Savitri Class in Hindi with Alok Pandey
Savitri Book Seven: The Book of Yoga, Canto Two: The Parable of the Search for the Soul
In our ignorance we cut our world into strips of ‘mine and yours’, ‘good and bad’ etc, but in fact everything is there in everyone, as a potential possibility. It is waiting for its hour to manifest, and when the moment arrives springs up a surprise upon us.
An awful insurgence overpowers man’s soul.
In house and house the huge uprising grows:
Hell’s companies are loosed to do their work,
Into the earth-ways they break out from all doors,
Invade with blood-lust and the will to slay
And fill with horror and carnage God’s fair world.Death and his hunters stalk a victim earth;
The terrible Angel smites at every door:
An awful laughter mocks at the world’s pain
And massacre and torture grin at Heaven:
All is the prey of the destroying force;
Creation rocks and tremble top and base.This evil Nature housed in human hearts,
A foreign inhabitant, a dangerous guest:
The soul that harbours it it can dislodge,
Expel the householder, possess the house.An opposite potency contradicting God,
A momentary Evil’s almightiness
Has straddled the straight path of Nature’s acts.It imitates the Godhead it denies,
Puts on his figure and assumes his face.
A Manichean creator and destroyer,
This can abolish man, annul his world.But there is a guardian power, there are Hands that save,
Calm eyes divine regard the human scene.
All the world’s possibilities in man
Are waiting as the tree waits in its seed:
His past lives in him; it drives his future’s pace;
His present’s acts fashion his coming fate.
The unborn gods hide in his house of Life.The daemons of the unknown overshadow his mind
Casting their dreams into live moulds of thought,
The moulds in which his mind builds out its world.
His mind creates around him its universe.
All that has been renews in him its birth;
All that can be is figured in his soul.Issuing in deeds it scores on the roads of the world,
Obscure to the interpreting reason’s guess,
Lines of the secret purpose of the gods.In strange directions runs the intricate plan;
Held back from human foresight is their end
And the far intention of some ordering Will
Or the order of life’s arbitrary Chance
Finds out its settled poise and fated hour.Our surface watched in vain by reason’s gaze,
Invaded by the impromptus of the unseen,
Helpless records the accidents of Time,
The involuntary turns and leaps of life.Only a little of us foresees its steps,
Only a little has will and purposed pace.
A vast subliminal is man’s measureless part.
The dim subconscient is his cavern base.
Abolished vainly in the walks of Time
Our past lives still in our unconscious selves
And by the weight of its hidden influences
Is shaped our future’s self-discovery.
Thus all is an inevitable chain
And yet a series seems of accidents.The unremembering hours repeat the old acts,
Our dead past round our future’s ankles clings
And drags back the new nature’s glorious stride,
Or from its buried corpse old ghosts arise,
Old thoughts, old longings, dead passions live again,
Recur in sleep or move the waking man
To words that force the barrier of the lips,
To deeds that suddenly start and o’erleap
His head of reason and his guardian will.[Savitri: 481 – 483]
(line breaks are added to emphasize separate movements)
