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Sri Aurobindos' Savitri
(an Adventure of Consciousness) |
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Theme of Savitri
(i) Evolution of Consciousness
Introduction
To discuss the theme of a poem before actually reading it is perhaps not a very right method nor is it a happy and joyous one. It is like unstringing the harp of Sarswati to analyse and examine the strings instead of enjoying the music. But the large majority of common readers and students who are to be introduced to the reading of Savitri and their interest aroused, need some sort of foothold to step into the arena of the Unknown that forms the canvas of the poem. Savitri is no ordinary poem. All that are under the blue sky and beyond, visible or invisible, audible or inaudible, known or unknown physical or spiritual are all compacted in a single poem. Without some sort of footing an average reader of poetry is bound to lose himself in this vast ocean. At least some sort of a broad thematic design of the poem shall be a needed help so that the reader may maintain his bearing. The rest, of course, entirely, depends on the reader himself. He must know how one should read Savitri. This has been stated in the concluding section of chapter two.
Poetry of Sri Aurobindo sings of the divinity of man and his divine possibilities, flowering of the consciousness embedded in the Inconscient and Ignorance. This upward march of human soul from its earthly state ‘to the discovery of a greater self’ is what Sri Aurobindo calls spiritual evolution or evolution of consciousness. New poetry can sing of this only when its poet realises ‘a complete spiritual realisation’ in himself. Secondly, the new poetry must have the power to remould and transform the individual and the race or humanity. This can be done when the new poetry infuses human mind, life and body with a higher transformative power of consciousness.
These two characteristics which Sri Aurobindo expects the new poetry to fulfil form the poetic Agenda and format of his magnum opus, Savitri. The poetic agenda he adopts and follows in his epic reveals two major underlying currents of the poem’s theme, the two that go inseparably together and are to each other complementary. The first is the soul’s ‘epic climb’ along ‘truth’s golden road that runs through finite things to eternity’. This is what may be called spiritual evolution of man or evolution of consciousness. The second function of the new poetry is the responsibility Sri Aurobindo puts on it, i.e. to build the soul of man and ‘remould’ the earthly life into life divine. This can be done, says Sri Aurobindo, if the supramental Consciousness which alone has the power to transform can be discovered, realised and brought into the earth consciousness: “An unborn Power must build reality.” (Savitri : 46) The two threads of the poem’s theme thus are
1. Evolution of consciousness or spiritual evolution, and
2. Transformation of earthly life into life divine.
This chapter shall discuss the first theme of the poem.
“The Science of the West has discovered evolution as the secret of life and its process in this material world; but it has laid more stress on the growth of form and species than on the growth of consciousness: even, consciousness has been regarded as an incident and not the whole secret of the meaning of the evolution.”1 Let us survey in brief what this scientific theory of evolution is and if it has given a satisfactory explanation of the secret of life here on earth.
Scientific theory of Evolution: an explanation and its shortcomings:
In the nineteenth century Charles Darwin in his monumental treatise, The Origin of Species, came out with his doctrine of the evolution of species. His doctrine, based mainly on ‘survival of the fittest’ and ‘an adaptation to environment’, helped in establishing the fact that an evolution there is and species evolve from a lower stage to a higher and more complex stage by a law of heredity. Then Lamarck gave his theory of evolution by the inheritance of acquired characters. To him the acquired characters are transmitted by heredity and new advanced species evolve. Mendel, another evolutionary scientist, even reduced the recurrence of inherited characters to numerical law.
it is true that the theory of evolution has been the key-note of the thought of the nineteenth century Europe. It brought massive changes in the temperament of the European mind, her politics, her literature, her social fabric and morality; all got radically changed by this new doctrine. The new theory not only influenced science and thought-attitude of the time but ushered in an era of victory for the materialistic notion of life and the universe. The moral idea of progress in society and politics got replaced by the evolutionary notion of progress. In other words, ‘it is the victory of the economic man over the idealist’, says Sri Aurobindo.
The materialistic or scientific theory of evolution has many lacunae and shortcomings which it fails to explain. It starts with the premise that ‘all world is a development out of indeterminate Matter by Nature’. There is no cause, no aim, but simply ‘an automatic deployment’, to use a phrase of Sri Aurobindo. The scientific theory has before it ‘two eternal factors of existence, Matter and Energy’, and according to it no other factors are needed for its operations. “Its first regard is on Matter as the one principle of being and on Energy as a phenomenon of Matter; but in the end one questions whether it is not the other way round, all things the action of Energy and Matter only the field, body and instrument of her workings.”2 Here lies the first drawback of the scientific theory, and listen to Savitri:
The persistent thrill of a transfiguring touch
Persuaded the inert black quietude
And beauty and wonder disturbed the fields of God.
— Savitri : 3
It is the ‘transfiguring touch’ of some energy on inert matter that makes it vibrate with beauty and wonder of life and ‘carries our lives’.
Scientific theory has given the law of heredity as the mechanism of evolution. This law has marked limitations. The process of evolution is not at all so ‘exclusively physical and biological as at first it looks’. If this were true, then ‘a law of hereditary progressive variation and a purely physical cause of all mental and spiritual phenomenon’ as conceived by the scientific theory may be accepted. But all mental and spiritual phenomena are not transmitted by heredity by which new species are or have been created; for things to be transmitted are not only physical and biological but psychological too. If physical evolution is the whole fact, there must be a capacity for the hereditary transmission of variations acquired through ‘adaptation to environment’. But it is not so. The law of heredity fails to explain this; ‘for there is the reproduction of that which was already evolved’. This is the lacuna in the law of heredity, the mechanism of the scientific theory of evolution. There is another significant and more serious question that needs much explaining by the scientific theory. Is the physical theory of evolution capable of explaining by purely material causes and a material constitution the mystery of the emergence of life in matter and the equal mystery of the emergence of mind in life? The physical and scientific explanation of the evolution is, therefore, no more than ‘a hypothetical assumption’. It has to be accepted that there is something more behind this mystery than meets the eye, ‘a more complex and less materialistic account of the truth of evolution’. The theory of science may be a correct statement of phenomenal fact, that new forms have evolved but it has miserably failed to answer the why and how of ‘one of the initial mysteries of Nature’, says Sri Aurobindo.
Sri Aurobindo’s theory of Spiritual Evolution
In his explanation of the mystery of creation Sri Aurobindo puts forward ‘the cardinal fact of a spiritual evolution as the meaning of our existence here’. To him the truth of evolution i.e. the explanation of the mystery of creation lies in the evolution of consciousness. Science has discovered evolution as the secret of life and its process in this material world; but it has laid more stress on the growth of form and species than on the growth of consciousness’. Consciousness is regarded by it as a mere incident and has been relegated to an inferior position. Sri Aurobindo’s theory of evolution of consciousness explains the great mystery of creation and the process of evolution.
“The word evolution”, writes Sri Aurobindo, “carries with it in its intrinsic sense, in the idea at its root the necessity of a previous involution.. all that evolves already existed involved, passive or otherwise active, but in either case concealed from us in the shell of material Nature. The Spirit which manifests itself here in a body, must be involved from the beginning in the whole of matter and in every knot, formation and particle of matter, life, mind and whatever is above mind must be latent, inactive or concealed active powers in all the operations of material energy.”3
It was as though even in this Nought’s profound,
Even in this ultimate dissolution’s core
There lurked an unremembering entity
Survivor of a slain and buried past.
— Savitri : 2
The ‘unremembering entity’ is the concealed godhead in the consciousness involved in Matter, ‘the ultimate dissolution’s core’. Evolution is the gradual release of this consciousness in forms of life and mind. “Nothing can evolve out of Matter which is not therein already contained.”4 Explaining his theory Sri Aurobindo says, “The spiritual process of evolution is then in some sense a creation, but a self-creation, not a making of what never was, but a bringing out of what was implicit in the Being.”5 Existence on earth is the result of “A spiritual evolution, an evolution of consciousness in Matter in a constant developing self-formation till the form can reveal the indwelling spirit, is then the key-note, the central significant motive of the terrestrial existence.”6 Sri Aurobindo’s yogic vision sees behind the appearances of the universe the presence of ‘the Reality of a Being and Consciousness, a Self of all things, one and eternal’. This One Being and Consciousness is involved here in Matter. “Evolution is the method by which it liberates itself; consciousness appears in what seems to be inconscient, and once having appeared is self-impelled to grow higher and higher and at the same time to enlarge and develop towards a greater and greater perfection. Life is the first step of this release of consciousness; mind is the second; but the evolution does not finish with mind, it awaits a release into something greater, a consciousness which is spiritual and supramental.”7
Creation, according to Sri Aurobindo’s theory of spiritual evolution, is the result of the action of consciousness on Matter that “Cradled the cosmic drowse of ignorant Force”:
A fallen ignorance in its covert night
Laboured to achieve its dumb unseemly work,
A camouflage of the Inconscient’s need
To release the glory of God in Nature’s mud.
— Savitri : 138
and as a result,
The first writhings of the cosmic serpent Force
Uncoiled from the mystic ring of Matter’s trance;
— Savitri : 138
It is the ‘writhings of the cosmic serpent Force’ involved in ‘the mystic ring of Matter’s trance’
That animates these mute and solid cells
And leads the thought and longing of the flesh
And the keen lust and hunger of its will.
— Savitri : 138
Thence a mighty Life-principle working in and upon the conditions of Matter and applying to it its own laws, impulses, necessities
Compelled renewed consent to see and feel
— Savitri : 3
Thus the Life energy from its own plane ‘invaded’ the material sheath to awaken the involved consciousness.
An eye of deity peered through the dumb deeps;
A scount in a reconnaissance from the sun,
It seemed amid a heavy cosmic rest,
The torpor of a sick and weary world,
To seek for a spirit sole and desolate
Too fallen to recollect forgotten bliss.
— Savitri : 2
When life reached its glory and power, and
It could not house the wideness of a soul
Which needed all infinity for its home.
— Savitri : 238-9
then the next higher principle, the Mind Force invades the living Matter. “Not Matter alone, but Life and Mind working upon Matter help to determine evolution.”8 Life and Mind are to be looked upon not merely as a phenomenon in Matter but as energies with their own peculiar qualities, powers and workings’. Such a spiritual idea of evolution could alone make the materialistic theory of evolution sustainable. Sri Aurobindo’s teaching states that “One Being and Consciousness is involved here in Matter. Evolution is the method by which it liberates itself; consciousness appears in what seems to be inconscient, and once having appeared is self-impelled to grow higher and higher and at the same time to enlarge and develop towards a greater and greater perfection. Life is the first step of this release of consciousness; mind is the second; but the evolution does not finish with mind, it awaits a release into something greater, a consciousness which is spiritual and supramental.”9 Evolution is ‘the adventure of consciousness and
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.
— Savitri : 339
Evolution shall continue under the pressure from ‘the closed Beyond’,
As all must be until the Highest is gained
In whom the world and self grow true and one:
Till That is reached our journeying cannot cease.
Always a nameless goal beckons beyond,
Always ascends the zigzag of the gods
And upward points the spirit’s climbing Fire.
— Savitri : 238
“The next step of the evolution beyond Mind must be towards the development of Supermind and Spirit as the dominant power in the conscious being. For only then will the involved Divinity in things release itself entirely and it become possible for life to manifest perfection.”10
There is a being beyond the being of mind,
An Immeasurable cast into many forms,
A miracle of the multitudinous One,
There is a consciousness mind cannot touch...
— Savitri : 705
This consciousness, the supramental Truth – Consciousness, is “the fount of the creation and its works, it is the origin of all truth here” (Savitri : 705) When evolution reaches that stage, “All earth shall be the Spirit’s manifest home” (Savitri : 707),
Revealing the secret deity in the cave.
Then shall the earth be touched by the Supreme.
— Savitri : 705
and
The Spirit shall look out through Matter’s gaze
And Matter shall reveal the Spirit’s face.
— Savitri : 709
It is left to Sri Aurobindo to explain the scientific theory of evolution. In his theory of spiritual evolution he gives to the scientific theory its right and true place. Explaining the evolutionary working of Nature, he writes, “The terrestrial evolutionary working of Nature from Matter to Mind and beyond has a double process, there is an outward visible process of physical evolution with birth as its machinery, for each evolved form of body housing its own evolved power of consciousness is maintained and kept in continuity by heredity; there is at the same time an invisible process of soul evolution with rebirth into ascending grades of form and consciousness as its machinery. The first by itself would mean only a cosmic evolution, for the individual would be a quickly perishing instrument, and the race, a more abiding collective formulation, would be the real step in the progressive manifestation of the cosmic Inhabitant, the universal Spirit: rebirth is an indispensable condition for any long duration and evolution of the individual being in the earth-existence. Each grade of cosmic manifestation, each type of form that can house the indwelling spirit, is turned by rebirth into a means for the individual soul, the psychic entity, to manifest more and more of its concealed consciousness; each life becomes a step in a victory over Matter by a greater progression of consciousness in it which shall make eventually Matter itself a means for the full manifestation of the Spirit.”11 Then
The spirit shall take up the human play,
This earthly life become the life divine.
— Savitri: 710
Commenting on the law of heredity as the mechanism of the scientific theory of evolution, Sri Aurobindo writes, “Heredity is only a material shadow of soul-reproduction, of rebirth of Life and Mind into new forms... there is the reproduction of that which was already evolved; for new characteristics to be propagated in the species they must have been accepted, received, sanctioned in the vital and mental worlds; then only can they (acquired characters) be automatically self-reproduced from the material seed.”12 If not so, the acquired characteristics are returned into ‘the treasury of the subconscient’.
For numberless millions of years, one cannot imagine for how long, Nature laboured and toiled to create a material universe of flaming suns and stars and their systems, then for a lesser but still innumerable millions of years she worked to make this earth a habitable planet. For all that long period, it seemed, she was busy only with the evolution of solid Matter. Life and mind were kept a secret in apparent non-existence. Then life manifested as a vibration in the metal, a growing and seeking and a feeling outward in the plant; ‘an instinctive force and sense, a nexus of joy and pain and hunger and emotion and fear and struggle in the animal, - a first organised consciousness’. Then Nature was busy no more ‘exclusively with matter for its own sake, but most with palpitant plasmic matter useful for the expression of life, the evolution of life was now her one intent purpose. And slowly too mind manifested in life, an intensely feeling, a crude thinking and planning vital mind in the animal, but in man the full organisation and apparatus... And from that time onward the growth of mind rather than any radical change of life became her shining preoccupation, her wonderful wager. Body appeared to evolve no more, life itself evolved little or only so much in its cycles as would serve to express Mind heightening and widening itself in the living body; an unseen internal evolution was now Nature’s great passion and purpose.’
Millenniums have passed since mind evolved into an organised entity and yet no new species have appeared or evolved. To the outward eye it would seem as if evolution has stopped with perfecting of the mind. Of course ‘the physical evolution at least were finished long ago leaving man behind as its poor best result and no new beings or superior creations were to be expected any longer. But this appears to us so long as we look at forms and outsides only and not at the inner significances of the whole process.’ The theory of evolution of consciousness can very well solve this riddle too. “New living forms may no longer be appearing freely, but this is because it is not, or at least it is not primarily, new living forms that the Force of evolution is now busied with evolving, but new powers of consciousness.”14 In other words the Force of evolution has shifted its field of action from the outward to a more internal evolution, from developing new forms to ‘new powers of consciousness’. And Sri Aurobindo’s vision of spiritual evolution speaks of the emergence of higher and still higher levels of consciousness till the highest, the supramental Truth-Consciousness, is attained,
There is a consciousness mind cannot touch,
Its speech cannot utter nor its thought reveal.
It has no home on earth, no centre in man,
Yet is the source of all things thought and done....
— Savitri: 705
This is the supreme Truth-Consciousness, ‘the fount of the creation’, ‘the origin of all truth here’. Such beings of Truth-Consciousness shall be ‘the high forerunners, the heads of Time’ and ‘the first-born of a new supernal race’.
Consciousness:
Sri Aurobindo’s theory of spiritual evolution, as we have seen in the foregoing pages is basically an evolution of consciousness. But what after all is consciousness, its characteristics, power and function, mode of working and so on. During his yogic exploration Sri Aurobindo discovers that “Consciousness is a fundamental thing, the fundamental thing in existence — it is the energy, the motion, the movement of consciousness that creates the universe and all that is in it — not only the macrocosm but the microcosm is nothing but consciousness arranging itself.”15
This inherent reality in existence is “not only power of awareness of self and things, it is or has also a dynamic and creative energy. It can determine its own reactions or abstain from reactions; it can not only answer to forces, but create or put out from itself forces.”15 All that concerns awareness, forces, power, energy comes under the domain of consciousness.
The home of consciousness is in the transcendent where it stays involved in the Superconscient. This creative Energy descends from the transcendent plane and flows down into Space and Time for the purpose of creation and in a joy of ‘self-creation without end or pause’ it creates innumerable worlds, ‘the grandeurs of the infinite’:
It flung into the hazards of its play
A million moods, a myriad energies,
The world – shapes that are fancies of its Truth
And the formulas of the freedom of its Force.
— Savitri: 95
The potential energy of the consciousness involved in the Being turns into its kinetic form and ‘a limitless movement filled a limitless peace’, ‘the thousand —fold expression of the One’. The consciousness continues descending, fragmenting its energy and as a result universal states or worlds come into existence. These universal states created by the consciousness may be called its gradations although it itself remains one single energy. “It will be evident that by consciousness is meant something which is essentially the same throughout but variable in status, condition and operation...”16
The gradation of worlds or planes (the universal states or variables of consciousness) form a great connected complex movement. Savitri describes it in many beautiful expressions, as ‘the World-Stair’ ‘a lone immense high-curved world pile / Erect like a mountain – chariot of the gods’; ‘a brief compendium of the Vast’; ‘a summary of the stages of the spirit’, and so on. The gradations or planes of consciousness are universal states and form ‘a great connected complex movement’: “the higher precipitate their influences on the lower, the lower react to the higher and develop or manifest in themselves within their own formula something that corresponds to the superior power and its action. The material world has evolved life in obedience to a pressure from the vital plane, mind in obedience to a pressure from the mental plane. It is now trying to evolve supermind in obedience to a pressure from the supramental plane. In more detail particular forces, movements, powers, beings of a higher world can throw themselves on the lower to establish appropriate and corresponding forms which will connect them with the material domain and, as it were, reproduce or project their action here. And each thing created here has, supporting it, subtler envelopes or forms of itself which make subsist and connect it with forces acting from above. Man, for instance, has, besides his gross physical body, subtler sheaths or bodies by which he lives behind the veil in direct connection with supraphysical planes of consciousness and can be influenced by their powers, movements and beings. What takes place in life has always behind it pre-existent movements and forms in the occult vital planes; what takes place in mind presupposes pre-existent movements and forms in the occult mental planes... But all this must not be taken in too rigid and mechanical a sense. It is an immense plastic movement full of the play of possibilities and must be seized by a flexible and subtle tact or sense in the seeing consciousness.”17
The physical is not the only world created by the consciousness. Many are the worlds and realms created in universal Nature. “There are worlds of a larger subtler life than ours; vital worlds; worlds in which Mind builds its own forms and figures, mental worlds; psychic worlds which are the soul’s home; others above with which we have little contact. In each of us there is a mental plane of consciousness, a psychic, a vital, a subtle physical as well as the gross physical and material plane. The same planes are repeated in the consciousness of general Nature.”18
This long explanation so explicitly and convincingly written with Sri Aurobindo’s vision and experiences that one has no choice but to accept the cardinal truth that consciousness is the moving spirit behind all creation, and consequently of evolution. In his theory of spiritual evolution we get a very satisfying explanation of the great mystery of Creation.
Book Two of Savitri – ‘The Book of the Traveller of the Worlds’ – comprising fifteen cantos, describes the various worlds and realms of consciousness in the universal Nature and narrates how the seeker climbs one realm of consciousness to a higher in his upward march,
A voyager upon uncharted routes
Fronting the viewless danger of the Unknown,
Adventuring across enormous realms,
He broke into another Space and Time.
— Savitri : 91
So begins his journey into another space and time. This journey carries him along the worlds or realms of consciousness in universal Nature:
Alone he moved watched by the infinity
Around him and the Unknowable above.
— Savitri : 95
But, first, one must find a means for this difficult journey back to his goal. After long and difficult yogic exploration Sri Aurobindo discovers the means the All-Wise had already provided in the form of ‘the World –Stair’ made of hierarchies of cosmic worlds, hidden in our inner consciousness,—
There walled apart by its own innerness
In a mystical barrage of dynamic light
He saw a lone immense high - curved world-pile
Erect like a mountain - chariot of the Gods
Motionless under an inscrutable sky.
As if from Matter’s plinth and viewless base
To a top as viewless, a carved sea of worlds
Climbing with foam-maned waves to the Supreme
Ascended towards breadths immeasurable;
— Savitri : 98
Planted firmly on earth the Stair holds in it all the realms of consciousness, ‘a brief compendium of the Vast’. In truth this World-Stair is
A summary of the stages of the spirit
Its copy of the cosmic hierarchies
Refashioned in our secret air of self
A subtle pattern of the universe.
— Savitri : 98
This ‘holds the key to our ascending fate’ —
It calls out of our dense mortality
The conscious spirit nursed in Matter’s house.
The living symbol of these conscious planes,
— Savitri : 99
and
Its steps are paces of the soul’s return
From the deep adventure of material birth,
A ladder of delivering ascent
And rungs that Nature climbs to deity.
— Savitri : 99
The World-Stair, ‘a connected and complex movement’, is made up of universal realms of consciousness in general Nature when the consciousness took a plunge from its transcendent plane —
Once in the vigil of a deathless gaze
These grades had marked her giant downward plunge,
The wide and prone leap of a godhead’s fall.
— Savitri : 99
In this ‘holocaust of the Supreme’, there is formed the ‘ladder of delivering ascent’ and along this ladder begins the upward climb of the consciousness. Leaving his mind consciousness the adventurer enters one by one the ascending hierarchies of universal Nature. Passing through the realm of vital plane, the world of life force, to the mental plane, consciousness attempts to reach still higher planes. At each plane, the consciousness creates form to suit that particular plane. This form continues life after life through reproduction and heredity till the consciousness evolves further and there is then a change in the form, minor or major, as required according to its need. Sri Aurobindo’s spiritual evolution is veritably an unfolding of the consciousness that got imprisioned when it plunged from the superconscient level and becomes inconscient.
Explaining the evolutionary working of Nature, Sri Aurobindo writes, “This terrestrial evolutionary working of Nature from Matter to Mind and beyond has a double process. There is an outward visible process of physical evolution with birth as its machinery, — for each evolved form of body housing its own evolved power of consciousness is maintained and kept in continuity by heredity; there is at the same time an invisible process of soul evolution with rebirth into ascending grades of form and consciousness as its machinery.”19
The spiritual process of evolution, according to Sri Aurobindo’s vision is “in some sense creation, but a self-creation, not a making out of what never was, but a bringing out of what was implicit in the Being.”20 A spiritual evolution, “an evolution of consciousness in Matter in a constant developing self-formation till the form can reveal the indwelling spirit, is then the key-note, the central significant motive of the terrestrial existence.”21
About the mystery of creation and the art of evolution Sri Aurobindo comments: “In a sense, the whole of creation may be said to be a movement between two involutions, Spirit in which all is involved and out of which all evolves downward to the other pole of Matter, Matter in which also all is involved and out of which all evolves upwards to the other pole of Spirit.”22 Without involution, no evolution is possible, for “Nothing can evolve out of Matter which is not therein already contained.”21 The creation oscillates between the highest omnipotent Spirit wherein all is involved and hidden in the superconscient Light and the equally omnipotent dark abyss of inconscient Matter. The inconscient Matter is, therefore, “not so much a matrix as a chamber of materialised energy in which are gathered up all the powers of the Spirit; they are there, but work in the conditions of the material energy, involved, we say, and therefore not apparent as themselves. Material energy would be then life packed into the density of Matter... Life itself would be an energy of a secret mind, a mind imprisoned in its own forms and quivering out in nervous seekings of life for its intenser recognisable power of consciousness”21 says Sri Aurobindo. And between the two poles of involution, ‘the path of the divine Event’, the Being eternally moves—
A power of fallen boundless self awake
Between the first and the last Nothingness,
— Savitri : 1
The theory of spiritual evolution implies a double evolution. The Consciousness-Force inherent in the Infinite Being “brings out eternally the structure of its action in a universe of which the last descending scale is based upon an involution of all the powers of the Spirit into an inconscient absorption in her self-oblivious passion and structural workings.22 This is the first evolution from the top downward; from the first involution of the Consciousness-Force in the Superconscient to the second involution in the Inconscient is the passage of becoming. This is the Spirit’s manifestation through gradual self-forgetfulness till it plunges into the Inconscient, a state of utter self-forgetfulness. This passage of the Spirit’s manifestation may be called Devolution. “Thence comes an ascent and progressive liberation of power after power till the Spirit self-disclosed and set free by knowledge and mastery of its works repossesses the eternal fulness of its being.”22
But the oblivion that succeeds the fall,
Had blotted the crowded tablets of the past,
And all that was destroyed must be rebuilt
And old experience laboured out once more.
— Savitri : 3
This retracing of the path to Spirit’s self-knowledge or self-finding is the present terrestrial evolution or the second creation.
Bases of Evolution and its mechanism:
“There is not only this material plane of being that we see... there is more; for beyond these many couches of the physical existence are other supraphysical degrees, a many layered plane of Life, a many layered plane of Mind, planes of Supermind, of Bliss, of Consciousness Force and of infinite Being on which the physical existence depends for its origination and its continuance. It is higher planes that flood the constantly unfolding unseen energies which have raised its evolution from the obscurity in which it began to the splendour of a light of consciousness to which the highest human mind shall only be the feeble glimmer of a glowworm fire before the sun in its flaming glories.” (Essays Divine & Human, 261) Here Sri Aurobindo gives in a nutshell the salient characteristics of and key to the great Mystery of Creation and its evolution on this earth and to which the epic Savitri gives a poetic expression and which forms the epic adventure of the poem. If the passage is properly understood and analysed not with the rigidity of human logic, then we get the following fundamentals of creation and its evolution as envisaged by the yogi.
First, there is a stupendous hierarchy of grades or variables of consciousness, of supraphysical degrees, between the darkest inconscient Matter and the most luminous spirit. In other words all that happens in creation takes place between the two poles of the omnipotent Inconscient and the omniscient Superconscient. Secondly, the physical existence depends for ‘its origination and its continuance’ on these higher planes of consciousness that constantly flood the unseen energies unfolding from the Inconscience. This implies an involution of ‘unseen energies in the obscurity of the Inconscient. Lastly, the origination of the physical existence i.e. its creation, and its continuance i.e. its evolution depends on the higher supraphysical grades.
Let us take up one by one these fundamentals that form bases of evolution. Sri Aurobindo says that besides the material plane of existence, there is a stupendous hierarchy of grades of consciousness of supraphysical degrees, between inconscient Matter and the most luminous superconscient Spirit. Two very all important questions face us here that need some explaining. The first of the two questions is – How does the stupendous hierarchy of grades or realms of consciousness come into existence? The creation of these supraphysical worlds of consciousness is the result of the infinite Being’s self-manifestation, fragmentation of the Consciousness Force through self-forgetfulness. It may be called the joy of becoming, to create from One’s own substance; it may also be an attraction for an adventure in the unknown, and so on. This infinite Spirit has twin aspects of Being and becoming, the eternity of Oneness and the eternity of pluralism. The infinite Being’s will to be many, his insistence on adopting a pluralistic attitude, leads to the fragmentation of the Consciousness Force and as a consequence the creation of a hierarchy of worlds from top downward—
Creation leaped straight from the hands of God;
Marvel and rapture wandered in the ways.
Only to be was a supreme delight,
— Savitri : 124
These supraphysical grades of consciousness are ‘rather different scales of one graded and interwoven system of being, parts therefore of one complex universal system’. Moreover as they are in ‘a more subtle substance and with other movements’, their presence can have no verifiable proofs. These higher planes in fact require no verifiable proof as these worlds enter into the field of man’s consciousness.
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,
— Savitri : 340
Or, sometimes
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.
— Savitri : 340
Or again,
Sometimes the inexpressible Mystery
Elects a human vessel of descent.
A breath comes down from a supernal air,
A Presence is born, a guiding Light awakes,
A stillness falls upon the instruments:
— Savitri : 42
But man too can ‘project himself partially into these higher planes under certain conditions’—
Our souls can visit in great lonely hours
Still regions of imperishable Light,
All-seeing eagle-peaks of silent Power
And moon-flame oceans of swift fathomless Bliss
And calm immensities of spirit Space
— Savitri : 42
Or,
He lays his hands sometimes on the Unknown,
He communes sometimes with Eternity
— Savitri : 385
and then
Out of some vast superior continent
Knowledge breaks through trailing its radiant seas,
And Nature trembles with the power, the flame.
— Savitri : 54-5
These are the inner and spiritual evidences of the existence of some higher, other-worldly and supraphysical realms that come in contact with human consciousness; or man may even under certain conditions project himself into those worlds. In either way there is an interaction between man and the higher planes. Hence no need of any verifiable proofs of the existence of higher supraphysical grades of consciousness.
The second question in regard to this stupendous hierarchy of supraphysical realms of consciousness that needs much explaining is: Do these realms or Worlds have any significant role to play vis-a-vis this terrestrial creation and its evolution? In what way the physical existence depends on these higher planes for ‘its origination and its continuance’ as Sri Aurobindo says. These higher planes or systems are the self-existent typal worlds and are ‘at least coeval and coexistent’ with the physical universe. “A secret continuous action of the higher powers and principles from their own planes upon terrestrial being and nature... must have an effect and a significance”23, says Sri Aurobindo. The truth of this statement is corroborated by human experience too; in rare and exceptional moments when man is open inwardly, suddenly he is transported to things unborn and beyond, or from some unknown continents other-worldly thoughts, ideas, images flash upon the inward eye; this may be taken as influences from higher planes as the action of Grace.
The creation and its evolution of Life, Mind and Spirit in the physical are, according to Sri Aurobindo, the result of two co-operating forces. The opening sentence of that power – packed scripture of Integral Yoga – The Mother – categorically states: “There are two powers that alone can effect in their conjunction the great and difficult thing which is the aim of our endeavour, a fixed and unfailing aspiration that calls from below and a supreme Grace from above that answers.” These form the two forces of evolution
1. ‘an upward-tending force from below’, and
2. ‘an upward-drawing and downward – pressing force from above’. The upward-tending force is the power of aspiration calling from below in order to be released into some higher plane of consciousness from the inscrutable darkness of inconscient Matter where the Spirit had plunged during devolution of the Consciousness Force. This aspiration is the power that
Inspires our ascent to viewless heights
As once the abysmal leap to birth and life.
— Savitri : 101
The aspiration of the ‘fallen boundless self’, that afflicts the Inconscient with the need to be, is
A nameless movement, an unthought Idea
Insistent, dissatisfied, without an aim,
Something that wished but knew not how to be,
Teased the Inconscient to wake Ignornace.
— Savitri : 1-2
The World Force from its inertia is thus wakened and stirred to its kinetic state and a self-impelled inertia then acts to bring the consciousness involved in the Inconscient, for
All was found there the Unique has dreamed and made
— Savitri : 97
This happens at every stage of evolution.
The ‘upward – tending force from below’ is certainly the initial power to tease and afflict the Inconscient with the need to be. But this alone cannot evolve what is latent in the omnipotent hold of the Inconscient. There is need of an additional and co-operating force for this tremendous labour. That force of evolution is the ‘upward-drawing and downward-pressing force’ provided from above by the higher, supraphysical grades of consciousness. This force has two aspects. One is the ‘upward drawing force’ which is needed to pull out of the Inconscient the spirit imprisoned in it: “To release the glory of God in Nature’s mud.” (Savitri – 138) The second aspect of the force, ‘the downward-pressing force’ of the superior planes acts simultaneously to manifest their world and nature on the material plane so as to induce the like consciousness to emerge from the in conscient’s depth
A splendour presses or a Power breaks through,
Earth’s great dull barrier is removed awhile,
The inconscient seal is lifted from our eyes
And we grow vessels of creative might
— Savitri : 108
As the higher principles manifest their worlds here by their ‘downward-pressing’ force, the Godhead concealed in the inconscient matter finds greater, wider and higher realms of consciousness for the release of its glory, enters these kingdoms as and when manifested on earth. This is the way by which the fallen Godhead journeys back to its more luminous state. This is the mechanism of evolution according to Sri Aurobindo’s vision. He writes, “it is the pressure of the Life – world which enables life to evolve and develop here in the forms we already know; it is that increasing pressure which drives it to aspire in us to a greater revelation of itself and will one day deliver the mortal from his subjection to the narrow limitations of his present incompetent and restricting physicality.”24
Life heard the call and left her native light.
Overflowing from her bright magnificent plane
On the rigid coil and sprawl of mortal Space,
Here too the gracious great - winged Angel poured
Her splendour and her sweetness and her bliss,
Hoping to fill a fair new world with joy.
— Savitri : 130
By the pressure from the Life world the life consciousness
... stooped to make her home in transient shapes,
In Matter’s womb she cast the Immortal’s fire,
In the unfeeling Vast woke thought and hope
— Savitri : 130
and as a result
New sentient creatures filled the unseen depths,
Life’s glory and swiftness ran in the beauty of beasts,
Man dared and thought and met with his soul the world.
— Ibid
“It is the pressure of Mind-world which evolves and develops mind here and helps us to find a leverage for our mental self-uplifting and expansion, so that we may hope to enlarge continually our self of intelligence and even to break the prison-walls of our matter-bound physical mentality.”24
A difficult evolution from below
Called a masked intervention from above:
Else this great, blind inconscient universe
Could never have disclosed its hidden mind.
— Savitri : 146-7
As the earthly life “could not house the wideness of a soul / which needed all infinity for its home” (Savitri : 238-9), so from a still higher realm of the Mind the pressure arrives—
A musing spirit looked out on the worlds
And like a brilliant clambering of skies
Passing through clarity to an unseen Light
Large lucent realms of Mind from stillness shone.
— Savitri : 239
Similarly, it is the pressure of the supramental and spiritual worlds which is preparing to develop here the manifest power of the Spirit and by it open our being on the physical plane into the freedom and infinity of the superconscient Divine; that contact, that pressure can alone liberate from the apparent Inconscience, which was our starting point, the all conscient Godhead concealed in us.”25
This is how each stage of creation evolves here on earth
As if reversing a deformation’s spell,
Released from the black magic of Night,
Renouncing servitude to the dark Abyss,
It shall learn at last who lived within unseen
— Savitri : 171
The pressure of the higher principles of the Supermind, of Bliss, of Conscious Force and of infinite Being when ‘felt in the unconscious universe’ can create happier and wider fields for the concealed godhead to emerge into these more luminous realms,—
It made the breath a happy mystery.
And brought a love sustaining pain with joy;
A love that bore the cross of pain with joy
Eudaemonised the sorrow of the world,
Made happy the weight of long unending Time,
The secret caught of God’s felicity.
— Savitri : 312-3
The pressure from the higher realms of the supraphysical grades has two purposes. It is this pressure from above that ultimately ‘held the spirit to its miraculous course’ along the World-Stair, and thereby “to release the glory of God in Nature’s mud” into higher, wider, and more subtle realms of consciousness: “To free the self is but one radiant pace” (Savitri: 353) There is a more significant purpose: “Here to fulfil himself was God’s desire.” (ibid) When all these supraphysical worlds are manifested on the material plane – “A million lotuses swaying on one stem” (Savitri: 279)
then there is Divine fulfilment in creation. But at present while the tardy evolution is still on its half way at the mental plane, the situation is—
A world that knows not its inhabiting Self,
Labours to find its cause and need to be;
A spirit ignorant of the worlds it made,...
Struggles to emerge, to be free, to know and reign;
— Savitri : 329
The gradation of supraphysical worlds or planes is one whole. The material world has evolved life in obedience to a pressure from the vital plane, mind in obedience to a pressure from the mental plane. It is now trying to evolve supermind in obedience to a pressure from the supramental plane...
And when that greater Self comes sea-like down
To fill this image of our transcience,
All shall be captured by delight, transformed:
In waves of undreamed ecstasy shall roll
Our mind and life and sense and laugh in a light
Other than this hard limited human day,
The body’s tissues thrill apotheosised,
Its cells sustain bright metamorphosis.
— Savitri : 171
and then
This little being of Time, this shadow soul,
This living dwarf figure-head of darkened spirit
Out of its traffic of petty dreams shall rise.
Its shape of person and its ego face
Divested of this mortal travesty,
Like a clay troll kneaded into a god
New made in the image of the eternal Guest.
— Savitri : 171
“What takes place in life has always behind it pre-existent movements and forms in the occult vital planes; what takes place in mind presupposes pre-existent movements and forms in the occult mental planes.”26 This becomes more and more evident as one progresses in a ‘dynamic yoga’. Savitri gives a clear poetic expression to this symbolic truth in Book Two. Sri Aurobindo, however, cautions, “But all this must not be taken in too rigid and mechanical a sense. it is an immense plastic movement full of the play of possibilities and must be seized by a flexible and subtle tact or sense in the seeing consciousness. It cannot be reduced to a too rigorous logical or mathematical formula.”26
The stupendous hierarchy of the grades or realms of consciousness as ‘a many layered plane of life, a many layered plane of Mind, planes of Supermind, of Bliss, of Consciousness Force and of infinite Being’, is a great connected complex movement, rather superimposed with no rigid line of demarcation, each melting into the higher and lower worlds. The poet gives a beautiful symbolic description of the hierarchy of these self-existent worlds—
There walled apart by its own innerness
In a mystical barrage of dynamic light
He saw a lone immense high-curved world-pile
Erect like a mountain chariot of the Gods
Motionless under an inscrutable sky.
— Savitri : 98
This is Sri Aurobindo’s famous ‘World-Stair’ metaphor, of course a symbolic one, on which is based the entire principle of the spiritual evolution as enunciated by the poet of Savitri. The poet describes the World-Stair as
Planted on earth it holds in it all realms:
It is a brief compendium of the Vast.
This was the single stair to being’s goal.
A summary of the stages of the spirit,
Its copy of the cosmic hierarchies...
A subtle pattern of the universe.
— Savitri : 98
“Each plane, in spite of its connection with others above and below it, is yet a world in itself, with its own movements, forces, beings, etc., working under its own laws, for its own manifestation. It does not follow that the self-creation of any higher plane on the material will be in its totality. Many are the possibilities of the self-creations of the higher planes on the material; ‘some fail altogether (to manifest) and leave at the most an idea that comes to nothing; some try seriously (to manifest) and are repelled and defeated... Others effectuate a half manifestation’, and so on. This is because the higher supraphysical realms along the ‘World-Stair’ to manifest themselves on the material plane “come into conflict and have not only to overcome the resistance of the physical consciousness and of matter, but their own internecine resistance to each other.”27
As a higher plane attempts to manifest on the material, it comes in direct confrontation with the resistances from the omnipotent Inconscient
But while the magic breath was on its way,
Before her gifts could reach our prisoned hearts,
A dark ambiguous Presence questioned all.
The secret Will that robes itself with Night
And offers to spirit the ordeal of the flesh,
Imposed a mystic mask of death and pain.
— Savitri : 130
The higher realm which comes to manifest a higher grade of consciousness on the physical, now ‘must obey the inert Inconscient’s law’ —
Whose stamp of failure haunts all ignorant life.
Inflicting still its habit on the cells
The phantom of a dark and evil start
Ghostilike pursues all that we dream and do.
— Savitri : 140
Or,
Its treacherous elements spread like slippery grains
Hoping the incoming Truth might stumble and fall,
— Savitri : 317-8
Only in rare cases a higher plane succeeds in precipitating its result in a more complete and successful creation.
In principle the manifestation of a supraphysical plane on the material is expected to be exactly similar, but not in actuality; “the very fact of translation into another substance and another rhythm of manifestation makes a difference. It is something new that has manifested and it is that that makes the creation worth while.” Sri Aurobindo illustrates, “What for instance would be the utility of a supramental creation on earth if it were just the same thing as a supramental creation on the supramental plane? It is that, in principle, but yet something else, a triumphant new self-discovery of the Divine in conditions that are not elsewhere?28
Process of Creation & its evolution:
The word evolution carries in it an intrinsic sense of a previous involution, for only that which existed involved can alone evolve. “Nothing can evolve out of Matter which is not therein contained,”4 says Sri Aurobindo. The terrestrial evolution, therefore, has to be part of a larger and an integral process, and then only it becomes meaningful. Some sort of a driving force inherent in inconscient matter must be behind the evolutionary urge of Nature. The entire process of the spiritual evolution as enunciated by Sri Aurobindo, has in it fourfold movements.
1. The first original Involution when all is involved in the Superconscient:
2. Devolution i.e. the first evolution from top downward or manifestation of the Spirit.
3. The second Involution when all powers of the descending consciousness of the spirit get involved in the Inconscient.
4. Evolution terrestrial, the process of the spirit’s self-finding or step by step release from its involved state in the Inconscient.
First Involution:
Sri Aurobindo’s spiritual vision sees that ‘behind the appearances of the universe there is the Reality of a Being and Consciousness, a Self of all things, one and eternal’. The fourfold movement of the evolutionary process is truly He alone and from Him proceeds the whole creation: “Himself the play, Himself the player, Himself the playground.”29 He beyond Time and Space, the pure Being and Consciousness, the supreme Existence in ‘the Eternal’s stillness’ in unmoved joy where and in whom all is in a state of involution, hidden in the blaze of Superconscient Light. All is contained in this blissful peace of the superconscience, though formless—
There only reigns the Spirit’s motionless power
Poised in itself through still eternity
And its omniscient and omnipotent peace.
— Savitri : 321
and
Of all the beauty and the marvel here,
Of all Time’s intricate variety
Eternity was the substance and the source;
— Savitri : 672
Here lies the origin and cause of creation.
Devolution:
The word ‘devolution’ connotes descent through a series of changes; or for our understanding a creation from the top downward or simply manifestation of the One Being. Sri Aurobindo sees the presence of the Reality of one Being and consciousness behind the appearances of the universe. All things are one Being, “but a one who insists on his own infinite diversity and even a suggestion that there is in this eternal unity an eternal pluralism; the Infinite Being self-repeated in an infinite multiplicity of beings, each unique and yet each the One.”23 The supreme Reality has twin aspects of Being and Becoming.
Devolution is the result of the Being’s becoming, the Being’s ‘will to be many’ and His delight of self-creation ‘to house its bodiless thrill’ in forms. It is His insistence on His ‘own infinite diversity’, ‘an eternal pluralism’, — May I be many, and
The Absolute, the Perfect, the Alone
Has called out of the Silence his mute Force
Where she lay in the featureless and formless hush
Guarding from Time by her immobile sleep
The ineffable puissance of his solitude.
— Savitri : 67
The Consciousness – Force lies involved in the superconscient’s Silence; it is only when the Being wills to be many that the involved Consciousness — Force separates from the Being, and His ‘rapturous and unstumbling Force’ turns kinetic and begins her act of creation.
The serried kingdoms of the graded Law
Plunged from the Everlasting into Time
— Savitri : 88
and ‘flashing out of the Timeless leaped the worlds’. And the consciousness – Force—
In her mystery’s moods divorced from the Maker’s laws
She too as sovereignly creates her field,
Her will shaping the undetermined vasts,
Making a finite of infinite;
— Savitri : 84
and
As if her rash superb wagered to outvie
The veiled Creator’s cosmic secrecies.
— Ibid
The Consciousness-Force fragments and plunges, plunges and fragments in the act of creation.
It flung into the hazards of its play
A million moods, a myriad energies,
The world-shapes that are fancies of its Truth
And the formulas of the freedom of its Force.
— Savitri : 95
Sri Aurobindo says, “Existence that multiplied itself for sheer delight of being and plunged into numberless trillions of forms so that it might find itself innumerably. The Omnipotent has formulated itself in a vast cosmic self-driven Inertia that by disintegration creates; the Infinite is self-expressed here in a boundless fragmentation.”30 And all the while
The Eternal’s stillness saw in unmoved joy
His universal Power at work display
In plots of pain and dramas of delight
The wonder and beauty of her will to be.
— Savitri : 95
The Master of existence then enters ‘the world-shapes’ that the Force has created
Along a naked curve in bourneless Self
The points that run through the closed heart of things
Shadowed the indeterminable line
That carries the Everlasting through the years.
— Savitri : 40
and
The All-Conscious ventured into Ignorance,
The All-Blissful bore to be insensible...
And drinks experience like a strengthening wine.
— Savitri : 66-7
As a result of the devolutionary creation, ‘a carved sea of worlds’ descending from the top is created at each level of fragmentation of the Force. Descending from breadths immeasurable, creating world after world, the Force becomes darker, less conscious and less intense in power and under its self-impelled inertia is hurled headlong to plunge into utter and dark unconsciousness. With the fragmentation of the Force during devolutionary creation, there enters in the manifestation the element of rigid separativity. Thus is formed the cosmic ignorance, the worlds of the finite: ‘divorced from the Maker’s laws’—
Her will shaping the undetermined vasts,
Making a finite of the infinity;
— Savitri : 84
and
In this drop from consciousness to consciousness
Each leaned on the occult Inconscient’s power,
The fountain of its needed Ignorance,
Archmason of the limits by which it lives.
— Savitri : 89
All the while
In the mystery of her cosmic ignorance,
In the insoluble riddle of her play,
— Savitri : 64
the Conscious – Being becomes ‘whatever her artist will can make’. Offering ‘His substance a material for her works’—
Driven by his own formidable Power,
His chosen partner in a titan game,
Her will he has made the master of his fate,
Her whim the dispenser of his pleasure and pain;
He has sold himself into her regal power
For any blow or boon that she may choose:
Even in what is suffering to our sense,
He feels the sweetness of her mastering touch,
In all experience meets her blissful hands;
— Savitri : 66
and ‘He builds bodies for his shapeless energy’ and enters every formation
All-knowing he accepts our darkened state,
Divine, wears shapes of animal or man;
Eternal, he assents to Fate and Time,
Immortal, dallies with mortality.
The All-Conscious ventured into Ignorance,
The All-Blissful bore to be insensible.
Incarnate in a world of strife and pain,
He puts on joy and sorrow like a robe.
— Savitri : 66-67
Second Involution :
Numberless are the worlds formed in hierarchical descending order during the great plunge, and infinite are the gradations and variables of consciousness during its devolutionary fragmentation. All these form a sort of ladder, ‘the World-Stair’ wherein “Aspects of being donned world-outline” (Savitri. 96) The Being’s ‘will to be’ at last reaches the ultimate stage of the fragmentation of His Force. The Soul looks out into a dark unknown world and out of curiosity He too plunges into that ‘negative infinity, the Inconscient formed by the plunge of His Force;—
Then, curious of a shadow thrown by Truth,
It strained towards some otherness of self,
It was drawn to an unknown Face peering through night.
It sensed a negative infinity,
A void supernal whose immense excess
Imitating God and everlasting Time
Offered a ground for Nature’s adverse birth
And Matter’s rigid hard unconsciousness.
— Savitri : 454
Such is the way the Being comes to be imprisoned in the Inconscient, though a self-chosen act. This state is what Sri Aurobindo calls the second Involution.
As to the how of the fall of the Consciousness into the Inconscience and Ignorance, Sri Aurobindo says, “it is the division, the separation, the principle of isolation from the Permanent and One that brought it about; it is because the ego set up for itself in the world emphasising its own desire and self-affirmation in preference to its unity with the Divine and its oneness with all; it is because instead of the one supreme Force, Wisdom, Light determining the harmony of all forces, each Idea, Force, Form of things was allowed to work itself out...”31 As to why came this division, Sri Aurobindo explains,” in the transition of the Divine in the Oneness to the Divine in the Many, this ominous possible became at a certain point an inevitable. For once it appears it acquires for the Soul descending into evolutionary manifestation an irresistible attraction which creates the inevitability.”31 It is an attraction which might be taken as “the call of the unknown, the joy of danger and difficulty and adventure, the will to attempt the impossible, to work out the incalculable, the will to create the new and the uncreated with one’s self and life as the material, the fascination of contradictories and their difficulty of harmonisation.”31
As one drawn by the grandeur of the Void
The soul attracted leaned to the Abyss:
It longed for the adventure of Ignorance
And the marvel and surprise of the Unknown
And the endless possibility that lurked
In the womb of Chaos and in Nothing’s gulf
— Savitri : 455
Or,
It tired of its unchanging happiness,
It turned away from immortality:
It was drawn to hazard’s call and danger’s charm,
It yearned to the pathos of grief, the drama of pain,
Perdition’s peril, the wounded bare escape,
The music of ruin and its glamour and crash,....
— Savitri : 455
Many may be the reasons of the plunge of the Eternal Conscious Being, of this holocaust.
From the point of view of human understanding perhaps there has been ‘one unknown factor’ not taken care of i.e. ‘the depths of the abyss, the possibilities of the Divine in the Ignorance and Inconscience’. But that is not so. To the Divine Wisdom “the result of the descent must be such, and having appeared it must be worked out.”32 The more difficult the situation, greater becomes the skill of the World-Magician. Perhaps that has been the secret Plan of the Divine; “if the plunge into Night was inevitable, the emergence into a new unprecedented Day was also a certitude, and that only so could a certain manifestation of the Supreme Truth be effected.”32
The whole of creation is, in a sense, ‘a movement between two involutions, Spirit in which all is involved and out of which all evolves downward (or devolves) to the other pole of Matter, Matter in which also all is involved and out of which all evolves upwards to the other pole of Spirit’. This is Sri Aurobindo’s theory, nay his yogic vision of evolution as an evolution of consciousness in contrast to the scientific theory.
Evolution:
To Sri Aurobindo, evolution is the method or mechanism by which the spirit involved in the Inconscience liberates itself:
Even in this ultimate dissolution’s core,
There lurked an unremembering entity,
Survivor of a slain and buried past
Condemned to resume the effort and the pang,
— Savitri : 2
This is the stage when evolution begins. In essence evolution is not making of a more organised body or a more efficient and capable life and mind. These are only part of the mechanism of evolution and its outward circumstance. In truth evolution is ‘the strife’ of a somnambulised Consciousness ‘to wake and be free and find and possess itself and all its possibilities to the very highest. It is a slow becoming of a Godhead, the growth of a Spirit’. The tardy evolutionary movement is a field
... of the mysterious play
In which the Unknown pursues himself through forms
And limits his eternity by the hours
And the blind Void struggles to live and see,...
— Savitri : 22
Evolution is the release of consciousness from its ‘flat earthly state to the discovery of a greater self.’
The present terrestrial evolution begins from the second involution in inconscient Matter in which all the powers of the Spirit’s consciousness had plunged during devolution—
.... Matter’s rigid hard unconsciousness
Harbouring brilliance of a transient soul
That lights up birth and death and ignorant life
— Savitri : 454
The poet describes this state in another beautiful verse—
A darkened Nature lived and held the seed
Of Spirit hidden and feigning not to be.
Eternal Consciousness became a freak
Of an unsouled almighty Inconscient;
— Savitri : 455
This ‘seed’ held in almighty Inconscient ‘teased the Inconscient to wake Ignorance’ and strives ‘to raise its head and look for absent light’.
If Sri Aurobindo’s vision of a spiritual evolution is accepted, then creation is no more a mystery and a riddle as it is taken for. The vision of the spiritual evolution totally explains, reveals and unmasks ‘one of the initial mysteries of Nature’. Evolution is the Game of games that the Eternal Child plays in his eternal garden. Writing on the drama of Evolution as enacted on this earth, Sri Aurobindo says, “The experiment of human life on an earth is not now for the first enacted. It has been conducted a million times before and the long drama will again a million times be repeated. In all that we do now, our dreams, our discoveries, our swift or difficult attainments, we profit subconsciously by the experience of innumerable precursors and our labour will be fecund in planets unknown to us and in worlds yet uncreated. The plan, the peripeteia, the denouement differ continually, yet are always governed by the conventions of eternal Art. God, Man, Nature are the three perpetual symbols. The idea of eternal recurrence affects with a shudder of alarm the mind entrenched in the minute, the hour, the years, the centuries, all the finite’s unreal defences. But the strong soul conscious of its own immortal stuff and the inexhaustible ocean of its ever flowing energies is seized by it with the thrill of an inconceivable rapture. It hears behind the childlike laughter and ecstasy of the Infinite.”33 This Game of games is a perpetual process, for the Eternal Child does not tire nor does He stop dreaming of new games:
It seemed to cast from it universe like a dream
Vanishing for ever into an original Void.
— Savitri : 555
Savitri is the revelation of the Truth of this eternal Game played on this earth as its field of operation for the present.
‘Evolution’ as poetised in Savitri:
An epic must narrate an adventure. Savitri too, though an epic with a difference, narrates an adventure of the grandest type ever undertaken by epics of the past. This adventure is not undertaken in the physical consciousness on the material plane. The poem breaks into another Space and Time and the poet takes the epic adventure into supra-physical worlds or realms of consciousness beyond the limits of the physical. The fields of adventure in Savitri are made of ‘a more subtle substance and with other movements’ and the protagonist is the human soul. This adventure is
the epic climb
Of human soul from its flat earthly state
To the discovery of a greater self
And the far gleam of an eternal Light.
— Savitri : 46
In other words the adventure here is the adventure of consciousness which is the basis of spiritual evolution.
The poem opens at the pre-creation period. “It was the hour before the Gods awake” as they were not yet required for management of creation. The poem narrates how creation, ‘the divine Event’ was being resisted by the omnipotent Inconscient, the Night,
Across the path of the divine Event
The huge foreboding mind of Night, alone
In her unlit temple of eternity,
Lay stretched immobile upon Silence’ marge.
— Savitri : 1
The entire scenario appeared —
The abysm of the unbodied Infinite;
A fathomless zero occupied the world.
— Ibid
And in this ‘opaque, impenetrable’ darkness dwelt the ‘fallen boundless self’ that had taken a plunge from the superconscient involution : “a venturesome leap of spirit into space.”
Then the poem narrates how from this darkness was churned ‘cradled’ the Force that lay in its potential state
As in a dark beginning of all things,
A mute featureless semblance of the Unknown
Repeating for ever the unconscious act,
Prolonging for ever the unseeing will,
Cradled the cosmic drowse of ignorant Force
Whose moved creative slumber kindles the suns
— Ibid
The ‘cosmic drowse of ignorant Force’ became kinetic (‘moved creative slumber’) to create the material universe where
Earth wheeled abandoned in the hollow gulfs
Forgetful of her spirit and her fate.
— Ibid
This clearly suggests that Earth was destined to be the field of evolution; the aim and purpose of this evolution shall be the self-finding of the spirit imprisoned in inscrutable darkness.
The poem then states how evolution can be effective to create. This is possible as a result of the working of two co-operating forces. First, there is ‘an upward tending force from below’ in the form of an aspiration: “Something that wished but knew not how to be”, or
An unshaped consciousness desired light
And a blank prescience yearned towards distant change.
— Savitri : 2
This is beautifully expressed by a symbolic simile —
As if a childlike finger laid on a cheek
Reminded of the endless need in things
The heedless Mother of the universe,
An infant longing clutched the sombre Vast.
Insensibly somewhere a breach began:
— Savitri : 2
This is the power of aspiration, the ‘upward-tending force from below’. But this alone is not sufficient to bring out the involved consciousness and release the concealed Godhead. However, this’ upward – tending force’ paves the way for the working of the other co-ordinating force, ‘the upward-drawing and downward-pressing force’ from above. The power of aspiration from below ‘troubled the far rim of life’s obscure sleep... amid a heavy cosmic rest,’ and it (Life plane) being the supraphysical plane nearest to earth, arrived from the other side of the boundlessness,
To seek for a spirit sole and desolate
Too fallen to recollect forgotten bliss.
— Savitri : 2
Or, listen again—
Life heard the call and left her native light.
Overflowing from her bright magnificent plane
On the rigid coil and sprawl of mortal Space,
Here too the gracious great-winged Angel poured
Her splendour and her swiftness and her bliss,
— Savitri : 130
Thus ‘intervening in a mindless universe’, the Life consciousness sends its message through ‘the reluctant hush’—
Calling the adventure of consciousness and joy.
— Savitri : 2
The
‘upward – drawing and downward – pressing force’ of the Life consciousness
from above has twofold functions. First, its message of the adventure of consciousness
and joy gives hope and new strength to the concealed godhead to emerge out
of the omnipotent hold of the inconscient Matter: “To release the glory of
God in Nature’s mud”
(Savitri: 138) Secondly, the “downward – pressing force’ of the Life
consciousness from above attempts to create its own kingdom on the material
plane. The aim is to provide a wider, freer and a higher realm of consciousness
as the home for the emerging spirit and also to bring out of the Inconscient
the life consciousness concealed there. But
The Might that came upon the earth to bless,
Has stayed on earth to suffer and aspire.
— Savitri : 133
Life when manifested on earth, the ‘dolorous meeting’ with the inconscient Matter brings ‘the evil mystery of her change’ that we find here—
But while the magic breath was on its way,
Before her gifts could reach our prisoned hearts,
A dark ambiguous Presence questioned all.
The secret Will that robes itself with Night
And offers to spirit the ordeal of the flesh,
Imposed a mystic mask of death and pain
— Savitri : 130
‘Such was the evil mystery of her change’.
Many – layered is this self-existant realm of Life consciousness on the height. Each layer manifests on the material plane in order to give a better, wider and happier home to the emerging Godhead. But
The worlds, the forms her goddess fancy makes
Have lost their origin on unseen heights:
Even severed, straying from their timeless source,
Even deformed, obscured, accursed and fallen, —
— Savitri : 121-2
Why is this so? To this question the poem’s answer is
Since even fall has its perverted joy
And nothing she leaves out that serves delight,—
— Ibid : 122
Or, the omnipotent Inconscient
Inflicting still its habit on the cells
The phantom of a dark and evil start
Ghostlike pursues all that we dream and do.
— Savitri : 140
Although this mighty ‘wide-winged Angel’ has achieved much in the initial stage of this terrestrial evolution,
But what she needed most she cannot build;
All shown is a figure or copy of Truth,
But the Real veils from her its mystic face.
All else she finds, there lacks eternity;
All is sought out, but missed the Infinite.
— Savitri : 183
The working of the supraphyiscal Life consciousness on the material plane has been narrated in detail in Book Two, Cantos 3 to 9 of the epic. But this power cannot take ‘a greater adventure’s call’. For
A glory and sweetness of satisfied desire
Tied up the spirit to golden posts of bliss.
It could not house the wideness of a soul
Which needed all infinity for its home.
— Savitri : 238-9
A greater power than that of Life consciousness must manifest to carry evolution forward, —
A musing spirit looked out on the worlds
And like a brilliant clambering of skies
Passing through clarity to an unseen Light
Large lucent realms of Mind from stillness shone.
— Savitri : 239
This many – layered supraphysical realm of Mind consciousness is the new ‘downward-pressing force’ that acts on manifested life on earth:
Appointed by the Spirit of the Worlds
To mediate with the unknowing depths,
A prototypal deft Intelligence
Half-poised on equal wings of thought and doubt
Toiled ceaselessly twixt being’s hidden ends.
— Savitri : 241
This Arch-Intelligence arriving from the realm of Mind gives to the descending and subtle Mind substance a physical form:
On earth by the will of this Arch-Intelligence
A bodiless energy put on Matter’s robe;
Proton and photon served the imager Eye
To change things subtle into a physical world
And the invisible appeared as shape
And the impalpable was felt as mass:
— Savitri : 241
Mind establishes its reign in terms of the material.
The many layers from the universal Mind plane came down one by one to establish their reign on the material plane in obedience to the will of the Spirit of the Worlds so as to create a wider room for the hidden Entity. Thus could the unremembering Entity find step by step its release from the darkness. First came from the Mind plane the ‘silver grey expanse where Day and Night had wedded and were one.’ Then came’ a realm of early Light and the regency of a half-risen sun’ and ‘by the will of this Arch-Intelligence a bodiless energy put on Matter’s robe and
Idea was disguised in a body’s artistry,
And by a strange atomic law’s mystique
A frame was made in which the sense could put
Its symbol picture of the universe
— Savitri : 241
These are ‘Mind’s first forward steps’ —
Its young formations move the mind of earth
To labour and to dream and new-create,
To feel beauty’s touch and know the world and self:
The Golden Child began to think and see.
— Savitri : 243
The creation of this physical mind was necessary – ‘That the World-Ignorance might grow slowly wise’—
Only a slow advance the earth can bear.
Yet was her strength unlike the unseeing earth’s
Compelled to handle makeshift instruments
Invented by the life - force and the flesh.
— Savitri : 244
Then comes ‘a dwarf three-bodied trinity’; the smallest of the three is ‘a riveter of Life to habit’s grooves’. The evolution and formation of the Law of habits binds the unruly forces of earthly life. The second of the trinity is
A rash Intelligence leaped down lion-maned
From the great mystic Flame that rings the worlds
And with its dire edge eats at being’s heart.
Thence sprang the burning vision of Desire.
— Savitri : 247
Yet all the time it drove the earth consciousness unwittingly ‘towards the hidden Something’:
An eager spring to seize and to possess
Unguided by reason or the seeing soul
Was its first natural motion and its last,
It squandered life’s force to achieve the impossible:
— Savitri : 248
Lastly ‘came Reason, the squat godhead artisan’; ‘Nothing she knew but all things hoped to know.’ Reason’s thought is an endless march without a goal,
There comes no breaking of the walls of mind,
There leaps no rending flash of absolute power,
There dawns no light of heavenly certitude
— Savitri : 251
The situation now appears as —
Matter was an incident in being’s flow,
Law but a clock – work habit of blind force.
Ideals, ethics, systems had no base
And soon collapsed or without sanction lived;
— Savitri : 254-5
A higher realm of Mind must press downward to create and release a higher consciousness from the inconscient involution.
A pure Thought – Mind surveyed the cosmic act.
Archangel of a white transcending realm,
It saw the world from solitary heights
Luminous in a remote and empty air.
— Savitri : 259
Out of spiritual secrecy these ‘celestial visitants’ gaze with their ‘downward-pressing force’ to create on material plane worlds—
Where knowledge is the leader of the act
And matter is of thinking substance made.
— Savitri : 259
But our ‘dwarf will and cold pragmatic sense’ “admit not the celestial visitants”. Yet
In our unknown depths sleeps their reserve of truth,
On our unreached heights they reign and come to us
In thought and muse trailing their robes of light.
— Savitri : 263
“Attracting into time the timeless Light, imprisoning eternity in the hours,” the bright gods of Thought’ from the higher Mind insist and plan to ‘snare the feet of Truth in earthly mind,
In an aureate net of concept and of phrase
And keep her captive for the thinker’s joy
In his little world built of immortal dreams:
There must she dwell mured in the human mind.
— Savitri : 274
A large step has thus been taken in the evolution of the mind consciousness.
‘Always the ideal beckoned from afar.’ Evolution at the mental stage does never stop and Mind tirelessly reveal and create at ‘each step a luminous world’:
Each stage of the soul’s remote ascent was built
Into a constant heaven felt always here.
At each pace of the journey marvellous
A new degree of wonder and of bliss,
A new rung formed in Being’s mighty stair,
A great wide step trembling with jewelled fire
As if a burning spirit quivered there
— Savitri : 277
The ‘burning spirit’ quivered to press upon the material plane, ‘mounting in haste to the Eternal’s house’ carrying the pilgrim soul in its evolutionary march. The world is ‘turned into a temple ground and all discloses the unknown Beloved’. As the heavens of the Ideal like ‘a flame in a white voiceless cupola’ touch our life,—
Our hidden centres of celestial force
Open like flowers to a heavenly atmosphere;
Mind pauses thrilled with the supernal Ray
— Savitri 278
‘Pressed on the bosom the Immortal’s touch is felt’, and “Life yields to the divinity within”.
With the pressure and manifestation of ‘the secrecy of the House of Flame’, aspiration kindles further to rise
On the other side of the eternal stairs
The mighty kingdoms of the deathless Flame
Aspired to reach the Being’s absolutes.
Out of the sorrow and darkness of the world,
Out of the depths where life and thought are tombed,
Lonely mounts up to heaven the deathless Flame.
— Savitri : 279
“It burns for ever on the altar Mind” and “Once kindled never can its flamings cease” This aspiration is
A fire along the mystic paths of earth,
It rises through the mortal’s hemisphere,
Till borne by runners of the Day and Dusk
It enters the occult eternal Light...
Its worlds are steps of an ascending Force:
— Ibid. 279-80
These ‘giant contours’ or burning realms are
Homes of unfallen and illumined Might,...
Heights of the grandeur of Truth’s ageless ray,
As in a symbol sky they start to view
And call our souls into a vaster air.
— Ibid 280
Evolution thus enters the illumined state of the heavens of Ideal through the upward – tending force of aspiration from below and the upward-drawing and downward-pressing force from the higher realms: it is an endless spiral of ascent and descent, of ascent of the evolutionary consciousness aided by the descending pressure from the higher realms.
The evolutionary consciousness then rises into the ‘enormous Self of Mind’, the ‘witness Lord of Nature’s myriad acts’. But here too ‘nothing could be known’: “That must be reached from which all knowledge comes.” (Savitri : 284) For
This great spectator and creator Mind
Was only some half-seeing’s delegate,
A veil that hung between the soul and Light,
An idol, not the living body of God.
— Savitri : 286
The still immobile Self of Mind is ‘some pale front of the Unknowable’: “A shadow seemed the wide and witness Self.” (Ibid.) It is “a stage for the comedy of Ignorance.” (Ibid) —
Our sweet and mighty Mother was not there
Who gathers to her bosom her children’s lives....
— ibid
Evolution to rise and unfold the consciousness further
A greater Spirit than the Self of Mind
Must answer to the questioning of his soul.
— Ibid. 287
The emerging consciousness enters the home of universal Spirit, the ‘World-Soul’:
In a far shimmering background of Mind-Space
A glowing mouth was seen, a luminous shaft;
A recluse-gate it seemed, musing on joy,
A veiled retreat and escape to mystery.
Away from the unsatisfied surface world
It fled into the bosom of the unknown,
A well, a tunnel of the depths of God.
— Savitri : 289
‘Through many layers of formless voiceless self’, it plunged to reach the last profound of the world’s heart’—
And from that heart there surged a wordless call
Pleading with some still impenetrable Mind,
Voicing some passionate unseen desire.
— Ibid
Into a crystal mood of air, ‘a beckoning finger of secrecy’ points to the pilgrim soul from some hidden depth—
As if a message from the world’s deep soul,
An intimation of a lurking joy
That flowed out from a cup of brooding bliss,
There shimmered stealing out into the Mind
A mute and quivering ecstasy of light,
A passion and delicacy of roseate fire.
— Ibid
The ‘intimation of a lurking joy’, ‘a mute and quivering ecstasy of light’, ‘a passion and delicacy of roseate fire’, from the world’s soul flowed stealing out into the Self of Mind. This hidden call to ‘unforseen delight’, though ‘nameless to the unremembering mind’, draws it up to its ‘lost spiritual home’ and ‘the truant heart’ is led back to rapture.
A nook was found that could embrace all worlds,
A point that was the conscious knot of space,
An hour eternal in the heart of Time.
— Savitri : 290
The adventurer along the evolutionary path has entered ‘the silent soul of all the world’:
Here was the welling core of finite life;
A formless spirit became the soul of form.
— Savitri : 291
The realm of the World-Soul is ‘the fashioning chamber of the worlds’, creation’s centre. All that is made and then unmade originate and rest in this realm:
Forces and lives and beings and ideas
Are taken into the stillness for a while;
There they remould their purpose and their drift,
Recast their nature and re-form their shape.
Ever they change and changing ever grow,
And passing through a fruitful stage of death
And after long reconstituting sleep
Resume their place in the process of the Gods
Until their work in cosmic Time is done.
— Savitri : 294
In the stillness of the World-Soul between birth and birth there is
A pause that gave new strength to do and be.
— Ibid
and the soul under the watching eye of nameless Gods, journeyed on — ‘a single conscious power’ — “To the source of all things human and divine.” Savitri 295) There he beheld the deathless figure of Two-in-One in a biune creative poise. There the consciousness fronts the One guarding ‘the austere approach to the Alone:
Above them all she stands supporting all,
The sole omnipotent Goddess ever-veiled
Of whom the world is the inscrutable mask;
— Savitri : 295
Once in that consciousness
“His spirit was made a vessel of her force;” (Ibid.)
and
Attracted to the large and luminous depths
Of the ravishing enigma of her eyes,
He saw the mystic outline of a face
— Savitri : 296
Then
Overwhelmed by her implacable light and bliss,
At atom of her illimitable self
Mastered by the honey and lightning of her power
— Ibid
a cry of adoration and desire arose from the stillness of the soul. With the surrender of his boundless mind, with the self-giving of his silent heart, the adventurer “fell down at her feet unconscious and prone.” The consciousness now stands in the Para Brahman state.
This experience leads the consciousness to greater knowledge. Above the Mind and its universe the adventurer
...stood in a realm of boundless silences
Awaiting the Voice that spoke and built the worlds.
A light was round him wide and absolute,
A diamond purity of eternal sight;
A consciousness lay still, devoid of forms...
— Savitri : 297
This is the zone of sheer existence that lived in its own peace; a solid bare ground of consciousness
On the single spirit’s bare and infinite ground.
Out of the sphere of Mind he had arisen,
He had left the reign of Nature’s hues and shades;
He dwelt in his self’s colourless purity.
It was a plane of undetermined spirit
That could be a zero or round sum of things
— Ibid
This realm is
A lonely station of Omniscience,
A diving – board of the Eternal’s power,
A white floor in the house of All – Delight.
— Savitri : 297
Not only this realm is the ‘diving – board of Eternal’s power’ but from here
A thousand roads leaped into Eternity
Or singing ran to meet God’s veilless face.
— Ibid. 298
‘Here closed the finite’s crawl to the Infinite.’ The evolutionary consciousness ‘had reached the top of all that can be known’—
His sight surpassed creation’s head and base;
Ablaze the triple heavens revealed their suns,
The obscure Abyss exposed its monstrous rule.
All but the ultimate Mystery was his field,
Almost the Unknowable disclosed its rim.
— Savitri : 300
In this high realm his consciousness ‘scanned the secrets of the Overmind’ and ‘linked creation to the Eternal’s sphere’ and ‘took up the reins of cosmic Force.
The poem gives a beautiful picture of the Overmind:
Then stretches the boundless finite’s last expanse,
The cosmic empire of the Overmind,
Time’s buffer state bordering Eternity,
Too vast for the experience of man’s soul:
— Savitri : 660
It is the world from where the cosmic gods build their own nature’s world. There
All Time is one body, Space a single look:
There is the Godhead’s universal gaze
And there the boundaries of immortal Mind:
The line that parts and joins the hemispheres
Closes in on the labour of the Gods
Fencing eternity from the toil of Time.
— Ibid 660-1
In its corridor one hears the tread that comes
Out of the Unmanifest never to return
Till the Unknown is known and seen by men.
— Ibid. 661
But the spiritual Evolution, as Sri Aurobindo sees, has not attained its goal till the consciousness attains the Supramental and the Supermind establishes its reign on the material plane. For this to happen the ‘upward-tending force’ or the evolutionary urge and aspiration has to rise into the transcendental plane. Side by side the ‘upward-drawing and downward-pressing’ force from the supramental plane must act on the lower grades of consciousness on the material plane. The situation at this stage of the evolution of consciousness (the Overmind stage) is
The Sole in its solitude yearned towards the All
And the Many turned to look back at the One.
— Savitri : 326
Then a state grew when “Existence found its truth on Oneness’ breast” and “The great world – rhythms were heart-beats of one Soul”—
As if a sea exploring its own depths,
A living Oneness widened at its core
And joined him to unnumbered multitudes.
A Bliss, a Light, a Power, a flame-white Love
Caught all into a sole immense embrace;
— Savitri : 322-3
Towards these many-layered transcendental planes the consciousness of the adventurer raises its aspiring gaze. Through these many layered planes of Truth, planes of Consciousness, of Bliss, of Infinite Being, journeys the ascending consciousness: “The lyric voyage of a divine soul” (Savitri : 675)
Now begins the consciousness’ pursuit of the Unknowable, for
All is too little that the world can give:
Its power and knowledge are the gifts of Time
And cannot fill the spirit’s sacred thirst...
Hidden by its own works it seemed far off,
Impenetrable, occult, voiceless, obscure.
— Savitri : 305
The unknowable seems unapproachable: “Near, it retreated; far, it called him still” and “who that mightiness was he knew not yet.”—
A distant greatness left it huge and dim,
A mystic closeness shut it sweetly in:
It seemed sometimes a figment or a robe
And seemed sometimes his own colossal shade.
— Savitri : 306
‘A giant doubt’ overshadowed the advance of the adventurer and “His spirit faced the adventure of the Inane.”
Aspiring and half-sinking and upborne,
Invincibly he ascended without pause.
Always a signless vague Immensity
Brooded, without approach, beyond response,
Condemning finite things to nothingness.
— Ibid
Then came ‘a mighty term’ to this ascent,—
A height was reached where nothing made could live,
A line where every hope and search must cease
Neared some intolerant bare Reality.
— Ibid
Thus ‘abandoned by the worlds of Form he strove’ and
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.
— Savitri : 308
All perished in its namelessness
There was no second, it had no partner or peer;
Only itself was real to itself...
It dwelt aloof in its bare infinite,
One and unique, unalterably 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 alive, who lives by none.
— Savitri : 309
‘A stillness absolute’ and incommunicable “Meets the sheer self-discovery of the soul” (Savitri : 310). But a high negation is not all to be attained:
A huge extinction is not God’s last word...
To free the self is but one radiant pace;
Here to fulfil himself was God’s desire.
— Savitri : 311-2
As while the consciousness stood on ‘being’s naked edge’
And all the passion and seeking of his soul
Faced their extinction in some featureless Vast,
The Presence he yearned for suddenly drew close.
— Ibid
This Presence is that of ‘the Mother of all godheads and all strengths’, the mediatrix who binds earth to the Supreme and ‘built a golden passage to his heart—
Abolishing the signless emptiness,
Breaking the vacancy and voiceless hush,
Piercing the limitless Unknowable,
Into the liberty of the motionless depths
A beautiful and felicitous lustre stole
The Power, the Light, the Bliss no word can speak
Imaged itself in a suprising beam
— Savitri : 312
The vision of the Divine Mother makes the consciousness aspire for more: “His small beginnings asked for a mighty end:”
Only he longed to draw her presence and power
Into his heart and mind and breathing frame;
Only he yearned to call for ever down
Her healing touch of love and truth and joy
Into the darkness of the suffering world.
His soul was freed and given to her alone.
— Savitri : 316
This is the most powerful of the ‘upward – drawing and downward – pressing force’ from above. Combined with this force, an intense yearning and perfect self-giving of the freed soul draws the consciousness from its cosmic state into the transcendental planes. The Consciousness now journeys through the many-layered planes of Truth, planes of Consciousness, of Bliss, of infinite Being:
Eternal mountains ridge on gleaming ridge
Whose lines were graved as on a sapphire plate
And etched the borders of heaven’s lustruous noon
Climbed like piled temple stairs and from their heads
Of topless meditation heard below
The approach of a blue pilgrim multitude
And listened to a great arriving voice
Of the wide travel hymn of timeless seas.
— Savitri : 673
Thus asends the consciousness towards the Eternal mountains, the many-layered planes of the Transcendent climbing like ‘piled temple stairs’.
The first of these domains where all Nature appeared marvellous without fault, ‘invaded by beauty’s universal revel’ and the
.... being’s fibre reached out vibrating
And claimed deep union with its outer selves
— Savitri : 675
Yet
These were the first domains, the outer courts
Immense but least in range and least in price,
The slightest ecstasies of the undying gods.
— Savitri : 676
Higher the consciousness’ swing of vision swept and was
Admitted through large sapphire opening gates
Into the wideness of a light beyond,
These were but sumptuous decorated doors
To worlds nobler, more felicitously fair.
— Ibid
Endlessly aspired the pilgrim consciousness and realm upon realm received its ‘soaring view’. Then what seemed ‘one crown of the ascent’ where finite and the infinite are one, the consciousness beheld the strong immortals’ seats who ‘live for a celestial joy and rule’. These are
The middle regions of the unfading Ray.
Great forms of deities sat in deathless tiers.
Eyes of an unborn gaze towards her leaned
Through a transparency of crystal fire...
Shapes of entrancing sweetness spilling bliss...
A tangle of bright bodies, of moved souls...
The harmonious tread of lives for ever joined
In the passionate oneness of a mystic joy
As if sunbeams made living and divine
— Ibid
‘Melting in waves of sympathy and sight’, ‘smitten like a lyre that throbs to others’ bliss’ and ‘drawn by the cords of ecstasies unknown’, the adventurer bore
The imperishable eyes of veilless love.
— Savitri : 677
‘Beyond what tongue can utter or mind dream’, the consciousness was thrilled by
Worlds of an infinite reach crowned Nature’s stir.
There was a greater tranquil sweetness there,
A subtler and profounder ether’s field
And mightier scheme than heavenliest sense can give.
There breath carried a stream of seeing mind,
Form was a tenuous raiment of the soul:
— Ibid
Into those heights the spirit went floating up
Like an upsoaring bird who mounts unseen
Voicing to the ascent his throbbing heart
Of melody till a pause of closing wings
Comes quivering in his last contented cry
And he is silent with his soul discharged,
Delivered of his heart’s burden of delight.
— Savitri : 678
It was, indeed, “The lyric voyage of a divine soul.” Mute in ‘the maze of these surprising worlds’, ‘a marvellous form responded’ to the adventurer’s gaze
Whose sweetness justified life’s blindest pain;
All Nature’s struggle was its easy price,
The universe and its agony seemed worth while.
— Savitri : 679
Darkness of the Inconscient and Death’s ‘destroying might’ abolished for ever,
A secret splendour rose revealed to sight
Where once the vast embodied Void had stood.
Night the dim mask had grown a wonderful face.
— Ibid
This is the status of Sachchidananda consciousness—
All grace and glory and all divinity
Were here collected in a single form;
All worshipped eyes looked through his from one face;
He bore all godheads in his gradiose limbs.
An oceanic spirit dwelt within,...
A flood of freedom and transcendent bliss
Into immortal lines of beauty rose.
— Savitri : 680
“It is by having experience of the Sachichidnanda, pure existence – consciousness – bliss, that the ascent to the supramental and the descent of the supramental become (at a much later stage) possible,” says Sri Aurobindo. “For first one must get free from the ordinary limitation by the mental, vital and physical formations, and the experience of the Sachchidananda peace, calm, purity and wideness gives this liberation.”34 Therefore the supreme advice comes from the Superconscient —
Arise upon a ladder of greater worlds
To the infinity where no world can be.
But not in the wide air where a greater Life
Uplifts its mystery and its miracle,
And not on the luminous peaks of summit Mind,
Or in the hold where subtle Matter’s spirit
Hides in its light of shimmering secrecies,
Can there be heard the Eternal’s firm command
That joins the head of destiny to its base.
These only are the mediating links
— Savitri : 694
But in ‘the slow evolution’s sluggard steps’, the consciousness has to rise all the grades and not
To dare too soon the adventure of the Light,
Pushing the bound and slumbering god in man
Awakened mid the ineffable silences
Into endless vistas of the unknown and unseen,
Across the last confines of the limiting Mind
And the Superconscient’s perilous border line
Into the danger of the Infinite
— Savitri : 693
Then discends the great assurance from the height
There is a consciousness mind cannot touch,
Its speech cannot utter nor its thought reveal.
It has no home on earth, no centre in man,
Yet is the source of all things thought and done,
The fount of the creation and its works.
— Savitri :705
“Supermind is between the Sachchidananda and the lower creation. It alone contains the self-determining Truth of the Divine Consciousness and is necessary for a Truth-creation.”35 The supreme Sachchidananda is the supracosmic Reality who is above this and all manifestation, says Sri Aurobindo. “The earth is a material field of evolution. Mind and life, supermind, Sachchidanda are in principle involved there in the earth-consciousness:”36 So far mind and life principles have evolved and organised in Matter. “Now supermind is to descend so as to create a supramental race.”36 He further says “The descent of the supramental means only that the Power will be there in the earth – consciousness as a living force just as the thinking mental and higher mental are already there.”37 Giving a clarification to a question he emphatically says that it does not follow that humanity as a whole will become supramental and also it is not likely that the mental stage will disappear from the ascending ladder. (Mother India, Oct. 1975, pp. 795-7) Let us listen to Savitri regarding these two significant statements:
Some shall be made the glory’s receptacles
And vehicles of the Eternal’s luminous power.
These are the high forerunners, the heads of Time,
The great deliverers of earth-bound mind,
The high transfigurers of human clay,
The first-born of a new supernal race.
— Ibid
Secondly, if the World – Stair is easily disturbed, ‘it would break the settled balance of created things;’
If men were not and all were brilliant gods,
The mediating stair would then be lost
By which the spirit awake in Matter winds
Accepting the circuits of the middle Way,
By heavy toil and slow aeonic steps
Reaching the bright miraculous fringe of God,
Into the glory of the Oversoul.
— Savitri : 690
“If the earth were not an evolutionary but a typal world, then indeed one could predict that the descent of a higher type of consciousness would swallow up or abolish the existing type. Ignorance would end and the creation in the ignornace disappear either by transmutation or by annihilation and replacement... But, earth being an evolutionary world, the supramental descent is not likely to have such a devasting completeness. It would be only the establishment of a new principle of consciousness and a new order of conscious beings and this new principle would evolve its own forms and powers in the terrestrial order.” (Mother India, Oct. 1975)
The supermind shall be his nature’s fount,
The Eternal’s truth shall mould his thoughts and acts,
The Eternal’s truth shall be his light and guide.
All then shall change, a magic order come
Overtopping this mechanical universe.
A mightier race shall inhabit the mortal’s world.
— Savitri : 706
This is the aim Sri Aurobindo sets before his concept of evolution of consciousness, when “All earth shall be the spirit’s manifest home” (Savitri: 707)
Thus shall the earth open to divinity
And common natures feel the wide uplift,
Illumine common acts with the Spirit’s ray
And meet the deity in common things.
Nature shall live to manifest secret God,
The Spirit shall take up the human play,
This earthly life become the life divine.
— Savitri : 710
Then “Matter shall reveal the Spirit’s face” (Savitri : 709) and that would be the day of Divine fulfilment on earth. Towards this goal the Evolution on earth moves.
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