Savitri Study Class with Dr Alok Pandey, Book 7 Canto 2
Behind the little surface life of man there are powers and forces that can make or mar his world. There are soul-powers asleep within his being even as there are demoniac and dark powers that lie in his subconscious tracts. Our reason is unable to fathom them let alone deal with them. Some of these forces are dangerous enough to destroy his life and of others, even capable of dislodging the soul whereby the human body becomes merely a shell harbouring the dark agencies of the nether worlds.
Adventuring into infinite mind-space
He unfolds his wings of thought in inner air,
Or travelling in imagination’s car
Crosses the globe, journeys beneath the stars,
To subtle worlds takes his ethereal course,
Visits the Gods on Life’s miraculous peaks,
Communicates with Heaven, tampers with Hell.
This is the little surface of man’s life.
He is this and he is all the universe;
He scales the Unseen, his depths dare the Abyss;
A whole mysterious world is locked within.
Unknown to himself he lives a hidden king
Behind rich tapestries in great secret rooms;
An epicure of the spirit’s unseen joys,
He lives on the sweet honey of solitude:
A nameless god in an unapproachable fane,
In the secret adytum of his inmost soul
He guards the being’s covered mysteries
Beneath the threshold, behind shadowy gates
Or shut in vast cellars of inconscient sleep.
The immaculate Divine All-Wonderful
Casts into the argent purity of his soul
His splendour and his greatness and the light
Of self-creation in Time’s infinity
As into a sublimely mirroring glass.
Man in the world’s life works out the dreams of God.But all is there, even God’s opposites;
He is a little front of Nature’s works,
A thinking outline of a cryptic Force.
All she reveals in him that is in her,
Her glories walk in him and her darknesses.
Man’s house of life holds not the gods alone:
There are occult Shadows, there are tenebrous Powers,
Inhabitants of life’s ominous nether rooms,
A shadowy world’s stupendous denizens.
A careless guardian of his nature’s powers,
Man harbours dangerous forces in his house.
The Titan and the Fury and the Djinn
Lie bound in the subconscient’s cavern pit
And the Beast grovels in his antre den:
Dire mutterings rise and murmur in their drowse.
Insurgent sometimes raises its huge head
A monstrous mystery lurking in life’s deeps,
The mystery of dark and fallen worlds,
The dread visages of the adversary Kings.
The dreadful powers held down within his depths
Become his masters or his ministers;
Enormous they invade his bodily house,
Can act in his acts, infest his thought and life.
Inferno surges into the human air
And touches all with a perverting breath.
Grey forces like a thin miasma creep,
Stealing through chinks in his closed mansion’s doors,
Discolouring the walls of upper mind
In which he lives his fair and specious life,
And leave behind a stench of sin and death:
Not only rise in him perverse drifts of thought
And formidable formless influences,
But there come presences and awful shapes:
Tremendous forms and faces mount dim steps
And stare at times into his living-rooms,
Or called up for a moment’s passionate work
Lay a dire custom’s claim upon his heart:
Aroused from sleep, they can be bound no more.
Afflicting the daylight and alarming night,
Invading at will his outer tenement,
The stark gloom’s grisly dire inhabitants
Mounting into God’s light all light perturb.
All they have touched or seen they make their own,
In Nature’s basement lodge, mind’s passages fill,
Disrupt thought’s links and musing sequences,
Break through the soul’s stillness with a noise and cry
Or they call the inhabitants of the abyss,
Invite the instincts to forbidden joys,
A laughter wake of dread demoniac mirth
And with nether riot and revel shake life’s floor.
Impotent to quell his terrible prisoners,
Appalled the householder helpless sits above,
Taken from him his house is his no more.
He is bound and forced, a victim of the play,
Or, allured, joys in the mad and mighty din.
His nature’s dangerous forces have arisen
And hold at will a rebel’s holiday.
Aroused from the darkness where they crouched in the depths,
Prisoned from the sight, they can be held no more;
His nature’s impulses are now his lords.
Once quelled or wearing specious names and vests
Infernal elements, demon powers are there.Savitri: 480 – 481
[Breaks are added to emphasize separate movements]
