Savitri is the record of Sri Aurobindo's yoga and the transcription as far as human language will permit of supraphysical realities and states of consciousness rarely if ever attained. The Mother has luminously pointed out that not even one word can be changed without changing the meaning. Reading or listening to Sri Aurobindo's poetry and trying mentally to turn it into a series of simple prose statements is a self-defeating exercise. Far better to take the Mother's advice and read "with a blank mind" than to worry over the interpretation of every line, thereby depriving oneself of everything that is most valuable, profound and significant! Much of Savitri is a mystery to the mind, and it will ever remain so if we go only by the mind.

We ought to find an approach that would get away from the traditional search for "explanations". Once again, the cue is available from the Mother:

… Read properly, with the right attitude, concentrating a little before opening the pages and trying to keep the mind as empty as possible, absolutely without a thought. The direct road is by the heart. I tell you, if you try to concentrate really with this aspiration you can light a flame, the psychic flame, the flame of purification in a very short time, perhaps in a few days. What you cannot do normally, you can do with the help of Savitri. Try and you will see how very different it is, how new, if you read with this attitude, with this something at the back of your consciousness: as though it were an offering to Sri Aurobindo. …

"The direct road is by the heart." These words became our inspiration and guiding light. This is how a friend of mine looks at Savitri, approaches Savitri.

Savitri by heart

A poem like Savitri is not a collection of "thoughts" however lofty, not an expression of emotion however profound. Savitri is a living body built of sound and sense by a power of secret knowledge seizing on words and forcing them to bear a charge of meaning that cannot be apprehended by the intellect alone. How then are we to study Savitri?  What method do we follow in order to open our minds to its manifold secrets and our hearts to its spiritual truth? 

In conversation with a young disciple of Sri Aurobindo's yoga, the Mother is reported to have said: "Indeed, Savitri is something concrete, living:  it is all replete, packed with consciousness. It is supreme knowledge above all human philosophies and religions. It is the spiritual path, it is Yoga...everything, in its single body." 

When some members of our center in Singapore resolved to meet once a month to begin a systematic study of Sri Aurobindo's Savitri we wanted to work out a new approach based on what the Mother had done in the Ashram. She had chosen a few short passages from each canto to read aloud on tape. The tapes were sent to Sunil, who set himself the task of translating their content into the language of music. The Mother and Huta, a painter whose gift had been nurtured by the Mother herself, used to meditate together on the chosen verses and Huta would try to express what had come during the meditation in terms of color and line. We liked the idea of this "multi-media" approach and wondered if it could be adapted to our own circumstances, specially as we were lucky enough to have an almost complete set of tapes recording the Mother's readings and Sunil's music. 

My own experience over many years as a teacher had convinced me that most people approach poetry in the wrong way. This is because they have only a vague idea of what real poetry is, or what the poet is trying to do. Poetry is not prose in fancy dress or a cryptic message needing to be decoded with the help of a dictionary. It is true that Sri Aurobindo's vast knowledge of the English language can be daunting, but it is still a mistake to think that translation into simpler language will enable us to understand him better. We may indeed understand something-however the "something" will not be what Sri Aurobindo is trying to tell us. It will be different, for there are no redundancies, no interchangeable words in Savitri.  Sri Aurobindo writes:

I have not anywhere in Savitri written anything for the sake of mere picturesqueness or merely to produce a rhetorical effect: what I am trying to do everywhere in the poem is to express exactly something seen, something felt or experienced; if for instance I indulge in a wealth-burdened line or passage, it is not merely for the pleasure of the indulgence, but because there is that burden, or at least what I conceive to be that, in the vision or the experience.

Savitri is the record of Sri Aurobindo's yoga and the transcription as far as human language will permit of supraphysical realities and states of consciousness rarely if ever attained. The Mother has rightly pointed out that not even one word can be changed without changing the meaning. Reading or listening to Sri Aurobindo's poetry and trying mentally to turn it into a series of simple prose statements is a self-defeating exercise. Far better to take the Mother's advice and read "with a blank mind" than to worry over the interpretation of every line, thereby depriving oneself of everything that is most valuable, profound and significant! Much of Savitri is a mystery to the mind.

We needed to find an approach that would get away from the traditional search for "explanations." Once again, we took our cue from the Mother:

… Read properly, with the right attitude, concentrating a little before opening the pages and trying to keep the mind as empty as possible, absolutely without a thought. The direct road is by the heart. I tell you, if you try to concentrate really with this aspiration you can light a flame, the psychic flame, the flame of purification in a very short time, perhaps in a few days. What you cannot do normally, you can do with the help of Savitri. Try and you will see how very different it is, how new, if you read with this attitude, with this something at the back of your consciousness: as though it were an offering to Sri Aurobindo. 

"The direct road is by the heart." These words became our inspiration and guiding light. No longer would we rack our brains for meanings, or reach for a dictionary at the first sight of an unfamiliar expression. We would begin every session with a meditation to Sunil's music and the Mother's voice on tape. And then we would read and let the ever-changing images created by Sri Aurobindo impose their own message, "stirring the blind brain," as he says, until it is ready to receive "the embodied truth":  (p. 375)

Its message enters stirring the blind brain

And keeps in the dim ignorant cells its sound;

The hearer understands a form of words

And, musing on the index thought it holds,

He strives to read it with the labouring mind,

But finds bright hints, not the embodied truth.

Sri Aurobindo is speaking of the Mantra, the utterance charged with spiritual power. The mind cannot comprehend the Mantra, perceiving only  "bright hints," but still the power works on hidden levels of being,  preparing for the moment when the greater revelation will come, when the  ordinary mentality is overpassed and understanding merges with a vision  that transcends anything language can express. Savitri is all Mantra. 

We try to see each line of Savitri as an embodied Truth. So we do not want to analyse the language in search of "meanings." We do not take a living body apart—that kills it. Analysis of the "form of words" will leave us with a lifeless corpse; for the soul of the poetry will have escaped us.  Wherever possible, we try to read as if watching a video: trying to see what is suggested or described, recreating in imagination the images as they follow one upon the other, ever changing and evolving. Savitri is full of images, some elaborated in detail, others deeply embedded in the text.  Someone has said: "There is a picture in every line"—and it is true. Sri Aurobindo writes:

When Savitri is not understood, it is because the truths it expresses are unfamiliar to the ordinary mind or belong to an untrodden domain or enter into a field of occult experience: it is not because there is any attempt at a dark or vague profundity or an escape from thought. The thinking is not intellectual but intuitive or more than intuitive, always expressing a vision, a spiritual contact or a knowledge which has come by entering into the thing itself, by identity.

The language of images is older and more powerful than the language of words. But when words are borne on the carrier wave of meter and rhythm used by a master poet, depth upon depth of meaning unfolds. We are precipitated into that highly creative and synthesizing consciousness which may have been lost in our long love affair with analytical reasoning. The final aim must be to transcend this too, moving towards the intuitive insight that alone can fully reveal the glory of Savitri: "Out of our thoughts we must leap up to sight..." (Savitri, p. 276)

It has been claimed that multi-sensory experience, which at best should include mental insight, leads to an intuitive grasp of reality that is more profound (because wider in scope) and less articulate, in the intellectual sense. We have been trying to bring imagination rather than intellect to the study of Savitri by an enhanced awareness of the pictorial quality of Sri Aurobindo's poetry. We do this by asking: What is he showing us? What picture emerges from these lines? What does this image suggest? rather than  the more traditional question: What does it mean? We have used paintings to stimulate discussion and as a focus for meditation and, of course, the music specially composed by Sunil. 

Such an approach is not easy at first. "Seeing" creates a richness of association pointing to a meaning that is not fixed and static like a dictionary definition but complex and evolving and ultimately touching the Truth-Vision that encompasses in itself all possible meanings. The poetic word, as used by Sri Aurobindo, acquires a limitless extension of significance for the receptive reader. That is why the Mother can say:

I  tell you, whoever, wishing to practice Yoga, tries sincerely and feels the necessity for it, will be able to climb with the help of Savitri to the highest step of the ladder of yoga, will be able to find the secret that Savitri represents...

Patience is needed, a willingness to wait for answers. The structure of Savitri is cyclic: a theme is introduced and a question arises. The theme will recur again and again, and each time the theme will receive a more complex treatment and the question a more complete answer. Really and  truly, Savitri can be understood only in the context of our own life  experience; for it demands of the reader not just a mental understanding  but a recognition , the first small step towards that "knowledge by  identity" referred to by Sri Aurobindo in the passage quoted above. 

A few years ago I had the good fortune to be sitting near to Nirodbaran, the "scribe" to whom Sri Aurobindo dictated so much of the final version of Savitri. I told him very briefly about our plan to try a new approach. He commented: "Do you want everyone to learn Savitri by heart?" Since then, how many others have asked the same question! The answer is "Regretfully, no, we have something else in mind"... regretfully, because learning favourite passages by heart, enjoying them, meditating upon them, making them part of our lives, allowing them to inspire and guide us, is the best approach of all. Then, as the Mother said, "all that we need we will find in Savitri."