Savitri Class in Hindi with Alok Pandey
Savitri Book Three: The Book of Divine Mother, Canto Four : The Vision and the Boon
Man is too weak to travel the great Path of ascent into a divine nature. He is caught up in his little or big problem centered around his small ego-self. And yet there is always hope. The hope is there because behind man’s imperfect consciousness there stands the Divine, the Godhead who turns even failure and fall into a means for our progress and evolution. He knows his steps and leads man even though man is misleading himself. And in the end what power can prevail over God? This is the great assurance that there is the Divine who is leading the world despite all the anomalies of life. It is in Him that we can discover the strength and find once again Hope and Light and Love and Grace. It is this singular truth that gives impetus to our effort and helps us to move forward ever forward despite everything.
His failure is not failure whom God leads;
Through all the slow mysterious march goes on:
An immutable Power has made this mutable world;
A self-fulfilling transcendence treads man’s road;
The driver of the soul upon its path,
It knows its steps, its way is inevitable,
And how shall the end be vain when God is guide?
However man’s mind may tire or fail his flesh,
A will prevails cancelling his conscious choice:
The goal recedes, a bourneless vastness calls
Retreating into an immense Unknown;
There is no end to the world’s stupendous march,
There is no rest for the embodied soul.
It must live on, describe all Time’s huge curve.
An Influx presses from the closed Beyond
Forbidding to him rest and earthly ease,
Till he has found himself he cannot pause.
A Light there is that leads, a Power that aids;
Unmarked, unfelt it sees in him and acts:
Ignorant, he forms the All-Conscient in his depths,
Human, looks up to superhuman peaks:
A borrower of Supernature’s gold,
He paves his road to Immortality.
What seems impossible today is indeed the starting point of what will be possible tomorrow. Already we see glimpses of divinity and hints of the Godhead in our life.
The high gods look on man and watch and choose
Today’s impossibles for the future’s base.
His transience trembles with the Eternal’s touch,
His barriers cede beneath the Infinite’s tread;
The Immortals have their entries in his life:
The Ambassadors of the Unseen draw near.
A splendour sullied by the mortal air,
Love passes through his heart, a wandering guest.
Beauty surrounds him for a magic hour,
He has visits of a large revealing joy,
Brief widenesses release him from himself,
Enticing towards a glory ever in front
Hopes of a deathless sweetness lure and leave.
His mind is crossed by strange discovering fires,
Rare intimations lift his stumbling speech
To a moment’s kinship with the eternal Word;
A masque of Wisdom circles through his brain
Perturbing him with glimpses half divine.
He lays his hands sometimes on the Unknown;
He communes sometimes with Eternity.
Man is a strange mix of Earth and Heaven and he is born to reconcile the two within his consciousness. Therefore the Vision wonderful commands Aswapati to continue working upon the Earth which will one day see the crown of Victory. But not now. That hour must come and will come. Until then Aswapati must prepare the earth helping humanity to move one small step at a time towards the great Goal.
A strange and grandiose symbol was his birth
And immortality and spirit-room
And pure perfection and a shadowless bliss
Are this afflicted creature’s mighty fate.
In him the Earth-Mother sees draw near the change
Foreshadowed in her dumb and fiery depths,
A godhead drawn from her transmuted limbs,
An alchemy of Heaven on Nature’s base.
Adept of the self-born unfailing line,
Leave not the light to die the ages bore,
Help still humanity’s blind and suffering life:
Obey thy spirit’s wide omnipotent urge.
A witness to God’s parley with the Night,
It leaned compassionate from immortal calm
And housed desire, the troubled seed of things.
Assent to thy high self, create, endure.
Cease not from knowledge, let thy toil be vast.
No more can earthly limits pen thy force;
Equal thy work with long unending Time’s.
Traveller upon the bare eternal heights,
Tread still the difficult and dateless path
Joining the cycles with its austere curve
Measured for man by the initiate Gods.
And then comes the final word of assurance that despite all the darkness, despite all that resists and delays and obstructs the human march, Light and Love are destined to grow. Meanwhile we must keep burning the flame of faith and hope and not settle for the lesser prize of the temptation of an individual salvation. For a day will come when the Divine reign shall be established upon Earth.
My light shall be in thee, my strength thy force.
Let not the impatient Titan drive thy heart,
Ask not the imperfect fruit, the partial prize.
Only one boon, to greaten thy spirit, demand;
Only one joy, to raise thy kind, desire.
Above blind fate and the antagonist powers
Moveless there stands a high unchanging Will;
To its omnipotence leave thy work’s result.
All things shall change in God’s transfiguring hour.”[Savitri: 339 – 341]
