“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.”

 

[Hymns to the Mystic Fire, p. 22]

Savitri not for the general reader

Opponent of that glory of escape,

The black Inconscient swung its dragon tail

Lashing a slumberous Infinite by its force

Into the deep obscurities of form.

 

“There too a metaphysical idea might be read into or behind the thing seen. But does that make it technical jargon or the whole thing an illegitimate mixture? It is not so to my poetic sense. But you might say, ‘It is so to the non-mystical reader and it is that reader whom you have to satisfy, as it is for the general reader that you are writing and not for yourself alone.’ But if I had to write for the general reader I could not have written Savitri at all. It is in fact for myself that I have written it and for those who can lend themselves to the subject-matter, images, technique of mystic poetry.

 

“This is the real stumbling-block of mystic poetry and specially mystic poetry of this kind. The mystic feels real and present, even ever present to his experience, intimate to his being, truths which to the ordinary reader are intellectual abstractions or metaphysical speculations. He is writing of experiences that are foreign to the ordinary mentality. Either they are unintelligible to it and in meeting them it flounders about as if in an obscure abyss or it takes them as poetic fancies expressed in intellectually devised images. That was how a critic in the Hindu condemned such poems as Nirvana and Transformation. He said that they were mere intellectual conceptions and images and there was nothing of religious feeling or spiritual experience. Yet Nirvana was as close a transcription of a major experience as could be given in language coined by the human mind of a realisation in which the mind was entirely silent and into which no intellectual conception could at all enter. One has to use words and images in order to convey to the mind some perception, some figure of that which is beyond thought. The critic's non-understanding was made worse by such a line as:

 

Only the illimitable Permanent

Is here.

 

Evidently he took this as technical jargon, abstract philosophy. There was no such thing; I felt with an overpowering vividness the illimitability or at least something which could not be described by any other term and no other description except the ‘Permanent’ could be made of That which alone existed. To the mystic there is no such thing as an abstraction. Everything which to the intellectual mind is abstract has a concreteness, substantiality which is more real than the sensible form of an object or of a physical event. To me, for instance, consciousness is the very stuff of existence and I can feel it everywhere enveloping and penetrating the stone as much as man or the animal. …  The mystical poet can only describe what he has felt, seen in himself or others or in the world just as he has felt or seen it or experienced through exact vision, close contact or identity and leave it to the general reader to under-stand or not understand or misunderstand according to his capacity. A new kind of poetry demands a new mentality in the recipient as well as in the writer. …

[Savitri, pp. 735-36]

The Mother: Prayers and Meditations

Tokio: September 24, 1917 

 

Thou hast subjected me to a hard discipline; rung after rung, I have climbed the ladder which leads to Thee and, at the summit of the ascent, Thou hast made me taste the perfect joy of identity with Thee. Then, obedient to Thy command, rung after rung, I have descended to outer activities and external states of consciousness, re-entering into contact with these worlds that I left to discover Thee. And now that I have come back to the bottom of the ladder, all is so dull, so mediocre, so neutral, in me and around me, that I understand no more....

 

What is it then that Thou awaitest from me, and to what use that slow long preparation, if all is to end in a result to which the majority of human beings attain without being subjected to any discipline?

 

How is it possible that having seen all that I have seen, experienced all that I have experienced, after I have been led up even to the most sacred sanctuary of Thy knowledge and communion with Thee, Thou hast made of me so utterly common an instrument in such ordinary circumstances? In truth, O Lord, Thy ends are unfathomable and pass my understanding....

 

Why, when Thou hast placed in my heart the pure diamond of Thy perfect Felicity, sufferest Thou its  surface to reflect the shadows which come from outside and so leave unsuspected and, it would seem, ineffective the treasure of Peace Thou hast granted me? Truly all this is a mystery and confounds my understanding.

 

Why, when Thou hast given me this great inner silence, sufferest Thou the tongue to be so active and the thought to be occupied with things so futile? Why?... I could go on questioning indefinitely and, to all likelihood, always in vain....

 

I have only to bow to Thy decree and accept my condition without uttering a word.

 

I am now only a spectator who watches the dragon of the world unrolling its coils without end.  

A Talk by Amal Kiran dated 29 August 1970

During the last talk I realised that the subject was as much myself as Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, but I could not really help it and I hope you will forgive me if I repeat the folly. I even made the claim that in Savitri Sri Aurobindo had referred to me twice because twice he has mentioned lameness symbolically. I might take a cue from that procedure and complete the count by giving you some more lines from Savitri, which bring in the same characteristic. Only here the reference seems to be more general than particular. It is part of an occult vision of this enigmatic world of ours with all its play of contraries and its internal paradoxes. Sri Aurobindo figures it in the form of a strange bird which is hanging in the sky and disclosed to the eye of yogic vision. The lines run:

 

All things hang here between God's yes and no, ...

The white head and black tail of the mystic drake,

The swift and the lame foot, wing strong, wing broken

Sustaining the body of the uncertain world,

 A great surreal dragon in the skies.

 

It's a tremendous vision. As the lame foot is there you might hold the passage to be a covert allusion which could again be considered unmistakable. But the wingedness gives one pause, until one remembers my versifying tendencies and Plato's idea that a poet is a winged creature who has no power over himself but sort of lives in the air of the mind blown by various forces good or otherwise. In any case it is difficult to think how so grandiose and dreadful a figuration as the dragon could be applied to a person, whether he be a versifier or not! I myself wondered until I suddenly realised what a tremendous drag on the Mother and Sri Aurobindo I had been! (laughter)

Sri Aurobindo’s Death can be very poetic; not only so, but he can use surrealistic images. Savitri is insistent on taking back the soul of Satyavan he has snatched and, after a long debate, he makes an offer that she can have it if she could reveal to him eternal truth, if she dwells in her heart. Death thought that he was safe in making the offer conditional, that Savitri would not be able to do it, that truth cannot stay in a mortal’s breast, mortal birth as she had taken. Here is his argument: (pp. 654-55)

 

All things hang here between God's yes and no, 

Two Powers real but to each other untrue,

Two consort stars in the mooned night of mind

That towards two opposite horizons gaze,

The white head and black tail of the mystic drake,

The swift and the lame foot, wing strong, wing broken

Sustaining the body of the uncertain world,

A great surreal dragon in the skies.

 

Too dangerously thy high proud truth must live

Entangled in Matter's mortal littleness.

All in this world is true, yet all is false:

Its thoughts into an eternal cipher run,

Its deeds swell to Time's rounded zero sum.

 

Thus man at once is animal and god,

A disparate enigma of God's make

Unable to free the Godhead's form within,

A being less than himself, yet something more,

The aspiring animal, the frustrate god;

Yet neither beast nor deity but man,

But man tied to the kind earth's labour strives to exceed,

Climbing the stairs of God to higher Things.

 

Objects are seemings and none knows their truth,

Ideas are guesses of an ignorant god.

Truth has no home in earth's irrational breast:

Yet without reason life is a tangle of dreams,

But reason is poised above a dim abyss

And stands at last upon a plank of doubt.

 

Eternal truth lives not with mortal men.

 

Or if she dwells within thy mortal heart,

Show me the body of the living Truth

Or draw for me the outline of her face

That I too may obey and worship her.

 

So it is the white head and black tail of the mystic drake, the swift and the lame foot, wing strong, wing broken sustaining the body of the uncertain world, a great surreal dragon in the skies, who is presented to us very vividly by none other than Death.