Here we have the celebration of the arrival of the warrior with a “conqueror’s sword”. Savitri’s one single task is to dissolve Death. The “seeker of the Unknown and the Unborn, carrying a light from the Ineffable”, she shall concentrate on removing the last veil of Death spread over the great Mystery of this mortal creation. The epic Savitri asserts it, asserts it in the greatness of her spirit. In its wake other things will follow. Removal of Death is the prerequisite, the necessary and sufficient condition for the truer growth of the soul of the earth in the expanding worlds of the Truth, the Right, the Vast, satyam-ŗtam-bŗhat—and that is what it has undertaken to present. Physical transformation and the new creation are the things to follow in this sequel. In that sense, Savitri’s task is specific, clear-cut, precise; it is to focus and resolve the issue the incarnate She is going to face.

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Savitri has reached the state of absolute Nirvana in the progress of her Yoga. It was her transcendental governing Spirit who was directly guiding her in it. Eventually, she became God’s nothing,—that in it all be God. In this connection, it is significant to note what the Mother tells about her becoming one with Sri Aurobindo, one in the absolute transcendence that he would speak to her in English. It was a sign of her total identity with him. Such full immergence! Savitri’s was a Nirvana-realisation beyond the Gita’s Brahma-Nirvana, beyond the Buddha’s Nirvana where even God vanishes. It was beyond the Vedantic ‘not-this, not-that’, beyond known and unknown realms, beyond all the formations of this infinite manifestation, including the transcendental. There was in it no Ignorance, there was no Death left behind; these cannot be there, nor grief and suffering and joy and pleasure. The cause of Ignorance and Death springing up from the Inconscience had disappeared, and the occult conquest over them was already made. It was as if by a miraculous yogic process going back in time, into the Past to remove the Cause from which all the effects flowed. In this Nirvana of hers it was the all-pervasive ‘yes-this, yes-that’, the absolute positive in the supreme Will. It was the state of affirmation of everything in the Will of the Lord. There existed only “What Thou Willest, What Thou Willest”, the supreme mantra of action.

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Man can accept his fate or else he can refuse it when he has arrived at the moment of the truth. This is true for the case of highly evolved souls who have a certain mastery over the forces of Nature, of the lower Prakriti in which otherwise we are locked or trapped. Yet Savitri is somebody else, though she shares the need of human grief. There is something absolutely remarkable about Narad’s understanding of Savitri, the Sun-Word, the daughter of the Son of Strength. He says: sometimes one life is charged with earth's destiny, and that it cries not for succour from the time-bound powers,—because alone she is equal to her mighty task. Indeed, she herself seems to be the luminous and strong golden Destiny having taken birth here to mould the destiny of the world. She is La Forza del Destino, The Force of Destiny. Sri Aurobindo writes in a letter: “…both destiny and will exist and even a free-will exists somewhere; the difficulty is only how to get at it and make it effective.”

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The physical is capable of receiving the higher Light, the Truth, the true Consciousness and of manifesting it. It is not easy, it needs endurance and will, but a day will come when this will be quite natural. It is just, just the door opened—that is all, now one must go on… Savitri’s work is concerned with it. The issue of her soul is, in the face of Ignorance and Death, to hew the ways of Immortality, immortality of the physical in the terrestrial creation. But this has to happen after reckoning all the facts of existence, the spirit’s will and the cosmic forces operating in tandem as well as in opposition. The accomplishment, and the victory, of the “What Thou Willest, What Thou Willest”, lies in Savitri doing the Shakti Yoga, the Yoga of the Conquest of Death. She must do this Yoga under the direct command of the supreme Consciousness-Force herself. There, in it, is settled her soul’s issue.

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Human Savitri has to prepare herself to meet the challenge of Death by doing Yoga, Yoga directly under the guidance of the supreme Shakti, her superconscient self. She has discovered Love, but Love’s safety in her humanity rests in her holding the divine Power in it, holding it in her spirit and in her equipped soul. Narad comes to initiate her on the path, that she may succeed in hewing the ways of Immortality in this mirky transient and sorrowful world, dominated since its beginning by Ignorance and Death. In this attempt of hers one day she will be standing on a dangerous brink, “carrying the world’s future on her lonely breast”. She might lose, she might stumble and fall—and the outcome is unknown even to Narad. Will it be extinction or eternal life in the Good of the Great—who knows what shall be the end? Narad foretells: Even if God seems to leave her to her lone strength can battle against doom—even on a brink where Death alone seems close and no human strength can hinder or can help. She must be left to herself, to her mighty self and Fate. When she will be left to herself, will then be Love safe in her. This is what happened on the fated day in the lone and inhuman forest when the Noon was covered by the dark Shadow.

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The book Savitri is writing is the saga of Consciousness-Force working in this material creation, the divine saga of manifestation, the drama of despair and delight in the play of possibilities. Its blueprint is in the Transcendent, its action is on the cosmic stage, its dénouement in the Spirit of the Void, the Shadow hidden behind the God of Love, its resolution is with the sword of victory. The difficulties are there, enormous difficulties born from the Creator himself in his contrary greatness. Every bit of hers meets its opposite with a much stronger hostility and antagonism, with fallacy, betrayal, violence. But “To stay the wheels of Doom this greatness rose…” This greatness that is Savitri must face the engines of the precarious and dangerous universe; she must hold the wheel in her firm hand and drive the car of success; she must operate the leverage that gives the desired direction to the course of events. The flame of her soul and not the troubled throb of the locomotive should lead the course of action. In that process she suddenly finds the efficacious and desirable leverage, the handle that make things work in their greatness and in their nobility. What is that sudden leverage Savitri has to operate? It is a prayer, a master act, a king idea that can link man's strength to a transcendent Force. When that comes into operation, then miracle is made the common rule, and a mighty deed changes the course of events and things.

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The great World-Mother now in her arose:
A living choice reversed fate's cold dead turn,
Affirmed the spirit's tread on Circumstance,
Pressed back the senseless dire revolving Wheel
And stopped the mute march of Necessity.
A flaming warrior from the eternal peaks
Empowered to force the door denied and closed
Smote from Death's visage its dumb absolute
And burst the bounds of consciousness and Time.

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It was a compression—a mechanical compression—and at the same time (both things at the same time), such an intensity of aspiration! There is in these cells an extraordinary intensity: "The Truth, the Truth, the Truth. ..” Then, in the middle of all this, I went into a state of very deep trance, a sort of samadhi, from which I emerged five hours later—it lasted from 10 at night to 3 in the morning—five hours later, beatific, and conscious that I had been conscious all the time, but of something inexpressible. And what a light! A light, a light ... a fantastic light.

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A work she had to do, a word to speak;
Writing the unfinished story of her soul
In thoughts and actions graved in Nature's book,
She accepted not to close the luminous page,
Cancel her commerce with eternity,
Or set a signature of weak assent
To the brute balance of the world's exchange.

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The physical vibration is important. The circumstances relating to the work of transformation make the physical vibration important. I feel it, for as soon as I want to do something with someone on the physical plane (physical, mind you), it all comes into the body. And the body is simply seized ... I see that absolutely physical vibrations are being used all the time. It's really so different. All the work which is done at a distance (gesture indicating action stemming from the mind)—it acts, of course, but ... You know, even now, all this (Mother touches her body, her hands) feels so vibrant and alive that it's difficult to sense its limits ... as if it extends beyond the body in all directions. It no longer has any limits.

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The question if Savitri is going to win or lose the godlike game for man has been kept open. But there is the absolute certainty that she is not going to give it up. She will fight to the last bit whatever be the opposition and whatever be the result. It was the question of the Destiny itself, and she has her soul’s intuition and strength to cross the Rubicon carrying the legions with her. Never shall she submit to the command of the sinister Senate—because “to lead, to deliver was her glorious part.”

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Can anything definite be said about the outcome of Savitri’s encounter with Death? Surely, she has come here to conquer him, has come to hew the path of immortality for the evolutionary soul of the earth, for the march of the future. It must step from darkness into light, from ignorance into knowledge, from mortality into deathlessness. And yet there is the play of the unknown Destiny. Is her work going to be determined by it? Is she going to be governed by the forces emerging from the womb of evil and falsehood and obscurity and all that is downward pulling, pulling into the abyss of Inconscience? Then there is no hope for this creation.

“Alone she must conquer or alone must fall.” But will she conquer or will she fall? Even the best of foreknowledge Narad has comes only from the Overmind world where there cannot be absoluteness of knowledge. Absoluteness of knowledge belongs only to the Supermind but Narad, standing on the border between Overmind and Supermind, has a certain intuition of it and he is declaring the outcome in its full operative convincingness. He also knows that the outcome can be affirmed only when Savitri shall do successfully the Yoga of the Conquest of Death. Until then this “or”.

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Whether to bear with Ignorance and Death
Or hew the ways of Immortality…

Does Savitri possess an alternative, either to bear the yoke of Ignorance and Death or to hew the ways of Immortality? In fact that question doesn’t arise in her case. By the yoke of Ignorance and Death she has to hew the ways of Immortality. The passage of Immortality has to cut through Ignorance and Death,—or else there will really be no meaning in her taking the mortal birth. Where there is Ignorance there is Death and as long as Death is present Ignorance cannot go away. True, in the meanwhile, Death has a role to play as if to promote evolutionary march through the fields of universal Ignorance; mortality advances because of Death. Therefore the Immortal accepts the condition of Death and Ignorance, that thus alone Death can be met and conquered. It is not a shadow battle, not an abstract confrontation; the full might of Death is what offers itself for change, for transformation. Both life and death are the fuel for the unceasing fire of the incarnate Immortal and it is they together who give seeing sight for the blind to love. This must now come to a terminus when the possibilities of seeing sight in the waking of knowledge can open out. In fact there is a degree of inevitability in it and the question of “or” cannot rise. “Supramental change is a 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.” That is the path of Immortality beyond the summits of mind which has to be hewed. But in order that that happens, the Yogi must meet the Night in her own Den of Darkness, he must become the Pilgrim of the Night.

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The Master of Evolution is harsh with those who have come to help evolution move forward. Not that he takes that poise or stand, but it is so in the very nature of things. Difficult and painful is the task and those who approach for help they themselves become antagonists. At the hour of dire necessity no human help comes and even if it should come it proves unavailing. The cosmic evil is too deep to unroot and the cosmic suffering too vast to heal by the small effort of the small petty mortal. The only hope for him and for the world is the Immortal doing the sacrifice for the mortal. But, in the first place, why this unhappiness and transience here in this creation of God, this misery, this death, this ignorance as if they were intentional, designed with a purpose? True, hard is the world-redeemer’s task, and a few are saved while the rest strive on and fail. There is thus the deep conundrum of this creation, and Savitri is made to experience it. There is a riddle, riddle which is a mystery wrapped in an enigma.

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Savitri’s moment of truth is the moment of truth of this creation. It is going to decide its entire fate. Yet suffering and desire associated with it are a part of a larger Ecstasy, untouched by death yet working under the fruitful spell of death. Savitri must accept them, Savitri must endure them. The lonely forest, green and smiling and dangerous, where the Antagonist is to arrive at the appointed moment foreseen and foretold by the heavenly Seer is the battleground for the occult confrontation. The eternal Hand is there, and it is under its sanction the performance of the world- and death-winning Sacrifice by Savitri is going to assure victory to her.

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Savitri as a young girl is growing in the love and beauty of the palace in Madra, growing on the banks of the swift-running Alacananda. A golden princess wearing the raiment of the gods, she knows only happiness,—and there is the protection of tranquil heaven for all her movements. But she must also meet the reality of this world if she has come to deal with the reality of this world. The gladness of her soul must experience pain and anguish of the mortal creature. She cannot be someone who is exempt from the woes of mortality. She must bear this creature’s suffering lot. But how is this going to happen? Savitri by her native right is child of felicity, calm and purple-robed and bright like the gold-fire. Can grief at all enter into her life? Yet that must happen. If it has to happen it can happen only because of the working of the firm and inescapable Hand and not because of anything else, certainly not from anything from herself. But whose is this inescapable Hand? Sri Aurobindo himself explains.

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The soul of man soars as the Bird, the Hansa, past the shining firmaments of physical and mental consciousness, climbs as the traveller and fighter beyond earth of body and heaven of mind by the ascending path of the Truth to find this Godhead waiting for us, leaning down to us from the secrecy of the highest supreme where it is seated in the triple divine Principle and the source of the Beatitude. The Deva is indeed, whether attracting and exalted there or here helpful to us in the person of the greater Gods, always the Friend and Lover of man, the pastoral Master of the Herds who gives us the sweet milk and the clarified butter from the udder of the shining Cow of the infinitude. He is the source and outpourer of the ambrosial Wine of divine delight and we drink it drawn from the sevenfold waters of existence or pressed out from the luminous plant on the hill of being and uplifted by its raptures we become immortal.

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Shelley was not only a poet of other worlds, of Epipsychidion and of The Witch of Atlas; he was passionately interested in bringing the light, beauty and truth of the ideal super-world from which he came into the earth life—he tried to find it there wherever he could, he tried to infuse it wherever he missed it. The mental, the vital, the physical cannot be left out of the whole he saw in order to yield place only to the ethereal and impalpable. As he heard the skylark and felt the subtle essence of light and beauty in its song, he felt too the call of the same essence of light and beauty elsewhere and it is the things behind which he felt it that he compares to the hymn of the skylark—the essence of ideal light and beauty behind things mental, the poet and his hymns, behind things vital, the soul of romantic love, behind things physical, the light of the glow-worm, the passionate intensity of the perfume of the rose. I cannot see an ordinary glow-worm in the lines of Shelley's stanza—it is a light from beyond finding expression in that glimmer and illumining the dell of dew and the secrecy of flowers and grass that is there. This illumination of the earthly mind, vital, physical with his super-world light is a main part of Shelley; excise that and the whole of Shelley is not there, there is only the ineffectual angel beating his wings in the void; excise it from the Skylark and the true whole of the Skylark is no longer there.

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In the course of a conversation with the attendant-disciples on 28 September 1941, the topic of Thought the Paraclete came. Sri Aurobindo remarked: “What I have meant there is that thought is the intercessor between the Supreme Truth and the human consciousness. Thought flies to the Supreme Truth to connect its consciousness with the earth and after its departure all that is left behind is the Self. That is what I have meant there....”

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When the music of the Bird of Fire comes from the massive source of sound embedded in the primordial Hush and when the fire-winged wild drakes swim in the silvery pool a supra-surreal luminosity of the spiritual starts appearing into our skies for which one has to have the right sight and the right sense of hearing. Then only can the poetry download its wonderful contents into our world of perception. Let us take a couple of examples to see to what extent we can be successful in this respect. Here is Amal Kiran’s Prelude.
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