There is a realm of sheer beauty which can enrapture the imaginative mind. In Book II, Canto 14, while reaching the level of the world-soul Aswapati finds that:  

 

There was a strange spiritual scenery,

A loveliness of lakes and streams and hills,

A flow, a fixity in a soul-space,

And plains and valleys, stretches of soul-joy,

And gardens that were flower-tracts of the spirit,

Its meditations of tinged reverie.

Air was the breath of a pure infinite.

A fragrance wandered in a coloured haze

As if the scent and hue of all sweet flowers

Had mingled to copy heaven's atmosphere.

Appealing to the soul and not the eye

Beauty lived there at home in her own house,

There all was beautiful by its own right

And needed not the splendour of a robe.

All objects were like bodies of the Gods,

A spirit symbol environing a soul,

For world and self were one reality.

(pp. 292-93)

 

An apt symbol clothes a great psychological truth when the Seer sees the life-force in man:

 

Astray in the echo caverns of Desire,

It guards the phantoms of a soul's dead hopes

And keeps alive the voice of perished things

Or lingers upon sweet and errant notes

Hunting for pleasure in the heart of pain.

A fateful hand has touched the cosmic chords

And the intrusion of a troubled strain

Covers the inner music's hidden key

That guides unheard the surface cadences.

Yet is it joy to live and to create

And joy to love and labour though all fails,

And joy to seek though all we find deceives

And all on which we lean betrays our trust;

Yet something in its depths was worth the pain,

A passionate memory haunts with ecstasy's fire.

Even grief has joy hidden beneath its roots:

For nothing is truly vain the One has made:

In our defeated hearts God's strength survives

And victory's star still lights our desperate road;

Our death is made a passage to new worlds.

This to Life's music gives its anthem swell.

(p. 194)

 

The repetition of the sound in the echo makes the desire soul run from echo to echo in search for an unreality, imposing upon it impossible labour of "hunting for pleasure in the heart of pain".

 

At times we have a total vision of all the worlds,—the whole cosmos given in a few lines which is one of the marvels of poetical expression:

 

There walled apart by its own innerness

In a mystical barrage of dynamic light

He saw a lone immense high-curved world-pile

Erect like a mountain chariot of the Gods

Motionless under an inscrutable sky.

As if from Matter's plinth and viewless base

To a top as viewless, a carved sea of worlds

Climbing with foam-maned waves to the Supreme

Ascended towards breadths immeasurable;

It hoped to soar into the Ineffable's reign:

A hundred levels raised it to the Unknown.

So it towered up to heights intangible

And disappeared in the hushed conscious Vast

As climbs a storeyed temple-tower to heaven

Built by the aspiring soul of man to live

Near to his dream of the Invisible.

Infinity calls to it as it dreams and climbs;

Its spire touches the apex of the world;

Mounting into great voiceless stillnesses

It marries the earth to screened eternities.

Amid the many systems of the One

Made by an interpreting creative joy

Alone it points us to our journey back

Out of our long self-loss in Nature's deeps;

Planted on earth it holds in it all realms:

It is a brief compendium of the Vast.

This was the single stair to being's goal.

(p. 98)

 

When we have a description of a spiritual experience—and there are several dozens of them—we find the language adequate and appropriate to the experience. There are intensities of delight, of power, of ecstasy, of calm-wideness of self, each carrying its authentic atmosphere with the expression. When Aswapati felt the approach of the supreme Power, the Divine Mother, here is what he felt:

 

All at her contact broke from silence' seal;

Spirit and body thrilled identified,

Linked in the grasp of an unspoken joy;

Mind, members, life were merged in ecstasy.

Intoxicated as with nectarous rain

His nature's passioning stretches flowed to her

Flashing with lightnings, mad with luminous wine.

All was a limitless sea that heaved to the moon.

A divinising stream possessed his veins,

His body's cells awoke to spirit sense,

Each nerve became a burning thread of joy:

Tissue and flesh partook beatitude.

Alight, the dun unplumbed subconscient caves

Thrilled with the prescience of her longed-for tread

And filled with flickering crests and praying tongues.

Even lost in slumber, mute, inanimate

His very body answered to her power.

The One he worshipped was within him now:

Flame-pure, ethereal-tressed a mighty Face

Appeared and lips moved by immortal words;

Lids, wisdom's leaves, drooped over rapture's orbs.

(p. 334)

 

The intensity of the experience of Delight and Power and its transforming influence penetrating right up to the physical body is vivid here. If this one gives us an experience of the higher consciousness and its nearness with at! the exaltation that accompanies it, there is another type in which Aswapati comes down to his physical consciousness from Trance,—after the intense experience on the highest level of his being, where he communicates with the Supreme Power. This is how he felt:

 

The warm-lipped sentient soft terrestrial wave,

A quick and many-murmured moan and laugh,

Came gliding in upon white feet of sound.

Unlocked was the deep glory of Silence' heart;

The absolute unmoving stillnesses

Surrendered to the breath of mortal air,

Dissolving boundlessly the heavens of trance

Collapsed to waking mind. Eternity

Cast down its incommunicable lids

Over its solitudes remote from ken

Behind the voiceless mystery of sleep.

The grandiose respite failed, the wide release.

Across the light of fast-receding planes

That fled from him as from a falling star,

Compelled to fill his human house in Time

His soul drew back into the speed and noise

Of the vast business of created things.

A chariot of the marvels of the heavens

Broad-based to bear the gods on fiery wheels,

Flaming he swept through the spiritual gates.

(p. 347)

 

The soft wave of the earthly air came like living warm lips, perhaps almost kissed him, and conveyed to him its moan and laugh, many-murmured. At its approach the heart of the supreme Silence in which Aswapati was abiding unlocked its doors and the heavens of trance were dissolved because the absolute stillness willingly surrendered to the breadth of mortal air and so Aswapati collapsed to waking mind. It is not that with rare spiritual experiences only the Master gives us peaks of poetical expression, even with very ordinary experiences of life his revealing Light is equally effective. Man has believed in the efficacy of prayer for ages or in the inevitable conquest of an Idea or a Will. In four lines, see how he reveals its truth:

 

A magic leverage suddenly is caught

That moves the veiled Ineffable's timeless will:

A prayer, a master act, a king idea

Can link man's strength to a transcendent Force.

Then miracle is made the common rule,

One mighty deed can change the course of things;

A lonely thought becomes omnipotent.

All now seems Nature's massed machinery;

An endless servitude to material rule

And long determination's rigid chain,

Her firm and changeless habits aping Law,

Her empire of unconscious deft device

Annul the claim of man's free human will.

(p. 20)

 

At times there is a description of perfection which the earth is seeking through the laborious march of evolution. We have several ideals of perfection given us by many philosophers and poets. Here is one which gives the integral vision of the final fulfilment in which the earth,—

 

Then is she moved to all that she is not

And stretches arms to what was never hers.

Outstretching arms to the unconscious Void,

Passionate she prays to invisible forms of Gods

Soliciting from dumb Fate and toiling Time

What most she needs, what most exceeds her scope,

A Mind unvisited by illusion's gleams,

A Will expressive of soul's deity,

A Strength not forced to stumble by its speed,

A Joy that drags not sorrow as its shade.

For these she yearns and feels them destined hers:

Heaven's privilege she claims as her own right.

Just is her claim the all-witnessing Gods approve,

Clear in a greater light than reason owns:

Our intuitions are its title-deeds;

Our souls accept what our blind thoughts refuse.

Earth's winged chimeras are Truth's steeds in Heaven,

The impossible God's sign of things to be.

(pp. 51-52)

 

Explaining how the life-force in man, his vital being is unable to attain its most constantly pursued aims of absolute knowledge, absolute power, and absolute delight, he affirms that it has a vision of gods in heaven, but is able to create here on earth out of mortal elements at first only an ape, and then man, the demigod. As to the failure of life-force in attaining joy, this is what he says:

 

A poignant paradox pursues her dreams:

Her hooded energy moves an ignorant world

To look for a joy her own strong clasp puts off:

In her embrace it cannot turn to its source.

Immense her power, endless her act's vast drive,

Astray is its significance and lost.

Although she carries in her secret breast

The law and journeying curve of all things born

Her knowledge partial seems, her purpose small;

On a soil of yearning tread her sumptuous hours.

(p. 196)

 

The life-energies that move here in this ignorant world are not really blind but "hooded" and act as if they were blind, and in their search for joy they lay strong clasp upon things with the result that those objects cannot turn in the hard embrace to the delight which is their source. It is thus that life inflicts upon itself by her own blind efforts the joylessness about which she complains, and shuts out the joy she is seeking.

 

The personality of man is not integrated; in fact, integration of personality is one of the problems of human psychology. The solution proposed in Sāvitrī, for integrating finally the human personality is one that is in keeping with the spiritual ideal of Indian culture. This is what he proposes:

 

A union of the Real with the unique,

A gaze of the Alone from every face,

The presence of the Eternal in the hours

Widening the mortal mind's half-look on things,

Bridging the gap between man's force and Fate

Made whole the fragment-being we are here.

At last was won a firm spiritual poise,

A constant lodging in the Eternal's realm,

A safety in the Silence and the Ray,

A settlement in the Immutable.

(pp. 35-36)

 

It would require the union of the Individual with the Transcendent, and also the realisation of the One Divine everywhere and the realisation of the Tune-movement as an expression of the Eternal. The first union would replace the ego and consequently remove all the dividing inflictions to which man is subject. The second would harmonise his relations with the surrounding collectivity thus helping the integration of his personality, and the realisation of the universe as the manifestation of the Eternal would make him free from the transitoriness of the movement of time and settle his consciousness in the Eternal,

 

In Book II, Canto 3, "The Glory and Fall of Life", life makes her landing on this globe. As a result of the inner pressure of aspiration from matter and the descent of life-force on earth the magnificent panorama of life-manifestation takes place. This is how the earth felt and looked:

 

In Matter's womb she cast the Immortal's fire,

In the unfeeling Vast woke thought and hope,

Smote with her charm and beauty flesh and nerve

And forced delight on earth's insensible frame.

Alive and clad with trees and herbs and flowers

Earth's great brown body smiled towards the skies,

Azure replied to azure in the sea's laugh;

New sentient creatures filled the unseen depths,

Life's glory and swiftness ran in the beauty of beasts,

Man dared and thought and met with his soul the world.

But while the magic breath was on its way,

Before her gifts could reach our prisoned hearts,

A dark ambiguous Presence questioned all.

The secret Will that robes itself with Night

And offers to spirit the ordeal of the flesh,

Imposed a mystic mask of death and pain.

Interned now in the slow and suffering years

Sojourns the winged and wonderful wayfarer

And can no more recall her happier state,

But must obey the inert Inconscient's law,

Insensible foundation of a world

In which blind limits are on beauty laid

And sorrow and joy as struggling comrades live.

(p. 130)

 

In these few lines we get the most complete picture of the outbreak of life-force on earth in innumerable forms.

 

Speaking about the limitations of reason as an inconclusive instrument of knowledge and action, he gives us a fine image of the utilitarian aspect of its work:

 

A bullock yoked in the cart of proven fact,

She drags huge knowledge-bales through Matter's dust

To reach utility's immense bazaar.

(p. 252)

 

In one revealing image there is an incomparable picture of the utilitarian action of human reason.

 

There are passages throughout the poem in which the sympathy and love for humanity find a very vast and intense expression. When Aswapati realises the presence of the supreme Power, it does not remain a realisation confined to his little personality, for, says the author, the Divine Power:

 

…built a golden passage to his heart

Touching through him all longing sentient things.

A moment's sweetness of the All-Beautiful

Cancelled the vanity of the cosmic whirl.

A Nature throbbing with a Heart divine

Was felt in the unconscious universe;

It made the breath a happy mystery

And brought a love sustaining pain with joy;

A love that bore the cross of pain with joy

Eudaemonised the sorrow of the world,

Made happy the weight of long unending Time,

The secret caught of God's felicity.

Affirming in life a hidden ecstasy

It held the spirit to its miraculous course;

Carrying immortal values to the hours

It justified the labour of the suns.

(pp. 312-13)

 

so that he became a centre for the action of a Higher Power over the whole of humanity. The Divine that he wants man to realise is not one devoid of sympathy and love, for he describes it in his experience as:

 

"a Nature throbbing with a Heart divine"—and it was— "a love that bore the cross of pain with joy".

 

In the same context, he speaks of it as "a burning Love from white spiritual founts"—

 

A burning Love from white spiritual founts

Annulled the sorrow of the ignorant depths;

Suffering was lost in her immortal smile.

A Life from beyond grew conqueror here of Death;

To err no more was natural to mind;

Wrong could not come where all was light and love.

The Formless and the Formed were joined in her.

Immensity was exceeded by a look,

A Face revealed the crowded Infinite.

Incarnating inexpressibly in her limbs

The boundless joy the blind world-forces seek,

Her body of beauty mooned the seas of bliss.

(p. 314)

 

It is the Divine Power that commands Aswapati to continue his labours in the field of life, by telling him:

 

Adept of the self-born unfailing line,

Leave not the light to die the ages bore,

Help still humanity's blind and suffering life:

Obey thy spirit's wide omnipotent urge.

A witness to God's parley with the Night,

It leaned compassionate from immortal calm

And housed desire, the troubled seed of things.

Assent to thy high self, create, endure.

Cease not from knowledge, let thy toil be vast,

No more in earthly limits pen thy force;

Equal thy work with long unending Time's.

(p. 340)

 

And then, it says further on:

 

Let not the impatient Titan drive thy heart,

Ask not the imperfect fruit, the partial prize.

Only one boon, to greaten thy spirit, demand;

Only one joy, to raise thy kind, desire.

Above blind fate and the antagonist powers

Moveless there stands a high unchanging Will;

To its omnipotence leave thy work's result.

All things shall change in God's transfiguring hour.

(p. 341)

 

Aswapati standing in the presence of the Supreme Divine Power had grown wide and he found that "his single freedom could not satisfy" his soul that had grown cosmic and so "her light, her bliss he asked for earth and men."

 

In this vast universal sympathy and compassion the Master is divine and therefore not likely to be easily understood by men whose ideas of compassion and sympathy are very crude.