Savitri, the mantra of transformation, as the Mother put it so powerfully and so beautifully, is regarded by some as the fifth Veda. In a sense it follows the line of Vedic poetry where revelation mounts upon revelation and intuition is overlept by intuition. The sounds, words, style, substance all touch a highest intensity of Truth and Beauty and Power whose ultimate result on the hearer and the reader, whether they understand the inner and inmost sense or not, is delight; Delight that is at the background of Creation and at the Apex of all things. Savitri releases this Delight as the rhythms of a higher hemisphere roll down through the sound symbols and word symbols into the sphere of sorrow and mortality. The result of this meeting is a transmutation of consciousness, a growing out of our present state of darkness and ignorance into Light and Freedom and Immortality. This effect is described so perfectly in Savitri itself:
As when the mantra sinks in Yoga’s ear,
Its message enters stirring the blind brain
And keeps in the dim ignorant cells its sound;
The hearer understands a form of words
And, musing on the index thought it holds,
He strives to read it with the labouring mind,
But finds bright hints, not the embodied truth:
Then, falling silent in himself to know
He meets the deeper listening of his soul:
The Word repeats itself in rhythmic strains:
Thought, vision, feeling, sense, the body’s self
Are seized unutterably and he endures
An ecstasy and an immortal change;
He feels a Wideness and becomes a Power,
All knowledge rushes on him like a sea:
Transmuted by the white spiritual ray
He walks in naked heavens of joy and calm,
Sees the God-face and hears transcendent speech:
In a sense all of Sri Aurobindo’s writings after his attainment of the silent Nirvanic consciousness in 1907 are mantric. They are the result of a ‘spiritual seeing’ and not the usual mental analysis through the labouring mind. The mind of the thinker in him was already transmuted into the mind of the seer and all of the Arya writings bear witness to this stamp of Light and Fire that courses through the words and sounds as they swim into our ken from a higher sphere of Truth-Light. But in Savitri the attempt is to give this higher consciousness and the mantra that descends from there into the mind of the seer a most perfect rhythm and expression. Savitri follows the trail of Sri Aurobindo’s Yoga. As He ascended to higher and higher planes and as the natural instruments underwent the transmutation in the wake of this ascension, Sri Aurobindo wrote and rewrote the divine epic from that newly attained state of ascension. Naturally this continued right upto the very last days of His bodily sojourn. Therefore Savitri is special among His writings. It is not just the seeing of the Seer and the revelation that accompanies this seeing but the outpouring of this higher seeing in the most perfect words and sounds that human speech can ever envisage. The expression is as close to perfection as the consciousness experiencing it. Thus it contains within its word-body and sound-body the power to help us not only to come into contact with the state of consciousness that is expressed here but even more to actually ascend into that state. It has not only a revelatory power, the power to change our thoughts and understanding which revelation gives, but the power to transmute us as well; that is to say, to help us grow into that which it embodies, not just in thought and understanding but also in feeling, willing and the very body’s sense.
It is a Veda in another sense as well. For the truths revealed here are not those that are ordinarily experienced by our narrow range of senses but those that are beyond the limits of our mortal sight and mortal hearing and yet touch and fill everything that we sense and experience with a diviner experience:
Releasing things unseized by earthly sense:
A world unseen, unknown by outward mind
Appeared in the silent spaces of the soul.
He sat in secret chambers looking out
Into the luminous countries of the unborn
Where all things dreamed by the mind are seen and true
And all that the life longs for is drawn close….
A reporter and scribe of hidden wisdom talk,
Her shining minutes of celestial speech,
Passed through the masked office of the occult mind,
Transmitting gave to prophet and to seer
The inspired body of the mystic Truth.
A recorder of the inquiry of the gods,
Spokesman of the silent seeings of the Supreme,
She brought immortal words to mortal men.
Above the reason’s brilliant slender curve,
Released like radiant air dimming a moon,
Broad spaces of a vision without line
Or limit swam into his spirit’s ken…..
That is why it is idle to understand it with the labouring intellectual mind and clamp its free rhythm to any known rhythms and metre. This does not mean that the Divine poem can neither be understood nor has any rhythm. That would be neither poetry nor truth. It simply means that we have to adopt another method and use other means to ‘understand’ it and enjoy its rhythm. Revelation has to be received, and with the humility and aspiration that one naturally feels when face to face with a great truth. It is this that opens an inner door and the sense of the words and the rhythm of the sounds is revealed to us by the gods and the consciousness of Truth that has brought down the poem and given it a form of human speech and a birth among the mortals. Indeed the mantric poem is a boon to earth that has been brought down through the arduous tapasya of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. The best we can do is to be grateful to Them for this boon and receive it with a mind open to Light through aspiration and a heart open to Love through a seeking and longing for the Divine. Is this not the book of Love itself, the song of Delight, the message of the Superconscient Fire to which our ears are sealed and our hearts closed to its subtle intimations:
The skilful Penman’s unseen finger wrote
His swift intuitive calligraphy;
Earth’s forms were made his divine documents,
The wisdom embodied mind could not reveal,
Inconscience chased from the world’s voiceless breast;
Transfigured were the fixed schemes of reasoning Thought.
Arousing consciousness in things inert,
He imposed upon dark atom and dumb mass
The diamond script of the Imperishable,
Inscribed on the dim heart of fallen things
A paean-song of the free Infinite
And the Name, foundation of eternity,
And traced on the awake exultant cells
In the ideographs of the Ineffable
The lyric of the love that waits through Time
And the mystic volume of the Book of Bliss
And the message of the superconscient Fire.
In fact we can see how each time Sri Aurobindo withdrew from the immediate and the outward scene, He placed in the midst of seeking and suffering humanity something that would redeem him and carry him through the dark and perilous passage that one has to pass in the divine dispensation of things. Thus, when he withdrew from the scene of Indian Nationalism, he had kindled and awakened in the heart of a nation the living Presence of Bhavani Bharati, the guardian deity of India’s destiny whom He invoked by recharging the mantra Bande Mataram with the strength of his love and sacrifice for the Indian nation in whose resurgence he saw the hope of redemption of all mankind and an important condition for the awakening of the world to a New and higher Light. Having established the settled will for freedom in the soul of a nation, he moved on to establish a settled will for another kind of freedom and another type of revolution in the soul and mind of humanity. Here too, once he had opened the path and worked out the major lines of advance, he withdrew behind the external scene but not before installing the Divine Mother in the temple of the earth and in the midst of an ignorant yet aspiring humanity. Finally, when the necessities of the work demanded that he withdraw one step further and work from behind the iron curtains of death where our earthly sight reaches not, he placed once again in the hands of the striving human race the magical mantra of Savitri to help, to heal, to carry the human march forward with a song of hope in its heart and a ray of the Supreme Light to chase away the darkness that hangs around our earthbound soul.
There is yet another similarity between Savitri and the Vedas. The theme of the Vedas is the epic of human ascension from the mind to a higher and Supramental status of being; it is a document that reveals to us the human journey from the dark womb of things to the eternal Light. In Savitri too we have a detailed description of this epic climb, not only of the human soul but also of the earth nature since its first insect crawl towards the most glorious of flights that is yet to come. In fact the book starts with this dense veil of Night, this black pall of Inconscience that covers all things. It ends with the dream of a greater dawn for earth and man. So too, the Vedas speak of the Dawn emerging after the battle with the forces of Darkness and Ignorance that hold earth nature in their powerful grip. In Savitri these forces are typified in the being of Death whose compelling logic seems to stifle any will and aspiration for a Divine Life upon earth. But She conqers Death not only by the power of Her mastering Omniscient Thought but even more by Her Omnipotent Will. What is foreseen in the Vedas is here fulfilled in Savitri, – ‘The end of Death, the death of Ignorance’, to use lines from the book itself. Sri Aurobindo reveals in the Secret of the Vedas about this Dawn, the bringer of illumination for earth and men:
Usha is the divine illumination and Dakshina is the discerning knowledge that comes with the dawn and enables the Power in the mind, Indra, to know aright and separate the light from the darkness, the truth from the falsehood, the straight from the crooked, vṛṇīta vijānan. The right and left hand of Indra are his two powers of action in knowledge; for his two arms are called gabhasti, a word which means ordinarily a ray of the sun but also forearm, and they correspond to his two perceptive powers, his two bright horses, harī, which are described as sun-eyed, sūracakṣasā and as vision-powers of the Sun, sūryasya ketū. Dakshina presides over the right-hand power, dakṣiṇa, and therefore we have the collocation dakṣiṇe dakṣiṇāvān. It is this discernment which presides over the right action of the sacrifice and the right distribution of the offerings and it is this which enables Indra to hold the herded wealth of the Panis securely, in his right hand. And finally we are told what is this secret thing that was placed for us in the cave and is concealed in the waters of being, the waters in which the Thought of the Fathers has to be set, apsu dhiyaṁ dadhiṣe. It is the hidden Sun, the secret Light of our divine existence which has to be found and taken out by knowledge from the darkness in which it is concealed.
[CWSA, The Secret of the Vedas: page 195]
We have in Savitri these marvelous lines that are comparable in their splendor only to the inner Dawn that our forefathers once witnessed in their inner consciousness:
The persistent thrill of a transfiguring touch
Persuaded the inert black quietude
And beauty and wonder disturbed the fields of God.
A wandering hand of pale enchanted light
That glowed along a fading moment’s brink,
Fixed with gold panel and opalescent hinge
A gate of dreams ajar on mystery’s verge.
One lucent corner windowing hidden things
Forced the world’s blind immensity to sight.
The darkness failed and slipped like a falling cloak
From the reclining body of a god.
Then through the pallid rift that seemed at first
Hardly enough for a trickle from the suns,
Outpoured the revelation and the flame.
The brief perpetual sign recurred above.
A glamour from unreached transcendences
Iridescent with the glory of the Unseen,
A message from the unknown immortal Light
Ablaze upon creation’s quivering edge,
Dawn built her aura of magnificent hues
And buried its seed of grandeur in the hours.
An instant’s visitor the godhead shone.
On life’s thin border awhile the Vision stood
And bent over earth’s pondering forehead curve.
Interpreting a recondite beauty and bliss
In colour’s hieroglyphs of mystic sense,
It wrote the lines of a significant myth
Telling of a greatness of spiritual dawns,
A brilliant code penned with the sky for page.
Almost that day the epiphany was disclosed…..
The struggle between Darkness and Light, between Evil and Good or as the Vedic sages saw it between the gods and the titans is not the whole truth. It is a passage, an important practical distinction that we can ill-afford at our present stage of evolution. Yet, in the end the two seeming opposites stand reconciled in the Vision of the All-Wonderful. The Player of the flute, the divine Beloved of the gopis is also the slayer of Kansa and reveals Himself as Time, the Destroyer on the battlefield of Kurukshetra. The great and sole Omnipotent Goddess hiding her heart of Beauty and Love appears before our ego-self as Kali, the fierce and the terrible; Rudra and Shiva are a single god! The Vedic epiphany describes the wonderful vision of the One who stands behind all things, the eternal seed and core of transient things, not only ‘things’ and objects extended in Space but also ‘things’ and events that unfold in Time. Savitri carries this vision of the One also to its ultimate grand culmination. There are passages of exquisite beauty and power and grace that bring out this vision of the One to our mist-laden eyes ever struggling to make sense of the evil that one sees within and around oneself. Our eyes see only division while Truth is supreme unity and sublime Harmony. God and the World, Soul and Nature, Spirit and Matter are not two eternally separate but are two poles of a single unity:
One who has shaped this world is ever its lord:
Our errors are his steps upon the way;
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…..All here where each thing seems its lonely self
Are figures of the sole transcendent One:
Only by him they are, his breath is their life;
An unseen Presence moulds the oblivious clay…..
The Absolute, the Perfect, the Alone
Has called out of the Silence his mute Force
Where she lay in the featureless and formless hush
Guarding from Time by her immobile sleep
The ineffable puissance of his solitude.
The Absolute, the Perfect, the Alone
Has entered with his silence into space:
He has fashioned these countless persons of one self;
He has built a million figures of his power;
He lives in all, who lived in his Vast alone;
Space is himself and Time is only he.
In fact the whole canto on The Secret Knowledge is a grand synthesis, a tremendous divine reconciliation of the paradox called this world, a reconciliation not only in Knowledge, as attempted by the Vedic mystics and the great seer of the Isa Upanishada in their profound and bold utterance Isavasyam idam sarvam, yat kincha jagatyam jagat [All this is for habitation by the Lord, whatsoever is individual universe of movement in the universal motion], but a reconciliation also in Power (as the Tantric yogis attempted). This double reconciliation of the static and dynamic sides of the One Reality is carried to its ultimate possibility wherein the seemingly two, God and the World, Oneness and the Multiplicity of creation, Soul and Nature, Brahman and Maya are reconciled in a grand and happy marriage of Heaven and Earth:
He is the Maker and the world he made,
He is the vision and he is the Seer;
He is himself the actor and the act,
He is himself the knower and the known,
He is himself the dreamer and the dream.
There are Two who are One and play in many worlds;
In Knowledge and Ignorance they have spoken and met
And light and darkness are their eyes’ interchange;
Our pleasure and pain are their wrestle and embrace,
Our deeds, our hopes are intimate to their tale;
They are married secretly in our thought and life.
One is reminded of the great and mysterious message of the Isa Upanishada again:
- But he who sees everywhere the Self in all existences and all existences in the Self, shrinks not thereafter from aught.
- He in whom it is the Self-Being that has become all existences that are Becomings, for he has the perfect knowledge, how shall he be deluded, whence shall he have grief who sees everywhere oneness?
- It is He that has gone abroad—That which is bright, bodiless, without scar of imperfection, without sinews, pure, unpierced by evil. The Seer, the Thinker, the One who becomes everywhere, the Self-existent has ordered objects perfectly according to their nature from years sempiternal.
- Into a blind darkness they enter who follow after the Ignorance, they as if into a greater darkness who devote themselves to the Knowledge alone.
- Other, verily, it is said, is that which comes by the Knowledge, other that which comes by the Ignorance; this is the lore we have received from the wise who revealed That to our understanding.
- He who knows That as both in one, the Knowledge and the Ignorance, by the Ignorance crosses beyond death and by the Knowledge enjoys Immortality.
- Into a blind darkness they enter who follow after the Non-Birth, they as if into a greater darkness who devote themselves to the Birth alone.
- Other, verily, it is said, is that which comes by the Birth, other that which comes by the Non-Birth; this is the lore we have received from the wise who revealed That to our understanding.
- He who knows That as both in one, the Birth and the dissolution of Birth, by the dissolution crosses beyond death and by the Birth enjoys Immortality.
Savitri brings this greatest of all ‘formulas’, if formula there can ever be, of Truth, the highest wisdom ever uttered by the human speech even more closer to us, not only to the mind but also to the heart and our very body’s self::
The master of existence lurks in us
And plays at hide-and-seek with his own Force;
In Nature’s instrument loiters secret God.
The Immanent lives in man as in his house;
He has made the universe his pastime’s field,
A vast gymnasium of his works of might.
All-knowing he accepts our darkened state,
Divine, wears shapes of animal or man;
Eternal, he assents to Fate and Time,
Immortal, dallies with mortality.
The All-Conscious ventured into Ignorance,
The All-Blissful bore to be insensible.
Incarnate in a world of strife and pain,
He puts on joy and sorrow like a robe
And drinks experience like a strengthening wine.
He whose transcendence rules the pregnant Vasts,
Prescient now dwells in our subliminal depths,
A luminous individual Power, alone.
The Absolute, the Perfect, the Alone
Has called out of the Silence his mute Force
Where she lay in the featureless and formless hush
Guarding from Time by her immobile sleep
The ineffable puissance of his solitude.
The Absolute, the Perfect, the Alone
Has entered with his silence into space:
He has fashioned these countless persons of one self;
He has built a million figures of his power;
He lives in all, who lived in his Vast alone;
Space is himself and Time is only he.
Finally we find in the lore of the Vedic seers an effort to grow into the Godhead through the law of sacrifice and mutual giving, – the seers offering sacrifice to the gods, thereby increasing them, and the gods pouring down all their riches in turn upon man to fashion in him a godlike strength and light and joy. Savitri takes this truth too to its greatest and highest possibility. Not just to grow in the likeness of the gods but to grow into the very likeness of the Divine, the Knowledge and Power and Freedom and Glory and Perfection of the Divine, the God who dwells secret within our heart. This is the wisdom that is secret to our mind and the ignorant groping of the senses, and yet it is this Transcendent Wisdom that works secretly within all things, within earth and much more so within man, who is meant to serve as a bridge between heaven and earth.
Pent up behind this ignorance is a secret knowledge and a great light of truth; prisoned by this evil is an infinite content of good; in this limiting death is the seed of a boundless immortality.
Sri Aurobindo The Secret of the Vedas: page 191 (CWSA 15)
The Absolute, the Perfect, the Immune,
One who is in us as our secret self,
Our mask of imperfection has assumed,
He has made this tenement of flesh his own,
His image in the human measure cast
That to his divine measure we might rise;
Then in a figure of divinity
The Maker shall recast us and impose
A plan of godhead on the mortal’s mould
Lifting our finite minds to his infinite,
Touching the moment with eternity.
This transfiguration is earth’s due to heaven:
A mutual debt binds man to the Supreme:
His nature we must put on as he put ours;
We are sons of God and must be even as he:
His human portion, we must grow divine.
Our life is a paradox with God for key.
But there is yet something greater, the greatest of all mysteries known to man. It surpasses even the Vedic lore. The Gita speaks of it as a great mystery, etadrahasyauttamam, the mystery of Divine birth in Time, the assumption of a transient mortal body by the Eternal Divine, the Immortal descending amidst our mortality, consenting to pass through the narrow gates of death so as to redeem this sphere of sorrow by the Grace Divine. Savitri, above all things, is the story of the Avatara, the Divine becoming human in order to redeem humanity, ‘paying here God’s debt to earth and man’ as Savirti puts it. It is not just about the human ascension and the path of sacrifice that man must undertake to grow into a diviner mould. It is much more about the divine descent, the sacrifice that the Divine undertakes to uplift man and earth. It is the other side of story, as seen by the eyes of God and revealed to our souls by none else but ‘the All-Wise who leads the unseeing world’. This is the supreme value of Savitri, one that no poetry can surpass, since it has flowed from the authentic experience of none other than the Avatara Himself. It is the story of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo’s life, of that dimension that the human eyes cannot see. The Mother put it so succinctly:
Savitri
The supreme revelation of Sri Aurobindo’s vision
(About Savitri)
1) The daily record of the spiritual experiences of the individual who has written
2) A complete system of yoga which can serve as a guide for those who want to follow the integral sadhana.
3) The yoga of the Earth in its ascension towards the Divine.
4) The experiences of the Divine Mother in her effort to adapt herself to the body she has taken and the ignorance and the falsity of the earth upon which she has incarnated.
The Mother CWM 13
Thus we see that it is also the story of Earth; the story also of man, the inner story of the Divine unfolding upon earth and in man. It is the story, the path, of all who have and continue to inwardly struggle and battle for the victory of Divine life upon earth. Many a mystics and saints and yogis and sages will find some of their experiences documented here. In fact, in the very third Canto of the first book one finds a detailed description of almost all the major spiritual experiences that mystic literature has recorded over the millenniums. But that is only the starting point of a great and tremendous journey, one that has never been undertaken so far and yet it is the same journey that runs as an undercurrent of every life since creation began, – the journey of the Divine in matter and His progressive revelation through evolution, albeit in terms of matter, assuming many a names and forms till at last it reaches that giant point where the Glory hidden in our own depths begins to shine out through the cloak of mortal man and the eyes of God looks out through human eyes. But this too only serves for a yet greater start, a leap from one peak of realization to another till that Reality is found in ‘whom the world and self grow true and one’.
THIS too must now be overpassed and left,
As all must be until the Highest is gained
In whom the world and self grow true and one:
Till That is reached our journeying cannot cease.
We see therefore that not only in its conception and sense but also in its method and source, Savitri is a divine poem. Its power and purpose is not only to acquaint us with diviner things, of the ways divine, but to uplift us through its touch divine into higher and higher states of consciousness. That is why each time we read and re-read it, another and greater meaning begins to dawn upon us. We move as if from dawn to greater dawn. In the ever enlarging circle of our vision, as we climb from hill to hill of an inner sight, we behold the beauty and the wonder of this creation, the deep utility of tears and the apparent justification of death and struggle and error and pain in a world that has issued forth out of the womb, not of some original darkness, but, as Savitri puts it:
All here is a mystery of contraries:
Darkness a magic of self-hidden Light,
Suffering some secret rapture’s tragic mask
And death an instrument of perpetual life.
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.
The inconscient world is the spirit’s self-made room,
Eternal Night shadow of eternal Day.
Night is not our beginning nor our end;
She is the dark Mother in whose womb we have hid
Safe from too swift a waking to world-pain.
We came to her from a supernal Light,
By Light we live and to the Light we go.
What greater song of hope can there be than this? In a world torn by inner and outer conflicts, collapsing under its own heavy load, there comes in the persona of Savitri the Grace that saves, the Word of Light made flesh, the power of the All-Creative Spirit, the sole Omniscient Omnipotent Goddess ‘of whom the world is an inscrutable mask’. Leaning across the wideness of inner Space which is the home of her birth, she travels through the silence of Space, entering the heavy and pain-laden atmosphere of earthly life. The sole purpose of this divine descent is to awaken matter to its spiritual Reality and earth to its supreme goal. Towards this end there is another consenting player, – Man, in and through whom this divine destiny of earth has to be realised. Man is the meeting point of the two poles that seem like opposites to our limited and dividing mental vision. On one side, we have the stamp of the Inconscience in every cell of our being. It takes many a hues and colours; the seal of heredity, the defeatist murmur that ever rises to slay the faith, the whispers of the dark denizens that often steal into the chambers of our mind and speech and corrupt all that is good and beautiful and true by their foul breath. Many are the masks of Death, many its entry points into our lives. It can even assume divine looking masks that allure us to an other-worldly realization of the Perfection we seek here upon earth as embodied beings. But this is only one side of the story of man’s life, not the totality of his being. However much Science and Philosophy may deny or Reason fail to grasp, there dwells within us the One who can create and destroy universes with a single breath. He is the evolutionary Godhead whose secret pressure keeps us moving forward despite ourselves. He is the hope of earthly life, the leader of the human march. It is He who brings down to earth by the power of his one-pointed aspiration and tapasya Savitri, the Light of the Supreme. He is Aswapati, the human father of Savitri but also the sole seer and the Lord of Yoga who brings down to earth’s dumb need her radiant power. Man, the meeting point of the two in whom the play of contraries has taken a rather acute turn is Satyavan, the one who holds the truth somewhere in his secret depths. But now he has lost it, outcast from the glory that must be his, he struggles and stumbles upon this earth with his uncertain mind. The mind of man, blind and error prone is not all his earthly climb can reach. There are shining summits of Glory and Wisdom to which Mind can climb and from which Mind itself is born. But entering an earthly embodiment, trapped by the senses that ever condition and limit and blind him rather than reveal the truth, he is ever striving to reclaim and rediscover the glory it has lost. This is Dyumatsena, the human father of Satyavan, the illumined mind that has here fallen blind. It must recover its lost sight and regain its celestial kingdom.
These are the four main characters of the drama of earthly life as it unfolds itself towards the future cycle. The Divine poet reveals this inner truth and symbolism of Savitri to us:
The tale of Satyavan and Savitri is recited in the Mahabharata as a story of conjugal love conquering death. But this legend is, as shown by many features of the human tale, one of the many symbolic myths of the Vedic cycle. Satyavan is the soul carrying the divine truth of being within itself but descended into the grip of death and ignorance; Savitri is the Divine Word, daughter of the Sun, goddess of the supreme Truth who comes down and is born to save; Aswapati, the Lord of the Horse, her human father, is the Lord of Tapasya, the concentrated energy of spiritual endeavour that helps us to rise from the mortal to the immortal planes; Dyumatsena, Lord of the Shining Hosts, father of Satyavan, is the Divine Mind here fallen blind, losing its celestial kingdom of vision, and through that loss its kingdom of glory. 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.
We are clearly told that this is not merely an allegory or a symbol but concrete and immense realities taking on a human shape. Their earthly drama, for which they came down in a particular epoch assuming a certain name and form, does not cease with a single victory. This first victory, of which Savitri bears the witness and is a record, paves the way for other similar victories, if we too can surrender our soul and self into the hands and being of Savitri and become the happy recipients of Her Grace. This is the mystic marriage that our being waits for, the marriage of our earthbound soul with the heavenly Grace, of which the All-seeing Sun and the gods are the sole witnesses and the earth itself the ground of the sacred ceremony. This eternal marriage of the Lord and His spouse is to be enacted in many a bodies and lives. But for that our nature must be lifted to its utmost possibility where the eternal Lord and His Shakti are one. Only the power of Aswapati, the Supreme Lord, and the Grace of Savitri, the Divine Mother, can achieve this hoped for miracle in man. When this happens there truly begins a New Age and a new cycle of earthly life. Then is the being of Satyavan fulfilled, and then a new chapter of destiny opens for earth and one master-act changes Fate. This master-act of which Savitri and Satyavan are the living examples is the act of luminous faith and surrender, even as Satyavan who, recognizing in the persona of Savitri the illuminating Grace of an All-transfiguring Divine Love, surrenders:
But thou hast come and all will surely change:
I shall feel the World-Mother in thy golden limbs
And hear her wisdom in thy sacred voice.
The child of the Void shall be reborn in God,
My Matter shall evade the Inconscient’s trance.
My body like my spirit shall be free.
It shall escape from Death and Ignorance…..Even a brief nearness has reshaped my life.
For now I know that all I lived and was
Moved towards this moment of my heart’s rebirth;
I look back on the meaning of myself,
A soul made ready on earth’s soil for thee…..Descend, O happiness, with thy moon-gold feet,
Enrich earth’s floors upon whose sleep we lie.
This great act of surrender to the Divine Grace with an absolute trust is only for the great in spirit. This is the supreme wisdom, the wisdom that saves us from many a complications and takes us through the shortest and surest route towards this predestined great end. This is the supreme word of Savitri, the greatest and the wisest advice ever given to man, the advice of surrendering all he is and does to the Divine Master within or the Avatara without, the two who are a single being; one unseen and hidden within our depths, the other standing before our eyes as the Leader of the human march through the great battle of life. When we thus surrender ourselves to the Spirit of Savitri that is as living and real today as it was yesterday; when we approach Her in the spirit of humility as a child would seek his mother not so much through the pride of the intellect but through the door of love in our heart, then Savitri herself begins to reveal her mysteries. It is not a book that we read but try to enter into the atmosphere of a living and conscious Deity, the Being of the Divine Mother of whom Savitri is an embodiment, then She Herself takes us by the hand through every passage and, carrying us in Her arms helps us understand what we see and hear and sense and feel till the true Knowledge awakens and our soul and mind and body are thrilled by the rapture of the epiphany. She becomes then the Teacher and awakens in us the inner listener, the hearer of the Divine Word who is seated within our soul. Nothing is impossible or difficult for one who has thus opened and given himself to Savitri, the living embodiment of Light and Truth and Love Divine.
Lay all on her; she is the cause of all [Savitri: Book Twelve]
The Mother reveals:
The direct road is through that – the heart……Try and you will see how very different it is, how new, if you read with this attitude, with this something at the back of your consciousness, as though it were an offering to Sri Aurobindo. You know it is charged, fully charged with consciousness; as though Savitri were a being, a real Guide. I tell you, whoever wants to practice Yoga, if he tries sincerely and feels the necessity, he will be able to climb with the help of Savitri to the highest rungs of the ladder of Yoga, will be able to find the secret that Savitri represents. And this without the help of a Guru. And he will be able to practice it anywhere. Savitri by itself will be his guide, for all that he needs he will find in Savitri.
[Sweet Mother: Luminous Notes: Conversation with the Mother by Mona Sarkar]
