Then the divine afflatus, spent, withdrew,

Unwanted, fading from the mortal's range.

 

A sacred yearning lingered in its trace,

The worship of a Presence and a Power

Too perfect to be held by death-bound hearts,

The prescience of a marvellous birth to come.

 

The divine afflatus withdrew although it had come with the intention of staying here, of making this world its permanent home, of love and beauty and joy. But for love and beauty and joy to stay permanently, there have to be the necessary conditions, the supporting conditions of sweetness and harmony as much as of the wideness of spirit, and luminous strength of calm, and the perception of the all-pervasive reality in objects and things and creatures. There has to be the constant attitude of worship of the Presence and Power who are the Master, gŗhaswāmī, and the Mistress-in-charge of the divine Household, gŗhaswāminī.

 

This pair—the Presence and the Power—occurs on several occasions in Savitri, for instance when Aswapati the Yogi stood on being’s naked edge. “A presence he yearned for suddenly drew close.” He surrenders entirely to her, the being of wisdom, power and delight. He has the conviction that it is she who alone can remove the indignity of our mortal life, indignity of death; his spirit gets caught in her intolerant flame and he knows that the Power that lives upon the heights must act. In order that that happens, he identifies his will with her will in the oneness of her strength: A vast surrender becomes his only strength to accomplish whatever has to be accomplished. (p. 315)

 

Now other claims had hushed in him their cry:

Only he longed to draw her presence and power.

 

And he did it. His was a yogic longing and had the efficacy of his yoga-tapasya in it. In fact, what is it that this worship of the Power and the Presence will not achieve? Truth-Being and Consciousness-Force, the Sat and the Chit parts or aspects in the divine Ananda of the highest possibilities of manifestation or, in personalized forms, Ishwara and Ishwari, Bhagavān and Bhagavati of the Bhakta with the Bhāgavat seated in his soul, Shiva and Shakti of the highest Tantric with the book of occult knowledge, Tantra-Vidyā shining in his spirit—they are the two who in the dynamism of the Real-Idea establish things in the transcendent and then in the cosmic working. Invoking them is the absolute certainty of things getting actualized here, actualized when the consent comes, the assenting Word is spoken. But also problems come with a thousand forces entering into the cosmic play. This is because of our imperfection, we bound to death. God-light comes but stay it cannot for too long, not only because of imperfection and incapacity to receive it but primarily because of the resistance for its entry in the terrestrial process. About the cosmic Being and his Power let us read the following: (Savitri, p. 111)

 

There are brighter earths and wider heavens than ours.

 

There are realms where Being broods in its own depths;

It feels in its immense dynamic core

Its nameless, unformed, unborn potencies

Cry for expression in the unshaped Vast:

Ineffable beyond Ignorance and death,

The images of its ever-living Truth

Look out from a chamber of its self-rapt soul:

As if to its own inner witness gaze

The Spirit holds up its mirrored self and works,

The power and passion of its timeless heart,

The figures of its formless ecstasy,

The grandeurs of its multitudinous might.

 

Thence comes the mystic substance of our souls

Into the prodigy of our nature's birth,

There is the unfallen height of all we are

And dateless fount of all we hope to be.

 

On every plane the hieratic Power,

Initiate of the unspoken verities,

Dreams to transcribe and make a part of life

In its own native style and living tongue

Some trait of the perfection of the Unborn,

Some vision seen in the omniscient Light,

Some far tune of the immortal rhapsodist Voice,

Some rapture of the all-creating Bliss,

Some form and plan of the Beauty unutterable.

 

Worlds are there nearer to those absolute realms,

Where the response to Truth is swift and sure

And spirit is not hampered by its frame

And hearts by sharp division seized and rent

And delight and beauty are inhabitants

And love and sweetness are the law of life.

 

A finer substance in a subtler mould

Embodies the divinity earth but dreams…

 

This is in the wide cosmic operation. But we also meet the silent soul of the world who is a single Being, a Presence and a Power (p. 291)

 

A single Person who was himself and all

And cherished Nature's sweet and dangerous throbs

Transfigured into beats divine and pure.

 

One who could love without return for love,

Meeting and turning to the best the worst,

It healed the bitter cruelties of earth

Transforming all experience to delight;

Intervening in the sorrowful paths of birth

It rocked the cradle of the cosmic Child

And stilled all weeping with its hand of joy;

It led things evil towards their secret good,

It turned racked falsehood into happy truth;

Its power was to reveal divinity.

 

Infinite, coeval with the mind of God,

It bore within itself a seed, a flame,

A seed from which the Eternal is new-born,

A flame that cancels death in mortal things.

 

Here is the God-Infant in the Universe. Here is power who would reveal divinity by canceling death that is at present prevalent in mortal things. The sense of immortality in the mortal world is what is born with it.

Here is one more instance—of presence and power coming together. Savitri is replying to Death (p. 623) that he is looking on an unfinished world which itself is assailed by him, and he saying that God is not and all is vain. But

 

In God concealed the world began to be,

Tardily it travels towards manifest God:

Out imperfection towards perfection toils,

The body is the chrysalis of the soul:

The infinite holds the finite in its arms,

Time travels towards revealed eternity.

A miracle structure of the eternal Mage,

Matters its mystery hides from its own eyes,

A scripture written out in cryptic signs,

An occult document of the All-Wonderful’s art.

All here bares witness to his secret might,

In all we feel his presence and his power.

 

As a matter of fact, this creation is a blaze of his sovereignty’s sun, though our reason might get baffled by his ways. There is evil here no doubt, and falsehood and sorrow and suffering and ignorance and death. But then they appear to be no more than just incidents on the long path of his truth and awareness and joy. There might be great reluctance in accepting the gifts offered to us by God, but there is the insistent Power and Presence which will do things, do things here also supramentally. Until then

 

Only a little the God-light can stay:

Spiritual beauty illumining human sight

Lines with its passion and mystery Matter's mask

And squanders eternity on a beat of Time.

 

As when a soul draws near the sill of birth,

Adjoining mortal time to Timelessness,

A spark of deity lost in Matter's crypt

Its lustre vanishes in the inconscient planes,

That transitory glow of magic fire

So now dissolved in bright accustomed air.

 

The message ceased and waned the messenger.

 

If its lustre vanishes in the Inconscient planes, if the dawn fails to enduringly break on horizon of the death-bound world, then it cannot be the supramental lustre, it cannot be the divine Dawn, the wide shining dawn as the Veda would insist. The cause of this retreat has to be discovered and then the solution found. That is the main theme, the purport of the epic, of Savitri given to us by Sri Aurobindo. In it the cause of the problem is traced and occult-yogically the solution triumphantly worked out.

 

 

 

(Savitri, p. 5)