Savitri Study Class 05-04 “Beginnings of Life upon Earth”, pp. 132-141

Audio recording of the Savitri Study Class with Alok Pandey. Book 2, Canto 4.

Life becomes an aimless drift as it emerges out of matter where it has lost itself. It begins to emerge and start its evolutionary journey as a prisoner of matter and fully dependent upon it. Here it has become its very opposite and slowly step by step rediscover and release themselves using matter as the base and instrument.

A world that ever seeks for something missed,
Hunts for the joy that earth has failed to keep.
It has joined its hunger to the hunger of earth,
It has given the law of craving to our lives,
It has made our spirit’s need a fathomless gulf.
…
A formless yearning passions in man’s heart,
A cry is in his blood for happier things:
Else could he roam on a free sunlit soil
With the childlike pain-forgetting mind of beasts
Or live happy, unmoved, like flowers and trees.
The Might that came upon the earth to bless,
Has stayed on earth to suffer and aspire.
The infant laugh that rang through time is hushed:
Man’s natural joy of life is overcast
And sorrow is his nurse of destiny.
p. 132-133

 

Adorer of a joy without a name,
In her obscure cathedral of delight
To dim dwarf gods she offers secret rites.
But vain unending is the sacrifice,
The priest an ignorant mage who only makes
Futile mutations in the altar’s plan
And casts blind hopes into a powerless flame.
A burden of transient gains weighs down her steps
And hardly under that load can she advance;
But the hours cry to her, she travels on
Passing from thought to thought, from want to want;
Her greatest progress is a deepened need.
Matter dissatisfies, she turns to Mind;
She conquers earth, her field, then claims the heavens.
p. 134

 

In Ignorance she pursues the unfinished work,
For knowledge gropes, but meets not Wisdom’s face.
Ascending slowly with unconscious steps,
A foundling of the Gods she wanders here
Like a child-soul left near the gates of Hell
Fumbling through fog in search of Paradise.
…
He chanced into a grey obscurity
Teeming with instincts from the mindless gulfs
That pushed to wear a form and win a place.
Life here was intimate with Death and Night
And ate Death’s food that she might breathe awhile;
She was their inmate and adopted waif.
…
Indifferent to beauty and to light,
Parading she flaunted her animal disgrace
Unhelped by camouflage, brutal and bare,
An authentic image recognised and signed
Of her outcast force exiled from heaven and hope,
Fallen, glorying in the vileness of her state,
The grovel of a strength once half divine,
The graceless squalor of her beast desires,
p. 135

 

Matter smitten by Matter glimmered to sense,
Blind contacts, slow reactions beat out sparks
Of instinct from a cloaked subliminal bed,
Sensations crowded, dumb substitutes for thought,
Perception answered Nature’s wakening blows
But still was a mechanical response,
A jerk, a leap, a start in Nature’s dream,
And rude unchastened impulses jostling ran
Heedless of every motion but their own
And, darkling, clashed with darker than themselves,
Free in a world of settled anarchy.
The need to exist, the instinct to survive
…
It was a vain unnecessary world
Whose will to be brought poor and sad results
And meaningless suffering and a grey unease.
Nothing seemed worth the labour to become.

But judged not so his spirit’s wakened eye.
…
Even in that aimlessness a work was done
Pregnant with magic will and change divine.
The first writhings of the cosmic serpent Force
Uncoiled from the mystic ring of Matter’s trance;
It raised its head in the warm air of life.
It could not cast off yet Night’s stiffening sleep
Or wear as yet mind’s wonder-flecks and streaks,
Put on its jewelled hood the crown of soul
Or stand erect in the blaze of spirit’s sun.
p. 137-138

 

Impure, degraded though her motions are,
Always a heaven-truth broods in life’s deeps;
In her obscurest members burns that fire.
A touch of God’s rapture in creation’s acts,
A lost remembrance of felicity
Lurks still in the dumb roots of death and birth,
The world’s senseless beauty mirrors God’s delight.
That rapture’s smile is secret everywhere;
It flows in the wind’s breath, in the tree’s sap,
Its hued magnificence blooms in leaves and flowers.
p. 139

 

If Being had not plunged into the dark
Carrying with it its triple mystic cross.
Invoking in world-time the timeless truth,
Bliss changed to sorrow, knowledge made ignorant,
God’s force turned into a child’s helplessness
Can bring down heaven by their sacrifice.
A contradiction founds the base of life:
The eternal, the divine Reality
Has faced itself with its own contraries;
Being became the Void and Conscious-Force
Nescience and walk of a blind Energy
And Ecstasy took the figure of world-pain.
In a mysterious dispensation’s law
A Wisdom that prepares its far-off ends
Planned so to start her slow aeonic game.
A blindfold search and wrestle and fumbling clasp
Of a half-seen Nature and a hidden Soul,
A game of hide-and-seek in twilit rooms,
A play of love and hate and fear and hope
Continues in the nursery of mind
p. 141