August and pitiless in his calm outlook,
Heightening the Eternal's dreadful strategy,
He measured the difficulty with the might
And dug more deep the gulf that all must cross.
Assailing her divinest elements,
He made her heart kin to the striving human heart
And forced her strength to its appointed road.
For this she had accepted mortal breath;
To wrestle with the Shadow she had come
And must confront the riddle of man's birth
And life's brief struggle in dumb Matter's night.
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.
Sri Aurobindo explains it by posing
a question: But what is Brahman? “Whatever reality is in existence, by which
all the rest subsists, that is Brahman. An Eternal behind all instabilities, a
Truth of things which is implied, if it is hidden in all appearances, a
Constant which supports all mutations, but is not increased, diminished,
abrogated,—there is such an unknown X which makes existence a problem, our own
self a mystery, the universe a riddle. If we were only what we seem to be to
our normal self-awareness, there would be no mystery; if the world were only
what it can be made out to be by the perceptions of the senses and their strict
analysis in the reason, there would be no riddle; and if to take our life as it
is now and the world as it has so far developed to our experience were the
whole possibility of our knowing and doing, there would be no problem. Or at
best there would be but a shallow mystery, an easily solved riddle, the problem
only of a child's puzzle. But there is more, and that more is the hidden head of
the Infinite and the secret heart of the Eternal. It is the highest and this
highest is the all; there is none beyond and there is none other than it. To
know it is to know the highest and by knowing the highest to know all. For as
it is the beginning and source of all things, so everything else is its
consequence; as it is the support and constituent of all things, so the secret
of everything else is explained by its secret; as it is the sum and end of all
things, so everything else amounts to it and by throwing itself into it
achieves the sense of its own existence.” In the experience and realization of
the eternal Truth, the Truth of the Brahman, all these riddles and puzzles
vanish.
But a God’s labour must be put in
before one comes anywhere closer to it. There is a voice and it cries: “Go
where none have gone! Dig deeper till the foundation stone is reached, knock at
the keyless gate.” The Yogi does it and describes what he saw after reaching
the grim foundation stone and knocking at the keyless gate:
I saw that a falsehood was planted
deep
At the very root of
things
Where the grey Sphinx guards God’s
riddle sleep
On the Dragon’s
outspread wings.
Savitri must answer the riddle
sleep of this Sphinx, lest she gets devoured by her. The Mother tells something
extraordinary, her experience, narrated on 6 August 1969:
Last night, I spent the whole night
with Sri Aurobindo somewhere, I don't know where, but there were lots of
people. … the peculiar thing is that when I wake up, it doesn't go away! And
when I lie down again, it's there, just where I had left it: it goes on. … it
goes on, whether I concern myself with it or not. But Sri Aurobindo was ...
it's odd, he looked as if younger. He was happy, and very amused, passing all
kinds of remarks—remarks full of humor, you know!—about things and people. I
noticed he was ... as if brighter, I don't know how to put it. … In the end,
it's all a question of consciousness.
The body is growing INTENSELY conscious of what responds to the
true Influence, and what's still the residue of habit and the universal,
terrestrial development (general, terrestrial), very conscious. Sometimes, it's
... almost painful, you know, that old way of being. And at certain times, the
vision is almost veiled, as though I were seeing through a veil; at other times
it's ABSOLUTELY precise. I can't believe it
depends on the eyes. It was that world ... as if it wanted to ENTER into this world, and, I don't know how to explain
... as if it wanted to force its way into this world. And it came ... it comes
and IMPOSES itself, it settles with such
power.” Instead of transformation it would be a sort of invasion by this subtle
world, which will pierce the veil, the barrier, and will enter, will manifest
in the physical world. In The Riddle of
this World this is what Sri Aurobindo writes: mental man's full liberation
and enlightenment will come when he crosses the line into the light of a new
superconscient existence. "But in itself this would change nothing in the
creation here, the evasion of a liberated soul from the world makes to that
world no difference. But this crossing of the line if turned not only to an
ascending but to a descending purpose would mean the transformation of the line
from what it now is, a lid, a barrier, into a passage for the higher powers of
consciousness of the Being now above it. ..." It would mean a new creation
on earth, a bringing in of the ultimate powers which would reverse the
conditions here." In the Mother’s experience it is “something that PRESSES to be manifested. ... And then you
wake up and its THERE, it hasn't budged; you don't MOVE from one world into the other: the two
consciousnesses are together (Mother slips the fingers of her right hand
between those of her left hand). The ordinary consciousness seems artificial,
and it's ‘dominating’—but it's NOT truer,
it's less true. Last night, it was very, very clear.”
The Riddle of the World: If you can
solve it, you will be immortal, but if you fail you will perish. In his 1933
letter Sri Aurobindo explains it as follows:
In the beginning it was you (not
the human you who is now complaining but the central being) which accepted or
even invited the adventure of the Ignorance; sorrow and struggle are a
necessary consequence of the plunge into the Inconscience and the evolutionary
emergence out of it. The explanation is that it had an object, the eventual
play of the Divine Consciousness and Ananda not in its original transcendence
but under conditions for which the plunge into the Inconscience was necessary.
It is fundamentally a cosmic problem and can be understood only from the cosmic
consciousness. If you want a solution which will be agreeable to the human mind
and feelings, I am afraid there is none. No doubt if human beings had made the
universe, they would have done much better; but they were not there to be
consulted when they were made. Only your central being was there and that was
much nearer in its temerarious foolhardiness to Vivekananda's or X's than to
the repining prudence of your murmuring and trembling human mentality of the
present moment—otherwise it would never have come down into the adventure. Or
perhaps it did not realise what it was in for? It is the same with the
wallowers under their cross. Even now they wallow because something in them
likes the wallowing and bear the cross because something in them chooses to
suffer. …
Once the supramental is established
in Matter, the transformation will be possible under much less troublesome
conditions than now are there. These bad conditions are due to the fact that
the Ignorance is in possession and the hostile Powers an established authority,
as it were, who do not care to give up their hold and there is no full force of
Light established in the earth-consciousness which would not only meet but
outweigh their full force of darkness. … In the supramental consciousness such
attacks are not possible—the coexistence of supramental and the lower darkness
in the same being and body is not possible. It is precisely for that reason
that the supramentalisation of the body consciousness is laid down as the
condition of the successful transformation. If attacks continue and can come in
successfully, it means that the body consciousness is not yet supramentalised. The
descent of the supramental can hasten things, but it is not going to … change
everything in the twinkle of an eye.
Sri Aurobindo begins his letter
with “in the beginning it was you (not the human you who is now complaining but
the central being) which accepted or even invited the adventure of the
Ignorance; sorrow and struggle are a necessary consequence of the plunge into
the Inconscience and the evolutionary emergence out of it.” He continues to
explain the spiritual metaphysics further. But a deeper occult-spiritual aspect
of this beginning is brought out more revealingly in Savitri as follows: (pp. 454-56)
O mortal who complainst of death
and fate,
Accuse none of the harms thyself
hast called;
This troubled world thou hast
chosen for thy home,
Thou art thyself the author of thy
pain.
Once in the immortal boundlessness
of Self,
In a vast of Truth and
Consciousness and Light
The soul looked out from its
felicity.
It felt the Spirit's interminable
bliss,
It knew itself deathless, timeless,
spaceless, one,
It saw the Eternal, lived in the Infinite.
Then, curious of a shadow thrown by
Truth,
It strained towards some otherness
of self,
It was drawn to an unknown Face
peering through night.
It sensed a negative infinity,
A void supernal whose immense
excess
Imitating God and everlasting Time
Offered a ground for Nature's
adverse birth
And Matter's rigid hard
unconsciousness
Harbouring the brilliance of a
transient soul
That lights up birth and death and
ignorant life.
A Mind arose that stared at
Nothingness
Till figures formed of what could
never be;
It housed the contrary of all that
is.
A Nought appeared as Being's huge
sealed cause,
Its dumb support in a blank
infinite,
In whose abysm spirit must
disappear:
A darkened Nature lived and held
the seed
Of Spirit hidden and feigning not
to be.
The eternal Consciousness became
the home
Of some unsouled almighty
Inconscient;
One breathed no more as spirit's
native air.
A stranger in the insentient
universe,
Bliss was an incident of a mortal
hour.
As one drawn by the grandeur of the
Void
The soul attracted leaned to the
Abyss:
It longed for the adventure of
Ignorance
And the marvel and surprise of the
Unknown
And the endless possibility that
lurked
In the womb of Chaos and in
Nothing's gulf
Or looked from the unfathomed eyes
of Chance.
It tired of its unchanging
happiness,
It turned away from immortality:
It was drawn to hazard's call and
danger's charm,
It yearned to the pathos of grief,
the drama of pain,
Perdition's peril, the wounded bare
escape,
The music of ruin and its glamour
and crash,
The savour of pity and the gamble
of love
And passion and the ambiguous face
of Fate.
A world of hard endeavour and
difficult toil
And battle on extinction's perilous
verge,
A clash of forces, a vast
incertitude,
The joy of creation out of
Nothingness,
Strange meetings on the roads of
Ignorance
And the companionship of half-known
souls
Or the solitary greatness and
lonely force
Of a separate being conquering its
world,
Called it from its too safe
eternity.
A huge descent began, a giant fall:
For what the spirit sees, creates a
truth
And what the soul imagines is made
a world.
A Thought that leaped from the
Timeless can become,
Indicator of cosmic consequence
And the itinerary of the gods,
A cyclic movement in eternal Time.
Thus came, born from a blind tremendous
choice,
This great perplexed and
discontented world,
This haunt of Ignorance, this home
of Pain:
There are pitched desire's tents,
grief's headquarters.
A vast disguise conceals the
Eternal's bliss.
Savitri has entered this home of
Pain, and the Master of Evolution is at his task, he now as if assigning to Savitri
the hardship and the burden and the difficulty of the process in the mortal
birth, the creation’s travail:
One dealt with her who meets the burdened great.
Assigner of the ordeal and the path
Who chooses in this holocaust of the soul
Death, fall and sorrow as the spirit's goads,
The dubious godhead with his torch of pain
Lit up the chasm of the unfinished world
And called her to fill with her vast self the abyss.
August and pitiless in his calm outlook,
Heightening the Eternal's dreadful strategy,
He measured the difficulty with the might
And dug more deep the gulf that all
must cross