Here is a beautiful comment: “I like so much the idea
of approaching Savitri from the
heart, reading it with a blank mind, and learning it by heart as well. I notice
that when I memorize a particular passage, the mantric qualities of the writing
connect to the psychic center and through the memorization, I am able to carry
that connection all through the day, reciting favorite lines sometimes any times
over. It's uplifting somehow...” With it we can say that Savitri can
certainly be an upāsanā grantha, a Book for Spiritual Practices. In fact
it is, and everything is available in it. The term upāsanā is of course to be understood not in
conventional religious but in spiritual sense, in it having a shade of
tantricism that gives a definiteness and solidity to the entire pursuit, a kind
of occult form that endures everything; it becomes the support, ādhāra,
for the higher powers of Light and Knowledge and Life and Spirit to live in it.
So if such is the possibility, then it leads one to do a bit of introspection
also. All that one is doing or discussing in the context of, say in the story
of Savitri, Savitri's waking up on the fated day, may
be too much of mentalisation. It may have its own value, and pleasure, but as upāsanā—well,
we don't know; we must examine it perhaps in some another way. Is it really
mentalisation? Or it is the mind’s way to go beyond mind, preparing itself to
receive higher intuition? Will it not be wonderful if so?
And conceivably it could be so—going beyond mind to
intuition. One certainly need not think it as mere abstract or mental exercise.
It is surely possible to get new insights into Savitri's profound depth
by other methods also. How can one rule out the opening of other faculties
lying dormant in us? That won’t be logical.
But here is another line of thinking. In Sonia Dyne's
article there is posing a "both/and" rather than an
"either/or" choice between a "mental" or
"multi-media" mantric/music/art approach to studying Savitri. She says: "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." Doesn't
the integral approach include even apparent mutual exclusivites? Surely it
does.
Definitely there is benefit in both approaches—the
mental and the heart-by-heart. Arguably this is the integration we are seeking,
synthesis and integration where both the approaches can be seen complementing
each other, they in the superior working being interdependent, the mind—the
heart, the very being—all mutually beneficial, all fulfilling each other in the
powers of respective expresiion.
But let us meditate on what
the Mother says: “If truly one knows how to meditate upon Savitri, one will receive all the help one needs.”
Indeed, all our faculties, our will and thought and feeling, our spirit and
soul must awake to the sun that is Savitri. And, in fact, any one of
these can be a way to live in Savitri. The rest will come from Savitri.
I heard of a person who could not see but when Savitri was given to him,
he ‘saw’ that it was all written in gold. I also recall an occasion what a
learned person said in his talk after my presentation in a conference. I had
quoted Savitri and soon he said, rather obliquely, that the Mother never
liked Savitri being discussed at all. I responded, simply by saying: “I
don’t know.” Is she not the Sun from which we can kindle all our suns?
Another person told the Mother: “Mother, I want to read
Savitri, but I just can’t do that—as
if there is nothing in front of me, a blank page, I can’t see the letters, I
can’t read the words.” The Mother replied: “It means that one needs another eye
to read the letters of Savitri, one
reads Savitri with another eye.” If
only we get that bright eye, divya
chakshu! But perhaps it is Savitri
who is going to give us that bright eye, that divya chakshu. To grow in Savitri
is, to begin with, to get that eye. And there is yet another incidence, of a
very high police officer at the district headquarters. He felt something and at
once took six months leave and went to his village. Everyday he would go early
in the morning to his farm and read there Savitri
for hours and hours, till late in the evening. He was not a very scholarly
person but he must have definitely received something—otherwise he would not
have been doing it for long hours and for such long months. In the same manner
a committed scholar would too benefit from it.
There are many aspects of Savitri and there are
many ways of looking at Savitri. The
most important is of course its affirmation of the Spirit in things, Spirit as
the dynamic Truth shaping in its expansive luminous freedom the destiny of this
creation. This also implies that, to enter into Savitri, we have to make
an extensive, a substantial, a broad-based many-sided preparation as far as our
instruments are concerned; we have to also make progress leading to wideness of
consciousness, including possibly the yogic-spiritual. While Savitri
itself can become a means for that progress, there is needed the right kind of
effort from our side, even a professional readiness to enter into its vast body.
We must be prepared to undertake the hardship of its discipline by keeping
ready all the instrumental aspects of our personality—with the mind capable of
receiving intimations of a luminous knowledge, and the heart responding to the
ardencies of life-movements in their thousand moods of magnificence and
dignity, and the will steady in its intent, steady like a bright flame of
sacrifice burning upward to heaven. What is it here that cannot be pressed into
service for the fullness of realisation that Savitri offers? Indeed,
nothing there is that cannot be transformed by Savitri. But,
fundamentally, there has to be in us a “call” to live in Savitri which
shall give us the Truth and the things of the Truth. With it alone can begin
our yogic life in Savitri, of making Savitri our upāsanā grantha, making
it our Book of Yoga.
In the meanwhile, however, we can live in Savitri’s presence in several
ways. In Savitri there is deep spiritual philosophy put in the revealing
language of a poet, its expression carrying the inspired and inevitable Word.
We have in it mysticism, occult knowledge, religion, metaphysics, arts,
sciences, literature, history of man and history of the earth, all that is
noble and living, that can impart to our perception the sense of infinity which
can give meaning to our daily occupations. Any one of these can become our
foundational engagement. In fact, it has thus already opened out an altogether
new world of creative action for us. Based on Savitri we already have
Sunil Bhattacharya’s music, and Huta Hindocha’s paintings under the direct
guidance of the Mother. These are examples of the new art that is to come in
its wake, and there will be many more creations to bring Savitri itself
closer to us. We thus envisage the coming of new schools of thought, new choreography,
poetry, criticism, comparative research and studies, fiction, songs, oratorical
dissertations, discourses, recitations and readings, all welling up from this
inexhaustible fountain of creativity. The poem has also been translated into
several languages, mostly in verse-form, but also at times as prose renderings.
Maybe some of these are rudimentary attempts and much will have to be done to
achieve some minimum aesthetic satisfaction that is to be expected from a work
connected with it. Nonetheless, these attempts do demonstrate the possibilities
that have sprung up from Savitri’s world of delight. If around the
stone-still statue of Buddha, in Ellora, there is the calm of infinity that
nothing can disturb, we shall expect a crystalline stream of sweetness and joy
rushing from the marble face of Savitri; halo’d by the moon of beauty,
or carved in the heart of amethyst, she shall prove to be “the Sun from which
we kindle all our suns.” If only, Satyavan-like, our “mind transfigures to a
rapturous seer”!
About approaching Savitri, the Mother says that “the direct road is by
the heart.” She told this to young Mona Sarkar in one of his meetings with her
which can be read
here. This talk has the power to settle everything for us. She prefaced it
by saying: "I shall give you something special; be prepared." The
talk begins as follows: “It does not matter if you do not understand it—Savitri,
read it always. You will see that every time you read it, there will be
something new experience; things which were not here, things you did not
understand arise and suddenly become clear. Always an unexpected vision comes
up through the words and lines. Every time you try to read and understand, you
will see that something which was hidden behind is revealed clearly and
vividly. I tell you the very verses you have read once before, will appear to
you in a different light each time you re-read them.” And she says: “Always
your experience is enriched, it is revelation at each step…” Perhaps there is
always something special she gives to each individual to be in Savitri.
Her demand is: “Be prepared.” What a powerful injunction this, “Be prepared!”—and
this has to be a many-sided preparation!
“Become
a channel for the sound that is Savitri,” Rod Hemsell. “Everything depends on the Word. For
it is the word of creation, the very sound that brings to birth the worlds, the
luminous goddess-form of the Supreme:
tat savitur
varam rūpam jyotih parasya dhīmahi yannah satyena dīpayet
and it shall illumine us with the Truth. For as Sri Aurobindo affirms often
enough in Savitri, ‘She is the golden bridge, the wonderful fire ... She
is the Force, the inevitable Word.’ It is arguable, perhaps--the seer having
received this boon of dŗştī, sŗtī, smŗtī in a clairaudient trance, as
the simultaneous inevitable revelation of the truth of his realization, thence
to be delivered forth by him as mantric verse for the subsequent illumination
of fit hearers—that this sacred word might best be read, and received, by the
listening heart of a clairaudient silence… Sri Aurobindo's theory of mantra,
the text of Savitri itself, and our experience, seem to support rather
emphatically the notion that it is the audible sound, with its dynamics of
pitch, rhythm, image, and conceptual spiritual content that has a unique
potential and power to effect in the fit outward hearer the experience of which
it speaks, and of which it is the living symbol… [Y]et, perhaps it is only the
experience itself that can achieve these goals, which certainly exceed anything
that mind as we know it can analyze. Its validity is to be found only in the
revelation itself, which proceeds from the Truth. And this finding is the
process that Savitri narrates and establishes in us. She is the
supramental force as She issues forth in goddess-form from the Divine Mother,
as She descends into the consciousness and speech of the supramental Avatar, as
She enwraps the subtle body of the Earth and takes physical birth in the body
of the Mother, to reveal the soul and tapasya of the transformation of Death
and the evolution of immortal life, and as She enters our space in the form of
mantric vibration. One must simply become a channel for the sound that is Savitri
and receive Her without reservation.”
Rod Hemsell continues: “There
are innumerable instances in Savitri that illustrate, comment upon, and
reveal this truth. Perhaps a negative argument in support of this notion can be
made at this point, bearing in mind that the written page is dumb, and the only
real proof is in the hearing. To attempt an example, nonetheless, let us look
at the first few lines of the canto titled The
Adoration of the Divine Mother.
A stillness
absolute, incommunicable,
Meets the sheer
self-discovery of the soul;
A wall of stillness
shuts it from the world,
A gulf of stillness
swallows up the sense
And makes unreal
all that mind has known,
All that the
labouring senses still would weave
Prolonging an
imaged unreality.
I don't know how one can have the experience of the elongation of the ‘All’ in
the next to the last line, and then of the lengthening, depending, and slowing
of sound that occurs with ‘still would weave’ culminating in the extremely
elongated and heavy ‘Prolonging,’ which qualifies in an indescribably accurate
way the sense of the final term ‘unreality,’ without reading these lines aloud,
instrumentally. The net result of reading instrumentally is to invite that
stillness absolute into the spaces we are so accustomed to being filled with
sensational unrealities. And that experience of stillness is a prerequisite of
all that follows... Savitri has the power to actually bring about such
an emptiness and stillness, instantaneously deeper than meditation usually can
achieve even with considerable effort.”
A questioning mind will wonder
how “the experience of the elongation of the ‘All’ in the passage come simply
by reading these lines aloud." What does this sentence mean? Perhaps we
could see as follows. It is an experience of silence which is the substratum
for all sounds and it comes when one attends to the sounds in their pure depth,
like one sees the beauty of the formless residing behind and around the form,
the image. It is as though there is complete independence in the mind and
senses from universal nature. "The sheer self-discovery of the soul" takes
us to a point where "an absolute stillness" meets us. This
"swallows up the sense." Until this point the world's reality
persists through the instrumental nature.
But there is something magical
about the passage that occurs in the above quotation:
A stillness
absolute, incommunicable,
Meets the sheer
self-discovery of the soul;
A wall of stillness
shuts it from the world,
A gulf of stillness
swallows up the sense
And makes unreal
all that mind has known,
All that the
labouring senses still would weave
Prolonging an
imaged unreality.
The sense of prolonging in it comes essentially from the alliterative effect of
‘l’ in the entire description. This elongated and sustained alliteration in
seven consecutive lines is rare in Savitri and perhaps altogether absent
in the English poetry. The liquidity of sound flows on and on, reaching the
ocean of some luminous harmony. The whole Overhead atmosphere acquires the
character of the subtle sound heard in the hush of the inner heart. At the same
time, the last but one line’s “All” has a special role here, a role which is
reinforced by the “all” in the previous line. Put that “All” elsewhere and all
is lost. For instance, if you read the line like
The labouring
senses all that still would weave,—
and the magic is gone; it sounds clumsy. The anapaest in the middle of the
iambic line of the original text gives a kind of lift, happy buoyancy which is
absent if it is moved to the second place. We cannot say that the author was
inspired to write the line the way he wrote. It was kind of natural to him with
its living sense and rhythm:
All that the
labouring senses still would weave…
The word ‘all’ appears 1293 times in Savitri, but very rarely is the
effect we have here present elsewhere. Thus on p. 3:
And all that was
destroyed must be rebuilt
And old experience
laboured out once more.
All can be done if
the God-touch is there.
The third line here is epigrammatic and is a forceful condensation of thought,
but poetically is different from “All that the labouring senses still would
weave.” The cosmicity of the ‘All’ in “All that the labouring senses still
would weave” gets replaced by the all-inclusiveness of the other.
We might even say that Sri Aurobindo was not inspired, really. I mean, he just
wrote it in the spontaneity of the seer-poet’s speech. He saw, and he wrote.
That’s all, that’s the mystery or beauty of “All that…” He moves in those
domains and just tells us a few things about them in their native tongue. It is
we who keep on wondering at it, for our lack of contact with or access to those
domains.
Reading Savitri silently or aloud—they have different powers. Copying Savitri’s
few pages daily has another power.
Silence, the nurse
of the Almighty's power,
The omniscient
hush, womb of the immortal Word,
And of the Timeless
the still brooding face,
And the creative
eye of Eternity.
Aren’t the two then different aspects of the Yoga one does with the help of Savitri?
It takes about twenty hours to read the whole of Savitri aloud and if it
is done in three days the effect is so massive that a kind of solid dynamism
gets founded on the peace that flows from it. It’s an experience. And to bear
it needs a certain capacity. Reading it contemplatively is another experience
of entering into its luminous wideness.
What we have to simply do is,
to live in Savitri who shall give us the Truth and the things of the
Truth. Let me quote here something from a news bulletin:
It is generally
accepted that people read in order to understand themselves and the world
around them, to expand their personal insight. Most of us take for granted the
act of reading in our daily lives, but a history of reading shows that it
changed and developed like all other human activities. While we think of
reading as an intensely personal and usually silent activity, it used to be
very different. In the Argentina-born writer Alberto Manguel’s book A History of Reading we learn that
people used to always read aloud. Early Greek and Latin texts were written
without punctuation or separations between words, just a continuous string of
words that had to be read aloud, sounded out, in order to get the meaning of
the words in relation to each other. It wasn’t until the 9th century that
silent reading became common.
Something of the early mystery regarding the modes of reading still remains
when we consider poetry, that is, writing which is written for sound. There are
those who would argue that half the beauty of poetry is lost if it is not read
aloud; that when they read silently people learn to look for meaning rather
than respond to the beauty of what they hear. At the age of 73 WB Yeats is said
to have commented that he had spent his entire life as a poet taking out of his
poetry everything that had been written for the eye alone and using only those
words that spoke to the ear.
In Sri Aurobindo we have a poet
extraordinaire and in his epic poem Savitri,
a poetic experience in reading aloud or listening that has touched many souls.
Narad (Richard Eggenberger), who has been reading and reciting Savitri for the last 45 years or more,
reminds us that each line of the poem is mantric, and it is the power of the
mantra that can put us into contact with the spiritual experiences described in
the poem. He points to the Author’s Note at the start of Savitri, where Sri Aurobindo says that “still this is not a mere
allegory, the characters are not personified qualities, but incarnations or
emanations of living and conscious Forces with whom we can enter into concrete
touch and they take human bodies in order to help man and show him the way from
his mortal state to a divine consciousness and immortal life."
Nolini Kanta Gupta once told some students at the Sri Aurobindo International
Centre of Education that there are personalities behind the words written by
Sri Aurobindo, and if you listen carefully, letting each word sound through
your mind and heart until it strikes the soul within, “the consciousness, the
being in each line comes to you. And you find how beautiful it is. This is an
approach of love, not of the intellect to understand and explain.”
The art of listening to or reciting good poetry is then no mystery, but a
revelation to the inner being, a development of the capacity to hear and see
and feel a world of Beauty, Truth, and Love. But the beauty is one can read
aloud in the silent mind and move in the revelations that come crowding the
corridors of all our faculties. This reading aloud itself is another massive
mode of silence and when the two fuse, one goes beyond the path of the heart or
the path of the mind; there one enters into
experience of the “superconscient realms of motionless Peace”; there
“Mind motionless sleeps waiting Light’s birth.” In fact, when one goes beyond
all these formulations, these thousand expressive-persuasive approaches, then
really opens the Path of the Heart the Mother speaks of, Savitri by Heart. Until then all is preparation, a necessary and
enriching preparation to get into the transformative dynamics of Savitri itself.
RY Deshpande