Once Huta asked the Mother to explain Savitri. After a brief meditation for a moment or two, she said enthusiastically: “If I have to explain these passages, I would rather prefer to start from the very beginning and give a full explanation of the whole of Savitri.” She did it for the opening Book, The Book of Beginnings, and this has been brought out in five volumes, titled About Savitri. The Mother’s explanations along with the paintings by Huta, inspired and approved by her, are a wonderful gift to us and we can never be adequately thankful to the Mother for it. The only way of expressing our thanks could be to grow more and more in Savitri who shall give us the truth and the things of the truth. The Mother herself says,—reports Huta:

 

The work is really very good. When I concentrate and go back to the Origin of Creation, I see things as a whole in their reality and then I speak.

 

You see, each time when I speak, Sri Aurobindo comes here. And I speak exactly what he wants me to speak. It is the inner hidden truth of Savitri that he wants me to reveal.

 

Each time he comes, a wonderful atmosphere is created. I have read Savitri before but it was nothing compared to this reading.

 

Here are the explanations of the Mother pertaining to Book One Canto Two: The Issue.

Awhile, withdrawn in secret fields of thought,

Her mind moved in a many-imaged past

That lived again and saw its end approach:

Dying, it lived imperishably in her;

Transient and vanishing from transient eyes,

Invisible, a fateful ghost of self,

It bore the future on its phantom breast.

 

Along the fleeting event's far-backward trail

Regressed the stream of the insistent hours,

And on the bank of the mysterious flood

Peopled with well-loved forms now seen no more

And the subtle images of things that were,

Her witness spirit stood reviewing Time.

 

This is the way in which the Poem is built. We will know the story of Her life because She remembers it. At that celestial moment of Her existence She remembers all Her past life and then it will be told to us.

All that she once had hoped and dreamed and been,

Flew past her eagle-winged through memory's skies.

As in a many-hued flaming inner dawn,

Her life's broad highways and its sweet bypaths

Lay mapped to her sun-clear recording view,

From the bright country of her childhood's days

And the blue mountains of her soaring youth

And the paradise groves and peacock wings of Love

To joy clutched under the silent shadow of doom

In a last turn where heaven raced with hell.

 

Twelve passionate months led in a day of fate.

 

An absolute supernatural darkness falls

On man sometimes when he draws near to God:

An hour comes when fail all Nature's means;

Forced out from the protecting Ignorance

And flung back on his naked primal need,

He at length must cast from him his surface soul

And be the ungarbed entity within: 

That hour had fallen now on Savitri.

 

For those who have come upon earth fully conscious of their entire being and conscious of their Origin, there is at first a period when this consciousness gets veiled by the physical life and the body-consciousness. It withdraws deep within and waits for the hour when the outer circumstances will make it necessary for that inner self to manifest and to become fully active in the body. And generally, as life is organised, it is some more or less dramatic event that makes this change not only possible but needed.

 

Even those who have come fully conscious, because they are compelled to take birth in the body of a child, their consciousness withdraws for many years, more or less, and has not the full activity that it had in other worlds. But some circumstance, some event tears off the veil and the inner consciousness takes back its place and its activity. It is that that is fully described in these lines of Savitri.

 

It is only when the outer crust of the ordinary life is violently broken by some unexpected and tragic event that the inner consciousness has the opportunity of taking the place of this outward movement and governing fully the whole being. From the point of view of growth of consciousness, that is the justification of all these dramatic events. An eventless life is not often a progressive life. 

A point she had reached where life must be in vain

Or, in her unborn element awake,

Her will must cancel her body's destiny.

 

For only the unborn spirit's timeless power

Can lift the yoke imposed by birth in time.

 

Only the Self that builds this figure of self

Can rase the fixed interminable line

That joins these changing names, these numberless lives,

These new oblivious personalities

And keeps still lurking in our conscious acts

The trail of old forgotten thoughts and deeds,

Disown the legacy of our buried selves,

The burdensome heirship to our vanished forms

Accepted blindly by the body and soul.

 

The true self of Savitri belongs to the Eternal Consciousness and, naturally, was free. But, when accepting to take a body upon Earth, this true self is covered by so many different layers of consciousness that, unless it takes a very complete resolution to manifest and to overcome all the obstacles, it cannot act freely. Now she was put in front of the expected catastrophe in Her life, which externally would put an end to the joy of Her existence, and there was only one way to overcome this fatality. It was to make the Highest Spirit and ite Power intervene directly in order to counteract the laws of destiny.

An episode in an unremembered tale,

Its beginning lost, its motive and plot concealed,

A once living story has prepared and made

Our present fate, child of past energies.

 

The fixity of the cosmic sequences

Fastened with hidden inevitable links

She must disrupt, dislodge by her soul's force

Her past, a block on the immortal's road,

Make a rased ground and shape anew her fate.

A colloquy of the original Gods

Meeting upon the borders of the unknown,

Her soul's debate with embodied Nothingness

Must be wrestled out on a dangerous dim background:

Her being must confront its formless Cause,

Against the universe weigh its single self.

 

On the bare peak where Self is alone with Nought

And life has no sense and love no place to stand,

She must plead her case upon extinction's verge,

In the world's death-cave uphold life's helpless claim

And vindicate her right to be and love.

Altered must be Nature's harsh economy; 

Acquittance she must win from her past's bond,

An old account of suffering exhaust,

Strike out from Time the soul's long compound debt

And the heavy servitudes of the Karmic Gods,

The slow revenge of unforgiving Law

And the deep need of universal pain

And hard sacrifice and tragic consequence.

 

By the Power of Her Origin and the legacy of the One, she must overcome all the laws established in manifestation and conquer the resistance of all that been organised since centuries and millenniums and show that the Supreme is All-Powerful over His own creation.

 

In all the world as it is now, death and dissolution reign. She wants to abolish their law in order to establish the Supreme Life and Consciousness. It is the story of the conquest that will be told in the Epic.