Loretta reads Savitri:One.V "The Yoga of the King: The Yoga of the Spirit's Freedom and Greatness" part 3

Transcript of:

Savitri: Book One, Canto V, part 3 of 3

by Loretta, 2016 (18:24)

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Loretta reads Savitri Book One: The Book of Beginnings Canto V: The Yoga of the King: The Yoga of the Spirit's Freedom and Greatness Part 3 of 3, pages 87-91

   

We've reached the final individual attainments of the great yogi king. These are his own attainments in his own being, for his own yogic self-fulfillment. The king receives the results of all he has done so far, and also the results the come because of the great cosmic powers that have been working in him. Finally, a reconciling wisdom at the height of the Everlasting brings divine unity to the aspects of the king's humanity. And we will see in the future that now he is ready to go on for a divine service for the rest of humanity.

In this canto, Sri Aurobindo describes the things that Aswapati sees and experiences. And he describes the way he changes, without referring to “the king” – without saying this is happening to the king. We know that Sri Aurobindo was always writing about his own yogic experience. And here, he gives us his attainments in a general way, by talking about what there is, what is seen, and what goes on, without talking about the king. The king only comes into it at the beginning and at the end. This opens it up even more directly for us to relate to. We're able to get even more from Sri Aurobindo's work.

Up to this point, we've been reading Savitri in small sections between five and eight pages long. We stop at the major change, so that we don't read too much at one time. And almost each time, in the space of those few pages, Sri Aurobindo has described the greatness that we can achieve, and the wonderful greater world to come, and then he goes down to the reality of our consciousness, and the reality of the world as it is, and the reality of the things that have to change. Almost every time, he has put both of these things in what he's written. Now, this time, we only have the greater being of the king. The king is moving up and on, forward into the hidden worlds behind our material life. These worlds are hidden to us, because of our lack of development of consciousness. But the king is ready. And Sri Aurobindo describes the occult force which allows the discovery of the worlds of the marvelous unknown.

He writes about the occult force as the Shakti, the Divine Mother, the Force of the Supreme. So he will be using the words “her” and “she” throughout this to show that it is always the action of the Supreme – the Supreme transcendent Mother – who is the cosmos itself.

Sri Aurobindo and Mother always said that we have to increase our consciousness in two directions, in two ways. We must be conscious of the highest, and we must be conscious of the lowest. So now the king is going to experience this. He enters the “forefront of God's (thousandfold) house” (p.87), “a magic (porch) of entry”, “a court of the mystic traffic of the worlds”. And now, “life in him learn[s] its huge subconscient rear”. And the little fronts in him “unlock to the unseen Vasts” (p.88).

Here in the forefront of God's invisible house, the king discovers a great order of things. And intuitively, he can see the kingdoms of the cosmic Law, which start at the top – at the height of the Everlasting – and go all the way down into Time. And then they bring back up from Time into the Everlasting everything that is there. The king can see at the summit the light of “the Trinity supreme” (p.89), where there is no darkness or sleep.

And then Sri Aurobindo tells us that at the top “a grand solution close[s] the long impasse” (p.90). “Impasse” is a French word, meaning a deadlock where nothing can move, where all is stuck. And this is the impasse at the height of human effort. This is at the point in our spiritual work where we have done all that we can, and can't go any longer.

And now we see, at the height, there is a solution. “There was no quarrel more of truth with truth” (p.90). The king is really ready to go on.

A many-miracled Consciousness unrolled

Vast aim and process and unfettered norms,

A larger Nature’s great familiar roads. (p.91)

There were “sunbelts of knowledge” and “moonbelts of delight” (p.91), stretching out in ecstasy in great vastness. Here the king could enter and stay awhile. In this last high world where all worlds meet.

A voyager upon uncharted routes

Fronting the viewless danger of the Unknown,

Adventuring across enormous realms,

He broke into another Space and Time. (p.91)

And here we are in Savitri.

...
A border sovereign is the occult Force.
A threshold guardian of the earth-scene’s Beyond,
She has canalised the outbreaks of the Gods
And cut through vistas of intuitive sight
A long road of shimmering discoveries.
The worlds of a marvellous Unknown were near,
Behind her an ineffable Presence stood:
Her reign received their mystic influences,
Their lion-forces crouched beneath her feet;
The future sleeps unknown behind their doors.
Abysms infernal gaped round the soul’s steps
And called to its mounting vision peaks divine:
An endless climb and adventure of the Idea
There tirelessly tempted the explorer mind
And countless voices visited the charmed ear;
A million figures passed and were seen no more.
This was a forefront of God’s thousandfold house,
Beginnings of the half-screened Invisible.
A magic porch of entry glimmering	p.88
Quivered in a penumbra of screened Light,
A court of the mystical traffic of the worlds,
A balcony and miraculous façade.
Above her lightened high immensities;
All the unknown looked out from boundlessness:
It lodged upon an edge of hourless Time,
Gazing out of some everlasting Now,
Its shadows gleaming with the birth of gods,
Its bodies signalling the Bodiless,
Its foreheads glowing with the Oversoul,
Its forms projected from the Unknowable,
Its eyes dreaming of the Ineffable,
Its faces staring into eternity.
Life in him learned its huge subconscient rear;
The little fronts unlocked to the unseen Vasts:
Her gulfs stood nude, her far transcendences
Flamed in transparencies of crowded light.
A giant order was discovered here
Of which the tassel and extended fringe
Are the scant stuff of our material lives.
This overt universe whose figures hide
The secrets merged in superconscient light,
Wrote clear the letters of its glowing code:
A map of subtle signs surpassing thought
Was hung upon a wall of inmost mind.
Illumining the world’s concrete images
Into significant symbols by its gloss,
It offered to the intuitive exegete
Its reflex of the eternal Mystery.
Ascending and descending twixt life’s poles
The seried kingdoms of the graded Law
Plunged from the Everlasting into Time,
Then glad of a glory of multitudinous mind
And rich with life’s adventure and delight
And packed with the beauty of Matter’s shapes and hues	p.89
Climbed back from Time into undying Self,
Up a golden ladder carrying the soul,
Tying with diamond threads the Spirit’s extremes.
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.
In this soar from consciousness to consciousness
Each lifted tops to That from which it came,
Origin of all that it had ever been
And home of all that it could still become.
An organ scale of the Eternal’s acts,
Mounting to their climax in an endless Calm,
Paces of the many-visaged Wonderful,
Predestined stadia of the evolving Way,
Measures of the stature of the growing soul,
They interpreted existence to itself
And, mediating twixt the heights and deeps,
United the veiled married opposites
And linked creation to the Ineffable.
A last high world was seen where all worlds meet;
In its summit gleam where Night is not nor Sleep,
The light began of the Trinity supreme.
All there discovered what it seeks for here.
It freed the finite into boundlessness
And rose into its own eternities.
The Inconscient found its heart of consciousness,
The idea and feeling groping in Ignorance
At last clutched passionately the body of Truth,
The music born in Matter’s silences
Plucked nude out of the Ineffable’s fathomlessness
The meaning it had held but could not voice;
The perfect rhythm now only sometimes dreamed
An answer brought to the torn earth’s hungry need
Rending the night that had concealed the Unknown,
Giving to her her lost forgotten soul.	p.90
A grand solution closed the long impasse
In which the heights of mortal effort end.
A reconciling Wisdom looked on life;
It took the striving undertones of mind
And took the confused refrain of human hopes
And made of them a sweet and happy call;
It lifted from an underground of pain
The inarticulate murmur of our lives
And found for it a sense illimitable.
A mighty oneness its perpetual theme,
It caught the soul’s faint scattered utterances,
Read hardly twixt our lines of rigid thought
Or mid this drowse and coma on Matter’s breast
Heard like disjointed mutterings in sleep;
It grouped the golden links that they had lost
And showed to them their divine unity,
Saving from the error of divided self
The deep spiritual cry in all that is.
All the great Words that toiled to express the One
Were lifted into an absoluteness of light,
An ever-burning Revelation’s fire
And the immortality of the eternal Voice.
There was no quarrel more of truth with truth;
The endless chapter of their differences
Retold in light by an omniscient Scribe
Travelled through difference towards unity,
Mind’s winding search lost every tinge of doubt
Led to its end by an all-seeing speech
That garbed the initial and original thought
With the finality of an ultimate phrase:
United were Time’s creative mood and tense
To the style and syntax of Identity.
A paean swelled from the lost musing deeps;
An anthem pealed to the triune ecstasies,
A cry of the moments to the Immortal’s bliss.
As if the strophes of a cosmic ode,	p.91
A hierarchy of climbing harmonies
Peopled with voices and with visages
Aspired in a crescendo of the Gods
From Matter’s abysses to the Spirit’s peaks.
Above were the Immortal’s changeless seats,
White chambers of dalliance with eternity
And the stupendous gates of the Alone.
Across the unfolding of the seas of self
Appeared the deathless countries of the One.
A many-miracled Consciousness unrolled
Vast aim and process and unfettered norms,
A larger Nature’s great familiar roads.
Affranchised from the net of earthly sense
Calm continents of potency were glimpsed;
Homelands of beauty shut to human eyes,
Half-seen at first through wonder’s gleaming lids,
Surprised the vision with felicity;
Sunbelts of knowledge, moonbelts of delight
Stretched out in an ecstasy of widenesses
Beyond our indigent corporeal range.
There he could enter, there awhile abide.
A voyager upon uncharted routes
Fronting the viewless danger of the Unknown,
Adventuring across enormous realms,
He broke into another Space and Time.
END OF CANTO FIVE
END OF BOOK ONE