,
apaana, which leads him to expend energy and so towards death;
samaana, which regulates the incoming and the outgoing forces and
maintains as far as possible an equilibrium of interchange; vyaana,
which distributes the vital energies by a pervasive movement in the
system; and udaana, the finest form of all, which serves as the
strength of human aspiration towards the Divine and a secret
channel of communication between the physical life and the greater
life of the spirit), and antahkaranacatustaya (manas, buddhi, ahankaara,
citta). It is with the help of these 19 instruments that we come into
contact with the world outside. These instruments relate us with the
world outside our body.
We shall discuss the three other poises of the Divine
Consciousness in the following chapter.
500
42: Book XI – The Fourfold Being 2
We saw in the previous chapter how Sri Aurobindo weaves into his
poem the great psychological insights which the Mandukya
Upanishad announced to the world so long ago. Indian psychology
never lost sight of the fact that only a small part, whether of the
world-being or our own being, comes into the range of our
perception, understanding, or our action. The rest is lost to us
because it is either hidden behind in subliminal reaches in the
depths of the subconscient or in the highest peaks of
superconscience. This fact is expressed in ancient Indian psychology
by dividing consciousness into three provinces: waking state,
dream-state, sleep state – jagrat, swapna, sushupti. It posits in the
human being a waking-self, a dream-self, a sleep-self, with the
fourth or the Turiya beyond.
Sri Aurobindo gives a succinct description of these states in this
passage taken from the Synthesis of Yoga
If we examine the phraseology of the old books, we

shall find that the waking state is the consciousness of
the material universe which we normally possess in
this embodied existence dominated by the physical
mind. The dream-state is a consciousness
corresponding to the subtler life-plane and mind-plane
behind, which to us, even when we get intimations of
them, have not the same concrete reality as the things
of the physical existence. The sleep-state is a
consciousness corresponding to the supramental plane
proper to the gnosis, which is beyond our experience
because our causal body or envelope of gnosis is not
developed in us, its faculties not active, and therefore
501
we are in relation to that plane in a condition of
dreamless sleep. The Turiya beyond is the
consciousness of our pure self-existence or our absolute
being with which we have no direct relations at all,
whatever mental reflections we may receive in our
dream or our waking or even, irrecoverably, in our
sleep consciousness.
CWSA 23-24: 520
We have already noted that the Mandukya Upanishad gives to

these four states of consciousness in the individual these names:
wakefulness, dream, sleep, and Superconciousness or Self-
consciousness, and the technical names given to them are
Vaishvanara, Taijasa, Prajnaa and Atman. In later Vedanta, four
states of consciousness are also recognised in the macrocosm or
cosmic consciousness, and they came to be called Viraat (Viraaj),
Hiranyagarbha, Isa, and Brahman respectively. These are in the
macrocosm and the states described in the Mandukya are in the
microcosm. The basis for this representation of correspondence
between the microcosm and the macrocosm can be found in the
Chandogya Upanishad.
Savitri recognises these four states of cosmic consciousness
embodied in the marvellous figure now standing in front of her. We
have already studied the lines 336 to 353 in Canto 1 of Book XI
which describe the Virat aspect of the Brahman. Now before we
move on to the description of the Hiranyagarbha aspect of the
Supreme consciousness – the consciousness of the dream-form, let
us take a brief look at how the Mandukya Upanishad describes the
Hiranyagarbha aspect of Brahman. It describes it as follows:
Swapna sthaanah antahprajnah saptaangam

ekonavimshatimukhah praviviktabhuk taijasah dvitiiiyah
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paadah
He whose place is the dream, who is wise of the
inward, who has seven limbs, to whom there are
nineteen doors, who feels and enjoys subtle objects,
Taijasa, the Inhabitant in Luminous Mind, He is the
second.
It is a consciousness which has dream as its abode (swapna sthaanah).

It is internal to the waking consciousness (antahprajnah). It has seven
limbs (saptaangam) like the waking consciousness (head, heart, arms,
nose, eyes, ears and feet being its seven limbs). Like the waking
consciousness, it has also nineteen mouths (ekonavimshatimukhah).
These have been mentioned in the previous chapter. This
consciousness enjoys or absorbs into its being only the subtle
(praviviktabhuk).
Now this is how this aspect of the Supreme Consciousness is
described in Savitri:
In him shadows his form the Golden Child

Who in the Sun-capped Vast cradles his birth:
Hiranyagarbha, author of thoughts and dreams,
Who sees the invisible and hears the sounds
That never visited a mortal ear,
Discoverer of unthought realities
Truer to Truth than all we have ever known,
He is the leader on the inner roads;
A seer, he has entered the forbidden realms;
A magician with the omnipotent wand of thought,
He builds the secret uncreated worlds.
Armed with the golden speech, the diamond eye,
His is the vision and the prophecy:
503
Imagist casting the formless into shape,
Traveller and hewer of the unseen paths,
He is the carrier of the hidden fire,
He is the voice of the Ineffable,
He is the invisible hunter of the light,
The Angel of mysterious ecstasies,
The conqueror of the kingdoms of the soul.
p. 681 lines 354-373
Hiranyagarbha, the Self of the Dream-world, is close to Virat, like its

subtle shadow. Hiranyagarbha, the Golden Child, takes his birth in
the luminous Vasts above. He is the source of thought and dream
and his sight penetrates the invisible. His ears catch sounds which
have never reached the human ear. So in a real sense, the dream
consciousness is a higher and a subtler consciousness, as will be
clear when we compare it with the physical state of dream.
It should be borne in mind that the dream-state in which
Hiranyagarbha functions is not the same as the physical state of
dream. The latter belongs to the physical mind, while in the former
the mind proper is at work, liberated from the intimate mingling of
the physical mentality. Sri Aurobindo explains the difference
between the dreams of the physical mind and the dream
consciousness we are talking about here as follows:
The dreams of the physical mind are an incoherent

jumble made up partly of responses to vague touches
from the physical world round which the lower mind-
faculties disconnected from the will and reason, the
buddhi, weave a web of wandering phantasy, partly of
disordered associations from the brain-memory, partly
of reflections from the soul travelling on the mental
plane, reflections which are, ordinarily, received
504
without intelligence or coordination, wildly distorted
in the reception and mixed up confusedly with the
other dream elements, with brain-memories and
fantastic responses to any sensory touch from the
physical world. In the Yogic dream-state, on the other
hand, the mind is in clear possession of itself, though
not of the physical world, works coherently and is able
to use either its ordinary will and intelligence with a
concentrated power or else the higher will and
intelligence of the more exalted planes of mind. It
withdraws from experience of the outer world, it puts
its seals upon the physical senses and their doors of
communication with material things; but everything
that is proper to itself, thought, reasoning, reflection,
vision, it can continue to execute with an increased
purity and power of sovereign concentration free from
the distractions and unsteadiness of the waking mind.
The Synthesis of Yoga CWSA 23-24: 521
This is also why this consciousness is described in the lines of

Savitri quoted above as the ‘discoverer of unthought realities/ Truer to
Truth than all we have ever known.’ This consciousness is also the
leader on the inner roads. Hiranyagrbha is a seer who can enter the
realms normally closed to the waking consciousness. He is a
magician wielding an all-powerful faculty of thought; he builds the
secret uncreated worlds.
We have noted above that Dream consciousness can use the will
and intelligence of more exalted planes of mind since it is entirely
free from the distractions and unsteadiness of the waking mind.
This consciousness is armed with ‘the golden speech, the diamond
eye,/His is the vision and the prophecy’. He constantly casts the
formless into forms; he hews paths hitherto unseen and travels
505
upon them. He is the carrier of the hidden fire, and he is the voice of
that which is beyond speech. He is the invisible hunter of the light
that eludes, the Angel of the mysterious ecstasies of the subtle
realms. He is the conqueror of the kingdoms of the soul.
The greatest strength of the dream state lies in its power to open
up easily the higher ranges and powers of thought, emotion and
will by which the soul grows in height, range and self-mastery.
Since this consciousness is free from the distraction of sensible
things, it can by an ever deeper vision and identification hope for
access to the Divine. It can by an absorbed inner joy and emotion
prepare itself for the delight of union with the Divine beloved, the
Master of all bliss, rapture and Ananda.
The third aspect of Brahman is called Ishwara or Prajna at the
level of the Atman. Macrocosmically we regard this consciousness
as the creator of the whole universe, while microcosmically it is the
creator of the internal world of the Jiva. The Mandukya Upanishad
describes it as follows:
Yatra suptah na kamcana kaamam kaamayate, na kamcana

swapnam pashyati, tat sushuptam / susupta sthaana
ekiibhuutah prajnaanaghana eva aanandamayah hi
aanandabhuk cetomukhah prajnah triitiiya paadah
When one sleeps and yearns not with desire, nor sees
any dream, that is the perfect slumber. He whose place
is the perfect slumber, who becomes Oneness, who is
wisdom gathered into itself, who is made of mere
delight, who enjoys delight unrelated, to whom the
conscious mind is the door, Prajna, the Lord of
Wisdom, He is the third.
He is the third aspect of the Brahman consciousness. This
506
consciousness is likened to the state of dreamless sleep, where there
are no desires, and the very nature of this Being is delight.
Eshah sarveshwarah eshah sarvajnah eshah antaryamin

eshah yonih sarvasya prabhavaapyayau hi bhuutaanaam.
This is the Almighty, this is the Omniscient, this is the
Inner Soul, this is the Womb of the Universe, this is the
Birth and Destruction of creatures.
This consciousness is designated as the Master of all things (eshah

sarveshwarah). This being is also all-knowing, omniscient (eshah
sarvajnah). This knowledge of Ishwara is not merely perceptional or
cognitive. It is knowledge by identity. He is the womb of all things.
He permeates all things (eshah antaryamin). All things come from
him and return to him. This entire universe is fully present in the
Being of the Causal state. (eshah yonih sarvasya). Everything comes
forth from Him and everything returns to him, and everything is
sustained by Him. (prabhavaapyayau hi bhuutaanaam.)
This consciousness is described in Savitri as follows:
A third spirit stood behind, their hidden cause,

A mass of superconscience closed in light,
Creator of things in his all-knowing sleep.
All from his stillness came as grows a tree;
He is our seed and core, our head and base.
All light is but a flash from his closed eyes:
An all-wise Truth is mystic in his heart,
The omniscient Ray is shut behind his lids:
He is the Wisdom that comes not by thought,
His wordless silence brings the immortal word.
He sleeps in the atom and the burning star,
507
He sleeps in man and god and beast and stone:
Because he is there the Inconscient does its work,
Because he is there the world forgets to die.
He is the centre of the circle of God,
He the circumference of Nature’s run.
His slumber is an Almightiness in things,
Awake, he is the Eternal and Supreme.
p. 681 lines 374-391
Behind both the Virat and the Hiranyagarbha stands a third spirit or
aspect, the Prajna, the secret cause of the other two. That is a massed
superconscience which is enclosed in light. This all-knowing
consciousness is called the Sleep state; this consciousness is beyond
thought, beyond emotion and beyond will.
All grows from his silence as a tree grows from a seed. He is at
once our seed, our core and our base. All light is but a flash from his
closed eyes; in his heart is the mystic all-wise Truth, behind his
eyelids is the omniscient ray of Light. He is the Wisdom that comes
not by the process of thought but is self-existent. His wordless
silence brings the immortal word.
He is the one who sleeps in the atom and also in the burning
star. He is asleep in all forms – in man, god, beast and stone.
Because of his presence, the Inconscient does its work. Because of
his presence in it, the world forgets to die. He is the centre of the
circle of God.; he is also the circumference along which Nature
moves. He is the creative slumber that represents the presence of
God in everything. When awake he is the eternal and the Supreme.
The sleep-state represents a higher power of being,

beyond thought into pure consciousness, beyond
emotion into pure bliss, beyond will into pure mastery;
it is the gate of union with the supreme state of
508
Sachchidananda out of which all the activities of the
world are born. The use of the words dream and sleep
for these higher states is symbolic. The normal physical
mind is not at home in these higher states of being.. It
is not true that the Self in the third status called perfect
sleep, sushupti, is really a state of slumber. The sleep
self is on the contrary described as Prajna, the Master
of Wisdom and Knowledge, Self of the Gnosis, and as
Ishwara, the Lord of being. To the physical mind it
may feel like sleep – a wider and subtler consciousness,
a greater waking. To the normal mind all that exceeds
its normal experience but still comes into its scope,
seems to be a dream; but at the point where it borders
on things quite beyond its scope, it can no longer see
truth even as in a dream, but passes into the blank
incomprehension and non-reception of slumber.
Awake on these levels the soul becomes master of the
ranges of gnostic thought, gnostic will, gnostic delight.
Even on the yet higher level open to us, that of the
Ananda, the awakened soul may become similarly
possessed of the Bliss-Self both in its concentration and
in its cosmic comprehension.
The Synthesis of Yoga CWSA 23-24: 525
The Mandukya Upanishad describes not only the gross, subtle and
causal conditions of the manifested consciousness but also
Consciousness as such. This is Reality in itself, independent of all
relations. Even Ishwara is a description of a relationship in the
universe, the lordship of the universe. What is the swarupa lakshana,
the essential nature of the supreme consciousness? It abides by
itself, in its majesty. What is that Light that which cannot be seen by
others, which shines but shines not upon anything? That is the state
of Pure Consciousness, the Absolute consciousness, which the
509
Mandukya calls Turiya, that which transcends all relational
manifestations. The Mandukya Upanishad describes it as follows:
Na antah prajnam na bahih prajnam na ubhayatah prajnam

na prjnaanaghanam na prajnam na aprajnam/ adrishtam
avyavahaaryam agraahyam alakshaNam acinntyam
avyapadeshyam ekaatma pratyaya saaram
prapancopashamam shantam shivam advaitaam caturtham
manyante sah aatmaa sah vijneyah
He who is neither inward-wise, nor outward-wise, nor
both inward- and out-ward wise, nor wisdom self-
gathered, nor possessed of wisdom, nor unpossessed
of wisdom, He who is unseen and incommunicable,
unseizable, featureless, unthinkable, and unnameable,
Whose essentiality is awareness of the Self in its single
existence, in whom all phenomena dissolve, Who is
calm, Who is Good, Who is the One than whom there is
no other, Him they deem the fourth; He is the Self; he
is the object of Knowledge.
Our discussion of the four aspects of the Supreme Consciousness

has taken us to the metaphysical intricacies dealt with in the
Mandukya Upanishad. I have tried to show here the closeness
between the descriptions of these states of consciousness with the
corresponding descriptions in Savitri.
The God of Death who appeared throughout Books IX and X as
Savitri’s adversary was finally vanquished in the fourth canto of
Book X. Here in the beginning of Book XI, the same God appears
again but in an enchanting form described in these lines:
One whom her soul had faced as Death and Night
510
A sum of all sweetness gathered into his limbs
And blinded her heart to the beauty of the suns.
Transfigured was the formidable shape.
p. 678-679 lines 279-282
It is in this enchanting figure that Savitri sees all the four aspects of
the Supreme Consciousness. We have already seen this with regard
to the Virat, Hiranyagarbha and Ishwara aspects. Now Savitri sees
in this figure the Turiya aspect as well.
Above was the brooding bliss of the Infinite,

Its omniscient and omnipotent repose,
Its immobile silence absolute and alone.
All powers were woven in countless concords here.
The bliss that made the world in his body lived,
Love and delight were the head of the sweet form.
p.682 lines 392-397
Above the Prajna aspect, Savitri saw the infinite in its conscious
bliss, reposing in its omniscience and omnipotence, alone and
absolute in its immutable silence. All powers were held together
there in infinite harmony.
The poet continues to describe the enchanting figure now
standing in front of Savitri in lines 398 to 437. We shall take up these
lines in the following chapter.
Before we conclude, we should ponder over the significance of
what we are examining here – the total transformation the God of
Death undergoes. The poet clearly states that this figure now
standing before Savitri blinding her heart to the beauty of the suns,
and who has gathered all sweetness into his limbs is none other
than the one whom she had faced as Death and Night. After all, the
511
God of Death then is not an unmitigated evil. There is no such thing
as unmitigated evil living by itself and forever in Sri Aurobindo’s
metaphysical system. If there is something called Evil, and that lives
independent of Good, then you have a duality as the truth about
this world. For Sri Aurobindo, there is only the Supreme Reality,
and that is the Brahman, and in this manifested world His real
swarup ‘nature’ is Sat-Chit and Ananda. But where does evil in the
form of Death come from? Sri Aurobindo has pointed out that
Death is a functionary of God, he must have created him for some
purpose. He therefore will continue to be around us as long as he is
useful for the Divine’s purpose in this creation. What is the main
function of death? His main function is to prod the human soul
caught in the meshes of ignorance to wake up and realise his
Godhood and Godlike perfection here on earth. Let me conclude for
now with a very beautiful aphorism in which Sri Aurobindo
captures this insight:
Death is the question Nature puts continually to Life

and her reminder to it that it has not yet found itself. If
there were no siege of death, the creature would be
bound for ever in the form of an imperfect living.
Pursued by death he awakes to the idea of perfect life
and seeks out its means and possibility.
CWSA 13:205
512
43: Book XI (lines 392–516)
Savitri sees all the four aspects of the Supreme Divine in the most
enchanting form standing in front of her. We have already seen how
the Virat, Hiranyagarbha and Ishwara aspects of the Supreme are
described by he poet. Now Savitri sees in this figure the Turiya
aspect as well. Before we examine how this aspect is described, let
us briefly examine how it is characterised in the Mandukya
Upanishad. The Mandukya describes it as follows:
Na antah prajnam na bahih prajnam na ubhayatah prajnam

na prjnaanaghanam na prajnam na aprajnam / adrishtam
avyavahaaryam agraahyam alakshanam acinntyam
avyapadeshyam ekaatma pratyaya saaram
prapancopashamam shantam shivam advaitaam caturtham
manyante sah aatmaa sah vijneyah
He who is neither inward-wise, nor outward-wise, nor
both inward- and out-ward wise, nor wisdom self-
gathered, nor possessed of wisdom, He Who is unseen
and incommunicable, unseizable, featureless,
unthinkable, and unnameable, Whose essentiality is
awareness of the Self in its single existence, in whom
all phenomena dissolve, Who is calm, Who is Good,
Who is the One than whom there is no other, Him they
deem the fourth; He is the Self, He is the object of
Knowledge.
We see above how the Upanishad makes an attempt to describe in

words what is basically ineffable. Let us see no how Sri Aurobindo
handles this challenge:
513
Above was the brooding bliss of the Infinite,
Its omniscient and omnipotent repose,
Its immobile silence absolute and alone.
All powers were woven in countless concords here.
The bliss that made the world in his body lived,
Love and delight were the head of the sweet form.
In the alluring meshes of their snare
Recaptured, the proud blissful members held
All joys outrunners of the panting heart
And fugitive from life’s outstripped desire.
Whatever vision has escaped the eye,
Whatever happiness comes in dream and trance,
The nectar spilled by love with trembling hands,
The joy the cup of Nature cannot hold,
Had crowded to the beauty of his face,
Were waiting in the honey of his laugh.
Things hidden by the silence of the hours,
The ideas that find no voice on living lips,
The soul’s pregnant meeting with infinity
Had come to birth in him and taken fire:
The secret whisper of the flower and star
Revealed its meaning in his fathomless look.
His lips curved eloquent like a rose of dawn;
His smile that played with the wonder of the mind
And stayed in the heart when it had left his mouth
Glimmered with the radiance of the morning star
Gemming the wide discovery of heaven.
His gaze was the regard of eternity;
The spirit of its sweet and calm intent
Was a wise home of gladness and divulged
The light of the ages in the mirth of the hours,
A sun of wisdom in a miracled grove.
514
In the orchestral largeness of his mind
All contrary seekings their close kinship knew,
Rich-hearted, wonderful to each other met
In the mutual marvelling of their myriad notes
And dwelt like brothers of one family
Who had found their common and mysterious home.
As from the harp of some ecstatic god
There springs a harmony of lyric bliss
Striving to leave no heavenly joy unsung,
Such was the life in that embodied Light.
He seemed the wideness of a boundless sky,
He seemed the passion of a sorrowless earth,
He seemed the burning of a world-wide sun.
Two looked upon each other, Soul saw Soul.
pp. 682–683 lines 392-437
The Divine as the Prajna Purusha has already been described in the
lines preceding the lines reproduced above. Above this Prajna
Purusha is the Infinite in its conscious bliss, reposing in its
omniscience and omnipotence, alone and absolute in its immobile
silence. All powers are present here since they are woven into
countless concords (harmonies).
Here in the body of this figure can be seen the bliss that has
made the world, and of the sweet form of this figure, love and
delight are the head. All the joys that flow from the passionate
human heart when its desires are fulfilled are recaptured and held
captive by the blissful limbs of this being as in the captivating
meshes of a net.
In the beauty of the face of this figure is collected all the beauty,
including even the beauty that the human eye cannot capture fully;
all the happiness including that which comes in dream and trance,
and the sweet nectar spilt by love in excitement, all the joy that
515
nature’s vessel cannot contain – all these are contained in his
honeyed laughter.
There are things that lay veiled by the silence of earthly time and
there are also ideas that cannot be expressed in speech; all these
burn bright in his being; in him takes place the potent meeting of
the inner soul with infinity. In his fathomless look stands revealed
the secret whisper of the flower and the star.
The curve of his lips is as eloquent as a rose of dawn. His smile
plays with the wonder of the mind and stays in his heart when it
leaves the mouth; it shines with the radiance of the morning star,
shining like a gem of heavenly revelation.
His look is the stare of eternity. In its sweetness and calm is the
felicity of a sage; it reveals the wisdom of the ages in the mirth of
fleeting hours. In it shines a sun of wisdom as in an enchanted
wood.
In the harmony of his mind all opposites find a close mutual
relationship; these contraries appear wonderful to each other and
marvel at each other’s myriad differences; they dwell together like
the members of one family, who have found their common and
mysterious home.
This embodiment of Light standing before Savitri stood like a
harmony of lyric bliss issuing from the lyric of an ecstatic God,
trying to make sure that no heavenly joy is left unsung.
He seemed as wide as the boundless sky; he seemed to personify
the passion of an earth freed from sorrow; he seemed like the
burning of a world-wide sun.
The two looked upon each other, Savitri and this effulgent figure
in front of her. The soul of Savitri saw the soul of what had
appeared like the God of Death.
Then like an anthem rising from transparent cave of the heart, a
voice soared up whose enchanting sound seemed to have the power
516
of changing the painful weeping of the suffering earth into sobs of
ecstatic joy and her cry into a happy song of the spirit. This was the
voice of the enchanting figure standing in front of Savitri..
“O Savitri, O human image of the immortal word, you have seen
beyond the ornate walls of the senses and forced the thought-
covered doors to swing open and you have seen through the arches
of revelation and unlocked passages of spiritual sight. You have
found the entry into the heavenly state of the soul and found the
golden key to the treasures beyond. I am wonder-struck that you
have been able to do all this.
“There has opened in you the secret sight which man misses in
his blindness and it has enabled you to see beyond Time and
revealed to you the course which my chariot takes, and disclosed to
you how death is my underground channel through life to reach my
hidden vistas of bliss.”
Then the enchanting presence in front of her tells Savitri who he
is:
I am the hushed search of the jealous gods

Pursuing my wisdom’s vast mysterious work
Seized in the thousand meeting ways of heaven.
I am the beauty of the unveiled ray
Drawing through the deep roads of the infinite night
The unconquerable pilgrim soul of earth
Beneath the flaring torches of the stars.
I am the inviolable Ecstasy;
They who have looked on me, shall grieve no more.
The eyes that live in night shall see my form.
pp. 683–84 lines 455-464
“I am the object of the hushed search of the jealous gods who

pursue my wisdom’s vast mysterious word. I am the beauty of the
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secret Divine Ray, which attracts the unconquerable pilgrim soul of
the earth as it trudges along the tangled roads of the endless night,
beneath the flaring torches of the stars. I am the Ecstasy that is
secure from assault or trespass. Those who look on me shall never
grieve again. Only they for whom the external world and its show
are a night (those who have no absorbing interest in the outer world
and its drama) shall see my form.”
Now this enchanting Divine being begins to weave a subtle net
which he wishes to cast on Savitri as one final test of her integrity
and dedication to her mission in life. As usual, it is prefaced by a
philosophical note which highlights how impossible it is to achieve
what Savitri is keen on achieving – the transformation of earthly life
into its perfect divine image.
The Divine Being continues:
“On the shores of the sea of consciousness which flows through
several straits, underneath an agitated sky (reflecting the stress the
sea of consciousness is experiencing), two powers which originated
from the same source walk up and down close to each other and yet
are separated in the life of man; they are Soul and Nature. Nature
leans down to embrace the earth, and the Soul longs to touch the
skies.
Two powers from one original ecstasy born

Pace near but parted in the life of man;
One leans to earth, the other yearns to the skies:
Heaven in its rapture dreams of perfect earth,
Earth in its sorrow dreams of perfect heaven.
The two longing to join, yet walk apart,
Idly divided by their vain conceits,
They are kept from their oneness by enchanted fears;
Sundered mysteriously by miles of thought,
They gaze across the silent gulfs of sleep.
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p. 684 lines 467-476
“Heaven in the rapture of its perfection dreams of making earth

perfect like itself, and earth in its sorrow dreams of changing itself
into a perfect heaven. These two powers yearn to unite but still
walk apart from each other, vainly divided by their vain sense of
self-importance. What keeps them apart from one another are their
mysterious fears of each other. They are thus separated from each
other inexplicably as though by a long distance of several miles. All
they really do is to gaze at each other across the gulfs of the
Ignorance.
Or side by side reclined upon my vasts

Like bride and bridegroom magically divorced
They wake to yearn, but never can they clasp
While thinly flickering hesitates uncrossed
Between the lovers on their nuptial couch
The shadowy eidolon of a sword.
p. 684 lines 477-482
“Or these two powers recline upon my vast spaces side by side like
a bride and bridegroom, but mysteriously separated. When they
wake up, they yearn for each other but they cannot clasp one
another as long as the shadowy sword of state hangs above
threateningly between the lovers on the marriage bed.” (It is a
notional sword not a real one, but it is enough to keep the lovers
separated until they realise the imaginary status of this sword.)
But when the phantom flame-edge fails undone,

Then never more can space or time divide
The lover from the loved; Space shall draw back
Her great translucent curtain, Time shall be
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The quivering of the spirit’s endless bliss.
p. 684 lines 483-487
“But once it is realised that it is only a phantom sword, not a real

one, it gets dissolved along with its flame-edge. Then nothing,
neither space nor time, can separate the lovers. Space will draw
back her great transparent curtain, and Time shall quiver with
endless bliss of the Spirit.”
Attend that moment of celestial fate.

Meanwhile you two shall serve the dual law
Which only now the scouts of vision glimpse
Who pressing through the forest of their thoughts
Have found the narrow bridges of the gods.
Wait patient of the brittle bars of form
Making division your delightful means
Of happy oneness rapturously enhanced
By attraction in the throbbing air between.
p. 684 lines 488-496
“You will have to await that moment of celestial fate when the
phantom sword which keeps the lovers separated dissolves once
and for all. In the meanwhile you and Satyavan will have to learn to
accept and follow the law of duality (of Soul and Nature separated).
The true nature of their relationship is now grasped only by those
whose acute vision takes them beyond the thick forests of thought
to a vision of the narrow bridges of the gods which span the gulf.
“Wait in patience and bear with the fragile separation created by
outer forms, hoping to see a happy oneness uniting them one day.
Even you can see this division as a delightful means of enhancing
their oneness. You can understand this if you contemplate the secret
behind the ecstatic attraction they feel for one another.”
520
At this point, the Divine being offers to Savitri a glorious
alternative to what he has just described. This alternative amounts
to Savitri disowning this world and leaving it to its ambiguous fate
and to climbing on to the blissful home in which she can play
blissfully as an eternal divine child.
Yet if thou wouldst abandon the vexed world,

Careless of the dark moan of things below,
Tread down the isthmus, overleap the flood,
Cancel thy contract with the labouring Force;
Renounce the tie that joins thee to earth-kind,
Cast off thy sympathy with mortal hearts.
p. 685 lines 497-502
“But, O Savitri, there is another fate you can choose. But to make
that choice, you should be willing to give up this troubled world;
you should pay no heed to the sad groaning and complaining that is
for ever going on this earth, you should turn your back on earth and
this life. You should cancel your contract to be in the world and
keep working for its redemption. You should cut off the bond that
ties you to earth-kind and cast off your sympathy with the human
hearts and their aspirations.
“Once you are thus liberated from your self-imposed bondage to
earth, you can rise and claim the spirit’s rights.”
Arise, vindicate thy spirit’s conquered right:

Relinquishing thy charge of transient breath,
Under the cold gaze of the indifferent stars
Leaving thy borrowed body on the sod,
Ascend, O soul, into thy blissful home.
p. 685 lines 503-507
521
“You should then relinquish your charge of the transient breath
which has tied you down to your body. Abandon your body
borrowed from Nature and leave it on the earth under the cold stare
of the indifferent stars, and be the soul you are and ascend to your
blissful home in the transcendent world.”
The assumption here is that the our soul comes from the
Supreme in the transcendental world and as long as we remain
bound to our body, vital and mind complex, we are tied down to
earth and its imperfections which manifest and torment human life
in the forms of sorrow, old age, ignorance and finally death. So as
long as we are on earth in this complex of body, life and mind, we
shall remain alien to the glories of the Spirit – its bliss, immortality
and truthful existence. That is why a choice is placed before Savitri.
“Here in the playground of the eternal Child

Or in domains the wise Immortals tread
Roam with thy comrade splendour under skies
Spiritual lit by an unsetting sun,
As godheads live who care not for the world
And share not in the toil of Nature’s powers:
Absorbed in their self-ecstasy they dwell.
Cast off the ambiguous myth of earth’s desire,
O immortal, to felicity arise.”
p. 685 lines 508-516
“Once you ascend to this home of the Spirit, you will be like the
eternal child playing in the playground of bliss. You will then be
walking with your comrade in splendour, Satyavan, in the domains
of the wise immortals. There in the spiritual skies, the sun never
sets. You and Satyavan will be able to live there as gods live. You
will have no care, you will not be sharing in the toil and hardship of
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nature as in earthly life. You will live like gods ever-absorbed in
your self-ecstasy. Cast off the dubious myth of a perfected earth.
Arise to felicity, O immortal being.”
As we see here, this Divine Being is very persuasive. He tries to
convince Savitri, as the God of death did in the earlier cantos, that
human life on this earth cannot be redeemed. There cannot be any
perfection here, neither for the body, nor the vital, nor the mental
being of man. Only the Spirit encaged here in the physical form of a
human birth can rise to the status of perfection, if it relinquishes
what Nature has supplied to it in the course of evolution. This, you
will realise, is tantamount to an attempt to sabotage the very
purpose and mission of Savitri’s birth. Savitri of course rejects the
alternative placed before her.
523
As we noted towards the end of the preceding chapter, although

Savitri has triumphed over the God of Death, she is still being
tested, although this time by the enchanting figure of the Supreme
standing before her. He asks her to ‘Cast off the ambiguous earth’s
desire’ and to rise to felicity forever.
His argument this time is subtle: in this world, for the play of
manifestation to continue, Spirit and Matter, or the soul and Nature,
have to remain separated, like ‘bride and bridegroom magically
divorced’; they can only yearn to clasp each other but will never
succeed in doing so. They remain separated because over their
nuptial couch there hangs ‘the shadowy eidolon (unsubstantial image)
of a sword’. Until this shadowy sword gets dissolved, which will take
a long, long time, Savitri and Satyavan will have to abide by this
law of separation.
But there is an alternative. Savitri can leave her body on earth
and ascend as a soul into her blissful home, and live there with
Satyavan as her companion like eternal children in an eternal
garden of bliss. But before she can do that, she will have to fulfil a
crucial condition. This condition is described by the poet in these
words:

p. 685 lines 500-502
In other words, Savitri will have to give up this terrestrial existence

and relinquish her interest in it.
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This alternative offered to Savitri is along the lines of what is
regarded as the highest wisdom by almost all the spiritual traditions
of the world. The life which we live in this world can only be
‘anityam’ and ‘asukham’, in the words of the Gita, and the kingdom
of God can never be founded here. It is to be sought either in the
world within us or in other world beyond this earth – in some
heaven, Kailash, or Vaikunth.
As Savitri was listening to these words from the enchanting
image of the Supreme standing before her, a joy poured down on
her exceeding any joy on earth or heaven. It was the bliss of some
eternity unknown until now, a rapture of some Infinite waiting for
her. She responds to this voice with a confident felicity in her heart.
A smile rippling across her wide eyes like the first beam of the
morning sun rippling over two lotus pools:
“You are the Supreme who overwhelms man’s soul with the gift
of life and also with the experience of death, with the pleasures of
this world and with its pain which follow one another like Day and
Night. You tempt man’s heart with the allure of heaven, and you
also test his strength and endurance with the close touch of hell. But
right now with this offer of yours, I cannot tell which of these you
are doing, whether you are testing my resolve or enticing me with
the offer of a home of bliss. But I reject your offer and I refuse to
climb to your everlasting Day just as I have rejected your eternal
Night.”
“Eternal Night” here refers to the experiences to which she was
subjected to when she first stepped into the Kingdom of Death.
These are described in Book IX of Savitri. You probably remember
how the God of Death tried to create in her a pressure of
psychological terror and tried to convince her of the utter
insignificance of the human being in this vast universe which he
held under his sway. As a sample of the verbal terror he uses there,
let me quote a few very telling lines from Book IX, Canto 2:
525
A fragile miracle of thinking clay,
Armed with illusions walks the child of Time.
To fill the void around he feels and dreads,
The void he came from and to which he goes,
He magnifies his self and names it God.
p. 586 lines 165-170
Savitri now explains why she is refusing his offer:

“I choose not to turn away from your terrestrial Way, however
uncertain and full of hazard it may appear. All I ask of you is my
other self – Satyavan. You don’t need him in your worlds to
enhance their joy or felicities. The earth needs his beautiful spirit
created by you so that we can cast the net of delight over the whole
of life.”
And then in some of the most glorious lines in this entire poem,
Savitri declares her total commitment to this earth and to human
life on earth:
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.
p. 686 lines 537-541
“The mightiest of souls choose earth as their workplace. Only those

who are heroes can choose it as their battlefield. The life on earth is
the forge in the fire of which the great builders fabricate their
material. For me, O King, the servitudes which you impose on me
on earth are a greater blessing than all the glorious liberties of
526
heaven.”
The heavens, no doubt, give the soul all the great liberties – but
they have always existed there. The soul doesn’t have to do
anything to earn them. They are in fact the very nature of the soul.
But the soul chose this adventure of consciousness, this plunge into
the Inconscient, so that the One can be manifested as the Many and
in each of the Many recreate the great liberties and felicities of the
Supreme. This requires a great struggle, the participation in a long
struggle, through the Night and the Ignorance, until the
consciousness evolves from the Inconscient to the Superconscient.
This is the meaning of this evolutionary journey. In one of the letters
Sri Aurobindo wrote to the Mother when she was in Japan, he
expresses this basic idea in these words:
Heaven we have always possessed, but not the earth,

and the aim of my yoga, is to make, in the words of the
Veda, heaven and earth equal and one.
That is why the servitudes on earth are sweet; they spur us on to get
rid of these imperfections. This is the whole excitement of existence.
Savitri continues: “I am no stranger to the heavens; they were
once my natural home, before I came down to earth.”
The heavens were our home too, before our souls embarked on
this adventure of consciousness through the Inconscient and
Ignorance. Savitri has been depicted as an Avatar in this poem, but
we are ordinary mortals. Nevertheless, the process of the birth of an
Avatar is not all that different from the process through which we
ordinary mortals are born, as explained by the Gita. In an Avatar,
the Divine is born by the conscious control of the Prakriti by the
Purusha, so the Prakriti is full of light and the will of the Purusha.
The Divine being is thus born through atma maya, but fully
527
conscious of the divinity within. (Gita 4.6) In the birth of ordinary
beings, we too come from the divine, but we are born in such a way
that we become helplessly subject to the controlling power of
Ptrakriti. (Gita 9.8) We seem to be suffering from some kind of
amnesia and do not know who we really are.
Now to resume what Savitri was saying:
“I too have wandered in the star-studded groves of heaven, and
walked in their sun-gold pastures and through their meadows
brightened by the silver sheen of the moon. I too have heard the
musical laughter of the streams in heaven and stood under branches
exuding the aroma of myrrh.
“I too have revelled in the fields of light cooled by the ethereal
winds. I too have danced to the wonderful beat of music there, have
danced to the spontaneous beats of the great and easy dances of the
gods. Surely, the lanes through which your children walk are
fragrant, and lovely is the memory of their feet walking amid the
marvels of the flowers of that Paradise.
“But mine is a heavier tread, a mightier touch, because I dwell
on earth. There where I dwell, gods and demons battle in the night;
I am engaged in a wrestle with the forces of darkness and ignorance
on the borders of the spirit’s realm. My being has been taught to
bear and endure the uneven and arduous beat of life on earth. I hold
on to the edge of some great divine hope. I dare the impossible with
this painful struggle. In me the spirit of immortal love stretches its
arms out to embrace the whole of mankind. The heavens to which
you invite me seem to me too remote from suffering humanity. A
joy which I cannot share with all is for me imperfect. This is why I
reject your offer of a heaven for me and Satyavan alone. Oh, how I
wish I could spread myself to encircle and capture in my net of love
more and more hearts until love in us pervades the whole world!”
What Savitri has said here in these four lines -
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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.
p. 686 lines 564-567
may be taken by some readers as an expression of the highest

sentiments of modern Western liberalism or the noblest sentiments
of the moral idealism. But in Savitri’s case, these sentiments are
born out of a purely spiritual realisation of an inner unity of the soul
with all. The Gita (6.29) describes this exalted inner state as that in
which one sees the Self in all beings and all beings in the Self. It also
describes this state (6.30) as that in which one sees the Divine
everywhere and all in the Divine. This is a spiritual state in which
there is a total identity between you and your neighbour, and so the
question of asking you to love your neighbour as yourself does not
even arise. This experience of spiritual oneness goes beyond the
philosophical or moral notion of equality. For such a person how
can there be his lonely salvation? Since he sees all as himself, he
even takes upon himself the burden of their happiness and sorrow
by which he himself is not affected. For such a sage, doing good to
all creatures is his occupation and delight. He is a true lover of God
who loves God wherever he finds him and he finds him
everywhere.
Savitri continues in an ecstatic tone:
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!
O thou who soundst the trumpet in the lists,
Part not the handle from the untried steel,
529
Take not the warrior with his blow unstruck.
Are there not still a million fights to wage?
p. 687 lines 570-577
“O what a wondrous thing is this life beneath the wheeling stars in

the sky! For victory of life in the tournament with death, for
bending the fierce and difficult bow (like the one which Rama is
famed to have strung before he won the hand of Janaka’s daughter
Sita) and for the vital as the splendid sword of God – these are
mighty tasks worth achieving. For this O Lord, you have blown the
trumpet as at the beginning of a tournament. But please do not
separate the handle from the steel blade which it holds firmly in its
clasp, please do not take away the warrior from the battlefield
before he has had an opportunity to strike his blow.”
O king-smith, clang on still thy toil begun,

Weld us to one in thy strong smithy of life.
Thy fine-curved jewelled hilt call Savitri,
Thy blade’s exultant smile name Satyavan.
Fashion to beauty, point us through the world.
p. 687 lines 578-582
“O king-smith, clang on and weld us into one in the strong furnace

of your smithy of life. Let me, Savitri, be the fine-curved jewelled
handle of the sword, let Satyavan be the jubilant smile of the
shining blade. Fashion us into an exultant and beautiful weapon
and point us through the world.”
Break not the lyre before the song is found;

Are there not still unnumbered chants to weave?
O subtle-souled musician of the years,
530
Play out what thou hast fluted on my stops;
Arise from the strain their first wild plaint divined
And that discover which is yet unsung.
p. 687 lines 583-588
“Do not break the lyre before it has found the song it wishes to play.
Are there not still a great number of songs for us to play? O subtle-
souled musician, play out what you have started to play on the
instrument of my being. Ascend from the movement, the first wild
note played on it intuitively, and discover that which is still
unsung.”
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.
p. 687 lines 589-594
“I know that I can lift man’s soul to God. I know that man will
ultimately succeed in bringing down the Immortal down to earth.
Our will can labour and succeed only when permitted by your will.
But without your sanction and support, even the force of the titan
turns out to be a senseless whirlwind, and without you even the
strength of gods can be a trap.”
Savitri states here that her aim of transforming human life by
bringing down God’s consciousness down on earth can be achieved
because it seems to be God’s will too. She is not trying to do
something contrary to the divine Will. She is not driven by any
titanic ambition fuelled by the ego. Sri Aurobindo in dreaming of
the perfection of life on earth goes beyond what so far has been
531
thought possible by our Acharyas and leaders of thought. But this,
he has discovered from his own sadhana, is God’s own plan for
mankind, and that is why he is able to declare with such supreme
confidence, as he has done in the concluding paragraph of his book
The Mother that:
The supramental change is a thing decreed and

inevitable in the evolution of the earth-consciousness;
for its upward ascent is not ended and mind is not its
last summit.
Savitri concludes her reply with these words:
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.”
p. 687 lines 595-600
“Do not let the gulf of inconscience swallow the human race that is
still struggling through earth’s ignorance towards the Light of the
Divine. O thunderer with the lightnings of the soul, this creation of
which man is the leader now, do not let darkness and death
frustrate man in his quest for God’s perfection on earth; do not let
your bright sun sink unto inconscience and death. Achieve the
hidden decree of your firm resolve and the mandate of your secret
world-wide love.”
Savitri’s words seemed to get lost in the immensities of thought
which seize them at their high points and conceal their meaning and
532
they seem to have been lost in the unthinkable and the ineffable. But
these are the sources from which thoughts and speech – which
shape the future – originate.
This chapter is a brief summary of the entire argument of Savitri.
There is at the outset the assumption made by almost all spiritual
traditions that perfection in this life is impossible to achieve. This
world will for ever remain ‘anityam, asukham’ (transient and
unhappy). Some individuals can find escape from this world into
the kingdom of God, which is either within ourselves or in some
other world. For all those living in this world to attain this
realisation is impossible, because very few can attain to that inner
state which makes this liberation and release into another world
possible. So this world will always remain what it is. Therefore,
Savitri is offered an exclusive heaven for herself and Satyavan in
which they can live happily for ever. Savitri rejects this age-old
solution to human problems. She is totally averse to rejecting this
world in the name of spiritual happiness and fulfilment. If
spirituality has any value, it is as a resource to bring perfection to
this imperfect world. Savitri knows that this is a difficult goal to
achieve. But then why was this world created at all, if getting out of
it into some heaven is the only issue here? Are we suggesting that
that the Divine made a mistake in creating this world and that you
and I are now trying to correct his mistake by rejecting this world in
favour of some remote heaven?
Savitri therefore rejects the offer made to her by the Divine
figure standing before her. She opts for this world and wants to
continue the evolutionary struggle which has so far traversed from
the Inconscient to Matter, and from matter to Life, and from Life to
Mind, and then to higher and higher grades of the Mind. She has
understood God’s plan behind this creation. The One wanted to be
the Many but each of the many had to manifest God’s perfection in
all aspects of life. She knows that this supreme achievement cannot
be won with the mental consciousness as our highest resource. We
533
need to bring down here on earth a higher consciousness, the
supramental consciousness, which alone has the power to change
human nature. She and Satyavan want to go back to earth where
they will work together to make this supreme consummation
possible. This is the meaning of Savitri’s soul’s choice, which is a
part of the title of this canto and of Book XI of Savitri.
534
We have now seen on several occasions that Savitri brings a new

dynamics to man’s spiritual enterprise and a new purpose to his
existence on earth. She is realist enough to recognise that human life
today is riddled with death, desire and incapacities of various
kinds. However, she does not regard these circumstances as
permanent features of life, but only as so many existential
challenges to be overcome in the course of the evolutionary journey
towards perfection. The fulfilment of our life does not lie in some
extra-territorial realm like Vaikuntha or Kailasha, nor does it lie in
an existence of absorption in an inner liberation, peace and bliss
while the external being of man remains besieged by ignorance,
incapacity, sorrow, uncertainty and death. Therefore, as we have
seen, she refuses the offer of a separate of heaven of fulfilment for
Satyavan and herself. What she is seeking is not a heaven but
transformed territorial existence – a perfect life for the whole of
mankind here on earth. She pleads to the Supreme standing before
her to let her and Satyavan return to earth because they still have
‘unnumbered chants to weave’ to rid man of the burden of those
existential problems. She says with great confidence

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.
p. 687 lines 589-594
Savitri is also aware of the fact that this is the secret purpose of the
535
creator of this world. That is why she is seeking the Divine’s
blessings in this project of hers. She concludes her impassioned plea
for man’s fundamental right to live the life divine on earth with
these words:
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.
p. 687 lines 595-600
This defiant response from Savitri leaves the Godhead (the figure of
the Supreme standing in front of her) undaunted. With a bright
smile on his face, he says to her:
“If the nature of man and that of the earth get transformed and
become celestial, how can earth continue to exist? Heaven and earth
can never be one; they gaze at each other and long for each other,
but there is such a vast gulf between them which few can cross. The
dualism between earth and heaven is impossible to eradicate. None
coming from the ethereal sources from which all forms come can
touch the other shore which, although all can see, none can ever
reach.
“It is of course true that heaven’s light sometimes visits the mind
of earth, but heaven’s thoughts burn in the skies of the mind like
solitary stars. Heavenly aspirations and seekings, like the beautiful
and fluttering wings of birds, often move the human heart and fire
it with great hopes and dreams. Visions of joy, which for ever seem
to be beckoning man to rise beyond himself, stir him. But earth has
not yet realised any of these dreams and the lustre of these dreams
seems to be for ever diminishing.
536
“Some of these seeds of light and bliss bear sorrowful flowers.
They touch human heart like faint notes of harmony grasped from a
song half or indistinctly heard and they get lost amidst the
cacophony of several wandering voices. Some of these intimations
that touch humans are like foam from the tossing luminous seas
which reflect the beautiful but distant delight of gods; they are
raptures unknown to humankind, almost a miracle of happiness;
these thrill the earth and spread like a vague influence her mind
and senses.
“Earth is aware that above her little finite steps and scope, there
is a new pattern of perfection quite beyond her laws and rules. That
is a universe of self-found felicity, not dependent on anything
outside its own self. An inexpressible rhythm of timeless beats
pervades this world and this beat is one of the heart-beats of the
One, which has many different movements. That is a magical
universe created by the harmonies of the self; the freedom of the
infinite is the law there and all forms in that world are wonderful
and it would appear as though the Absolute has become a plastic
substance out of which they are fabricated. There, in that world, is
the All-Truth and also the All-Bliss.
“But that world is still too remote from earth. The earth can at
best boast of containing some fragments of a star-lost gleam; of a
few casual visits by the gods. All that visits bring her are no more
than a Light that fails, a divine Word that soon falls silent. Nothing
that these Gods can offer stays on earth for long. That is one great
inadequacy of this earth; she can neither receive enough from the
world of Gods, and very little of what she receives, can she retain
within herself.”
In this passage Savitri touches the heart of the problem of human
inadequacy. This is not the occasion to discuss the problems which
our rationalists have about the very concept of God. We assume
here that Gods exist and that they are not mere figments of the
believer’s imagination. By ‘Gods’ we mean beings or powers of
537
consciousness that dwell on a higher plane and shape the human
consciousness through their influence. The influence that the ‘Gods’
are able to exert on us determines the nature of our consciousness.
The nature of our consciousness should concern us more than the
perfection and the glory of the beings of the Gods. This is because
on the nature of our consciousness depends the world around us.
Therefore, to what extent our consciousness is able to reflect the
power and light of the Gods, or how much of the Divinity we can
now incarnate in our consciousness becomes of crucial importance.
Our consciousness is an arena open to various kinds of
influences, not all of them from the Gods alone. There are also
hostile forces in the occult worlds which often act upon the human
consciousness and corrupt it. Again, our consciousness has arisen
out of the Inconscient and so it has on it a large stamp of the source
from which it has arisen. Our own subconscient contains “dark
caverns” as the Rigveda describes them, a mental, a vital, and a
physical subconscient ending in what Sri Aurobindo has called the
Nescient. These regions harbour a multitude of brutal forces and
forms, including finally the forces of death and disintegration; and
these forces rise and contaminate the human consciousness in
various degrees. The influence received from the Gods of the higher
planes is thus ranged against all these various elements, some of
them decidedly hostile. Thus man’s consciousness is a battleground
on which the forces of good and evil contend for supremacy.
As noted earlier, the world we create around us depends very
much on our consciousness, and the world we have managed to
create around ourselves happens to be still corrupt and imperfect.
That shows that the consciousness we possess today is itself
imperfect and corrupt. Not only is this corruption and imperfection
reflected in the life all around us in the form of human suffering and
human depravity but also it has shown itself capable of harbouring
the great perpetrators of evil in our midst such as Hitler, Mussolini,
Stalin, Idi Amin and Osama Bin Laden. These are not just
538
autonomous beings unrelated to us, and we cannot just shrug our
shoulders and disown responsibility for the monstrous forces they
unleash. They are merely the concrete and objective forms of certain
tendencies we ourselves harbour and nurse in our consciousness;
and therefore they feed on us. When we think of the century we
have just left behind, the harm done by some of these
personifications of evil mentioned above eclipses all the good that
our saintly Gandhis, Florence Nightingales and Martin Luther
Kings have done. Our world is what it is – so full of imperfections,
corruption, and suffering caused by man’s cruelty to man, as well as
by death and incapacity – a) because our consciousness is still not
capable of reflecting the divine influences in a sufficient measure,
and b) because the Gods that have so far descended into this
creation are not powerful enough to counter through their influence
and action the effects of what may be called the evil or asuric
tendencies in our consciousness. From this follows the conclusion
that there can be no real change or improvement in the human
condition unless man acquires a greater or higher consciousness
than the mental consciousness he now has, which can receive more
powerful divine influences or influences hitherto not accessible to
him. This would require that man rises from the mental to what Sri
Aurobindo has called the supramental consciousness.
To resume our study of Savitri:
“From the earth you can have a few glimpses of the heights of
the perfect world but it is incapable of having a lasting view of this
world.
A few can climb to an unperishing sun,

Or live on the edges of the mystic moon
And channel to earth-mind the wizard ray.
p. 689 lines 644-646
539
“But only a few can climb to the unperishing sun of spiritual truth
or very few can live on the edges of the mystic moon of spiritual
bliss and direct the earth-mind to this perfection or create a channel
through which the influences emanating from this illumined world
of truth and bliss can be received on earth.
The heroes and the demigods are few

To whom the close immortal voices speak
And to their acts the heavenly clan are near.
Few are the silences in which Truth is heard,
Unveiling the timeless utterance in her deeps;
Few are the splendid moments of the seers.
p. 689 lines 647-652
“There have been until now very few heroes and demigods among
the humans who can communicate with the immortal Gods and
receive their influences. Very few human beings are close enough to
the Gods in consciousness and the truth of these Gods is not yet
heard clearly. The splendid moments of the seers precisely aim at
this communion, but even such moments are very rare.
Heaven’s call is rare, rarer the heart that heeds;
The doors of light are sealed to common mind
And earth’s needs nail to earth the human mass,
Only in an uplifting hour of stress
Men answer to the touch of greater things:
Or, raised by some strong hand to breathe heaven-air,
They slide back to the mud from which they climbed;
In the mud of which they are made, whose law they know
They joy in safe return to a friendly base,
And, though something in them weeps for glory lost
And greatness murdered, they accept their fall.
p. 689 lines 653-663
540
“The call of the Spirit is very rare among humans. And even among
those who are called, fewer still heed the call and respond to it. For
the average human mind the doors of knowledge are sealed and the
needs of his outer being nail him to the earth to such an extent that
he behaves as though it were the only reality. Men sometimes
respond to the touch of great ideas and ideals but that is only for a
short time and that too under the inspiration and influence of the
uplifting hour. Often it is the inspired example or teachings of a
strong and noble human leader that lifts us and we aspire to breathe
heaven-air. But once this uplifting element or the inspiring
individual leaves the scene, men slide back to the mud from which
they had climbed to a higher level of existence. They slide back into
the world of ignorance, corruption and falsehood. They are much
more comfortable in that downward slide because they are made
for the most part from ignorance and they understand very well the
laws that govern ignorance. They return to their base in ignorance
and take delight like one who has romped home. And yet
sometimes they miss something of the glory that they had
experienced briefly and weep for it, for the greatness they have
murdered, and quietly accept the fall.
To be the common man they think the best,

To live as others live is their delight.
For most are built on Nature’s early plan
And owe small debt to a superior plane;
The human average is their level pitch,
A thinking animal’s material range.
p. 689 lines 664-669
“They come to believe that it is best to be the common man, and

take delight in living as other folks live. This is because most people
541
are built according to an earlier cast of evolutionary nature and do
not have any natural affiliations to any higher planes of
consciousness. The average human level is their ideal and they
remain for ever confined to the range of a thinking animal.
“Nature climbs the ladder of evolution step by step and it is a
long ascent, and in the rigid economy of cosmic life, each creature is
assigned a place and a task and it is bound to these by the form
taken by its nature and by the force which nature invests in it. The
evolutionary force has bound each being by its own swarupa and
swabhava. One cannot easily disturb this settled order and
functioning without upsetting the nature’s balance. Any attempt to
do this will create a huge disturbance in the established order of
things, and there will appear a huge gap in the pattern set up by
nature. If there were no men left on this earth and all were to
become transformed into brilliant gods, then the human species
which now functions as a mediating stair between the lower and
higher species would be lost. Such a linking stair is indeed very
much needed because the consciousness awakened in Matter needs
to get used to the rigours of a slow and difficult evolution through
the vital and mental realms until it reaches the miraculous borders
of a spiritual realisation and the glories of the soul world.
“My will, my call, is there universally in men and things. But the
huge python-like Inconscient lies at the bottom of this creation and
tries to pull back to its breast of Night and Death and Sleep the
whole of this creation lest it escapes its hold. It holds most of this
creation in the dark and dumb abysm and allows only a little
consciousness to escape from this prison, but it is intolerant of the
growing light in this consciousness and tries to hold it back as close
to the mouth of its cavernous being. The Inconscient is very much
like a fond ignorant mother who tries to keep her child forever tied
to the apron strings of Nescience.
“This mysterious creation has come out of the Inconscient, where
all consciousness sleeps in a slumber of self-oblivion. The
542
Inconscient itself cannot understand this mystery without the help
of man’s mind. Man is its key to unlock a door of consciousness (of
self-awareness). But this very Inconscient holds man dangled in its
grasp; it has drawn a huge circle around his thoughts so that they
can range far and wide but within the bounds of the circle drawn
around them. It shuts his heart to the light of the Spirit. Man’s mind
is closed from above by a dazzling light that shines above it and is
also closed from the bottom by a black and binding border. He
seeks the Truth not directly but through words and images about
the truth. He pores laboriously over the surfaces and brute outsides
(as he does in his science) and when he delves within, his cautious
steps do not go deeper than the shallow seas. Therefore even his
Knowledge is a form of Ignorance. His view is barred from his own
inner depths; he cannot look on the face of the Unknown Reality.
How do you expect such a limited being to see with the Omniscient
eyes, and how can he will with the Omnipotent force? How can
man who has made a fetish of his finiteness ever see or understand
the Infinite?
“Savitri, you are no doubt very compassionate and therefore
very eager to help man to throw off the limitations of his ignorance.
But this is too huge a task, best left to the slow pace of Nature
inching its way upwards through the ages as it follows the
directions of the Will that works even through the Inconscient.
Leave the earthly race to its imperfect light. All shall be achieved in
the fullness of Time.
“Although the human race is bound to its human nature, to its
strengths and limitations, man’s soul is greater than his present fate.
This spirit in him can rise imperiously above the circumstances
imposed by Time and Space and detach itself from subjection to the
universal common nature because of which all life is subject to the
dualities of grief and joy. Thus freed from the hold of the universal
law, the radiant spirit can blaze its way triumphantly across the
limitations of the mind, no matter how obscuring, and burn alone in
543
the skies of the Eternal, an inhabitant of a vast and endless calm.
“O Savitri, O Flame Divine, draw back into your own luminous
self. Or return to your original form and power on the seer-summit
of thought and world. You are indeed the partner of my eternal
being. Be one with the infinity of my power. For you are the World-
Mother and the Bride of the Supreme. Withdraw your identification
with the fruitless yearning of earth for a perfect life and detach
yourself from this unconvincing dream of the earth, and recover
your wings that can fly across infinity and pass back into the Power
from which you have come. You can raise your flight to that height,
and when your heart rises above the unsatisfied beats on earth, it
can feel once more the immortal and spiritual joy of a soul that
never lost its felicity by descending to earth and its woes. Raise your
heart of love which has fallen into the abyss of desire and moves
about in an agitated manner in that gulf. Liberate yourself for ever
from Nature’s forms and find out what the aimless cycles of Time
seek to realise in earthly shapes.
“Break your mould of mortality into eternity. Melt like lightning
into the invisible flame that you really are. O ocean-like being, draw
in and clasp the waves that roll on your bosom and be happy for
ever in that all-encompassing surge. Become one with the stillness
of your depths, and in that stillness you shall know the Lover and
the Loved who become one, discarding what divides you from him.
Receive your lover into boundless Savitri, and merge yourself into
infinite Satyavan. O miracle, cease where you began”.
In one sense, the Supreme Being proclaims here the ultimate
negation of everything – of this creation, of the human enterprise on
earth and the significance of Savitri’s role as the Avatar; but more
about this in our next chapter.
544
Savitri has now heard from the figure of the Supreme standing in
front of her a most persuasive appeal for relinquishing what she
regards as her life’s mission. As we have seen, Savitri has been
depicted in this epic poem as an incarnation of the Supreme Mother
come down on earth to take the evolutionary ascent, now
epitomised in man, one step higher – to lift man, and with him
evolution itself, one step higher, from the mental to the
Supramental stage. This is not the work that can be accomplished
by a Vibhuti, by an exceptionally brilliant manifestation of the
Supreme in a human being. Such a mission requires the direct
descent of the Supreme Consciousness into a human embodiment.
But in the speech we have just heard from the Supreme, there is an
appeal to Savitri to give up her Avataric mission and return to her
original status as the ‘partner of the divine’s unhoured eternity’’ and to
merge with the Divine as the ‘infinity’ of his power. During the long
colloquy with the God of Death Savitri had to encounter similar
appeals, often supported by strong arguments. So encountering a
negative attitude is not something new for Savitri. But this time the
negation is total and final.
This time the arguments advanced by the wondrous figure of the
Supreme, who has replaced the God of Death but who still pursues
his agenda as relentlessly as Death did, are quite formidable. The
first one is that earth and heaven are destined to remain separate for
ever although the earth has always aspired to reach heaven. The
second argument is that ‘A few can climb to an unperishing sun’, and
that:

545
Page 689 lines 653-657
The third argument is that even among those who manage to scale
these heights, very few feel comfortable there, and ‘when the
uplifting hour of stress’ subsides, they prefer to slide back to ‘the mud
from which they climbed’ because they feel comfortable there. The
fourth argument is that ‘Each creature to its appointed task and place/ is
bound by his nature’s form, his spirit’s force’. In other words, man is
cast by nature into a certain mould of swarupa and swabhava. It
would be difficult to break this settled arrangement made by
Nature. The fifth argument is that man, as he is now made, is
playing a crucial and indispensable role in the scheme of things. He
is now the mediating stair by which the Spirit once awakened in
Matter winds its way and gradually learns the difficult task of
growing through the difficult intermediate stages until it is ready
for the glory of the Oversoul. The next argument is that the
Inconscient out of which this creation has emerged is unwilling to
let man seek his liberation out of her clutches. She has made sure
that his mind and heart are forever under her control; she has put
severe limits to their growth such that omniscience and
omnipotence are for ever beyond his reach. He is even barred from
his own inner depths. “Therefore, O Savitri’, he says:
Leave to the circling aeons’ tardy pace

And to the working of the inconscient Will,
Leave to its imperfect light the earthly race:
All shall be done by the long act of Time.
Page 691 lines 712-715
546
Man is best left alone to his fate as it will be worked out in her own
time by Nature in her wisdom.
Man is not only a helpless creature caught up in Time and space
and tied down to his own kind but there is also the soul in him
which will one day free him from the cosmic commonalty and raise
him to his highest destiny. The suggestion made here is that some
day his soul will gain its liberation, while the rest of him will for
ever remain what it is already. This is a state that nothing can
change.
Then he tries to persuade Savitri to give up her Avataric mission
of trying to persuade human nature to change so that man can
achieve perfection not only in his inner life but in its outer
manifestations through body, life and mind as well. He asks her to
withdraw into her luminous self and be one with the infinity of the
Divine. She is in reality ‘the World-Mother and the Bride’, the bride of
the Supreme. So long as there is a manifestation, Satyavan and
Savitri as individuals will remain always divided, separated. Savitri
can merge only with the infinite Satyavan, and only the boundless
Savitri can receive Satyavan into her.
This is almost the final appeal that is made to Savitri to give up
her mission. We have seen how in the first phase of this long
colloquy, the God of Death was very haughty and dismissive of
Savitri. When these tactics failed, the adversary began to confront
Savitri with arguments from almost all philosophic positions, from
Nihilism to Idealism, almost from Sartre to Shankaracharya. Savitri
does not dismiss any argument of the God of Death as untenable
but points out in each case how one-sided it is. She confronts the
God of Death with a truth which is integral. At a later stage, the
God of Death accepts defeat and gives up his case. But very soon, he
is replaced with a wonderful image of the Supreme, who is friendly,
but he too uses subtle ways of testing Savitri’s resolve, as we have
seen. His speech which we have just now analysed is his very last
attempt to dissuade Savitri. This is a finite world and is destined to
547
remain imperfect and ‘anitya’ and ‘asukham’, transient and unhappy,
in the words of the Gita. No Avatar can rescue the manifested world
from its imperfection.
We have now reviewed the implications of the long appeal made
by the figure of the Supreme to Savitri contained in lines 607 to 755
of Book XI. He makes the apparently irrefutable argument that
although the human race is bound to its own kind, the soul of man
is greater than his fate. He urges her to withdraw into her luminous
soul and thus return to her original might. He reminds her that she
is the World Mother and the Bride. He entreats her to rise out of the
fruitless yearning of earth’s life and pass back into the Power from
which she came. This is the same kind of advice which traditionally
spirituality gives to all of us suffering mortals. It does not make any
difference that Savitri is no ordinary mortal but an Avatar. There is
no perfection possible here on earth, so withdraw into the Kingdom
of God within you and live there in your soul.
Like a wave in the ocean, be one with the surge of the ocean. In
the manifested world, the Lover and the Loved are always separate;
they can truly be united only as spirits. ‘O miracle, where thou
beganst, there cease!’ is the final word spoken to Savitri by the figure
of the Supreme standing by her side.
Savitri is unmoved either by the logic or by the eloquence of the
Supreme. She has something to say in response to the position that
the manifested world is not real but only the spirit is, therefore it
does not matter if one withdraws from the manifested world when
the going gets tough. She now reveals as it were the metaphysical
foundation for her faith in the manifested world. She says:
“In vain are you tempting two spirits with bliss saved out of a
suffering world. My soul and Satyavan’s are linked indissolubly for
the one task for which we have taken birth on earth.”
In vain thou temptst with solitary bliss
548
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.
Page: 692 lines 757-763
“There is one task for which we have taken birth here – to raise the
world to God in deathless light. We have to bring God’s perfection
down to the world and thus to change the imperfect human life
swaddled by death, desire and incapacity to life divine, to a life of
perfection, characterised by immortality, bliss and power. I am firm
in my resolve and will always hold on to my will to save the world
and man. O blissful Godhead, even the charm of your enchanting
voice cannot take control of my will and snare it. I shall not
abandon the earth to gain other worlds, however happy they may
be.
“How do you think this world has come into manifestation?
There has always dwelt in men and things the Eternal’s vast Idea
(the Real-Idea or a creative Knowledge-Will, a truth that will be self-
effective) and his dynamic Will. It was because of this that this vast
creation began and the manifestation has come so far. Otherwise
from where else could have come about this vain wilderness of
stars, these mighty, bare revolutions of the sun?”
The implication here is that all this is intended by the Divine and
therefore this vast, inexplicable universe has come about, with so
many things about it we cannot easily comprehend. This idea is
further expressed in a most poetic way in the following lines:
Who made the soul of futile life in Time,

Planted a purpose and a hope in the heart,
549
Set Nature to a huge and meaningless task
Or planned her million-aeoned effort’s waste?
What force condemned to birth and death and tears
These conscious creatures crawling on the globe?
Page: 692 lines 773-778
“Who made the soul, (which is eternal and immortal,) in the

otherwise futile life which begins and ends in time? Who planted a
purpose, this aspiration and hope in the human heart ‘the divination
of Godhead, the impulse towards perfection, the search after pure Truth
and unmixed bliss, the sense of a secret immortality’57 ? Who set Nature
to the huge and seemingly meaningless task of manifesting such a
vast and complex creation, or who planned this wasteful effort of
Nature which has been going on for so many aeons and which
might continue for several aeons more? Who or what force
condemned to birth, tears and death all these conscious creatures
crawling, running about or flying or walking on this globe?”
The answer of course is obvious – the Divine Creator, who is also
the Lord-dancer on the stage of this universe, inviting all of us to
participate in the ecstatic play.
These few lines we have just examined remind us of a splendid
poem by Sri Aurobindo which makes us gallop to its anapaestic
measure58 . I shall reproduce here just two stanzas from this poem
entitled “Who”, written by Sri Aurobindo even before he came to
Pondicherry.
In the blue of the sky, in the green of the forest

Whose is the hand that painted the glow?
57
The Life Divine p.1
58
An anapaest is a metrical foot consisting of two short syllables followed by one
long syllable or of two unstressed syllables followed by one stressed syllable: for
example the word ‘unaware’.
550
When the winds were asleep in the wombs of the ether,
Who was it roused them and bade them to blow?
He is lost in his heart, in the cavern of Nature,

He is found in the brain where he builds up the thought:
In the pattern of and bloom of the flowers He is woven,
In the luminous net of the star he is caught.
SABCL 5:40
The next few lines take up an idea that was first raised by the figure
of the Supreme and then dismissed as not of much consequence.
If earth can look up to the light of heaven

And hear an answer to her lonely cry,
Not vain their meeting, nor heaven’s touch a snare.
p. 692 lines 779-781
“If earth can look up to the light of heaven and receive a response to
her lonely cry, their meeting can not be considered vain, nor can the
touch of heaven be regarded as a snare.”
This seems to be a rejoinder to the following lines from the figure
of the Supreme which describes the contact of heaven and earth as
not being very fruitful. I shall quote those very lines in which he
says this:
Heaven and earth towards each other gaze

Across a gulf that few can cross, none touch,
Arriving through a vague ethereal mist
Out of which all things form that move in space,
The shore that all can see but never reach.
p. 688 lines 611-615
551
The next few lines from Savitri are among the most crucial lines in
the whole poem:
If thou and I are true, the world is true;

Although thou hide thyself behind thy works,
To be is not a senseless paradox;
Since God has made earth, earth must make in her God;
What hides within her breast she must reveal.
I claim thee for the world that thou hast made.
p.692-93 lines 782-787
“If you and I are true, then the world also must be true. It can’t be a
falsehood, a mere illusion, although you hide yourself behind your
works. In this creation, we see the works of the Creator but not the
Creator himself. The creator has become the creation from a part of
his own being. God has made this earth: God has become this earth
and so God is bound to emerge out of this earth. After all God hides
in the breast of this creation, and so the earth must reveal what she
already has hidden in her. All I am doing here is to claim you for
the world you have created out of yourself.”
The supposedly predominant Indian view of this world, at least
according to the Western understanding of it, is that Brahman or the
Supreme divine Consciousness alone is real and the world is an
illusion and a mithya. Sri Aurobindo is totally opposed to this view
which is articulated most vigorously by an Adwaitic creed
associated with Shankaracharya and his followers. Sri Aurobindo
holds that the world is real because it is the becoming of the
Supreme Divine. It is not a creation in the sense a potter creates a
pot and the pot is separated from the potter in substance and
existence but is casually dependent on the creator. Sri Aurobindo
uses the word “manifestation” in place of “creation” because the
552
former implies that the product, the world, is inherent in the
producer. If the world is of the very substance of the Supreme
Divine, who is real, then world is also inescapably real. The normal
theistic conception of creation ex nihilo (from or out of Nothing) is
unacceptable to Sri Aurobindo because it would make Nothing a
second reality alongside the creator. Sri Aurobindo rejects
Shankarite Mayavada because, according to him, not only is it
unsound in its metaphysics, but it also fails to attach any value to
our life in the world.
Because of the excessive prestige accorded to the school of
Shankaracharya in the West, the Mayawada, this stereotyped view
of Indian philosophy, is prevalent in India as well as outside India.
This view, as we have seen, is characterised by the position that the
world is an illusion and the Brahman alone is real. Any action in an
illusory world is of no significance and the only worthwhile action
is that which enables one to develop a thorough distaste for the
world and encourages one to escape from it. Therefore according to
this view nothing needs be done to develop the world in its own
terms, and there can be no progress in society. Sri Aurobindo’s The
Life Divine denies this position and argues against it extensively. The
arguments that move Sri Aurobindo more deeply are the arguments
which arise from the effect of the mayavada on the values of a
society. He points out that the belief in the world as an illusion can
bring about a weakening of the life-impulse and an increasing
littleness of its motives. At best it leads to an absorption in an
ordinary narrow living. Mayavada does not support the great
progressive human idealism by which we are spurred to a collective
self-development. Sri Aurobindo provides a positive programme in
contrast to mayavada in which the world and each being living in it
is thoroughly real, intrinsically valuable, and progressing toward
greater value. This much should suffice at the moment on the
significance of Sri Aurobindo’s insistence that the world is real. We
may have to return to this central issue in Sri Aurobindo’s
553
philosophy at some later stage.
Then Savitri continues and presents another principal doctrine
associated with Sri Aurobindo.
If man lives bound by his humanity,

If he is tied for ever to his pain,
Let a greater being then arise from man,
The superhuman with the Eternal mate
And the Immortal shine through earthly forms.
Else were creation vain and this great world
A nothing that in Time’s moments seems to be.
p. 693 lines 788-794
Savitri now turns to another point raised by the figure of the

Supreme earlier. He had said that man is irreplaceable on the
evolutionary ladder, because he is now the mediating stair ‘By
which the spirit awake in Matter winds / Accepting the circuits of the
middle way’. In reply Savitri now says that if, for whatever reason,
man is bound for ever to his humanity, and if he is for ever bound
to pain, ‘Let a greater being then arise from man’, so that this
superhuman being arising out of man can carry on the evolutionary
torch further until the Immortal divine shines through earthly
forms.
Savitri is suggesting here that if man cannot hold within himself
the greater consciousness called the Supermind, let there be a new
successor to man who will have the capacity to hold this new
consciousness. This has often happened during the course of
evolution. When a higher form of consciousness than that capable of
functioning in the vegetable kingdom had to descend on earth, the
world of sentient life (the animal life-form) evolved here and with
that animal life flourished here. When it was time for the Mental
consciousness to come down in its full measure, the animal world
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until then was found inadequate and the human being appeared on
the scene. Similarly if for whatever reason the present human
species proves incapable of receiving the Supermind, a successor to
man, a form superior to him, will appear on the scene.
Else were creation vain and this great world

A nothing that in Time’s moments seems to be.
p. 693 lines 793-794
If this consummation does not happen, then this creation which has
come thus far will be in vain and this great world which exists in
time will have no issue, or final resolution. But I am sure, she says,
that this shall not happen.
But I have seen through the insentient mask;

I have felt a secret spirit stir in things
Carrying the body of the growing God:
It looks through veiling forms at veilless truth;
It pushes back the curtain of the gods;
It climbs towards its own eternity.
p. 693 lines 795-800
“But I have seen”, says Savitri, “through the mask of the insentience
that covers the evolving spirit. I have sensed a secret stir in the spirit
carrying the body of the growing body of the God. It looks through
the veiling forms at the truth that is unconcealed. It is impatient to
push back the curtain put over by the Gods, to climb back to its own
eternity, to its own perfect manifestation on earth.”
555
The figure of the Supreme standing beside Savitri tries to dissuade

her one more time. He already knows who Savitri is and has seen
how adamantine is her resolve to enable earth to grow into the
Divine perfection. Her one strong argument is that since ‘God has
made earth’, (God has become earth,) earth must remake itself into
God. The tussle now seems to be between Being and its Becoming.
The God asks Savitri to go back to her original Being
O flame, withdraw into thy luminous self.

Or else return to thy original might
On a seer-summit above and world;
Partner of my unhoured eternity,
Be one with the infinity of my power:
p. 691 lines 726-730
But Savitri argues that this creation is real, and what is already
hidden in the earth’s breast, the earth must have the freedom to
reveal. If man is too bound by his humanity,
If he is tied for ever to his pain,

Let a greater being then arise from man,
The superhuman with the Eternal mate
And the Immortal shine through earthly forms.
p. 693 lines 789-792
The God standing by her side now makes one last attempt to
dissuade Savitri from pursuing her goal. He says to her:
“O living power of divine creativity manifest in the world, you
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can indeed create all that the spirit has dreamed; you are indeed the
force by which I made these worlds. You are my vision, my will and
my voice. You are the power which executes my will, and you are
my voice and through you I express myself. But you have
knowledge as well; you know the world-plan and you also know at
what a slow pace Time moves.
“In the intensity of the drive of your passionate heart and in
your zeal to redeem man and earth, do not be impatient with the
obstacles placed by time and with the slow pace at which evolution
puts its lazy steps. Do not challenge the spirit in this ignorant world
to dare too soon the adventure of the Light; do not prod the bound
and slumbering godhead in man and wake him up since he will
then find himself in the endless realms of the unknown and unseen
beyond thought the last limits of the limiting mental consciousness.
Do not push man beyond the perilous border into the
Superconscient’s realm and into the danger of the Infinite.
“But if you are unwilling to wait for Time and God, then you can
do your work and force your will on Fate. But this is not where you
can make that great choice and alter fate. This is not where the
Supreme Voice can give its sanction to your choice. But for that you
will have to climb on a ladder of greater worlds where no world can
be. So far, I have been taking you through my symbol kingdoms,
first through the dark night of negation, and then through the twilit
worlds of doubts and dreams, and even now you are in my symbol
world of absolute and pure day. I am now releasing you from all
these symbol worlds.
“The realms in which Greater Life reveals its mystery and
miracle, or the summits of the mental region, or the magic worlds
where the subtle physical hides its bright secrecies – these are not
the realms in which the Eternal’s command joining the issue of
destiny to its origin can be heard. Because these regions are only the
mediating links; they do not have the originating vision, nor can
they take the action which takes this world to its fulfilment, or
557
provide the support that holds perpetually the cosmic pile of this
creation.
“There are two powers that hold the two ends of this creation in
Time; these are the Spirit that foresees everything and Matter that
brings into manifestation the thoughts of the Spirit. Matter is the
dumb executor of all the decrees of God or the Spirit; it does so
without leaving out even an iota or a dot. It is an agent who doesn’t
question. Although it is Inconscient and bare, it brings into
manifestation through evolution the content which is bequeathed to
it as its charge by the Divine – his intentions in Time and Space, in
inanimate things as well as in animate beings. Matter fulfils without
changing anything the task given to it, it does not cancel even a
small part of what is done. It does not deviate even one bit the fiat
of the Divine; it does not change the steps of the unseen.
“If you wish to liberate man and earth, ascend to the heights of
the Spirit and from there look down on life and discover the truth of
God and man and the world. Only then, seeing all and knowing all,
do what you propose to do. But first of all, rise O soul, into your
timeless self; and from there decide how to change destiny and then
stamp your will on it.”
It should be noted here that much of this is really not new to
Savitri, nor does this in any way a contradict Savitri. Savitri knows
who she really is, and she has been through an intense tapasya prior
to the day on which Satyavan was destined to die. Her inner
spiritual resources are all easily accessible to her now. She has
already discovered the Cosmic Spirit and attained the Cosmic
Consciousness, as we saw in Canto 7 of Book VII. So Savitri is ready
even to ascend into her timeless self.
Besides, as mentioned above, the god is trying to be helpful in
the speech we just had from him. He frees her from all the heaven-
worlds which he had imposed on her during their journey. He tells
her also what she must do to stamp her will on Fate and Time. He
558
admits that Matter is bound to execute all that the Spirit wills.
Matter may look dumb and even Inconscient but it does not alter in
any way the obligation on it to execute what the Spirit wills without
leaving out even an iota or dot.
Two are the Powers that hold the ends of Time;

Spirit foresees, Matter unfolds its thought,
The dumb executor of God’s decrees,
Omitting no iota and no dot,
Agent unquestioning, inconscient, stark,
Evolving inevitably a charged content,
Intention of his force in Time and Space,
In animate beings and inanimate things;
Immutably it fulfils its ordered task,
It cancels not a tittle of things done;
p. 694 lines 841-850
If Savitri is convinced that it is the Spirit’s design or plan to bring

perfection to man on earth, then nothing can stop this from
happening. It must be noted that this is the speech of the so-called
adversary of Savitri, who has now appeared by her side in the
wondrous form of the supreme – the place occupied earlier by the
God of death before he was vanquished by Savitri.
As soon as the God ended and the sounds gave way to silence, a
power went forth and shook the founded spheres and loosed the
stakes that hold the tents of form. Savitri was now freed from the
hold of vision and the coverings of thought, and the heaven-worlds
around Savitri vanished in the spiritual light in the vast theatre of
Space.
Then there was a movement all around, a cry, a word was heard
beginningless in its vast discovery and timeless in its return beyond
the range of thought. Savitri hears the eternal Thought set in the
559
rhythm of the calm seas and vibrating ineffably in orbits beyond
Space and on the roads of the timeless. Savitri now lived fulfilled in
an ineffable world.
She felt that she was the energy of the Sat-Chit-Ananda and
dwelt in a measureless Reality as a rapture, a being, a force, a many-
motioned and interlinked fullness; she felt that she was a luminous
spouse of the Divine extending a vast embrace in which all are held
in the immense Divine delight, bearing the eternity of spirit, bearing
the burden of universal love – a wonderful mother of innumerable
souls. She felt she knew all things, imagined or willed. Her ear was
now receptive to the ideal sound; her sight was no more bound to
the convention of form. Her heart, she felt, had become a thousand
doors of oneness. She saw a sanctuary of brooding light and on the
other side of which was the beyond.
Then the enormous fiat paused in its formidable movement.
Silence with all that it contained rolled back in the Unknowable.
Savitri was absolutely still. She transcended within herself the
phenomenon of form. Even that radiant god standing by her side
was not to be seen any more. Savitri felt that around her there lived
a tremendous spirit like a mysterious flame around a melting pearl.
In that phantom-like atmosphere, with even Space abolished, there
was a voice speaking words which the ears could not hear. Now
Savitri has to face the ultimate test of her resolve to go beyond the
goal of personal salvation, peace, silence and bliss for herself. She
has rejected this ideal for a nobler ideal for keeping working on
earth with Satyavan as her companion until she can convince
humanity of the need to rise to a higher consciousness and bring
that consciousness down to make human life here perfect. But so far
the choice that Savitri had made was theoretical, in the realm of
ideals. But now the God confronts her with a most tempting offer
which will have immediate practical consequences.
The God is willing to offer her a great choice, which in fact turns
out to be four choices or in the form of boons. But it is important to
560
note that Savitri has a choice in each case. Nothing is thrust on her
without her consent. What does the God offer? As the first boon, he
offers her Peace and a most happy cessation of being.
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.
p. 696 lines 898-907
The Voice said, “Choose, O spirit, this choice will not be given
again. For now I am speaking to you from the highest heights of my
being. I offer you the peace that is beyond name and form, the peace
in which all things come to rest. In a happy vast sublime cessation
of being you will know what felicity of extinguished flame is – the
immense extinction in eternity, a point that disappears in eternity. It
is like the sinking of a wave in a limitless sea, the end of the trouble
of all wandering thoughts, the end of the journey of your pilgrim
soul. Accept, O music, that the notes of music which life is
producing for you have become weary, O stream, the banks of the
channel through which you flow are already breached and broken.”
The moments fade into eternity, and there is some yearning
within a bosom unknown, and Savitri feels this and her heart
silently replied: “Your peace, O Lord, give me your peace as a boon
to keep within for the magnificent soul of man struggling amid the
roar and ruin of wild Time; give me your calm, O lord, which brings
561
your joy with it.”
This first boon is in essence the boon of Nirvana – the peace
beyond name and form, the peace in which all things rest, the
feeling of felicity at the sublime extinction of a flame. This is like the
sinking of a wave into a limitless sea. Savitri gratefully accepts the
offer of peace but adds an important condition to it. She says: “Give
peace to me as a boon to keep within for the magnificent soul of
man struggling here in the roar and ruin of wild time”. She wants
the peace and the joy it brings for man who is still leading an
anguished life on earth. She wants it to be available to man to
pursue his goal of perfection of life on earth.
Limitless like the ocean around a solitary island, the cry of the
eternal rose a second time, and the god offered a second boon:
“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.”
p. 696 lines 919-024
“O Savitri, the gates to the ineffable are wide open right in front of
you. My spirit leans down to liberate you by breaking the knot of
earth that has held you down. Drawn to a oneness without sign or
thought, my force shall throw down all walls and fences that
separate the earth beings. It will strip heaven bare, so that you can
look at the whole thing with the large eye of infinity, and it will
unweave the stars and dismantle the creation so that it may pass
into silence.”
Following these words that were capable of destroying the
world, there was an immense pause during which Savitri heard a
562
million creatures cry to her. Through the tremendous stillness of her
mind, Savitri spoke: “Give me your oneness, O Lord, your oneness
in the many hearts that are turned to me; give to me the sweet
infinity of your own numberless souls.”
Savitri wants oneness, not the oneness which annihilates all
differences in this world but which is the oneness of the souls, the
sweet infinity of many souls coming together.
Then she is offered the third boon:
“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.”
p. 697 lines 933-937
Retreating mightily like a sea in ebb, the great voice swelled a third
time in admonition and said, “I spread everywhere the shelter of
my wings, and I offer you the refuge of my powerful wings. From
its great depths, beyond the reach of any person or thing, my power
of utmost splendour looks forth, held still in its majesty of sleep and
withdrawn from dreadful whirlings of the world below.”
In answer to the voice, there was a sob of things, as if to remind
Savitri how much this power is needed to overcome all the myriad
inadequacies of life on earth everywhere. And passionately Savitri
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.”
p. 697 lines 940-942
563
“Give to me your energy, O Lord, to gather all men and women,
and to take all things and creatures in their grief and gather them
lovingly like a mother into my arms.” Once again, she accepts the
boon to be able to continue with her mission on earth.
Solemn and distant like the note of an angel’s lyre, the warning
sound was heard one last great time. It said, ”I open to you the wide
eyes of my solitude to reveal to you the sheer rapture of my bliss,
where it lies in a pure and perfect hush, unmoving in a trance of
ecstasy. There it was resting from the sweet madness of the dance
from which the creative throb of hearts was first born.”
A hymn of great adoration climbed like a musical beat of winged
uniting souls breaking the silence with this appeal. In an immense
yearning, Savitri’s response is:
“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.”
p. 697 lines 955-958
“Give me your embrace, O Lord, which takes away the living knot
of pain, your bliss in which all creatures breathe, the magic flowing
waters of love. Give me all your sweetness for earth and for men
and women living on it.”
Before I conclude, I would like to comment briefly on this
episode of the four boons, or the choices given to Savitri four times
and her responses to these. In the original Mahabharata story as
narrated by Vyasa, during the colloquy between Yama and Savitri,
Yama is greatly impressed by Savitri’s knowledge of Dharma, her
cultured manner of speaking and her language, even her polished
564
diction. So pleased is he with Savitri for these extraordinary
accomplishments of hers that he urges Savitri to seek from him a
boon asking for anything she wants except Satyavan’s life. Savitri
asks for the restoration of the eye-sight of the father of Satyavan,
Dyumatsena. Yama grants this but he is not satisfied. He asks her to
seek from him another boon, and then another and then another,
until he ends up giving her four boons. For a second boon, Savitri
asks that Dyumatsena’s lost kingdom be restored to him. By the
third boon, she asks that her sonless father be granted a hundred
valiant sons. Then Yama encourages her to ask for a fourth boon.
Savitri then says: “By our union, mine with Satyavan, let there be a
hundred sons, noble and heroic in deed, well-born, extending the
glory of the house.” Then when Yama realises that Savitri cannot
have the sons he had bestowed on her by his fourth boon, except
through Satyavan, he bestows on her the fifth boon – that of
Satyavan’s life. And with that Satyavan is restored to life.
Unlike Yama in Vyasa’s Mahabharata story, the God of Death in
Sri Aurobindo’s legend is the quintessential Adversary. His aim is
to thwart Savitri’s enterprise. So, as we have seen, he keeps
opposing Savitri with all his power and with all the intellectual
resources he can muster. But he is finally vanquished by Savitri, and
he disappears and his place is taken by the enchanting figure of the
Supreme God. When arguments and persuasion fail to have any
effect on Savitri, he tries to win her over to his side by offering these
four boons we have discussed in this chapter. Savitri doesn’t ask for
these boons, the God offers this choice. In the Mahabharata story, it
is Yama’s feeling that Savitri might go back satisfied with what he
has to offer her as his boons. Besides, he genuinely likes her and
admires her for her learning and for her virtuousness and for her
understanding of Dharma. He wouldn’t like to send her back
empty-handed. But in Sri Aurobindo’s legend, these boons
represent one last attempt to persuade Savitri to give up her
commitment to earth and to bringing Divine perfection to it.
565
It is but natural that the God should offer her what until now
have been regarded as the highest rewards of a spiritual life –
Nirvana and the blessings that go with it. These are peace, oneness
(the annihilation of the sense of the other), energy and bliss. These
are no doubt spiritual felicities, but with one built-in drawback to
them: they make you escape from life. Savitri would like to retain
these spiritual felicities but turn them to good use in ushering in an
age of new consciousness or what Sri Aurobindo has called the
Supramental consciousness. If that is done, then these very features
will be seen as the features characterising the supramental
consciousness.
566
48: Book XI – The Soul’s Choice59
Savitri is not great only as literature. It is a living book, a book that

can give you the force that is needed to walk on the path that the
Mother and Sri Aurobindo have laid out for us. They have done all
that is needed to make sure that the path is secure and sure. As a
living book, Savitri vibrates with the consciousness of Sri Aurobindo
and therefore also of the Mother. It is not only the manifesto of the
new spiritual age that is about to dawn on humanity, but it is also a
power-house. This power becomes dynamic only when we receive
it in ourselves and manifest it in our lives through our sadhana.
Savitri is thus very closely linked with our sadhana; it is not a book
which is merely to be read or written about. I think the most
appropriate way of celebrating it is by incarnating the Savitri
consciousness through our lives.
This time we devoted our sessions held at the Beach Office of the
Sri Aurobindo Society to a study of Book XI of Savitri. As you
remember, last year when we met here we concluded Book X.
Towards the end of Book X, we saw that Savitri had made sure that
the God of Death had no more questions to ask; all his objections
had been met and the questions he had raised were answered. This
process seems to have helped the God of Death to realise who he
really is.
Savitri, the incarnation of the Divine Mother, does not fight to
vanquish and destroy anybody; the Mother is intent on
transforming all those who misunderstand the whole project of
earthly evolution and strive to slow down its onward progress or to
reverse it. The God of Death seems to be doing his best to put a stop
to the progress of evolution. First he comes as the Dark Night and
59
Transcript of the talk by Dr. Nadkarni at Savitri Bhavan on March 5, 2002, from
Invocation No. 15 & 16, August 2002
567
tries to intimidate Savitri, and when that fails he takes on various
intellectual positions and argues against the feasibility and the
reasonableness of her enterprise, which is to enable man to throw
off the yoke of ignorance and death. It is not always clear what role
the intellect plays in human affairs; it is meant to guide man but
often ends up by confusing him. The God of Death raises many,
many confusing questions, and Savitri answers them all. As we
have seen, the God of Death never tells a lie, the God of Death
always deals in truths, but in half-truths. Savitri completes each
half-truth that the God of Death puts forward. In this way, one by
one various questions are raised, and Savitri answers all of them.
Finally, when the God of Death has no questions left to ask, he says,
“You have the Wisdom, you have the Knowledge. But do you have
the Power to bring in the new Consciousness, the new Light that
you want to bring?”
In reply, Savitri removes her veil so that the Supreme Divine
Mother that she really is stands before the God of Death. A
powerful radiance emanates from Savitri and surrounds the God of
Death. This is the part of the text that we read last time. The
important thing is that when this happens, at this great moment of
triumph, Savitri addresses the God of Death and says:
“I hail thee, almighty and victorious Death,

p. 666 lines 894-895
This is the moment of defeat for the God of Death, and yet Savitri
hails him as
...almighty and victorious Death,

568
And why she calls him ‘victorious’ is explained further on,
I have given thee thy awful shape of dread

And thy sharp sword of terror and grief and pain
To force the soul of man to struggle for light
On the brevity of his half-conscious days.
Thou art his spur to greatness in his works,
The whip to his yearning for eternal bliss,
His poignant need of immortality.
p. 666 lines 906-912
She says, “You have been reminding man all the time of his
poignant need for immortality. If we have now reached this stage..”
as Savitri has reached, “...it is because of Death’s proddings. So you
have fulfilled the purpose of your being here, which is to drive man,
goad him onward on the path of immortality, and you have brought
us here to do this, and in the process you have made yourself
redundant as it were. Therefore we hail you and declare you
victorious.”
But the God of Death is not yet conquered, he is only defeated.
And therefore although his form disintegrates, something of his
spirit still remains, so that at the end of that canto we are told that:
...Satyavan and Savitri were alone

But neither stirred: between those figures rose
A mute invisible and translucent wall.
p. 668 lines 969-971
There was an invisible translucent wall and Savitri and Satyavan

were not entirely alone. What this wall signifies, we will see later in
Book XI.
569
Now we turn to Book XI, which has the phrase “The Eternal
Day” in its title. When we review Books IX and X we see that the
God of Death takes Savitri through three different regions, namely
through the Darkness or the region of the Eternal Night; then come
the two Twilight zones. Now we enter the fourth zone, that of the
Eternal Day.
There are seven and a half to eight pages of exquisite poetry
which describe this world of perfection, the Eternal Day. In
Pondicherry when we were looking at it, we were able to finish this
part very quickly, because the only way you can deal with these
eight pages is just to read them and be quiet. There is nothing you
can add to them. This is not the conception of the biblical paradise
or the paradise in the Puranas. This is a totally different notion of
perfection. I will just read a few lines and then go on. This is how it
begins:
A marvellous sun looked down from ecstasy’s skies

On worlds of deathless bliss, perfection’s home,
Magical unfoldings of the Eternal’s smile
Capturing his secret heart-beats of delight.
God’s everlasting day surrounded her,
Domains appeared of sempiternal light
Invading all Nature with the Absolute’s joy.
p. 671 lines 1-7
This is the kind of world, this is the kind of paradise or world of

perfection that has been described here over seven or eight pages
and it is a gorgeous description. It goes on:
Air seemed an ocean of felicity

Or the couch of the unknown spiritual rest,
A vast quiescence swallowing up all sound
570
Into a voicelessness of utter bliss;
Even Matter brought a close spiritual touch,
All thrilled with the immanence of one divine.
The lowest of these earths was still a heaven
Translating into the splendour of things divine
The beauty and brightness of terrestrial scenes...
p. 672 lines 58-66
This wonderful description concludes like this:
Air was a luminous feeling, sound a voice,

Sunlight the soul’s vision and moonlight its dream.
On a wide living base of wordless calm
All was a potent and a lucid joy.
p. 678 lines 253-256
At the end of the section we feel that we are surrounded by this

perfect world, this paradise or heaven. But then begins a section
which suddenly gives a kind of shock. We had assumed at the close
of Book X that the God of Death had disintegrated and was gone.
But then in the next section we are told:
One whom her soul had faced as Death and Night

This figure was a being of light:

p. 678 lines 279-281
571
Here Sri Aurobindo does something which adds a new dimension
to the description of the four states of the Self described in the
Upanishads. In the Mandukya Upanishad, there is a description of
the four states of the Self – the Waking Consciousness, the Dream
Consciousness, the Sleep Consciousness, and what is called the
Turiya or fourth state. These are the four states of the individual
atman (Self), of the individual’s consciousness, of the microcosm.
Corresponding to that there is the macrocosm. In the Chandogya
Upanishad the four states of cosmic consciousness are described in
brief. Corresponding to the Waking Consciousness we have Virat or
Vaishwanara; corresponding to the Dream Consciousness we have
Hiranyagarbha; corresponding to the Sleep Consciousness we have
Ishwara; and corresponding to the Turiya we have Brahman as
Ananda.
Now in this part of Savitri we find a rich contribution to the
Upanishadic lore. Sri Aurobindo describes the four states of this
Parabrahman, the macrocosm, in wonderful poetry. Let me begin
by reading the first passage, where he describes Virat, the
phenomenal universe, Brahman manifested as the external world:
In him the architect of the visible world,

At once the art and artist of his works,
Spirit and seer and thinker of things seen,
Virat, who lights his camp-fires in the suns
And the star-entangled ether is his hold,
Expressed himself with Matter for his speech:
Objects are his letters, forces are his words,
Events are the crowded history of his life,
And sea and land are the pages for his tale.
p. 680 lines 336-344
572
Then he describes the second aspect which is called the
Hiranyagarbha, the master of subtle matter, Brahman manifested as
the Creator, self-container:
In him shadows his form the Golden Child

Who in the Sun-capped Vast cradles his birth:
Hiranyagarbha, author of thoughts and dreams,
Who sees the invisible and hears the sounds
That never visited a mortal ear,
Discoverer of unthought realities
Truer to Truth than all we have ever known,
He is the leader on the inner roads;
A seer, he has entered the forbidden realms;
A magician with the omnipotent wand of thought,
He builds the secret uncreated worlds.
p. 681 lines 354-364
Just now I only read out to you the description of these two aspects.
There are two more, but we do not have enough time to dwell on
the other two aspects. I will now proceed to give you some
indication of what is happening in this section.
We are in for a big surprise. The radiant figure, the four aspects
of whose being have been described in such glorious poetry, still is
seen pursuing the aim which the God of Death had pursued all the
time, namely that of dissuading Savitri from pursuing her goal. He
tells her, “In this world, Spirit and Matter have been forever
separated. They can never come together. That is the nature of this
world. Spirit and Matter are separated, Purusha and Prakriti are
separated. Only in the lives of a few individuals can the Purusha
and Prakriti recognise who each is – and then they step out of this
world. But if you want to live in this world, you have to accept the
dual law. And as long as you accept the dual law the world will
573
continue to be exactly what it is. If you are tired of this, if you are
willing to give up this world, there are wonderful opportunities for
you. You can find peace, you can find bliss, you can find nirvana.
That is what I am offering you.” He says:
Yet if thou wouldst abandon this vexed world,

p. 658 line 597
The world will always remain vexed, that is the assumption, and if
you are willing to abandon this world,
Careless of the dark moan of things below,

p. 658 line 598
From here on earth there will always be the wails and the whining
and the suffering and the cry of humanity; if you are willing to
forget about all this, then you have a clear path to follow:
Tread down the isthmus, overleap the flood,

Arise, vindicate thy spirit’s conquered right:
Relinquishing thy charge of transient breath,
Under the cold gaze of the indifferent stars
Leaving thy borrowed body on the sod,
Ascend, O soul, into thy blissful home.
p. 685 lines 499-507
He thus gives her an invitation to return to the blissful home of the
574
Spirit. But Savitri replies:
“O besetter of man’s soul with life and death

And the world’s pleasure and pain and Day and Night,
Tempting his heart with the far lure of heaven,
Testing his strength with the close touch of hell,
I climb not to thy everlasting Day,
Even as I have shunned thy eternal Night.”
p. 685 lines 526-531
“Just as I rejected your eternal Night, I also reject your everlasting

Day”
To me who turn not from thy terrestrial Way,

Give back the other self my nature asks.
p. 685-86 lines 532-533
She says, “I have not come here seeking either the bliss of paradise,
or the peace of nirvana, I have come here to take Satyavan back
with me to Earth. That is my one single purpose – to take him back
with me.”
And then Savitri explains why she wants to go back to earth.
This is something of a constant theme in all of Sri Aurobindo’s
writings. Nobody has to tell him that the earth is corrupt, that the
world is imperfect; that avatars have come and gone and yet the
world does not seem to show any marked improvement. If you take
away suffering from one corner of the world, it erupts in another
corner, reduce it in one area of life, it increases in another. If we had
Hitler yesterday we have Osama Bin Laden today, we have another
name, another reason; economists, sociologists and politicians can
always offer a perfect analysis of why what happened had to
575
happen. None of them can predict it, none of them can stop it, they
can only explain it perfectly after these tragedies happen. This will
go on and on and on, and so this world is a terrible place, nothing
happens, nothing improves here, nothing gets better.
In several of his letters to Sri Aurobindo, Dilip Kumar Roy raised
this very issue: “Why, when this world is in such a mess and has
always been a mess, why are you so much fascinated by this earth?
What gives you such faith in its future?” Sri Aurobindo’s replies
always followed the line which Savitri now takes. Savitri replies:
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.
p. 686 lines 537-541
To be here, to struggle with this imperfect and miserable world, to

bring perfection to it, to bring God’s perfection and fullness to this
world – this is the glorious opportunity that the earth always gives
us. Because it is the only evolutionary world. All other worlds,
however glorious, are frozen in their glory. What are these heavens?
These are all heavens for retired souls, people who have no
potential for growth, for evolution.
There is a belief in the Indian tradition that even gods, if they
want to rise higher, have to come down to earth and take a human
birth – because this is the only place in the whole universe which
has a psychic being and where evolution takes place. And if today
you are just a clod of clay, you still have the hope that tomorrow,
the day after, or five years later, one millennium later, you will be
able realise the perfection of God in a handful of dust. That is this
place, – our sordid, miserable earth. “Heavens? Why are you in
576
such a hurry to go back to your heavenly home? We have all come
down from that abode of peace and perfection, from Sachidananda.
I know what heavens have to offer” she says:
The heavens were once to me my natural home,

I too have wandered in star-jewelled groves,
Paced sun-gold pastures and moon-silver swards
And heard the harping laughter of their streams
And lingered under branches dropping myrrh;
I too have revelled in the fields of light
Touched by the ethereal raiment of the winds,
Thy wonder-rounds of music I have trod
Lived in the rhyme of bright unlabouring thoughts,
I have beat swift harmonies of rapture vast,
Danced in spontaneous measures of the soul
The great and easy dances of the gods.
p. 686 lines 542-553
You can go to heaven and dance the easy dances of the gods.
O fragrant are the lanes thy children walk

And lovely is the memory of their feet
Amid the wonder-flowers of Paradise:
A heavier tread is mine, a mightier touch.
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.
577
Too far thy heavens for me from suffering men.
Imperfect is the joy not shared by all.
p. 686 lines 554-567
“If any perfection, if any happiness, any felicity cannot be shared by

all, to that extent,” Savitri says, “it remains to me imperfect. I have
not come here for salvation for myself.” What she is saying, in other
words, is: “I need the boon of freedom for the whole of mankind,
freedom from suffering, from death, from incapacity. This is what I
seek. Do not tempt me, do not try to lure me away from my single
aim. I have a single goal and that is to take Satyavan with me back
to earth and work among human beings, so that human beings may
rise and realise the fullness of their potential. Nothing can deter me
from this.”
There is a letter in reply to Dilip Kumar Roy where Sri
Aurobindo writes about one of his poems called “The Life
Heavens”, in which there is a glorious description of the vital
world’s perfection. And as he is describing it, you hear the voice of
earth, saying:
“I, Earth, have a deeper power than Heaven;

My lonely sorrow surpasses its rose-joys,
A red and bitter seed of the raptures seven; –
My dumbness fills with echoes of a far Voice.
“By me the last finite, yearning, strives
To reach the last infinity’s unknown,
The Eternal is broken into fleeting lives
And Godhead pent in the mire and the stone.”
SABCL 5:575
Here is a little of what Sri Aurobindo has said by way of

commentary on this poem. He says:
578
All the non-evolutionary worlds are limited to their
own harmony like the Life Heavens. The Earth, on the
other hand, is an evolutionary world, not at all glorious
or harmonious even as the material world,... but rather
most sorrowful, disharmonious, imperfect. Yet in that
imperfection is the urge towards a higher and more
many-sided perfection. It contains the last finite which
yet yearns to the supreme Infinite. (It is not satisfied by
sense-joys precisely because in the conditions of the
earth it is able to see their limitations). God is pent in
the mire (mire is not glorious, so there is no claim to
glory or beauty here), but that very fact imposes a
necessity to break through that prison to a
consciousness which is ever rising towards the heights.
SABCL 22:388
In this section we find again and again that there is a confrontation

between two perspectives. One is the perspective which has the
weight of a long Indian tradition, which says that getting out of life,
freedom from punarjanma, is the great goal of all spiritual
endeavour. This business of not coming back to birth has somehow
become our highest aspiration. Let me give you a small illustration
of what I mean. A recent issue of the Bhavan’s Journal has
published an interview with Lata Mangeshkar. Lata Mangeshkar, as
you know, is a person who has given so much joy and delight to
millions of people of our generation and she has been doing it for so
long. She was asked, “What is your highest aspiration?” and she
replied “Not to come back to birth again!” Why does she say that,
has she thought about it? No.
In the Indian tradition, this is regarded as the highest goal, so if
anybody asks you that question, you must say this. If I were Lata
579
Mangeshkar, I would have said, “In this life I have given great
delight, as they say, to Indian audiences. In my next life, I would
like to give equal pleasure to African audiences, European
audiences, American audiences, etc. ” Why does she not say that? If
you are an Indian, you do not say that. If you are an Indian you say,
“I want moksha, I want nirvana, I want out.” This, Sri Aurobindo
has always resisted. Sri Aurobindo tells us that the fact that we have
always tried to get out of this world is the reason for many of the
great tragedies that have happened to India, particularly during the
last thousand years or so.
So this is the reply this Being of Light gets from Savitri. Now he
is no longer a God of Death, he is a refined Being of Light. But even
as a Being of Light he tempts her, and at one point Savitri says,
“You have tried to forge a weapon, and of that weapon, I Savitri am
the hilt and Satyavan is the blade.” I will read that. She says:
O thou who soundst the trumpet in the lists,

Part not the handle from the untried steel,
Take not the warrior with his blow unstruck.
Are there not still a million fights to wage?
O king-smith, clang on still thy toil begun,
Weld us to one in thy strong smithy of life.
Thy fine-curved jewelled hilt call Savitri,
Thy blade’s exultant smile name Satyavan.
Fashion to beauty, point us through the world.
Break not the lyre before the song is found;
Are there not still unnumbered chants to weave?...
p. 687 lines 574-590
“Why do you want to become a spoil-sport, why? This is what we
580
are intended to do, but instead of blessing us, you are trying to
disrupt this by separating me and Satyavan, and you are promising
me a kind of a escape from this world!”
The God of Death now become a Being of Light, is very, very
sophisticated, very clever, and he asks Savitri, “I do appreciate your
concern for mankind, you want to save mankind, you want to bring
them perfection, but have you ever consulted mankind, have you
asked them if they want to be saved? You may like to save them,
but do they want to be saved? No.” He says, “Mankind has
temporary enthusiasms when they suddenly stand up, wave a flag
and announce a new goal, a new ideal, etc... But this goes on for a
few years, then suddenly the enthusiasm wanes and we are back
where we started. So this sudden enthusiasm that you find in
human beings, of idealism, of heroism, is only short-lived.” He
gives expression to this despair very beautifully:
A few can climb to an unperishing sun,

Or live on the edges of the mystic moon
And channel to earth-mind the wizard ray.
The heroes and the demigods are few
To whom the close immortal voices speak
And to their acts the heavenly clan are near.
p. 689 lines 644-649
And then he says

p. 689 lines 653-657
581
Wars produce heroes, freedom struggles produce heroes, some
crisis in life produces these great heroes. But once the freedom has
come, once the war is over, the same old corruption, the same old
pettiness, the same old cupidity, all come and settle down again in
man’s life. So mankind does not really get any better, it remains
always the same.

Or, raised by some strong hand to breathe heaven-air
They slide back to the mud from which they climbed;
Why?
In the mud of which they are made, whose law they know
They joy in safe return to a friendly base,...
We all make an attempt to climb a little higher, then go back and

wallow in the mud, like pigs, because that is where we belong, that
is what we enjoy, where we are at home – this is mankind. The
Being of Light asks Savitri, “You want to save this mankind?”
To be the common man they think the best,

To live as others live is their delight.
p. 689 lines 656-665
Well, the Being of Light then goes on to suggest the following line of
action to Savitri: “You have only two choices, either to merge in the
vacancy of non-being, nirvana; or, you know who you are, you are
the Supreme Mother who has incarnated on earth, why do you not
withdraw yourself into your original status?” In other words, in
582
either case, take yourself away from the earth-scene, give up the
great ideal you have been pursuing. This is what the God of Death
now converted into the Being of Light still keeps telling her. Savitri,
as you know, does not accept any of these things and finally she
says:
“In vain thou tempst 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,...
What is it we want to achieve?
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.
p. 692 lines 757-763
Sri Aurobindo has said that his yoga has three main objectives –
one: to enable the aspiring sadhak to rise to the highest level of
consciousness, which he has called the supramental consciousness,
and to bring it down to earth; two: under this power, under this
influence to transform all the parts of our being, the mind, the life
and the body so that they can function as perfect instruments of a
perfect soul. Transformation of life and the manifestation of the
Divine in terrestrial life is thus the second objective. And third, this
is not an individual salvation. But to use this tremendous new
consciousness to change the whole of humanity gradually and
slowly so that the entire nature participates in this new birth. So
bring down the consciousness, the supreme consciousness called
the supramental consciousness, change life, mind and body, give to
each one of them the perfection that is latent in them; and three,
583
take the whole of humanity with you.
Savitri says:
I sacrifice not earth to happier worlds.

p. 692 line 767
This goes on and we do not have the time to go through all the
details. Finally this Being of Light says to Savitri, “If you want to
influence the earth, if you want to change the destiny of the earth,
you cannot do it through parliaments, you cannot do it through
financial institutions, you cannot do it through revolutions. What
you have to do is to rise to a status of the spirit where no world
exists, rise to the highest spiritual consciousness and from there,
impress your will on this world.”
And at that moment everything disappears, including this Being
of Light. All forms dissolve and Savitri finds herself on top of this
entire creation, where there is nothing, no creation yet, it is a kind of
blank slate, and at that time, this moment, whatever Savitri asks for
will be given to her.
The God of Death became for a while a Being of Light. Now even
he is dissolved. What she hears is a disembodied Voice and this
Voice gives Savitri four chances to ask for whatever she wants. Each
time, it says:
Choose, spirit, thy supreme choice not given again;...

p. 696 line 898
And each time the Voice also suggests the choice she is expected to
make. The choices suggested are different forms of cessation from
being, different forms of Nirvana.
584
In a happy vast sublime cessation know, –
An immense extinction in eternity,...
I am offering you an immense extinction in eternity.
A point that disappears in the infinite,—
You know nirvana is basically a flame that is extinguished,
Felicity of the extinguished flame,
then:
Last sinking of a wave in a boundless sea,...

p.696 lines 901-905
Each individual being is a wave that rises on a sea and when the
wave merges back with the sea, you are one with the sea, there is no
wave left any more, your individuality is extinguished. In other
words, he is offering her escape, extinction: nirvana is ready, just
ask for it. But what Savitri asks for in reply is:
“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....”
p. 696 lines 913-915
She does not give up, she answers, “If you want to give me
585
anything, give it for the magnificent soul of man on earth.” A
second time, similarly he says:
“Wide open are the ineffable gates in front.

My spirit leans down to break the knot of earth,...
p. 696 lines 919-920
“I will destroy everything, all forms, and make sure that you have
nothing but peace and bliss.” At that moment, and each time such
an offer is made, the poet beautifully describes how Savitri hears a
cry that is coming up from the earth:
She heard a million creatures cry to her.

p. 696 line 926
Remembering the earth, she says:
“Thy oneness, Lord, in many approaching hearts,

My sweet infinity of thy numberless souls.”
p. 697 lines 929-930
A third time, and a fourth time, Savitri is incorrigible, whatever he

says, with whatever force and emphasis, ”I am offering you
extinction from this world”, she answers, “Give me love, give me
energy, give me oneness for man on earth”.
When Savitri insists on all this, at that moment, this god of
Death, who became a Being of Light and then just a Voice, is finally
transformed, because from now on he does not put any
impediments in Savitri’s way. He has been won over entirely by
Savitri, not merely vanquished. For Savitri is not creating a path to
586
salvation for herself, she has shown her readiness to include all of
mankind, because she has realised that no one can be saved
completely until all are saved. Once you realise this great truth and
are entirely focussed on this goal, then even the gods are with you.
So now he is entirely satisfied and there follow four or five pages of
surpassingly wonderful poetry where this god, now the Supreme,
gives his consent to Savitri’s enterprise and promises its fulfilment.
The Mother has said somewhere that all these experiences
described in Savitri, beginning from the point where the
confrontation with Death takes place at the end of Book VIII,
through Books XI, X and XI, were all her own experiences. “I have
gone through them all” she has said. It seems that Sri Aurobindo
used to write these lines at night, and the following morning he
would come and read them out to her, and on one occasion she is
reported to have said, ”O Lord, you have divulged all my secrets to
the world.” So what is written here is in fact the Mother’s own
experience. There is a beautiful recording available of the Mother’s
reading of this long passage (which begins on page 696) and when
the Mother reads these lines, her voice gets choked; her
identification with Savitri is so strong.
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.
p. 701 lines 1097-1105
587
And then it continues:
Who hunts and seizes me, my captive grows:

This shalt thou henceforth learn from thy heart-beats.
p. 702 lines 1112-1113
And in the concluding part, if you hear it in the Mother’s voice, it is

available on a tape, it is wonderful, she says:
For ever love, O beautiful slave of God!

p. 702 line 1114
The Mother says that reading this line gave her the most
overpowering experience of the entire book.
For ever love, O beautiful slave of God!

O lasso of my rapture’s widening noose
Become my cord of universal love,
O mind grow full of the eternal peace;
O word, cry out the immortal litany;
Built is the golden tower, the flame child born...
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.
p. 702 lines 1114-1130
588
‘I sent you down, a dual power’. Many of the recent writers on Sri
Aurobindo and the Mother have emphasized that they have been a
dual Avatar. This has never happened before. An Avatar has come
and after he has finished his task another Avatar has come. This
time two Avatars had come together. It is because the work
undertaken this time is of great importance, and is a very complex
one. As Sri Aurobindo himself has said, the ascent from the monkey
or the ape to man was not as steep as the ascent that man is now set
to make from man to Superman. So a lot of things had to be done at
the same time; and, as you know, the work that Sri Aurobindo did
and the Mother did, had never been attempted before. The great
tapasya they performed right after the Siddhi Day, of twenty-fourth
November 1926, until he left his body at the end of 1950, that is, for
24 years, has remained a mystery. Sri Aurobindo refused to revise
some of the great books that needed to be re-written, like The
Synthesis of Yoga and so on, On Rebirth and other essays, saying he
had no time. What was Sri Aurobindo doing? If you want to see
what Sri Aurobindo was doing, you have to go to Aswapati’s yoga
and see how he was busy, digging in a filth of horror and mire: the
entire work that he did in the Inconscient, all that cleansing of the
Augean stables. Even after doing all this, he was not satisfied. He
decided, “I will give this body to ensure that the descent of the
Supramental Consciousness is hastened” and he offered his
physical body for that great purpose on the 5th of December 1950.
His body got shattered in that attempt, but in 1956, as the Mother
has announced it, the Supramental Consciousness has come down.
So here in Savitri there is a description of what kind of a
consciousness it is, what kind of a perfection that world will be, and
it is also predicted that:
The incarnate dual Power shall open God’s door,

Eternal supermind touch earthly Time
589
p. 705, 1240-1241
The incarnate dual Power will together work and shall open God’s
door. Finally, I would like to relate this to the great statement that
the Mother made announcing the descent of the Supramental
Consciousness in earth.
This evening the Divine Presence, concrete and

material, was there present amongst you. I had a form
of living gold, bigger than the universe, and I was
facing a huge and massive golden door which
separated the world from the Divine.
As I looked at the door, I knew and willed, in a single
movement of consciousness, that ‘the time has come’,
and lifting with both hands a mighty golden hammer I
struck one blow, one single blow on the door and the
door was shattered to pieces.
Then the supramental Light and Force and
Consciousness rushed down upon earth in an
uninterrupted flow.
MCW 15:202
This too was predicted in Savitri.

A number of other things one can note here, but we have no time
to go into all those just now, so I will simply read the last part,
which tells what will happen when the Superman comes. When the
Supramental Consciousness comes down, man’s mind will work
differently, man’s vital will be transformed, even the body will
remember God. The body will not be made of the substance of
which is it made now. It will be lighter, more plastic, etc., etc. – all
590
these things have been described in this long prophetic passage.
And the passage closes with these words which are very well
known:
A divine force shall flow through tissue and cell

And take the charge of breath and speech and act
And all the thoughts shall be a glow of suns
And every feeling a celestial thrill.
Often a lustrous inner dawn shall come
Lighting the chambers of the slumbering mind;
A sudden bliss shall run through every limb
And Nature with a mightier Presence fill.
Thus shall the earth open to divinity
And common natures feel the wide uplift,
Illumine common acts with the Spirit’s ray
And meet the deity in common things.
Nature shall live to manifest secret God,
The Spirit shall take up the human play,
This earthly life become the life divine.
p. 710 lines 1416-1430
This is not the conclusion of the Canto. There follows a short

passage describing Savitri after her great triumph, descending from
that high plane back to the earth and that is described in the last two
pages.
Now before I conclude, there is a letter which I think I should
share, that I would like to read to you, because this is not as well
known as some of the other things. Often people talk about the
Supramental Consciousness as if it were something dull,
uninteresting, as if they were saying, “I do not know why Sri
Aurobindo wants this Supramental Consciousness it does not seem
to be something very exciting or inspiring...” You know that for
591
Indians anything spiritual is a dull thing – we have made
spirituality the dullest possible thing, because we have always
talked about it in negative terms. Here Sri Aurobindo, in response
to a letter, whose letter I do not know, writes something which I
think all of us should make a copy of and place in a prominent place
in our homes or where we are likely to see it again and again, for it
is a very inspiring message about the Supramental, where he is
saying that the touch of heaven does not cancel the earth but fulfils
it. He says:
The supramental is not grand, aloof, cold and austere;

it is not something opposed to or inconsistent with a
full vital and physical manifestation; on the contrary, it
carries in it the only possibility of the full fulfilment of
the vital force and the physical life on earth. It is
because it is so, because it was so revealed to me and
for no other reason that I have followed after it and
persevered till I came into contact with it and was able
to draw some power of it and its influence. I am
concerned with the earth, not with worlds beyond for
their own sake; it is a terrestrial realisation that I seek
and not a flight to distant summits. All other yogas
regard this life as an illusion or a passing phase; the
supramental yoga alone regards it as a thing created by
the Divine for a progressive manifestation and takes
the fulfilment of the life and the body for its object.
When he was asked ”Why do you want to do yoga?” he answered:

”For the fulfilment of life”. Not abandonment of life, not
cancellation of life, not impoverishment of life, but for the fulfilment
of life. That is what he is saying.
592
The supramental is simply the Truth-Consciousness
and what it brings in its descent is the full truth of life,
the full truth of consciousness in Matter. One has
indeed to rise to high summits to reach it, but the more
one rises, the more one can bring down below. No
doubt, life and body have not to remain in the
ignorant, imperfect, impotent things they are now; but
why should a change to fuller life-power, fuller body-
power be considered something aloof, cold and
undesirable? The utmost Ananda the body and life are
now capable of is a brief excitement of the vital mind
or the nerves or the cells which is limited, imperfect
and soon passes: with the supramental change, all the
cells, nerves, vital forces, embodied mental forces can
become filled with a thousand-fold Ananda,...
He says that our delight in every aspect of our life will multiply a
thousand-fold.
...capable of an intensity of bliss which passes

description and which need not fade away. How aloof,
repellent and undesirable! The supramental love
means an intense unity of soul with soul, mind with
mind, life with life,...
People very often have asked “What will happen to love in the
supramental world?” and this is what Sri Aurobindo has said:
The supramental love means an intense unity of soul

with soul, mind with mind, life with life, and an entire
flooding of the body consciousness with the physical
593
experience of oneness, the presence of the Beloved in
every part, in every cell of the body. Is that too
something aloof and grand but undesirable? With the
supramental change, the very thing on which you
insist, the possibility of the free physical meeting of the
embodied Divine with the sadhak without conflict of
forces and without undesirable reactions becomes
possible, assured and free.
And then he adds:
I could go on – for pages, but this is enough for the

moment.
SABCL 22:90-91
594
49: Book XII – Epilogue, and an Overall Review60
This is the concluding session of our Savitri study camp that began
eleven days ago at the Beach Office of Sri Aurobindo Society in
Pondicherry. We will all remember this session being held at Savitri
Bhavan this afternoon for a long time to come because it marks the
conclusion of the first cycle of Savitri study camps that we began
some fourteen years ago. Savitri is inexhaustible as a source of
spiritual delight, power, illumination and inspiration and the
completion of the first cycle of study camps cannot be taken as
anything more than the completion of our first reading of this
wonderful epic. After this first cycle, let us hope and pray, there will
be more such cycles. Holding these study camps is like performing
a yajna; so many things have to go right and so many people have
to work together before a study camp can be held successfully. I
have no doubt in my mind that those of us who have been
privileged to participate in these study camps for so many years
have been the recipients of a special grace from the Mother. For me
personally these study camps have been an abounding Grace. Let
me therefore at the very outset offer our gratitude to the Mother
who has kept us focused on Savitri through all these years. Without
her support at every stage these camps could not have been held.
One of the happy developments in the structure of our study
camps in more recent years has been this addition of a concluding
session held at Savitri Bhavan. This is a most happy occasion for all
lovers of Savitri, whether they come from Auroville, or from the
Ashram in Pondicherry or from any part of India or of the world;
we can all come together here for a celebration of Savitri from time
to time.
60
Transcript of Dr. Nadkarni’s talk at Savitri Bhavan on March 5, 2003, from
Invocation No. 19, April 2003
595
This time at our study camp we first took up for study Book XII,
the concluding Book of Savitri with the title “Epilogue”. As you
know, Book XII, like Book VIII, received very little attention from
Sri Aurobindo during his extensive revisions of the epic undertaken
mostly after 1930. As Richard Hartz has observed, this is something
very interesting in itself. In the original Legend of Savitri and
Satyavan, the two central facts are the death of Satyavan (the theme
of Book VIII) and his resuscitation, his revival, his coming back to
life (the theme of Book XII). Exactly these are the two books, Book
VIII and Book XII, that have not received much revision from Sri
Aurobindo. This suggests that Sri Aurobindo was not so much
interested in the fact of death itself, or in the fact of revival, but
rather in the spiritual facts and forces behind them, and in the
spiritual solution to the problem of death.
Nevertheless, Book XII is a very pleasing piece of narrative
poetry. The first version which Sri Aurobindo wrote between 1916
and 1918 was probably a very inspired composition, and many lines
from that early version are still found in the present form of this
Epilogue. This part of course does not have the epic elevation of
many other parts of Savitri. But as narrative poetry, this Epilogue
has a movement which is limpid and smooth in flow and it has
some great and wonderful lines. To give you a taste of what the
poetry is like in Book XII, I will read out just one short excerpt from
it. When Satyavan regains his consciousness, he begins to wonder
where he is and where he has been. He sees a change in Savitri, so
he is wondering whether this is the same Savitri that he had known
earlier, and he doesn’t quite know how to deal with her. And Savitri
reassures a bewildered Satyavan with these words:
“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
596
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...”
p. 719 lines 155-172
In the original legend of Vyasa, the events related in this Epilogue

take up almost one third of the total number of slokas in which the
legend has been narrated. We are told in some detail what each of
the major characters in the story, including Satyavan’s parents and
some of the venerable sages and Rishis who lived in their
neighbourhood, did and said. Sri Aurobindo is not interested in
dealing with this part of the story but he had to bring his epic poem
to a conclusion. And he does exactly that in this Epilogue. When
Nirod-da reminded him about revising Book VIII and Book XII, he
said, “Oh that – we will see about that later.” He knew exactly what
was happening. He seems to have been in a great hurry at this point
in time. This was some time in the second fortnight of November
1950. Sri Aurobindo had already taken the decision to leave his
body. In spite of all these factors, Book XII seems to be an adequate
conclusion to the epic, although it is by no means as outstandingly
appropriate as the opening section of the epic, which, according to
Richard Hartz, Sri Aurobindo is believed to have revised at least
597
fifty times. According to the information Richard has given us, there
are forty-five manuscripts of the first canto, and on five typescripts
Sri Aurobindo has made further changes, so in all there are at least
these fifty versions. I don’t think that many of us have read the first
canto fifty times – I haven’t. That is the care that Sri Aurobindo
bestowed on some parts of Savitri. There are other parts however,
like the great benediction of the Supreme Divine in Book XI, which
consists of about 500 flowing lines and which he dictated to
Nirodbaran almost uninterruptedly over a few days.
Book XII is a short book and we completed our reading of it in
about three days. As the duration of our Study Camp was eleven
days, we had eight extra days left. During these eight extra days I
tried to do some sort of a review of the epic as a whole, by focussing
on certain major themes in it. The themes which we explored during
our review were, first “Sri Aurobindo’s vision and its fulfilment in
Savitri”; second, “The Mother’s footsteps in Savitri”; and third, “Sri
Aurobindo’s vision of our future”. These were the three themes we
pursued during the last eight days. Today I will try to review the
poem in another fashion, and to do this in the limited time we have
at our disposal here is indeed to attempt the impossible.
We don’t realise sufficiently that the goals Sri Aurobindo
defined for his yoga were not only revolutionary for his own times,
they remain revolutionary even today, since even today very few
thinkers dare set such high goals for man’s future on earth.
Traditionally, spiritual paths have had two kinds of goals: finding
one’s place in some Vaikuntha or some Kailash, or some special
heaven or paradise where you will be waited on by eight damsels,
where you will have all the comforts of life and no inconveniences
and imperfections, where you will never grow old or fall ill. One is
supposed to earn this kind of fulfilment for oneself by doing the
right kinds of things and living the right kind of life while one lives
one’s life here on earth. Although this goal has received some
attention in the Indian spirituality as well, the Indian tradition has
598
shown its preference for another kind of goal, which is merger into
Nirvana, getting out of the cycle of death and birth. Almost all the
religious and spiritual traditions swear by this goal. If you ask any
Indian, whether he is learned or an ignoramus, if you catch him in a
spiritual kind of mood and ask him “What is your life’s greatest
ambition?” he will say, “My life’s greatest ambition is to get out of
this cycle of birth and death.” He hasn’t thought about it, but by
virtue of being Indian it is in his bloodstream, he is supposed to say
it and he says it. This whole attitude is one of negation of life. By
implication it means that once you become spiritual you have to
regard this life as an error made by God and it is your responsibility
to correct him by seeking to withdraw totally into some kind of
nameless and featureless existence beyond.
Sri Aurobindo brought the revolutionary idea that spirituality is
not a way to abrogate life, to cancel life, but to bring fulfilment to
life. And he defined his spirituality in these terms. He said that
spirituality should bring fulfilment not only for man’s spirit, but
also for the instruments of man’s spirit, that is for the mind, the vital
and the body. He defined it as clearly as possible. And secondly he
maintains that his aim is not to bring perfection which is limited to
an individual or to a few individuals. His aim is to make this
perfection accessible to the whole of humanity. What we want is a
new consciousness that settles down here and becomes accessible to
the whole of humanity. This is something new. This collective
aspect is the demand of the Time Spirit. If anything is great and
good, you cannot get it just for yourself – if it is good and it is great
you must also make sure that everybody else can participate in it.
Sri Aurobindo was ahead of his times. And even in those days he
kept saying, “I don’t want the Supramental consciousness as an
individual attainment only. It has to be the gain of the whole earth-
consciousness.” This was his definition of the aims of his yoga. And
his great epic, Savitri, is a story of the pursuit of these aims.
In Savitri, as you know, there are two biographies and one
599
autobiography. It contains a description of Sri Aurobindo’s yoga,
which is Aswapati’s yoga, so it has a first part that is
autobiographical. It is also a spiritual biography of the Mother. So
there are many passages in Savitri which remind us of the Mother,
and the Mother herself in her Agenda and other places has said that
much of Savitri is a narration of her own personal experiences. Some
of these experiences, she says, she had even thirty years before she
came to Pondicherry. She never mentioned these experiences to Sri
Aurobindo. Yet Sri Aurobindo was able to depict these experiences,
write about these experiences in Savitri. Then there is a third
biography here, and it pertains to you and me – it is our biography,
telling us how we got here, from where and through what stages,
and where we are supposed to go from here. At this stage, why is
our life in such a mess, and after man, who? And what will ensure
our passage to the next stage? Sri Aurobindo deals with all such
questions in his epic.
To start at the beginning, we find that already in the second
canto of Book I Sri Aurobindo very beautifully summarises the
central issue in Savitri’s life:
For this she had accepted mortal breath;

To wrestle with the Shadow she had come
And must confront the riddle of man’s birth
And life’s brief struggle in dumb Matter’s night.
But not to submit and suffer was she born;
To lead, to deliver was her glorious part.
p. 17 lines 229-238
600
This was the issue of her life: ‘Whether to bear with Ignorance and
death’. We humans have always made compromises with Ignorance
and Death. We have said to Ignorance and Death, “All right, give
me some relief from your onslaught while I am here on earth,
however temporary it may turn out to be. Let this world belong to
you, you can reign here as long as you like.” So we have always
sought escape from this world, we have always refused to confront
the problem of Ignorance and Death. We have said, “This cannot be
changed, this is the ultimate dispensation of God here for man and
for earth, who are you and I to challenge this?” But Savitri has come
precisely to challenge this. This is what these lines tell us.
Then in the following canto, we get the beginning of Aswapati’s
story. Aswapati’s yoga, as you know, takes up about 320 pages,
about 12,000 lines. No one can write about anyone else’s life or yoga
in so much detail. It is very clear that here Sri Aurobindo is writing
about his own yoga. In a letter of 1946 he has given us some
indications of what this yoga was about and what are the different
stages we have to look for in this yoga. In Cantos 3 to 5 of Book I
Aswapati is shown achieving his own spiritual self-fulfilment as an
individual, and this part of his development consists of two yogic
movements, first a psycho-spiritual transformation and then a
greater spiritual transformation with an ascent to a supreme power.
In Book II we are shown how Aswapati undertakes an
exploration of all the worlds and planes of consciousness, right
from the subtle physical, the vital, through the mental and then
through the spiritual worlds. He is in search of the creative
principle which will help him or show him how to transform the
nature of life, how to bring perfection to life. In spite of all this
exploration which is contained in the fifteen cantos of Book II,
nearly 200 pages of spiritual experiences in the various worlds, he is
unable to find the secret he was looking for. The very dynamics of
this upward journey he has undertaken bring him to the doorstep of
the Nirvanic experience. This climactic moment is described in
601
Canto 2 of Book III. And this is, I think, a very great moment in the
spiritual history of mankind and particularly of India. This is the
moment when Aswapati is on the verge of entering Nirvana but
something in him says that there is another, a more glorious destiny
possible for man.
This moment is in some sense comparable to a similar moment
in Amitabha Buddha’s life. Legend has it that when the Buddha was
about to enter Nirvana, he stopped and looked back on life and saw
the whole of humanity immersed in ignorance and suffering. He
decided to turn back to help humanity to liberate itself from
ignorance and suffering. Buddha, of course, had great compassion
and love for humanity. But I do not think that he had any particular
remedy to correct the problems of life. He only thought “I do not
want Nirvana only for myself. I would like to take with me as many
people as possible.” So the only way he had of saving mankind was
to try to save each human individual separately, make him realise
that this world is transitory and full of suffering and then persuade
him to join him in the pursuit of Nirvana. Very laudable indeed,
and we must praise him for that, and he has been rightly declared
an Avatar for that by the Indian tradition. But how many people can
you save like this? Besides, ultimately what is it that you are trying
to teach them? You are trying to teach them how to escape from this
life. You are not teaching them anything about how to bring
perfection to this life.
That is something new about Sri Aurobindo. Like Amitabha
Buddha, his compassion for mankind too was boundless, but he
had something more than compassion. It is not enough to have
compassion and love because by themselves they do not go very far.
You need something more, you need a power strong enough to
transform human consciousness and through it human nature. And
Sri Aurobindo had discovered this power. He has written about it in
Savitri and in his other books such as The Life Divine. In Savitri,
Aswapati finds that this power is not available in any of the realised
602
worlds, so he goes into the Transcendental World, where the past,
the present and the future are one, and there he experiences a world
of perfection that is waiting to come down. In Book III we have a
wonderful description of this world of perfection which is called the
Supramental World:
A Bliss, a Light, a Power, a flame-white Love

Caught all into a sole immense embrace;
Existence found its truth on Oneness’ breast
And each became the self and space of all.
The great world-rhythms were heart-beats of one Soul,
To feel was a flame-discovery of God,
All mind was a single harp of many strings,
All life a song of many meeting lives;
For worlds were many, but the Self was one.
This knowledge now was made a cosmos’ seed:
This seed was cased in the safety of the Light,
It needed not a sheath of Ignorance.
Then from the trance of that tremendous clasp
And from the throbbings of that single Heart
And from the naked Spirit’s victory
A new and marvellous creation rose.
Incalculable outflowing infinitudes
Laughing out an unmeasured happiness
Lived their innumerable unity;
Worlds where the being is unbound and wide
Bodied unthinkably the egoless Self;
Rapture of beatific energies
Joined Time to the Timeless, poles of a single joy;
White vasts were seen where all is wrapped in all.
There were no contraries, no sundered parts,
All by spiritual links were joined to all
And bound indissolubly to the One:
603
Each was unique, but took all lives as his own,
And, following out these tones of the Infinite,
Recognised in himself the universe.
p. 322-323 lines 209-238
Even in the midst of experiencing the glories of this supramental

world, Aswapati is still concerned about the earth. Even in that new
world waiting to be born, he is aware of the need of the earth. Even
when he is experiencing this blissful future he is concerned about
you and me, and says, “How do I make this world accessible to
mankind?” At the same time he sees his own small, pitiable little
fragile body, lying at the edge of the world and says “What about
that body? That is also part of me. Here, the spirit is all fulfilled, it
has bliss, it has oneness, it has perfection, but shouldn’t my body
also be participating in this perfection? How can I make this
possible? ” These are Aswapati’s concerns because they are the
concerns of Sri Aurobindo’s yoga. And finally, since he cannot
figure out any way of bringing this world down himself, he
approaches the Supreme Divine Mother, the Adishtatri of this
world and of all the worlds, and prays to her. In the next canto we
see what Aswapati has to do to bring this world on earth.
When he sees the Supreme Mother, the first thing that she tells
him is that man is exactly where he is now because he belongs
there: “Don’t try to accelerate the progress, because man is not yet
ready to say goodbye to Ignorance. He likes to wallow in Ignorance.
Let him have a long enough innings – some day he will begin to
look for this perfection, but not yet.”
But Aswapati, being Aswapati, says
“How shall I rest content with mortal days

And the dull measure of terrestrial things,
I who have seen behind the cosmic mask
604
The glory and the beauty of thy face?
Hard is the doom to which thou bindst thy sons!
How long shall our spirits battle with the Night
And bear defeat and the brute yoke of Death,
We who are vessels of a deathless Force
And builders of the godhead of the race?
...
Ever the centuries and millenniums pass.
Where in the greyness is thy coming’s ray?
Where is the thunder of thy victory’s wings?
Only we hear the feet of passing gods.
p. 341 lines 266-282
We are all ready to receive gods, we have kept everything ready;

but we hear only shuffling footsteps, and then somebody comes and
tells us that the gods have gone away, we must wait for the next
time. Man is reduced to despair and hopelessness. And if you trust
his judgement he will be for ever lost in the labyrinthine mental
consciousness which he has woven around himself. The only
solution to this, O Divine Mother, is for You to come down and take
on the responsibility of bringing this new consciousness down.
Human effort, human power and strength are inadequate to do this.
Only an avatar can do this.
So he prays to the Divine Mother:
“Omnipotence, girdle with the power of God

Movements and moments of a mortal will,
Pack with the eternal might one human hour
And with one gesture change all future time.
Let a great word be spoken from the heights
And one great act unlock the doors of Fate.”
p. 345 lines 416-421
605
The Mother listens to this prayer and agrees to send an emanation,
an avatar of hers.
“O strong forerunner, I have heard thy cry.

One shall descend and break the iron Law,
Change Nature’s doom by the lone spirit’s power.
A limitless Mind that can contain the world,
A sweet and violent heart of ardent calms
Moved by the passions of the gods shall come.
All mights and greatnesses shall join in her;
Beauty shall walk celestial on the earth,
Delight shall sleep in the cloud-net of her hair,
And in her body as on his homing tree
Immortal Love shall beat his glorious wings.
A music of griefless things shall weave her charm;
The harps of the Perfect shall attune her voice,
The streams of Heaven shall murmur in her laugh,
Her lips shall be the honeycombs of God,
Her limbs his golden jars of ecstasy,
Her breasts the rapture-flowers of Paradise.
She shall bear Wisdom in her voiceless bosom,
Strength shall be with her like a conqueror’s sword
And from her eyes the Eternal’s bliss shall gaze.
A seed shall be sown in Death’s tremendous hour,
A branch of heaven transplant to human soil;
Nature shall overleap her mortal step;
Fate shall be changed by an unchanging will.”
p. 346 lines 429-452
This is the promise made by the Supreme Divine Mother.

As you know, in Vyasa’s legend of Savitri and Satyavan, Savitri
606
is an exceptionally gifted young woman but there is no reference to
her being an avatar. Recent work by Richard Hartz and others has
shown that somewhere around the mid 1920’s, Sri Aurobindo
realised who Mirra Richard really was. His recognition of her as the
Mother, as an Avatar of the Supreme Divine Creatrix, became the
seed for the revision that Sri Aurobindo undertook on Savitri after
1926 or 1928. He clearly saw that it was the Mother’s mission in life
to bring down the new consciousness. If we look at the description
of the birth of Savitri that Sri Aurobindo has given, there can be no
doubt at all that Sri Aurobindo means to present her as an avatar.
As we are told in the pages of the Essays on the Gita, an avatar comes
down particularly when there is an impasse, some kind of a
blockage to the progress of evolution and only an avatar can clear
this; so the avatar is needed. But it looks to me that this time we had
to have twin avatars – Sri Aurobindo came as an avatar, and the
Mother also came as an avatar. I wonder whether there have been
any feminine avatars in the past, although the consciousness of the
Mother has always been present on earth in some form whenever a
breakthrough in evolution was about to take place. But this time the
Supreme Divine Mother herself has come down as an Avatar. This
is probably because the change now contemplated, the
transformation anticipated now, is going to be so radical, so
unheard-of in the history of evolution. The work to be undertaken
this time is not an ordinary one. The magnitude of the issues
involved is such that two avatars had to come. You should realise
that this doesn’t happen very often in the history of evolution.
Those of us who lived in the last century had the enormous good
fortune of being contemporaries of the first feminine avatar on
earth. That is something to celebrate, and I thought I should
mention this because we are this year celebrating the 125th birth
anniversary of the Mother.
This marks the culmination of Aswapati’s quest, and from then
onwards in the poem it is basically Savitri’s story, starting with her
607
birth. It is very clear from the way Sri Aurobindo describes Savitri’s
birth that he saw her as an Avatar. Consider the following lines:
In this high signal moment of the gods

Answering earth’s yearning and her cry for bliss,
A greatness from our other countries came.
A silence in the noise of earthly things
Immutably revealed the secret Word,
A mightier influx filled the oblivious clay:
A lamp was lit, a sacred image made.
A mediating ray had touched the earth
Bridging the gulf between man’s mind and God’s;
Its brightness linked our transience to the Unknown.
A spirit of its celestial source aware
Translating heaven into a human shape
Descended into earth’s imperfect mould
And wept not fallen to mortality,
But looked on all with large and tranquil eyes.
One had returned from the transcendent planes
And bore anew the load of mortal breath,
Who had striven of old with our darkness and our pain;
She took again her divine unfinished task:
Survivor of death and the aeonic years,
Once more with her fathomless heart she fronted Time.
p. 353 lines 139-159
There are also a number of passages further on in Book IV – if you

read them, those of you who were in the Ashram in the 50s and 60s
might even begin to hear the footsteps of the Mother, they are so
closely modelled after the Mother. We can immediately see that this
is the person Sri Aurobindo is describing in these lines. Take these
lines, for example:
608
A friend and yet too great wholly to know,
She walked in their front towards a greater light,
Their leader and queen over their hearts and souls,
One close to their bosoms, yet divine and far.
Admiring and amazed they saw her stride
Attempting with a godlike rush and leap
Heights for their human stature too remote
Or with a slow great many-sided toil
Pushing towards aims they hardly could conceive;
Yet forced to be the satellites of her sun
They moved unable to forego her light,
Desiring they clutched at her with outstretched hands
Or followed stumbling in the paths she made.
p. 363 lines 152-164
Some felt her with their souls and thrilled with her,
A greatness felt near yet beyond mind’s grasp;
To see her was a summons to adore,
To be near her drew a high communion’s force.
So men worship a god too great to know,
Too high, too vast to wear a limiting shape;
They feel a Presence and obey a might,
Adore a love whose rapture invades their breasts;
To a divine ardour quickening the heart-beats,
A law they follow greatening heart and life.
pp. 363-64 lines 173-182
Some turned to her against their nature’s bent;

Divided between wonder and revolt,
Drawn by her charm and mastered by her will,
Possessed by her, her striving to possess,
609
Impatient subjects, their tied longing hearts
Hugging the bonds close of which they most complained,
Murmured at a yoke they would have wept to lose,
The splendid yoke of her beauty and her love:
Others pursued her with life’s blind desires
And claiming all of her as their lonely own,
Hastened to engross her sweetness meant for all.
pp. 364-65 lines 208-218
After this “Book of Birth and Quest”, we come to Book V, “The

Book of Love”. I think that this book belongs primarily to the legend
of Satyavan and Savitri. It is not directly connected either with the
Mother’s life or her yoga. Sri Aurobindo develops this into a very
beautiful book and I have said in many places that if Sri Aurobindo
had written nothing else but The Book of Love he would have still
left an indelible mark on English literature. Nowhere else in the
world’s literature do we find such beautiful poetry based on love
fulfilled. We have great poetry on love frustrated, but love fulfilled
is hardly regarded as a fit subject for poetry, but in Book V there is
wonderful poetry. We have to move on just now because it does not
immediately concern our present frame of reference.
Book VI, the “Book of Fate” is also a very important Book and is
a testimony to Sri Aurobindo’s great gifts as a poet and a thinker.
But we need not pause here to take a closer look at this Book since,
like Book V, it does not address the central issue we are pursuing
here.
We move on to Book VII, “The Book of Yoga”. As you know, in
the original legend Savitri performs a vrata, a vow, a triratra vrata,
for three days and nights, close to the day on which that Satyavan is
destined to die. Sri Aurobindo has taken this event and transformed
it into Savitri’s yoga. Just as Aswapati’s yagna becomes Aswapati’s
yoga, and gets an expansion of about 12,000 lines – what Vyasa
610
describes in ten lines, Sri Aurobindo describes in 12,000 lines –
similarly here the austerities practised by Savitri in the
Mahabharata legend get converted into Savitri’s yoga. And the
description of this yoga, while reminding us in some of its general
features of the Integral Yoga developed by Sri Aurobindo, also
brings to our mind many of the special features of the Mother’s
“psychic approach”. Aswapati’s yoga is the yoga of a scientist. Very
leisurely, very impersonal, he has all the time at his disposal and he
observes unmoved whatever is presented to his view, whether he is
in the vital worlds of the gods or in the world of darkness and
falsehood. His job is to report, his job is to observe, and that is what
he does. And he goes like a cone of fire ascending from one level to
another level, one level to another level. Savitri’s yoga has a
different kind of tempo. Hers is a more impassioned, more
dynamic, more direct approach. She goes through her psychic
being. Through her psychic she makes her way into the
Supramental realm. The other difference between the two yogas is
that in Aswapati’s yoga you have a description of the psycho-
spiritual transformation of Aswapati – a psychic transformation,
and also a spiritual transformation; there is no description of
Aswapati undergoing the supramental transformation. But in my
view in Savitri’s yoga we have a description not only of the psychic
and the spiritual transformation of Savitri, but also of her
supramental transformation. And this is to my mind described or
indicated in Canto 5 of Book VII, “The Finding of the Soul.”
This is my hypothesis, and I won’t mind being proved wrong on
this. Instead of being evasive, it is good to formulate a hypothesis
and leave it for other scholars to contend with and improve upon. I
can’t believe that Savitri was ready to take on the God of Death as
she does in Books Nine, Ten and Eleven without having acquired
the supramental consciousness and its powers; that is my first point.
The second is that our psychic being, when it meets the soul, meets
the jivatman. But for Savitri’s psychic being, the jivatman is the
611
Supreme Mother herself. So when Savitri’s psychic being meets the
jivatman, the soul, it must be merging with the Supreme Divine
Mother. And once you merge with the Supreme Divine Mother,
your consciousness merges with the Supramental because the
Supreme Divine Mother stands for the Supramental. And the
descriptions given in this canto suggest this extraordinary
happening. I will just read a little bit to illustrate what I have just
now said:
At last a change approached, the emptiness broke;

A wave rippled within, the world had stirred;
Once more her inner self became her space.
There was felt a blissful nearness to the goal;
Heaven leaned low to kiss the sacred hill,
The air trembled with passion and delight.
A rose of splendour on a tree of dreams,
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 immortal lustre as his robe,
Trailed heaven like a purple scarf and wore
As his vermilion caste-mark a red sun.
p. 523 lines 39-51
Another passage which describes this scene is equally suggestive:
A sealed identity within her woke;

She knew herself the Beloved of the Supreme:
These Gods and Goddesses were he and she:
The Mother was she of Beauty and Delight,
The Word in Brahma’s vast creating clasp,
The World-Puissance on almighty Shiva’s lap,—
612
The Master and the Mother of all lives
Watching the worlds their twin regard had made,
And Krishna and Radha for ever entwined in bliss,
The Adorer and Adored self-lost and one.
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 lines 118-134
There are other descriptions here which are extraordinary in their

implications. At the end of this canto, we are shown the
mahakundalini descending into Savitri, and opening up each of her
chakras. This descent of the mahakundalini is the descent of the
Supramental Force into Savitri – that is how I understand these
lines.
There is one more thing I would like to mention about Savitri’s
yoga, and that pertains to the most interesting Canto 4, where
Savitri is met by three madonnas – the Madonna of Compassion
and Love, the Madonna of Might, and the Madonna of Wisdom.
Each of these madonnas comes to Savitri and says that she is her
soul. What is interesting is that after each madonna finishes
whatever she has to say to Savitri, an egoistic perversion of each
madonna complains to Savitri about how the world has ill-treated
that particular being. Now it seems to me that these madonnas, who
are godheads like Durga and Lakshmi and Kali and so on, are
overmental godheads. And if Savitri after meeting these godheads
goes beyond them, it can only be into the Supramental realm.
The other interesting implication of this is equally important.
613
The overmental gods and goddesses have been with us for a very
long time. To these gods and goddesses we have been praying, we
have been offering our adoration and worship. Yet these gods and
goddesses have proved, by and large, ineffectual in remedying the
basic inadequacies of human consciousness. They have been able to
give to their chosen devotees money, fame, success, long life, health,
progeny, etc.; that is why they are honoured as gods. But I don’t
think that these overmental godheads have been effective in
cleansing the human heart of things which have darkened human
existence here – namely, jealousy, greed, lust, pride, hatred, and
egoism of all kinds that have made our world such a miserable
place. For that to happen, we need stronger gods, more powerful
gods. Sri Aurobindo says in one place that the battle between the
asuras and the devas has always been taking place in the quivering
theatre of the human consciousness. Since the human consciousness
has emerged from the inconscient it still has on it a large stamp of
the inconscient. It is in the arena of this consciousness that gods and
divine influences, as well as the hostiles and asuric forces, descend
and a struggle has been going on for the control of the human
consciousness. In spite of our mental allegiance to the gods, it seems
that most often it is the asuras who are winning. As a result, our
world is in such a big mess in spite of the gods we worship. Either
there must be something lacking in the gods we worship, or there
must be something wrong in the way we receive these gods within
us. It doesn’t matter which gods we worship, what is important is
which gods we incarnate in our own life. And so a time has now
come, not to discard the overmental gods, but to invoke more
powerful gods. Somebody once asked the Mother, “Mother, once
we are in this new yoga, should we still be worshipping old gods?”
And the Mother gave a reply which is simple and yet very subtle.
She said, “Once you are in this yoga and you start getting the real
experiences of this yoga, you will never be satisfied by worshipping
the old gods, either individually or all of them put together.” So a
614
time has now come for us to focus on new gods, because we need a
new consciousness to come down. And ultimately the gods will not
be able to destroy the asuras around us. We have to do it ourselves,
and the godly forces that we receive now are too weak to
accomplish this task.
The Mother makes a very interesting comment in one place. She
says, “Durga, Mahishasuramardini, comes down and slays the
demon Mahishasura. But then she has to come again the following
year to do the same thing. She has to come down and do this every
year.” Why does she have to come every year? Once she comes and
destroys the demon, we get busy; after she has destroyed it, we
ourselves recreate or resuscitate the demon. It is something in us
that feeds these asuric propensities. And that is why the Buddha
once said that when a vibration of evil comes to the human heart,
the human consciousness does not have the capacity to convert it
into its opposite. It only strengthens it and sends it back. Buddha
did not know how to avoid doing this; the remedy he suggested
was that we should sever all relationship with the world. Then only
will we be safe.
But we don’t want to do that. Our aim is to continue to live in
this world and to bring perfection to life here. So all this indicates
that a time has come for us to take a new step if we want to ward off
all the asuric and hostile forces that manifest themselves in Hitlers
or Stalins, or Idi Amins or in Osama Bin Ladens. They are all fed on
the lifeblood of our own consciousness, we are all responsible for
them in some sense. It is no use thinking “I am very pure, I am very
holy, I have nothing to do with them.” We are all connected from
within. And if we want really to get rid of them, we need to be able
to receive the new gods, we need to receive into our consciousness
the victorious power of the supramental consciousness. That is what
I see as the message of this particular Canto, Canto 4 of Book VII,
“The Triple Soul Forces”.
Savitri has then, after Canto V, still a long journey ahead of her.
615
She is asked to go through an experience of emptying herself.
Savitri is reminded that she has not come down on earth to manifest
the supramental consciousness only in herself, but to become a
channel through which this new force with its light and power can
flow and spread through the whole world. For this Savitri had to
undergo the discipline of emptying herself. This is described in
Canto 6 and the word Nirvana in the title of this canto refers to this
process of emptying oneself, of surrendering one’s siddhis to the
Divine. There are two kinds of nirvana. One is the nirvana of the
adwaitic and Buddhist kind, but in Sri Aurobindo’s yoga there is a
nirvana where after reaching a particular siddhi you offer this
siddhi to the Divine and empty yourself. Otherwise, as I said
jocularly, as we see around us, our spiritual track is all full of frozen
yogis; there are as it were frozen yogis all over, who don’t want to
move, who don’t want to stir because they are all big with their own
siddhis. But at every stage, once you have acquired a siddhi, you
have to learn to offer it back to the Divine so that there is space in
you for a further siddhi. Savitri therefore goes through this process
of emptying herself and finally attains what is called the Cosmic
Consciousness, and then she becomes an effective channel through
which the higher force begins to come down on earth.
This completes the description of Savitri’s yoga.
Then comes Book VIII where we meet the god of Death, and
after that, there are Books IX, X and XI. These Books describe the
confrontation between the God of Death and Savitri. We studied
these three books in some detail in the study camps held during in
recent years, so I do not wish to deal with them here except very
briefly.
Somewhere there is a reference in the writings of the Mother to
these three books as the collective yoga of the Mother. Death is not
just the negation or disintegration of physical existence. Death
comes to us in many forms. Very often death comes to us in the
glorified form of temporarily captivating intellectual philosophies
616
which hold us spellbound and do not let us move into the higher
regions. They blind us with the light they bring with them, and as a
result we can’t see beyond them. They say, “You have reached here,
you are high enough”. The intellect has a way of fascinating the
human mind because man is primarily manomaya, a mental being.
When the intellectual solution comes we feel thrilled. We do not
even ask what purpose such solutions serve. So there are various
philosophies: idealism, pragmatism, realism, nihilism and so on.
And then we see in Savitri that Death can profess any philosophy to
badger Savitri with – Buddhist philosophy, Adwaita philosophy,
etc. None of the philosophies he professes is completely false, but
each one of them is incomplete. And Savitri completes each of the
philosophies he professes. The integral philosophy of Sri
Aurobindo, as you know, does not negate or ignore any of the other
philosophies. Take for example Marxism. Sri Aurobindo says that
Marxism is not all wrong, the only problem with Marxism is that it
is incomplete. Similarly Freud’s psychology – it is not wrong but it
is incomplete. Similarly Darwin’s biology and all the theories based
on it – they are not wrong, but they are one-sided and therefore
suffocatingly incomplete. This is the stance of Sri Aurobindo: that
every one of these philosophies contains a kernel of truth, but that
there is a tendency to exaggerate things. And for each one Sri
Aurobindo brings the completion for it. The same thing Savitri does
again and again with the arguments of Death until finally all his
philosophies are exhausted.
One of the favourite debating points the God of Death uses is the
fickleness and physicality of much that goes in the name of human
love. He says that love is just a glandular disorder, it is a physical
attraction embellished with imagination. Savitri does not deny this
at all. But she says that it is only partly true. Love has other more
refined, sublime, and less physical expressions. In one of these
passages, she asserts the great value of love in these words:
617
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.
O Death, not for my heart’s sweet poignancy
Nor for my happy body’s bliss alone
I have claimed from thee the living Satyavan,
But for his work and mine, our sacred charge.
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 is man’s lien on the Absolute.”
p. 633 lines 439-461
I don’t think that even Shakespeare has comparable lines on love

although he is supposed to be a great poet of love.
There is another equally wonderful passage. Often people ask,
“How do you know that the Supramental will come? So far it has
not come.” That’s a very profound argument isn’t it? “So far it
hasn’t come, so how do you know that it will come in future? How
do you know?” Death is asking that question, and Savitri’s answer
is very simple.
618
How sayst thou Truth can never light the human mind
pp. 648-49 lines 274 -292
Finally, Death is vanquished. At this point something very

significant happens. Savitri does not conquer her own death. Savitri
conquers death for Satyavan. Who is Satyavan? We have been told
by Sri Aurobindo that Satyavan is the Earth-Soul, Man’s soul in
evolution. So in granting Satyavan freedom from death what Savitri
has done is to grant to the whole of mankind the potential for
immortality. We have all been rendered potentially immortal by
this great gift of Savitri.
Well, we have now reached the final stage of this drama. The
God of Death is vanquished, but he comes back as the Supreme
619
Divine himself, and once again tests Savitri, offering her a special
world, a special heaven of peace and bliss to live in with Satyavan.
Savitri rejects that offer saying “I have come down with Satyavan to
help mankind reach perfection. I don’t want any solitary happiness
for just the two of us.” When Savitri passes this last test as well, the
Supreme Lord is very pleased with Savitri and says to her “Savitri,
you have fulfilled all my expectations of you.” He predicts that
because of what she has done, one day everything will change, a
new world will be born, and this life will turn into the life divine.
Savitri then returns to earth with Satyavan’s soul clutched to her
heart.
All then shall change, a magic order come

Overtopping this mechanical universe.
A mightier race shall inhabit the mortal’s world.
On Nature’s luminous tops, on the Spirit’s ground,
The superman shall reign as king of life,
Make earth almost the mate and peer of heaven,
And lead towards God and truth man’s ignorant heart
And lift towards godhead his mortality,
A power released from circumscribing bounds,
Its height pushed up beyond death’s hungry reach,
Life’s top shall flame with the Immortal’s thoughts,
Light shall invade the darkness of its base.
Then in the process of evolving Time
All shall be drawn into a single plan,
A divine harmony shall be earth’s law,
Beauty and joy remould her way to live;
Even the body shall remember God.
pp. 706-07 lines 1277-1293
Nature shall live to manifest secret God,
620
The Spirit shall take up the human play,
This earthly life become the life divine.
p. 710 lines 1428-1430
It is extremely difficult to summarise this immense and magnificent

epic in fifty minutes, but I have been foolish enough to try it. I hope
I have achieved what I set out to do in some small measure. Hasn’t
it been said of the Divine’s Grace that it can make the dumb
eloquent and the lame scale the top of a mountain?
621

M Nadkarni The Golden Bridge

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M Nadkarni The Golden Bridge

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Savitri

The Golden Bridge, the Wonderful Fire

An Introduction to Sri Aurobindo’s epic

This publication has been funded by SAIIER

(Sri Aurobindo International Institute of Educational Research)

Published by Savitri Bhavan, a unit of SAIIER, Auroville

Discover more e-books and other activities on our website:

Ebook Edition 2015

Dr. Mangesh V. Nadkarni

for whom the only passion and joy in life was

reading, writing and talking about

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother

and their Grace and Love for humanity.

To the person who inspires me every day

through memories of his exemplary life.

My most sincere thanks go

I first heard Dr. Nadkarni speak when I was a student. He was

Mangesh Nadkarni was born to recite. I have heard many eminent

We do, we do! With Nadkarniji, explanation often became poetry

“Then we come to a glorious description of a

Whenever Nadkarniji began reciting from Savitri the passage

“But if it is true that this world is perceived, who

Nadkarniji dissuades students of Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy and

“But although Savitri and The Life Divine were both

Though we tend to speak of evolution in the Aurobindonian canon,

“Savitri is not great only as literature. It is a living

Golden words! And so much in keeping with the eminent Professor

Savitri has come to occupy a special place among Sri Aurobindo’s

Indeed Savitri is something concrete, living, it is all

This is the first of a series of articles on Savitri. The main purpose of

I used Savitri as a means of ascension. I began with it

Sri Aurobindo describes here the standards he set for himself in

As [Savitri] now stands there is a general overmental

Amal Kiran has reminded us that the mention of Overmind aligns

My child, everyday you are going to read Savitri; read

Amal Kiran, a well-known student of Savitri, also advises the reader

The Mahabharata Story of Savitri and Satyavan

Sri Aurobindo’s version

Whether to bear with Ignorance and death

In the long passage presented above, Savitri remembers how ‘Love

All in her pointed to a nobler kind.

We have now acquainted ourselves with the legend of Satyavan and

…if I have not poetical genius, at least I can claim a

The final version of Savitri that thus emerged shows some

The Mahabharata Legend:

Aswapati’s Yoga falls into three parts. First, he is

At the head she stands of birth and toil and fate,

And concludes thus (line 179):

Below, the wonder of the embrace divine.

At last in this transcendental realm Aswapati sees the world of

A new and marvellous creation rose.

Whether to bear with Ignorance and death

Then suddenly the narration freezes at the end of Canto 2, around

Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri

Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri

The Voice withdrew into its hidden skies.

In the preceding chapter we took a bird’s eye-view of Books I, II, III

The Mahabharata Legend

Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri

…a sanctuary of youth and joy,

Through his description of this place the poet creates a wonderful

As if a weapon of living Light,

To live, to love are signs of infinite things,