Savitri Class in Hindi with Alok Pandey
Savitri Book Three: The Book of Divine Mother, Canto Four : The Vision and the Boon
The ‘Voice’ arising out of the Vision wonderful has cautioned and assured Aswapati. It has cautioned him that the boon he is asking may be too great and premature for earth. While he can be granted this boon if he so chooses but earth and humanity is not yet ready for the Supramental Force. If the gates of the golden outpourings of the supramental Sun were opened then the Earth may not be able to bear it and break down under the transformative pressure. Man does not want the change and earth and mater are not yet receptive, open and supple enough to bear it. At the same time, the ‘Voice’ arising out of the Transcendent sphere also assures Aswapati, the incarnate Divine, that a day will surely come when what he has seen and hopes and aspires for will be done and this earth and humanity awake to the Supramental Glories of the Spirit. But the time for that great moment is still far. Aswapati has glimpsed that Glory and can choose to merge into That Supreme Source of all things. However the ‘Voice’ rather exhorts him not to do so. Instead he should obey the grandiose urge of his spirit to prepare humanity and earth through the long process of Time. This is the command for Aswapati.
Aswapati hears it in the listening spaces of his soul. But his heart is too intense and passionate for the change. His tapasya is no ordinary mortals but of the incarnate Divine himself. He must win for earth and man the long-awaited change for which all creation awaits. Hence he pleads the case of humanity in the court of all-fulfilling Time.
August and sweet sank hushed that mighty Voice.
Nothing now moved in the vast brooding space:
A stillness came upon the listening world,
A mute immensity of the Eternal’s peace.
But Aswapati’s heart replied to her,
A cry amid the silence of the Vasts:
“How shall I rest content with mortal days
And the dull measure of terrestrial things,
I who have seen behind the cosmic mask
The glory and the beauty of thy face?
Though he has come from higher realms of the Spirit, he has a human being experienced the suffering and pain of humanity. He has seen firsthand what human beings go through battling with Death and Night striving to build Beauty and Love upon earth. Even though the efforts of the race are in ignorance and men have not the might to build the perfection that aspire for, yet their strength can be aided by the forces of a higher order rather than being allowed to linger in the darkness struggling with their ignorance..
Hard is the doom to which thou bindst thy sons!
How long shall our spirits battle with the Night
And bear defeat and the brute yoke of Death,
We who are vessels of a deathless Force
And builders of the godhead of the race?
Or if it is thy work I do below
Amid the error and waste of human life
In the vague light of man’s half-conscious mind,
Why breaks not in some distant gleam of thee?
Ever the centuries and millenniums pass.
Where in the greyness is thy coming’s ray?
Where is the thunder of thy victory’s wings?
Only we hear the feet of passing gods.
Aswapati lays bare the apparent fruitlessness of the toil that is ever marred by Death. Whatever is built is brought down again or else marred and maimed by an ignorant Force that still governs the Earth and the human race. All changes momentarily and all still remains the same. This is the paradox that rules humanity. Great kings come and great moments of time arise as giant waves out of the ocean of timelessness but sooner or later collapse back into the inconscient seas, pulled back into some original darkness that lies at creation’s back. The toil appears endless and little is gained after much effort and that too hardly stays for long.
A plan in the occult eternal Mind
Mapped out to backward and prophetic sight,
The aeons ever repeat their changeless round,
The cycles all rebuild and ever aspire.
All we have done is ever still to do.
All breaks and all renews and is the same.
Huge revolutions of life’s fruitless gyre,
The new-born ages perish like the old,
As if the sad Enigma kept its right
Till all is done for which this scene was made.
Too little the strength that now with us is born,
Too faint the light that steals through Nature’s lids,
Too scant the joy with which she buys our pain.
In a brute world that knows not its own sense,
Thought-racked upon the wheel of birth we live,
The instruments of an impulse not our own
Moved to achieve with our heart’s blood for price
Half-knowledge, half-creations that soon tire.
A foiled immortal soul in perishing limbs,
Baffled and beaten back we labour still;
Annulled, frustrated, spent, we still survive.
Yet a godlike impulse continues to strive in man, refusing to give up, refusing to accept failure and defeat as permanent. All creation labours and suffers and strives to give birth to the divine humanity awaiting its hour in the depths of the human race. Man was born for this and for this he struggles however unconsciously and ignorantly. And behind it all there stands the evolving Godhead concealed in Earth, wearing the shapes of stone and plant and beast and man. That is the great assurance of the future, the great promise and the hope. This was the original impulse for creation and fate, necessity and chance cannot stall it for long. Indeed they are bound to eventually disclose the Rose of New creation enclosed as a bud within the heart of Earth.
In anguish we labour that from us may rise
A larger-seeing man with nobler heart,
A golden vessel of the incarnate Truth,
The executor of the divine attempt
Equipped to wear the earthly body of God,
Communicant and prophet and lover and king.
I know that thy creation cannot fail:
For even through the mists of mortal thought
Infallible are thy mysterious steps,
And, though Necessity dons the garb of Chance,
Hidden in the blind shifts of Fate she keeps
The slow calm logic of Infinity’s pace
And the inviolate sequence of its will.
All life is fixed in an ascending scale
And adamantine is the evolving Law;
In the beginning is prepared the close.
Man is like an X whose one end is stuck in the mud of earth but the other aspires to Heavens. He is meant to be the link between Earth and Heaven. This is his great destiny and not to remain forever in this half-animal, half human design with some glimpses of the godhead within. Aswapati has witnessed this in man and hence he is full of hope.
This strange irrational product of the mire,
This compromise between the beast and god,
Is not the crown of thy miraculous world.
I know there shall inform the inconscient cells,
At one with Nature and at height with heaven,
A spirit vast as the containing sky
And swept with ecstasy from invisible founts,
A god come down and greater by the fall.
A Power arose out of my slumber’s cell.
Abandoning the tardy limp of the hours
And the inconstant blink of mortal sight,
There where the Thinker sleeps in too much light
And intolerant flames the lone all-witnessing Eye
Hearing the word of Fate from Silence’ heart
In the endless moment of Eternity,
It saw from timelessness the works of Time.
Overpassed were the leaden formulas of the Mind,
Overpowered the obstacle of mortal Space:
The unfolding Image showed the things to come.[Savitri: 341 – 343]
