"Only the pure in soul can walk in light."
Savitri 448
The Questions Raised by Death God
“Two things are needed. First, nothing in your being, no part of your being, should wish to die. That doesn’t often happen. You always have, somewhere in you, a defeatist: something tired or disgusted, which has had enough, something lazy or which doesn’t want to fight and says, ‘Ah, well, let it be over, so much the better.’ That’s enough – you’re dead. But it’s a fact: if nothing, absolutely nothing in you consents to die, you will not die. For someone to die, there is always a second, if a hundredth part of a second, when he consents. If there isn’t that second of consent, he will not die. But who is certain he doesn’t have within himself, somewhere, a tiny bit of a defeatist which just yields and says, ‘Oh well’? ... (Secondly) Hence the need to unify oneself. Whatever the path we may follow, the subject we may study, we always reach the same result. The most important thing for an individual is to unify himself around his divine center; that way he becomes a real individual, master of himself and of his destiny. Otherwise, he is a plaything of the forces, which toss him about like a cork in a stream. He goes where he doesn’t want to, is made to do what he doesn’t want to, and finally he gets lost in a hole without any way to stop himself doing so. But if you are consciously organised, unified around the divine center, governed and led by it, you are the master of your destiny. It’s worth trying.... At any rate, I find it’s better to be the master rather than the slave.”
The Mother
The Mother’s Agenda/September 7, 1968,
“God knows, never, not one minute in my life, even when things were the darkest, the blackest, the most negative, the most painful, not once did the thought come, ‘I would like to die.’”
The Mother
The Mother’s Agenda/Vol-5/p-288,
Questions raised by Death God, a temporary Instrument of the Divine in Ignorance:
The Triple Task Before the Sadhak of Integral Yoga
Before conquering Death from without, which is an issue left for the last Avatar and of all life, a Sadhak is given the triple task of conquering Death from within (1) by universalisation of Consciousness, (2) by illumining the Subconscient and Inconscient dark and twilight planes and (3) by change of Nature through activation of 'Yoga of Self-perfection' and Sachchidananda Consciousness. One may note that before the universalisation of Consciousness, a Sadhak has to undergo a long movement of Consciousness between the Psychic and Spiritual planes.
The First Task of Conquering Death by Universalisation of Consciousness: This experience will be followed by static Viswarupa Darshana as witnessed by the Arjuna of the Gita (Chapter-10) and dynamic Viswarupa Darshana as witnessed by the Death God in Savitri, Book-10, Canto-4. A Sadhak of Integral Yoga will not remain indifferent to the many people (Satyavan is the symbol of the Soul of man) who are dying every day and every minute, but activates his ceaseless movement in universalised Consciousness to harmonise and change the destiny of the race.
"A Mother-wisdom works in Nature’s breast
To pour delight on the heart of toil and want
And press perfection on life’s stumbling powers,
Impose heaven-sentience on the obscure abyss
And make dumb Matter conscious of its God.
Although our fallen minds forget to climb,
Although our human stuff resists or breaks,
She keeps her will that hopes to divinise clay;
Failure cannot repress, defeat o’erthrow;
Time cannot weary her nor the Void subdue,
The ages have not made her passion less;
No victory she admits of Death or Fate." Savitri-353-354
“In the enormous emptiness of thy mind
Thou shalt see the Eternal’s body in the world,
Know him in every voice heard by thy soul,
In the world’s contacts meet his single touch;
All things shall fold thee into his embrace.
Conquer thy heart’s throbs, let thy heart beat in God:
Thy nature shall be the engine of his works,
Thy voice shall house the mightiness of his Word:
Then shalt thou harbour my force and conquer Death.” Savitri-476
The Second Task of illumining the Subconscient and Inconscient planes: Savitri, without dying, in cataleptic trance, followed Death and Satyavan’s Soul in the Inconscient Night and she was determined to follow them in those adverse darkest planes and was even determined to pursue Satyavan’s Soul wherever Death would lead. Death was unable to understand the mystery of Savitri’s survival in the unborn void and escape from his death-net-trap.
A golden fire came in and burned Night’s heart of Inconscient Sheath; her dusky mindlessness grew conscious and began to dream, feel and think. By its influence, the Intolerant Darkness grew pale and drew apart till only a few black remnants stained that golden ray.
"To live, to love are signs of infinite things,
Love is a glory from eternity’s spheres.
Abased, disfigured, mocked by baser mights
That steal his name and shape and ecstasy,
He is still the godhead by which all can change.
A mystery wakes in our inconscient stuff,
A bliss is born that can remake our life."
Savitri-397
"He (Narad) sang the Inconscient and its secret self, (Discovery of Inconscient Self)
Its power omnipotent knowing not what it does,
All-shaping without will or thought or sense,
Its blind unerring occult mystery,
And darkness yearning towards the eternal Light,
And Love that broods within the dim abyss
And waits the answer of the human heart,
And death that climbs to immortality." Savitri-416
"Love’s golden wings have power to fan thy void:
The eyes of love gaze starlike through death’s night,
The feet of love tread naked hardest worlds.
He labours in the depths, exults on the heights;
He shall remake thy universe, O Death.”
Savitri-592
“O Death, I have triumphed over thee within;
I quiver no more with the assault of grief;
A mighty calmness seated deep within
Has occupied my body and my sense:
It takes the world’s grief and transmutes to strength,
It makes the world’s joy one with the joy of God.
My love eternal sits throned on God’s calm;
For Love must soar beyond the very heavens
And find its secret sense ineffable;
It must change its human ways to ways divine,
Yet keep its sovereignty of earthly bliss.” Savitri-633
The Third Task of Permanent Descent of Sachchidananda Consciousness: Satyavan’s return to earth, his home which is given back once again to live, signifies permanent descent of Sachchidananda Consciousness to earth consciousness which is the result of Savitri’s permanent ascent of Soul to Sachchidananda state; here symbolically represented as Everlasting Day, which now houses the promise of greater dawn and light.
“I climb not to thy everlasting Day,
Even as I have shunned thy eternal Night.
To me who turn not from thy terrestrial Way,
Give back the other self (Satyavan) my nature asks.”
Savitri-685
"His living cosmic spirit shall enring,
Annulling the decree of death and pain,
Erasing the formulas of the Ignorance,
With the deep meaning of beauty and life’s hid sense,
The being ready for immortality,"
Savitri-706
“Even there shall come as a high crown of all
The end of Death, the death of Ignorance.
But first high Truth must set her feet on earth
And man aspire to the Eternal’s light
And all his members feel the Spirit’s touch
And all his life obey an inner Force.
This too shall be; for a new life shall come,
A body of the Superconscient’s truth,
A native field of Supernature’s mights:
It shall make earth’s nescient ground Truth’s colony,
Make even the Ignorance a transparent robe
Through which shall shine the brilliant limbs of Truth
And Truth shall be a sun on Nature’s head
And Truth shall be the guide of Nature’s steps
And Truth shall gaze out of her nether deeps.”
Savitri-708
"The frontiers of the Ignorance shall recede,
More and more souls shall enter into light,
Minds lit, inspired, the occult summoner hear
And lives blaze with a sudden inner flame
And hearts grow enamoured of divine delight
And human wills tune to the divine will,
These separate selves the Spirit’s oneness feel,
These senses of heavenly sense grow capable,
The flesh and nerves of a strange ethereal joy
And mortal bodies of immortality."
Savitri-710
Death God will exist for him as there are gulfs between multiple planes of intermediate Consciousness. His task in this birth is to bridge as many gulfs as possible through the movement of vertical Consciousness or through a four-fold union with the Divine. When all the gulfs are bridged, then there will be a free flow of the highest energy to the Lowest planes and that is the hour of closure to physical immortality. This is a task for him left in All Life to attain.
Triple personalities of Death God:
We find in Death God, the reconciliation of three-fold personalities, that of mundane perfection, of moderate Spirituality and of Later Vedantic Spirituality. These three demonstrate their escapist trend towards life and submission to death which is either accepted as Spirit’s recoil from Matter or accepted as passage to the supreme abode of Param Dham. The double doors of escape are ‘Death of his body Matter’s gate to peace’ (Savitri-635) and ‘Death of his soul his last felicity.’ (Savitri-635) In Savitri, we find the personality of an ancient Vedantic Seer. To become an ancient Vedantist, one has to realise the dynamic aspect of Psychic, Spiritual and Supramental Being. He can confront Death and change his individual, collective and human destiny.
Perfect Mundane Personility of Death God: If one feels comfortable leading the existing life without the aid of the Divine, he is identified as a mundane.
(Death said) “They have traced a journey that foresees no goal.
Aimless man toils in an uncertain world,
Lulled by inconstant pauses of his pain,
Scourged like a beast by the infinite desire,
Bound to the chariot of the dreadful gods.”
Savitri-587
(Death said) “But Mind, a glorious traveller in the sky,
Walks lamely on the earth with footsteps slow;
Hardly he can mould the life’s rebellious stuff,
Hardly can he hold the galloping hooves of sense:”
Savitri-615
“This is the world in which thou mov’st, astray
In the tangled pathways of the human mind,
In the issueless circling of thy human life,
Searching for thy soul and thinking God is here.
But where is room for soul or place for God
In the brute immensity of a machine?”
Savitri-618
(Human love is) “A sweet secretion from the erotic glands
Flattering and torturing the burning nerves,
Love is a honey and poison in the breast
Drunk by it as the nectar of the gods.”
Saviti-618-19
“The souls of men have wandered from the Light
And the great Mother turns away her face.
The eyes of the creatrix Bliss are closed
And sorrow’s touch has found her in her dreams.”
Savitri-628
“How shalt thou bring the Everlasting here?
There is no house for him in hurrying Time.
Vainly thou seekst in Matter’s world an aim;
No aim is there, only a will to be.”
Savitri-644
The Moderate Spiritual Personality of Death God: If one is satisfied with the partial union with the Divine and the boon or opulence received through that partial union, then he is identified as a Moderate.
(Death said) “In the Alone there is no room for love.”
Savitri-608
(Death said) “If Satyavan had lived, love would have died;
But Satyavan is dead and love shall live
A little while in thy sad breast, until
His face and body fade on memory’s wall
Where other bodies, other faces come.”
Savitri-610,
(Death said) “And thou, go back alone to thy frail world:”
Savitri-612
(Death’s Soul slaying message to moderate humanity)
“Accept the brief light that falls upon thy days;
Take what thou canst of Life’s permitted joy;
Submitting to the ordeal of fate’s scourge
Suffer what thou must of toil and grief and care.”
Savitri-620
Death said to Para-prakriti Savitri:
“What knowst thou of earth’s rich and changing life
Who thinkst that one man dead all joy must cease?
Hope not to be unhappy till the end:
For grief dies soon in the tired human heart;
Soon other guests (human admirers) the empty chambers fill.”
Savitri-637
Death said to Para-prakriti Savitri: “Return and try thy soul!
Soon shalt thou find appeased that other men (human admirers)
On lavish earth have beauty, strength and truth,
And when thou hast half forgotten, one of these
Shall wind himself around thy heart that needs
Some human answering heart against thy breast;
For who, being mortal, can dwell glad alone?
Then Satyavan shall glide into the past, (Satyavan is the symbol of Paramatma)
A gentle memory pushed away from thee
By new love and thy children’s tender hands,
Till thou shalt wonder if thou lov’dst at all.
Such is the life earth’s travail has conceived,
A constant stream that never is the same.”
Savitri-637-638,
“This truth I know that Satyavan is dead
And even thy sweetness cannot lure him back.
No magic Truth can bring the dead to life,
No power of earth cancel the thing once done,
No joy of the heart can last surviving death,
No bliss persuade the past to live again.
But Life alone can solace the mute Void
And fill with thought the emptiness of Time.
Leave then thy dead, O Savitri, and live.” Savitri-655-656
Later Vedantic Spiritual Personality of Death God: If one searches for the Divine exclusively by renouncing life, then he is identified as a later Vedantist or ascetic.
“I think Sri Aurobindo deliberately made this Death very vulgar to discourage all the Illusionists and Nirvanists.”²⁰
The Mother
Death further proposed Savitri to deliver Satyavan from earthly bondage, not to call him to the treacheries of earth, but rather permit him to live in the silence, felicity and vast tranquil peace of Nirvana.
(Death said) “If thou desirest immortality,
Be then alone sufficient to thy soul:
Live in thyself; forget the man thou lov’st.
My last grand death shall rescue thee from life;
Then shalt thou rise into thy unmoved source.”
Savitri-594
(Death said) “Earth only is there and not some heavenly source.
If heavens there are they are veiled in their own light,
If a Truth eternal somewhere reigns unknown,
It burns in a tremendous void of God;
For truth shines far from the falsehoods of the world;
How can the heavens come down to unhappy earth
Or the eternal lodge in drifting time?”
Savitri-609
(Death said) “The Avatars have lived and died in vain,
Vain was the sage’s thought, the prophet’s voice;
In vain is seen the shining upward Way.
Earth lies unchanged beneath the circling sun;
She loves her fall and no omnipotence
Her mortal imperfections can erase,
Force on man’s crooked ignorance Heaven’s straight line
Or colonise a world of death with gods.”
Savitri-609-610
(Death said) “Heaven’s hour adjourned flees into bodiless Time.
Death saves thee from this and saves Satyavan:
He now is safe, delivered from himself;
He travels to silence and felicity.
Call him not back to the treacheries of earth
And the poor petty life of animal Man.
In my vast tranquil spaces let him sleep”
Savitri-611
(Death said) “Renounce, forgetting joy and hope and tears,
Thy passionate nature in the bosom profound
Of a happy Nothingness and worldless Calm,
Delivered into my mysterious rest.”
Savitri-612
(Death said) “How canst thou force to wed two eternal foes?
Irreconcilable in their embrace
They cancel the glory of their pure extremes:
An unhappy wedlock maims their stunted force.
How shall thy will make one the true and false?
Where Matter is all, there Spirit is a dream:
If all are the Spirit, Matter is a lie,
And who was the liar who forged the universe?
The Real with the unreal cannot mate.
He who would turn to God, must leave the world;
He who would live in the Spirit, must give up life;
He who has met the Self, renounces self.
The voyagers of the million routes of mind
Who have travelled through Existence to its end,
Sages exploring the world-ocean’s vasts,
Have found extinction the sole harbour safe.
Two only are the doors of man’s escape,
Death of his body Matter’s gate to peace,
Death of his soul his last felicity.
In me all take refuge, for I, Death, am God.”
Savitri-635
“In vain his heart lifts up its yearning prayer,
Peopling with brilliant Gods the formless Void;
Then disappointed to the Void he turns
And in its happy nothingness asks release,
The calm Nirvana of his dream of self:
The Word in silence ends, in Nought the name.”
Savitri-644
“If God there is he cares not for the world;
All things he sees with calm indifferent gaze,
He has doomed all hearts to sorrow and desire,
He has bound all life with his implacable laws;
He answers not the ignorant voice of prayer.
Eternal while the ages toil beneath,
Unmoved, untouched by aught that he has made,
He sees as minute details mid the stars
The animal’s agony and the fate of man:
Immeasurably wise, he exceeds thy thought;
His solitary joy needs not thy love.
His truth in human thinking cannot dwell:
If thou desirest Truth, then still thy mind
For ever, slain by the dumb unseen Light.”
Savitri-646
“If heavens there are whose gates are shut to grief,
There seek the joy thou couldst not find on earth;
Or in the imperishable hemisphere
Where Light is native and Delight is king
And Spirit is the deathless ground of things,
Choose thy high station, child of Eternity.
If thou art Spirit and Nature is thy robe,
Cast off thy garb and be thy naked self
Immutable in its undying truth,
Alone for ever in the mute Alone.
Turn then to God, for him leave all behind;
Forgetting love, forgetting Satyavan,
Annul thyself in his immobile peace.
O soul, drown in his still beatitude.
For thou must die to thyself to reach God’s height:”
Savitri-647
Ancient Vedantic Spiritual Personality of Savitri: In ancient Vedanta, the Matter and Spirit are given equal importance and thus Matter and Spirit are reconciled through dynamic Divine union.
(Savitri said) “Out of thy shadow give me back again
Into earth’s flowering spaces Satyavan
In the sweet transiency of human limbs
To do with him my spirit’s burning will.
I will bear with him the ancient Mother’s load,
I will follow with him earth’s path that leads to God.
Else shall the eternal spaces open to me,
While round us strange horizons far recede,
Travelling together the immense unknown.
For I who have trod with him the tracts of Time,
Can meet behind his steps whatever night
Or unimaginable stupendous dawn
Breaks on our spirits in the untrod Beyond.
Wherever thou leadst his soul I shall pursue.”
Savitri-590
(Savitri said) “A curse is laid on the pure joy of life:
Delight, God’s sweetest sign and Beauty’s twin,
Dreaded by aspiring saint and austere sage,
Is shunned, a dangerous and ambiguous cheat,
A specious trick of an infernal Power
It tempts the soul to its self-hurt and fall.”
Savitri-629
“Give me back Satyavan, my only lord.
Thy thoughts are vacant to my soul that feels
The deep eternal truth in transient things.”
Savitri-637
“I am not bound by thought or sense or shape;
I live in the glory of the Infinite,
I am near to the Nameless and Unknowable,
The Ineffable is now my household mate.
But standing on Eternity’s luminous brink
I have discovered that the world was He;
I have met Spirit with spirit, Self with self,
But I have loved too the body of my God.
I have pursued him in his earthly form.
A lonely freedom cannot satisfy
A heart that has grown one with every heart:
I am a deputy of the aspiring world,
My spirit’s liberty I ask for all.”
Savitri-649
Sri Aurobindo was able to accommodate His (and also The Mother’s) all life’s comprehensive high Spiritual Visions and experiences in symbolic characters of incarnations, emanations and instruments, depicted from the legendry epic Mahabharata where Savitri, the descending Godhead, Avatara, the all Mother, the Mother of all Time, knew her fiery Self and her Being’s aim of pursuing the Soul of earth, symbolised as Satyavan in his earthly form in each birth and in all life. She glimpsed the glory for which she had chosen earth and its atmosphere for gradual and subsequently constant, intense, comprehensive and instantaneous total descent of Divine attributes of Truth-Light, Power, Wisdom and Delight. She keeps her will alive to drive human Souls and fills in their brute elements, the endless hope to Divinise clay and confronts the riddle of Birth, inevitable Death, grooves of iron Law and fixed Fate in them with the sheer power of her unchanging Soul force manifested as Divine Love. She has chosen the Souls who have long suffered on this harsh globe, for the field of her sacrifice and action and she is even ready to walk and waste all infinity with wounded feet to accomplish her seemingly impossible task of transforming earth’s shadow, twilight and grey inhibitions.
Satyavan, a mere woodsman, raised his consciousness to the status of the ascending integral Godhead, Avatara, by the Power of consecration and loss of ego and was destined to fulfil Savitri’s mighty Mission of bridging the gulf between Heaven, Earth and Hell. He was also the Eternal Consciousness, a unique rare treasure loaned by Gods, who accompanied Savitri from the beginning of the creation as first ‘man and woman’⁵ or first dual Incarnation and the Supreme had promised to grant physical immortality in all life when the first Avatara’s ‘heart dared death and suffered life.’⁶ He continued his life in many successive births and bodies as ‘twin souls born from one undying fire’⁵ of this mortal existence to endure in his human heart a million wounds representing the delegate Soul of earth. Through his long suffering in human form the God’s debt is paid. His Godhead status does not prevent him from living ‘in one house with the primal beast’¹⁷ in the forest, colloquies with the Djinn and Asuras of the Subconscient world; thus in the Divine’s single plan he reveals solidarity with antagonist powers; ‘high meets the low’¹⁷ or ‘God’s summits look back on the mute Abyss;’¹⁷ accepts to be small and human on earth. While tracing the path of immortality he signed salvation’s testament with his blood and broke into the dangerous and dark Inconscient’s depth and if he were to meet the Spiritual fall in the form of death while attempting to break the wheel¹⁴ of earth’s doom and before bridging the gulf between Heaven and Earth in order to balance the dark account of mortal Ignorance then this would be a great loss for humanity. Or an Avatara, as a delegate Soul of Heaven lent to earth must live a brief period in human history in order to trace and build a passage in intermediate ranges consciousness so that a large section of humanity will be able to bridge the gulf between Heaven and Earth and reconcile Spirit with Matter with less effort. This work is further accelerated if Divine Love becomes active in Earth’s atmosphere through the action and interfusion of dual Avatara. His Divine work on earth of invasion of a series of Light and Love is treated unfinished and half done till all the evils are slain or transformed in their Inconscient home.
In Savitri and Satyavan, Soul and Nature had realised equal Divine Presences and merged themselves in oneness of wide harmony and balance. They had treasured the rich relation of their brief human birth through a subtle link of union or clasp of two eternities through many successive births and bodies of un-beginning past and felt the call of Spirit’s unending future joy; even they knew their Selves older than the birth of time. A vast intention of love’s unseen Presence has drawn these dual incarnating Powers closer in this life and their love asks to wait endlessly as if they have all eternity ahead for their self-fulfilment. Together they have disdained from the God’s everlasting Night of Inconscient world and turned away from His everlasting Day of Sachchidananda plane and returned to earth to wage a million wars against the universal dark rebel forces attached to present unstable existence, to bear the earth Mother’s ancient adversary and to accomplish their double task of raising the world to God’s deathless Light, a permanent ascent of Divine Consciousness and bringing down Divine Shakti to earth and men, a permanent descent of Divine Consciousness.
Death God, the dire universal impersonal dark Force, here personified as godhead of the Inconscient world, Yama, who as the intolerant dark instrument of the Divine, Yantra, guards and obeys the Divine’s fixed immutable law of Nature which is a part and derivation of His dynamic Super nature and his hunger through world spreading death-net-trap can devour all those who are unable to open towards the Spirit’s changeable Supernature and endless Truth. He was oblivious of his temporary instrumental action in Ignorance and considered himself as Omnipotent Supreme Power without the Spiritual experience of Divine Identity and Oneness. He was aware of static Divine union of Saints and Avataras and the Ananda and the Freedom gained through this union were not enough to dismantle death from outer existence. For him, man’s identity was diminished as ‘the naked two-legged worm’² and he was not aware of the Divine’s mighty whole, total vision and swift evolutionary change in Knowledge through dynamic Divine union for His unfinished world existence and was aware only of the incomplete task given to him during the passage of man’s tardy evolution in Ignorance within the boundary of three gunas. He, like cosmic Gods, has the immeasurable heart of silence, knowledge of past, present and future, trikaladristi and limited power of offering boons to the wounded mortals and in his understanding of existence, the soul-saving truth is thoroughly distorted and his soul-slaying words have denied contact with the Spirit and Divine. Savitri’s Mind and Soul’s clarity delivered Death God partly from the limitation of gospel of human love and twilight thought in which falsehood is ‘mingled with sad strains of truth’¹⁹ and he became powerless before her greater God status and a superior incarnating Divine Mother Power. The future vision of Savitri promises that when she will enter Spiritual experience of everlasting Day, this formidable shape of Death and his pessimistic harsh philosophy will be changed into the beauty of suns and a sum of all sweetness will gather into his limbs. His grand fort of darkness, huge Inconscient’s grasp and sad destroying might will be abolished forever, his vague infinity filling the universe with dangerous breath will be transformed and he will emerge as a wonderful God. Now the Spiritual significance and utility of Death is identified as a passage in the Soul’s unending journey of all life in order to ‘force the soul of man to struggle for Light’⁹ and a ‘whip to his yearning for eternal bliss.’⁹ The nobility of Divine instrumentation of untransformed Death is still hidden from humanity as he abruptly ends the parable of the charm of life. This greatness will be revealed to man when he is aware of the Divine’s comprehensive plan extending over all life, confirming that death is a Spirit’s opportunity to begin a greater life.
Twenty-three Questions raised by Death God followed by Savitri's Reply:
1: Death said:
“Thy passionate influence and relax,
O slave Of Nature, changing tool of changeless Law,
Who vainly writh’st rebellion to my yoke,
Thy elemental grasp; weep and forget.
Entomb thy passion in its living grave.
Leave now the once-loved spirit’s abandoned robe:
Pass lonely back to thy vain life on earth.” Savitri-575
Answer attempted:
“Ever he comes to us across the years
Bearing a new sweet face that is the old.
His bliss laughs to us or it calls concealed
Like a far-heard unseen entrancing flute
From moonlit branches in the throbbing woods,
Tempting our angry search and passionate pain.
Disguised the Lover seeks and draws our souls.
He named himself for me, grew Satyavan.
For we were man and woman from the first,
The twin souls born from one undying fire.
Did he not dawn on me in other stars?
How has he through the thickets of the world
Pursued me like a lion in the night
And come upon me suddenly in the ways
And seized me with his glorious golden leap!
Unsatisfied he yearned for me through time,
Sometimes with wrath and sometimes with sweet peace
Desiring me since first the world began.
He rose like a wild wave out of the floods
And dragged me helpless into seas of bliss.
Out of my curtained past his arms arrive;
They have touched me like the soft persuading wind,
They have plucked me like a glad and trembling flower,
And clasped me happily burned in ruthless flame.
I too have found him charmed in lovely forms
And run delighted to his distant voice
And pressed to him past many dreadful bars.
If there is a yet happier greater god,
Let him first wear the face of Satyavan
And let his soul be one with him I love;
So let him seek me that I may desire.
For only one heart beats within my breast
And one god sits there throned. Advance,
O Death, Beyond the phantom beauty of this world;
For of its citizens I am not one.
I cherish God the Fire, not God the Dream.” Savitri-613-14
2: Death said:
“Wilt thou for ever keep thy passionate hold,
Thyself a creature doomed like him to pass,
Denying his soul death’s calm and silent rest?
Relax thy grasp; this body is earth’s and thine,
His spirit now belongs to a greater power.
Woman, thy husband suffers.” Savitri-575
Answer attempted:
“Savitri…
Drew back her heart’s force that clasped his body still
Where from her lap renounced on the smooth grass
Softly it lay, as often before in sleep
When from their couch she rose in the white dawn
Called by her daily tasks: now too, as if called,
She rose and stood gathered in lonely strength,
Like one who drops his mantle for a race
And waits the signal, motionlessly swift.
She knew not to what course: 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
Like a still sail upon a windless sea.” (Savitri-575)
3: Death said:
“Hast thou beheld thy source, O transient heart,
And known from what the dream thou art was made?
In this stark sincerity of nude emptiness
Hopest thou still always to last and love?” Savitri-586
Answer attempted:
“The Woman answered not. Her spirit refused
The voice of Night that knew and Death that thought.
In her beginningless infinity
Through her soul’s reaches unconfined she gazed;
She saw the undying fountains of her life,
She knew herself eternal without birth.” (Savitri-586)
4: Death said:
“What shall the ancient goddess give to thee
Who helps thy heart beat?” Savitri-586
“Aimless man toils in an uncertain world,
Lulled by inconstant pauses of his pain,
Scourged like a beast by the infinite desire,
Bound to the chariot of the dreadful gods.
But if thou still canst hope and still wouldst love,
Return to thy body’s shell, thy tie to earth,
And with thy heart’s little remnants try to live.
Hope not to win back to thee Satyavan.
Yet since thy strength deserves no trivial crown,
Gifts I can give to soothe thy wounded life. (Four boons offered by Death God.)
The pacts which transient beings make with fate,
And the wayside sweetness earth-bound hearts would pluck,
These if thy will accepts make freely thine.
Choose a life’s hopes for thy deceiving prize.” Savitri-587-588
Answer attempted:
“First I demand whatever Satyavan,
My husband, waking in the forest’s charm
Out of his long pure childhood’s lonely dreams,
Desired and had not for his beautiful life.
Give, if thou must, or, if thou canst, refuse.” Savitri-589
Dyumatsena, the self-exiled King of Shalwa, father of Satyavan, is the Divine’s Conscious instrument, Yantra, here fallen blind, limiting his capacity to three gunas and walks lamely on this dangerous world with slow evolutionary mental footsteps. Through this Spiritual fall he has lost the celestial inner kingdom of seven immortal Selves and through that loss its kingdom of outer glory and opulence. Due to this adverse fate, he now sojourns a wiser life in the solemn rustle of the wood and his yearning towards All meets two solitudes (1) that of outcast from the empire of the outer light symbolically represented as crutch upon which his faltering-limb supports and he helplessly stumbles in the rushing speed of hasty Time and (2) lost to the comradeship of five galloping hooves of sense that of sound, touch, sight, taste and smell symbolically represented as his sightless blind identity. This double doom of his father compelled Satyavan to live in the high peopled loneliness of the Spirit which called the Divine Mother to enter his earthly life in human form and finally helped his long pure childhood’s lonely dream to restore King Dyumatsena’s steady royal walk in high dynamic outer Kingdom and a deeper visionary eye of Divine Wisdom. Restoration of outer Kingdom was also the outcome of his revival of the inner Kingdom through sadhana in double seclusion.
5: Death said: (First boon offered by Death God)
“Indulgent to the dreams my touch shall break,
I yield to his blind father’s longing heart
Kingdom and power and friends and greatness lost
And royal trappings for his peaceful age,
The pallid pomps of man’s declining days,
The silvered decadent glories of life’s fall.
To one who wiser grew by adverse Fate,
Goods I restore the deluded soul prefers
To impersonal nothingness’s bare sublime.
The sensuous solace of the light I give
To eyes which could have found a larger realm,
A deeper vision in their fathomless night.
For that this man desired and asked in vain
While still he lived on earth and cherished hope.
Back from the grandeur of my perilous realms
Go, mortal, to thy small permitted sphere!
Hasten swift-footed, lest to slay thy life
The great laws thou hast violated, moved,
Open at last on thee their marble eyes.” Savitri-589
6: Death said:
“Hast thou god-wings or feet that tread my stars,
Frail creature with the courage that aspires,
Forgetting thy bounds of thought, thy mortal role?” Savitri-590
Answer attempted:
“Who is this God imagined by thy night,
Contemptuously creating worlds disdained,
Who made for vanity the brilliant stars?
Not he who has reared his temple in my thoughts
And made his sacred floor my human heart.
My God is will and triumphs in his paths,
My God is love and sweetly suffers all.
To him I have offered hope for sacrifice
And gave my longings as a sacrament.
Who shall prohibit or hedge in his course,
The wonderful, the charioteer, the swift?
A traveller of the million roads of life,
His steps familiar with the lights of heaven
Tread without pain the sword-paved courts of hell;
There he descends to edge eternal joy.
Love’s golden wings have power to fan thy void:
The eyes of love gaze starlike through death’s night,
The feet of love tread naked hardest worlds.
He labours in the depths, exults on the heights;
He shall remake thy universe, O Death.” Savitri-591-92
7: Death said:
“What is thy hope? to what dost thou aspire?
This is thy body’s sweetest lure of bliss,
Assailed by pain, a frail precarious form,
To please for a few years thy faltering sense
With honey of physical longings and the heart’s fire
And, a vain oneness seeking, to embrace
The brilliant idol of a fugitive hour.
And thou, what art thou, soul, thou glorious dream
Of brief emotions made and glittering thoughts,
A thin dance of fireflies speeding through the night,
A sparkling ferment in life’s sunlit mire?
Wilt thou claim immortality, O heart,
Crying against the eternal witnesses
That thou (Savitri) and he (Satyavan) are endless powers and last?” Savitri-592
Answer attempted:
“O Death, who reasonest, I reason not,
Reason that scans and breaks, but cannot build
Or builds in vain because she doubts her work.
I am, I love, I see, I act, I will.” Savitri-594,
8: Death said:
“But if there were a Being witnessing all,
How should he help thy passionate desire?” Savitri-593
Answer attempted:
“When I have loved for ever, I shall know.
Love in me knows the truth all changings mask.
I know that knowledge is a vast embrace:
I know that every being is myself,
In every heart is hidden the myriad One.
I know the calm Transcendent bears the world,
The veiled Inhabitant, the silent Lord:
I feel his secret act, his intimate fire;
I hear the murmur of the cosmic Voice.
I know my coming was a wave from God.
For all his suns were conscient in my birth,
And one who loves in us came veiled by death.
Then was man born among the monstrous stars
Dowered with a mind and heart to conquer thee.” Savitri-594
9: Death said:
“How can the heavens come down to unhappy earth
Or the eternal lodge in drifting time?
How shall the Ideal tread earth’s dolorous soil
Where life is only a labour and a hope,
A child of Matter and by Matter fed,
A fire flaming low in Nature’s grate,
A wave that breaks upon a shore in Time,
A journey’s toilsome trudge with death for goal?
The Avataras have lived and died in vain,
Vain was the sage’s thought, the prophet’s voice;
In vain is seen the shining upward Way…
O traveller in the chariot of the Sun,
High priestess in thy holy fancy’s shrine
Who with a magic ritual in earth’s house
Worshippest ideal and eternal love,
What is this love thy thought has deified,
This sacred legend and immortal myth?...
If Satyavan had lived, love would have died;
But Satyavan is dead and love shall live
A little while in thy sad breast, until
His face and body fade on memory’s wall
Where other bodies, other faces come…
Love cannot live by heavenly food alone,
Only on sap of earth can it survive.
For thy passion was a sensual want refined,
A hunger of the body and the heart;
Thy want can tire and cease or turn elsewhere.
Or love may meet a dire and pitiless end
By bitter treason, or wrath with cruel wounds
Separate, or thy unsatisfied will to others
Depart when first love’s joy lies stripped and slain:
A dull indifference replaces fire
Or an endearing habit imitates love:
An outward and uneasy union lasts
Or the routine of a life’s compromise:
Where once the seed of oneness had been cast
Into a semblance of spiritual ground
By a divine adventure of heavenly powers
Two strive, constant associates without joy,
Two egos straining in a single leash,
Two minds divided by their jarring thoughts,
Two spirits disjoined, for ever separate.
Thus is the ideal falsified in man’s world;
Trivial or sombre, disillusion comes,
Life’s harsh reality stares at the soul:
Heaven’s hour adjourned flees into bodiless Time.
Death saves thee from this and saves Satyavan:
He now is safe, delivered from himself;
He travels to silence and felicity.
Call him not back to the treacheries of earth
And the poor petty life of animal Man.
In my vast tranquil spaces let him sleep
In harmony with the mighty hush of death
Where love lies slumbering on the breast of peace.
And thou, go back alone to thy frail world:
Chastise thy heart with knowledge, unhood to see,” Savitri-609-10-11-12
Answer attempted:
“My love is not a hunger of the heart,
My love is not a craving of the flesh;
It came to me from God, to God returns.”
Savitri-612
“‘Love is not sexual intercourse.
Love is not vital attraction and interchange.
Love is not heart’s hunger for affection.
Love is a mighty vibration coming straight
from the One. And only the very pure and
very strong are capable of receiving and
manifesting it."
Then an explanation on what I mean by “pure,” the very pure and very strong. ‘To be pure is to be open only to the Supreme’s influence, and to no other.’ Far more difficult than what people consider purity to be! Which is something quite artificial and false.”
The Mother/The Mother’s Agenda /4/319-20,
10: Death said:
“But where is room for soul or place for God
In the brute immensity of a machine?...
(human love is) A sweet secretion from the erotic glands
Flattering and torturing the burning nerves,....
Earth’s human wisdom is no great-browed power,
And love no gleaming angel from the skies;
If they aspire beyond earth’s dullard air,
Arriving sunwards with frail waxen wings,
How high could reach that forced unnatural flight?...
But not on earth can divine wisdom reign
And not on earth can divine love be found;
Heaven-born, only in heaven can they live;
Or else there too perhaps they are shining dreams.
Nay, is not all thou art and doest a dream?...
How shall the Ideal’s unsubstantial hues
Be painted stiff on earth’s vermilion blur,
A dream within a dream come doubly true?
How shall the will-o’-the-wisp become a star?” Savitri-618-19
Answer attempted:
“All our earth starts from mud and ends in sky,
And Love that was once an animal’s desire,
Then a sweet madness in the rapturous heart,
An ardent comradeship in the happy mind,
Becomes a wide spiritual yearning’s space.
A lonely soul passions for the Alone,
The heart that loved man thrills to the love of God,
A body is his chamber and his shrine.
Then is our being rescued from separateness;
All is itself, all is new-felt in God:
A Lover leaning from his cloister’s door
Gathers the whole world into his single breast.
Then shall the business fail of Night and Death:
When unity is won, when strife is lost
And all is known and all is clasped by Love
Who would turn back to ignorance and pain?” Savitri-632-33
11: Death said:
“Thus wilt thou hire the glorious charlatan, Mind,
To weave from his Ideal’s gossamer air
A fine raiment for thy body’s nude desires
And thy heart’s clutching greedy passion clothe?” Savitri-634
Answer attempted:
“O Death, I have triumphed over thee within;
I quiver no more with the assault of grief;
A mighty calmness seated deep within
Has occupied my body and my sense:
It takes the world’s grief and transmutes to strength,
It makes the world’s joy one with the joy of God.
My love eternal sits throned on God’s calm;
For Love must soar beyond the very heavens
And find its secret sense ineffable;
It must change its human ways to ways divine,
Yet keep its sovereignty of earthly bliss.
O Death, not for my heart’s sweet poignancy
Nor for my happy body’s bliss alone
I have claimed from thee the living Satyavan,
But for his work and mine, our sacred charge.
Our lives are God’s messengers beneath the stars;
To dwell under death’s shadow they have come
Tempting God’s light to earth for the ignorant race,
His love to fill the hollow in men’s hearts,
His bliss to heal the unhappiness of the world.
For I, the woman, am the force of God,
He the Eternal’s delegate soul in man.
My will is greater than thy law, O Death;
My love is stronger than the bonds of Fate:
Our love is the heavenly seal of the Supreme.
I guard that seal against thy rending hands.
Love must not cease to live upon the earth;
For Love is the bright link twixt earth and heaven,
Love is the far Transcendent’s angel here;
Love is man’s lien on the Absolute.” Savitri-633
12: Death said:
“For how in the soiled heart of man could dwell
The immaculate grandeur of thy dream-built God,
Or who can see a face and form divine
In the naked two-legged worm thou callest man?” Savitri-634
Answer attempted:
“Yes, I am human. Yet shall man by me,
Since in humanity waits his hour the God,
Trample thee down to reach the immortal heights,
Transcending grief and pain and fate and death.
Yes, my humanity is a mask of God:
He dwells in me, the mover of my acts,
Turning the great wheel of his cosmic work.
I am the living body of his light,
I am the thinking instrument of his power,
I incarnate Wisdom in an earthly breast,
I am his conquering and unslayable will.
The formless Spirit drew in me its shape;
In me are the Nameless and the secret Name.” Savitri-634
13: Death said:
“O priestess in Imagination’s house,
Persuade first Nature’s fixed immutable laws
And make the impossible thy daily work.
How canst thou force to wed two eternal foes?
Irreconcilable in their embrace
They cancel the glory of their pure extremes:
An unhappy wedlock maims their stunted force.
How shall thy will make one the true and false?
Where Matter is all, there Spirit is a dream:
If all are the Spirit, Matter is a lie,
And who was the liar who forged the universe?” Savitri-635
Answer attempted:
“My heart is wiser than the Reason’s thoughts,
My heart is stronger than thy bonds, O Death.
It sees and feels the one Heart beat in all,
It feels the high Transcendent’s sunlike hands,
It sees the cosmic Spirit at its work;
In the dim Night it lies alone with God.
My heart’s strength can carry the grief of the universe
And never falter from its luminous track,
Its white tremendous orbit through God’s peace.
It can drink up the sea of All-Delight
And never lose the white spiritual touch,
The calm that broods in the deep Infinite.” Savitri-635-36
14: Death said:
“He said, “Art thou indeed so strong, O heart,
O soul, so free? And canst thou gather then
Bright pleasure from my wayside flowering boughs,
Yet falter not from thy hard journey’s goal,
Meet the world’s dangerous touch and never fall?
Show me thy strength and freedom from my laws.” Savitri-636
Answer attempted:
“But Savitri answered, “Surely I shall find
Among the green and whispering woods of Life
Close-bosomed pleasures, only mine since his,
Or mine for him, because our joys are one.
And if I linger, Time is ours and God’s,
And if I fall, is not his hand near mine?
All is a single plan; each wayside act
Deepens the soul’s response, brings nearer the goal.” Savitri-636
15: Death said: (Second boon offered by Death God)
“I give to thee, saved from death and poignant fate
Whatever once the living Satyavan
Desired in his heart for Savitri.
Bright noons I give thee and unwounded dawns,
Daughters of thy own shape in heart and mind,
Fair hero sons and sweetness undisturbed
Of union with thy husband dear and true.
And thou shalt harvest in thy joyful house
Felicity of thy surrounded eves.
Love shall bind by thee many gathered hearts.
The opposite sweetness in thy days shall meet
Of tender service to thy life’s desired
And loving empire over all thy loved,
Two poles of bliss made one, O Savitri.
Return, O child, to thy forsaken earth.” Savitri-636-37
Answer attempted:
“But Savitri replied, “Thy gifts resist.
Earth cannot flower if lonely I return.” Savitri-637
16: Death said:
“What knowst thou of earth’s rich and changing life
Who thinkst that one man dead all joy must cease?
Hope not to be unhappy till the end:
For grief dies soon in the tired human heart;
Soon other guests the empty chambers fill.
A transient painting on a holiday’s floor
Traced for a moment’s beauty love was made.
Or if a voyager on the eternal trail,
Its objects fluent change in its embrace
Like waves to a swimmer upon infinite seas.”” Savitri-637
Answer attempted:
But Savitri replied to the vague god,
“Give me back Satyavan, my only lord.
Thy thoughts are vacant to my soul that feels
The deep eternal truth in transient things.” Savitri-637
17: Death said:
“Return and try thy soul!
Soon shalt thou find appeased that other men
On lavish earth have beauty, strength and truth,
And when thou hast half forgotten, one of these
Shall wind himself around thy heart that needs
Some human answering heart against thy breast;
For who, being mortal, can dwell glad alone?
Then Satyavan shall glide into the past,
A gentle memory pushed away from thee
By new love and thy children’s tender hands,
Till thou shalt wonder if thou lov’dst at all.
Such is the life earth’s travail has conceived,
A constant stream that never is the same.” Savitri-637-638
Answer attempted:
“All our earth starts from mud and ends in sky,
And Love that was once an animal’s desire,
Then a sweet madness in the rapturous heart,
An ardent comradeship in the happy mind,
Becomes a wide spiritual yearning’s space.
A lonely soul passions for the Alone “ Savitri-632
Its complementary line:
“The soul that can live alone with itself meets God;” Savitri-460
“In the dim Night it (Savitri’s heart) lies alone with God.” Savitri-635
“The ideal sadhaka should be able to say in the Biblical phrase, “My zeal for the Lord has eaten me up.” CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-58
“One thing only I can tell you that whatever the sincerity, simplicity and purity of the relation between two human beings, it shuts them off more or less from the direct divine force and help and limits their strength, light and power only to the sum of their potentialities.”
The Mother
TMCW/Vol-14/Words of the Mother-II/p-120
18: Death said:
“Hope not to call God down into his life.
How shalt thou bring the Everlasting here?
There is no house for him in hurrying Time.
Vainly thou seekst in Matter’s world an aim;
No aim is there, only a will to be…
The aimless journey that can never pause,
The waking toil, the incoherent sleep,
Song, shouts and weeping, wisdom and idle words,
The laughter of men, the irony of the gods?
Where leads the march, whither the pilgrimage?
Who keeps the map of the route or planned each stage?...
Think not to plant on earth the living Truth
Or make of Matter’s world the home of God;
Truth comes not there but only the thought of Truth,
God is not there but only the name of God.
If Self there is it is bodiless and unborn;
It is no one and it is possessed by none.
On what shalt thou then build thy happy world?
Cast off thy life and mind, then art thou Self,
An all-seeing omnipresence stark, alone…
How shall the mighty Mother her calm delight
Keep fragrant in this narrow fragile vase,
Or lodge her sweet unbroken ecstasy
In hearts which earthly sorrow can assail
And bodies careless Death can slay at will?
Dream not to change the world that God has planned,
Strive not to alter his eternal law.” Savitri-644-45-46-47
(The third boon offered by Death God)
“If heavens there are whose gates are shut to grief,
There seek the joy thou couldst not find on earth;
Or in the imperishable hemisphere
Where Light is native and Delight is king
And Spirit is the deathless ground of things,
Choose thy high station, child of Eternity.
If thou art Spirit and Nature is thy robe,
Cast off thy garb and be thy naked self
Immutable in its undying truth,
Alone for ever in the mute Alone.
Turn then to God, for him leave all behind;
Forgetting love, forgetting Satyavan,
Annul thyself in his immobile peace.
O soul, drown in his still beatitude.
For thou must die to thyself to reach God’s height:
I, Death, am the gate of immortality.” Savitri-647
Answer attempted:
“Offer, O King, thy boons to tired spirits
And hearts that could not bear the wounds of Time,
Let those who were tied to body and to mind,
Tear off those bonds and flee into white calm
Crying for a refuge from the play of God.
Surely thy boons are great since thou art He!
But how shall I seek rest in endless peace
Who house the mighty Mother’s violent force,
Her vision turned to read the enigmaed world,
Her will tempered in the blaze of Wisdom’s sun
And the flaming silence of her heart of love?” Savitri-647-48
19: Death said:
“Why should the noble and immortal will
Stoop to the petty works of transient earth,
Freedom forgotten and the Eternal’s path?” Savitri-652
Answer attempted:
“I trample on thy law with living feet;
For to arise in freedom I was born.
If I am mighty let my force be unveiled
Equal companion of the dateless powers,
Or else let my frustrated soul sink down
Unworthy of Godhead in the original sleep.
I claim from Time my will’s eternity,
God from his moments.” Savitri-652
She answered, “Straight I trample on the road
The strong hand hewed for me which planned our paths.
I run where his sweet dreadful voice commands
And I am driven by the reins of God.
Why drew he wide his scheme of mighty worlds
Or filled infinity with his passionate breath?
Or wherefore did he build my mortal form
And sow in me his bright and proud desires,
If not to achieve, to flower in me, to love,
Carving his human image richly shaped
In thoughts and largenesses and golden powers?
Far Heaven can wait our coming in its calm.
Easy the heavens were to build for God.
Earth was his difficult matter, earth the glory
Gave of the problem and the race and strife.
There are the ominous masks, the terrible powers;
There it is greatness to create the gods.
Is not the spirit immortal and absolved
Always, delivered from the grasp of Time?
Why came it down into the mortal’s Space?
A charge he gave to his high spirit in man
And wrote a hidden decree on Nature’s tops.
Freedom is this with ever seated soul,
Large in life’s limits, strong in Matter’s knots,
Building great stuff of action from the worlds
To make fine wisdom from coarse, scattered strands
And love and beauty out of war and night,
The wager wonderful, the game divine.” Savitri-652-653
20: Death said:
“Or is this the high use of strength and thought,
To struggle with the bonds of death and time
And spend the labour that might earn the gods
And battle and bear agony of wounds
To grasp the trivial joys that earth can guard
In her small treasure-chest of passing things?
Child, hast thou trodden the gods beneath thy feet
Only to win poor shreds of earthly life
For him thou lov’st cancelling the grand release,
Keeping from early rapture of the heavens
His soul the lenient deities have called?
Are thy arms sweeter than the courts of God?” Savitri-652
Answer attempted:
“What liberty has the soul which feels not free
Unless stripped bare and cannot kiss the bonds
The Lover winds around his playmate’s limbs,
Choosing his tyranny, crushed in his embrace?
To seize him better with her boundless heart
She accepts the limiting circle of his arms,
Bows full of bliss beneath his mastering hands
And laughs in his rich constraints, most bound, most free.
This is my answer to thy lures, O Death.” Savitri-653
21: Death said:
“A Light above which none but thou hast seen,
Thou claimst the first fruits of Truth’s victory.
But what is Truth and who can find her form
Amid the specious images of sense,
Amid the crowding guesses of the mind
And the dark ambiguities of a world
Peopled with the incertitudes of Thought?
For where is Truth and when was her footfall heard
Amid the endless clamour of Time’s mart
And which is her voice amid the thousand cries
That cross the listening brain and cheat the soul?” Savitri-654
Answer attempted:
“How sayst thou Truth can never light the human mind
And Bliss can never invade the mortal’s heart
Or God descend into the world he made?
If in the meaningless Void creation rose,
If from a bodiless Force Matter was born,
If Life could climb in the unconscious tree,
Its green delight break into emerald leaves
And its laughter of beauty blossom in the flower,
If sense could wake in tissue, nerve and cell
And Thought seize the grey matter of the brain,
And soul peep from its secrecy through the flesh,
How shall the nameless Light not leap on men,
And unknown powers emerge from Nature’s sleep?
Even now hints of a luminous Truth like stars
Arise in the mind-mooned splendour of Ignorance;
Even now the deathless Lover’s touch we feel:
If the chamber’s door is even a little ajar,
What then can hinder God from stealing in
Or who forbid his kiss on the sleeping soul?” Savitri-648-49
22: Death said:
“Or is Truth aught but a high starry name
Or a vague and splendid word by which man’s thought
Sanctions and consecrates his nature’s choice,
The heart’s wish donning knowledge as its robe,
The cherished idea elect among the elect,
Thought’s favourite mid the children of half-light
Who high-voiced crowd the playgrounds of the mind
Or people its dormitories in infant sleep?” Savitri-654
Answer attempted:
“But who can show to thee Truth’s glorious face?
Our human words can only shadow her.
To thought she is an unthinkable rapture of light,
To speech a marvel inexpressible.
O Death, if thou couldst touch the Truth supreme
Thou wouldst grow suddenly wise and cease to be.
If our souls could see and love and clasp God’s Truth,
Its infinite radiance would seize our hearts,
Our being in God’s image be remade
And earthly life become the life divine.” Savitri-663
(Fourth Boon offered by Death God.)
23: Death said:
“If Truth supreme transcends her shadow here
Severed by Knowledge and the climbing vasts,
What bridge can cross the gulf that she has left
Between her and the dream-world she has made?
Or who could hope to bring her down to men
And persuade to tread the harsh globe with wounded feet
Leaving her unapproachable glory and bliss,
Wasting her splendour on pale earthly air?
Is thine that strength, O beauty of mortal limbs,
O soul who flutterest to escape my net?
Who then art thou hiding in human guise?
Thy voice carries the sound of infinity,
Knowledge is with thee, Truth speaks through thy words;
The light of things beyond shines in thy eyes.
But where is thy strength to conquer Time and Death?
Hast thou God’s force to build heaven’s values here?
… O human claimant to immortality,
Reveal thy power, lay bare thy spirit’s force,
Then will I give back to thee Satyavan. (fourth and last boon)
Or if the Mighty Mother is with thee,
Show me her face that I may worship her;
Let deathless eyes look into the eyes of Death,
An imperishable Force touching brute things
Transform earth’s death into immortal life.
Then can thy dead return to thee and live.” Savitri-663-664
Answer attempted:
“A mighty transformation came on her.
A halo of the indwelling Deity,
The Immortal’s lustre that had lit her face
And tented its radiance in her body’s house,
Overflowing made the air a luminous sea.
In a flaming moment of apocalypse
The Incarnation thrust aside its veil.
A little figure in infinity
Yet stood and seemed the Eternal’s very house,
As if the world’s centre was her very soul
And all wide space was but its outer robe.
A curve of the calm hauteur of far heaven
Descending into earth’s humility,
Her forehead’s span vaulted the Omniscient’s gaze,
Her eyes were two stars that watched the universe.
The Power that from her being’s summit reigned,
The Presence chambered in lotus secrecy,
Came down and held the centre in her brow
Where the mind’s Lord in his control-room sits;
There throned on concentration’s native seat
He opens that third mysterious eye in man,
The Unseen’s eye that looks at the unseen,
When Light with a golden ecstasy fills his brain
And the Eternal’s wisdom drives his choice
And eternal Will seizes the mortal’s will.
It stirred in the lotus of her throat of song,
And in her speech throbbed the immortal Word,
Her life sounded with the steps of the world-soul
Moving in harmony with the cosmic Thought.
As glides God’s sun into the mystic cave
Where hides his light from the pursuing gods,
It glided into the lotus of her heart
And woke in it the Force that alters Fate.
It poured into her navel’s lotus depth,
Lodged in the little life-nature’s narrow home,
On the body’s longings grew heaven-rapture’s flower
And made desire a pure celestial flame,
Broke into the cave where coiled World-Energy sleeps
And smote the thousand-hooded serpent Force
That blazing towered and clasped the World-Self above,
Joined Matter’s dumbness to the Spirit’s hush
And filled earth’s acts with the Spirit’s silent power.
Thus changed she waited for the Word to speak.
Eternity looked into the eyes of Death
And Darkness saw God’s living Reality.” Savitri-664-665
(Here, Savitri became dynamic Viswarupa of the Divine Mother and revealed it to the Death God.)
"The Two opposed each other face to face.
His being like a huge fort of darkness towered;
Around it her light grew, an ocean’s siege.
Awhile the Shade survived defying heaven:
Assailing in front, oppressing from above,
A concrete mass of conscious power, he bore
The tyranny of her divine desire.
A pressure of intolerable force
Weighed on his unbowed head and stubborn breast;
Light like a burning tongue licked up his thoughts,
Light was a luminous torture in his heart,
Light coursed, a splendid agony, through his nerves;
His darkness muttered perishing in her blaze.
Her mastering Word commanded every limb
And left no room for his enormous will
That seemed pushed out into some helpless space
And could no more re-enter but left him void.
He called to Night but she fell shuddering back,
He called to Hell but sullenly it retired:
He turned to the Inconscient for support,
From which he was born, his vast sustaining self;
It drew him back towards boundless vacancy
As if by himself to swallow up himself:
He called to his strength, but it refused his call.
His body was eaten by light, his spirit devoured."
Savitri-667
Recapitulation:
The Death God indirectly proposes six-fold renunciations in order to live alone with the Divine and to arrive at the secret of immortality. Those who (1) have personal will in place of Souls’ aim,³³ (2) superstition or twilight thought,³⁴ (3) speak lies or soul slaying truth,³⁵ (4) ‘quarrel between the individual and society or disastrous struggle between one community and another,’³⁶ (5) indulgence in human association and love,³⁷ and (6) practice of fixed law and slow evolution of Religion,⁵⁸ invites death unconsciously and they are prone to fall in the world spreading death net trap which divides life. The three gunas of sattwa, rajas tamas, which dwarf human life are identified as the parents of the above six elements. Those who do not renounce above six elements lead a mixed life without Divine protection and those who renounce them are identified in Savitri’s language, ‘Only were safe who kept God in their hearts.’⁶⁸
Death God also suggests⁵³ that reconciliation of (1) momentary action born out of personal will and (3) words born out of three modes of Nature can slay the Psychic Being or those who indulge in (3) loose talk and (1) loose desire driven sex action meet death and suffering in a thousand ways. He also reconciles⁵⁵ (1) personal will with (5) human love as a condition of human death.
1: Personal Will and Divine Will: Most human beings’ actual status is that they neither know their Soul nor their aim and their whole life are ‘issueless circles.’³³ They are ‘ardent slave’⁵⁴ of their ‘sensuous will.’ That is a strong justification of Death reigning over earth life. In the quest for immortality, the will to become something is transformed into the aim of deep central faith which ‘see only the Divine and seek only after the Divine’²⁷ and ‘The life that wins its aim asks greater aims.’⁶⁰
(Savitri said) "My will is greater than thy law, O Death;
My love is stronger than the bonds of Fate:" Savitri-633
(Savitri said) "I claim from Time my will’s eternity,
God from his moments....” Savitri-652
2: Twilight Thought and its complete Illumination: Mind’s twilight thought is enlarged, upraised and enlightened by Spiritualisation of intellect through the descent of Divine Force. Spiritualised Intellect can act as an efficient subordinate of Psychic and Spiritual Being. To ‘convert our twilit or obscure physical mentality into the plenary supramental illumination… this is offered to us as… the goal of Nature in her terrestrial evolution.’⁶⁷ All Spiritual experiences are verifiable, whereas all superstitions are symbols of twilight thought and not verifiable.
(Savitri said) “Why dost thou vainly strive with me, O Death,
A mind delivered from all twilight thoughts,” Savitri-638
3: Soul Slaying Truth and Soul Saving Truth: Soul slaying truth can be transformed into Soul saving truth, and one learns the lesson to constantly open towards overhead Truth and constantly reject the Subconscient and world Falsehood invading the untransformed Nature. In higher consciousness, these double efforts become natural and spontaneous. The tamasic mind, rajasic mind and sattwic mind are identified as three inconscient negations, three inner enemies and are symbols of Soul slaying truth. Man must overcome this hidden enemy through ceaseless inner war and without this confrontation or without silencing or pacifying this mind, he will lose his higher Spiritual destiny.
(Savitri said) “O Death, thou speakest truth but truth that slays,
I answer to thee with the Truth that saves.” Savitri-621,
4: Discord due to Quarrel and Harmony due to unity Consciousness: If attachment to mutable personality is the cause of our discord and quarrel with others, then the emergence of Cosmic Consciousness ‘would assure a harmonious diversity in oneness.’³⁶ In that Impersonal oneness, no such discord, quarrel, ‘and ignorance and vain and noisy effort exist.’³⁶
(Death said) “Two strive, constant associates without joy,
Two egos straining in a single leash,
Two minds divided by their jarring thoughts,
Two spirits disjoined, for ever separate.
Thus is the ideal falsified in man’s world;
Trivial or sombre, disillusion comes,
Life’s harsh reality stares at the soul:
Heaven’s hour adjourned flees into bodiless Time.
Death saves thee from this and saves Satyavan:” Savitri-611
5: Human Love and Divine Love: The limited and narrow human love is either transformed into boundless Divine Love or one must learn the lesson to open towards overhead Divine Love by rejecting transient human love and association. Integral Yoga forbids a seeker of Truth to increase human admirers³⁷ around him which later becomes the cause of his separative identity, Spiritual fall, ruin and death. There is a subtle physical love which bridges the gulf between human and Divine Love. That is identified as the special and the most unnoticed secret of Savitri book and to densify and universalise the subtle physical relation is identified as a process towards the attainment of long life and physical immortality.
Nature of subtle physical love:
“Thus we draw near to the All-Wonderful
Following his rapture in things as sign and guide;
Beauty is his footprint showing us where he has passed,
Love is his heart-beats’ rhythm in mortal breasts,
Happiness the smile on his adorable face.” Savitri-112
“In the communion of two meeting minds (subtle mental union)
Thought looked at thought and had no need of speech;
Emotion clasped emotion in two hearts, (subtle vital union)
They felt each other’s thrill in the flesh and nerves (subtle physical union)
Or melted each in each and grew immense (Spiritual union)
As when two houses burn and fire joins fire:” (Psychic union) Savitri-186
6: Religion and Spirituality: A fixed set of knowledge on Self, World and God is identified as slow evolution of Religion and it can be transformed into swift Spiritual evolution by constantly renewing, renovating⁵⁸ them by fresh inflow of Spirit’s touch or by endless unfolding of Spiritual Being.
“A slowly changing order binds our will.
This is our doom until our souls are free.” Savitri-154,
(Death’s Soul slaying message to moderate humanity)
“Accept the brief light that falls upon thy days;
Take what thou canst of Life’s permitted joy;
Submitting to the ordeal of fate’s scourge
Suffer what thou must of toil and grief and care.” Savitri-620
Then, after handling the above six deficiencies rightly, one Sadhaka (or Savitri within) can confront Time and Death in order to ‘win or lose the godlike game.’⁵⁷
OM TAT SAT
References:
References are from the Manuscript 'The Divine Bliss' on pages 12 to 16 and pages 28 to 30
“Divine Love.
It’s the only thing.
Sri Aurobindo has explained it in Savitri. Only when Divine Love has manifested in all its purity will everything yield, will it all yield – it will then be done.
It’s the only thing that can do it.
It will be the great Victory.
(silence)
On a small scale, in very small details, I feel that of all the forces, this is the strongest. And it’s the only one with a power over hostile wills. Only ... for the world to change, it must manifest here in all its fullness. We have to be up to it ...
Sri Aurobindo had also written to the effect, ‘If Divine Love were to manifest now in all its fullness and totality, not a single material organism would but burst.’ So we must learn to widen, widen, widen not only the inner consciousness (that is relatively easy – at least feasible), but even this conglomeration of cells. And I’ve experienced this: you have to be able to widen this sort of crystallization if you want to be able to hold this Force. I know. Two or three times, upstairs (in Mother’s room), I felt the body about to burst. Actually, I was on the verge of saying, ‘burst and be done with.’ But Sri Aurobindo always intervened – all three times he intervened in an entirely tangible, living and concrete way ... and he arranged everything so that I was forced to wait.”
The Mother
The Mother's Agenda/November 12, 1960