Section II:

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother on Savitri

(1) The Mother to Mona Sarkar:

"All the secrets that man possessed, He [Sri Aurobindo]

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has revealed, - as well as all that awaits him in the future; all this is found in the depth of Savitri. But one must have the knowledge to discover it all, the experience of the planes of consciousness, the experience of the Supermind, ... He has noted all the stages, marked each step in order to advance integrally in the integral yoga. All this is his own experience, and what is most surprising is that it is my experience also.... Each object, each event, each realisation, all the description, even the colours are exactly what I saw and the words, phrases are also exactly what I heard.... Yes, all the descriptions, the colours, the pictures I had seen, the words I had heard, all, all,... put by him in poetry, into miraculous poetry.... I repeat, it was not that I had told him my experiences and that he had noted them down afterwards, no, he knew already what I had seen. It is my experiences he has presented at length and they were his experiences also. It is the picture of our joint adventure into the unknown or rather into the Supermind. (Sweet Mother, pp. 26, 27 and 28)

(2)Sri Aurobindo to Amal Kiran (K.D. Sethna):

"I have not anywhere in Savitri written anything for the sake of mere picturesqueness or merely to produce a rhetorical effect; what I am trying to do everywhere in the poem is to express exactly something seen, something felt or experienced; if, for instance, I indulge in the wealth-burdened line or passage, it is not merely for the pleasure of the indulgence, but because there is that burden... in the vision or the experience." (Savitri, Cent. Ed., p. 794)

(3)Sri Aurobindo in the context of his poem "Thought the Paraclete":

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"But they are not padding; ... only some large lines are given, but the description is true, the epithets hit the reality and even the colours mentioned in the poem, 'gold-red feet' and 'crimson-white mooned oceans', are faithful to experience." ( Ibid., p, 797 )

[Writer's note: These observations of Sri Aurobindo apply with equal aptitude to all that is there in Savitri.]

(4) Sri Aurobindo apropos of the following passage from Savitri:

"All grew a consecration and a rite.

Air was a vibrant link between earth and heaven;

The wide-winged hymn of a great priestly wind

Arose and failed upon the altar hills;

The high boughs prayed in a revealing sky."

( Savitri, p. 4 )

"The picture is that of a conscious adoration offered by Nature and in that each element is conscious in its own way, the wind and its hymn, the hills, the trees. The wind is the great priest of this sacrifice of worship, his voice rises in a conscious hymn of aspiration, the hills offer themselves with the feeling of being an altar of the worship, the trees lift their high boughs towards heaven as the worshippers, silent figures of prayer, and the light of the sky into which their boughs rise reveals the Beyond towards which all aspires. At any rate this 'picture' or rather this part of the vision is a complete rendering of what I saw in the light of the inspiration and the experience that came to me.... This last line ['The high boughs prayed in a revealing sky'] is an

expression of an experience which I often had whether in the mountains or on the plains of Gujarat or looking from my window in Pondicherry not only in the dawn but at other times..." (Ibid., p. 790)

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