Savitri Class in Hindi with Alok Pandey
Savitri Book Three: The Book of Divine Mother, Canto One: The Pursuit of the Unknowable
The Divine Being, the Supreme Purusha of the Vedas is without form or attributes. Even the most beautiful form, the form of the gods, harmonious and sweet is merely a shadow and a reflection of Him who cannot be captured into any Form or defined by any Name. The worlds and the cycles of creation and dissolution emerge and return to him. The many colours of creation vanish in His Vast that exceeds all Space. All our riddles end at His Footsteps, the questionings of the mind and the answers of the soul, as if vain promptings without support. Such is the vision of the Godhead whom no sight can describe, no words define.
All glory of outline, sweetness of harmony,
Rejected like a grace of trivial notes,
Expunged from Being’s silence nude, austere,
Died into a fine and blissful Nothingness.
The Demiurges lost their names and forms,
The great schemed worlds that they had planned and wrought
Passed, taken and abolished one by one.
The universe removed its coloured veil,
And at the unimaginable end
Of the huge riddle of created things
Appeared the far-seen Godhead of the whole,
His feet firm-based on Life’s stupendous wings,
Omnipotent, a lonely seer of Time,
Inward, inscrutable, with diamond gaze.
Attracted by the unfathomable regard
The unsolved slow cycles to their fount returned
To rise again from that invisible sea.
All from his puissance born was now undone;
Nothing remained the cosmic Mind conceives.
Eternity prepared to fade and seemed
A hue and imposition on the Void,
Space was the fluttering of a dream that sank
Before its ending into Nothing’s deeps.
The spirit that dies not and the Godhead’s self
Seemed myths projected from the Unknowable;
All emerged from Him and returned back to Him as waves rising and lapsing into a vast and infinite ocean of Existence, Consciousness and Bliss. Time was not there for it was yet not born but only a sense of everlastingness in this ‘Self – Existent’ without beginning or end. Alone and Infinite, Ekamevadvitiyam, this sole ‘Reality’ seemed the very end of all his long search and experience. There was no place in IT for the world or soul, neither good nor evil touched Its tremendous Calm. It is the ultimate Mystery no sight can pierce, a depth beyond depth, an unfathomable zero that is also Infinite.
From It all sprang, in It is called to cease.
But what That was, no thought nor sight could tell.
Only a formless Form of self was left,
A tenuous ghost of something that had been,
The last experience of a lapsing wave
Before it sinks into a bourneless sea,—
As if it kept even on the brink of Nought
Its bare feeling of the ocean whence it came.
A Vastness brooded free from sense of Space,
An Everlastingness cut off from Time;
A strange sublime inalterable Peace
Silent rejected from it world and soul.
A stark companionless Reality
Answered at last to his soul’s passionate search:
Passionless, wordless, absorbed in its fathomless hush,
Keeping the mystery none would ever pierce,
It brooded inscrutable and intangible
Facing him with its dumb tremendous calm.
There was no effort, no action or response, no movement to know or a Knowledge to be won, no heart of love, no answer to life’s pain.
It had no kinship with the universe:
There was no act, no movement in its Vast:
Life’s question met by its silence died on her lips,
The world’s effort ceased convicted of ignorance
Finding no sanction of supernal Light:
There was no mind there with its need to know,
There was no heart there with its need to love.
All person perished in its namelessness.
This Supreme Being, Sat Purusha, sole Existence is the Parabrahman of the Vedas and the Shunyam, Nihil or Tao of the Buddhists. He is the Svyambhu Shiva of the Tantric yogis whom they find by the Grace of Shakti, the Truth of the tapasvis and the many paths that have approached the penultimate Mystery of the Beyond. Many are the names given to this Mystery by the minds that experienced It but He remains forever indefinable, inscrutable, impenetrable, infinite, alone.
There was no second, it had no partner or peer;
Only itself was real to itself.
A pure existence safe from thought and mood,
A consciousness of unshared immortal bliss,
It dwelt aloof in its bare infinite,
One and unique, unutterably sole.
A Being formless, featureless and mute
That knew itself by its own timeless self,
Aware for ever in its motionless depths,
Uncreating, uncreated and unborn,
The One by whom all live, who lives by none,
An immeasurable luminous secrecy
Guarded by the veils of the Unmanifest,
Above the changing cosmic interlude
Abode supreme, immutably the same,
A silent Cause occult, impenetrable,—
Infinite, eternal, unthinkable, alone.[Savitri: 307 – 309]
