Loretta reads Savitri:Six.II "The Way of Fate and the Problem of Pain" part 3

Transcript of:

Savitri: Book Six, Canto II (part 3 of 5)

by Loretta, 2018 (48:12)

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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 3 of 5, pages 448-454

   

Narad, the immortal messenger of the gods, has revealed that Savitri's chosen husband is doomed to die in one year. And therefore Savitri is fated to be a widow, one year from the day she marries.

Savitri has declared that she is stronger than Death, and she is greater than her fate. Once her heart chose, and it chooses not again. She has found the deep unchanging soul of love, and her love shall outlast the world.

Now her being has become one being with Satyavan. She has refused to look for anyone else; she won't leave him. Savitri's mother the queen has raised her voice, in the common complaint of all men against suffering and adverse fate, because her own child is doomed to suffer. She cried – she cried to know why it must be like this. She vividly described the poor suffering nature of man, in a world of tragedy and pain, and she asked why.

And Narad responded to the queen's cry for help by describing the world's miseries and difficulties even more graphically than the queen did. He explained that what we call pain and suffering are a necessary experience in our development. Man's nature is such that unless he can be free from ignorance and evil and folly, he will never evolve into the true divinity which is concealed inside him. Pain is needed to make him do this.

Narad called pain “the hammer of the Gods to break / A dead resistance” (p.443) in man's heart. Then he spoke of the great beings that take birth to save mankind. He spoke of what they have to suffer because they have to experience the pain, the misery, the suffering, that they came to heal.

Now as we begin this part of the canto, Narad describes the ‘world-redeemer’ – the world-redeemer and his heavy task. We can understand all this to be a continuing description of the work of those great beings that he's been speaking of. But we can also understand it to be a part of the path of yoga for the people who really are sincere about going all the way to the end, to achieve a real, high consciousness. To get the divine consciousness that Mother and Sri Aurobindo teach about.

Through Narad's words, Sri Aurobindo speaks to all who are drawn to really change their lower human nature into something more true than the usual level that mankind has reached today (as a general rule). We redeem ourselves, and we also redeem the world. There are greater beings who do it; we know that Savitri is Mother – she has a big redemption job to do. We know Mother was a world-redeemer; Sri Aurobindo is a world-redeemer. He did his sadhana for the world. But on one level, everyone who does sadhana to change themself changes the world at the same time.

We have some of Sri Aurobindo's poems about how hard it was along the way. Here in Savitri, he writes that the world-redeemer makes the choice to go through what is necessary. And the world-redeemer lives through the opposition of earth's powers, nature's ambushes, and the world's attacks.

After Sri Aurobindo came to Pondicherry, he wrote a poem about this. He called it “The Pilgrim of the Night”.

The Pilgrim of the Night

I made an assignation with the Night;

In the abyss was fixed our rendezvous:

In my breast carrying God’s deathless light

I came her dark and dangerous heart to woo.

I left the glory of the illumined Mind

And the calm rapture of the divinised soul

And travelled through a vastness dim and blind

To the grey shore where her ignorant waters roll.

I walk by the chill wave through the dull slime

And still that weary journeying knows no end;

Lost is the lustrous godhead beyond Time,

There comes no voice of the celestial Friend.

And yet I know my footprints’ track shall be

A pathway towards Immortality.

There are a lot of descriptions of Sri Aurobindo's yoga for the world in Savitri, in Book Two, “The Book of the Traveller of the Worlds”. Book Two is his sadhana, and much of it was done after 1926. He wrote almost all of Book Two after he retired in 1926, to devote himself as much as possible to just his sadhana.

There's also a poem he wrote which speaks about how hard his work was, which he called “A God's Labour”. And in “A God's Labour”, unlike the poem about the pilgrim of the night, he goes all the way to the end. Here are a few verses; they give us an idea of some of his experiences and choices:

“He who would bring the heavens here

Must descend himself into clay

And the burden of earthly nature bear

And tread the dolorous way.”

”I have been digging deep and long

Mid a horror of filth and mire

A bed for the golden river’s song,

A home for the deathless fire.

I have laboured and suffered in Matter’s night

To bring the fire to man;

But the hate of hell and human spite

Are my meed since the world began.”

“On a desperate stair my feet have trod

Armoured with boundless peace,

Bringing the fires of the splendour of God

Into the human abyss.

He who I am was with me still;

All veils are breaking now.

I have heard His voice and borne His will

On my vast untroubled brow.”

“A little more and the new life’s doors

Shall be carved in silver light

With its aureate roof and mosaic floors

In a great world bare and bright.”

Here in Savitri Sri Aurobindo writes that the world-redeemer must “enter the eternity of Night / And know God’s darkness as he knows his Sun.”

For this he must go down into the pit,

For this he must invade the dolorous Vasts.

Imperishable and wise and infinite,

He still must travel Hell the world to save.

Into the eternal Light he shall emerge

On borders of the meeting of all worlds;

There on the verge of Nature’s summit steps

The secret Law of each thing is fulfilled,

All contraries heal their long dissidence. (p.450)

Sri Aurobindo says that the world-redeemer's task will be done when the truth-conscious world comes down to earth, invading Matter with the Spirit's ray. And “mortal life shall house Eternity’s bliss, / The body’s self taste immortality.” (p.451).

This will happen in the body, and in the life, of the one who does the work for the world. And others, who are ready, will receive some of the result also – and they will go forward with it.

After speaking about the world-redeemer, Narad says to the queen that she must go through the life that she has complained about so bitterly. Then he tells her how to do it. He says:

O mortal, bear this great world’s law of pain,

In thy hard passage through a suffering world

Lean for thy soul’s support on Heaven’s strength,

Turn towards high Truth, aspire to love and peace. (p.451)

And then, Narad speaks to the queen just as the queen spoke to Savitri. The queen is told exactly the same thing that she told her daughter. She told her daughter not to be like the Titan, who “Climbs to usurp the kingdom of the gods / Or skirts the demon magnitudes of Hell” (p.434), and dashes his life against the eternal Law. Narad says to the queen:

Haste not towards Godhead on a dangerous road,

Open not thy doorways to a nameless Power,

Climb not to Godhead by the Titan’s road. (p.451)

The Titan harbors in himself all the negativities which we have, and which we need to transcend – but he harbors only that. We are a great mixture: we are an aspiring soul, and the Titan's influence is one part of the things that we have to get beyond. But because the Titan is only this, and nothing else, these things are much stronger in him. And no doubt, for teaching purposes, Sri Aurobindo uses these things to give us a very clear idea of what we have inside us (or what we can have inside us) in a much, much, much lower scale.

So we're going to see that Narad will go on to describe the work of the Titan – all of his adverse influence. He will describe them in much greater detail than the queen did. And he is showing the queen (and through his words, Sri Aurobindo is showing us) those aspects of our personality and character, which make trouble for us, and trouble for the rest of the world around us.

With these powerful descriptions of subtle beings of great power, we can take them and apply them to our level. For example, he says about the Titan:

All he would make his own, leave nothing free,

Stretching his small self to cope with the infinite. (p.452)

And this means to cope with life, whatever it brings us. We can't cope with the infinite; we can hardly cope with the finite. And possessing and controlling everything is not the way to deal with life or with other people; but we do try sometimes, in our own way. Sri Aurobindo says:

Power is his image of celestial self. (p.452)

We all have that to some extent. We lose our sensitivity; we lose that reason that we need to be guided by until we can get beyond it. And we just dive in for strength.

We see this again and again throughout history. A very recent example is Adolf Hitler during the Second World War. Another example, Sri Aurobindo says:

His little ‘I’ has swallowed the whole world,

His ego has stretched into infinity. (p.453)

And of course this is an extreme worst case, of human behavior that most of us have.

Indian spiritual tradition has clear classifications of different adverse beings. They are not people, but subtle entities from the subtle worlds. And in this case, entities from the lower vital plane, close to our earth-plane. They are all conscious powers in their own right. They act on us human beings because we have openings to them. Just knowing about them is to enter into a whole subject of study.

In the ancient spiritual tradition, there are ten levels of these beings; each one of them corresponds to one of the ten levels of our human development. For example, number 1, the first level, is pasu. Pasu is the word for the human animal, the lowest of the ten types of consciousnesses in the evolutionary scale. The pasu type is concentrated on the bodily life – the animal power in the body. The word pasu also means simply ‘animal’, and it's used for the bodies of all beings – bodies subtle and gross.

For spiritual thinking, it is also being used to mean ‘a deluded soul’, a soul who is clouded by ignorance, who is bound to the mortal worlds.

Number 5 is the Rakshasa, an anti-Divine being who concentrates on the sense-mind. It is the Rakshasa who first begins to think, but his thought is egoistic, and turned towards sensations. He seeks gross egoistic satisfaction, in life, and in mind, and in body. And so we can see that this way of being, if it is pushed upon us or made to influence us, is a hostile power that detains higher spiritual progress.

The avatar Rama, who was the first mental man, had to fight the Rakshasa Ravana. And if we see Rama was the first mental man, the Rakshasa – who first begins to think, but his thought is egoistic and turned towards sensations – this is something that Rama has got to deal with and overcome.

Then Asura. The Asura is number 6 of the ten types of consciousness in our evolutionary scale. He is an anti-divine being on the mentalized vital plane. So he's moved up from the development of the Rakshasa. The Asura is concentrated more on intellectual activity. In Sri Aurobindo's collected poems, there is a 3-page poem that he wrote, that he calls “The Rakshasas”. Sri Aurobindo and Mother often spoke of Asuras, and the asuric forces that we have to deal with; and sometimes they spoke of Rakshasas also.

In the book of Sri Aurobindo's collected poems, they have put an introduction to this poem about the Rakshasa. The introduction explains who Rakshasas are, and their universal action – an action which is really a part of the purification of consciousness.

Today people see wonderful statues of demons, Rakshasas, other kind of demons – in the temples. And they all evoke some kind of a reaction; there's all kinds of stories about what has to happen to them. But the real truth – the real truth – isn't very well followed. Because the real truth is that all the Titan's action is ultimately a divine work, even though it sounds so terrible; and any conquering of any kind of demon or anti-divine being, any ancient story, is really the story of some human victory. Some human victory of progress.

So here's the introduction to Sri Aurobindo's poem:

“The Rakshasa, the violent kinetic Ego, establishes his claim to mastery of the world replacing the animal Soul, — to be followed by controlled and intellectualised but unregenerated Ego, the Asura. Each such type and level of consciousness sees the Divine in its own image and its level in Nature is sustained by a differing form of the World-Mother.”

If you want to read the whole poem, you can find it in SABDA, the Ashram website. It's also now published in the current edition of Sri Aurobindo's collected works, Volume 2, p.322.

Collected Poems
“The Rakshasas”

PDF (3 pages)

And in the poem, Ravan, the Rakshasa, prays to Lord Krishna (the Divine Lord) to be allowed to continue his divinely given work of smiting and purifying. His terrible work. And Krishna grants his prayer. He can continue, until the Asura evolves. And then, when he's going to have to go, here he prays that when he has to be destroyed, it will be only God who destroys him. And in the poem, the goddess Kali grants his wish. And in the poem, this is a form of the terrible Kali, the Kali at that level of the asuric action. And just as Sri Aurobindo has said, the Titan's level and nature is sustained by a differing form of the World-Mother: this is the level of Kali that Sri Aurobindo has written is supporting and sustaining the terrible Rakshasa.

And if we remember, at the very beginning of this canto, when Narad is coming down to earth and he's chanting, on the way “He sang of the glory and marvel still to be born” (p.416). And Sri Aurobindo wrote:

And as he sang the demons wept with joy

Foreseeing the end of their long dreadful task

And the defeat for which they hoped in vain,

And glad release from their self-chosen doom

And return into the One from whom they came. (p.417)

As it happens, in the very recent broadcast on Mother's Quesitions and Answers of December 12, 1956, Mother spoke in detail about these beings. The subject was the subtle influences which form us and control us all of our lives, without our knowing it. She spoke of three orders of influence, and the third one is all these Titans.

Loretta reads Mother's Questions and Answers:      December 12, 1956 (part 2)

She taught a lot about the influences of these adverse vital beings. She taught about how they enter us, why they want to enter us, and how they influence us, and how we can deal with it. Because it's so close to the subject of this broadcast, we have the link to that broadcast in blue on the written part of the Radio page. Just click on that link whenever you want to, and you can hear it.

So coming back to Narad and the queen, we might just ask: why does Narad think it is so necessary to tell Savitri's mother – the good, beautiful, loving queen – that she should not be like a Titan? It doesn't look like she tries to dominate or control with violence; her ego isn't trying to swallow the whole world. What is the queen doing that calls this teaching forth?

The answer comes when we hear Narad say:

The soul suffering is not eternity’s key (p.453)

And then he says, we can't use sorrow to ransom heaven's demand on life. By this, we understand that the queen is overindulging herself in miseries and sorrows and complaining. So in this way, she is allowing herself to be influenced by these lower forces, and she's using Titan behavior here to try to get what she wants her daughter to have. And Narad tells her:

O mortal, bear, but ask not for the stroke,

Too soon will grief and anguish find thee out. (p.453)

A little later, he says:

Bear; thou shalt find at last thy road to bliss. (p.453)

He tells her that she is still too much the little self, so her consciousness forgets to be divine. Then he says:

Thy spirit’s strength shall make thee one with God,

Thy agony shall change to ecstasy,

Indifference deepen into infinity’s calm

And joy laugh nude on the peaks of the Absolute. (p.454)

We begin and end this broadcast with a Sanskrit mantra from the Kena Upanishad. It was translated by Sri Aurobindo. It was used in Sunil's Savitri music for Book Six, Canto II. And the mantra says:

“The name of That is “That Delight”; as That Delight one should follow after It. He who so knows That, towards him verily all existences yearn.”

“He who knows this knowledge, smites evil away from him and in that vaster world and infinite heaven finds his foundation, yea, he finds his foundation.”

Now we're going to hear Narad, speaking of the beings who work and suffer so we can feel That Delight. And we will hear what he says about the beings who look like they're working against it, but are really working for it.

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

...
“Hard is the world-redeemer’s heavy task;
The world itself becomes his adversary,
Those he would save are his antagonists:
This world is in love with its own ignorance,
Its darkness turns away from the saviour light,
It gives the cross in payment for the crown.
His work is a trickle of splendour in a long night;
He sees the long march of Time, the little won;
A few are saved, the rest strive on and fail:
A Sun has passed, on earth Night’s shadow falls.
Yes, there are happy ways near to God’s sun;
But few are they who tread the sunlit path;
Only the pure in soul can walk in light.
An exit is shown, a road of hard escape
From the sorrow and the darkness and the chain;
But how shall a few escaped release the world?
The human mass lingers beneath the yoke.
Escape, however high, redeems not life,
Life that is left behind on a fallen earth.
Escape cannot uplift the abandoned race
Or bring to it victory and the reign of God.
A greater power must come, a larger light.
Although Light grows on earth and Night recedes,
Yet till the evil is slain in its own home
And Light invades the world’s inconscient base
And perished has the adversary Force,
He still must labour on, his work half done.	p.449
One yet may come armoured, invincible;
His will immobile meets the mobile hour;
The world’s blows cannot bend that victor head;
Calm and sure are his steps in the growing Night;
The goal recedes, he hurries not his pace,
He turns not to high voices in the night;
He asks no aid from the inferior gods;
His eyes are fixed on his immutable aim.
Man turns aside or chooses easier paths;
He keeps to the one high and difficult road
That sole can climb to the Eternal’s peaks;
The ineffable planes already have felt his tread;
He has made heaven and earth his instruments,
But the limits fall from him of earth and heaven;
Their law he transcends but uses as his means.
He has seized life’s hands, he has mastered his own heart.
The feints of Nature mislead not his sight,
Inflexible his look towards Truth’s far end;
Fate’s deaf resistance cannot break his will.
In the dreadful passages, the fatal paths,
Invulnerable his soul, his heart unslain,
He lives through the opposition of earth’s Powers
And Nature’s ambushes and the world’s attacks.
His spirit’s stature transcending pain and bliss,
He fronts evil and good with calm and equal eyes.
He too must grapple with the riddling Sphinx
And plunge into her long obscurity.
He has broken into the Inconscient’s depths
That veil themselves even from their own regard:
He has seen God’s slumber shape these magic worlds.
He has watched the dumb God fashioning Matter’s frame,
Dreaming the dreams of its unknowing sleep,
And watched the unconscious Force that built the stars.
He has learned the Inconscient’s workings and its law,
Its incoherent thoughts and rigid acts,
Its hazard wastes of impulse and idea,	p.450
The chaos of its mechanic frequencies,
Its random calls, its whispers falsely true,
Misleaders of the hooded listening soul.
All things come to its ear but nothing abides;
All rose from the silence, all goes back to its hush.
Its somnolence founded the universe,
Its obscure waking makes the world seem vain.
Arisen from Nothingness and towards Nothingness turned,
Its dark and potent nescience was earth’s start;
It is the waste stuff from which all was made;
Into its deeps creation can collapse.
Its opposition clogs the march of the soul,
It is the mother of our ignorance.
He must call light into its dark abysms,
Else never can Truth conquer Matter’s sleep
And all earth look into the eyes of God.
All things obscure his knowledge must relume,
All things perverse his power must unknot:
He must pass to the other shore of falsehood’s sea,
He must enter the world’s dark to bring there light.
The heart of evil must be bared to his eyes,
He must learn its cosmic dark necessity,
Its right and its dire roots in Nature’s soil.
He must know the thought that moves the demon act
And the falsehood lurking in earth’s crooked dreams:
He must enter the eternity of Night
And know God’s darkness as he knows his Sun.
For this he must go down into the pit,
For this he must invade the dolorous Vasts.
Imperishable and wise and infinite,
He still must travel Hell the world to save.
On borders of the meeting of all worlds;
There on the verge of Nature’s summit steps
The secret Law of each thing is fulfilled,	p.451
All contraries heal their long dissidence.
There meet and clasp the eternal opposites,
There pain becomes a violent fiery joy;
Evil turns back to its original good,
And sorrow lies upon the breasts of Bliss:
She has learned to weep glad tears of happiness;
Her gaze is charged with a wistful ecstasy.
Then shall be ended here the Law of Pain.
Earth shall be made a home of Heaven’s light,
A seer heaven-born shall lodge in human breasts;
The superconscient beam shall touch men’s eyes
And the truth-conscious world come down to earth
Invading Matter with the Spirit’s ray,
Awaking its silence to immortal thoughts,
Awaking the dumb heart to the living Word.
This mortal life shall house Eternity’s bliss,
The body’s self taste immortality.
Then shall the world-redeemer’s task be done.
“Till then must life carry its seed of death
And sorrow’s plaint be heard in the slow Night.
O mortal, bear this great world’s law of pain,
In thy hard passage through a suffering world
Lean for thy soul’s support on Heaven’s strength,
Turn towards high Truth, aspire to love and peace.
A little bliss is lent thee from above,
A touch divine upon thy human days.
Make of thy daily way a pilgrimage,
For through small joys and griefs thou mov’st towards God.
Haste not towards Godhead on a dangerous road,
Open not thy doorways to a nameless Power,
Climb not to Godhead by the Titan’s road.
Against the Law he pits his single will,
Across its way he throws his pride of might.
Heavenward he clambers on a stair of storms
Aspiring to live near the deathless sun.	p.452
He strives with a giant strength to wrest by force
From life and Nature the immortals’ right;
He takes by storm the world and fate and heaven.
He comes not to the high World-maker’s seat,
He waits not for the outstretched hand of God
To raise him out of his mortality.
All he would make his own, leave nothing free,
Stretching his small self to cope with the infinite.
Obstructing the gods’ open ways he makes
His own estate of the earth’s air and light;
A monopolist of the world-energy,
He dominates the life of common men.
His pain and others’ pain he makes his means:
On death and suffering he builds his throne.
In the hurry and clangour of his acts of might,
In a riot and excess of fame and shame,
By his magnitudes of hate and violence,
By the quaking of the world beneath his tread
He matches himself against the Eternal’s calm
And feels in himself the greatness of a god:
Power is his image of celestial self.
The Titan’s heart is a sea of fire and force;
He exults in the death of things and ruin and fall,
He feeds his strength with his own and others’ pain;
In the world’s pathos and passion he takes delight,
His pride, his might call for the struggle and pang.
He glories in the sufferings of the flesh
And covers the stigmata with the Stoic’s name.
His eyes blinded and visionless stare at the sun,
The seeker’s Sight receding from his heart
Can find no more the light of eternity;
He sees the beyond as an emptiness void of soul
And takes his night for a dark infinite.
His nature magnifies the unreal’s blank
And sees in Nought the sole reality:
He would stamp his single figure on the world,	p.453
Obsess the world’s rumours with his single name.
His moments centre the vast universe.
He sees his little self as very God.
His little ‘I’ has swallowed the whole world,
His ego has stretched into infinity.
His mind, a beat in original Nothingness,
Ciphers his thought on a slate of hourless Time.
He builds on a mighty vacancy of soul
A huge philosophy of Nothingness.
In him Nirvana lives and speaks and acts
Impossibly creating a universe.
An eternal zero is his formless self,
His spirit the void impersonal absolute.
Take not that stride, O growing soul of man;
Cast not thy self into that night of God.
The soul suffering is not eternity’s key,
Or ransom by sorrow heaven’s demand on life.
O mortal, bear, but ask not for the stroke,
Too soon will grief and anguish find thee out.
Too enormous is that venture for thy will;
Only in limits can man’s strength be safe;
Yet is infinity thy spirit’s goal;
Its bliss is there behind the world’s face of tears.
A power is in thee that thou knowest not;
Thou art a vessel of the imprisoned spark.
It seeks relief from Time’s envelopment,
And while thou shutst it in, the seal is pain:
Bliss is the Godhead’s crown, eternal, free,
Unburdened by life’s blind mystery of pain:
Pain is the signature of the Ignorance
Attesting the secret god denied by life:
Until life finds him pain can never end.
Calm is self’s victory overcoming fate.
Bear; thou shalt find at last thy road to bliss.
Bliss is the secret stuff of all that lives,
Even pain and grief are garbs of world-delight,	p.454
It hides behind thy sorrow and thy cry.
Because thy strength is a part and not God’s whole,
Because afflicted by the little self
Thy consciousness forgets to be divine
As it walks in the vague penumbra of the flesh
And cannot bear the world’s tremendous touch,
Thou criest out and sayst that there is pain.
Indifference, pain and joy, a triple disguise,
Attire of the rapturous Dancer in the ways,
Withhold from thee the body of God’s bliss.
Thy spirit’s strength shall make thee one with God,
Thy agony shall change to ecstasy,
Indifference deepen into infinity’s calm
And joy laugh nude on the peaks of the Absolute.
…

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