Loretta reads Savitri:Six.II "The Way of Fate and the Problem of Pain" part 2

Transcript of:

Savitri: Book Six, Canto II (part 2 of 5)

by Loretta, 2018 (43:49)

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Loretta reads Savitri Book Six: The Book of Fate Canto II: The Way of Fate and the Problem of Pain Part 2 of 5, pages 442-448

   

Savitri's mother has given voice to the suffering in the world's dumb heart. She has given voice to man's revolt against his ignorant fate. “[L]ike sorrow questioning heaven” (p.437), passionately her heart has pleaded for an answer to why her beautiful child has to be doomed to marry a man who is also doomed – doomed to die in one year.

When we cry like this, we are asking for help. We want the comfort of a solution that will give us what we want, or at least we could find some comfort and feel a little better if we had some tenderness, some loving sympathy. But if the queen expected this, and if we expected that Narad will give this, we're all going to be disappointed. Narad speaks very straightforwardly, apparently without sympathy; he gives the real truth of things at the level of life that we are all living in.

We live the life of an embodied soul, evolving in a moral body made of inconscient Matter. But Narad speaks the truth; truth is its own power to heal. Truth is truth. And it acts in us for our good, whether or not we think so at the moment.

When Narad tunes his lips to earthly sound in order to answer the queen, something of the deep sense of Fate gives weight to his use of our much lighter mortal speech. Sri Aurobindo uses beautiful words to say that the immortal seer sees the future works of time. He says that Narad's forehead “shone with vision solemnised” (p.442) and:

Bare in that light Time toiled, his unseen works

Detected; the broad-flung far-seeing schemes

Unfinished which his aeoned flight unrolls

Were mapped already in that world-wide look. (p.442)

Then Narad starts to speak. And he asks:

Was then the sun a dream because there is night? (p.442)

He tells the queen that her thought is a light of the Ignorance: a brilliant curtain which hides God's face from her. The Eternal is hidden in the mortal's heart; the Eternal is living secret in the chamber of her soul, but she cannot hear him or feel him. And she cannot see the beatific sun.

Narad tells the queen (and in fact he's telling us at the same time) – he tells the queen this:

Thy mind’s light hides from thee the Eternal’s thought,

Thy heart’s hopes hide from thee the Eternal’s will,

Earth’s joys shut from thee the Immortal’s bliss. (p.443)

And therefore, he says, where Ignorance is, suffering too must come. And therefore, he says, pain is needed to teach us.

Narad sums up the queen's whole complaint by saying this:

Thy grief is a cry of darkness to the Light (p.443)

He is speaking from the standpoint of our evolution into a higher consciousness, where we will be able to move beyond the surface life. It is our divine destiny to have a life where what is inconscient in us now does become conscious of the Eternal's thought and the Eternal's will. And then we do live in the immortal's bliss.

He says “Pain is the hammer of the Gods to break / A dead resistance in the mortal’s heart” (p.443). Pain is the hammer needed to break our inertia, which is like living stone. We all have this inertia: resistance to change. In Sanskrit inertia is called tamas. Tamas is one of the three principles of energy in the cosmos. Tamas – or inertia – slows things down; it keeps things from moving too fast. Our tamas keeps us from moving.

People who are trying to be conscious of their inner movements, and really going deep, say they feel this resistance as a background of their usual thoughts about everything. Instead of thinking about something in its truth of the present moment, they think about it, or they see it, in the terms of past feelings and thoughts. So they're not living in the present. They're seeing the present through the screen of the past, and that screen is coloring the way they respond.

So people find they can't really receive what other people are feeling about them – because they apply something from the dead past, and they misunderstand their present experience, and they spoil their relationships.

This resistance can be seen in back of everything. Even when one is going to do something one likes, one complains: “What's the point?” It's this living resistance that has to be removed. And Narad says pain is the way to do it, because otherwise we would sit down and do nothing.

Then he goes on to describe how the eternal will works to shape the life divine in mortal forms. If you don't like to hear about suffering, you will hear Narad's wise descriptions just as distressing as the queen's complaining. They are both describing the things we live through in this world of ignorance and falsehood – the things which have been hard to go through, and the things we don't want to hear about. He says:

Implacable in the passion of their will,

Lifting the hammers of titanic toil

The demiurges of the universe work;

They shape with giant strokes their own; their sons

Are marked with their enormous stamp of fire. (p.444)

King Aswapati has already asked Narad if fire must always test the great of soul. And at that time, Narad answered not. He sat, looking ahead, knowing Fate is lord. But now he's answered with this, he's said: “marked with their stamp of fire”. And he also says:

Although the shaping god’s tremendous touch

Is torture unbearable to mortal nerves,

The fiery spirit grows in strength within

And feels a joy in every titan pang. (p.444)

This suffering of our outer being is welcomed by our soul, because our soul knows what it is really for.

Then Narad goes on to speak about the great soul who takes birth to save the world. There are many, there have been many, there will be many. And he says, “The sorrow of all living things shall come / And knock at his doors and live within his house” (p.446). He doesn't speak about Savitri yet. But in a way, he is also describing her. Here, he says that those who would save the race must share its pain. On their shoulders they must bear man's lowly fate. They bring the riches of heaven, and they are given man's suffering in exchange.

He speaks of the crucifixion of Christ as payment of the debt which the Eternal owes to those he has bound to death – those he has bound to the struggling life that yearns in vain for rest and endless peace.

When the creator takes birth into a body, the creator bears the law of pain and death, and the creator suffers just as we do. This is a retribution that smites the incarnate God. But, when God's messenger comes to help the world, he must bear the pain that he wants to heal; because he cannot cure the ills which he has never felt.

This is what Savitri will have to go through. Here at this moment, she is filled with her newly-discovered love. She is ecstatically happy. She has found her soul-mate. In all this light and all this love, Savitri's psychic being has come forward. And she is living in the wisdom of the soul, and speaking from the wisdom of the soul. She knows that she is deathless. She knows that her love is deathless. And she believes that she will have a different fate than the fate Narad has just described – although as yet, she does not know what it will be.

But we're going to see that when they are married, and the date of Satyavan's death draws near, Savitri, like her mother the queen, will fall to the lot of common man, and she will feel what common hearts endure in time. Savitri won't be living in her soul at that point. Her psychic being will be behind the veil of her suffering. And just as Narad said that the sorrow of all living things come to those that save, Sri Aurobindo writes:

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. (p.469)

At that point, Savitri lives a life of endless grief. So much so, that it even becomes part of her love for Satyavan. Sri Aurobindo writes:

Always the stature of her passion grew;

Grief, fear became the food of mighty love.

Increased by its torment it filled the whole world;

It was all her life, became her whole earth and heaven.

Although life-born, an infant of the hours,

Immortal it walked unslayable as the gods:

Her spirit stretched measureless in strength divine,

An anvil for the blows of Fate and Time (p.473)

Finally Savitri will overcome this, by finding her soul. By doing the things we all have to do to have our soul really, permanently forward in our being. And then Savitri will go on to prepare herself further to face Death, and to bring the soul of Satyavan back to life.

In speaking about the things that God's messenger will suffer when he comes to help the world, Sri Aurobindo says:

He meets an ancient adversary Force (p.446)

We find it throughout history. And he gives some examples. He says that the savior “wears the blood-glued fiery Centaur shirt” (p.447). In Greek mythology, the great hero Hercules dies because he puts on a garment which has been stained by the blood of the centaur Nessus. Hercules killed the centaur with a poisoned arrow, and the poison was in its blood when it died. So when Hercules put on the Centaur's blood-stained garment, it killed him.

Then Sri Aurobindo tells us that the poison of the world will stain the throat of the one who comes to save the world. There is an ancient Hindu legend where Lord Vishnu tells all the gods to churn the vast ocean of milk, and to drink the nectar of immortality which will come from their churning, in order to regain some lost glory. The gods and the demons joined together to churn the ocean of milk. In the process, a dangerous poison which could wipe out all creation came out. The gods and the demons appealed to Lord Shiva for help and protection. Out of compassion, Lord Shiva swallowed the poison, but he closed his throat to keep the poison from descending further into his body. The poison in Lord Shiva's throat was so strong that it turned his throat blue.

Sri Aurobindo also says the savior is “tied to the stake of a perennial Fire” (p.447); and we remember that Joan of Arc was tied to the stake in fire. But he says ‘perennial’ fire. This is a fire we all must go through – all those who are there for the test of the great of soul. Those who are ready.

Narad says that “A power came in to veil the eternal Light” (p.447).

A whisper lures to evil the human heart,

It seals up wisdom’s eyes, the soul’s regard,

It binds earth to calamity and pain. (p.447)

There is a secret will that makes our life a harder journey from inconscience to consciousness. In Book Two, the traveller of the worlds – when the king is the traveller of the worlds – he follows life's emergence out of inconscient matter. Because he wants to learn the secret of the evil mystery that came to impose this mystic mask of death and pain.

In Book Two, Canto VII is called “The Descent into Night”. The king, with his mind made calm to know, and his heart divorced from ignorance and blindness – the king searched for the world-wide failure's cause. Sri Aurobindo speaks of the inner war without escape: our battle against the origin of our suffering. And he describes what the king learns as he sees it coming into the creation. He writes:

Something crept forth that seemed a shapeless Thought.

The grey Mask whispered and, though no sound was heard,

Yet in the ignorant heart a seed was sown

That bore black fruit of suffering, death and bale. (p.203)

From there, the traveller king probes deeper and deeper into Life's deformed energy, until he finally arrives at the last locked floor of the subconscient – where he sees that “Being slept unconscious of its thoughts / And built the world not knowing what it built.” And because the king is one of the great beings, one of the messengers of God sent to help the world, he arrives at Being's floor after going through terrible, wounding experiences, and terrible suffering. “There in the slumber of the cosmic Will / He saw the secret key of Nature’s change.” (p.231) And he underwent many realizations, which released him from falsehood and division. Then:

The soul lit the conscious body with its ray,

Matter and spirit mingled and were one. (p.232)

The king has done the work, and he has received the result.

Soon Savitri will go through her destined ordeal – the ordeal that will make her capable of doing her divine work. We know that Savitri is the Divine Mother, the living incarnation of the Word of Truth. The Word of Truth that will conquer the falsehood, that will conquer death.

In his book, “The Mother”, Sri Aurobindo says the Mother was moved by some mysterious fiat of the Supreme, to work out something that was there in the possibilities of the Infinite. And she has consented to the great sacrifice, and “has put on like a mask the soul and forms of the Ignorance”.

“But personally too she has stooped to descend here into the Darkness that she may lead it to the Light, into the Falsehood and Error that she may convert it to the Truth, into this Death that she may turn it to godlike Life, into this world-pain and its obstinate sorrow and suffering that she may end it in the transforming ecstasy of her sublime Ananda. In her deep and great love for her children she has consented to put on herself the cloak of this obscurity, condescended to bear the attacks and torturing influences of the powers of the Darkness and the Falsehood, borne to pass through the portals of the birth that is a death, taken upon herself the pangs and sorrows and sufferings of the creation, since it seemed that thus alone could it be lifted to the Light and Joy and Truth and eternal Life. This is the great sacrifice called sometimes the sacrifice of the Purusha, but much more deeply the holocaust of Prakriti, the sacrifice of the Divine Mother.”

Now, Narad is going to begin to explain all of this to the queen.

“The Book of Fate”, “The Way of Fate and the Problem of Pain”...

...
Then after a silence Narad made reply:
Tuning his lips to earthly sound he spoke,
And something now of the deep sense of fate
Weighted the fragile hints of mortal speech.
His forehead shone with vision solemnised,
Turned to a tablet of supernal thoughts
As if characters of an unwritten tongue
Had left in its breadth the inscriptions of the gods.
Bare in that light Time toiled, his unseen works
Detected; the broad-flung far-seeing schemes
Unfinished which his aeoned flight unrolls
Were mapped already in that world-wide look.
“Was then the sun a dream because there is night?
Hidden in the mortal’s heart the Eternal lives:
He lives secret in the chamber of thy soul,
A Light shines there nor pain nor grief can cross.
A darkness stands between thyself and him,
Thou canst not hear or feel the marvellous Guest,
Thou canst not see the beatific sun.
O queen, thy thought is a light of the Ignorance,
Its brilliant curtain hides from thee God’s face.
It illumes a world born from the Inconscience	p.443
But hides the Immortal’s meaning in the world.
Thy mind’s light hides from thee the Eternal’s thought,
Thy heart’s hopes hide from thee the Eternal’s will,
Earth’s joys shut from thee the Immortal’s bliss.
Thence rose the need of a dark intruding god,
The world’s dread teacher, the creator, pain.
Where Ignorance is, there suffering too must come;
Thy grief is a cry of darkness to the Light;
Pain was the first-born of the Inconscience
Which was thy body’s dumb original base;
Already slept there pain’s subconscient shape:
A shadow in a shadowy tenebrous womb,
Till life shall move, it waits to wake and be.
In one caul with joy came forth the dreadful Power.
In life’s breast it was born hiding its twin;
But pain came first, then only joy could be.
Pain ploughed the first hard ground of the world-drowse.
By pain a spirit started from the clod,
By pain Life stirred in the subliminal deep.
Interned, submerged, hidden in Matter’s trance
Awoke to itself the dreamer, sleeping Mind;
It made a visible realm out of its dreams,
It drew its shapes from the subconscient depths,
Then turned to look upon the world it had made.
By pain and joy, the bright and tenebrous twins,
The inanimate world perceived its sentient soul,
Else had the Inconscient never suffered change.
Pain is the hammer of the Gods to break
A dead resistance in the mortal’s heart,
His slow inertia as of living stone.
If the heart were not forced to want and weep,
His soul would have lain down content, at ease,
And never thought to exceed the human start
And never learned to climb towards the Sun.
This earth is full of labour, packed with pain;
Throes of an endless birth coerce her still;	p.444
The centuries end, the ages vainly pass
And yet the Godhead in her is not born.
The ancient Mother faces all with joy,
Calls for the ardent pang, the grandiose thrill;
For with pain and labour all creation comes.
This earth is full of the anguish of the gods;
Ever they travail driven by Time’s goad,
And strive to work out the eternal Will
And shape the life divine in mortal forms.
His will must be worked out in human breasts
Against the Evil that rises from the gulfs,
Against the world’s Ignorance and its obstinate strength,
Against the stumblings of man’s pervert will,
Against the deep folly of his human mind,
Against the blind reluctance of his heart.
The spirit is doomed to pain till man is free.
There is a clamour of battle, a tramp, a march:
A cry arises like a moaning sea,
A desperate laughter under the blows of death,
A doom of blood and sweat and toil and tears.
Men die that man may live and God be born.
An awful Silence watches tragic Time.
Pain is the hand of Nature sculpturing men
To greatness: an inspired labour chisels
With heavenly cruelty an unwilling mould.
Implacable in the passion of their will,
Lifting the hammers of titanic toil
The demiurges of the universe work;
They shape with giant strokes their own; their sons
Are marked with their enormous stamp of fire.
Although the shaping god’s tremendous touch
Is torture unbearable to mortal nerves,
The fiery spirit grows in strength within
And feels a joy in every titan pang.
He who would save himself lives bare and calm;
He who would save the race must share its pain:	p.445
This he shall know who obeys that grandiose urge.
The Great who came to save this suffering world
And rescue out of Time’s shadow and the Law,
Must pass beneath the yoke of grief and pain;
They are caught by the Wheel that they had hoped to break,
On their shoulders they must bear man’s load of fate.
Heaven’s riches they bring, their sufferings count the price
Or they pay the gift of knowledge with their lives.
The Son of God born as the Son of man
Has drunk the bitter cup, owned Godhead’s debt,
The debt the Eternal owes to the fallen kind
His will has bound to death and struggling life
That yearns in vain for rest and endless peace.
Now is the debt paid, wiped off the original score.
The Eternal suffers in a human form,
He has signed salvation’s testament with his blood:
He has opened the doors of his undying peace.
The Deity compensates the creature’s claim,
The Creator bears the law of pain and death;
A retribution smites the incarnate God.
His love has paved the mortal’s road to Heaven:
He has given his life and light to balance here
The dark account of mortal ignorance.
It is finished, the dread mysterious sacrifice,
Offered by God’s martyred body for the world;
Gethsemane and Calvary are his lot,
He carries the cross on which man’s soul is nailed;
His escort is the curses of the crowd;
Insult and jeer are his right’s acknowledgment;
Two thieves slain with him mock his mighty death.
He has trod with bleeding brow the Saviour’s way.
He who has found his identity with God
Pays with the body’s death his soul’s vast light.
His knowledge immortal triumphs by his death.
Hewn, quartered on the scaffold as he falls,
His crucified voice proclaims, ‘I, I am God;’	p.446
‘Yes, all is God,’ peals back Heaven’s deathless call.
The seed of Godhead sleeps in mortal hearts,
The flower of Godhead grows on the world-tree:
All shall discover God in self and things.
But when God’s messenger comes to help the world
And lead the soul of earth to higher things,
He too must carry the yoke he came to unloose;
He too must bear the pang that he would heal:
Exempt and unafflicted by earth’s fate,
How shall he cure the ills he never felt?
He covers the world’s agony with his calm;
But though to the outward eye no sign appears
And peace is given to our torn human hearts,
The struggle is there and paid the unseen price;
The fire, the strife, the wrestle are within.
He carries the suffering world in his own breast;
Its sins weigh on his thoughts, its grief is his:
Earth’s ancient load lies heavy on his soul;
Night and its powers beleaguer his tardy steps,
The Titan adversary’s clutch he bears;
His march is a battle and a pilgrimage.
Life’s evil smites, he is stricken with the world’s pain:
A million wounds gape in his secret heart.
He journeys sleepless through an unending night;
Antagonist forces crowd across his path;
A siege, a combat is his inner life.
Even worse may be the cost, direr the pain:
His large identity and all-harbouring love
Shall bring the cosmic anguish into his depths,
The sorrow of all living things shall come
And knock at his doors and live within his house;
A dreadful cord of sympathy can tie
All suffering into his single grief and make
All agony in all the worlds his own.
He meets an ancient adversary Force,
He is lashed with the whips that tear the world’s worn heart;	p.447
The weeping of the centuries visits his eyes:
He wears the blood-glued fiery Centaur shirt,
The poison of the world has stained his throat.
In the market-place of Matter’s capital
Amidst the chafferings of the affair called life
He is tied to the stake of a perennial Fire;
He burns on an unseen original verge
That Matter may be turned to spirit stuff:
He is the victim in his own sacrifice.
The Immortal bound to earth’s mortality
Appearing and perishing on the roads of Time
Creates God’s moment by eternity’s beats.
He dies that the world may be new-born and live.
Even if he escapes the fiercest fires,
Even if the world breaks not in, a drowning sea,
Only by hard sacrifice is high heaven earned:
He must face the fight, the pang who would conquer Hell.
A dark concealed hostility is lodged
In the human depths, in the hidden heart of Time
That claims the right to change and mar God’s work.
A secret enmity ambushes the world’s march;
It leaves a mark on thought and speech and act:
It stamps stain and defect on all things done;
Till it is slain peace is forbidden on earth.
There is no visible foe, but the unseen
Is round us, forces intangible besiege,
Touches from alien realms, thoughts not our own
Overtake us and compel the erring heart;
Our lives are caught in an ambiguous net.
An adversary Force was born of old:
Invader of the life of mortal man,
It hides from him the straight immortal path.
A power came in to veil the eternal Light,
A power opposed to the eternal will
Diverts the messages of the infallible Word,
Contorts the contours of the cosmic plan:	p.448
A whisper lures to evil the human heart,
It seals up wisdom’s eyes, the soul’s regard,
It is the origin of our suffering here,
It binds earth to calamity and pain.
This all must conquer who would bring down God’s peace.
This hidden foe lodged in the human breast
Man must overcome or miss his higher fate.
This is the inner war without escape.
...

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