Many are the ways of being of the Divine Mother, many are Her powers and aspects through which She receives and responds to the deep cry in created things. Though these countless cries reach Her each moment and Her heart of love sends an appropriate response, She waits for the one cry to reach Her, the cry that is there in the deep essence of creation, the cry that represents our deepest need to join what now seems parted, to unite the creation with the Creator, the cry to make the terrestrial manifestation as beautiful, harmonious and divine as the core of creation is. But rarest of rare is this longing, mightiest of mighty is the work of building the Divine Perfection here in matter, highest of highest is the aspiration to see God born in clay and transmute it into the stuff of divinity that hides within its dark and sombre robe. The hearts of men are amorous of transient things that are won and lost by the moments. This is the state of humanity so well portrayed in Savitri:
But dim in human hearts the ascending fire,
The invisible Grandeur sits unworshipped there;
Man sees the Highest in a limiting form
Or looks upon a Person, hears a Name.
He turns for little gains to ignorant Powers
Or kindles his altar lights to a demon face.
He loves the Ignorance fathering his pain.
A spell is laid upon his glorious strengths;
He has lost the inner Voice that led his thoughts,
And masking the oracular tripod seat
A specious Idol fills the marvel shrine.
The great Illusion wraps him in its veils,
The soul’s deep intimations come in vain,
In vain is the unending line of seers,
The sages ponder in unsubstantial light,
The poets lend their voice to outward dreams,
A homeless fire inspires the prophet tongues.
Heaven’s flaming lights descend and back return,
The luminous Eye approaches and retires;
Eternity speaks, none understands its word;
Fate is unwilling and the Abyss denies;
The Inconscient’s mindless waters block all done.
Only a little lifted is Mind’s screen;
The Wise who know see but one half of Truth,
The strong climb hardly to a low-peaked height,
The hearts that yearn are given one hour to love.
His tale half told, falters the secret Bard;
The gods are still too few in mortal forms.”
And yet She knows that this is not all that man’s will can climb. Man’s destiny is neither an unending cycle of joy and grief, happiness and pain through vistas of apparently meaningless lives, nor is it an abrupt cessation in a vacant Naught that gives a lie to all his efforts and toils as if creation is a vanity of vanities, a dream seen by some eternal dreamer in a moment of being overpowered by darkness and besieged by the Night. But Sri Aurobindo reveals to us that the Night itself is a deliberate self-concealment of the One and Death is a grey temporary defeat pregnant with victory, a momentary holding back of the seeds of Light in the folds of darkness so that they can be released into the vastness of Beauty and Harmony and Delight when they have taken roots in the soil and are ready to sprout. We are children of Light who have sprung up from the Mother of infinite Radiances. By Her Light we live and to Her Light we go. A greater destiny awaits us but to be fulfilled it needs a ‘Yes’ from our human hearts. As co-partners in the game of creation, more so as co-sharers of divinity our consent is needed to unlock the doors of a greater Fate:
‘O Force-compelled, Fate-driven earth-born race,
O petty adventurers in an infinite world
And prisoners of a dwarf humanity,
How long will you tread the circling tracks of mind
Around your little self and petty things?
But not for a changeless littleness were you meant,
Not for vain repetition were you built;
Out of the Immortal’s substance you were made;
Your actions can be swift revealing steps,
Your life a changeful mould for growing gods.
A Seer, a strong Creator, is within,
The immaculate Grandeur broods upon your days,
Almighty powers are shut in Nature’s cells.
A greater destiny waits you in your front:
This transient earthly being if he wills
Can fit his acts to a transcendent scheme.
He who now stares at the world with ignorant eyes
Hardly from the Inconscient’s night aroused,
That look at images and not at Truth,
Can fill those orbs with an immortal’s sight.’
But since man is slow to respond, since he is caught in the ambiguous game which started as an adventure sport for the immortal soul, since he is easily lured by the apparent ways that lead us nowhere through promises false, since he is lost in the bylanes of life struggling to find the straight and sunlit road that would lead him to the crowning felicity, therefore, She has come. Arriving from the other side of boundlessness She has come, assuming our mortal breath with the will to divinise clay. Her advent is the golden chance for us to fulfil our divine destiny. If only we could hold Her hand or rather let Her hold ours, if only our hearts could respond to Her Love and let ourselves be carried by Her, if only we could open and give ourselves to Her in a widest, completest possible way then all will be done. Of course, She doesn’t wait for our opening and giving. Even in the densest darkness and the thickest resistance She works. Yet there is a difference, a big difference when we heed to Her call, smiling and carefree as children who have found their home in Her. A spark of faith, a little aspiration is enough for the contact to be made from our side that would seal our divine destiny. For with Her is the supreme mandate to transform our earthly life into the Life Divine. With Her is the victorious power of Divine Love. She is the answer of God to our deepest cry and the most sacred longing.
‘But like a shining answer from the gods
Approached through sun-bright spaces Savitri.
Advancing amid tall heaven-pillaring trees,
Apparelled in her flickering-coloured robe
She seemed, burning towards the eternal realms,
A bright moved torch of incense and of flame
That from the sky-roofed temple-soil of earth
A pilgrim hand lifts in an invisible shrine.
There came the gift of a revealing hour:
He saw through depths that reinterpret all,
Limited not now by the dull body’s eyes,
New-found through an arch of clear discovery,
This intimation of the world’s delight,
This wonder of the divine Artist’s make
Carved like a nectar-cup for thirsty gods,
This breathing Scripture of the Eternal’s joy,
This net of sweetness woven of aureate fire.
Transformed the delicate image-face became
A deeper Nature’s self-revealing sign,
A gold-leaf palimpsest of sacred births,
A grave world-symbol chiselled out of life.
Her brow, a copy of clear unstained heavens,
Was meditation’s pedestal and defence,
The very room and smile of musing Space,
Its brooding line infinity’s symbol curve.
Amid her tresses’ cloudy multitude
Her long eyes shadowed as by wings of Night
Under that moon-gold forehead’s dreaming breadth
Were seas of love and thought that held the world;
Marvelling at life and earth they saw truths far.
A deathless meaning filled her mortal limbs;
As in a golden vase’s poignant line
They seemed to carry the rhythmic sob of bliss
Of earth’s mute adoration towards heaven
Released in beauty’s cry of living form
Towards the perfection of eternal things.’
[all poetic quotes are from Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri]
