Aurobindo 14-Savitri-Book -1

An appreciation on Savitri- Book I The Book of Beginnings- Canto V The Yoga of the King: The Yoga of the Spirit's Freedom and Greatness Words within inverted commas are Aurobindo's 'As thus it rose, to meet him bare and pure A strong Descent leaped down. A Might, a Flame, A Beauty half-visible with deathless eyes, A violent Ecstasy, a Sweetness dire, Enveloped him with its stupendous limbs And penetrated nerve and heart and brain That thrilled and fainted with the epiphany: His nature shuddered in the Unknown's grasp.' 'His wakened mind became an empty slate On which the Universal and Sole could write.' 'Eternity's contact broke the moulds of sense.' 'The imprisoned deity rent its magic fence.' 'The python coils of the restricting Law Could not restrain the swift arisen God: Abolished were the scripts of destiny.' 'He saw unpathed, unwalled, his titan scope.' 'All once impossible deemed could now become A natural limb of possibility, A new domain of normalcy supreme.' 'All's miracle here and can by miracle change. This is that secret Nature's edge of might.' 'Across the unfolding of the seas of self Appeared the deathless countries of the One.' And' He broke into another Space and Time.' Like a child in primary class I touched this book My curious eyes as passing through the pages Bewared my heart my mind 'be wakeful'.. I became an alerted child not to misconstrue Thou unsurpassable poetic beauty and Thine'reality I pursued bowing Thee with wonderment that further pursues ............My consciousness this moment, O'Guru, I'm in awe....in invincible heights Ineffable Thee embellishing poetic creation My inquisitive apprehension, erring Thee may opine May there so, let Savitri in my self arise Aroused there so be knowledge and fortune End of book-1 =========================== Note: Some more inspiring descriptive linesfrom Book-1 canto-5 Page 81 In a moment shorter than death, longer than Time, By a Power more ruthless than Love, happier than Heaven, An Omniscient knowing without sight or thought, An indecipherable Omnipotence, A mystic Form that could contain the worlds, Yet make one human breast its passionate shrine, Drew him out of his seeking loneliness Into the magnitudes of God's embrace. As when a timeless Eye annuls the hours Abolishing the agent and the act, So now his spirit shone out wide, blank, pure: A fire that seemed the body of a god Consumed the limiting figures of the past And made large room for a new self to live. Page 82 As through a dress the wearer's shape is seen, There reached through forms to the hidden absolute A cosmic feeling and transcendent sight. Illusion lost her aggrandising lens; As with a sound of thunder and of seas, Vast barriers crashed around the huge escape. Immutably coeval with the world, Circle and end of every hope and toil Inexorably drawn round thought and act, The fixed immovable peripheries Effaced themselves beneath the Incarnate's tread. Page 83 The great hammer-beats of a pent-up world-heart Burst open the narrow dams that keep us safe Against the forces of the universe. All was uncovered to his sealless eye. A secret Nature stripped of her defence, Once in a dreaded half-light formidable, Overtaken in her mighty privacy Lay bare to the burning splendour of his will. In shadowy chambers lit by a strange sun And opening hardly to hid mystic keys Her perilous arcanes and hooded Powers Confessed the advent of a mastering Mind And bore the compulsion of a time-born gaze. Page 84 An almighty occultist erects in Space This seeming outward world which tricks the sense; He weaves his hidden threads of consciousness, He builds bodies for his shapeless energy; Out of the unformed and vacant Vast he has made His sorcery of solid images, His magic of formative number and design, The fixed irrational links none can annul, This criss-cross tangle of invisible laws; All she new-fashions by the thought and word, Compels all substance by her wand of Mind. Page 84&85 Mind is a mediator divinity: Its powers can undo all Nature's work: Mind can suspend or change earth's concrete law. Affranchised from earth-habit's drowsy seal The leaden grip of Matter it can break; Indifferent to the angry stare of Death, It can immortalise a moment's work: A simple fiat of its thinking force, The casual pressure of its slight assent Can liberate the Energy dumb and pent Within its chambers of mysterious trance: It makes the body's sleep a puissant arm, Holds still the breath, the beatings of the heart, While the unseen is found, the impossible done, Communicates without means the unspoken thought; It moves events by its bare silent will, Acts at a distance without hands or feet. This giant Ignorance, this dwarfish Life It can illumine with a prophet sight, Invoke the bacchic rapture, the Fury's goad, In our body arouse the demon or the god, Call in the Omniscient and Omnipotent, Awake a forgotten Almightiness within. In its own plane a shining emperor, Even in this rigid realm, Mind can be king: Page 86 A mediatrix with veiled and nameless gods Whose alien will touches our human life, Imitating the World-Magician's ways She invents for her self-bound free-will its grooves And feigns for magic's freaks a binding cause. From every source she has taken her cunning means, She draws from the free-love marriage of the planes Elements for her creation's tour-de-force: A wonder-weft of knowledge incalculable, A compendium of divine invention's feats She has combined to make the unreal true Or liberate suppressed reality: In her unhedged Circean wonderland Pell-mell she shepherds her occult mightinesses; Page 88 A magic porch of entry glimmering Quivered in a penumbra of screened Light, A court of the mystical traffic of the worlds, A balcony and miraculous facade. Above her lightened high immensities; Her gulfs stood nude, her far transcendences Flamed in transparencies of crowded light. Page 89 A last high world was seen where all worlds meet; In its summit gleam where Night is not nor Sleep, The light began of the Trinity supreme. Page 90 A grand solution closed the long impasse In which the heights of mortal effort end. A reconciling Wisdom looked on life; Page 91 As if the strophes of a cosmic ode, A hierarchy of climbing harmonies Peopled with voices and with visages Aspired in a crescendo of the Gods From Matter's abysses to the Spirit's peaks. Sunbelts of knowledge, moonbelts of delight Stretched out in an ecstasy of widenesses Beyond our indigent corporeal range. There he could enter, there awhile abide. End of book-1 Indira Renganathan