Savitri—the supreme revelation of Sri Aurobindo’s vision
The Mother

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Savitri: the Light of the Supreme
In Sri Aurobindo’s Gayatri Mantra we have a phrase “Savitŗ, the Light of the Supreme, or in Sanskrit jyotih parasya”. This we have taken for the name of our site which is specifically devoted to Sri Aurobindo's epic Savitri. It will be our endeavour to present its various aspects in the course of time. Texts of Savitri, the compositional details, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s writings about it will form one major section for reference purposes. Work on it by others in several other sections will follow in the sequel. It is also hoped that there will be audio-visual presentations in the creative spirit for us to grow more and more in it. Indeed, to live in Savitri who shall give us the truth and the things of the truth shall be the driving motivation behind this effort.

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The great ones are attentive to the unseen Truth and recognize from the sound of the augur wings the coming of the superman race, the gnostic race. They watch the Bliss for which earth's heart has cried. There is the certainty of these events unfolding. The small little mind of man may not comprehend these inevitabilities but the truth-light shall capture Nature by surprise and earth grow unexpectedly divine. The triumph is our days becoming a happy pilgrim march, and our will a force of the Eternal's power, and our thought the rays of a spiritual sun. This will be such a swift and astounding development that only a few will understand it, while those who are tied to their mental formulations will never believe in it. But this is on the way. Indeed, “belief shall be not till the work is done.”

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The essential character of Supermind is a Truth-Consciousness and it has not to arrive at knowledge but possesses it. It may indeed, especially in its evolutionary action, keep knowledge behind its apparent consciousness and bring it forward as if from behind the veil; but even then this veil is only an appearance and does not really exist. The Mind of Light is a subordinate action of Supermind, dependent upon it even when not apparently springing direct from it, in which the secret of this connection becomes evident and palpable.

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There will be built up, first, even in the Ignorance itself, the possibility of a human ascent towards a divine living; then there will be, by the illumination of this mind of Light in the greater realisation of what may be called a gnostic mentality, in a transformation of the human being, even before the supermind is reached, even in the earth-consciousness and in a humanity transformed, an illumined divine life.

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A mind of light will replace the present confusion and trouble of this earthly ignorance; it is likely that even those parts of humanity which cannot reach it will yet be aware of its possibility and consciously tend towards it; not only so, but the life of humanity will be enlightened, uplifted, governed, harmonised by this luminous principle and even the body become something much less powerless, obscure and animal in its propensities and capable instead of a new and harmonised perfection. It is this possibility that we have to look at and that would mean a new humanity uplifted into Light, capable of a spiritualised being and action, open to governance by some light of the Truth. Consciousness, capable even on the mental level and in its own order of something that might be called the beginning of a divinised life.

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The descent into the earth-life of so supreme a creative power as the Supermind and its truth-consciousness could not be merely a new feature or factor added to that life. It would open the access to the supramental consciousness and the supramental life. Mind might even become in man, what it is in fundamental origin, a subordinate, limited and special action of the Supermind, a sufficiently luminous receptacle of truth.

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A divine life upon earth, the ideal we have placed before us, can only come about by a spiritual change of our being and a radical and fundamental change, an evolution or revolution of our nature. The embodied being upon earth would have to rise out of the domination over it of its veils of mind, life and body into the full consciousness and possession of its spiritual reality. These would no longer be veils or imperfect expressions but true manifestations; they would be changed into states of light, powers of spiritual life, vehicles of a spiritual existence.

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If there is an evolution in material Nature and if it is an evolution of being with consciousness and life as its two key-terms and powers, this fullness of being, fullness of consciousness, fullness of life must be the goal of development towards which we are tending and which will manifest at an early or later stage of our destiny. The Self, the Spirit, the Reality that is disclosing itself out of the first inconscience of life and matter, would evolve its complete truth of being and consciousness in that life and matter. It would return to itself,—or, if its end as an individual is to return into its Absolute, it could make that return also,—not through a frustration of life but through a spiritual completeness of itself in life. Our evolution in the Ignorance with its chequered joy and pain of self-discovery and world-discovery, its half-fulfilments, its constant finding and missing, is only our first state. It must lead inevitably towards an evolution in the Knowledge, a self-finding and self-unfolding of the Spirit, a self-revelation of the Divinity in things in that true power of itself in Nature which is to us still a Supernature.

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Any complete reversal or elimination of the first evolutionary principle would mean the simultaneous manifestation of the secret involved consciousness in every part of this vast universal Inconscience; a change in a particular line of Nature such as the earth-line could not have any such all-pervading effect: the manifestation in earth-nature has its own curve and the completion of that curve is all that we have to consider. Here this much might be hazarded that in the final result of the revelatory creation or reproduction of the upper hemisphere of conscious being in the lower triplicity the evolution here, though remaining the same in its degrees and stages, would be subjected to the law of harmony, the law of unity in diversity and of diversity working out unity: it would be no longer an evolution through strife; it would become a harmonious development from stage to stage, from lesser to greater light, from type to higher type of the power and beauty of a self-unfolding existence. It would only be otherwise if for some reason the law of struggle and suffering still remained necessary for the working out of that mysterious possibility in the Infinite whose principle underlies the plunge into the Inconscience. But for the earth-nature it would seem as if this necessity might be exhausted once the supramental gnosis had emerged from the Inconscience. A change would begin with its firm appearance; that change would be consummated when the supramental evolution became complete and rose into the greater fullness of a supreme manifestation of the Existence-Consciousness-Delight, Sachchidananda.

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In the evolution of the spiritual man there must necessarily be many stages and in each stage a great variety of individual formations of the being, the consciousness, the life, the temperament, the ideas, the character. The nature of instrumental mind and the necessity of dealing with the life must of itself create an infinite variety according to the stage of development and the individuality of the seeker. But, apart from that, even the domain of pure spiritual self-realisation and self-expression need not be a single white monotone, there can be a great diversity in the fundamental unity; the supreme Self is one, but the souls of the Self are many and, as is the soul's formation of nature, so will be its spiritual self-expression. A diversity in oneness is the law of the manifestation; the supramental unification and integration must harmonise these diversities, but to abolish them is not the intention of the Spirit in Nature.

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Be dressed ready for service and keep your lamps burning, like men waiting for their master to return from a wedding banquet, so that when he comes and knocks they can immediately open the door for him. It will be good for those servants whose master finds them watching when he comes. I tell you the truth, he will dress himself to serve, will have them recline at the table and will come and wait on them. It will be good for those servants whose master finds them ready, even if he comes in the second or third watch of the night. But understand this: If the owner of the house had known at what hour the thief was coming, he would not have let his house be broken into. You also must be ready, because the Son of Man will come at an hour when you do not expect him.

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"If you had faith even as a grain of mustard-seed," said Jesus, "you would say to this mountain, Come, and it would come to you." What was meant by the word Faith, was really Will accompanied with perfect śraddhā. This śraddhā does not reason, it knows; for it commands sight and sees what God wills, and it knows that what is God's will, must happen. Using sight spiritual, śraddhā can become omniscient.

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The Mother says: “The true world is ready behind the apparent confused and chaotic world that we know. It is ready and it is waiting for the time of manifestation when Matter will be in such a condition that it can express the Higher Truth.” The incarnate Divine Yogi has willed it and kept it ready, the true world, the marvellous incredible world, breathing and growing in the dynamism of the spirit. That is the glorious-triumphant announcement of the arrival of the superhuman Rider.

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Here are the invisible augur wings declaring the eventful event about to occur, of the unmistakable arrival of the superhuman Rider. The process of evolution has reached the definite finality for the next step to open out, reached because it has been willed by the Avataric Supreme himself. In his yoga-tapasya in the earth-consciousness, in the body of the earth itself has been kindled the fire of that Event.

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Supermind in its conscious vision not only contains all the forms of itself which its conscious force creates, but it pervades them as an indwelling Presence and a self-revealing Light. It is present, even though concealed, in every form and force of the universe; it is that which determines sovereignly and spontaneously form, force and functioning; it limits the variations it compels; it gathers, disperses, modifies the energy which it uses; and all this is done in accord with the first laws that its self-knowledge has fixed in the very birth of the form, at the very starting-point of the force. It is seated within everything as the Lord in the heart of all existences,—he who turns them as on an engine by the power of his Maya; it is within them and embraces them as the divine Seer who variously disposed and ordained objects, each rightly according to the thing that it is, from years sempiternal.

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Who are these Immortals who have come maned with light and who see the superhuman Rider approaching us? Are they our forefathers who have become by their tapasya these luminous immortals? Or are they the resplendent Beings of Light in the Overmental world? Or are they the mighty Gods whose home is the infinity-wide Home of Truth, satyam ṛtam bṛhat,—the truth, the right, the vast? But if there is an absolute certainty in what is witnessed by them, if they are maned with light, they have to be the transcendental powers of truth and consciousness and force and joy, they have to be the supramental Gods. Possibly these could be Varuna, Aryamana, Mitra, Bhaga, Indra, Agni, Vayu, Savitra, the creators and increasers of the supramental riches not only in the possibilities of the transcendent but also of the cosmic and the terrestrial. Glad tidings therefore they are bringing to us and our trueness lies in welcoming them.

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In the early stages of his biological appearance, man did not have enough strength to survive in the extreme hostile environment. He could have gone away from the scene, as did the mastodon and the sloth. Yet he did continue to exist. However, his mind is ill-developed, he is ignorant of the meaning of his own life, he has the least inkling about the high and splendid fate awaiting on him. But had he been simply driven by the life-force, his fate perhaps would not have been much different from that of those mammoth creatures with several tons of mass; in them the life-force experimented something huge and monstrous, felt through them another joy, and eventually let them vanish. The breath that was breathing in them was withdrawn, and the harsh environment simply became the mechanistic cause for their departure from this world of life.

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We must acquire the faculty of getting the foreseeing knowledge; we must be able to hear the small voice of the Daemon seated in the depth of our being; our will must align itself with the cosmic Will; our mind must be identified with the mind of the world; the light of the Unknown must awaken in us the prophet and the seer. But as long as we are occupied with the outward and the quick, with the immediate gains in life, as long as the mind holds the soul back, we are slaves of our acts, as long as we thrive on the dead past it will not be possible for our gaze to be free and we will not be able to reach the sun of divine wisdom. Our pursuit should be to reach that sun of divine wisdom and to bring that sun of divine wisdom into the play of our thoughts and feelings and a thousand activities of the day.

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There is a double aspect of biography in Savitri, of the legendary Aswapati and Savitri, of the spiritual-occult, of Purusha and Shakti, Presence and Power, Omniscience and Omnipotence, supreme Being and Consciousness-Force, divine Will and divine Action, of human incarnates as Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. This double aspect is present in it in intimate and functional relationship, of the Divine’s will-to-be and the Divine’s will-to-become. It is a manifesto for the Divine’s manifestation.

The first half of Savitri is essentially presenting the yoga-tapasya of Aswapati, and the second the shakti-yoga of Savitri. For an epic entitled Savitri, this may look somewhat disproportionate in division but Savitri is at once a legend and a symbol, both together, the legend capitalising on the myth, and the symbol unfolding the manifesto in the language that holds in it the future. The legend essentially comes from the narrative as is given in the Mahabharata, it having the splendid Vedic roots in it. The Vedic roots themselves are symbolic; it is a revelatory myth belonging to the Vedic cycle. Savitri’s biographical is carrying in it this double aspect, the legendary and the symbolic.

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The realities of spiritual world when expressed in the luminous revelatory language of a yogi-mystic cease to be imaginations or abstractions of the mental formulation. In fact they never are those. Somehow those realities enter into the physical mould and breathe their light and love and knowledge and joy, repeating the marvel of the first descent of the immortal in the mortal.

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