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. Here it is: (pp. 211-19)
Book II Canto VII: The Descent into Night
A greater darkness waited, a worse
reign,
If worse can be where all is evil's
extreme;
Yet to the cloaked the uncloaked is
naked worst.
There God and Truth and the
supernal Light
Had never been or else had power no
more.
As when one slips in a deep
moment's trance
Over mind's border into another
world,
He crossed a boundary whose
stealthy trace
Eye could not see but only the soul
feel.
Into an armoured fierce domain he
came
And saw himself wandering like a
lost soul
Amid grimed walls and savage slums
of Night.
Around him crowded grey and squalid
huts
Neighbouring proud palaces of
perverted Power,
Inhuman quarters and demoniac
wards.
A pride in evil hugged its
wretchedness;
A misery haunting splendour pressed
those fell
Dun suburbs of the cities of
dream-life.
There Life displayed to the
spectator soul
The shadow depths of her strange
miracle.
A strong and fallen goddess without
hope,
Obscured, deformed by some dire
Gorgon spell,
As might a harlot empress in a bouge,
Nude, unashamed, exulting she
upraised
Her evil face of perilous beauty
and charm
And, drawing panic to a shuddering
kiss
Twixt the magnificence of her fatal
breasts,
Allured to their abyss the spirit's
fall. …
Repulsion stimulated inert desire;
Agony was made a red-spiced food
for bliss,
Hatred was trusted with the work of
lust
And torture took the form of an
embrace;
A ritual anguish consecrated death;
Worship was offered to the
Undivine. …
A wild-beast passion crept from
secret Night
To watch its prey with fascinating
eyes:
Around him like a fire with
sputtering tongues
There lolled and laughed a bestial
ecstasy;
The air was packed with longings
brute and fierce;
Crowding and stinging in a
monstrous swarm
Pressed with a noxious hum into his
mind
Thoughts that could poison Nature's
heavenliest breath,
Forcing reluctant lids assailed the
sight
Acts that revealed the mystery of
Hell. …
A lone discoverer in these menacing
realms…
He wrestled with powers that
snatched from mind its light
And smote from him their clinging
influences.
Soon he emerged in a dim wall-less
space. …
A travelling dot on downward roads
of Dusk
Mid barren fields and barns and
straggling huts
And a few crooked and phantasmal
trees,
He faced a sense of death and
conscious Void.
But still a hostile Life unseen was
there
Whose deathlike poise resisting
light and truth
Made living a bleak gap in nullity.
He heard the grisly voices that
deny …
The sky above a communiqué of Doom,
He strove to shield his spirit from
despair,
But felt the horror of the growing
Night
And the Abyss rising to claim his
soul.
Then ceased the abodes of creatures
and their forms
And solitude wrapped him in its
voiceless folds.
All vanished suddenly like a
thought expunged;
His spirit became an empty listening
gulf
Void of the dead illusion of a
world:
Nothing was left, not even an evil
face;
He was alone with the grey python
Night. …
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.
Existence smothered travailed to
survive;
Hope strangled perished in his
empty soul,
Belief and memory abolished died
And all that helps the spirit in
its course.
There crawled through every tense
and aching nerve
Leaving behind its poignant quaking
trail
A nameless and unutterable fear.
As a sea nears a victim bound and
still,
The approach alarmed his mind for
ever dumb
Of an implacable eternity
Of pain inhuman and intolerable.
This he must bear, his hope of
heaven estranged;
He must ever exist without
extinction's peace
In a slow suffering Time and
tortured Space,
An anguished nothingness his
endless state.
A lifeless vacancy was now his
breast,
And in the place where once was
luminous thought,
Only remained like a pale
motionless ghost
An incapacity for faith and hope
And the dread conviction of a
vanquished soul
Immortal still but with its godhead
lost,
Self lost and God and touch of
happier worlds.
But he endured, stilled the vain
terror, bore
The smothering coils of agony and
affright;
Then peace returned and the soul's
sovereign gaze.
To the blank horror a calm Light
replied:
Immutable, undying and unborn,
Mighty and mute the Godhead in him
woke
And faced the pain and danger of
the world.
He mastered the tides of Nature
with a look:
He met with his bare spirit naked
Hell.
Here is a remarkable sonnet Sri
Aurobindo wrote in 1938 when the work of supramental descent in his physical
was moving apace. He had made an assignation with the Night who with her mind born from Inconscience was standing across the path of the divine Event. It is to her unlit temple that the Yogi is making a pilgrimage, an act of exceptional daring.
I made an assignation with the
Night;
In the abyss was fixed our
rendezvous:
In my breast carrying God’s
deathless light,
I came her dark and dangerous heart
to woo.
I left the glory of the illumined
Mind
And the calm rapture of the
divinised soul
And travelled through a vastness
dim and blind,
To the grey shore where her
ignorant waters roll.
I walk by the chill wave through
the dull slime
And still that weary journeying
knows no end;
Lost is the lustrous godhead beyond
Time,
There comes no voice of the
celestial Friend,
And yet I know my footprints’ track
shall be
A pathway towards Immortality.
26-7-1938
18-8-1944