Audio recording of the Savitri Study Class with Alok Pandey. Book 1, Canto 4.
Spiritual thought has leaned towards the immobile witness Self and hence has discarded nature. On the other hand secular efforts have tended to discover the secrets of nature and make life perfect with these discoveries. Sri Aurobindo synthesizes the two in a harmonious oneness. He also synthesises the two poles of creation, – the higher gods above and the dark energies and titanic forces below. But most of all through this process of evolution which takes place as we move amidst dualities, through the wrestle of opposites, there is the saving Grace that intervenes and changes the course of destiny. It is this Grace, this Divine intervention which is the source of Hope and the promise of a New Creation of tomorrow.
Impervious to desire and doom and hope,
Their station of inviolable might
Moveless upholds the world’s enormous task,
Its ignorance is by their knowledge lit,
Its yearning lasts by their indifference.
…
As the breadths draw the small to adventure vast,
Their aloofness drives man to surpass himself.Careless they seem of the grief that stings the world’s heart,
Careless of the pain that rends its body and life;
Above joy and sorrow is that grandeur’s walk:
They have no portion in the good that dies,
Mute, pure, they share not in the evil done;
Else might their strength be marred and could not save.
Alive to the truth that dwells in God’s extremes,
Awake to a motion of all-seeing Force,
The slow outcome of the long ambiguous years
And the unexpected good from woeful deeds,
The immortal sees not as we vainly see.
He looks on hidden aspects and screened powers,
He knows the law and natural line of things.
Undriven by a brief life’s will to act,
Unharassed by the spur of pity and fear,
He makes no haste to untie the cosmic knot
Or the world’s torn jarring heart to reconcile.
In Time he waits for the Eternal’s hour.
Yet a spiritual secret aid is there;
While a tardy Evolution’s coils wind on
And Nature hews her way through adamant
A divine intervention thrones above.
p. 58
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;
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.
p. 59
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.
p. 60
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.
…
Thus have they made their play with us for roles:
Author and actor with himself as scene,
He moves there as the Soul, as Nature she.
p. 61
This is the knot that ties together the stars:
The Two who are one are the secret of all power,
The Two who are one are the might and right in things.
His soul, silent, supports the world and her,
His acts are her commandment’s registers.
Happy, inert, he lies beneath her feet:
His breast he offers for her cosmic dance
Of which our lives are the quivering theatre,
And none could bear but for his strength within,
Yet none would leave because of his delight.
…
Active, inspired by her he speaks and moves;
His deeds obey her heart’s unspoken demands:
Passive, he bears the impacts of the world
As if her touches shaping his soul and life:
…
A partner in her evil and her good,
He has consented to her passionate ways,
He is driven by her sweet and dreadful force.
His sanctioning name initials all her works;
p. 63
He is carried by her from Night to deathless Light.
This grand surrender is his free-will’s gift,
His pure transcendent force submits to hers.
p. 64
In the mystery of her cosmic ignorance,
Although she drives him on her fancy’s roads,
At play with him as with her child or slave,
To freedom and the Eternal’s mastery
And immortality’s stand above the world,
She moves her seeming puppet of an hour.
…
But conquering her, then is he most her slave;
He is her dependent, all his means are hers;
Nothing without her he can, she rules him still.
At last he wakes to a memory of Self:
…
Her highest heights she unmasks and is his mate.
Till then he is a plaything in her game;
p. 65
The master of existence lurks in us
And plays at hide-and-seek with his own Force;
…
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;
…
Immortal, dallies with mortality.
p. 66
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;
…
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.
p. 67
Thus will the masked Transcendent mount his throne.
When darkness deepens strangling the earth’s breast
And man’s corporeal mind is the only lamp,
As a thief’s in the night shall be the covert tread
Of one who steps unseen into his house.
A Voice ill-heard shall speak, the soul obey,
A Power into mind’s inner chamber steal,
A charm and sweetness open life’s closed doors
And beauty conquer the resisting world,
The Truth-Light capture Nature by surprise,
A stealth of God compel the heart to bliss
And earth grow unexpectedly divine.
…
A few shall see what none yet understands;
God shall grow up while the wise men talk and sleep;
For man shall not know the coming till its hour
And belief shall be not till the work is done.
p. 55
