The mystery of the Savitri-tale is, Satyavan’s death had to take place in the lonely forest, in total isolation, without any inkling of it to anybody; it had to take place not in the hermitage, but there where none else was present. This aspect of the episode is very significant indeed, even as luminously charged with the occult it is. That is the greatness of the story also, of the Savitri-legend narrated by the ancient seers. By holding the prophecy to herself only, Savitri kind of strengthened her will and her soul-power to face the event; everything got firmly and finely quintessenced into it, without the deleterious possibility of any dispersion of the effort that should go into it. Like spiritual experiences that take wings when made public, they evaporating or getting dissipated, this would have lost its effectiveness had she divulged it to others. The death in the forest where there was no human habitation is a remarkable insight of the giver of the story of Savitri.

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Savitri is alone in the forest with the corpse of her husband on her forsaken breast. The mighty and dreadful God has come to take away the soul of Satyavan, come at the appointed hour, the hour that was foretold by Narad. But even in this condition she is exceptionally distinctive than what a common person would normally be. She is alone. She has absolutely no fear. She is serene and calm, and griefless, and still like a breathing statue. Not a trace of emotionalism and associated tantrums that could go with the occurrence of such an event is present. Not by her thoughts and feelings and human reactions does she appraise the situation. It is as though she the human is no more there, as though she herself is dead, as though in that death her own mortality has disappeared, just disappeared. Her yogic condition is charged with the supernatural in its dense and luminous occult contents and self-assuring protection. The result is, in a strong and ceaseless stream of light, the divine Force enters into her soul and takes its full possession.

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Savitri is the only one who knows in the forest hermitage about the death of Satyavan on the foretold day and hour; neither he nor her parents-in-law nor the great accomplished rishis has any idea about it. But she has understood the meaning and purpose of it and, such was her greatness that, she keeps it hid from everybody. Why does she do that? By sharing this knowledge, could it not be that they would have worked out another approach to deal with the situation? But deep is Savitri’s understanding of human nature and the chances were that she would have been more cursed that assisted. Deeper yet is the occult aspect of this knowledge. By making it public she would have actually played into the hands of Death himself. All kinds of forces would have entered into operation and these would have caused great damage to her work. The significant fact is also that, death is to occur not in the hermitage but in the lonely forest when Satyavan and Savitri are alone, none else being present anywhere around, not even a passer-by happening to go that way. Savitri has taken the load of the human kind on herself and she knows that she is not going to get any help from anybody if she were to disclose it; on the contrary, it was bound to complicate the matter, frustrate the entire attempt, frustrate by dissipating the yogic power she had gathered in her soul. Therefore, as far as human Savitri is concerned, that whole situation makes her condition psychologically extremely difficult. On the one hand she cannot disclose what was impending, and on the other, she has to bear the reality, the time-born harshness of the moment all alone, absolutely all alone. The poet is handling with great deftness this emotional condition of Savitri, her plight also, she yet standing far above the emotionalism of the ordinary. She is in it yet she remains calm and composed, her spirit towering above all this mundane or even cosmic, it in oneness with her transcendental spirit.

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Savitri is different from all that we the common human beings are. She takes human birth no doubt, but always she keeps the contact with her divine origin intact. Even when young and growing, her companions and playmates were dazzled by her beauty-wisdom-splendour. As a fully developed and matured maiden she was too great for the mortal prince to espouse her in marriage; he was repelled by her exceptional personality. In spite of this she seems to be one who is denied the felicity that is her native right. Was that denial meant for her to become yet greater than her heavenly transcendental Savitri-hood? This should also imply that, she as though already knows the ordeal through which she had to pass as an aspect of her mortal birth. She accepts mortal state to conquer mortality in the mortal world.

It must have been pretty cruel of the godhead to await Savitri’s hour of ordeal. That would almost look rather nasty-spiteful of him. In any case, there is no escape for Savitri from the painful tribulation. She must meet Yama, the God of Death. He is the formidable Spirit of Antagonism born from Inconscience in response to the arrival of Life upon Earth, one who in his dark and terrible, hostile-repulsive form nullifies all the wonderful gains that come in the soul’s progress. As long as Death is present, things will always go wrong,—says the Mother. Yet that seems to be the way that progress can be made in the existing circumstance. But with Savitri’s coming, her taking the mortal birth, that need not be so. Now things should happen without death.

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A few have caught the flame, cleansed their souls in the Hour of God. But even they those who have caught the flame are not ready enough to live and move in the wide Eternity of God, in its splendour and in its glory, live here upon earth in its brightness, bright in the flame of immortality. When the moment comes, it is the Grace that comes to lift us up; the moment comes, and it is not we who cause that moment; what is expected of us is to be always ready to receive it. But hardly there is anyone who perceives its coming and, if at all he perceives, does he receive it. “I want twelve disciples to change the world.” But where are they? And one will betray him before the cock crows in the morning: "It is he to whom I shall give a piece of bread when I have dipped it." The grace will come and the will is there, but only when grace becomes will and will grace is there a possibility of redemption. Much beyond redemption is the total change of nature, transformation even of the physical, it opening to the grace and the will. That is Savitri’s task, and she has to do it by doing yoga-tapasya so that our will-and-action is identified with the highest possible will-and-grace.

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The cross Savitri has to carry has been made known to her by Narad. She has chosen Satyavan as her lover and husband and she is firm about the choice irrespective of whatever it might entail. Narad is going round and round, and not coming to the point straightaway. He knows everything, and already the royal audience has understood that there is something ominous about what Savitri has decided to do. But now the queen-mother of Savitri, Malawi, is insistent and demands of the sage to come out with the truth though harsh it might be to bear. Perhaps the sage was waiting for this demand on him, because one of the intentions he had in his mind was to steel the will of Savitri, to remain firm in her decision in spite of the calamitous prophecy he was about to make. In the process he was to set free the spring of cosmic Fate. So it was not just the calamity pertaining to an individual, it was through that individual’s deep and irreparable misfortune that the very future of the universe was going to be decided. So Narad is going to make the mysterious announcement with that full sense of responsibility. He even asserts that the great Gods use the pain of human hearts as a sharp axe to cut the path of the cosmic future, the path of glory and triumph—as though that pain is serving a kind of noble purpose. So Christ must carry the Cross, and Sri Aurobindo must suffer harshness and severity of the solitary imprisonment, the infuriating onslaught of its madness, and Savitri must bear the agony of the death of Satyavan exactly one year after the marriage. So now he sets universal destiny free in that epoch-making hour.

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Bearing the Cross and undergoing a harrowing Jail experience perhaps are relatively small aspects of the work to do which the Divine comes as the incarnate. There are deeper issues, far more deep than these ‘externalities’ visible to us. Of those deeper things we might get some idea by going through a few passages in Savitri. Let us take, for instance, the frightening-chilling, and also the daring experience of Aswapati when he entered into the domains of the Inconscient Life.

As in a shapeless beast's intangible jaws,
Gripped, strangled by that lusting viscous blot,
Attracted to some black and giant mouth
And swallowing throat and a huge belly of doom,
His being from its own vision disappeared
Drawn towards depths that hungered for its fall.
A formless void suppressed his struggling brain,
A darkness grim and cold oppressed his flesh,
A whispered grey suggestion chilled his heart;
Haled by a serpent-force from its warm home
And dragged to extinction in blank vacancy
Life clung to its seat with cords of gasping breath;
Lapped was his body by a tenebrous tongue. …
There crawled through every tense and aching nerve
Leaving behind its poignant quaking trail
A nameless and unutterable fear.

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After his acquittal in the Alipore Bomb Case on 6 May 1909 Sri Aurobindo was given an emotional reception at Uttarpara on 30 May 1909. This historical event should mark an important landmark not only in his life but also of the country for whose freedom and for whose values and ideals he spared no effort and did as an assigned task coming from the divine Instructor whom he obeyed implicitly, obeyed even at his personal risk of serious nature. In his speech at Uttarpara Sri Aurobindo disclosed some of the self-transforming and world-transforming things that had happened during the one-year period of incarceration. The speech was first published in his weekly Karmayogin, June 1909. Sometime during this incarceration he wrote a remarkable poem inviting those who heard the call of the country to join him even if that should entail hardship. Against him were beating the wind and the storm, even as he was sporting with solitude and had made misadventure a friend; it is under these countries that the challenge was thrown to the brave and the upright. He declared himself to be the Spirit of freedom and pride and only they who could be kinsmen to danger could join him and walk by his side. Only those souls who are full of wisdom and strength, the brahmateja and kshātrateja, will be in a position to accept this remarkable invitation, invitation for the righteous conduct of life even in its difficult and trying circumstance.

But why should the great suffer? Or is their suffering only an outward thing, for show to the trusting? Is there any real content in it? In other words, do they really have pain and grief and ache, the agony of harrowing experience? This will be a ridiculous question when one knows in every detail the crucifixion of Christ. Sri Aurobindo himself wrote in a letter to his brother Barin about the severe and painful work he was engaged in. In another context he answered Nirodbaran about these matters in considerable detail. Perhaps suffering on the cross or in a solitary cell in the jail are much smaller aspects than the inner wounds they have to bear. Who has any idea about them? None. But let us first read the speech Sri Aurobindo gave at Uttarpara on 30 May 1909.

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Sri Aurobino's account of his experiences as an undertrial prisoner in Alipore Jail, Calcutta. Arrested for conspiracy in May 1908, Sri Aurobindo spent one full year in jail while the British Government, in a protracted trial, tried to implicate him in various revolutionary activities. Acquitted and released in May 1909, he wrote a series of articles in Bengali in the journal Suprabhat describing his life in prison and courtroom.

Here he begins.

“On Friday, May 1, 1908, I was sitting in the Bande Mataram office, when Shrijut Shyamsundar Chakravarty handed over a telegram from Muzaffarpur. On reading it I learned of a bomb outrage in which two European ladies had been killed. In that day's issue of the "Empire" I read another news item that the Police Commissioner had said that he knew the people involved in the murder and that they would soon be put under arrest. At that time I had no idea that I happened to be the main target of suspicion and that according to the police I was the chief killer, the instigator and secret leader of the young terrorists and revolutionaries. I did not know that that day would mean the end of a chapter of my life, and that there stretched before me a year's imprisonment during which period all my human relations would cease, that for a whole year I would have to live, beyond the pale of society, like an animal in a cage. And when I would re-enter the world of activity it would not be the old familiar Aurobindo Ghose. Rather it would be a new being, a new character, intellect, life, mind, embarking upon a new course of action that would come out of the ashram at Alipore. I have spoken of a year's imprisonment. It would have been more appropriate to speak of a year's living in a forest, in an ashram, hermitage… The only result of the wrath of the British Government was that I found God.

On Friday night I was sleeping without a worry. At about five in the morning my sister rushed to my room in an agitated manner and called me out by name. I got up. The next moment the small room was filled with armed policemen…”

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26:1 And it came to pass, when Jesus had finished all these sayings, he said unto his disciples, 2 Ye know that after two days is the feast of the passover, and the Son of man is betrayed to be crucified. 3 Then assembled together the chief priests, and the scribes, and the elders of the people, unto the palace of the high priest, who was called Caiaphas, 4 And consulted that they might take Jesus by subtilty, and kill him. 5 But they said, Not on the feast day, lest there be an uproar among the people. ... 22 Pilate saith unto them, What shall I do then with Jesus which is called Christ? They all say unto him, Let him be crucified. 23 And the governor said, Why, what evil hath he done? But they cried out the more, saying, Let him be crucified. 24 When Pilate saw that he could prevail nothing, but that rather a tumult was made, he took water, and washed his hands before the multitude, saying, I am innocent of the blood of this just person: see ye to it. 25 Then answered all the people, and said, His blood be on us, and on our children. ... 35 And they crucified him, and parted his garments, casting lots: that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet, They parted my garments among them, and upon my vesture did they cast lots. 36 And sitting down they watched him there; 37 And set up over his head his accusation written, THIS IS JESUS THE KING OF THE JEWS. 38 Then were there two thieves crucified with him, one on the right hand, and another on the left. 39 And they that passed by reviled him, wagging their heads, 40 And saying, Thou that destroyest the temple, and buildest it in three days, save thyself. If thou be the Son of God, come down from the cross. 41 Likewise also the chief priests mocking him, with the scribes and elders, said, 42 He saved others; himself he cannot save. If he be the King of Israel, let him now come down from the cross, and we will believe him. 43 He trusted in God; let him deliver him now, if he will have him: for he said, I am the Son of God. 44 The thieves also, which were crucified with him, cast the same in his teeth. 45 Now from the sixth hour there was darkness over all the land unto the ninth hour. 46 And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? that is to say, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? 47 Some of them that stood there, when they heard that, said, This man calleth for Elias. 48 And straightway one of them ran, and took a spunge, and filled it with vinegar, and put it on a reed, and gave him to drink. 49 The rest said, Let be, let us see whether Elias will come to save him. 50 Jesus, when he had cried again with a loud voice, yielded up the ghost. 51 And, behold, the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom; and the earth did quake, and the rocks rent.

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Sri Aurobindo writes: “All true Truth of love and of the works of love the psychic being accepts in their place: but its flame mounts always upward and it is eager to push the ascent from lesser to higher degrees of Truth, since it knows that only by the ascent to a highest Truth and the descent of that highest Truth can Love be delivered from the cross and placed upon the throne; for the cross is the sign of the Divine Descent barred and marred by the transversal line of a cosmic deformation which turns it into a stake of suffering and misfortune. Only by the ascent to the original Truth can the deformation be healed and all the works of love, as too all the works of knowledge and of life, be restored to a divine significance and become part of an integral spiritual existence.”

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Earth-nature fears the assault of ether and of fire; it trembles at the naked power of Truth; it cannot bear the might and sweetness of the absolute Voice. When the Divine Mother stood in front of Aswapati, to give him a boon, she spoke in a voice “absolute and wise”, addressing him as “the Son of Strength”. Aswapati’s was no longer the frail earth-nature to break under the weight of her Presence; he could stand there firmly and resolutely, even insisting on what he wanted from her. But for us, for wee-bits, it will be an assault of fire and of ether; under it we will easily crumble or get crushed. Too great her presence for mortality to bear,—“too immense my danger and my joy,” as she tells Aswapati. Man is too weak to bear the Infinite’s weight and truth born too soon might break the imperfect earth. Such is the danger she herself indicates. If such is the answer Aswapati get, then it will be perhaps safer for the petty humanity to remain what it is. It will be only through the long centuries of preparation that there might be a chance of our standing the onslaught of the divine influx, the rush of the ether and the impetuous all-burning all-consuming fire.

For the aspirant soul there are powers of light and truth, the guardians to protect it from the evil and the hostile. There are the four great luminous kings, Varuna, Mitra, Bhaga, Aryaman, to take it safely on the heavenward route. The beauty is “they had read the riddle of death and found the secret of immortality.” They can protect us against the assault of the ether and the fire themselves.

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Savitri coming as an incarnation means she accepting the mortal’s lot, the indignity, the ignominy that is there in the human life. The Immortal has consented to share, the lot, the plight of the suffering soul, all the uncertainties that fill this creature’s daily life. In a way it is as if thus alone could she rise to a yet higher state of immortality. Indeed, if the gods wish to rise to higher worlds they must come down and take a human birth. Progress is here, and this beautiful birth though downhearted and full of misfortune and affliction is the Creator’s wonderful boon given to heighten the soul in the glory, in the possibilities of the widening manifestation. This is what the Vishnu Purana says: gods come here to make progress, the progress is here and nowhere else. This is what Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have said a number of times. But most of the gods are happy with their lot. Perhaps they can afford to be so; perhaps they do not wish to undergo the travail that is associated with this life of the mortal. But we are tied to this condition, to this state of things; in fact by that very token we will not be allowed to remain where we are.

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Hard is it to persuade earth-nature’s change. Harder is it also to impose change on the working of the nature of the earth. The issue is constitutional. The habits are pathological, related to body and health, of various kinds. The last habit is the habit of death. But, before that, there are the habits of suffering, error, falsehood, ignorance, gloom, pain, inertia, tamas, depression, fear, bhaya; there are suggestions of sadness, despair, of suicide, suggestions from what the Mother calls “the thieves of the vital world”. All these are parts of or consequences of our physical and sometimes psychological makeup and hard they are to eliminate. That is what we are presently composed of. Savitri’s task is connected with it, and she has to pay a heavy price, by accepting this world’s ignominy and its stubbornness, stubbornness of the mortal life. Its entire past stands against all progress.

Rishi Agastya was engaged in a long and arduous tapasya. But then he felt that he was not making progress. He was told to get up from the thick grass seat on which he was sitting and meditating. The moment he got up, flames rose up from it. He realised that, all along, his past samskaras, the old habits were getting consumed in the fire of the tapasya. Agni Pavaka, Fire the Purifier has to be kindled if such a change is to come about. Only such tapasya can perhaps persuade earth-nature’s change. The Avatars do it for us, for the entire earth.

There are a thousand things that happen in the subconscient, or in the occult, or else in half-dark half-bright subtle domains. And there are yet hungry lusty swallowing abysses below them. Here we are, we who laugh and weep; we suffer the stroke, exult in victory, struggle for the crown, bleed with the Fate’s whips. But change we do not strive for. Our nature remains crooked…

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Savitri had brought with her defeatless power, wide consciousness, bliss, calm delight, the delight that the Upanishads would say weds one soul to all, the delight that is the key to the flaming doors of ecstasy. But the unfortunate fact is littleness of the life that is ours, ignorant and death-bound. It denies all that she had brought with her; she uses not the key for the doors of ecstasy. Consequently life must suffer. The key to the flaming doors of ecstasy is to a life that is vaster and brighter than the life that is in heavens. It is also a life that does not remain static, is not inert and stationary in its frozen typal joy of fixed worlds, confined to its own form of happiness, forms that are only expressive and not determinative of the worlds to which they belong.

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Heaven should grow native on mortal soil. Will that happen? can that happen? There is the blinded quest in the heart of the helpless creature living on this soil. The face of the future is covered and the cycles of time, the great Manavantarsa roll in their futile pursuit. But how long shall this creation be so, unavailing, devoid of the sense of divinity if it is there at all within? Happily, however, there is also the deep urge and there is somewhere a perception that this creation is meant for something greater and nobler. And the call goes and the transcendental divine Power responds. She responds to deal with the issue of this suffering and burdensome mortality. Savitri awakes among the human tribes, ready to lift the load of worries and the afflictions springing up from the dark nature of things as they exist here at present. But what is it that she is offered in return? Nothing, really nothing, but she has no expectation, in the least; the minimum that is required, that her work be done is more or less absent. Earth's grain that needs the sap of pleasure and tears rejects the undying rapture's boon. The daughter of infinity receives the passion-flower of love and doom. A prodigal of her rich divinity, she has lent to men her self and all she was, lent with the hope that heaven might native grow on mortal soil. Her work is to work out that hope.

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Aswapati receives the boon from the Divine Mother when she promises him that one will be born and redeem the world. She the Eternal now steps into swift movements of Time, the rolling seasons of the earth: the Timeless enters into the rhythms of cyclic Time. She is conceived, she is born, she grows rapidly like a flame, bright and imperial and conquering—she seems at once to found a mightier race. One who has been coming here again and again, she has taken up yet again her unfinished task; to it she awakes among these human tribes. The great expectation is that this time it will be completed, the task for which she has been coming repeatedly. Now the embodied Guest is there to see it through. Because there is a kind of divine sponsorship of it, it becomes an assurance that it will succeed. That she belongs to Ishwarkoti is brought out everywhere in Savitri. Let us read the description, for instance, of the birth and growth of divine incarnation. She comes in response to the ardent prayer-desire Aswapati carried to the supreme Shakti standing on the verge of manifestation. She comes and weeps not fallen to mortality. One had returned from the transcendent planes and bore anew the load of mortal breath. Once more that Will put on an earthly shape. The Power within her shaped her moulding sense. She grows to her sweet and full maidenhood, and each minute becomes a throb of beauty's heart, the hours tuned to a honey-toned content. This is so because of this beauty an occult godhead is the cause. She a silent warrior pacing in her city of strength, calls by her aspiration high destiny down. Even as a child she is conscious of her high mission—because within her heart is seated the embodied Guest.

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When Pavitra was guided into meditation by Sri Aurobindo, practising the separation of Purusha from Prakriti, aspiring for his personal liberation, Mukti, he got the descent of the Divine Power from above, and all his meditation changed; it got centered on it and he became more receptive, more open to it. In this process, he asked Sri Aurobindo about the completion of what he started to do: the separation of Purusha from Prakriti and his final liberation. Sri Aurobindo answered that it was surely going to happen, but was not important anymore, for the Shakti was already working in this ādhāra, the ready support, and she knew better what to do and how to do it.

This Shakti is of the nature of Ishwara-Shakti, where the separation of Purusha and Prakriti is no more an issue. In fact the whole Vedic tradition is based on this Ishwarakoti power, where the realization of the Self was seen in the context of manifestation and not as separation from it. The idea of liberation, Mukti, as we know it now, is a later idea. In the view of a Vedic scholar it cannot be sanctioned by the Divine Shakti; therefore we have only few liberated souls, and mainly Avatars and Vibhutis, who had something else to accomplish in the world.

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When the heavenly Psyche is discovered, the real journey begins, the Journey toward and then in the Real. Savitri is told to first find her soul, that she does in it her assigned work. The moment human Savitri got this divine command, ādéśa, in her anguished human plight, she stepped back from her surface soul and entered into the dream or swapna state. There she witnessed the entire cosmic Past and the march of evolution; she also saw how on the long scene arrived the apelike man, vānara, ready to become a fuller mental being, the manomaya puruşa proper, the leader of the embodied vital being. This bowed apelike creature gave rise, inevitably, to the human: man not the descendant of the Darwinian ape, but the son of Manu. This son of Manu descended upon earth when the human body was ready, the Upanishadic well-fashioned body into which the cosmic gods can do their work. All this happened when the apelike creature’s body became a fit instrument for such a descent to take place.

Savitri continues to move through the swapna state and sees the possibility a greater birth, that there can be a more beautiful expression past this human form. This agreeable being’s beautiful expression can reach his fount of immortality; he can call the Godhead into his mortal life. What was concealed in the cosmic past, in the time’s deep and obscure subconscience, in the brightsome bosom of time, got revealed to Savitri. But the wonderful revelation was that it was accompanied by the descent of a portion of the mighty Mother in this human part of hers. This is something absolutely marvellous and Savitri became the centre of action to mould the future.

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In the context of the embodied Guest within making no response two questions might arise. There is first a difference between the Guest in the heart’s cave of Savitri and the guest sitting in our heart’s cave. Savitri belongs to Ishwarkoti and we to Jivakoti, one to the Divine category, the other to the human.

Could that mean that the Psyche, the embodied Guest within, is not identically the same Divine Agni in all? The only difference between the different individuals will be the difference in the degree to which it has "come out" in each person. That would be a glorious hope for us, that by following the glorious, the transcendent example of Savitri given to us by Sri Aurobindo we too might be able to push out the veil surrounding our psyche. In other words, can the Yoga of Savitri given in Savitri also be our Yoga, that it can be practised by any authentic seeker of the spirit? Is the Book of Yoga meant only for Savitri and that it is not a prescription for us all? Is it meant for any seeker-soul, each and every soul?

This cannot be, it is not so. In fact, it is Yoga distinctly meant for Savitri, Savitri alone, and it cannot be for anyone else. This cannot be the Yoga even for Aswapati.

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