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
Rejected the undying rapture's
boon:
Offered to the daughter of infinity
Her passion-flower of love and doom
she gave.
In vain now seemed the splendid
sacrifice.
A prodigal of her rich divinity,
Her self and all she was she had
lent to men,
Hoping her greater being to implant
And in their body's lives
acclimatise
That heaven might native grow on
mortal soil.
The daughter of infinity has taken
birth upon earth. She is the Radiant Daughter, kanyā téjasvinī of Vyasa
but what we are offering to her is the flower of pain, anguish, distress,
misery. She accepts all this because thus only it might bring to this suffering
mortal creature the prospects of immortality in a divine body, divine body here.
Savitri is one who is the resident
of the worlds of the supramental creation but here where we dwell are the
worlds of the Ignorance, worlds of mind and life and body separated in
consciousness from their source. She descends into this lesser triple universe.
Indeed, she has consented to the great sacrifice and has put on like a mask the
soul and forms of the Ignorance. But personally too she has stooped to descend
here into the darkness that she may lead it to the Light, into the Falsehood
and Error that she may convert it to the Truth, into this Death that she may
turn it to godlike Life, into this world-pain and its obstinate sorrow and
suffering that she may end it in the transforming ecstasy of her sublime
Ananda. In her deep and greater love for her children she has consented to put
on herself the cloak of this obscurity, condescended to bear the attacks and
torturing influences of the powers of Darkness and the Falsehood, borne to pass
through the portals of the birth that is a death, taken upon herself the pangs
and sorrows and sufferings of creation, since it seemed that thus alone could
it be lifted to the Light and Joy and Truth and eternal Life. This is the great
sacrifice of the Purusha, but much more deeply the holocaust of Prakriti. When
she works here, she works to establish the supreme ecstasies, the highest
heights, the noblest aims, the largest vistas. Or else she throws the spell of
the intoxicating sweetness of the Divine, causing miraculous streams of an
entrancing Ananda to flow. Hers is also the Power of Work and the spirit of
perfection and order, presiding over details of organization and execution,
relation of parts and effective combination of forces and unfailing exactitude
of result and fulfilment. The science and craft and technique of things belong
to that province. Carelessness and negligence and indolence she abhors; all
scamped and hasty and shuffling work, all clumsiness and à peu près and
misfire, all false adaptation and misuse of instruments and faculties and
leaving of things undone or half done is offensive and foreign to her temper.
When her work is finished, nothing has been forgotten, no part has been
misplaced or omitted or left in a faulty condition; all is solid, accurate,
complete, admirable. Nothing short of a perfect perfection satisfies her and
she is ready to face an eternity of toil if that is needed for the fullness of
her creation. Only when these powers have founded their harmony and freedom of
movement in the transformed mind and life and body, can the other rarer Powers
manifest in the earth movement and the supramental action becomes possible. The
supramental change is the thing decreed and inevitable in the evolution of the
earth-consciousness; for its upward ascent is not ended and mind is not its last
summit. But the change may arrive, take form and endure, there is needed the
call from below with a will to recognise and not deny the Light when it comes,
and there is needed the sanction of the Supreme from above. The power that
mediates between the sanction and the call is the presence and power of the
Divine Mother. The Mother's power and not any human endeavour and tapasya can
alone rend the lid and tear the covering and shape the vessel and bring down
into this world of obscurity and falsehood and death and suffering Truth and
Light and Life divine and the immortal's Ananda. [What
I have done here is to use selectively the text of The Mother running
over some 30 pages of the booklet, not everywhere keeping it as is generally done in quotations. The purpose is to focus attention on the
Incarnate’s rich divinity and her present travail. This is thus a free
adaptation of the original has been made in the topical context of the Savitri-passage.]
Thus heaven might native grow on mortal soil. That heav’n| might nat|ive grow|
on mort|al soil|: What a perfect iambic pentameter this line! Perfection of
expression going with the perfection of vision! implying their realisation!
In that perfection the daughter of infinity accepts all suffering, accepts to
pass through the portals of the birth that is a veritable death. The theme, nay
the experience, of crucifixion is the perfect illustration of the mystery of
this occult working. Regarding the Image of the Cross, here let me quote from Sonia
Dyne’s article Savitri by Heart:
Images of the crucifixion of Christ
are so frequently a part of the architecture of churches around the world that
they have lost a great part of their ability to shock or provoke a question in
the mind of the viewer, unless he or she is a committed Christian. Sri
Aurobindo has much to teach us about the meaning of the cross in human history,
for his vision of the Divine was not limited to the doctrine of any one
religion but soared above to find the essential truth behind the lives of the
great avataric teachers of mankind.
In one of his aphorisms Sri Aurobindo writes: “There are four very great events
in history, the siege of
But in what way did Christ from his
cross bring about such a far-reaching effect on the consciousness of the West?
According to Sri Aurobindo, each of the great avatars manifested on earth an
aspect of the Divine, and Christ himself manifested in human terms the divine
love and compassion at a time when man was in danger of losing touch with these
qualities of his soul. The divine Love Christ manifested in his life and death
brought not only a new hope and strength of purpose to those who had felt
powerless and full of despair in a world seemingly given over to oppression and
evil, but in a mystical sense it also delivered mankind from subjection to
these powers. This is how Sonia Dyne looks at the avataric role of Christ. It
is the flowering of the psychic being, of its coming forward in the
transactions of the collective world, and that has been the decisive
contribution of this divine incarnation—as though a price had to be paid for
it. The intensity of the Bhakti movement is a positive gain of the crucifixion
that changed the course of time in a radical manner. Psychic Mysticism and
Sufism, unknown to the past, brought God nearer to us as much as it took us
closer to him.
The popularity of the film The Passion of
Christ has once again focused attention on the meaning of the life of
Jesus. The film follows the events leading to the crucifixion and the final
journey along the Via Dolorosa—the Way of Suffering. A Christian writer has
recently summed up that meaning in these words:
As we follow Jesus’s journey to
No one has written more movingly about the passion of Christ than Sri Aurobindo
in Savitri (The Book of Fate, Canto 2). To him, the cross was a symbol
of “a seemingly eternal world-pain which appears falsely to replace the eternal
bliss.” It is the world-soul which hangs upon the cross, until the time when
mankind will cease to embrace and accept the drama of conflict and fratricide.
Men are in love with grief and sin, says Sri Aurobindo—therefore Christ still
hangs on the cross in
And then apropos of Ishwarakoti and Jivakoti this from the Synthesis of Yoga
is very revealing, marvellous indeed:
It must be remembered that there is
always a difference between the supreme Supermind of the omniscient and
omnipotent Ishwara and that which can be attained by the Jiva. The human being
is climbing out of the ignorance and when he ascends into the supramental
nature, he will find in it grades of its ascension, and he must first form the
lower grades and limited steps before he rises to higher summits. He will enjoy
there the full essential light, power, Ananda of the infinite self by oneness
with the Spirit, but in the dynamical expression it must determine and
individualise itself according to the nature of the self-expression which the
transcendent and universal Spirit seeks in the Jiva. It is God-realisation and
God-expression which is the object of our Yoga and more especially of its
dynamic side, it is a divine self-expression in us of the Ishwara, but under
the conditions of humanity and through the divinised human nature.
So if we have to use the current
philosophical language of the human potential, we can say that it lies in
realization of the powers of the Spirit and their expression in our life, life
that must grow under the Sun of Truth-and-Beauty-and-Joy. It is a potential
that does not get dried up, but rather becomes richer and richer in the
infinity of what is noble and harmonious and dynamic. Our celebration is in the
triple majesty of the creative will working out things in this vast and
multifaceted manifestation. Such is the stupendous scope for the Jivakoti, even
as the Ishwarkoti is there to pour down its exhaustless transcendences in the
unfolding movement of the growing and expanding Time, in eternity of the
eternal Time. Savitri’s coming is an aspect of that movement. It is for this
that the divine Guest is seated here in the secret heart cave. He is not only
the propelling force acting from within; it is he who finally emerges in
activity.