First Transparent Robe, pp. 106-107 (SH 064)

Savitri Class in Hindi with Alok Pandey
Savitri Book II: The Book of the Traveller of the Worlds, Canto II: The Kingdom of Subtle Matter

The eternal being’s first transparent robe.
But when it must come back to its mortal load
And the hard ensemble of earth’s experience,
Then its return resumes that heavier dress.
For long before earth’s solid vest was forged
By the technique of the atomic Void,
A lucent envelope of self-disguise
Was woven round the secret spirit in things.
The subtle realms from those bright sheaths are made.
This wonder-world with all its radiant boon
Of vision and inviolate happiness,
Only for expression cares and perfect form;
Fair on its peaks, it has dangerous nether planes;
Its light draws towards the verge of Nature’s lapse;
It lends beauty to the terror of the gulfs
And fascinating eyes to perilous Gods,
Invests with grace the demon and the snake.
Its trance imposes earth’s inconscience,
Immortal it weaves for us death’s sombre robe
And authorises our mortality.
This medium serves a greater Consciousness:
A vessel of its concealed autocracy,
It is the subtle ground of Matter’s worlds,
It is the immutable in their mutable forms,
In the folds of its creative memory
It guards the deathless type of perishing things:
Its lowered potencies found our fallen strengths;
Its thought invents our reasoned ignorance;
Its sense fathers our body’s reflexes.
Our secret breath of untried mightier force,
The lurking sun of an instant’s inner sight,
Its fine suggestions are a covert fount
For our iridescent rich imaginings
Touching things common with transfiguring hues
Till even earth’s mud grows rich and warm with the skies
And a glory gleams from the soul’s decadence.
Its knowledge is our error’s starting-point;
Its beauty dons our mud-mask ugliness,
Its artist good begins our evil’s tale.
A heaven of creative truths above,
A cosmos of harmonious dreams between,
A chaos of dissolving forms below,
It plunges lost in our inconscient base.
Out of its fall our denser Matter came.

Thus taken was God’s plunge into the Night.

[pp. 106-107]