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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Sometimes the mantra comes with a decisive command to change the routine course of life. It gives to it a new direction, and all is at once changed. With it a sudden inflow of joyful energy events and happenings get altered. In its superconscient dynamism the shapes of the future start becoming brighter and happier. When the calm listening ear is attuned to it, absolutely with the cerebral activity falling quiescent, and when its power begins to operate, the soul’s deepest truth commences affirming itself in each and every activity. A mighty transformation is wrought in the recipient’s inner being.

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Apropos of the passage from Savitri dealing with the power of silence in the depths of god, let us look at the nature of the Vedic mantra, its formulation according to Rishi Agastya. A Vedic Hymn of Affirmation—stoma—speaks of it being “framed by the heart and established by the mind”. We have in such an instructive Rik, by Agastya, the very definition of the mantra,—framed by the heart and confirmed or established by the mind. In it is perhaps the earliest recorded theory of the creative Word, a theory expounding the process by which the supreme utterance takes birth in the consciousness of the poet who is at once a seer and a thinker. It is this mantra that makes him a poet-seer, a Rishi.

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When the poetic rhythm takes its birth in the golden-white intensity of truth’s dynamism, in gleaming vastness of the Vedic Ritam, it carries the power by which the unrealised potentialities become manifest in manifestation. In its movement world after truth-world comes into existence. When it descends into our consciousness, upborne by the deep silence of our being, then it establishes in it the verities of its rich and widening qualities. We are born to the life of the multifold spirit in the abundances of its wonders. We have our true birth in it.

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When it comes to the question of spiritual poetry, aglow with several suns of beauty, joy, life, power, truth in manifold combinations, or severally, one has to rise much above the human level, spend years of intense effort to enter into the world of the original sound where revelation and inspiration find their native expression, sound held by the deep and luminous hush. We may have ample poetic intelligence and creative insight, an unfailing aesthetic sense too, yet the vision and language and rhythm of the mantra may be quite lacking. A direct perception not only of the mysterious and the divinely haunting, a living contact with the reality is that which alone can give us such poetry. One large sustained example is in the ancient poetry of the Rig Veda; in our own times, dimensions of the infinite joining the aspiring soul’s, and in the answering benediction of the Gracious, are in Savitri. To get that kind of poetry one has to be a Yogi-Poet indeed.

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The hidden Word was found, the long-sought clue,
Revealed was the meaning of our spirit's birth,
Condemned to an imperfect body and mind,
In the inconscience of material things
And the indignity of mortal life.

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The Vedic tradition speaks of twelve Adityas, twelve Suns; their names are: Dhata, Mitra, Aryama, Rudra, Varuna, Surya, Bhaga, Vivasvana, Pusha, Savita, Twashta, and Vishnu. In the Gita Sri Krishna says that among the Adityas he is Vishnu. Each one of these Suns or Adityas represents a certain quality and cosmic function. Thus Love and Light are represented by the Sun as Mitra. In the form of Bhaga he is the Lord of Enjoyment, as the Increaser, he becomes Pushan. If the new creation founded by Aswapati in the House of the Spirit is to manifest upon earth, then these suns must be set ablaze in the material sky. The Mother of the Godheads holds the key in the dynamism of the twelve suns and it is that which can set into operation the process of the physical transformation.

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In Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri did the divine executive Shakti get the consent from the Supreme before she granted the boon to Aswapati? This aspect is very clear in the Savitri-tale narrated by Vyasa in the Mahabharata, when she told him that she is giving him the boon of a radiant daughter in the authorization of the great Father-Creator Brahma himself, bhagavān pitāmaha. But it seems to be absent in the epic by Sri Aurobindo. If, as we have in his The Mother, “nothing can be here or elsewhere but what she decides and the Supreme sanctions,” then this difference between the two narratives assumes importance of a fundamental character; in a certain sense, it becomes crucial also, absolutely central. Vyasa’s Aswapati approaches Goddess Savitri with the intention of getting a son, that by the righteous conduct the order of the worlds be maintained in its functioning, that the dharma of the eternal truth which upholds the creation, which holds it together and which makes it move forward is maintained; that is the sense of the word dharma. It is in that context that the Goddess obtains the sanction from the Supreme, from the Father-Creator Brahma, bhagavān pitāmaha. Did in a similar way, or in some other manner the divine Shakti in Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri receive such a sanction from the Supreme? Did she already have it with her before her meeting with the Son of Strength, one who had climbed the creation’s peaks? Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri does not speak of it in any specific way. Perhaps extremely significant occult-spiritual factors, aspects of the yogic will are present in the profound issue and they need to be looked into with attention. Perhaps bringing the theme of “sanction” into the presentation could be incongruous in more than one respect.

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