Loretta reads Savitri:Four.IV "The Quest" part 1

Transcript of:

Savitri: Book Four, Canto IV, part 1 of 2

by Loretta, 2018 (35:20)

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Loretta reads Savitri Book Four: The Book of Birth and Quest Canto IV: The Quest Part 1 of 2, pages 377-381

   

Savitri is now journeying through the world. She is searching for her life's partner – the second self which her nature asks for. The eternal mate of her own eternal soul.

So far in Savitri, Sri Aurobindo has not written a lot about karma, or past lives, or past-life experiences. Only in the canto on the World-Soul did he really address it so that we could see it clearly. Possibly he did write about it but we didn't recognize it – because in this canto he tells us about it, fairly clearly, but he does not directly say that Savitri's soul (her psychic being) has taken a rebirth. He assumes that we know that. Instead, he says things like:

But as she moved across the changing earth

A deeper consciousness welled up in her:

A citizen of many scenes and climes,

Each soil and country it had made its home (p.377)

And then he says:

The stars at night were her past’s brilliant friends,

The winds murmured to her of ancient things

And she met nameless comrades loved by her once.

All was a part of old forgotten selves (p.377)

In the same way, without directly saying it, Sri Aurobindo tells us also that she has come to her soul-mate Satyavan many times before, in previous lifetimes. He says it with these words:

Even her motion’s purpose was not new:

Traveller to a prefigured high event,

She seemed to her remembering witness soul

To trace again a journey often made.

Mother has explained that any memory that we may have from our own past lives has to be stored only from our own soul. Our soul keeps it, because our soul is the only part of us which takes birth in the world and survives through life and death. Over again, over again.

So that past-life memories that we have come only from those high moments of consciousness – in any of our past lives – where our soul was active and in front, in the consciousness that we had then, in the person that we were then. And the Divine Mother's work is to work for changing the earth in its evolution. We know that she has taken birth many times to do this, because this was Mother – this was Mother's work; she spoke about it.

So here, in this story, Savitri is a very developed being – because she's the Divine Mother. And she's guided by a very developed psychic being. We see that she has a lot of memories. And we see that her relationship to her soul-mate is one of those memories that she has kept. So we understand part of this soul-mate relation by seeing that her soul was guiding her to him many times, in many lives. And we also know that Mother and Sri Aurobindo have both said that they were soul-mates. So Sri Aurobindo is speaking some very personal experience here.

In all their teachings, Sri Aurobindo and Mother explain a lot about the hidden beings and forces which shape our lives. Knowing these things is simply part of being conscious – conscious of the way the world works, conscious of the way we work – and they are tools for working on ourselves. So in Savitri he brings them up often.

We can look back at a cosmic being, a cosmic power – that is to say, in this case, an action of the function of our karma. Our karma that moves our lives. With Savitri, we can look back to Book One, Canto II: “The Issue”, when he first tells us about Savitri. And he refers to the cosmic work that she has taken birth for. Here is his description of a force – a being – which seems to function to bring the highest and best out of us, by giving us the hard tasks of our life. And he writes this:

One dealt with her who meets the burdened great.

Assigner of the ordeal and the path

Who chooses in this holocaust of the soul

Death, fall and sorrow as the spirit’s goads,

The dubious godhead with his torch of pain

Lit up the chasm of the unfinished world

And called her to fill with her vast self the abyss.

August and pitiless in his calm outlook,

Heightening the Eternal’s dreadful strategy,

He measured the difficulty with the might

And dug more deep the gulf that all must cross. (p.39)

We know that Savitri is the Divine Mother, coming to fix things here; and in this case, Sri Aurobindo shows us that she has to fill the need of the world – the abyss – with her own self. Her consciousness, which is the new consciousness. And this is the Mother's work; and this is what he's having Savitri do.

Then he says something about how this force can take the Divine Mother and give her this human work. He says this:

Assailing her divinest elements,

He made her heart kin to the striving human heart

And forced her strength to its appointed road. (p.39)

Sri Aurobindo writes on many levels all through Savitri; and here we can see it. Because while he's writing about Savitri taking her journey, with the same words, through this, we can see that the Divine Mother took these many births and took these special journeys. He says that the deeper consciousness that wells up in Savitri as she travels also takes “all clans and peoples for her own, / Till the whole destiny of mankind was hers” (p.377). He says:

Vaguely or with a flash of sudden hints

Her acts recalled a line of bygone power (p.377)

So something of the Divine Mother consciousness is revealing itself to Savitri and to us.

Back in [Book Four, Canto I: “The Birth and Childhood of the Flame”], [alluding again to] the god that digs more deep the gulf that we all must cross – the karmic god – he says about Savitri, “She took again her divine unfinished task” (p.353). Sri Aurobindo refers to other karmic gods here, in the first page of Canto IV – in powerful poetry, he starts again the subject of Topic::karma. Savitri is driving her beautiful chariot on the roads of the world. And he says:

A guidance turned the dumb revolving wheels

And in the eager body of their speed

The dim-masked hooded godheads rode who move

Assigned to man immutably from his birth,

Receivers of the inner and outer law,

At once the agents of his spirit’s will

And witnesses and executors of his fate. (p.377)

He says they “[Carry] the unbroken thread old lives have spun” (p.378).

Nothing we think or do is void or vain;

Each is an energy loosed and holds its course. (p.378)

And then he says:

The shadowy keepers of our deathless past

Have made our fate the child of our own acts,

And from the furrows laboured by our will

We reap the fruit of our forgotten deeds. (p.378)

It's a beautiful way to describe the action of karma. Sri Aurobindo wrote a whole book about karma. He called it, The Problem of Rebirth. In the public mind – and the things that people mostly think about these days, about karma – the idea is that we make our own punishments and misfortunes today; we do it by the things we have already done in the past. And the things we do today make our punishments and misfortunes of tomorrow. But that's actually not the biggest part of karma. And Sri Aurobindo kind of plays all of that down in the book – because all the good that we have is karmic. So he speaks more about the divine work of karma. And the point that he puts the most stress on is that we can move beyond karma.

Essays in Philosophy and Yoga
“The Problem of Rebirth”

PDF (180 pages)

He also points out the same thing here in Savitri; he says that these “dim-masked hooded godheads” (p.377) are “instruments of a Will supreme” (p.378). So Sri Aurobindo's main point is that karma is the spirit's will – even in our earthly law. We can also say that our karma is our fate, our destiny – and in Savitri, we find all through that Sri Aurobindo emphasizes fate much more than death. And f ate is what Savitri has to overcome. Death is only an instrument of fate, a function of fate. Our will is the key factor in changing our fate. And the changing of our fate for good – for the better, for the higher – is the spiritual development of our will.

And he says that when the will of our being is infinite in the spirit, karma and consequence become only the joy of the spirit. Our karma becomes the working out of force and energy as the expression of a higher consciousness. And all the negative results, you may say – or the negativity, whatever it might be – is just not there anymore.

We all have our own individually designed “dim-masked hooded godheads” (p.377), which carry the unbroken thread our old lives have spun. In a sense we have contributed to their very creation, by what we have done in our past lives – and the laws of karma, and the way these gods evolve to do their work, have all these complex inputs – but we can all get beyond them. We have to know the fact that they are there. And we have to work within ourselves, as always. Particularly I think on being one with the Divine's will, and willing good things. Wanting good things, always. And catching ourselves when we don't.

After speaking about karma, Sri Aurobindo brings in the individual Self – but the big individual Self, and he writes it with a capital ‘S’. This is the individual part of the cosmic self, the All. And this Self, our higher self, presides over each one of our individual beings. We all have our own. In Sanskrit it is called the Topic::Jivatman – our individual part of the Atman, the supreme self.

And here, in this part of Savitri (which is not the first time he's talked about it, and won't be the last time he talks about it), he says that Savitri is aware of “a calm Presence throned above her” (p.378). This calm Presence was above her brows – above her head. And it “saw the goal and chose each fateful curve” (p.378). When he says ‘curve’, we can think of it as the inner road, and the outer road.

It used the body for its pedestal;

The eyes that wandered were its searchlight fires,

The hands that held the reins its living tools;

All was the working of an ancient plan,

A way proposed by an unerring Guide. (p.378)

The Jivatman is not the psychic being. Sometimes people think it is, because both are the Divine in us. But our psychic being is our individual soul that is the part of us that takes birth again and again. The Jivatman – our individual Self, part of the cosmic self – is unborn and eternal. It upholds our manifested personality from above. It is our central being, above nature. It is calm and untouched by the movements of nature in general, and by the movements of our nature.

Sri Aurobindo actually tells us about the psychic being and the Jivatman in the same few lines; they're actually together in Savitri. He does that in Book Nine. Savitri is alone in the forest; her husband has died; almighty Death is there. And she must rise and face death to argue for her husband's soul. And here is what Sri Aurobindo writes:

… her spirit above

On the crypt-summit of her secret form

Like one left sentinel on a mountain crest,

A fiery-footed splendour puissant-winged,

Watched flaming-silent, with her voiceless soul (p.575)

So we see both together here. This first part of Book Nine, Canto I, is a really complete description of the Jivatman. And we're going to see that it's just a little bit like it was today (as we read Canto IV). He says that before she's aware of almighty Death, she's holding Satyavan's lifeless body close to her breast. And then comes upon her the change which can overtake the human soul, and hold it up towards its luminous source. He says:

Only the spirit sees and all is known.

Then a calm Power seated above our brows

Is seen, unshaken by our thoughts and deeds,

Its stillness bears the voices of the world:

Immobile, it moves Nature, looks on life.

It shapes immutably [our] far-seen ends (p.571)

So if you want to read all this beautiful description – and it's quite extraordinary – it's on pages 571-573. At one point he does say about the truth of the Jivatman – because the Jivatman is our central being – and he says what the Jivatman does in seven words. And when the Jivatman is forward – everything is happening to Savitri to get her ready – he says, “A central All assumed her boundless life.” (p.572). And so suddenly, she is centered, there are no boundaries; she can act.

And we know that this happens to us in times of crisis. And these are, you could say, the ‘mechanics’ of how it happens. This is the part of our being that comes forward.

The first two pages of this canto are filled with such deep wisdom. And then Savitri goes through the world, and Sri Aurobindo describes the outer pathways of her journey. In the same way that we were with Savitri's father, the traveller of the worlds – he travelled through the inner worlds of being, to ask the Divine Mother to take birth – now we travel with his daughter, the Divine Mother, Savitri, as she passes through the outer world scenes. Scenes filled with the lives of men and women. She goes from the highly populated places, where she sleeps in the palaces of the kings, down through smaller kind of life. Through village and farmland, where man bends to plow the soil. And then she continues on, into the free and griefless places of the wilderness and wild things.

And here, Sri Aurobindo tells us about our mother, the earth. And he tells us that she has a soul. He says:

The inner ear that listens to solitude,

... could hear

The rhythm of the intenser wordless Thought

That gathers in the silence behind life,

And the low sweet inarticulate voice of earth

In the great passion of her sun-kissed trance

The quieted all-seeking mind could feel,

...

The unwearied clasp of her mute patient love

And know for a soul the mother of our forms. (p.380)

After this, it seems that Sri Aurobindo is saying that Savitri is not only the Divine Mother, but also the earth. And of course we know that the body of the earth is the body of the Divine Mother. And so he uses a kind of poetic license. You can't figure out, from when he says ‘her’ and ‘she’, exactly who he's talking about. It could be one, it could be two, it could be all three. And he tells us that the bosom of our mother kept for us many beautiful places in nature – all things he describes as belonging to the earth alone. But then he says:

August, exulting in her Maker’s eye,

She felt her nearness to him in earth’s breast,

Conversed still with a Light behind the veil,

Still communed with Eternity beyond. (p.381)

Is this our Savitri? Is it Savitri as she journeys in earth's beautiful places? Or is this the Divine Mother? Or is this her manifestation as our earth – and maybe all three. Or is it the deeper consciousness which has welled up in Savitri, as she's getting closer to her fate, to the mate of her soul, to the divine work that she is fated to do. Does a part of her being really know that it truly is all three.

The Book of Birth and Quest, Canto IV: “The Quest”...

Canto Four
The Quest
The world-ways opened before Savitri.
At first a strangeness of new brilliant scenes
Peopled her mind and kept her body’s gaze.
But as she moved across the changing earth
A deeper consciousness welled up in her:
A citizen of many scenes and climes,
Each soil and country it had made its home;
It took all clans and peoples for her own,
Till the whole destiny of mankind was hers.
These unfamiliar spaces on her way
Were known and neighbours to a sense within,
Landscapes recurred like lost forgotten fields,
Cities and rivers and plains her vision claimed
Like slow-recurring memories in front,
The stars at night were her past’s brilliant friends,
The winds murmured to her of ancient things
And she met nameless comrades loved by her once.
All was a part of old forgotten selves:
Vaguely or with a flash of sudden hints
Her acts recalled a line of bygone power,
Even her motion’s purpose was not new:
Traveller to a prefigured high event,
She seemed to her remembering witness soul
To trace again a journey often made.
A guidance turned the dumb revolving wheels
And in the eager body of their speed
The dim-masked hooded godheads rode who move
Assigned to man immutably from his birth,
Receivers of the inner and outer law,
At once the agents of his spirit’s will
And witnesses and executors of his fate.
Inexorably faithful to their task,	p.378
They hold his nature’s sequence in their guard
Carrying the unbroken thread old lives have spun.
Attendants on his destiny’s measured walk
Leading to joys he has won and pains he has called,
Even in his casual steps they intervene.
Nothing we think or do is void or vain;
Each is an energy loosed and holds its course.
The shadowy keepers of our deathless past
Have made our fate the child of our own acts,
And from the furrows laboured by our will
We reap the fruit of our forgotten deeds.
But since unseen the tree that bore this fruit
And we live in a present born from an unknown past,
They seem but parts of a mechanic Force
To a mechanic mind tied by earth’s laws;
Yet are they instruments of a Will supreme,
Watched by a still all-seeing Eye above.
A prescient architect of Fate and Chance
Who builds our lives on a foreseen design
The meaning knows and consequence of each step
And watches the inferior stumbling powers.
Upon her silent heights she was aware
Of a calm Presence throned above her brows
Who saw the goal and chose each fateful curve;
It used the body for its pedestal;
The eyes that wandered were its searchlight fires,
The hands that held the reins its living tools;
All was the working of an ancient plan,
A way proposed by an unerring Guide.
Across wide noons and glowing afternoons,
She met with Nature and with human forms
And listened to the voices of the world;
Driven from within she followed her long road,
Mute in the luminous cavern of her heart,
Like a bright cloud through the resplendent day.
At first her path ran far through peopled tracts:	p.379
Admitted to the lion eye of States
And theatres of the loud act of man,
Her carven chariot with its fretted wheels
Threaded through clamorous marts and sentinel towers
Past figured gates and high dream-sculptured fronts
And gardens hung in the sapphire of the skies,
Pillared assembly halls with armoured guards,
Small fanes where one calm Image watched man’s life
And temples hewn as if by exiled gods
To imitate their lost eternity.
Often from gilded dusk to argent dawn,
Where jewel-lamps flickered on frescoed walls
And the stone lattice stared at moonlit boughs,
Half-conscious of the tardy listening night
Dimly she glided between banks of sleep
At rest in the slumbering palaces of kings.
Hamlet and village saw the fate-wain pass,
Homes of a life bent to the soil it ploughs
For sustenance of its short and passing days
That, transient, keep their old repeated course,
Unchanging in the circle of a sky
Which alters not above our mortal toil.
Away from this thinking creature’s burdened hours
To free and griefless spaces now she turned
Not yet perturbed by human joys and fears.
Here was the childhood of primaeval earth,
Here timeless musings large and glad and still,
Men had forborne as yet to fill with cares,
Imperial acres of the eternal sower
And wind-stirred grass-lands winking in the sun:
Or mid green musing of woods and rough-browed hills,
In the grove’s murmurous bee-air humming wild
Or past the long lapsing voice of silver floods
Like a swift hope journeying among its dreams
Hastened the chariot of the golden bride.
Out of the world’s immense unhuman past	p.380
Tract-memories and ageless remnants came,
Domains of light enfeoffed to antique calm
Listened to the unaccustomed sound of hooves
And large immune entangled silences
Absorbed her into emerald secrecy
And slow hushed wizard nets of fiery bloom
Environed with their coloured snare her wheels.
The strong importunate feet of Time fell soft
Along these lonely ways, his titan pace
Forgotten and his stark and ruinous rounds.
The inner ear that listens to solitude,
Leaning self-rapt unboundedly could hear
The rhythm of the intenser wordless Thought
That gathers in the silence behind life,
And the low sweet inarticulate voice of earth
In the great passion of her sun-kissed trance
Ascended with its yearning undertone.
Afar from the brute noise of clamorous needs
The quieted all-seeking mind could feel,
At rest from its blind outwardness of will,
The unwearied clasp of her mute patient love
And know for a soul the mother of our forms.
This spirit stumbling in the fields of sense,
This creature bruised in the mortar of the days
Could find in her broad spaces of release.
Not yet was a world all occupied by care.
The bosom of our mother kept for us still
Her austere regions and her musing depths,
Her impersonal reaches lonely and inspired
And the mightinesses of her rapture haunts.
Muse-lipped she nursed her symbol mysteries
And guarded for her pure-eyed sacraments
The valley clefts between her breasts of joy,
Her mountain altars for the fires of dawn
And nuptial beaches where the ocean couched
And the huge chanting of her prophet woods.	p.381
Fields had she of her solitary mirth,
Plains hushed and happy in the embrace of light,
Alone with the cry of birds and hue of flowers,
And wildernesses of wonder lit by her moons
And grey seer-evenings kindling with the stars
And dim movement in the night’s infinitude.
August, exulting in her Maker’s eye,
She felt her nearness to him in earth’s breast,
Conversed still with a Light behind the veil,
Still communed with Eternity beyond.