What Aswapati has transcendentally experienced, what he has willed and achieved in the infinity of the Spirit, all that must become the earthly real. What is operative here at the moment is the errant Power, one who by division attempts to find the indivisible One, an impossible proposition. This Error must be obliterated, totally liquidated. Such is the task that Aswapati recognises, a task which must be done if this creation has to have any sense in it, any meaning to it; and he attends to it right earnestly. This is the deconstruction needed to be done before any new scheme can be considered for implementation. Our response to the positive, the constructive and the creative, and the progressive, had been all along corrupt and frustrating and, therefore, deconstruction is necessary; it should take place at the origin of this corrupting and frustrating crookedness. In any case, it cannot be the popular metaphysical mind-prompted deconstruction; it is not merely analyzing the text simply because language is inherently unstable and shifting. It has to be the spiritual-occult deconstruction. It has to be an act of Shiva the Destroyer.

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The work of Aswapati as the Divine Incarnate is to will a new creation and establish it in the House of the Spirit. The next task of making it manifest upon earth is the task of Savitri as the Shakti Incarnate. Will and Action, samkalpa and krīyā, the first followed by the second, both are necessary for bringing about the birth of the new world here upon earth. The universal principle is: he wills and she executes. The second cannot happen without the first. It is as though a transcendental archetype, a dynamic and breathing design or model charged with the possibilities of expression, is the sine qua non for the new world to at all take birth here. When it is created up there, in the Real-Idea, in its luminous potencies, then only can it materialise here, brought into the evolutionary process; then only can the heavenly ideal become terrestrially real.

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In this vast outbreak of perfection's law
Imposing its fixity on the flux of things
He saw a hierarchy of lucent planes
Enfeoffed to this highest kingdom of God-state.
Attuning to one Truth their own right rule...
Each gave its powers to help its neighbours' parts,
But suffered no diminution by the gift;
Profiteers of a mystic interchange,
They grew by what they took and what they gave,
All others they felt as their own complements,
One in the might and joy of multitude.

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The mornings come but we make ourselves not the light, and the Buddha returns not. In fact, why should he? Should he return, he will definitely have to make a trip first to Kyoto and then to Copenhagen. Instead, what we have now is “the inconvenient truth” of our sad making, and we keep our eyes shut to the pressing reality. We look into the faces of “frightened crowd”, not only of this age but of times to come in sorrowful movement. This is the result of clipped and grouchy human potential and if “something of inexplicable value” has to emerge we will have yet to know what the Buddha meant when he said “Make of yourself a light”.

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The Puraņas tell us that Brahma created the worlds by the Tapas-Will, by the power of concentrated gathering in of consciousness. In the present instance, Aswapati created the new world by the power of his yogic samkalpa, as an act of supreme will in the identification and union with the Divine. He had the knowledge, of the Eternal and the Eternal in Time, and he was carrying with him the desire of the world for its fulfilment. There was the problem of the two negations pulling the soul of man in two opposite directions, the rejection of the world by the exclusive God-seeker and the denial of the materialist dismissing the things of the spirit. More fundamentally, there is the entrenched antagonism to all that is high and noble and spiritually elevating, all that is fulfilling, hostility pitched against life, the extreme ill-will and nastiness of death and its stark malevolence. Contradictions have somehow entered into this creation and they have to be met and dealt with, removed, contradictions between falsehood and truth, evil and good, suffering and happiness, darkness and light. The world left behind continues to be governed by naked falsehood and ignorance and death. Aswapati accepts it not. Not only does he not accept it; he sets himself to resolve it.

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Keats’s sonnet On First Looking into Chapman's Homer is a high mark in Romantic poetry. In the octave, the poet has travelled in the realms of gold, and one of them is the great property of Homer, a vast tract of living and vibrant land, the seer-poet holding the lordship in the company of the heroic gods and goddesses. Here is the gold of many and many-sided splendours, born from the womb of the celestial Muse herself. The sonnet describes the new wonder the poet has discovered. The awe experienced by him comes out most powerfully in the last line, “Silent, upon a peak in Darien.” But Aswapati’s new and marvellous creation is something different. It is a creation breathing in topaz radiance and has many worlds, the worlds of beauty, of love, joy, thought, will, knowledge, power, light, form, reality’s substance, all with the growing God-kind perfection everywhere. But their materialisation upon the earth must await the “veiled Transcendent’s ultimate decree”. In the House of the Spirit this new creation is ready but waiting for the veiled Transcendent’s decree. It comes in the form of a boon. That boon is the incarnation of the divine Savitri upon earth: “One shall descend and break the iron Law.” That shall be the precursor of the new creation manifesting in its deepening and widening glory.

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We have in the Gita a significant term brahma-nirvāņa which, as Sri Aurobindo explains in the Essays, is the extinction in the Brahman, the Vedantic loss of a partial in a perfect being. This state is different from that of supreme peace, of a calm self-extinction, śāntim nirvāņa-paramām, which is not the Buddhist's Nirvana in a blissful negation of being. Generally, in these connotations, Nirvana is taken in the sense of total non-attachment and extinction of the ego. It is a state of inner deeper happiness, of peace, the peace of an absolute inactive cessation. “Sages win Nirvana in the Brahman,” says the Scripture; everything is blown out in it, everything transient and sorrowful. It further says: Brahman-knower is he who has risen into the Brahman-consciousness, brahmavid brahmaņi sthitāh. One who has the deeper inner happiness and the deeper inner ease and repose and the intense inner light, that Yogin becomes the Brahman and reaches self-extinction in the Brahman, brahma-nirvāņam.

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The gains of the world are, fortunately, not all that insignificant and we can derive a good deal of contentment from our daily occupations and activities; we can feel relief from the feeling of frustration that invades us over and over again. But, perhaps, only the complaint is that these gains and these gifts are too little to convince the spirit’s secret eagerness, to satisfy the deeper thirst. It seems, it is that desirable uneasiness in us which prods us on, nudges us on the fulfilling quest, always urging us to make progress. We remain disenchanted till life’s meaning and purpose are discovered, till we live in what they bring to us. The deep-seated quest is therefore happily there, inherently there, and we cannot just rest till the discovery is made. In its absence our greatest actions would remain dull, obtuse, uninteresting.

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Now as an aspect of a great decisive occult-yogic step, Aswapati is stepping into the impenetrable luminous blank in which even the world’s yearning he was carrying with him vanishes. What he sees in that luminous blank, the brilliant Void, is a potent universe without galaxies, without streams, mountains, beasts or birds or men, all withheld in its utter formlessness, in that which can become manifest, epiphanic. Behind Sachchidānanda stood the quiescent, and what remained was nothing but the Nirvana of the Absolute, the austere apocalyptic alone, Nirvana beyond Nirvana of the Manifest. The cosmic and even the transcendental have disappeared from sight. Yet he must know that one power alone whose enigma gives meaning and contents to all these thousand things, manifest and unmanifest, phenomenal and eternal. In the process, everything is abolished, and there stands only the forceful positive, the fire that gives fire to these countless fires. In it his spirit’s will pursues the unknowable.

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Then suddenly there came a downward look
As if a sea exploring its own depths;
A living Oneness widened at its core
And joined him to unnumbered multitudes.

Aswapati was expecting a response from the divine Shakti, but no voice came down from the high silences, no answer from the austere solitude of hers. There was only a stillness of cessation, the “wide immortal hush before the gods were born”. Yet there was eagerness in the heart of the anticipator. It is in this condition that something wonderful happens, something transcendentally marvellous to open up the possibility that could exist here down below. That indeed makes the “downward look” exploring sea-like its own depths perfectly and congruently acceptable: the plunge of the look deepening into the depths down below is in great harmony with the contents it is also speaking of. There is the sense of unity and accord, of gracefulness and elegance.

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Then suddenly there came a downward look
As if a sea exploring its own depths;
A living Oneness widened at its core
And joined him to unnumbered multitudes.
A Bliss, a Light, a Power, a flame-white Love
Caught all into a sole immense embrace;
Existence found its truth on Oneness' breast
And each became the self and space of all.
The great world-rhythms were heart-beats of one Soul,
To feel was a flame-discovery of God,
All mind was a single harp of many strings,
All life a song of many meeting lives;
For worlds were many, but the Self was one.

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Will “the ninth hour of the day in which a vision of Beatrice dressed in red” appeared in front of Dante also come to us, dawn on us? Can we have the “the final vision” of that ānandamayi-chaitanyamayi-satyamayi-paramé? More importantly, it will be wonderful if we should live in her, grow in her, allow her to do her work in us. She is there to kindle our suns, but let us also gather the critical mass and luminosity to become her suns. The tapasya with all those spiritual realizations can find its fulfilment only when the full manifestation of the supreme realities shall take place. She alone can do it.

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About occultism the Mother says in one place the following: “Now, there are people who are fortunate to be born with their inner senses naturally developed, and nothing can prevent them from remaining awake. If these people meet in good time someone who can help them in a methodical development, they can become very interesting instruments for the study and discovery of this occult world. In all ages there have been initiatory schools which took up these particularly talented people and educated them in this kind of science. These schools were always more or less secret or hidden, for ordinary men are quite intolerant of those capacities which are beyond them—and disturb them. But there were fine periods in human history when these schools were recognised and much appreciated and respected, as in ancient Egypt, ancient Chaldea, ancient India, and even partially in Greece and Rome. There were always schools of initiation, even in mediaeval Europe, but there they had to be very carefully hidden, for they were pursued and persecuted by the official Christian religion, and if perchance it was discovered that such and such men or women were practising these occult sciences, they were tied to the stake and burnt alive as sorcerers!...”

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Let us chant the Vedic Praise to Lakshmi, one of the sweetest in the lyric-hymnological compositions, inspired and elevating, lofty in its tone and majestic in its depiction of the divine Goddess, at the same time solid and luminous in its quantitative assertions. “Invoke for you O Agni, the Goddess Lakshmi, who shines like gold, yellow in hue, wearing gold and silver garlands, blooming like the moon, the embodiment of wealth. O Agni! Invoke for me that unfailing Lakshmi, blessed by whom, I shall win wealth, cattle, horses and men. ...”

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The divine Goddess in her threefold aspect is described variously in the Purāņas. Thus she is the triple power of creation-maintenance-destruction, of Brahma, Vishnu and Mahesh, she the Creatrix, the Sustainectrix, the Destructrix of the worlds. And then she is Svāhā, the oblation or fire-offering in the Yajna made to all the gods; in the utterance of Svāhā they all receive their shares of the fruit of the fire-sacrifice, Yajna. It is by sacrifice the creation lives and grows; in it it shall disappear when in the cycles of time it is ready to step into the next movement. Even if the oblation is Brahman, and the fire-offering is Brahman, offered in the fire of Brahman, made unto Brahman, it is indeed she who is all that, the multiple power of manifestation achieving whatever has to be achieved for the individual as well as the universe, for the entire creation.

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O thou Goddess, embodied Strength, present in all beings and things,
three times my reverences to thee, my reverence.
O thou Goddess, embodied Peace, present in all beings and things,
three times my reverences to thee, my reverence.
O thou Goddess, embodied Motherhood, present in all beings and things,
three times my reverences to thee, my reverence.

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Here is a hymn to Durgā Yudhiṣthira sang when on his way to the City of Virāţa:

Salutation to Thee, O giver of blessings,
Dark Virgin, observant of the vow of chastity,
Whose form is beauteous as that of the rising sun,
And Thy face as that of the full moon;
Four-armed and faced art Thou.

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The scriptural literature in Sanskrit is full of hymns and devotional compositions, praising the Divine Goddess, Devī, in her various forms and with countless attributes. In fact, the descriptions are such that, each adjective becomes a noun; each attribute gets personified and becomes her power. The language in the process becomes extraordinarily vigorous and prevailing, revelatory, tellingly forceful. To get an idea about the substance—and that is the best we can have at present—of these masterworks, we could just reproduce the renderings made by Sir John Woodroffe The Harivamśā—a sequel of the Mahābhārata.

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If mantra is always charged with power, if mantra is a Word that creates happy majesties, if mantra speaks of desirable excellences, if mantra brings realisation of what it utters, then we have it here, in Sri Aurobindo’s Adoration of the Divine Mother, the inevitable Word, the supreme Word established in the earth-consciousness to transform it into the divine substance of Truth, Beauty, Delight, into God-Life, all held by the Spirit’s vast calm.

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In the magic of Savitri there are present, together or variously, the luminous density of the Vedic intuitive-spiritual, the Upanishadic profundity of the seer-vision and seer-thought, and the Gita’s psychic warmth and enchantment flooded with the sheer Overhead. The wonderful result is, in the Adoration of the Divine Mother, we have not the submissive or acquiescent, the passive compliance of a Bhakta to the God of his Worship, not the dāsya-bhāva, but a surrender of another kind, almost as if both the devotee and the deity were each other’s comrades and companions, equals. It is not womanly but masculine surrender to the Divine that we see in it. The quality of the surrender of Aswapati is mannish, vigorous, lofty, wonderful, full of knowledge and power, more spiritual than psychic.

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