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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If there is a faultless world with dazzling and colourful inhabitants, then one would like to know whether it is an archetypal world, or it is the evolutionary perfection poised for manifestation. Here are Masters of creation, perfect in joy because they are sovereign in truth, sovereign in truth because they are perfect in joy. The possibility is that of the bursting of a greater secret Consciousness. “A first formation of a gnostic consciousness and nature will be the consequence.”

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The eternal Goddess moved in her cosmic house
Sporting with God as a Mother with her child:
To him the universe was her bosom of love,
His toys were the immortal verities.
All here self-lost had there its divine place.
The Powers that here betray our hearts and err,
Were there sovereign in truth, perfect in joy,
Masters in a creation without flaw,
Possessors of their own infinitude.

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Moses—Pythagoras—Michael Angelo—Victor Hugo—Amrita and in between Brihaspati and Hermes and Rudra entering into the birth doing the Yoga of Self-Perfection—that is the wonderful march in the Adhyatmayoga! That is the soul preparing itself to get into the new creation. That is the stream of crystalline births readying itsef to receive the rush of the oceanic flood, the flood of light and life and love, the sachchidanandaic possibilities of manifestation. This human potential is of another kind and needs centuries of preparation under the day-bright Abundance of the Divine Benevolence.

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The transition from mind to supermind entails two features: in it is the scope and reach of acquiring a superior instrument of thought and knowledge; but, and more importantly, it effects the conversion of the whole consciousness, opening it more and more to the supramental. In it is also born the supramental thought, will, sense, feeling. The working of these faculties begins with the mind, mind proceeding to the formation of the luminous mind, it eventually becoming wholly intuitivised. The final stage of the change comes “when the supermind occupies and supramentalises the whole being and turns even the vital and physical sheaths into moulds of itself, responsive, subtle and instinct with its powers. Man then becomes wholly the superman.” Obviously, the last cannot happen unless there is the ‘archetypal’ support available for it to come into existence in the evolutionary unfolding. There is the necessity of the new creation being present in the transcendent, the bright mother to bring out issues in this play of manifestation. It must precede the appearance of the superman on the earth. Sri Aurobindo’s whole work, although it has several subsidiary objectives as aspects of its overall dynamics, of its pragmatism, is concerned chiefly with it, with the gnostic race, and it is to that he was throughout committed.

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The creation of the new world is connected with the integral perfection. That perfection is possible only when, first, the mind of the physical opens to the higher light, light beyond intuitive mind, beyond overmind, when it opens to the supramental light and force. The physical mind’s opening to the supramental light and force is the necessary condition for the new creation to manifest upon earth. It has happened in the luminous subtle-physical; it must happen in the gross. But then it is more an aspect of manifestation than of creation which has already happened, happened in the transcendent. Our own part is, to open ourselves to it, in every respect, open the physical, the vital, the mental, the spiritual, the psychic to it, every dimension of the human potential lending itself to the process of manifestation. Perfection will not impose itself upon us, we have to open ourselves to it, allow it to work in us in the fulfilment of the human potential, in the expression of our true individuality, the swabhāva of our soul.

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To work for your perfection, the first step is to become conscious of yourself, of the different parts of your being and their activities. You must learn to distinguish these different parts one from another, so that you may become clearly aware of the origin of the movements that occur in you, the many impulses, reactions and conflicting wills that drive you to action.

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The Yoga of Self-Perfection associated with the creation of the new world in the Divine Will has its early foundation in the Sapta Chatusthaya, the seven elements or seven tetrads. Sri Aurobindo had received it when he was in the Alipore Jail as an under-trial prisoner for his alleged act of sedition against the British government in India. A note says: “These mantras along with the notes which accompany them were written down by Sri Aurobindo, probably after his release from prison in May, 1909, and certainly before his departure from Chandernagore on March 31, 1910.” Sri Aurobindo was acquitted and released from the jail; however, the British were still after him. Soon he had to go in hiding. This he did after receiving an inner command, ādeśa; first he was in Chandernagore for two and a half months, and then he left for Pondicherry. Both the towns were French settlements at those days. Sri Aurobindo remained in Pondicherry ever since then, the place having become his Cave of Tapasya. It is here that the Mother was soon to join in the great work they had come to do together. The early seeds of the great work, from the point of view of Adhyatmayoga, were in these Chatusthayas, precise in their formulation, almost like Yoga Aphorisms.

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In the creation of the supramental world in us by the Divine Will, both are needed: constant expansion and self-perfection. Aswapati’s Yoga of Self-Perfection has to take care of the second term. He had become vast by his largeness; he must achieve self-perfection required for it. The aspect of self-perfection is the aspect of not only rising above all the workings of the blind lower inconscient Nature or Andhaha Prakriti in us, but also to make her receptive to the divine working in her, she lending herself to the action of the Consciousness-Force who alone can make such a creation possible. In fact it is she who, in the Divine Will, can establish a new world, the supramental world. The Mother’s stipulation of “expansion of consciousness”, of becoming vast by our largeness has now to accompany the “constant personal progress”, of opening ourselves to the greater possibilities of our soul and our spirit.

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In order to form a supramental world, there must be the expansion of consciousness and constant personal progress, there must be the constant idea of the being, the constant will of the being, the constant preoccupation of the being. There must be great widening to make room for the movements of the Supermind, Supermind by its very excellence being vast, infinite. Thus Aswapati became vast by his largeness, in the largeness of his yoga-tapasya. Incarnating the supramental consciousness in a human body, he was here as Eternity’s delegate, his action a decisive action direct from the Supreme. Aswapati’s birth in the mortal world, mŗtyuloka, is in order to do the Yoga of the Supreme, the Yoga of Evolutionary Transformation. He does it, and in it he creates a new world in the House of the Spirit. Not only that; he gathers within himself the needed power to support the action of the Divine Executrix, that this new world, the supramental world be brought down by her, made manifest here upon earth. In this yoga-tapasya is the mortal birth of the divine Savitri. Such great is presently the the boon, the fruit of the Yoga of Evolutionary Transformation. Even after this siddhi or accomplishment she will continue to come here again and again, but those births will not be the kind of the mortal birth. Those new births of hers, and Aswapati’s, will be the divine births in Evolution. They will be for realisation of the divine possibilities through the divine birth, divya janma.

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In one of the footnotes to the Agni-hymns, Sri Aurobindo makes the following comment: “The supramental world has to be formed or created in us by the Divine Will as the result of a constant expansion and self-perfecting.” Both the terms are fixed in it, expansion and self-perfecting. Could this not have been the method of Aswapati in creating the new world in the supramental? He had become vast by his largeness, extending all the way up to the Unknowable and enveloping every bit of this immense manifestation, including those of the dark abysses; he had achieved self-perfection in such completeness that no trace of the Inconscient and the Subconscient was present in it; it was a oneness that could embrace all the positives and the negatives, rejecting nothing, that it is all God’s creation, that there is nothing but the Divine who exists in each and every aspect of this freedom and extensiveness.

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What Aswapati has transcendentally experienced, what he has willed and achieved in the infinity of the Spirit, all that must become the earthly real. What is operative here at the moment is the errant Power, one who by division attempts to find the indivisible One, an impossible proposition. This Error must be obliterated, totally liquidated. Such is the task that Aswapati recognises, a task which must be done if this creation has to have any sense in it, any meaning to it; and he attends to it right earnestly. This is the deconstruction needed to be done before any new scheme can be considered for implementation. Our response to the positive, the constructive and the creative, and the progressive, had been all along corrupt and frustrating and, therefore, deconstruction is necessary; it should take place at the origin of this corrupting and frustrating crookedness. In any case, it cannot be the popular metaphysical mind-prompted deconstruction; it is not merely analyzing the text simply because language is inherently unstable and shifting. It has to be the spiritual-occult deconstruction. It has to be an act of Shiva the Destroyer.

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The work of Aswapati as the Divine Incarnate is to will a new creation and establish it in the House of the Spirit. The next task of making it manifest upon earth is the task of Savitri as the Shakti Incarnate. Will and Action, samkalpa and krīyā, the first followed by the second, both are necessary for bringing about the birth of the new world here upon earth. The universal principle is: he wills and she executes. The second cannot happen without the first. It is as though a transcendental archetype, a dynamic and breathing design or model charged with the possibilities of expression, is the sine qua non for the new world to at all take birth here. When it is created up there, in the Real-Idea, in its luminous potencies, then only can it materialise here, brought into the evolutionary process; then only can the heavenly ideal become terrestrially real.

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In this vast outbreak of perfection's law
Imposing its fixity on the flux of things
He saw a hierarchy of lucent planes
Enfeoffed to this highest kingdom of God-state.
Attuning to one Truth their own right rule...
Each gave its powers to help its neighbours' parts,
But suffered no diminution by the gift;
Profiteers of a mystic interchange,
They grew by what they took and what they gave,
All others they felt as their own complements,
One in the might and joy of multitude.

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The mornings come but we make ourselves not the light, and the Buddha returns not. In fact, why should he? Should he return, he will definitely have to make a trip first to Kyoto and then to Copenhagen. Instead, what we have now is “the inconvenient truth” of our sad making, and we keep our eyes shut to the pressing reality. We look into the faces of “frightened crowd”, not only of this age but of times to come in sorrowful movement. This is the result of clipped and grouchy human potential and if “something of inexplicable value” has to emerge we will have yet to know what the Buddha meant when he said “Make of yourself a light”.

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The Puraņas tell us that Brahma created the worlds by the Tapas-Will, by the power of concentrated gathering in of consciousness. In the present instance, Aswapati created the new world by the power of his yogic samkalpa, as an act of supreme will in the identification and union with the Divine. He had the knowledge, of the Eternal and the Eternal in Time, and he was carrying with him the desire of the world for its fulfilment. There was the problem of the two negations pulling the soul of man in two opposite directions, the rejection of the world by the exclusive God-seeker and the denial of the materialist dismissing the things of the spirit. More fundamentally, there is the entrenched antagonism to all that is high and noble and spiritually elevating, all that is fulfilling, hostility pitched against life, the extreme ill-will and nastiness of death and its stark malevolence. Contradictions have somehow entered into this creation and they have to be met and dealt with, removed, contradictions between falsehood and truth, evil and good, suffering and happiness, darkness and light. The world left behind continues to be governed by naked falsehood and ignorance and death. Aswapati accepts it not. Not only does he not accept it; he sets himself to resolve it.

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Keats’s sonnet On First Looking into Chapman's Homer is a high mark in Romantic poetry. In the octave, the poet has travelled in the realms of gold, and one of them is the great property of Homer, a vast tract of living and vibrant land, the seer-poet holding the lordship in the company of the heroic gods and goddesses. Here is the gold of many and many-sided splendours, born from the womb of the celestial Muse herself. The sonnet describes the new wonder the poet has discovered. The awe experienced by him comes out most powerfully in the last line, “Silent, upon a peak in Darien.” But Aswapati’s new and marvellous creation is something different. It is a creation breathing in topaz radiance and has many worlds, the worlds of beauty, of love, joy, thought, will, knowledge, power, light, form, reality’s substance, all with the growing God-kind perfection everywhere. But their materialisation upon the earth must await the “veiled Transcendent’s ultimate decree”. In the House of the Spirit this new creation is ready but waiting for the veiled Transcendent’s decree. It comes in the form of a boon. That boon is the incarnation of the divine Savitri upon earth: “One shall descend and break the iron Law.” That shall be the precursor of the new creation manifesting in its deepening and widening glory.

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We have in the Gita a significant term brahma-nirvāņa which, as Sri Aurobindo explains in the Essays, is the extinction in the Brahman, the Vedantic loss of a partial in a perfect being. This state is different from that of supreme peace, of a calm self-extinction, śāntim nirvāņa-paramām, which is not the Buddhist's Nirvana in a blissful negation of being. Generally, in these connotations, Nirvana is taken in the sense of total non-attachment and extinction of the ego. It is a state of inner deeper happiness, of peace, the peace of an absolute inactive cessation. “Sages win Nirvana in the Brahman,” says the Scripture; everything is blown out in it, everything transient and sorrowful. It further says: Brahman-knower is he who has risen into the Brahman-consciousness, brahmavid brahmaņi sthitāh. One who has the deeper inner happiness and the deeper inner ease and repose and the intense inner light, that Yogin becomes the Brahman and reaches self-extinction in the Brahman, brahma-nirvāņam.

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The gains of the world are, fortunately, not all that insignificant and we can derive a good deal of contentment from our daily occupations and activities; we can feel relief from the feeling of frustration that invades us over and over again. But, perhaps, only the complaint is that these gains and these gifts are too little to convince the spirit’s secret eagerness, to satisfy the deeper thirst. It seems, it is that desirable uneasiness in us which prods us on, nudges us on the fulfilling quest, always urging us to make progress. We remain disenchanted till life’s meaning and purpose are discovered, till we live in what they bring to us. The deep-seated quest is therefore happily there, inherently there, and we cannot just rest till the discovery is made. In its absence our greatest actions would remain dull, obtuse, uninteresting.

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Now as an aspect of a great decisive occult-yogic step, Aswapati is stepping into the impenetrable luminous blank in which even the world’s yearning he was carrying with him vanishes. What he sees in that luminous blank, the brilliant Void, is a potent universe without galaxies, without streams, mountains, beasts or birds or men, all withheld in its utter formlessness, in that which can become manifest, epiphanic. Behind Sachchidānanda stood the quiescent, and what remained was nothing but the Nirvana of the Absolute, the austere apocalyptic alone, Nirvana beyond Nirvana of the Manifest. The cosmic and even the transcendental have disappeared from sight. Yet he must know that one power alone whose enigma gives meaning and contents to all these thousand things, manifest and unmanifest, phenomenal and eternal. In the process, everything is abolished, and there stands only the forceful positive, the fire that gives fire to these countless fires. In it his spirit’s will pursues the unknowable.

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