Loretta reads Savitri:Seven.I "The Joy of Union; the Ordeal of the Foreknowledge of Death and the Heart’s Grief and Pain" part 1

Transcript of:

Savitri: Book Seven, Canto I, part 1 of 2

by Loretta, 2018 (28:48)

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Loretta reads Savitri Book Seven: The Book of Yoga Canto I: The Joy of Union; the Ordeal of the Foreknowledge of Death and the Heart’s Grief and Pain Part 1 of 2, pages 465-468

   

Savitri is returning to the wild Shalwa forest. Her parents are bringing her back to marry Satyavan. Sri Aurobindo writes that Savitri's heart had chosen, and now her heart was fulfilled, as she goes to live with Satyavan and his parents in the primeval loneliness of nature. She will be far from the cheerful sound of man's crowded days.

This book and canto open with the words:

Fate followed her foreseen immutable road.

Sri Aurobindo says that:

Man’s hopes and longings build the journeying wheels

That bear the body of his destiny

And lead his blind will towards an unknown goal. (p.491)

The face and form of our fate are born within us, and we are the child of our secret soul – our soul, the immortal part of us which guides us life after life, through the lives that it has chosen for us to experience as we make our progress. He says that here, on the physical plane of creation, matter seems to mold our life in our body, and our soul follows. But he says that the souls of greater spirits can be the artist of their own fate.

This is the mystic truth our ignorance hides:

Our ordeal is the hidden spirit’s choice (p.491)

Savitri's soul is actively governing her fate. Most people are just a combination of mental and vital and physical parts and actions, which are not organized, and are not integrated yet as they progress on their road to progress. And therefore, people are always subjected to so many outside influences, and they are moved by these influences without knowing anything about it.

Elsewhere in Savitri, Sri Aurobindo writes:

The conscious Doll is pushed a hundred ways (p.162)

He also writes:

Our tasks are given, we are but instruments;

Nothing is all our own that we create:

The Power that acts in us is not our force.

Although his ego claims the world for its use,

Man is a dynamo for the cosmic work;

Nature does most in him, God the high rest:

Only his soul’s acceptance is his own. (p.568)

Sri Aurobindo tells us that Savitri's heart on the strength of its unbending road, forced the long cosmic curve – the long cosmic movement – to its issue. The time had come for a major change. And Savitri had come to be the instrument for this major change in the world.

In a few very beautiful words, Sri Aurobindo describes how princess Savitri, the daughter of a great king, is escorted by armored squadrons of chariots: through lands of hills, and cities, and rivers, to the wild Shalwa forest, where first she met her eternal partner in this lifetime. He tells us for Savitri:

The past receded and the future neared (p.492)

And then he describes for us the luxury and beauty and love that Savitri now leaves behind, to live in a silence filled only with the voice of bird and beast. She will live the life of ascetic exile, in the dim-souled inhuman forest.

No longer will she live in a beautiful palace. She will live in a low, thatch-roofed hermitage, in a clearing in the forest filled with sunlight. And we know – and Savitri knows – that she has one year. And Sri Aurobindo says that as her life with Satyavan went on, Savitri's spirit, indomitable and immutable, watched the haste of Time, and immobile and invincible force, waiting.

Sri Aurobindo tells us about the parents, parents of a doomed child. Parents of two young people who are about to marry. He describes Satyavan's mother in a very touching way. She is the “stately care-worn woman once a queen” (p.493), who now wanting nothing from life for herself, but who hoped for everything for her beloved and adored son. Wanted for him all the joy of earth, and all the beatitude of heaven. And then Sri Aurobindo speaks of Savitri's poor parents, who know everything. Here they are, prolonging the pain of departure, unable to separate from their own adored and beloved child, heavy with the sorrow of the coming day. Because they know that in one year Satyavan will be gone, he will die. And all the joy of their daughter's life will come to an end.

Finally, helpless against the choice of Savitri's heart, they leave her to her rapture and her doom, in the heart of the deep forest.

And so Savitri begins her new life, as the wife of Satyavan. Sri Aurobindo says that she put everything that was one her life up to that time, behind her. And she welcomed everything that would be both his life and her life.

Back in 1933, Mother gave some advice to people who were about to marry: advice about how to live together, how to live together successfully, and how to stay together for the rest of their lives. This passage has been published in several places; it's in one of Champaklal's books. And it's in the centenary edition of Mother's Collected Works. It's volume 14 of the centenary edition, and it's in the book called Words of the Mother – II. And it's on page 291. It's [in the section] called “Marriage and Children”, and here is Mother's advice:

“To unite your physical lives, your material interests, to become partners in order to face together the difficulties and successes, the defeats and victories of life — that is the very foundation of marriage, but you already know that it is not enough.
         To be united in your sensations, to have the same aesthetic tastes and enjoyments, to be moved in common by the same things, one through the other and one for the other — that is good, that is necessary, but it is not enough.
         To be one in your deeper feelings, to keep a mutual affection and tenderness that never vary in spite of all the blows of life and can withstand every weariness and irritation and disappointment, to be always and on every occasion happy, extremely happy, to be together, to find in every circumstance tranquillity, peace and joy in each other — that is good, that is very good, that is indispensable, but it is not enough.
         To unite your minds, to harmonise your thoughts and make them complementary, to share your intellectual preoccupations and discoveries; in short, to make your sphere of mental activity identical through a widening and enrichment acquired by both at once — that is good, that is absolutely necessary, but it is not enough.
         Beyond all that, in the depths, at the centre, at the summit of the being, there is a Supreme Truth of being, an Eternal Light, independent of all the circumstances of birth, country, environment, education; That is the origin, cause and master of our spiritual development; it is That which gives a permanent direction to our lives; it is That which determines our destinies; it is in the consciousness of That that you must unite. To be one in aspiration and ascension, to move forward at the same pace on the same spiritual path, that is the secret of a lasting union.”

This canto has one title, but we could say that it is in two parts: first, “The Joy of Union”, and second, “The Ordeal of the Foreknowledge of Death and the Heart's Grief and Pain”. This time, we're going to be with Savitri just in the joyful part.

Priceless she deemed her joy so close to death;

Apart with love she lived for love alone. (p.468)

When we truly love somebody, that is what we do. And that love colors everything we are, everything we think and feel and do. Elsewhere Sri Aurobindo has said, “Love is a glory from eternity’s spheres” (p.397). And we feel that. Every moment is eternal. We are uplifted, and made something more. It makes us feel so good, that we love even the fact that we are alive. We want to go on living. Life is worth it, even with all the difficulties and problems, because we love. And our love makes life worth so much more to us than all the rest. Our love is always priceless.

This happens to us when we are with a partner, but it is also true when the one we love is not someone with whom we are in a couple relationship, or even someone of our own age. Parents can be in love with their children all their lives. The relationship starts even before birth. And this all-pervading love transfigures people who are about to become parents. A new mother lives is a kind of special heaven of love; everything is positive, everything is beautiful. If people are careful to keep this feeling and to nourish this love for their own family members, it stays and it grows, and all the love the parents give in caring for their children lives on in the children. And the children give it back to their parents, as the parents age and need to be cared for, just as the parents cared for them after they were born.

Here in a few brief sentences, Sri Aurobindo describes Savitri's first experiences of living in love with her husband.

Night was a chrysoprase on velvet cloth,

A nestling darkness or a moonlit deep;

Day was a purple pageant and a hymn,

A wave of the laughter of light from morn to eve.

His absence was a dream of memory,

His presence was the empire of a god.

A fusing of the joys of earth and heaven,

A tremulous blaze of nuptial rapture passed,

A rushing of two spirits to be one,

A burning of two bodies in one flame.

Opened were gates of unforgettable bliss:

Two lives were locked within an earthly heaven

And fate and grief fled from that fiery hour. (p.494)

So, Savitri, “The Book of Yoga”. “The Joy of Union; the Ordeal of the Foreknowledge of Death and the Heart's Grief and Pain”...

Canto One
The Joy of Union; the Ordeal of the Foreknowledge of Death and the Heart’s Grief and Pain
Fate followed her foreseen immutable road.
Man’s hopes and longings build the journeying wheels
That bear the body of his destiny
And lead his blind will towards an unknown goal.
His fate within him shapes his acts and rules;
Its face and form already are born in him,
Its parentage is in his secret soul:
Here Matter seems to mould the body’s life
And the soul follows where its nature drives.
Nature and Fate compel his free-will’s choice.
But greater spirits this balance can reverse
And make the soul the artist of its fate.
This is the mystic truth our ignorance hides:
Doom is a passage for our inborn force,
Our ordeal is the hidden spirit’s choice,
Ananke is our being’s own decree.
All was fulfilled the heart of Savitri
Flower-sweet and adamant, passionate and calm,
Had chosen and on her strength’s unbending road
Forced to its issue the long cosmic curve.
Once more she sat behind loud hastening hooves;
A speed of armoured squadrons and a voice
Far-heard of chariots bore her from her home.
A couchant earth wakened in its dumb muse
Looked up at her from a vast indolence:
Hills wallowing in a bright haze, large lands
That lolled at ease beneath the summer heavens,
Region on region spacious in the sun,
Cities like chrysolites in the wide blaze
And yellow rivers pacing lion-maned
Led to the Shalwa marches’ emerald line,	p.466
A happy front to iron vastnesses
And austere peaks and titan solitudes.
Once more was near the fair and fated place,
The borders gleaming with the groves’ delight
Where first she met the face of Satyavan
And he saw like one waking into a dream
Some timeless beauty and reality,
The moon-gold sweetness of heaven’s earth-born child.
The past receded and the future neared:
Far now behind lay Madra’s spacious halls,
The white carved pillars, the cool dim alcoves,
The tinged mosaic of the crystal floors,
The towered pavilions, the wind-rippled pools
And gardens humming with the murmur of bees,
Forgotten soon or a pale memory
The fountain’s plash in the white stone-bound pool,
The thoughtful noontide’s brooding solemn trance,
The colonnade’s dream grey in the quiet eve,
The slow moonrise gliding in front of Night.
Left far behind were now the faces known,
The happy silken babble on laughter’s lips
And the close-clinging clasp of intimate hands
And adoration’s light in cherished eyes
Offered to the one sovereign of their life.
Nature’s primaeval loneliness was here:
Here only was the voice of bird and beast,—
The ascetic’s exile in the dim-souled huge
Inhuman forest far from cheerful sound
Of man’s blithe converse and his crowded days.
In a broad eve with one red eye of cloud,
Through a narrow opening, a green flowered cleft,
Out of the stare of sky and soil they came
Into a mighty home of emerald dusk.
There onward led by a faint brooding path
Which toiled through the shadow of enormous trunks
And under arches misers of sunshine,	p.467
They saw low thatched roofs of a hermitage
Huddled beneath a patch of azure hue
In a sunlit clearing that seemed the outbreak
Of a glad smile in the forest’s monstrous heart,
A rude refuge of the thought and will of man
Watched by the crowding giants of the wood.
Arrived in that rough-hewn homestead they gave,
Questioning no more the strangeness of her fate,
Their pride and loved one to the great blind king,
A regal pillar of fallen mightiness
And the stately care-worn woman once a queen
Who now hoped nothing for herself from life,
But all things only hoped for her one child,
Calling on that single head from partial Fate
All joy of earth, all heaven’s beatitude.
Adoring wisdom and beauty like a young god’s,
She saw him loved by heaven as by herself,
She rejoiced in his brightness and believed in his fate
And knew not of the evil drawing near.
Lingering some days upon the forest verge
Like men who lengthen out departure’s pain,
Unwilling to separate sorrowful clinging hands,
Unwilling to see for the last time a face,
Heavy with the sorrow of a coming day
And wondering at the carelessness of Fate
Who breaks with idle hands her supreme works,
They parted from her with pain-fraught burdened hearts
As forced by inescapable fate we part
From one whom we shall never see again;
Driven by the singularity of her fate,
Helpless against the choice of Savitri’s heart
They left her to her rapture and her doom
In the tremendous forest’s savage charge.
All put behind her that was once her life,
All welcomed that henceforth was his and hers,
She abode with Satyavan in the wild woods:	p.468
Priceless she deemed her joy so close to death;
Apart with love she lived for love alone.
As if self-poised above the march of days,
Her immobile spirit watched the haste of Time,
A statue of passion and invincible force,
An absolutism of sweet imperious will,
A tranquillity and a violence of the gods
Indomitable and immutable.
At first to her beneath the sapphire heavens
The sylvan solitude was a gorgeous dream,
An altar of the summer’s splendour and fire,
A sky-topped flower-hung palace of the gods
And all its scenes a smile on rapture’s lips
And all its voices bards of happiness.
There was a chanting in the casual wind,
There was a glory in the least sunbeam;
Night was a chrysoprase on velvet cloth,
A nestling darkness or a moonlit deep;
Day was a purple pageant and a hymn,
A wave of the laughter of light from morn to eve.
His absence was a dream of memory,
His presence was the empire of a god.
A fusing of the joys of earth and heaven,
A tremulous blaze of nuptial rapture passed,
A rushing of two spirits to be one,
A burning of two bodies in one flame.
Opened were gates of unforgettable bliss:
Two lives were locked within an earthly heaven
And fate and grief fled from that fiery hour.
But soon now failed the summer’s ardent breath
And throngs of blue-black clouds crept through the sky
And rain fled sobbing over the dripping leaves
And storm became the forest’s titan voice.
Then listening to the thunder’s fatal crash
And the fugitive pattering footsteps of the showers	p.469
And the long unsatisfied panting of the wind
And sorrow muttering in the sound-vexed night,
The grief of all the world came near to her.
Night’s darkness seemed her future’s ominous face.
The shadow of her lover’s doom arose
And fear laid hands upon her mortal heart.
...

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